Texas refused to license a woman who had spent five years in back-to-back drug treatment programs and now works at an electrical company, and a barber who had finished a state substance-abuse program. In both cases the commissioner who moved to refuse gave the same reason aloud: too little time had passed since the crime.
The refusals came seven minutes apart on Oct. 28 before the Texas Commission of Licensing and Regulation, the seven-member board over the agency that licenses barbers, electricians and air-conditioning technicians and issued or renewed 1,020,822 licenses in the year ending August 2025. The commission heard eight contested cases, adopted every recommendation and adjourned inside ninety minutes. Six people were refused a license or stripped of one, four of them on criminal history.
Neither has a conviction. Both are on deferred adjudication — a guilty plea the judge accepts without entering a finding of guilt — with ten years of supervision. State law bars a licensing agency from counting that as a conviction, but the shield arrives only after supervision ends and the case is dismissed, and not even then if the application came less than five years later. For a ten-year term, by this newspaper’s own reading of the statute, that is fifteen years in which Texas may hold the plea against an applicant. The provision is not new: it dates to 2013.
Her supervision runs to Jan. 4, 2034. She was about 22 when the robbery happened, the prosecutor said, and will be about 41 before that span closes. His runs to 2032.
The ground is not improvised. Where a conviction relates to the job, the law makes the agency weigh seven things. The third is “the amount of time that has elapsed since the person’s last criminal activity”. The fifth is rehabilitation and the seventh is letters of recommendation, and in the electrician case both were blank. The record had been held open for roughly seven letters and rehabilitation certificates, the prosecutor said, and “those were never submitted to the court and were not considered on the record”. By statute, producing them was the applicant’s own burden.
So the commissioners could hear about her recovery and not weigh it. One asked anyway. Commissioner Lori High of Spicewood pressed twice — “I wanted you to elaborate on the rehab treatment that you received” — and the applicant described treatment centers “back to back to back” across what she called “my journey of rehabs from 2020 until 2025”. The prosecutor allowed that she “is on the right path for rehabilitation”, then asked for refusal anyway, citing a robbery in which a person died and in which she drove the car away.
Then the motion, naming the judge’s recommendation by its initials:
“I make a motion we adopt the PFD as written due to the very small amount of time since the incident in question occurred.”
Seven minutes later the barber, who told the commissioners “I barely got a GED” and could not file his paperwork online, drew a motion citing “the uh short amount of time that’s elapsed since the incident”. Both carried on voice votes with no audible dissent.
Texas law offers a middle option the record does not show weighed. For electricians and air-conditioning contractors — three of the four criminal-history cases — the statute lets this commission issue a restricted license as an “alternative to denying, revoking, suspending, or refusing to issue or renew” one, on conditions it writes itself, including that the holder “be supervised”. A commissioner reached for that in the third electrician case, asking whether a “restrictive license” had been addressed and “Did he have a sponsor”. “He didn’t provide that”, the prosecutor answered. The statute asks no sponsor of the applicant; supervision is a condition the department may impose.
The agency says it wants the opposite. Its website says the commission “prioritizes second chances for Texans who have criminal history”, and that “the best way to reduce recidivism is to minimize the time between release and gainful employment”. The same page says applicants are “never automatically denied” and each is “reviewed on a case-by-case basis” — which is what Oct. 28 was.
No one outside the room has taken a public position on these refusals. In April, Marc Levin told the Dispatch that Texas had been “training people to be barbers in prison, but they couldn’t get a cosmetology license” — though he described a gap he said recent changes have narrowed, and has said nothing about deferred adjudication.
Anyone in this position can ask the agency in advance whether a record disqualifies them. Both applicants had already paid for coursework. A refusal can go to district court within 30 days of becoming final. The commission meets again Dec. 8.
The item the Dispatch expected to be the story took ninety seconds. The charitable bingo division presented its fiscal 2027 compliance and financial audit plan, telling the members staff expect to complete “at least 112 audits and 102 game inspections” on bingo license holders, chosen by a risk assessment. It was informational, drew no questions and needed no vote. A commissioner asked what happens to repeat offenders. After voting a $4,000 penalty against a salon that employed two unlicensed workers, a member asked what the agency does the second time: another order and another fine, the prosecutor said. “I just want to make sure we have tougher penalties because if you just slap them on the wrist and they’re making more profit than 4,000, we’re right not really helping the state of Texas”, he said. A new internal auditor. Members approved a fiscal 2027 internal audit plan built by Plante Moran, newly engaged for four years. A student warned about AI. The meeting’s only public speaker, a Dallas student writing a paper on “agentic commerce”, urged the commission to press online marketplaces to verify the licensed tradespeople that AI tools recommend.