© 2018 The Texas Lawbook.
By Natalie Posgate
(Jan. 8) – Two Dallas attorneys have filed a lawsuit on behalf of a Houston investigative communications firm that is seeking information behind the 2009 firing of Texas Tech Red Raiders football coach Mike Leach.
In a lawsuit filed Monday in Lubbock County against Texas Tech University, longtime Houston television reporter-turned communications consultant Wayne Dolcefino seeks the court to issue a declaratory judgment that will require university officials to hand over a series of public records requests Dolcefino filed on behalf of Leach this past fall.
“This case is about providing public access to information to ensure accountability of our governmental institutions,” says the 21-page lawsuit, which was filed by Michael K. Hurst and Julie Pettit on behalf of Dolcefino. “Texas Tech has flagrantly disregarded the law following its controversial termination of popular football coach, Mike Leach – it breached a contract, hid behind sovereign immunity, and now blatantly violates the Texas Public Information Act by failing to produce the public records associated with the termination. This suit is to ensure that abuses of power do not go unchecked.”
Texas Tech’s general counsel, John Huffaker, said in an email that the university has not yet been served with the lawsuit.
Texas Tech fired Leach at the end of 2009 upon accusations about his mistreatment of a player with a concussion, Adam James (the son of prominent sports commentator Craig James). According to court documents, the university fired Leach one day before Leach was owed $2.4 million in conjunction with the expiration of his six-year contract.
Leach, who is now the head football coach at Washington State University, sued Texas Tech one week after his termination on claims he was fired without cause, but ran into obstacles recovering anything from the school after it “successfully played the ‘sovereign immunity’ card to end the litigation,” the lawsuit says.
In Texas, sovereign immunity is a tool that can be used by governmental entities to avoid lawsuits with the idea that the entity cannot conduct state business if it is busy being overly concerned about lawsuits, Dolcefino’s complaint says.
“Texas Tech wants to reap the benefits of being a governmental body by hiding behind sovereign immunity so that Coach Leach cannot sue it,” the lawsuit says. “But Texas Tech also wants to avoid the obligations of being a governmental body by refusing to produce the documents that it is required by law to produce.”
Monday’s lawsuit seeks a judge to order Texas Tech to release multiple batches of emails and phone records between university’s board of regents members and the chancellor that Dolcefino believes could shed light on Leach’s 2009 termination.
In a written statement, Texas Tech spokesman Brett Ashworth called the lawsuit “baseless litigation” and said the school has fully complied with meeting Dolcefino’s requests as required in the Texas Public Information Act.
“During this initial litigation in 2010, the university turned over thousands of pages of information, many of which were made public and are available to Mr. Dolcefino,” the statement said. “Mr. Dolcefino made 25 public records requests, all of which received a response from the university. Of those requests, only five pertained to Mike Leach. The others pertain to current Texas Tech University officials and operations. We will continue to be responsive to requests as required by the law.”
In his lawsuit, Dolcefino paints a different picture, alleging that the university has only produced 312 pages of documents to his firm despite previously identifying 1,785 pages worth of documentation relevant to Coach Leach’s termination. He also alleges that Texas Tech overcharged him with a more than $18,000 bill “for exponential, unauthorized and improper charges” for the document production.
Included in that bill, the lawsuit says, is a $17,000 “document retrieval charge,” but according to Texas state law, “a charge of that nature is reserved for the retrieval of documents that are stores offsite or are archived. Here, Dolcefino had only sought emails stored in the computer systems of Texas Tech.”
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