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Update: 1/28/26 at 11:14am
In a trial recess, Precinct 2 Travis County Commissioner Brigid Shea said that she believes the law entitles extraterritorial jurisdiction residents to sign the petition. Shea is a veteran of the 1990s Save Our Springs citizen petition initiative. She said that she was told by the late City Clerk Elden Aldridge that a then-city council member directed him to go back and review all the signatures on that petition – not just a sampling – to keep that petition off the next election ballot. That delay allowed developers to file many more development applications before voters overwhelmingly approved the SOS water-quality ordinance.
Asked who that city council member was, Shea said that he’s still alive so she would rather not say. Aldridge served as the City Clerk of Austin from 1988 to 1997.
Update: 1/28/26 at 10:45am
Opening arguments
For the plaintiffs: In his opening, Bill Bunch, who is representing the Austin United PAC, argued that this is a narrow case about whether the Austin City Clerk properly performed her ministerial duties in excluding signatures from Austin United’s petition due to jurisdiction of voters and a host of technicalities. He said that the case has nothing to do with city arguments that the petition ordinance violates Hotel Occupancy Tax law, as the city asserts. He claims those challenges are not ripe unless or until the petition is validated by the clerk and adopted by council or approved by voters.
For the defense: Attorney Paul Trahan, who is representing the City of Austin, in his opening statement said the case is about whether the Austin United PAC got 20,000 legal signatures. He said the evidence will show the PAC came up short. He said the city clerk’s office bent over backwards to count every signature she legally could. He said the signatures of people who live outside the city but within Austin’s extraterritorial jurisdiction are illegal. Trahan said the court will hear testimony from the city clerk’s office that the did everything right and their methods used are unimpeachable. Trahan is with the firm Rose Norton Fulbright, which the city hired to lead its defense.
Update: 1/28/26 at 10:15am
Today, the Austin United PAC is in court to stop the city of Austin from moving forward with building a new convention center downtown unless voters approve it. The case is being heard by Travis County District Court Judge Jessica Mangrum. Austin Free Press writer Andrew Wheat is in the courtroom and sending updates:
Prior to the trial, Mayor Kirk Watson spoke to the media before proceedings began, emphasizing the economic benefits of a new convention center. Asked by Austin Free Press about the city’s decision to strike extraterritorial jurisdiction residents from the petition, the mayor said that ETJ residents don’t vote. When Austin Free Press pointed out that they do vote in some matters, the mayor said that he would leave that issue to the attorneys in the trial.
At the start of the trial, the attorneys on both sides had an extended bench discussion over whether City Clerk Erika Brady, who is out on medical leave, must testify. Judge Mangrum did not immediately publicly reveal her decision on that point.
Austin United PAC heads to court tomorrow to stop the city of Austin from moving forward with building a new convention center downtown unless voters approve it.
The courtroom fight pits grassroots petitioners against City Hall over familiar Austin questions: who controls the city’s biggest investments — the voters or bureaucrats? And can local officials scrap citizen-driven initiatives without revealing the details of how they disqualified petition signatures?
At the center of the legal battle is Austin United PAC, a citizen group that gathered more than 25,000 signatures last fall to force a vote on halting the project. The group submitted thick stacks of signatures to the Austin City Clerk’s office in October, only to see the petition tossed out weeks later when the city determined that its statistical sampling showed hundreds of signatures were invalid.
City Clerk Erika Brady concluded that the petition fell just 494 names short of qualifying for the May ballot. Austin United immediately asked the city to provide the technical details of the statistical sampling that Brady used to invalidate the petition. The city refused, arguing that it was the proprietary information of a city contractor: University of Texas statistics professor Thomas Sager.
Those dynamics set the stage for the trial scheduled for tomorrow and Thursday before Travis County District Court Judge Jessica Mangrum.
The stakes are high: The court’s decision will determine whether voters get one last chance to reverse a massive investment of $1.6 billion to build a new convention center with total costs of $5.6 billion over 30 years. The legal clock is ticking as a result of a Feb. 13 state deadline to put items on the city’s May ballot. If the court validates the petition the city council could either adopt the petition outright or serve it to voters on the ballot.
If the court rules for the city, Austin United will not have time to mount another petition drive before contractors pour concrete for the new convention center. Contractors already demolished the old convention center. The city plans to use hotel occupancy tax revenue to build and operate the new facility.
Hiding the ball
One issue in the case has been the city’s refusal to release details on the statistical sampling used to invalidate the petition. City Attorney Deborah Thomas wrote Austin United in November that the material is not “public information” and that the city “does not have” the data produced by professor Sager. Arguing that those data are his proprietary secret sauce, Sager said that he would be harmed if competing statistics contractors obtained those data.
Those city efforts to hide the ball drew criticism from open government officials. “It would seem, just as a matter of public policy, that this is the kind of thing that should be made public,” attorney James Hemphill, an open government specialist at Austin-based Graves Dougherty Hearon and Moody, told Austin Free Press.
“If their (city officials’) argument is, ‘Well, no, we contracted with this professor as a private person to do this work for the city,’ you would think that the city would do more” to obtain and provide that information, said Hemphill, who sits on the board of the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas.
“It seems to me that that is still a public record that the city would be required to produce under the Public Information Act,” agreed UT journalism lecturer and former Austin American-Statesman executive editor John Bridges. “Farming something out to a third party,” doesn’t change that fact that “it’s still a government record.”
In a Jan. 21 pretrial court hearing, Judge Mangrum ordered the city to turn over the statistical sampling details to Austin United. She barred the plaintiffs from sharing that information with others.
In a twist, a star witness, City Clerk Brady, has gone out on medical leave, preventing Austin United attorneys from questioning her. Those lawyers, led by Save Our Springs Alliance attorney Bill Bunch, deposed Deputy City Clerk Stephanie Hall, instead.
“Unclean hands”
Austin United lawyers will argue on Wednesday that Brady improperly invalidated signatures of people who printed their names, changed addresses within city limits, or used a post office box. They further allege that the clerk wrongly excluded 315 voters who live in the city’s extraterritorial and limited purpose jurisdictions.
The city forcefully has denied those claims. “The City Clerk meticulously followed established legal procedures in reviewing the petition and only disqualified signatures that did not meet legal requirements,” the city said in a written statement to Austin Free Press.
“Beyond the signature argument, the proposed ordinance conflicts with the City Charter and state law and could not lawfully be enacted. The (Austin United) lawsuit ignores years of public process and comes far too late,” the city statement said.
The city hired Rose Norton Fulbright to lead its legal defense. Rose Norton Fulbright attorney Paul Trahan did not respond to calls by Austin Free Press. Apart from the written statement above, the city declined to answer questions, including about what it’s paying its outside counsel.
The city’s lawyers said that — even if a judge rules that Austin United gathered the required 20,000 petition signatures — the measure is still illegal on its face. In a court brief, they noted that city and state laws prohibit ballot initiatives that “appropriate money or authorize the levy of taxes.” The city contends Austin United’s proposal violates those restrictions by redirecting hotel occupancy tax revenue from the convention center to “cultural and outdoor tourism” instead.
The city also is urging the court to throw out the case because it says that Austin United has operated in bad faith, leaving it with “unclean hands.” As evidence, the city noted that Austin United didn’t submit the petition until the old convention center was demolished. It added that key Austin United players previously were involved in a 2019 petition to reallocate hotel taxes to cultural arts and require a vote on any convention center overhaul. That petition was rejected by 54% of voters.
Austin United lawyer Bunch threw cold water on the city’s case.
“This looks like a ‘kitchen sink’ answer to our lawsuit, aimed at distracting and wasting time rather than focusing on the real issues,” Bunch wrote Austin Free Press in a statement. “There’s law and facts against most everything they argue. If there are ‘unclean hands,’ for example, they are on the city staff and council side, not on the citizen petitioners’ side.”
The looming trial echoes one in the 1990s, when a court ordered the city to put a Save Our Springs water-quality ordinance on the ballot. Sixty-four percent of voters ultimately approved that measure, reshaping local environmental policy for decades. More recently, a 2018 court ruling forced the city to put on the ballot a petition challenging the controversial CodeNext land-use plan. Voters narrowly rejected it.
Facing a Feb. 13 ballot-placement deadline, Mangrum is expected to rule quickly.
Andrew Wheat is the managing editor of the Austin Free Press.
Disclosure: Save Our Springs Alliance Executive Director Bill Bunch is on the Austin Free Press advisory board.
