AUSTIN, Texas — A district judge has ruled that the Austin City Council violated the Texas Open Meetings Act when it placed 13 city charter amendments on the Nov. 5 general election ballot.
According to a report from KVUE's media partners at the Austin American-Statesman, Judge Maya Guerra Gamble temporarily blocked the placement of those charter amendments on Austin ballots, but it still remains to be seen whether voters will still see the propositions when they vote in the fall. The city charter is the city's governing document.
The city has the option of either agreeing with the judge's temporary injunction, which would leave the amendments off the ballot until a trial on the Texas Open Meetings Act violations can be held in January, or filing an appeal of Guerra Gamble's decision.
As of Friday afternoon, an appeal of the decision has yet to be filed.
The Texas Open Meetings Act is a set of rules and regulations governing bodies must follow to keep meetings and official government business transparent and open to the public. The ruling in the case stemmed from a lawsuit filed against the Austin City Council by the nonprofit group Save Our Springs Alliance, which asserted that the council violated the act's public participation and public notice requirements when it authorized the election at a hearing Aug. 14.
All of the proposed amendments were compressed into a single agenda item, rather than each one being taken up individually, which the lawsuit says limited the amount of time for public comment and didn't provide sufficient public notice.
