Washout
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By Jenny Staff, Fri., Jan. 22, 1999
As things stand now, the draft mitigation policy would apply only to "parent" (i.e., primary) tracts within the city limits, and only within the Barton Springs Zone. For every 5% increase over S.O.S. impervious cover limits, the landowner would be required to provide mitigation property equal to half the net site area of the parent tract. While impervious cover would be capped at 40% in the recharge zone, the limit would be 50% in the Contributing Zone. The mitigation tract must be at least as environmentally sensitive as the parent tract, on which impervious cover will be "clustered." (City staff will develop criteria to estimate environmental sensitivity.) The new development would have to be situated so as not to require the development of additional public utility infrastructure. The policy will also contain restrictions on where and what size the mitigation tracts may be, for example, at least 50% of the mitigation land must be in the same watershed and within two miles of the parent tract.
Up to Me Update
In the next major item on the council's agenda, more legalese was employed in the service of a good thing: the council's resolve to prevent yet another Eastside neighborhood from being visited by something the neighbors don't want. The council is right to extend to the East the same kind of self-determination they regularly allow westsiders. But the plight of the Up to Me drug rehabilitation center is a sad one, nonetheless.
Though they denied both her organization's request to move to Webberville Road and her lawyer's insistence that the group was exempt from the law that gave the council the right to approve or deny the move, when Up to Me administrator Patricia Jennings protested plaintively that she was just a humanitarian trying to do a job, she seemed to have gained the sympathy of councilmembers. ("We believe you," said Spelman, a critic of Jennings' tactics in last week's "Council Watch"). Their sympathy is well-placed, because Patricia Jennings is in fact a humanitarian. She's doing work most people won't do; taking care of men that most of us would rather pretend don't exist.
With the approval Thursday of the 11th and 12th Street revitalization plans (See "Naked City"), momentum for change in East Austin may finally be picking up. Would the arrival of Up to Me on Webberville Road diminish, or even slow, the progress for which many Eastsiders have fought so hard? Maybe not, but a whole slew of Up to Me's might. The Rosewood neighbors can't be blamed for drawing the line at this particular establishment; they have more than their allotment of such, and the line has to be drawn somewhere.
It would be easy to admonish the Webberville neighbors to do the noble thing and give Up to Me a chance to prove themselves. But it's always neighborhoods like Rosewood that are asked to make this kind of sacrifice. When will Tarrytown have to come to council protesting a drug treatment facility for felons, or a recycling plant or a gasoline tank farm? PODER representative and Planning Commission member Susana Almanza noted that while on the west side "they fight malls and grocery stores. We can't do that." Granted, places like Up to Me are not generally flush with the kind of cash it would take to score a 78703 zip code -- so they will naturally gravitate toward the more affordable (read: less prosperous) neighborhoods, where homeowners can least afford the hit that declining property values inevitably produce. One remedy for this problem could be a revised East Austin Overlay, one with more enforcement options for keeping bad development out of Eastside neighborhoods.
In its dealings both with its landlord and with the city, Up to Me has shown signs of profound naiveté: of contract law, of zoning regulations, and especially of the way to make friends at City Hall. And they've been punished for it. Now Up to Me is in a real jam. They show signs of wanting to sue, as people backed into corners are wont to do. But the opportunity the council gave them to work things out with the neighborhood, while more of an uphill battle than ever, is still out there. The Eastside neighbors, though agitated, still seem willing to enter mediation. Even Gardens Neighborhood resident John Limon, who came downtown Thursday to publicly criticize Up to Me's tactics, said he'd participate: "I hope (I can)," he said. "I'd like to be part of it."
This Week in Council: The council will also consider second and third reading approval of a zoning change to allow the construction of a Home Depot on Stassney in South Austin, which would be built under S.O.S. standards, but which has some neighborhood opposition (but not from the relevant neighborhood association, which cut a deal with developers that's to their liking). The confluence of these two projects begs the question: How many big-box home repair stores will this area support? Though the D.I.Y. ethic of Home Depot and its competitors is admirable, and though words like "mitigation," "buffer of greenspace," and "water retention ponds" may sound like (and may in fact be) an improvement on old-style development, these projects could sorely aggravate the spread of sprawl and oversized generic retail in southwest Austin. Isn't this what S.O.S. was supposed to protect us from?
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