Alcohol Commission to Meet Behind Closed Doors over Vacant Director’s Job

The Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission will meet Nov. 10 with almost nothing on its public agenda and a closed-door session on the executive director’s job, a post the agency’s own leadership page lists as vacant. The meeting falls a day after the deadline — 5 p.m. Nov. 9 — for written comment on the broadest set of rule changes the agency has put out this year, none of which is on the agenda.

The agency has had no executive director listed since its last chief, Thomas Graham, moved to the Wholesale Beer Distributors of Texas, a change the beer wholesalers’ national trade publication reported in late August. The commission has announced neither his departure nor a successor, and its leadership roster shows Deputy Executive Director Yolanda A. Hall under her own title rather than as an acting chief. Two other senior posts are listed vacant and two more are filled on an interim basis. Commissioners met in a special called session Sept. 1 to discuss the director’s employment behind closed doors, taking no action. The Nov. 10 item is worded to cover appointment, employment, compensation, evaluation, reassignment, duties, discipline or dismissal — the full statutory phrase, which signals nothing about which of those is at issue. An item in that form is routine when a board is choosing a new chief executive.

What is on the public agenda is thin: approving minutes from the Sept. 22 meeting, and approving an internal audit charter. A charter is the document that sets out what an agency’s internal auditors may examine and to whom they report; boards across Texas state government approve one, usually once a year, because the professional standards the Texas Internal Auditing Act incorporates call for it.

The rules out for comment are a different matter. Written on the recommendation of the Texas Regulatory Efficiency Office, which reviewed the agency this year, they would stop a written warning from counting against a bar or store when the commission sets a later penalty — and remove the right to a hearing to contest one. They would stretch from 12 months to 24 the window in which repeated employee violations raise a presumption that the owner indirectly encouraged them, cut records retention on food and beverage certificates from four years to two, drop the tracking of complimentary drinks, and repeal the rules establishing the agency’s advisory committees, which the commission says it does not foresee needing.

The commission could have adopted those rules Nov. 10 — the notice gives Nov. 8 as the earliest possible date — but did not put them on the agenda. When it does take them up is the thing to watch.

Meeting at a glance

Commissioners

• Robert A. Eckels — chair; Spring; attorney; Harris County’s chief executive, 1995-2007.
• M. Scott Adkins — El Paso; president and chief executive, PyroCom Systems.
• Chad M. Craycraft — Dallas; executive vice president and general counsel, Graduation Alliance.
• Hasan K. Mack — Austin; municipal bond attorney, McCall, Parkhurst & Horton.
• Deborah “Debbie” Gray Marino — San Antonio; senior vice president, SWBC.

All five seats are filled. Governor Greg Abbott appointed Eckels chair in September 2025, succeeding Kevin J. Lilly; the release gives his hometown as Spring, while the agency’s own roster lists his office as Houston. Adkins and Craycraft were appointed in January 2025 to terms running to 2029; Mack and Marino were reappointed to terms running to 2031. Eckels’ term ends in 2027. The commission grew from three members to five after its 2019 Sunset review; its next review is set for the 2030-31 cycle.