Does Galveston County's bid for ordinance power have a snowball's chance?

How residents of the county’s unincorporated areas would answer that question likely depends on their circumstances.

People who live in the county because they want to be left alone to do more or less as they see fit on and with their own property likely will oppose it; people living beside an unrelated salvage yard or beside a neighbor who’s building a giant, looming cube of a McMansion from property line to properly line might support it.

Constituents living near Santa Fe who oppose a developer’s plan to build a 300-unit housing project seem to be among the main impetuses behind the lobbying effort.

That development by Live Lone Star LLC caused consternation among neighbors who fear it would increase flooding along Dickinson Bayou and cause traffic problems on Country Side Street, a two-lane road providing the only route in and out of the new development.

Opponents appealed to the county to intervene, but learned it has very little power to do so.

The local debate about the county’s lobbying effort will be interesting.

So will observing the commissioners court, which is made up mostly of small-government conservatives, arguing for more power to restrain private property rights in service of the common good.

It’s a long, frequently strange, trip from a list of legislative priorities to the floor of the Texas Legislature, so the county’s ask is mostly an idea at this point.

But assuming the county’s request survives the many detours, pitfalls and blind alleys where muggings might occur, it will be interesting to observe the legislature’s attitude toward it.

While county leaders might be inclined toward an orthodox reading of the property rights gospels, state leaders are absolutely rabid about it.

They have opposed, impeded and litigated over municipal attempts to regulate plastic bags and short-term rentals, to preserve trees and to keep fracking rigs out of city parks, to name a few.

In 2017, while addressing Conservative Coalition Research Institute, an Austin-based think tank, Gov. Greg Abbott expressed his disdain for the “patchwork of local regulations,” existing in Texas because local governments have ordinance power and described his vision of a better way.

“As opposed to the state having to take multiple rifle-shot approaches at overriding local regulations, I think a broad-based law by the state of Texas that says, across the board, the state is going to preempt local regulations, is a superior approach,” Abbott said.

The question wasn’t even whether the state should override local regulations, that was a given, but how to most efficiently do that.

And then he went off on a riff about the power and beauty of the individual.

“If you really want to talk about local control, you reduce it to the lowest common denominator and that is the individual. We retain the right as individuals for our own local control, for each of us, to be able to chart our own course, chart our own destiny based upon our own DNA.”

That, of course must include operating a salvage yard as your own personal character deems fit and piling dirt as tall as your personal road map to the future might demand, consequences on people downstream be damned.

Are state lawmakers likely to embrace this effort to exercise greater local control over what people, and corporations, do with the property they own in the county?

• Michael A. Smith