Opinion ID: 2834394
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The Court’s Strained Reading Invites Absurd Results

Text: The Court acknowledges that any interpretation, literal or not, that produces absurd results should be discarded. [12] In my view, the Court’s interpretation works multiple absurdities.
Undercuts the Court’s Literalist Construction of Subsection ( i ) Most disconcerting is that the Court’s noncontextual analysis cannot be squared with other parts of Chapter 43, principally section 43.056, which centers on the City of Houston’s contractual duty to provide must-have services to areas slated for annexation ( e.g. , fire and police protection, EMS, road maintenance, solid waste collection, water and wastewater facilities). [13] The Legislature in subsection ( l ) authorizes Houston residents and landowners to request arbitration to force compliance with the City’s service plan, and, strikingly, it uses the very same “fails to take action” phrase that appears in section 43.052( i ). Subsection ( l ) provides: A person residing or owning land in an annexed area . . . may enforce a service plan by petitioning the municipality for a change in policy or procedures to ensure compliance with the service plan. If the municipality fails to take action with regard to the petition, the petitioner may request arbitration of the dispute . . . . [14] Under long-settled authority, “fails to take action” must mean the same thing here as it does in section 43.052( i ). [15] The multiple parallels at work here—the same phrase enacted the same day in the same bill describing the same proceeding—could not present a more “classic case for application of the normal rule of statutory construction that identical words used in different parts of the same act are intended to have the same meaning.” [16] I venture this prediction: if today’s case centered not on subsection ( i ) but on subsection ( l ) and a Houston resident’s request to arbitrate the City’s alleged breach of a service plan, the Court would read “fails to take action” exactly as I read it in subsection ( i ). Studied consistently and contextually, the meaning is self-evident: someone in an annexed area can request arbitration to enforce the service plan if the city grants no relief on the petition. Applying today’s construction of “fails to take action,” however, if the City of Houston denied a service-plan enforcement petition, arbitration would be unavailable. This reading runs head-long into subsection ( l )’s two-step process for enforcing City of Houston service plans: (1) a petition urging the City to comply, then (2) arbitration if the petition produces no compliance. The notion that arbitration is possible only if the City refuses to move a bureaucratic muscle is conceptually untenable. The paramount goal of service-plan enforcement is illusory if the City of Houston can foreclose a service-plan challenge simply by rejecting the petition outright. Such a result would render subsection ( l ) wholly impotent and allow the concerns that prompted its enactment to thrive unchecked. [17] The landowner is seeking to compel obedience to the service plan—a formal “contractual obligation” [18] —and vital city services will remain unprovided whether the City rejects the petition or ignores it; granting arbitration only if the City’s response is dilatory, but not if it is direct, works an absurd result. The very next sentence in subsection ( l ) removes any doubt that the Legislature intended “fails to take action” to mean “fails to take favorable action.” It authorizes persons living outside of Houston to apply for a writ of mandamus to prod service-plan compliance from their respective cities. [19] It cannot possibly be the law that every Texan outside the Houston city limits can freely and immediately seek mandamus relief to enforce their cities’ service plans while Houstonians deprived of basic services and whose enforcement petitions are rejected must hope exclusively for a State-led quo warranto action. Again, this result defeats the fundamental purpose (and contractual promise) of the service-plan statute, but it is necessitated by the Court’s construction of section 43.052( i ). Chapter 43 is most coherent and consistent when “fails to take action” means the same thing in both provisions. The Court, however, cites “context” to reserve the right to interpret subsection ( l ) differently because “sections 43.052( i ) and 43.056(l) not only differ in the types of disputes they address, but also in how arbitrations of those disputes are to be conducted.” [20] That is true, but also irrelevant; the decisive “fails to take action” language is word-for-word identical and operates the same way—the triggering phrases are grammatical and structural twins—and there is no principled basis for distinguishing the indistinguishable. [21]
The City’s view, at its core, is that a landowner entitled to request arbitration is never entitled to receive arbitration. Rather, subsection ( i ) is “an essentially consensual remedy of limited applicability,” something vested in the City’s absolute discretion. [22] I disagree that cities are only subjected to arbitration if they choose to be. Section 43.052( i ), like the identically worded section 43.056( l ), grants an actual remedy, not a “consensual” one and not merely a request for one. The Court’s “consensual remedy” holding endorses a path by which cities may circumvent the legislatively preferred three-year plan: “Just Say No”— deny everything and arbitrate nothing. Under this view, if a city (for reasons I cannot imagine) wanted to cede some of its planning authority, it would ignore the petition. But if a city wanted to retain unfettered control, it would deny the petition. Given how cities prize and safeguard their municipal annexation authority, [23] no rational city would ever renounce power by ignoring a petition when it could redouble power by denying it. If the Legislature intended only to authorize cities to volunteer for arbitration, then no statute was necessary as home-rule cities already possess “all the powers of the state not inconsistent with the Constitution, the general laws, or the city’s charter.” [24] A city that wants to arbitrate something does not need a statute granting it permission. Because “the legislature is never presumed to do a useless act,” [25] we must presume that it intended something more than voluntary arbitration. More revealing, though, is the City’s argument that all this sound and fury about arbitration and inclusion in the city’s annexation plan signifies nothing because the fast-track nature of (h )( 1) annexations will quickly moot the entire dispute. As the City noted at oral argument: “If the landowner asks to be included in a three-year plan, the city sits on it, that remedy or rather any consideration of whether it should be in a three-year plan is lost [once the area is annexed].” The underlying facts illustrate the City’s position that all landowner action under subsection ( i ) is ultimately futile: $ the Estate proposed to the City a high-density housing plan in the City’s extraterritorial jurisdiction (ETJ) $ five days later the City directed its staff to begin expeditious (h)(1) annexation (goal: to bring the property within the City limits so it could impose low -density development restrictions) $ the Estate then petitioned for inclusion in the City’s three-year plan (goal: to delay the (h)(1) annexation so it could vest the property’s high-density development plan) Under the City’s position, heads the city wins and tails the landowner loses. The calendar is inexorable. Arbitration is forever a mirage because even if a landowner is theoretically entitled to arbitration, the City’s annexation—the very annexation being challenged—zooms along the (h )( 1) fast track, thus short-circuiting the dispute.
The City says arbitration is possible in exactly one situation: “when a city refuses to consider or evaluate the request—exercising the proverbial ‘pocket veto.’” The pocket-veto analogy is inapposite because a pocket veto, classically understood, quickly yields a definitive outcome: rejection. [26] Accepting arguendo the City’s pocket-veto characterization, the Legislature, unlike the United States Constitution, has failed to define the contours, and the Court avoids addressing these concerns, [27] most notably (1) how much time must elapse before the landowner may request arbitration? and (2) what form of “action” suffices to derail arbitration? [28] Subsection ( i ) is open-ended and sets no decision-making deadline by which a city must respond to a landowner’s petition. If a city sits idle, a landowner has no way of knowing whether the city has merely failed to open its mail or, alternatively, has in fact reviewed the petition but quietly decided not to grant it. What length of city inaction is sufficient before a landowner may seek arbitration? Meanwhile, as the landowner awaits a formal response, the city continues speedily annexing the targeted property under subsection (h )( 1). Moreover, the Court, while purporting to construe “fails to take action” literally, actually spurns its own literalist method. The Court says arbitration is unavailable because the City’s categorical refusal amounts to “action.” The word “action,” however, encompasses a wide range of activities: reviewing a petition, conducting research, convening a hearing, deliberating, etc. [29] Why are these actions not “action”? The Court implicitly limits the word “action” to mean dispositive action—when a city formally denies a petition—but the Court cites nothing to explain why nondispositive action fails to qualify. By restricting “action” to a yes-or-no decision, [30] the Court has in fact abandoned literalism by reading the statute to mean “fails to take final action,” a locution that, notably, lawmakers have used elsewhere in the Local Government Code regarding land use regulation, but not here. [31] The Court thus allows context to inform the meaning of “action,” but it does so selectively, picking and choosing when it will permit context to guide its statutory analysis.