New Beginnings Fellowship Church’s mission springs from a literal translation of the gospel of Matthew 25:35: “I was a stranger and you invited me in.”

“It’s the most important passage in the Bible,” said Joe Donalson, a church minister.

The church started in Houston, converting abandoned houses into shelters. Hurricane Harvey inspired it to expand its mission, and in 2017 New Beginnings acquired an empty nursing home in Canton, 60 miles east of Dallas, hoping to convert it into another shelter.

But the quaint community, best known for its famous giant monthly flea market, resisted. The dispute grew contentious, spinning into lawsuits. Donalson became a regular at city meetings, seldom missing an opportunity to call out local politicians.

So when he decided to run for Canton City Council he knew the campaign might get heated. What he didn’t anticipate is that it would get him tossed in jail.

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Earlier this month Donalson was taken into custody at the San Jacinto Jail, where he’d gone to visit an inmate. After checking Donalson’s driver’s license deputies informed him that Van Zandt County — home to Canton — had issued a warrant for his arrest. His bail was set at $25,000; he spent the next day and a half behind bars. His crime: filing to run for public office when he’d been convicted of a felony, 35 years ago.

The question of whether someone with a criminal record can run for office in Texas has, if anything, become more confusing recently. As a result, today a candidate with a record faces two dramatically different potential receptions when he or she declares candidacy: A place on the ballot — or arrest and criminal charges. Sprinkle the high passions and influences of local politics into the mix, and their risk in seeking elected office becomes especially unpredictable.

State law says to participate in elections those convicted of a felony must have been officially pardoned by the governor — a vanishingly rare occurrence — or “released from the resulting disabilities” of their crimes. For voting purposes the phrase has been interpreted to mean former felons can cast a ballot when their sentence is complete.

So criminal justice advocates argue the same must be true for office-seekers, as well. Some jurisdictions have agreed. In 2018, the City of Austin allowed Lewis Conway to run for city council despite his 1991 manslaughter conviction. Last year in San Antonio, city council candidate Walter Perry, Sr. and state representative candidate Steve Huerta appeared on the ballot despite their felony convictions. (All lost.)

Attorney General Ken Paxton, himself facing felony securities fraud charges, tackled the question last May. He argued that just because a person can legally vote doesn’t mean he can run for office, concluding a prior felony conviction disqualified someone from elected office unless he or she was pardoned or officially granted clemency by a judge — also extremely uncommon.

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Paxton’s opinions are advisory, however, and local jurisdictions have continued to treat candidates with criminal pasts differently. In Houston, a judge earlier this month said city council candidate Cynthia Bailey could remain on the ballot, despite a 2007 theft conviction. (An opponent is appealing.)

In the San Antonio suburb of Cibolo, by comparison, Mayor Stan “Stosh” Boyle was arrested last July for not disqualifying himself from his successful 2017 election because of a 1998 drug conviction. The city council voted to keep him in office anyway. In September, he was charged again after filing for his 2019 re-election, which he also won. The cases, being prosecuted by the attorney general’s office, are pending.

His lawyer, Eric DeWalt, said Boyle’s arrests were troubling not only for limiting his legal rights, but also because the case against Boyle was initiated by a political opponent, who DeWalt said issued the mayor an ultimatum of exposing him unless he resigned. “There was a political undertone,” he said.

“Nowadays,” Boyle wrote in a statement, “if your political opponents can’t beat you at the ballot box, they attempt to misuse our justice system to thwart the will of the voters.”

‘A very angry young man’

Although New Beginnings has an attorney, most of its voluminous legal filings have been prepared by Donalson, who said he acquired his skills during his two decades of incarceration. “I learned it all in the prison law library,” he said.

Donalson was 18 years old when he was convicted in a series of arson fires that gripped Houston in the mid-1980s. Dubbed the Fondra Firebug, Donalson -- then named Damon Downs -- was linked to a dozen fires in the southwest part of the city. In a 1986 interview, he said he did it for the attention; investigators traced phone calls he made to the fire department after setting the blazes.

He was sentenced to 50 years (later reduced on appeal). Court records show he was an active self-advocate early on, filing dozens of legal claims and appeals. “I was a very angry young man,” he said.

After his 2006 release Donalson found work as a legal courier. He later started his own company, ferrying filings from Houston attorneys’ offices to courthouses.

He enjoyed a media flare in 2018 after contacting Houston police to report that a nervous-seeming man who hired him to file a property deed looked familiar. It turned out to be Joseph Pappas, who days earlier had pedaled his bike next to one being ridden by Mark Hausknecht and fatally shot the prominent Houston physician. Pappas had nursed a 20-year grudge against the doctor, blaming him for his mother’s death, police said.

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Since 2009, Donalson said he has thrown himself into his church work for the homeless. “When I was a kid, no one gave me a second chance, the benefit of the doubt,” he said. “That’s what I’m trying to do for everyone else.”

New Beginnings wasn’t the first to imagine a new life for the former Heritage Manor Nursing Home just blocks west of Canton’s downtown. Kevin Chapman, who’d established a sober living center in nearby Eustace, said he was approached in 2014 by local officials seeking a similar facility for people being released from the local jail, especially veterans.

He bought the 109-bed building in 2015. “At first, the movers and shakers of the county were just rolling out the red carpet for us,” he recalled.

But after word spread among neighbors how the building was to be used, Chapman said, the support evaporated. “The city also started to come down on us really hard,” he added. “They were making it impossible for us to move forward.”

The building was sold to another nonprofit, only to be returned to Chapman months later. “There are a lot of wealthy people in that neighborhood, and they don’t want that kind of thing there,” said Sue Hosack, who handled the real estate listing.

New Beginnings acquired the property in October 2017. According to court filings, Donalson said he soon heard from locals that his shelter would be unwelcome in Canton. He said residents also told him there was a plan to develop the property behind the nursing home, owned by the city’s largest landholder, Henry Lewis. A Future Land Use Plan map on the city’s website shows a proposed thoroughfare that appears to cut through the nursing home property into Lewis’s. Donalson came to believe he was involved in more than a simple code dispute.

He protested in conventional ways — meeting with city officials, attending council sessions, eventually fighting in court. But he also deployed more unconventional tactics. When a city inspector kept identifying minor infractions Donalson disputed, he researched the man and discovered he’d lost his job in another city and lacked proper credentials, which he reported to Canton.

He recorded his interactions with Canton officials, posting them on YouTube, with commentary. He cruised the city recording examples of what he saw as the same code violations he was being asked to fix. When the city posted a notice of violation because the New Beginnings building lacked sprinklers, Donalson replaced his address with that of Canton’s City Hall and posted the placard there — where, he noted, there were no sprinklers, either. (A building inspector said City Hall wasn’t big enough to require them.)

‘We need some new blood’

Though their attorney, Canton officials declined to be interviewed. In court filings they characterized the dispute as a simple public safety matter. The old nursing home was too dangerous to occupy and should be repaired or demolished, but Donalson and New Beginnings “have defiantly declared that they are not required to comply with the City’s health and safety code provisions,” one stated.

Donalson said his frustrating experience trying to open the homeless facility led him to contemplate a run for city office. “I don’t want to be on city council,” he said. “But a lot of people in Canton came to me and said, ‘We need some new blood, to straighten things out.’” He filed to run on January 16.

It’s unclear who lodged the complaint against Donalson. Van Zandt County District Attorney Tonda Curry said the matter was investigated by the Canton Police Department. Chief Brad Allison declined comment.

Curry said the case was clear-cut: When Donalson filed for office, he did not disclose his disqualifying arson conviction. “The answer to the question for Mr. Donalson is ‘yes,’ and he wrote ‘no’ under oath,” she said. A grand jury indicted him January 31.

Donalson said there was enough ambiguity in Texas law to protect him. It didn’t.

On February 9, a Sunday, he had driven to the jail in Coldspring, an hour north of Houston, to interview an about-to-be-released inmate to see if he was a good fit for one of New Beginnings’s shelters -—“just to see where his head was at.”

Records show he was taken into custody at 2:30 in the afternoon. Donalson said he was handcuffed and given a jumpsuit to put on. He said he wasn’t given an opportunity to call his lawyer to bond out until the following day. County records show he was released late Monday, just before midnight.

Last month New Beginnings lost most of its legal claims and was ordered out of the old nursing home. Now, after his arrest, Donalson said he’s done with Canton. “No,” he said. “I’m not running for city council.”