Rep. Dustin Burrows (R-Lubbock) and NFIB Texas join “Beyond the Bite” podcast to discuss the Texas Regulatory Consistency Act.
SAN ANTONIO (Sept. 1, 2023) – “None of the elected officials should be the face of this bill,” Rep. Dustin Burrows (R-Lubbock) said when describing the bipartisan Texas Regulatory Consistency Act (HB 2127). “[Small business owners] should be the face of this bill. This is who we celebrate taking the chance with their capital and creating jobs.”
Burrows, who authored HB 2127, and NFIB State Director Annie Spilman appeared on the “Beyond the Bite” podcast in San Antonio to discuss why small business owners support the measure and dispel just a handful of the myths being advanced by the measure’s opponents.
CLICK HERE to listen to the full conversation. Excerpts are below:
While discussing mandates passed in San Antonio and Austin at the behest of politically motivated labor groups, Spilman reminded listeners that the ordinances included hidden subpoena powers:
“In 2018 we started to see first the City of Austin trying to regulate private employment practices in the way of mandating paid sick leave in a very authoritarian manner. It wasn’t just to provide paid sick leave for their employees. What the ordinance would do was create subpoena power for the city. It’s very scary. And if a mere allegation was made against a small business employer, who doesn’t have in-house compliance officers, doesn’t have attorneys, these folks truly don’t even know that a new ordinance has been passed until they’re slapped with a fine, but if an allegation has been made that they’re not in compliance with this new local ordinance, and again they may not even live in Austin, now the city has subpoena power over their records.
“The office that was going to oversee this in Austin, the Equal Opportunity and Fair Housing Office, was going to be overseen by the Workers’ Defense Project, which is a local labor union. It’s the fox guarding the hen house. I’m not saying they’re a bad group, I’m saying they don’t like private employers. They’re trying to unionize and take over every small and large business in the state of Texas.”
Complying with regulations at the local, state, and federal levels is a complicated and time-consuming task for small business owners with limited resources, Spilman noted:
“Small business owners simply don’t have the liberty to vet all of these laws that are thrown at them. They’re being hit from the bottom, from the middle, and from the top. Regulation costs a small business owner 26 percent more as it’s applied to their employees than it does to a larger business. When it costs a small business more, that’s going to cost our local economy more, because they’re going out of business and they employ more than five million in our state.”
Burrows also described how the bill was changed throughout the legislative process to address the concerns of city and local officials, as has been reported on by the Fort Worth Star-Telegram:
“The City of Fort Worth […] I met with them several times and I made some changes based upon what the mayor had asked me for and some things that she brought up that were really good ideas and opinions. I talked to my mayor back home. I got on the phone with several mayors of colleagues of mine who said, ‘Well my mayor is concerned about this, this, and this.’
“There was a propaganda campaign to say this bill did a lot of things that it didn’t. And so my colleagues would say, ‘My mayor has heard we’re not going to be able to have clean streets or address overgrown lots and things of that nature.’ And so I would jump on the phone with the mayor, I would find in the statute where they still got to do those things and they would usually leave that conversation saying, ‘I was lied to. I was hoodwinked by this propaganda machine.’”
The podcast features testimony from NFIB small business owner member Lisa Fullerton, a supporter of regulatory consistency measures in three legislative sessions. While testifying during the 88th session, Fullerton said:
“It’s my understanding cities are not losing their authority, or that this bill is usurping that. This is just to clarify that they’re doing things and recommending things that were never in their purview, to begin with.”
At the conclusion of the conversation, San Antonio City Councilman Marc Whyte hosts a roundtable discussion with small business owners, who share why they need regulatory consistency.
CLICK HERE to listen to the full conversation.
