Louisiana residents sue over SpaceX tax deal process

Complaint alleges eight violations across four meetings

The suit, filed Monday against the Vermilion Parish Police Jury and the Vermilion Parish Industrial Development Board, alleges eight violations of Louisiana’s open-meeting law across four meetings in July and August. The plaintiffs describe a concerted attempt to conceal key decisions on the SpaceX deal from public view. Five alleged violations target the police jury and three target the industrial board, which was created to facilitate the tax agreement. That agreement is called a PILOT, for “payment in lieu of taxes,” agreement. The suit says the relief sought could void the PILOT agreement, reached to land the $100 billion SpaceX undertaking, if the court grants it.

Starbase Louisiana is going up on 125,000 acres of marshland once owned by ExxonMobil. Vermilion Parish is among several parishes that have sued oil and gas companies for coastal damage related to drilling activities in the 20th Century. By contract, the industrial development board owns the land set for Starbase Louisiana, and SpaceX has the right to recover it. The board approved the PILOT agreement on Aug. 25, in a vote that included a lease-back arrangement with SpaceX for use of the acreage obtained from Exxon. The PILOT agreement has been publicly disclosed. It exempts Starbase Louisiana from local property taxes but requires SpaceX to pay $25 million a year to local taxing authorities. The agreement spells out what SpaceX pays in place of taxes and outlines a schedule for reaching several jobs benchmarks, among other terms. The Starbase Louisiana undertaking has been described as the biggest economic development deal in state history.

The plaintiffs are Pecan Island resident Cheryl Choate, Abbeville residents Robert Young and Rebecca Young, and the Vermilion Citizens Coalition, Inc., a nonprofit Robert Young incorporated Oct. 21. New Orleans attorney William Most represents them. The plaintiffs say they are not trying to upend Starbase Louisiana itself; they describe the case as a petition for good government and transparency. The complaint frames three crucial actions: approving the ExxonMobil settlement that unlocked the coastal land, resurrecting the industrial board and signing off on the PILOT agreement.

On notice, the complaint alleges that neither of the industrial development board’s two meetings was properly noticed. The board met for the first time in decades on July 23 and approved the PILOT agreement on Aug. 25. The notice posted for the board meetings was a sheet of paper stuck to an Abbeville courthouse, and it referenced the matter only by the SpaceX project’s state code name, Project Osprey. The plaintiffs described the board itself as a mystery. “It has no website. It has no publicly listed email address. It is not referenced in the Vermilion Parish code of ordinances. It is not referenced in state law. And its origin is also shrouded in mystery. The VPIDB was created in 1972, and then went inactive in 1997,” according to the petition.

On the agenda, according to meeting minutes, the police jury approved a settlement in the Vermilion Parish case in a unanimous vote on July 15. The complaint alleges that the matter was not on the meeting agenda and that no motion to add it was carried during the proceedings, leaving the public without advance notice of the decision before jurors that day. “No item on the agenda gave any indication that the VPPJ would be considering a settlement with the ExxonMobil company,” the suit alleges. The terms of the ExxonMobil settlement have not been disclosed.

The complaint also alleges that the police jury illegally amended its agenda mid-meeting when it appointed seven people to the industrial development board shortly after the settlement vote. The board had been defunct for nearly 30 years. The plaintiffs acknowledge that adding items during a meeting is permissible in emergencies, but say it should not be used to evade public-notice requirements. A month later, the jury voted to replace one member of the industrial board, again without placing the item on the agenda or adding it during the meeting, according to the complaint.

The complaint further alleges that a staffer from the governor’s office removed the settlement documents from Vermilion Parish after the police jury approved them. “The efforts to keep the public in the dark are so extreme that after the Vermilion Parish Police Jury signed a settlement agreement with ExxonMobil, the Governor’s office sent a staff member to take away every single copy of the agreement – so that Vermilion citizens cannot even review what their elected officials agreed to,” the suit alleges. After denying an Oct. 16 public-records request filed by The Current, an attorney for the police jury said the body had no digital copies and that the governor’s office currently held the original documents for “processing.”

On livestreaming, the suit alleges that the police jury did not livestream either meeting, amounting to two more alleged violations of state open-meeting law. State law requires governing authorities serving communities of 25,000 people or more to “broadcast live” their proceedings. The Abbeville Meridional reported that no Vermilion Parish Police Jury meeting had been livestreamed since Louisiana revised its open-meeting law to include that requirement in 2024.

Gov. Jeff Landry, a vocal critic of the parish’s oil-and-gas suits, posted about the ExxonMobil agreement after the July 15 vote on X, the social media platform owned by SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. Landry and his economic development leadership have made widespread use of non-disclosure agreements connected to big-ticket deals like SpaceX and the Meta Hyperion Data Center in Richland Parish. The governor has defended the speed and secrecy of such deals, arguing that they could not happen without it. “You think I want Texas to steal my thunder, you think I want other states to know what we’re working on? Quite frankly, that’s what has continued to happen in Louisiana before I became governor,” Landry told reporters in a press gaggle after the SpaceX announcement.

Vermilion Parish officials have largely celebrated the deal and brushed aside concerns about secrecy. “The public did have a role,” Vallo told the Times-Picayune the day after the SpaceX announcement in August. “They found out about it yesterday.” Police Jury President Chad Vallo referred comments about the lawsuit to the police jury’s attorney, who did not respond in time for publication.

Critics say the secrecy has instead suppressed public input on transformative projects. Pecan Island residents complained that they were in the dark in the run-up to the SpaceX deal’s announcement and argued that they should have some say in a decision likely to change everything for the small coastal community. At a meeting with Pecan Island residents in September, SpaceX officials could not rule out that the number of launches would block access to homes and hunting camps. The company hopes to one day fire 30 rockets each day as it works to build out its Starlink satellite network and put data centers into orbit.

The complaint asks the court to decide whether the four meetings complied with state open-meeting law.