BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — Louisiana’s public records law doesn’t apply to a private, for-profit company building a 162-mile-long (261-kilometer) crude oil pipeline in the state, a judge said Thursday in rejecting a bid by environmental groups for access to company records.
State District Court Judge Michael Caldwell said he sees no basis for compelling Bayou Bridge Pipeline LLC to turn over pipeline project records to the groups that sued the company last week. But he gave the groups’ attorneys 15 days to amend their public records lawsuit against Bayou Bridge before he would formally dismiss it.
The groups claimed Bayou Bridge is subject to the Louisiana Public Records Act because the company is acting as an “instrumentality of the state” by taking or expropriating more than 400 parcels of private property for the project.
Company lawyer James Percy said Bayou Bridge is a “purely private corporation.” Read more…