They seek information that they say they have been denied so far.
A group opposed to a private firm’s plans to build a bullet train stretching from Dallas to Houston has filed a lawsuit against the Texas Department of Transportation and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in an effort to obtain communications between the firm and state officials.
Texans Against High-Speed Rail submitted a public information request last year to TxDOT seeking any documentation from the agency related to Texas Central Partners, the private firm developing the rail. The group is arguing that many of the documents responsive to the request were withheld and the information that was released was heavily redacted without clear reasoning.
“I think there’s a lot of documents that were not provided,” said Kyle Workman, president of Texans Against High-Speed Rail, a group of largely rural opponents attempting to derail the project. “I think there were a lot of documents that were redacted inappropriately. We’re hopeful that we can work with the state and get this resolved relatively quickly and painlessly.”
Workman said the request, submitted on March 20 last year, asked for any documents concerning Texas Central or its proposed high-speed railway from 2009 to 2015. The lawsuit claims the resulting records would likely consist of email communications between the various entities involved with the project.
Upon receiving the request, TxDOT kicked it to the Attorney General’s office, seeking a ruling on whether the documents could legally be released. According to the lawsuit, Texas Central submitted a brief to Paxton’s office urging them not to release certain information as it “contains trade secret and confidential commercial and financial information.”
Texas Central submitted a copy of the brief to Texans Against High-Speed Rail with much of its contents redacted. The lawsuit claims the redacted brief limits the group’s ability to challenge a ruling from the Attorney General because they cannot develop an “effective challenge” without “sufficient identification of the alleged confidential information.”
The Attorney General ruled in July that TxDOT could withhold documents discussing certain information. Workman said the group eventually received some documents from their request earlier this year, though they had significant holes. The Attorney General’s office did not return requests for comment Thursday.
The theory that Texans Against High-Speed Rail is working on is that the state is secretly in cahoots with Texas Central, rather than simply serving as a regulator. Anything’s possible, I suppose, though I don’t really see Ken Paxton as being particularly sympathetic to Texas Central. But we’ll see.