Cloud Tree
Give Them Hell, Bill!
RECEIVED Thu., April 27, 2006
Dear Editor
The Chronicle became my window on Austin after my wife and I moved from Falls Church, Va., to Hays County in 1999. I came to trust your reporting and then your judgment because I believed "you got it." Having grown up on a Dallas County farm during the Forties and Fifties drought, my memories of Austin were certainly idyllic of when it was a "sleepy college town."
Sometimes SOS Bill Bunch is his own worst enemy, but I shudder to think what Austin would be like today without this unique organization and its single-minded focus on protecting all aspects of Barton Springs.
Recent "Page Two" comments by Louis Black [April 7], and Michael King's "Point Austin" [April 21], bring to mind how "Establishment" the Chronicle has become in just six years when it comes to Barton Springs and what it takes to preserve that Edwards Aquifer canary.
Isn't anyone at the Chronicle listening anymore? Twelve thousand plus citizens created an Envision Central Texas paradigm that includes preserving the Aquifer, its watershed, and a lot more of what we need to retain that special quality of life that attracts so many of us.
Citizens across Hays and western Travis counties have coalesced to protect their own little "barton springs" from Houston-style high-density residential sprawl following LCRA Pied Piper, Joe Beal, as he plays the empty tune that the developers and engineering firms orchestrate. They all will be gone with their fortunes when there isn't enough water and the Piper has to be paid.
We can't rely on LCRA, TCEQ, U.S. Fish & Wildlife, or City Hall. SOS on its worst day has done more to preserve the public health, safety, and welfare than all of them combined. Keep giving 'em hell, Bill.
The Chronicle became my window on Austin after my wife and I moved from Falls Church, Va., to Hays County in 1999. I came to trust your reporting and then your judgment because I believed "you got it." Having grown up on a Dallas County farm during the Forties and Fifties drought, my memories of Austin were certainly idyllic of when it was a "sleepy college town."
Sometimes SOS Bill Bunch is his own worst enemy, but I shudder to think what Austin would be like today without this unique organization and its single-minded focus on protecting all aspects of Barton Springs.
Recent "Page Two" comments by Louis Black [April 7], and Michael King's "Point Austin" [April 21], bring to mind how "Establishment" the Chronicle has become in just six years when it comes to Barton Springs and what it takes to preserve that Edwards Aquifer canary.
Isn't anyone at the Chronicle listening anymore? Twelve thousand plus citizens created an Envision Central Texas paradigm that includes preserving the Aquifer, its watershed, and a lot more of what we need to retain that special quality of life that attracts so many of us.
Citizens across Hays and western Travis counties have coalesced to protect their own little "barton springs" from Houston-style high-density residential sprawl following LCRA Pied Piper, Joe Beal, as he plays the empty tune that the developers and engineering firms orchestrate. They all will be gone with their fortunes when there isn't enough water and the Piper has to be paid.
We can't rely on LCRA, TCEQ, U.S. Fish & Wildlife, or City Hall. SOS on its worst day has done more to preserve the public health, safety, and welfare than all of them combined. Keep giving 'em hell, Bill.
Charles O'Dell, Ph.D.
Dripping Springs ETJ
Dripping Springs ETJ
[Louis Black replies: Six years! Hell, we sold out long before that, as I count it, almost 25 years. But against such a sophisticated argument let me paraphrase my thinking on this (Michael King is more than capable of speaking for himself). These are two well intenioned badly written, badly laid, way-too-vague propositions that in the long run won't work, they won't open government up and they won't protect the Springs. They will do far more damage than good. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe not. But it is these propositions that would become the law, not the intentions behind them, not the desires of the citizens, not the various and sundry explanations of what they are supposed to mean by SOS board members. To pretend that in dissenting we are lying, being bought-off, have sold out – in general that those who disagree are corrupted, evidences more than anything else the self-righteously corrupt damage being done to Austin's progressive community.]
