When a city repeatedly wastes taxpayer dollars, refuses to enforce state law, allows violent crime to spiral, or ignores its financial responsibilities, the people who suffer most are the taxpayers, families, and hardworking citizens left to clean up the mess and pay the bill.

Municipal Receivership: A Solution for Failing Cities

Municipal receivership is a temporary state intervention for cities that have demonstrated chronic failure. It is a mechanism by which failing cities would be “corrected” and steered back in the right direction by a state-appointed receiver.

Twenty other states have implemented municipal receivership, and it has been successful in stabilizing distressed municipalities, restructuring finances, restoring essential services, and ultimately returning authority to local leaders once objective goals are met.

Standards used elsewhere have included persistent fiscal mismanagement, repeated violations of state law, refusal to cooperate with immigration enforcement, chronic violent crime, or other failures that threaten the safety, rights, or financial well-being of Texans.

Importantly, cities would first be given every opportunity to correct courses themselves. Only after repeated failures would the state intervene. Once clear performance benchmarks are met, local control would be restored.

Texas already recognizes this concept in principle regarding public education. When school districts fail to meet their obligations or protect students, the state has intervened.

Municipal receivership would establish a simple principle: if local officials cannot responsibly manage the authority entrusted to them by the state or by their constituents, the state has an obligation to protect its citizens.

Original reporting: Texans for Fiscal Responsibility — read the source article.