Breaking News Update: Austin United PAC plaintiffs lose in court, but pledge to redo anti-convention center petition
Travis County District Judge Jessica Mangrum has ruled against Austin United PAC’s challenge to the city’s rejection of its anti–convention center petition, but the group says it will quickly regroup and launch a new drive aimed at the November ballot.
Mangrum’s briefing attorney notified Austin United PAC lawyers Friday evening, Feb. 6, that she is ruling in favor of the city of Austin.
“We are surprised and strongly disagree with this outcome,” said an Austin United PAC statement. “This ruling allows the City to sidestep a public vote and move forward with a $5.6 billion, 32-year debt-financed project without a direct vote of the people, despite clear evidence that thousands of eligible voters were wrongfully excluded from the petition process.
“We are not backing down,” the statement added. Our “legal team will be evaluating legal next steps. As a result of today’s decision, we will immediately begin organizing a new citizen-led petition to place this issue directly before voters on the November ballot.”
The city clerk had previously found the Austin United PAC petition fell 494 names short of the 20,000 valid signatures needed, after invalidating about 23% of signatures in a statistical sample.
Four hundred and ninety-four names.
That’s the number of petition signatures at the heart of Austin United PAC’s court case that seeks to block the city of Austin’s $1.6 billion convention center rebuild. Austin City Clerk Erika Brady invalidated Austin United’s petition in November for falling 494 names short — a decision that’s now under review in Travis County District Court.
Although lawyers for both sides pressed other arguments at trial on Wednesday and Thursday, they always returned to that central issue.
“This case is about whether the PAC got 20,000 legal signatures,” Rose Norton Fulbright attorney Paul Trahan argued on the city’s behalf at the trial.
“This is a narrow case,” Save Our Springs Alliance attorney Bill Bunch said, representing Austin United. “We are looking at the how the city clerk exercised her ministerial duty to review this petition and whether she complied with the law.”
Judge Jessica Mangrum listened much and spoke little in court. At the end of day, she said that she’ll ask herself if the decisions that the city clerk made in disqualifying petition names were proper under the law. Mangrum is expected to rule swiftly, given that the legal deadline for putting items such as this on the city’s May ballot is Feb. 13.
A key witness in the case, City Clerk Brady was out on medical leave. Mangrum did not grant plaintiff requests to compel her testimony.
Image credit: Andrew Wheat.
The dueling parties painted starkly different pictures of Brady’s actions. Bunch argued that she “disqualified hundreds of registered Austin voters by imposing criteria that do not appear in the (city) charter or state law, excluding voters based on jurisdictional labels, address formatting and other technicalities.”
Trahan pushed back. “The evidence will show that the city clerk’s office bent over backwards to count every signature it legally could,” he said. “For the plaintiffs to criticize these hardworking public servants the way they have is disgraceful.”
“The petitioners stand in the shoes of the council and because this power of limited direct democracy is reserved to the people, it’s favored. It’s to be protected even more than the city council’s legislative process,” Bunch said. “If you rule with us on this law,” he told the judge, “then we win.”
Brady invalidated the convention center petition in November after reviewing a sample of 25% of the 25,441 petition names that Austin United submitted a month earlier. Austin United claims that Brady wrongly disqualified hundreds of names in finding that the petition fell 494 validated signatures short. If the petition has 20,000 validated voter names, then the city must either adopt it as an ordinance or put it on the May ballot. Enacting the petition would derail the convention center that the Austin City Council is keen to build at a cost of $5.6 billion over 30 years.
The petitioners claim that the clerk wrongly excluded petition names for various reasons. In the biggest one, Brady struck 315 names of people who live in the city’s extraterritorial and limited purpose jurisdictions. Those residents typically don’t pay city property taxes but are subject to certain city regulations.
Since those 315 names came from the city’s sample of just 25% of the petition names, they’re roughly equivalent to striking four times as many signatures from the entire petition — 1,260 of them. If the judge validated just those names alone, the petition easily would clear its 20,000-signature hurdle.
The city sometimes allows residents beyond Austin’s city limits to participate in petitions, including a 2019 one that challenged the use of city-owned property for sports or entertainment facilities. The parties clashed over whether those residents have a voice in the convention center petition — a question that stumps even consummate City Hall insiders.
Image credit: Andrew Wheat.
Mayor Kirk Watson attended the first day of the trial. Just before it started Austin Free Press asked him why the city counted extraterritorial residents on the 2019 petition but not now. “They don’t vote,” Watson said. Reminded that extraterritorial jurisdiction residents do vote in some instances, Watson said, “I’m going to let the lawyers argue the legal argument, let the judge make the decisions.”
In the courtroom shortly thereafter, Trahan said residents of extraterritorial jurisdiction may sign petitions when the proposed ordinance would apply to those areas. The convention center does not apply out there, he argued. Bunch contended that the petition seeks to spend fewer city hotel tax dollars on the convention center and more on parks and cultural arts – including in those special jurisdictions. He argued that those excluded residents have a right to sign the petition.
Austin United also argued that the clerk wrongly scotched 87 sampled petitioners who either didn’t put an address on the petition or jotted down an address that didn’t match their voter roll. If the judge approves all the sampled address-problem signatories, then the whole petition gains about 348 more names. In closing remarks, Trahan reiterated Deputy City Clerk Stephanie Hall testimony that her office’s “goal is to verify every signature we can any way we can find.”
Retired University of Texas professor Betsy Greenberg helped Austin United verify names. She testified that notes on petition records obtained from the city indicate that city clerks jotted down addresses of many petitioners who hadn’t provided them, verifying that they were on the voter rolls before disqualifying them anyway.
Image credit: Andrew Wheat.
In a pretrial brief, the plaintiffs cited such a case where a city clerk added in the Barton Springs Road address that petitioner Daniel McClellan left out. “Rather than validating his signature,” the plaintiffs alleged, “the Clerk deliberately omitted Mr. McClellan’s address from her final petition validation report, obfuscating the fact that the petition signer was indeed an eligible Austin voter.”
Plaintiff attorney Bobby Levinski asked Deputy City Clerk Stephanie Hall at the trial why McClellan was disqualified. She said that it was because he had not provided an address. Shown that the clerk’s office had added McClellan’s address and then crossed it out, Levinski asked Hall where a clerk obtained the address. Probably from the voter rolls, Hall replied. Asked if McClellan was a registered voter, Hall said, “I think we’d need more information.” Directed to where a clerk wrote in McLellan’s voter ID number, Levinski asked if that indicates that McClellan’s a registered voter? “Yes,” Hall replied.
Austin Free Press contacted McClellan prior to the trial and asked him to review the city clerk’s records about him. “I would resent the city disqualifying me for that reason, especially after they found me in the voter rolls,” the retired state worker said. Hotel occupancy taxes should “serve the whole city, not just the convention center.”
Image credit: Andrew Wheat.
Echoing that theme, Travis County Commissioner Brigid Shea testified that the county has lobbied the city to invest some hotel taxes in refurbishing the Travis County Exposition Center. But the city decided to keep all of that money for itself to build the new convention center.
Shea testified that she and Bunch worked together in the 1990s on the Save Our Springs water-quality petition, which a judge had to order onto the ballot after the city council refused to do so. During a trial recess, Shea told Austin Free Press that former City Clerk Elden Aldridge told her before his 2003 death that an Austin City Council member directed him not to review a statistical sample of the SOS petition but to instead check every SOS signature.
That thorough petition validation delayed the 1992 SOS petition from the May ballot to November, Shea said. And that gave developers six more months to file grandfathered development applications that “didn’t have to comply with SOS.”
Shea declined to name that council member in question — but left the door open to do so after his death.
Andrew Wheat is the managing editor of the Austin Free Press.
Disclosure: Save Our Springs Alliance Executive Director Bill Bunch sits on the advisory board of the Austin Free Press.
Leave a Reply