Courting Favor
The lesson in the tale of Bob and Jane Cull—the North Texas homeowners who recently lost their politically charged case before the Texas Supreme Court—is don’t buy a home from the biggest campaign donor in the state.
The Culls bought a $233,000 home in 1996. The house had severe structural and foundation problems, and the Culls have spent the past 11 years trying to recoup their losses from builder Perry Homes. The company is owned by Bob Perry, who, in his spare time, spends several million dollars every election cycle to finance the campaigns of the state’s most powerful politicians and judges.
The Culls initially filed suit against Perry Homes in state court. Just before trial, they changed their minds and opted for binding arbitration instead. The building industry usually prefers arbitration because builders usually win. In fact, the builder-dominated Texas Residential Construction Commission—the state regulatory agency that Perry helped create and on which Perry’s corporate attorney serves—implemented a set of rules designed to funnel housing disputes into arbitration. Arbitration hearings have become the place homeowner complaints go to die.
Except this time the Culls actually won and were awarded an $800,000 judgment, no less. Having lost at its own game, Perry Homes challenged the award in court. A district judge and an appellate court both sided with the Culls. But the Texas Supreme Court—in a 5 to 4 ruling—threw out the arbitration award. The justices decided that the Culls, by suing in state court and then belatedly deciding to file for arbitration (to win compensation for their faulty house), had in fact treated Perry Homes unfairly. They ruled the arbitration invalid and commanded the Culls to take their case back to a trial court, where they had originally filed suit nearly eight years ago.
Since 2000, Perry and his family have contributed $135,000 to Supreme Court justices. The Perry-funded HillCo PAC has given another $172,000. The most unseemly of those contributions went to Justice Nathan Hecht. In early 2007, Hecht solicited donations from numerous corporations with business before the court to pay off a large legal bill he had incurred fending off an ethics investigation (see “Hecht of a Job,” July 27, 2007).
Among those that came to Hecht’s aid was HillCo, which gave $16,000 the month before Hecht and the court heard oral arguments in Perry’s case against the Culls. Yet Hecht refused to recuse himself. More than a year later, Hecht was one of the five justices who poured out Bob and Jane Cull in favor of Bob Perry.
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