Granbury Recall Explodes: 5 Officials Face Voters

Granbury, TX – Granbury’s political establishment is about to face a very public reckoning. Five of the city’s six elected officials are now the targets of a recall effort born from the bitter fight over Project Patriot, a proposed 2,000-acre artificial intelligence data-center and power-generation campus on the former Knox Ranch. The next chapter begins Monday night, when the Granbury City Council holds public hearings on the recall petitions.

The hearings are scheduled for 6 p.m. Sept. 28 at Granbury City Hall. The targets are Mayor Jim Jarratt, Mayor Pro Tem Bruce Wadley, and council members Greg Corrigan, Gary “Skip” Overdier, and Zeb Ullom. Councilwoman Angela Parker is not included.

For a city of Granbury’s size, recalling five members of a six-member elected governing body is hardly routine municipal housekeeping.

The recall petitions were filed July 13 by residents associated with Grassroots Granbury and Voices of Granbury, including organizers Janet Logsdon and Daniel Piatt. Organizers said each petition contained roughly 1,446 to 1,470 signatures, and claimed the totals exceeded the number of votes several of the officials received when elected. The organizers also said the five petitions collectively contained more than 5,000 signatures.

The fight traces directly to Project Patriot.

The Back Story

Granbury annexed approximately 2,090 acres of Knox Ranch in January. On April 7, the council voted 5-1 to change the property’s zoning to industrial after the Planning and Zoning Commission had recommended against the change. The property is tied to Bilateral Energy LLC, who is developing plans for a large data-center campus with on-site power generation.

And this is where the politics gets messy.

Residents have accused city officials of failing to adequately disclose what was being contemplated for the property before annexation and of violating open-meetings requirements. Those allegations are contested and remain the subject of litigation. A lawsuit filed in April challenged the annexation and rezoning process, including allegations concerning the Texas Open Meetings Act.

Bilateral Energy presents a very different picture. The developer describes Project Patriot as a privately financed, self-contained campus that would generate its own electricity rather than depend on Granbury’s electric grid. The company says its planned “islanded” system is designed to avoid adding demand to local utilities and says TCEQ approved the project’s electrical generating facility in July 2025.

On July 28, Granbury announced that the petitions would not be certified, saying the signatures failed legal requirements and that the allegations did not meet the charter’s requirement for sufficiently specific claims of misfeasance or malfeasance.

Recall organizers went to court.

Organizers asked the Second Court of Appeals in Fort Worth to force the city to recognize the petitions and move toward a November election. The city subsequently reversed course and agreed to present the petitions to the council. On Sept. 21, the appeals court dismissed the mandamus proceeding as moot because the city had already agreed to process the petitions.

Granbury’s charter gives residents a defined recall mechanism. Article 4, Section 4.07 requires signatures from at least 15% of qualified voters registered at the last general city election, or 200 voters, whichever is greater. It also requires petitions to identify specific alleged acts of misfeasance or malfeasance. Under Section 4.08, if an official requests a hearing and does not resign, the council is required to order a recall election at the earliest date permitted by state law.

All five officials requested the hearings.

City Attorney Jeremy SoRelle has indicated that a recall election could not occur until May, while recall attorney Art Martinez de Vara has argued that an earlier special election remains legally possible. The November ballot deadline also became an issue during the court fight.

Meanwhile, residents have separately collected more than 800 signatures seeking no-confidence action against City Manager Chris Coffman and City Attorney Jeremy SoRelle. Those petitions are political pressure, not charter recalls of elected officials.

So here Granbury sits: five elected officials facing recall hearings, a massive industrial development still generating controversy, lawsuits over how the project was handled, and a community deeply divided over whether city government has been sufficiently transparent.

Monday night won’t decide the recalls. It could, however, determine whether Granbury’s voters eventually get to decide for themselves.

And frankly, that is where this fight belongs. Government officials make decisions in the name of the people who elected them. When thousands of citizens believe those decisions were made without enough sunlight, the answer shouldn’t be to make the paperwork disappear. It should be to let the process run its course. The voters can then render the verdict.