Texas civil commitment board takes up its contractor’s medical costs under a Sunset review

The board that oversees Texas’s civil commitment program for sex offenders meets Friday on medical care at its West Texas lockup, a 2027 budget and an audit plan — while state reviewers decide whether the agency should exist at all.

Civil commitment is not prison. A jury must find beyond a reasonable doubt that a repeat sexually violent offender has a condition making another such offense likely; the commitment begins when the prison sentence ends and lasts until a court lifts it. Most of the men committed live at a secure center in Littlefield, north of Lubbock, run under contract since 2019 by Management & Training Corp. The agency counted 656 people in the program in August 2025, all but one of them men, and 498 at the Littlefield center in February.

Medical care there has been a running argument. Board members pressed the company in May of last year and again in August over what it spends sending men off site for care, according to the agency’s own adopted minutes. The chair said in August that the lack of effort put into cutting those costs was very disappointing, and that questions the executive director had emailed three months earlier were still unanswered. Ten men accounted for 64 percent of one year’s off-site medical costs, and Covenant Health has told the agency it will not take new specialty patients from the center. Friday’s agenda carries the company’s cost-cutting report again, as agendas have since 2025.

The rest is money and staffing: a 2027 budget, the request the agency sends the Legislature for 2028 and 2029 under an instruction to ask for 3 percent less, an internal audit plan, and an update on operations at the center, where the minutes recorded 26 security officer vacancies in February. Officers there were paid $16 an hour as of August 2025, against $26 at a state prison unit then opening nearby. A 2024 state audit found the health agency that buys mental health services at the center had overpaid the company’s medical arm by $242,099.

Behind all of it is Sunset review. The agency is abolished on September 1, 2027 unless the Legislature votes to keep it; reviewers publish their report in October and lawmakers take it up when they convene in January. The board also meets privately on personnel matters relating to the executive director’s office, and nothing public explains that item. Public comment is a standing item with no published sign-up.

Meeting at a glance

Board members

• Christy Jack, Fort Worth — chair; former Tarrant County prosecutor.
• Kathryn “Katie” McClure, Kingwood — vice chair; former felony prosecutor.
• Roberto Dominguez — retired chief of the Mission Police Department.
• Rona Stratton Gouyton, Fort Worth — victims’ advocate and survivors’ group founder.
• Bruce Toney, Sagerton — criminal investigator, 39th Judicial District Attorney’s Office.

The roster is from the agency’s own board page and the governor’s appointment releases. Government Code §420A.002 sets five seats and requires that one member have experience managing sex offenders, one in investigating or prosecuting sex offenses, and one in counseling or advocating for victims of sexual assault; and §420A.003 has the governor designate the presiding officer and requires the board to meet at least quarterly. The agency’s Sunset filing gives Dominguez’s home as Mission; his role as a retired police chief there comes from the governor’s appointment release rather than agency records. Staff contact: Marsha McLane, (512) 341-4421.