At the end of 2020, Houston mayor Sylvester Turner asked Arturo Michel to serve as the city’s attorney for Turner’s final three years in office. For Michel, it would be his second stint as the top attorney for the largest city in Texas, having served as city attorney for Mayor Bill White in the early 2000s.
The son of Mexican immigrants, Michel grew up in Chicago and attended Northwestern University for his undergraduate studies. Before enrolling at University of Michigan Law School, Michel worked in San Antonio for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, or MALDEF, where he focused on Voting Rights Act issues by assisting demographers, obtaining data and performing simple analysis.
After law school, Michel came to Houston and worked at Bracewell for 18 years in its public law group, focusing his practice primarily on educational clients. In 2004, Houston Mayor Bill White asked Michel to be city attorney. In 2020, when Ron Lewis, Mayor Turner’s city attorney, decided to take a job in the nonprofit sector, Turner asked Michel to come back.
The Texas Lawbook interviewed Michel as part of a series of articles on city and county attorneys.
Texas Lawbook: Did you always want go into public service?
Arturo Michel: My experience with MALDEF is what got me interested in law. I was always interested in doing something that related to public service. Bracewell was a good fit because they worked with a lot of educational entities, K-12, charter schools, private schools, community colleges and universities.
Lawbook: What kind of issues did you work on?
Michel: It changed over time. At the beginning, it was a lot of things that are peculiar to government: open meetings, open records and student discipline. Because education is labor intensive, there were a lot of employment issues. Over time, I focused more on economic development, real estate issues, transactional issues and also more advising the governing bodies.
Lawbook: You were hired by Bill White and then you came back in 2020. How has the job changed over the years?
Michel: Unfortunately the carpet has remained the same (laughs), but more substantively, the number of lawyers is roughly the same. I think we’re about 110 now, and it’s probably about 180 with support staff. The size has been the same, but it seems like the workload is more intense now. It seems like the dollars are bigger at issue, and a lot of it has to do with the issues Houston has in terms of trying to get its pension and what it pays — primarily public safety. Then the other big issue that really began when I was there before is the extent to which local control has been eroded. You’ve seen it both on the legislative end in terms of the laws that the Legislature passes. You have also seen it in the judicial system, particularly with the Texas Supreme Court that has its tendency to define laws are preempted.
We get a lot of constituent complaints, a lot of complaints from council members, over bars and nightclubs. What emanates from that — the noise, it attracts violence, the parking, the trash issues — a lot of that. To some degree, you have liquor law violations, that’s out of our hands. The TABC handles that. A system where there was perhaps more collaboration, perhaps some delegation of authority, could be helpful. So those are the issues that I see that are more heightened now than before.
Lawbook: Your office is divided by different functional divisions. Are there certain issues or certain departments that are busier now or have a heavier workload?
Michel: There has been an increase in the number of contract work that’s occurring. There are more contracts; several of them are more complicated. It is difficult to keep up with, especially in certain areas like aviation, for example, and environmental that often affects public works. We’re under a consent decree with the EPA regarding waste water, so those are complex issues.
I would say transactional and contracts is one that’s expanded both in need for bandwidth and also complexity. We have a neighborhood services department that deals with deed restrictions, which in Houston not having zoning is one of the primary vehicles to maintain and preserve a neighborhood. They deal with deed restrictions and with the Chapter 125 nuisance claims, after hours clubs, things of that nature, has also greatly expanded. It’s just probably due to more of a population and the development of entertainment areas. Washington Avenue Corridor really took off at the beginning of the last decade, also areas like along Richmond Avenue where many clubs operate without permits in violation of alcoholic beverage laws.
The third area, I would say, is we seem to have an increase in torts and civil rights [claims]. We group our torts and civil rights together. I think it’s primarily an increase in the tort claims that we faced. For example, those from chases and … slip and falls in public arenas, things like that. That’s probably just reflective of [the fact that] generally we’re a litigious society, which is not necessarily a bad thing. It’s better to settle disputes that way, but it does put a heavy burden on those lawyers. Then, even if the civil rights cases have not increased perhaps in number, we probably have more complex civil rights cases than before in the last few years. For example, we have the Harding Street shootings here where several police officers were sued, and there have been some critical indictments that have come out of that. Those are complex matters that are heavy in terms of number of witnesses, experts, resources and so on.
Lawbook: Texas has been rapidly growing, including Houston. In Austin, that’s translated to more land use issues. For the city of Houston, how has the rapid expansion our cities affected your work?
Michel: I think there’s a lot of commonality there. I think there are land use issues that we have here. Because we experience hurricanes here and the associated flooding, there are a lot [of people] who view that we don’t control development enough and it contributes to the flooding of the neighborhoods. On the other hand, there’s always concern about development. The Greater Houston Area has not complied with the Clean Air Act with federal ozone requirements. Because of that and the building of new plants, it will probably be more expensive retrofitting that’s needed. Obviously, that’s vital to the Gulf Coast. That’s an area where obtaining federal or state funds would be very helpful.
On the other hand, you have the issue of the associated pollution and you have neighborhoods, like on the East End, that want better enforcement. So there’s a bit of a balancing that has to be done [regarding land use] … particularly here with flood control issues and how that works. Then you have greater density, so you have transportation issues. A city as sprawling as Houston is very important, and that was magnified during Harvey. What do you do with the workforce? How do you get people to where they need to be? If people can’t [live] closer and as it becomes more expensive in Houston, particularly in the core areas, how do you move the workforce?
Lawbook: How does all that fit into the type of work you do on those issues?
Michel: That typically comes from a planning perspective, and then there’s federal and state funding and joint projects with the city and the county. For our department that is being able to, for lack of a better word … realize what are the true important issues to get a project moved along and not have the people feel it’s tied up with the lawyers. The main focus of our department is to make sure we understand the mayor, council and city’s priorities, and the biggest part of the project. Also, don’t be afraid to give an assessment of, “We can let go of this” and “This is very important for this reason.”
Lawbook: Do you communicate with other legal departments inside and outside the state?
Michel: We do. We have regularly scheduled calls for both and we rely on our counterparts to get an idea of what you do, particularly in those areas that aren’t as developed as others. You have problems relating to neighborhoods, illicit activity associated with bars or other things like that.
I know Dallas has taken action and has been in some litigation regarding after-hours and clubs like that, so we do talk to them to find out: “What have you seen, how is that going?” [Or] the court decisions: “What do you think motivated the judge on with regard to any particular injunction?”
Lawbook: The Legislature in session. What issues is your department following? What would you like to see the Legislature address?
Michel: A legal department is a support department and has to be closely aligned with its client, a strong mayor form of government. What Mayor Turner has spoken about and what’s important to him is healthcare, particularly mental healthcare, and the use of the state surplus for those services. It would be more legislation or funding that would be more community based, sort of an extension of prenatal or maternal healthcare so that it’s there. That also dovetails with our view of public safety where, you know, there’s a lot of talk about defunding and so on. The City of Houston has never done that, but what the mayor will say is our officers are often asked to deal with mental health issues quite a bit. So the more resources that can be put into that to take the strain off would give us a more effective law enforcement capabilities.
We’d like to see property tax relief. On the one hand, we’re constrained with revenue caps by the state and also by our own voters here. We believe that should be dependent on the locality. If they need funds to combat, say illegal dumping, they should be allowed to keep the revenue from that. But the property tax relief is more in the form of what do you do with our appraisal system. It’s just a difficult issue where the larger business entities have the funds to combat that and get the relief they want that the average homeowner does not. So the greater burden falls on residential. So relief there in terms of being able to control the appraisal system, because I don’t think it can be done within the existing system.
Lawbook: What are some main areas where your office would look to outside council, and what are you looking for when you’re hiring outside council?
Michel: We do the vast majority in-house. So when we go to outside council, it is occasionally just due to the amount of work that is tying people up. The Hardy Street litigation would be one. Secondarily, … this is the more predominant one, is where you need the expertise. On several airport matters, on environmental matters, we go outside. It’s usually that type of regulatory expertise where we go for that, including litigation. Hardy Street is also high profile, in addition to taking time. Another one would be our recent litigation involving our northeast water purification plant — a dispute with the contractors. The City of Houston is funding that with several other water authorities. So it’s a very high dollar situation.
When we look for council, we look for the expertise and that they’ve done this before. If they haven’t before, you try to talk to them about what it’s like working for government. The main thing is that you’re dealing with a multi-member body and not a single pyramid structure. So you might have to pivot. You have to listen closely, but it’s primarily expertise. And like any other personal services relationship, the ability to work with the client.
Lawbook: Is geography an issue?
Michel: Our preference is always to work with someone who is Houston-based. Because Houston is a large, sophisticated legal market, we’re often able to find that here. But it’s not always the case. Probably more in the highly regulatory area, we rely on council in D.C., for example.
Lawbook: Looking ahead, what are some goals you have for the department?
Michel: Given the constraints on revenues, and in particular that are going be more severe once the coronavirus money ends, we have to be more efficient and we’re going to have to do more with less. So the goal for the department really is to be able to have more interaction among the lawyers. … Bounce ideas off each other so that … we have more interaction among our litigators and our transactional lawyers, so when they’re drafting a contract or other agreement, they’re aware of the latest case law — that could save us time and money or avoid a lawsuit on the line.