By Mike Kanin from the InFact Daily.
Austin City Council members Thursday unanimously approved the $18 million acquisition of land in Hays County that might otherwise have been developed as the Jeremiah Ventures project. With the move, council members eliminated a long-running fight over grandfathering rules, environmental protections and the regulatory reach of city government.
Though this specific issue appears settled, Austin council members Thursday also postponed action on a new iteration of grandfathering rules. Known as the Vested Rights Ordinance, the measure would take the place of the city’s former Project Duration Ordinance – a document that council members repealed this year after intense legal and legislative pressure.
The delay means that the larger issue will not be settled before January. City staffers are reportedly in negotiations with the Real Estate Council of Austin over specifics.
The Jeremiah Ventures project would have created a development over the Barton Springs recharge zone of the Edwards Aquifer. Long-debated, the project raised the hackles of environmental interests over its treatment of sewage and its general location in a sensitive region. Jeremiah Ventures spent about six years trying to break ground on a residential subdivision with plans for 1,400 homes and a wastewater treatment facility that could process 330,000 gallons a day.
Under a modified offer, proposed by Jeremiah Ventures after several local government entities filed a lawsuit to block the development, Austin City Council approved in August the development of 1,000 homes and up to 270,000 gallons of effluent water daily, leaving the Save Our Springs Alliance (SOS) more or less alone in pursuit of legal action to block any development.
The Austin City Council’s recent decision to instead purchase the land from Jeremiah Ventures alleviated SOS concerns.
In addition to preservation of critical environmental features, the city’s purchase will reserve water rights associated with the tract for five years. As late as Thursday morning, that figure rested at only three years. With council member Chris Riley pushing Austin city staff to extend the rights to four years, owners’ representative Nikelle Meade of Husch Blackwell told council members that her clients would extend those protections to the full term.
SOS Executive Director Bill Bunch told the Austin City Council he welcomed the agreement.
“Buying this land for watershed protection is really the ideal outcome for this seven-acre struggle that we’ve been in,” he said. “We’re very happy to see this on your agenda (and) we strongly support buying it at a fair price.”
Bunch then questioned the figure tied to the deal. City staff told council members, on prompting, that the property was appraised at $18.3 million, $300,000 less than what the city paid.
This story was reprinted under an agreement between the Hays Free Press and InFact Daily.
