Texas PUC Handed Another Legal Defeat on State USF

appellee AMA TechTel, a CLEC, for similar reasons that the court gave in a June 30 decision supporting Texas Telephone Association (TTA) and other RLECs in a similar case (see 2207010045). Earlier in the AMA case, the state appeals court required the PUC to pay the CLEC the full amount of state USF support it was owed since Dec. 1. "While the present case appears before us in a different procedural posture from that in TTA, the application of legal principles to the pleaded and undisputed facts is substantively the same and our analysis and holdings are largely dictated by that opinion,” Justice Thomas Baker wrote Wednesday. As in the June 30 opinion, state law and PUC regulations preclude the state commission from underfunding TUSF, said Baker: The PUC must pay monthly support amounts. Like the RLEC group, AMA sufficiently pleaded a Texas Administrative Procedure Act claim, he said. The court overruled the PUC's contention that AMA failed to exhaust administrative remedies before bringing the APA challenge. AMA sufficiently pleaded a viable regulatory takings claim and the trial court didn't abuse its discretion when it granted temporary injunctive relief to AMA, he said. "It was the PUC Parties’ decision to amend the Solix contract and refuse to fund the TUSF that altered the parties’ relationship,” so “the status quo is the relationship of the parties prior to the PUC Parties’ challenged actions,” wrote Baker. “We reject the premise implicit in the PUC Parties’ contention that a party may act unlawfully and then claim that the impacts of that unlawful behavior cannot be remedied or mitigated pending a trial on the merits.” Justices Melissa Goodwin and Gisela Triana, the judge who wrote the TTA decision, joined Baker in Wednesday’s opinion. Following the earlier court actions, Texas commissioners Aug. 1 raised the revenue-based TUSF surcharge to 24% from 3.3% (see 2207140060). The Texas PUC and AMA didn’t comment.