Art Martinez de Vara’s Push to Limit the Power of Local Governments in Texas — ProPublica

In February, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit accusing Dallas officials of failing to adequately fund the city’s police department and violating a voter-approved measure requiring it to hire up to 900 new officers.

“I filed this lawsuit to ensure that the City of Dallas fully funds law enforcement, upholds public safety, and is accountable to its constituents,” Paxton said in a news release demanding that the city adhere to a 2024 change in its charter. “When voters demand more funding for law enforcement, local officials must immediately comply.”

The reason Paxton could pursue such action, the reason the Dallas city charter even requires hiring more officers, was due in large part to a man named Art Martinez de Vara. A private attorney with a law practice based in Houston and a tiny South Texas town called Von Ormy, Martinez de Vara was one of the driving forces behind the changes in the charter that opened Dallas up to such a lawsuit in the first place.

Martinez de Vara’s personal website lists him as a state historian, an anthropologist and an attorney, in that order. He’s also the mayor of Von Ormy, a community of 1,100 people. But over the past two decades, Martinez de Vara has been much more than that. He has made a name for himself in Texas conservative circles as the architect behind the formation of a handful of small towns with austere — nearly nonexistent — local governments.

His push for limited-government concepts is not out of the norm in Texas, a state that has long worn that badge with pride. But the so-called “liberty city” experiment, in which communities agree to lean governments, little to no taxation and scant regulation, never grew into a large-scale movement. So in recent years, Martinez de Vara and other limited-government advocates have taken a different tack: They’ve ramped up efforts to restrict local governments’ ability to decide how they spend their money and which policies they can adopt.

That’s what happened in Dallas.

Two years ago, Martinez de Vara joined a coalition of power players associated with a nonprofit called Dallas HERO, a group funded in part by Republican megadonor and Dallas-area hotelier Monty Bennett.

As HERO’s attorney, Martinez de Vara helped draft and lobby for ballot measures that required the city to dedicate a large share of its budget to hiring more police officers and significantly increase starting pay, even if it meant cutting other public services. Last year, the city agreed to fund hiring 350 more officers to begin meeting the new requirement, which has no timeline for compliance.

Another measure Martinez de Vara helped draft made the city more vulnerable to lawsuits from opponents of its actions, by stripping the city of its immunity from litigation.

The measures, the group argued, would make Dallas safer and ensure local officials were more accountable to their constituents. But Dallas’s elected officials, nearly all of whom were opposed to the measures, say the reality has been detrimental. They are cutting city services and staff to ensure they have the money for the new recruits, even as crime continues to drop. And they’ve already had to spend additional money to defend themselves against a lawsuit brought by a couple who argued that the city violated its own noise regulations by allowing the construction of a church basketball court near their home. (A judge dismissed the couple’s claims tied to the city charter amendment, but that ruling is now on appeal.) Paxton’s lawsuit — which Dallas maintains it still has immunity from — now puts a new microscope on the city more than a year after the propositions passed.

“The Republican officials running Texas have long sought to gain leverage over the Democrat officials running the state’s largest cities, so I am not surprised that Attorney General Paxton joined with HERO lawyers to sue Dallas,” said Cal Jillson, a political science professor at Southern Methodist University.

Dallas is not the only city dealing with the fallout from efforts pushed by Martinez de Vara.

Earlier in his career, he persuaded five small towns to incorporate. At least two of them still struggle to provide basic services.

In Von Ormy, just outside of San Antonio, the town still doesn’t have a sewer system 18 years after it was created, relying entirely on septic tanks. And about 60 miles away in the town of Kingsbury, Mayor Shirley Nolen, a supporter of Martinez de Vara, acknowledged that the low-tax, small-government model has been hard to maintain. “That’s kind of a double-edged sword,” she said. “There’s no regulation.”

During the past year, Martinez de Vara also served as the attorney for the nonprofit Texas Government Accountability Association. According to Republican former Texas Rep. Matt Krause, previously a member of the association board, the organization is funded in part by Bennett, who has used his fortune to advocate for the passage of school vouchers, end transgender care for youth and upend homeless services in big cities.

Bennett and Martinez de Vara declined to talk to WFAA for this story. When WFAA traveled to Von Ormy to ask Martinez de Vara about HERO, he declined to talk, citing pending litigation. When asked about his work in Von Ormy, he said, “I can’t because it’s all tied in.”

The accountability association’s leaders spent most of 2025 trying to entice, and sometimes force with petition drives, various cities and other government entities across Texas to enter into contracts that required them to pay membership fees to the organization and adhere to a set of prescribed accountability and transparency requirements. If they failed to do so, they risked being sued.

Odessa, a Republican stronghold in West Texas, became one of the first cities to sign on. But the city quickly sued TGAA to get out of the deal, arguing in court documents that the group sought to “illegally transfer” local rulemaking power to itself and wanted the right to veto decisions made by city leaders.

Elected officials should not give up government immunity or their ability to make their own decisions, said Bill Helfand, a municipal law expert and Houston attorney.

“I cannot imagine how any responsible government official or body would agree that they are not capable of self-governance, literally,” Helfand said. “I would vote against any person running for any elective office who agreed they need outside oversight to ensure they are doing their elected duties.”

The Rise of the “Liberty City”

Over the course of a career that began nearly two decades ago, Martinez de Vara has worked for two state lawmakers and served as assistant general counsel for the Republican Party of Texas. He also has at least 15 years of experience in local government, including terms as either mayor or city attorney in several small towns near San Antonio.

That journey started in 2006, when Martinez de Vara was still a law school student at St. Mary’s University and he began a campaign to incorporate Von Ormy, a 2-square-mile community just southwest of San Antonio on Interstate Highway 35. By forming their own local government, Von Ormy citizens would have the legal authority to make their own laws.

Martinez de Vara worked with residents who feared annexation from sprawling San Antonio, framing the effort as an example of how Texans could resist what he saw as creeping municipal overreach. Von Ormy, he said, would form a government that would work toward eliminating property taxes while still providing basic services to its residents, and would offer free business permitting and few regulations.

“We were fighting not only for sewer, potholes and police protection but for self-determination and empowerment of our community,” Martinez de Vara wrote in a firsthand account of the incorporation campaign. In May 2008, Von Ormy residents said yes to becoming their own city in a vote of 117 to 16.

Martinez de Vara, who did not grow up in Von Ormy but whose family has lived there for generations, became its first mayor. The town’s incorporation and his election garnered statewide attention for the model of government he proposed, one he said made Von Ormy the “freest little city in Texas,” according to a 2017 story in the Texas Observer. He later called the community “a unique opportunity to experiment with democracy,” describing it as the kind of place where people can freely set off fireworks and smoke cigars wherever they want.

But cracks quickly began to form. Martinez de Vara had pushed incorporation partly to help fund construction of a sewer system for the community, whose residents relied on septic tanks. But the sewer service was going to cost millions of dollars and would require the city to borrow money. Martinez de Vara opposed taking on any extra debt.

Tensions escalated over Martinez de Vara’s plan to eliminate property taxes, according to interviews, City Council minutes and previous news accounts. Some City Council members began to question whether the zero property tax approach was sustainable, possibly creating an overreliance on sales taxes.

Martinez de Vara eventually succeeded in eliminating the city’s property taxes. But the move threw the City Council into disarray and eventually led to misdemeanor charges against council members who were charged with violating the Texas Open Meetings Act in an attempt to override his action. Those charges were later dropped, and Martinez de Vara eventually decided not to seek a subsequent term as mayor amid the turmoil. Council members reinstated the property tax in his absence.

The challenges, however, were not a deterrent for his vision of expanding the liberty cities model. Over the years, he helped various communities in some capacity to incorporate and eventually started working to enshrine the liberty cities model into law.

Doing so, Martinez de Vara told attendees at a January 2015 forum sponsored by the influential conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation, would prevent future elected leaders from abandoning the model by, for instance, raising taxes. The group supported such legislation in a policy brief calling the liberty city model a “new concept for self-governance.”

Martinez de Vara by then had become chief of staff for state Sen. Konni Burton, a Republican who represented portions of North Texas west of Dallas and was a leader in one of the founding tea party chapters. In February 2015, Burton filed a bill that would bar leaders of liberty cities from adopting a property tax without approval from at least 60% of voters, mandate voter approval before taking on public debt and allow a citizen’s bill of rights “expressly limiting” city authority. The bill did not pass. Burton, who left office in 2019, declined to speak to WFAA for this story.

The idea behind the liberty city movement in Texas, especially for small rural cities, was to promote incorporation for basic public services at low cost. But in practice, the model has not proven successful, said Jillson, the SMU political science professor.

“A few towns, like Von Ormy, tried it, but the results were disappointing,” Jillson said. “Turns out meaningful public services do cost money, so mayors and city councils were left fighting over tax cuts and poor services until everyone simply threw up their hands.”

More than a decade after its formation in 2015, the town of Kingsbury, which Martinez de Vara helped to incorporate, has only one paid employee. Everything else is handled by volunteers. “We don’t have water or sewer. We don’t have trash pickup,” said Nolen, the town’s longtime mayor. “It’s all very self-reliant farmers and ranchers out here. We don’t want any property tax.”

The liberty cities model of fewer regulations, however, has also brought with it the challenge of dealing with a landfill that moved in just outside the tiny city’s boundaries. Some balked when Nolen began talking about passing zoning rules, she said.

“People are like, ‘Well, I don’t want anybody telling me what to do on my own property,’ and I’m like, ‘I don’t either.’ However, I don’t want Joe Bob’s unlined-hole-in-the-ground battery disposal coming in next to my house,” she said.

Sixty miles away in Von Ormy, two truck stops make up a significant part of the city’s revenue. Residents and businesses still rely on septic tanks, and locals say larger businesses have been hesitant to relocate there because of the lack of sewer service.

“I’m sure you’ve driven around,” said Alex Quintanilla, a former city commissioner. “There’s nothing around here. What is there?”

A New Tactic, an Uncertain Future

Martinez de Vara’s vision for a liberty city, and whether he can carry it out, will be tested once again. Von Ormy reelected him as mayor last year, a few months after the passage of the Dallas HERO initiatives.

Even as he returned to the leadership role of the town, Martinez de Vara and his allies, through the Texas Government Accountability Association, continued efforts to dictate how other cities make budget and policy decisions.

The TGAA branded itself as an initiative focused on helping local governments embrace stronger ethics and transparency. But officials in cities that encountered the new organization questioned that goal. Some argued the organization’s real aim was to find a way to control cities, similar to what happened with Dallas HERO in 2024.

The connections between Dallas HERO and TGAA go beyond kindred philosophies and the legal services of Martinez, who also served as TGAA’s lawyer. The man who handles finances for TGAA is the chief accounting officer for a hotel company founded by Bennett, the business owner who provided financial support for the Dallas HERO propositions. Dallas HERO and TGAA share a mailing address, according to the organizations’ 990 tax forms from 2024. The same mailing address is also listed on the 2024 IRS filing for Dallas Express Media, the parent company for the conservative online site Dallas Express, of which Bennett is publisher. The website posted several pieces championing Dallas HERO and lambasting city leaders who opposed it. Similarly, the site criticized city council members of one community for declining to join TGAA.

Krause, the former state representative and former TGAA board member, said he has known Bennett and Martinez de Vara for years through his work in conservative politics. As with HERO, he said, Bennett financially supports the accountability association.

“When I knew I was going to be working with Art again on TGAA, I was really excited,” Krause said. “He’s just a brilliant guy. It doesn’t surprise me that that’s somebody that Monty would have trusted and respected to be kind of the final voice on these kinds of things.”

TGAA’s model has been to hold cities to frequent audits and, in general, bind future councils to an externally written rulebook that limits local officials’ discretion, critics say. If a member entity is accused of violating the agreement, the TGAA agreement requires it to waive governmental immunity from citizen lawsuits.

TGAA tapped at least two of the cities Martinez de Vara had helped incorporate to sign on, including Kingsbury, where he is still city attorney. The town was the first to join.

The group also approached Providence Village, a planned community in North Texas that Martinez de Vara had helped to incorporate more than a decade earlier. Leaders of the town declined. Representatives from TGAA started a door-to-door campaign in the small city. They sought to gather signatures to “force the town to hold and pay for, at taxpayers’ expense, an election to add a provision to our town charter requiring TGAA membership,” Mayor Linda Inman posted on Facebook last June.

Inman, who did not respond to repeated requests for comment, wrote on Facebook that TGAA was using a recruitment strategy “that relies on buzzwords and scare tactics to mislead voters into signing their tax dollars away to a nonpublic, third-party entity with no interest in the towns and cities they’re targeting.”

In the end, only Kingsbury and Odessa, a city of 124,000 people, joined the organization. Von Ormy officials considered joining but took no action.

Odessa signed on at the behest of its conservative city manager, John Beckmeyer, former head of the state GOP. Beckmeyer did not return messages seeking comment for this story.

After new City Council members were elected in Odessa in November 2024, the city sued to get out of the deal. The terms of the contract were steep: After a grace period, Odessa would have to pay roughly $24,000 annually to maintain its membership, an amount that could increase and had no cap. The contract had no end date. And the only way the city could get out of the agreement was to hold a citywide election.

Layne Rouse, an attorney representing Odessa in the case, said the TGAA is an example of “dark money controlling politics through a backdoor contract” because its donors aren’t public.

In December, a judge declared Odessa’s TGAA contract “void and unenforceable.” The association appealed the ruling but, on Feb. 12, withdrew the appeal without explanation.

TGAA officials did not respond to questions about the lawsuit or its efforts to recruit cities.

Now TGAA’s future, and Martinez de Vara’s role with the group, appear up in the air. Besides withdrawing its appeal of the Odessa lawsuit, the group hasn’t had any meetings since December. Recent efforts to contact TGAA employees and board members have resulted in emails bouncing back.

But Martinez de Vara remains busy. When Paxton, the state attorney general, filed the lawsuit in February suing Dallas, a P.O. Box associated with Martinez de Vara’s law office in Von Ormy was listed on the petition. He represents two Dallas residents in the lawsuit who say they’ve been harmed by the city’s failure to grow its police force.

He told The Dallas Morning News that Dallas HERO had “no formal role in the litigation” but confirmed that he remains its attorney.

“I coordinated with the attorney general’s office. They were in need of someone to represent the private plaintiffs and I agreed to do so,” Martinez de Vara said. “I was a logical person to reach out to.”