Citizens

One end of my county is stirred up over an annexation effort by a small town on our southern border.  A bit further south sit three or four other smallish towns that are growing both commercially and industrially, and on the other side of them, across Nueces Bay, the larger town of Corpus Christi has quite a bit of industry.  Our county, in contrast, watched industry pass it by during the 20th century, leaving it to develop primarily as a tourist and fishing spot and home for retirees.  Jobs for young people aren't plentiful here.  The commute to the greater employment opportunities to our south is doable but not obviously attractive, especially since our rent prices are pushed up by the coastal location and the tourist trade.  The tourist trade, in turn, depends on our preservation of the bays and shores.

The town on our southern border, Aransas Pass, is the mainland twin to the barrier island's much more prosperous Port Aransas, covered with condos, bars, and restaurants.  Aransas Pass struggles with its infrastructure and tax base.  It also fears incursion and encirclement from its municipal neighbors to the south.  It has constantly to reckon with the mixed blessing of industrial development, particularly to the south, tempting with its jobs and property values but threatening with its dirt.

In the southern, unincorporated part of my county, which has mostly scattered residential development, is the site of an old carbon-black plant.  A new owner recently has invested a lot of cash into cleaning up the unsightly but largely inert crud left behind and has received state environmental clearance to redevelopment the property for commercial or industrial but not residential uses.  The city of Aransas Pass, noticing this spring that Texas was about to pass a new law requiring the consent of the annexees, quickly took initial steps to annex an area that includes the old plant site.  They hoped to be grandfathered under the old statute, thus avoiding the expense and uncertainty of a referendum.

The proposed annexees generally oppose the city's move, fearing that they'll pay much greater taxes without getting any services.  Many city residents to the south applaud what they see as a chance to use a city's statutory land-use restrictions to control or prevent industrial development, powers that are largely denied to a county government.  Opponents of the annexation are mixed on their view of the proposed industrial development, but some question whether the city genuinely will restrict it, given their current negotiations with industrial developers on the other side of town.  Others view the developers and the annexing city with perhaps equal suspicion.

It is my painful duty to report the unsurprising news that public officials have not achieved the highest possible level of transparency and informed citizen involvement.  Many citizens are only now beginning to pay attention.  Accusations of smoke-filled-room tactics and hypocrisy are vying with charges that previously uninvolved citizens are belatedly second-guessing the beleaguered public servants.

In short, it's a dispute after my own heart.  My neighbors are struggling with the trade-off between creating jobs and preserving habitat.  If a site was used industrially for a century, what should be done with it now, and at whose expense?  Should taxpayers buy it up and turn it into a bird sanctuary?  Should it be set aside for industry, so we can concentrate on preserving other, still pristine coastal marshes?  Do we have the right to insist that the owners fund a residential development--or even a nature preserve--instead?  If they build a residential neighborhood, are we really sure that canals, lawns, septic tanks, pesticides, and fertilizer will affect the bays less than some kind of light industrial park?  Should more houses be built practically at sea level in hurricane country?  Did the city skip steps in its rushed annexation move, or must it start over and this time subject itself to the new resident consent process?

The public discussion of all these issues is confused, opaque, and fraught.  There are now three lawsuits pending or threatened, one for defamation of the plant-site owners, another alleging the plant-site owners are pursuing the defamation action to squelch public participation in a legitimate policy dispute, and a third attacking the annexation process.

I'm in my element, attending meetings and hearings, writing them up, posting them on Facebook, doing my bit to keep the public discussion fact-based and focused, and trying to make the implicit trade-offs more explicit.  I'm meeting some interesting new people and encouraging them to run for office.

5 comments:

  1. Good hunting, Tex.

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  2. Good work, I am glad someone likes it.
    I would be looking for a remote mountaintop and a drink!

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  3. Is there any chance whatever that the sludge left from carbon-black processing is a resource desired elsewhere as input to another, more modern, process?

    I'm thinking about the recent controversy over China's near monopoly over so-called "rare earth" metals used in batteries and what-not. Turns out in the decades just post WWII, the US had that near monopoly. Rare earths are typically left over from platinum mining. The tailings had high concentrations of the various stuffs. Processing the tailings was more expensive than it was worth, then, as there was little market for the refined metal. Now, of course, the equipment to get at it is dispersed, (some of it to China) and the industry would have to be re-created.

    So, I'm wondering if the rubber sludge is a "alternative fuel" or a feedstock to organic chemical needs, or a garden soil moisture mulch ...

    Actually, I'd ask the local high school or community college chemistry classes to research the topic for me...

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  4. It wasn't really sludge, just enough of a surface dusting to make everything look black for decades. It's all grassy now. The owners spent $3MM on cleanup, not that that protects them from being labeled enemies of the people. I wasn't sure to think when I first heard of them, but they've made a good impression on me in recent weeks. We'll see.

    Anyway, the carbon-dusted dirt was trucked to a landfill about 50 miles away. TCEQ considers it inert and of little interest as a toxin, certainly not a groundwater issue. The bigger problem was diesel oil that leaked here and there. The libel suit is over a city official who called it a Superfund site, which it never was. I suspect she thinks of "Superfund" as an all-purpose description of a site that someone might associate with pollution, but if you're trying to market real estate, that's a big deal. It makes clear title almost impossible to transfer, a real nightmare.

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  5. Maybe I'll buy the land in question, wall it off, and keep it for my exclusive use. It'd mine, mine, mine, and nobody else can have it.

    Maybe on my new property I'll do what I threatened to do (my wife wouldn't let me) when Walmart wanted to build one of its department stores in the neighborhood and local do-gooders objected, browbeating Walmart to build one of their small neighborhood stores instead: build a biker shop, with bar and on-site escort service, on it.

    It really chaps my patootie when do-gooders insist on forcing their outcomes on the rest of us and politicians are so ashamed of their dealings--or distrustful of their bosses--that they want to keep their nefariosities under wraps.

    Burn them both to the ground, Tex. Replace all that carbon black.

    Eric Hines

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