Texas Technology Board Finishes a Deregulation Rewrite of Its Own Rules Oct. 29

The board that governs the Texas Department of Information Resources votes Oct. 29 to throw out the chapter of rules covering how the agency itself runs and replace it with a rewritten version, the end of a project the governor’s deregulation office helped set in motion. The public comment period closed Oct. 18.

The agenda calls the item an amendment. What the agency published in the Texas Register on Sept. 18 is not one. It repeals all nine sections of the chapter that covers the agency’s own administration and substitutes ten new ones. The agency says the rewrite came out of the review every Texas rule gets every four years and a separate look by the Texas Regulatory Efficiency Office, the deregulation shop inside the governor’s office, and that it keeps the intent of each rule while cutting what is unnecessary and renumbering the rest. It reports no added cost to small businesses or rural communities.

Not all of what moves is housekeeping. The new sections fix when a contract has to come to the board: any award worth more than $1 million, and, separately, any major outsourced contract whatever it is worth. Below that the board delegates the decision to the executive director, emergency buys included. They also let the executive director accept a donation not exceeding $250,000 on his own, with anything larger going to the board and anything above $10,000 requiring a signed donation agreement. And they name the advisory committees the agency runs, among them one on data management and one on buying technology in bulk.

Two more rule votes follow. The board would send out for comment a proposal to repeal Chapter 205 outright, the chapter that sets the technical standards state agencies must follow for mapping and geographic data. That repeal text has not been published, so what if anything would replace it is not yet public and this article does not say. The board would also open a 30-day review of the chapter governing how agencies buy commodity technology.

The rest is routine but for two items. Members vote on a second amendment to the state’s public cloud management contract, held by NTT Data Americas since August 2025, and on the report on state technology spending and projects that the agency owes the governor and the Legislature by Nov. 15 of every even-numbered year — the deadline that put this meeting where it is on the calendar. Public testimony comes just before adjournment.

Meeting at a glance

Board members

• Ben Gatzke — chair; Fort Worth; chief executive, BorrowWorks.
• Jeffrey W. Allison — Houston; chief executive, Monument Energy.
• Walter “Frank” Coppersmith III — Round Rock; chief executive, Smarter Reality.
• Christopher “Stephen” Franke — Dallas; vice president, C1 Insurance Group.
• Jeffrey Tayon — Houston; independent investor.
• Keri Pearlson — Austin; principal research scientist, MIT.
• Ex officio: Daniel Avitia Jr. — executive director, Texas Department of Motor Vehicles.
• Ex officio: Andrew Friedrichs — executive director, governor’s Public Safety Office.
• Ex officio: Keith Halman — chief information officer, Texas Tech University System.
• Ex officio: Sylvia Hernandez Kauffman — chief information officer, Health and Human Services.

Roster from the agency’s governing board page, re-read October 20, unchanged from the Dispatch’s August check. The page does not give term expiration dates, gives no cities for the four ex officio members, and does not say whether they vote; this article does not characterize that. It writes Keri Pearlson’s affiliation as “MIT Austin,” which the Dispatch could not match to a named MIT unit, so the plain form is used here. Meeting contact: gloria.cervantes@dir.texas.gov.