When criminal activity has created a blight on a community, law enforcement and local officials should use every tool at their disposal to address the issue. El Paso County’s recent common nuisance action against the Gateway Hotel—which has become a hotbed of crime in recent years—is the perfect case study.

According to the county’s petition to abate the nuisance, law enforcement has been called to the Gateway Hotel 693 times in the last two years. Surveillance footage shows evidence of gunfire, assaults and disorderly conduct. A police report lists suspected prostitution and notes that “continuous criminal activity” has increased with the presence at the hotel of members of a notoriously violent Venezuelan street gang. 

As a reminder, the Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code (CPRC) defines 28 specific actions as common nuisances, including many of the criminal activities occurring at the Gateway Hotel. El Paso’s petition specifically lists 53 violations of the CPRC, including delivery, possession, or use of a controlled substance; aggravated assault; criminal trespass; public intoxication and indecency with a child, among many others.

The El Paso County attorney is correct to pursue this cause of action. Texas law provides for common nuisance actions to abate the nuisance—in other words, shut down the criminal activity. Money damages aren’t recoverable unless an injunction prohibiting further harmful conduct is violated.

This case is an example of an appropriate use of Texas’ common nuisance statutes to protect a community from harmful unlawful activity. 

It also has nothing to do with reining in public nuisance lawsuits used by cities and states across the nation to usurp the appropriate legislative process.

Texas law is clear about what constitutes a common nuisance—going so far as to laundry-list those specific actions. It is less clear about what constitutes a public nuisance, making it easy to conflate the two. We saw this time and again in committee hearings last session on HB 1372—which addressed abuses of public nuisance lawsuits—even from the county attorneys who regularly file common nuisance lawsuits. 

But these officials routinely and correctly use specific common nuisance lawsuits to shut down criminal activity—not public nuisance lawsuits. And despite some of the committee testimony we heard, common nuisance lawsuits are not used to reimburse local governments for the cost of policing those criminal activities.

Nothing in the proposal to rein in public nuisance lawsuits would have impacted El Paso County’s ability to bring a common nuisance lawsuit to shut down the criminal activity at the Gateway Hotel.

HB 1372 would have created simple guardrails to help courts determine cases that the public nuisance doctrine should not apply to—specifically those targeting legal or permitted activities after they have been authorized by the Legislature or a regulatory body. We hope the Legislature will take another look at this important measure in 2025.