Section 1.4 gave the shape of this: local government cannot license you, and can still govern what you build. The structure underneath it is worth having in full, because it is what you actually quote at a permit desk. Insurance Code § 6002.003 opens with the rule — the chapter and its rules have uniform force and effect throughout the state, a municipality or county may not enact an ordinance or rule inconsistent with them, and an inconsistent one is void and has no effect. Everything after that opening is a set of specific things local government may still do, each with its own conditions, and one further limit that overrides the rest.

The conditions on those local powers are easy to skip and are where most disputes actually sit. A municipality or county may mandate that a fire alarm or detection system be installed in certain facilities — but only if the installation conforms to applicable state law. It may require a better type of alarm or detection system, or an otherwise safer condition, than the state minimum. And it may require regular inspections by local officials of smoke detectors in dwelling units, using the meaning that term carries in Property Code § 92.251, and require those detectors to be operational at the time of inspection. That third power is narrower than it sounds: it is an inspection power over smoke detectors in a defined class of residential property, not a general power to inspect fire alarm work.

Then comes the part that decides the permit-desk conversation, and it is built as two provisions in tension. Insurance Code § 6002.003 first says that notwithstanding any other provision of that section, or Insurance Code § 6002.155, a municipality or county MAY require a registered firm to obtain a permit and pay a permit fee for an installation, and require the installation to conform to its building code or other construction requirements as well as state law. It then says that notwithstanding THAT, a municipality or county may not impose qualification or financial responsibility requirements other than proof of a registration certificate. Read together, the permit, the fee and the code all stand; proof of the firm’s registration certificate may be demanded; anything beyond that — a local competency test, a bond, evidence of financial standing — may not. Nothing in Insurance Code § 6002.155, then, cuts down a city’s permit power over registered firms — that first “notwithstanding” is doing real work of its own.

Two smaller provisions close the section, and one of them cuts against the grain. A political subdivision may not require a registered firm, a license holder, or a license holder’s employee to maintain a business location or residency inside that subdivision in order to work there. But a municipality or county MAY, by ordinance, require a registered firm to make a telephone call to a monitored property before the firm notifies the municipality or county of an alarm signal it has received from a fire detection device. That is local government regulating a registered firm’s own dispatch procedure — sitting alongside a bar on local licensing, and expressly allowed.