Resolution Urging State Receivership for Failing Texas Municipalities

November 15, 2025

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WHEREAS, the stability and prosperity of life for all Texan citizens depends on the proper functioning of its major cities, which serve as indispensable engines of commerce, transportation, and statewide economic vitality, and whose breakdown directly undermines statewide growth, investment, and competitiveness; and

WHEREAS, in recent years the local governments of several large Texas cities have increasingly rejected sensible public-safety and fiscal-stability policies, embracing instead non-prosecution of violent crimes, reckless spending, open defiance of duly enacted state law, and other suicidal policies that jeopardize the economic well-being of the entire state; and

WHEREAS, efforts to bring these cities back into alignment-including the recent “Death Star” bill and other state preemption measures have expanded the State of Texas’s authority to prescribe uniform rules, but cannot compel local officials to enforce those rules, leaving the state with laws on paper but no guarantee of execution on the ground; and

WHEREAS, President Trump has recently demonstrated the decisive impact that direct intervention-bypassing an incompetent local government-can achieve in a failing city, as shown through his law-enforcement surge in our Nation’s capital; and

WHEREAS, governors possess plenary authority over the municipalities of their states-just as the President exercises authority over the District of Columbia and therefore can implement comparable interventions when expressly empowered by state legislation; and

WHEREAS, other states have history of permitting such intervention over municipalities, known as “Receivership,” including Michigan’s oversight of Detroit, New Jersey’s takeover of Camden, and Rhode Island’s control of Central Falls, each of which restored basic governance by temporarily substituting state competence for local dysfunction; and

WHEREAS, Texas and many other states already employ receivership or state management for specific public institutions such as failing school districts, distressed utilities, or public-health systems-demonstrating that targeted, temporary state control is lawful, ethical, and well precedented; and

THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, that, in the interest of ensuring the economic prosperity of all Texas, the Young Republicans of Texas call upon the Texas Legislature and the Governor of Texas to enact a robust municipal receivership statute. This statute will allow the governor, under certain conditions related to lawlessness, financial distress, or chronic noncompliance with state law, to vest a state-appointed receiver with full executive authority over a municipality for a limited amount of time to restore justice and order.

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