- The city of Alachua faces two lawsuits from Tara Forest LLC's developer over delays, redactions, and charges for public records related to Tara development.
- Developer Sayed Moukhtara paid $1,388.94 for records but received over 8,000 pages heavily redacted or incomplete from the city.
- A Sept. 12 suit seeks court orders for the city to justify withheld records and release those deemed public amid ongoing litigation.
The count of Tara lawsuits filed against the city of Alachua increased to two with a new case submitted last month, claiming weeks of delays, unjustified redactions and hundreds of dollars in charges for public records related to the five-part development.
Gainesville-based Childers Law filed the Sept. 12 suit on behalf of Tara Forest LLC’s developer, Sayed Moukhtara.
Moukhtara asked in the suit for a court to order the city to produce written statements justifying why records were withheld and redacted, to submit the records for camera inspection and to release them, if deemed public.
Alachua City Manager Rodolfo Valladares told Mainstreet in an email that the city is aware of the lawsuits but cannot comment on specifics while they are active. He said the city will address allegations, legal arguments and merits of either case through the judicial process.
“While the City cannot comment further on the pending litigation at this time, we appreciate the opportunity to reaffirm our commitment to transparency, accountability, and the fair and consistent administration of City processes,” Valladares wrote.
According to the suit, Moukhtara has paid the city $1,388.94 since June to access various public records and estimates more than 8,000 pages of redacted records. The Childers firm transmitted a litigation hold and records preservation demand to Valladares and interim City Attorney Scott Walker to prevent document destruction ahead of litigation.
Some requests have yet to be filled, and any with redactions await justification that Moukhtara’s attorney Nicholas Whitney said needed to go beyond the “attorney-client privilege” reason stated, especially when the city had said there’s no active or imminent litigation.
The developer’s requests in question started in June, when Moukhtara asked the city to produce records showing how external counsel and the city attorney evaluated Tara applications after he received an $89,786.02 bill for the work.
More than 70 days later, Alachua produced “limited records.” Of the 573 files released, the suit said only about 64% were not duplicates, unreadable files or Moukhtara’s own documents.
When the city did release invoices, they came redacted without reason. Walker provided 19 of his office’s own invoices directly to Childers’ firm in August but left out times when city staff would’ve contributed to the bill while responding to Moukhtara’s records requests.
“The City’s redactions are themselves refusals of access,” the suit said.
The suit highlighted instances when information should have been collected in the requests but wasn’t.
One redacted file titled “2025-11-25_Tara Phoenicia_export” came back with all 317 pages blank. Only 15 were identified as exempt.
The suit also said correspondence detailing Alachua City Commissioner Jacob Fletcher’s phone and email communications earlier this year about public records requests related to Tara were not released.
“Those entries establish that individual City officials corresponded extensively about the Plaintiffs’ pending development applications, the subject matter of Plaintiffs’ requests, and about public records requests generally, and the City has not produced the correspondence,” Jeff Childers wrote. “The deficiency is glaring. The City has never represented that it searched the accounts or the devices of any Commissioner, of the City Manager, or of any other individual officer or employee for records responsive to Plaintiffs’ requests. It has never identified whose accounts it searched, what it searched, or what it found.”
One wave of requests involved 54 categories of records, including files such as engagement letters, invoices and retention agreements from counsel outside the city, press releases and city communication with Alachua County and state agencies.
Forty days later, the city released records related to nine of the categories. Walker wrote to Childers in July that the information requested spanned across multiple years, entities and subject matters that didn’t relate to Moukhtara’s original Tara inquiries.
Walker said the requests went “far beyond what is necessary to evaluate the City’s billing and instead appear designed to burden the City’s administration and chill its legitimate exercise of regulatory authority.”
A message to Moukhtara from the city regarding a records request the developer made in August said it would require over 15,000 documents, 54,000 emails, and 300 hours of redactions, totaling more than $6,500.
Moukhtara narrowed down the request, according to the suit, but the city has not produced those records.
The September lawsuit, not previously reported, preceded an Oct. 1 lawsuit seeking up to $10 million in monetary damages from the city. That suit related to hearing delays for Tara April stormwater infrastructure plans. Click here for a timeline of the Tara developments.
Last year, Fletcher publicly raised concerns about the city’s lack of timely fulfillment and “unjustified” charges for public records requests.