Texas House Passes HB 2255: 6 More Years of TRCC

Candy Evans — Sat, 09 May 2009 00:25:42 +0000

Though the Legislature’s Sunset Commission staff declared that the Texas Residential Construction Commission ought to ride off into the sunset, the House passed legislation to keep the supposedly “save consumers from bad builders” agency keep on keeping on until 2015. Prior to final passage, the House adopted 23 amendments, including one to eliminate the $250 fee to file for state-sponsored inspection. No kidding: to even file a complaint against a Texas builder you have to pony up a $250 fee. It also raised the cap from $75,000 to $175,000 on what individuals can collect from the newly created homeowner recovery fund, which serves as a last resort for homeowners who could not collect damages or get a construction defect repaired. Last March, Channel 8′s Byron Harris filed a great story on how lawmakers received hundreds of thousands of dollars from Houston home builder Bob Perry, one of the TRCC’s biggest designers supporters. Perry says he supports the TRCC because it protects consumers from unscrupulous builders, but consumer groups say the agency needs to go bye-bye since it makes already-distraught consumers jump through too many hoops (including an arbitration process and inspections) before they can sue a bad builder. Those hoops, says one realtor, just might have been put in place to encourage inaction.

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Texas House Passes HB 2255: 6 More Years of TRCC