As
befits a house of worship, the Beautiful Savior Lutheran Church, off the stub of Pleasant Valley
Road that runs south of William Cannon, sits on a hill. This is a good thing,
since, according to city and federal authorities, everything below it is fixin’
to wash away.
On a rainy Saturday morning two weeks back, a couple hundred people crowded
into the prefabricated building that houses the church. Latecomers found
themselves parking within the boundaries, as presently defined, of Onion
Creek’s 100-year floodplain, though the creek itself is more than 1,000 feet
distant. Which means that the neighborhood across Pleasant Valley, flanked by
the creek on three sides, is now within what the city defines as the 25-year
floodplain. Which means residents are now subject to development restrictions
that prevent them from, for example, replacing their homes should they burn
down. Or adding on to their cramped quarters with so much as a deck. Or moving
a mobile home (the reigning housing option for about half the residents, though
they’re so tricked out you’d barely know they were prefab) onto an empty lot
for which they just paid $18,000 in cash, and whose seller did not inform them,
and probably didn’t know, about these restrictions, and who has now
disconnected her phone.
Which makes the residents of this Onion Creek neighborhood very angry indeed,
and as they ascend to Beautiful Savior, they are in no mood to either worship
or witness a political tap dance. The meeting features an assortment of city
staff — Drainage Utility director Mike Heitz, Development Review and
Inspection head Alice Glasco, and Heitz’ deputy Theresa Duncan, the overseer of
Austin’s floodplain management. Plus Councilmember Daryl Slusher, who seemed to
walk in almost by accident, and ended up wrangling the frustrations of the
crowd, single-handedly and on the spot. People stormed out in a series of
huffs. Residents screamed and cried. City leaders were called liars and fools,
as opposed to the typical silent suspicions of the same. Accusations were
leveled of a grand plot to drive the neighbors from their homes. Class warfare
was declared by mainstream, church-going, Anglo working men and women of Far
South Austin, in no uncertain terms. Much was said about tax strikes and
lawsuits and vigilante action, and mass descent on the council chambers a
la PUD Night.
In short, mild-mannered city officials were deluged by a 100-year flood of
bile from the no-longer-silent majority, and showed themselves to be up Onion
Creek without a paddle.
What happened? Not enough, and that’s the problem; despite having three years
to do so, the city failed to convince the 1,000 or so folks down here that
anyone north of the river gives a flip about their problems. So far, the Onion
Creek fiasco has been a primer on how the City of Austin goes about making a
bad thing worse.
The background: Onion Creek, the longest creek in Texas by some accounts, has
its headwaters somewhere near the Hays-Blanco county line, meanders through
Hays and Travis Counties, and then skirts the southern Austin city limit,
running through several subdivisions and into McKinney Falls State Park, where
it joins with Williamson Creek, crosses through the hay fields and the back
edge of Bergstrom, and eventually dumps into the Colorado. Its
400-or-so-square-mile watershed, spreading into five counties, is by far the
largest of any of the bakers’ dozen creek basins that make up Austin.
If you’ve lived here in Bat City for any time, you probably know more about
drainage and floodplains, watersheds, detention ponds, and impervious cover
than most Americans. But in case you don’t: Every creek in Austin flows through
an area defined, under the auspices of the notorious Federal Emergency
Management Agency (FEMA — the hurricane people), as its 100-year floodplain.
This does not mean it floods once every 100 years, but that there’s a 1% chance
of its being inundated every year; it’s possible to have three or five
100-year-floods in a row, or to go for 200 years without one. Within that area,
based on data provided by FEMA, a locality has to define a narrower floodway
— in Austin, the 25-year floodplain, or a 4% annual chance of inundation,
though other heuristics are used by other cities — within which development
will be as difficult as possible, if not completely impossible. By doing this,
the city can participate in FEMA’s flood-insurance program — which covers all
of us regardless of watershed status — and is eligible for federal assistance
should any of our creeks jump its banks and wreak havoc. Indeed, Austin’s
restrictions are so strict that the city qualifies for a discount on its FEMA
insurance, though the Drainage Utility’s current mantra is “That’s not why we
do it.” Rather, the need to safeguard lives and property makes the 25-year
floodway The Forbidden Zone.
As watersheds fill up with impervious cover, and as geographic data gets
refined, floodplain definitions change. In Austin, FEMA has twice in the last
two decades embarked on “more comprehensive” studies to define the floodplains
of our creeks, Onion among them — in other words, they’ve admitted they
screwed up the prior studies. Usually, the difference between one floodplain
definition and the next amounts to a couple of feet of elevation, and the
number of properties that, due to the change, become officially flood-prone can
be counted without taking your shoes off. With its last study (published in
1993) of Onion Creek, however, FEMA raised its 100-year flood level more than
20 feet, which means that the 25-year floodway — which used to comprise mostly
the parkland and easements flanking the creek — now swallows this entire
neighborhood, all the way to Pleasant Valley Road. Unless property owners can
secure a variance — which requires individual review by both Planning
Commission and City Council, supporting testimony from both city and private
civil engineers, and usually the beneficence of St. Jude — they can forget
about ever improving or selling their lots and homes.
The city feels it has no choice but to shut down development in the
neighborhood — as FEMA sees it, these folks have always lived in the floodway
and on borrowed time. To which many residents counter that, in the two or three
decades they’ve lived there, their homes have never flooded — not during the
Memorial Day flood of 1981 in which more than a dozen people died, not during
the Christmas flood 10 years later that hit Southeast Austin particularly hard.
This might imply that FEMA’s estimates are wrong, wrong, wrong. Then again,
recorded flood data from before the subdivision’s existence (circa 1973)
reputedly shows that these parcels have been well under water during previous
storms. The city will restudy the area, but doesn’t expect the situation to
change much. (In Hays County, local officials and property owners took FEMA to
court and got the flood level lowered five feet, but even this — an unlikely
prospect in Austin — would still leave the bulk of the neighborhood under the
hypothetical deluge.)
Apparently, says Duncan, some old-timers at the meeting remembered those
floods in the 1940s and ’50s, and took her aside afterwards to share these
memories, but were afraid to say so in front of their neighbors. Why the
reticence? Judging from their several hours’ worth of pained complaint, ‘twould
seem the Onion Creekers want to separate city heads from city bodies not over
the flood level, but over the city’s less-than-inspired response to the news;
conceding the accuracy of the FEMA estimates would have provided the city with
cover it clearly did not deserve.
The FEMA study, after all, was done three years ago, Hays County had already
litigated it, and the reconstruction of the Onion Creek bridge along William
Cannon — approved in a 1986 bond election — had been cancelled and reassigned
to the relevant state and federal agencies, because a bridge to accommodate the
newly risen waters was beyond the city’s financial means. Yet no one in the
neighborhood was notified until late 1995 that the floodplain had changed (or,
for that matter, why the bridge hadn’t been built). The Drainage Utility (which
in 1993 was still part of Public Works where floodplains were concerned) says
it took 18 months to compile the relevant database of property owners, which
many Onion Creek residents find hard to believe, and you probably do too. Even
at that, many at the meeting never received this letter. Those who did learned
merely that, as one resident describes it, “our zoning had changed, and maybe
we should think about getting flood insurance.”
Much of Austin is already within 100-year zones, and the consequences to
property owners are fairly negligible. But within the narrower floodway, things
get ugly. Unfortunately, the city doesn’t have any established procedure for
notifying folks in that floodway that their property has effectively been
condemned. On most creeks, the 25-year zone is already claimed by the city as
easement, and never before have 600 homes been reclassified en masse as
potential flood bait. In fact, the city typically doesn’t even calculate the
floodway for an entire watershed; only when property owners attempt to pull
permits does the city determine whether that particular parcel is in the
Forbidden Zone. It was such a case, concerning a property from which you can’t
even see Onion Creek, that made the city, and the neighbors, realize that they
were, literally, in deep.
So in itself, it wouldn’t quite be fair to second-guess the city’s Onion Creek
response, since it’s no doubt true that, as Duncan puts it, “We didn’t have any
idea of the magnitude of the problem.” However, by its own admission, the city
knew back in 1993 that it had trouble on its hands, since it protested the
greatly expanded floodplain with FEMA, to no avail. (The decision not to follow
Hays County’s lead and litigate was made somewhere higher up the city food
chain than where Duncan sits.) And it would stand to reason that, if lives are
at stake, the city would want to know which, and how many, properties in this
newly swollen floodplain were likewise in the floodway, instead of waiting for
them to be uncovered via standard procedure and risking staggering liability if
we’d had a flood last year instead of a drought.
Luckily, the Onion Creek neighborhood is still there, and its occupants don’t,
or at least didn’t, think they’ve lived in mortal danger for decades. Instead,
they feel screwed by senseless bureaucracy, and rumor has rushed in where the
city failed to tread. A common suspicion is that the city wants to clear out
the neighborhood, for reasons having something to do with the new and nearby
Bergstrom airport. This seems unlikely, since adjacent neighborhoods across
Onion Creek and closer to Bergstrom seem little affected by the new FEMA
boundaries. These developments downstream — to say nothing of subdivisions
upstream like the Onion Creek Country Club — are far more affluent than the
area by Pleasant Valley Road, with its prefabs and prominent Capitol Metro
service. Don’t think for a moment that this truth has been lost on the
residents; at least a quarter of the comments made at the meeting were
paraphrases of “Once again, it’s either South or East or Southeast Austin gets
the shaft.” (When Heitz noted that if Onion Creek were let alone, FEMA could
pull the entire city’s flood insurance, a man in the back yelled out: “I don’t
give a damn about the folks in West Lake Hills.” He was applauded.)
It didn’t help that city staffers came to the meeting, their main chance to
set Onion Creek minds at ease, with neither a good explanation for what has
happened so far, or a good plan for what happens next. It fell to Slusher,
perceived by the calmer souls in attendance as one of the good guys, to craft
an impromptu strategy from the crowd noise — forming a team of relevant
department heads (not all of whom bothered to show up at the meeting),
considering granting a mass variance to the neighborhood instead of to one
property at a time, and the like.
Such measures might help quiet the passions of the neighbors, although some
residents would likely not have been mollified if Jesus Christ himself promised
them a task force. But the only real answers to the Onion Creek question appear
to be a massive flood-control project upstream — the tentative price tag for
that is $15 million, and the unresolved technical and legal details are many
and vivid — or a buy-out of the entire neighborhood, which may end up being
cheaper for the city, given that property values are likely to plummet in the
area. Flood control is more politic and clearly the choice of the neighborhood,
but no one has $15 million lying around, and getting it would require the
support, through votes and tax collections, of the West Austin fat cats that
the neighborhood vilifies, since Onion Creek property won’t generate that kind
of revenue in 100 years.
As the meeting wore on, this unsavory truth seemed to dawn on the residents,
whose cries to take money from Boondoggle X and spend it on their working-class
selves became more muted. So add one more massive and inevitable liability to
the growing list of fiscal demands clouding the city’s budgetary future.
Geographic destiny has dug a hole in Onion Creek about a half-mile wide, and
the city’s lackadaisical response has continued to widen the chasm. But, as
Slusher assured the crowd, “Y’all are becoming a top priority real fast.”
Forestalling the floodwaters might be the easy part; the real challenge will be
bailing out the bad blood that now swamps Onion Creek.
This article appears in September 6 • 1996 and September 6 • 1996 (Cover).