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What's Up With Stratus?
From its origin, “grandfathering”
legislation has been used to subvert a primary function of democracy
– the power of citizens to correct wrongs. Emancipation
freed black men and empowered them with the right to vote. State
grandfathering laws blocked their right to vote. Passage ten
years ago of the citizen-intiated Save Our Springs Ordinance
was supposed to prevent, at the very least, large amounts of
paved surface in the Barton Springs watershed and create a uniform
standard for development in Austin’s jurisdiction. Texas
State grandfathering legislation, sponsored by certain Austin
developers and their high priced attorney/lobbyists, has continually
attempted to render the Save Our Springs Ordinance toothless.
Indeed, grandfathering claims were at the root
of the recent massive development deal made this summer between
the City of Austin and Stratus Properties. Back in the early
1980s, Gary Bradley filed development plans with the city for
his Circle C ranch development over the Barton Springs Recharge
Zone. Bradley’s Circle C Development Corporation went
bankrupt, and Jim Bob Moffett’s Freeport McMoRan provided
the funding to bail him out. When Bradley could not follow through
with the terms of this new partnership, Freeport, now Stratus
Properties, took ownership of 1,253 acres of the Circle C project.
However, the original agreement between Bradley
and the City of Austin created a covenant, running with the
land and binding any future owners, that protected the city’s
right to protect water quality. Specifically, the agreement
provided that development in the Circle C lands “shall
comply with the applicable special watershed ordinances, as
amended from time to time.”
And while just such an amendment known as the
Save Our Springs ordinance was lawfully passed by the citizens
of Austin in 1992, ten years later Stratus waved around a bill
passed by our State Legislature – a bill sponsored and
heavily lobbied for by Stratus – which, in the rich tradition
of grandfathering, attempts to exempt Stratus’ Circle
C development plans from the Save Our Springs Ordinance. Fearing
reprisal from the State Legislature in the form of more Austin-bashing
legislation, the City Council decided to make a deal with Stratus.
Before the City Council made its final vote for
the Stratus deal (6-1 with Raul Alvarez against), Save Our Springs
Alliance filed a lawsuit asking the court to determine if the
Save Our Springs Ordinance is exempt from the State grandfathering
clause. Our legal team—which includes David Brooks, the
state’s leading expert on local government law—researched
the law and the relevant facts and concluded that we have a
strong claim that the SOS ordinance is exempt from grandfathering
under state law. Nevertheless, the City Council majority went
ahead with the Stratus deal, throwing in millions of dollars
of development subsidies along the way.
What happens to the recently passed Stratus deal?
We intend to add claims to our suit that the City/Stratus development
deal violated several laws. The most important of these claims
is that the development deal constituted unlawful “contract
zoning” whereby the city unlawfully bargained away its
own and future council’s powers to zone the land through
an honest legislative process that asks what the best use of
the land is, not what zoning should it be guaranteed through
backroom dealmaking. Another claim focuses on the council’s
inappropriate limits on citizen participation in the zoning
hearings, wherein citizens were limited to 3 minutes each to
comment on 15 separate zoning cases, a mere 12 seconds per case.
Joining David Brooks, SOS Alliance executive director Bill Bunch,
and long-time outside counsel Amy Johnson on the case will be
attorneys Joe Crews and David Richards.
While the legal case proceeds, we are keeping
a close eye on Stratus as they try to secure deals to build
out thousands of sensitive acres of undeveloped land in the
Barton Springs watershed. You, too, can monitor this irresponsible
company whose entire business history has focused on building
more roads, houses, and sewer lines in the Barton Springs watershed
by visiting this site regularly.
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