Eric Dexheimer of The Houston Chronicle wrote an incredible—almost unbelievable—story about how political power works in Texas. You may recall that Disney has its own self-governing district in Florida. Florida has almost 2,000 “special districts.” Texas has more than 4,000. Read this story to see how the very rich and politically connected can frustrate public projects and expand their holdings.

Dexheimer wrote:

In 2019, the city of Dripping Springs was finalizing plans for a new pipeline to move wastewater from its busy north end to a regional treatment plant on the south. Half a decade in the making, planners said the line was essential to control development in the rapidly growing Austin suburb.

One of the dozen or so properties they identified for the pipeline to cross belonged to Bruce Bolbock, an anesthesiologist. Valued at more than $9 million, the bucolic Hill Country ranch rolls across 225 acres in Hays County, and he didn’t want a buried raw wastewater pipeline on even the narrow strip it required. In addition to having a delicate natural spring on the property, he raised bison and exotic toucans that “require a very consistent environment that’s free of noise [and] disturbance.”

With the looming threat of the city taking his land through eminent domain, Bolbock placed a phone call to a Dallas hotel magnate and generous supporter of conservative political causes named Monty Bennett. Bennett didn’t have a magic wand. But he did have a sort of superpower: his own government.

In 2011, then-state Sen. Lance Gooden — now a U.S. Congressman — whose candidacies Bennett supported financially and with whom he reportedly co-owned land, sponsored a new law forming the Lazy W District No. 1municipal utility district. Such special-purpose governments typically are created so developers can sell bonds to pay for water and sewer lines in new subdivisions. New residents then pay the MUD assessments to retire the loans.

But court records show the Lazy W was created at Bennett’s request and primarily for him; it is almost exclusively made up of his sprawling private family ranch in Henderson County, an hour-and-a-half drive southeast of Dallas. Although he has said he wanted to form the district to conserve its natural beauty, Bennett also was clear he wanted his own government to wage a personal battle against the Tarrant Regional Water District, which had proposed routing a pipeline across the ranch.

Broadly, Lazy W argued that one government can’t sue another for eminent domain. So once Bennett’s ranch became District No. 1, TRWD could not legally take its property. The water district ended up routing its line around Bennett’s ranch. Now the Bolbocks wondered if Bennett might be able to use his government — even though it was located 200 miles from their property — to protect their land, too.

They hit on a solution: Despite the distance, Bennett’s special district “purchased” a thin strip of land encircling the Bolbock’s spread. By surrounding the private ranch with a protective government moat, Lazy W, a special district based in an entirely different region of the state, has been able to prevent Dripping Springs from moving ahead on its preferred pipeline plan.

Bennett has used the district granted to him by the Legislature in other unusual ways. The Lazy W recently flexed its government muscle by seeking to condemn 55 acres of a neighbor’s private property against his will and absorbing it into the district. The neighbor argued Bennett simply wanted to add some land to his ranch.

“This taking is a sham whose sole purpose is to confer private benefits to private parties,” the neighbor, Arlis Jones, wrote in a legal filing.

While Jones tries to recover his property, however, Lazy W has already erected a fence around it.

‘The invisible government of Texas’

The Lazy W isn’t the only Texas special district to use its government powers in non-conventional ways unforeseen by the lawmakers who created them. Like tiny viruses unleashed on the state, some quietly mutate beyond their original purpose to upend local communities.

A 2014 legislative report on special districtscounted about 3,350 across Texas, including hospital, emergency services, utility, school and water districts, among others. There are hundreds in Harris County alone. In a recent hearing, Sen. Paul Bettencourt (R-Houston) said the number of them has since surpassed 4,000. Lawmakers this year have filed bills that would create dozens more.

Because there are so many and they are so hyperlocal, the districts can operate far under the radar of public scrutiny, even though they are vested with powers that can affect the daily lives of citizens. “There are appropriate purposes for these,” said Rod Bordelon, distinguished senior fellow for public affairs at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, who has studied the districts. “There’s just not a lot of oversight and review.”

While government leaders are elected by the people they represent, for example, special district officials generally are appointed, and often are the same developers — or their hand-picked representatives — who formed the district. “In general, most citizens know comparatively little about the jurisdiction, structure, functions, and governance of special purpose districts,” the 2014 report concluded, “thus making them the invisible government of Texas.”

Operating so far out of sight can lead to misuse, said Bettencourt. “They’re set up opaquely where things can happen that are at best poor policy, and at times borderline corrupt. It can become weaponized,” he said.

Last year, Hearst Newspapers detailed how a small group of Travis County developers were using their special district consisting of bare farmland to collect millions of dollars off taxpayers who in some cases lived far away.

The SH130 Municipal Management District No. 1 was established by the Legislature in 2019 to help develop a community near the Austin airport. But its directors discovered they could leverage the district’s status as a government entity to obtain generous property tax breaks for other developers even if the projects were nowhere near the district. In exchange, the developers paid SH130 millions of dollars in fees.

Local taxpayers must make up the difference in foregone property tax revenue. That meant citizens where the tax-break properties were located effectively have had to pay more to backfill the revenue lost to projects that neither they, nor their elected leaders had any say in, said Williamson County Treasurer Scott Heselmeyer. SH130 “is trying to fund its own development off the backs of taxpayers in other parts of the state,” he said.

When they learn of such unintended uses, lawmakers must scramble to fix them by amending the laws that created the districts. This year lawmakers proposed no fewer than three bills to rein in the SH130 Municipal Management District. Earlier this month, the Texas Senate voted to dissolve the district it helped create just three years ago.

Yet with so many special districts across the state, lawmakers concede it can feel like a game of legislative Whac-A-Mole. “It’s very rare that a taxing unit gets dissolved around here,” Bettencourt said.

Rep. Glenn Rogers (R-Mineral Wells), meanwhile, introduced a bill to protect cities such as Dripping Springs from, say, having to wage battle against a far-away a conservation district over their local development plans. It sought to remove the governmental immunity from eminent domain lawsuits of “certain water districts.”

“I was troubled by the abuse of special district powers I saw in this case,” Rogers said in a statement. The House Committee on Land & Resource Management “is determined to ensure that special districts serve their intended public purposes, and aren’t used improperly as personal fiefdoms to accomplish private purposes.”

Public park not so well-known

Bennett made his fortune acquiring and operating hotels and is a Texas political heavyweight, donating hundreds of thousands of dollars to support primarily conservative causes and candidates. But he’s also known as a dogged and creative legal opponent willing to wage long and expensive court battles to protect against what he sees as threats to his interests.

In addition to turning his ranch into a governmental entity, he buried the cremated remains of two family acquaintances on the Lazy W in the path of the proposed pipeline route, using the cemetery to help create another legal obstacle to the Tarrant water district’s plans. He supported candidates to replace the district’s incumbent board, as well.

Dissatisfied with media coverage of his business operations and politics, he resurrected the name of an old African-American newspaper, the Dallas Express. With Bennett as its publisher, it has produced friendlier coverage. When the Dallas Weekly labeled it a “right-wing propaganda site” he sued the paper for libel. After a Texas appeals court dismissed the lawsuit last summer, Bennett took it to the Texas Supreme Court, where it is currently pending.

The designated contact for the Lazy W, Traci Merritt, an employee of Bennett’s Remington Hotels, did not respond to emails or phone messages seeking to interview Bennett.

According to Henderson County court documents, Lazy W said it moved to absorb its neighbor’s 55.8 acres of private property because the land was needed to fulfill the special district’s mission of protecting nature. (The Lazy W changed itself from a MUD into a conservation district in 2013, according to the Texas Commission on Environmental Qualify, which registers the districts.) “The board of directors has determined that the current land is necessary for the provision of additional habitat for wildlife,” according to the September 2019 condemnation filing.

The neighbor responded that Bennett simply wanted his land for his own and so was using the government he controlled to take it.

“The sole purpose of this attempted condemnation is to add Mr. Jones’ 55 acres to the Lazy W Conservation District (and, by extension, to Bennett’s Lazy W Ranch),” Jones’s legal team wrote in a filing. “The public has no access to the 55 acres, legal or otherwise … Further, no plans or documents exist showing any access to or uses for the property by the public.”

Jones and his attorney, Andrew Cox, declined comment. Lazy W attorney Stephen Christy noted there was long-simmering tension between the property owners.

“Mr. Jones has a long history of aggravating his neighbors,” he wrote in an emailed response to questions. He added that “The purpose for the district to condemn land is for a public park, which is how it’s currently being utilized.”

It’s not a well-known public park.

“I know there’s a Lazy W Ranch, but it’s definitely not public land that’s available” for public access, said Mark Anderson, a Texas Parks and Wildlife Department game warden assigned to the area. “It’s not publicized, for sure. I’ve never heard of it.”

Internet and newspaper postings show a Frisbee golf tournament was held on the Lazy W last October. Christy said the course is available by reservation. Dwight Robson, who manages the 18-hole course, said it was built last fall, and while it is considered public, the only access is via Bennett’s private land so arrangements to play there must be made through him.

In March 2022, a jury found in Jones’s favor, concluding Lazy W’s taking of Jones’s property served no public purpose. Yet in what legal experts say is a near unheard-of event, the verdict was tossed when Lazy W appealed and the court reporter could not produce a full transcript of the trial.

With no official record of the trial, the 12thCourt of Appeals in January ordered the entire case to be re-heard back in Henderson County. The new trial is scheduled for the end of the year.

Project stopped in its tracks

A 3.5-hour drive away, Dripping Springs, too, has found that battles with the Lazy W can be protracted.

With its population soaring in recent years, the city has worked hard to keep up with infrastructure demand, said public works Director Aaron Reed. The state’s regional water plans prefer more pipelines running to fewer treatment plants, and planning for the new wastewater pipeline running along the eastern side of the city began in 2014.

Although attention was given to mapping a direct route, Reed said the 3-mile pipeline’s pathway was determined mostly by topography. Planners wanted a gravity-fed line, which doesn’t move liquids under pressure so produces fewer leaks and tends to last longer. The east side was selected because it was less developed and so would need to cross fewer individual properties, Reed said.

By 2019, Dripping Springs had a state permit and began contacting about a dozen landowners seeking their permission for a 30-foot-wide easement to lay the pipe through their properties. Mayor Bill Foulds said negotiations were proceeding well with the Bolbocks, until “Suddenly Lazy W is involved.”

Bruce Bolbock, who purchased his property in 1989, said he isn’t anti-development, but he was frantic to shield his land and its wildlife from a pipeline project that could harm them. “If it leaks, then what?” he said. “As just an individual landowner, you have zero protection.”

Bennett, who he learned of by reading articles about him, “was very sympathetic. He said, ‘I think I can help.’” With their shared commitment to conservation, “He offered to allow us to join the Lazy W.”

Foulds described the outline of property Bennett’s conservation district acquired surrounding the Bolbock’s ranch as a 30-foot-wide “picture frame.” Records show the land was conveyed to the Henderson County conservation district in February 2020. The Bolbocks maintain it, use it and have the right to buy it back for $10 if the city succeeds in condemning it, legal filings show.

Dripping Springs filed a condemnation notice in 2021. But last May, Hays County Court-at-Law Judge Chris Johnson concluded the Lazy W Conservation District had governmental immunity and Dripping Springs could not take any of its land, grinding the project to a halt.

The city has appealed, arguing Bennett’s North Texas special district is not being used to benefit Texas citizens, but only to preserve one family’s Hill Country estate. “The Lazy W Strip is being used to protect private property interests, not any public interest,” it wrote in a filing last summer. If this were allowed, Foulds warned, there was nothing to prevent any special district in any part of the state from inserting itself into a local government’s affairs.

Christopher Johns, the Bolbock’s attorney, said he understood the concern. But “The Legislature set up the rules,” he said. “And we played by the rules.”

eric.dexheimer@houstonchronicle.com