They code-named the spaceport and called it duly posted. I know the phrase. Duly posted is what a public body writes in its own minutes when the notice went up on the one wall nobody reads, under a name nobody would recognize, for a meeting nobody from the public attended. It is technically a sentence about the law. It is actually a sentence about the door. I spent years at the You Know Who Post in a cardigan that cost more than a parish council member’s annual stipend, writing gentle copy about “economic development” as if it were weather that happened to small places. I never asked who printed the forecast. These days I read every public number about property taxes with more personal interest than I’d like, and this one is the biggest I have ever seen.
Here is the record. The Vermilion Parish Police Jury’s committees meet Wednesday, Nov. 4, the day after the election, and the Courthouse/General Needs agenda lists an executive session — closed to the public — to discuss the lawsuit asking a court to void the parish’s SpaceX tax agreement, The Vermilion Times reported Oct. 31, 2026, from the parish’s own posted agendas. The same agenda lists a “Request for SpaceX Related Funding” from the Vermilion Council on Aging, with no amount. The suit, filed Monday, Oct. 26, in the 15th Judicial District Court by the Vermilion Citizens Coalition and three residents, alleges eight Open Meetings Law violations, The Advocate’s Alex Lubben reported. It says the police jury revived the parish’s Industrial Development Board, inactive since 1997, by amending its July 15 agenda mid-meeting, and that on Aug. 25 the board approved a payment-in-lieu-of-taxes agreement with SpaceX for its planned $100 billion spaceport near Pecan Island — listed on the agenda only as “Project Osprey,” announced by a one-page notice posted at the courthouse 24 hours ahead, with no notice sent to the state as the law requires. The seven-member board approved it unanimously in less than half an hour with no public comment, hours before Gov. Jeff Landry announced the project at an invitation-only event behind barricades, the Louisiana Illuminator and Gulf States Newsroom’s Drew Hawkins reported, citing recordings of the meetings. At the board’s first meeting in July, its program counsel, Butler Snow lawyer Mike Busada, said a notice posted somewhere in the courthouse would do. “Back door?” a board member joked. “Doesn’t have to be the front door,” Busada replied. The agreement trades property taxes for payments starting at $25 million a year and rising 2 percent annually for 25 years — about $800 million — plus $20 million for local infrastructure and $25 million for a charitable fund. The exemption alone is worth nearly $23.8 billion over 25 years; the payments cover about 3 cents of every dollar SpaceX would otherwise owe, by the newsroom’s analysis, as part of what it calls the largest incentive package in state history, an estimated $27.5 billion. The suit puts the break at about $8 million for each of the 3,000 jobs SpaceX estimates. A notice of lease recorded less than two hours after the vote carries a SpaceX executive’s signature dated Aug. 20, five days before it. The land came from ExxonMobil marsh the state acquired in a coastal-lawsuit settlement and sold to SpaceX for $100 million; SpaceX transferred it to the board, which leased it back. When plaintiffs asked for that settlement, parish counsel said the records had been delivered to the governor’s office, according to the petition. Two police jurors who attended both board meetings had signed nondisclosure agreements for “Project Osprey” in June.
Now the defense, and there are several. The board’s minutes say the Aug. 25 notice was “duly posted and given in the manner provided by the Open Meetings Law.” Landry’s office says its executive counsel attended the July 15 meeting, that the Exxon settlement was approved in open session after an executive session, that courts ordered the settlement kept confidential, and that the parish’s outside attorney has a copy. Landry defended the NDAs: “You think I want Texas to steal my thunder?” Busada called the PILOT a “phenomenal deal” for the parish, and said the point was to “really roll out the red carpet.” The plaintiffs themselves say theirs “is not a lawsuit against SpaceX or the Starbase”; neither SpaceX nor the state is a defendant, and SpaceX did not respond to the Illuminator. Fine. Courts will decide the eight counts; these are allegations. But read the handshake. The state negotiated, the firm signed five days early, a dormant board was woken up to hold the pen, and the public’s seat at the table was a sheet of paper on a courthouse wall under a bird’s name. The state didn’t fail to protect the parish from the company. It ran the meeting for the company and called it a notice. And now the response to a lawsuit about closed doors is, of course, a closed door. Both parties are the help. One brings the NDA. One brings the term sheet. The rocket brings the barricades.
Deb says if the church council had voted on the new fellowship hall under the code name “Project Pelican” with a note taped to the boiler room door, the Altar Guild would have rioted, and they’d have been right. Buck says he’d like three cents on the dollar on his property taxes and is prepared to change his name to Osprey. I love them. They are seasoning.
“Duly posted” is the alibi. The 3 cents is the story. Sit with it until it confesses. A parish signed its piece of the largest incentive package in its state’s history in under thirty minutes, by a board raised from a thirty-year sleep, under a code name, with the public’s only notice a page on a wall, and with the related land settlement carried back to the governor’s office — and the lawsuit asking to have it done again in daylight is about to be discussed behind a door marked executive session. Maybe the court sends it back and the parish gets a better deal. I hope it does; the people of Pecan Island are the ones who will live under the launches. But a deal this big that could only survive in the dark is not development. It is a transfer with a press event. The cardigan stays. Fill the notebook. Then ask the Vermilion Parish Police Jury, out loud, at Wednesday’s public comment period before the doors close: who wrote the “final offers,” why couldn’t the public see the agenda’s real name, and when the Council on Aging comes asking for “SpaceX related funding,” why is it asking at all, if the parish kept only 3 cents on the dollar?
Sources:
- The Vermilion Times, Brison McPhail, “Council on Aging to Ask Police Jury for SpaceX-Related Money; Jurors Set Closed-Door Talk on Starbase Lawsuit,” Oct. 31, 2026
- Louisiana Illuminator / Gulf States Newsroom, Drew Hawkins, “‘Behind closed doors’: The secret SpaceX deal and the lawsuit challenging it,” Oct. 27, 2026
- The Advocate, Alex Lubben, “Lawsuit seeks to void SpaceX tax deal in Vermilion Parish,” Oct. 26, 2026
— Theo Ashford-Lindström
Leave a Reply