My Journey to Understand El Paso’s Lobbying Expenses

In 2019, the Texas Legislature passed a law (House Bill 1495) to help correct “unethical political behavior” at the local level. One key provision in the law requires political subdivisions to disclose the amount of money being spent to lobby the legislature in their proposed budgets.

As more fully articulated in Sec. 140.0045 (b)(2) of the Government Code, “…the proposed budget of a political subdivision must include, in a manner allowing for as clear a comparison as practicable between those expenditures in the proposed budget and actual expenditures for the same purpose in the preceding year, a line item indicating expenditures for…directly or indirectly influencing or attempting to influence the outcome of legislation or administrative action, as those terms are defined in Section 305.022, Government Code.”

Armed with this knowledge, I recently visited the budget section of the city of El Paso’s website in an attempt to learn more about the municipality’s lobbying expenditures. This should have been a relatively straightforward matter, but it turned out to be a winding road with a question mark at the end.

Starting Point

As you may notice, the city’s ‘Tax & Budget’ landing page features a ‘Budget Books’ section that contains access to 6 years of adopted budget data, including for fiscal years 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024. Ordinarily, an interested party would simply peruse these budgets to determine a governmental entity’s penchant for spending money on lobbyists—but that’s not the case here.

Source: City of El Paso’s Office of Management & Budget

A careful search of El Paso’s FY 2024 budget did not turn up the type of information usually found in other large city budgets, like Austin (see pg. 276), Houston (see pg. II-20), and San Antonio (see pgs. 599, 608 – 610). In fact, the city’s budget makes no mention of anything that could be considered as satisfying the requirements established in HB 1495. Only once is the term ‘lobbyist’ used, on pg. 246 of the budget, and it offers no real information about the actual or projected expenditures.

Source: City of El Paso’s FY 2024 Budget (pg. 246)

Were I unfamiliar with the city’s lobbying efforts, I might conclude on the basis of this information that the city of El Paso simply hadn’t engaged in any past legislative advocacy nor did they plan to do so in the future. However, it turns out that I am familiar with their recent activities.

During the 2023 legislative session, I routinely fought against the city of El Paso’s lobby team to advance conservative proposals, like allowing ETJ residents a voice in their governance (SB 2038), allowing certain voters to hold disannexation elections (HB 3053), and preempting city regulations, like minimum lot size requirements (SB 1787). In each of these instances, the city of El Paso lobbied against these reforms in committee, as evidenced by the witness lists (see here, here, and here). The fact that they had a representative in committee to fight against each of these bills means that they had lobbying expenditures. And those expenditures should have been recorded in the budget…or so I thought.

Asking Questions

Wanting to know more about the city’s lobbying expenses, I turned to the Public Information Act (PIA), which “gives you the right to access government records.” And on March 13^th, I posed the following question to the city through its online portal:

To whom it may concern– Pursuant to the Texas Public Information Act, Ch. 552 of the Texas Government Code, I respectfully request that the following information be returned electronically: – The section or portion of the city’s most recent adopted budget that complies with H.B. 1495 (87R) requiring a comparison of budgeted expenditures and prior-year expenditures “for directly or indirectly influencing or attempting to influence the outcome of legislation or administrative action.”

Shortly thereafter, the city responded with a request for clarification that read in part:

Now, I have to be honest, before this experience I had never really considered that some cities were reading the law so as to include lobbying expenses in their proposed budget and removing that information from their adopted budget. But that appears to be what the city of El Paso is doing (otherwise, they’d be violating state law). What makes its actions all the more aggravating is that the city only provides adopted budgets to the public on its ‘Tax & Budget’ website. Users are not given proposed budgets.

All of which suggests that the original purpose of HB 1495—correcting unethical political behavior—is being frustrated in Sun City.

Following the city’s request for clarification, I sent in a new PIA request with modified language hoping to address the concern raised. It read:

To whom it may concern– Pursuant to the Texas Public Information Act, Ch. 552 of the Texas Government Code, I respectfully request that the following information be returned electronically: – The section or portion of the city’s proposed budget for 2023-24 that complies with H.B. 1495 (87R) requiring a comparison of budgeted expenditures and prior-year expenditures “for directly or indirectly influencing or attempting to influence the outcome of legislation or administrative action.” https://www.elpasotexas.gov/assets/Documents/CoEP/OMB/FY24-Budget/FY-2024-Proposed-Budget-Book-Compressed.pdf

What the city eventually responded with was illuminating.

Findings

In response to my last request, El Paso city officials provided me with an Excel spreadsheet documenting lobbyist-related expenditures and revenues for FYs 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024. The sums reported are not insignificant.

According to the city’s response, it spent $211,399 during the FY 2023, which began “on September 1, 2022 and end[ed] on August 31, 2023.” For the current fiscal year—which runs from September 1, 2023 through August 31, 2024—the city anticipates maintaining that level of expenditure ($211,399), through some unspecified contractual arrangement (see Outside Contracts – NOC).

Source: City of El Paso PIA Response

Upon receipt, I attempted to match up the information received with the revenue and expenditure data listed in the city’s adopted budget; however, this ultimately proved unfruitful. I even investigated the back of the city’s budget (i.e. Schedule E) which contains is a list of departments and outside contractors, but none appeared to be a proper fit, including the city attorney’s office which earlier listed a ‘lobbyist’ in its division summary.

Source: City of El Paso’s FY 2024 Budget

In the absence of this detail, it’s not possible to know just quite yet which city department is responsible for the lobbying activity nor which outside contractor is benefitting. Still, we at least have some sense of the resources being committed by the city to advance its own interests at the Texas Capitol.

Another big question still lingers though. That is, might we need to revisit HB 1495 to clarify that proposed and adopted budgets must contain lobbying-related expenditure information in better detail, so that people understand who these lobbyists are, what services are being provided, and how much, if any, other public monies are being spent on advocacy efforts not covered by the law (i.e. membership dues and fees paid to pro-government associations)? I think the answer is yes.