Showdown at Maverick Ranch
Henry Cisneros and the state’s highway boosters were determined to bull-doze a loop through the pristine Hill Country near san Antonio. Now, all that stands in the way is three sisters and five generations of Texas history.
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For nearly two years, the boosters pondered the question. Then, unexpectedly, a solution appeared in the form of another roadway whose planning would serve as the model for their own. A few miles closer to the city sat the tract of land where Texas Highway 151 would be built. Originally conceived to relieve west side traffic congestion, 151 attracted the Sea World entertainment park—a gold mine for landowners on either side of the road. The highway won the state’s approval because one such landowner, a flamboyant developer named Marty Wender, and his urban planner friend, the equally flamboyant Ralph C. Bender, had hatched a novel scheme: To make sure the highway department couldn’t pass up construction, they donated the right-of-way on Wender’s acres, kicked in a few million dollars for frontage roads, and persuaded the city and other landowners to do the same.
The developers could afford such largess. At the height of San Antonio’s boom, the value of raw land suddenly blessed with a freeway shot from $2,000 an acre to $15,000 an acre. Cisneros’ pitch of Highway 151 had dazzled the highway commission and its chairman, Houston developer Bob Lanier, who is now that city’s mayor. The project was ballyhooed as a national model of public- and private-sector partnership. In it, the department had found the tacit formula that now dominates Texas road-building policy: If you want to propel a highway far up on the list of priorities, come see the commissioners with donated right-of-way.
“At the ground-breaking ceremonies for 151,” Wender recalls, “everybody was there. Henry. Bob Lanier. General McDermott. We’re standing around talking about economic development. So we said, ‘Look, we’re trying to build a fifteen-thousand-acre biomedical research park a little farther out. If we’re creating jobs, will the highway department help us build a road to it?’ Bob Lanier said, ‘Yes. We’ll look at it.’ He said, ‘This is a great day. Not only are we celebrating saving money, we got a freeway that promotes economic growth. We got cash from the developers. We got the right-of-way free of charge. Everybody wins.’ ”
THE HIGHWAY COMMISSION APPROVED construction of the second highway, 211, in March 1986. At a cost of $18.5 million, 211 would cut north eighteen and a half miles from U.S. 90 to Highway 16. The northward route carried the highway department into sensitive territory—especially a recharge zone of the Edwards Aquifer. But its four-page environmental assessment sounded an all-clear on water and air quality, soil erosion, endangered species, archaeological and historical sites. And it praised the potential benefits the road could bring. “Long-term economic effects,” the document held, “are almost of a magnitude that is hard to imagine.”
Initial construction of 211 was limited to its first four miles: a two-lane highway adjoined by strips of land cleared and blasted through mesquite savannah. With quick access to U.S. 90, it seemed to be all the road the research park’s bioscientists would need for a decade or two. But developers were anxious to get the next fifteen miles of 211 built as well. By 1986, the real estate boom was going bust. Without a freeway, investors in rural Bexar County would surely be stuck with all that overvalued land. With a freeway, however, they could ip those boondocks at a healthy price—one calculated in square feet, not acres.
To expedite the construction of this second segment, the four developers with land along that stretch of 211 retained Ralph Bender, the urban planner involved in the 151 project. For his clients, Bender drew maps for the highway department that would get them every possible foot of frontage. The developers donated the right-of-way for their land, which amounted to about 80 percent of the total, and promised to bear the cost of buying or condemning the rest.
It was a sweet deal for the highway department. Even if it collapsed, Bexar and Medina counties—not the state—would have to pick up the easement tab. Evidently, it never dawned on the department’s engineers that there might be an ethical problem. The engineers justified their case with population growth projections and a long-range transportation plan that had called for such a road as far back as 1968. Yet they essentially gave over control of the department to real estate speculators, who led them by their noses: The speculators drew the maps, arranged for rights-of-way to be donated, and greased the way with multimillion-dollar incentives. By making it too tantalizing a deal for the highway department to turn down, shareholders in four private development companies got the state to build them a freeway that they believed would make them rich.
But the push for 211 didn’t stop there. Egged on by the same developers, who saw dollar signs in the prospect of an even longer road, the highway commission, in November 1988, authorized pursuit of a fourteen-mile extension that would arc from 16 to I-10 and FM 3351. The mere possibility of an Austin—San Antonio corridor of development was enough reason for the highway department to get the ball rolling—despite the fact that north of 16, no funds were set aside for actual construction, and the state, not the counties, would have to bear 90 percent of land acquisition costs.
Luckily, the engineers had a hole card. Just beyond 16 was the 3,500-acre spread of a trusted ally: John White, who had made his living in Uvalde, mining rock that is greatly esteemed in Texas highway construction. White had sold his company and wanted to make it easier and more profitable for his heirs to divide the family’s rural retreat. He explored the terrain with his longtime friends district engineers Raymond Stotzer and Richard Lockhart and eventually decided to donate his right-of-way to the new highway.
Unfortunately, that route through the White Ranch sends 211 straight at the Fenstermakers. It’s nothing personal. The Maverick Ranch lies between the highway department and its legal objectives, I-10 and FM 3351. In order to skirt small subdivisions—with their utility connections, mortgage balances, and tricycles in the driveway—the department can scarcely avoid taking on the sisters.
AS IT HAPPENS, THE FENSTERMAKERS are not the only ones who oppose the construction of 211—just the loudest. A few miles north of the research park, for example, there’s Milton Stolte, who raises grain on an irrigated 329-acre farm. Stolte doesn’t want to lose 22 acres and have his land cut in half by a winding highway route. “I went to Austin for that big commission meeting in March of ’86,” Stolte recalls. “When I signed in, they asked me, ‘Are you pro or con?’ I said, ‘Con. I’m against it.’ They said, ‘You can’t testify.’ I did get to see a highway department guy who told me, ‘Don’t worry, this is all preliminary.’ But after lunch, after Henry Cisneros made his speech, Bob Lanier looked left, looked right, and they all said, ‘Aye.’ The state could condemn my land.”
North of 16, other landowners are also up in arms. A retiree named James Bowman has been to see design engineer John Kight. Upon discovering a route drawn within a baseball throw of his front porch, Bowman traveled to the district office, where he yelled and poked a finger in Kight’s chest. More important, however, is Myfe Moore, one of John White’s three children. Before inking the deal giving the state a fifth large donation of right-of-way, John White had a fatal heart attack. After her father died, Myfe told the engineers that she had no intention of honoring his wish to grant the right-of-way; she would fight 211 tooth and nail. “Mr. Kight came to our office one day,” she says, “and implied that we had better get along and work together with them on a route that was acceptable to everybody, or else they’d come in where they wanted to. He said, ‘You really wouldn’t want us coming right by your house, would you?’ Last time I saw him, though, he was extremely polite. He said, ‘Do you ever consider that you’ve got all that beautiful land, 3,500 acres, to use whenever you want, while all those poor families in San Antonio can’t come on it? You know, it’s almost a kind of financial discrimination.’ ”
Highway 211 will have to make a neck-wrenching detour if it cannot cross the White Ranch. That’s fine with Myfe Moore. In late June last year, she gathered neighbors opposed to 211 at her ranch house to discuss just such a prospect. Present were ranchers, a lawyer, an agriculture teacher, a retired air-traffic controller, and Bebe Fenstermaker. As a group, they control virtually every foot of possible frontage between 16 and the northernmost border of Maverick Ranch. Their objective has become not just sparing individual properties, but stopping the highway altogether.
Sandy Logan, a dark-haired cabinetmaker who lives on forty acres of a divided family estate, sums up their sentiments best. “The main issue here,” he told the group at Myfe Moore’s, “is not so much the bird habitat or the springs and the wells. My grandfather came over from Scotland and bought this piece of property. Three generations now have been raised on it. It’s our way of life. It’s the way we chose to live.”
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