Why a West Texas county is building a new courthouse even after voter…

  

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ODESSA — Employees at the Ector County Courthouse follow one rule particularly seriously: Keep food in a sealed container.

Any other form of storage may lead to formal discipline.

This stringent rule, established nine years ago, helps prevent mice and roaches from swarming the floor in the dilapidating building where pests congregate and water pipes burst.

County officials hope their employees won’t have to worry about those problems once a newly constructed courthouse opens in 2027. On Tuesday, county commissioners approved taking on $325 million in new debt to build the courthouse and a juvenile detention facility.

The county took the extraordinary step of taking on this new debt after voters previously rejected a similar proposal. Local governments traditionally ask voters to take on new debt with bond elections. In certain instances, they’ll also seek approval to raise taxes to pay for the new debt.

Ector County is the epicenter of West Texas, known to provide a home to tax-weary residents. Voters here have routinely rejected tax increases and bond requests to pay for upgrades to roads, government buildings and schools.

Opponents of the decision said county officials have circumvented the will of voters. Ector County Judge Dustin Fawcett, the county’s chief executive, said the anti-tax mindset has prevented the county from making long-term investments. The county’s $105 million budget can only provide bandaids to the growing infrastructure challenges the courthouse faces.

“We have not had good, thoughtful financial practices as a county, and it comes from a laissez-faire approach to the government,” he said. “There’s a lot of different ways of thinking through these things in governance, but oftentimes what you see is people get elected to office, and all they want to do is go in and vote for no new taxes, lower taxes.”

To finance the building of the new courthouse and a juvenile detention facility, Fawcett and the county’s four commissioners used a form of borrowing known as certificates of obligation, or COs. These certificates are a form of debt that local governments use either in the case of an emergency or to address infrastructure issues. Ector County will increase property taxes to pay for the construction. A family that owns an average home valued at $196,500 will see a $17 increase on their annual tax bill, county officials said.

Texas counties borrowed about $526 million in this kind of debt in 2022. In 2023, they borrowed $486 million.

The money will enable the county to purchase the land it has selected to build a new courthouse and build it. Plans for the design have not been publicly released. County officials plan to release them in about three months.

The current courthouses’ exterior honeycomb design is a unique sight in Odessa, a remnant of the style of the 1930s.

At least 20 departments work in the building, from the district attorney to the environmental enforcement and pre-trial services. Inside, the county’s prosecutors prepare and organize their caseload. It is where residents go to court over family disputes, misdemeanors and civil cases. Residents can also seek personal records, like birth and death certificates. Also inside the courthouse are five district judges who preside over cases and enforce state law.

About 700 people, including the courthouse’s staff, use the building on a daily basis. At the entrance, two guards welcome the residents, trickling in. Every person walks through a single metal detector that leads down the hall to two elevators, which often break down.

When the metal detector broke once this year, the security guards hand-screened every person who was called for jury duty that day.

The courthouse has closed twice because of flooding. When the building floods, the employees must find shelter for hundreds of boxes containing court transcriptions and county business. Some leaks were so widespread that the employees have started to use small portable dumpsters to catch every droplet. Once, a squirrel fell through the roof, the county clerk said.

The courthouse was built in the 1930s and has since been expanded two times: once in 1968 and a second in the 1980s to add new departments. Most of the facility’s infrastructure was inherited from the 1960s, including cast iron and copper pipes.

Previous county judges of the fast-growing West Texas community tried and failed to renovate the courthouse. In 2013, then County Judge Susan Redford asked voters to approve $95 million in debt. Voters rejected the proposal. Her successor, Ron Eckert, unsuccessfully asked commissioners to approve $85 million in 2018.They did not.

Eckert, at the time, told commissioners the building was structurally unsound.

“We don’t know when that building is going to collapse. When are we going to have a real problem there where we can’t hold court,” he told YourBasin, a local news outlet.

In 2020, County Judge Debi Hays borrowed $26 million for the juvenile detention facility, money that was never spent that the county has been paying back. When COVID-19 spread throughout the nation and disrupted the economy, the money Hays secured was not enough to buy land to build a facility. Hays would have needed to borrow more money or call a bond election to make up the difference.

Kevin Mann, the facility’s director since 2016, said the challenges he and his staff face have increased. He said the detention center no longer has enough space to process the detainees, which include children aged 10 to 16 years old.

In one of the building’s quarters, there is a room where family members can speak to the detainees through arranged visits. Behind that room, officers will guide a row of new detainees to process them into the facility.

Employees repurposed a courtroom to conduct meetings and training for new staff members after they outgrew the conference room, which is now a lunch room. Across the building, employees find vacant spaces to place filing cabinets that don’t fit anywhere else.

Mann also said the offenses are more severe and lead to longer detention sentences, which the facility cannot handle.

“This building is not designed for what we’re dealing with,” he said.

Communities that trust their governments are likelier to support efforts to borrow money for infrastructure and new amenities, said Tim Bray, director of the Institute for Urban Policy Research at the University of Texas at Dallas.

He said residents establish trust through the agencies they can see, such as law enforcement or roads. The relationship a resident has with a particular agency can determine whether they trust the county to make decisions for them.

“You can’t rely on every single resident to be intimately familiar with how public finance works, so that trust matters,” Bray said.

Seeking improvements through taxes is a difficult proposition in West Texas, a conservative community that prefers its government small and its expenses low. Only recently did the Ector County School District pass a $400 million bond after voters rejected multiple attempts over the last decade.

Fawcett, the county judge, said he wanted to ask voters. He wanted to spend two years evaluating the condition of the building before taking the issue to the voters. The worsening conditions of the courthouse compelled him to seek debt without voter approval first. He said voters elected him to make those decisions.

Fawcett, who is up for reelection in 2026, said he believes voters will understand why he made that decision.

“I’m a constitutionalist,” he said. “We can only do what the Legislature allows us to do, and they have allowed us to do this. I’ll let the election take care of itself.”

Jeff Russell, the former vice president of the local economic development corporation and local business owner, has opposed many bond proposals in the past. He said the plans the county judges and commissioners brought forward were not robust enough to justify the cost. The county judge and commissioners should release the plan first before approving the debt and let voters decide in a bond election, he said.

“Historically, Ector County voters have not liked big debt issues,” he said. “When they get their first tax bill, that’s when it’s going to hurt.”

Disclosure: University of Texas – Dallas has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.