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

Heading: The Undeniable Meaning of “Fails to Take Action” Elsewhere in Chapter 43

Text: 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]