Some new plaintiffs, too.
A group of river-related businesses has sued the City of New Braunfels, Texas Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson and Mark Vickery , executive director of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, over a ban on disposable containers on rivers within New Braunfels city limits that went into effect this year.
The suit, filed [last] Monday in a Travis County District Court, seeks a permanent injunction against the ordinance, claiming it is unconstitutional and effectively bans alcohol on the river. An attempted alcohol prohibition on the rivers was tossed out in 2000, in part because of a Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission letter saying the city didn’t have the authority to ban alcohol.
[…]
Patterson is among the parties in this latest suit because he is the effective trustee of state-owned public waterways, the suit said. It said Vickery is named because the so-called can ban “unlawfully seeks to regulate and control municipal solid waste management activities that are within TCEQ’s jurisdiction.”
The story says that a “nonsuit” was filed by plaintiffs on Wednesday, which I presume means that the earlier litigation is no longer active. I welcome feedback on that from the lawyers out there.
A “nonsuit” is a voluntary dismissal in a form that usually preserves the plaintiff’s right to give the case another shot in the future. Personally, I don’t usually use the term in filings, precisely because it’s not clear to non lawyers (or at least non lawyers who don’t share John Cleese’s experience with Norwegian Blue Parrots).
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