A Dallas County district judge is leaving the State Fair of Texas gun ban in effect after an injunction hearing Thursday.
Attorney General Ken Paxton sued Dallas and the fair last month because the fair is now banning guns from Fair Park — excluding active and qualified retired peace officers. The fair previously allowed concealed carry.
Attorneys for the State Fair, the city of Dallas and the state made their cases in front of 298th District Judge Emily Tobolowsky Thursday. The judge’s ruling will give the losing party only days to appeal, and the fact that the State Fair is fast approaching will require the courts to move quickly.
State Fair president Mitchell Glieber said the decision was a victory for the organization.
“We’re just ready to turn our attention to the State Fair of Texas – eight days away from opening, we’re ready to go and hoping that we can keep our folks as safe as humanly possible, that’s the goal,” he said.
Texas law forbids state agencies and political subdivisions — such as Dallas — from banning licensed handgun owners from carrying guns on government owned or leased property. The State Fair says it has significant control over Fair Park as part of its longstanding lease agreement with Dallas for the annual event.
State Fair attorneys successfully argued the gun ban is legal because the organization operates independently as a private nonprofit, not a government entity.
“The State Fair of Texas is not an agent of the city of Dallas,” said Jim Harris, attorney for the State Fair. “The State Fair of Texas has not been delegated any governmental powers or authority by the city of Dallas.”
Paxton’s office, meanwhile, argued that because of the agreement the fair is acting under the authority of Dallas. Therefore, the decision to ban guns from the fair is the city’s decision and that makes the ban illegal, said Ernest Garcia, chief of the administrative law division of the attorney general’s office.
“This case is about public policy and its application to public property,” Garcia said. “This is not a case about private property rights or interests.”
The state added two licensed gun owners and one unlicensed gun owner as plaintiffs in the lawsuit, according to court documents.
Alex Dubeau, an administrative law investigator with the attorney general’s office, was the state’s only witness. He said he received multiple calls and emails from citizens complaining about the fair’s gun ban shortly after it was announced.
As a result of his investigation and review of the fair’s lease agreement, Dubeau said he believed the fair had violated the law.
“They had allowed firearms previously, and I see that all of a sudden they’re not because of an incident that happened from an unlicensed gun holder,” he said. “So, the unlicensed gun holder committed a crime last year, and now this year they punish license holders by not allowing them to defend themselves."
Jeff Tillotson, an outside attorney for the city of Dallas, said the city had no role in the fair’s decision to ban firearms from Fair Park, so the city is not liable. He argued Paxton’s lawsuit should be thrown out altogether because, among other things, the concerned citizens Dubeau mentioned didn’t make their complaints first to the city directly as required by law.
Glieber testified the city has no control over the State Fair’s decision making. He said the fair made the decision to ban guns in February and informed the Dallas Police Department of its decision in May.
The hearing comes about a week after Paxton’s office withdrew a legal opinion from 2016 that supported the fair’s stance and contradicted Paxton’s own. The attorney general wrote then that as long as the government entity has nothing to do with the ban, it’s legal.
Dubeau testified he doesn’t believe the 2016 opinion is applicable to the State Fair and Dallas because their lease agreement is not an “arms-length agreement" as the opinion says.
Rather, he said, the two are intertwined in their operation of the fair, as evidenced by Dallas police officers working to secure fairgrounds and DPD signage posted on walls.
But State Fair attorney Jim Harris said the fair pays Dallas police officers for securing the fairgrounds.
As expected, the defendants’ attorneys used Paxton’s words against him. Tillotson said the attorney general came to the right conclusion eight years ago.
“Typically, if opinions go away, it’s because they’re superseded by law,” Tillotson said. “It has not been replaced, it’s not been said the logic was wrong, it was just withdrawn largely as a litigation tactic. We think that’s meaningful for the court here.”
Paxton’s office said it withdrew the opinion as it prepares to respond to a more recent request for opinion from two Republican state lawmakers. State Sen. Mayes Middleton of Galveston and Texas Rep. Dustin Burrows of Lubbock questioned whether the State Fair’s lease agreement with Dallas meant the fair was “operating jointly with a government entity” — citing the 2016 opinion — and thus legally questionable.
What Paxton didn’t withdraw was his dismissal of two citizen complaints about the Fort Worth Zoo in November 2016.
In that dismissal he concluded a private, nonprofit organization — in that case, the Fort Worth Zoological Association — was not a government entity and it was not illegal for the organization to ban guns from city-owned property.
State attorneys didn’t seem to directly address Paxton’s previous stances.
If the State Fair’s gun ban takes effect, the fair’s safety team members would inform any fairgoers with guns of the policy and ask the person to return their weapon to their vehicle.
It’s not clear if Paxton’s office plans to appeal Thursday’s ruling.
Got a tip? Email Toluwani Osibamowo at tosibamowo@kera.org. You can follow Toluwani on X @tosibamowo.
KERA News is made possible through the generosity of our members. If you find this reporting valuable, consider making a tax-deductible gift today. Thank you.
