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Austin United PAC filed a lawsuit Monday against the city of Austin, asking a judge to overturn the city’s rejection of its convention center petition and to force the release of statistical records the city is using to keep the measure off the May 2026 ballot.
The suit contends that City Clerk Erika Brady wrongly disqualified the petition in November after her office sampled about a quarter of the 25,441 signatures and declared that the petition fell an estimated 494 verified signatures short of the 20,000 needed to be put on the spring ballot.
The petition asks voters if they want to put the city’s plans for a new $1.6 billion convention center on hold. It comes as voters are expressing skepticism about the city’s fiscal management and spending on big-ticket items.
With the statutory clock ticking, Austin United is asking for an expedited hearing so a court can direct the city clerk to verify the petition. If the court does that, the Austin City Council could either adopt the petition as an ordinance or put it on the May 2026 ballot. The state deadline to put items on that ballot is Feb. 13.
Austin United’s pleadings assert that Brady improperly disqualified “the signatures of qualified voters who are plainly on the voter rolls or who are otherwise readily identifiable by the information submitted.” It says that the clerk improperly struck signatures of people who printed their names, changed addresses within city limits, or used a post office box. It also claims that the clerk wrongly excluded 315 voters who reside in the city’s extraterritorial and limited purpose jurisdictions.
The lawsuit requests a court order compelling the city to disclose details about the statistical sample used to invalidate the petition. At the center of the case is the city’s refusal to release the sampling information and methodology used to determine that the petition fell short of the requisite 20,000 validated voter signatures.
City Attorney Deborah Thomas told the Austin United in a Nov. 26 letter that the material is not “public information” and that the city “does not have” the data produced by University of Texas statistics professor Thomas Sager. The city paid Sager $875 to produce the analysis, according to city records that Austin Free Press obtained through a separate Public Information Act request.
That disclosure denial has ignited a broader dispute over transparency. Open government advocates argue the city is undermining the intent — if not the letter — of the Texas Public Information Act in not disclosing information that the city paid a private contractor to produce.
“My general statement is that the Public Information Act is intended to be applied broadly in favor of transparency and It would seem, just as a matter of public policy, that this is the kind of thing that should be made public,” said attorney James Hemphill, an open government specialist at Austin-based Graves Dougherty Hearon and Moody.
“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.
To give a definitive opinion on the matter, Hemphill said he would need to review the facts of the case and the city’s claims.
UT journalism lecturer John Bridges is unimpressed with both the petitioners and the city. He said that the petition to delay construction of a new convention center “was kind of crazy given the thing (old convention center) was in ruins at the time.”
Nonetheless, Bridges, a former executive editor of the Austin American-Statesman, faulted the city for not providing the records: “This is certainly a matter of public interest, and it seems to me that that is still a public record that the city would be required to produce under the Public Information Act.
“Farming something out to a third party,” doesn’t change that fact that “it’s still a government record,” he said.
“Show its work”
Instead of releasing the sampling data behind its decision, city officials are seeking an opinion from the Texas Attorney General’s Office to withhold those records. A spokesperson for the city attorney’s office declined Austin Free Press’ requests for interviews, saying, “We don’t have anything further on this topic.” UT Professor Sager also declined to comment.
In a letter to Austin United, city attorneys said they based their denial of the records request in part on a 1990 Attorney General decision that found that a computer program, which a public university used to safeguard the privacy of student records, was not public information.
In a Dec. 9 letter to the Texas Attorney General, who oversees the Public Information Act, the city attorneys also argued that the requested information “implicates the proprietary interests” of Sager’s A&S Enterprises, Inc. The city quoted Sager as saying that, “Each program is an original adaptation by me to the requirements of signature verification systems generally.”
Austin attorney Bill Bunch, who legally represents Austin United PAC in the dispute, disagrees. The city has “an ethical obligation to ‘show its work’. . .to “demonstrate to the public and the 25,000 voters who signed the petition that the sampling review was done with integrity and in full compliance with controlling state law,” Bunch wrote to the city Dec. 3, prior to filing the lawsuit.
“If the random sample was created and utilized with integrity,” he wrote, “the city should be eager to produce it rather than hide it.”
“Perverse incentive”
Transparency advocates said Austin’s approach undermines public trust and contradicts legislative efforts to close loopholes that hide publicly funded work by private contractors such as Sager.
In 2019, lawmakers led by then-state Sen. Kirk Watson, who now serves as Austin’s mayor, passed a bill that expanded open records rules to cover third party government contractors. In a failed earlier push to pass similar legislation in 2017, Watson didn’t mince words as to why such legislation was needed.
“State and local governments are increasingly outsourcing public services,” Sen. Watson and the bill’s co-sponsor warned in a Houston Chronicle opinion piece. Court decisions keeping government contracts secret “create a perverse incentive to channel public money through private entities in order to avoid disclosure.”
Watson’s office did not respond to an Austin Free Press request for an interview.
That did not go unnoticed. “It’s ironic,” Bridges said, “that Austin’s own mayor, who pushed for that reform at the Capitol, now leads a city relying on the same loophole the Legislature tried to eliminate.”
Advocates noted that courts previously have had to force Austin officials to place citizen petitions on the ballot and warned that this case could become another example of the city spending more effort defending its internal processes than honoring public accountability and government transparency. Craig McDonald of Texans for Public Justice worked on a 1990s local campaign finance reform petition that local voters approved only after a judge ordered the measure onto the ballot.
“When the powers that be don’t like what you’re doing, obstruction is their tactic,” McDonald told Austin Free Press. “That’s what they did on $100 limits and it looks like that’s what they’re doing on the convention center.”
Andrew Wheat is the managing editor of the Austin Free Press.
Disclosure: Save Our Springs Executive Director Bill Bunch sits on the Austin Free Press Advisory Board.
