Texas Parks and Wildlife asked the Attorney General’s office on Friday to block release of a draft agenda that had listed a closed-door discussion of land near Boca Chica State Park. The request came even though the item had already been pulled from the final agenda for a Texas Parks and Wildlife Department commission meeting scheduled for early November.
That filing puts the Gina Hinojosa SpaceX land sale back in the spotlight because the draft agenda had been the clearest public sign that commissioners were preparing to talk about land tied to SpaceX’s expansion in South Texas. The Tribune independently reviewed the drafted language after requesting it on Oct. 19, following Texas Monthly reporting that commissioners were expected to discuss the sale of 1,300 acres behind closed doors.
The land at issue is not a small patch of coastal dirt. Boca Chica State Park is roughly 1,060 acres, and Texas Parks and Wildlife owns nearly 500 parcels of land in Cameron County, according to the county appraisal district. SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocket company, has increasingly acquired more land near the park over the last decade, and its employees recently established a new city called Starbase.
That is why the draft agenda matters even after the item disappeared from the final version. Texas Parks and Wildlife still sought to keep the draft from becoming public, a move that suggests the agency did not want the paper trail around the discussion to circulate before or after the meeting. The agency did not explain in the available facts why it believed the agenda should stay sealed, but the effort makes clear it saw the document itself as sensitive, not just the subject it described.
What comes next is narrower than the original reporting but no less important: whether the commission meeting in early November will produce any public action at all on the land near Boca Chica State Park. If the discussion stays behind closed doors, the public may learn less about a potential sale involving more than 1,000 acres of state land than the size of the deal would suggest.
