The Texas Supreme Court on Monday declined to order the Austin City Council to rewrite the ballot language on the proposed ride-hailing ordinance that will go before voters May 7.
Austin music manager Samantha Phelps, working in conjunction with Uber, last week filed a petition for a writ of mandamus, asking the court to require new ballot wording because the council-approved language “is purposefully skewed to persuade the public to vote against the proposition.”
The city said the language was factual and not misleading, and that for a court to require new wording, Phelps would have to prove the City Council took an “arbitrary and unreasonable” action. Though the council approved the language in February, Phelps waited until just before Travis County was set to lock down the ballot language to file her petition, the city said.
The court issued an order denying the petition but did not release an opinion Monday.
“We made every effort to make sure the ballot language fairly represented the petition, so today the Supreme Court denied Uber’s attempt to overturn that language and affirms what we did,” Council Member Ann Kitchen said.
[…]
Austin elections attorney Buck Wood said there is no way to appeal the court’s order, as it is “purely a state law matter” and not a federal issue. Wood said he was not surprised by the decision.
“I suspect the lateness of it probably swayed some votes,” Wood said, noting that it took “three weeks” for the petition to be filed.
See here for the background. An Uber spokesperson is quoted in the story saying that the court’s order “was not a ruling on the merits of the ballot language”, which says to me that there may yet be further litigation if the referendum does no pass. Isn’t this fun? The Trib and the AusChron have more.