Two Vermilion Parish government bodies violated Louisiana’s Open Meetings Law when they approved key pieces of SpaceX’s $100 billion spaceport near Pecan Island, according to a lawsuit filed Monday (Oct. 26) by a nonprofit and parish residents.
The suit alleges eight violations and asks a judge to void the parish industrial development board’s Aug. 25 quick approval of the deal, which happened hours before Gov. Jeff Landry announced the project.
It also describes how a project negotiated behind nondisclosure agreements reached a public vote: with a code name on the agenda, a single notice posted on a courthouse door and no notice sent to the state, as required by law.
This story is based on recordings of the board’s two meetings, on July 23 and Aug. 25, obtained by the Gulf States Newsroom, along with board records and the lawsuit.
The meetings
The Industrial Development Board of the Parish of Vermilion, Louisiana is a public nonprofit that can own and lease property to promote industrial and commercial projects. This summer, the board met for the first time in decades at the courthouse in downtown Abbeville.
It had been inactive for so long that no copies of its bylaws remained.
In a recording of the July 23 meeting, Mike Busada, a lawyer with the firm Butler Snow described as “Program Counsel” in the board’s minutes, walks members through how the board process works.
“You are an independent body. You are appointed by the [Vermilion Parish Police Jury] for set terms, but at this point you will act as your own board,” Busada says. “The decisions that you make are final.”
Corbett “Cobb” LeBouef, III, the newly elected president, asks whether it’s up to the board if a request is “worthy of a meeting.”
“Correct,” Busada answers.
“If an industrial company comes and wants to, yeah, we’ve certainly got to meet,” LeBouef goes on. “But if a resident just wants to have some questions answered, do we have to appease them?”
“No, you don’t,” Busada says.
Meetings require a 24-hour public notice, Busada adds. Because the board has no website, a notice posted somewhere in the courthouse will do.
“Back door?” one board member jokes.
“Doesn’t have to be the front door,” Busada replies with a laugh.
A month later, on Aug. 25, the board meets for the second time. The agenda posted in the courthouse the day before lists a payment-in-lieu-of-taxes (PILOT) agreement for a project code-named “Project Osprey” — an arrangement in which a company makes annual payments to local taxing bodies in place of property taxes.
The agreement, Busada says in a recording of that meeting, is to put the “infrastructure in place” to “really roll out the red carpet” for the company behind “Project Osprey.”
Busada reads the motion aloud, approving a deal with “Space Exploration Technologies Corporation — we can say the name,” he says, getting a laugh from the room.
“You mean Osprey?” one board member jokes — to more laughter.
“I think I’m gonna name my next child Osprey,” Busada quips back.
“You can finally put SpaceX, I guess,” another board member says.
Less than half an hour after the meeting started, the seven-member board unanimously approved a property tax agreement that would be part of the largest incentive package in state history — an estimated $27.5 billion in tax breaks — with no public comment.
A few hours later, in an event hall just past a stage set up outside the courthouse for a Cajun zydeco band, Gov. Landry announced SpaceX’s $100 billion spaceport. The event was invitation-only, and barricades closed downtown Abbeville off to the public.
The lawsuit says those meetings, and the police jury decisions that preceded them, were part of a pattern of keeping the public out of the process.
The lawsuit
The petition, filed in the 15th Judicial District Court, names the Vermilion Parish Police Jury and the Industrial Development Board as defendants. The plaintiffs are the Vermilion Citizens Coalition and three residents: Dr. Robert J. Young III, Rebecca C. Young and Cheryl Choate, who lives on Pecan Island.
In an interview with the Gulf States Newsroom, William Most, the attorney representing the plaintiffs, said Louisiana’s Open Meetings Law is meant to ensure that public business is conducted in an open and public forum — to “make sure that our public officials are working for us, not the other way around.”
“In Vermilion Parish, two government bodies appear to have had a pattern of doing everything they could to keep their decision-making secret from the public,” Most said. “Citizens should, and by law are required to, have an opportunity to provide input.”
The petition itself says it “is not a lawsuit against SpaceX or the Starbase,” but one “against public malfeasance and for good government.”
The industrial board was resurrected at a July 15 Vermilion Parish Police Jury meeting after nearly 30 years of dormancy. The agenda was posted online the afternoon before and included various committee reports, a replacement for a resigning juror and a closed-door executive session labeled “Vermilion Parish Litigation,” followed by a resolution on those cases. There was no mention of an industrial development board.
But according to the signed meeting minutes, the jury returned from executive session and voted unanimously to amend its agenda “to discuss a board,” then voted unanimously to revive it and name seven members to it.
State law does allow a body to amend its agenda during a meeting, but not as a “subterfuge” to defeat the law’s purposes. Most said the board’s revival fits that description, pointing to the roster of board members that was ready before the meeting.
“If you know it’s coming, that’s the kind of thing you can’t change an agenda mid-meeting about,” he said.
The suit says the jury also approved a settlement with ExxonMobil on July 15, with no agenda item for it. The petition describes the settlement as having helped clear the way for the state to acquire land later sold to SpaceX at “far below market values.”
In response to questions about the meeting, Gov. Landry’s office said in a statement, “Our Executive Council [sic] attended the July 15, 2026, meeting,” along with an assistant district attorney for the parish, to answer questions about the coastal case and settlement.
The office said the settlement was discussed in executive session, but the police jury voted to approve it in an open meeting after the executive session.
The parish’s attorneys have a copy of the settlement, Landry’s office said, which the 24th and 25th Judicial District Courts ordered to be kept confidential.
But when the plaintiffs’ lawyers requested the agreement, parish counsel said the documents were returned to the governor’s office by its executive counsel, according to the petition. The governor’s office, Most said, sent someone to Vermilion Parish to have the jurors sign, then took the document away without leaving a copy.
“You can’t even go look at what your public officials approved,” he said. “I’ve never seen that before.”
The plaintiffs argue that without a copy of the settlement agreement, the parish has little way to tell whether the terms are being upheld.
The suit also alleges the jury failed to livestream its July 15 and Aug. 19 meetings, as state law requires.
The suit alleges the industrial board never sent notices of its July 23 and Aug. 25 meetings to the state commissioner of administration, as state law requires. According to the petition, the Division of Administration told the plaintiffs it has no such notices on file, and because the board has no website, it didn't post notice online.
“The only place they gave any notice was they put one piece of paper on the courthouse door where no one would even know to look for it,” Most said.
The board’s minutes say the Aug. 25 notice was “duly posted and given in the manner provided by the Open Meetings Law.”
Most said the board intentionally used the “Project Osprey” codename on the Aug. 25 agenda to hide the subject from the public. Using code words on an agenda, he said, is “completely and unequivocally undermining the goals of the law.”
The deal
Records obtained by the Gulf States Newsroom, including agendas, minutes, the resolution, a project summary and a notice of lease recorded with the clerk of court, show the Aug. 25 vote came at the end of a process that was largely finished and hidden from the public.
The notice of lease, recorded at 11:23 a.m. on Aug. 25 — less than two hours after the meeting approving the deal adjourned — carries a SpaceX executive’s signature dated Aug. 20, five days before the vote. A certificate authorizing her to sign is dated July 31, eight days after the board’s first meeting. The notice describes the lease as dated “as of” Aug. 1.
SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment at the time of publication of this story.
The resolution the board passed authorizes officers to sign documents “required to effectuate a property tax abatement as negotiated with the Company.” The project summary says the incentives were negotiated among the state, parish officials and SpaceX.
At the July 23 meeting, Busada described the sequence: Butler Snow works with the state and a regional economic development group to vet a project, drafts documents in advance, then presents the package to the board for a vote.
On Aug. 25, he told members SpaceX had accepted what the state and parish side had put forward as its “final offers.”
The agreement trades property taxes for payments to the parish starting at $25 million a year and rising 2% annually for 25 years — roughly $800 million in total by the Gulf States Newsroom’s calculation of the payment schedule. It would also pay $20 million within 90 days of signing for local infrastructure, split among those bodies, and commit $25 million to a charitable fund.
Set against that, the property-tax exemption alone is worth nearly $23.8 billion over 25 years. Annual payments from SpaceX would cover about 3 cents of every dollar in property taxes the company would otherwise owe, according to records the Gulf States Newsroom obtained and analyzed.
At the Aug. 25 meeting where the industrial board approved the PILOT, Busada called it a “phenomenal deal” for the parish.
Parish officials who signed nondisclosure agreements were also in the room. Two police jurors attended both industrial development board meetings: Mark Poche, who made the July 15 motions to accept the board and to approve the ExxonMobil settlement, and Chad Vallo, the jury’s president. Both signed NDAs related to “Project Osprey” in June, a month before the jury voted to revive the board.
Busada told the board in July the jurors were there as “visitors,” part of keeping the board separate from the jury so the parish can’t be held liable for its decisions.
The police jury declined to comment for this story — the industrial development board did not respond to a request for comment.
Poche and Vallo were two of dozens of local and state officials who signed NDAs for “Project Osprey.” It’s part of a broader practice under Landry, who has required more than 100 state employees to sign them and signed one himself with Meta over its $50 billion data center in Richland Parish. About 77% of the entire Louisiana State Senate has signed an NDA, according to a Gulf States Newsroom analysis.
Landry defended the nondisclosure agreements after the SpaceX announcement.
“You think I want Texas to steal my thunder?” he told the Gulf States Newsroom, saying companies want to talk with elected officials without other states knowing what is being worked on.
The lawsuit targets the last step in that process. The petition asks the court to void only the board’s Aug. 25 actions, undoing the board’s approval of the PILOT agreement. Most said the plaintiffs want the decisions redone in public.
“If you mess up, you fess up,” he said.
The deal may still have supporters among residents, he said, and that is the point.
Melissa Hargrave with Vermilion United, a volunteer community coalition in the parish, said she sees redoing the meetings where the deal was approved as an opportunity to be more transparent.
“Something that big should not have been done behind closed doors,” she said. “With the public’s eyes on it, maybe we might get a better deal out of it.”
But voiding the PILOT deal, she noted, would not unwind everything. SpaceX also has a separate cash sale deal and cooperative endeavor agreement with the state that she said no one has been able to get — including the media.
Her organization has been trying to get records and information for residents. The group does not expect a full federal environmental review, so it’s lining up independent experts and baseline soil and water samples.
“Our ultimate goal,” she said, “is to be able to get enough information to the public so they can make informed decisions about their future before any rockets start launching here.”
This story was produced by the Gulf States Newsroom, a collaboration between Mississippi Public Broadcasting, WBHM in Alabama, WWNO and WRKF in Louisiana and NPR.
