AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Has the Save Our Springs Ordinance worked?
One quick answer is that yes, it has served to protect environmentally sensitive parts of Austin from overdevelopment. Barton Springs, after all, remains highly swimmable.
However, a more critical view finds the law may simply have pushed such development out of the reach of Austin’s rules.
The ordinance, passed 20 years ago this week by Austin voters, was designed to limit development above the Barton Springs portion of the Edwards Aquifer to protect the area’s water quality and endangered species. Its passage stood as a watershed moment in the political formation of the Austin environmental movement.
Critics at the time fretted that it would dampen economic growth. Supporters envisioned it as a way to preserve the water quality of the iconic Barton Springs Pool as well as, ineffably, Austin’s way of life.
A brief rehashing of history: On Aug. 8, 1992, Austin voters approved the ordinance by a nearly 2-1 ratio.
The vote had been two years in the making, the consequence of a famous into-the-night public hearing in June 1990 that brought more than 800 people to City Hall to protest a plan by Freeport-McMoRan Inc. to develop 4,000 acres in Southwest Travis County.
That proposal was rejected, and the council in February 1991 passed an ordinance with strict, but temporary, limits on development. Those rules were lightened considerably by another ordinance that October, and several developers filed development plans under the lesser regulations to lock in rights guaranteed by the Legislature.
The weakened ordinance angered environmentalists, who drafted the language of the Save Our Springs Ordinance and collected more than 30,000 signatures to put it on the ballot.
The get-out-the-vote effort galvanized an environmental voting bloc that still plays a crucial role in city elections.
It launched the Save Our Springs Alliance, the bare-knuckled environmental group unafraid to mix it up with developers in court — or in the news media. And, in turn, it made Bill Bunch, the group’s director, a curse word for said developers.
But did it successfully limit development to preserve water quality?
Whatever answer one might give is, in the end, overdetermined.
Home Builders Association of Greater Austin Vice President Harry Savio, who fought the ordinance at every turn, still holds that it merely pushed suburbia farther out, to communities such as Lakeway and Cedar Park.
“That whole initiative resulted in a complex set of (development) criteria,” jacking up prices in Travis County, Savio said.
But growth in the Hill Country, near a metropolis and undeniably pretty, might have been inevitable. The construction of malls, of subdivisions, of roads just outside Austin’s reach might have happened with or without the ordinance.
Bunch, for his part, said the ordinance would have been more successful if not for the legislative push by some property-rights groups and developers.
The AMD campus in Southwest Austin and buildings on the south end of MoPac Boulevard top the list, in Bunch’s view, of construction that happened because of grandfathering exceptions to the ordinance.
Impervious cover — rooftops, parking lots and other surfaces that prevent rainwater from trickling into the ground — in the part of the Barton Springs zone in the City of Austin’s jurisdiction crept up from 7 percent to 13 percent between 1990 and 2000, said Erin Wood, a senior research analyst with the City of Austin’s Watershed Protection Department.
Meanwhile, protected space — land preserved as open space — increased from 3 to 34 percent as the result of a series of city bond issues and work by environmental groups to buy land or conservation easements to protect water quality.
Environmental issues after the Save Our Springs Ordinance have become so ingrained in the Austin psyche, Bunch said, that no City Council candidate “ever ran on jobs versus the environment again.”
“Instead, pro-business candidates have always run on a pro-environment message,” Bunch said. “One way to look at it is the message has been institutionalized. Another is that message has been co-opted.”
The next 20 years could lead to broader environmental battles.
Some recent studies have shown that water in Barton Springs can trickle in from farther-flung parts of the great Edwards Aquifer system than originally estimated. “Water from Barton Springs contains low concentrations of a number of man-made chemicals,” U.S. Geological Survey research hydrologists Barbara Mahler and MaryLynn Musgrove wrote in an email. “Water quality changes depending on how much rain we have had and how recently it has rained.”
In summing up the Save Our Springs Ordinance’s impact, Bunch said that the important thing is “we’re still swimming in beautiful, clean, clear water.”
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Information from: Austin American-Statesman, http://www.statesman.com
