Potter County District Court | Photo by Noah Dawson

Alex Fairly’s legal team filed a brief with the Seventh Court of Appeals earlier this week as a part of the ongoing appeal of his civic center funding lawsuit.

The lawsuit stemmed from the city’s attempt to issue tax anticipation notes to fund renovations to the civic center. Shortly after Amarillo City Council voted to approve the notes (Councilman Place 1 Cole Stanley was the only vote against the plan), businessman Alex Fairly filed a lawsuit to halt the plan, citing the fact that voters had rejected a similar plan at the ballot box in 2020.

Judge William Sowder, who presided over the trial last October, ruled in favor of Alex Fairly. Shortly after the ruling, both sides began preparing to appeal the ruling. The City of Amarillo appealed nearly every finding in the ruling (with the exception of Article II of the Amarillo City Charter to the ordinance in question). Meanwhile, the appeal by Fairly argues that the ruling did not go far enough. In the briefing filed earlier this week, his legal team stated that "the trial court erred in failing to award Cross-Appellant a declaration that the Ordinance violates section 1431.008(b)."

The cited portion of the Texas Government Code states that “a governing body that pledges to the payment of anticipation notes an ad valorem tax to be imposed in a subsequent fiscal year shall impose the tax in the ordinance or order that authorizes the issuance of the notes.”

Fairly’s legal team argued during the trial that, in addition to other violations of state law, the city violated the law by not imposing the tax in the ordinance. In the brief filed earlier this week, Fairly’s legal team argued that levying a tax is a part of the process of imposing a tax. The brief states that “the City hangs its entire case on the fact that Ordinance 7985 uses the word ‘levy,’” before countering by stating that “saying the word ‘levy’ is not an incantation that magically makes a document into a valid tax levy under Texas law.”