Amarillo City Council will discuss the city’s 2025 lobbying priorities during their September 10th meeting.

The topic has been a major point of contention locally. The Republican Party of Texas officially opposes the practice of taxpayer-funded lobbying, though many cities, including Amarillo, continue to engage in the practice.

The item is only listed as a discussion item for the upcoming meeting, with no documents provided detailing what priorities will be discussed. Typically, the council passes a list of its priorities late each odd-numbered year ahead of the state legislature’s session starting in January. The passage of the most recent set of priorities was plagued with technical issues, though it ultimately passed with then-councilman Cole Stanley being the only vote against the package.

While we do not yet know how the discussions will go during the meeting, we did ask the council when they were running in 2023 where they stood on the issue of taxpayer-funded lobbying. Below is the exact question we asked on our questionnaire and how each candidate responded.

Question:

Do you believe the City of Amarillo should participate in the practice of taxpayer-funded lobbying? Please explain.

Mayor Cole Stanley:

If we want to compete with other cities then it is necessary to utilize lobbyist. However, that needs to be done with revenues and not property taxes.

Councilman Place 1 Josh Craft:

Our elected representatives should do their job to prevent the utilization of taxpayer money for lobbying. I do recognize there are projects such as the Vet School that happened because of lobbying, and we may need to ask for help when it’s outside our scope of expertise. Should it happen, the City must be very vigilant, and require full transparency to the citizens.

Councilman Place 2 Don Tipps:

NO!!! Tax payer funded lobbying is completely wrong in my opinion. Under current law, a government can payroll deduct union fees or use public funds to hire lobbyists that may or may not support the views of the individual these funds were taken from. Their money may be used to even support a candidate they oppose through PAC contributions. This is a gross misuse of taxpayer money.

Councilman Place 3 Tom Scherlen:

No, I believe the best people to be lobbying for Amarillo would be its' Council and its'citizens

Councilman Place 4 Les Simpson:

That would have to be addressed on an individual basis. There is value in lobbying on occasion. It was crucial in ultimately getting the Texas Tech School of Veterinary Medicine located in Amarillo.