Paxton sues to block Meadow annexation in Collin County MUD dispute

Ken Paxton’s latest court move has put about 400 acres tied to The Meadow back into legal limbo, with the attorney general asking a Collin County judge to wipe out the annexation and declare the utility district’s actions an open-meetings violation.

The May 4 filing says Double R Municipal Utility District No. 2A broke the Texas Open Meetings Act when its board accepted the resignations of every member, named replacements and then voted to annex the project. Paxton says that happened during a remote-field meeting on Sept. 12, 2025, and argues the public was kept out of a decision that changed the project’s land status.

For people watching growth east of Plano and toward Josephine, the immediate issue is not whether The Meadow gets built tomorrow. It is whether the legal fight slows any path toward utilities, annexation and the local approvals a large development needs before ground is ever broken. The development was first announced in 2024 as a 402-acre project near Josephine and was originally pitched with more than 1,000 homes, a mosque, a faith-based school and a community college. It was later rebranded as The Meadow in November 2025.

The new suit also lands on top of an already crowded court calendar. A Collin County judge has issued a temporary injunction in a separate case involving the same municipal utility district, limiting the board’s authority while that dispute heads toward a Nov. 16 trial date. Paxton’s filing seeks to void the annexation itself, which would mark a sharper blow than earlier challenges because it attacks the district action that put the land under the project’s control.

The dispute has become one of the region’s most politically charged land-use fights. Gov. Greg Abbott announced in March 2025 that the Texas Workforce Commission had opened a fair-housing investigation into EPIC and affiliated entities. Paxton said days earlier that he had opened a consumer-protection investigation and issued a civil investigative demand to Community Capital Partners. A federal review later closed with no violations found, and the Texas Workforce Commission reached a fair-housing settlement with the developers in September 2025, a deal a Travis County judge recently ordered the agency to follow.

That legal tangle matters in Collin County because it reaches beyond one Muslim-oriented housing project. The case is testing how special-purpose districts operate, how transparent their meetings must be, and how much politics can shape expectations for future growth near Josephine and the fast-developing North Texas edge. If Paxton succeeds, The Meadow’s annexation could be voided and the project pushed farther back into uncertainty, adding another layer to a fight that is already years ahead of construction but already reshaping local land-use politics.