Texas is taking back the elevator-safety forms it issued in April, after the trade association for the state’s commercial building owners told regulators the new paperwork was leaving elevators out of service for days instead of hours.
The forms govern what gets written down as a reportable condition — the state’s term for a fault serious enough that the equipment has to come out of service. Once one is reported, the program’s chief inspector told the Elevator Advisory Board Oct. 6, the owner has 24 hours to notify the department and has to keep the machine shut off until the repair is finished. Widen what counts, and more elevators sit.
The chief executive of the Texas Building Owners and Managers Association, who gave his name as Bradley Elliot, was the only member of the public to speak.
uh you know, elevators are being down for extended periods of time where, you know, you could usually get an elevator up and running in a day, but because of some of these new kind of enhanced requirements, you’re essentially, you know, you might be down to 3 days.
Some of his members, he said, run buildings with a single elevator, or two, and when one is down for an extended period “now you’re running into accessibility issues”. In a two-elevator apartment tower that is the difference between an annoyance and a resident who cannot get downstairs. Two of the board’s nine seats are empty, and one of them is the seat reserved for a public member who is a person with a disability.
The state regulates a great many elevators with very few inspectors. The department’s own published fact sheet counts 43,683 commercial and other non-residential elevator certificates in fiscal 2025. The licensing division told this meeting that Texas ended fiscal 2026 with 180 licensed inspectors and 377 registered contractors. That is about 243 units for every licensed inspector — this newsroom’s own arithmetic from the department’s two figures, across two different years, and an order of magnitude rather than a workload. Elliot put it at “over 40,000 elevators it regulates but you only have 200 QI inspectors”; the elevator count checks out and the inspector count is generous by 20.
The department’s general counsel did not defend the forms. He said they had been reviewed in response to the public and that the April changes were being undone. “We decided we’re just going to revert back to the forms the way they were prior to April.” Owners should see it, he said, “within this month”.
What is not being undone is the rule underneath, and a board member made sure the record said so. Patrick Shaw, who holds the seat for owners of buildings six stories and taller, asked whether this was about layout or about substance: “We’re not necessarily talking about rolling back um reportable condition.” Sheila Swett, the Houston inspector on the board, suggested the fear is overdrawn in practice — “I believe inspectors only shut down an elevator if it is unsafe”, she said, and a fault that merely breaks code gets written on the inspection report instead. The chief inspector conceded the department had not explained itself.
When we presented the changes in the policy, it was not sufficiently clear on what the procedures would be. And so now we’re going back and looking at these procedures to make sure that they’re very clear and concise on what should be done first, second, and third.
There is a case for asking owners to report more, and it came from the department’s own enforcement division in the same meeting. Citations for failing to tell the state about unsafe equipment went “from zero last fiscal year so far to 28 in the current fiscal year so far”, against 404 complaints opened in all; citations for skipping an annual inspection fell to 30 from 57. Enforcement cautioned that the 28 “may be attributable to violations that occurred in the previous fiscal year, not the current one”, so whether the new forms caught more hidden faults or merely renamed old ones is not something the record settles.
The board could not act on any of it. A staff member announced at the outset that “at this point, uh, we do not have a quorum”, and the general counsel warned the commenter before he began that nothing he said could draw an official response. The work groups meant to rewrite what counts as a reportable condition — the substance under the paperwork — were deferred for the same reason. Scott Anderson, the Houston public member presiding, asked staff to try to get them stood up “before the end of December”. The meeting adjourned at 11:18 a.m. with no date set, and the department’s board page still lists none.
A new licensing system is coming. Staff told the board the department is consolidating its licensing systems into a modernization project it calls TDLR Core, and that it will be tracking the legislative session that opens in January. No timetable for the elevator program’s move onto the new system was given on the record. Call volume up sixteen percent. The customer service division reported 13,664 contacts in fiscal 2026 against 11,799 the year before, with July the busiest month at 1,473 calls and emails. Open Meetings Act training. With no quorum and a new member seated, the board spent its first substantive stretch on the annual training the statute requires — quorum, deliberation and notice rules — which is why an agenda built around work groups produced none.