The two utilities seeking permission to build a 370-mile power line from San Antonio to the Permian Basin asked the judges hearing the case on Monday to reject a landowner coalition’s bid to consider new evidence after the hearing ended. A Uvalde County ranch filed its own opposition the same day — and its reason for opposing is that the coalition’s preferred outcome would push the line onto its land.
Both filings are in response to a July 13 motion by the Hill Country Preservation Coalition to reopen the record in Docket 59336 at the Public Utility Commission of Texas. Reopening the record means asking the administrative law judges to accept more evidence after the evidentiary phase has closed — it closed on June 1.
The evidence at issue is a packet the coalition labels Exhibit HCPC-7. The packet consists of correspondence from the Compatible Lands Foundation and the Nature Conservancy, which hold a conservation easement over property in Val Verde County that would be impacted by the route. The packet also includes a June 5 letter from Colonel Eric M. Bissonette, commander of the 47th Flying Training Wing at Laughlin Air Force Base.
The coalition argues the correspondence shows that sworn testimony at the hearing left a misleading impression about whether the easement holders and the Air Force objected to Route 13, one of the 77 routes before the judges.
AEP Texas and the City of San Antonio, acting through CPS Energy, told the judges the packet is “inadmissible hearsay” — out-of-court statements by people who never intervened in the case, never gave sworn testimony and were never cross-examined, now offered to prove the statements are true.
The applicants also argued the coalition cannot call the material newly discovered, because a February 5 letter from The Nature Conservancy was handed over in discovery on April 16 and the coalition never sought to put it in the record. They pointed the judges to a ruling in another case, Docket 59315, where the judges denied a similar motion in May on the grounds that late evidence would disadvantage parties who filed on time and would invite a cascade of further requests.
Briscoe Ranch’s opposition runs 44 pages and is blunter about what is at stake. The ranch notes that the testimony the coalition attacks was elicited by the ranch’s own counsel, and that the coalition quoted only part of the exchange. It argues the packet does not supply the proof the coalition needs: no denial of a utility easement under the instrument’s approval provisions, no refusal of a height deviation, no Air Force or Defense Department objection to the specific segment at issue, and no engineering finding that a route cannot be built within the easement’s restrictions.
Col. Bissonette’s letter, the ranch says, never mentions Route 13 or that segment at all. The June 26 letter from the easement holders saying they “will continue to actively oppose any route proposed through Skyline Ranch” is, in the ranch’s words, “a statement of advocacy intent, not an exercise of the instrument’s approval procedure.”
Then the ranch names its interest plainly. Route 13 does not currently cross the Briscoe Ranch. Route 4, which both the applicants and commission staff recommend, does — as does Route 9, the alternative the land owner coalition prefers. Both use a segment crossing the ranch’s 9,000 contiguous acres in Uvalde County. Knock out Route 13, the ranch argues, and the line most likely lands on its land instead.
Both responses apply the same legal test, from a 2003 Austin appeals court case, Pretzer v. Motor Vehicle Board: whether the new evidence is material, relevant and decisive; whether admitting it would cause undue delay; and whether refusing it would create an injustice. Both filings argue the coalition fails every prong, and both stress the clock. SOAH Order No. 4 sets Aug. 31, 2026 as the statutory deadline for the commission’s decision under PURA Section 37.057; Briscoe Ranch’s filing puts it two days earlier, at Aug. 29.
The judges, Sarah Starnes and Amy Davis, have not ruled on the motion. They have also not ruled on an older motion by American Stewards of Liberty to defer the question of whether the line is needed at all, a question the commission has reserved for a separate case. No proposal for decision — the judges’ written recommendation to the commissioners — has posted.