Austin United PAC appealed to the Texas Supreme Court this week to resurrect its petition challenging the city’s planned $1.6 billion convention center rebuild – a move aimed at letting residents vote on the issue in May.
The group filed its Feb. 10 emergency mandamus petition four days after Travis County District Judge Jessica Mangrum ruled for the city in the case without explaining her rationale. That all but killed Austin United’s chances for getting its anti-convention center initiative on the city’s spring ballot.
“We filed an emergency mandamus at the Texas Supreme Court,” Austin United said in a written statement. “We hope any action resulting from this moves quickly. We are exploring other options.”
The high court either will quickly ask the city to respond to Austin United’s appeal or will refer Mangrum’s decision to the intermediary Third Court of Appeals, according to Save Our Springs Alliance attorney Bill Bunch, who is representing the PAC in the case.
“The City was notified that plaintiffs’ emergency mandamus filing was rejected because it failed to follow the Texas Rules of Appellate Procedure, but we received the refiled petition” on Feb. 11, said a city statement provided to Austin Free Press. “We are currently reviewing it to compare with the prior filing and will prepare a response, if requested by the Court.”
Austin United’s earliest response to Mangrum’s ruling was to announce that it would restart its petition drive from scratch. In November, City Clerk Erika Brady found that that petition fell 494 names short of the 20,000 valid signatures needed after she invalidated about 23% of signatures in a statistical sample.
Austin United filed suit in December, alleging that the clerk wrongly excluded more than 1,000 valid signatures.
That first petition — now being appealed to the high court — sought to ask voters in May to halt the convention center. The proposed new petition would shoot for the November ballot, instead, if Austin United loses its appeal on the first petition.
At the center of Austin United’s Supreme Court appeal is the argument that the Austin City Clerk improperly disqualified residents of Austin extraterritorial and limited purpose jurisdictions from the petition. Validating those signatures would put the petition well over the requisite 20,000 names.
Against this backdrop, city officials are moving forward to lay the foundation of a new convention center, which they estimate will cost $5.6 billion in hotel tax revenue to operate over 30 years.
Austin United’s petition advocates investing that money instead in local parks and cultural arts. At trial, the city argued that this would be illegal under a state law governing hotel occupancy taxes. Austin United lawyers pushed back on that interpretation, citing a 2003 Texas Attorney General advisory opinion that finds that cities have wide latitude in using these funds for purposes that directly promote tourism and the convention and hotel industry.
Andrew Wheat is the managing editor of the Austin Free Press.
Disclosure: Save Our Springs Alliance Executive Director Bill Bunch sits on the Austin Free Press advisory board.
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