Lubbock County Commissioners have finally tackled our absolute number one public safety threat: bored locals and retirees staring at flashing screens. Thanks to a hyper-aggressive game room ordinance passed last year and aggressively tweaked this past February, the county has successfully nuked the number of local game rooms from 45 down to a mere 23. Tax Assessor-Collector Ronnie Keister openly admitted that commissioners made “no secret” of their desire to kill off as many as humanly possible. Because nothing says “Texas freedom” quite like local bureaucrats regulatory-smothering businesses out of existence.
Sheriff Kelly Rowe famously labeled these establishments a “den of scum and villainy”—a delightfully dramatic Star Wars reference for a county that routinely struggles with actual violent crime rates. But why chase real criminals when you can target the true masterminds: game room owners who dare to close for more than seven days straight? Under a brilliant new clause, if a business closes for over a week without filing the proper permission slips with the county, their permit is revoked. Six game rooms have already been executed via this bureaucratic tripwire because apparently, taking a vacation is a civic sin.
The county also tried to cap game room operations at a hilarious 45 hours a week—essentially treating adult gaming like a part-time summer job—until Eric Thompson, owner of the vibrant blue El Fronteriso, slapped them with a lawsuit. A judge stepped in to grant a temporary order allowing them to stay open 12 hours a day, proving that even the court system finds the county’s micromanagement a bit much. Thompson actually shuttered his place in April just to stop “escalation” from local law enforcement, who had raided his shop and seized his property. Naturally, the criminal charges against him were dropped last month, but the county is still aggressively holding onto his seized stuff. Classic Lubbock justice: no crime committed, but we’re keeping your toys anyway.
To give this entire circus a veneer of sophisticated diplomacy, the county created a brand-new “citizen board” to hear appeals from ruined business owners. It’s a seven-person board that only requires three people to actually show up to make decisions, which is the most beautifully efficient government approach to productivity ever conceived. Keister proudly reported their first meeting in May went “pretty well,” which is standard administrative code for “nobody threw a chair, and we still got to say no.”
With half of the county’s game rooms successfully wiped off the map, we can all sleep soundly tonight knowing that our streets are finally safe from the harrowing menace of low-stakes digital entertainment—now, if we could just get the commissioners to view our tire-popping potholes with the same level of existential dread.
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