Environmental City: People, Place, Politics, and the Meaning of Modern Austin

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Environmental City

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Environmental City People, Place, Politics, and the Meaning of Modern Austin William Scot t Swearingen, Jr .

University of Texas Press Austin

Support for this book comes from an endowment for environmental studies made possible by generous contributions from Richard C. Bartlett, Susan Aspinall Block, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Copyright © 2010 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2010 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to: Permissions University of Texas Press P.O. Box 7819 Austin, TX 78713-7819 www.utexas.edu/utpress/about/bpermission.html ♾ The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.481992 (R1997) (Permanence of Paper).

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Swearingen, William Scott, 1961– Environmental city : people, place, politics, and the meaning of modern Austin / William Scott Swearingen, Jr. — 1st ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-292-72181-4 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-292-72202-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. City planning—Environmental aspects—Texas—Austin. 2. Land use, Urban— Environmental aspects—Texas—Austin. 3. Environmentalism—Texas—Austin. I. Title. HT243.U62A979 2010 307.1′160976431—dc22 2009024797

This book is dedicated to all the “little old ladies in tennis shoes,” who saw what it could look like before the others did; to Roberta Crenshaw, whose vision, drive, and efforts were so important to what it does look like; and to Mary Arnold, who is, simply, always there.


Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction. The Environmental Meaning of Austin

ix 1

Part 1. People, Land, and Place

1.

The Theory behind the Connections

17

Part 2. The Landscape Emerges

2. The Landscape Emerges

35

3. Institutionalizing Environmental Concerns: City Government and City Politics 71 Part 3. The Environmental Meaning of Austin

4. Of Neighborhoods and Environment: Contesting the Growth Machine 103 5. The Environmental Meaning as Banner: The Save Our Springs Coalition and the Green Machine

142

Part 4. The Environmental City

6. The Environmental City

183

7. The Doing of It: Continuing the Environmental Meaning

244

viii Contents

Methodological Appendix

Notes

253

Index

263

Photo section follows page 141.

249

Acknowledgments

I am indebted to several people who helped shape my thinking about this movement. Anthony Orum, now at the University of Illinois–Chicago, has been an enormous help all along. His book Power, Money, and the People is an invaluable resource in understanding why Austin began to grow in the first place, and how that growth set up the conflicts in modern Austin. Anyone interested in the history of Austin should own Orum’s book. During our discussions and correspondence years ago, it was he who suggested the big question that shaped so much of this book: Since the meaning of “growth” is so strong, what factors might influence the specific alternative meanings to “growth” that do arise? The first part of my book overlaps his, and then I continue the story about where his leaves off, as the environmental movement became the dominant challenger to the ideology of growth. Orum left Austin before the environmental movement attained the political power it did. But in the course of his book, he documents a whole set of people who began to challenge the notion of growth in the 1960s and 1970s, and it was from the conflicts of that time that the environmental movement emerged. I have taken that time period as the beginning of our present meaning. Conversations and correspondence with Orum over the years have helped my thinking about this book enormously, especially his insightful critiques of earlier drafts. The strengths of the book reflect his generous help; its faults can be attributed only to me. So why were the environmental movement, and the environmental meaning, the things that emerged to challenge the growth ideology and serve as the banner for a different kind of place? Where the environmental movement came from, why it became the main organizing force that fought against unregulated growth, and how it shaped the look and feel of Austin today could not be explained without some way of understanding the link between people and the environment. Peter Ward, at the University of Texas, was able

Acknowledgments

to point me in the direction of social geography for those concepts. Geography provides an understanding of the relationship between humans and their environments, and I rely on the concepts from that field—the landscape and discourse analyses—to understand why the environmental meaning could arise in the first place. The good people at the Austin History Center deserve praise for their very capable and professional abilities. The AHC collections and the staff who keep them made much of the historical work in this study possible. I owe a special thanks to Dr. Jerry Shepperd at Austin Community College, who rearranged my teaching schedule one year so that I could write chapter 6. And more thanks go out to peers and friends who have thought the book a worthwhile project and encouraged me, especially Dr. John Cotter, a colleague at St. Edward’s University, whose excitement about the whole idea has been a kind of last straw in pushing me to get the thing published. A big thanks to Allison Hardy at the City of Austin for putting together the open space map, and to Eric Trimble at St. Edward’s for his help with all the graphics work. My wife, Dr. Susan Schorn, who has also watched some of the changes to Austin and the movement we took some part in, helped with the final editing of this book. She also continues to live with me (no easy task) and collaborates on two remarkable projects of our own named David and Lilly. It is amazing how having children can focus one’s thought: The more I think about Austin and its changes, the more I consider the future of our children. What kind of a city will we pass on to them? Our whole family enjoys the pleasures of Austin and its environment; we swim in Barton Creek, kayak on Town Lake, hang out at the springs, walk the hills and the preserves. I wonder what kind of meaning our children find in this experience, and I wonder if the environmental meanings will shape their actions, and the future of Austin, as well. But it has to be the people of Austin’s movements for place that I must thank the most—those thousands who fought and continue to fight hard to retain some of Austin’s character and beauty in the midst of fast-paced growth. Without the people who fought tooth and nail for years and years to insist that they be allowed some voice in how Austin’s growth would take place, this history would never have been written. It could not have been, for there would have been no counter to the Growth Machine, no political movement, no AEC, no WE CARE Austin, no Austin Tomorrow, no Creeks Project, no Trail at Lady Bird Lake, no ZPP, no SBCA, no SOS, no Barton Creek Preserve, no Hill Country Conservancy, no Liveable City, no forwardthinking city administrators and officials. Without them, there would have been nothing to suggest that some people thought a city could look and feel like it had the natural built into it, rather than plowed under it.

Environmental City


Introduction The Environmental Meaning of Austin

The land and the times shaped the people. The people and their times shaped a city. And modern Austin—its look, its feel, its landscape, its meaning—was created in that crucible where the environment and the economy and the people met to practice politics. As Austin grew from a sleepy college and government town in the midtwentieth century into the sprawling city of the early twenty-first, two broad ideas of Austin as a place came into conflict. One idea was that Austin, like so many other cities in America, would be a place defined by economic output, money, and wealth. The other, which emerged over time as growth intensified, was based on a place defined by its quality of life. The first idea was based on building a city that drew business so that businesspeople could make money. People who made their money in business, real estate, and property development wanted to see Austin grow, because for them, growth meant more money. Many businesspeople and civil leaders believed in growth because more people meant more overall business, a bigger economy, and hence more money to be made in any business endeavor. For the most part, the growth interests wanted Austin to grow fast, grow big, and grow wealth for themselves. They were not terribly interested in preserving Austin’s environment, because that environment was the land. In a capitalist economy, and especially in Texas, land is property. Property has monetary value, and in Texas, property ownership is seen by most as sacrosanct, conferring on its owner a God-given right to make money. Many people who wanted Austin to grow owned property and speculated in real estate. They knew that property values would increase if Austin grew, creating more profit for them. The growth promoters in business and politics also had some natural allies in the city administrators who headed the bureaucracy, even if the adminis-

Introduction

trators did not necessarily think of it that way. The city administrators of the 1950s to 1980s had learned their craft in schools that taught them the technical ways to build a city without regard to impact on the environment. They had been taught that their job was to facilitate the growth of the city by laying roads and sewers. They had learned, and were adept at practicing, the building of urban space over the natural environment, rather than with or into it. Between the property, business, and bureaucratic groups, a Growth Machine emerged in the 1970s that continues to this day. The Growth Machine is a metaphor used by Harvey Molotch to explain why cities grow.1 It describes how business, property, government, and ideologies all work in ways that together produce urban growth. The combined actions of real estate developers, landowners, businesspeople, the press, and government agencies promote growth in general because they all have some interest in it. As people move to the city, rising demand for housing causes land to become more expensive. Developers, landowners, and speculators make a profit from the increase in land prices. Businesspeople profit by selling their goods and services to the increasing population. Newspapers and media outlets tend to favor growth, because it increases their readership and thus their revenue. Government agencies are tasked with providing services to new development (roads, sewers, electricity, schools, etc.), and as these services are built they foster added growth. Growth Machines are not propelled only by local businesspeople and speculators. Cities are tied to larger national and global capital markets that provide what Henri Lefebvre calls a “secondary circuit of capital.”2 There is money to be made in real estate as cities grow, so investors and corporations from around the country and the world look at real estate markets in cities as an investment opportunity. Much of the capital invested in a city’s real estate actually comes from outside that city, and Austin’s fast growth brought it to the attention of multinational capital investors who invested in real estate. These individuals and organizations do not necessarily work together in a dark, smoke-filled back room, although at times that does happen. For the most part, they are working on their own toward their own purposes: profit, business, laying pipe, organizing city government, etc. But since all of them are doing things that end up facilitating city growth, the sum total of all their actions creates a kind of machine of growth that no one particular person or group is necessarily in charge of. And that makes growth even harder to stop, guide, or control than if it were directed by one single person or group. Cultural beliefs about growth, what we call the ideology of growth, also fuel the Growth Machine. The roles of the Growth Machine are filled by people, and these people act on the assumption so common in America that

The Environmental Meaning of Austin

“growth” in and of itself is good. The business interests, especially, promote that assumption to the general public with the “rising tide lifts all boats” story. This story is true to an extent; rising tides do lift many boats, but they lift the yachts a lot higher, many smaller boats get swamped, and many just float along in the same basic shape they were in before the tide rose. Growth, like tides, wipes out or changes many things that people enjoy or need: the natural environment, neighborhoods, affordable housing, atmosphere, culture. The growth ideology neglects those pesky issues because it is promoted mostly by people who stand to gain financially from urban growth. But the idea is such a common explanation of our economy that most people seem to accept it as fact. When people in the public accept the assumption that growth in general is good for them, they too become part of the ideology of growth; as long as everyone from businesspeople to homeowners assumes that “growth is good,” most people will go along with growth, and the people who make money from growth will come out ahead. But a second idea of Austin emerged because there were lots of people who did not necessarily buy into the ideology of growth. They did not believe in undirected growth over everything else, and they began to think of their city in other terms. Many of these people did not make their living from jobs that required constant growth. They worked in state government and education, or in businesses that served those institutions. They did not need to think in terms of factories or real estate or big business. Instead of defining their lives in terms of profit brought by growth, they tended to define them in terms of an intangible idea called quality of life. For these people, Austin’s quality of life came from cultural factors such as the music, the laid-back feel of a college town, the more liberal atmosphere. It came from the neighborhoods they lived in, and from the natural environment of the area: the heat, water, and sun that added to and accentuated the other things. It all went together, but in the end so much of the city’s quality of life was provided by its natural environment that the environment became the main focus of concern for many people, and eventually the main arena of conflict between the qualityof-life groups and the members of the Growth Machine. The conflict emerged when people who wanted to retain that quality of life began to try to direct growth and save some of the natural environment during the time that Austin was becoming a big city. The quality-of-life people defined Austin as a place that was pleasant to live in because of its natural environment—the hills, the river, the creeks. They wanted to preserve, use, and enjoy those environmental features in their daily life—to walk in the creeks, see the hills, feel the water. They were beginning to define Austin as a place that was built into and defined by those features, and they began to

Introduction

promote the idea that growth should be guided in order to save those features. But the idea of slower, more deliberate, and controlled growth that preserved the natural environment conflicted with ideas about growth for profit held by land speculators and many businesspeople. Those competing desires created the conflicts that have been fought out in city politics, lawsuits, and rulemaking for four decades, from the late 1960s until today. Larger national environmental trends and programs of the time influenced what happened in this conflict. In the 1960s and 1970s, the ideas of the national environmental movement were beginning to influence the way many Americans thought about their urban environments, and many people who lived in Austin existed in daily contact with a strikingly beautiful environment that was being degraded by urban growth. The national environmental movement found fertile ground in Austin, and many people active in the preservation of Austin’s environment saw their action as part of a larger environmental consciousness. The local was influenced by the national. As former mayor Frank Cooksey (mayor of Austin’s first “environmentalist council” in 1985) put it to me in an interview, “The place has always boasted of the Hill Country. At one time it was spoken of as the ‘violet crown’—that was the hills, you know. The natural environment was something that everyone was happy about. When the [national] environmental movement started, it caught on big here—it had meaning here.” The Clean Air and Water acts, federal programs enacted to address pollution, and later the Endangered Species Act gave people in Austin ways to clean up existing pollution and alleviate some of the negative consequences of urban growth. These programs helped people in Austin create a landscape that retains some of the natural environment of the area in a less degraded state, allowing people to enjoy the river, creeks, and hills. On one level, then, this is a history of the environmental movement in Austin: how it began; its connection to the larger national trends; and how it promoted ideas about the relationship between people, cities, and the environment. But it is also about a deeper movement, a movement to retain a sense of place that was Austin. It is a history of how the environment emerged as the main component of the fight to preserve some of Austin’s special feel, how it became a movement that symbolized that deeper movement for place. The movement for place was the underlying cause of Austin’s environmental movement. Early on, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the environment was one of several defining aspects of place that people worried was being destroyed by growth. The efforts to preserve hills, creeks, and lakes were one part of a larger struggle to preserve things that were “Austin”: historical features, neighborhoods, cultural events, music venues, etc.; things that gave the city


its special feel. As time went on, though, the environment became the central symbol to those who believed Austin should be defined by its quality of life rather than its size or economic output. By the 1990s, the “environmental movement” and “environmentalists” were thought of as the main group that fought against “developers,” who symbolized the Growth Machine. This book is organized around that history—how it happened, who was part of it, and what it did to create the Austin of today. This book is also about broader issues that influenced and still influence both movements. It is about the larger relationship between people and their environments. It is about the way a particular kind of natural environment, mixed with a particular kind of economy in a particular historical period, shaped a social movement: how that movement shaped a discourse and a meaning of the city, and how that meaning has shaped Austin today. In this larger sense, the story of Austin’s environmental meaning is an example of how the relationship between natural environment (the land, waterways, flora, and fauna of an area) and social environment (our economy, politics, and ideas) can shape a city.3 It is a particular story, but the forces involved are at work in many cities across America and the world. One way to understand the relationship between people and their cities is through a discourse analysis. On one level, a discourse is how people talk and think about a place. But a discourse is more than that. The way geographers use it, a discourse is a communication between social groups and their physical landscape.4 It is this communication between people and their natural and built environments that creates a meaning of a landscape. The meaning resides in our minds—it is the symbolic representation of the landscape that we carry around in our minds, a way we understand how the people, the buildings, and the nature go together to produce some unique place. Those words and ideas in turn influence and are influenced by the kind of urban space—the cities—people build. A discourse includes both the physical structure of the built environment and the ways people think about that environment. The two shape each other. Words and ideas are shaped by the environment people build and inhabit, and built environments shape the way people think about the place. The things people build are thus both outcome and producer of the words and ideas used to describe a place. Austin’s discourse emerged from a four-decade battle to preserve some of the city’s natural environment in the midst of growth. That discourse has become institutionalized in the landscape, politics, and administrative machinery of modern Austin. The movement to direct growth preserved some of Austin’s natural environment in a system of parks, greenbelts, and preserves

Introduction

that allow Austinites to experience an unbuilt, “natural” setting in the midst of a city. It also enabled the movement for place to get a seat at the table politically, allowing quality-of-life advocates to win elections as city council members, who have some ability to influence the way city space in Austin gets built. Perhaps most importantly, the movement has been able to make significant changes in the way the city bureaucracy carries out the technical requirements of laying water lines, sewers, roads, and infrastructure in more environmentally friendly ways. All of this became possible because the quality-of-life advocates were able to build political power around the environmental movement. They won elections, and they found ways to work within the bureaucracies to change the rules. But in order to do that, they had to build a wide base of support in the population. That support came mostly as the people and the movement began to think and talk about Austin in ways that made the natural environment a central symbol of the city’s quality of life. Because the symbolism of the environmental movement in Austin allowed people to attain political influence, and thus influence the shape of urban growth, it became for a time what Orum calls a “banner under which the struggle [for the administrative apparatus of the city] is carried out.”5 The environment became the strongest symbolic component of Austin’s quality of life, and that symbol allowed the quality-of-life advocates to organize an effective political base that won them a seat at the table of political power. Since it was under the banner of “the environment” that so much of this political base was organized, I call this symbolic definition the environmental meaning of Austin. A History of a Meaning The environmental meaning of Austin emerged over time through the political, legal, and bureaucratic arenas as the growth and environmental factions fought over rules, regulations, and preservation. It was incredibly contentious, so contentious that many people claimed Austin had a two-party system from 1980 on: developers and environmentalists. It was not exactly that simple— there were neighborhood and social activists involved at least as much in the early days, and they have continued to be integral to the efforts of the “environmentalists.” Not all developers were against environmental protection, and there were always some fractures in the “developer” group. But by the mid-1980s, the phrase “environmentalists vs. developers” was pretty much how people saw the issues surrounding growth, and it symbolized the two sides of growth.


In the early years of growth, concerned citizens pushed for the creation of citizens’ boards in the administration that would allow them to write environmental protections into the building codes of the city. Various groups also wrote a series of water-quality ordinances in an attempt to force the development process to take account of the natural environment. These were efforts to make the administrative machinery of city hall codify the importance of preserving the environment in the midst of growth. But these efforts were only moderately successful. The Growth Machine—all the economic and bureaucratic elements that promote and shape growth—had little interest in preserving the environment. These elements of the Growth Machine acted upon a meaning of Austin as a place defined by growth and economic output, and they planned its built environment in ways that grow over the environment rather than into it. Citizens who wanted to build the city into the environment rather than over it were forced to turn to electoral politics to try to take control of city hall. The political campaigns over city council races, bond issues, and road placement became the most obvious and public fight over the meaning of Austin. The terms of debates in these political battles—the way people framed their arguments—were the main kind of public communications in that discourse of the city. In the political battles over bonds, city council seats, and parkland acquisition, the environment emerged as the defining symbolic component of quality of life in Austin. From these battles came the definition of the conflicting groups in Austin, solidified in the discourse of “environmentalists vs. developers” of the 1980s and 1990s. And from that discourse emerged the environmental meaning of Austin as a political banner and cultural symbol of the landscape. This book tracks the emergence of the environmental meaning through a history of the landscape, people, and politics of Austin. The environmental meaning emerged through four time periods that roughly parallel the decades from the 1960s to today. The first chapter, “People, Land, and Place: The Theory behind the Connections,” introduces the theory and concepts I use from sociology and geography to examine how it did emerge. The 1960s and 1970s shaped the environmental meaning primarily through landscaping projects and administrative policies. Chapter 2, “The Landscape Emerges,” details the way a built environmental landscape emerged in reaction to growth. The third chapter, “Institutionalizing Environmental Concerns: City Government and City Politics,” details the way quality-of-life advocates and environmentalists found a way to influence the bureaucracy of the city to make growth slightly less damaging to the environment and increase participation of citizens in the planning process. Chapter 4, “Of Neighborhoods and Environment: Contesting the Growth

Introduction

Machine,” covers a period defined by the political battles over growth in the 1980s, which created the “environmentalists vs. developers” discourse of Austin’s politics. During this period, “the environment” emerged as a defining aspect of Austin’s quality of life. The political campaigns over growth in the 1980s furnished a set of words and symbols that defined Austin as a place based on its natural environment. It also solidified a social network of activists and residents who would begin to vote for policy based on this sense of place. During the 1990s, those groups developed an organizational structure that allowed them to compete effectively with the Growth Machine for political power. The fifth chapter, “The Environmental Meaning as Banner: The Save Our Springs Coalition and the Green Machine,” details how these elements came together to build a political coalition that found a way to utilize the environmental meaning of Austin as the banner under which they competed, relatively successfully, with other interest groups. Chapter 6, “The Environmental City,” brings us to the present. It provides a general overview of the physical and social landscapes that continue to shape the meaning of Austin today: a seat at the table of political power for the quality-of-life people, a series of energy and building codes called green energy and green building, a nonprofit group called Liveable City that includes businesspeople and environmentalists on its board of directors, a land-buying organization called the Hill Country Conservancy (also a mix of businesspeople and environmentalists), and the ongoing advocacy work of the Save Our Springs Alliance. The chapter ends with a description of how the people of that movement for place have changed the way Austin’s city government works, which is one of the most important changes the movement has made. These are all the present-day outcomes of the battles over growth that began in the 1950s, and they continue to shape the landscape of modern Austin today. They are at once the outcomes of the environmental meaning and its modern incarnation. The Environmental City Today That meaning is no longer simply local. Building environmental cities is an effort taking shape across the United States today to address global warming. Because of its efforts to become a green city, Austin has become known nationally as a place based on environmental meaning—it has become an environmental city in the minds of people all over the country. Austin is seen


as a city at the forefront of adopting building and energy strategies meant specifically to alleviate the problems of global warming. One reason Austin politicians and city departments have generated their green-city programs is that the environmental movement in Austin has created a powerful political constituency, influencing who gets elected to the city council and mayor’s offices. Anyone who runs for those offices must at least talk green, but more importantly, many of them really are green. It is no longer just “environmentalists” who propose environmentally friendly policy. Some of Austin’s modern leaders are businesspeople who see the need to use city policy as a tool to address local and global environmental issues. Former mayor (now state senator) Kirk Watson was a lawyer and member of the Chamber of Commerce who served as mayor during the “Green Council” of the 1990s. He found a way to get businesspeople and environmentalists talking; pushed the “three-legged stool” of environment, economic growth, and equity as the key to Austin’s future; and helped pass bonds that bought thousands of acres of land to protect the Edwards Aquifer from development. While they were on the council in 2006, Mayor Will Wynn, who had spent twenty years in commercial real estate, businessman Brewster McCracken, and former navy pilot Lee Leffingwell launched the Austin Climate Protection Plan, a set of city policies designed to meet the goal of making Austin carbon-neutral by 2020. Building a city and being green are no longer opposite actions; they can be put together through a new way of looking at growth that is taking shape at the national level as well as in Austin. Another reason for the city’s innovative programs is that Austin’s environmental movement produced people who know how to work the bureaucracy to create environmentally friendly policy. Some of those people were early advocates of environmental ideas and got their start in the city politics of the 1970s. They are people like Roger Duncan, who was active on the anti-nuke side of two major elections in the city in the 1970s (described in chapter 2) and then served as a city council member in the 1980s (chapter 3). Duncan has used his position in the city’s public utility to create several nationally known green-energy programs for the city, and has been a leading actor in creating Austin’s Green Building Program. Austin also serves as a laboratory for ways that cities can protect and restore their natural environments. Finding ways to keep land free of development is crucial. The voters of Austin have passed several bond issues to buy land. Local officials have worked with federal agencies to preserve even more land. The city has begun a program to restore some of these lands to natural vegetation that was destroyed through ranching and agricultural prac-

10 Introduction

tices of the past. Local land trusts are working hard to set aside even more, through conservation easements that keep land development-free. In addition to building the physical component of Austin’s environmental meaning, this effort is an example of ways cities can build in more environmentally friendly ways.6 More than just land acquisition is involved, though; there are some real gems in Austin that few know about. The city’s Hornsby Bend watertreatment facility, for example, is more than just a waste facility. It is a multipurpose facility that recycles the city’s wastewater (the stuff that goes down the toilet) through natural biotic processes. These biosolids are mixed with yard trimmings, grass, and leaves picked up curbside from homeowners every week, and composted to create Dillo Dirt. Dillo Dirt is sold as compost to consumers in Austin at gardening stores. The ponds at Hornsby Bend attract migrating birds by serving as habitat for so many different varieties that birders nationwide know of the site. These government entities and programs are outcomes of the landscape and movement that produced the environmental meaning of Austin, but of course the story doesn’t really end here. It goes on into the future. The environmental meaning will have an influence on the way Austin looks as it grows even larger. The ongoing change from city to metropolis is an even bigger change than from town to big city, and the challenges to the environmental meaning of Austin are enormously greater today because of it. The next decades will present an even bigger challenge than the growth boom of the 1980s and 1990s. The change from city to metropolis doesn’t just herald a change in size; it heralds a change in structure of the area that will have major consequences for the environmental meaning of Austin. Whether that meaning, and the physical and social landscape that created that meaning, continue into the future is a question that is being answered as you read this book. And it is pertinent to other cities as human populations continue to grow and concentrate in urban areas. Biography and History: How This Book Came to Be Written I would like to add a word about my own role in this history so that readers might understand the way I wrote it, and why I wrote it. I grew up in Austin when it had a relatively small-town atmosphere. What I thought of as Austin, as a young person in the 1960s and 1970s, was essentially bounded by US Highway 183 to the north, Airport Boulevard to the east, Lake Austin Boulevard to the west, and Ben White Boulevard to the south. These features

The Environmental Meaning of Austin 11

formed a kind of box that defined the city (see map 2.3). A big part of my perspective of Austin came from living in the central part of this area, and growing up in Austin gave me a perspective on the city’s environmental history that is somewhat unique. When I was growing up, we kids rode our bikes to Town Lake and swam in it. We walked Barton Creek, swam in it, made out with girls in it. We drove insanely fast along the narrow two-lane roads and highways through the Hill Country (and some of us died on them) in order to go “out to the lake” (Lake Travis), where we would spend the day or night swimming, waterskiing, and having fun.7 And we hung out at Barton Springs, a spring-fed pool where Barton Creek flows into Town Lake. For us it was the perfect place where our social and physical worlds intersected. Our friends were there, the girls were there, and the water was there. It wasn’t just the physical environment that did so much to define our lives growing up in that town that was Austin. It was the music, the more liberal culture, the laid-back feel of the place. I grew up watching Willie Nelson play and sing at events; we learned what marijuana smelled like by walking past the performers’ tents and snickered at our mothers’ comments about “that smoke.” I sat on the side of the stage at free outdoor concerts where Stevie Ray Vaughan taught us about blues music, listened to local bands play the Armadillo World Headquarters the week it finally closed for good. We all went to Aqua Fest every year, a summer festival featuring motorboat races on the lakes, various parties, and ethnic nights—Czech night, Spanish night, German night, etc.—with appropriate foods and music. We lived in a diverse city, and the arts and entertainment reflected it then, as now. Austin is a liberal city, one of the few places in Texas that is liberal, and that was due in large part to the University of Texas. There was (and is) a kind of trickle-down phenomenon in education as the larger intellectual environment fostered by a major university shows up in the education of school-age kids. Many UT graduates stayed to teach school here, and because of them we learned things in high school that many others never did, questioned some things that others would not have. I probably became a sociologist because the unbelievably good teachers at Austin High School were Kennedy liberals who thought the government was supposed to do things to help the majority of people rather than just the rich or the already powerful, and they instilled those ideals in us. All of which is to say that I grew up living and experiencing those things that were so important to the creation of that movement for place that was then gaining steam. I was too young to explain it or define it, of course, and even the adults in the process of creating that movement were still groping for the words and phrases that would define it (the phrase “quality of life” ended

12 Introduction

up being the main one). But growing up in such a place and time was an experience I tapped later, when I began to write this history. What I call the environmental meaning of Austin was forming in me as well as in others. Leaving Austin reinforced that meaning in my head: I left Austin to go to Texas A&M University in College Station in 1980, just as things were really heating up politically at home. The socially conservative, physically flat landscape of the A&M area reinforced my sense of Austin as a place by illustrating graphically what Austin has that other areas do not: hills, creeks, lakes, and the culture of the town. I came back to Austin in 1985, got my teaching certificate, and left again in 1988 to teach in El Paso. That change was more startling than moving to A&M; I nearly went insane looking for a body of water to swim in or a tree to climb. At least there were mountains to climb out there (which kept me from suicide or murder), but again, the stark contrast between the social and physical elements of Austin and not-Austin reinforced my mental image of Austin. So I ran back to Austin in 1989 to enter graduate school, having missed out on all the major action of the 1980s. The change from laid-back town to big city was drastic. The core city was still there, but many friends had moved out of it into the northern or southern suburban areas. The “Y” at Oak Hill, where two highways diverge, had been country when I left. One drove through pastureland to get to it. When I returned, it had become part of Austin, developed all the way to the small town of Bee Cave, which was itself rapidly becoming a mere dot in the suburban sprawl still moving west today. Suburban North Austin now looks exactly like any place in Dallas or Houston. Housing and strip malls had appeared on many of the spots we had walked or swum as kids, and buildings were covering the hills that had been green only a few years before. Austin was looking different, and it felt different. In 1991, the furor over the Barton Creek PUD (Planned Unit Development) blew up, and along with many others I went down to the city council chambers to register my disgust with “developers,” their projects that were ruining the place where I grew up, and the power of money and influence to roll over public opinion. When the SOS (Save Our Springs) Coalition ran its petition drive, I was, as Brigid Shea would later put it, “one of those hundreds of people who wandered in and said, ‘What can I do?’ ” And I spent the next decade as a minor foot soldier in Austin’s environmental movement, passing out flyers and working phone banks and elections and such. Volunteering on so many campaigns gave me some insight into the times and the people and the movement, and I got to know many of the people personally. Some of the details in this book come from that experience, but more important is the overall theme that emerged: The environmental movement is an outcome of

The Environmental Meaning of Austin 13

a deeper movement for place. The environmental movement served as a symbol of that deeper movement for a time in the 1990s, but the movement for a sense of place has been around longer than the “environmental movement” of the late 1980s and 1990s. All of us who worked in this movement in various capacities heard the way it was put, heard the leaders and the volunteers and the general public talk about it. The environment was part of Austin, one of the things that gave the place its feel. That deeper movement for place still exists today, even though the “environmentalists” and the environmental meaning are less important in driving it. My participation in the movement also helped define my academic interests, and my academic training helped define my understanding of the movement, its people, and my own role in it. If my childhood shaped my emotional and psychological ideas about this place we call Austin, my academic background and occupation shaped my intellectual curiosity about it. In urban sociology I found a literature that synthesized my interest in social inequalities with my concern over the changes in Austin. In the urban literature I found the idea that cities are the built forms of unequal social structures, especially the political economy of capitalism. It was in this literature that I found a way to understand the changes in Austin in terms of larger social structures. In the writings of Anthony Orum and Mark Gottdiener, I found ways of thinking about cultural events such as SOS in the wider political economy, and Sharon Zukin’s works on lofts and the landscapes of power brought together the concepts of political economy with the concepts of landscapes. It was in their writings that I was first introduced to the idea that cities have meanings, that they are meaningful constructs to the people who live in them, and that these constructs matter to residents. My experiences of Austin from my childhood, my participation in the environmental movement, my academic training; they all interact up there in my head, bouncing off each other, trying to understand it all in various ways. Sociology helps explain the power and economic relations that cause social movements. The geographers who talk about images of the city and the discourse of the city help explain how the physical and the social and the ideal go together. Frame analysis from sociology helps us understand the way ideas are communicated between social groups. When you put all three of these together, you get a pretty good idea of how the environmental meaning of Austin emerged, and how it shaped the way Austin looks today. The reason I use the concepts of landscapes and frames and discourse is that they help explain what I and so many others have experienced. In my intellectual interests I wanted to apply those concepts, and from my experience in Austin, I saw what I considered to be a natural laboratory to explore them. I wanted to see

14 Introduction

how a particular group’s meaning of a particular city could affect the creation of urban space in that particular city, and these concepts help me do that. I hope they will help others do the same as they consider Austin or their own city spaces. So this book is my way of understanding what has happened in the past that has led to the present in Austin, Texas. It is a history of one set of Austinites who thought about their city in a particular way. It is not the history of the movement; it is a history, but I think it hits the main events and groups that have created the city of Austin today. And it is my attempt to do two things at once: tell a history and analyze the causes and effects of that history. I offer this history to other Austinites, especially newer Austinites, as a primer on how our city came to look as it does and on the people who shaped it and the battles they fought. I offer the book to sociologists as a case study of the ways people, place, and politics come together to shape urban space. The case study of Austin is one part of the larger effort to understand how particular forms of urban space are created in particular cities. I offer to readers in general this brief glimpse of modern Austin as a story that explains why you think of Austin as the Environmental City. Austin is known nationwide by its environmental meaning. It is thought of by many as a cool, laid-back place with a pretty environment. That idea of Austin exists in the national consciousness because of the people who built the Environmental City. This book will introduce you to them and show you how they have done it.

Part 1

P eople, Land, and Place


Chapter 1

The Theory behind the Connections

The main thing to understand about Austin is the relationship between the “environmental movement,” which most people have heard about, and the underlying movement for place that few outside the movement know about. People have heard about the “environmentalists” because environmentalists carried that underlying movement into political power, mainly by creating a meaning of Austin that allowed them to win political participation with the Growth Machine and real estate interests. So people tend to think it was all about “the environment.” It was, to a great degree, but it was a bit more complicated than that. The root of it all was about retaining a feel of a kind of place. It wasn’t just the environmental movement that carried that action for place; neighborhood issues were as much or more evident at various times (and they really drive the action today). However, the environmental and neighborhood movements were (and are) related. Many of the same people were involved with both movements, and still are today. The energy that propelled both was created by that desire of Austinites to protect and create a sense of place, a sense of a unique city. Since that feel of place was influenced so much by its physical environment, and the fights to preserve that environment, over time the environmental movement became the standard bearer of that movement. Austin’s environmental meaning emerged as part of that interplay. Since this book is about the way that particular urban meaning arose over time, and how it influenced city policy and the shape of the city, we need to have some conceptual tools that let us analyze how and why that happened. This chapter will introduce them. It will be helpful in understanding some of the commentary throughout the book, but those interested in the history more than the analysis can skip right to chapter 2.

18 People, Land, and Place

The Evolution of a Meaning: Place, Discourse, Landscape, and Framing At a very basic level, a discourse is the way people talk and think about their habitation. The landscape is part of that discourse. It is the physical world you see around you and the people who inhabit it. Place is the way you feel about where you live, and the discourse helps create those feelings, that sense of place. Framing is also part of the discourse—the way people try to describe to others what they are doing and how they think about their habitat. So the way people frame their arguments and political dialogue about their landscape also shapes their sense of place. So far, so good. From there, though, things get a bit tricky, because different sociologists and geographers have used these tools somewhat differently, and the terms themselves can be hard to define when we try to use them on specific cases. This chapter defines the way I use them, and illustrates some of the ways they can be used to understand Austin’s environmental meaning. Place and the City So much of the conflict in Austin is about a sense of place that we need to understand “place” as a concept, and how “place” is formed. Place and location are somewhat different. Location is the spot on the map. Place is how you think about that physical spot, the ways you think of it as a unique physical, psychological, and social spot. That spot can be on a small scale, like your family home. When you think of your home as a place, for example, what do you see in your mind? A house, yes, but most likely you also think about what goes on in that house—what your family members do there, how they relate to one another, the kinds of emotions that are caused by your relationship to those people. Place can also be defined on a larger scale. What do you see in your mind when you say, “I work at a great (or lousy) place”? Again, it is not just the buildings in which you work, but what happens to you in those buildings. It is also a great or lousy place because of the way people relate to you while you are in that building. Now move the scale of place up to the city level. What kind of place is New York City? San Francisco? Austin? Your answer to that probably includes the natural features of the area that you are aware of, the kinds of buildings you know about in that city, and most importantly, the kinds of people you think of when you think of that city. When I think of San Francisco (my second favorite city in the universe), I think of the hills, the townhouses, the trolley system, BART, and the kinds of people I meet there. When I think

The Theory behind the Connections 19

of New York, I think mostly of Manhattan, which is about the only part of the city I visit when there. So my idea of New York as a place is defined by the big buildings, the river, the mass transit, the restaurants on the street, Central Park, and those people trying to sell me pot in the park (!). When I think of Austin as a place, I think of the waterways, the creeks, the hills, the music, the laid-back culture caused in part by the heat, the Tex-Mex food, and all those people I run into while using those spaces and experiencing that culture.1 The ideas and images I have of those three cities may be slightly or completely different than the ideas and images you have of them. We may have different representations of those cities in our heads, and thus the cities may have different meanings to us. A conservative evangelical Christian may have some very negative impressions of all three cities—San Francisco has too many gay people acting far too weird, New York is too crowded and has too much crime, and Austin has too many strange, tree-hugging liberals. These cities may represent all the things some dislike about modern American culture, so they mean bad places. To others they mean valued places full of diversity, excitement, etc. But regardless of how we think of them, each is thought of as a unique place based on their natural, built, and social features. The fact that different people have different representations in their heads about different cities is an important aspect of place, because it helps us understand why place can be contentious. People who have different ideas about how to use space often come into conflict because of the different uses to which they want to put that space. Those uses are often caused by the roles we fill in our social order. My wife wants to use the space in our house in a neat, clean, orderly fashion. Our children, on the other hand, want to use that space in a chaotic, disorderly fashion. Those competing desires cause no small amount of conflict, because my wife thinks of home as her place to escape the work world and relax. My children see our house as the place they live and play, where they produce chaos and disorder through their favorite activities. People have similar kinds of conflicts over how to use urban space. Often their roles in the social order cause them to think of different uses for space. Workers and residents of neighborhoods, for example, often think of their block or neighborhood as a place defined by the buildings they live in, and the way their friends and neighbors use those buildings, streets, and open spaces to interact. They are places to live and raise families and enjoy life. Real estate developers and land speculators, on the other hand, see those areas as potential profit-making sites. The neighbors and developers can come into conflict when a developer or speculator buys up some of the property or buildings and


puts them to uses the neighborhood residents don’t like. The developer might build something on a vacant lot that kids played in, depriving the neighborhood of a communal space. Or he might tear down a building with low rents to build one with higher rents, thus driving residents out of their own neighborhood. These kinds of actions cause conflict because the residents see the area as a place defined by their use of it; the developer sees it as a place defined by its potential profit. Urban sociologists call these two kinds of value use value and exchange value, and the difference between the two kinds of value causes most of the conflicts in cities today. Most social movements in cities arise to defend use values against owners/developers who want to sell or redevelop an area for greater exchange value. Most growth coalitions are groups of businesspeople and property owners who think in terms of exchange value. Generally, exchange value, and the growth coalitions that coalesce around it, win out, because our capitalist economy defines things in terms of their financial (exchange) value rather than their use value. But they don’t always win completely. Sometimes well-organized neighborhood, ethnic, political, or environmental groups can manage to wrest some control over land in some areas and retain some of the use value it holds for them.2 These conflicts are usually at the heart of arguments over redevelopment of particular neighborhoods or downtown areas. And sometimes the conflicts between groups are so large that they shape the entire discourse of a city. Sometimes there are enough people who have the same general idea of a place that they fight about how to build entire cities, and this is what happened in Austin. When enough people hold the same general meaning of a city, an urban meaning is created. But there are many competing meanings of any given place, any given city. Various social groups disagree over what a city should be, or mean, and that creates conflict. These conflicting meanings guide people’s social behavior and their voting behavior. When a particular meaning is strong enough that coalitions and social movements coalesce around it, and use it to organize for the purpose of shaping the direction and growth of the city, that meaning can serve as the kind of “banner” Orum is talking about. That is what happened in Austin as it grew into a big city. As is typical of all cities, one group solidified around growth as its banner, believing that a growing city would bring more wealth to themselves and the population in general. They saw land in terms of its exchange value. Another group solidified around the environment in reaction to that growth, because they thought of land in terms of use value. They wanted neighborhoods and open space and


a clean environment to use for their daily lives. They thought there were some kinds of lands that should be retained for public, communal use, rather than built out for private profit. And they believed all of this in large part because the environment they were trying to protect helped define Austin as a unique place. Their movement and their banner—the environmental meaning—are still a powerful social and political force in the city. Discourse A sense of place forms as people talk and think about the spaces they use. We talk and think about the world through the filters and lenses our society gives us, through political, economic, religious, and other cultural belief systems. This is one reason so many people buy into the ideology of growth—the whole idea that “growth” and “profit” are good comes from deep within the American cultural system. It is part of our cultural heritage from the time Europeans settled the continent in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. Individually owned farms and businesses created deep notions of a sanctity of private property, and the desirability of profit. The growth of America to the west meant a bigger, stronger, wealthier country. Growth and profit are also part of our economic system today. We are taught notions about the goodness of profit, and the greatness of growth, by the capitalism in which we are raised. Because we are raised in such an economic system, most of us simply assume the way that system functions is correct, normal, and true. Thus we are socialized to think about our land, our spaces, and our places in terms of profit and value. Social geographers apply this basic sociological idea of cultural filters to studies of the relationship between people and their environments. They sometimes use a discourse analysis to understand how our ideas about spaces and places are created and solidified by social institutions (like our politics, economy, and religion) and cultural meanings. The language we use, the words, phrases, clichés, and aphorisms we speak when we talk about our environment and landscapes, create ideas of those spaces. They “are the stuff of the discourses, the verbal vehicles through which the knowledge [of our environment] is coded, modified, and most importantly, validated.”3 It is the validation that creates place in its strongest form; when people feel they have a sense of what their environment is used for and what it means, and that use is somehow valid according to their cultural values, a physical environment can come to have social meaning. Space can become a place. A discourse analysis describes the kinds of language and attitudes associated with particu-


lar sites, and shows how the larger culture influences the specific attitudes of the people who use those sites. Discourse analysis explains how their culture and their environment interact to create a meaning, to create place. The physical environment can suggest various uses, but the uses people think about come from their society. For example, a hillside can suggest the following possible uses: mining for metals, a ski slope, building houses on it to provide scenic vistas of the area (and/or look down on your neighbors), making a park out of it to fly kites in, making a great big garden out of it so that everyone in the area can see pretty stuff. So in that sense the topography is suggesting—communicating—possible uses. But the choices we make from among those possibilities usually come from our society, or our role in it. Ancient Greeks might have seen a hillside and thought, “Put a temple on it!” Heights were closer to the gods, good places for temples. Ancient Celts often thought of hills as the best place to build forts, because they lived in an age of violent physical conflict where protection from other bands was needed. Contemporary Americans are more likely to think about how nice it would be to own a house on top of that hill, not only for the scenic vista, but also as a status symbol. These are general examples that come from larger historical, social, and cultural backgrounds. Our individual social roles can also influence the kinds of uses we think about. Schoolchildren might see that hill as an ideal playground. A rich man will see it and want to build his mansion on it to make sure everyone else knows he is rich and (literally and figuratively) has to look up at him. Retirees in an old folks’ home across the street might like the garden idea. The different uses to which they want to put that hill are based on what they do in society. Thus, a discourse is really more than just words and thoughts from our culture. It is a kind of communication between people and their environment. Using a discourse in this way helps explain how an environment can influence the way people think and act. It is both physical and social, although the social predominates. Our social ideas, our historical time, and our cultural beliefs all shape the uses to which we might put our environments, and how we think about our environments. That is the basis of a discourse: that communication between the physical, the social, and the mental. For the purposes of this book, then, I define a discourse as just that: a communication between the physical, the social, and the mental. The social and the mental predominate, because those are the main bases upon which we humans do things, but the physical is both an influence on what we do and think and a product of what we do and think. A simple way to visualize a discourse is a circular process in which the physical suggests possibilities, various human groups think up different uses they want from among those


possibilities, and the humans then shape the physical landscape by using their environment in the ways they choose. One result of this process is a sense of place; when people use the physical in ways that are meaningful socially, emotionally, and psychologically, they put all that onto a physical thing and call it their “place” (if it means bad stuff to them, a “bad place”). Doing that— putting all those emotional and psychological feelings onto a physical location and calling it a place—defines that place as important and good (or bad). It also tends to attach that place to a specific group. The example of “home” above is an easy way to understand how we attach meaning to a physical location and thus create place. My home is a place because it is a physical location that I associate with all sorts of pleasant experiences. When considering our cities as places, we see that whole communities can attach uses and emotions to a physical location, and feel that it is their place. A city can come to mean something different to different groups within that city, based on their roles and what they do in their society, which is what happened in Austin when the environmental meaning emerged. Landscape To understand the environmental meaning of Austin, we have to talk about the landscape, because the physical features of the area suggested (communicated) various possible uses to its residents. The cultural ideas of capitalism, growth, nature, and the use values of residents all caused different people to think about which of those uses to choose. Some wanted to build things on them for private profit. Others wanted to preserve them for public use. And the period during which Austin grew into a big city had a big influence on how people thought about the environment of Austin. Some of the ideas about “the environment” were just coming into our national cultural discussion as Austin grew, so the national environmental movement influenced how people thought about what to do with those features. And national policy provided a set of tools that allowed people in Austin to preserve some features in various ways. When they did that—when they took some of the physical features of the area, and preserved them as parks and open space—they created a landscape, a look and feel of a city. That landscaping project has been a central component of Austin’s environmental meaning. It has created the meaning in physical form, and that physical form gives people who live in and visit Austin ideas about the people, the place, and the meaning of the city. The landscape of Austin serves as a “vast mnemonic device,” as one geographer puts it,4 a physical repository of social forces, cultural conflicts, and psychological processes. The physical


landscape allows others to participate in the environmental meaning by walking on the trails, swimming in the creeks, hiking in the hills, etc. But the way it got there was through social action, and when you walk on Austin’s trails, or swim in its creeks, you are experiencing the outcome of that meaning (it was the movement that got them preserved so you could walk or swim there). You are also becoming a possible part of that movement. If you enjoy those activities on those features, you are more likely to join in efforts to preserve more of them in the future, or vote for people who talk about Austin’s environment as something to preserve. To understand how this “vast mnemonic device” operates, we need to consider three components of a landscape. As geographers use the concept, landscape has both physical and social components. In order to really explain what happened in Austin, I will break the physical landscape into two parts: the natural and the built. This will give us three parts to the landscape—the natural, the built, and the social—and it is important to the story of Austin’s environmental meaning that we understand what part each plays in the history of Austin. The “natural” component of the landscape is the physical geography formed by nature, hills, creeks, the river, springs, flora, and fauna. It is “natural” in the sense of being unbuilt or unmodified by humans. In Austin, the natural landscape into which early Austin was built presented a beauty that many people wanted to preserve. It includes the hills of the Hill Country on the west, the Colorado River that runs through the city, the creeks that run down from the hills, and the springs that bubble up from the ground. The physical component of the landscape also includes the “built” elements—the buildings, parks, neighborhoods, etc.—modified or formed by humans. When you drive on a road or work in a building or play in a park, you are using the built elements of the landscape. When we turn that into a verb, we get the term “landscaping.” Landscaping is the act by humans of building or modifying the natural terrain. When we talk about landscaping an entire city, we are talking about how and where people build roads, houses, buildings, parks, pools, schools, hospitals, etc. It is similar to landscaping your yard, but on a larger scale. You landscape your yard by modifying it, placing trees, bushes, rocks, driveways, and fences. Cities are just huge versions of that process. People modify their environment by building on it or shaping it, placing houses and buildings and parks. The wilderness preserves, lakes, and open spaces retained in the core city of Austin are examples of landscaping meant to retain natural space in the midst of built space. They are examples of human-designed “natural” landscaping. But a landscape is simultaneously physical and social. The building, or


landscaping, of towns and cities by humans is inherently social; people modify their natural environments to serve social and psychological purposes (and here we are back to the discourse). For example, ancient cities all over the globe were often built by placing religious or totemic symbols in the center of the city, and the design of the city suggested to people who lived in them that they had a relationship with the gods or their own group. The landscaping of an area also illustrated social power: Those people who were entitled to use the buildings at the center (priests, kings, senators, etc.) had the social power to direct and control others, and as a result were seen as having a higher status by others in their society. In modern America, the huge buildings that house the white-collar directors of multinational capital in New York and other cities illustrate who has social power today: Those who work in the megalithic corporate buildings are given higher status than others because they work in those buildings. They also have a great deal of social power because their actions direct the investment of capital all over the globe. Several of those buildings in near proximity can become a center, full of buildings that serve as what sociologist Sharon Zukin calls one kind of landscape of power.5 In Austin, the landscaping efforts of environmentalists have included saving some natural spaces from human manipulation and building particular human-designed structures into preexisting geographic spaces. The wilderness preserves, lakes, and open spaces retained in the core city are examples of landscaping meant to retain natural space in the midst of built space. The systems of parks and greenbelts that do so much to define the core city of Austin are examples of human-designed “natural” landscaping.6 The building of urban space around those natural features is a way of landscaping the city. One of the best examples of this interplay between the built environment and the social environment is Zukin’s illustration of power and landscape in the new suburbs after WWII.7 The social order of the postwar suburbs was defined by exclusionary zoning laws and the social class of those who moved there. The exclusionary laws allowed suburban developers to keep minorities out and ensured that only whites lived there. The suburbs were always a marker of social class and upward mobility for white workers who “may have grown up in the city or a small town. But the move to the suburbs represented a step up in social class.”8 The original inhabitants of the suburbs were the “company men” of the postwar corporation, the mid-level managers and white-collar workers, all of whom saw themselves as part of the particular social group called white, middle-class Americans. They defined their roles in society by their roles at work and by the suburbs they lived in. And the very existence of the suburbs was a creation of social power. They existed only because of “the presence of large-scale, bureaucratic economic


power. The suburbs grew by the efforts of major real estate developers and financial institutions, the federal government, and national corporations.”9 The suburbs were not only a reflection of economic power; they were a built form that suggested the homogeneity of the corporate bureaucracy and the roles the white-collar worker played in those corporations. The three went together—the built environment, the social environment, and the power of large institutions. The suburban landscape thus consisted of the exclusionary, all-white, class- and occupation-based people (the social component), along with the housing arrangement they lived in (the built component) that was reflective of the bureaucratic structure in which they worked (grid-patterned streets, identical architecture of houses, etc.). People who lived in those postwar suburbs understood and defined their place in the social order by living in a built environment that looked like the social relations of the postwar business world. The suburbs “meant” white, middle-class America. The interplay between the physical, the social, and the institutional was at work in the creation of Austin’s environmental meaning as well, although in slightly different ways. The people who lived in Austin lived in a place defined by hills, creeks, and rivers rather than grid-patterned streets lined with “houses made of ticky-tack” (a phrase from an old song from the 1950s). The warm climate, the geography of the area, and the culture of Austin all created a laid-back feel to a town where life was defined as much by how you lived as by where you worked or how much money you had. Many people had the idea that if you wanted to make money, you went to Dallas or Houston, and if you were more interested in quality of life, you lived in Austin. That quality was defined to a big extent by a slower pace and beautiful environment, both of which were beginning to be changed by growth. Thus to many Austinites the suburbs, and growth in general, “meant” the antithesis of what Austin “meant.” The natural and built environments of Austin are the physical components of the environmental meaning. The social component is all the acts of many people over time that create the built landscape, such as parks and greenbelts, that preserve some of the natural environment for use. The two are reiterative; preserving and building environmental landscapes in one decade gives physical evidence that it can be done for the next decade. People living in and using these physical landscapes in the following years begin to think of the city as a place defined in large part by those landscapes, and that leads to more social action to preserve and build more of them. In this way Austin’s environmental meaning arose over several decades as various groups worked toward a similar purpose of preserving natural features in the midst of growth. These efforts


became a social movement. The movement, and the landscape it created, have come to define Austin as a place symbolized by its environment. A landscape, then, becomes a big repository of those feelings and ideas about the group and the way it lives, the way it thinks, the way it feels. As Lynch puts it: The named environment, familiar to all, furnishes material for common memories and symbols which bind the group together and allow them to communicate with one another. The landscape serves as a vast mnemonic system for the retention of group history and ideals.10

But how does it get named? And how does social conflict enter into that naming? One way is when people define their space by framing their arguments in particular ways, usually as they fight over how to use that space. Framing a Sense of Place We can understand how a landscape contributes to the discourse of a city by describing the physical things that are built, how that built environment is used, and the social relationships that create and are influenced by that built environment. We can also understand a discourse by looking at the verbal and written symbols used by social groups as they try to build the kind of spaces they want to live, work, and play in. To understand the social part of the discourse, we read and listen to what people and groups have written or said about their activities and the reasons for those activities. Their writings and speech help us understand the discourse of a place because they let us see how people think about their city in a way that creates the idea of place. Writings and speech also let us see how people try to gather support for their ideas of place from others. Groups that are in conflict over what kind of city space to build often try to get others in their city to support their way of thinking so they can build the kind of space they want. They try to convince others to see things their way, gathering enough support to install rules and regulations that will lead to the kinds of city space they desire. One tool we can use to see how social groups try to gain that support from others is called frame analysis.11 When people want to achieve some goal, like passing a civil rights bill, shutting down a nuclear reactor, or protecting a natural environment, they have to mobilize others in the society to join them, either by working in the movement itself or by voting for the goal. Mobilization requires finding ways to frame an issue that resonate with others


they are trying to mobilize. Framing is not some kind of insidious propaganda campaign. It is a way to talk about an issue that gets others who are interested in the issues to say, “Oh, yeah, I think that’s right, I should go get involved (or vote for it).” Frame analysis has been used extensively in the study of social movements, and it appears in some case studies of how people in other cities successfully frame their movements in political contests between themselves and their local growth coalitions.12 The idea of framing emerged in the sociology of social movements as a way of measuring how social movements attract attention, convince others to advocate for the movement’s goals, and become successful at changing policy. In this book I analyze frames for the same basic reason, but I want to take the concept one step further. On the one hand, the framing done by both sides of the growth issue was representative of the ways social movements and their adversaries sought to convince others to share their point of view. But we can also use frame analysis to help understand a discourse of a city. Looking at the ways people framed the issues shows us how they were thinking and talking about their city at the time. Most importantly, the process of framing issues is not just representative of the thoughts and ideas of the time: That process helps create thoughts and ideas because it is part of the way social groups define for themselves what is going on. Linguists and social psychologists know that when we put our worries and concerns into words, the words we choose create a reality for us. We define our ideas through our language, and our language in turn defines our ideas. For example, in my head (and heart) I know I have some kind of relationship with my wife and children, some kind of emotional feeling for them and tie to them. But it is hard to really explain that feeling in words because sometimes words cannot translate exactly what we feel. So in order to explain it in words, I tell myself and other people that I “love my family.” Those words “love” and “family” then define in my mind what that relationship is—the words allow me to define that feeling, that connection. The act of framing is similar—a large-scale, social version of the same process. When groups define their issues using words and symbols, they are doing more or less the same thing I am doing when I define my relationship with my family. Those frames can create ideas about the subject, and define the relationship between people and their environment. People may have vague feelings about an issue, and through language and symbolism they bring those feelings to a level where we pay attention to them, make them a topic of conversation. Framing then defines those feelings, connecting them to other


ideas and feelings. Framing thus defines for us what we are thinking about. When the subject is a community, or city, framing is a way of solidifying and communicating our definitions about the area we live in, about our relationship to that area and the people who inhabit it. In other words, they define our sense of place. Applying that idea to Austin, we can see how the frames adopted by both sides were not just an effect of the discourse, they were a producer of it as well. The framing of the issue helped define, and thus create, the idea of Austin as a special place. People in Austin framed their concerns in ways that linked growth, the environment, and the city itself, helping create and solidify its discourse of place. So I use the concept of framing, and the tool of frame analysis, to show how people define for themselves and others the ways they think about place. Framing by social movements is at the heart of our discourses about our cities and our communities. It is the way that people define to one another how to think about their city and community, how to think about their places. It was the very act of framing—and the competing frames the groups used— that defined in public format the linguistic and symbolic components of that discourse. Looking at the framing of issues over time allows us to see how the discourse of place in Austin emerged. The documents included in the first two chapters, such as the Austin Tomorrow Goals, the Creeks Project, and the Austin Environmental Council newsletter, are examples of what sociologists call frame articulation. They show the new angles of vision Austinites were creating as they began to articulate why building particular environments (parks and greenbelts) and keeping urban development off other kinds of natural space (by preserving the creeks, creating preserves, and keeping public land public) were important to them. Those early documents reveal an emerging frame of Austin that conceived of a city’s worth not in terms of size or economic output, but in terms of its quality of life. That quality of life was defined in large part by the natural environment in and around the city. After the initial framing of their issues, groups must convince others to adopt their frames in more formal election contests. Looking at competing frames in local elections helps us see how different social groups such as developers and environmentalists were talking about Austin, and how they were trying to convince people to vote about growth issues in Austin. These are called frame alignment processes; groups try to align their own ideas about the issue (their frames) with voters who are not necessarily active in a social movement, but who will hopefully vote their way on issues. In order to win


elections, groups must consciously try to reach out to the mass of voters in order to convince them to vote for things the group wants, like preserving open space or channeling growth away from the environmentally sensitive areas. The two kinds of frame alignment that are most helpful in understanding the environmental meaning of Austin are frame amplification and frame bridging. Frame amplification is when people and groups accent or highlight particular issues and events as more salient than others. Calling attention to the destruction of the natural environment in and around Austin’s lake, creeks, and neighborhoods was a way of accentuating the importance of the environment in that new angle of vision, that new way of thinking about Austin as a place. Frame bridging is when groups try to get lots of other people to see things through their new angle of vision. Groups often try to do so by “invigoration of existing values or beliefs”13—making public statements that relate the new problem to values and beliefs that people already have. Many people value economic fairness, for example, and environmental groups have long talked about the ways that current residents pay for suburban development that harms the environment by paying higher taxes that are used for suburban infrastructure. Showing how taxes and environmental problems are related is a kind of frame bridging. Both kinds of alignment processes are attempts to get the larger mass of voters to vote for the programs or policies the group desires. One place we can see frame alignment and amplification is in the writings and speech used during elections and political campaigns, and I use examples from city elections to show how that was done in Austin in chapters 4 and 5. Putting It All Together Frame analysis is a helpful tool to understanding the meaning of Austin, because when we look at what people are writing and saying, we can better understand the social discourse of the city. When we look at the words and symbols used by social groups in their efforts to convince others of their ideas, or in the political campaigns over control of the city government and bureaucracy, we can see how the framing of issues creates a symbolic idea of the city. When we combine a frame analysis with maps and pictures of the built environment produced by these groups, their landscaping projects, and the elections in which they fought against other ideas about the use of their area, we see how the discourse of a place influences the physical landscape.


Combining the three—the physical, the social, and the symbolic—we can understand the environmental meaning of Austin, and how it emerged through time as a discourse between the three elements. A discourse analysis that looks at the landscapes and framing of Austin helps us understand how it became a place worth fighting for by so many people. And it helps explain why Austin today looks like it does.


Part 2

T he Landscape Emerges


Chapter 2

The Landscape Emerges

The Geography of Austin The natural environment into which Austin was built is simply beautiful. The city sits at the intersection of two geological features—the plains to the east, and the Hill Country to the west. The area was originally settled by immigrants who called the small town Waterloo. In 1838 President-elect Mirabeau B. Lamar of the Republic of Texas spent some time at the settlement hunting buffalo. Later, as president, Lamar commissioned a team to find a site for the capital of the new republic and specifically told them to include Waterloo. Waterloo was eventually selected as the site of the capital for its beauty, water, and plentiful game. It was renamed Austin in honor of Stephen F. Austin, who had brought Anglo settlers to Texas. In 1839 Lamar sent his agent, Erwin Waller, to survey the town. The geographic features of the area helped structure Waller’s ideas about the layout for the new capital city. In addition to the Colorado River, two of the area creeks served as the boundaries for the early town. Waller’s original map plats of the city are bounded by Shoal and Waller creeks, and the symbolic importance of water is represented in Waller’s choice of street names: He named the east-west streets for trees, and the north-south streets for the rivers in Texas (see map 2.1). The water features and terrain of the area continued to influence the design of Austin. As late as 1873 these two creeks served as natural boundaries that defined the city. A nineteenth-century map of the town illustrates how the town’s growth was shaped by these features (see map 2.2). It was not until 1928 that a bridge was built across Shoal Creek, allowing housing to be erected upon the western ridge in what was called Pemberton Heights. Later neighborhoods appeared along the ridge, or were nestled up

36 The Landscape Emerges

Map 2.1. Original Proposal for Capital City. From Barton Springs Eternal: The Soul of a

City, ed. Turk Pipkin and Marshall Frech (Austin, TX: Softshoe Publishing, 1993).

against it. As the town grew northward along Shoal and Waller creeks, some of the finer homes in the town were built up on that ridge, with striking views of the rest of the town. Along with the western ridge and eastern hills that defined the city, there are smaller hills and valleys throughout the city. Some of the hills between Shoal and Waller creeks served to create striking views of the river and the downtown area and helped define neighborhoods. The Capitol Building sits between two of the smaller hills in the town, which help to define its space. The Colorado River served as a natural barrier to the south, limiting growth on that side of it. Frequent flooding of the river made crossing it uncertain. It was not until a concrete bridge was built in 1911 that housing began

The Landscape Emerges 37

to be created in earnest south of the river. A trolley line across the bridge then linked north and south, which spurred business and residential development on the south side. On the south side, the land rises away from the Colorado for a few miles until it reaches the peneplain. The creeks on this side of town have cut canyons flowing south to north, creating natural barriers that also help define residential neighborhoods. The confluence of hills and waterways served as early geographic features that shaped the way the town grew. Map 2.2 shows the topography of the town and illustrates how the place was built to nestle in between the creeks, river, and hills. By the time that map was made, the city was beginning to grow up the hill to the east, but Shoal Creek was still the western boundary. As the town outgrew these water barriers, the Hill Country to the west of Austin provided a natural semicircle on the west side. In the past, Austin was known as the “City of the Violet Crown” for the spectacular effect of the sunsets over the Hill Country. Along with the river and creeks, one particular water feature stands out as special to many Austinites. Located at the mouth of the largest southern creek coming down from those hills (Barton Creek), in the central park next to the lake, there is a natural formation of springs that pumps out twenty-six

Map 2.2. The Topography of Early Austin. PICA 22984, Austin History Center, Austin

Public Library.


million gallons of water a day. This formation has been a central swimming facility for Austin since the late 1800s. In the 1920s the city built a dam oneeighth mile below the springs, creating Barton Springs Pool, which presently serves as a natural swimming area and recreation center for the city. Since the pool is in the bed of Barton Creek, it flows through a shallow canyon surrounded by huge pecan and oak trees, acres of grass, and rock formations eroded by the creek. The canyon slopes are maintained as grassy open spaces, which for several months of the year are occupied by hundreds of swimmers and sunbathers as a kind of hillside beach. This mix of “natural” and humanconstructed topography creates a peaceful relaxation experience away from the noise and bustle of daily urban activity. Staying at the pool for any length of time creates the type of experience one usually finds only on camping or hiking trips, yet the experience can be had in the middle of a large city. Between them, the river, creeks, hills, and springs of Austin, along with a temperate climate, create a special kind of environment into which a town has been built. The daily experience of these geographic features, along with the lush foliage of the area, suggests to the mind a relaxed, beautiful style of living. That style of living, though, was made possible largely by a major manmade change in one part of the natural environment, the Colorado River. Setting the Stage: Taming Nature Allows Austin to Flourish The economy and demography of Austin were also shaped by its geographic setting. As the capital city, Austin had its major job bases in the education and government sectors. Early on, there were a few extractive activities, some farming, and government offices. Later the University of Texas grew into an important employer, adding higher education to the job base. There is not much mining to be had in the area, and the town was not the central transportation crossroads on which cities like Dallas or San Antonio were built. In the early days the town served mostly as a crossroads between the farmland to the east and the ranch land in the Hill Country. The destiny of Austin was to a large extent limited by its river. The river was unpredictable until a series of dams was built on it in the 1940s and 1950s, so it was not an economic asset upon which to build any kind of heavy industry or trade. Some years there was too little water, some years too much. A picture in the Austin History Center shows a Civil War soldier standing astride the Colorado, one foot on each side of it. The drought that dried up the river that year reduced it to a thin trickle running over dirt. In other years, flooding caused problems. The area experiences heavy flooding


every decade or so, and when the floods came, the Colorado ravaged everything in its path. It wiped out farms, homes, and businesses that were in its floodplain. Bridges across it were destroyed, rebuilt, and destroyed again, limiting how much Austin could grow on the south side. The photo of the flood of 1935 in the photo section shows the corner of Congress and Riverside, just south of the Congress Ave. Bridge. The unpredictable nature of nature, in the form of the Colorado River, limited how much Austin could grow, as well as the kind of economy it could have. Early promoters of a greater Austin were keenly aware of the problems the river caused and saw that taming that river would reap huge rewards. These were the men whom Orum calls urban entrepreneurs, men who had a vision of an Austin as a civilized, cultural city. The first real promoter of Austin as a place was Alexander Penn Wooldridge, who moved to Austin from Kansas in 1872. He worked as a lawyer and banker for forty years, then served as mayor from 1909 to 1919. Wooldridge began to promote the idea that Austin could become a shining city on the hill, a great civilized center in the midst of wilderness.1 Wooldridge is a great example of the kind of ideas about growth, prosperity, and civilization that people had in American culture. He and many like him thought of growth in moral terms as well as financial terms; creating growth was creating prosperity, which was a moral good. It would alleviate human suffering. Talking about the time period he was living in, and looking toward a time when things were better, he wrote: I assume that our community, as a whole, is a poor one, and generally speaking, becoming poorer every day . . . We could endure the darkness of the hour if we clearly saw daylight ahead: and then, this is no more a matter of the future than would necessarily be the case with any other scheme for the public benefit.

That daylight ahead was a future he saw of a growing, prosperous city, a place that would provide for the poor community he was addressing. His ideas for improving the city were ideas to improve the lot of all, which was seen as a moral and social good. Why did men like Wooldridge see a city as a moral and social good? Remember that people in the 1800s did not have the amenities we take for granted today: no air-conditioning, no motorized transportation, no plumbing (you were lucky if you had an outhouse for that), no electricity until later in the century. Agriculture was almost entirely dependent on the natural


cycles. When it rained, people had food; when it didn’t, people went hungry. Food was the most expensive item in a household budget until the 1970s. People were much more dependent on nature for their survival and prosperity back then, and finding ways to guide, harness, and tame nature occupied much of humanity’s time. Ideas about nature and cities were also influenced by the culture of the United States. The United States as a country was built by “taming nature,” as waves of immigrants moved steadily west from the coast. The Europeans and their descendants who moved steadily westward, displacing American Indians and converting forests to farmland and towns, lived in an agricultural economy. The very reason to cut down trees and plant corn was for survival, in order to feed more and more people in a growing country. Farming brought order out of the chaos of wilderness. That kind of culture and economy created ideas about wilderness and civilization. “Wilderness” was not only chaotic and unpredictable, but could not be harnessed for financial profit. So the visionaries of the time thought of cities as the ultimate expression of civilization. What we call Washington, D.C., for example, was originally Washington City, named for the first president. George Washington himself was very much involved in planning the city, because it was, to him and many contemporaries, an example of the kind of civilized society he hoped America would become.2 To build a great city, a cultured place, created order out of the chaos of wilderness. The idea of civilization was the idea of humans dominating nature through their culture, which allowed humans and their arts, sciences, and society to flourish. Building a city was building civilization, and that was seen by many people, like Washington and Wooldridge, as a moral good. For later people, who pressed the idea of a greater Austin in the 1920s to 1940s, the betterment of Austin was part of their raison d’être. Orum gives them the name of urban entrepreneurs, people who want to build a special city because that in itself is the goal, rather than later market entrepreneurs, who want to grow the city just because building city space makes money. It is not that the entrepreneurs were against wealth; they themselves were businesspeople, wealthy. But they thought of building a city as a project worth their lives, and of a community as an expression of themselves. Orum documents their achievements in his book, and their names are inscribed all over town in the things named after them: schools, parks, dams, libraries, airports. These people “are described routinely, in the newspapers, in personal correspondence, and in personal interviews I have conducted, as having had a love affair with the city of Austin.” People like Tom Miller, Walter Long, and Edgar Perry “saw the success of Austin as their own personal success. Austin’s progress was


their progress . . . these men came to hold a certain picture in their minds of the future of Austin, and that picture was a vision of their own future.”3 This vision required the Colorado to be tamed, because its chaotic nature inhibited the growth of that place. Over the years a few dams were built or begun by private entities, only to be destroyed by floods. What finally allowed the entrepreneurs and other businesspeople to tame the river was the New Deal. Most of the dams were paid for by that program. Buchanan Dam started the Highland Lakes chain of dams. Mansfield Dam created Lake Travis. Lyndon Baines Johnson was a master of working the New Deal bureaucracy in Washington and a master of deal making in Texas, and with his political skills and horse trading two of the most important dams were finally funded, Tom Miller Dam and the Longhorn Dam. Tom Miller Dam was built on top of the remains of two earlier dams that were washed away in flooding. It created what is now Lake Austin, which served as another boundary to the west of the city until a low-water bridge was built below it and West Lake Hills began to be developed. The final dam, Longhorn Dam, was built in 1960. The lake created by Longhorn Dam was called Town Lake until it was renamed Lady Bird Johnson Lake in 2007. Town Lake runs through the middle of Austin, helping define the feel of the core city. The New Deal legislation and the political power of locals in Washington allowed the urban entrepreneurs to do what they had sought for half a century: tame the river. Taming the river allowed them to build that shining city on the hill. The building of the dams set the stage for what has happened in the postwar era. The dams provided environmental stability as well as hydroelectric power. Floods were managed by releasing the water slowly through the Highland Lakes they created, and those lakes could store water for drought years. Roads and bridges were secure, agriculture was secure, the entire economy of the Austin region was stabilized, and that stability allowed economic expansion. People could now live along the river and the chain of lakes without fearing its wrath, or own a lake house that served as a weekend getaway. When I was a child, it was a mark of status to own such a lake house, along with a boat and some skis to play on the water. Desirable housing could be built up and down the river, which brought more people to the area to live in Lakeway, Lago Vista, and other small exurbs that now dot the length of the Highland Lakes chain. The river became a source of beauty and recreation rather than an unpredictable natural phenomenon. Businesses could be lured to Austin on the promise of a secure source of water, and they could attract skilled workers because of the lifestyle the now-tamed river afforded. Those factors allowed business leaders in Austin to court emerging high-


tech firms, lobbying and making deals with them to move to the city. By the 1960s early technology firms were building in Austin, a trend that accelerated from the late 1970s until the present. By the 1970s the predominant economic activity in Austin was centered around white-collar occupations in government, education, and an emerging technology industry. This kind of economy created a social and class structure that included a relatively high degree of educated middle-class white-collar workers, rather than a large pool of laborers or working class. The economy was not dependent on industry or resource extraction, so people did not need to think about taking from the environment for their livelihood. They could see the environment as something to live in rather than work from or pollute with factory smoke. And one of the great historical ironies of Austin is that taming the river— taming the environment—actually set the stage for the emergence of the environmental movement in Austin. As we will see later in this chapter, Town Lake became a focus for some early conservation efforts in the 1970s, which were part of Austin’s early environmental movement. Few people at first saw the lake as something that could become parkland, partly because the banks were so ravaged from the floods, partly because the river had always been so unpredictable. Once the Longhorn Dam had been built, creating a lake in the middle of Austin, one of the city’s most interesting women and some of her friends began to push the city to make the entire lake into a park. Due mostly to their efforts, the idea to make the lake a central park really got going in the 1970s, and it did eventually become a major park. At the same time that effort was taking place, though, the city was growing, and more and more people were moving to Austin. As the city grew, urban pollution began to spoil the river, lakes, and creeks. Pollution of the lakes and creeks was one of the main motivating factors of the early conservation movement in Austin, a movement that became the environmental movement. Taming the river allowed Austin to thrive and grow, but that growth was ruining some of the things people liked best about the city at that time. The predominant idea of the city among businesspeople and growth promoters was that Austin would be a place to make profit through growth. To them, growth was a good thing. Other people began to think of the city in ways that were not based upon industry or trade or economics, but rather upon how you lived in that city, how you enjoyed the culture and the environment and the history of the city rather than the wealth created by the city’s growth. They wrapped up their feelings about that way of living and all those things that created it in the phrase “quality of life,” and they saw growth as something


that had a negative effect on that quality. As time went on, the arguments about growth began to revolve around these two competing definitions of a city, whether Austin was a place defined by profit making or by its quality of life. Those competing definitions of the city as a place shaped the main social and political conflicts in Austin for four decades, and created the social movement that became known as Austin’s environmental movement. Early Manifestation of Austin’s Meaning: The Parks System Because of the mixture of lifestyle and economic definitions of the city, a parks system has been a central concern of many since the 1920s. Parks were not something that would promote conflict between “environmentalists” and “developers”; early businesspeople promoted them as ways to define the city and attract other residents. The 1928 Master Plan (written before the river was tamed) noted that since the city’s heavy economic base was not industrial, “it is only natural that the chief characteristics of greater Austin will continue, as at present, essentially a cultural and educational city.”4 The plan noted that Austin’s geography lent itself to a multi-tiered parks system. The Parks Plan called for several different-sized parks, ranging from neighborhood parks to municipal parks, and set out the placement of parks so that they were easily reached by the populace. The concern with preserving a natural feel extended particularly to the larger metropolitan parks, which “should be chosen for their natural advantages . . . They should preserve, for the city dweller, as much natural topography and scenery as is possible.”5 The plan specified that parks were to be so numerous any citizen would be able to walk to a park in a short distance (this later became the “five-minute walk” idea). In addition to preserving a “natural” character of the geography, the parks were conceived by the plan as integral to the definition of individual neighborhoods. Parks were to be placed and built so that they served as “intimate community and recreational areas . . . The design should reflect in a measure, the nature of their surroundings” within the neighborhood.6 In this regard, the plan suggested that the creek beds of Austin serve as natural features around which to plan a system of parkways and boulevards, singling out Shoal and Waller creeks as two main avenues of transportation. The plan noted that the two creeks should make “available for recreational purposes large areas of low lying land which are unsuited for residential development.”7 Though the name “greenbelts” for these areas was yet to come, people were thinking about making parkland along Austin’s creeks as early as 1928.8 The creeks were included in the plan as part of a parkway system that would define


the kind of city Austin could be. This was partly because of the natural terrain of the creeks: Much of it is floodplain; since you can’t build on it, you might as well make a park out of it. It was also a reflection of how the creeks of Austin function as natural features that define neighborhoods and residential areas. Later master plans followed this trend toward parks. The 1958 Planning Commission wrote a report on their plan that began with the understanding that “Austin is primarily an attractive place in which to live.”9 Although not the main focus, the plan made detailed reference to the visible form of the city. “The appearance of the City is of great importance . . . [and] the commission is more and more aware of its responsibility in planning for the beauty and orderly growth of Austin.”10 A program of tree planting, landscaping, and billboard control was suggested to improve the appearance of the city. The commission’s report served as the basis of the 1961 plan. When the Austin Plan of 1961 was written, it prioritized the development of the riverfront into an integrated greenbelt trail system surrounding the city. This is the first plan that had suggestions to turn Town Lake, and Shoal and Waller creeks, into what we now call greenbelts. These mandates were not written into the 1961 plan as what we now call environmental concerns. They were seen by the business and civic leaders of the time as ways to increase the attractiveness of the city to future residents and businesses. In order to continue attracting white-collar workers and jobs, the plan emphasized a pleasant-looking, residential city, defined by its neighborhoods rather than by industry. The Planning Commission wrote that their plan saw itself as “an expression of the moral obligation that the city has to its residents . . . [that would] stabilize neighborhoods and protect property investment, and will insure that Austin will continue to improve its physical environment on the basis of the long range public interest.”11 To these men, “public interest” was defined in large part by property values, and the Planning Commission and Planning Department of 1961 saw that what made Austin property values high was a pleasant, neighborhood environment. Planning for the use of the creeks and parks, then, was a mechanism to simultaneously ensure quality of life and quality of investment. Within a few years, though, many people would start to think that sometimes these two did not go together in perfect harmony. Although the quality of life in Austin helped to determine the quality of investment, there was disagreement as to which was more important. The early conflict between people in town was which of these ends of the spectrum—quality of life or quality of investment—would be the focus of the emerging city. It was this disagreement that led to many of the conflicts over Austin’s natural environment.


A Movement Begins: Conservation of Parkland and Open Space Although the idea of a city defined by its beauty and natural landforms struck some as a good idea, other powerful landowners and businesspeople pushing Austin toward a big city had different ideas as to how to treat public land. These people stood to benefit socially and financially from that growth, and land was a principal resource for attaining that benefit. Other people were not happy with the kinds of changes brought by growth. Some actively fought to protect public lands from being used for private schemes, and tried to find ways to preserve the creeks and parks from the kinds of pollution brought by urban growth. They were not anti-growth, but they were concerned with saving public land in the midst of the growth that was occurring. Many of these people had ideas about city space gleaned from their educational and professional experiences. They were well educated and well traveled, and thus had been exposed to different ideas about cities and their environments. They were willing to use their financial and professional resources to build natural environments into the urban landscape. To do that, though, they had to contend with an array of institutional forces that promoted growth and acted contrary to the conservation of the environment. The stories of these people are indicative of the kinds of hurdles that have faced many Austinites who tried to conserve some of the environmental features that define the city. Early conservation efforts faced three big problems: inadequate parks funding, bureaucratic indifference, and private landownership. They had a hard time overcoming these forces, but there were several successes. The things that did succeed shaped both the physical and social environments that exist in Austin to this day. The Conservationists: Different Ideas about City and Nature One of the earliest and most active of these Austinites was Roberta (Bobbie) Dickson, later Crenshaw, married to Ben Crenshaw, Sr., father of the famous golfer. Bobbie Crenshaw died a few years ago. Her friends who knew her in the early years still tend to call her Bobbie Dickson, so she appears in some of the material below by that name, but she is more widely known by Crenshaw. Crenshaw was from Arkansas and came to Austin to attend the University of Texas, graduating in the late 1930s. The summer after graduation, she married Malcolm Reed, a wealthy middle-aged man, causing quite a scandal in the small town of Austin. On their honeymoon the couple traveled to Europe and other parts of the world, where Bobbie saw how cities in other countries built parks into the fabric of their design. Bobbie spent years of her life trying to


get the City of Austin bureaucracy to pay more attention to parks in Austin, and was instrumental in saving several large parcels of land from development. After Malcolm died, she gave some of their land to the city to build Reed Park, and spent a lot of her own money to put trees on Town Lake. The thing that most bothered Crenshaw was the way the city machinery and some of the business elite treated public land as a private commodity to enrich themselves. As a member and later chair of the Parks Board, she served mostly as a thorn in the side of several growth promoters who would regularly grant their friends and business partners land that the city owned. She remembers how she was perceived at the time: In those days I was considered a wild radical dingbat. I guess I would have been the Brigid Shea of that period,12 except that Brigid knew what she was doing. She is a professional at what she does, who . . . knew what it took to make an issue, while I just went along making people mad.

What she did to make people mad was to energetically push administrators and council members to pay as much attention to parks and public space as they did to private projects. In doing so, Crenshaw often found herself trying to simply maintain the amount of dedicated parkland that existed. One of the people Crenshaw worked with in her efforts was Russell Fish. Russell had been an air force pilot trainer in San Antonio, where he met Janet Long, daughter of Walter Long, Austin’s longtime Chamber of Commerce president.13 As a Boy Scout, Russell had grown up with an interest in wild lands and was an enthusiastic devotee of the emerging ecosystems sciences in the 1960s and 1970s. Moving to Austin with his new bride to help her father run his legislative service, Russell became a well-respected member of the community. His resume reads like a list of social service groups in the city: president of ten groups, such as the Aqua Festival, Boy Scouts Council, and Kiwanis Club; chair or member of twenty-one local boards and commissions; and board member of some fifteen business groups. Russell Fish had a foot in most of the social and business circles in town. Early on, the efforts of Crenshaw and Russell Fish were mostly reactive: The city would often give or lease land to developers that was officially dedicated parkland, and the two would spend time and energy trying to retain the land as parks. A good example of this was Ski Park. In the mid-1960s, a developer and former Chamber of Commerce president named Tom Perkins, who loved waterskiing on Town Lake, convinced the city council that a ski park on the lake would make a good project. The ski park required the creation of


a ski pond next to the lake, a building, and a set of bleachers for spectators to sit on, all of which existed on city parkland. All of that would have to be built on public land. The city gave that parkland to Perkins to develop his ski park. But the ski park did not do well, and it soon went broke. Ski Park is one of the first examples of a long-term trend in Austin. The city, through administrative or city council action, will give land to developers or help pay for their developments in some fashion. The city itself usually gets nothing in return, other than the promise of some vague benefit in the undefined form of “growth,” “revenue,” etc.14 Ski Park was by no means the end of schemes to develop parkland along the lake for private gain. In the late 1960s a developer who was a member of the Texas Legislature decided to build a huge theme park on Lake Austin just east of I-35, across from Perkins’s failed ski park. This developer approached the city council, asking for forty acres of dedicated parkland on the lake, and asked that the city grant him half of the lake itself above the dam. This developer had been to Disneyland, and in typical Texas fashion, wanted to make a Texas version of a water theme park. Texas fashion means doing things big, and his design was typically Texan, typically grandiose. He wanted the lake space because he was going to have two Civil War–era frigates built, put them on the lake, and have them shoot fireworks at each other in a nightly faux battle. Near them, he was going to place a submarine like the one in Disneyland, allowing people to view the bottom of Town Lake.15 This scheme was supposed to generate the kind of attendance that Disneyland generated, along with revenue and tax money for the city. Such pretensions to greatness were sour enough for Dickson and Fish, but worse was the use of city parkland and city funding to help build such a place. Fish, for his part, spent hours at the council pointing out that the land was dedicated parkland, and that the city would be sued if it gave the developer the land. Dickson spent weeks behind the scenes trying to rally opposition. But when it came time to vote on the issue, the council seemed ready to give the land to the developer on a 4–3 vote. In a last-ditch effort, on the day the council was to vote on the project, Dickson went to the Austin National Bank to see the banker in charge of the loan for the project. She convinced the banker that Fish was sincere in his threat of a lawsuit, and that this project, like the ski park, would quickly go broke. As Crenshaw recalled it, the banker called down to the council and got council member Ben White on the phone, telling him that the bank would not give the loan to the developer. White then refused to vote on the project, effectively sinking it. As she and I talked about this episode,


Map 2.3. The Core City, ca. 1972. The creeks, river, and neighborhoods that define the

core of Austin. Adapted from Austin Creeks’ Horizons ’76 Committee, City of Austin.

Crenshaw laughed in delight at the memory of how infuriated the other proproject council members were. “They thought they had old man White in their paw, but he surprised them. When he refused to vote, they took a recess, took White in the back room, and tried to strong-arm him. But all he said was, ‘I am not going to vote on this issue today.’ So it failed!” The First Hike and Bike: A Greenbelt Takes Shape along Shoal Creek Another person who was able to use her social position to influence the creation of Austin’s landscape was Janet Fish, the daughter of Walter Long and wife of Russell Fish. Walter Long had come to Austin in the early years of the century and was one of the prime movers in Austin. He served as the Chair of the Chamber of Commerce from 1914 to 1949, actively promoting a vision of a growing Austin all his life. The family home sits on a hill overlooking Shoal Creek. Janet had grown up riding her family horses on an old bridle path along that creek. The path had been built by the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) during the Depression, but had fallen into disrepair since the


city was not willing to spend money on its upkeep. Janet, along with Dickson and Parks Director Beverly Sheffield, saw the creek as a natural parkway and wanted to restore the old CCC trail. She approached the city about ways that the creek could be cleaned up and the bridle path restored. But the city was not willing to spend the money required. Janet, on the other hand, had decided that something was going to happen, and she set about making it happen. Since the city would not dedicate the money required, Janet contracted the city to do much of the restoration work, using her own money. Parks Director Sheffield recalls that “one day Janet came down to the office and wrote out a $5,000 check to the city. Later on, her husband Russell joked that check was her new car!” That was a lot of money in the 1950s, but $5,000 did not cover the entire expense to make the trail. So Janet got community organizations such as the Boy Scouts and church groups to donate time and labor to clear and build the trail. In addition, Janet actually made a map of all the houses along the trail for its first section. She went to each household, asking them to take responsibility for a small section of the creek adjacent to their property. Asked if this helped, she laughed, “Sure—then their yard help wouldn’t go over and dump their trash on [it]!” Most residents were enthusiastic, and many who lived along the trail volunteered time to keep it clean. Several households organized their children into “junior deputies” who were told to watch the trail and report anyone dumping trash. Janet actually “deputized” the kids, giving them badges and note pads on which to write the names of transgressors. The Fishes, Dickson, Sheffield, and many others hoped to extend the trail well up the creek, past its present end at 35th Street. But they had trouble with landowners who would not grant easement rights. The land on the creek that presently houses Seton Hospital contains a set of free-flowing springs, named Seiders Springs. The original plan to build Seton would have ruined the spring and used land the Fishes wanted for the Hike and Bike. Russell and the landowner fought in the city council, Russell asking that the landowner not be given the right to build over the spring. “We are friends again now, but we fought bitterly over that land,” says Russell. The owner eventually agreed to set the hospital back so as not to destroy the spring, and gave the trail a right-of-way. In 1976 three sisters descended from original settlers, the Seiders, gave a $10,000 donation to restore the park at the springs where they had grown up. This donation allowed the city to create Seiders Park, presently the northern terminus of the trail. The Seiders sisters gave their money to conserve the land as a public good, but other landowners farther up the creek were not to be moved. As Russell


approached them about trail access, some agreed, but many would not hear of it. The reason many gave was that they “didn’t want ‘common people’ wandering along their property.” The city bureaucracy created its own problem as well, mostly in the area of upkeep. The city was supposed to maintain the trail, and while Russell was trying to get property owners to cede access, Janet was trying to get city departments to take care of trash, trail destruction, and other problems. Janet gave her Shoal Creek trail the name “Hike and Bike Trail,” a name that stuck. The trail became a model linear park at both the local and national levels. One of Janet’s friends was Liz Carpenter, assistant to Lady Bird Johnson (wife of President Lyndon Baines Johnson). Janet gave pictures of the Hike and Bike to Carpenter, who showed them to Lady Bird. Lady Bird was so impressed with the trail that she passed out pictures of it in her beautification efforts around the country. As the trail got national acclaim, several national magazines wrote articles on it, and Janet got calls from other cities asking how the project was done. As a form of landscape, the Hike and Bike Trail served as the model for all the future greenbelts in Austin, showing how area creeks could be used for recreation and parks rather than dumping grounds. It also provided a name for an idea used by other cities across the nation, for the first time placing Austin in the forefront of thinking about environmental landforms and city designs. It is a noteworthy aspect of the Shoal Creek story that these early conservationists were able to create the trail because of their private wealth and social position. Their resources were used to beautify a section of the city in which they lived. Although Parks Director Sheffield worked with Janet on the idea of contracting the city to do the work, overall the nature of the city bureaucracy was then (as now) focused on creating urban space, not green space. It was not until Janet paid the Parks Department to act as contractor that the department agreed to come into the plan. Private landowners proved even more difficult to move; the trail ends where it does today because landowners would not give right-of-way to continue it. Ecology and Preserves: New Ideas Shape New Conservation To the efforts of Old Austinites and wealthier residents were added another group of people who emerged as early conservationists. These were the professionals: lawyers, early high-tech workers, and university personnel who came to town to work in the university and government industries. Their professional training and higher education had exposed them to ideas about the


natural environment and cities, and how the two could interact to produce a more livable urban environment. Because of their education, they understood early warnings about environmental degradation. They were the vanguard warning of environmental problems caused by growth. Beverly Sheffield, who helped Janet put the Shoal Creek trail together, was the earliest of the professionals. Trained as a parks administrator, his professionalization focused on the importance of parks in the city. Sheffield came to the city in 1946, serving as Parks Director until 1973. He was a strong advocate for parks from the beginning, and spent his three decades as Parks Director helping to shape the parks system that exists today. He was also an early proponent of the greenbelts idea. The importance of open space and recreation that so many early conservationists worked for shines through in the professional assumptions Sheffield obtained from his philosophy and his training: “[T]here’s certain things basically man needs. Man needs space. Man needs a place for action. A kid has to have action—they’ve got to go out and do something. They’ve got to have a certain amount of success in doing something. And parks are good for people even in a passive way. The person that’s sitting on the park bench watching the ducks in the creek, they’re enjoying the open space. They’re enjoying animal life. They’re enjoying the environment. And I think we all have an interest in that.” Sheffield was instrumental in helping the early conservationists turn many of their ideas into actual projects. He was one of the few bureaucrats in the city at the time that facilitated rather than harmed the effort to preserve and extend public lands. He worked with Janet Fish to build the Shoal Creek greenbelt, and with Lady Bird Johnson to build the Town Lake park and greenbelt. He oversaw the creation of the modern Zilker Park and continued to swim a mile a day in Barton Springs until almost the day he died. Sheffield had a vision of the centrality of open space and parkland in the urban setting, and as the head of the Parks Department, he was able to use his professional training to get these projects done. Other early professionals had been exposed to different ideas about the relationship between humans, the city, and the natural environment from their membership in the professions and their higher levels of education. Many of them were active in the local Sierra Club chapter, which served as an early organization for conservationists. The club had been started by a former Texas land commissioner, and Don Berman, an early high-tech worker, took the helm in the 1960s. Monica Walden, who had a master’s degree in library science, Richard Shannon, an attorney, and other highly educated arrivals made the club an active group in the early efforts to conserve open space and park-


land in Austin. They were also the vanguard of the local environmental movement. At that time, the ideas of ecology and environment and ecosystems were not at all commonly understood concepts. Those were “science” back then, and most people had not been exposed to that kind of science. Walden points out that “Most Sierra Club people had a higher education, because at the time you didn’t get an ‘environmental education’ in school—you picked it up later.” Picking it up required some exposure to scientific ideas, which came mostly in postgraduate education or in the work you did. Ideas of the relationship between humans, cities, and their environment began to come together in a more formal way in this group of people. They began to press for more than just the conservation of public land; they began to focus on the actual building of roads and urban infrastructure itself. That was a new approach: The efforts of Dickson and Fish and Sheffield were about creating parks; this was about questioning the plans of the state Highway Department, and even the core assumptions about the function of roads and automobiles. One of the main efforts the Sierra Club led in the late 1960s and 1970s was an attempt to preserve Austin’s creeks and parks from plans to build roads over them. This was a lot harder than building parks; the road-building bureaucracies are extremely powerful in the decisions about where roads and bridges are laid. The club had some success at convincing those departments to reduce the number of bridges it would build over creeks, but in the end it could not stop them all. As originally planned, for example, Highway 360 was going to cross Bull Creek six times. The Sierra Club worked with the city and highway departments to drop the number of bridges, eventually, to three. Bull Creek later became a park that retained a more pristine feel without the extra bridges, but the bridges destroyed any attempt to retain any wilderness feel to it. Another of the city’s creeks, Barton Creek, served as an early site of conflict between conservationists, landowners, and bureaucrats. Barton Creek is arguably the city’s most beautiful creek, carving a deep and sometimes wide canyon that comes into Austin from the southwest. Because of its size, beauty, and setting, it was an obvious choice for preservation. The first effort to preserve the creek began in 1970, and the creek remains in the center of public debate and political action to this day. The idea that Barton Creek could be set aside as a natural area was suggested as early as the 1950s, when Parks Director Sheffield thought about turning it into a parkway with a two-lane country road down it. At that time he thought it could serve as a kind of automotive park—people could drive down it and view it, sort of like the Blue Ridge Parkway in the eastern part


of the United States. The creek lovers of today would be horrified even to hear that kind of suggestion,16 but Sheffield’s idea back then was focused on building accessible park space, not a preserve. In 1970, in accordance with the first Earth Day, a group calling itself Citizens for a Barton Creek Park (CBCP) proposed that the city create a thirteen-mile-long wilderness park along the creek from Zilker Park all the way up the creek to Highway 71. The group, consisting of members of the Sierra Club, the Austin Environmental Council, and members of the university community, circulated a petition of support for the effort. The circular included an open letter to the city council from the CBCP, stressing the benefits of such a park in defining the kind of place Austin could be: In the case of the Barton Creek canyon, the City’s legitimate but mini‑ mal concern for flood and soil protection and pollution control must be paired with an equally vital concern: the preservation of an area of unique natural beauty as a refuge of tranquility and relaxation for the public. There are not—there cannot be—very many cities of the size of Austin around the world that are blessed with such an extraordinary enclave of wilderness so close to the heart of downtown. A free-flowing stream with rapids, with pools that reflect precipitous bluffs, a marvel of variety in colors, textures, and shapes, a place to see flowers rarely seen in a city, to hear bird songs rarely heard by city dwellers—these are assets of inestimable value to the residents of Austin.17

The circular noted that the city would have to buy the land, because public ownership would have to extend several hundred feet beyond the floodplain on either side if the wilderness character of the canyon were to be preserved. The prime goal of the Barton Creek Plan was not to build just another park, it was to preserve a slice of the wild in the urban, and thus retain nature in the urban. The CBCP was the first group to focus public attention on the Barton Creek watershed and give hydraulic information about the effects of development on Barton Springs. The first bumper stickers exclaiming “Save Barton Creek” were issued. In an early sign of the environmentalist-developer fight, the group began with a statement about saving the creek “from land developers who destroy the natural beauty of the creek and its banks and sides to build apartments, houses, and commercial development.” The complaint about developers was not just that they built houses and roads in areas that should


have been left “natural,” but that the taxpayers who did not want that development were forced to subsidize it with urban infrastructure. It was an early form of the complaint that is still at the heart of many arguments made by environmentalists today. The CBCP announcement stressed that “real estate development of areas that should be preserved for their scenic beauty has taken place only because we the taxpayers subsidize such development with sewer lines, highways, and other public services.”18 The petition generated about 400 signatures, impressive for 1970, but the city maintained that the cost was too high, and the parkland was not purchased. However, the idea would not go away, and in 1975 a bond issue approved by the voters provided money to buy the land in Barton Creek all the way up to Highway 71. But the money was not spent, and the city did not begin to buy the land for several years. The staff had other growth-related projects to deal with first; as usual, parks and open space were at the low end of the staff projects. In addition, members of a city council that was decidedly developer friendly knew people who owned land along the creek. The longer the council waited to buy the land, the higher the prices for that land would go, bringing in more profit to their acquaintances when it was sold. By the time the city began land purchases, the prices along the creek had escalated, and the city was able to afford only half the land approved by the bonds (the owners of the land were getting much more than they would have had the city bought it in 1975). The park itself did not actually open until 1985, and the city lost a $60,000 state grant because it chose to close a planned access to the upper greenbelt. The planned access would have been opened in a neighborhood of newer, expensive homes, and the homeowners complained that it would have brought too much traffic and crime to the neighborhood.19 Other attempts to conserve open spaces sprang up around the city as previously green areas were developed. Sometimes they were successful, other times not. When they were successful it was often due to pressure from wealthier residents, leadership by professionals, and the social resources of Old Austinites to retain green space in the city. For example, golf courses were considered open green space at the time. The Lions Municipal Golf Course, situated in the heart of what was then one of Austin’s middle-class neighborhoods, is a prime example of how a course can contribute open space in the city. The course is a full eighteen holes, covering about a square mile of territory. It was built so that on two sides people saw only trees from the street, and on two others large sections of open green. Driving, riding, or walking along the edges of the course, one


experiences the effect of open space that residents wanted: a large swath of green in the middle of a neighborhood. It was also usable space for many of us: Local children rode their bikes on trails through the forested parts, walked through them to school, and snuck onto the green to walk around late at night when they were supposed to be in bed. Playing hide-and-seek from the groundskeepers was probably as much fun for the groundskeepers as for the kids, although the groundskeepers wouldn’t have admitted it. Teenagers took advantage of the woods for other activities; they could be prime make-out spots for those who knew their ways, and the course provided a green haven away from the world of adults when it was needed. Wildlife still flourished all over the course because of its proximity to Lake Austin (which is just across the street), and one could see all manner of bird and mammalian wildlife in the woods when quietly walking through them.20 The land is owned by the University of Texas, but the city held the lease on the land and had built the golf course. In the early 1970s the University of Texas wanted to sell the land upon which the course was built in order to raise money for street extensions in the campus. Virginia Bedinger, who lived near the course and whose husband was a stockbroker, got together with other golfers and organized an effort called Save MUNY.21 These residents wanted the city to retain control of the land so that the green space of the course could be preserved in their neighborhood. Soon after the formation of Save MUNY, a professional named Mary Arnold joined and then led the effort. Arnold was a Plan II graduate of the University of Texas, and had been the Assistant Dean of Women at the university during the 1960s. Perhaps because of her degree in political science and her experience at the university, Arnold’s mind works in terms of detail. Unbelievable amounts of detail. Arnold is able to map out the multiple layers of governmental and institutional domains that intersect to create the growth and environmental issues in Austin. She can quickly produce just about everyone and every institution with any kind of domain over a particular issue, and she knows how all the pieces fit together. Save MUNY was the first time she put these talents to work in groups advocating environmental issues, and thus began her knowledge and mastery of the details of city government and policy. The Save MUNY campaign ended in a victory for the open space concept. The victory came in large part because a reporter for a weekly paper got Ed Clark, a newly appointed university regent and Old Austinite, to say that he did not favor the sale because green space was important for the city. Due to the pressure from the Save MUNY campaign and that news article, Clark


and fellow regents Allan Shivers and Frank Erwin got together in a secret meeting with council members Lowell Lebermann, Bob Binder, and Mayor Roy Butler. The group made a deal in which the city would pay for the street extensions on campus, but would keep the lease on MUNY for another thirteen years. In the 1980s the city renegotiated the lease for thirty years in exchange for land overlooking Town Lake, and allowed UT to lease out a tract to apartment builders, who converted some old student housing into highrent apartments. The campaign was one of the early successes of conservationists to retaining green space in the city, but it was about more than just a golf course. According to Arnold, the Save MUNY campaign was an attempt symbolic of the effort to make Austin into a special kind of city. She recalls that the driving concern of the Save MUNY effort was that “[u]rban natural areas were important to the fabric of urban life. Green space has always been part of Austin, and in the 1970s we had to look back and reaffirm these things about Austin that we wanted to preserve. Green space was one of the things we wanted to preserve.” Although the formerly pristine hills above the south side of the lake now sport massive villas for the rich, the golf course continues to provide a huge swath of green on the edge of Tarrytown. Just as important for Austin, the Save MUNY campaign was the springboard for Arnold’s four-decades-long tenure as a leader in the movement to preserve some of Austin’s open spaces and natural environment, a role she continues to fill today. Another project that took time to create began as an open space concept in the early 1970s. When West Lake Hills was writing its own master plan, it included Loop 360, and the Audubon Society noted at the time that an area of West Lake Hills known as Wild Basin would probably be built out as part of that suburb. Several people who were part of an early environmental group called Now or Never, under the leadership of Janet Poage, wanted to create a wilderness preserve in the Hill Country, a preserve that would conserve the natural character of the land. Russell Fish helped out in the early stages. The Wild Basin supporters wanted a preserve where the (then) new ideas about ecology could be applied by providing a laboratory of conservation and education that would also function as an open space preserve. Preserving the natural feel of some Hill Country land in the midst of growth was cast as a way to “preserve a representative portion of the Edwards Plateau . . . and to study the effects of urbanization upon wildlife, soils, and vegetation.”22 They tried several funding sources over time, each of which dried up, but eventually got the county to obtain a federal matching grant to support the money they raised on their own. Today the 277-acre Wild Basin Preserve, located in


the midst of suburban housing in the hills just west of Austin, serves as an educational center and day hiking area with three miles of trails that wind through representative features of the Hill Country, and hosts a variety of nature education events.23 The Shoal Creek Hike and Bike Trail, the Barton Creek greenbelt, MUNY, and the Wild Basin Preserve all stand today as some of the open spaces and parkland that defined the concern for conservation of open space in the city for Austinites in the 1960s and 1970s. They are the physical legacies of the time period that began to shape the landscape that would so define Austin’s environmental meaning. But along with this physical legacy, the conservationists’ efforts helped create a lasting social legacy. It was the conservationists who really began to define the city in relation to its natural environment, and whose efforts dovetailed so well with the emerging environmental movement in the United States. The actions of the conservationists began the discourse of Austin that defines the city in terms of its natural environment, and that discourse began to manifest itself in the formation of later groups that we now call environmental groups. The Social Legacy: The First Environmental Groups Form These early conservationists and professionals became the leaders in the effort to conserve Austin’s open spaces, but they could not have created an Environmental City on their own. It was the mass of people who provided so much of the energy for that. There was a substantial feeling among many Austinites in the 1960s and 1970s that urban growth was ruining the environment they lived in and destroying the features that defined the town, the creeks and hills among them. Many of the people who lived in the central neighborhoods felt that parts of their neighborhoods were being ruined by growth. Some were taken with the emerging environmental movement. Some mainly wanted to preserve as much green space as possible in the city as a general way to retain the feel of Austin. This mass of people furnished the membership of the social, church, and civic groups in town, and filled out the rosters of some of the earliest organizations dedicated to conserving some of Austin’s environment. Conservation was an idea initially promoted by the Old Austinites in the late 1950s through the early 1970s. But as growth accelerated in the 1970s and 1980s, conservation activists began to organize environmental groups on their own and eventually took the reins of the movement in Austin, continuing the earlier work begun by the Old Austinites. In the late 1960s Russell Fish, Bobbie Dickson, and people from the Sierra


Club founded a group whose goal was to protect Austin’s unique environment. Called the Austin Environmental Council (AEC), it was the first attempt to craft an umbrella organization that would organize the efforts of various local groups dedicated to protecting Austin’s environment. Funded largely by Dickson, the AEC became the first in a historic line of such umbrella organizations. The genesis of the AEC was almost accidental. Russell Fish recounts that he “and Bobbie Dickson had been talking to the Planning Commission on some issue that I don’t remember, and after that, as we went around and saw people socially, we would be told by people that they were either right on target, or ‘against development.’ ” Those who were on their side were asked to join the AEC. The AEC was not formed in the “environmentalists vs. developers” discourse that would later become the main political cleavage in Austin. Instead, the AEC represented a break within the social circles of Austin of the time, between those who wanted primarily to see the city grow and those who wanted to preserve the environmental qualities of the city as it grew. The names of the AEC board and advisors read like part of a Who’s Who of Austin at that time. Governor Preston Smith, Chamber President Walter Long, Fred Adams of Adams Extract, Lowell Lebermann, President Peter Flawn of the University of Texas, and several other prominent citizens were on the board initially. The Chamber of Commerce even dedicated a threepage story to the organization in its publication. It was a broad-ranging group of old West Austin money, UT people, and neighborhood residents. Much of the leadership and energy came from UT students and faculty, especially from the architecture school. The number and names of groups that joined is a testament to the concern about Austin’s environment; the second AEC newsletter lists twenty-four civic groups that maintained an official relationship with the AEC by providing liaisons from their groups to the AEC. The groups ranged from garden clubs and historical societies to the local Sierra Club and Audubon Society. The number of subscribers to the AEC newsletter is a mark of public concern for ecological and conservation issues in Austin during the late 1960s and early 1970s; the AEC newsletter reached 30,000 people in 1970—about 10 percent of the total population of Austin at the time. The AEC served as a template for organizing concerns about the environment in Austin. Members of the AEC were learning how to use the bureaucratic planning system to challenge the builders and businesspeople who had traditionally run the Planning Commission. They filed the first lawsuit used


to obtain green space for the city, unsuccessfully bringing suit in district court to get easement rights for a Barton Creek Hike and Bike. The AEC was also a way for conservationists to publicize the relationship between developers, growth, and city financial policy that affected the natural environment. At the time, the city was giving rebate contracts to developers, and the AEC tried to address the contract arrangement as an environmental issue. The rebate contracts were initiated after WWII as a means of inducing housing developments in the city. When developers built housing projects, they had to pay for the water and sewer lines. But the rebate contracts repaid the cost of these lines to the developer, and the money for the rebates came out of the general city budget. So the rebates were seen by many as a means by which current residents paid for new development that they didn’t want. The city was subsidizing development, and many of the new developments were affecting the water quality of the creeks. One AEC plank was the dissolution of these “sweetheart deals to developers.” These rebates were phased out in 1975 as liberal council members Jeff Friedman and Bob Binder, and council aide Dean Rindy, pressed home the ways in which developers were actually turning a big profit from the contracts. Although the refund contracts were eventually terminated, city subsidization of growth in environmentally sensitive areas is an issue that remains front and center in the contest over Austin’s growth today. The city continues to build utilities out to suburban developments, and another kind of rebate to developers appeared a decade later when the city began to annex Municipal Utility Districts (explained in chapter 3). The AEC was the first organized attempt in Austin to create an umbrella group that could coordinate with other social groups whose organizational interests dovetailed with environmental issues. Its actions to preserve the environment in Austin, and its newsletter meant to publicize those issues to the populace, serve as early signs of the emerging discourse of Austin’s environmental meaning. The AEC was the first large-scale organization devoted to promoting environmental protection, because its members believed that conserving open space in Austin retained a particular kind of feel of Austin. Having those spaces defined the city to many people in the AEC, and the people in the AEC were being defined by their actions to conserve those natural spaces. Framing a Sense of Place The AEC and its newsletter serve as a prime example of the emerging discourse of environmental meaning and illustrate how the process of framing is


Figure 2.1. Austin Environmental Council Newsletter Cartoon.

part of that discourse. The newsletter was a communication device between citizens who were concerned about the need to retain open green space along the creeks and river. The communication was a central part of the emerging discourse of Austin, helping define that discourse through what sociologists call frame articulation, that process by which people create new ways to think about events (such as growth, in this case). The writing in the newsletter was beginning to articulate the preservation of the environment as the defining characteristic of Austin and to think of Austin in terms of a place defined by how it controlled growth or preserved itself in the midst of growth: If we can find the resources within us to cooperate out of a common need, as creatures living within a total environmental system; if we can see past untamed urban growth along these life sustaining bands of green, and restrain out of wisdom and care for the common good, then we Austinites can indeed take part in salvaging Central Texas’s most naturally gifted city.24

The AEC was at heart a conservation movement. Ecology and environmentalism were new words and new ideas, but the people of the AEC had the idea that “natural” or open space that existed in Austin helped define the town by providing a connection to the environment in the midst of city living. A cartoon (figure 2.1) from the newsletter shows this concern about the loss of pristine land and the suburbanization that was occurring around Austin. It shows the concept of retaining nature in town, juxtaposed with the suburban sprawl that was changing the small-town atmosphere of Austin. The fifth panel illustrates the whole idea of retaining open space and nature. The woman sits in a field located inside Austin rather than outside the city, presumably in a park or open space near her neighborhood.


In addition to the concern with saving green space, there was an emerging discussion of the ways city policy favors a few private builders and the costs to all citizens. The newsletter began to talk about the ways that rebate contracts benefited developers, and how the policies of the time actually created unequal taxation and environmental damage. Those were pretty new ideas back then. Figure 2.2 shows the relative weights of the concerns articulated by the AEC as it attempted to “salvage Central Texas’s most naturally gifted city.” The figure shows the main issues that were tracked by the AEC: ecology programs and information, pollution, city policy/ordinances, and other issues.25 By linking these issues together, the AEC was beginning to put the pieces together, to articulate how they were connected and how they influenced the environment in Austin. The block sizes show their relative amount of appearance in the newsletter. Ecology issues were given the greatest weight. Most ecology articles focused on concern for protecting the city creeks from damage brought by growth and the desire to make them into greenbelts. The newsletter also began to discuss the ways in which pollution and city policy were linked. The articles in the newsletter helped articulate the idea that the environment was a defining feature of Austin, and that common action toward conserving that environment was needed. The group contributed to the emerging discourse of Austin by publishing early sentiment and symbolism about the environment, and by showing that thousands of people in Austin had similar ideas about the city and its environment. It was the first umbrella entity to try to organize the efforts of various people and groups whose ideas about Austin included conserving its environment. But the AEC was to be short lived. In 1972 Dickson was taken out of action by a stroke, the Barton Creek Plan was squelched, and the AEC drifted apart. “We fought, bled, and died on the Barton Creek Plan,” says Russell Fish, who moved away from Austin in 1978 without getting to see the

Figure 2.2. Austin Environmental Council Issues. From Austin Environmental Council Newsletter, 1970–1971.


Barton Creek greenbelt established as the wilderness park it is today. But the AEC was not the only group to form in response to concerns about parkland and the environment. “The Environment” Comes to Town: The National Environmental Movement and Local Meanings As the 1970s progressed, the ideas of the conservation approach were giving birth to early environmental science and ideas. The national environmental movement, Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring, and Earth Day 1970 had focused public attention at the national level on the deleterious environmental effects of modern production and urbanization. In Austin, the ideas and concerns of the national environmental movement found a fertile home because of the geology, economy, and demography. Former mayor Frank Cooksey’s quote in the introduction of the book sums it up: “When the [national] environmental movement started, it caught on big here—it had meaning here.” The demographics of Austin were one reason why. There is a positive correlation between occupation and environmental sentiment as well as education and environmental concern.26 The ideas of the national environmental movement found a fertile home in Austin, a city with a relatively large, educated white-collar population. In addition, because of its geography, parks system, and neighborhoods built into the hills and creeks, those ideas had a physical salience for thousands of Austin’s residents. And as the city grew, the creeks, lake, and hills around which Austinites lived were being degraded by development. The national focus on the environment helped give the residents of Austin a template for understanding the changes they saw growth bringing. One of the groups that formed as a result was WE CARE Austin. Based on a coalition in Denver that had begun the idea, WE CARE stood for Women’s Environmental Coalition Alerts you, Relates your efforts, and Enlists your actions. Nancy Bowman, founder of an environmental organization in West Lake Hills called Now or Never, had been to a national Junior League convention in Chicago in 1970 where the WE CARE idea had been promoted. Bowman came home with the idea to form a WE CARE coalition in Austin. She and others enlisted a diverse group of organizations such as church groups, women’s clubs, and the Sierra Club to form the coalition. Bowman wrote that the purpose of WE CARE Austin “Shall be to assume active responsibility in the creation of a quality environment through research, education, and action.”27 Bowman believed that a local WE CARE group could play an important part in Austin because preserving the environment in Austin was part of preserving the kind of place Austin was, a place defined


in part by its natural environment.28 In her agenda for the initial meeting, Bowman wrote that the idea is to bring awareness to people of Austin as to what they have; project ahead to a population of 600,000 in the year 2000. Will there be hillsides covered with trees or will all the hillsides be covered with asphalt? Will lakes be usable for contact sports; or must all that be in chlorinated swimming pools; will we have increase of air pollution witnessed in October like Houston? Will we have amenities like driving down Shoal Creek with trees, or will it all be apartment houses? What do you want?29

The group had a fair number of members, and as with the AEC, most were not what would now be considered “environmentalists.” Indeed, one of the stated goals of the organization was to promote the awareness of, and educate people about, environmental issues. The members were fairly staid middle-class residents of Austin’s neighborhoods, not at all radical or even particularly liberal. For some members, WE CARE Austin was more a social organization than an activist organization. Pledges to the Junior League, for example, had to do a certain amount of community service, and WE CARE Austin projects counted as part of that service. Because the leadership core of WE CARE Austin were also members of the Junior League, the league served as the main organization from which labor for WE CARE Austin projects was drawn. Many pledges seemed to have as much interest in the social status that membership in the Junior League brought as with promoting environmental concerns in Austin. But if the rank and file of WE CARE Austin contained some budding socialites who found “the environment” important as an avenue into Austin society, the leaders of WE CARE Austin were a different story. Nancy Bowman, Jean Mather, Mary Arnold, and a handful of others formed a leadership core and have remained committed activists for environmental and neighborhood issues to the present day. Arnold quickly became one of the main organizers and directors of the organization. The leaders’ concern was with saving green space and other environmental features in the city, and they hoped to have WE CARE serve as an organization that would, in Arnold’s words, “bring the environment into Austin.” The group remained active for many years, but the inherent tension between nascent environmentalists and Junior League socialites became a problem for the coalition as time went on. Coalition member groups sometimes had differing degrees of enthusiasm for environmental causes. When the Austin Independent School District proposed building a new high school


on dedicated parkland on Town Lake, for example, many groups in Austin were vociferously opposed, including WE CARE Austin. Bowman recalls that the Sierra Club, a constituent organization of WE CARE Austin, had “fought tooth and nail against the building of the new Austin High School on dedicated parkland, as they should have—Austin High School should not be on dedicated parkland.” But the Sierra Club was at the time considered by many to be a pushy or radical group, and its tactics made “environmentalist” a controversial name. Because of the radical label, WE CARE’s association with the issue became a problem for some of the socialites in the group. So WE CARE Austin decided to attempt more noncontroversial projects. Unfortunately for WE CARE Austin, even those projects they hoped would be more neutral could quickly become controversial, because the desire to keep the environment in Austin conflicted with ideas about commerce and growth in Austin. One such project was the Congress Avenue Beautification Program. As Austin grew, Congress Avenue, which had been the main street of town since it was built, was cluttered with buildings and traffic. Pedestrian walkways had become extremely limited. In many people’s minds, the street was becoming unsightly, and it was definitely not representative of a beautiful city. So WE CARE began a beautification program in hopes of returning pedestrian access and greenery to the street. The program was chosen in hopes of remaining noncontroversial. But that program “turned out to be controversial itself,” Bowman recalls, laughing, “because we were taking away some parking spaces and decreasing the width of the street to put in trees and gazebos.”30 Because bringing the environment into the city involved decreasing automobile access, it was controversial. But the campaign was a success; Congress Avenue now has wide pedestrian walkways, and the gazebos installed along it served as the design for the ones that the bus company would later put all over town. In bringing the environment to Austin, WE CARE Austin found itself in a unique position: Middle-class women and neighborhood residents may have wanted a beautiful environment in Austin, but those sentiments often conflicted with the interests of the businessmen to whom many were married, or for whom many worked. WE CARE Austin conservationists and WE CARE Austin Junior Leaguers sometimes found themselves on opposite sides of these issues because of the different social circles they ran in; businesspeople and many others wanted a Congress Avenue dedicated to automobile traffic. They did not want the lanes decreased for trees and pedestrians. “The Junior League pretty much dropped out because these environmental issues got too political,” Bowman says, and without that base of workers, the number of projects WE CARE Austin could do dropped dramatically. De-


creased in number, the group remained active until the early 1990s, when it was a member of the Save Our Springs Coalition (see chapter 4). WE CARE Austin was formed in hopes of enlisting a wide spectrum of people into the effort to bring the environment to Austin, but it became a casualty of its time, and a harbinger of the emerging conflicts about growth between social groups in town. Roberta Crenshaw had been accused of being a “little old lady in tennis shoes”; WE CARE was accused of being a whole bunch of “little old ladies in tennis shoes.” Environmental concerns conflicted with the desires of businesspeople and the Growth Machine that was emerging. It was an early example of the emerging conflict that would be defined by the “environmentalists vs. developers” theme in the following decade. The Environmental City Takes Shape: Landscape Creation in the Midst of Growth The AEC and WE CARE Austin began to promote the idea of conserving the environment as one of the defining characteristics of the meaning of the place. As they promoted this idea, they began to create a discourse of the city that eventually led to the environmental meaning. This discourse was emerging through group action as people put their grievances into words. But just as importantly, it was emerging in the landscaping projects to make open space, parks, and the environment central to the lived experience of Austinites. Two of these successful landscaping projects remain central features of the Environmental City today: the Lake Austin greenbelt and the Creeks Project. Both showed the way toward things people today simply take for granted. The idea of beautifying Town Lake had been around for a while, in the minds of Parks Director Beverly Sheffield, Roberta Crenshaw, and a few others. Crenshaw was always in the forefront of the effort to make Town Lake into a park. She spent lots of her own money and untold hours of her time showing people what the area could look like. She (and her “help”) planted almost 400 trees down at the lake, and even put in a little path at Congress Avenue and Cesar Chavez Street (then called 1st Street) to show what it might look like. In 1972 a group of people with quality of life in mind got together to do something with Town Lake, putting together the Town Lake Beautification Project. Less a project of conservation (as was Wild Basin), it was more along the lines of the Fishes’ idea of greenbelts. But no city entity dedicated any money to the idea. Then Lady Bird Johnson came back to town. Lady Bird had just finished running a program of beautification in Washington, D.C., had been pro-


moting beautification projects for cities across the country, and was ready to continue the idea in Austin. Sheffield remembers that once she was back in Austin, Lady Bird contacted him and said, “Beverly, come over and let’s have a social visit and let’s talk about what you’re going to do on Town Lake.” So I told her, we got to get the mayor and city manager’s attention. She said, “All right, you get them over here at 4 o’clock and we’ll have cocktails . . .” and so I went back to talk to the city manager, and he was so . . . put out with me, a little ol’ head of the Parks and Recreation Department, me talking to Lady Bird Johnson and coming back and issuing him an invitation, he almost fired me! [laughing] Well, finally we did talk to the mayor . . . [but] for a while there was deep resistance, deep resistance, because the electric company owned a lot of [the land, and many of the] staff and the council, well, they didn’t like Bobbie Dickson.

Two West Austinites, Les Gage and Hallie Burns, took on the task of organizing the project. Gage was a former council member and first Chair of the Environmental Board who brought younger liberals into the program; Burns was the wife of the president of Citibank who was able to recruit from the west side Junior League types. Although he and Burns did most of the work, Gage gives credit to Lady Bird as the one who was able to get the project moving. It was she who got Mayor Roy Butler’s attention. “Butler was one of these guys that was very committed to the Johnsons,” recalls Gage. “So when Mrs. Johnson went to him and said, ‘Roy, I think this is something we ought to do,’ he did it. It wasn’t that Roy was committed to any great thing, it was just that he thought, ‘Hell, this is something I ought to take.’ ” One of the things that helped the project along so much was Lady Bird’s knowledge of the resources available from the federal government. Based on her knowledge and contacts with federal agencies, the committee was able to get some grants to pay for the project, because it was hard to raise enough money in town. The federal grants garnered by Lady Bird actually paid for most of the trail system and sprinkler system. The committee raised a much smaller sum, enough money for trees and amenities. They had a fund-raising event at the Johnson Ranch outside Austin and asked an unknown singer named Willie Nelson to play. “Someone said he was really good, and he would do it for our price, which was free!” Gage remembers. The efforts of the committee have paid off handsomely. The original plan has now been implemented, with a hike-and-bike trail running almost continuously around Town Lake. Almost all of the land along the lake is now dedicated parkland, and years later Roberta Crenshaw convinced the High-


way Department to build a footbridge under the MoPac Bridge. The footbridge links both sides of the lake Hike and Bike, forming a continuous footand-bike trail that the Fishes had proposed a decade earlier. That bridge has been named for Crenshaw, who did so much to show how the lake could be used as a park, and the lake was recently renamed Lady Bird Johnson Lake. Those who did the naming got it backward, though. Lady Bird herself once said that “Bobbie is the engineer on the train to save Town Lake, and . . . I am just a passenger.”31 Lady Bird was being too modest; she was a very important passenger, and the Town Lake greenbelt might not exist today without her having been on the train (it was her fund-raising ability that earned most of the money for it). But if Town Lake needed renaming at all, it should have been renamed Roberta Crenshaw Lake. As with so much of the parks system in Austin, it was Crenshaw who pushed for it, showed how it could look, and did so much of the hard work to promote the idea and get it all started. Hundreds of thousands of people now walk, run, swim, and play under the trees she planted with her own money and hands.32 Austin’s parks landscape, and especially the greenbelt all along the lake, was shaped by Crenshaw more than any of the other early conservationists. She badgered and bothered and made people furious, and when they wouldn’t build parks, she just did it on her own to show them it could be done. Until the day she died, she was working to retain city-owned land along the lake for parkland, including opposing a deal by the city to sell a parcel of city-owned land now called the Lumberman’s tract. It would not have detracted from Lady Bird’s role at all to name the lake in Crenshaw’s honor—it was her vision that got it all started.33 Regardless of the name, the parks and greenbelts that surround the lake stand today as the mainstay of Austin’s premier downtown parks system. But even though both women and numerous other committee members worked hard to establish the trail around the lake, it did not get built overnight. In fact, it almost did not. There were ten more years of fighting with business groups that wanted to use that public land for their own private projects. Chapter 3 describes that battle and what it took to turn the vision into a reality—a hard-fought political battle by the next generation of advocates for Austin’s parks and environment. Many others in town were also interested in putting together a city that was defined by its open spaces. About the time that the Lake Project was being put together, the United States Bicentennial was being planned. As part of that national celebration, cities were encouraged to make up “Gifts to the Nation,” and some federal funding was available to create these gifts. Austin’s gift was the Creeks Project. Several people got together under the


name Horizons ’76 Committee, including architects, UT people, the ubiquitous Mary Arnold, and several West Austin residents. University professor Sinclair Black was directing some funding from an NEA grant, and this was used in part to pay for the project. Led by Black and west side resident Maline McCalla, the group built upon the 1958 development plan, and followed the template of the Fishes’ Shoal Creek Hike and Bike to propose a system of greenbelts along all the creeks that feed into the Colorado River in Austin. They took their plan on a road show through town, highlighting it to civic groups, schools, and the university. Linked to the Town Lake Plan and the Austin Tomorrow Plan (described in the next chapter), the Creeks Project sought to create a multimodal transportation and parks system that would help define Austin as a greenbelt city: The idea of a greenbelt city has captured the imagination of Austinites from the city’s founding . . . The plan, as proposed, includes pedestrian and bicycle trails along creek greenbelts, linking all areas of the city: and promotes cultural, recreational and commercial development while restoring or preserving natural areas and buildings that are historically or aesthetically valuable.34

The project was meant to be a logical extension of ideas laid out in the earlier master plans, and spells out in detail the dominant themes that marked concerns with open space, neighborhood identity, directed growth, and the idea of Austin as “a city of greenbelts marked by continuous open space along the 18 creeks of Austin.”35 The Fishes, the AEC, Citizens for a Barton Creek Park, and many other groups had been pushing for just such a system. But the Creeks Project was finally made feasible in the 1970s because of newly acquired Federal Floodplain Insurance (FFI). Parks Director Sheffield had long urged the city to build and define greenbelts as multipurpose entities. He had heard from drainage utility departments in other parts of the country that cities could buy drainage in floodplains and leave the land as parks. The FFI program was one of a series of federal programs that addressed environmental damage within cities. The program gives individual property owners along floodplains the ability to buy federal flood insurance if their city has established regulations for setbacks along the creeks in the floodplain. The greater the setbacks prescribed by city ordinance, the lower the rates landowners are charged. The city itself does not buy the insurance; rather, the city’s residents benefit from the insurance if the city has setback requirements. By this time, flooding along Shoal Creek was beginning to show Austinites the problems of urbanized floodplains. Shoal Creek has a small water-


shed, and it was quickly becoming completely urbanized. As more and more houses and streets and parking lots were built in its watershed, storm water in the floodplain was funneled straight into the creek, flooding out homes and businesses along it. The flooding, along with prodding from Sheffield and the AEC, convinced the council to pass a setback ordinance that allowed the city to be part of the plan. Although the Floodplains Ordinance was beneficial to individual landowners along the creeks, as well as to the city in general, its passage was fought vigorously by developers and the Chamber of Commerce, who saw in it an attempt to limit the ability of builders to place structures wherever they wanted (even in places that would flood). But the long-term benefit has been obvious as the ordinance has kept new buildings in the creek floodplains farther away from the creeks themselves, creating more open space around them. The Creeks Project, along with the setbacks defined by the Floodplains Ordinance, allowed the creation of the greenbelt system in Austin by building in green buffer zones between creeks and buildings. Between the Hike and Bikes, Town Lake Beautification, and the Creeks Project, the creeks and river in Austin were being made into a built form that emphasized open space and use of the natural landforms of the city for pleasure. The Core City map (map 2.3, page 48) is from the Creeks Project. It shows how the creeks defined sections of the city and noted that if all the creeks were made into greenbelts, most of Austin would be within a fiveminute walk of parkland, which was the goal of the 1921 Master Plan. The reasons for doing the projects are indicative of people’s sentiments about their city. The Creeks Project in particular envisioned the creeks as defining aspects of Austin: Austinites have long held the dream of protecting and preserving numerous creeks . . . this site on the Colorado was recognized as suitable for the Texas Capitol, and the original mile square city was laid out between Shoal and Waller creeks . . . Later planners recognized the valuable legacy left to Austin by its founding fathers, and . . . an early encyclopedia described Austin as a “greenbelt city.”36

Because of this sentiment, by the end of the 1970s the parks, greenbelts, and preserves in Austin were in the process of being built into the city as one of its defining characteristics. Creating these projects was something that would make Austin a different kind of city, a different kind of place. A social landscape was being defined as well as a physical landscape. The groups that were forming to build parks and greenbelts were also trying to influence city policy to make it more environmentally friendly. That was even harder than


getting the parks and greenbelts and preserves built; it became a major point of contention that would shape the discourse of Austin over the next twenty years. To understand how that happened, we have to understand something about the local government and its city bureaucracy and why they became a part of the action as the environmental meaning arose. It is to these institutions that we now turn.

Chapter 3

Institutionalizing Environmental Concerns City Government and City Politics

The early movement to preserve Austin’s environment was organized around building a system of parks and preserves that would retain some of the natural state of the hills, creeks, and river that made up the geography of Austin. The system of parks that had already been built, the Town Lake and Creeks Projects, Janet Fish’s Hike and Bike, and preserves in the Hill Country all showed people what could kind of place Austin could be. But as the city continued to grow, the effects of development were becoming noticeable in the urban runoff, pollution, and degradation of the creeks and lakes. In 1961 the drainage of poisons from a chemical plant killed all the fish in Town Lake and for 200 miles downstream, illustrating in striking detail how urban activity could destroy water bodies. By the late 1960s the condition of Town Lake was so bad that people were told not to swim in it. Trash clogged the creeks, and urban runoff was a noticeable problem described in newspaper editorials. All of these problems showed people what kind of place Austin was actually becoming. The environmental damages caused by rapid growth in the late 1960s– 1970s were one of the main reasons that people seriously began to question the growth ideology. There were many people who wanted to stop growth completely. But far more were looking for ways to preserve what they liked about Austin as it grew. The negative effects of growth were being talked about within a combination of student activism, liberalism that decried the good ol’ boy network, and increasing neighborhood and environmental activism. Some of these people were trying to write city development codes and use the city administration to define the environment as one more thing to think about when developing an area. These people tended toward a guided-growth philosophy and thought that creating rules for development would help alle-


viate environmental destruction. Others began to enter the political arena in order to try to take control of the city government away from the good ol’ boy network they felt was responsible for the problems growth caused. These were the political liberals, and they were beginning to question the notion that growth in and of itself was a good thing. They began to talk about the ways in which growth was helping a few people get rich, but not helping the majority of people. It was all part of a question of fairness: Who gained from growth, and who lost? Some of these people tended toward a no-growth stance. But most tended toward a restricted-growth philosophy, believing that growth should be planned and channeled in ways that did the least harm to the environment and neighborhoods. All these different people working in different areas overlapped, and together they created both administrative and public definitions of the importance of the environment to the meaning of Austin. The Bureaucratic Forms of Government and the Emerging Environmental Meaning One of the largest obstacles to conservation and parks building in the 1960s and 1970s was the professionalized norms of the city planners, engineers, and department heads. Many had graduated from civil engineering departments that had taught them how to build streets and infrastructure in grid patterns that would foster automobile travel. The planning philosophy they had learned was rooted in instrumentalism, a philosophy that resulted in a focus on efficiency as measured in terms of time and money instead of equity and intangible considerations. Their professional focus was on rational bureaucratic development, which planned and built roads and sewers by expected volumes of traffic and waste facilities. Likewise, highway officials were trained to think in terms of where to place highways; they were not trained to think about the effects of highways on parts of the city. The philosophy of planners and engineers saw streams as obstacles to be crossed or covered, saw land in terms of its market and utilitarian values, and judged the effect their plans had on people’s daily lives in terms of ease of movement by automobile. It was planning to build over the environment, not conservation or development into or along with the environment.1 In addition, planning departments, as bureaucracies, operate under the bureaucratic ideals of rationality and efficiency. They are engaged in “Planning the City Practical,” as Foglesong calls it, emphasizing the laying of streets, both to the suburbs that the planners assumed were there to be served, and within the city as planners adapted roads to the “flow of traffic and the nature

Institutionalizing Environmental Concerns 73

of the city’s activities.”2 These instrumental ideals lead to short-term solutions that seem to be cheap and quick, such as laying pipes in creek beds, or making concrete abutments to channel creeks. In the long run, these kinds of engineering devices that plan against the normal flow of water have proved to be more costly than designing with the normal flow of water.3 But this recognition has only recently become obvious to cities across the nation, and in the 1960s and 1970s, Austin followed the dominant planning and engineering paradigms.4 The city councils rarely included parks as a high priority. The Parks Department has always been the bastard child of the city administration, and it typically receives very little money as a ratio of city budget to actual amount of parkland. One of the things that early conservationists found most frustrating was this slight. In the early days of the conservation effort, the Parks Department was subsumed as part of the Public Works Department. As part of the Public Works Department, the parks were defined as something to “fix,” like broken sewers. Parks could be used as a financial asset by the Public Works Department by transferring money from parks to public works of other sorts. Crenshaw found this one of the greatest obstacles to creating and maintaining parks: “If we needed sand in our little ball park, they would come and charge us to fix it, and they always managed to do it on the weekends, and charge us overtime!” To address these problems, some people decided to try to change the administrative rules, to put in place routines that forced the city staff to consider environmental safeguards as part of the development process. Once again, it was an Old Austinite and a couple of professionals who led the way. Holding the Line: Waiting for an Environmental Constituency One of the Old Austinites who saw the need to make the city bureaucracy more responsive to conservation efforts was Lowell Lebermann. Lebermann’s family owned land and businesses in town, and he grew up a moneyed child of that family. But something happened to Lebermann that did not happen to other wealthy Austin children. An unfortunate accident in his youth left him partially blind (he later became fully blind). So his parents hired a tutor, and Lebermann spent a lot of time reading about and discussing public affairs and philosophies of citizenship with his tutor. As the national environmental movement got going in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Lebermann became interested in the environment, educating himself about the ways natural ecosystems interacted with city growth. He was active in many social organizations and served as student body president while at the University of


Texas. Thus was citizen Lebermann philosophically primed to act when he was elected Councilman Lebermann in 1971. Lebermann took the honor of being publicly called “the environmental councilman” by Mayor Roy Butler, but he recalls that when he got on the council, he did not have a grand design for environmental protection. Conservation ideas were just beginning to find their way into the city administration, and Lebermann was bounded by the status quo of the time as he tried to convince bureaucrats and growth advocates like Butler that something had to be done about the environment. Russell Fish and many others in the Austin Environmental Council found him wanting as a conservationist; he “was supposed to be our environmental spokesman on the city council, but he had to play both sides” of the growth-conservation divide. What Lebermann did have was a general sense that if Austin’s environment was going to survive the city’s growth, there had to be some sort of constituency in the public sphere, an understanding among Austinites that the environment actually was in danger of degradation from urban growth. To a large degree, this constituency needed to be educated about environmental problems, which early conservationists and the Austin Environmental Council were doing. But growth was increasing, and the conservationists needed time that was rapidly running out. Although many Austinites were concerned about the environment in their town, there were also those who were not. Some of the wealthy West Austinites with business and political ties to the council were opposed to any kind of government regulation. Many of these people did not experience the degradation of creeks and the river because they did not use them for their own recreation. Lebermann notes that instead of using their neighborhood creeks or river, they drove out of town to private, undeveloped land on the weekends. They did not have to think about preserving Austin’s natural environment because they owned their own “nature” outside town. So Lebermann, along with other conservationists, began thinking about how to use the structure of the city government itself as a tool to play for time while the hoped-for constituency developed. The base of the constituency was already there in people’s concern for the area creeks, but it had little voice in city government. A controversy over Bull Creek brought the problem to a head and helped start the process of changing the administrative machinery of urban growth. One of the biggest creeks in the northwestern hills is Bull Creek. In the early 1970s, the Water and Wastewater Department was making plans for a sewer line to go in the creek to accommodate development in its area. The Sierra Club and AEC were already jockeying with the city to keep sewer lines


out of creeks, and the plan to put a line in Bull Creek caused intense controversy between conservationists and Water and Wastewater Department staff. Conservationists did not want the sewer lines to ruin the character of the creek (which later became a greenbelt). They didn’t want the creek torn up, or sewer seepage to ruin it for walking or swimming. But staff were doing their job by laying the pipe, and at that time cities laid pipe in creek beds because the beds were the lowest part of the topography. Conservationists took their complaints to the city council, moving the controversy to the political level. But the city council did not establish a policy on how or where to lay pipe; the staff did. To deal with this fundamental structural problem, Lebermann and head planner Dick Lillie, with some vocal help from the AEC and the Sierra Club, convinced the new city council to create an Office of Environmental Resources Management. The office was initially conceived as an entity to oversee city activities. Oversight of private development came later. Lebermann saw that there was a need for a bureaucratic entity within the zoning process that would “be a filter to the zoning folks to take a look specifically at the environmental impacts of development projects.” In addition to the office, a citizens’ board was created to oversee environmental impacts of development. During this time a series of citizens’ boards were being put in place in the planning process. City council members appointed the board members from the general citizenry, which allowed input from non-staff into the process. Because of the Bull Creek flap, a citizens’ Environmental Board was added to the process. For Lebermann and other conservationists, the board and the office were one step in a process that Lebermann describes as a way to play catch, to begin to look at what was happening, to shape regulations and so forth, to contemplate the problem of [environmental] degradation. And begin an assessment of what we have here [in Austin]. So it focused the attention . . . until we could eventually develop a constituency for these matters to pass tougher legislation.

The controversy over Bull Creek thus led to an official standing for environmental issues in the development process. Les Gage was appointed by Lebermann to chair the new Environmental Board. One of the first actions Gage undertook as chair of the board was a comprehensive review of the city’s road-building plan. Gage began to ask how roads and bridges would impact the creeks and hills, a question that had not


been asked by staff in the past. Both Gage and Lebermann believe that at the time, the biggest problem for the environment was getting the city bureaucracies themselves to add environmental impact as a component of their planning. Gage notes that “at that time no one in the city thought about, ‘what’s going to happen if I pour concrete, or build an interchange?’ Nobody even thought about what happens with runoff, that sort of thing.” With the creation of the Environmental Board and office, the city staff would have to think about the environmental impacts of its actions. It was a big change from past ways of doing things, and a boon to conservationists’ efforts. Now they needed a good director for the Office of Environmental Resources Management. One of the applicants they got was Stuart Henry. He had worked with the City of Houston Health Department, starting their Air Pollution Control Program. Henry was a member of the Sierra Club in Houston and thus was known by Don Berman, who headed the Austin chapter. Berman told Russell Fish and Roberta Crenshaw about Henry, and the three of them convinced Lynn Andrews, the city manager, to hire him. What the city got in Henry was more than it bargained for. Henry’s concern for the environment and his intentions for the environmental office got him on the opposite side of Mayor Roy Butler and incoming City Manager Dan Davidson. That duo quickly emerged as a strong pro-growth force that tried to inhibit the environmental reforms that conservationists were seeking to implement. Another Arena of Social Conflict: The Strong Manager Form of Government The relationship between the city staff and the city council of Austin is structured by the strong manager form of government. The philosophical basis of this form of government is that the council issues broad goals and directives to the city manager, who then fulfills these broad goals by instituting specific policies. The city staff are the ones who write and direct the specific plans. The council does not always approve the specifics of the policies. Ideally, this keeps unscrupulous council members from exercising too much power or control. But at the same time, it creates a bureaucratic fiefdom in which the city manager has more control over the shape of the city than does the city council. City staff, for their part, are dependent for their jobs on the city manager, who hires them and oversees them, rather than on the council. This helps ensure a great deal of loyalty to the city manager and the manager’s interests rather than to the broad goals the council sets. It also gives the city manager


power to restrict the amount and kinds of information that the council gets from the staff. In Austin, the staff are not allowed to talk to the council. The council has to ask the city manager for information, and the manager then chooses which staff members will give the information and what kind of information will be given. This gives a huge gatekeeping advantage to the manager. Austin’s strong manager form of government caused plenty of headaches for early conservationists. Prior to 1974, Lebermann, Henry, and some others had pushed for an ordinance regulating usage of the central city creeks. That attempt had not gone very far because, in large part, the city staff was not inclined to give much thought to protecting the natural environment. The Creeks and Lake ordinances were part of Lebermann’s desire to hold the line on environmental degradation with city rules. They were making slow if any progress with City Manager Dan Davidson and the rest of the staff, who had been uninterested until 1974. That changed when a local developer began to bulldoze Harpers Creek in South Austin. This apparently infuriated thenmayor Roy Butler because, according to Henry, the developer was “a real asshole that pissed off a bunch of power boys in town. Butler and the power boys were mad because it showed that you could misuse the system, and the power boys didn’t want it known that present laws allowed anyone to do anything with the creeks.” So Henry and the Environmental Resources Management office drew up what would become the Creeks Ordinance. The ordinance was designed to protect the creeks from damage caused by the building of new developments in the suburbs. At the time this was a rather new idea in city planning, and when it was written, the ordinance’s restrictions applied only to private development, not to city departments. Nor did the ordinance apply to the present inner-city creeks, which were mostly developed already. Its specifications were very general, and new developments needed only to show that they made “allowances” for storm water runoff. But it also included a new idea that “the proposed development preserves the natural and traditional character of the land and waterway to the greatest extent feasible.”5 That would be a point of contention on every development project: What was the natural and traditional character of the land? Who would say? How would you have to preserve it? Private developers were not going to be pleased. Because the ordinance applied only to private development, it looked to the conservationists like an ideological smokescreen behind which Davidson and Butler could hide. They could publicly take credit for passing the ordinance, yet continue to lay infrastructure with no regard to imposing upon


themselves the rules they imposed upon private development. “They were willing to make developers look at what they were doing, but not themselves!” exclaims Henry, still angry about the deception after thirty years. “It was okay to talk about developers screwing up things, but not the city! Dan Davidson told me not to talk about that.” The relationship between the Butler-Davidson duo and developers posed yet another problem. There were two groups of developers in town at the time. The older group—Walter Carrington, who had built a subdivision named Travis Country, Nash Phillips, Clyde Copus, Bill Milburn—all had made their fortune building suburban tract housing. They were quite happy with the status quo. But there was a nascent recognition on the part of some younger developers that development could be done in a way that took the environment into consideration, at least to a degree. Unhappily, these developers would often run into the requirements of the Planning Department that were, in the opinion of Henry and Gage, backward. Henry remembers that Gary Bradley and Sid Jagger, two of the younger developers, were interested in working with the Environmental Board to create development projects that were more environmentally friendly. Bradley tried to do some innovative things at his Rob Roy development, but the Planning Department insisted that he build gutters that did not really need to be there, which soured him on the whole process.6 The old-guard developers were opposed to changes in planning regulations because their projects were already planned in accordance with existing regulations.7 And the old guard had plenty of contacts in the Planning Department and on the city council. Newer ideas by people like Bradley and Jagger, who were more willing to work with the Environmental Board, were opposed not only by city staff but also by older developers. The old guard had another ally in the city staff: City Manager Dan Davidson. Davidson had been an assistant manager under Lynn Andrews, a person never known to harbor any concern for the environment. Henry believed that “Davidson was in Clyde Copus’s [a large house builder] pockets.” Davidson, for his part, believed that the new environmental ordinances hurt the tract home builders because the ordinances imposed a greater cost to the builder, which increased the cost of the house to the buyer.8 Davidson’s economic assumption was that these costs would be a disincentive for the development of tract homes being built by the old guard. As it turns out, there was no disincentive. Tract homes were built throughout the 1980s and 1990s; the cost was passed along to the buyer, but the builder retained the same level of profit and thus kept building. Indeed, because of overall growth, housing prices—and profits—increased substantially. But the association between


Davidson and the old guard remained a sticking point that indirectly led to a strange electoral outcome when some of the newer developers allied with liberal challengers in the 1975 election to defeat candidates backed by the old guard (described below).9 The attempt to institute environmental protection through the planning process created mixed results. At the time, the office and the board worked less well than conservationists had hoped because the council-manager form of government functioned to retain old ways of doing things. As the first director of the Environmental Resources Management office, Henry had trouble instigating real reforms even when some younger developers were willing because of the relationship between older developers, Butler, and Davidson. The office and board began to put environmental impacts of urbanization into the process, but it took a while before the effect was felt. Even the first Creeks Ordinance was less effective because the city itself was not bound by the ordinance, so it could continue to lay infrastructure in harmful ways. If they did not work as well as the conservationists had wanted at the time, they have had enduring impacts on Austin’s environmental efforts. Some of their benefits were not obvious at the time, but have had long-lasting payouts. With the institution of the citizens’ boards, an unofficial break in the wall between city staff and city council was created. Citizens on the board are able to find out about and discuss specific plans for city programs and private development in the pipeline. Members of the boards are then able to informally relay such information to council members who appointed them, or to citizens’ groups advocating for environmental protection. The Environmental Board thus became a way for information to get out of the process, to council members and other citizens who would otherwise not be informed of details the city manager chooses not to reveal. The board today is one of the main ways citizens and council members find out about development projects that are in the pipeline. It played an important role in the 1980s battles over growth and development in Austin, and was central to the 1991 SOS issue (described in chapter 5). At the time, though, the board was just one more outcome of the tension among conservationists, developers, staff, and city manager. This tension was created, to an extent, by intergenerational differences. By today’s standards the younger developers would not be considered especially environmentally friendly, but at the time even thinking about laying gutters in different ways was a step forward. And although older planners generally hindered environmental considerations because of their professional socialization, some newer


planners making their way up the chain of command were more interested in environmental issues as planning issues. One was Dick Lillie. Lillie had a big idea that had a profound influence on the design, politics, and symbolism of Austin. Creating a Planning Constituency: Austin Tomorrow Lillie had been the one who took the 1958 Master Plan and used it as a template to draft the 1961 plan. He knew the process, and his concern was that master plans are drafted by consultants or staff, with no input from the citizenry, and are then given to the Planning Commission and council for adoption. The citizenry finds out about them as the last step. Seeing the conflicts in Austin brought by urban growth, Lillie wanted to draft a plan in reverse order, with citizen input as the first step. He discussed the idea with Mayor Butler, Planning Commission Chair Bill Milstead, and City Manager Dan Davidson. All were in agreement with the concept, and Lillie began to implement his idea, using money from a federal grant set up to help cities do just that. The grant required cities to include citizen input in the exercise, which was just what Lillie wanted to do. Lillie’s main purpose in this exercise was very similar to what Lebermann was trying to do with an environmental constituency. Lillie wanted to develop a constituency that understood how growth operated and what the city planning mechanism could do to influence growth. He wanted to develop the program as an educational device: to educate the community on the impact of growth and everything that growth, land use, transportation, schools, environment, all those things that growth impacts. And my purpose in doing that was to develop a constituency in favor of community planning. I wanted to build a program that would allow the exchange of information about growth [between citizens] and city government, . . . What should they be doing as citizens—what are your responsibilities as citizens— to be informed, to vote, to support Capital Improvement Projects and bond issues. And to do that you have to know what’s going on. And without this program, this outreach program, that was not happening. My perception was that if you don’t have this outreach, by the time it comes to action to support bond issues, annexation, environment, all sorts of actions, you’ve got to have a constituency out there that has knowledge of what’s going on.10

Lillie’s program involved a massive outreach effort to get the citizenry involved in the process. In 1975 he set up a Goals Assembly whose members


Figure 3.1. Themes of Concern in the Austin Tomorrow Goals Process.

were demographically representative of the city’s population.11 The plan divided the city into sectors, from which the Planning Department contacted church groups, citizens’ groups, anyone who might be interested in participating. They further subdivided the sectors into neighborhoods and invited participation from representatives of each. Representatives from groups in each sector then held meetings with the staff and told them of their concerns about the effects of growth, ranked those concerns in order, and gave possible solutions to them. By the end of this part of the program, 3,600 people had participated as representative members of various groups in the city. Their efforts were published as the Goals Book, which was adopted by both the outgoing and incoming councils that year. Because it contained a fairly representative sample of the citizenry, the Goals process is a good place to get a sense of which growth-related issues people were concerned about as their city grew. There are ten City-Wide Goals listed in the Goals Book, each with a number of general policy suggestions listed to meet that goal. Each goal and its suggested policies were put together by separate committees, yet there are general concerns that repeat themselves throughout each section. These recurrent themes are illustrated in figure 3.1, which shows the relative importance of each. The greatest concerns of Austinites who participated in the Goals process were to increase the efficiency and coordination of planning and to maintain and protect the parks and environment in Austin. Concern for the environment was beginning to shape the conflict over growth in Austin, and the recommendations of the Goals Assembly reflect the value placed on the


environment. The language of the Goals report shows how the concern for the environment was entering the discourse about Austin. When the Goals were written into the comprehensive plan, the environment was listed as a defining part of the city. The report begins with a statement of the uniqueness of Austin socially and geographically, succinctly stating the feeling of many Austinites of the time: Each city possesses a spirit of its own—a reflection of the collective attitudes and aspirations of its citizens. The history of Austin shows that people here usually viewed their town on the Colorado River as special and distinct, a center of government, education, and community in a splendid environmental setting. The outstanding beauty of the capital city is lauded by proud Texans everywhere, and many have chosen its free atmosphere and quieter pace over the competing features of large centers of finance and industry.12

That distinctiveness and spirit were based in large part on the environment and geography of the area. The first goal of the plan is to “assure that the development of the urban environment is compatible with the unique natural and constructed features of the Austin area.”13 The innovative Austin Tomorrow Program described in specific detail what kind of place Austinites wanted to build, and what environmental features they wanted to protect, change, and create in the midst of a growing city. The environmental committee developed the solution of guiding or channeling growth into areas that were less environmentally sensitive. Dividing the city into five areas, the Goals report suggested funneling growth into the core city and along a north-south axis that roughly followed I-35 as it ran south to San Antonio and north to Waco. According to the plan, growth was to be channeled into the core city first in order to reduce urban sprawl (area 1, the star in the middle of the map); next into the city proper, where municipal services and utilities were already in place (area 2); then to north-south corridors along I-35 (area 3). Area 4 included the Hill Country to the northwest and southwest. These were areas that had already been slated for utilities servicing but were listed as low-priority areas for growth because of their environmental sensitivity. The northern zone included much of the Bull Creek watershed; the southern, the Williamson Creek watershed. The plan hoped to slow down growth in those areas by slowing infrastructure placement, even though it had already been planned. Area 5 included most of the rest of the Hill Country to the west of Austin, and the Blackland Prairie farmland to the east, both of which were “deemed least suitable for Austin’s future growth because of its distance from


Map 3.1. Austin Tomorrow Growth Areas. Adapted from map by the Austin Tomorrow Plan, City of Austin, 1980.

the city and its poor environmental suitability for development. Growth in this area would continue current trends toward urban sprawl, and would not conform to the goals and objectives of the Comprehensive Plan.”14 Areas 4 and 5 to the west contain some of the most beautiful Hill Country views and most threatened creek watersheds. Channeling growth into suitable areas was thought a strategic mechanism to ensure that the environment suffered as little as possible when the city grew:


The fundamental premise to be incorporated into the regulations is that the urban and suburban development of land should be restricted in areas with limited ability to absorb urbanization without severe environmental degradation, and in instances where plans for development disregard environmental constraints.15

Lillie’s hope was to use two primary tools to see the goals implemented: prioritize infrastructure to priority growth areas defined in the plan, and use an aggressive annexation strategy to bring the environmentally sensitive areas near the city under city control. Lillie and the Planning Department adopted these tactics as the way to channel growth into the core city. They hoped to develop undeveloped land in the core, redevelop poorer areas in the city, and channel new development away from the most environmentally sensitive areas outside the city. The Austin Tomorrow process brought thousands of citizens into a participatory exercise in planning and taught them how to take part in the planning process. Teaching people how to be engaged in planning had enormous consequences in the political system; the program was the main cause of the emerging network of neighborhood organizations whose actions would serve as the next iteration of the environmental meaning, and the environmental goals defined by the program served as a linchpin for activity that was to come in the early 1980s. The themes expressed in that plan were a democratically formulated codification of the fears, hopes, and plans of Austinites for a city that retained its unique natural environment by channeling growth away from environmentally sensitive areas. Austin Tomorrow provided a plan for the type of city Austinites desired, including a public statement of the physical and symbolic desires of Austin residents for their city. As part of that plan, it showed that many citizens had the desire for protection of environmental amenities as defining features of the city. The Goals process created a written statement that is part of the frame articulation about the environment in Austin. By the late 1970s the staff had begun to adopt the strategies that would allow Austinites to control the growth of the city in accordance with their plan. The plan had been officially adopted by the council, but the individual departments were supposed to create ways to carry it out. Some did, but others were slow to get to it. The Parks Department began to implement the goals fairly quickly. The Water and Wastewater Department was getting to it, and that was important to the overall growth plan because this department laid the water service to new development. It would have been an impor-


tant part of guiding growth. But before the Austin Tomorrow strategy of annexation and channeling growth could be carried out, an emerging political relationship between environmentalists, minorities, and liberals would play out in a way that eventually caused huge problems for channeling growth in Austin. Electoral Politics, Governing, and the Emerging Environmental Constituency The broad-based concern for the environment expressed in Austin Tomorrow was making itself felt in electoral politics as well as planning. In elections about growth in the 1970s, the environment began to emerge as one issue upon which to rally voters against unplanned growth. The saga of the South Texas Nuclear Project was one of the first of these election issues. In the late 1960s, Austin had committed a few thousand dollars to study a joint venture nuclear generator facility to be shared by Austin, Houston, and San Antonio. After the new council was seated in 1971, an election was held to allow Austinites to vote on whether the city should join the venture. The Lower Colorado River Authority board of directors opposed entry into the project, mainly because they had not been apprised of the details of the preliminary plan.16 Further opposition to the project came from people who worried about safety issues, cost, and damage to the environment. Calling the project “the Nuke,” they reminded people of the dangers of nuclear waste. Worries about environmental destruction were not just about Austin, they were more generalized fears about nuclear waste and radiation, but including the environmental issues in the campaign related the campaign to the environment in Austin. On the other side Mayor Roy Butler was convinced that Austin should be included in the project and heavily promoted it. He pressured the head of the Environmental Board, Sinclair Black, to make the board vote for the project, and tried to get Stuart Henry to do so as well. Black made Butler’s connivances public, and this along with the hesitation by the LCRA Board convinced most voters to reject the plan in the election. The Nuke looked like a dead issue. But an especially harsh winter, and a depleting amount of fuel for heating, led to a rematch in 1973. The opposition to the plan was just as strong the second time around, and even brought some new faces into the electoral fray. Along with people worried about potential fallout from a meltdown, new council member Bob Binder called attention to the potential cost overruns of


the project. A group of University of Texas students, including Steve Gutow and David Butts, entered the fray. The two students had just successfully run a congressional election for Lloyd Doggett, and they brought their electoral experience to bear in order to defeat the project. But pro-nuke forces were also more active this time around. The LCRA Board knew about the declining energy resources, and favored it this time. Butler and the council campaigned heavily for the project, leaving Binder the lone opponent. Business and growth advocates pushed heavily for it. Because the growth promoters were the main people behind the Nuke and many of the controlledgrowth people were against it, the election turned into something more than an issue of electric power. To many it became a vote about growth in general, with pro-nuke forces claiming the energy was needed to grow, and anti-nuke forces claiming it would facilitate growth at too high a cost. The election was hard fought and unbelievably close: The issue was carried by a mere 722 votes out of 39,000 cast, and the city bought into the Nuke. The controversy was not over, though. Just as Binder had worried, the Nuke turned into a black hole of cost overruns. It generated almost no power, and the costs to build it just kept rising. Roger Duncan, who became a council member in 1981 (and later deputy general manager at Austin Energy), led three campaigns to get Austin out of the Nuke. Part of the campaigns was always nuclear energy as an environmental problem. The other was its cost overruns. By 1981, Austinites had finally decided enough was enough and voted to get out of the project. Duncan was able to convince enough people to go against it in the end because, he says, “by 1981 it was primarily a cost issue. We won that election by making it a combination of both [environment and cost].” By then, though, nobody would buy Austin’s share—the project was scandalously over budget and delivering an absurdly low amount of power for its cost. Austin still has its share, and as of 1997, Austin citizens were paying 40 percent of their electric utility bill just to pay off costs associated with Austin’s share of the project.17 The Nuke elections were not the only electoral issues that related Austin’s growth to its environment. In 1975, UT students Steve Gutow and Steve Rosenbaum put together the Coalition for a Progressive Austin. The coalition was meant to be an umbrella organization that included groups opposed to the kind of unbridled growth the Butler council and city staff were bringing. The coalition included environmentalists, liberals, anti-nuke groups, and east side minorities. Its formation was an attempt to bridge a built-in split that had been indicative of Austin politics as the liberals mounted their challenge to the growth promoters. West side environmentalists and those desiring less


growth in Austin were often in conflict with east side minorities who believed that growth was necessary for the economic advancement of the Hispanic and black populations. The behavior and pro-growth attitude of the Butler council helped the liberals bridge that gap. The coalition was tenuously held together by a common desire to replace the business and conservative social interests then dominant on the Butler council, and built a slate of liberal candidates to challenge those interests. The slate was held together by a common alliance against rapid growth, and Gutow and Rosenbaum tried to fashion a platform of “nogrowth” for the candidates.18 As much as anything the platform was a way to challenge the “pro-growth” stance of the Butler council and highlight the division in town between those who saw Austin as a place for economic expansion and those who saw it as a place defined by its quality of life. Three people, Stuart Henry, Margret Hofmann, and Sarah Weinstock, all ran as environmentalists. The 1975 council election was the first time that people identified themselves as environmentalists and ran on that identification. Environmentalist and “no-growth” sentiment thus became linked in the public mind, and that linkage would remain part of the discourse of Austin for many years thereafter. Given the tenor of the times, the coalition had a shot at victory, but there were no guarantees. Their effort was pushed over the edge by two things. One was the student vote. David Butts, Ken McAhn, and other University Democrats made a major push on campus that registered 15,000 students to vote, almost all of whom voted for coalition candidates. The second major help for the coalition was a scandal involving illegal campaign contributions and bribes to the business interests on the council. As a result of a lawsuit claiming fraud and deception, the Securities Exchange Commission began investigating Southwestern Bell Telephone. In the course of the investigation it was revealed that Mayor Roy Butler and council member Dick Nichols had been the recipients of illegal campaign contributions by Southwestern Bell, and that council member Dan Love had been the recipient of some special business from the firm. The company had also promoted Nichols’s daughter to a management position, even though she was said to be “dumber than hell” on a tape-recorded conversation by Southwestern Bell employees that was made public in the course of the investigation.19 The student vote and this publicity resulted in the downfall of the businessmen’s council that had held power for decades, allowing a more liberal council to take its place. Although one of the environmentalists lost, she lost to Lowell Lebermann, who was already concerned with environmental issues. Hofmann won in a runoff, soon


garnering the name “Tree Lady” for her efforts at preserving trees in Austin. The 1975 council was at least environmentally friendly, and a couple of people, Lebermann and Hofmann, were at that time considered environmentalists. One of the most interesting aspects of the 1975 election is the window it opens on the split between the older West Austin business crowd and a younger set of more liberal businesspeople and developers who allied themselves with the challengers. Ed Wendler, for example, had made a lucrative career as a lobbyist at the Texas Legislature, but at midlife had decided that the liberal causes of Austin were his own, and emerged over the 1970s as a very capable power broker. As one way of raising money to challenge the Austin Chamber of Commerce candidates, he introduced some newer developers like Gary Bradley and John Wooley to the liberals. During the 1970s, much of the money that backed the liberal candidates was from the newer developers, and there was a certain level of shared interest. Butts remembers driving around with Bradley, talking about the things that would be accomplished once they took power, although a certain air of implicit conflict was present at such times.20 Bradley, especially, was able to parlay his contributions to the liberals into votes for his development projects in the early 1980s. The liberal coalition was successful partly because it found ways to harness the energy of some younger businesspeople and developers who were not tied in with the good ol’ boy network downtown. But although it had a few environmentalists on it, the 1975 council was not defined as an environmentalist council. It was called the liberal council because of the coalition that had put it together. The council, led by new mayor Jeff Friedman, was elected at a pivotal point in Austin’s history. Residents who had elected the new liberal council hoped they would address problems brought by growth, and guide growth in ways that helped everyone in the coalition. The big question at this point in Austin’s history was whether growth could be channeled into the north-south corridor, away from the sensitive environmental areas, as Austin Tomorrow suggested; whether social programs would be funded; and whether parks and greenbelts could be given a higher priority as the city grew. The answer to this question would come in large part as a result of a critical bond election in 1975. The Environment Becomes an Issue In order to fund the Capital Improvements Program that the Planning Department had initiated as part of the 1961 Master Plan, a series of bond proposals had been put to the vote of the citizens of Austin over the years. Several


of these had been passed in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and in late 1975 another batch was presented to the citizens for a vote. The December 6, 1975, bond election represented two kinds of splits in Austin. The obvious split was between business interests, developers, and growth promoters who would profit from unplanned growth vs. progressives, student activists, environmentalists, neighborhood activists, minorities, and liberals who saw the detrimental effects of this growth on the city. But another, more nuanced split existed between groups opposed to unregulated growth. Some believed that the city could stop growth; others believed that the city was going to grow, like it or not, and that the only way to effectively save the environment and neighborhoods was to direct that growth. Before the 1975 bond election, Lillie, Lebermann, and some of the early conservationists typified the latter stance; the budding relationship between the liberals and newer developers was one aspect of this directed-growth attitude. After the 1975 election, the newly elected Mayor Friedman himself made public this position in a speech before an audience in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1975, when he told them: [O]ne of my biggest jobs will be to convince [people] that I am not opposed to new streets and highways, new sewers and water lines, nor new buildings and annexation. I am opposed to them at any cost, while handicapping our “People Programs” with a “what’s left” attitude . . . I am extremely pleased about the opportunity we have to reorient priorities and place “People’s Programs” ahead of “Paving Contracts.”21

Believing that the bonds were necessary to direct growth, the Friedman council, Lillie, and the ongoing committee of Austin Tomorrow all pushed hard for the entire bond package, which included money for parks, streets, sewers, and other projects. They might have expected the business groups to help, since those groups had promoted prior bond issues. But the businesspeople were still smarting at their defeat in the recent council election, so they took no action to help. And many of the citizens who had been part of the early environmental groups opposed the bonds in the belief that they would actually increase growth to the southwest. So did Butts and what he calls the “pragmatic progressives” in the University Democrats who were mostly responsible for the 1975 council victory. In the bond election of 1975, the pragmatic progressives and the student activists found themselves in a strange situation. They supported most of the bonds. But they opposed the water and wastewater bonds, bringing the group


into conflict with the council they had elected. “We viewed the bonds as growth promoters to the southwest,” says Butts, who led the effort against the bonds, “because the research we had done on it convinced us that a lot of the money would go to the watershed, not just the preferred growth corridor. We thought this was a giveaway to developers.” They were not the only ones. Many people, like Marilyn Simpson, an emerging neighborhood leader, saw that the bonds directed some of the water and wastewater money toward projects that were not approved by voters. Because of this and other irregularities, there was a palpable feeling in several quarters that the bonds would serve suburban development at the expense of core city refitting. There was also a general concern over the fact that the bonds would increase utility rates. Several black leaders formed a group called Black Voters Against Paternalism to join in against the bonds because they felt the bonds would be unequal taxation, with East Austin paying the bills and getting none of the benefits. As had been the case with utility rebates, many citizens felt that if passed, the bonds would have created a situation in which core city residents were effectively paying more money to increase the new suburban development that many of them wanted to stop. So Butts’s group, electoral tacticians that they were, decided that if they could pull in the anti-tax vote and couple that with the anti-development vote, they could defeat the infrastructure bonds. They had raised about $6,000 for the coming statewide races in 1976, and decided to spend that money in the attempt to defeat the infrastructure bonds. Their decision to oppose the bonds created a huge division between themselves and the council they had helped elect. “We had a meeting at one point with the council members we had got elected, and Friedman said we were all wrong, and there was a lot of shouting going on,” recalls Butts. “Things were so bad that cries of ‘F *** you!’ were flung back and forth between one of the student leaders and one of the council members for several minutes.” But neither side would budge. Butts’s group waged a “true guerrilla campaign; we set up a phone bank in an apartment, we leafleted, did press conferences. We had a bunch of ragtags, and we just went to war!”22 The bonds issue was at heart a referendum on growth, even more so than the council election a few months earlier. And in the bond election, the environment was a more central concern than it had been for the city council race. The strange thing about the election was that it was waged between the factions of the liberal coalition rather than between the liberals and the business interests. Both sides in the election laid claim to protecting the environment. Opponents of the bonds made much of the fact that four times as much money would go for infrastructure in the environmentally sensitive southwest


as for core city “People Programs.” Proponents noted that the bonds were needed to direct growth into the preferred growth corridor specified in the Austin Tomorrow Goals process; advertisements for the supporters of the bonds boldly proclaimed that “A vote against water and wastewater is a vote against the preservation of our environment.”23 Showing pictures of Friedman and the two minority council members as ways to counter East Austin attacks, proponents’ ads claimed: There is a great deal of difference between forced growth and stopping raw sewage from running into our creeks and back yards of some 4,000 families. The tragic fact is this is actually happening in certain parts of Austin. And more of this environmental destruction will occur if we don’t act today.24

But opponents did not believe the money would all be spent in that corridor. Butts’s group countered with their own ad. Convincing a layout director at the Daily Texan to have their ad placed right next to the proponents’ ad, the bond opponents’ banner read: WE STILL CARE ABOUT OUR CITY COUNCIL, BUT THEY CAN DO BETTER THAN PROPOSITIONS ELEVEN AND TWELVE . . . Austin doesn’t need to pass a water and sewer package that is a developer’s dream that forces growth and risks rocketing utility rates.25

Using the 15,000-person list of voters they had registered for the council election, and bringing in the anti-tax vote, Butts’s group defeated the infrastructure bonds. All the other bonds passed without problem. Anger at increasing suburbanization and utility rates, and a low voter turnout, sank the water and wastewater bonds. The bond election of 1975 had two important consequences for growth in Austin and the discourse about Austin. It began to bring the environment front and center into the political system as an issue around which to build electoral victory. The election had a big impact on the thinking of Butts and the student progressives. They saw that just electing people to the city council was not enough to slow down the rapid growth of Austin. As Butts thinks about it today, he believes that [T]he problem had been that we were politically pragmatic progressives. We had outlined a program, thinking that if we elected our people, they would do the right thing. Well, that was naive. So we discovered that we won victories but not the war. Some of our people were flakes. Hofmann, for example,


was so unpleasant that we refused to back her next time around. We thought our people [on the council] were in the vanguard with us, but we were not yet clear about our direction. The Nuke and [1975] bonds kind of, just kind of, clarified the direction for us. [The Nuke and bond elections] began to push the progressives into thinking that we needed to make the progressive movement driven by environmental issues, instead of the coalition idea.

Outcomes of the Bond Election: MUDdying the Waters The defeat of the bonds had another impact on Austin’s future and created a huge problem for regulating growth in the Austin area. Lillie and the Planning Department had counted on the bonds for money to extend utilities into area 3 of the Austin Tomorrow Plan. But cities are required to provide infrastructure to newly annexed areas within a short period of time, so the strategy of annexation depended on the ability to put in those utilities. Since the bonds had failed, the city had no funding for utilities, and hence could not legally annex land in this area. That led to a situation that has benefited developers and hindered efforts at growth regulation ever since. Prior to 1975, the State of Texas had provisions for development outside city utility areas. Developers could apply to the State of Texas for a Water District, which could sell bonds to buy water. However, Water Districts could not sell bonds to pay for sewage service. They had to use septic systems. In the 1970s the state began to allow developers to use Municipal Utilities Districts (MUDs), which were allowed to sell bonds to build wastewater plants. MUDs built within the city ETJ (extraterritorial jurisdiction) had to be built with the consent of the city. Many of the developing suburbs around Austin were Water Districts. Several developers with Water Districts had been counting on the city annexing their developments and getting the utilities provision that came with annexation. Many had already asked the city to annex them. But the failure of the bonds meant that Austin could not legally annex those developments because the city had no money to lay wastewater connections. So, many developers decided to use the tool of the MUD to provide sewer service. MUDs sell bonds for sewer service as well as water service, so a MUD can build sewer systems. MUDs are a double boon to developers. When a developer built under a Water District, he had to provide septic tanks for each house. The cost of the tank was passed along to the buyer of the house. With a MUD there was no need for septic tanks. Developers could build their own sewer systems, and thus the initial cost of each house was lower. And the way they pay for those sewer systems is another boon for developers. The devel-


oper loans money to the MUD to pay for the system. The MUD pays back the developer with interest. The interest is paid for by taxes the MUD levies on its residents. The developer comes out ahead because he sells houses more quickly, and he makes interest on the loan he gave the MUD. He makes more money in a MUD than he would have in a Water District. The homebuyers may come out ahead in the short run because of slightly lower upfront costs and lower mortgage payments, but they may actually pay more in the long run through their taxes that pay back the interest on the developer’s loan. The big loser in the MUD equation was the city. After the failure of the bond election, Ed Wendler, Sr., a consultant to several developers, lobbied the Texas Legislature to make some changes in the MUD law that made it easier to develop land where the city did not want it, through a kind of blackmail mechanism. The developer has to ask the city if he can build a MUD in the city ETJ. The city can consent or decline. If the city consents, the MUD can be created. If the city declines, the developer then has to request city services. If the city refuses to provide services, the developer can set up the MUD without city consent. The problem for Austin was that the failure of the bonds in the election meant the city did not have bonding authority to service the MUDs. Cities are required to provide services to any area they annex, and the loss of the bonds meant that Austin had no legal option to annex because it had no money. Thus developers could request MUDs secure in the knowledge that the city would have to decline to provide services. This, to parts of the Growth Machine, was not a problem anyway. To get around the fact that voters had said no to the growth bonds, the city also made a deal with some nearby MUDs in the southwest. Because of the election, the city could not sell bonds to lay pipe to the MUD, but the MUDs could sell bonds to lay pipe that would connect them to the city lines. The MUD-issued bonds would pay for laying the pipe. The city would pay them back later. Worse yet, the city told the MUDs that if they wanted to do that deal, the pipes would have to be oversized—because staff assumed growth would leapfrog the MUDs, and they wanted to have the greater pipe capacity for later, when the assumed growth became real growth. This kind of contract is another way that assumptions about future growth become a reality of future growth; one pipe is going to be built, so staff plan for future growth by specifying the pipe be larger than needed for the proposed development, which makes it easier to add housing farther out along that pipe route later. Any future attempts to curb growth in the area by curbing infrastructure are therefore that much harder. The changes in the MUD laws caused enormous harm to any effort to regulate development over sensitive environmental features. MUDs are built


out under the water codes in effect when the agreements on pipes or annexation are made. Because of the payback cost to the developer, Austin has a policy of annexing MUDs only when the potential property taxes are relatively equal to the amount of money required to pay off the bond debt. This usually happens when the MUD is mostly built out. So MUDs tend to build heavily, densely, with little regard to environmental quality, and the city does not annex them until they have done most of their damage. And when Austin consented to the early MUDs in the southwest, there were as yet no city water-quality ordinances—those were to come in 1979 and the early 1980s. This has caused a huge problem for environmental protection in Austin because none of Austin’s later (and stronger) water or environmental codes apply to MUDs built from that time. MUDs have made protecting the environment around Austin incredibly more difficult. Because of the MUDs, development quickened in the most environmentally sensitive areas that Austin Tomorrow had defined for lowpriority growth, city ratepayers pay relatively more of the share of the pipes to development that they don’t want, and voters have no say in where the houses get built. The Emerging Frames of the Environmental City: Terminology and the Meanings of the Environment The elections of the 1970s were all about growth and the assumptions that propel it. The root question was, does development simply happen, or can it be channeled so that it does not harm the environmental amenities Austinites enjoy? The city staff operated on the assumption that there would be large amounts of urbanization in the area, so they planned to lay roads and sewers over the environment. Theirs is the core assumption of the growth ideology: Davidson and city staff were finding ways to service the development of houses in areas 4 and 5 of Austin Tomorrow on the assumption that they would be built anyway. That assumption became reality as the city extended sewer services to the area, which allowed more houses to be built. And once the MUD became the main development entity outside the city limits, trying to keep growth out of the southwest area was almost impossible. Conservationists and environmentalists were trying to shape the design of the city to keep development off the aquifer and creeks. The citizens’ Environmental Board recommended an alternative approach to planning that assumed the city could channel growth by defining different types and degrees of suburbanization appropriate for different areas. That controlled-growth assumption was the basis of the Austin Tomorrow Plan.


By challenging the assumptions that growth is inevitable and uncontrollable, the emerging environmental constituency was shaping the way that growth issues were discussed. They were helping to set the terms of debate by illustrating the detrimental effects of growth on the natural environment, framing the issue in ways that had not yet been heard. And as activists pressed at the system that favored vested economic, bureaucratic, and political interests, an inevitable reaction set in. Labels appeared to identify out-groups. Growth interests sought to frame environmental concerns as outside the mainstream. Just because they had a large number of moderate business and civic members in the group, for example, the AEC was not immune to charges that they were somehow against development. Russell Fish, who served as the AEC president, describes how the group had to consciously “lean over backward to avoid being tagged ‘radicals,’ which some businesspeople and even council members did anyway.” The “radicals” tag was one of the first attempts on the part of vested business and development interests to marginalize environmental activists in Austin. Linking the emerging environmental group to flag-burning “radicals” on the University of Texas campus was one easy way for growth promoters to marginalize legitimate concern for changing the way growth was carried out. Another tag used to minimize the actual kinds of people involved in the conservation movement was “little old ladies in tennis shoes.” That moniker came from the involvement of women’s organizations in the emerging environmental movement. Playing as it did to the inherent sexism of the time, defining conservationists as little old ladies who had no place in the real world of business, finance, and city building allowed the growth interests to define conservationists as meddlers with no appreciation for the cold realities of the business world. One interesting mark of the impact of this emerging discourse of Austin was its influence on the rhetoric about the environment. Sometimes the meaning of terms was simply different. Conservationists were beginning to talk about ecology as a scientific term that described the effects of urbanization on natural ecosystems. When the term appeared in the speech and actions of builders and developers, it meant something different. At this time the Chamber of Commerce did not occupy the position as outright opponent of environmental concerns that it would come to take in the 1980s and early 1990s. Indeed, one-time president of the chamber Walter E. Long was one of the initial Honorary Trustees of the AEC. The chamber found some ways to be “ecological”; in 1970 President John Nash appointed a Quality of Living Task Force, saying in a speech that “Austin’s quality of living is important aesthetically, ecologically, and economically.”26 But the kinds of ecological quality the chamber focused on were not the same ecological problems that


scientists and the AEC were discussing, and the terms meant very different things. The chamber gave out an award for companies with outstanding grounds landscaping, for example, making pretty lawns and grounds (as opposed to conservation of unbuilt lands) their “environmental” concern. Defining “conservation” as landscaping lawns around buildings, and giving out “ecological” awards, showed that environmental concerns were impacting the discourse about Austin. Socially powerful groups often try to co-opt opposition terms by changing the meanings of those terms so that they can be made to more closely fit the meanings of the ruling ideology. One of the early successes of the conservationists, the AEC, and political progressives was to force conservation, ecology, and the political power of landowners into the public realm. There they challenged the ideology that urban growth was good for everything and everyone. The way they framed the conservationists, the marginalization and co-optation undertaken by business and real estate interests, can be understood as a reaction against a new meaning of Austin that exposed the systems of power that benefited business interests. As reactions, these marginalizing strategies were essentially signs that the discourse in Austin was changing to include previously unheard concerns and definitions of Austin as a place. The Early Years: Landscapes, Discourse, and the Emerging Meaning of Austin The discourse of Austin that would create its environmental meaning began to emerge during the 1970s in the creation of parks, greenbelts, and preserves. Building them was the social part of that meaning. They themselves are the physical part. The two went together—they were the way the environment and the people “talked to” each other. The geography of Austin suggested possible uses and images of hills, the river, and creeks. People’s cultural and psychological desires moved them to choose some of those possible uses, in this case making the geographic features—the “nature” of Austin—into parkland and preserves. As geographic landforms, the creeks, lakes, and hills of the Austin area have historically defined the character of the city. The experience of living in these landforms suggested a kind of place that influenced people’s reaction to the growth of that place. The committee of citizens who put together the Creeks Project, for example, wrote that the waterways of Austin defined the city both physically and symbolically. “When we speak of the natural endowment of Austin, we are inevitably talking about the Colorado River and all


the creeks and waterways that flow into it,” wrote the committee.27 People and groups in Austin wanted to preserve that natural endowment in a system of parks and open spaces, and the act of creating those kinds of spaces began to foster a sense among many Austinites that they had some common idea about the kind of place Austin should be. The landscape they began to create in the late 1960s and 1970s began to form the physical, lived, experienced part of the environmental meaning of Austin. The parks, greenbelts, and preserves are built landscapes in the sense that humans take the landforms and modify them (by putting in trails, planting trees, etc.) for the social purposes of communal use (recreation and relaxation). As physical landscapes, their presence as large swaths of “natural” areas connotes the idea that the natural can be built into the urban design. There were larger-scale social factors that influenced which possible uses of their environment Austinites might choose. The city’s economy influenced ideas about those physical landforms and Austin as a place. Austinites did not need to extract resources from nature to form a vibrant economy, so nature could be thought of as something to enjoy on a daily basis. There was no need to take from it by mining, for example, so nature could not only be part of the city, but could help define life in that city. Austin as a place could be defined partly by how nature was built into city space, rather than how city space builds over nature. The national environmental movement of the time merged with the economy and demography of the city. Austin’s growth began to speed up during a period in which the national environmental movement was making its ideas felt, and Austin as a place was a natural fit with the larger environmental movement. The national movement found fertile ground in a local place with the striking physical topography and ecology of Austin. Groups such as the AEC and WE CARE Austin showed that there was a constituency in Austin for a city defined by its environmental amenities. The work of prominent citizens on the Town Lake Beautification Project and the Creeks Project indicated that public sentiment. National laws and policies tied to that movement helped too. The Clean Water Act allowed cities to update their water treatment plants and take sewage out of rivers and creeks, allowing Austinites to keep their creeks and river cleaner for recreational use. The federal floodplains insurance allowed Parks Director Beverly Sheffield to actually start building the greenbelt projects envisioned by the early master plans and the Creeks Project. The liberal movement of the time also had an influence. The civil rights era made people ask how they could make their communities better, and many people who were active in that larger movement began to participate in com-


munity planning in Austin. The activists from that movement were ideologically more liberal, more interested in creating a public good and public space than making money on private property. Over time in the 1960s–1970s, many of those people moved into community planning and environmental organizations in Austin, lending their energy and knowledge to the landscaping project. There was a kind of organic progression of the liberal political movement nationally—from the national movement for equal rights, to protests against the Vietnam War, and then to environmentalism. Many of the people working in those movements had worked at the local level to organize support for them, and many continued to work at the local level, organizing voting constituencies and local communities of interest for national issues. People moved so seamlessly from civil rights to anti-war to national environmental and local growth issues because the liberal approach to social problems is rooted in broader issues of equity and democracy. Liberal philosophy tends to ask questions based on who gains and who loses. How do the powerful benefit from unequal social relations? Who makes money and gets rich while messing up other people’s lives? The liberal approach to urban growth and environmental problems was part of that general philosophical stance—who would benefit from growth, and who would lose? Many people thought that the environment was one of the losers. People who enjoyed the environmental amenities in Austin were seeing a communal good destroyed for private gain. The anti-nuke movement in Austin was one of the primary examples of this intersection of national and local. Austin’s anti-nuke movement was large and well organized, part of the larger anti-nuclear movement nationally. The anti-nuke movement, along with the political participation in Austin Tomorrow and the elections over growth, were substantially fueled by the energy that had fueled the earlier national social movements. As people added environmental issues to the other national issues of the time, the environment became one of the liberal issues in town. The elections on the Nuke, the Friedman council, and the 1975 bonds began to push the environment into the public realm of politics, where it became part of the arguments about growth. Even the historical preservation movement had an impact, one that was indirect but profound. Mary Arnold thinks back on the preservation movement as important “because it got us to look at our past and . . . preserve our past as we grew into the future . . . [it focused attention on] how the natural parts of our community were important in defining who we are and who we want to be.” All these things—the intersection of geography, economy, and historical


period—influenced the emerging discourse about the city of Austin. Early master plans had talked about a “city of greenbelts,” but it took Janet Fish’s Shoal Creek greenbelt to show how that could be done. The Creeks Project Committee built upon those earlier plans and Janet’s greenbelt, and began to put into place a system of linear parks along the city’s creeks. Preserves along Bull Creek north of the river, and in the Hill Country south and west of town, were set aside. Thanks to the early conservationists, Town Lake was beginning to look like a park instead of a trash dump. Today there are more than twenty-five miles of developed trails in the greenbelt system, partly linking more than 17,000 acres of parkland. The system has given Austin one of the highest parkland-to-population ratios in the nation among cities its size.28 Living, playing, and working in the hills, creeks, and along the river exposes people to ways of thinking about Austin defined by the natural environment. Building the parks and greenbelts and preserves reaffirmed that experience. The act of laying your eyes on them, putting your feet on them, inhaling the smell of them, immersing your body in their waters, all in the middle of a big city, allows you to physically experience one idea of Austin as a place. In Austin the built form of parks, greenbelts, and preserves was that vast mnemonic system that geographers like Kevin Lynch talk about, at least for these people. The social act of building parks, open space, and greenbelts created both the built landscape and the idea of Austin as a place defined by its environmental features. The landscape the people created was a way of communicating their own meaning of Austin not only to one another, but to future residents of Austin. The natural environment, the social ideas about that environment, and the built forms that used that environment for enjoyment were all part of the emerging discourse of Austin. The kinds of spaces envisioned by early conservationists, civic committees, public projects, and the daily human use of these forms laid the base of a constituency that would come to defend the notion of Austin as a place representing a quality of life during its boom years of the 1980s. The early conservationists, the AEC, the Town Lake Committee, and the Creeks Project showed people what the city could be like. But the fast-paced growth of Austin was showing people what it would be like if growth were not somehow directed. The 1970s were a turning point in all sorts of ways for Austin. As growth began to speed up, Austin began its transformation from sleepy college and government town into sprawling city. The conservation and political activity of the late 1960s and 1970s was largely a reaction to that growth, and all that activity shaped the discourse of the place. The combined attempts by many people and groups to preserve the environment in the midst of growth was part of that early movement for place,


part of the social landscape of people, plans, and ideas that were intersecting in Austin at the time. The Austin Tomorrow Program was one of the most important steps in that process because it provided a very specific document of the type of city Austinites desired. The document was a public statement of the physical and symbolic desires of Austin residents for their city. The growth planning expressed in it showed a democratically formulated codification of the fears, hopes, and plans of Austinites for a city that retained its unique natural environment by channeling growth away from environmentally sensitive areas and into a preferred growth corridor. Even more importantly, the program was instrumental in creating a network of neighborhood organizations whose actions would serve as the next iteration in the formation of Austin’s environmental meaning. The goal of protecting existing neighborhoods and their environment served as a linchpin for political activity that was to come in the early 1980s. The politics, programs, and policies of the early conservationists and environmental groups contributed powerfully to the landscape of the central city, the discourse of Austin as a place, and to a degree the restrictions on development in the suburbs. But they had little effect on growth in general. That was partly because they were not trying to stop growth so much as to shape it. Some were “no-growth,” but most saw growth as something that had to be directed, as Mayor Friedman made clear. Many hoped that Austin Tomorrow and the elections of the mid-1970s would allow them to do that, but that was not to be. The loss of the 1975 bonds led to developers lobbying the Texas Legislature, which changed the MUD rules. Developers then used MUDs to get around the Austin Tomorrow Plan. The bureaucratic inertia of the city benefited developers by stretching infrastructure into the very areas Austin Tomorrow specified as the lowest priority for growth. Growth did not slow; it intensified. Because of that growth, the conflicts that shaped the early conservationists’ efforts would be refocused during the 1980s. Arguments about growth would become much more contentious as the city bureaucracy, business, and developer interests solidified into a Growth Machine. In the coming decade, neighborhoods and the environment would take the place of conservation as the focus of concern about growth in Austin. Growth was intensifying, but so was opposition to its effects, and as the next iteration of the emerging environmental meaning, quality-of-life advocates would solidify a voting constituency under the symbol of the environment.

Part 3

T he Environmental Meaning of Austin


Chapter 4

Of Neighborhoods and Environment Contesting the Growth Machine

Throughout the 1970s the Hike and Bikes, Creeks, and Town Lake projects, preserves, and ongoing parkland acquisition began to create a physical landscape that suggested an Environmental City. But by the end of the 1970s, the nascent efforts at building an Environmental City were being stymied by a force much stronger than a few intransigent bureaucrats or individual developers with good connections at city hall. The Growth Machine had arrived. Growth advocates had successfully lobbied several national large high-tech firms like IBM, Motorola, and 3M to site their businesses in Austin, which ensured the growth of the population. Austin was now a growing city, with projections of a million people living in the area by the first decade of the new century. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, new investment from around the country and the world was being funneled into land speculation. Land prices were driven skyward as investors bought land one day and quickly resold it for double their purchase price. City staff, whose job was providing services to new residents, routinely planned roads and infrastructure to outlying areas. The Austin American-Statesman almost reflexively backed bond proposals and road projects that encouraged growth. Lobbyists at city hall pressured council members to pass growth-friendly rules and regulations. Where would all those people live? And how would they get around? These questions drove the decisions of land investors, city bureaucrats, and political leaders. This period became known to Austinites as “the 1980s Boom.” During the Boom, the next iteration of the environmental meaning of Austin emerged as neighborhoods and the environment became the focus of efforts to preserve a sense of place in the midst of growth. The desire to protect both was magnified because of the Boom, and led to a series of elections that tied the two concerns together. The groups that formed around those

104 The Environmental Meaning of Austin

twin concerns coalesced into a network that was able to win some key elections and even elect the first environmentalist council (the Cooksey council of 1985). During the 1970s environmental concerns had been articulated in the designs for parks and greenbelts, and institutionalized in the planning process. Concern for the environment was one component of the liberals’ challenge to the old way of doing things, although a junior member of their political platform. During the Boom, environmental issues grew in salience until the environment emerged as the senior twin of the platform to retain Austin’s quality of life. The electoral battles in which that happened cemented a new discourse about Austin, the “environmentalists vs. developers” conflict, and provided a symbolism about Austin that would be solidified in the 1990s as the environmental meaning of Austin. Of Neighborhoods and Creeks The late 1970s saw a huge increase in the number of neighborhood associations in Austin. To a big extent their increase was driven by the Austin Tomorrow process, which cultivated neighborhood leaders and helped form associations for various neighborhoods. Before Austin Tomorrow, there were twenty-nine neighborhood organizations. By the time the program had ended, there were sixty-six.1 The older groups that had formed to protect neighborhoods and environments, groups like WE CARE Austin and the Austin Environmental Council, had trained cadres of leaders who were available for the new associations. At the same time the Austin Neighborhoods Council (ANC), in place since 1973, began to experience a renaissance in the late 1970s under the leadership of the vibrant Marilyn Simpson. In 1979 the ANC incorporated as a non-profit organization to coordinate neighborhood groups, assist in the formation of new neighborhood groups, serve as an information source for neighborhoods, and “encourage and endorse individuals who are responsive to the needs of neighborhoods” to run for political office.2 The ANC became a powerful voice in Austin, opposing not only specific development projects in the central city neighborhoods, but also unplanned growth in general. The group held monthly meetings and put out a monthly newsletter that listed zoning requests, plans for streets and new ordinances, and hearing dates for such issues. The organization trained people how to present their concerns at hearings, the Planning Commission, and the city council. The ANC also worked on several issues that affected both neighborhoods and the environment, fighting trash burners in the middle of some

Of Neighborhoods and Environment 105

South Austin neighborhoods and opposing a plan to dump sewage in Lake Travis. Austin’s creeks were one of the environmental issues with which the ANC and its constituent organizations got involved. Many of Austin’s neighborhoods are built around creeks, and the creeks provide a certain feel to those neighborhoods. The idea of making greenbelts along creeks was already in the public mind, and many people wanted their neighborhood creeks protected and turned into greenbelts. The desire to protect their creeks often got people involved in neighborhood issues. One such person was Jean Mather, of the Travis Heights Neighborhood Organization (today the South River City Citizens). Mather led her organization in an effort to protect Blunn Creek, finally getting the city to make it into a greenbelt. Mather and her husband are architects and had seen some different ways of planning city designs when traveling in Europe. They came to Austin in the early 1960s. Mather got engaged in the planning process when the Highway Department was getting ready to put a pipe in one of the creeks she walked. “The Highway Department had a law that said you had to keep creeks in their natural state. So a friend and I created as much of a fuss as we could, and we did prevent them putting in a pipe.” That bit of fuss got her appointed to the Planning Commission, where she learned the process from the inside. In 1972 she started her neighborhood organization, and a developer who owned some of the land along the creek dedicated it to the members. The city Parks Department got hold of it later and made it a park, but it was the neighbors who really saw what it could be. Mather had some of the same trouble with city bureaucrats as Roberta Crenshaw had north of the river. “I remember once a car came rolling down and got stuck in the creek, and we told the city, ‘Get it out, it’s a park,’ and the city said, ‘It’s not a park, it’s a drainage easement.’ ” She and several others later got the city to buy land to create the Blunn Creek Preserve south of Oltorf at the head of the creek. The Blunn Creek Preserve is very small but serves as a model of how land can be preserved inside the city for ecological purposes. The Blunn Creek greenbelt exemplifies the whole concept of neighborhood greenbelts; it is to my mind the best model of the concept in Austin. The Blunn Creek greenbelt links neighborhood blocks and schools by providing a linear park that winds along the creek through the entire area. It is built into the Travis Heights neighborhood in a way that helps define the entire area by providing an integrated way to walk or bike to various parts of the neighborhood. Kids can walk to school on it, commuters can ride bikes along it, people can move from one park to another on it, and the entire length is defined by


the creek. The path and the parkway along it simply follow the creek. Thus the physical environmental features of the creek bed, and the park built along it, add to a sensory impression of the neighborhood. The neighborhood is to a great degree defined by the Blunn Creek greenbelt, which is itself defined by the creek. Residents are exposed to this relationship between neighborhood and creek every time they use the space, and thus neighborhood and environment are integrated in space and in people’s minds. Integrating creeks and neighborhoods was on other people’s minds as well. Environmental activists Jackie and Jack Goodman were already involved in water and growth issues in the 1970s, as neighborhood and environmental activism began. Residents in their area of South Austin near Williamson Creek asked them to help organize neighborhood organizations along the creek in order to help clean up a treatment plant on it. A temporary wastewater treatment facility had been built in 1954 to service the area, but it was not planned to service the massive amount of new development that began in the late 1970s. By 1982 overdevelopment in South Austin had so overloaded the facility that sewage was leaking into Williamson Creek, and residents could not wander along the creek near their house. The facility was so overloaded that the city had to truck the waste out daily, and the smell was horrible. McKinney Falls State Park lies downstream, and the State had to close the falls and creek to swimmers due to the fecal pollution. Jack and a friend had already filed a lawsuit to make the city close the plant, and the neighbors knew they could help get things done. Just as frustrating for the Goodmans and their neighborhood association were the changes that growth was bringing to their neighborhood. “Developers were not only doing these things environmentally, they were also impacting [our] lower-middle-class neighborhood out in far South Austin with a tremendous amount of high-density developments that were ruining the feel of the area,” says Jack. “They had commercial and industrial zoning slammed right up against single-family neighborhoods. At that time the developer community was coming out saying, we’re going to do as we please, and just pro forma we are going to talk to you all as neighborhoods, but quite frankly we are going to do as we please, because quite frankly there’s nothing you can do because of the zoning laws. Well, they found out differently—that it wasn’t just Hyde Park and Northwest Hills that could protect themselves, that we could as well.”3 The Goodmans and others in the neighborhood teamed up with the ANC to form United South Austin, which successfully sued the city to fix the sewage problem. Parts of Williamson Creek became a greenbelt, although without the kind of hike-and-bike trail that Blunn Creek has. Without the


sewage leaking into it, people could once again wander the creek in their neighborhood and swim at McKinney Falls. Neighborhood, environmental, and social concerns had all mixed together. The Goodmans were the kind of people one found in Austin during that time—socially liberal and educated enough to find out how to “fight city hall.” The pollution of Williamson Creek and the crowding of the neighborhood were a stark, physical example of how growth was affecting people unevenly: Developers make profit, neighborhoods deteriorate. Like the Goodmans, many of the people who have been active in fights over Austin’s growth began their public participation when growth caused problems for their neighborhoods and the creeks that flowed through them. The Williamson Creek problem led to a four-decade history of activism for Austin’s environment on the part of the Goodmans; in addition to the many other things they have done, Jack started the Colorado River Watch Foundation, and Jackie served two terms on the city council in the 1990s. This sort of thing was happening all over town, and the Austin Tomorrow process had taught lots of people how to be a part of the system that addressed these issues. The mix of neighborhood and environment shaped the concerns about growth that many people felt, and many of them began to put concerns and actions together to preserve both. The link between quality of life, neighborhood, and the environment began to enter the political arena when proposed development along the most magnificent of the city’s creeks, Barton Creek, spurred a coalition that forced the city to adopt some of the major environmental protections in Austin. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Barton Creek and Barton Springs became a focus for organized resistance to the Growth Machine. Helped by the networks and organization of both the ANC and WE CARE Austin, a group of people emerged from a conflict that began as an individual neighborhood issue but quickly morphed into a more general set of grievances about the environmental damage caused by growth. The result of that conflict was the creation of two of the most active environmental organizations in Austin’s history, the Zilker Park Posse and Save Barton Creek Association. Those organizations would eclipse the old Austin Environmental Council in their ability to shape public policy. In the 1960s and 1970s, the environment had been one of several general grievances over growth. The furor over development along Barton Creek in the 1980s forced the environment of Austin into the political realm as an issue itself, a status from which it has never receded. Indeed, the story of the environmental meaning of Austin is to a large degree the story of Barton Creek and Barton Springs.


Bulldozers, Bridges, and Parks: The Growth Machine Arrives on Barton Creek One of the people who loved to walk Barton Creek was the young lawyer Joe Riddell. Riddell was a vocal champion of the environment from early on and had been appointed to the Environmental Board because of his love for Austin’s environment. He loved (and still loves) to walk Barton Creek when dry, canoe it when full of water. At that time the creek provided a walkway out of the South Austin neighborhoods into unbuilt land that still resembled the country more than the city. It was not yet a greenbelt, but there was a trail along the creek that had existed since Indians camped along it and a Spanish settlement had been built on it.4 At that time the creek provided a real experience of “nature” in the midst of the urban because a person could literally walk out of the city along the trail, just keep walking, hearing only the sounds of nature. The only real protection creeks had at the time was the Creeks Ordinance, whose standards were to “preserve land to the greatest extent possible.” Riddell knew as a lawyer that that statement was pretty vague, so he kept an eye on the development proposals coming into the city. One day someone told him that there were bulldozers in Barton Creek, and he didn’t believe it until he saw them himself, because no one had filed any plans. He walked down to the creek and found developer Bill Milburn’s bulldozers blasting a huge swath in the middle of the creek. He brought suit to stop it. He had just finished working on another political campaign and “knew a little about how to politicize” an issue, so he did a press conference at the site. Stan Adams, the Lamar Savings banker, confronted him at the conference and threatened him with lawsuits if he continued. Adams was to be disappointed; Riddell and others were not intimidated, and Millburn’s plans for development along the creek set off a series of events that helped create one of the longest-lived environmental groups in Austin. Riddell was furious about the destruction, and took to the adjacent neighborhoods on foot to alert nearby homeowners of Milburn’s development plans. With Riddell’s help, several of these new homeowners like Jim Bannerot, who had just purchased his home within a hundred feet of the creek, got involved in the process. Bannerot’s property looked across the creek to a forested patch of land on the opposite bank. Millburn’s bulldozers were blasting away to put in pipes to service a new set of houses and apartments that would replace that forested patch of land. Bannerot was not happy about that, nor were many others along his side of the creek. Riddell helped them form a neighborhood group called the Barton Creek Citizens Association (BCCA). The BCCA was concerned primarily with the effects of the development across the creek


on their own neighborhood—they didn’t want the lights or noise it would bring, and felt it would ruin the feel of their neighborhood. The feeling of the group was that the creek was a neighborhood issue, not an environmental issue. But Bannerot believes that the two were related. “At a big level it was selfish desire to protect neighborhood amenities,” he says. “But at another level, it transcended selfish protection,” because BCCA members provided all of the labor of restoration of the creek, and “wanted it back like it was before the pipe, to help the environment.” Millburn’s development on the creek was just the beginning. One of the biggest issues faced by creek lovers was the development of the Barton Creek Square Mall. In 1973 Sid Jagger bought land in the Barton Creek watershed with the intent of developing a large, multi-use project that included office buildings, apartments, and single-family dwellings. Jagger lobbied the city to annex the property so that he could get city services, promising that he would include deed restrictions on the use of the land so that it would not adversely affect the water quality of Barton Creek. Shortly thereafter, however, Jagger sold the property to one of the nation’s largest mall builders, Melvin Simon. That firm’s intention for the property was a dense mall surrounded by several acres of asphalt parking lots. And the mall would not be built along the hillsides of the land: The firm intended to (and did) literally blast and bulldoze the top off the hill, flattening it to provide for the mall. The property had been zoned for one purpose under the assumption that it would be built with several innovative environmental protections. It now came to the council for rezoning for an entirely different purpose, with no environmental safeguards included. The city staff recommended only that filtration devices be installed, but no standards were set for the effectiveness of these devices. Bannerot and Riddell went to the council and asked for the establishment of measurable requirements for the filtration devices. But the Friedman council approved the developer’s language. The only devices that were actually installed were some retention ponds below the mall. These sand and gravel traps remove only some pollutants, and they overflow in heavy flood seasons. Although chemical sludge has been found in the ponds, the city cannot force the mall owners to clean it because the covenant agreement under which the zoning was approved includes no enforcement mechanism. The mall served as one of the most potent symbols of unrestrained growth built over the environment rather than into it. It symbolized the Growth Machine to all: Proponents see in it the market and business and economic vitality; opponents see in it an ugly set of buildings and a huge parking lot that pollute their creeks and springs. The destruction of the hilltop and the paving of Barton Creek Square Mall were a perfect example of the competing defi-


nitions of Austin. Would it be defined by innovative environmental designs and protection of the environment, or would it follow the typical suburban paradigm of large parking lots paved over the environment? The mall illustrated to many people the ideology of growth and the power of the Growth Machine over a sense of place. It was good for growth, bad for place. Buildings themselves were not the only threat to the creek or neighborhood amenities. Apartments and malls grow along roads. Roads have to bridge creeks, and the parts of the Growth Machine that laid the roads proposed a bridge over Barton Creek that would extend into the Barton Hills neighborhood. The Department of Transportation had plans to extend MoPac, an intra-city highway, south across the river, running along Barton Creek. Although MoPac is funded largely by the State of Texas, the city pays for part of it. The city council must therefore approve any city money to be spent on the road, and it scheduled a meeting to discuss the issue in 1976. Sally Shipman, who was then on the Planning Commission, phoned Betty Brown, who lived in the Barton Hills neighborhood. Brown was another one of those tireless campaigners for Austin’s neighborhoods. The two knew each other as members of WE CARE Austin, and Shipman warned Brown about the bridge. Brown alerted several of her neighbors, and the Barton Hills Neighborhood Association (BHNA) formed as an ad-hoc group to combat the building of the bridge. Brown went down to the council and testified against the idea, and the council voted not to include funding for the bridge in the CIP bonds that year. But the state highway and city transportation departments were bureaucratic components of the Growth Machine, and they were intent on building the bridge. By June 1978 the bridge was back before the Planning Commission, and so was the BHNA. Some of the neighborhood residents were professional engineers, people like Ann Orzech and David Gregg. Their professional training gave them knowledge of planning issues, and their skills allowed them to question the methodology and interpretations of the traffic analyses presented by the Department of Transportation. These two appeared and presented their own data that conflicted with the Department of Transportation data. Seeing the conflicting data, the Planning Commission voted to include money in the fiscal-year 1979 budget to do an engineering study for the bridge. When word of the study got out to the neighborhood, a royal battle ensued between neighbors who wanted the bridge put in and those who wanted it kept out. Neighbors who wanted the bridge cited their desire to relieve traffic and have another access point out of the neighborhood. Brown’s group was opposed to the bridge, and the BHNA members went door-to-door canvassing


the entire neighborhood. They found that more people were against it than for it. The BHNA then canvassed the adjacent Horseshoe Bend neighborhood, finding it overwhelmingly opposed as well. The BHNA and their canvass galvanized opposition to the bridge, and the Horseshoe Bend neighborhood joined the Barton Hills neighborhood to form the BH-HBNA. Both bridge opponents and proponents filled the council chambers at a hearing in August 1978. The pro-bridge faction was clearly in the minority at the meeting, and the anti-bridge faction was extremely vocal in its disapproval. BH-HBNA members cited their concerns that the bridge would destroy the integrity of the neighborhood, increase the risks of traffic, and pose an environmental problem to the creek.5 The bridge, Brown argued, would “destroy the quiet, natural atmosphere which all Austinites should be able to enjoy” along the creek.6 Because of the sentiment against the bridge, the council once again decided not to include the bridge itself in CIP bonds for 1979. Instead they hired the Voorhees firm to do a study on the project. The third time around, council member Richard Goodman told Brown that the council was disposed to vote for the bridge, and their best hope was to take their chances on the Voorhees study. So the neighborhood association took a new tack. They demanded that some of their members be included in the study. This demand was granted, and members of the association helped prepare the data for the Voorhees study. When the report was issued, it was a mixed blessing for the environment of Southwest Austin. Due in no small part to the efforts of the BH-HBNA, the report unequivocally concluded that the bridge need not be built. However, it did say that traffic problems in that section of town were going to be fixed only by upgrading the roads in the area, roads that led directly into the area specified by Austin Tomorrow area 4 as low priority. On the strength of the Voorhees report, the council dropped its plans for the bridge (which some insiders say the Highway Department still wants to this day). But the Voorhees report presaged future problems for the Barton Creek watershed, citing as it did the need for extensive roadway services into one of the most sensitive regions of the Edwards Aquifer Recharge Zone. The fights that emerged around the Barton Creek neighborhoods were part of a larger issue that was coming into focus as Austin grew. The identification of Austin as a special place, defined by quality of life rather than urban expansion, was coming into the public discourse over the building of bridges and malls. People against roads and malls on Barton Creek, and those who fought against other road and development projects elsewhere, were ac-


cused by growth advocates of opposing progress. In a sense, opponents were contesting the ideology of progress; they did not believe that growth in and of itself was a good thing, and they did not think of Austin as a great place because it was big. They thought in different terms. The conflict between the ideology of growth and a meaning of place is poignantly illustrated in a statement of the BH-HBNA from January 1980: How, then, shall we live? This is the basic, long range question. Some who favor the bridge have accused us of being selfish, for putting our interests ahead of the convenience of other Austinites, and for standing in the way of progress. But is the deterioration and decline of established residential neighborhoods truly “progress”? . . . We must protest that important values are at stake. Austin is the sum total of its neighborhoods; and each time the residential character of one of them is drastically altered by the introduction of through traffic, the quality of life in the whole city is diminished. This neighborhood concept was confirmed by the new . . . Austin Tomorrow Program, when it urged protection of existing neighborhoods . . . [W]e hope to have exhibited to you some of “what makes Austin, Austin,” and why we cherish it so.7

In such fashion was the meaning of “what makes Austin, Austin” being expressed in 1980. For this group and many like it, neighborhoods were the main focus of the quality of life of Austin. But a concurrent issue that involved some members of the BH-HBNA was already beginning the process by which the discourse of “what makes Austin, Austin” would be transformed into an environmental issue. The controversy was about the effects of development on parkland and along the creek near Zilker Park, Austin’s flagship metropolitan park. But more specifically, it was about the effects of development on Barton Springs pool. Austin’s flagship pool, Barton Springs, is located in the park. The pool is special because it is not a normal pool. It lies at the mouth of Barton Creek, and the water that emerges from the Barton Springs pool is fed by a huge underground aquifer that lies under the creek. Water from the aquifer emerges from a set of natural springs, and the pool is filled by the spring water. The pool does not have a concrete bottom; it is simply part of the creek that was turned into a swimming pool when the city built a dam for that purpose in the 1920s. The aquifer is fed by rainwater that falls above the pool, and water that emerges in the pool is therefore indicative of what is happening to


the land above the pool and along its banks. Within hours after Simon began blasting the hill to level it for his mall, the water emerging from the springs turned dark and silty because of the activity on top of the aquifer. It was one of the first visual signs of how growth along Barton Creek could ruin Barton Springs, a potent alarm for many.8 In 1978 the development trio of Bradfield, Cummings, and Mayfield were at the Planning Commission asking for rezoning of some land between Barton Creek and the planned extension of MoPac south. Few people know about it beforehand, but on the morning that the council was scheduled to hear the request, Planning Commissioner Sally Shipman alerted Betty Brown of the hearing. Brown appeared at the hearing and “requested a delay so the citizens could have time to be more informed. Delay granted; I had the ball and was forced to run with it.”9 Brown and her friend Marilyn Simpson, the president of the Austin Neighborhoods Council, began putting together a coalition of groups opposed to the development. The neighborhood association was concerned about development in the area. But the mall had shown the threat of development on the creek to the springs, and several environmental groups got involved. WE CARE Austin was there once again, as were the Audubon Society, Sierra Club, and a few others. Together the groups formed the Citizens for the Protection of Zilker Park and Barton Springs (the CPZPBS), appointing Simpson as spokesperson. The CPZPBS did a citywide petition drive, broadening the issue from a neighborhood creek issue to a citywide concern for two of Austin’s most prized possessions, the park and the springs. The public hearing on the zoning request was held on November 3, 1978, in an acrimonious atmosphere. Bradfield had been quoted in a Statesman article as saying that “[p]eople from all over town have been whipped into a lather by the groups . . . protesting in a capricious manner for lack of something better to do.”10 Ads bought by the CPZPBS appeared in local papers urging “all who love Zilker Park and Barton Springs to contact the city council: and then come to the hearing.”11 Once again, the council chambers were packed with opponents of the requested zoning change. Under this public pressure, the council voted to allow offices on the tract while requiring that a 100-foot residential buffer zone be kept in place between them and the park. But the council put off consideration of the zoning changes for the apartments farther upstream, which kept the issue alive. In his coverage of the issue, Bill Collier of the Statesman began to call the group the “Zilker Park zoning posse” because of the number of groups involved.12 And the name stuck, shortened to just the Zilker Park Posse.


The issue of zoning along the creek had become more than just a neighborhood issue. It became a larger issue of protecting Barton Springs and parkland in Zilker, community assets enjoyed by people from all over Austin. Many of the people involved decided to create a long-lasting group that would work specifically to protect the Barton Springs watershed and Edwards Aquifer. Although some of the people were BH-HBNA members, many were from north of the river or lived in South Austin outside the bounds of the Barton Hills neighborhood. They created two organizations that quickly grew in size, the Save Barton Creek Association (SBCA) and the Zilker Park Posse (ZPP). The SBCA was the non-profit arm of the group, whose main goal was to increase awareness of environmental problems and publicize the need for “the preservation of Barton Springs and the unique environment of Zilker Park and the Barton Creek Watershed . . . [as well as] protecting the quality of the water flowing into Barton Creek and emanating from the Springs into Barton Springs Pool in an effort to restore the purity and crystal clear quality of the water.”13 The second arm of the group was a registered Political Action Committee called the Zilker Park Posse, adopting the name dubbed by Collier. The Zilker Park Posse was organized as the political arm of the group that could raise and spend money lobbying council members and endorsing political campaigns. By June 1979, the ZPP had issued a program of six steps designed to safeguard Barton Creek and Barton Springs, and was pressuring the council to adopt their program. The program called for a moratorium on development near the creek, along with establishment of water-quality monitoring and parkland purchase along the creek.14 The council considered the ZPP moratorium on development in the area, but before it was passed the council voted to rezone the Bradfield-CummingsMayfield land for apartments. That decision added fuel to the fire, so that when the council got around to a hearing on the proposed moratorium on July 5, 1979, more than 150 people signed up at the council chambers to speak for the moratorium, with an uncounted number overflowing the chambers into the street. In the face of such public support, the council unanimously passed a six-month moratorium on new building in the watershed. The moratorium stated that no new subdivision plattes were to be accepted for that time. But as interpreted by City Manager Dan Davidson, the moratorium allowed developers who had already filed development plans to continue to build. Davidson’s interpretation allowed the Bradfield-CummingsMayfield projects to continue apace, along with several other projects filed while the council had put the matter off. This pattern became standard practice


for growth-friendly councils over the next decade. They would put off consideration of ordinances until developers had their chance to file plans; once the plans had been filed, they would interpret the new ordinances to apply only to future development. The builders could then build more densely and more destructively because they were building under older, less stringent rules. In the middle of the conflict over the development moratorium, the council received a Barton Creek watershed study that had been ordered in 1975. Conducted by Espey, Huston & Associates, the report verified much of what the CPZPBS and ZPP had been saying: that runoff from impervious cover caused a serious hazard to the integrity of Barton Creek.15 The report confirmed what many Austinites had been saying about the creek, and the report’s recommendations for protection were mainly things that had been proposed in the past as ways the city could protect the creek. But in a prescient statement of the relationship between people and the environment in Austin, the report concluded that the issue would not go away. The Austin AmericanStatesman did a story on it that included the root issue: [A]ny development will result in some further deterioration of the natural system. The degree of loss which is tolerable is as much a political and legal question as it is an ecological one.16

That two-sentence statement defines what would be the main issue in all the future fights over development in Austin. Developers wanted the freedom to create a big loss, and their opponents wanted to limit the loss. Under pressure from the ZPP and others, the council appointed a task force to write a Barton Creek Ordinance regulating development in the watershed, which underwent a series of revisions over time that gradually toughened up development restrictions in the watershed, although never up to today’s standard. The biggest sticking point in writing that ordinance was establishing measures for degree of loss. The second was deciding how much loss was acceptable. The next chapter includes the story of these ordinances because the arguments over acceptable loss resulted in a strong ordinance and a series of lawsuits that defined the environmental movement in the 1990s. The ZPP was in a sense a transition organization that began to add the environment in general to neighborhood quality as something that defined Austin’s identity. It brought the environment front and center into the battle with the Growth Machine. The original grievances of people along Barton Creek were about the neighborhoods, but development along lower Barton Creek threatened more than just the Barton Hills neighborhood. It threat-


ened the nature of Barton Creek and the water in Barton Springs, which many people used and loved. By 1981, the Zilker Park Posse had become the leading proponent of environmental concerns in Austin, and their political action forced the environment onto the front burner of the discourse of Austin as the Boom took hold. This emerging discourse was summarized by the Christmas 1981 edition of the ZPP newsletter. The front page showed a closed Barton Springs pool, looking up the pool from the drainage end, with seaweed and muck flowing out. An insert shows the “pool closed” sign, and BOYCOTT BARTON MALL is the banner across the page. The danger to the pool symbolized the kinds of changes brought to the city itself, and the meaning of that city as a small, quiet place in the midst of natural beauty. Inside the edition is an excerpt of an old English poem: The law locks up both man and woman Who steal the goose from off the common But lets the greater felon loose Who steals the common from the goose

The poem was a parable of Austin at the time, a city many people felt was losing its own treasured commons—hills, lakes, and especially Barton Springs—to private development. The Indians, it said, sold Manhattan to the Dutch for a handful of trinkets. “Are we, too, selling Austin for a handful of trinkets?” it asked. What were the commons back then? Land and culture. The decision of Motorola to build on the aquifer in Oak Hill, spreading more urban sprawl, the loss of the Armadillo World Headquarters (one of the main performance venues for the meeting of the many kinds of music, and many kinds of people, in Austin), and the land on which Barton Creek Mall was built. Another example—where the “common” happens to be our water supply—is the speculation that occurred on a large tract of land over the Barton Springs Aquifer . . . Where once was a graceful hill with rainfall draining naturally in five different directions, now squats the largest shopping center in the Southwest.17

While the definition of “what makes Austin, Austin” was still expressed mostly in terms of neighborhood protection, concern for an environmental feature was beginning to enter the discourse of Austin as a defining feature of the city, a common treasure, a common thing that made the city a special place, and a reason to channel growth.


The Ideology of Growth and Its Discontents In the early 1980s, a series of bond issues and council elections allowed the environmental groups to promote their ideas about Austin to a wider constituency of voters. Because they were often fought between growth advocates and those who wanted to preserve the environment in the midst of growth, the elections of the 1980s moved the discourse of Austin firmly toward the “environmentalists vs. developers” dichotomy that provided such a strong symbolic definition of the conflicts in Austin for twenty years. These elections were public fights: The claims made by both sides were laid out to the citizens of Austin in the advertisements and documents of the political campaigns. The elections themselves served as an arena in which the battle between the Growth Machine and its opponents articulated a set of frames about the environment and other issues related to growth in Austin. They were a defining part of the discourse of Austin, both reflecting the ways people thought about Austin, and helping to define those ideas about place. The Posse Rounds Up Support In early 1981 the city council put a bond proposal before the voters containing provisions to buy parkland, but also to build more water and wastewater projects into the southwest portion of Travis County, in zone 4 of Austin Tomorrow. The water bonds were heavily promoted by then-mayor Carole McClellan and the Chamber of Commerce. They were opposed by several groups, including the ZPP, which felt that they were another attempt by growth advocates to hide financing for infrastructure to the southwest. That infrastructure would allow more building along Barton Creek and add more pollution to the creek and Barton Springs. In their effort to defeat the bonds, ZPP advertising framed the issue along three intersecting lines that have remained the standard complaint of environmental organizations up to today. The ZPP ads showed that new sewer lines would lead to new development on the creek and aquifer recharge zone (ZPP television ads showed bulldozers in Barton Creek), that the bonds funneled growth to the southwest in contravention of the Austin Tomorrow Master Plan, and that the citizens would be the ones who paid for the destruction in the form of higher utility bills, which would rise due to the indebtedness on the bonds used to pay for them. The fight over the bond issue saw labeling on both sides that indicated the kinds of conflict growth was creating. Bond promoters began calling opponents “no-growthers”; opponents of the bonds called bond proponents “pro-


growthers.” Defending themselves against charges that its members were “no-growthers,” the ZPP stated that this issue was not one of growth or nogrowth. Instead: The issue in this election is growth management. The citizens of Austin have stated they want planned, managed growth. This is not happening in spite of the [Austin Tomorrow] Master Plan. We are urging the voters to reaffirm that statement by voting against the water and waste-water bonds.18

The charge by the ZPP surprised the mayor and the chamber backers. Backed by strong neighborhood support, the opposition groups won the day. The victory in the bonds election showed that the ZPP could reach voters by defining growth issues in “controlled growth” terms, emphasizing the Austin Tomorrow Master Plan. The ZPP took this frame into the following council election as they put forth their own slate of candidates. Contrary to the Austin Tomorrow Plan, the west and southwest were in the process of being developed into highly profitable subdivisions. The people who wanted to continue developing in these areas were backing a slate of candidates who were perceived as friendly to the idea of growth, including most of the incumbents. Thus the city council election of 1981 saw a fight between a well-financed group of growth candidates against the grassroots efforts of the ANC, a residential electric ratepayer group led by Conrad and Shudde Fath, and the ZPP. The fight amplified the “growth vs. controlled growth” frame as developer influence on the council played against neighborhood, environment, and residential electric rate concerns. The amount of developer influence over the council was a major issue in the election. The Statesman itself helped frame the issue, asking whether “money is the winning criterion” and doubting whether a candidate without money behind him could win.19 Some of the ZPP candidates used this frame in their own campaign ads. Larry Deuser, for example, headed one of his ads with the slogan “Not a nickel’s worth of Developers’ Money has been contributed to Larry Deuser’s campaign. EVER WONDER WHY?”20 Deuser promised to “end the subsidy to developers . . . The present policy of using taxpayers’ money to build water and sewer lines outside the city limits (and outside the preferred growth corridor) for the benefit of the developers must come to a screeching halt.”21 For the ANC and ZPP, the influence of developer money was a contributing factor to the larger issue of whether Austin’s natural environment would be protected by following the goals of Austin Tomorrow. Their political ads


framed the issue as protecting Austin’s creeks and Barton Springs, using Austin Tomorrow as the mechanism to control growth along these features. The headline of a full-page ad bought by ZPP asked, “WILL OUR MASTER PLAN PROTECT OR DESTROY AUSTIN’S NATURAL RESOURCES?” and included a three-fourths-page graphics map that showed the features under discussion: the preferred growth corridor, huge bulldozers, and large arrows showing the direction of travel that runoff takes. The southwestern runoff would pollute Barton Creek and Barton Springs, the northwestern runoff Bull Creek, the lakes, and the river. The ad reminded voters all over the city that Austin Tomorrow was adopted in large part so that development would not destroy Austin’s water by urban runoff into creeks, lakes, and the aquifer.22 The ad was also one of the first and most widely seen illustrations of the hydrology of the Edwards Aquifer system, showing people exactly how the system worked and what was at stake. The science of the Edwards Aquifer was entering the public sphere as a reason to channel growth. In addition to the ANC and ZPP, Conrad and Shudde Fath formed a PAC to promote a residential electric rate proposal that would reduce rates on the core. Their PAC endorsed the same candidates as the ZPP. The River City Coordinating Council, an umbrella group for communication between about thirty organizations, endorsed them as well. Door-to-door volunteers distributed 85,000 endorsement flyers for the Fath PAC and about 45,000 for the RCCC during the council elections and the runoff election. Due to the organizational networks of the ANC, the Fath PAC, and the promotional efforts of the ZPP, the election favored the controlled-growth advocates. Roger Duncan, who was running campaigns to get Austin out of the Nuke, was then a member of the Environmental Board, and led the fight against the 1980 bond package. He won handily in the first round, and three other endorsed candidates made the runoff election. By the runoff race a month later, the frames of environmental protection, developer influence, and ongoing development had tightened up and were symbolized by the mayor’s race. Election coverage in the Statesman continued to frame the issue in terms of “developer influence” by analyzing the money raised and spent by each candidate.23 The challenging candidates were concerned with the larger issues as well, and had begun to define the mayor as a symbol of everything that was wrong with the fast-paced, uncontrolled growth in Austin. The question asked by the challengers was “Has Carol McClellan Protected Our Water?”24 and campaign ads noted that Barton, Williamson, and Bull creeks had all been adversely affected by utility construction in their watersheds (which McClellan and her council had approved).


The developer candidates were promoting growth as an economic necessity for the economy, representing the standard ideology of growth, which rests on the argument that a city must grow or the economy will shrink. That argument is almost always a “jobs vs. [anything else]” argument. In Austin it was “jobs vs. the environment.” But Austin is a college town with many highereducated residents who knew the problems with that argument. Growth does bring more jobs and thus more money to some people, but not all people, and not everyone gets an even amount of extra money. Nor does everyone come out ahead; as property values rise, so do the taxes on those properties. Seniors on fixed incomes, low-income workers, young families without much money—all are harmed by the increase in housing costs and taxes. Urban growth also produces unpleasant side effects—what economists call “externalities”—such as pollution, traffic jams, etc. Citizens who already live in a city that is growing bear the costs of growth in the pollution that must be cleaned up, the taxes that pay for the new streets, etc. Unguided growth fosters uneven development, where some parts of town get built with pricey new amenities while others are left to deteriorate. Those who live in the newer parts may come out ahead; those left behind do not. The people who do always come out ahead from growth are the land speculators, real estate agents, and others who make money from new housing and buildings. Growth will generate wealth for them, even if it does not bring good jobs or an even distribution of wealth to everyone else. Thus growth promoters almost always pretend that growth must be generalized, undirected, and happen according to “the market,” or people will lose jobs and wealth. The argument is ridiculous: Growth can occur in areas that are not environmentally sensitive and still create more jobs and more wealth. It might not create as much wealth for one particular housing developer on one plot of land in the southwest corner, but it would create plenty of wealth for others in other parts of town. That was the goal of Austin Tomorrow’s planning process—to create a plan to channel growth so that benefits accrued more evenly and environmental problems were minimized. The coalition of neighborhoods and environmentalists had these issues in mind when they were fighting this ideology of growth, and they reframed the growth argument by blending the economic argument for more individual wealth with an idea of communal wealth based on creeks, the river, and Barton Springs. Referring to the economic argument and McClellan’s votes as mayor, the ZPP reframed the growth rhetoric with the statement that “OUR WEALTH IS OUR WATER.”25 Because of its centrality to the formation of the ZPP, Barton Springs had


become a major symbol in the race between Mayor McClellan and challenger Bob Binder, a former councilman. Binder attacked McClellan for her ties to developers, saying that “Harming Barton Springs was the inevitable and foreseeable result of those many votes [by McClellan] in favor of the mayor’s developer friends.”26 McClellan sought to neutralize her record by firing back that “Barton Springs is sacred to me”27 and began running commercials reminding voters that Binder had voted for the Barton Creek Square Mall zoning in 1975. In the end, the challenger’s candidates Duncan, Deuser, and Charles Urdy won the council races, while Binder lost the mayor’s race to McClellan. The outcome of the election created what members of the ZPP thought would be a four-seat council majority that would be amenable to directing growth according to the Austin Tomorrow Plan. But ZPP’s hopes of an environmental majority were dashed a few months later when Urdy voted with the growth advocates to allow Motorola to build a new plant in Oak Hill, directly on top of the aquifer. The city agreed to prioritize water and sewer infrastructure to the plant, which would facilitate housing and other development in the area. The vote infuriated ZPP members, and Urdy remembers the vote well. To him, it was a jobs issue. He voted for the Motorola plant in the belief that it would bring jobs for people from East Austin.28 Pro-growth groups convinced Urdy that bringing Motorola to Austin was in fact a “jobs or the environment” issue. It was the same old spurious argument about growth: Motorola could have built elsewhere, creating jobs without building on a sensitive environmental feature. It could even have built near East Austin and allowed minorities access to jobs within a short distance of their homes.29 But though environmentalists protested that Austin Tomorrow was about channeling away from the sensitive environment of the aquifer, the ideology that growth and environment were antithetical was continually deployed by business groups and real estate speculators as justification for building there. That ideology was deployed in other areas as well. Nowhere was the ideology that “growth will happen” more strongly asserted than in road projects. And there was a major road project being driven by the Growth Machine straight onto the aquifer. The Road Goes on Forever: MoPac and Suburban Development Just after Urdy cast the vote for Motorola, the new ZPP-elected council found itself enmeshed in an uproar caused by the unplanned growth of subdivisions in the southwest and northwest. Utilizing the tool of the MUD (see chapter 2), suburban developments had sprouted up all over both areas,


bringing snarled traffic to the city’s north-south throughways. These traffic problems were taken up by the Austin Transportation Study group (ATS). The ATS is a board that plans the road network in and around Austin and is composed of representatives from the city, county, and state. It can approve or disapprove road plans, and in 1981 the board was set to vote on whether to extend MoPac both north and south. The state Highway Department pushed for the extension of MoPac, but since the City of Austin would be paying part of its cost, the department needed the approval of the Austin City Council to build the extension. The Highway Department conceived of MoPac as an inter-city roadway. But as did the Austin Tomorrow Plan, the new city council members elected by the neighborhoods and ZPP conceived of MoPac as an intra-city roadway. They opposed the extension. Although the new council had a majority against the extension, the city’s ATS representative at the time was council member Ron Mullen, who was for the extension. The new council voted 4–3 to replace Mullen with Urdy on the ATS to ensure that the ATS vote would be against the extension. That move infuriated Mullen, who had a state district court issue an injunction placing him back on the ATS. Knowing that Mullen would vote for the extension, the four anti-extension council members then called for a citywide referendum on the issue, hoping to force Mullen as the city representative to vote against the extension. The ensuing campaign saw the usual lineup of environmental and neighborhood groups on one side, and Mullen, the mayor, and developers on the other. City staff and Chamber of Commerce interests cited the need for the road to reduce expected traffic increases. Mullen, angry at his treatment, led the charge for the extensions. State and county road builders wanted the road as well. Based on ATS traffic pattern projections, the state and county had plans for the road extension that they were not going to give up. Those are big entities with lots of resources, and they had very definite plans for the road. In addition, residents in some of the newly developed suburbs were for the extension, hoping that it would lessen the traffic congestion in their areas. Many groups perceived the MoPac issue as a solution to lessen traffic problems (the Statesman framed it as traffic vs. the environment30). For others, the issue went deeper. To opponents, it was once again a question of what kind of city Austin would become: a big, sprawling, suburbanized area, or a directed and planned place. ZPP ads continued to emphasize the hydrological system that polluted Barton Springs, using the pool as a symbol for the changes in the kind of place Austin represented, asking, “What Is This Swimming Hole Worth?”31 A Travis County analyst hit the nail on the head when he noted that the issue was not simply traffic vs. the environment, but essentially “the


impact of development in the suburbs on the inner city.”32 Those against the extensions both north and south made the point that extending the road into the suburbs drove the population out of town and forced those people to become commuters who worked in Austin but lived elsewhere. An umbrella group named Economical Transportation for Austin’s Neighborhoods (ETAN) led the fight against the extensions. Composed of groups like ANC, ZPP, SBCA, Central Austin Democrats, WE CARE Austin, and others, ETAN placed ads asking the pointed question, “Who will benefit from the extensions?” ETAN listed local developers whose property would benefit from the extension and noted that the average contribution to the PAC supporting the extension was $1,000.33 ETAN argued that people who opposed the extensions don’t want to pay higher taxes so outsiders can get to town quicker. People who don’t want Barton Springs killed by pollution, a Houstonized Austin, or their taxes raised to help rich developers get richer.34

To opponents, the MoPac extension was very much an issue of fairness and growth. It was about providing city services to developments that the city had not planned on servicing, that the Austin Tomorrow Plan had specified as low-development areas, and that would drain the inner-city tax base for the benefit of people who did not contribute taxes to the city. The MoPac extension threatened more than just physical environmental features. It threatened the kind of place that many Austinites believed their city to be. The “Houstonizing Austin” quote used in the ETAN ad was one that had been making the rounds, and for MoPac opponents it encapsulated the whole argument. ETAN members did not want Austin to look like the standard suburbanized city typified by Houston. Their sense of place was based on the feel of a small town, not a sprawling metropolis. ETAN could not compete against the road backers’ money, and they had a hard time convincing voters not to build a road that many would use. People sitting in snarled traffic want more roads because they think more roads will reduce traffic. People who live in neighborhoods next to overcrowded thoroughfares hope the new roads will reduce traffic in their own area. Thus, the number of interest groups for the MoPac extension was greater and easier to mobilize than groups that might have backed the bond proposal the previous year. And the money raised by the growth boosters was significant. Their PAC showed contributions of $30,000 (a significant sum in those days), much of that from developers and banks.35 Proponents of the extensions out-


spent the opponents 10 to 1, and it showed in the election results. Between the big money and the many people who wanted to reduce their traffic, the MoPac extensions won by about 2 to 1. It was not just money or promises of reduced traffic that the boosters were deploying. The MoPac campaign showed that the boosters were learning to play the game according to the new discourse of Austin. During the MoPac vote, what I call stealth neighborhood groups began to be used by pro-growth actors. The leading pro-extension PAC was titled Neighbors for MoPac, using the neighborhood association identification to define themselves to the public as a group of residents concerned about traffic rather than a group of wealthy individuals and businesses with financial interests in the outcome of the elections. How many voters believed their cover is unknown—the ANC was against the road. But the use of the term “neighborhood associations” by growth boosters shows how important that frame had become. It also foreshadows the kind of cover used by national resource extraction corporations in the 1990s as they green-scammed their PACs with environmentally friendly names. Always on the crest of the wave, Austin is. The loss of the MoPac extension election was a big loss for the hopes of controlling growth, especially into the southwest. Soon thereafter, trying again to direct all that new growth, the ZPP-backed council proposed a huge bond package for the city. The council structured the bonds so that the majority of the money raised would be spent on projects within the preferred growth corridor. However, the utility bonds were written in such a way that no distinction was made between money to be spent on upgrading existing utility lines and placing new water, sewer, and electric lines. By structuring the bonds to service primarily the growth corridor, fissures grew in several groups, and the simple “environmentalists vs. developers” dichotomy broke down. Many who were against the 1980 bonds were for the 1981 bonds, and lines of fissure showed up in various organizations as more strident voices fought more moderate voices. The ZPP was about the only group to take a formal stand against some of the bonds. But even their board was split. The ZPP opposed the utility bonds on the grounds that the city was once again subsidizing growth, and that developers should pay for the infrastructure to their projects. They supported the parks bonds and had no position on the other bonds. But their split board, and their different positions on utility and parks bonds, caused a public schism. Some, like board member Shudde Fath, thought that they should support the entire package because it was written by the people they had helped elect.36 Others, like then-president Connie Moore and board member Jeanette Grainger, were adamantly opposed to the utility bonds at the least.


That split was made public, finding its way into an article about the bonds on the day before the election.37 And during a radio call-in show, Fath and Moore made contradictory statements about the board’s position. Fath also failed to specify in a press release she handed out that the board opposed only the utility bonds, and not the whole package.38 The mixed signals led to some very hard feelings between several people with very strong personalities, and led to a vote by the ZPP board to remove Fath from her seat. Because of her advocacy for residential utility customers, Fath was well respected in the community. In addition to leading the ratepayers’ PAC that endorsed the elected council members, Fath had been an active member of the Utility Commission since its inception. Many people thought the ZPP vote had been unfair to her, and two of Fath’s defenders resigned from the board in protest. In the election, several of the bonds passed, and the utilities bonds opposed by the ZPP were resoundingly defeated (by about 60 to 40 percent). But the ZPP’s opposition to parts of a bond package that most organizations either supported or did not oppose cast them as the more radical element of the environmental movement. Although the SBCA had originally set up the ZPP as a Political Action Committee, and shared three board members with the ZPP, friction had developed between the two groups as people with a more determined “no growth” stance drifted toward the ZPP, and those with a more “controlled growth” stance drifted toward the SBCA. The SBCA continued on with a somewhat tarnished reputation caused by its association with the ZPP, which weakened its public and political stance, and the ZPP soon disbanded. But the SBCA quickly brought Fath on board as an officer, and she has been on the board ever since, working tirelessly to protect Barton Creek and Barton Springs. She remains a respected voice for environmental preservation today, and the city recently named a tract of preserve land in her honor. Despite its unsavory end, the ZPP was an important link in the development of the environmental meaning of Austin. The group served as a sort of evolutionary link between the neighborhood associations and environmental issues, promoting the environment as a key feature of the kind of place they wanted Austin to be. The frames the ZPP promoted in the early 1980s electoral contests were public statements that protecting Austin’s environmental resources could be done in the midst of growth by regulating the placement of utilities and services. Although several members quietly wished that growth would stop, preferring the town to remain as it was,39 nowhere in any ZPP literature is there any mention that Austin should stop growth. Instead, ads and fund-raisers reflected the goals of the Austin Tomorrow Program: Direct growth into the preferred growth corridor, away from the Hill Country, where the aquifer recharged.


Austin vs. Growth: The Discourse of “Environmentalists vs. Developers” But these goals were to be bulldozed by the Growth Machine. The loss in the MoPac election showed the basic problems for environmental protection in Austin. Although they would win some small victories against specific development projects along a couple of creeks or parks, it was almost impossible to compete successfully with the Growth Machine on the general principle of growth. There were too many interests promoting that ideology, and the ideology itself is so ingrained in American thought that most people simply assume that roads and suburbs and malls are necessities. It is hard to get people to vote against a road that will allow them to drive to their new house in the pretty hills, and difficult to convince them that a mall is not necessary. After the MoPac election, the SBCA tried to find ways to work within the political and economic realities of the Growth Machine, but there was not much to work with. In the mid-1980s SBCA presidents Jack Goodman and Bert Cromack, plus others, tried with some success to work with developers to establish development plans that would be more environmentally friendly. Sometimes they got land out of the deal; in one case a mall developer gave the city a huge swath of land that was integrated into the Barton Creek greenbelt. That donation allowed the city to create the first wilderness park in Austin, about 200 acres of undeveloped parkland called Gus Fruh Park. At times they worked with developers to install innovative environmental protections. But there was so much development going on that few developers could even be reached, and many of them saw the SBCA as “enviromaniacs” and radicals who wanted to keep them from developing anywhere. The SBCA also tried to limit growth in zone 4 by getting the city to install small sewer lines to new developments. If the sewer lines were small, that would limit the number of homes that could be served, and thus indirectly limit building in the zone. But that tactic did not work out, because city staff wanted the bigger lines. The staff, bureaucratic members of the Growth Machine, wanted to put in large lines to developments because staff assumed they would need the larger capacity for future development. From the staff ’s point of view, it was cheaper to do it now than later. That is always the problem with the bureaucratic parts of the Growth Machine. City staff is trained to lay infrastructure to serve development they assume must happen, and in so doing ensure that it does happen. The political economy of Austin also favored development interests that were building suburbs in the northwest and southwest, zone 4 of Austin Tomorrow. When the ZPP and SBCA tried over time to write a set of ordi-


nances that would restrict development in the watersheds of creeks that contributed to the recharge zone of the aquifer, developer influence on the task forces that wrote the ordinances diluted the level of protection. Even when written, the Planning Commission would regularly grant variances to the ordinances, reducing their effect. The developers who were part of the Growth Machine posed other problems for controlling growth. In the mid-1980s, the city undertook to write a new master plan to guide growth, called the AustinPlan. The Austin Tomorrow Program had been accepted as a plan, but never codified into any legal requirements or ordinances. The AustinPlan was meant to become a plan that would be codified as law. The AustinPlan looked pretty much like the Austin Tomorrow Program in its goals: a north-south development corridor, a compact city, environmental protections. It even had some of the same people on its committees. But the AustinPlan process had problems from the start. The two planners who ran the project were from a city in Florida and did not understand Texas state laws, especially the fact that Texas cities cannot write land use ordinances for their ETJs. Once this became clear, the planners tried to find an indirect route for governing growth by reducing city infrastructure in the environmentally sensitive zones. But the developers on the project became intransigent: They needed the additional infrastructure to the southwest to service all the developments they were building. Those developers went to the Texas Legislature and got a law passed that said cities had to pass ordinances one by one instead of as a set. There were several hundred ordinances written into the AustinPlan, and the council was not particularly interested in voting on each and every one. So the plan died, a victim of developers, the city council, and the Texas Legislature. With the death of the AustinPlan, the decade-long attempt to establish some mechanism to control growth came to an end. The land speculators had won big, and real estate development would continue to propel suburban sprawl and degrade the environment of the Hill Country. The Meanings Collide: Parkland and the First “Environmental Council” By 1983 the council had once again become developer friendly. Mullen beat Lowell Lebermann for the mayor’s position, and Mark Rose, a lobbyist, beat Deuser by spending an enormous sum of money in their race. The Growth Machine was running at full speed, and the talk among the council and Chamber of Commerce was about how to bring even more business to Austin. Mullen and Rose were making a few good business deals themselves; there was a plan to move the airport somewhere so it could become an inter-


national airport, and the small town of Manor was suggested. It later came to light that Mullen, the biggest proponent of the Manor site, had invested heavily in land near the site. The developer/council relationship did not go unpublicized. Two journalists in town, Daryl Slusher and Daryl Janes, were writing the Daryl Herald, a sheet that plumbed the depths of city deals to developers and developer influence on the council. Slusher grew up near the Blue Ridge, which has given him a love for the natural environment. But he was originally more interested in social issues. He came to Austin in the 1970s to go to school, spending his leisure time at Pedernales and other jewels of the Hill Country, and participating in the music scene. “Austin was the city of the violet crown, you could literally see the violet at sunset. It had clean air, you could see the stars, the clean water.” He liked the uniqueness, the natural beauty, and the affordability. “People used to take lower-paying jobs to stay here. They still do some, but it’s gotten more expensive to live, and so there is less of that now.” Slusher and Janes used the Herald to describe the cozy relationship between developers and the city council, and Slusher began to connect the negative environmental, social, and economic consequences of growth caused by that relationship. The Herald lasted three years, in which time Slusher detailed how city policy favored growth over environmental protection, big developments over small homeowners, and business interests over individual taxpayers. Slusher also became a key player in opposing another one of the growth promoters’ designs, a convention center. Mullen and several other businessmen proposed building a convention center on the south side of Town Lake, with a canal running up from the lake through the project. The convention center was supposed to allow Austin to compete against Dallas and Houston for huge national conventions, and a whole slate of boosters got behind the idea. To provide more infrastructure and authority for that and other growth projects, the Mullen council proposed a whole set of bonds and charter amendments for January 1985. The proposal to build a convention center on the prime parkland of Town Lake symbolized in the most direct way possible the conflict over the two visions of Austin. The project was to be built at Auditorium Shores, a huge swath of parkland where concerts and festivals are often held. The land had been slated by the Town Lake Project to become part of the Town Lake Hike and Bike. Convention center or park? Business city or quality-of-life city? Huge buildings or the environment? The convention center and bonds issues of that year were key elections between growth groups and the neighborhood/ environmental nexus, fought over the definition of Austin. A group called the Town Lake Park Alliance (TLPA) organized against


the convention center. Meeting at the home of Jean Mather, who had helped bring the Blunn Creek greenbelt to the Travis Heights neighborhood, the steering committee of the TLPA had several of the people who worked so hard to retain parkland in the 1970s and 1980s. There was Mary Arnold, of course (there seems to be a rule in Austin that you can’t protect environmental amenities without Arnold’s help), council member and anti-nuke organizer Roger Duncan, WE CARE Austin member Susan Toomey Frost, and University of Texas professor (later dean of the architecture school) Alan Taniguchi, who had been on the original Austin Environmental Council board. The group hired Slusher to be the petition drive organizer. Slusher collected enough signatures to get a proposition on the 1985 ballot that would have forced the city to dedicate the land as parkland. The TLPA figured that getting the land dedicated would save it from the convention center. Two days after the TLPA item was certified to be on the ballot, Mayor Mullen put his own proposition on the ballot. The convention he wanted would be on public parkland, so to redirect attention from that fact that parkland would disappear, Mullen called his item the Parks Endowment Fund. The fund would have provided that all profits from the convention center be used to build neighborhood parks. The convention center boosters were then able to claim that anti–convention center people were against neighborhood parks.40 Backed by big money, the campaign for the parks fund/convention center was able to run a huge advertising blitz in the media, targeting the TLPA proposal for defeat in television and newspaper advertisements. The TLPA had little money, but it used the grassroots networks of the neighborhood and environmental groups to amplify the core issues. The framing of the issue by the TLPA was the culmination of the conservation/parks philosophy begun in the 1970s. TLPA fund-raising letters urged making Town Lake “the showcase urban waterway of the southwest, a swath of open space, green and quiet and dignified, amidst the clamor of a growing metropolis.”41 The organization tapped into the neighborhood/environment nexus to raise funds and distribute information. They raised enough money to put a few ads in the paper and on the radio, but the real TLPA resources were the social networks formed in the preceding elections. Although the convention center boosters spent four times as much as the TLPA, their “Parks Fund” was stomped 67 to 32 percent. The networking ability of the neighborhood and environmental groups allowed the TLPA to craft a winning strategy without a lot of money. Booster efforts seemed to have their biggest effect by narrowly defeating the TLPA proposal 51 to 49 percent. What could have been seen as a narrow defeat only energized the TLPA to further efforts. After the election the TLPA proposed a ten-point Town Lake


Program that called for completing the Town Lake greenbelt by dedicating all city-owned land around the lake as parkland. The TLPA held meetings with the candidates for city council that May, asking them to sign on to the program. They got the environmental slate to sign on first, then invited the growth slate to come in. This tactic essentially forced booster candidates to sign on; the idea of parks was by then so important to the discourse of the city that even in the growth-crazed atmosphere of 1985, candidates could not run against parks. The TLPA was not the only group working the 1985 council election. Although the ZPP had drifted off into the sunset, the efforts at coalition building around Barton Springs eventually led to the formation of another registered PAC, called SANE. SANE stood for Save Austin’s Neighborhoods and Environment and was a melding of neighborhood, environment, and liberal networks. Another group of people formed the People’s PAC to advocate for social issues. The two soon joined hands, creating a coalition of progressive groups across town called “SANE—the People’s PAC,” headed up by Jack Goodman. The big contribution from the PAC came in the 1985 council elections as the group ran a grassroots campaign for a slate of candidates up against huge developer and business money. The funding of the 1985 council election made it the epitome of the “environmentalists vs. developers” dichotomy that had emerged during the previous elections. SANE put together a slate of candidates from the environmental and neighborhood groups to challenge the developer slate, including past SBCA president Frank Cooksey and neighborhood leader George Humphrey. Although some developers had contributed to some of the neighborhood candidates in the past, by 1985 neither Cooksey nor Humphrey was getting any campaign money from developers. All the big money was going to growth candidates, creating an obvious attempt by growth promoters to buy the election.42 The transparent attempt to buy the council infuriated many people, and Jack Goodman, who helped run the SANE slate, recalls that “people started coming in giving us two or five dollars, saying that developers were trying to buy this election.” Electoral politics was not the only arena of conflict over growth and parkland. Lawsuits were part of the times as well; they were part and parcel of the fights between developers and advocates for public land, and they could become personal and vindictive. The attempt to keep private development off public land was one of the main things the early conservationists had spent so much of their energy on, and it had earned them the ire of businesspeople who wanted that land for their own profit. By the 1980s, little had changed. The TLPA and the bonds elections were essentially about preserving public


space—in the form of parkland—that was owned by the city. One such tract of land next to the lake illustrates the connections between the money and the power boys in town, and their desire to use city land for private profit taking. The land is a privately owned tract along the lake on the downtown side, but the city owns property in front of it, called the Sand Beach tract. In the mid-1980s a developer wanted to build an office building on the tract, and wanted the city to grant him rights to put a road from his building through the city property. Mayor Mullen and some partners put some money into the project, and were working on getting street access (Mullen planned on setting up his insurance office in the building). But the city land was next to parkland, and many parks advocates, including Roberta Crenshaw and Mary Arnold, had been trying to get the city to dedicate the Sand Beach tract as parkland for years. When the developer and Mullen’s group got the city to allow the road across the land, Arnold, Crenshaw, and Susan Toomey Frost sued the city for not posting the legally required notice of such decision. Mullen’s group sued them right back, for money. In a sign of the bad feelings generated by all the conflict over land use, and the hardball tactics of Mullen and developers like him, his lawsuit charged that “Plaintiffs’ conduct was willful, wanton, and malicious and in reckless disregard of [Mullen’s group’s] rights and was part of a pattern of such disregard, and is the type of conduct that should be punished by . . . damages.” Mullen’s lawsuit asked the court to assess damages against the three women for bringing the lawsuit at all—asking for about $800,000.43 Here were powerful businessmen, one of whom was the mayor, suing three of the city’s leading women for trying to preserve parkland. But the suit wasn’t just about the land, it was about the fights between the groups, the tactics used, and the anger generated. The “pattern of such disregard” meant the actions of the women over time to preserve parkland. From the businessmen’s point of view, that “type of conduct” was a pain in their necks and potential profits, and they were using the law to get back at the women. How dare a bunch of activists—women at that—run around trying to keep them from making money off publicly owned land? The lawsuit was a very personal attack on the women’s activity over the years to preserve parkland. These men were mad, they wanted the women to pay, and they were using the legal system to scare others from advocating for public land. It was a clear signal to others that advocating for public land would cost them, personally. Interestingly, the attorney general of Texas intervened on the side of the women, because the State had originally given the land to the city on the


condition it remained public. The case worked its way up the system, and was eventually declared moot by an appeals court when the developer went bankrupt. But the lawsuit by Mullen’s group came right before the election of 1985, and the Cooksey campaign used it in a political advertisement in the week before the election, asking, WHY ARE MAYOR MULLEN AND HIS PARTNERS SUING THESE LADIES FOR OVER $800,000? BECAUSE THEY QUESTIONED MAYOR MULLEN’S LAND DEVELOPMENT DEAL USING CITY PARKLAND . . . AND THEY WOULD NOT BE BULLIED!44

The ad was a perfect example of the times, illustrating the conflict between developers and the little guy (or girl) trying to preserve land in the midst of growth. It was another flashpoint of controversy that helped the little guys win the election. The 1985 city charter and council elections played out like a referendum on all that was growth vs. all that was quality of life, and in the midst of massive unplanned growth, the citizenry seemed to vote squarely for a program of planned growth. Outspent by a huge margin, the SANE candidate slate won through a grassroots campaign that handed out 80,000 flyers door-to-door. The revenue bonds for new infrastructure to zone 4 and the Parks Endowment Fund to build the convention center were soundly defeated, while bonds for energy conservation passed. Requirements for a comprehensive growth plan and the creation of a city Growth Management Department both passed overwhelmingly. The 1985 city council election saw a slate of environmentalists and neighborhood activists, led by new mayor Frank Cooksey, elected to a controlling majority. It was called the first “environmental council” because of its majority who had served as environmental or neighborhood leaders. The Cooksey council, led by council member Sally Shipman, soon dedicated all city-owned land along the lake as parkland.45 But when the Cooksey council turned its efforts toward directing growth in general, and protecting the aquifer in particular, they had little luck. The new kind of MUDs available to developers drastically reduced the city’s ability to regulate development in its surrounding areas. About the only tool left to the city was the use of its limited purpose annexation power. So the Cooksey council tried to annex surrounding areas as quickly as possible in order to regulate development in the aquifer region. Not only did that not work well, it led to a substantial backlash from developers. Just because the growth interests and the boosters had lost a big local elec-


tion didn’t mean they had to abide by the sentiments expressed in that election. As had happened in 1975 when they had lost a bond election, developers fought the efforts of environmentalists at the state level. Unhappy about the prospect of being forced to abide by the city’s water regulations and land-use restrictions, they lobbied hard at the 1987 session of the Texas Legislature. Out of that session came the first of what became known as “Austin-bashing legislation.” The term “Austin-bashing legislation” was coined by neighborhood and environmental groups to describe legislation that limits Austin’s ability to direct growth outside its jurisdiction near the city. The Austin-bashing laws of the 1987 session of the Texas Legislature included some sweeping changes to state law. The legislature took away Austin’s limited purpose annexation powers.46 It changed the language on land-use planning laws to make it clear that cities could not impose land-use zoning in their ETJs. Although cities normally do not have land-use zoning authority in the ETJ anyway, they did have some authority to enforce water-quality ordinances in the ETJ. The 1987 legislature changed that too, allowing landowners in the ETJ to challenge city water-quality ordinances at the Texas Natural Resources and Conservation Commission and in district court.47 Finally, the legislature began to write grandfathering exemptions. House Bill 4 stated that once a permit has been filed in the development process, the development need not follow any city regulations passed after that point. This get-in-under-the-wire tactic had been used by developers in Austin before. As discussed earlier in the chapter, developers filed many permits during the 1980 Barton Creek development moratorium, and City Manager Davidson ruled that all those permits need not follow new regulations. House Bill 4 simply codified this developer tactic at the state level, and the law has substantially weakened Austin’s ability to protect the aquifer and its springs. The 1980s Elections: Framing the Discourse of Austin During the electoral battles of the mid-1980s, the conflict between developer interests and people who defined Austin by its quality of life began to create a discourse of Austin defined by the “environmentalists vs. developers” dichotomy. Success in political campaigns comes in part through framing issues in ways that match voter attitudes, by aligning the concerns of a social movement with “larger sentiment pools” in the wider public.48 Analyzing how different groups frame the same issue helps us understand the public discourse of Austin in the 1980s. It helps us see how groups were trying to gain support for their positions on growth, and thereby helps us understand how the neigh-


Figure 4.1. What Issues Were the Groups Talking About? Created by author.

borhoods and the environment became the main issues that defined the conflict. As much as that, though, the campaign literature helps us see how that definition of place was forming. It was not just a sign (outcome) of people’s thinking; it helped codify their thinking, helped identify the key issues, and helped define the way people in Austin thought about their place. Figure 4.1 shows the different emphases the groups placed on growth issues. The block sizes represent the relative number of attributions in the ads surveyed. The figure points out an intuitive contrast. Both sides talked about fiscal issues and protecting neighborhoods, and even Austin as a unique place. But whereas other groups (the growth advocates) emphasized planning for growth and gave time to environmental issues, neighborhood/environmental groups emphasized environmental issues and talked about which people were benefiting financially from growth. Figure 4.2 shows that as the neighborhood/environmental (N/E) axis framed its grievances in terms of neighborhood protection, it forced neighborhood issues into the public realm, where growth advocates had to address the issue. Figure 4.3 shows how they did the same with the environment. N/E groups had the support of large neighborhood coalitions that devel-

Figure 4.2. Which Groups Were Talking about Neighborhood Issues in 1980s Elections? Created by author.

Figure 4.3. Which Groups Were Talking about Environmental Issues over Time? Created

by author.


opers could not tap. So development-backed candidates began to lay claim to support from “neighborhood groups.” N/E groups made environmental issues a central component of their concerns about growth, and other groups had to address those concerns themselves. By the 1985 elections, both sides were talking about the environment as an issue, and thus did the environment become part of the discourse of Austin. Most of these groups were of dubious background: stealth neighborhood groups that appeared to endorse development candidates. For example, the group South Austin was formed in 1981 to endorse a slate of developer candidates. The name South Austin suggested that the group was part of the geographic base of the Barton Hills Neighborhood Association and Zilker Park Posse, but South Austin was for the very things the Barton Hills groups were against. The group Neighbors for MoPac appeared in 1982 to place half-page ads contesting ZPP ads. An advertisement for growth candidate Shyra Darr in the council election of 1985 shows a group of people under the banner “WE ARE THE NEIGHBORHOOD” who commend Darr for helping when “a city facility threatened to take our homes from us.”49 How the city facility was going to take their homes is not explained. But these stealth neighborhood groups allowed growth promoters to claim neighborhood issues as their own. The stealth neighborhood groups were a co-optive strategy on the part of developer and business groups. The fact that such groups were created illustrates how the discourse of Austin was so heavily influenced by the quality of its neighborhoods; developer candidates and groups had to lay claim to neighborhood issues as a minimum requirement for a campaign in Austin (whether they won or not). Creating such groups was an attempt to reframe pro-growth policies as “neighborhood” policies. Another way to get an idea of how growth advocates’ rhetoric shifted to match the terms set by the neighborhood and environmental groups can be found in direct mailings sent by growth candidates. Statements from 1983 and 1985 mail-outs illustrate the effect that N/E frames were having on the discourse of Austin. For example, Mullen’s mayoral letters laid claims to environmental protection by listing what he had done and how he had “stopped developers” in the process: You wanted traffic improvements. The MoPac extensions I fought for are well under way . . . We passed the Lake Travis and Lake Austin Watershed Ordinances . . . We stopped developer plans for utility districts in the Northwest with a tough city land use plan.50


Mullen’s claim to having “stopped developer plans” was interesting in light of the fact that Mullen was the primary recipient of developer money when he sent this mail-out.51 A similar bit of disingenuity could be found in the 1983 races, where developer-backed candidates Spaeth and Rose tried to blame N/E efforts to protect Barton Creek as the cause of the city’s problems: Trying to stop the city’s growth by restricting the availability of utilities is not effective. Aggressive annexation policies will allow us to steer new development into the master plan’s preferred growth corridor.52

What the ads failed to mention was that those annexation policies had been made much more difficult by developers’ use of MUDs, which effectively sank the Austin Tomorrow Plan to which the two growth candidates referred. The city could not use “aggressive annexation policies,” but the mail-outs still referred to them and the “master plan’s preferred growth corridor” because voters knew about both and perceived them to be tools for protecting the environment. This sort of framing by growth proponents was fairly common throughout the 1980s. They claimed that the environmental problems, higher taxes, and traffic congestion caused by growth were actually due to the protective policies the N/E groups were calling for. The irony of the activity on the part of neighborhood and environmental groups is that they were not able to stop or even really channel growth, but they had set the terms of the discourse. In order to compete in the electoral arena, growth proponents had to co-opt the meanings of Austin that neighborhood and environmental groups were successfully promoting. One of the most interesting examples of this kind of framing was a 1985 attempt by city council candidate Darr, who at the time worked for a large development firm, to blame environmentalists for the problems development was causing: The experiment to stop growth by not providing roads and services failed. It turned city control over to developers. They used state law to create Municipal Utility Districts. We got traffic jams, water rationing, sewage in our creeks, and higher home prices.53

Darr was completely correct in her condemnation of developers and MUDs, but she didn’t quite explain about her relationship with the developers controlling the city. Darr had been Mullen’s assistant at city hall when he was the main pro-growth vote on the council. When she ran for office, she


was working as the project manager of Woodmark Development Company. But because of the discourse of the time, she apparently found that she had to run against the “developers” who employed her and funded her race. Meanings and frames are promoted through venues other than political advertising, of course. The confluence of the symbolic and technical frames promoted by neighborhood and environmental groups may be best summarized by one of Bill Oliver’s songs printed in the ZPP Express: It’s breaking my heart strings What’s coming down Barton Springs Making my tongue speak The Shopping Maul of Barton Creek! Filling the stream we know With development overflow And it makes my heart sing The beauty of Barton Springs So lucky to have so near Such a delicate ecosphere But it’s spilling right through our hands Like the spirit of the Master Plan Changing the town we know Into a city of grow, grow, grow . . .54

The 1980s Contests: The Environmental Meaning Emerges Concerns about the environment emerged along with the neighborhood protection movement, but by the mid-1980s the environment was gaining greater saliency than neighborhoods in a meaning of Austin promoted by those opposing uncontrolled growth. The environment began its role as a public issue when neighborhoods tried to protect specific environmental features in their neighborhood. But through a series of citizen actions and political elections, the “environment” itself began to become a rallying point for those contesting the fast-paced urban growth of Austin. The names of the citizens’ groups most active in the promotion of the controlled-growth philosophy reflected the concern with the environment: Zilker Park Posse, Save Barton Creek Association, Town Lake Alliance. The Save Our Neighborhoods and Environment PAC was a formal recognition of the relationship between neighborhood and environmental groups. Neighborhoods remained an important issue, but the terms of the discourse were changing, formalizing “the envi-


ronment,” water, and to an extent Barton Springs as symbols of the kind of place Austin was. Neighborhood and environmental groups of the 1980s made substantial contributions to the environmental meaning of Austin today. Landscaping the central city was one of their major accomplishments. They were able to continue the landscaping project begun in the 1970s, the landscape that shapes and defines the core city of Austin today. Their electoral victories allowed them to continue building the environment into the city that had begun in the 1970s with the Greenbelt, Creeks, and Town Lake plans. They finished the Town Lake greenbelt and the trail around the lake, except a small chunk that is still in private hands today.55 They established the first wilderness park along Barton Creek (called Gus Fruh Park today), using land they bargained from a developer. They strengthened the water-quality ordinances begun in the 1970s, and passed a subdivision ordinance that required developers to contribute a portion of their land for parkland. If you run or ride or walk around Lady Bird Lake today, you have them to thank. If you hike and swim along lower Barton Creek, you are using space they got for you. If you live in a newer part of Austin, your neighborhood park exists in part because of their efforts. And if you wade or swim in the creeks, you have them to thank: Your creeks are clean enough to do so in large part because of them. They also had a major impact on a symbolic level. The battles of the 1980s helped establish an alternative meaning of Austin. The networks of neighborhood and environmental groups were able to win elections because they framed their issues in ways that reached a larger core of voters across the city. Their frames amplified grievances about growth held by large numbers of Austinites: the destruction of neighborhood amenities and environmental features, the negative consequences of growth on the feel of Austin, the cozy ties between big money and local government. They linked concern for the environment with concern for other issues and tied them together: neighborhood protection, liberal social issues, economics, and most importantly integrating the planning and environmental issues. Through the framing of the growth issues in political battles, the idea of Austin as a place defined by its environment was encoded in public thought, speech, and politics. As the two groups struggled for control of Austin’s political machinery, “environmentalists vs. developers” became the symbolic definition of a fight over the kind of city Austin was to be, and helped define the kind of place it was to thousands. And they had a huge effect on the political system in Austin. All the political action throughout the battles of the 1980s created a set of networks, a voter base, that had the potential of becoming organized around a symbolic


definition of Austin rooted in environmental concerns, a set of voters who could be called upon to vote in favor of environmental advocacy. And they provided a trained cadre of leaders who knew how to run and win political campaigns. By the end of the decade, though, it was more evident than ever that even substantial electoral wins were not able to slow or even direct growth itself. And that had been the main issue of concern throughout the decade. By the mid-1980s the quality-of-life groups could win elections, but they could not gain enough power to direct growth in ways the Austin Tomorrow Plan had defined. Winning at the city level simply moved the battle to the state level, where developers and speculators were in their own element. The Texas Legislature is extremely conservative and devoted almost wholly to the pursuit of profit. “Bidness” is king in Texas. Texas legislators were not at all impressed by what they considered a bunch of liberals and hippies telling a developer what he could do with his land. Developers were able to scuttle the AustinPlan at the Texas Legislature, allowing suburban growth to speed up in the southwest. Attempts by the Cooksey council to slow that growth by annexing land in the area led to a set of “Austin-bashing laws,” and the Texas Legislature took away the city’s authority over its ETJ. The state-level laws were the real nail in the coffin; without the ability to regulate and annex adjacent territory, the city was unable to regulate growth in Austin Tomorrow zone 4 or 5. By the late 1980s environmentalists and neighborhood advocates had the seats on the council, but the council had very little ability to regulate growth. That is one of the reasons their hold on the council did not last. David Butts blames their loss of the council at the end of the decade on the fact that although they could preserve parkland and create greenbelts, even upgrade water-quality ordinances, they could not stop growth in general. As growth intensified, he recalls, many people who had fought that growth believed that “the council hadn’t succeeded in saving anything, and they alienated their hard won constituency.” Voters were unhappy that their electoral successes had not resulted in directing growth away from the hills and aquifer, and, worn down by all the time spent fighting about it, the energy of the network that had fueled the 1980s campaigns ebbed. But the definition of Austin as a place defined by its environment never died out. It flowed underground for a while, like the water through the aquifer: unseen but still there, ready to reappear later. Which it would, in torrents. When it did, it would solidify the environmental meaning as the main organizing symbol of the movement for place. Indeed, it was the apparent hopelessness over the ability to control growth at the end of the 1980s that led to a movement in the following decade that eclipsed even the ZPP uprising


at the beginning of the 1980s. Once again a group of people would form to try to protect Barton Springs from the damages of development upstream. But this time, a symbolic political campaign defining Austin in terms of its environment would turn a fractious coalition called Save Our Springs into an enduring political base that would not only solidify the discourse of Austin around environmental symbolism, but give quality-of-life advocates a real seat at the table of the political system in Austin.

Photo 1. Barton Springs pool, date unknown. PICA 01009, Austin History Center, Austin Public Library.

Photo 2. The flood of 1935: South Congress Avenue and Riverside Drive are underwater. ND 35-101-05, Austin History Center, Austin Public Library.

Photo 3. Tree planting, Town Lake, ca. late 1960s/early 1970s. PICA 22955, Austin History Center, Austin Public Library.

Photo 4. Barton Springs pool has been closed many times because of pollution carried downstream from development in the Edwards Aquifer region. Photograph by Alan Pogue, 1985.

Photo 5. Mary Arnold, Susan Toomey Frost, and Roberta Crenshaw, 1985. Author photo.

Photo 6. Daryl Slusher (right) and Gary Bradley (left) discuss Bradley’s development

plans in the old city council chambers, ca. 1991. Photograph by Alan Pogue.

Photo 7. The all-night PUD hearing, June 1991. Photograph by Alan Pogue.

Photo 8. Council members Brigid Shea and Jackie Goodman on the city council dais,

ca. 1993. Photograph by Alan Pogue.

Photo 9. Council member Jackie Goodman on the phone, election night, 1993.

Photograph by Alan Pogue.

Photo 10. Bill Bunch in his element: collecting signatures and funds to protect Barton Springs, at the pool, 1994. Photograph by Alan Pogue.

Photo 11. Daryl Slusher and family, election night, 1994. Photograph by Alan Pogue.

Photo 12. Some of the Green Machine on election night, 1996: Mary Ann Neely, David Butts, Mark Yznaga, Leslie Pool, and Todd Main. Author photo.

Photo 13. Town Lake (renamed Lady Bird Lake): a wooded greenbelt in the middle of

the city, 2009. Author photo.

Chapter 5

The Environmental Meaning as Banner The Save Our Springs Coalition and the Green Machine

Setting the Stage: How Much “Protection” Is Enough? The Edwards Aquifer is a huge underground water supply that lies under Central Texas. The section under the Austin area covers 365 square miles. The aquifer is a vast system of fractures in the limestone of the region. Water enters the aquifer system as it drains into cracks and crevasses in the aquifer recharge zone. As rainwater falls in the area, some of it enters the aquifer through the recharge zone. A larger land area of 264 square miles, called the contributing zone, exists to the west of the recharge zone. Rain or other water that falls in the contributing zone is carried by the creeks into the recharge zone, where some of it enters the aquifer. The water in the aquifer then flows downhill underground toward the Colorado River, and the vast majority of it emerges from the ground at the set of springs called Barton Springs. Barton Springs pumps out roughly 32 million gallons of cool 68-degree water a day. Water quality in the aquifer, and therefore in Barton Springs, is affected by the large-scale urbanization occurring in the contributing and recharge zones. As storm water runoff from urban streets and buildings enters the aquifer, it carries the pollutants of the urban area: petroleum residue, gasoline, toxic metals, pesticides, and other substances. Most of this pollution enters the aquifer through seepage as the water runs over the ground and slowly sinks into the aquifer, instead of from some source such as a pipe. This is called non-point-source pollution, and the way pollution enters the groundwater influences the perception of pollution. When you see a pipe dumping pollution into a stream or lake, that pollution is very obvious. But you cannot see pollution entering the aquifer because there is no one point at which it happens.

The Environmental Meaning as Banner 143

Figure 5.1. From Ken Butler, “Managing Growth and Groundwater Quality in the Edwards Aquifer Area, Austin, Texas,” from Public Affairs Comment 29(2) (1983).

Because of the way it enters the aquifer, it is harder to define and measure pollution entering the aquifer. Non-point-source pollution means that no one factory or building can be found to stop pollution. All developments will pollute some, but the aquifer region is very large, so no one single project can destroy the aquifer by itself. However, many projects together can. Pollution from urbanization occurs invisibly, so unless you have learned about the system you are not likely to even think about it. It occurs as a generalized rather than a specific problem. Solutions therefore become technical scientific issues rather than simple fixes like plugging a pipe or fixing a sewer line. Urbanization of the recharge and contributing zones is itself the problem, and the only


way to solve that problem is to reduce the amount of pavement and the number of buildings on the aquifer. Anything less will degrade the water quality of the aquifer, the creeks, and Barton Springs. But anything less will also reduce the profits of the international corporations and the local developers who make money building those urbanized areas. So the kind of pollution that can harm Barton Springs, the economy of land speculation, and the attempt to preserve the environment created a perfect storm around Barton Springs. Barton Springs, physically located in the center of modern Austin, has served as a source of drinking water and recreation for humans for centuries. The springs have served as a geographic and social center of Austin since the late nineteenth century. In the 1920s the City of Austin built a small dam one-eighth mile below the springs, creating a huge, spring-fed pool in the middle of Zilker Park, the largest park in Austin. Hydrological studies conducted by the city indicate that “storm runoff from medium density residential development can be five to ten times greater than low density residential areas,”1 so the densely built suburbs popping up in the aquifer area southwest of Austin began to cause concern for the water quality in Barton Springs. This concern was codified in the Austin Tomorrow Plan, which specified that growth should be directed away from the aquifer area. But developers found that subdivisions in the aquifer area were highly profitable. There was a high demand for housing in the area: The beautiful scenery to be found in the area draws people, and the white flight from Austin as the city integrated its schools in the late 1970s increased the number of people who wanted to live outside the city. By the 1980s it was obvious to people in Austin that protecting Barton Springs meant regulating growth and development over the aquifer. The Zilker Park Posse described in the preceding chapter arose as a response to this desire. The ZPP and SBCA pressured the 1980 council to write a development ordinance for Barton Creek. Because of their pressure, the council created the Barton Creek Task Force, consisting of seven members: three environmentalists, three developers, and Neal Graham, the chair of the Environmental Board. Ken Manning, a lawyer and engineer, and Seth Searcy, a lawyer, sat on the task force for the SBCA. They wrote the original version of the Barton Creek Ordinance and brought it to the task force for consideration. The task force used their draft as the basis for the Barton Creek Ordinance. The task force then sent the ordinance to the city council for approval. The strength of public concern generated by the ZPP’s actions convinced the normally developer-friendly 1980 council to pass the ordinance. At its writing in 1980, the Barton Creek Ordinance was one of the most comprehensive and strictest water-quality ordinances in the nation. But it suffered from the


fate of so many of Austin’s water-quality ordinances: the number of variances handed out to developers. About 80 percent of projects covered by the ordinance received some kind of variance. As a model, it was a good start, but it was not fulfilling its promise as a realistic check on development. In addition, protecting the aquifer meant protecting all the creeks that ran through the recharge zone, not just Barton Creek. The SBCA and the Environmental Board wanted a comprehensive ordinance that would apply to all creeks that passed through, but the staff and council wanted to write ordinances creek by creek. So from 1980 to 1982, a set of ordinances were written by successive task forces for different watersheds. With the exception of the Barton Creek Ordinance, the task forces had a majority of developer representatives (“the council learned from the Barton Creek Task Force,” says Joe Riddell, who served on several, “and from then on all the task forces were stacked with developers”). Environmentalists wanted density ordinances that would ensure less runoff from development, which they got in the Barton Creek Ordinance. But developers did not want to be restrained in the number of buildings they could erect, and the later developer-controlled task forces wrote “clean-up” ordinances. Relying on technology to fix pollution, these ordinances allowed any density so long as sand filters or other technological fixes were installed to clean the water after it flowed across the pavement. The problem was that no one knew if those fixes would actually work to remove pollutants from actually entering the aquifer. Today we understand that about 80 percent of the total suspended solids from runoff can be trapped by ponds, but that they filter out only 30–50 percent of dissolved nutrients (e.g., nitrogen and phosphorous). That means that 20 percent of pollutants such as oil and grease and grime from roads do get through into the aquifer, polluting the water. In addition, the nitrogen and phosphorous that go into the aquifer cause algae blooms in the creeks and Barton Springs pool. Huge blooms began to occur in the pool during the 1990s, clogging the eyes and hair of swimmers. The blooms are more than just a problem for swimmers; they are a problem for the ecosystem of the aquifer, creeks, and pool. The blooms use up too much oxygen from the water, which reduces oxygen for other plants and animals like the salamander, and those begin to die. Most of the unfiltered solids come from roads and cars, and most of the nitrogen and phosphorous comes from fertilizers used on lawns and golf courses in the new suburbs. Thus even with good maintenance of ponds and sand traps, suburban development will cause pollution in the aquifer, the creeks, and Barton Springs. And good maintenance of the ponds is not assured. There were few regulations in the ordinances on cleaning the ponds. Although the ponds placed


near apartments or business centers are supposed to be cleaned by the owners of the units, ponds in residential areas were to be left to the city to clean, and the city has never had the resources to do so. Nor does the city have the staff to go check all the ponds to see which need cleaning. So drainage or runoff ponds were not nearly as effective a solution as limiting the total amount of concrete poured in the first place. Because of the creek-by-creek task forces, by the mid-1980s there was a mishmash of ordinances in place, each with different requirements for different creeks. The Environmental Board proposed a comprehensive ordinance that would synthesize all of the ordinances into a single format, based on impervious cover limits. Impervious cover means pavement and rooftops— anything that stops water from naturally filtering into the ground is impervious cover. Houses, streets, and parking lots are all impervious cover. So an ordinance based on impervious cover would by definition limit the number of buildings and parking lots a developer could build. The Environmental Board, the staff of the Environmental Department, and even some developers were in favor of the idea. But Gary Bradley had just bought Circle C in the Slaughter Creek watershed, and the proposed ordinance would have limited his ability to develop the project to the density that he desired. Spending somewhere in the area of $300,000, Bradley flew in several specialists in urban planning to testify before the city council. Using highly technical information and dubious definitions of degradation, these experts testified before the council that there was no correlation between impervious cover, density, and pollution.2 Environmentalists were slam-dunked by Bradley’s tactics, and a comprehensive ordinance was not written until the Cooksey council was elected in 1985. Brought into power on the strength of the grassroots efforts of neighborhood and environmental organizations, the Cooksey council passed the Comprehensive Watershed Ordinance (CWO). But even with a majority of environmentally friendly members on the council, it was not easy to do. It was the height of the Boom. Developers, real estate interests, the Chamber of Commerce, and banks all actively opposed the CWO. The CWO itself was never as strong as it could have been because it was a compromise between developers and environmentalists; the task force that put it together had representatives from both.3 As written, it was a mixed blessing. Because of pressure from business groups, it did not apply to the core city creeks (Shoal, Waller, and others).4 But it did apply to outlying creeks, especially those in the southwest. Most of the CWO simply re-codified previous ordinances, but it did stiffen some environmental protections. Those opposed to it lobbied heavily.


But once it became obvious that the ordinance would pass with at least four votes, the other council members joined in, passing the CWO 7–0 on final reading. Cooksey thinks the others voted for it because “politicians know it can get you in trouble to vote against environmental acts here.” These ordinances were attempts to regulate polluted runoff in the aquifer region. But none had yet been written at a true non-degradation standard. That is, all had allowed runoff and pollution at levels that were known to degrade stream beds and water quality. The early ordinances simply limited the amount of degradation that occurred. Developers would not accept a non-degradation standard because they would not have made as much profit if they had to abide by such a standard. The attempt to protect the aquifer and Barton Springs was one of those contests that created the environmental meaning of Austin: It was a fight over how much protection environmentalists could wrest from the Growth Machine. But then a wrinkle appeared. In the late 1980s the Boom went bust. The land bubble popped, and value plummeted. It was part of a national correction; speculators were going broke all over, and the federal Resolution Trust Corporation (RTC) found itself the owner of a substantial amount of property in and around Austin. Two of those speculators helped propel the next set of political battles over the environmental meaning of Austin. Barnes/Connally had a huge tract of land on Barton Creek that they had planned to develop with environmental protections worked out between themselves and the SBCA in the 1980s. But they went bankrupt in the bust, leaving the land in the hands of the banks. Gary Bradley’s Circle C Ranch had to file for bankruptcy, and Bradley had to make desperate deals with the FSLIC to keep his part of the development. The entity that filled the money vacuum in both cases was one of the multinational corporations that make big profits investing in the real estate development of cities, Freeport McMoRan. Freeport bought the Barnes/Connally property for a song. In addition, it bailed out Bradley by buying the commercial parts of the Circle C development and loaning him money to help restructure his bankruptcy so that he could keep the residential parts. It was not just a friendly loan—Freeport needed the political connections that Bradley had on the Austin city council and with the Texas Legislature in order to build out their own projects on the old Barnes/Connally land. Bradley, Freeport, and Freeport’s chief executive officer Jim Bob Moffett all played key roles in the defining moment of Austin’s environmental meaning, not just for who they were, but for what they represented.


The SOS Battle Pounding the PUD: The Public and the Meaning of Austin By the 1980s the environment had become institutionalized in the way that early conservationists like Lowell Lebermann, Stuart Henry, and the Austin Environmental Council had wanted. The city boards and commissions that had been put in place to oversee the development process had members of the neighborhood and environmental groups on them. Those people were now working within the bureaucratic process, and many had made friends with people in the bureaucracy. Their positions on the boards gave them information about technical and political issues that were in the pipeline, and they knew what development projects were coming. Their place in the system didn’t give them a lot of direct power (they were often outvoted on the boards by developer appointees), but it gave them information about coming events. One of the development projects they found out about was a Planned Unit Development (PUD) that was not following the usual way of doing things. In 1989 Freeport McMoRan bought the land along Barton Creek that Barnes/Connally lost in the bust. Freeport spun off a company, Barton Creek Properties (BCP), to manage and develop the land. BCP proposed a huge development project, written around a master plan that specified how all parts of the property were to be used and developed. The project was called the Barton Creek PUD. Requesting numerous environmental variances from staff, BCP was not following the protocols worked out between environmentalists and developers in the past. At the time Jackie Goodman, then–SBCA president and later a city council member, sat on the Planning Commission. She relates that “in most projects, when developer representatives come to the boards and commissions, they talk to the members about the project . . . give you information, show you topography, mitigation measures, all that kind of thing. But with the PUD that wasn’t happening. [A] nameless source said, ‘You know what’s happening is that instead of coming to talk to anybody, they are going to spend all their energy on the council. It doesn’t matter to them whether the boards and commissions go with them or not. They are just going to go through the process because that’s the process. But they are working on council members, not board members.’ And I said, then we have to make sure that changes.” Making sure that changed was a matter of publicizing the issue, and the Save Barton Creek Association had been established to publicize environmental issues. As the PUD proposal worked its way through the process, the SBCA began to alert people of the PUD’s presence. Every information sheet


the SBCA put out mentioned the project. The SBCA asked candidates for local elections what they would do if asked to approve the project. Eventually the project reached the Planning Commission, passing overwhelmingly against Goodman’s dissent. Once a date was set for a hearing by the council, the SBCA, EarthFirst!, and other environmental organizations began to publicize the hearing date. They posted flyers on cars at Barton Springs, passed out circulars at the Town Lake Hike and Bike, and sent out mailings. Whole Foods Market, a local health food store, gave the SBCA some money, which they used to put a few ads on the radio (featuring actor and environmental advocate Robert Redford). Other local media jumped on the bandwagon voluntarily. On the day of the hearing, popular KUT deejay John Aielli urged people to attend the meeting that night (which caused him some amount of grief from management after the event). Two morning deejays on a rock station urged people to go to the meeting with the raunchy battle cry “Pound the PUD!” The Austin Chronicle, a central information source about politics in Austin, also publicized the meeting. Daryl Slusher, by then the political reporter for the Chronicle, did a special story about the upcoming PUD hearing. The day of the hearing, the front page of the Chronicle showed Barton Springs closed, with a banner that read “If you don’t read this, we will kill this pool.” The number of calls to council members against the proposal was huge: 1,300 calls against the proposal to one council member alone.5 Public turnout at the hearing was unprecedented in scale. Some of the council hearings about Barton Creek development in 1979–1981 had turned out 200–300 people. This time over 900 people signed up to speak against the project; many more filled the streets outside the council chambers, waving signs and leading chants. In addition to those who actually spoke at the hearing, well over 1,000 people were on hand to protest what in any other city would have been a simple presentation by developer representatives on just another housing development. They overflowed the chambers, milling in the street and filling adjacent buildings. The energy and anger and emotions created during the 1980s battles of “environmentalists vs. developers” remained in many Austinites, and here was yet another big developer proposing to build on Barton Creek. I had heard about the meeting on the radio and had seen the Chronicle, but I got to the meeting late, around 10:00 at night. Even that late the crowd was enormous, spilling out of the council chambers into the street. The mood of the crowd was distinct. Anger was obvious, but much more so concern, and a sense of a public will, a real feeling among people that something had to be done, a purpose, and that the meeting was an expression of that. I could not yet put


that purpose into words; I was not familiar enough with the issue at the time. But along with anyone else who was there that night, I saw that something deeper than a simple development proposal was pushing this reaction. I had thought I would go watch and hear a few speeches, assuming that people were no longer able to sign up to speak. But Mayor Lee Cooke had allowed people to continue to sign up late into the night, and I was able to do so too.6 There were so many people signed up to speak that I waited until 3:00 in the morning to actually have my turn. And when I did speak at 3:00 a.m., it was to a completely packed chamber—people were not leaving after they spoke. Those in the chamber were sticking around to see the vote on the issue. Not everyone could fit in the building at one time; hundreds came and went throughout the night, creating a never-ending stream of people in and around the hearing until at least 4:00 a.m., when I finally left, exhausted. Others stayed up all night watching it on TV at home; I had two friends who later told me they were watching me speak at 3:00 in the morning! And I went to bed when I got home—my friends stayed up watching the meeting on TV until the actual vote at 6:00 a.m. The emotion and anger that fueled the response that night was not just from a few hardworking environmentalists who were upset. The kinds of people waiting in line, and filling the streets between 10:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m., represented the variety of Austin’s population, a cross-section of people one sees every day in Austin. There were people in suits who had come after work, people in tie-dye, people in house clothes, children in bedclothes brought by their parents. There was coiffured hair, dreadlocks, crew cuts, ponytails, and a few cowboy hats. Everything from boots to sandals. Emotions were high, and people expressed rage, fear, regret about development on the creek, and determination not to allow more. The pool had been closed several times that year due to fecal coliform brought down the creek by a broken sewer pipe serving development upstream, a fact that was continually mentioned. The cross-section of the city was also apparent in the types of speeches made. Former mayor Frank Cooksey pleaded that he was “just an old country lawyer and don’t know much about this” issue, but please don’t allow this development (how effective was the word crafting of this “old country lawyer”—a public speaker at his best); an EarthFirst! type had collected a bunch of golf balls from the creek below the golf course and dumped them on the chamber floor to make his point; a cheerleading middle-aged white-collar worker led the crowd in some chant against development; a prototypical new-age woman cried that Jim Bob Moffett had obviously been wounded as a child; parents with children asked for protection of the pool for them and future generations.


David Armbrust, lobbyist for the PUD, had the votes of four council members in favor of the PUD going into the hearing.7 But he had not counted on the show of public support against the proposal. The hearing lasted until 6:00 a.m., at which time the council voted unanimously to reject the proposal. It was the longest public hearing in the city’s history and had the largest number of speakers. The Barton Creek PUD hearing of June 7, 1990, was one of those historic points in Austin’s environmental history, pivotal to everything that would happen in the next few years. It showed that there was still substantial feeling in Austin for protecting the natural resources that make the city unique, an overwhelming sentiment expressed by the huge number of people who spoke and attended. My main impression of the sentiment of that meeting is a sense that all those speakers believed there was something about Austin that would be ruined by this project. Barton Springs in particular, of course, but many referenced the Boom years and the unplanned growth that had changed the place from a town to a city in just a few years. The public participation and the sentiment expressed in that meeting were an expression of the environmental meaning of Austin from average citizens, and they showed environmental and political leaders that there was still a strong public force in Austin for protecting the environment and directing growth. The Meaning Is Over-RULE-d The public response at the 1990 PUD hearing led the 1990 Cooke council to pass a moratorium on development in the Barton Creek watershed. The 1990 moratorium was meant to be only a short-term step to control development in the watershed until the Comprehensive Watershed Ordinance could be rewritten as a non-degradation ordinance. When the end of the moratorium approached, the Chamber of Commerce pulled out an old ordinance from 1985 that stated the city should conduct an Economic Impact Statement (EIS) for any major project. The rule had always been interpreted by staff to mean the EIS would be conducted at the discretion of the council, and had only been used for individual ordinances twice before.8 At the request of the chamber, the council agreed to an EIS, and hired a consultant to conduct the study. The council knew the study would take at least three months, during which time developers would be able to file their projects under the old CWO instead of a stronger version. To prevent those kinds of filings, the Cooke council passed the Interim Ordinance, a stronger version of the CWO that would be in effect only until the following year, when the new CWO would be voted on by the next council.


But the next city council turned out to be very friendly to developers. There were no longer any environmentalists on the council, and four of the seven council members created a voting bloc that did everything it could to block the upgrade of the CWO. The animosity created by the new council members began shortly after they took office, and their behavior was so bad that they themselves became a potent symbol of the power of big money and developer influence that many felt was ruining Austin. They created a voting bloc that would come to play havoc with environmentalists’ efforts at strengthening the CWO. Ronney Reynolds, Bob Larson, and Louise Epstein, joined by Charles Urdy, created a voting bloc called RULE (Reynolds, Urdy, Larson, and Epstein) by Slusher in the Austin Chronicle. When the new RULE council came in, environmentalists wanted the stronger standards of the Interim Ordinance to be adopted as the standards of a newer, updated CWO. The Interim was a step toward a true nondegradation ordinance, attempting to regulate the amount of pollution that runs off a development by limiting the amount of concrete that could be poured in a development. But as written by staff, the proposed new CWO would have allowed older development plans to build out under their old exemptions. When the issue of adopting the Interim as the new CWO appeared on the council agenda, RULE voted for a delay. So Mayor Bruce Todd appointed a Mayor’s Task Force to draft a new ordinance that would upgrade the CWO. This task force came up with an ordinance that became known as the Compromise Ordinance, because the members of the task force had compromised on its requirements. Since it was a compromise between developers and environmentalists, it was not very strong, and it did not make many people in either camp very happy. Environmentalists wanted it stronger, developers weaker. SBCA Programs Manager George Cofer, Mary Arnold, and others had put together a technical group composed of experts in geology, hydrology, and other related fields who testified before the Planning Commission that the ordinance needed to be stronger. Freeport lobbyist David Armbrust, a member of the task force, had originally supported the task force recommendations. However, by the time the task force presented its findings to the Planning Commission, he had withdrawn his support. The city staff did not like it, and had written an even weaker ordinance according to their own standards. So at that point there were two proposed versions of the ordinance, one weak and the other weaker. But not weak enough for some. The Planning Commission was controlled by RULE appointees, who were, to put it mildly, developer friendly. Gail


Gemberling, a member of the Planning Commission, was reported by wags to be seen often at Gary Bradley’s house. Don Bosse was a developer representative on the commission known for his ability to help developers get what they wanted from councils. The other commissioners were lobbied heavily by Bradley and a few other developers. As a result there was little consideration of the Mayor’s Task Force recommendation, weak as it was. Nor was the weaker staff proposal given much attention. Gemberling chaired the meeting, and “discussion” of the proposal was minimal. After several commissioners had expressed opposition to the task force recommendations, Bosse literally pulled from his pocket a copy of his own ordinance. Instead of adopting the task force ordinance, the Planning Commission adopted Bosse’s draft, which later came to be called the Composite Ordinance. The Composite cobbled together Bosse’s and the weaker staff ordinance. The Composite was written to reflect the needs of the developers who had lobbied the Planning Commission. The Planning Commission and RULE claimed that the Composite was non-degradation, but it was not.9 Contemporary geological literature showed that from about 10 to 15 percent impervious cover on a recharge area was the limit of pollutants the land in its natural state could filter and remove. The Composite allowed up to 50 percent impervious cover at road intersections and allowed up to 25 percent elsewhere on the aquifer. Although it allowed only houses and parks within 300 feet of a creek, it allowed higher impervious cover on new development than the Interim Ordinance had. And as had been the case in the past, the Composite allowed any development that had filed a plat plan anytime in the past to fall under the standards of the 1986 CWO. Any exemptions that had been granted under that ordinance were carried forward to the Composite Ordinance.10 Thus, as in the past, any developer who had filed a plan under an old ordinance, but had not begun to build his project, was not required to build under the stricter new ordinance. Bradley’s Circle C MUD development is a prime example of development that benefits from this kind of game. Circle C lies directly atop the recharge zone. During this time it had not yet been built out, remaining mostly undeveloped land. Yet in the Composite Ordinance, Circle C was placed in the same category as wholly urbanized areas of the core city.11 Bradley would therefore have been able to build Circle C to the density and runoff standards of the dense residential areas of the core city, contravening entirely the point of an ordinance written supposedly to decrease the amount of density and runoff on the recharge zone. In October 1991, the RULE council passed the Composite Ordinance, RULE to 3.


The decision to write the Composite Ordinance infuriated environmentalists and destroyed any hope of working with developers or the RULE council. It proved to members of the task force that RULE was uninterested in working with them. It was also the first time that environmental activists had been completely stopped in the ongoing upgrading of the water-quality ordinances that had begun with the original Barton Creek Ordinance. Jackie Goodman reflects on how the actions of developers, the Planning Commission, and RULE forced environmentalists to give up on the process: “RULE were so arbitrary and the whole atmosphere at city hall was just rife with unpleasantness and unfairness and dictatorship and absolute indifference to us, to the community feeling. Up until RULE, every single council, even developercontrolled councils, went with improving the watershed ordinances. Before RULE, developers with projects did in many cases better than the CWO. They always say we’ll take it to court; they always tried to challenge it; we knew that. But there was never this kind of ugliness and confrontation. The refusal [by RULE] to go with the Interim . . . was just so arbitrary that it just pissed people off.” The actions of RULE made it obvious to environmental leaders and many citizens that they were not going to get any cooperation from the RULE council. The refusal of RULE to adopt a compromise ordinance between environmentalists and developers, and the heavy-handed way they forced through the developers’ ordinance, did much to create the pivotal election battle between “environmentalists vs. developers.” The SOS Coalition Forms The PUD hearing had been so expressive of an emotional energy that several different groups of people in Austin had separately begun to think about formally organizing that energy into some kind of larger umbrella organization. Several people wanted to build an organized movement that could challenge the kind of unplanned growth so many groups had been working against for so long. But the environmental and neighborhood coalitions that had emerged in the 1980s were fractured by the time of the bust. So much new development had come so fast during the Boom that by the late 1980s no one group could keep up with it all. Each group had its own focus, and there was not much interaction between them. Individual group foci and clashing egos of leaders led to a proprietary, turf war attitude that made it difficult for any one group to act in concert with another group. The older, established groups were having a hard time finding coordinated ways to use the public energy the PUD hearing had expressed. And the failure of the Cooksey council to


stop growth over the aquifer region had depressed much of the environmental constituency. However, there were some newer kinds of organizers in town who did find a way to get things moving toward an umbrella organization. Once again the national environmental movement influenced activity in Austin. That movement had had a big influence on the conservationist thinking and activity of the late 1960s and early 1970s. By the 1980s the movement had become institutionalized in the form of national organizations that opened local chapters in cities across the nation, such as Clean Water Action (CWA). Other national citizens’ groups such as Citizen Action (CA) had local offices all over the country. Although not specifically environmental, the mission and structure of CA was to facilitate community organizing at the local level in order to train people for successful political action. Both CWA and CA organizations had offices in Austin, and the staff of both saw that, in Austin, environmental issues could be used as focal points for community organizing. These national organizations helped shape what happened politically at the local level because the people who ran them were trained to do exactly that. Brigid Shea, then director of Clean Water Action, “always saw [the goal of clean water] as a way of empowering people who had been [promoting] the importance of the natural environment to this city,” but whose efforts had not been able to slow or direct growth. Todd Main of Citizen Action thought the job of Citizen Action was to be a kind of “political shepherd” for citizens, bringing the expertise and knowledge of his organization to community groups in Austin. Both Shea and Main were horrified at the level of fractiousness in the environmental groups in town, and both saw the PUD hearing as a possible source of organizing. Other professional organizers saw it as well. Helen Ballew, then at the Hill Country Foundation, is a good example of this new breed of professional: a person whose job it is to facilitate and organize community groups. She had worked at the Nature Conservancy, a national organization, and was involved in doing one of their regional projects on the Texas Hill Country. Ballew approached the Hill Country Foundation, a smaller local organization giving grants for small projects, education, outreach, etc. She started a project with them called the Barton Springs Project, and eventually took over as chair of the foundation. During her time working on environmental issues, she became convinced that “where the rubber meets the road is community organizing,” and she didn’t see a lot of that in Austin in 1990. She and Bill Bunch ran the project for several years, and the PUD hearing got them to start thinking about community organizing around Barton Springs. Bunch was another of this new breed, a lawyer who had worked with


Stuart Henry in Henry’s law firm doing environmental law when people brought cases to them. But Bunch wanted to do more than that and left “to do my own things in order to target my activity, not wait for it to come to me.” Bunch is a passionate advocate for the environment; he was a champion swimmer in college, and champion athletes are typically very motivated people. That motivation and passion for the environment came together in his advocacy for the aquifer and Barton Springs. Along with those qualities, Bunch brought newer technical legal knowledge he thought could be used in Austin. He thought that “some of the older groups did not even know about the national environmental laws that had been passed in the 1970s that could be applied to the problem here,” and he wanted to do that. He was dumbfounded at what he saw as the established groups “bargaining away their positions, doing ‘deals’ that protected nothing and allowed plenty of variances and loopholes.” Bunch wanted to focus on “effective action, not just activism for its own sake.” All of these newer professional community organizers and environmental advocates saw the PUD hearing as the spark that could ignite a flame and reenergize a movement to protect the watershed. Before working with Clean Water Action, Shea had been a reporter who had traveled the world covering public events, but she had not seen anything like the PUD hearing in an American city. The passion that was driving the hearing showed her that people in Austin had some sense of themselves as a city, and the sense of place that showed through convinced her that Austin was the place for her. When she was down at the meeting, and wandering through the crowds, “it struck me that I had never seen anything like that. It was such a clear sign of the public will . . . how powerfully people cared about the issue. When I saw the thousands of people who came down for that meeting, I decided Austin was the kind of community I wanted to live in.” John Umphres, who did research and political work for the coalition, saw that organizing possibility too. “If 200 people had showed up [rather than over 1,000], SOS would not have happened. [The PUD hearing] sort of got things in motion, got things rolling, at least enough so that people could be recruited” to work on the SOS campaign. All of the organizers were disheartened at the balkanization and lack of effectiveness of the established groups, especially their inability to focus the feelings of the PUD hearing in an organized fashion. In order to try to bring the camps together, Bunch and Ballew came up with the idea to write a Barton Springs position paper that would spell out a long-term program to save Barton Springs, hoping the paper would make people work together for a common program of action. They asked representatives from several of the


established groups in town to come together and write the position paper. A stronger water-quality ordinance was one of the points of the paper, and the primary emphasis of the document was on protecting the water flow into the aquifer in the Barton Springs recharge and contributing zones. Because they were still fighting the growth advocates’ claims that environmentalists were somehow “no-growth,” the position paper specifically stated that the city would not restrict growth, but that it should channel growth into areas that would not harm the water quality of the inland waterways: Assuming the City of Austin and the State of Texas will not and cannot prohibit all new development, local and state officials, the citizens of Texas, and the business community must act . . . to maximize the likelihood that Barton Springs can be protected from further degradation.12

As part of this maximizing attempt, the plan called for the adoption of the Interim Ordinance on a permanent basis, with amendments added to strengthen pollution control requirements on new development. The newer people in town thought they were putting together something new, but to those who had been around a while the position paper looked like déjà vu all over again. It was for all intents and purposes a restatement of the environmental goals first established in the Austin Tomorrow Plan of the 1970s, carried forward in the ZPP program of 1980, requested in the AustinPlan of the mid-1980s, and demanded of the Cooksey council elected in 1985. It reads like a restatement of the controlled-growth philosophy of the 1980s, which had not succeeded. And some of the people involved in writing it were a bit fatalistic about the whole situation. But Ballew and Bunch hoped that completing this process of coalition building would reenergize people, and deprive developers and the council of their ability to use a divide-and-conquer strategy against the fractured groups. They wanted to take what they called a “hard line” approach to the PUD, and believed the position paper would get all the other groups organized around one specific approach. Ballew thinks they succeeded, and that once people had signed on to it, “there was little wiggle room left to bargain with Jim Bob and the others. When [we took that attitude], some of the professional politicians in town saw that [we] were actually serious and teamed up with us because they saw we were unified.” The political pros had indeed been working on things from their end. New council member Gus Garcia, a seasoned politician, saw the economy coming back from the bust years, saw a developer council emerging, and knew what that meant from past experience. He figured that without any kind of leader-


ship coming from other sources, the council would do as others had in the past and follow the wishes of the Chamber of Commerce. Garcia told his aide Mark Yznaga to see what he could do in the way of organizing the energy of the PUD into some kind of organized political force, offering his office as a “conduit of information to the environmental groups” where they could get information about ongoing events.13 Yznaga had contacts with many of the Democratic Party operators as well as the civic organizers. He and David Butts had just run Garcia’s council race against a developer candidate. Yznaga knew Shea and Main, and along with Ann Kitchen14 they began talking about organizing the environmental groups into a coherent force. All three thought they saw the same basic problem; while there were several environmental groups working to try to protect the springs, they were not effective. Yznaga hoped that creating a registered Political Action Committee would enable the environmentalists to subdue the ego conflicts, speak with one voice, communicate, and act effectively. So did Butts, who has been active in Austin’s politics for thirty years, working on political campaigns for the quality-of-life issues. He knows the politics of Austin inside and out and has an ear to the ground politically. He has never considered himself an “environmentalist” per se, rather an old-line Democratic Party liberal, and he had not actually been to the PUD hearing, but its outcome surprised him. His political ear heard something there. “Days after [the hearings] I would be at Whole Foods or Magnolia Cafe, and I would hear [people] talking about it, . . . you knew that this whole thing struck a nerve. So I knew that out of that could grow a whole movement.” Yznaga and Kitchen met with several people, including Shea, Main, Ballew, and Bunch, at Shudde Fath’s home in August 1991, and the group officially formed as a coalition. They registered as a PAC, adopting the name the Save Our Springs PAC. The organization became a triangle of trained community organizers, environmental groups that supplied the grassroots effort, and infrastructure work done by seasoned political tacticians. They put Shea out front as spokesperson and director of the effort. The energy of the PUD hearing had shown activists that a meaning of Austin still existed for the public that could be harnessed for an environmental campaign. Now the coalition had to harness that energy in a way that would be effective within the limiting conditions of the growth ideology, the power of developers, and the intransigence of the RULE council. Defining Protection: The SOS Ordinance The first thing was to write an ordinance and get it on a ballot. But how to do so, and the actual reason for writing it, were big questions. There were


different ideas about the purpose of running a campaign for an ordinance, between the desires of the environmentalists (the SBCA people, Ballew, and Bunch, for example) to protect the springs through a strong ordinance, and the stance of the political professionals (Butts and Yznaga) who thought the main goal should be to win a referendum campaign. The focus was different. Yznaga thought running an election campaign on the ordinance could use the energy of the campaign to create a more organized political force that would be able to win future city council elections. He hoped that it would make real protection possible over the coming years. Bunch, Ballew, and the Goodmans wanted to write an ordinance that would protect the springs according to the geological evidence. They wanted a true non-degradation ordinance and saw the SOS coalition as a long-term entity whose goal was to protect Barton Springs as much as win future elections. One of the models that had been created by some of the geologists working with SOS members George Cofer and Mary Arnold showed that the maximum limits on impervious cover in the recharge zones was 8–9 percent for true non-degradation. Prevailing scientific literature at the time established 10–15 percent as the maximum limits. Environmentalists in the coalition believed that the SOS Ordinance should reflect these scientific maximums. But Yznaga and Butts were worried that the coalition would not be able to sell a “non-degradation” ordinance to the electorate. They thought it would be too easy for developers to make environmentalists look like radicals if the coalition pushed for an ordinance that was too restrictive on development. The coalition knew that developers would fight hard against any ordinance. Anticipating developer frames of “unreasonable” laws and regulations, they had to establish a standard of development that could be defined as “reasonable” to the public. Another problem for the coalition was that they were not sure how much protection they could get in the context of the Texas legal system. Texas laws allow landowners a much greater degree of control over their land than many other states’ laws. Cities in Texas have little control over land in their ETJ15 and none over surrounding areas outside the ETJ. The SOS Coalition therefore had to write an ordinance that could be successfully defended in court under Texas law, and they were pretty sure that a true non-degradation ordinance would not make it. The compromise that resulted reflected the tensions between those who wanted a non-degradation ordinance and those who wanted to ensure electoral victory. As the group finally wrote the SOS Ordinance, it allowed development density two to three times higher than what science said it had to be for true non-degradation. It allowed 15 percent impervious cover in the recharge zone, 20 percent in the contributing zone of Barton Creek, and


25 percent in the remainder of the aquifer contributing zone. These were to be the maximum limits in each zone, and developers would have to meet certain criteria in order to be granted the maximums. As a further compromise to protection, the ordinance allowed development projects two to three years in which to phase into compliance with the regulations. If a development project already had a site plan approved and began building according to that plan within three years, the project could be built without complying with the SOS Ordinance. The SOS Coalition knew there was going to be a fight over their proposed ordinance and bent over backward to be “reasonable” so that they could pass it. As much as they bent, though, it wasn’t enough to satisfy some very rich and influential developers. In the Arena: Bradley, RULE, and Jim Bob Moffett Regardless of whether the SOS Ordinance was reasonable to the public, it was unreasonable to the real estate developers who owned land on the aquifer. The developers who owned land in the watershed, especially Gary Bradley, and their RULE allies on the city council did everything they could to kill the “reasonable” SOS Ordinance. But their machinations backfired on them; the SOS Coalition had seasoned professionals running the show, and the actions of RULE and Bradley were some of the best weapons ever given to the coalition in its campaign to make the SOS Ordinance law. The other was Jim Bob Moffett. Moffett was the chief executive officer of the Freeport McMoRan Corporation. After Barnes/Connally went broke in the bust, the Resolution Trust Corporation ended up with their land on Barton Creek. Freeport bought the land from the RTC as another corporate investment, to use for profit, and spun off an entity to administer the investment called FM Properties (FMP). FM Properties hired veteran developer lobbyist David Armbrust to help them win approval of their development. When the RULE council was about to pass the weak Composite Ordinance, Armbrust set up a meeting between some environmentalists and some of the FM Properties people. According to those present at the meeting, Moffett came with the attitude that he was simply proposing a business deal, telling all involved that his company was going to build out the land according to the Composite. Moffett ran the meeting with a heavy hand; he had not come to cut a deal or to negotiate, but to tell environmentalists how it was going to be. Craig Smith (of the Sierra Club) and Jackie Goodman (of the SBCA) attended the meeting. Goodman, a small, quiet woman, was the only


one to take Moffett, a hulking ex-football player, to task. Once Moffett had stopped telling people what was going to happen, Goodman told him that his project was unacceptable, and that they were going to fight him. Moffett, used to the world of business, made the kind of comment that is fairly normal in the business world, telling the SBCA people that he would help fund lawsuits against the city if they did not allow him to build. Someone leaked the meeting to the Statesman, and when its reporter asked Craig Smith about the meeting, Smith told them that Moffett had threatened to bankrupt the city.16 Smith came under a lot of fire for letting that into the papers, and Moffett denies having said exactly that. But Smith recalls that the context was clearly threatening: He said it in the context of the litigation that would result . . . he was just saying, “Look, you ought to accept this, we’re going to comply with this new ordinance they are going to pass, it’s going to be great, it’s going to bring a lot of jobs to town” . . . And we said, “No, we don’t have to accept it, and we are still going to fight it.” And that’s where he said something like we’ll bankrupt the city. Maybe he said it will bankrupt the city if you turn this down . . . He said there are people out there who just want to sue the city to invalidate all these rules you have down here, and they’re just looking for somebody to bankroll their effort. The clear implication, and I’m convinced it was deliberate, was that [Moffett] would bankroll those people.

Moffett just made things worse for himself in later public statements. He publicly threatened to persuade other Fortune 500 companies from locating in Austin should the SOS Ordinance pass. A Freeport television advertisement claimed that a subsidiary of Freeport had won a prestigious environmental award, and had to be retracted when the Sierra Club immediately pointed out that the subsidiary had won the award before Freeport had bought it. These sorts of bullying attitudes and manipulation of the facts made Moffett the perfect symbol of outside developers who promoted the growth of Austin that many disliked. Moffett was not alone. Gary Bradley had bought the huge ranch named Circle C in the 1980s and was intent on developing the land as a MUD. He went broke in the bust and filed bankruptcy under Chapter 11 to keep the land. As part of the reorganization, the banks agreed to write off $90 million of the debt (which the taxpayers had to absorb), and Bradley borrowed $10 million from Freeport to pay off the rest. The corporation later helped Bradley out of bankruptcy by guaranteeing $43 million in loans in return for an option to buy the development (the corporation did buy parts of it later).17 In addi-


tion to his history of lobbying against water-quality ordinances, the money flow from Freeport associated Bradley with Moffett. Bradley was the ultimate example of developers with connections at city hall who got their way at the cost of polluted water paid for by the taxpayers. Once SOS had written its ordinance, they had to conduct a petition drive to have it placed on the ballot for a vote. The organization spent several months gathering the signatures they needed, setting up tables on the Town Lake trail, at Barton Springs, in local businesses that supported the effort. The process itself should have been fairly simple, but politics intervened. Shea had been told by the city clerk that they needed about 35,000 signatures to qualify for the ballot, and that once the signatures were turned in it would be a fairly short process to verify them as valid. Once the signatures were in, however, RULE continued to do what they could to slow down the process. Normally a random sampling of signatures is used to verify the number needed, which keeps the process shorter and simpler. But according to Shea, the clerk told her that “Ronney Reynolds told me to check every entry.” Checking each signature one by one required several more weeks. Once those signatures were in and verified, other problems presented themselves. The county clerk, who certifies voter rolls, decided there were actually more voters in the county than she had originally certified, which meant that SOS had to go out and get about 2,000 more signatures. They got the extra signatures, which required more weeks, but the delays seemed designed to make sure the SOS Ordinance never made it to the ballot. The delays imposed by law were not the end of it. The RULE council bent over backward in an effort to discredit it, publicly thwarting the efforts of the SOS Coalition to have its petition placed on the ballot. Both developers’ and environmentalists’ polls were indicating that the SOS Ordinance would pass. So, in the time-honored tradition of Austin politics, the Real Estate Council of Austin (RECA), Bradley, FMP, and other developers focused their energy on lobbying RULE to delay the vote on SOS so that developers would have time to file their development plans under the weaker Composite Ordinance. By Texas law, once the original SOS petition had been verified by the city clerk, the council had to place the ordinance on the May 1992 ballot. None of RULE came to the meeting in which that was to happen, denying a quorum required to do so. The SOS Coalition had to get a district judge to order the council to hold a meeting and place the initiative on a ballot. Forced by the judge to come to that meeting, RULE abstained from voting, again thwarting the quorum needed. Again the judge had to order the council to place the initiative, and RULE hired a developer-lawyer to defend themselves against the judge’s order. RULE even proposed their own alternative ordinance that


used weaker Lower Colorado River Authority standards of allowable pollution. But when Garcia forced a vote on the RULE ordinance, RULE voted against its own ordinance, showing how little they really cared about writing a new ordinance. After several more weeks of delay, and under pressure from the court, the RULE council finally passed a resolution to place the SOS petition on a ballot for the August 1992 election. During the months-long delay, Bradley and FMP were busy filing development plans for their projects under the older, weaker ordinances. Once the initiative was on the ballot, the maneuvers continued. In what appeared to be an effort to confuse voters, Reynolds had his own ordinance placed next to the SOS Ordinance on the ballot. Reynolds’s ordinance appeared as “An alternative ordinance to improve water quality and prevent water pollution within the Barton Springs zone” and included the phrase “also referred to as the SOS initiative in the body of the text.”18 Using the same terms in the title and body of his ordinance seemed to be an attempt to confuse the issue. SOS had to send a last-minute mail-out instructing voters on the difference, and the Chronicle discussed it as well, adding fuel to the fire. RULE and the developers did not adopt these delaying tactics just because they were mean spirited, although there was a large amount of that involved. The two sides were so antagonistic by then that some of the RULE bloc were just doing what they could to gum up the works in order to get at their opponents. But for the developers, there was money at stake. The delaying tactics by RULE allowed developers time to get permits to develop over 10,000 acres under the CWO rules, so that they would be able to build more densely than if the SOS Ordinance passed. The higher standards of the SOS Ordinance would have reduced the amount the developers could build, and thus reduce their profits. Getting RULE to delay as long as possible was a money-making proposition for them. The ties between developers and the RULE council got little play in the city’s monopoly daily newspaper, the Austin American-Statesman. Had that been the only paper in town, few people might have learned about those ties. But there was another kind of paper in town, the Austin Chronicle, a biweekly arts and entertainment magazine. It had a politics column written by Daryl Slusher (who had co-published the Daryl Herald in the 1980s and had run the TLA campaign to stop booster plans for a convention center on Town Lake), which covered city hall in far more depth than the Statesman. Slusher and others at the Chronicle spent months detailing the schemes of RULE to keep the SOS proposition from being placed on the ballot. The Chronicle reported detailed information about Moffett, Bradley, and the RULE council that


was all too willing to do favors for them. When Reynolds served as a caddy for Jim Bob in a fund-raising golf tournament, he symbolized the entire relationship between Jim Bob and the RULE council members that Slusher had dubbed “Moffett’s Muppets.” Chronicle cartoons showed the four RULE council members dancing on puppet strings held by Moffett. Others showed Moffett and Bradley behind the council members whispering instructions to them. Framing a Sense of Place Between Moffett’s public statements, Bradley’s opposition to the Creeks Ordinances, and RULE’s behavior, the SOS Coalition almost had their campaign frames handed to them. But the group went the next step, and the frames of their campaign made explicit the ties between the environment of Austin and the sense of place that was Austin. The framing of the election brought the themes of the past, the environment, and the place together in a well-defined way that formalized the environmental meaning of Austin. Their opponents gave the SOS Coalition a way to frame the recurring themes of the 1980s in very specific terms. SOS literature identified Moffett, developers, and “their city council mouthpieces”19 as the people to fight against, noting that “Save Our Springs is a story that began when citizens took a stand against greedy developers like Jim Bob Moffett . . . And if we don’t write the last chapter, Jim Bob Moffett and a few greedy developers will.”20 Identifying developers and corrupt officials as the problem defined the election in insider/outsider terms, framing Austin as the place to save from outside developer forces that corrupt that place and its leaders. The extralegal and disingenuous actions of RULE created only contempt for the council members as a group and allowed the SOS Coalition to remind voters of how corrupt they were. The RULE corruption was a potent frame-bridging tool; voters who might not swim in Barton Springs were still upset about the political influence of big money. SOS also had some potent symbols that had been used in the past. The 1980s battles had established the environment itself as something that defined the meaning of Austin. Barton Springs had been used as one symbol of that environment in the past, but the SOS Coalition placed the pool front and center as the symbol of the environment and of Austin itself. SOS literature consistently identified Barton Springs as “the Soul of the City” and “the Jewel in the Crown of Austin,” symbolizing in a specific environmental feature the


general idea of Austin as a unique place. Barton Springs thus became the defining symbol of the environmental meaning of Austin. But how to put that symbol into terms that would attract votes and neutralize developer claims about “unreasonable” ordinances? Framing the issue by defining Austin as a special place because of its environment was a big part of the overall campaign strategy. Much of the advertising that created this frame was put together by the members of the group, with advice from Butts, who had been a public strategist in past campaigns, and Robert Hernandez, then with the Democratic Party. Dean Rindy, who had been part of Austin’s environmental movement from its inception in the 1970s (Rindy was the chair of the Environmental Group of Austin Tomorrow), did the televised media for the campaign. His experience over the years had shown that “in Austin, the environment is identified with the place—[Austinites] identify it with themselves—it’s part of their reason for being.” The sentiment was there, and the campaign team found ways to pull that sentiment out, to define it in symbolic and practical terms. The tagline to the later SOS literature illustrates the frame of Austin and its environment: This Saturday, August 18th, we can write the last chapter in the fight to preserve the springs . . . and fight to preserve the quality of water and the quality of life that makes living and working in Austin so special . . . Because Save Our Springs is our story. It’s Austin’s story.21

“Austin’s story” was an appropriate tagline for the entire SOS movement because it encapsulated the sense of Austin as a place that was being ruined by growth and development. All of the political and community action pros, even those who were new to Austin, saw this during the run up to the election, and that sense was palpable to everyone who participated in the SOS organization and the campaign for the ordinance. The genius in that campaign was to frame the issue in ways that captured the feeling of Austin as a place, and get people to vote based on that feeling. Rindy had seen the polls on environmental sentiment for years, and knows that “the environment in terms of cave bugs doesn’t score well in polls. But if you put it in terms of clean water it does score—that shows up over and over.” So SOS television framed the place by linking the city and its clean water. Literature and advertising claimed that “[n]o one has the right to pollute others’ water.”22 Fund-raising letters put together by Hernandez began with the clean water theme, and incorporated that theme with a statement of threat to the symbol of Austin:


Go to your sink and get yourself a glass of water, and let me tell you about the fight to save Barton Springs from irreversible pollution . . . Clean tap water is a basic right and need for you and your family. Barton Springs is also a right—our right . . . the crystal clear water . . . was ours . . . as long as you could peel down to a swimsuit and feel the cool, refreshing water on your skin—Barton Springs was as much yours as anyone’s. The idea of someone trying to take it from you was as unthinkable as someone trying to poison your tap water.23

The sense of place defined by the environment gave the coalition a potent symbolic tool in defining the in-groups and out-groups of the fight. Moffett and his global corporation symbolized to many people the outsider ruining a place in order to make money. Bradley was not so much a physical outsider; he had been around a long time, but had done so much to derail efforts at writing strong water-quality ordinances that few people by then could find anything nice (or even neutral) to say about him. His dealings with Moffett and his desire to build a huge project on top of the aquifer placed him in the same league. “Moffett’s Muppets”—the RULE council members who seemed to bend over backward to do Moffett’s bidding—rounded out the group. Together the actions of these people provided an out-group that threatened the sense of place. The links between the outside money, the local developer, and the actions of RULE illustrated another major grievance: government corruption. The documentation of money and politics in the Chronicle had reminded many people of the corruption that money can bring to politics, and the influence of big money over community concern. Yznaga always thought the election was about a sense of place as much as anything else, that Barton Springs symbolized more than just a pool, and that the ties between RULE and the developers really brought that home to people. “The pool was a symbol of quality of life and power of government to disrupt what people want. [The election was to a big extent] . . . expressions of popular discontent about something the government was doing, and the elitist attitude of the governors in doing it.” RULE especially angered many. “People perceived the council as doing something against their wishes just to be mean about it and abuse their power.” The actions of RULE and the developers gave the coalition an advantage in the election because the coalition could bridge the frame of environmental protection to the frame of corrupt officials, bringing in swing voters and others who were angry about the process as much as the pool itself. The coalition had another advantage in frame bridging as well. The 1980s had taught environmentalists what to expect from business and development


groups. The economic claims and redirection techniques of development groups had been used for so long that their claims were anticipated by the SOS Coalition. Ballew and Bunch, especially, had been looking for ways to counter the developer/growth frame that environmental protection was bad economically, and they had created a program to do just that. As part of her efforts in the Hill Country Foundation before the SOS issue blew up, Ballew had started a program called Another Business for Barton Springs.24 She never did think the issue was “environmentalists vs. developers”—she saw it as the citizenry vs. a few developers and vested interests with land on the aquifer. So she used the ABBS program to highlight the point during the election. Many small businesses joined the program, placing Another Business for Barton Springs stickers on their windows and countertops. Business itself thus became a platform to raise awareness about the issue and define it as a community concern rather than an “economy vs. environment” concern. Placing full-page ads in the Chronicle with the list of these businesses helped the coalition frame its initiative as a broad-based moderate proposal, negating the economic frames that developer groups could use against them. “SOS Means Business. Save Barton Springs!” read the advertisement and mail-out banners, which the group used as the coalition tagline. SOS television advertising also used the frame that environmental issues are business issues. The coalition got Lee Walker and John Scanlan, well-known businessmen, to be spokesmen. They were featured on some commercials describing how Barton Creek was an economic asset because of its pristine features and clean water.25 Even the titles of the spots were “Good Business” and “Good Economic Sense.” The developer group formed to fight against the SOS Ordinance was called Citizens for Responsible Planning (CRP). The CRP board of directors read like a list of pro-growth actors from the 1970s and 1980s. Former City Manager Dan Davidson served as treasurer, and the board included former planning commissioners, bankers with loans out to developers in the southwest, and Republican businessmen.26 Several of the board members were friends or associates of Bradley. CRP endorsements were featured from realtors, wealthy property owner associations, and builders. The CRP used the usual frames that SOS was anti-growth and would raise taxes, cost jobs, and even lower available finances to schools. The CRP also claimed that lawsuits against the ordinance would be brought by homeowners deprived of property rights. A couple of stealth neighborhood groups played the usual race card that environmentalists did not care about minority issues, and claimed that neighborhoods and schools would be harmed by the SOS Ordinance. Opponents of the ordinance tried innuendo and scare tactics. Former Mayor Carole Mc-


Clellan held meetings and sent out letters to other “neighbors” claiming that SOS was drafted “behind closed doors . . . SOS won’t say how it was written or what research it’s based on.”27 The CRP even asked business owners to put CRP literature in the paycheck envelopes of their employees. One member of the CRP, the Chamber of Commerce, hired Ray Perryman, an economist from Waco, Texas, to conduct a study of the possible economic effects of the SOS Ordinance. The chamber officially paid Perryman $10,000 to conduct the study, but people close to the study claim that Perryman got ten times that. Perryman’s conclusion that Austin would lose 140,000 jobs if the SOS Ordinance passed was touted widely by anti-SOS interests. But the claim was so outrageous that many simply laughed it off, even those who normally would see themselves on the side of business. “It is the best study money can buy” was a quote going around that I heard from several friends who are businesspeople. Those kinds of frames had been used by growth groups in the 1980s, but times had changed. The CRP was hampered in its ability to convince voters that SOS was bad economics because Rindy was right about the sentiment for the environment in Austin. The 1980s had set the terms of public discussion, showing that people cared deeply about the environment, and many thought about the place called Austin in terms of its environment. The CRP had to frame its arguments within that context, which limited the CRP to playing on SOS turf. In mail-outs, the CRP claimed it was for more environmental protection, but that SOS was “The Wrong Solution.”28 Playing on the desires for green space and parkland in Austin, the CRP maintained that by voting for Reynolds’s ordinance, “environmentally sensitive land would be acquired to provide ‘green belts’ around our water resources.”29 Admitting that Austinites wanted clean water, CRP literature claimed that the CWO was the strongest water-quality ordinance in the country (never mentioning that CRP members had fought tooth and nail against the ordinance, or that it had an 85 percent exemption rate). In a particularly twisted argument, CRP literature claimed the CWO mandated that “[r]unoff from building must now be as clean as drinking water!”30 The CRP claimed that the SOS Ordinance was the “wrong solution” that would actually harm the environment by forcing developers to install septic tanks that would pollute the aquifer.31 In the end, the CRP wasted its effort. The SOS Ordinance passed by a 2–1 margin, the largest public show of support for an environmental issue in Austin’s electoral history. The scale of the victory took even the SOS Coalition by surprise. The SOS Ordinance was supported by majorities even in solidly conservative and pro-developer voter precincts all over the city. One reason the SOS Coalition won so handily was the coalition’s success


in framing the issue in terms of place, and using Barton Springs as the featured symbol of place. The environment of Austin had already moved to center stage as a symbol of place in the 1980s battles. The SOS campaign focused that symbolism by making Barton Springs itself the defining feature of the place. Years after the election, Craig Smith of the Sierra Club, a board member of SOS, remembered how the election took on a symbolic significance of place. “I heard somebody call Barton Springs, in the context of the campaign, it was the Holy Grail. It took on emblematic qualities. People valued Barton Springs, yes, but as an emblem, a symbol, it brought forth a deeper feeling than any creek or swimming pool ever could.” The SOS campaign was a major evolutionary step in the discourse of Austin as the Environmental City, and the turning point in the power relations of modern Austin. The campaign was run by framing the environment, and Barton Springs in particular, as the symbol of place. The ability of the SOS campaign to amplify that frame and bridge it to other concerns (business and political corruption) in explicit ways was one of the things that made SOS so successful. The group could do that in large part because SOS could identify the insider vs. outsider competition between those who were part of that place (Austinites) and those who were outside it (developers and corrupt officials). The victory came in large part because the group framed the issue as one of protecting a place. The frames they used were a logical progression of the ways Austinites had been talking about their city for two decades. The frames from the 1970s and 1980s had helped define for people how their city was related to the natural environment, and the arguments over growth had implied a sense of place that was being ruined. Framing the SOS issue in terms of protecting a special place, then, was the next logical step in the symbolism of Austin’s environmental meaning. The framing of the election solidified the symbolism of Austin around its environment, symbolizing the sense of place in one particular feature (Barton Springs). The framing around a sense of place was the next step in an ongoing dialogue between a group of people, their environment, and their city. It was the next phase in the discourse of Austin. The Banner and the Green Machine The practical effect of the environmental meaning as banner was substantial. It enabled quality-of-life advocates to use the environmental meaning as the symbolic banner under which they organized electoral strategy in city elections. Yznaga’s strategy to use the SOS campaign as a mechanism of political


organization resulted in a political network that become somewhat institutionalized in the 1990s; Butts, Yznaga, and Rindy served as the main strategists, and a core group of tactical and operational personnel from the SOS battles continued to be part of the political campaigns year to year. Several of today’s political tacticians and managers learned their craft during the SOS battle and the subsequent campaigns. The SOS campaign helped energize and train a set of people who know how to run elections—from mail-outs to phone banks to the practical street work of get-out-the-vote campaigning. This organizational apparatus led its proponents and detractors alike to call it the Green Machine. Using this organizational apparatus, members from the SOS Coalition ran for places on the city council in the following years. The city council elections of the early 1990s were not overwhelming by any means, nothing on the scale of the SOS victory. They were all close, but they were won by the Green Machine because of the organizational ability created from the SOS campaign and the symbolic power of the environmental meaning. SOS frames, confirmed by developers’ behavior in the courts and legislature, continued to be used as a mobilizing tool in the city council elections. In the city council election following the SOS victory, Jackie Goodman and Brigid Shea won seats on the city council by beating Louise Epstein and Bob Larson, two of the RULE. Their victory created a 4–3 slant on the council in favor of the greens, and the following year (1993) Mary Arnold ran for the council against Reynolds, hoping to solidify their position. Arnold looked good to win. But that year (1993) a cultural issue confounded Yznaga’s strategy by introducing a whole new set of voters into the electoral mix. The new council with Goodman and Shea on it proposed a city benefits package that insured the domestic partners of city employees, including gay employees. The issue of city-sponsored insurance for gay partners had every bit as much resonance for social conservatives as the environment had had for many other Austinites. Several conservative churches conducted their own petition drive to block the benefits. They gained enough signatures to place their proposition, numbered Proposition 22, on the ballot along with the council races. Conservative voters brought out by Proposition 22 voted for the opponents of SOS candidates, causing the loss of two seats the Green Machine had counted on winning. Arnold lost to Reynolds, and the chamber-chosen candidate Eric Mitchell won Urdy’s seat and quickly allied himself with Todd and Reynolds. The council thus remained divided, though with a tenuous 4–3 bloc in the environmentalists’ favor. By 1996, business and developer groups had every reason to believe they would win a huge victory and retake the city council. Two years of demonizing


Shea and the “enviromaniacs” on talk radio, anti-environmentalist coverage by the Statesman, and holdover resentment against “the government” built by Republicans in the 1994 national congressional elections seemed to guarantee that the SOS-backed council members would easily be defeated. The business/developer groups meant to win. The main organization of the business coalition was the Real Estate Council of Austin (RECA), and a group called Take Back Austin (TBA) formed to “take back” Austin from the environmentalists. RECA spent $90,000 in corporate money on the election, much of which was illegally raised and spent. In its own campaign literature, RECA ran very much against the “environmentalists.” But things turned out differently than RECA and TBA had thought they would. Shea and Max Nofziger decided not to run, leaving their places open and depriving RECA/ TBA of their anti-environmentalist angle. That left only Goodman as punching bag, and Goodman has been around Austin politics for long enough to know how to deflect the punches. She had the money and support from the old-line liberal/Democrat crowd that served as her voter base, and Peck Young, who had won the 1975 Friedman council race, was her campaign manager. Because of her history of service in several organizations, Goodman could define herself in terms larger than simple environmental protection, while her opponent, Becky Motal, could cite only her “business experience.” For one of the open seats, longtime Parks Board President Beverly Griffith faced off against local radio talk show host and retired Air Force Colonel Rick Wheeler, who identified himself as “the business candidate.” As with Goodman, Griffith had the old-line Democratic establishment and neighborhood groups behind her, and Wheeler was the developer/real estate representative. Daryl Slusher had run against Todd in the preceding mayoral election and had barely lost. He returned to run for the other open seat with his pronouncements that fiscal conservatism and environmental protection were one and the same. Slusher faced a field of lawyers and businessmen who sounded in public remarkably like himself, except for their level of concern for the environment. Slusher’s message of fiscal conservatism and environmental protection was integral to a larger message that Yznaga and Butts were promoting in the campaign, because the root concern was still about controlling growth. The election was not overtly “SOS vs. developers,” but the message was clear in the framing of the election. The quality-of-life advocates were returning to the frame that the environment was one of the things harmed by growth, in addition to taxpayers, the poor, and the city itself. From his end, Butts framed the election as “Who is going to control city hall? Developers? Or people representing neighborhoods, environment, and taxpayers? Slusher’s message was


integral to that: He was saying that those in charge of the council used tax money to subsidize growth that harmed others—social groups and the environment.” Slusher had always maintained this position in his writing, and he did a “boondoggle tour” to kick off his campaign, taking reporters to several buildings that the city had bought for more money than they were worth from owners who had lost money in the 1980s bust. Griffith’s campaign made the choice explicit; all of her literature made reference to RECA itself, and she ran against that kind of influence on city policy that neglected parks and the environment in favor of making money for developers. The theme of the election on the quality-of-life side was that city hall was being used to enrich only a few while creating negative consequences for the city itself. On the RECA side it was all about business. The RECA/ TBA candidates often sounded remarkably like the quality-of-life advocates but substituted “business” for “environment.” “Growth” and “development” didn’t sell well anymore, and everyone, by then, was for “quality of life.” Bereft of the two sitting environmentalists they had been hammering on for the past three years, the RECA/TBA candidates had little imaginative to say, so they simply said what quality-of-life advocates had been saying while throwing “business” into the mix. The 1996 election was very close, and boiled down very much to a battle of the voter base: Whichever side could turn out their voters would win. And that is where the long-term strategy of Yznaga and Butts paid off. Using the mailing list, and the volunteer and voter base created in the SOS campaigns, the quality-of-life advocates won. Goodman sneaked a victory in her place without a runoff, a rarity in Austin council elections. In their runoffs Slusher beat his TBA opponent by a mere 1,200 votes, while Griffith beat her TBA opponent by 3,000 votes. The networks established by the neighborhood organizations of the late 1970s and 1980s, the environmental organizations of the 1980s, and the SOS campaign of the early 1990s paid off as their voters went to the polls in larger numbers than the chamber voter base. The coalition organized around a meaning of Austin defined by the city’s environmental amenities had managed to maintain a (thin) majority control of the city council. By the 1997 council race, the organizing power of the environmental meaning and the Green Machine proved itself unbeatable, turning out a first-ever 7–0 “environmental” council. The council campaigns were run by the progressive trio of Butts, Yznaga, and Rindy, operated by people who supported SOS, and symbolized by quality-of-life issues. With the help of the SOS voter base, unknown SOS member Bill Spelman beat a developer, Gus Garcia


won his race, and Kirk Watson beat Ronney Reynolds for the position of mayor. The 1997 election that created a 7–0 “Green Council” was the ultimate electoral outcome of the environmental meaning as banner in Austin. All three races were won with the help of the political organization put in place during the SOS campaign, but the election itself returned to the theme that had driven all the activity since 1970: growth. The quality-of-life advocates were still trying to win enough power to direct growth in less harmful ways, and still making the case that growth harmed the things that made Austin a special place. What had changed was the political efficacy of that group. Their victories in the SOS battle and the 1993 and 1996 council races showed some of the businesspeople in Austin that the quality-of-life advocates were here to stay, and some of them began to acknowledge that in the mayor’s race. At first, Reynolds (the R in the RULE council) looked very well positioned for the mayor’s race. He had been collecting campaign contributions for three years, and had an impressive war chest. Then Kirk Watson, who came from the Democratic Party network and had served as both treasurer of the Environmental Defense Fund and vice chair of the Government Relations Division of the Chamber of Commerce, entered the race. Watson had a reputation as a mediator who could find solutions to environment/developer conflicts, and he had the support of both environmentalists and many Chamber of Commerce members. He ran his race by talking about ways the two groups could reach some consensus, looking for ways to put the environment and business together. In the next year he would solidify this consensus approach with the concept of “Smart Growth,” the idea that a city could grow economically by protecting the assets that drew people to the city. Watson did not make up the phrase; the Smart Growth idea was making its way through national conversations in other cities around the country. But as he applied it to Austin, Smart Growth meant that Austin could grow its economy best by preserving that which attracted people to Austin: its environment. Developers and home builders in the southwest saw real estate as their own path to riches, and many businesspeople still held to the “growth is good for everything” philosophy. But there were some newer kinds of businesspeople in town during the 1990s, located in the high-tech sector, who saw things somewhat differently. People who owned businesses or worked in that sector knew that their employees were attracted to work at their firms because of Austin’s quality of life, and they knew that the environment of Austin was one of the main things that gave it that quality. This change in the econ-


omy of Austin began to influence the elections of Austin most strongly in Watson’s Smart Growth platform. High-tech businesspeople and workers were not against growth itself, but they were for the environment that drew that growth. Many other businesspeople began to see the logic as well, along with many of Austin’s voters. Butts saw this during the campaign: “Watson figured out how to use that phrase for his run and was able to bring in a lot of chamber people to be for him because of it. So there [the frame] moved from ‘Environmentalists vs. Developers’ to ‘Growth’ itself, although the environmental component was ‘Save the environment as central to quality of life during growth, because the environment brings people to the high-tech and white-collar occupations and move here.’ ” When Watson made the runoff with Reynolds, Reynolds saw the writing on the wall. He bowed out of the race, claiming that he did not want to go negative in order to beat Watson. There may have been more to Reynolds’s decision than that, though. Polling results were showing Watson gaining strength, and business and chamber groups indicated that they would continue to support Watson over Reynolds. Peck Young, the longtime political consultant who had helped win the Friedman council elections in 1975 and Goodman’s election in 1996, thinks that Reynolds would have had a hard time raising money from his former developer-backers.32 The result was a de facto win for Watson, and the start of the Watson council, also called the Green Council. The Landscape and Politics: Voting for a Meaning Barton Springs and the environment were symbolic of the sense of place driving the SOS election and subsequent council races. The symbolism was part of the discourse that had emerged over twenty years. During that process the sense of place, the symbols of place, and the social groups that promoted that sense of place created one another in an ongoing process of definition. That process was part of the discourse of Austin, an ongoing communication between the physical and social parts of the landscape. The physical landscape of Austin made the symbols possible. The hills, river, and springs were a natural set of features defining the feel of Austin, and the parks and greenbelts built upon them highlighted their centrality to those who used them. Their existence in the middle of the city, and the use of them by thousands of people who lived near them, provided a way to understand what Austin “meant” to many. The political battles were a major part of the social landscape. The symbolism of the environment in general, and Barton Springs in particular,


focused and helped define a meaning of Austin. The opposition between the Green Machine and the developer and business groups identified who was for that meaning and who was against it. There is a crystal-clear spatial pattern to the voting in Austin; since the 1980s the core city has provided the mainstay of votes for environmental and neighborhood issues, while areas outside the core tend to vote against environmental issues and candidates. Central Austin serves as the voter base of the environmental meaning. This should come as no surprise; the main environmental features and older neighborhoods shape the lived experience of core city residents. In the 1980s and early 1990s, all the major parks, almost all the greenbelts, and Town Lake itself were located in the core city. The hills and creeks that do so much to define the physical sense of neighborhoods are found there. Zilker Park and Barton Springs are found there. Barton Creek and Shoal Creek are found there. The symbolism of the environmental meaning arose there because the fights of the 1970s and 1980s had been fights to preserve those features as Austin grew outward. The people who lived in those features, who lived near and used the parks, greenbelts, and river, defined life in Austin in large part by those features. The physical features of Austin are not the only reason the core city votes more green. There are other defining characteristics of Austin for quality-oflife advocates as well. For many people the music scene structures the feel of Austin as much as the parks. The blend of races and cultures in the core creates a higher level of diversity, and the artistic amenities are all in the core. The more liberal attitudes of the core city derive in part because of the higher education of those who live in it, and the University of Texas houses 40,000 students who are younger and more liberal. Youth, profession, and education are all associated with liberal voting patterns on general social concerns, and environmental issues are one of those. And never, ever forget Tex-Mex and barbeque. Anyone who has ever spent a day on the lake and finished it off with a mound of chips and queso, a plate of beans and enchiladas, and a few margaritas will understand immediately the connection between heat, water, and Tex-Mex food that do so much to define Austin as a place.33 Anyone who has ever spent a day swimming, hiking, or waterskiing will understand why those ribs and sausage and a good dark beer afterward are so central to the life of Austin. Heat, sun, water, music, food, diversity: They all shape the experience of Austin as a place. But the physical landscape—the hills, creeks, parks, and lakes—provide the grounding for them all in a literal sense. Most of the social activities of the core city take place within or near these features; the lived experiences of recreation, home, business, and group gatherings are shaped


by these features in ways that people are aware of. The things people do in the core city are done in and among its environmental features. Homes are built into them for living. Parks and greenbelts are built into them for recreational use. Office buildings are built on top of ridges or near a creek specifically for the view or closeness to “nature.” The biggest music festivals and yearly extravaganzas are held in the central parks and along Town Lake. People can ride bicycles to work and school along greenbelts. The weather is good for outdoor recreation most of the year, and many thousands take advantage of it in those parks, lakes, and greenbelts. Many Tex-Mex and barbeque joints are built near the water of the lakes and creeks so that people can sit on the decks overlooking them. In Austin’s core city, the physical landscape and the social landscape are so intertwined that a discourse of Austin as a place must somehow express that interconnection. The city’s voting patterns reflect that connection and further help establish that discourse. To be an “Austinite” in this sense means to be a person who is part of that connection, to have one’s life in part defined by that connection between the social life and the physical environment. The landscape outside the core is different. The physical landscape in the northern, eastern, and some of the southern areas does not include any of the striking hills or creeks. These areas are outside the university area, so they do not have the student population. Newer arrivals are more prone to live in outlying areas where housing is cheaper than in the core, and they have no institutional memory or ties to past battles. People who live in the periphery are more segregated by race and class than those in the core, reinforcing a sense of separation. There are some precincts to the west that are actually in the hills, but housing is more expensive there and the population is richer, more conservative, and more likely to vote Republican than Democrat. The differences in these kinds of physical and social landscapes helped shape the discourse of Austin and its environmental meaning. The desire by core residents to preserve some of the natural within the city as it grew was shaped by their landscapes. They were more likely to identify themselves with the environment as an expression of Austin. As Rindy put it, “they identify it with themselves—it’s part of their reason for being.” Their desire, their group identity, and their self-identity were structured by the landscapes they inhabited. They did not want Austin to look like Houston, and they created a physical and social idea of Austin that shows up in their voting behavior. The landscapes of the periphery shape different perceptions. Many people who live in the periphery live in a built environment that looks exactly like any Houston or Dallas or Atlanta: flat, suburbanized space. People who live in the periphery inhabit landscapes that look and feel like any other suburb in


America, landscapes that create what E. Relph calls a diffused placelessness rather than a sense of living in a unique place.34 That kind of space seems normal to them, so they may not have any reason to feel a connection to a place called Austin. A sense of place in the core, placelessness in the periphery. The symbolism of the environmental movement over time, and the SOS movement and the Green Machine in the 1990s, captured that difference, reflected it, and recreated it as people in the core city voted for the environmental meaning while the periphery did not. Lawsuits and Lobbying: The Legal Fights Just winning elections to the city council and building alliances with downtown groups was not enough to stop development on the aquifer. The SOS Coalition turned itself into the SOS Alliance and set up the SOS PAC to continue the political battles. It also created the SOS Legal Defense Fund (SOSLDF), because the group had to fight a series of legal actions brought by developers in the watershed. These actions took several years to resolve, mostly in favor of the alliance. But the developers won the biggest battle; they lobbied the Texas Legislature to grandfather all of their land out of the SOS regulations. In addition to filing lawsuits against the city, Bradley and FMP convinced the Texas Legislature to take them out of Austin’s regulatory authority. As it had with MUDs in the 1970s, the legislature created an entity that allowed FMP and Circle C to escape Austin’s regulatory authority. Named a Water Quality District, the entities were answerable to the Texas Natural Resources Conservation Commission, which imposed fewer environmental restrictions on development than does the city.35 This bill essentially granted Circle C Ranch independence from Austin’s water-quality regulation. Another bill granted several new MUDs to FM Properties so that it could escape Austin’s development requirements. Led by the tenacious efforts of Bill Bunch, the SOSLDF defended the SOS Ordinance from legal challenges in various court cases. With pressure from the SOSLDF and the SOS-backed council members, the city fought the lawsuits and legislation. A Freeport lawsuit was overturned at the appeals level when the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the SOS Ordinance did not violate the constitutional rights of FMP. So much for bankrupting the city. Bradley’s case, Quick et al., went all the way to the Texas Supreme Court, which decided by unanimous opinion that the ordinance was valid, that cities


do have the right to pass such ordinances, and that the ordinance was a valid subject for a petition drive. The Water Quality Protection Zones that removed Bradley and FMP from Austin’s jurisdiction did not survive. In 2000 the Texas Supreme Court declared unconstitutional the 1995 law that created them. The end result of this string of court cases was in favor of SOSLDF: The ordinance was declared valid, and the city had the right to enforce it. Those were the big wins in the string of court cases: the idea that citizens and cities can indeed pass laws that regulate the growth of their city, and that the legislature cannot simply remove developers from those regulations. But although the developer lawsuits were all found in favor of the city, lobbying efforts of the developers paid huge dividends. The Texas Legislature passed SB 1704, which barred cities from imposing new regulations on developers after they file initial plans. This bill is known as the grandfather bill because it allows developers to build out new subdivisions under older, less stringent environmental rules. A developer need only have filed a plan to develop, not actually have begun development. If you filed a plan in 1987 and never built the subdivision, when you started building in 2001 you could follow the old 1987 rules. The city staff interpreted the rule to mean that just platting one small section of the tract would count as the date on which the whole thing fell under an ordinance. So a small fifty-acre plat could “hold” a 5,000-acre piece for grandfathered status. When the RULE council put off the vote on the SOS Ordinance, developers could file plans that were now grandfathered; 277 development applications were filed during that time, almost half of them on behalf of Jim Bob Moffett and Gary Bradley. So the majority of the land that would normally have been developed under the SOS Ordinance was grandfathered out of it. Another factor in the legal efforts to protect Barton Springs and Barton Creek is the Endangered Species Act (ESA). The Barton Springs salamander has been listed as an endangered species under that act. But even that had mixed results. In 1992 (prior to the SOS election), the Department of the Interior found that the Barton Springs salamander, which lives only in the limestone of the Edwards Aquifer, might be endangered or threatened by runoff from development in the recharge zone. In January 1992 Dr. Mark Kirkpatrick, at the University of Texas, petitioned the US Fish and Wildlife Service to list the salamander as endangered and to designate Barton Springs as a critical habitat for the salamander. Political pressures immediately inserted themselves into the decision. Listing the salamander was not something that developers wanted, and the entire issue quickly became a political hot potato. Then-Texas governor George W. Bush weighed in against the listing, citing the “property


rights” of Texas landowners. Developers actively lobbied against it, as did the City of Dripping Springs. Under all this pressure the Fish and Wildlife Service chose not to list the salamander as endangered, but instead entered into a conservation agreement with the State of Texas. SOS et al. sued over the decision not to list the species, and the court required the agency to list the salamander as endangered, which it finally did in 1997. The Barton Springs salamander was then placed on the endangered species list. But the listing did not have any immediate impact on development in the watershed, because the agency said that development that conformed to state and local waterquality regulations posed no hazard to the salamander, and did not violate the Endangered Species Act. The Discourse of Austin: SOS and the Environmental Meaning The outcome of the political battles of the 1990s was a mixed bag for the aquifer, but a clear win for a notion of place. Although the rulemaking authority of the SOS Ordinance was eviscerated by the grandfathering legislation, the political effect of the SOS movement was tremendous. The SOS movement itself was a result of the conflicts between groups of people over the kind of city Austin was to be. SOS was the continuation of a movement that began in the 1970s, a movement to retain a special feel of a city, a sense of place, in the midst of urban growth. It was part of the decades-long attempt to guide growth away from sensitive environmental features that did so much to provide that special feel and sense of place. The conflict between two definitions of the city—a city defined by economic and spatial growth vs. a place defined by quality of life—created two kinds of battles: one over spatial growth in general, and another over the symbolic meaning of the city. Growth advocates and developers won the former; the quality-of-life advocates won the latter. The SOS movement showed that the quality-of-life advocates had a vision for the city that could be promoted in the public realm to win enough political power to have a seat at the table in modern Austin. In the end, winning the symbolic victory was the turning point for qualityof-life advocates. During the 1990s business and developer groups began to lose elections because they were playing on the environmentalists’ symbolic turf. The ideology of growth in and of itself no longer sells, and “business vs. environment” no longer plays well. Real estate and business groups must now work on some level with environmentalists instead of in outright opposition to them.


Their newfound political power is shaping the discourse of Austin today in the amount of parkland and open space retained, in the way the city is built, in the kinds of government programs that are instituted, and in the social landscape that continues to keep neighborhood and environmental issues front and center in Austin politics. The Environmental City continues to take shape in the midst of massive urban growth because the people who organized around the desire to define the place by its quality of life created a meaning of a place, defined that place and its quality of life by its natural environment, and used that environmental meaning to win a seat at the table of political power in modern Austin. The 1997 Watson council—the Green Council—was both the culmination of the environmental movement and the change to modern Austin. None of the members of the Green Council remain on the council today; the city has a two-term limit on council seats, and all have served their terms. But the leaders and the citizens who are part of the movement are still in town, still promoting environmental protection and environmental landscapes. The discourse of Austin continues to revolve around quality-of-life issues, and the environment is still a major part of those issues. The attempt to protect the aquifer and Barton Springs continues. And the ideas about environmental protection promoted by this movement have moved into the administrative realms of city government, institutionalizing environmental protection in the way things are built in Austin. What the people of this movement are doing with their power and organization will show whether the environmental meaning can maintain and expand its political and symbolic organizing role as Austin changes from a big city into a major regional metropolis. So let us have a look at what they are doing to build the Environmental City.

Part 4

T he Environmental City


Chapter 6

The Environmental City

Austin, Texas, the Environmental City of today, was created because enough people in Austin thought the environment in which they lived was one of the main things that defined the kind of place in which they lived. Their forty years of social action to protect that environment was part of their desire to protect and preserve a particular kind of place. So the social movement that became known as “the environmental movement” always hid as much as it revealed, especially to those arrayed against it. It was about preserving the environment, but it always went deeper than that. The environmental movement emerged as the banner for a deeper movement for place because the environment is so much of what creates the sense of place. The movement to preserve the environment in the midst of massive unplanned growth was part of the deeper movement to preserve an idea of a place, an idea of an “Austin” that was based on its quality of life rather than the riches people made from its growth. That relationship between the environmental movement and the deeper movement for place shows up in the subtle difference between the people in the early parts of this book and those in the later parts. The difference is in degree rather than in kind, but it is there, and it helps explain some of the subtleties of the present, especially the groups and disagreements that exist today. Many who were leaders and members of the movement in the 1970s and 1980s (see chapters 2–4) talked about their participation in this movement in terms of Austin as much as or more than the environment itself. Those people, and their movement, emerged in response to the rapid growth that was changing a place they knew and loved. The environment was so central to that sense of place that much of their energy focused on protecting it, but the desire to preserve a place caused the desire to protect the environ-

184 The Environmental City

ment. Everyone from Roberta Crenshaw, who did as much as anyone to start this “movement” by pressing for parks, to Mary Arnold, who has always been absolutely irreplaceable in the movement, to Daryl Slusher, who arrived in the late 1970s and never stopped working for Austin, to the South Austinites like Jack and Jackie Goodman and the founders of ZPP and SBCA, who worked so hard to protect Barton Creek, talked about the environment as part of Austin. The environment as part of Austin, not Austin as part of the environment. The movement for environmental protection in Austin began in the late 1960s and early 1970s as people saw environmental amenities degrading along with other things that growth was changing. Growth was changing Austin, making some people richer, making the environment poorer, and changing the older laid-back feel of the place. The Austin Tomorrow process produced a document that illustrated how people wanted to channel that growth so that the positive things about Austin, including its environment, would be preserved in the midst of that growth. The battles over growth in the 1980s were very much about those changes to a sense of place, the loss of a quality of life people felt, and the power of well-connected developers to ruin the Austin Tomorrow Plan for their own riches. Neighborhoods, transportation, and housing and economic issues were as important as the environment in the election of the Cooksey council of 1985, even though the environmental issues played a significant part. Neighborhoods and the environment were then the main symbolic nexus that illustrated the changes brought by growth, with the environment taking a greater and greater role as time went on (see chapter 3). The Cooksey council was thought by many to be the first “environmentalist” council (Cooksey was the president of the Save Barton Creek Association), but it was elected on a wide range of issues caused by rapid growth and the destruction of a sense of place. The movement for place had a huge influence on voting and politics. The political pros like Dean Rindy and David Butts and Mark Yznaga, all of whom have been working in Austin politics for upwards of forty years, know what people here vote for. They can tell you that the politics of Austin have been shaped by the overlapping movements, but that the movement for a sense of “Austin” as a place is somewhat different from the “environmental” movement. The two overlap because the environment does so much to define the way of living that existed in the 1970s and early 1980s, before the developers and growth promoters wiped out the vision crafted by its citizens in the Austin Tomorrow process of the 1970s. That movement for place structured what the people of the 1970s and 1980s tried to do with the city, and it had an enormous impact on the politics and voting patterns of the 1980s and 1990s,

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which were driven very much by the changes growth was causing to the sense of place. In the 1990s the environmental movement became the main organizing structure, and “the environment” the organizing symbol, for this deeper movement to retain a sense of place based on quality of life rather than economic output (see chapter 5). One of the reasons the environmental movement became the banner of the movement for place was due to the interplay of national and local forces. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, a newer set of people began to participate in the environmental movement. Many of them were what I have called professional organizers. They were trained in community organizing, and some, like Brigid Shea, Todd Main, and Helen Ballew, were trained in organizing to protect the environment as part of a national strategy to organize local communities into groups that would advocate and vote for social concerns. Some, like Bill Bunch, were trained to use the law to protect the environment. Most were tied to larger national organizations like Clean Water Action or Trust for Public Land or Citizen Action. Because their organizational focus was on the environment itself, they tended to see preserving environments in Austin—particularly the Edwards Aquifer—as part of the larger national environmental movement. If the older activists talked about the environment as part of Austin, the professionals tended to talk about Austin as part of the environment, or the environmental movement in general. But again, the difference is as much in degree as anything else, and the key phrase is “tended to.” Everyone involved sees the link between a larger national goal of preserving the environment and the actions of Austin’s environmental movement as a way that goal can be furthered in a local area. They have always thought globally, acted locally. When the newer professionals tend to talk about Austin as part of the environment, that is also due to their organizational focus. Many of them saw community organizing as central to social equity; working for equity meant finding ways to organize community groups politically. Since it was obvious that the energy surrounding opposition to unplanned growth was already strong in Austin, they found a focus in the environment. These newer people became integral to the success of Austin’s environmental movement because they brought their professional skills to the movement. Most of them came to Austin in the late 1980s or early 1990s, so they had not been part of that earlier movement for place that had emerged in reaction to growth. When they got to Austin, the desire for a kind of city that propelled that earlier and underlying movement had not gone away, but it had become less organized and focused because it had lost the battle against growth that had occupied it for more than a decade. The 1991 PUD hearing


was a clear and visible sign that energy remained to be tapped, and the skills the professionals brought from their professions helped organize and direct it in what became the SOS movement. The deeper movement was reenergized and refocused through the SOS Coalition consisting of the older activists, the newer professionals, and the old political pros from the liberal/Democratic political networks in Austin. The 1992 SOS Coalition reenergized the deeper movement for place by defining environmental protection as the signifier of place. The environmental movement became the symbolic political banner around which the deeper movement about place was organized. And it worked. “Environmentalists” took control of city hall away from “developers,” and the Green Machine institutionalized environmental concern in city policy, because the movement for Austin as a place was signified by the environmental movement. This subtle difference between two concurrent movements helps explain what has happened in Austin from the 1970s, and helps explain what is going on now. The environmental movement today no longer serves as the main banner under which to organize opposition to growth. One reason is that growth won; Austin is going to be a metropolis soon, not just a big city. The other reason is that the environmentalists won too: By attaining political power, they have institutionalized environmental protection in the midst of that growth. So today the foci of citizen action have broadened out to include other issues related to growth and the environment. The environmental movement is still active in Austin, its groups are still here, and they still have a big influence on city policy (and some on the county, but almost none at the state level). The political pros who ran the SOS campaign and the Green Machine are still running campaigns for the winning city council candidates. But much of the energy of that underlying movement, the movement to retain a feel of a place, is now focused on various other issues as well, including arguments about neighborhood issues that come from central city redevelopment, ideas about the correct way to implement new urbanist development, transportation policy, and energy policy. These are all related to the environment in direct and indirect ways. The need for new urbanist development within the city, for example, is seen by many as a way to decrease the suburban sprawl that causes most modern environmental problems. Transportation and energy issues are inherently environmental issues, because cars and coal-burning power plants are causing global warming. These new issues are being discussed by various groups, implemented in city policy, and since this is Austin after all, fought over in the political system. The victory of the environmental movement on the political level allows the foci to change, and


many of the people who were and are involved in the environmental movement are now involved in these related issues. These other issues are front and center now because the underlying movement has always been about creating a type of city that preserves a way of life, a feel of a place, in the midst of urban growth. I have called the people who shaped and led the two movements the quality-of-life advocates because that is how they talk about this way of life, or feel of place. This is especially true of the older activists, those who talk about the environment as part of Austin. The environmental movement in Austin emerged as part of the underlying movement for place because the hills, creeks, and river provided a physical structure that defined daily life in Austin. People lived on them, worked on them, played in them, created neighborhoods on them, and raised families in them. In doing so they began to think of the physical environmental features, and “the environment” in general, as something that defined their lives as Austinites. The ideas of the national environmental movement helped people to think about ways they could preserve their environment, and the national laws and government programs helped actually do some of that. But the various people and entities in the Growth Machine, those who believed in or acted upon the ideology of growth, did not think or act in the same terms. They promoted an idea of Austin defined by its size and money, and the Texas state legislators who were part of that ideology of growth passed laws that kept Austin from guiding its own growth into the channels the quality-of-life people wanted. I have called the people who were part of that Growth Machine the growth promoters. They might not call themselves that, and in fact many of them also thought about quality of life. But their roles as businesspeople, developers, real estate speculators, realtors, and city bureaucrats who service urban growth all caused them to act in ways that promoted city growth: real estate people through land speculation and sales, bureaucrats because it was their job, businesspeople and boosters because they believed in the ideology of growth. Growth promoters tended to think that environmental protection reduced profits. They might think of quality of life in Austin, but their version of quality of life included making lots of money in land speculation or business, or just doing their job. Their roles in the game caused them to have an interest in seeing Austin grow along the suburbanization paradigm. The different meanings of Austin—quality of life vs. growth/big city— found their public expression in the political realm. Because the movement for one kind of city was fighting against another, quality-of-life issues necessarily became political issues. People who thought of Austin in those quality-of-life


terms had to fight to preserve the natural environment and their neighborhoods by influencing city policy, and that meant electing officials and hiring city staff who would create city policy. They hoped to use city policy to preserve what they already had in the core city, expand the parks and greenbelts, and steer suburban development away from the most sensitive Hill Country areas. Their movement had to express itself as a political movement. So the discourse of the city—that communication between people and their environment—was defined in large part through the political system. As part of the political fights between themselves and the growth promoters, they found symbols of place in the environment, and in Barton Springs in particular. They found ways to frame that sense of place through environmental symbolisms, and they created a “Green Machine” that harnessed the sense of place to win elections. By the late 1990s and early 2000s, they had achieved a place at the table of power in Austin, and were able to institutionalize the protection of the environment in city policy. That power came too late for some things. With the creation of MUDs in the 1970s, the death of the AustinPlan in the 1980s, and the grandfathering legislation of the 1990s, the City of Austin had very little institutional power to guide suburban growth on its fringes. The SOS Ordinance that helped create the Green Machine has had little direct effect in reducing development on the aquifer because HB 1704—the grandfathering legislation—grandfathers almost all the land on the aquifer. The victory of the big suburban developers with land on the aquifer—through their pull at the Texas Legislature—ensures that the Hill Country to the southwest disappears daily under roads and subdivisions, degrading the water quality of the aquifer and burying what was beautiful countryside under ugly suburban sprawl. The quality-of-life people lost the battle over growth in general, and thus lost a kind of place that no longer exists. The Austin I grew up in, the smaller city with a laid-back feel and lots of pristine Hill Country to enjoy, no longer exists. Growth turned it into something else. Barton Creek and Barton Springs are not dead yet, but as Austin gets even bigger and more growth covers the aquifer, they are more threatened than ever. The hills are more alive to the sound of bulldozers than songbirds, even if you could see or hear the birds while stuck in traffic on roads that used to be countryside. For other things, their power came in time. The movement for a kind of place was not able to stop growth because, short of a massive economic meltdown, once the Growth Machine gets going it is almost impossible to stop. But the movement was broad based enough to attain some major victories that allowed it to create a particular kind of landscape in the midst of that growth. The movement had a gradually increasing influence on city policy


over the decades covered in this book, and that influence grew substantially during the 1990s. The quality-of-life people succeeded in taking the reins of city government, and had enough influence on city rules and regulations, that they have retained much of what was good about that other, older place. In some very important ways, they have made it even better. They have created a landscape that preserves much of the natural environment in the midst of an ever-growing city. The parks, preserves, greenbelts, and now open space that define so much of the landscape of Austin were all created by the movement as it sought to preserve the natural in the midst of massive urban growth. The way things are built is done in much more environmentally friendly ways. The physical landscape these people created, and the social landscape that shapes it, created the discourse of Austin that was all wrapped up under the catch-all phrase of the “environmental movement.” But it was always deeper than that, always about something more. They never put it in quite this way, because the phrase is mine, but the essence of the environmental movement in Austin was always about how to build the natural into the urban rather than plowing it under the urban. They were doing that because the sense of Austin as a place was always defined by the mixture of the natural and the social and the urban. That, they have been saying for forty years now. The underlying movement for place has always been about how we live in a way that mixes the best of all three, and how we can build a city that retains that mix. In this, they are succeeding. They are creating the Environmental City. So let’s take a look at how the physical, the social, and the political intersect today in ways that are building the Environmental City. The New Discourse: Smart Growth and the Three-Legged Stool The biggest change in the discourse of Austin has come about because the quality-of-life constituency, running under the banner of “the environment,” took control of the city council in the 1990s. The efficacy of the political organization that began during the SOS campaigns forced business and chamber groups to acknowledge that they have to deal with environmental advocates on a more equal playing field than had been the case in the past. The Smart Growth frame promoted by Kirk Watson and the Green Council was also an evolution in the discourse of Austin. The whole concept was a way of bringing the environment and the economy together, instead of framing them as opposites. Many people in Austin had made that point in the past, in many ways, but the developer groups had been so adamantly op-


posed to environmental restrictions on real estate development that they had never (at least publicly) considered the idea. From the 1970s to 1996, developer groups had framed the issue as “environment vs. jobs,” the main frame of the growth ideology. Many businesspeople in general, and many voters, were so filled with the ideology of growth that any suggestion that a city could shape growth to protect its environment seemed like a repudiation of basic economics. People who held that ideology saw the movement to protect the environment as either misplaced or simply wrong. The conflict between those two ideas—retaining a quality of life by directing growth vs. expansion of wealth by undirected growth—evolved into the “environmentalists vs. developers” discourse of the city. The names given to quality-of-life advocates, from “little old ladies in tennis shoes” in the 1970s to “enviromaniacs” and “tree huggers” in the 1990s, were part of that discourse. But Smart Growth became a way of talking about growth that brought the two arguments together. Not all businesspeople were taken with the idea, but the phrase “Smart Growth” put environment and economics together in a way that people talking about directing growth were not automatically seen as wild-eyed radicals. In the 1990s the Chamber of Commerce had commissioned a California firm to study how Austin could best compete in the national economy. That study laid out in detail how Austin’s economic competitiveness would be based on a mixture of economy, environment, and (social) equity. As a chamber member, Watson had a large part in commissioning that study. Many of the newer businesspeople, especially in the technology sector, saw it as perfectly logical. There were environmentalists who were not thrilled with the phrase. Many were skeptical about the “Smart” part of growth, and like the RECA gang they simply distrusted the other side. But many saw the concept as a confirmation of everything they had been saying for thirty years: that people wanted to live in Austin because of its environment, that protecting the environment was good for business. Watson and the 1997 Green Council solidified the place of the environment in Austin’s future when they began to promote a triangle or “threelegged stool” of economy, environment, and equity for Austin’s growth. That triangle was not just rhetoric; the Green Machine is more than just environmentalists. The quality-of-life advocates were able to maintain their position of dominance in Austin city politics for a decade and more by creating an alliance of progressive businesspeople, environmentalists, and networks concerned with social equity (mainly east side organizations of ethnic minorities, but also the police and firefighters’ unions). Talking about them as a triangle, or a three-legged stool, created a new public definition of interests, a new way of putting things together, in a con-


scious attempt to redefine the relationship between those interests. That new definition reframed the issue; it was no longer “environmentalists vs. developers,” but environmentalists as one interest group working with other interest groups toward a common goal of creating a livable city. Reframing the conflict in terms of “Smart Growth” solidified the role of environmentalists as insiders in a process of building a quality city, rather than outsiders constantly fighting developers in a seesaw battle for seats on the council. The political power of the SOS Coalition, the election of Watson, and the reframing of the issue led to a fascinating election that would have been inconceivable in 1991. Watson and the Green Council put together a bond proposal that requested funding for all three legs of the stool. For the environmental leg, it asked for the purchase of 15,000 acres of land in the Barton Springs Recharge Zone, to be left undeveloped. For the downtown business groups and boosters, it asked for money to build a convention center and fix up Waller Creek as a walkway next to the center. And for social equity issues, it asked for libraries, parks, and social amenities for underserved areas of town. The election saw a historic alliance of the chamber and environmental groups. The SOS Alliance campaigned for the downtown projects in return for the Chamber of Commerce supporting the land buy. The actual campaign for the bond package was run by the SOS Political Action Committee, whose grassroots network and get-out-the-vote campaign won the election. All the bonds passed.1 One reason the bonds passed was that they contained money for downtown improvements. This was not just political horse-trading—many environmental leaders were concerned with downtown creeks, and some money was supposed to be spent fixing up Waller Creek. But something else was changing during this time. The developer interests that had so much influence over the city council from the 1960s to 1980s were essentially suburban developers. That was one reason they promoted “growth” as an economic engine. Their version of growth meant expansion of the city outward, and they made their riches building suburban housing. But by 1998, Austin had two types of developers, not just one. During the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, the central cities of the United States began to see a renaissance as the technology/financial/service sectors of the economy replaced the old production functions of the inner cities. Inner cities all over the country were being rebuilt and renewed, and a new culture of urbanism was emerging in these pricy downtown renewals. Much of Austin’s draw was already downtown—the lake, the cultural amenities, etc. That made it ripe to join these larger national changes, and the Watson council made it city policy to bring development downtown. The new policies gave tech firms


and corporations subsidies and tax breaks to locate downtown instead of over the aquifer. The hope was that bringing development downtown would keep it off the aquifer, and Watson sold that idea to environmentalists as one possible tool in the kit to reduce building on the aquifer. Thus to the older suburban developers was added a new breed of downtown developer, building new office and condo complexes, high-rises, etc. They are younger, less tied to suburban development, and not entrenched with the older developers who had been fighting environmentalists for decades. The businesses that locate downtown attract highly skilled workers with promises of living in an environmentally pleasant city. A pristine environment brought highly paid workers to town who could afford the highpriced lofts and condos the developers were building. These interests don’t see “growth” as inherently suburban in nature because they are building downtown. They either don’t see a conflict between environmental protection for the aquifer and their own profits, or they actually see their interests aligned with environmentalists. These changing times changed the discourse of Austin. There were two turning points that created the discourse of modern Austin. The 1991 SOS campaign was one, when quality-of-life advocates found a banner under which to create a long-lasting political strength in city politics. The Watson council itself was the other. In one way it was a culmination of the “environmentalists vs. developers” discourse, because the environmentalists won. In another, more profound way, the Watson council was the change to modern Austin, part of a changing discourse where “environmentalists” shared power, and the direction of the city, with business groups and real estate people. Their ability to share power is resulting in the Environmental City. The year after the first big bond election, another ballot issue was passed by the Green Machine, approving more money for more large parks and greenbelts along area creeks in the south and east. More again was approved in the early 2000s. This newly purchased land is creating miles of greenbelt on the model proposed by the Creeks Project in the 1970s. The amount of green space along Austin’s creeks, in the recharge zone, and in the wilderness preserves is steadily increasing, and the landscape found in the core city is being extended outward from the core. So the landscaping designs begun by Austinites in the late 1960s continue today, stronger than ever. The underlying reason for extending those parks and greenbelts to the newer areas is the same reason quality-of-life advocates built the core city parks and greenbelts in the 1970s–1990s. Doing so is building the physical landscape of the environmental meaning. Building these new parks and greenbelts will help landscape the newer Austin in much the same


way as the core city parks and greenbelts helped landscape the Austin in this book, the landscape that produced the environmental movement, the SBCA, the Cooksey council, the SOS Coalition, and the Watson council. Since the physical landscaping project has been so central to the discourse of Austin for the past forty years, let us look at the physical landscape shaping modern Austin today. The Physical Landscape Landscaping the Environmental City: Preserves, Parks, and Open Space The Cooksey council of 1985–1988 tried to establish an ordinance to protect endangered species in the city boundaries and ETJ. The Austin-bashing legislation of 1988 ended that attempt as the Texas Legislature passed a bill preventing cities in Texas from doing so in their ETJs. So environmentalists in Austin began to pressure the Fish and Wildlife Service to protect the species under the Endangered Species Act, and during the 1980s and 1990s the agency began to list several species in the area as endangered. That began to slow down development, because developers have to file for permits when a project is found to impact the habitat of an endangered species. It also began to cause headaches for county and state agencies that build roads and infrastructure. Several different developers, government officials, and environmentalists from all over the region began to work on ways to develop land within the framework of the ESA requirements. Developers and local government entities saw that without some sort of a regional solution, anyone who wanted to build anything was going to have to go through the permit process, which would cost each project time and money.2 Travis County officials wanted to find a solution to a financial debacle of a road district, and were being held up by ESA requirements. Environmentalists wanted to use the ESA to protect habitat. The Texas Nature Conservancy, under the direction of Jim Fries, began asking the parties to meet together to work out some way of dealing with the issue. The parties eventually got together to create the Balcones Canyonlands Conservation Plan (BCCP). The hope of the conservancy was to create a regional plan for development that would set aside preserves of unbuilt land in perpetuity to provide habitat for the endangered species. The preserve system would allow developing entities to apply as a group for a regional 10(a) permit, instead of filing individual permits. The plan that actually emerged was more an outcome of political pressure

Map 6.1. Building the Natural into the Urban. The parks and open space in the Austin area are the physical landscape of the Environmental City.

Source: Allison Hardy and the City of Austin.


than of scientific knowledge; the biology of the area took second place to the economic desires of landowners and the growth vector of government entities. One of the first things the BCCP executive committee did was to put together a Biological Advisory Team (BAT) that would advise them about how much land would be needed to preserve species ranges and what kinds of protections would be needed to preserve habitat. The original BAT projections were that 160,000 acres of fairly contiguous unbuilt land would be required to protect the species. As the process went on, that estimate was cut to 120,000 and finally to 29,000. It was cut because developers threatened to pull out of the process if land set-asides required of them were too high, and they lobbied the politicians for lower totals. The economics of the plan were also contingent on electoral politics. Several of the representatives from all sides of the plan think the BAT eventually gave the 29,000-acre figure because they thought it was what the plan could reasonably afford and could pass at the polls. The original plan proposed that the City of Austin, Travis County, and the federal government would buy and contribute land to the set-asides. It was fairly easy to convince Austin voters to issue bonds to pay for land. Selling the project as “land to be preserved from development,” and placed on the same ballot as the 1992 SOS Ordinance, Austinites voted by 60 percent to fund their share. But the plan ran into problems in the county election the following cycle. There was less experience and commitment to running a bond election for open space in the county than there was in the city. In addition, by the time of the county election, the continuing anger over and distrust of FM Properties were influencing events. When the county election came around, FM Properties had just proposed a development agreement with the city, part of which was to set aside land to be used for the preserve system of the BCCP. The environmental group EarthFirst! was against the development agreement, distrustful of Freeport’s role, and concerned that the plan lacked verification or enforcement mechanisms to ensure that it was actually working to preserve the species.3 EarthFirst! made enough of a show of opposition that, added to the conservative opposition in the county, the county bonds were barely sunk (they failed by a percentage point). The project looked dead until Travis County Commissioner Valerie Bristol resurrected it through a different funding mechanism that raised the county money by charging mitigation fees to developers. This mechanism did not raise the money really needed by the project, and neither developers nor environmentalists were happy with it. As a framework for saving the 160,000 acres needed for species habitat, the plan failed when the county bonds failed. It survived at reduced levels, and there is disagreement among the partici-


pants as to whether it benefits big developers more than small landowners. But there seems to be general agreement that there is not really enough land to adequately protect the species’ habitat. Some species might survive at reduced levels, but the BCCP will not be able to provide the range of required habitat to support them at current levels. On the other hand, the BCCP lands are very influential in creating more open space in Austin. The city is part of the BCCP, which calls for the city, Travis County, and other entities to create a preserve system called the Balcones Canyonlands Preserve (BCP). This will not be enough to preserve the endangered species at current levels; its main effect is on the landscape of Austin. The plan is adding over 30,000 acres of open space to the system of preserves, parks, and open space that define Austin. It preserves Hill Country land that would otherwise have been developed. As Austin grows west, it grows around that land, and the BCCP land is becoming a major defining piece of modern Austin: huge swaths of unbuilt land in the middle of a major city. The BCP is a major component of the effort to protect water quality in Austin’s creeks. Bull Creek, in Northwest Austin, was one of the main points of contention in the early 1970s. Efforts to keep development off it (and sewer lines out of it) at that time propelled the environment to the forefront of city policy and got the first environmental boards in place. But it is the BCP that really allows substantial preservation of the Bull Creek watershed. A huge portion of the watershed is now BCP land, some of which is held by the city, some by the county. The Barton Creek watershed is much vaster than the Bull Creek watershed, and the proportion of its watershed held in the BCP is smaller. But BCP lands are essential to preserving Barton Creek. The city owns the BCP lands along the lower creek (the Barton Creek greenbelt and Barton Creek Wilderness Park), and the Nature Conservancy owns a much larger tract called the Barton Creek Habitat Preserve farther up the creek. All of that land is in the Barton Creek watershed. Austin continues to preserve land around the city in other ways as well. The bonds passed by the Watson council included money to buy 15,000 acres of land, and the subsequent bond packages have allowed another 20,000 or so. These lands were purchased by the city for the purpose of retaining unbuilt land over the Edwards Aquifer Recharge Zone. Whereas the BCCP lands were established to maintain endangered species habitat, the WQPL (Water Quality Protection Lands) were bought to keep clean water in the aquifer. The lands bought with the recent series of bond money are managed by the water utility, because they are in the Drinking Water Protection Zone (DWPZ).


The DWPZ is part of the Smart Growth ideas of the Watson council, applying economic rationales to the hydrology of the area. Austin gets its drinking water from its lakes, and the water that runs into those lakes comes in from the western lands. Some of it comes out of the aquifer at Barton Springs and two other springs farther up the lake. The main kind of pollution in Austin’s drinking water is urban pollution: oils, grease, and chemicals from tar and construction—all the things that suburbanization of the western lands causes. The more polluted the water that comes in, the more it costs to clean the water in order to drink it. Retaining land that would otherwise be paved reduces the total pollution of Austin’s drinking water, which means less money need be spent to clean it before drinking. Cleaner water coming into the lakes means cheaper drinking water (and cleaner swimming water in Barton Springs). Since the water utility has the task of providing clean drinking water, the lands were put under its control. Part of the job of the Wildlands Management Office in the water utility is to restore the lands and get the right kinds of native grasses and plants growing there again, because the native plants not only clean the water as it flows across the land but also help retain more of that water. Lands that are kept unpaved actually filter and clean water on their own; as water flows over the grasses and ground, it is actually cleaned up a bit before it seeps into the creeks or springs. The land cannot remove huge amounts of pollution, but it can clean up small amounts. The water filters into the aquifer more slowly, keeping the aquifer more full of cleaner water that is there for Austinites to swim in. There are two ways Austin acquires land in the DWPZ: fee simple purchases and conservation easements. Fee simple purchases are when the city buys the land and owns it. Unfortunately for the city, land prices on the recharge zone have risen exponentially since the early 1990s, and the cost per acre is very high. That means if the city tried to buy land outright, it would not get very much for its money. On the other hand, purchasing conservation easements allows the city to spread the money further and retain more land in its natural state. In a conservation easement, the city buys the right to subdivide or develop the land from the owner. The land itself remains in the hands of the landowner, but he cannot develop or subdivide it. Since the city is not buying the land outright and only one particular kind of use exists for that land, and since the landowner gets to keep the land (to live on or ranch or hunt, etc.), the cost of an easement is lower than buying it fee simple. The downside of conservation easements can be a lack of public access for recreation. Unless the agreement stipulates that public access is granted, the public cannot walk or ride on the land—it is still the owner’s private property. On the


up side, the purpose of buying the development rights is to reduce concrete poured on the aquifer, so the city can protect more land for its money. The largest piece of land preserved as conservation easement, for example, is just upstream of the Nature Conservancy BCP lands along Barton Creek, keeping that water—and the water in Barton Springs—just a little bit cleaner. The BCP lands, the WQPL, and the new parks and greenbelts are adding to the landscape that builds the natural into the urban rather than paving it under the urban. They are becoming mini-preserves in the midst of an urban area, places for flora, fauna, and people to interact. Officially most of them are off limits to recreational use right now. The water utility manages most of the city’s BCP lands and all of the WQPZ lands. Since the purpose of the BCP lands is habitat preservation and the purpose of the WQPZ lands is to keep drinking water clean, the utility has set up an office to manage the lands for restoration of flora and fauna rather than recreation. It allows some guided walks and activities on some of them under the direction of staff (mostly the BCP lands), and a couple of trails are being built on others now, including trails through some of the lands to link up with a longer thirtyfour-mile Walk for a Day trail that several groups are trying to build. The utility knows that people want recreational access on the lands, and staff are in the process of building a greater range of access programs for the future. The planning tends toward educational tours and activities explaining the various ecosystems and their management. But many people aren’t going to wait for access. Some of those lands are being used right now by various people looking for recreation on “natural land.” Many people who ride or walk on the Barton Creek and Bull Creek greenbelts are surprised to learn that the trails they use today were not built by the Parks Department. Some have been there for centuries, because the creeks are natural pathways into and out of the Hill Country. Along Barton Creek there are old Indian camps, and the walls of an old Spanish settlement still stand just off the main trail. As the land was walked by contemporary people, the old trails reappeared. Most of the trails along Barton Creek and Bull Creek follow the natural contours of the hills and creeks. They have been there before, but we just reopened them as we walked and explored them anew (in some cases before the lands were actually city-owned greenbelts). Similar things are going on now on some of the DWPZ lands. That is partly because many people in Austin assume that unbuilt land can and should be enjoyed by walking on it or riding on it or exploring it. The social geography of Austin mirrors the physical geography: People drawn to Austin because they can enjoy its environment are more likely to enjoy it on their own


terms, fence or not. Many like to live here because they can find space, find “nature,” in the middle of the urban. Such people will continue to explore and use the BCP and DWPZ lands, and eventually they will have some kind of official recreational access. More adults will want to live in a place they assume should have preserves of wild land near their homes, and more children will grow up assuming that of course a city is supposed to have unbuilt, wild lands in the middle of it. Living near and exploring those lands will continue to create social ideas of what a city can and should be because people will use them for recreation. The latest attempt to define the kind of land to be set aside can be found in the Travis County Greenprint Map (map 6.2). The map shows how the parks and open-space lands to the west are creating a landscape defined by open space in the middle of urban space. The darker-shaded areas indicate tracts of land the greenprint group thinks need to be acquired. The darker the shade, the higher the priority to conserve. Most of the tracts west of the city shown as Parks and Open Space are BCCP and WQPL lands. In that area the priority land is mostly between tracts that are already open space, hoping to link the land that is already preserved. What is really interesting is how much high-priority land appears in the eastern part of the county, much more than the western. The environmental movement of Austin has had remarkable success in preserving land in the Hill Country on the western side of the county (including the Edwards Aquifer underneath it). Now some are saying it is time to go east and continue the project. Most of the high-priority land in the eastern part of the map is along creeks that feed the Colorado, and along floodplain land next to the river itself. The land is in need of preserving because Austin is growing east faster than west. If the people of Austin are able to find ways to preserve those creeks and waterways before they are paved over by growth, they will expand the physical landscape of Austin’s environmental meaning east and south. As new residents take up life near those green spaces, they too will be able to live in that meaning of Austin. The Social Landscape of Modern Austin The physical landscape of Austin suggests the Environmental City to the eye (and foot and bike), and is one of the major components of the discourse of Austin. The social landscape that created the built landscape is the other part of the discourse, part of that process where the social and physical landscapes “talk” to each other, how they create each other. The underlying movement for place in Austin, and the environmental

Map 6.2. Travis County Greenprint Map. Source: The Trust for Public Land.


movement it spawned, is part of the social landscape, a desire on the part of many people to create or protect a way of living and an idea of the city. The environmental movement had its infancy in the landscaping of the parks and greenbelts in the 1960s and 1970s. Its adolescence was in the political battles of the 1970s and 1980s. The SOS battles of the 1990s, and the Green Machine that won them, brought the movement to maturity, when the environment served as the symbolic banner that flew over the underlying movement for place. The Green Machine helped harness the energy of people who want to live in an Environmental City, and its political efficacy allows them to continue the landscaping project today. But the social landscape has changed a bit since the Green Machine won the Watson council. “Environmentalists” no longer control the city council, for example, although there are always one or two council members who define themselves and are seen by others as the “green” council member. The Green Machine of the 1990s has broken up and no longer fields a concerted slate of candidates. In Austin’s politics today, the environmental movement and the environmental meaning do not play the same overarching symbolic role they did in the 1990s. The environmental movement is still quite active in Austin, but the underlying movement to build a kind of place is less focused on preserving land over the aquifer. Instead, that deeper movement is dealing with other major issues, some of which are directly related to the environment, others indirectly. The two movements are still very much a part of the social landscape of Austin today, and both continue to shape the way Austin is being built and run today. But the way that is happening is somewhat different than in the 1990s. Fractures in the Coalition: To Deal or Not to Deal? One reason the environmental meaning no longer serves as the main symbolic banner for the underlying movement is the reality of the Austin-bashing laws and grandfathering legislation, which exacerbate the tensions within the environmental movement. Those tensions are created by disagreements over the best tactics to use in preserving the environment. Given the legal reality of the grandfathering statute, the question became, what are the best ways to reduce overall development on the aquifer? In June 1997 the city discovered that the grandfathering bills had been inadvertently repealed by the 1997 legislature. Without those bills in effect, the SOS Ordinance would have applied to all new development on the aquifer. Although the legislature made it plain that it would correct the accidental repeal in the 1999 session, the uncertainty of the situation created an


opening for the City of Austin to work with developers to resolve it. Because the Watson council was a 7–0 Green Council, developers had little hope that the council would just let it drop, and in March 1999 RECA (the Real Estate Council of Austin) and the Chamber of Commerce announced a “truce” between themselves, SOSA,4 and environmental advocates. When they got together, the legislature was in the act of writing House Bill 1704 to re-grandfather all remaining land owned by developers under the older 1980s laws. City officials and SOSA members worked for weeks with members of RECA and the Chamber of Commerce to reach a deal they hoped would keep that bill from passing. They wanted to show the legislature that the Greens and the developers could negotiate their own settlement. The truce was in the form of a deal to limit development on the recharge zone by Stratus and Bradley, but it never happened. Lobbyists for Stratus (including Richard Suttle, a lawyer in the same firm as David Armbrust, who was part of the “truce” negotiations) were down at the Capitol, working for passage of 1704, which passed overwhelmingly. Since the whole point of the truce was to keep that from happening, the agreements fell apart. The end result of this process created disagreements between environmentalists over the best course of action: Should they make deals with the developers building on the aquifer that would reduce the amount of concrete poured, even though it allowed more than SOS standards, or should they keep fighting in court and the legislature to force the grandfathered projects to come under SOS? The problem for environmentalists was that House Bill 1704 gave developers the upper hand in any negotiations over land development; as long as they had simply filed a plan to develop land before SOS was passed, they could develop under the older rules. Since the RULE council had delayed the vote on the SOS Ordinance for that very purpose, the majority of land in the recharge zone was grandfathered. That didn’t mean landowners had complete carte blanche to develop anything, since much of the land would still fall under some older rules that did require some limits. And city staff were the ones who had to verify whether a development’s plans had to be grandfathered (most are; more on this below). But it gave landowners and developers the upper hand in negotiations. At the same time, another kind of argument between environmentalists was going on, this one a technical argument over the concept of clustering, which went all the way back to the CWO. The clustering concept is based on the theory that a project can build more densely in one area if it leaves other areas less dense or unbuilt. Some environmentalists thought that you could make deals with developers that allowed them to build dense developments on one site (apartments, condos, and business buildings, for example) in re-


turn for leaving other portions less dense (putting one house per acre instead of four per acre, or setting aside unbuilt land for preserves). For example, you could allow a new development to exceed SOS standards on ten acres if the developer bought another twenty to remain unbuilt, or if they put money in a trust for land to do so. But that meant allowing much higher density in some areas than SOS allowed. And since the big developers owned so much of the grandfathered land in the recharge zone, it meant making deals with Bradley and Stratus. A lot of people were not willing to do that; the political battles between themselves and these developers had left too many scars, and some believed that they could still use the legal process to force developers to abide by SOS standards. In addition, there was never any overarching policy that defined how to do land trades or clustering; each project had to be evaluated on its own merits. Some projects were built on more sensitive recharge features (caves, sinkholes, etc.) and therefore were less suited to land trading (those projects needed to have limited density wherever possible), while other projects were on less sensitive areas and could be allowed to build more densely if they would do some kind of trading. Another disagreement revolves around where you do the trading. Should the city allow a developer to donate land (or money for land) that is far removed from his development, or should he donate land that is in the same watershed as his development? Other issues can enter in as well, which happened when the Terrace PUD was built. The Terrace PUD sits directly on top of Barton Creek in close proximity to an existing neighborhood (Horseshoe Bend/Barton Hills). Environmental issues came up against neighborhood issues. The PUD wanted to retain open land by building up instead of out. Some environmentalists thought that was a good idea because going up instead of out was the lesser actual environmental impact. But the tall buildings along the Barton Creek greenbelt meant destruction of the visual aesthetics of the creek and neighborhood, which many disliked. And making a deal to allow more density right on the creek itself really bothered a lot of people. The essential idea behind all of this has been wrapped up in the term mitigation, meaning to mitigate polluted runoff on one site by preserving unbuilt land on another. All of these factors were at play as environmentalists, city staff, and elected officials thought about ways to make deals that would mitigate pollution from development, and it led to a schism within the environmental coalition, splitting environmentalists. Many, such as Bunch and the SOSA Board, wanted to continue a more “hard-line” approach without deals, or at least without deals where the developers got to pour more concrete than SOS allowed. Others, including several on the Watson council, believed that


the grandfathering law put an end to SOS, and the best way to preserve the aquifer was to make deals with the developers based on mitigation. The disagreement began to strain the coalition at the height of the Watson/Green Council, right after the successful 1998 bonds package. The first big split came in 2000 when the Watson council worked out a deal with Bradley based on the clustering idea. Bradley owned three tracts of land, and the essence of the deal was that Bradley got to develop one tract more densely than SOS limits in return for keeping the other two tracts less dense than the SOS limits. The city would also get conservation easements on some land nearby. Bradley would get water and wastewater for the other two tracts, and one of them would have a huge resort hotel and golf course on it. The city would also waive the normal fees it imposes on development in order to pay back the bonds spent on infrastructure to the development, in this case costing the city between $5 million and $8 million. The specifics of the deal were much more involved, but the basic approach was based on the clustering idea.5 For those who thought the deal was a good move, it all boiled down to the basic facts of the grandfathering legislation. Bradley could claim all of his land was exempt and build out under older, weaker ordinances. The many lawsuits over the ordinance, the water-quality zones, and the other Austinbashing legislation were working their way through the court system at the time, and no one knew for sure what would happen with them (in the end, Bradley and Stratus lost almost all of the lawsuits, but the grandfathering legislation stood). Proponents of the deal, then, thought it was the best they were going to come up with under the grandfathering legislation. Some also thought it was time to move on and “give peace a chance” rather than continuously fighting Bradley and other developers. Opponents were vociferously against it. The deal was opposed by the SOS Alliance and many other environmentalists for various reasons, some having to do with technical issues and uncertainties about clustering, but mostly having to do with Bradley’s past behavior. Very few thought Bradley could be trusted to hold up his end of any agreement. Bradley has reneged on several of his contractual obligations with the city, going back to his original MUDs in 1983. That contract stipulated the MUDs would follow the city’s watershed ordinances “as amended from time to time,” which meant he should have built new projects under the newer SOS Ordinance. But Bradley got developer councils and the Texas Legislature to prohibit enforcement of that provision of his contract. Bradley has spent years working to keep stronger water-quality rules from being put in place, lobbying city councils and more importantly the Texas Legislature. He was one of the people who helped sink


the AustinPlan in 1988 (the plan that was to have codified Austin Tomorrow), was the driving force behind the RULE council’s efforts to keep the SOS Ordinance off a ballot in 1992, and had filed some of the lawsuits in its aftermath.6 Given Bradley’s history of breaking promises and contractual obligations, those opposed to the deal worried that the clustering arrangement allowed Bradley too much freedom to move things around; exact amounts of impervious cover could be changed after the agreement was signed. Opponents were also angry that once again, the city was spending money to help Gary Bradley develop his property without being repaid—the fee waivers were millions more dollars that the city has essentially given Bradley over the years. The issues and arguments went back and forth for weeks, but in the end the council unanimously approved the deal, pitting environmentalists on the dais and in favor of the agreement against those who opposed it. The Bradley deal created hard feelings between former friends. The disagreements over whether to work with or make deals with developers, and the disagreements over which developers to deal with, became the major dividing line between former coalition members. Leaders, groups, and individuals within the environmental movement began to disagree on the propriety of various deals, and that split remains the main controversy within the movement today. The latest and most controversial action occurred when Advanced Micro Devices, a national corporation that manufactures computer chips and other bits, decided to build on the aquifer. As part of its Smart Growth Plan, the Watson council had created a Desired Development Zone, essentially zones 1, 2, 3, and 5 on the Austin Tomorrow Map (map 3.1). This is the area where the city wants growth to occur. Drawing growth toward the DDZ is part of the attempt to draw major development away from the aquifer zone and the creeks to the west. The Smart Growth Plan tries to use incentives to draw growth into the DDZ and away from the WQPL. All major cities in the United States offer incentives to businesses to move there or expand their operations. Austin does the same, but in Austin there are more incentives in the DDZ than elsewhere. In order to get the incentives in Austin, the business has to agree to a wide range of requirements, including social equity and environmental issues, and there are fewer requirements in the DDZ. Regardless of anything else they agree to, though, a firm that locates on the aquifer area is not supposed to be given any city subsidies at all. And if they do develop outside the DDZ, they are not supposed to get any subsidies in the future. There is no legal way to keep development off the aquifer, so to an extent the Smart Growth incentives are as much like a gentlemen’s


agreement as anything, with the city as one gentleman and firms—especially high-tech firms like AMD—the others. AMD had originally acted like a gentleman. It already had a plant in Austin outside the zone (built in 1979). But in 2006 the company decided to build a new headquarters directly on top of the aquifer, on one of the most sensitive areas above Barton Creek. AMD said it would build an environmentally friendly state-of-the-art project and donate mitigation money to local land trusts, but the decision caused a lot of worry among environmental groups. Why? Major employers building their sites on the aquifer will pull their workers to live on the aquifer. Environmentalists remembered when Motorola had built in the area, and by the mid-1990s the majority of Motorola employees ended up living in the aquifer contributing zone. Other development follows those houses to service them. That is hundreds of new houses, miles of new roads, acres of parking lots—all of it impervious cover right where it should not be. An AMD headquarters would not only be a pull to new development, it would set a bad precedent for the modern era, when land-use issues such as these have supposedly been settled. Part of the Bradley deal was a stipulation that no major employers would be allowed to build on lands covered in that agreement (“major employer” was defined as 300+ workers), and here AMD was doing just that. Environmentalists worried that over 2,000 people would want to work at—and live near—the facility (the company employs over 2,500 people).7 They worried that other companies might do so as well, drawing more development nearby as people moved near the new workplaces. So the SOS Alliance (SOSA) decided to do what the SOS Coalition had done in 1991: run a petition drive, collect signatures, get an item on the ballot, win an election. But instead of just writing an ordinance, they decided to amend the city charter itself. The city charter is like the U.S. Constitution: the set of rules that govern how the city government operates. Amending the charter is a bigger deal than just passing an ordinance, but many environmentalists were angry about the AMD decision to locate on the aquifer, and they believed amending the charter was the only way they were going to keep it from happening again.8 They felt they needed to go to that level because AMD was just one example of a development that city staff defined as grandfathered when the SOSA thought it should not have been. Austin staff reviews development projects being built out today to see if the current uses of the land match what is given as the original “submittal” land uses. If there is substantially enough difference between the old plan and the current application, it is deemed a new project and subject to SOS. City staff thought the project did fall under


the grandfathering law. But the land has been through bankruptcy, and was being developed for a different purpose than the original plan, so the SOSA thought it should not be defined as grandfathered. Part of the amendment the SOSA wrote was meant to clarify exactly what fell under that law and what did not. This amendment was called the Clean Water Amendment. Another reason the SOSA was so angry about the decision to define the land as grandfathered was the various deals made between the city and developers since the Bradley deal, trading land for development rights. To the SOSA, the deals had begun to look a lot like the backroom shenanigans that had characterized the RULE council of 1991. So the SOSA teamed up with civil liberties and open government groups to propose an Open Government Amendment. The proposed amendment would have required that the city conduct all of its business online, even to the point of forcing department heads and other staff to post their calendars online in real time. The idea was that citizens would be able to see who was meeting with whom before they actually met, instead of weeks after, and thus could keep track of possible deals in the works. All of which makes perfectly good sense if your goal is to find out which developers are meeting with which staff or council members to work on land-trading deals, but it didn’t make any sense at all to people who worked in the city, including some former council members who were part of the 1992 SOS Coalition. The Open Government Amendment was much more controversial than the Clean Water Amendment. Almost no one on the council or staff liked it, and few thought it was workable. The petition drive was successful (the SOS Coalition had done this before, after all, so the SOSA knew how to get the signatures), and the city had to put it on the ballot. But things got even hotter at that point; the staff wrote the ballot language to highlight the worst possible outcomes, including extra taxes they said would have to pay for it. So the SOSA had to go to court and get a judge to order the city to change the ballot language from argumentative to neutral. The original 1992 SOS Coalition had had to struggle with similar legal issues, forcing the city to put its ordinance on the ballot in reasonable language and time, and here it was happening all over again, even with a supposedly more enlightened council and staff. The election campaign for the proposals created even more animosities, with former allies accusing each other of bad faith and worse. Several former council members from the 1997 Watson council were against the amendments for various reasons, most of which boiled down to a belief that they would not work as the SOSA thought they would. Several of the people against the SOSA Amendments were proponents of land trades and clustering and felt


the amendments would hamper their ability to use that tool. Some thought AMD’s offer of mitigation money was a good thing. Many also felt the amendments were written in such a way that they would have unintended consequences. They formed a PAC (EDUCATE PAC) to campaign against the proposals, sent out a flyer, and put a few ads in the papers. Business interests, RECA, and the Home Builders Association formed another one, the Committee for Austin’s Future, which raised about $450,000. It was a strange election: many of Austin’s oldest environmental activists, like George Cofer, Jackie Goodman, and Daryl Slusher, beloved former mayor Gus Garcia, and some of the people who had run the bonds campaigns were working against the SOS Alliance and some of its board members, like Mary Arnold. Shudde Fath and some on the SBCA Board were for the proposals, and others were against (although the SBCA did endorse the amendments). The split among environmentalists almost guaranteed the amendments would lose. The 1992 SOS Ordinance passed because there was a united front on the part of all the environmental advocates, and the campaign was run by the political pros. This time the groups were publicly split, and the SOSA campaign was not run by the pros who had run the 1992 campaign. The amendments failed even in solidly green core city precincts. The election showed more than anything how the times and the discourse had changed, from the 1992 frame of “environmentalists vs. developers” to a “best tactics” frame. I heard one of the most interesting illustrations of the changing times one day as I talked to Mike Blizzard, who ran the EDUCATE PAC campaign. Blizzard got his start in Austin politics when he helped out on Slusher’s first mayoral race (Slusher barely lost), was a strong “team player” guy in the Green Machine (he helped run the 1998 bonds campaign), and got so mad at Slusher for making the Bradley deal that the two wouldn’t even speak to each other for years. Blizzard was nobody’s softy. And yet he ended up working with Slusher again on the EDUCATE PAC. Why? Changing times. “I used to think it was all us against them,” he told me that day, “but I don’t think that is the way it is now. Now, it’s more a case that we have to find ways to work together, all of us, to protect the aquifer.” When a person like Mike Blizzard told me that, I knew things had changed. But Blizzard was just one example of what was happening as the political discourse moved from “environmentalists vs. developers” to something different. Those who ran the amendments campaign didn’t seem to understand that changing discourse, or at the least they seemed to have assumed that replaying 1992 would simply work again. The pro-amendment campaign was run with much the same vocabulary as the original 1992 SOS petition campaign, framing “developers” as the bad guys, and lumping any opponents to


the amendments, including the EDUCATE PAC, into the same league. But lumping the well-known activists and leaders in with “developers” made no sense to an electorate that had always thought of those activists as the leading spokespeople for the environment. EDUCATE PAC was telling people this was the wrong solution, that it was not a simple black-and-white issue. The amendments campaign was still using the black-and-white language of us vs. them. “Them” came to include the older leaders, and it just turned a lot of people off. The amendments campaign had little chance of success in the new landscape, as they refought a battle from a different landscape and frame of reference.9 And it did not end there. AMD was not on lands covered in the Bradley deal, but pressure to develop there continues as well. The lands that were part of the Bradley deal are supposed to be developed according to the deal, in perpetuity. Recent activity in the area is testing whether that will actually happen, though. Bradley went bankrupt in 2004, and in 2007, developer Bill Walters secured a contract on 265 acres of land that were included in the deal from the Bradley bankruptcy trustee. Walters requested that the city council grant him a PUD that would allow more development than the Bradley deal allows. The request was opposed by the SOSA and other environmentalists, who rallied several hundred people to contact the city council. The council then voted to punt the issue for the time; they denied the current request but intended to take it up again after the 2009 city council election.10 The whole issue shows one of the big problems with protecting land over the aquifer, one that has been a problem for decades. Although laws and rules may be in place restricting development, developers can lobby staff and council members and get variances from those laws or rules. The high-profile cases of the Bradley deal and the AMD development highlight a new social landscape defined by disagreements over the best tactics to use, and when to use them. The disagreements have put strains on the environmental coalition, and at times like the Bradley deal and the charter amendments, that strain blows up publicly. The disagreements tend to revolve around specific development projects rather than “dealing” in general. Some projects cause a lot of disagreement, and some don’t. Some individuals and groups are more likely to accept deals that others will not. The Save Our Springs Alliance plays a central role in those debates, and maintains its reputation among environmental groups because of its stance in that overall debate. Because of its role, it tends to draw people who are less likely to want to make deals, and are therefore seen as the “hard-line” element in town. Other groups draw people who are more likely to accept deals. Sometimes the disagreements get personal; some people see others as “less green,” others


as “pigheaded” or just “idiots.” The desire to protect the aquifer and Barton Springs is heartfelt in everyone trying to get it done, and you can hear the deep feelings in people come out during meetings, at dinner, at events; the snide comments, the rolled eyes, the derisive snorts, the occasional obscenity. Activists are a hardheaded bunch to begin with, and there are a lot of “holier than thou” moments (“greener than thou” in Austin) when the big disagreements blow up. But the situation is more nuanced than just “hard-liners” vs. “deal makers” or “sellouts.” Dick Kallerman is a great person to talk to about the new social landscape because he can’t be pigeonholed on either “side.” He is presently the president of the SOSA Board, but he has been around Austin’s environmental movement for so long that he has his foot in every major group: SBCA, Sierra Club, HCC, SOSA. Kallerman points out that SOS is not against all development, and in fact has worked with several developers. He just wants them to follow the SOS Ordinance if they do develop. “If people are going to build on the aquifer and they do it according to the rules, we clap and say, go for it. The big disagreements come because of the grandfathering. Arguments between environmentalists are really pretty rare, but sometimes it comes down to whom you are willing to work with—sometimes people will work with developers and that causes others to see them as less green. The Hill Country Conservancy [described below] is a good example of that. Because they are willing to work with developers, they are seen as only quasi-green.” The SOSA has more of the hard-line reputation “because we have the lawyers and are willing to sue! Ultimately, ‘hard line’ is a lawsuit, or the potential for one, that gives us an edge,” explains Kallerman. In other words, the reason the SOSA is more “hard line” is because they are set up to be. That is the nuance of the split here in Austin today. The SOSA is not against all agreements, but they do want people to play by the rules established when the SOS Ordinance was declared law by the Texas Supreme Court. The SOSA looks “hard line” because their organizational goal is to protect the aquifer, and they have the money and legal resources to do that. On some of the high-profile disagreements, from the Bradley deal to the AMD case, there really is a split between them and others because they don’t think the deal is justified. But just as often as not, they are leading the way for most others because they are the ones with the legal and financial resources to do so. One of the main ways they are out in front today is by making alliances with other groups in the aquifer region to create the Greater Edwards Aquifer Alliance. The alliance is composed of groups in San Antonio, smaller towns in the area, and various groups over the aquifer. The thing that really links them all together is roads, specifically US 281. The state wanted to make what


is now a four-lane road into an eight-lane toll road, directly over the aquifer recharge zone, which would do what all such roads do: pave the way for more suburban development. “It’s designing highways with a meat cleaver that got us into it,” says Kallerman. “The San Antonio people oppose it too, because 1.5 million people drink from aquifer water there, and one day it’s going to go dry” (because of overpumping to supply water to all the new suburbs). Two of the groups in the alliance, Aquifer Guardians in Urban Areas (AGUA) and Texans United for Reform and Freedom (TURF), sued the Department of Transportation (TxDOT) and the Federal Highway Administration in federal court for failure to prepare an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) on the project. SOS attorneys Andrew Hawkins and Bill Bunch and San Antonio attorney Charlie Riley represent the groups, and because of the lawsuit, the road-building agencies rescinded approval for the plan. These things have a way of coming back in Texas—our entire Texas “transportation” apparatus is set up to do little but build roads for cars—but for now, the plan is nixed. Another group the SOSA works with is closer to home: the Fix 290 group. The growth issues involved with Fix 290 illustrate the core dilemmas involved in protecting the environment as Austin grows today. Fix 290 is a group opposed to the Highway Department’s plan to put a toll road through Oak Hill, a smaller part of Austin on the aquifer. Like US 281, the proposed highway is seen as an environmental issue for the aquifer. Bigger highways lead to more subdivisions, which means more pollution of the aquifer. Fix 290 is composed of people who were part of the Oak Hill Neighborhood Association (OHNA) but broke from OHNA because that group is more developer oriented. OHNA wants to have a kind of new urbanist development as a town center in Oak Hill, but they want to put it on currently undeveloped land, just next to a square kilometer of asphalt that could be redeveloped instead. OHNA supported AMD; Fix 290 was against it. There is a split today in Oak Hill over what and how to build, very much like the disagreements in other parts of Austin, and the SOSA gets involved because Oak Hill itself sits directly on top of the Barton Springs segment of the Edwards Aquifer, where the contributing zone meets the recharge zone. The SOSA helps them with legal advice and other kinds of ideas. The issues raised by highway 290 and the town center idea are perfect examples of the big issues and disagreements in Austin over the best way to build, grow, and regulate growth. There are some people in various groups in Austin—the Sierra Club, Liveable City, and others—who think a new urbanist redevelopment there would be good because it would reduce local car traffic. Others in the same groups, and people in the SOSA, say no, it would actually bring more traffic, and bring it right on the aquifer recharge zone.


It’s a dilemma—what’s the best tactic to reduce traffic here? It is also part of larger arguments about environmental protection in general. New urbanist proponents believe the best way to reduce car trips overall, and thus global warming, is by creating dense, walkable centers that mix housing, business, and retail. If it is all right there together, they say, people won’t need to drive long distances to get what they need, and that will reduce traffic overall. So they like the town center idea. Others say, well, that’s fine, but don’t do it on the aquifer. Kallerman says that the SOSA will take the latter solution. “SOSA is going to say, ‘Well, you just have to not add concrete on the recharge, or do things that support development.’ They could develop it the right way, and SOSA wouldn’t complain. But the basic argument would have to be, don’t bring more development—more concrete and thus cars—over the aquifer.” And that is the reason there will continue to be arguments among environmentalists. The SOSA as an organization will almost always advocate for the lesser development option, and that will make them look “hard line” compared to others who think you can develop in less harmful ways. A New Social Landscape: The Hill Country Conservancy The arguments about the best tactics to use occur because others think mitigation can work as the best overall solution, that “developers” and “environmentalists” can work together on a large scale to mitigate ongoing development by keeping other land undeveloped. The main group that does that is the Hill Country Conservancy (HCC). The mission statement of the HCC reflects the new discourse that was emerging during the Watson council. Its mission is “to ensure a healthy environment and economy in the Barton Springs Edwards Aquifer region by preserving natural areas, scenic vistas, rivers and streams, working farms and ranches and the rural heritage of the Texas Hill Country for generations to come.” That mission is not new, of course; it has been the basic mission of the environmental movement in Austin since the 1980s. What is new is the acknowledgment by business interests that “the environment” and “the economy” are not diametrically opposed. That basic acknowledgment came mostly because the environmentalists forced the business and developer groups to the table. The HCC was put together because of the power of the Green Machine and the success of the SOS Legal Defense Fund. “One of the pieces to this,” says Cofer, is that “Bill Bunch was kicking their ass in court, and some of the smarter developers thought that it would be cheaper to work with SOS than against them in the long run. Bill won all those lawsuits in federal court, and fighting them was


costing [developers] enormous amounts of money. So the legal victories did in fact get some of the developers to say, OK, we have to work with [environmentalists]. The clients were more practical about it. Many figured that if they had to get green to build their projects, they would get green.” Getting green didn’t mean everyone was happy to develop land at low densities. Cofer makes a point of noting that only two big projects came in voluntarily; the grocery chain HEB built a store by SOS standards, and Temple-Inland built its headquarters campus to the same standards. But Cofer saw that “lots of others began to come in and say, ‘Okay, what will it take for us not to fight this out?’ ” The HCC became one answer to that question, by allowing developers and others to donate money in return for variances on their developments. In essence, the HCC is an institutionalization of the mitigation idea. It creates a mechanism that allows developers to fund preservation of open space while building more densely than SOS allows. With money from developers, the government, and other grants, the HCC can either purchase land outright or buy development rights to land. Buying development rights is being used in many parts of the country today as a tool to retain open spaces near growing cities. Many rural landowners on the edges of growing cities would prefer to keep their land in a rural state, but the difficulties in making a farm or ranch profitable, combined with the market economics of urban growth, almost always make that impossible. As cities grow, land prices nearby escalate, and the taxes go up. This creates a problem for landowners—their taxes rise, sometimes too high to make a real profit from farming or ranching. There is an incentive to solve that problem by selling the land and making a good chunk of money. It is a bind many rural landowners don’t like, because many would prefer to “keep the country, country” as they used to say in Austin. But the economics of urban growth pretty much force either the landowner, or more often than not their children who inherit the land, to sell. The idea that a city or nonprofit can buy the rights to develop the land helps solve the dilemma. A group or city that buys the rights to develop a property gives the owner money, though not as much as he would make selling the land to a suburban developer. The group that now owns the development rights chooses whether to develop or not, and of course they choose not to because that is the whole point. The ranch or farm remains in the hands of the family, who still own it, but they cannot develop it. Which is fine with the family, because they want to keep it rural. So the land remains undeveloped, the family gets to keep living on it, and in the case of the Edwards Aquifer, it keeps functioning to filter, clean, and recharge the water of the aquifer and


Barton Springs. One example the HCC helped put together is the Storm Ranch. The Storm Ranch is the largest conservation easement, held by the Nature Conservancy and the City of Austin (see map 6.1). The HCC becomes one of the tools in the kit to preserve land on the aquifer, build the green city, and make a physical statement of the idea that the environment and economy are linked, not separate. For example, in 2008, AMD gave $650,000 in order to mitigate the extra density it built on its site directly on top of the aquifer. Stratus Properties also pledged $2 million to the conservancy in 2006. The HCC will use their share of the money to apply for federal grants that require local matching funds. Whether Stratus and AMD should have been allowed to get away with that is an example of the mitigation argument in Austin today; should development be allowed to be denser on one site if it can mitigate that density by preserving unbuilt land on another site? Many people are still mad about the fact that HCC gets money from developers like AMD, they worry about the actual effect of these deals, and some don’t like the idea of “environmentalists” and “developers” working together. Cofer and the HCC Board see it exactly the opposite, though, believing they have found a way to move beyond the old discourse toward a set of tools that both “sides” can agree upon. The Changing Discourse: The Environment as Part of a Livable City The HCC is not the only group to form as a way of working on the threelegged stool. Several of the people who formed the original 1991 SOS organization and ran the Green Machine formed a group called Liveable City in order to bring the three legs together in an advocacy group. Original SOS Board members Mark Yznaga, Brigid Shea, and Ann Kitchen, together with advocates for various other issues in Austin, set up the group. Unlike the HCC, which focuses solely on the environmental leg, Liveable City works on all three, focusing more on equity and other issues. The title of the group itself encapsulates the emerging discourse in Austin—the attempt to build a Liveable City is becoming the main symbolic component of that underlying movement about place. Preserving the environment is part of that, but so is creating affordable housing, mass transit, good schools, decent wages, and all the other things that people need in order to survive in the city so that they can preserve and enjoy the environment. The idea behind Liveable City is to ask, what makes a place worth living in? A clean, nice environment is one thing, but social, economic, and equity factors are even bigger parts. Watson suggested a three-legged stool. Liveable City has the “5 Es of Sustainability


That Support a Livable Community: Equity, Engagement, Esthetics, Economy, and Environment.” The whole idea of a “livable city” is driving much of the thinking, action, and politics in Austin today. Different environmentalists and social activists are working on various aspects of this whole idea: some on transportation, some on redevelopment, some on energy, some on new urbanist ideas. The idea of Liveable City is trying to put them all together in some kind of coherent framework so that a larger progressive agenda can be crafted around growing sustainably. No one illustrates the thinking in the minds of people trying to create a Liveable City more than Mark Yznaga (who helped run the 1992 SOS petition campaign), the director of LC, and David Foster, one of the board members. Yznaga comes at it from a community-oriented perspective—he thinks of Austin in terms of a larger community. Foster comes at it from a more universal approach, thinking of building livable cities as one solution to environmental problems in general. But they end up at the same position: Austin needs to grow in ways that will increase its quality of life, rather than just grow in ways that cause social and environmental problems. When you talk to Yznaga about it in some detail, it is obvious that he is one of those people who think about a city as an organism, as a community in which people are reliant on one another in various ways. One day in the early 1990s, while we were talking, he was looking out the window, and said he “sees the streets as veins and arteries, and I’m watching the blood flow as I look out the window. To me [the 1992] SOS [election] wasn’t about Barton Springs, it was about the arteries, veins, mythos—the quality of life. And it was about power—who was going to wield it, and for whom.” Yznaga never defined himself as an environmentalist, even though he, David Butts (who also never defined himself as such), and Dean Rindy (who comes closest to the moniker of the three) pretty much ran the Green Machine and won its electoral victories. Why was he so involved, then? Because it was about a place, “a community that allows people to have a happy life—all concerned with others’ well-being. Communal well-being [is] defined as basic health, safety, and financial support (necessities) so all can be psychologically healthy. It should give people a common vision.” Yznaga has been looking for ways to create both the common vision and the actual policies that have allowed that communal health for twenty years now, in the original SOS Coalition of 1991, the Green Machine, and the Watson council. Once that was in place, he began to think about the next step. Liveable City is that next step. David Foster is another example of the kind of people serving on the board


of LC. Foster is the director of the Austin chapter of Clean Water Action, which means his actual job is advocating for policies that produce clean water. He doesn’t think of his work in Austin in quite the same way as Yznaga, though there are similarities. They both think the environment is part and parcel of a truly livable city, that preserving the environment can be done only by making the rest of the city function well for its people. And that requires a completely different way of using transportation within the city, which is Foster’s main focus. The dependence on the car—and the gasoline needed to run it—as the main transportation system is one of the main reasons for the polluted waterways in the United States; oil and gas and gunk from cars run off the streets into creeks and rivers, polluting the water. CO2 gets pumped into the atmosphere. So for Foster, and Clean Water Action, transportation moves front and center as a main element of environmental protection. While Yznaga has more imagery and metaphor to drive his thinking and action, Foster has more actual experience living in a livable city. As part of his graduate studies in history, Foster spent three years living in Germany with his family. He got to see many different German cities, some about the size of Austin. European cities are built as compact cities based on mass transit, walking, and bicycling, and the Foster family lived a happy life there without ever owning a car. People walked to the market, rode their bikes to work, took the train to the close-in suburbs or other cities, and for Foster, the experience became a defining moment in the way he thinks about cities. “For whatever reason, humanity has opted to live in cities,” he says. “And that means we have to figure out ways to build sustainable cities. When I got back from Germany, I had seen it done there, and there was this activity in Austin talking about doing it here. It was SOS, it was the Green Council, the Watson council, the talk about Smart Growth. All the elements were there. So here was Austin trying to do growth right, and the right people were saying all the smart things.” The environmental movement, and the movement for a place, in Austin had created a set of people who were thinking about “doing growth right”; they had been for twenty-five years. Foster fits perfectly into that social landscape, a person for whom the broader goals of creating a sustainable city can be tried out in a specific city. The five Es of a livable city, then, are a grander vision of the three-legged stool. The goal of LC is how to put equity and transportation and other issues together with environmental concerns to build a place that is more sustainable, that people can afford to live in, that creates a high quality of life. Liveable City does not have the popular panache of the SOS Alliance; it is not focused specifically on Barton Springs or the environment because its goals encompass more than just the environment. But the goals it articulates rep-


resent the next iteration of the underlying meaning of place, that underlying movement to retain those things that make life so nice in Austin as it grows. The terms have changed from “environmentalists vs. developers” to “livable city,” but the intent of the people is still the same: create a place that has a high quality of life and feels like a distinct entity that gives meaning to life. Signs of the New Discourse: Austin Politics Today The new politics of Austin reflect this new discourse. In an important sense, the politics of Austin today resemble the politics of the early 1980s more than the 1990s. Neighborhood concerns have come back front and center, representing the quality-of-life issues that helped start the whole movement for place. “To a big extent, the energy today is back to the neighborhoods,” reports Mary Arnold, because the most local place people live, and feel the effects of growth, is in their neighborhood. She should know; once again she is involved in Save MUNY, one of the first things she got involved with way back in the 1970s. As it was then, trying to save a golf course in the middle of an Austin neighborhood is both an environmental and a neighborhood issue. The university is once again talking about selling the land to developers, and the neighbors are once again trying to find ways to keep it a golf course. Some of the neighbors play on it, but most of them want to retain the course because it is a huge expanse of green space in the middle of West Austin. It is an environmental feature that helps define their neighborhood area. The university also owns lots of land near the course, including some along the lake that remains forested (it is kept in its natural state to use for biology studies). This strip of wooded land along the lake keeps green space integrated into the neighborhood. Some of the land presently houses the married-student-housing apartments, which neighborhood advocates want to keep. “Those apartments are our affordable housing units in West Austin,” says Arnold, and one of the things the neighborhood association wants to do is retain some affordable housing in the area. Why would the neighbors want to keep some affordable housing in the area? It is the equity component of a livable city. For various reasons, many people in the neighborhood don’t want to live in an area that only the rich can afford. They think economic diversity is part of their sense of Austin, and they want to live in a place where people can mix. Neighborhood organizations and the environmental movement have been the two main engines of the movement for place in Austin. For a time the environment became more prominent, but as the environmental issues about


growth on the aquifer began to resolve themselves in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the energy created by a concern for place, and the movement for a kind of city, has shown itself more through the actions of neighborhood organizations. The groups overlap, and many people in environmental organizations are also in neighborhood organizations, because the two have always been connected in Austin. The changes to city government pushed through by “environmentalists,” for example, were ways to make city government and the development process more responsive to citizen input for environmental and neighborhood concerns. But regulating the kind and quality of development in Austin is also very much about creating a kind of place people want to live, and that place is defined by more than just environmental concerns; social and philosophical issues exist side by side. One of the best examples of this mix can be seen in an issue that took several years to resolve, from the late 1990s to 2008. It was about “big box” retail stores, and their appropriateness for a place called Austin. The “big box” retailers are the Walmarts and Targets and others like them. They arose in American society as part of the suburbanization paradigm, and like malls, they are part of some larger problems. They are typically built in the middle of huge, multi-acre parking lots, creating impervious cover that channels polluted runoff into creeks or sewers, which channelizes the waterways while keeping clean water from filtering into local aquifers. They are usually just big square buildings on a pad of concrete (hence the name “big box”), and like malls, the only way to access them is by car. Because they are based around the car and only the car, big boxes cause traffic and pollution and contribute to global warming. These are universal problems, but put all that traffic and pollution (and the twenty-four-hour floodlights) in an existing neighborhood, and they become local problems for the people who live there. They ruin the neighborhood. Big boxes impose other social costs as well: The traffic they cause is paid for by the people of the city and borne by the neighbors; the wages they pay are so low that many workers have to rely on city services (health, housing, food stamps, charity) to survive. They are part of the problem Austin and other cities have in trying to create a different kind of urban space. Regulating the size, placement, design, and operation of such big boxes is therefore part of a larger effort to redesign our cities in more livable, less destructive ways. And in Austin, they became part of the conflicts about growth that keep the movement for place alive. Environmental groups had been talking up a Big-Box Ordinance since the 1990s, as a way of limiting impervious cover on the aquifer and reducing the kind of suburbanization destroying the Hill Country. Some of the new urbanist types were also talking about it, as were a few of the people in the


neighborhood organizations. Liveable City talked it up. But it was the actions of Walmart itself that brought it all to a head. In 2003 Walmart announced plans to build a new supercenter with a typically huge parking lot. It planned on building 51 percent impervious cover, far more than the SOS Ordinance would have allowed. The Bradley deal had gone through by this time, limiting development in the area to a maximum of 15 percent impervious cover. But this particular piece of land was not covered in it, and development had been approved sometime in the early 1990s. So Walmart was going to be able to build a massive parking lot that would have polluted the aquifer with runoff, and there was not a lot that environmentalists could do about it using the rules in place at the time. The issue actually enflamed citizen action, though, because once again an environmental issue was also seen as a neighborhood issue. Neighbors did not want the increased traffic the development would bring: an estimated 13,800 vehicle trips per day along the only two streets that went to the parking lot, both of which went right through recently built neighborhoods. It generated so much resistance from the neighbors, in fact, that for the first time in Austin’s long history of battling Circle C, the Circle C Homeowners Association allied itself with Austin environmental groups. Along with other nearby neighborhood groups, they formed the No-Aquifer-Big-Box Coalition to oppose the development, and were joined by groups as diverse as the Austin Independent Business Alliance (which was concerned about Walmart’s impact on local businesses), labor organizations concerned with pay issues, and the Austin chapter of the National Organization for Women (which was concerned about Walmart’s discrimination against female employees). The public outcry and opposition from wide-ranging groups forced Walmart to back down, and the company decided not to build on that site. The controversy also got the city council to pass a No-Aquifer-Big-Box Ordinance restricting the size of such developments over the aquifer. During the same year, the South River City Citizens group had spent lots of time and their own money to deal with a new Walmart being built in South Austin at the head of Blunn Creek. (This was not the first time the creek had been at the center of controversy in that neighborhood—see chapter 3.) Partly because of the general heat generated by the aquifer development proposal, the SRCC was able to negotiate several changes to the design of that supercenter, including many environmental protections and additions. In the same year, Lowe’s began to build a new box on top of the aquifer, on the edge of the small town of Sunset Valley. Few in Sunset Valley wanted the boxes; 80 percent of Sunset Valley residents get their drinking water from the aquifer. To try to force Lowe’s to reduce its footprint, Sunset Valley actually gave the


land on which it sat to the City of Austin, hoping that Austin’s SOS Ordinance would then restrict that project.11 All these big-box problems brought the idea of a more general citywide Big-Box Ordinance into the public discussion about growth. In late 2006 a neighborhood group found out that Walmart planned to open a huge box supercenter in the heart of North Austin, in an abandoned mall. The mall had been a suburban mall in the 1970s; now, it is surrounded by neighborhoods in the middle of Austin. People who were hoping the mall would be torn down and replaced by more new urbanist development were disappointed to find out Walmart was going to build its biggest inner-city project in the country on the site. One of the neighborhood groups, the Allandale Neighborhood Association, had a meeting at which the developer and his local lobbyist/lawyer Richard Suttle came to explain what they were going to do with the project. These two had been working with the officers of the association, and had assumed everything was set and ready to go. But the meeting did not go as they had anticipated. A middle-aged woman in the neighborhood stood up in the meeting and asked them, “Is there anything we can say or do to get you to change your minds, because I am completely against what you are planning to do!” It turns out there were a whole lot of other people from the neighborhood who were also opposed. And one of them was Brigid Shea. Shea had been the director and spokesperson for the SOS Coalition when it ran the ordinance campaign in 1991–1992, and she retained that role after the election for the SOSA. She then served on the city council. She had recently moved into the Allandale neighborhood and had heard about the proposal from a member of the association. Like Roberta Crenshaw before her, Shea is not at all shy about saying what she thinks, has a long history of doing it, and finds ways to get things done. Because of her background, though, she had some experience and knowledge that Crenshaw never had. She is one of the professionals who came to town in the late 1980s, one of the people trained in mobilizing public support for environmental issues. She had served on the city council, so she knew the city operations and development procedures inside out. Even more than Crenshaw, Shea knows how to make an issue, and she knows how to use the political system to attain a goal.12 And she doesn’t like being rolled over by rich, powerful people. “The developer just came into the neighborhood and said something no developer should ever say,” she recounts of the experience. “They said, ‘This is a done deal, and you can’t do anything about it.’ ” That is not the kind of thing Shea likes to hear. She didn’t just think the project was a terrible idea. She knew how to operate a group that opposed development projects in Austin, and


how to work the system to get her goal met. Shea stood up in the meeting and announced that she would be happy to help organize opposition to the plan. And they did. The neighborhood organization voted out the officers who had worked with the developers, and then put in people opposed to it. They publicized the issue, got other nearby neighborhood organizations to join in, and with Shea’s help started a group called Responsible Growth for Northcross (RG4N). With her help the group began to build broad bases of public support; eventually the development proposal became a citywide issue, with people from all over town adding their voices against it. Liveable City was against it, environmental groups from the SOSA to the Sierra Club opposed it, and with all the unhappiness about it the project became one of the hot controversies of the year. Tempers flew—several people quit their neighborhood associations because of the conflict. A dead rat is purported to have been placed on one person’s porch because of her stance. Lawsuits flew—the neighborhoods sued the city, and the developers threatened to sue the city. Accusations flew—city officials and council members were accused of purposely slowing things down so Walmart could do its project, and worse. Prospective city council candidates weighed in. The controversy and the energy surrounding it spurred the council into writing the Big-Box Ordinance. The ordinance specifies that proposals for retail stores over 100,000 square feet must undergo a public input process; the developer has to notify neighborhood organizations within a mile of the proposed project, the city must hold a public hearing on the project, and the city council must approve it (grocery stores are exempt from the process). The neighbors also won some real concessions from Walmart, including a substantial reduction in the footprint (it is less than half the size it would have been), less impervious cover (the thing is on the Shoal Creek watershed), and a site design that includes more sidewalks and landscaping. With all this citizen action, the project began to look more like something that fits people’s desire for a type of Austin, a more pedestrian-friendly, more compact, more environmentally sound, more livable city. Getting the ordinance passed—and the RG4N uprising that spurred it on—was a big part of “what makes Austin, Austin” today. The ordinance makes these kinds of boxes political issues, and if the political will is against them, they have a lower chance of being built now. Social action in Austin is about creating a type of place that represents people’s idea of a livable city, a place they think of as defined by their ideals, whether that action is seen as part of the “environmental movement” or part of “the neighborhoods.” These kinds of problems crop up all over town. In East Austin, gentrifi-


cation is quickly pushing low- and middle-income minority people out of neighborhoods some have lived in for generations. In the university area, older housing that used to define the feel of that part of town is being torn down and replaced with high-priced condos. In South Austin, rising land values mean rising rents and housing costs, changing the kinds of people who can live there. The university area and South Austin were the first “weird” parts of Austin, partly because of cheap housing relative to other parts of town. As rents and prices rise, the old stomping grounds of hippies, rednecks, workers, and other weird people are becoming unaffordable. The feel of South Austin especially is changing, moving from a mixture of classes and races to a more homogenized white upper-middle-class area. These issues are making themselves felt in Austin politics, and you can really see it at election time with the words and phrases used in the 1990s. Sometimes they work, other times they don’t, but their use illustrates how frames are changing to meet new conditions. One example was seen in the city council race of 2008 between council member Jennifer Kim and challenger Randi Shade. Kim’s mail-outs and campaign literature highlighted the big three in Austin: “Standing up for our Neighborhoods . . . Standing up for our Environment . . . Standing up for Austin’s Families, Secured agreements to provide affordable housing in new developments,”13 endorsements from greener and liberal social organizations, and a picture of her standing with Brigid Shea. But Kim had a reputation of being hard to work with on the council and voting for neighborhood and environmental issues just because they were popular. As Shade showed a real threat of winning, the Kim campaign sent out several flyers that could have come straight from the 1992 SOS campaign. They hit all the key words that defined the politics of the 1990s: “If Randi Shade is elected, who will be pulling the strings? Randi Shade’s top campaign advisor is a powerful City Hall lobbyist . . . Electing Shade will increase his access to power and help his developer clients,”14 read one, showing a puppet dancing on strings. It could have been a copy of the famous Chronicle cartoon showing the RULE council as puppets of Gary Bradley and Jim Bob Moffett. Another showed a pipe pumping sewage into a creek and claimed that “Randi Shade would negotiate away Barton Springs . . . Shade stated she thought the city should have compromised with developers instead of passing the Save Our Springs Ordinance protecting our aquifer,” with a reverse side showing a clean glass of water and asking, “Would you like clean water or would you rather compromise?” It was another set of images and frames taken directly from the SOS battles in the early 1990s. Shade herself does not have an environmental background. She comes


from the old-line liberal/Democratic networks and did not make a big issue of the environment. In 1994 the imagery and framing used by Kim (not to mention her endorsement by Shea) probably would have carried the day. But not today. Shade absolutely creamed her—Kim won only about a third of the vote. What was Shade’s big draw? Her campaign frame was “Different. Just like Austin,” and she defined herself in more contemporary terms. A popular bumper sticker has been around town for a few years now that says “Keep Austin Weird,” and the campaign played off that theme.15 Shade’s mail-out was a laundry list of contemporary concerns: traffic, environment, public safety, affordability, neighborhoods. Discontent with her personal mannerisms was part of Kim’s downfall, but she should have had a better chance with Shea and some of the green endorsements. Yet the green frames fell flat, and a person who framed herself as an all-around multiple-issues type won. Times—and the main concerns—have changed. The environment is one of the many things people are worried about, but you can’t win just by typecasting your opponent as a developer pawn anymore. However, you can certainly talk about people who actually are developers, using words and frames that play off older battles by applying them to new situations. The contest between Laura Morrison and Cid Galindo that year showed this kind of reframing. Reading Galindo’s website and mail-outs and campaign material is to see new urbanist ideas about growth guide a campaign; sustainable city, green city, planning for growth—all the key ideas about urban planning were there, and Galindo had written an article about a plan for growth he was working on while on the Planning Commission. Galindo was one of many people who helped start the Austin chapter of the Congress for New Urbanism, and he served on a group called Envision Central Texas that suggests ways to grow that are more sustainable. In terms of the emerging discourse of Austin, especially the sustainable city frame, he seemed to represent the direction many people want to go in doing growth right. Yet Galindo was up against a well-known and respected neighborhood leader, Laura Morrison, who was president of the Austin Neighborhoods Council. And her campaign was helped by the best in town: Butts, Yznaga, and Rindy. The Morrison campaign made a point of saying that Galindo was not so much an “urban planner” as a “developer” because of his role with his father’s development business and his own business. The moniker by itself didn’t sink him: Galindo is not a Bradley, but many people thought that he got religion (the new urbanist kind) when he decided to run for the council (unlikely, given his work on the urbanist organizations years prior). More to the point, through, he was talking about density, about ways to redevelop


downtown and central Austin. Those are worrisome words to many in the neighborhood organizations, who don’t like the changes density and infill bring to their neighborhoods and housing affordability. The “developer” frame morphed to fit the times: not the 1990s developer as one who ruins the environment (the Edwards Aquifer and Barton Springs), but the new one who ruins neighborhoods. To a big extent it was back to the future again: The campaign was very much about the same concerns heard in the late 1970s and early 1980s as the pace of growth began to increase, because the pace of growth today is just as great, and the worries are very much the same. Luckily for the City of Austin, it is not 1985 anymore, and the basic electoral facts have changed. Austin politics is no longer driven by “environmentalists vs. developers” frames because the social groups behind various candidates today simply do not fall neatly into two opposing camps. Environmental and social equity have become taken-for-granted components of Austin’s future by many influential businesspeople, and even by the Chamber of Commerce. The days when the Real Estate Council and the chamber teamed up against the Green Machine are over. Many individual businesspeople are much greener now, especially those in the younger generation. The chamber’s own studies refer constantly to the environment. Suburban developers no longer carry as much sway; high-tech firms carry as much or more weight. Elections are now won by people who can create diverse mixtures of support, including businesspeople, rather than turn out their respective bases. Nowhere is this more clear than an election that will take place as this book goes to press. All signs point to Lee Leffingwell becoming the mayor of Austin in 2010, and there is a very good possibility that Chris Riley will be sitting on the city council. Both have led environmental and neighborhood groups, both have served on various city boards and commissions, and both are generally seen as the “green” candidate. But neither is going to win because of that. They are going to win because they have the support of broader coalitions that perceive a connection among the three Es, and are thinking about the best people to run a city of a million in the coming decade. The mayor’s race looked a lot different in December than it did in April. Council members Brewster McCracken and Lee Leffingwell both wanted the job. Both have green credentials—together with Mayor Will Wynn, they wrote the Austin Climate Protection Plan. Both are well liked, and both really do see the importance of building a green city through city policy. Of the two, Leffingwell was seen as more of the “green candidate,” since he came from the Environmental Board. McCracken, though, is younger and more telegenic, and leans more toward the business side. He presents an image that would cer-


tainly represent a younger, growing, tech-savvy national city, and was expected to attract a lot of money and backing from influential people. Many thought he would be very hard to beat. McCracken was visibly running as 2008 closed, although he did not technically enter until spring. Carole Keeton Strayhorn, who had been mayor from 1977 to 1983 when her last name was McClellan, was also running. But Leffingwell could not formally announce a campaign until the spring. He was in the middle of a three-year term, and if he had announced for mayor, the city would have had to pay for a special election to replace him on the council. Leffingwell had pledged not to do that, which put him at a significant disadvantage compared to McCracken and Strayhorn, both of whom could raise money and campaign all through the spring. Many kept encouraging Leffingwell to run, including Ted Siff and Joe Pinnelli. Both men come from the old-line liberal/Democratic wing of Austin. Pinnelli made his money building houses for rich people and has donated quite a lot of it to liberal social causes. He is no stranger to business. Siff has been an integral part of landscaping Austin. In the 1990s he was the Texas director of the Trust for Public Land, which was integral in putting together the BCCP and parkland acquisition deals. After that he served as director of the Austin Parks Foundation. His green credentials are more on the “get things done behind the scenes” side rather than the more visible “movement” side. The two men got several others together from across the political spectrum to form a Draft Lee for Mayor committee, composed mostly of equity people that included labor and leaders in the African American and Hispanic communities. Noticeably absent was anyone defined strictly as an environmentalist. (Mike Blizzard, who sits on the board of the Hill Country Conservancy, was the closest thing to a dedicated “environmentalist” of the group. But he is not a leader of that movement in the sense of a Jackie Goodman or a Bill Bunch.) They did not even have Mary Arnold in the mix (which may be the only time in the history of Austin that she has not been in on something like this).16 The group raised money and kept Leffingwell in the headlines, and once he was able to formally announce without triggering an expensive special election, he officially entered the race. McCracken formally announced shortly thereafter. To win elections in Austin, you have to go in front of a lot of forums; you have to meet with many, many groups; you have to answer a lot of questions publicly; and you get grilled constantly by citizens at these events who know a lot about city policy in Austin. For various reasons McCracken has not come out well in this process compared to Leffingwell. “You put Brewster and Lee up against each other like they were in the environmental forum or neigh-


borhood forum,” observes Siff, and “Brewster comes off as inexperienced. He has the right concepts and good ideas, but is not as straightforward or clear about how he would translate his ideas into policy on the ground. He also hasn’t convinced the neighborhoods and environmentalists that he can work in a team to get something accomplished.” Leffingwell, on the other hand, can, because he has been doing it for the past decade. Leffingwell is also well known as a person who works across the lines of the three Es in Austin. Leffingwell has green credentials but has worked on equity issues as much as or more than green issues, coming from a labor background as well as the Environmental Board. Many people who currently hold elected offices in the city, county, and state have publicly endorsed Leffingwell, which is very unusual—sitting elected officials rarely endorse candidates in city elections. Most of that is due to respect for Leffingwell, someone they see as a person who can get things done in the big city that Austin has become. That three-legged stool of environment, equity, and economy translates into electoral politics in terms of green, liberal, neighborhood, and business groups, and that equation is driving politics. Things have changed so much since the 1990s that Siff looks at this election and notes with some surprise that “the chamber is just not a factor in this race. There are significant individual business leaders who are a factor in every race. They raise millions of dollars for chamber programs. But they are more important than the president of the chamber or the chamber itself.” That is because they can raise lots of money and get downtown business and real estate interests to support particular candidates. In the mayor’s race, they are split. Many of their networks are supporting Leffingwell, many others McCracken. Almost all of them, however, are for Riley, who is seen as the “green candidate” in his race. Why? “Because the business guys are simply not afraid of a smart environmentalist, although they would not be for a green candidate who is perceived to be a fringe type,” says Siff. “They will support an environmentalist who works for practical solutions.” And Riley certainly fits that mold. Born and raised in Austin, a member of the Planning Commission, he started the Downtown Austin Neighborhood Association. Riley walks the walk of modern environmentalism and new urbanism and applies their core ideals to Austin. He lives downtown rather than in the suburbs, rides his bike to work rather than driving, and is a strong advocate of transportation policy that will lessen car traffic and increase mass transit in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. And he gets along very well with the new business ethic that sees the environment as part and parcel of a city whose economy is based on people who come here in part because of its environment. As of this writing Riley is in the only tight race of all the council races, running


against Perla Cavazos, herself a member of the Planning Commission and a leader in the Hispanic community. The tightness reflects the more equal distribution of power in Austin today between environmentalists (almost all of whom endorsed Riley) and other social groups that see the equity component as equally important (Cavazos has notably worked on affordable housing and other equity issues). If there is an edge in this race, it is to Riley, because so many of the business networks are endorsing him. The actual coalitions that will decide the elections are thinking about the candidates in terms of people who can guide a city into the next century, thinking about the relative needs of equity, environment, and economy as the city grows even bigger.17 City Government and the Green City These concerns about growth are very much a part of the political landscape today, and the policies of future city councils will have an effect on them. That is why they are still fought out in Austin’s elections. In addition, though, what happens in the city government itself—the city administration—will have a huge impact on all of them, probably a longer-lasting impact than electoral politics, because environmental concerns have become institutionalized in Austin’s administrative system to a degree unthought of by the conservationists forty years ago. This is not to say that city government now works seamlessly to protect the environment. It does not. In many ways it still works to foster development rather than citizen input on that development. It is set up to give developers and landowners more input and information than citizens. And like any bureaucracy, it proves extremely frustrating to those outside it who are trying to protect neighborhoods and the environment from the harmful effects of development. But there have been substantial changes to that bureaucracy since the 1970s, brought about by the environmental movement. And some of the people of that movement went to work in the city agencies that are now responsible for making some of the biggest changes. So I want to introduce you to some of those people working in the city administration today, people who are having a huge impact on how Austin is being built as a more environmentally friendly city now. You have already met some of them in previous chapters. Roger Duncan, who headed up the anti-nuke campaigns of the 1970s and became a city council member in the early 1980s because of it. His friend Mary Ann Neely, who ran those campaigns and served on the SOS Coalition. Daryl Slusher, journalist, a leader of the effort to keep Town Lake the park it is now, city council


member in the late 1990s and early 2000s. There are some new ones to meet now. One is Toby Futrell, a woman who “just drifted into city government,” as she puts it. Futrell eventually became a city manager with a passion, vision, and commitment to Austin as a community that led her to create new ways of looking at city government and city bureaucracy, but she herself is quick to explain that she is just one of a generation of city officials with the same goals. Then there are Kevin Anderson, who heads the Center for Environmental Research at Hornsby Bend, and his wife, Elizabeth Welsh, who runs the Austin Youth River Watch program. All are indicative of the kinds of people who have been working to create an Environmental City: the first four for decades, Anderson a more recent arrival, and Welsh a native who was raised on that work. They have all found a professional focus doing work that helps create a greener city. All are examples of the kinds of people who see Austin as a place defined by environmental protection, and the work they do recreates that place as an Environmental City. What a difference a few decades, and a strong social movement, can make. I began this book talking about early conservationists who felt like they were banging their heads against the walls of the city bureaucracy in order to get city staff to think about protecting the environment as they went about their work. Lowell Lebermann, Les Gage, and Stuart Henry all saw their main task as changing the city structure while they waited, in Lebermann’s words, for an environmental constituency to develop. Well, it paid off, handsomely, and it paid off mainly because of the constituency that did develop in the form of a movement. The change in the city bureaucracy the early conservationists pushed through, in tandem with the massive pressure from the political actions of the environmental movement, has created a city government and city officialdom that may be different from any other city in the United States. What they are doing exceeds even the early conservationists’ hopes. No one illustrates that change more than Futrell, Austin’s city manager from 2002 to 2008. Comparing Dan Davidson and Toby Futrell is like comparing the pipe and street layers of the 1950s to the innovative people who inhabit the top layers of Austin’s government agencies today. Not that Davidson was a bad manager; in fact, Futrell speaks highly of him as a warm and competent person (and a “city manager’s city manager,” as she calls him). But he came out of the planning departments of the postwar era, when city officials learned that their job was laying pipe and building streets. Paying attention to the environment was simply not on the agenda at that time. The education and training of Davidson’s generation was steeped in what one author calls the technical aspects of “building the city practical.”18 Futrell ended up being a city manager committed to building the city possible. And that happened because she is an example of the kind of people that Austin created,


people drawn to the city because of its environment and culture, shaped by the battles to protect those things, and moving into the upper layers of city agencies at that crucial time when the Green Machine and the Watson council were taking control of city politics. Futrell herself is an example of many of the cross-currents in Austin: of people who fell in love with the place and did not want to leave, of the arguments between environmentalists and other quality-of-life advocates, of the way the administrative bureaucracy has been influenced and changed by the movements in Austin, of people’s demands for a better kind of city. The way people think of her is also part of those cross-currents. Her tenure as manager is illustrative of the controversies that surround city government and politics. When she began as city manager, many people were excited that a longtime Austinite was finally going to be manager; most city managers go from city to city, stay a few years, and move on to make more money in a bigger city. Futrell intended to stay. The first few years went fairly smoothly. But as she put in place some of her ideas over time, and made decisions about growth and environmental policy, people began to argue about those decisions. This is Austin, and groups in Austin fight about lots of stuff, especially stuff that happens at the highest levels of government, because they are concerned about their city. Futrell, and the job she inhabited, was part of that. She has thought long and hard about the role of city government and city agencies in Austin, much of it from that personal experience, and has much to say that illustrates why Austin is the Environmental City of today. I quote her at length because her observations are so trenchant and so illustrative of the kind of people who are building the Environmental City. Futrell came to Austin at the tender age of seventeen, in 1970, to attend the University of Texas. Like so many others attending the university then (and now), being young and partying and living life took precedence over studying, and she ended up dropping out. I was having too much fun, in a wonderful city with all this wild stuff going on. I dropped out and waited tables to live here and have fun. The main types of work back then were education or government, and like many people who wanted to live in Austin, I could get a job with the city. So I entered into an entry-level job for the city.

Eventually she rose—or, as she emphasizes, drifted—through the ranks and was appointed city manager by the remaining Green Council right after Watson left (Gus Garcia had become mayor). As she drifted upward over the past decades, Futrell worked with other


people in city government who had ideas of ways the city bureaucracy could be restructured to facilitate environmental protection. The issue was important to them because, like Futrell, so many of them were part of the larger citizenry that thought of the environment as one of the defining things that made Austin such a special place. Futrell and her co-workers were not leaders or organizers of that movement. They were part of the masses of people whose energy and ideas about Austin fueled that movement. We were all against growth in the early days. I chained myself to a tree to try to stop Barton Creek Mall! But we realized at some point that [a] no-growth [approach] wasn’t going to happen in Austin—[Mayor Will] Wynn said that for 100 years, every twenty years in Austin we have doubled in size. So we thought, if you want to preserve what brought us all to this community, you have to find a way to manage growth, to preserve what we love about this community.

One way to do that was by changing the way the city administration worked. During the battles between “environmentalists and developers” in the 1980s and early 1990s, Futrell and others started Austin’s first dedicated environmental department—the Environmental and Conservation Services Department (ECSD). The premise was, if we want to instill the value of the environment into every decision we made abut the city, we had to have a separate dedicated department to push the agenda. [Eventually] we had pushed the whole idea down the line into the individual departments, and everyone (all the other departments) began to take the environment into account. It was so integrated into everything we did that we didn’t need a dedicated Environmental Department anymore because we expected every employee to get it, and they did.

The ECSD helped seed the bureaucracy with policies that are environmentally friendly, because of the kind of people who work in city government in Austin, Texas. Many of those people are Austinites first, workers second. They think about their work as Austin officials in terms of how their work can make Austin better, how it can preserve what they like most about Austin. A newer generation of planners and officials has grown up since the national environmental movement influenced education and ideas about humans and their environment. They think about the environment because they, unlike Davidson’s generation, were exposed to new ideas and ways to protect that environment. But many of the main players in Austin’s city government today


are actually the old players, people like Futrell and Duncan and Slusher who came to Austin in the early 1970s as young people, fell in love with the place, and never left. As Futrell explains: Austin as a place, for many years, you either worked in government or the university. We all wanted jobs but didn’t want to leave, so many of us just drifted into government. They were the only jobs available. But that meant we changed the face of government. All these people who could have made a fortune somewhere else, or sometimes the work crews paving your street, come up with different ways of doing things in more environmentally friendly ways. The difference between Austin and San Antonio is that San Antonio just paved massive concrete culverts over their creeks. Our people didn’t do that—we figured out different ways to do things, to protect our creeks.

Why? Why did that happen in Austin and not San Antonio or Houston? As far as Futrell is concerned, it is because of the kind of place Austin represents, the kind of people that place attracted, and the kind of people who want to preserve the special feel of the place. I don’t think the community would have accepted anything different. The community pushed on the city organization every day—every meeting is filled with citizens pushing them to do it right. On every issue. The community wouldn’t accept anything different. That’s what the [underlying] movement did; it created people that know how to push and wouldn’t accept anything less from its own city government. People keep pushing that bar higher. It’s a righteous anger by people, a good thing, not a bad thing. It’s part of what makes the system work better here. And that is what the movement did. It’s like the [1991] PUD hearing—it wasn’t just the community that was there; the staff stayed after hours rooting for victory too! That chamber was half staff people. I stayed there all night, and many of my coworkers did too. We were all rooting for the outcome to be right, and it was.

Futrell and her contemporaries had some major impacts on the city bureaucracy, because they were some of the many Austinites committed to environmental protection as a way of preserving a particular kind of community, a particular kind of place. But Futrell’s tenure was not without controversy. Many people remained impressed with what she did until she retired. But her vision of a changed bureaucracy, and the way she made those changes, angered some. Toward the end of her tenure, many of the staff were unhappy


at what they saw as her ham-fisted way of getting things done; some city council members wondered what they were not hearing from her office; and many activists in town got mad at some of her decisions. She seemed to get crosswise with the neighborhood activists especially. She really got pilloried during the controversy over the new Walmart in North Austin; many believed she arranged things so that Walmart was allowed to build there (in reality, she recused herself from the process because her husband, a refrigeration technician, was a Walmart employee). The original proposal for the ordinance would have covered anything built at about 50,000 square feet. Futrell knew that would have covered many retailers and grocery stores as well and wanted the trigger higher, so that it was only about the Walmarts and not the grocery stores (it was set higher when the ordinance was finally passed). That looked suspicious to some, who thought she was trying to slow down the process or even allow more development and redevelopment of the kind. The city manager has to make a lot of decisions, and the controversies about her decisions arise in Austin because of the “righteous anger” she describes, of people wanting to move that bar higher. Many people felt she moved too fast and didn’t include enough input from community groups. But those controversies themselves illustrate how the movement affects city government and decision making in Austin. Futrell had such an impact on Austin because Austin created her and the policies she put in place. At the same time, the arguments about her decisions and way of operating are very much part of the energy that drives that deeper movement for place in Austin, the energy of people trying to make it better, and arguing about what that means and the best ways to do that. Another one of those people who has had an amazing impact not only on Austin, but on the United States, is Roger Duncan. Duncan also came to Austin as a UT student, and he stayed in town as part of the liberal political movements of the 1970s. He served as council aide to Margret Hofmann on the liberal Friedman council in that decade. Toward the end of that decade, he became a leader of the neighborhood movement and led opposition to Austin’s participation in the STNP—“the Nuke.” As a city council member (1981–1985), he suggested the idea of building a “virtual power plant,” installing energy conservation measures that would save the same amount of energy a coal plant produces. In 1992 he started the first Green Building Program in the country, a rating system that incorporates energy efficiency, water conservation, recycling, and building materials to see how much energy a building is saving. That model is the basis of the Green Building system and ranking scale used nationwide today. In 1998 Duncan moved to the electric utility, where he started the Green


Choice Program. Citizens and businesses can sign up to be part of this program, and based on the number of participants in the program, Austin buys energy from renewable sources (mostly wind and solar) to help power their homes. As more customers subscribe to GreenChoice, the proportion of green power in that mix grows larger and larger, so less electricity is needed from natural gas or coal-fired power plants overall. As more people contract for green energy, more can be purchased, and the cost goes down. It pays to be green in Austin, in more ways than one. The latest thing Duncan has done is to help start a national plug-in hybrid campaign, the Plug-In Partners National Campaign, which has been successful in creating a national market for plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs). The program began in Austin in 2005 and went national in 2006. The goal of the campaign is to get cities to tell automakers that their city governments and citizens will buy PHEVs if manufacturers produce them. When Duncan was putting together this national campaign, he approached it as an advocacy issue, and it was run just like a political campaign. He began in Austin at the local level and hired Mary Ann Neely as his local campaign manager. Neely is another longtime Austinite, active in the environmental movement on both political and policy sides, and a close friend of Duncan’s. Neely knows how to do campaigns because she has worked on several in Austin over the past thirty years (she ran Duncan’s campaigns for city council). So when Duncan and Neely thought about ways to get the automobile manufacturers to build PHEVs, they approached it like other campaigns they had done in Austin, but took it to a national level. “It’s a traditional campaign plan,” explains Neely. “You had a coalition supporting the idea, got signatures from citizens starting with citizens’ signatures here in Austin, and then you worked on getting other cities to sign up to be on board.” Each city develops its own way of getting citizen petitions, but they needed a model, a city to show it could be done. So Duncan and Neely started the campaign in Austin. Under Neely’s management of the campaign, “Austin paved the way and showed [other cities] how to do it. The campaign succeeded, and the manufacturers came to see that PHEVs were a good idea.” The Green Building, GreenChoice, and PHEV campaigns are based on the incentive idea, and Duncan is a pro at this. These types of programs are all part of the concept that local governments can create markets for alternative energy. Cities and states are big entities, and if they decide to buy alternative energy or transportation, manufacturers will be able to sell wind, solar energy, and PHEVs. As manufacturers of renewable energy and power sell more of their goods to cities and governments, the cost for each


goes down. As the cost goes down, individual consumers can get renewable power or PHEVs more cheaply. Cities can thus be on the leading edge of clean energy, building, and transportation, reducing global warming through market mechanisms. Duncan and Neely are examples of the kinds of people that Austin fosters, and the kinds of ideas created in building an Environmental City. Austin is a city full of people influenced by the national environmental movement because the environment of Austin has always been seen by many as absolutely central to the kind of place it is. Preserving water and air is part of preserving Austin. In the process, Austin’s people are having a huge effect on the national and international environmental movement, showing how cities can be at the forefront of meeting global environmental problems. People like recent mayor Will Wynn, who helped usher in Austin’s Climate Protection Plan. You can see it online,19 but the essence of the plan is a set of goals based on reducing the use of energy that produces greenhouse gases. It calls for powering all city facilities with green power by 2012, making the city’s transportation fleet carbon neutral by 2020, directing the utilities to use conservation measures and the purchase of green power to reduce the amount of coal power purchased, and developing programs that will allow citizens to figure out ways they can go carbon neutral. Duncan and Austin Energy pioneered most of these approaches over the past two decades, so the plan is essentially a set of things Austin has already done or has contemplated doing, encoded in overall city policy and moved to a larger scale. Wynn speaks to cities and groups all over the country about the plan, which puts Austin on the leading edge of the national green cities movement. Daryl Slusher is another perfect example of the kind of person who takes those larger national themes and works tirelessly for them in Austin because he loves the place and thinks they are the right thing to do for the city. He is a contemporary of Futrell. Both fell in love with Austin because of its culture: the music, the people, the times, and the environment. They are part of the crowd that used to hang out at the Armadillo World Headquarters, one of the main venues where music, culture, and liberal politics blended together in the 1970s. Both Futrell and Slusher point out that the culture and environment went together back then, as now, and you could not really separate them. The environment of the place helped give it part of its cultural feel. Slusher never defined himself as an “environmentalist” per se, but rather has worked for what he considers the betterment of the city itself for almost thirty years. Like Duncan, Slusher is one of those people Futrell thinks are created by the place as much as they create the place. Slusher has such a love for Austin, and a dedication to policy that will protect Austin’s environment,


that when Futrell thought about ways to get the water utility to act like the electric utility under Duncan, she immediately thought of Slusher. One of the things Futrell and others like her did with the city government they drifted into was to push policies into place that would create more environmentally friendly staff, asking, “How do you change city policy and staff attitudes so that city government contributes to the protection of the environment in the midst of growth?” Although the ECSD had succeeded in seeding the bureaucracy with the core values Futrell talks about, one of the few exceptions was the water utility. “[That utility] was leaderless, and especially wastewater,” she said. “It made decisions that weren’t in line with our values—totally opposite of the energy utility [with Duncan’s programs]. So I reverted back to the older model in order to jump-start that decision-making process.” She established an Office of Environmental Affairs and Conservation in the water utility. The person she wanted to head it was Slusher. Slusher took the job because it was a natural step for another person who sees environmental protection as part of the sense of place rather than just a cause in and of itself. “To me the greatest things about Austin are the people and the natural surroundings—plus the music, but I think the music springs from the first two.” Much like Futrell and so many others, Slusher thinks of his decades-long involvement with environmental issues as one of the things that helps preserve a kind of place that he fell in love with. “The environment was a huge part of why I got involved, but I was always fighting for a broader cause that included the environment, economic opportunity for everyone, as well as equal political opportunity like that exemplified by the multiracial coalition that brought the first minorities to political office.” So now Slusher is doing what Futrell hoped he would do: instilling the values of environmental conservation into everything the utility does. Slusher sees that as his main role in this position; he is organizing lots of programs within the utility to reduce energy use, to make the water utility part of the larger goals of running a city in ways that can address larger-scale environmental issues like global warming. Part of doing that is pushing that whole idea down the ladder, trying to instill those values Futrell talks about, let the wastewater workers do what others in the city administration have done— think up new ways to do things that are more environmentally friendly. Not just at the top, but all down the line. The idea has always been to make policy that encourages and allows that host of city workers to come up with ways to do things in their day-to-day work that are more environmentally friendly. “The whole point of that position is to get that utility to think about the environment, and it is working,” Futrell believes. “For example, there is a


guy on one of the work crews who was working on installing pipe, and came up with an idea to do that in a less harmful way. He thought it up based on his own experience putting in that pipe. So now if everything works and Daryl stays on track, what is happening at energy is what will be happening at water.” Austin’s values, exemplified by Duncan, Futrell, Slusher, and that host of other city workers, will continue to be institutionalized in its own city government. The last people I want you to meet are a couple of those hosts of other workers in city government that Futrell talks about, Kevin Anderson and his wife, Elizabeth Welsh. Anderson directs the Center for Environmental Research at Hornsby Bend, and Welsh is the program coordinator for the Austin Youth River Watch. These two are so typical of the kinds of people working on environmental issues in Austin today, and Hornsby Bend is such a unique outcome of Austin, that the three together serve as a great example of the ways people, policy, and the environment go together in Austin. Hornsby Bend is an amazing example of those values Futrell talks about that illustrate so much about Austin’s commitment to the environment. In the 1980s the city began to recycle all its sewage at the plant. All of the human waste—everything that goes down the toilets in Austin—goes to the Hornsby Bend plant. There it is treated biologically to produce a biosolid sludge. That treatment process releases methane, which is burned for power at the facility. The sludge is then mixed with yard waste. The city collects yard waste from homes once a week—homeowners can put out tree trimmings, grass cuttings, and any other vegetable material that comes from their yards on the curb. All of that grass and those cuttings are taken to Hornsby Bend and chopped up into mulch. The treated sludge and the mulch are then mixed together in huge compost piles on the site. The temperature inside the piles reaches 170 degrees Fahrenheit, killing any remaining pathogens and seeds. The mixtures are very precise, and the piles are turned on a strict schedule; all of this is conducted and monitored in a very scientific fashion. After a few months the piles are ready to use as compost. The utility uses the biosolids to fertilize farms on the site. The compost is sold as Dillo Dirt, a compost you can buy at any garden center in Austin. The water waste that comes out of the process is used to irrigate the farm fields on the site. It is all safe to use because all the harmful microbes have been killed off biologically. No chemicals need be used; nature does it all for the city. That saves the city money because none of that material need be put in a landfill or incinerated, as many cities do. The sale of Dillo Dirt makes money to help run the site. The city estimates that it saves over $600,000 a year recycling its human and yard waste instead of putting it in a landfill. The composting program at Hornsby was the first such


site in Texas when it began in 1987 (a few other cities do similar things today), and it has won two major awards from the EPA. To visit the site and see it all in operation is something else.20 I take students there every year, and we never fail to come back impressed that a city decided to spend the time figuring out how to recycle and use its waste rather than spend taxpayer dollars burning or burying it. The Hornsby Bend Water Treatment Facility illustrates one of the things that makes Austin the Environmental City. It is a testament to the environmental thinking and doing that illustrates the landscape and discourse of Austin—that sense that people can put the natural and the urban together to create a way of living in which cities work with natural processes rather than against them. There are three lagoons, or ponds, on the site, all of which together create an amazing bird habitat. The site provides a habitat for a huge range of local birds, home to over 360 species, and also serves as a stopover point for many migratory birds. Birders have been coming to the ponds since 1959 to watch, and in 1996 there was a controversy between the local Audubon Society and the Austin water utility because the utility was planning to close down the lagoon with the best shorebird habitat. Kevin Anderson was a graduate student at the time the controversy over the pond erupted, and he was put on the stakeholder committee representing people from the University of Texas who enjoyed Hornsby. “The staff saw it as a water treatment plant. The bird people saw it as bird habitat. And I ended up being the monkey in the middle. So Elizabeth and I devised a project to get them working together—it was to start building the trails . . . and that gave a focus to that group.”21 The stakeholder committee “helped the utility to think more holistically,” and the people on the committee kept working on ideas for the plant. They rechristened the stakeholder committee the Hornsby Bend Partnership, and a major part of the partnership was building relationships with other community organizations that could conduct their environmental programs at or based out of Hornsby. In 1999 Maureen McReynolds, then the head of the Environmental Department, asked Anderson if he would be interested in using the Center for Environmental Research at Hornsby to run those various programs. “So I redefined the mission of the CER with Maureen to be urban ecology and sustainability. That way I can work with any city agency or university or nonprofit organizations.” When he redefined that mission, Anderson created a city program whose purpose is to get community groups and organizations to practice sustainability programs at Hornsby Bend. Because of Anderson’s ideas, Hornsby has become more than just a recycling center for Austin’s wastewater and lawn clippings. It is a living laboratory for ways that cities


can use unique programs—mostly thought up by Austin’s own citizens— to organize city life in ways that fit more harmoniously with their natural environment. Anderson is using Hornsby to work on the Austin Climate Protection Plan as well. “Now with the Climate Protection Plan we are looking at carbon sequestration. Lots of carbon comes in here—and our job is to recycle it—to take that carbon and put it back in earth systems. The best place we can sequester carbon is in the soil, which is what Hornsby Bend does—we sequester carbon through composting.” The concept of carbon sequestration is new on the national scene as people talk about ways to reduce carbon in the atmosphere, and thus global warming. But it is as old as plants to the planet. Composting is nature’s way of putting carbon back into the earth, but few people think about it that way. People like Anderson, working at places like Hornsby Bend, are the ones who will be calling attention to these kinds of basic facts as Americans grapple for solutions to global warming. It turns out that cities can reduce carbon in the air by putting it back in the ground the old-fashioned way: by composting all the waste from the entire city. Anderson’s work at Hornsby is trying to find ways to get people thinking of humans and their cities as part of the larger ecosystems we inhabit, and finding specific ways to do that. Learning how we live in ecosystems means we have to understand how our urban lives are affecting the natural ecosystems in which we live. One of the organizations that helps do that is the Austin Youth River Watch program, housed at Hornsby Bend and run by Anderson’s wife, Elizabeth Welsh. Welsh grew up in Austin. She attended Austin High School, which sits on the lake, and joined the Youth River Watch in her junior year. The Youth River Watch was part of a larger program called the Austin River Watch, which had begun in the 1970s as a group of people called Clean Clear Colorado. Clean Clear Colorado people would go out on their own and monitor the water conditions, trash, etc., along the river. Eventually they teamed up with the LCRA, which formed the Colorado River Watch Network. The CRWN trained adult volunteers to take samples from the river to analyze for pollutants. Jack Goodman, the executive director of the River Watch Foundation, thought it would be a good idea to have a version of that for schoolchildren. He talked with various council members and staff about doing so and found most of them amenable (the staff was more excited about it than the council members, he says), although a couple of them didn’t like the idea. One of those, Louise Epstein (the E in RULE), “called it funding the training of eco-terrorists or something like that,” remembers Jackie Goodman.22 But five of the council members voted for it, and in 1992 the city started


the Austin Youth River Watch, and continues to fund the program today (the money actually comes from the water utility and watershed protection budgets). The program has historically worked with at-risk students from east side schools, because it was always seen as a way to promote retention and graduation rates among the students. The participants are embedded in a multilayer structure of adults, college students, and high school students. University of Texas faculty members oversee the work of the college students, who are interning in various capacities at the CER. The college interns train the high school students how to monitor, sample, and report on pollution in the river. The older high school students train the newer students. The high school students go out on the river (and along some area creeks) several times a month to do the actual sampling. They learn through practical experience the ways humans impact their environment, and the peer interaction helps keep them in school and boosts graduation rates. “The evaluators of the program say it does work, because the peer pressure helps the kids graduate,” reports Welsh. The program has been so successful that it is expanding into North Austin as part of some larger at-risk programs run in schools there. Welsh ended up directing the program in much the same way as Futrell ended up being city manager—she just kind of drifted into it. She became an intern for the program in college, then served on the board for three years. When the former director left to run the River Watch program at the LCRA, Jack Goodman called her up and told her the board wanted her to run the program. Welsh sees the AYRW program as part of a larger goal of building a sustainable city by educating people about the ways humans, their city, and their environment go together—not only educating them, but also training them to measure the effects of urbanization on our environment. She thinks the act of measuring is the biggest educational tool. “If we do find pollution, we can call the city and within fifteen minutes the city scientists are out there, looking at what these kids have found. And the kids see that if you find a problem, something is getting done in fifteen minutes! Also, these kids are learning the basic science that most people in our society never understand— how their actions influence the river.” That sense of accomplishment, and being embedded in a network of others doing similar work, is what pulls the graduation rates up. Anderson and Welsh also try to remind people in the environmental movement that there is an eastern Travis County as well as a western one. Both are very frustrated that the focus of the movement is on the Hill Country and does not include the Blackland Prairie. Anderson has to explain to almost everyone he meets that, yes, there is an aquifer on the east side too—several


of them, actually, and they are part of a large ecosystem of soils and creeks and the river. When TPL was doing the Travis County Green Footprint Project, no one on it even knew there was such a thing, and few if any people were even thinking about the east side. But Anderson and the Bastrop River Corridor Project have been mapping the river, and they know a lot about it now. Anderson went to the meetings of the footprint project, where the data they had used to do the mapping was really data of western Travis County. So the way the map looked, there was nothing in the east worth conserving. So I’m sitting there saying, “This is crazy, there’s nothing along the river or on the east.” They didn’t even have a soil set of data. When they included our data areas on the east side, it got mapped too. So in the final meeting for that greenprint, it was all the SOS folks asking, why is mapping all on the east side? “This means the city will never protect the aquifer again,” [the SOS people worried]. And I said, “Well, there is an aquifer on the east side too,” and there was just stone-cold silence until some voice said, “No, there isn’t.” So I had to explain about the geography, that yes, there is, and no one knew about it.

In fact, there is a decided lack of action for the east Travis County environment on the part of Austin’s environmental movement and contemporary environmental groups. This is understandable to an extent; the environmental movement in Austin emerged on the west side of Travis County because that is where the Hill Country, lakes, Edwards Aquifer, and Barton Springs are. More importantly, it is where the city was growing in the 1970s and 1980s, so these features became the focus of attention. Austin is only now growing east, so urban growth issues have only recently begun to affect that area. Until the 1980s, eastern Travis County was seen as farmland, not an area for suburban development (something the Austin Tomorrow Plan stated by classifying the area as the lowest priority for growth). That mindset remains in most environmentalists and old-time Austinites today; the only reason I think about it much is that I take my students to Hornsby every semester and see the suburbanization gobbling up what was farmland. But Austin is growing east now, and growing east faster than west. A new highway, SH 130, is being built there, and it will do what all new highways do near a big city: cause suburbs to spring up. The environmental problems that sprawl will cause there are every bit as bad as the ones it causes in the Hill Country, especially the pollution of the Colorado River below Austin. There is no Barton Springs to save there, but there is the river itself, several large creeks that feed the river, and something just as fragile as Barton


Springs, the Blackland Prairie. If the environmental movement in Austin is to continue shaping the landscape of Austin through greenbelts, preserves, and open space, it will have to begin to look east, at an ecosystem every bit as big as the Barton Springs segment of the Edwards Aquifer. If environmentalists begin to look east, begin to think about ways to landscape what will be the largest part of Austin in thirty years, in the same way they landscaped the core city and are landscaping the western lands, they will create a city unlike any other. The environmental meaning of Austin was created as people and groups landscaped their city in the midst of massive urban growth, as they took the natural landforms they lived in and built them into the urban by saving them as greenbelts and preserves. Over the next ten years, urbanization and suburbanization are going to fill up eastern Travis County faster than anyone realizes. If the people of this movement can do with the eastern Travis County creeks and river and the Blackland Prairie what they did with their creeks and hills and river in the core, they will recreate the environmental meaning in the minds of people who will live there in the next century. More importantly, they will recreate the Environmental City. The people who live there will be able to physically experience the Environmental City in the same ways we experience it today in the core and the west. They will be able to walk in the creeks, see the prairie, inhale its sights and smells, walk along its river, boat on it, swim in it. Neighborhood groups and other environmental groups will emerge to advocate for their creeks and river. The mix of physical space and social action to create more of that space will give new Austinites a sense that they live in a place, a distinctive city defined by the way it mixes the urban and the natural. They will be able to participate in the environmental meaning of Austin as we do today. Doing something to preserve as much of the prairie as possible will recreate the Environmental City in another way as well: It can be part of that larger environmental meaning of Austin, the one that illustrates to other cities how an urban area can work with the local ecosystem to address larger-scale environmental problems—in this case, global warming. While no one swims in the prairie as they do in Barton Springs, they can swim in the Colorado River below the Austin of today, and the prairie has a much greater significance for global warming and other local problems. The two are related to the aquifers of the area, as Welsh explains in the context of her work with the river. The prairie and the river and the aquifers are part of a much larger ecosystem that can help sequester carbon as one tool in the effort to reduce global warming: Now we are growing east, and the eastern part is in the DDZ, which is all Blackland Prairie, the most endangered ecosystem in North America. It’s as-


tounding to me that in a city that’s so worried about the environment, I hear almost nothing about the prairie. Restoring the prairie—the most endangered ecosystem in North America—would be a great carbon-sequestration tool—keeping and rebuilding the soils would trap so much carbon. There are huge aquifers that feed the Colorado, and the land around it [including the prairie] acts as a sponge—the way the soil works retains water and allows it to seep into the river. But development in East Austin is destroying soil through runoff.

Thinking east is pretty new to most environmentalists in Austin. Many of them—of us—have been here for over twenty years, others much longer, and have grown used to thinking about “the environment” in terms of Barton Springs and the Edwards Aquifer, because that is what the fight has mostly been about so far. But it should not be too hard a jump from west to east, from the upper Colorado and the Edwards Aquifer to the lower Colorado and the Blackland Prairie. It simply requires an expansion in thinking about “the environment,” and how protecting “the environment” defines people as Austinites, how it defines the city as a place. The river is the same above and below the dam, after all. Should we not create a river there as wonderful as the one we have here, a river people can swim and boat in? Preserving land in eastern Travis County would be even easier if done soon; it is cheaper right now, not yet as urbanized. There is some brief time in the next few years to buy it or get easements on it before it gets urbanized and ruined, like Shoal and Waller creeks are today. We are already beginning to rehabilitate and restore WQPL lands in the west to clean and filter runoff water that enters the Edwards Aquifer. Preserving land to the east now means less cleanup later, and cheaper land means more protected for the money. Protecting the Blackland Prairie would be a great tool to show people how humans and nature interact through the carbon cycle in the same way we protect the Edwards Aquifer to show how humans and nature interact in their water cycles. Preserving parts of the prairie and expanding the greenbelts into what will be Austin for the next generation would expand the environmental meaning to those who will live there after we have gone, recreating the Environmental City. It will recreate that sense of place that has driven the environmental movement in our time, because it will provide a physical way to experience a kind of city with nature built into it instead of paved under it. And it will prove that the environmental meaning is not reserved only for the core city and the west. If it does not happen, the future of that part of Austin will be defined by a kind of placeless suburban space, the suburban sprawl presently found north and south of the city today. Anyone wishing to experience the


sense of Austin that drives the current environmental movement will have to drive their cars—emitting carbon—half an hour across town to get to the “nature” we have saved on the west side. Kevin Anderson and Elizabeth Welsh are two sides of the same coin, a coin minted in the Environmental City. Like so many of the people described in this book, Anderson came from out of town with a larger social knowledge base about ecosystems. Like Duncan, his work in Austin is rooted in finding ways to address national and world environmental issues, and like Duncan he is applying that work to a specific city. The work both are doing on those larger national issues—creating more environmentally friendly ways to run a city—is one of the things that makes Austin a place defined by its environmental activity. On the other side of the coin, Welsh was created by Austin. She grew up in a city in which environmental protection was so normal that her entire life since tenth grade has been shaped by programs created to teach people about the environment. Her work as an adult continues to create people who know about the ways the urban and the environment go together. Anderson and Welsh are both part of the social landscape of Austin, part of the discourse of a place created as people talk to their environment and their environment talks to them. They are the next generation of people who will continue that discourse, and if their work in eastern Travis County leads to greater environmental advocacy for that ecosystem, they will be a big part of the next generation landscaping the Environmental City.

Chapter 7

The Doing of It Continuing the Environmental Meaning

I began this book about Austin’s environmental and social history by talking about a set of men who promoted an idea of Austin as a great cultural center, a great place. As I look around Austin and at its people today, I wonder what Alexander Wooldridge would think about this city he wanted so much to build. What would the other urban entrepreneurs think—those men who built parks and schools and dams, just to create a shining city, a great cultural place? So many of their dreams for their city were about a special place that represented something to them, and so much of the political and social movement that is called the “environmental movement” in Austin is about a special place that represents something to its people today, that I can’t help thinking they would have a lot to talk about. The specific meanings of their ideal city were somewhat different for the older and newer people: The urban entrepreneurs who built Austin focused on the civilized aspects of place because their notion of Austin as a special place was a representation of their ideals of civilization and advancement— schools, parks, business, culture. The people of the environmental movement, and the underlying movement for place described in this book, also based their sense of place on a representation of what they thought best in their culture and themselves. But the role of the environment is different. Like the city builders of old, the people of the movement for modern Austin talk about the parks and schools and culture (the music especially, as well as the more liberal political attitudes) as parts of the meaning of Austin. But although the movement to preserve and build a particular kind of place that emerged in the 1970s was influenced by all of those, it was the environment itself that became the central symbolic focus of the place. That could happen only because the earlier builders of Austin succeeded,

The Doing of It 245

and another generation continued building a place by trying to save all the good things about that place as it grew into a modern city. Once the dams had been built, the river tamed, the roads put in, the neighborhoods established, and the university culture and music scene emerged, the environment could become integral to the sense of place. “Nature” had to be tamed to create the place foreseen by the early promoters of Austin, because their notions of a great place were based on their cultural ideas of civilization, which meant a vibrant economy and culture. Those required freedom from the vagaries of nature. When the river is wiping out homes and businesses every couple of decades, and droughts are killing the crops in alternate decades, a city represents a place that transcends the problems caused by nature. Culture and nature are seen as opposing forces. Nature creates barriers to advancement, to civilization. But once that nature has been controlled enough to enjoy it, to allow a vibrant economy, a city can become a place defined by how well its people integrate their culture and their environment. “Nature” can be built into the city as one of the defining aspects of the place. It hasn’t happened often in the United States, but it happened in Austin. How people put nature and culture together—how they put their ideals of a great place into physical forms—became the discourse of Austin. Those representations in our heads, those meanings of Austin, set us on our courses of action. The meanings of Austin in the heads of its early builders were somewhat different from the meanings in the heads of its people today because they lived in different times. But the motivation for building a physical place that represents those meanings was most likely the same. The people who wanted to make a place, rather than just urban space, wanted to take their cultural ideals and values and build a city that represented them. The kind of city—of place—envisioned by the early urban entrepreneurs of Austin came about by taming the river, and it allowed another set of people called “environmentalists” to shape that city according to their ideals. In both times there were people who wanted to create a place that represented their ideals, and in both times they were the ones who went and did it. Today that movement is shaping ideas about how to build a bigger Austin in better ways. Austin is growing today in a new time, a time of global environmental problems and global warming, a time when humans are learning that saving their own global ecosystem will require new ways of living in their environments. The understandings of this new time have bred a new cultural ideal, the ideal of building a sustainable culture. Building a sustainable culture requires humans to build sustainable cities, and the policies and programs of the Environmental City are based on that understanding. Building the En-


vironmental City is part of that new cultural ideal, and the sense that Austin can be a place defined by its attempt to build a sustainable city is driving most of the social and physical action today. As they drive that action, the people in Austin keep recreating their Environmental City and its meaning. The SOS Alliance, Liveable City, Save Barton Creek, HCC, and other non-profits that work to preserve land; the individuals working hard to expand the landscape of the environmental meaning by creating preserves and open spaces in the Hill Country and Barton Springs watershed; the city agencies and their staff that work so hard to come up with ways a city government can create environmentally friendly policies; and the ordinary citizens who keep demanding that the bar be raised higher continue to recreate the environmental meaning of Austin every day. Craig Smith, past president of the SBCA, talks about the entire movement itself, composed of past, present, and future action, as the thing that defines Austin. As he puts it: I think that if we could do it [preserve the environment around Austin], the doing of it would define Austin. You know the [1992] SOS election in a way defined Austin. The fact that we did turn out those people that voted that way stamped us a certain kind of a city. I’m proud of that. So experiences mold character, and the SOS experience helped mold Austin. And if . . . here in the tail end of the twentieth century, the people who lived in Austin decided to invest a lot of money in buying up this undeveloped land near to town that was going to be wiped out if they didn’t do something, and bought it to save for the next century, the next 1,000 [years], that the doing of that would define what kind of place we are. I still think we could.

Smith’s belief in “the doing of it” encapsulates the history of this movement, and the main point of this book. The doing of it is the social part of Austin’s environmental meaning. The physical features of the area set the stage, and structure the kinds of ideas about a city that might emerge. The social landscape is created as people think about their city, talk about their city, do things to create what they imagine their city to be, and do things that will build a landscape that represents that image they have of their city. The physical landscapes they build—or, in Austin’s case, preserve in the form of open space—give other people ideas of what the city could be, and some of those people keep on doing it. It is a process that builds over time. The doing of it is both social and physical. Thousands of people in Austin have been “doing” the environment by fighting over it, creating policy over it, mobilizing political will for it, and preserving it in parks, greenbelts, and preserves for forty

The Doing of It 247

years. The doing of it is part of the discourse of place, because doing things to make Austin look like a city with the natural built into it, doing things to preserve the water quality of river, creeks, and springs, communicates a relationship between the natural, built, and social components of Austin’s landscape. The people of this movement have been building the natural into the urban, and that process, that doing of it, has created the environmental meaning of Austin. As the discourse of Austin moves away from the “environmentalists vs. developers” frame, and into a “livable city” frame, the physical and social landscapes they are creating—the doing of it—will continue to create the discourse of Austin’s environmental meaning into the future. Buying the land, creating the preserves, building a livable core city, creating great parks, staffing a city government with people creating more sustainable ways to run a city—all of these actions are both cause and effect of the environmental meaning of Austin. The desire to do these things was caused by an idea of Austin as a place defined by its quality of life rather than as a center of profit taking. The doing of these things through city politics and policy not only strengthens that sense of place, but recreates it in physical and social form. The environmental movement of Austin and the environmental meaning created each other. Together they have created—and are still creating—the Environmental City.


Methodological Appendix

This book has been in the writing for over fifteen years. Over the space of that time, I have interviewed nearly one hundred activists, council members, bureaucrats, community leaders, and businesspeople who were involved in the major issues described in the book. The quotes in the book are all from personal interviews I conducted with the individuals, unless otherwise stated in an endnote. The way I decided whom to interview began with my own participation in the SOS movement of the time. I began to interview people from the SOS Coalition after the 1992 election, and it was then that I began to find out about the deep history of the environmental movement. During this first round of interviews, I met the older activists who were part of the SOS Coalition, like Mary Arnold, Shudde Fath, and the Goodmans. They had been involved with the issues of growth since the 1970s, and in my conversations with them they suggested other leaders to talk to, people who had been part of the earlier conflicts over growth. Thus it was that I began to go backward in time, contacting people who had been part of it all. As I talked with them, they gave me more names, more contacts, more books and articles and city documents to read, which led to more rounds of interviews, more reading, and more information gathering (this is sometimes called snowball sampling). This process helped me identify the specific conflicts and issues described in the book: the bureaucratic infighting, the elections, the attempts to preserve open space, the landscaping plans. I interviewed most of the leaders of the groups described in the book, and many of the administrators and city officials involved with the issues. All were incredibly generous with their time. They talked with me in person, on the phone, and in e-mails, many several times each. Some have continued to have an ongoing conversation with me for years. In these cases it ought to be said that my “interviews” became conversations, and in some cases friendships. There were others as well, people whom I have interviewed over the course of time, not necessarily leaders of groups, but the members of groups. They were part of the larger mass of people who propelled this movement for place, and what they had to tell me began to converge with some of the things I was hearing from the leaders and officials. I discovered that I was hearing the sentiments driving the action, the “why” it was happening, and during all of these discussions I began to get a sense of the

250 Methodological Appendix

meanings people attach to their spaces, their city. Some of these sentiments appear in two academic publications that appear elsewhere,1 and they got me thinking about ways the big social institutions—what sociologists call the macro level—are influenced by our beliefs and values—which are called the micro level—and how the micro is affected by the macro. As the concepts and framework of the book took shape in my mind, I returned to key players for more information and more of their thinking about the issues involved. My own small involvement in the “environmental movement” allowed me to keep pace with the issues and keep contact with people, especially during the Green Machine years and the more recent events described in chapter 6. This contact has allowed me more conversations and more information about the twin movements today. This kind of research is commonly called participant observation, but that term makes it sound like I just dropped in to participate in the natives’ rituals and report my observations. I haven’t really thought about it like that. I have been both participant and observer, sometimes more of one, sometimes more of the other. That role has shaped my thinking about the movement, and the discourse and meanings, described in this book. Like the concepts of discourse and meanings themselves, my participation influenced my observation, and my observation my participation. Discourses and meanings are reiterative, as have been my participating and observing. Because of my role in this process, I do not pretend to present an “objective” history of Austin, if such a thing is possible. This is more of a story told mostly from the point of view of the quality-of-life people, because it was they who presented the Growth Machine with a reactive force not found in most cities, and they who have carved out the environmental landscape of the city. Without them, that landscape would not exist, nor would the meaning. The main questions driving my interest in this story have always been: Why did such a force emerge? What influenced it? What effect has it had? My focus has therefore been on the people and places that defined this movement, and the conflicts that were part of it. Part of my observing has been looking at the ways the issues were framed by various people and groups in different times. For each of the issues I include in this book, I read the press stories in the newspapers (the Austin American-Statesman and the Austin Chronicle) to find not only the basic facts but also what people were saying about the issue, and how they were saying it. Several people were able to supply the minutes of meetings and other records held by groups and individuals. I gathered other primarysource documents available about the issues, including flyers, handouts, mail-outs, and other campaign literature. In the early stages of the research, I read through five master plans, five landscaping projects, twenty-five issues of group newsletters, and twelve foundation documents or position papers from the 1970s to the 1980s. These primarysource documents began to influence my understanding of this long-term movement for place, as I studied the ways people framed their arguments about growth and Austin. I began to see that these records were part of the discourses that existed or were being created within the larger population of their times. I began to chart them over time, looking for common themes, changing emphases, and subtle differences. As I put these together with the ideas of the social geographers, I began to think the framing that sociologists talk about can also be used to describe the discourse of the city.

Methodological Appendix 251

As the conflict moved into the public realm of electoral politics during the 1980s, the two “sides” began to appeal to the general public through campaign advertisements. I gathered as many of these as I could, from the Austin American-Statesman, folders in the Austin History Center, and records held by groups and individuals. I initially read through all advertisements for a given election, looking for common themes across the advertisements. I then reread all the ads, and formulated a set of general themes present in the ads. Then, for each advertisement, I counted the number of specific attributions of that theme. These themes, or issues, are reported in the figures in the book. I continued to collect these kinds of documents for the campaign for the SOS Ordinance, and in addition to advertisements in the newspaper, I collected the actual mail-outs sent by both SOS and CRP, and the framing of those issues is reported in chapter 5. I continued using this process to help describe the changes in the discourse of Austin in chapter 6. The way I studied the framing of issues in the history of Austin, then, suggests that we might usefully expand our use of frame analysis as a sociological tool. As I studied the process in Austin, I began to think that framing is not simply a way to reach larger sentiment pools in the population. It is also a social-psychological process of definition. When used in the context of a discourse, especially, it is part of the social construction of reality, as are the concepts of landscape and place. Using framing as a tool to understand how place is defined and how discourses are created might give us a useful method to link the micro and macro levels of social action. At the micro level, individuals construct a reality of place, in part by framing their sentiments of that place. When individuals gather together and do so in groups, do it publicly, as they did in Austin, and in large numbers, that construction becomes part of the institutional action, of the macro level of politics and governance. It becomes a large-scale definition of reality, part of the meaning of a place.


Notes

Introduction 1. Harvey Molotch, “The City as a Growth Machine: Towards Political Economy of Place,” American Journal of Sociology 82(2) (1976): 309–330; “The Political Economy of Growth Machines,” Journal of Urban Affairs 15(1) (1993): 29–53. The Growth Machine idea is part of a larger theoretical orientation in urban sociology called the Growth Coalition Theory, which looks at the ways coalitions of landowners and businesses attain and hold power in cities. These coalitions are often opposed by neighborhoods, environmentalists, tenants, and sometimes racial/ethnic groups. The case of Austin presented here joins a list of case studies documenting these conflicts. A short list includes Richard Gendron and G. William Domhoff, The Leftmost City: Power and Progressive Politics in Santa Cruz (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2009); Stella M. Capek and John I. Gilderbloom, Community Versus Commodity: Tenants and the American City (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1992); Richard Edward DeLeon, Left Coast City: Progressive Politics in San Francisco, 1975–1991 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992); and Pierre Clavel, The Progressive City: Planning and Participation, 1969–1984 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986). 2. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of City Space (London: Basil Blackwell, 1991). 3. Another great city, Chicago, was shaped by similar forces, although without the social movement found in Austin. Like Austin, the physical features of the area and the social forces of the time came together to produce a city and shape its features. See William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992). 4. See Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960); E. Relph, Place and Placelessness (London: Pion, 1976); Edward W. Soja, “The SocioSpatial Dialectic,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 70(2) (1980): 207– 225; Doreen Massey, “New Directions in Space,” in Social Relations and Spatial Structures, ed. Derek Gregory and John Urry (London: Macmillan, 1981). 5. Anthony M. Orum, “Apprehending the City: The View from Above, Below, and Behind,” Urban Affairs Quarterly 26(4) (1991): 589–609.

254 Notes to pages 10–40

6. Chris Duerksen and Cara Snyder, Nature-Friendly Communities: Habitat Protection and Land Use Planning (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2005). 7. I have heard vicious rumors to the effect that we drank ourselves silly and did all sorts of quasi-legal and illegal things while having fun out there. Such rumors are completely false: Unlike today’s generation, we were perfect teens and young adults. Chapter 1 1. Unlike New York, in Austin no one would ever try to sell you pot in a park. They would just give it to you. 2. Gendron and Domhoff, The Leftmost City. 3. Gary McDonough, “On the Salubrity of Sites,” in The Cultural Meaning of Urban Space, ed. Robert Rotenberg and Gary McDonough (Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey, 1993). 4. Lynch, The Image of the City. 5. Sharon Zukin, Landscapes of Power: From Detroit to Disney World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). 6. Throughout this book, I use the term “core city” to refer to the area in Austin that served loosely as the boundaries of the city before the growth boom of the 1970s and 1980s. Map 2.3 of the city of Austin ca. 1972, on page 48, shows that area. Today the area is in the middle of a sprawling, diffused urban regional space. There are two reasons I use the term “core city.” The terms “central city” and “inner city” have a negative connotation in public speech today. I hope that the term “core city” will allow a more geographic and less normative connotation to be applied to the area. In addition, this core city is more than merely geographic. The landscape described in chapters 2 and 3 is built primarily in this area, and the voting trends of contemporary politics consistently show a division between this area and the surrounding areas. 7. Zukin, Landscapes of Power. 8. Ibid., p. 141. 9. Ibid. 10. Lynch, The Image of the City, p. 126. 11. Robert Benford and David Snow give a good review of this approach in their “Framing Processes and Social Movements: An Overview and Assessment,” Annual Review of Sociology 26 (2000): 611–639. 12. See, for example, chapter 4 in Capek and Gilderbloom, Community Versus Commodity. 13. Benford and Snow, “Framing Processes and Social Movements,” p. 624. Chapter 2 1. The quotes from Wooldridge are taken from Anthony Orum’s Power, Money, and the People: The Making of Modern Austin (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2002). 2. Joseph J. Ellis, His Excellency: George Washington (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004).

Notes to pages 41–62 255

3. Orum, Power, Money, and the People, p. 52. 4. Koch and Fowler, Consulting Engineers, “A City Plan for Austin” (Dallas, TX, 1928), p. 8. 5. Ibid., p. 27. 6. Ibid., p. 26. 7. Ibid., p. 25. 8. Many were also thinking about ways to segregate minorities in the city from whites. Part of the plan was to provide city services and schools to minorities only on the east side of town, hoping to draw minorities that way. There were to be parks for both, but the big ones were to (and did) expand on the west side, hoping to draw whites that way. It worked as planned: By 1930, 80 percent of African Americans were clustered in an area in East Austin; Hispanic communities emerged close to them. When I grew up in the 1960s–1970s, I-35 was very much the dividing line between white and nonwhite. It has stayed that way, for the most part, until very recently, and is changing only gradually. 9. City of Austin, Planning Commission, “City Planning Commission Recommendations on the Austin Development Plan” (1958), p. 1. 10. Ibid., p. 8. 11. Ibid., p. 1. 12. Shea is discussed in chapter 4. 13. Because both Fishes are frequently referred to, I use their first names to distinguish them throughout the text. 14. The city eventually got the land back in the 1980s. The old pond and bleachers are still there. But motorboating is no longer allowed on the lake, so none ski there now. 15. What submariners were to see is a mystery. The bottom of the lake is so murky that visibility would have effectively been zero. 16. My first reaction when he told me of his early idea was to choke out a “What did you say?!” and then ask him to tell me about it again. Those of us who use Barton Creek today think of it as a natural area set aside from cars and streets. But ours is a modern idea; in the early 1950s the parkway concept was in vogue because the automobile was the new thing. Mixing park space with automobiles was part of the zeitgeist of the 1950s. 17. CBCP circular, March 31, 1970. 18. Ibid. 19. This neighborhood continues to be against a formal access point to the greenbelt today; the Parks Department was planning an access there in 2005, but opposition from homeowners in the area convinced them not to build it. 20. This sometimes created nervous encounters after dark. 21. The MUNY acronym was adapted from the name “Municipal” Golf Course. 22. “Wild Basin Master Plan,” original draft, library of Russell Fish. 23. See their website, http://www.wildbasin.org/index.lasso. 24. AEC Newsletter 2(1) ( January 1971). 25. The AEC newsletter ran from March 1970 to October 1971, containing ten issues. It was organized as a series of topics, each topic coming under a heading such as “Council Office Open” or “Barton Creek Zoning Change Request.” 26. L. Milbrath, Environmentalists: Vanguard for a New Society (Albany: State Uni-


versity of New York Press, 1984); L. Milbrath, “Environmental Beliefs and Values,” in Handbook of Political Psychology, ed. Margaret Hermann (San Francisco: JosseyBass, 1986); Susan E. Howell and Shirley B. Laska, “The Changing Face of the Environmental Coalition: A Research Note,” Environment and Behavior 24(1): 134–144; Robert Cameron Mitchell, “How ‘Soft,’ ‘Deep,’ or ‘Left’? Present Constituencies in the Environmental Movement for Certain World Views,” Natural Resources Journal 20 (April): 345–358. 27. WE CARE Austin, initial meeting agenda. 28. Notes of the meeting held by Nancy Bowman. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid. 31. The “passenger” quote by Lady Bird Johnson appears frequently in newspaper articles of the time. 32. “Hands” meaning literally and figuratively. Crenshaw had her “help” planting the trees alongside her, calling them her “hands.” Everyone got dirty. They planted several hundred trees with her money, spent on both the trees themselves and the labor to plant them. 33. As mayor, Carole McClellan wanted to rename Town Lake after Lady Bird Johnson during her term, but according to her, Lady Bird replied, “Oh, no, my dear, not while I am here.” Subsequent mayors would not give up the idea. Lady Bird’s daughter Luci Baines Johnson explains that right before her mother’s death, thenmayor Bruce Todd asked Luci about it again. Luci took the idea to Lady Bird. “Then I told her Mayor Todd and all the other mayors, and especially her beloved Mayor Butler, who had started it with her, wanted to know if they could name the lake in her honor after her death because citizens were asking them to. Ever shy, she smiled and gave me a very modest thumbs-up.” From a transcript of the minutes of the Austin City Council, Naming of Lady Bird Lake—Austin City Council, July 26, 2007. 34. “Austin’s Creeks,” Horizons ’76 Committee, Austin, p. 3. 35. Ibid., p. 6. Highlights in original. 36. Ibid., p. 2. Chapter 3 1. The main literature on these issues can be found in Agenda for the New Urban Era: Second Generation National Policy, ed. Harvey S. Perloff (Chicago: American Society of Planning Officials, 1975); Peter Hall, “The Turbulent Eighth Decade: Challenges to American City Planning,” Journal of the American Planning Association 55(3) (1989): 275–282; Jay M. Stein, Classic Reading in Urban Planning: An Introduction (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1995); John Friedmann, “Two Centuries of Planning Theory: An Overview,” in Explorations in Planning Theory, ed. Seymour J. Mandelbaum, Luigi Mazza, and Robert W. Burchell (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Center for Urban Policy Research, 1996), pp. 10–29. 2. Richard E. Foglesong, Planning the Capitalist City: The Colonial Era to the 1920s (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986). 3. Personal interview, Luther Polnau, chief planner, City of Austin. 4. Personal interview, Dick Lillie, former chief planner, City of Austin.


5. City of Austin Ordinance 740307-I. 6. In fact, adherence to the rules in place at the time almost bankrupted Bradley and his business partner in their attempt to build the project. Orum explains in greater detail; see Power, Money, and the People, chapter 12. 7. Personal interview, Stuart Henry. 8. Personal interview, Dan Davidson. 9. The relationship between Davidson and the old guard was very close; Davidson went to work for Copus after he left his city manager position. 10. Ibid. 11. Goals Assembly Report, Planning Department, City of Austin, 1975, p. 12. 12. Austin Tomorrow Comprehensive Plan, 1979, p. 3. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid., p. 151, my emphasis. 15. Ibid., p. 33. 16. Orum’s Power, Money, and the People has a more detailed description of the Nuke events; much of this section relies upon that work. 17. Another nuclear plant sought Austin’s investment in 2008. Based in large part on the experience of the STNP, and looking at contemporary costs to build a nuke, the utility decided not to enter into the new nuke as a partner. If the new nuke is built, the city might buy power from it. 18. Orum, Power, Money, and the People. 19. Ibid., p. 298. 20. Personal interview, David Butts. 21. Friedman speech, June 13, 1975, Madison, WI, Friedman files, Austin History Center. 22. Ibid. 23. Political ad paid for by Students Who Support Our City Council, Daily Texan, December 4, 1975. 24. Ibid. 25. Political ad paid for by Student Action Committee–Young Democrats, Daily Texan, December 4, 1975. All caps in original ad. 26. Quoted in the Austin Environmental Council newsletter 1(2) (April 1970), p. 2. 27. Austin Creeks, p. 2. 28. Austin Parks and Recreation Department figures. Chapter 4 1. WE CARE Austin: A Pocket Directory of Environmental Groups, Agencies, and Services, issues 1974, 1981. 2. Austin Neighborhood Association bylaws, Betty Brown Collection, Barker History Center. 3. The reference to the Hyde Park and Northwest Hills neighborhoods was a reference to social-class differences of the time. The Hyde Park and Northwest Hills residents had more money, more social connections and resources, and were generally in the professional classes, as opposed to the blue-collar work the South Austinites


did. South Austin was “bubba land” back then, home to cowboys, hippies, and rednecks. Today, Bubba’s children find it hard to afford the area; growth has driven land values and rents too high for many working-class people. 4. You can still see the rock walls of the Spanish settlement today if you know when to leave the main trail and walk up a smaller trail. 5. BH-HBNA position paper, Betty Brown Collection, Barker History Center. 6. Betty Brown, speech to city council, July 30, 1978, Betty Brown Collection, Barker History Center. 7. Barton Hills–Horseshoe Bend Neighborhood Association, January 31, 1980, Betty Brown Collection, Barker History Center. 8. Interview with George Cofer, now director of the Hill Country Conservancy. Cofer was there when the water began to change, and his love for the pool led him into twenty-five years of work to protect that water and the pool. 9. Betty Brown, speech to the Save Barton Creek Association, November 3, 1988, SBCA archives. 10. “Proposed Development Stirs Opposition,” Austin American-Statesman, November 29, 1978. 11. Ad copy, Betty Brown Collection, Barker History Center. 12. Personal interview, Bill Collier. 13. SBCA bylaws. 14. Zilker Park Posse draft, SBCA archives, Austin History Center. 15. “Barton Creek Watershed Study” (Espey, Huston & Associates: Austin, TX, 1979). 16. “Barton Creek Study,” Austin American-Statesman, July 7, 1979 (my emphasis). 17. ZPP newsletter, Christmas edition, 1981. 18. Zilker Park Posse press release, January 30, 1980, Connie Moore Collection, my emphasis. 19. “Can a Walk-On Make the ‘Varsity’ without Money?,” Austin AmericanStatesman, March 12, 1981. 20. Political ad by Deuser campaign, March 1981, Connie Moore Collection. 21. Ibid. 22. ZPP paid political ad, Austin American-Statesman, April 1, 1981. 23. “Spending Not Key to Winning Votes in Winning Votes,” Austin AmericanStatesman, April 6, 1981. 24. ZPP political ad, Austin American-Statesman, April 29, 1981. 25. Ibid. 26. “Barton Springs Turns Hot with Candidates’ Invective,” Austin AmericanStatesman, April 1, 1981. 27. Ibid. 28. Personal interview, Dr. Charles Urdy. East Austin was at that time the area in which low-income African Americans lived. Urdy is African American himself and perceived “jobs” and economic growth overall as a way to help other African Americans move up. 29. Austin was still a very segregated city at the time, with poorer minorities living mostly east of I-35 and whites living west. It would have been quite a commute from East Austin. 30. Joe Gieselman, Travis County transportation analyst, in “South MoPac Fight Pits Traffic vs. Environment,” Austin American-Statesman, March 14, 1982.


31. ZPP political ad, Daily Texan, April 2, 1982. 32. “Feelings Run Deep in MoPac Debate,” Austin American-Statesman, March 14, 1982. 33. Economical Transportation for Austin’s Neighborhoods political ad, Austin American-Statesman, April 2, 1982. 34. Ibid. 35. “MoPac Proponents Lead Spending Race,” Austin American-Statesman, March 23, 1982. 36. Personal interview, Shudde Fath. 37. “Environmental Groups Split on Bonds,” Austin American-Statesman, August 27, 1981. 38. Fath, letter to ZPP board, October 6, 1981, Connie Moore Collection. 39. Interviews with former ZPP members. 40. The claim that the center would provide revenue was itself somewhat disingenuous. Convention centers rarely if ever raise money. They mostly run a deficit and must be propped up by city subsidies. There was little chance the center would generate revenue to build other parks. 41. Town Lake Parks Alliance fund-raising letter, Lake Austin file, Austin History Center. 42. “Big Donors Stiff Cooksey, Humphrey in Council Race,” Austin AmericanStatesman, April 3, 1985. 43. Plea in Intervention (by Town Lake Joint Venture) in Mary Arnold et al. vs. City of Austin (April 28, 1985, 98th District Court of Travis County). 44. Cooksey campaign ad, May 1985. 45. To the lasting disappointment of the three women who sued over the tract, Sand Beach was not included as parkland. Partly because of that, a huge development now sits next to the tract, which itself is now covered with streets and a drainage pond, unusable as parkland. Crenshaw was working against that development until the day she died, and Arnold is still furious about it. 46. This is probably unconstitutional under a provision of the Texas Constitution barring bills that apply to only one city, but the City of Austin did not fight the law. 47. An appeals court in the Quick et al. case ruled that it is unconstitutional to allow district courts to hear such challenges. The TRNCC has since been renamed TCEQ (Texas Commission on Environmental Quality), and it is historically more lenient on landowners than the City of Austin, often siding with developers in such conflicts. 48. Benford and Snow, “Framing Processes and Social Movements.” 49. Darr political ad, Austin American-Statesman, May 3, 1985. 50. Mullen mail-out, March 1985. Mullen biography file, Austin History Center, my emphasis. 51. “Big Donors Stiff Cooksey, Humphrey in Council Race.” 52. Spaeth mail-out, March 1983. Spaeth biography file, Austin History Center. 53. Darr mail-out, April 1985. Darr biography file, Austin History Center. 54. Bill Oliver, Zilker Park Posse Express, Christmas 1981. 55. A couple of apartment owners refuse to grant access across their lawns on Lady Bird Lake. Because of their intransigence, the Parks Department is working on a plan to build a long pedestrian causeway in the lake itself, which will run parallel to the apartments’ lawns, thereby linking the final section of the loop.


Chapter 5 1. City of Austin and Engineering Science, Inc., “Final Report of the National Urban Runoff Program in Austin, Texas” (1982). 2. Personal interview, Wayne Gronquist, SBCA past president. 3. One of the compromises continues to harm today’s attempts to protect major creeks. When the CWO was written, it allowed the city to have less control over the eastern creeks in return for stronger control over Barton Creek. This is causing problems today, as the city is trying to create a continuous greenbelt along Walnut Creek on the east side of town. The setback requirements for development on that creek are much less than on Barton Creek. Developments can be built even closer to Walnut Creek than they should, making it harder to acquire the land along the creek or keep the corridor wide enough to make a decent greenbelt out of it. 4. Personal interview, Frank Cooksey. 5. Austin Chronicle, June 15, 1990. 6. Shudde Fath relates that Cooke told her that allowing that many people to sign up was one of the biggest mistakes he had ever made. 7. Personal interview, Bill Collier, by then employed as Freeport spokesman. 8. Personal interview, David Kreider, Planning Department, City of Austin. 9. Personal interview, Mayor Bruce Todd. 10. Ibid. 11. City Ordinance 911017-B. 12. “Securing a Safe Future for Barton Springs: A Position Paper” ( July 1991), p. 5. 13. Gus Garcia, personal interview. 14. Then with Austin Women’s Political Caucus, Kitchen later served as a state representative from Austin and has been a political organizer and advocate for community issues ranging from the environment to health care. 15. ETJ stands for extraterritorial jurisdiction—land areas adjacent to but not yet incorporated into the city. 16. “Moffett, Environmentalists Hold Development Summit,” Austin AmericanStatesman, February 20, 1992. 17. Austin Chronicle, August 9, 2002. 18. City of Austin ballot, August 8, 1992. Copies of the ballot can be seen online at http://malford.ci.austin.tx.us/election/byrecord.cfm?eid=138. 19. “Louise Epstein and Bob Larson Won’t Quit—Will We?” SOS mail-out, SOS file, Austin History Center. 20. Ibid. 21. “We Can Write the Last Chapter in the Fight to Preserve Our Springs,” SOS mail-out, SOS file, Austin History Center. 22. “No One,” SOS television ad, Rindy Media. 23. “Clean Water” mail-out, SOS file, Austin History Center. 24. She had seen a bumper sticker on a car in New Mexico that had “Another Business for [something]” and used that idea as a template for her program in Austin. 25. “SOS Makes Economic Sense” and “SOS—It’s Good for Business,” SOS television ads, Rindy Media. 26. More voters in Austin are Democrats, but as at the national level, many businesspeople in Austin are Republicans.


27. Letter mail-out, Carole and Hill Rylander, SOS file, Austin History Center. 28. “What Do We Really Know about the ‘SOS’ Ordinance?” CRP mail-out, SOS file, Austin History Center. 29. Ibid. 30. “No Growth Is No Solution,” CRP mail-out. How the CRP defined “clean” is unknown, but it was not the definition used by the city in measuring pollutants in water. The ordinance actually required that storm water runoff be as clean after development as before. It did not address drinking water. 31. It is worth noting that none of the CRP claims came true except for the claim that lawsuits would follow the passage of the ordinance. Lawsuits were indeed brought, but mostly by large developers, not by small landowners claiming that the city had “taken” their property. In the end the city actually won all those lawsuits. 32. “Mayor: What, Me Negative?,” Austin Chronicle 16(36). 33. I am not aware of the scientific literature that establishes the relationship between the three, but it must exist. Someone should write a book about it . . . 34. Relph, Place and Placelessness. 35. The TNRCC has been renamed the TCEQ. Texas changes the name of its environmental agency every few years in order to find new ways to say “The environment is here to be used as a financial resource, not preserved as a community good.” Chapter 6 1. The ultimate irony of this election is the convention center. Chamber boosters had wanted to build one on Town Lake in the 1980s, and had been defeated by the neighborhood/environmental alliance of that decade. Here, some of the same people who had defeated that center—notably Slusher, who had led the fight against it then but was now on the city council—campaigned for it as part of the larger package. The boosters finally got their center, but only because the quality-of-life advocates campaigned for it. 2. Balcones Canyonland Habitat Conservation Plan, prepared for the Balcones Canyonland Habitat Conservation Plan Executive Committee by the Butler/Espey, Huston & Associates Team, Austin, TX (December 1990). 3. Personal interview, Robert Singleton, EarthFirst! representative on the original BCCP. 4. The SOS Coalition became the Save Our Springs Alliance after the ordinance campaign. 5. For those who are interested in the specifics, Slusher, then a council member, wrote a long, detailed analysis of the various parts of the deal, which was posted on the City of Austin website for years. It can now be seen on the Austin Sierra Club website at http://www.texas.sierraclub.org/austin/SlusherBradley.html. 6. Bradley’s refusal to follow his own agreements was not limited to the city. He made some enemies in business as well, including stiffing former partners, and his bankruptcy has cost taxpayers millions of dollars. For those interested in a list of his doings, see http://www.makegarypay.org. 7. Hector Ruiz, the chairman and CEO of the company, already lived in the area. Much of the anger had to do with the suspicion that he just wanted his headquarters near his own house so he didn’t have to drive as far to work.


8. It is also easier. In a weird legal quirk, citizens need to collect fewer signatures for an election on the charter than on an ordinance referendum. 9. One of the most interesting things I heard said about the election was from a friend who told me how he decided to vote. “I never could make up my mind, but in the end I voted for them [the amendments] because you just kind of had to, you know? But I never thought they would pass.” This answer illustrates the conflicting emotions and beliefs that result from the changing discourse. 10. Thus we will not know the fate of that deal until this book is published. 11. When they were mayor and council member, Gus Garcia and Daryl Slusher attended a big protest against the developments. They both told the crowd that the city could not at that time restrict the developments, that a new ordinance would be required to do that, and that people should work for such an ordinance. Because of their appearances at the rally, both were deposed by lawyers working for the big boxes in the ensuing legal battles. Developers wanted to sue the city, and the two men, for messing up their plans. During the deposition the lawyers tried to pin Garcia and Slusher into saying the city itself was trying to stop the developments. Neither had, nor was either that stupid. 12. This is something Crenshaw found admirable about Shea—see chapter 2. 13. Kim mail-out, “Standing Up for Austin.” 14. Words in bold appeared that way on the mail-outs. 15. Joshua Long gives a good overview of the “Keep Austin Weird” phenomenon in his book Weird City: Sense of Place and Creative Resistance in Austin, Texas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010). Long shows how the phenomenon is very much a part of the cultural expression of Austinites who sense that growth is changing— and ruining—their city. But “Keep X Weird” bumper stickers appear in other rapidly growing cities as well, and Long makes a good case that the phenomenon is a more general reaction by people all over who feel their places are threatened by growth. 16. The men did approach Arnold, but she was waiting to see whether Jackie Goodman would run, so she declined to participate. Goodman decided not to enter the race. 17. Ultimately, both Leffingwell and Riley won with no powerful opposition, thanks to the neighborhood/environmental nexus. 18. Foglesong, Planning the Capitalist City. 19. See www.ci.austin.tx.us/council/downloads/mw_acpp_points.pdf. 20. You can visit it online at http://www.ci.austin.tx.us/water/cer2.htm. 21. They built a set of trails for birders to walk on, including one along the river. They are adding more now. 22. Jackie Goodman served as a city council member from 1993 to 1999. Appendix 1. Scott Swearingen, “Sacred Space in the City: Community Totems and Political Contests,” Research in Community Sociology 7 (1997): 141–170; and “Trying to Create an ‘Environmental City’: Citizen Action in the Face of the Political Economy of Growth,” in The Small City and Regional Community: Proceedings of the 1996 Conference, ed. P. Meyer and T. Lyons, 12:249–254 (University of Wisconsin–Stephens Point: Center for the Small City).

Index

Adams, Fred, 58 Adams, Stan, 108 Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), 205– 206, 208–211, 214 African Americans, 87, 90, 225, 258n28 Aielli, John, 149 Air Pollution Control Program, 76 Allandale Neighborhood Association, 220 Anderson, Kevin, 229, 236–239, 243; and Bastrop River Corridor Project, 240 Andrews, Lynn, 76, 78 Another Business for Barton Springs (ABBS), 167 anti-nuke movement, 9, 86–87, 98, 129, 227. See also Duncan, Roger; Nuke, the Aqua Fest, 11, 46 Aquifer Guardians in Urban Areas (AGUA), 211 Armadillo World Headquarters, 11, 116, 234 Armbrust, David, 151–152, 160, 202 Arnold, Mary, 55–56, 68, 98, 129, 131, 152, 159, 170, 184, 208, 217, 225, 249, 259n45, 262n16 Atlanta, Georgia, 176 Auditorium Shores, 128. See also Lady Bird Lake; Town Lake Audubon Society, 56, 58, 113, 237 Austin: as “city of the violet crown,” 4, 37, 47, 128; defining of, 3, 5, 7, 27, 43,

53, 82, 96–97, 99, 109–110, 115, 128, 139–140, 165, 175, 247; discourse of, 5, 7, 10, 30, 61, 70, 82, 96, 99, 116, 117, 124, 133–138, 169, 174, 176, 179–180, 188–190, 208, 214, 223, 243, 245, 247, 250; as the Environmental City, 8–9, 57, 65, 169, 180, 183–243, 245–246; environmental meaning of, 6–8, 10, 12, 17–18, 21, 23, 26, 30–31, 57, 59, 65, 70, 96, 100, 103–104, 107, 138–139, 151, 158, 199, 241–242, 246; and sense of place, 4, 12–13, 18, 21. See also city council; quality of life Austin, Stephen F., 35 Austin American-Statesman, 103, 113, 115, 118, 119, 122, 161, 163, 171, 250–251 Austin-bashing legislation, 133, 140, 193, 204. See also Texas Legislature Austin Chamber of Commerce, 9, 88, 95–96, 117, 151, 168, 224; and city council, 127, 158; and environmental groups, 191; and MoPac extension, 122; and Smart Growth, 190; and Town Lake convention center, 261n1 Austin Chronicle, 149, 152, 163, 166, 250 Austin Climate Protection Plan, 9, 224, 238 Austin Energy, 86, 234 Austin Environmental Council (AEC), 53, 58–63, 65, 68–69, 74, 75, 95–97, 99, 104, 129, 148 Austin High School, 11, 238

264 Index

Austin Independent Business Alliance, 219 Austin Independent School District, 63–64 Austin Municipal Golf Course (MUNY ), 54–55, 57, 217, 255n21. See also Save MUNY Austin Neighborhoods Council (ANC), 104–107, 113, 118, 123–124, 223 Austin Parks Foundation, 225 Austin Plan of 1941, 44 Austin River Watch, 238 Austin Tomorrow Goals, 29, 81, 91 Austin Tomorrow Master Plan, 117–118 Austin Tomorrow Plan, 68, 94, 123, 137, 140, 144, 157, 184 Austin Tomorrow Program, 80–85, 88– 89, 91–92, 94–95, 98, 100, 104, 107, 111–112, 117–122, 125, 127, 140, 165, 184, 205, 240 Austin Transportation Study (ATS), 122 Austin Women’s Political Caucus, 260n14 Austin Youth River Watch, 229, 236, 238–239 AustinPlan, 127, 140, 188, 204–205 Balcones Canyonlands Conservation Plan (BCCP), 193, 195–196, 199, 200, 205 Balcones Canyonlands Preserve (BCP), 196, 198–199 Ballew, Helen, 155–159, 167, 185 Bannerot, Jim, 108–109 Barnes/Connally, 147–148, 160 Barton Creek, 11, 37–38, 52–54, 107, 117, 119, 125, 137, 139, 149, 175, 184, 188, 206, 255n16, 260n3; and the aquifer, 145; and Barnes/Connally, 147, 160; and the contributing zone, 159; as economic asset, 167; and Endangered Species Act (ESA), 178; greenbelt, 57, 62, 126, 198; and the Growth Machine, 108–116; Hike and Bike, 59; and Terrace PUD, 203; watershed, 53, 109, 111, 151, 196, 246

Barton Creek Citizens Association (BCCA), 108–109 Barton Creek Habitat Preserve, 196 Barton Creek Ordinance, 115, 146–145, 154 Barton Creek Plan, 53, 61 Barton Creek Properties (BCP), 148 Barton Creek PUD, 12, 148; hearing, 149–151, 154–156, 158 Barton Creek Square Mall, 109, 116, 121, 230 Barton Creek Task Force, 144–145 Barton Creek Wilderness Park, 196 Barton Hills, 110, 114, 115, 203 Barton Hills Neighborhood Association (BHNA), 110–111, 136 Barton Springs, 11, 38, 51, 107, 112–114, 116–117, 119–121, 125, 141, 142, 147, 156, 159, 162, 178, 197, 210–211, 214–216, 240–242; and algae, 145; and coalition building, 130; and community organizing, 155; and development, 53; and the Endangered Species Act (ESA), 178; and fecal coliform, 150; as “the Jewel in the Crown of Austin,” 164; and the meaning of Austin, 175; and pollution, 122–123; as “Soul of the City,” 164; as symbol of Austin, 138–139, 164–165, 169–170, 174, 188; watershed, 114 Barton Springs Project, 155 Barton Springs Recharge Zone, 191 Barton Springs salamander, 145, 178–179 Bastrop River Corridor Project, 240 Bedinger, Virginia, 55 Bee Cave, Texas, 12 Berman, Don, 51, 76 BH-HBNA, 111, 112, 114. See also Barton Hills Neighborhood Association (BHNA); Horseshoe Bend Big-Box Ordinance, 217, 220–221 Binder, Bob, 56, 59, 85–86, 121 Biological Advisory Team (BAT), 195 Black, Sinclair, 68, 85 Black Voters Against Paternalism, 90 Blackland Prairie, 82, 239, 241–242

Index 265

Blizzard, Mike (EDUCATE PAC), 208, 225 Blunn Creek, 105–106, 129, 219 Boom, the, 99, 103–104, 116, 146–147, 151, 154 Bosse, Don, 153 Bowman, Nancy, 62–64 Brackenridge Tract, 56 Bradfield-Cummings-Mayfield, 114 Bradley, Gary, 78, 88, 146–147, 153, 160– 163, 165–166, 177–178, 202–206, 208– 210, 219, 222–223, 261n6; and Quick et al., 177 Bristol, Valerie, 195 Brown, Betty, 110–111, 113 Buchanan Dam, 41 Bull Creek, 52, 74–75, 99, 119, 196; greenbelt, 198; watershed, 82 Bunch, Bill, 155–159, 167, 177, 185, 203, 211–213, 225 bureaucracy, 1–2, 6–7, 9, 26, 30, 70, 227–231, 235, 249; and conservation efforts, 73–74, 100; and the Environmental and Conservation Services Department, 231; and institutionalization of environmental concern, 148, 186; and parks, 46; and restructuring, 229–230; and the Shoal Creek Hike and Bike Trail, 50; and the Texas Constitution, 259n46 Burns, Hallie, 66 Bush, George W., 178–179 bust, the, 147–148, 154, 157, 160–161, 172 Butler, Roy, 56, 66, 74, 76–78, 80, 85, 256n33; council of, 86–87 Butts, David, 86–88, 89–91, 140, 158– 159, 165, 170–172, 174, 184, 215, 223 Capital Improvements Program, 88 capitalism, 1, 13, 20–21, 23 Capitol building, 36 Carpenter, Liz, 50 Carrington, Walter, 78 Cavazos, Perla, 227 Center for Environmental Research (CER), 229, 236–237, 239 Central Austin Democrats, 123

Central Austin, 175, 224 Chicago, Illinois, 253n3 Circle C Homeowners Association, 219 Circle C Ranch, 146–147, 153, 161, 177, 219 Citizen Action (CA), 155, 185 Citizens for a Barton Creek Park (CBCP), 53–54, 68 Citizens for the Protection of Zilker Park and Barton Springs (CPZPBS), 113, 115 Citizens for Responsible Planning (CRP), 167–168, 251, 261n30, 261n31 city council, 73, 75–79, 84, 128; and Austin Chamber of Commerce, 158; and Cooksey council, 104, 132, 140, 146, 154–155, 157, 184, 193; and creeks ordinances, 145; and Friedman council, 89, 98, 109, 171, 174, 232; and 1985 election, 132; and 1955 council, 88; and 1955 election, 79, 87–88, 174; and 1961 election, 118; and 1977 election, 172–173; and 1976 election, 172–173; and 1973 election, 173; and Watson (Green) council, 174, 180, 189–190, 193, 196–197, 201 City of Houston Health Department, 76 city staff, 76, 78, 84, 86, 94, 103, 152, 206–207, 231–235; and Barton Creek Square Mall, 109; and creeks ordinances, 145; and environmentally friendly policies, 246; and MoPac extension, 122; and protection of natural environment, 77; and relationship to city council, 79; and SB 1684, 178; and zone 4, 126 Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), 48 civil rights era, 97–98 Clark, Ed, 55–56 Clean Air Act, 4 Clean Clear Colorado, 238 Clean Water Act, 97 Clean Water Action (CWA), 155–156, 185, 216 clean water amendment, 207 Climate Protection Plan, 234

266 Index

clustering, 202–204, 207 coalition building, 130 Coalition for a Progressive Austin, 86 Cofer, George, 152, 159, 208, 212–214, 258n8 Colorado River, 24, 35–39, 68, 74, 82, 96, 142, 199, 238–242, 245; taming of, 41–42 Colorado River Watch Foundation, 107 Colorado River Watch Network (CRWN), 238 Committee for Austin’s Future, 208 Composite Ordinance, 153–154, 160, 162 Comprehensive Plan, 83 Comprehensive Watershed Ordinance (CWO), 146–147, 151–154, 163, 168, 202, 260n3 Compromise Ordinance, 152, 154 Congress Avenue Beautification Program, 64 Congress for New Urbanism, 223 conservationists, 45–48, 50–52, 56–57, 59, 64, 67, 73–79, 89, 96, 99, 148, 155, 227–229; and development, 130; and environmentalists, 94, 100 Cooke, Lee, 150, 260n6; council of, 151 Cooksey, Frank, 4, 62, 130, 132, 147, 150, 184; council of, 104, 132, 140, 146, 154–155, 157, 193 Copus, Clyde, 78 Creeks Ordinance, 77, 79, 108, 164 Creeks Project, 29, 65, 67–69, 71, 96, 97, 99, 103, 139, 192 Creeks Project Committee, 99 Crenshaw, Roberta, 45–48, 65–66, 73, 76, 105, 131, 184, 220, 256n32, 259n45 Cromack, Bert, 126 Daily Texan, 91 Dallas, Texas, 12, 38, 128, 176 Darr, Shyra, 136–138 Daryl Herald, 128, 166 Davidson, Dan, 76–79, 94, 114, 133, 167, 229, 230 Democratic Party, 158, 165, 171, 173, 176, 186, 223, 225, 260n26 Department of the Interior, 178

Desired Development Zone (DDZ), 205, 241–242 Deuser, Larry, 118, 121, 127 developers, 19–20, 47, 79, 89, 92–93, 132–133, 195, 262n11; and the aquifer, 147; and conservationists, 79; and city manager, 79; and framing, 29; and MoPac extension, 123–124; and small landowners, 196; and the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, 259n47; and the Watson council, 202 Dickson, Roberta (Bobbie), 45–49, 52, 57–58, 61, 66. See also Crenshaw, Roberta Dillo Dirt, 10, 236 Doggett, Lloyd, 86 downtown, 20, 36, 53, 67, 88, 131, 177, 224; business, 192, 226; and development, 192, 223–224; and urbanism, 191 Downtown Austin Neighborhood Association, 226 Drinking Water Protection Zone (DWPZ), 196–199 Dripping Springs, Texas, 179 Duncan, Roger, 9, 86, 119, 121, 129, 227, 231–236, 243 Earth Day (1950), 53, 61 EarthFirst!, 149–150, 195 East Austin, 90, 91, 121, 258n28; and gentrification, 221–222; and runoff, 242; and segregation, 255n8 east side aquifer, 239–240 Economical Transportation for Austin’s Neighborhoods (ETAN), 123 EDUCATE PAC, 208–209 Edwards Aquifer, 9, 94, 112–113, 114, 116, 119, 143, 147, 156, 166–168, 188, 192, 197–198, 199, 202–205, 208, 210–213, 240–242; contributing zone, 160, 194; and Jim Bob Moffett, 166; protection of, 133; recharge zone, 111, 125, 144–145, 178–179, 185, 196. See also east side aquifer Edwards Plateau, 56

Index 267

endangered species, 193, 195 Endangered Species Act (ESA), 4, 178–179, 193 Environmental and Conservation Services Department (ECSD), 230, 235 Environmental Board, 66, 75–76, 78–79, 85, 94, 108, 119, 146, 224 environmental constituency, 74–75, 80, 85, 95, 100 Environmental Defense Fund, 173 Environmental Department, 146, 230, 237. See also Environmental and Conservation Services Department (ECSD) Environmental Group of Austin Tomorrow, 165 environmentalists, 5–9, 13, 17, 25, 29, 54, 63–64, 85, 89, 133, 137, 140, 146–147, 157, 170–172, 179, 201, 215, 218, 226– 227, 229, 240–242, 245; and AMD, 206; and Austin Tomorrow, 95, 121; and the Barton Creek Task Force, 145–146; and clustering, 202–204; and the Coalition for a Progressive Austin, 86; and conservationists, 94–95; and the Cooksey council, 184; disagreements among, 202–203, 205, 208–210, 212; and framing, 29; and the Green Machine, 190; and the Hill Country Conservancy, 212–213; and Kirk Watson, 173, 192; and neighborhood groups, 120, 146, 226; and the 1965 city council election, 132; and the 1955 city council election, 87–88; and the RULE council, 152–154, 160; and Save Our Springs PAC, 158; and Smart Growth, 190– 191; and the SOS Coalition, 166– 167, 186; and the SOS Ordinance, 158–159, 162; and stealth neighborhood groups, 167; and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, 193; and Walmart, 219; west side, 86. See also Green Machine “environmentalists vs. developers” conflict, 5–8, 29, 43, 53, 58, 65, 104, 117, 124, 126–133, 139, 146, 148–149, 154,

167, 173–174, 186, 190–191, 208, 214, 217, 224, 230, 247; and the CWO, 152 environmental movement, 4, 6, 9, 12– 13, 17, 42–43, 57, 95, 180, 183, 199, 201, 210, 216, 221, 233, 240, 244, 247, 249–250; and institutionalizing environmental concern, 79, 155, 180, 186–187; and movement for place, 12–13, 17, 21, 23; and the Sierra Club, 51–52. See also national environmental movement Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), 237 Environmental Resources Management, 77 Envision Central Texas, 223 Epstein, Louise, 152–154, 158, 170, 238. See also RULE council Erwin, Frank, 56 Fath, Conrad, 118, 119 Fath, Shudde, 118, 119, 124–125, 158, 249, 260n6 Fath PAC, 119 Federal Floodplain Insurance (FFI) program, 68 Federal Highway Administration, 211 Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation (FSLIC), 147 Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, 177 Fish, Janet, 48–52, 68, 71, 99. See also Long, Janet Fish, Russell, 46–49, 56–58, 61, 68, 74, 76–77, 95 Fix 290, 211 Flawn, Peter, 58 Floodplains Ordinance, 69 FM Properties (FMP), 160, 162–163, 177–178, 195 Fortune 500 companies, 161 Foster, David, 215–216 framing, 18, 28–30, 59–62, 118–119, 164, 168–169, 250–251; and discourse of Austin, 27–30, 133–138; and reframing, 136, 191 Freeport McMoRan, 147–148, 152, 160, 162

268 Index

Friedman, Jeff, 59, 88–90, 100; and Friedman council, 98, 109, 174, 232; and 1955 council race, 171 Fries, Jim, 193 Frost, Susan Toomey, 129, 131 Futrell, Toby, 229–232, 234–236, 239 Gage, Les, 66, 75–76, 78, 229 Galindo, Cid, 223 Garcia, Gus, 157–158, 163, 172–173, 208, 229, 262n11 Gemberling, Gail, 152–153 Germany, 216 global warming, 8–9, 186, 212, 218, 234– 235, 238, 241, 245 Goals Assembly, 80–82, 84 Goals Book, 81 Goodman, Jack, 106–107, 126, 130, 159, 184, 238, 249 Goodman, Jackie, 106–107, 148–149, 154, 159–161, 170–172, 184, 208, 225, 238, 249, 262nn16,21 Goodman, Richard, 111 good ol’ boy network, 71–72, 88 Government Relations Division of the Chamber of Commerce, 173 Graham, Neal, 144 Grainger, Jeanette, 124 grandfathering legislation, 133, 201, 203–204, 206–207, 210. See also Texas Legislature Greater Edwards Aquifer Alliance, 210 Green Building Program, 232–233 GreenChoice Program, 232–233 Green Council, 9, 173–174, 180, 189–191, 202, 204, 216, 229. See also Watson, Kirk Green Machine, 169–174, 177, 186, 188, 190, 192, 200, 208, 212, 214–215, 224, 229, 250 green-scamming, 124. See also framing Gregg, David, 110 Griffith, Beverly, 171–172 growth, 2–4, 21, 44, 71, 79, 80, 89, 124, 140, 179, 184, 187, 230; and the aquifer, 144; controlled, 72, 83–85, 94–95, 100, 118–119, 132–133, 171; effects of,

on environment, 95; ideology of, 190; promoters of, 1–4, 7, 42, 45–46, 86, 89–90, 95, 120, 128, 130, 136, 161, 184, 187–188, 191; rapid, 71, 91, 99; uncontrolled, 86, 119–121; urban, 2–4, 6, 10, 29, 45, 57, 60, 62, 74, 80, 82, 96, 98, 116, 120, 138, 179–180, 187, 189, 213, 240–241; and water quality, 157. See also Growth Machine; suburbs; urbanization Growth Machine, 2–3, 5, 7–8, 17, 65, 93, 100, 103, 107, 117, 121, 126–127, 147, 253n1; and Barton Creek, 108–116, 187; and quality-of-life advocates, 250 Growth Management Department, 132 Gus Fruh Park, 126, 139 Gutow, Steve, 86–87 Harpers Creek, 77 Hawkins, Andrew, 211 HB 1684, 188, 202. See also Texas Legislature Henry, Stuart, 76, 77, 78–79, 85, 87, 148, 156, 229 Hernandez, Robert, 165 Highland Lakes chain, 41 Highway (Loop) 360, 52, 56 Highway Department, 52, 66, 105, 111, 122 Hill Country, 4, 11, 24, 35, 38, 56–57, 82, 83, 99, 125, 128, 155, 188, 196, 198, 212, 217, 239–240, 246; and degradation of environment, 127; and suburban sprawl, 127, 242 Hill Country Conservancy (HCC), 8, 210, 212–214, 225, 246 Hill Country Foundation, 155, 167 Hispanics, 87, 225, 227, 255n8 historical preservation movement, 98 Hofmann, Margret, 87, 91–92, 232 Home Builders Association, 208 Honorary Trustees of the AEC, 95 Horizons ’76 Committee, 68 Hornsby Bend, 10, 229, 236–238; Water Treatment Facility, 237 Hornsby Bend Partnership, 237

Index 269

Horseshoe Bend, 111, 203 Houston, Texas, 12, 128, 176; compared to Austin, 63, 123, 231 Humphrey, George, 130 Hyde Park, 105, 257n3 IBM, 103 Interim Ordinance, 152–154, 157 Interstate Highway 35, 82, 255n8, 258n29 Jagger, Sid, 78, 109 Janes, Daryl, 128 Johnson, Lady Bird, 41, 50–51; and Town Lake beautification, 65–66 Johnson, Luci Baines, 256n33 Johnson, Lyndon Baines, 41 Junior League, 62–64, 66 Kallerman, Dick, 210–212 “Keep Austin Weird,” 262n15 Kim, Jennifer, 222–223 Kirkpatrick, Mark, 178 Kitchen, Ann, 158, 214; and the Austin Women’s Political Caucus, 260n14 KUT, 15 Lady Bird Lake, 41, 67, 139, 256n33. See also Auditorium Shores; Town Lake Lago Vista, Texas, 41 Lake Austin, 11, 47, 55; greenbelt, 65 Lake Austin Watershed Ordinance, 136 Lake Ordinance, 77 Lake Travis, 11, 41 Lake Travis Ordinance, 136 Lakeway, Texas, 41 Lamar, Mirabeau B., 35 Lamar Savings, 108 Larson, Bob, 152–154, 158, 170 LCRA Board, 86 Lebermann, Lowell, 56, 58, 73–75, 77, 87–89, 127, 148, 229; and environmental constituency, 80 Leffingwell, Lee, 9, 224–225 liberalism, 11, 66, 71, 72, 85, 87, 90, 107, 171, 175, 186, 223, 225, 244; and liberal movement, 97–98 Lillie, Dick, 75, 79–80, 84, 89, 92

Liveable City (LC), 8, 211, 214–216, 219, 221, 246 Long, Janet, 46. See also Fish, Janet Long, Walter E., 40, 46, 48, 58, 95 Longhorn Dam, 41–42 Love, Dan, 87 Lower Colorado River Authority (LCRA), 85, 163, 238–239 Lowe’s, 219–220 Lynch, Kevin, 99 Magnolia Cafe, 158 Main, Todd, 155, 158, 185 Manor, Texas, 127 Mansfield Dam, 41 master plan, 99, 137, 148; and citizenry involvement, 80; of 1908, 43; of 1901, 69; of 1961, 88–89; of 1938, 80 Mather, Jean, 63, 105, 129 Mayor’s Task Force (Bruce Todd), 152–153 McAhn, Ken, 87 McCalla, Maline, 68 McClellan, Carole, 117, 119, 120–121, 167–168, 256n33. See also Strayhorn, Carole Keeton McCracken, Brewster, 224–225 McKinney Falls State Park, 106–107 McReynolds, Maureen, 237 Milburn, Bill, 78, 108–109 Miller, Tom, 40 Milstead, Bill, 80 minorities, 85, 89, 121; See also African Americans; Hispanics Mitchell, Eric, 170 Moffett, Jim Bob, 147, 150, 157, 160–163, 164–165, 178, 222 “Moffett’s Muppets,” 164. See also RULE council Moore, Connie, 124–125 MoPac, 67, 110, 121–125; extension of, 113, 136 Morrison, Laura, 223 Motal, Becky, 171 Motorola, 103, 116, 121, 206 Mullen, Ron, 122, 127–129, 131–132, 136–137

270 Index

Nash, John, 95 national environmental movement, 4, 23, 73, 97, 155–156, 185, 187, 230, 234, 243; and local movement, 62–65. See also environmental movement National Organization for Women, 219 Nature Conservancy, 155, 196, 198 Neely, Mary Ann, 227, 233–234 neighborhood groups, 104, 218, 221, 241; and environmentalists, 130, 134, 136–137, 139, 146, 226, 261n1; stealth, 124, 136, 167 neighborhoods, 37, 43–44, 100, 104, 106, 188; and activists, 232; central, 57; and MoPac extension, 122 Neighbors for MoPac, 124, 136 Nelson, Willie, 11, 66 New Deal, 41 Nichols, Dick, 87 1991 PUD hearing, 185–186, 231 1975 bond election, 88–93, 98, 100 No-Aquifer-Big-Box Coalition, 219 Nofziger, Max, 171 North Austin, 12, 220, 232, 239 Northwest Austin, 126, 136, 196 Northwest Hills, 106, 257n3 Now or Never, 56, 62 Nuke, the, 85–87, 92, 119; and STNP, 232. See also anti-nuke movement Oak Hill, 12, 116, 121, 211 Oak Hill Neighborhood Association (OHNA), 211 Office of Environmental Affairs and Conservation, 235 Office of Environmental Resources Management, 75–76 Oliver, Bill, 138 Open Government Amendment, 207 Orzech, Ann, 110 Parks Department, 73, 84, 105, 198, 255n19, 259n55 Parks Endowment Fund, 129, 132 Pemberton Heights, 35 Perkins, Tom, 46 Perry, Edgar, 40

Perryman, Ray, 168 Phillips, Nash, 78 Pinnelli, Joe, 225 Planning Commission, 79–80, 104, 105, 110, 113, 126, 152; of 1969, 148–149; of 1938, 44 Planning Department, 44, 78, 81, 84, 88, 92 Plug-In Partners National Campaign, 233 Poage, Janet, 56 Proposition 22, 170 Public Works Department, 73 quality of life, 1, 3, 6–8, 11–12, 42–44, 87, 132, 158, 165–166, 173, 179, 185, 187, 190, 215–217, 247; advocates of, 6–7, 100, 141, 169, 171–173, 175, 179, 187–190, 192, 229, 250, 261n1 Quality of Living Task Force, 95 Real Estate Council of Austin (RECA), 162, 171–172, 190, 202, 208, 224 Redford, Robert, 149 Republic of Texas, 35 Republican Party, 167, 171, 176, 260n26 Resolution Trust Corporation (RTC), 147, 160 Responsible Growth for Northcross (RG4N), 221 Reynolds, Ronney, 152–154, 158, 162– 164, 170, 173–174. See also RULE council Riddell, Joe, 108–109, 145 Riley, Chris, 211, 224, 226 Rindy, Dean, 59, 165, 168, 170, 172, 176, 184, 215, 223 River City Coordinating Council (RCCC), 119 Rob Roy, 78 Rose, Mark, 127, 137 Rosenbaum, Steve, 86–87 Ruiz, Hector, 261n7 RULE council, 152–154, 158, 160, 162– 165, 170, 173, 178, 207, 222; and the Composite Ordinance, 153–154,

Index 271

160; and the Planning Commission, 152–153. See also Epstein, Louise; Larson, Bob; Reynolds, Ronney; Urdy, Charles San Antonio, Texas, 38, 82, 211; compared to Austin, 231 Sand Beach Tract, 131, 259n45 Save Austin’s Neighborhoods and Environment (SANE), 130, 132 Save Barton Creek Association (SBCA), 107, 114, 123, 125–126, 130, 138, 144– 145, 147–149, 152, 159–161, 184, 193, 210, 246 Save MUNY, 55–56, 217 Save Our Neighborhoods, 138 Save Our Springs (SOS), 13, 141, 159, 162, 164–165, 202, 204, 206, 211, 213, 216, 240, 249; board of, 214, 246, 251; standards of, 202–203 Save Our Springs Alliance (SOSA), 8, 177, 191, 202, 204, 206–212, 220–221, 246, 261n1; amendments of, 207; board of, 203, 210 Save Our Springs Coalition, 12, 65, 160, 164, 170, 177, 186, 191, 193, 249, 261n4; formation of, 154–158, 206– 207, 215, 220, 227 Save Our Springs PAC, 158 SB 1684, 178. See also Texas Legislature Scanlan, John, 167 Searchy, Seth, 144 Securities and Exchange Commission, 87 segregation, 255n8, 258n29 Seiders Park, 49 Seiders Springs, 49 SH 130, 240 Shade, Randi, 222–223 Shea, Brigid, 12, 46, 155–156, 158, 162, 170–171, 185, 214, 220–222 Sheffield, Beverly, 49–53, 65–66, 68–69, 97 Shipman, Sally, 110, 113, 132 Shivers, Allan, 56 Shoal Creek, 35–37, 43–44, 63, 69, 146, 175, 242; and flooding, 68–68; green-

belt, 51, 99; Hike and Bike Trail, 48–50, 57; watershed, 221 Sierra Club, 51–53, 57–58, 62, 64, 74–75, 76, 113, 160–161, 210–211, 221, 261n5 Siff, Ted, 225–226 Simon, Melvin, 109, 113 Simpson, Marilyn, 90, 104, 113 Ski Park, 47 Slaughter Creek watershed, 146 Slusher, Daryl, 128–129, 149, 152, 163– 164, 171–172, 184, 208, 227–229, 231, 234–236, 261n1, 261n5, 262n11 Smart Growth, 173–174, 189–193, 197, 205, 216; and Chamber of Commerce, 190 Smith, Craig, 160–161, 169, 246 Smith, Preston, 58 SOS Legal Defense Fund (SOSLDF), 177–178, 212 SOS Ordinance, 158–164, 167, 177–179, 188, 195, 201–202, 204, 208, 210, 219– 220, 222, 251; opponents of, 167–168 South Austin, 105–106, 108, 114, 136, 219, 222, 257n3 South River City Citizens, 219 South Texas Nuclear Project (STNP), 85, 232, 257n17 Southwest Austin, 111, 126, 140, 146, 173 Southwestern Bell Telephone, 87 Spelman, Bill, 172 Storm Ranch, 214 Stratus Properties, 202–204, 214 Strayhorn, Carole Keeton, 225. See also McClellan, Carole suburbs, 25–26, 100, 126, 140; and development, 30, 90, 121–125, 144, 188, 224; in eastern Travis County, 240– 241; and pollution, 145; regulation of, 93; and suburbanization, 91, 95, 197; and suburban sprawl, 127 Sunset Valley, 219–220 Suttle, Richard, 202, 220 Take Back Austin (TBA), 171 Taniguchi, Alan, 129 Target, 218 Tarrytown, 56

272 Index

Terrace PUD, 203 Texans United for Reform and Freedom (TURF), 211 Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ), 259n47, 261n35 Texas Constitution, 259n46 Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT), 110, 211. See also Highway Department Texas Legislature, 88, 93, 100, 127, 140, 147, 177–178, 193, 202, 204; and Austin-bashing legislation, 133, 140, 193, 204; and grandfathering exemptions, 133, 177–178, 188, 201; and 1967 session, 133; and SB 1684, 178 Texas Natural Resources and Conservation Commission, 133, 177 Texas Nature Conservancy, 193. See also Nature Conservancy Texas Supreme Court, 177–178, 210 three-legged stool, 9, 189–193, 214–216, 224, 226 3M, 103 Todd, Bruce, 152, 170–171, 256n33 Tom Miller Dam, 41 Town Lake, 11, 42, 44, 47, 51, 65–66, 71, 99, 175–176, 227; and apartment owners, 259n55; and Austin High School, 63–64; Hike and Bike, 66– 67, 128, 149, 162; and proposed convention center, 128–129, 163, 259n40. See also Auditorium Shores; Lady Bird Lake Town Lake Alliance (TLA), 138; campaign of, 163 Town Lake Beautification Project, 65, 69, 97 Town Lake Committee, 99 Town Lake Park Alliance (TLPA), 128–131 Town Lake Plan, 68, 139 Town Lake Program, 129–130 Town Lake Project, 71, 103, 128 Transportation Department, 110 Travis Country (subdivision), 78 Travis County, 117, 193, 195–196; eastern, 239, 241–242; western, 240

Travis County Green Footprint Project, 240 Travis County Greenprint Map, 199, 200 Travis Heights, 129 Travis Heights Neighborhood Organization (South River City Citizens), 105 Trust for Public Land, 185, 225 Umphres, John, 156 United South Austin, 106 United States Bicentennial, 67 University Democrats, 87, 89 University of Texas at Austin, 11, 38, 45, 55, 95, 175, 217, 229, 231–232, 237; and Austin Youth River Watch, 239; and the Brackenridge Tract, 56; students, 86; urbanization, 56, 62, 68–69, 79, 84, 94, 96, 153, 241–242; and the aquifer, 142; effects of, on environment, 239; and pollution, 143–144 Urdy, Charles, 121, 152–154, 158, 170; and MoPac extension, 122. See also RULE council US Fish and Wildlife Service, 178–179, 193 Utility Commission, 125 Vaughan, Stevie Ray, 11 Vietnam War, 98 Voorhees firm, 111 Waco, Texas, 82 Walden, Monica, 51–52 Walker, Lee, 167 Waller, Erwin, 35 Waller Creek, 35–36, 43–44, 69, 146, 190, 242 Walmart, 218–219, 232 Walnut Creek, 260n3 Walters, Bill, 209 Water and Wastewater Department, 74–75, 84–85 Water Districts, 92–93 water quality: and ordinances, 7, 94, 166, 168; regulation of, 177; rules of, 204

Index 273

Water Quality Protection Lands (WQPL), 196, 198–199, 205, 242 Water Quality Protection Zones (WQPZ), 178, 198 Watson, Kirk, 9, 173, 189, 191; council of, 174, 193, 196–197, 203–205, 207, 212, 215–216; and developers, 202; and the Green Council, 174, 189– 190, 201, 229; and Smart Growth, 174, 189–190; and the three-legged stool, 9, 214–216 WE CARE Austin, 62–65, 97, 104, 110, 113, 123, 129 Weinstock, Sarah, 87 Welsh, Elizabeth, 229, 236, 238–239, 243 Wendler, Sr., Ed, 88, 93 West Austin, 58, 217, 255n8 West Lake Hills, 41, 56 Wheeler, Rick, 171 White, Ben, 47–48

white flight, 144 Whole Foods Market, 149, 158 Wild Basin Preserve, 56–57 Wildlands Management Office, 197 Williamson Creek, 106–107, 119; watershed, 82 Woodmark Development Company, 138 Wooldridge, Alexander Penn, 39–40 Wooley, John 88 World War II, 59 Wynn, Will, 9, 224, 230, 234 Young, Peck, 171, 174 Yznaga, Mark, 158–159, 166, 169–172, 184, 214–216, 223 Zilker Park, 51, 53, 112, 114, 144, 175 Zilker Park Posse (ZPP), 107, 113–127, 130, 136, 138, 140–141, 144, 157; and ZPP Express, 138

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