Texas Open Meetings Act UPDATE...

It's been noted by others that it appears the City Council failed to take up the Matrix Data Center issue prior to Marc Maxwell signing the Letter of Intent with MSB Global in December of 2024.

This is understandable. There is no record in any open session minutes, agenda items, executive session notices, or public disclosures of any discussion of the Matrix project,data center, or MSB Global (or any other reasonably related terms) prior to signing the LOI.  I even published a post describing this and why it was a problem under the Open Meetings Act.

However, it turns out this is not accurate...kinda. The Council did authorize it technically, but here's why it was "missed":

This was from the minutes of the 12/19/2024 special meeting.

That's our bad. We should have known from this that you went in on an $18 billion AI data center that's never been discussed publicly. Oh, and you've selected a developer that was never RFP'd.

"Just look at the agenda bro." Ok, let's.

The top description works fine for economic development negotiations. After all, if the City was too detailed here, it would defeat the purpose of the exemption that allows it to be discussed in closed session.

The problem is that the Open Session agenda item does not reasonably describe what the Council was acting on. First of all, I would challenge anyone who thinks "Thermo 4, 5, 6, & 7" is sufficient to give the public any idea that a multi-billion dollar data center is going in their backyard.

The worst part of it is: those lot values aren't referenced anywhere on the LOI itself. It just says the Property is around 800 acres out of 5,000. So how is anyone one supposed to know that those things go together - before or even after the fact? The public just has to infer that based on the dates and the actions that followed.

Please understand, I'm not suggesting the City changed the agenda language just for this deal. I think they use boiler plate language. I've found other examples like this. However, that doesn't alleviate the problems of insufficient notice and lack of transparency here. It's also clear that the City isn't interested in soliciting public feedback or providing any meaningful awareness. If they were, this process would have looked much different.

In looking at the AG's handbook on the Open Meetings Act the courts generally expect greater sufficiency in notifications involving matters of significant public interest (pg 32). This isn't a routine development with a home builder or a small factory. It's multi-gigawatt AI campus that significantly impacts municipal power, utilities, water, traffic, the environment, and the local economy at a scale that hasn't been contemplated before. I'm quite certain that deserves a little more disclosure than an abstract item on an agenda that got rammed through without public input.

This kind of secrecy wasn't necessary to protect the City's negotiating power. It's possible to balance economic development confidentiality while keeping the public informed. You can look at other local governments and see that for yourself (Hutto, Caldwell County, Manor, and College Station to name a few).

The handbook does say that sufficiency is decided by the courts, though. So, it would have to be litigated. But we really don't need a court to tell us this was handled poorly.