A state appeals court ruled that the groups who sued Cameron County and the state in challenging the constitutionality of the county’s beach closures for SpaceX’s Starship testing have enough standing to bring their case to trial.
Texas 13th Court of Appeals Justice Clarissa Silva dismissed a ruling by 445th District Court Judge Gloria Rincones who ruled in 2022 that the groups, Save RGV, the Sierra Club and the Carrizo Comecrudo Tribe of Texas, had no standing to bring a lawsuit against the county or the Texas General Land Office (GLO), which are included in the suit.
The appeals court noted that the Cameron County court offered no explanation for its claim.
The groups sued the state’s land office and Cameron County in 2021 for its use of a statute that allows county commissioners to close beaches for rocket testing. The groups say the statute is unconstitutional by violating the state’s Open Beaches amendment Texans voted for in 2009.
Last September, attorneys for the county and GLO argued that the Open Beaches amendment couldn’t be enforced and therefore the groups couldn’t file a lawsuit. But Silva disagreed.
“[The groups] did not bring a private action to enforce their right to access the beach. Such an action would most likely take the form of an injunction against a private entity, such as SpaceX, to prohibit their space flight launches that lead to the closure of Boca Chica Beach,” Silva wrote in the ruling. “Instead, appellants challenge the constitutionality of the statutes, rule, memorandum of agreement, and order.”
SpaceX lobbied for the statute in 2013 with the help of former state legislator Rene Oliveira, from Brownsville, who has since died. Cameron County and the GLO entered into an agreement that allowed beach closures for up to 12 Falcon rocket launches a year until SpaceX changed course with seemingly no repercussion.
Cameron County has the sole authority to close Highway 4, the lone road leading to Boca Chica Beach, and the beach itself when SpaceX is testing or launching Starship. The county regularly closes both weekly, with one conservation organization documenting that the county had closed access for more than 1,000 hours. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife service, according to a "60 Minutes" report, also documented that the county had exceeded its closure hours between 2019 and 2021.
The Federal Aviation Administration made SpaceX scale back its closure requests to receive a launch license for the company’s first Starship launch.
Marisa Perales, the attorney representing the groups, says the trial will be a legal argument against the statute rather than about the closures themselves.
“There's no dispute that the beach access is closed for spaceflight activities at least several hundred hours a year,” Perales told TPR. “So it's not going to be a lengthy trial in the traditional sense, where there are all of these witnesses that are presenting certain facts because there's no real dispute about the facts. So it is technically a trial, but it's going to be more like presenting the court with legal arguments about why the court should understand that the law is not consistent with our constitutional rights.”
Mary Angela Branch, a Save RGV member who lives in Port Isabel says the closures and SpaceX itself have affected Boca Chica Beach irreparably.
“There will never, ever be anything like it again, and the powers that be have restricted our access egregiously and poisoned this one of a kind biodiverse ecosystem,” Branch said. “It's a true crime against the environment."
Emma Guevara, an organizer for Sierra Club in Brownsville, said more work is ahead, mentioning the land exchange SpaceX and Texas Parks and Wildlife are in the midst of.
“It is an important part of our community, and to have our access to it taken away is a direct confrontation of our rights. This decision is good news, and we're happy about it," Guevara said. "But we're well aware of the obstacles we continue to face across the community, including the state trying to give away huge chunks of Boca Chica State Park to SpaceX."
Cameron County and the state can still appeal the case to the Texas Supreme Court and have at least a month to decide if it will do so.
