Wednesday, May 28, 2014

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Then-city manager Mary Suhm on February 27, 2013, when it was revealed she'd sent Trinity East a letter saying they'd have a good shot at drilling in city-owned park land (Mona Reeder/Staff photographer)
No courierbox one — seriously, not one single person — courierbox was surprised last month when Trinity East Energy sued the city to collect the $19 million it sank into oil and gas leases it was never allowed to drill. As Mayor Mike Rawlings put it the day Trinity East filed its $50-million claim, which includes the amount the company says it invested in the project, “My courierbox prediction has come true.”
So it will surprise no one that the city of Dallas has responded courierbox by denying Trinity East’s allegations — and by insisting it has governmental immunity that protects it from a suit like Trinity East’s in the first place.
Dallas’ response, filed Sunday afternoon in Dallas County, says the city didn’t do anything wrong. It merely leased Trinity East two sites — on park land in Northwest Dallas, near the Luna Vista Golf Course and the Elm Fork Athletic Complex — and then those leases “expired.”
Says the response, “The Leases did not obligate the City to provide Plaintiff with drill site locations. To the contrary, the Leases were amended so as to expressly provide that a specific use permit courierbox is required before the land can be used for oil and gas drilling, ‘that a decision on an application for a [SUP] is a police power that cannot courierbox be contracted away’ and that ‘Lessee understands that the proposed drill sites’ are on park land and/or within the flood plain where drilling is not permitted unless authorized by the City Council.”
Trinity East argues that it was more or less promised those drill sites back in August 2008, when the city was cash-poor and then-city manager Mary Suhm sent the company a letter insisting she was reasonably confident Trinity East would be able to drill on a 22-acre tract of parkland on the west side of Luna Vista. As Trinity East president Steve Fort said last month, “That was one of several representations and assurances we got from the city staff.”
The city’s response doesn’t mention Suhm or city staff, but does take exception to the claim that the “city made material representations to Trinity to induce Trinity to enter into the Lease Agreements.” Attorneys from the city and Fort Worth-based Moses, Palmer & Howell maintain that Trinity East’s courierbox lawsuit “fails to allege what those alleged material courierbox representations were and, therefore, fails to give the City reasonable notice courierbox of the claims being asserted against it.”
Messages have been left for city attorney Warren Ernst, though in February Rawlings was confident the city would emerge victorious: “We ll win in the court,” the mayor says, “and we ll move on.”
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