Politics
Up the Creek
Barton Creek—to many a symbol of Austin’s easygoing life—is in the hands of eager-beaver developers and a dawdling city government.
One day in June, Ellie Rucker, the popular consumer-advice columnist for the Austin American-Statesman, printed a letter from a lady in Wisconsin who said she was thinking of moving to Austin but wanted to know first about “costs, insects, scorpions, or rattlesnakes, and other problems” she had heard about. Rucker told her that she should be sure to stay away, because Austin is full of not only scorpions and rattlesnakes, but also ticks, chiggers, alligators, coral snakes, roaches, and many other unpleasantries. “We have sky-high utility bills,” Rucker wrote, “too many developers, too many bridges under construction, and enough people.”
That column loosed a flood of mail to the Statesman, all of it, aside from a prissy rejoinder from the chamber of commerce, wildly enthusiastic. Readers called Rucker witty, brilliant, and courageous; they nominated her for mayor, city manager, and editor of the Statesman; and they bitterly decried what they saw as the fast-proceeding decline and fall of Austin. “May your detractors be banished to Houston,” one man wrote, “where they can become rich beyond the dreams of avarice and wallow in the quagmire of overcrowded humanity.”
Austin is the Texas city that people find it easiest to fall in love with, and for reasons that would make a Houston or Dallas booster blanch. When the case for Austin is made (as it is to the point of obsession by its residents), it’s made on the basis of the city’s physical beauty and its easy, pleasant pace. Words like dynamic, new, and big, which spring naturally to the lips of people in Houston and Dallas, are seldom heard in Austin.
Meanwhile, however, Austin is booming every bit as much as its larger sisters. Because of its location, its comparatively low cost of living, and, indeed, its pleasantness, it has become a mecca for light industry, and its population is supposed to increase by about 35 per cent in the next dozen years. This prospect greatly disturbs much of the local citizenry, and Austin has become a hotbed of that most un-Texan of civic sentiments: opposition to growth. When the Michelin Tire Corporation put off its plans to build a new plant on the north side of town this summer, there were joyful letters in the Statesman. When the American Cities Corporation announced plans to pull down 48 acres of old and mostly seedy buildings downtown and replace them with a “revitalization” package of offices, hotels, and apartments, there were groans all over town—so many, in fact, that the project now appears to be dying. Lots of people in Austin don’t want their city to be like Houston and Dallas. They don’t want any ladies from Wisconsin moving to town. They think it’s time to pull up the ladder.
The particular issue that has most engaged these general passions is the development of the area around Barton Creek, which rises in the Hill COuntry south and west of Austin and winds its way down to Zilker Park and the Barton Springs swimming pool. The pool is the universal symbol of what there is to love about Austin. (See “Barton Springs Eternal,” TM, August 1978.) It’s an eighth of a mile long, fed by cool natural springs and banked with shady lawns, a democratic summertime hangout for students, hippies, lawyers, bankers, housewives, little kids—in short, everybody in town. If anything should happen to Barton’s, the feeling is, something precious will have been irretrievably lost to Austin.
To the untrained eye, the pool still looks wonderfully clean and fresh, although true aficionados say the water is just a bit cloudier than it was five or ten years ago. But it’s obvious to everyone that the environs of the pool have become a hot development area. In 1972 a former Kansas state legislator named Sid Jagger, who had come to Austin a decade earlier and gotten into the real estate business, built an apartment complex called Wind Ridge on the bluffs overlooking Barton Creek. He set off a small boom, and now there are 1300 apartment units either built or planned in the creek’s watershed just above Zilker Park. The threat these developments pose to the pool is partly visual and partly environmental. Although the pool is fed not by the creek but by an underground river called the Edwards Aquifer, the creek and the aquifer join forces at several points upstream. So if the creek is polluted, which in itself would be unfortunate, it might also pollute the pool.
Most residents of Austin think that development in the Barton Creek watershed should be severely restricted or stopped entirely. The developers naturally don’t want that, and they say that if they own land they ought to be able to build on it.
That puts the ball in the city’s court—its job is to balance the preservation of the creek against the property rights of the developers. The city has botched it magnificently. It could have come up with some plan to restrict development. It has not. It could have bought up land in the watershed—for four years it has even had money put in its coffers by the voters and the city council to do just that. It has not. The government of Austin has, in other words, so far completely failed to preserve the city’s best natural resource.
To its credit, the city has temporarily (but not permanently) stopped a proposed bridge over the creek and turned down shopping-center zoning on one plot of land. But, on the other hand, besides not mounting any overall effort to protect the creek, the city has given the developers a long string of victories. It has okayed the placement of a sewer line right beside the creek, and the building of a million-square-foot shopping mall a little way upstream on land Jagger sold to an Indianapolis developer. The city is also on the verge of approving rezoning that would permit development of a ten-acre plot very near the pool owned by the Knights of Columbus.* The city has allowed substantial development to take place in the watershed; at several points along the creek, concrete gullies collect the water that runs through the streets and gutters of the subdivisions and direct it into the creek. In July the city council passed a moratorium on new zoning and sewer hookups in the watershed within the city limits, but this was an act with little practical effect since those who already have zoning and sewer permits are allowed to go ahead and build.* On an issue where even a lot of pro-growthers want to control growth, growth has won resoundingly.
Five miles or so upstream from the Barton Springs Pool, the Barton Creek watershed is impressively beautiful and wild. The creek is shallow and clear, with occasional spectacular limestone cliffs rising up on one side or another. About four miles from town, two bridges cross the creek at the site of a huge development called Lost Creek. On the east bank is the Lost Creek Country Club, with a golf course right on the creek’s edge; on the west bank are expensive houses and newly bulldozed roads, an unpleasant jolt to the eye after the preceding wilderness.
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