Officials with the Texas Department of Transportation have sued Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott's office to prevent the release of records about Texas vehicle crashes.

The agency, in resisting the request from a San Antonio television station, cited a 1997 state law designed to shield those involved in car accidents from being contacted by attorneys looking to represent them in lawsuits. That law says that in order to get the report of a specific accident, a requester must have at least two of these pieces of information: the accident date, the address of the wreck and the names of those involved.

TxDOT had earlier agreed in a compromise to release information to News 4 WOAI and reporter Brian Collister that would include nothing about specific accidents. It's now withholding the entire database.That database lists specifics about all accidents that occur in Texas, including whether alcohol was involved and whether there were deaths or serious injuries.

The department has declined the media request even though the TxDOT Web site includes a page in which anyone can request such data from the agency. A query to that page by the American-Statesman on Tuesday, in fact, yielded an answer about alcohol-related accidents with fatalities in Central Texas within a few hours. (There were 22 in Travis County in 2007, eight in Hays and seven in Williamson.)

"TxDOT itself voluntarily releases the requested information via its own Web site," WOAI lawyers said in a motion intervening in the case between TxDOT and the attorney general in which it calls "nonsensical" the agency's position on the records. "A governmental body cannot voluntarily release information to one requestor and then withhold it from another."

TxDOT, when asked about the case, issued an e-mail statement.

"We need to see if our interpretation of the law is the correct one, and the continuation of this lawsuit will do that," spokesman Chris Lippincott said. "If Mr. Collister persists in his irresponsible pursuit of the private information of every Texan who has been in a car wreck, TxDOT will continue to fight him in court."

TxDOT last year took custody of the database, which begins with crashes occurring on Jan. 1, 2003, from the Texas Department of Public Safety. The DPS had proposed in 2006 that TxDOT take it over, given that the agency was the primary user of the information. The Legislature in 2007 passed a bill, carried by state Sen. Steve Ogden, R-Bryan, ordering that the database and 86 employees move from the DPS to TxDOT.

Collister made an open records request for the database to TxDOT in January. Collister says now that he hoped to use it to examine which roads or intersections in the San Antonio area were particularly dangerous, and to do other analyses of safety. TxDOT did not release the information and instead referred the request to the attorney general's office for a ruling, which is standard practice when a government entity thinks that its records are exempt from state open records laws.

The attorney general, in a March 31 opinion, sided with WOAI and said the database was an open record. TxDOT then filed a lawsuit in district court in Travis County to overturn that decision.

In the meantime, a TxDOT lawyer wrote an April 22 letter to Collister saying the agency would release information from the database that is "not personally identifiable," such as names of people involved in the accidents. The cost to WOAI would be $2,409 for an electronic copy (mostly for computer programming time) and $481,001 if the television station wanted the estimated 4.4 million pages of paper records.

Given the cost, the television station didn't immediately accept that proposal. Lippincott, in his e-mail, characterized that as a rejection of the TxDOT offer.

In late April, after discussions with TxDOT lawyers, the attorney general's office said it had changed its opinion and now agreed that the database did not have to be released. The two sides were prepared to submit a settlement to that effect to the court.

That decision is on hold after WOAI's official intervention in the lawsuit. Tom Kelley, a spokesman for the attorney general, said: "We got additional information and declined to join the settlement. ... We're trying to resolve this by early August."

Joe Larsen, a First Amendment lawyer from Houston representing WOAI, said the attorney general's office is taking a neutral stance.

"It's TxDOT that's going to be the tough nut to crack," Larsen said.