Rex Parris, founder of Lancaster-based personal injury law firm Parris Law, has been mayor of the city since 2008. In his time running the city, he has helped land international companies – such as BYD Company Ltd. – in setting up business operations in Lancaster and has helped develop clean-energy initiatives that include the city’s bus fleet. He recently sat for a Power Lunch with the Business Journal at The Third Place in Lancaster to discuss his time running the city and balancing that with his professional career.
You’re looking at 20 years of being mayor of Lancaster. How has the city changed socioeconomically since 2008?
Oh, I mean, it’s no comparison. The city didn’t have any money. I got elected in 2008 – the worst economic collapse in living history – but we were still able to rebuild the downtown. I’m really happy with what we’ve done. We now have a 40% reserve. No city has that. We have a bond rating better than the U.S. government, and we’re a relatively poor city. The GDP of the city is not real high. That’s changing, but it’s a slow process to change it.
You’re very pro-business. You’ve said you want to run the city like a business. Do you see people looking at your example here and saying we could do this too?
I see other cities doing that. It’s not an infrequent question – ‘What’s Lancaster doing?’ But California has an incredibly liberal population, and business is a dirty word, even though business is what feeds you. I spent a lot of time in China after I got elected, because I was recruiting BYD to come build their factory. We beat out every major city on the West Coast for that. Nobody could believe we did. I had to go to China many times, but I was the only one going. It was crazy. I learned how they do it in China to a certain degree. And I love the idea of public-private partnerships…so I brought that model here, and relatively successfully. We have the first hydrogen utility in the world; just signed our first contracts this week, and we will be producing most of the hydrogen on the West Coast, because we have the land to build the solar panels and we have the water. I’m trying to get a company to come in and build the the fuel cells here. I don’t have any doubt we’re going to be the hydrogen hub. It’s required millions of dollars investment. Most cities won’t make that type of investment, but the ultimate return to the city huge, just huge. I mean, we are projecting in the hundreds of millions a year. I work very hard at releasing judgment – I don’t look at anything as bad or good. I release that judgment, and then I can see more of the field than most people and I replace it with curiosity. That really is the motto of the city staff – ‘What could we do?’ not ‘What should we do?’
You’ve built up your own successful business. How did that inform your political rise?
I don’t look at politics as my religion – I’m a Baptist, not a Republican. I look at political affiliation as a means to an end, not the end. I really try to look at issues as to what’s the causation and what’s the long-term effect – what does this do in five years? How well we’re able to do that dictates how successful we are. I think that ability, in large part, was formed in developing the law firm. I was a solo practitioner, and the insurance defense industry could be incredibly brutal. I just woke up one day and realized these people will never respect me, but they will fear me and I accomplish that by working harder. I’ve got an iron a–, and that’s really the only secret to my success. I can sit in front of that computer and study longer than you can.
Does personal injury get a bad rap?
Yes and no. I fear what’s happened to the industry – we’ve got people out there doing things that they should be in prison for at a pace that is astonishing to me. I think a lot of it is because firms have started using fictitious names. My name is on that door. I care what we do with it. The value of not being anonymous is huge. The way you treat people changes. I’m very concerned with how the personal injury field is evolving. It’s because private equity owns those firms – they have shells and stuff like that. I first ran into private ownership of law firms by non-lawyers, and we got in a lawsuit over the fee of the case because we took the case from another law firm, and when we did the depositions, it turned out that a convicted felon owned that firm. That’s a major insurance defense firm. What we need is we need stronger judges that will call it when they see it, and we need a State Bar that quits going after the low hanging fruit. The solos live in fear of the State Bar. Major firms do not.
What’s the next big thing for the Antelope Valley?
Hydrogen is the long-term play. Whether you believe in climate extinction or you don’t, (oil) is going to run out, and the only play is hydrogen, not so much for transportation – although that’s where we’re going first, with buses – but the data centers. Those things consume enormous power, and the grid cannot handle it. We’re going to have to build microgrids for the data centers, and we’re in the process of doing that – until the government wakes up and gives me an SMR, a small modular nuclear reactor. Most of the solutions are at hand. It’s just bureaucracy. We’ve got to change the view of the leadership of this country and state to be builders, not regulators.
