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.