Saving the Springs: Urban Expansion and Water Quality in Austin - Politics of Urban Runoff: Nature, Technology, and the Sustainable City - page 60

Beyond the Austin City Limits
One of the most signifi cant challenges of the SOS Ordinance is that it is
only applicable within the City of Austin's municipal jurisdiction. An en-
vironmental activist states, “I think with the Barton Springs issues, there's
really a sense that the questions have moved outside of Austin. Within
our ETJ [extra-territorial jurisdiction], most of our development decisions
have already been made, the die has been cast.” 106 Thus, there are fears
of leapfrog developments cropping up in neighboring jurisdictions that
will affect water quality and result in a more sprawling metropolitan area.
Similar to the clash between property ownership and environmental regu-
lations mentioned earlier, there is a fundamental mismatch between the
hydrologic fl ows of the Edwards Aquifer and the fragmented jurisdictional
authorities that regulate growth over the aquifer.
To augment the regulatory approach, the City of Austin embarked on
an ambitious conservation land development program. In 1998, voters
approved $65 million in municipal bonds to purchase fi fteen thousand
acres of undeveloped land for water quality protection in the Barton
Springs Zone. Additional bond money was approved by voters in sub-
sequent years, and as of 2007, the City of Austin's Water Quality Pro-
tection Lands Program manages about twenty thousand acres in Travis
and Hays Counties, 60 percent of which is under conservation easements
and the remainder through full property ownership. 107 Effectively, these
lands serve as enormous stormwater BMPs to protect water quality. 108
The conservation land development approach to protect water quality
of the Edwards Aquifer differs from the regulatory approach by using
market-based mechanisms that follow the 1980s mantra of the Nature
Conservancy: “We protect land the old-fashioned way: we buy it.” 109 An
environmental activist notes that conservation development acknowledges
that “property rights proponents have a right and the best way to fi ght it
is to play the property ownership game.” 110
In effect, these jurisdictions have adopted the economic rational-
ist framework of the development community but reinterpreted it for
environmental benefi ts rather than profi t motive. Property can be pur-
chased for the public trust as opposed to being a private commodity.
An unintended consequence of purchasing land for conservation is that
it infl ates property values in the region and makes further conservation
purchases more expensive. Environmental law scholar William Shut-
kin summarizes the problem with conservation land development as
follows: