Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
3
Saving the Springs: Urban Expansion and
Water Quality in Austin
On the evening of June 7, 1990, the Austin City Council held a public
meeting to discuss a proposed four-thousand-acre development in the
southwest section of the city. A land development corporation was seek-
ing permission from the council to establish a Public Utility District in
the Barton Creek watershed that would provide infrastructure services
for 2,500 single-family homes, 1,900 apartment units, 3.3 million square
feet of commercial space, and 3 golf courses. More than nine hundred cit-
izens attended the public meeting and more than six hundred addressed
the city council, the majority of whom were strongly opposed to the pro-
posed development due to its potential impacts on the environment and
existing community. The council listened patiently and even extended
the meeting to accommodate the record number of citizens who wanted
to voice their opinions about the future of Austin. Just before dawn, the
council voted unanimously to deny the developer's request.
The notorious All-Night Council Meeting of 1990 was a turning point for
the citizens of Austin. The public forum effectively married the commu-
nity's historic tradition of grassroots community action with its growing
concerns for water quality protection, and in the process, changed the
character of local politics in the city forever. The meeting would serve as a
tipping point between unbridled urban development activities in the 1970s
and 1980s to a more managed growth approach in the 1990s and 2000s.
In this chapter, I examine the struggles of Austin residents to balance qual-
ity of life and environmental protection with economic development and
property rights. Local politics in Austin is often characterized by simplistic
dichotomies of preservation versus growth, locals versus outsiders, and
environmentalists versus developers, but issues of urban runoff transcend
these categories to reveal the tensions between culture and nature, built
and unbuilt, past and future.
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