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On July 20, 2026, former state Rep. Joe Pickett, who filed a lawsuit more than six years ago challenging El Paso’s environmental franchise fee, prevailed in the 8th Court of Appeals. The court agreed with an earlier ruling that the $6 monthly fee added to El Paso water bills is an illegal tax.
We want to know how much the City has spent fighting Mr. Pickett in the courts, so two days later we submitted a public information request to the City of El Paso asking for “a complete accounting of all the City’s costs for litigating against Joe Pickett over the franchise fee on our water bills, which he alleges is an illegal tax.” I requested “invoices and receipts for all legal bills related to litigation against Joe Pickett from October 1, 2020 to the present day.”
On July 29, the Office of the City Attorney informed us of their position that the “records specified in the submission should be withheld from disclosure based on the law.”
But 65 days later, on October 2, Ivana Kentera, Assistant Attorney General of the Open Records Division, wrote to the City informing them they “must withhold all routing and bank account numbers” per 552.136 of the Government Code but “must release the remaining information,” including the requested invoices and receipts for all legal bills.
The City has until November 4, the day after the election, to decide whether to appeal the case to the Texas Supreme Court, but we will soon tell the media and public how much the City has spent since 2020 to protect their illegal tax.
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