MannyIsGod
01-11-2005, 04:05 PM
The first time this proposal came before City Council was — oh, what a coincidence! — Dec. 14, the same evening that City Public Service held its public meeting on the proposed East Side coal-fired plant. Environmental activists scrambled to turn out in respectable numbers to both meetings.
SAWS voted to accept the PGA development proposal two days before Christmas and posted the 128-page environmental management plan on its Web site five days later. The City Council, which held a public hearing Tuesday, didn't get the document on the city's Web site until the day before the hearing.
It was obvious that the public meeting was just for show. One SAWS official told Smart Growth activist Chris Brown that it would be impossible to answer his questions before the council meeting on Thursday, let alone make any changes to the agreement.
Three years ago, tens of thousands of San Antonio voters signed petitions demanding a public referendum on the first golf resort proposal. This latest proposal, hustled through the approval process in a two-week period over the busy Christmas holidays, makes a farce of citizen involvement in the important decisions of government.
No more Mr. Nice Guy while democracy is under siege! .
http://www.mysanantonio.com/columnists/stories/MYSA010905.3H.ives.7f85ea6c.html
Thats simply an opinion column.
PGA war really won decade ago
Web Posted: 01/09/2005 12:00 AM CST
John Tedesco and Christopher Anderson
San Antonio Express-News
The approval of a controversial golf resort atop the aquifer recharge zone was foretold 10 years ago, when engineers for the developer exploited rules they helped write to circumvent an aquifer-protection ordinance, records show.
Pape-Dawson Engineers Inc., a San Antonio firm, made sure preliminary plans filed before the 1995 ordinance took effect could be used to grandfather the site through the approval process, according to correspondence written by one of the firm's vice presidents.
Through its efforts, the firm essentially gave a trump card to Lumbermen's Investment Corp. — a client and the developer behind the proposed PGA resort that was approved last week.
Because it was exempt from the 1995 rules, Lumbermen's said it could build thousands of homes over aquifer recharge features in Northeast Bexar County if it couldn't develop a 2,800-acre golf resort on the site.
The City Council's approval of the resort late Thursday ended three years of debate. Supporters said they negotiated strict terms to protect the environmentally sensitive recharge land of the Edwards Aquifer.
The 1995 ordinance limits development over the aquifer, but Lumbermen's effectively skirted it when Pape-Dawson filed a development plan before the aquifer rules were adopted, giving the company "vested rights" under a state grandfathering law.
In a private letter to Lumbermen's obtained from city files, a Pape-Dawson executive said the firm had worked behind the scenes in 1995 to make sure a type of preliminary master plan could be used to trigger vested rights.
The letter noted Pape-Dawson had filed such a plan for its client days before the city's new aquifer-protection ordinance became effective.
"Pape-Dawson has worked this issue as well as we could have anticipated," wrote Stephen Kacmar, a vice president of the engineering firm, in the Jan. 31, 1995, letter to Lumbermen's.
Kacmar and Gene Dawson Jr., who is now president of the family-owned firm, had been appointed to a city committee that drafted the ordinance.
Dawson previously had downplayed any perception of his firm's outfoxing city officials in a last-minute effort to grandfather Lumbermen's property.
Reached at his home Friday, Kacmar, who now works part-time for Pape-Dawson, said he didn't remember writing the letter, but added: "I was protecting a client. That's my responsibility from an engineering prospective."
Dawson did not return messages left at his office and on his mobile phone last week.
One member of a "vested rights" task force created by Mayor Ed Garza wonders why city officials didn't ask tough questions in the 1990s about Lumbermen's initial grandfathering claim.
"We wouldn't be having this debate about (the PGA resort) if the city had done its job in the first place," said City Councilman Julián Castro, who is running for mayor. "We should have put up a much bigger fight years ago."
Castro, who previously opposed the project, joined the council majority Thursday in the 10-1 vote to approve Lumbermen's resort plan. Castro and PGA supporters point out the final agreement imposes what they describe as stringent rules to protect the aquifer.
Councilman Carroll Schubert, another member of the vested rights task force and a mayoral rival of Castro, was reluctant to discuss the project's vested status, saying he didn't know all the details. EDIT: How the FUCK can he vote approving something when he doesn't know all of the details??!??!?!?!?
But he complained that developers often are singled out for doing something every interest group does: lobby.
"I will assure you, there are lots of other people with lobbyists at City Hall," Schubert said.
At 45, the gray-haired Dawson has proved to be a charming and articulate veteran in the seemingly endless conflict over how San Antonio should balance growth with conservation.
Dawson's engineering firm says it caters to landowners with "challenging, complicated, and sometimes controversial" projects, such as the PGA resort.
To best serve his clients, Dawson has said he believes in keeping close tabs on City Hall and influencing the rules that affect their business.
"We have to stay involved in the details of ordinance writing, board appointments, and council elections," Dawson wrote to the local real estate industry in a 2000 newsletter.
In the mid 1990s, the city grappled with a proposed ordinance to protect the swath of caves, sinkholes, and other ground features in North Bexar County that allow storm water to replenish the Edwards Aquifer.
Dawson and environmentalist Danielle Milam were appointed as co-chairs in 1994 to the committee that wrote the new environmental rules.
To prevent a rush by developers to avoid the ordinance, the City Council imposed a moratorium that banned the filing of development plans over the recharge zone until the new rules passed.
But the city didn't explicitly say the moratorium covered preliminary master plans. Pape-Dawson filed 20 plans covering 7,300 acres — including Lumbermen's property — before the city caught its mistake and closed the loophole.
The San Antonio Express-News first published details of the Pape-Dawson filings in January 2002, and in a later interview, Dawson insisted there was no sinister plot.
"Everybody that owned a property tried to file a (preliminary plan)," Dawson said.
"The city was in full participation," Dawson continued. "I mean, they signed off on all the (preliminary plans). Everyone knew, when the ordinance was passed, that all those (plans) were on file."
But Kacmar's letter suggests Pape-Dawson was using its position on the aquifer committee to acquire vested rights for Lumbermen's.
"For the last few weeks, we have been working behind the scene with respect to the new development regulations over the Edwards Aquifer recharge zone," Kacmar wrote to James Lassiter, then Lumbermen's senior vice president for real estate.
Kindly note, Kacmar continued, that the aquifer ordinance Pape-Dawson helped draft says any preliminary plan filed before the new rules are approved can justify "Category 1" status, the city's term for a vested project.
"As you know, we prepared a (preliminary plan)," Kacmar wrote, and Pape-Dawson filed it "just prior to council action on the new regulations."
Kacmar attached "what we believe to be a valuable letter from city planning indicating approval of your (plan) dated Jan. 20, 1995," days before the ordinance became effective.
"Accordingly, your property is now Category 1," Kacmar concluded, underlining the sentence for emphasis. "Pape-Dawson has worked this issue as well as we could have anticipated."
Former Mayor Howard Peak, who played a key role as a city councilman in promoting the aquifer ordinance, doubted Pape-Dawson did anything unethical.
"They were taking advantage of the law at the time," Peak said. "The way the letter was worded by Steve (Kacmar), maybe for the sake of his client he was puffing it up a bit."
In interviews and an e-mail exchange with the Express-News, the city's planning director at the time took a more skeptical view of Kacmar's letter.
"Clearly the good guys got outmaneuvered," wrote Dave Pasley, who had argued against accepting the plans but lost the battle.
"The City Council could have prevented this whole grandfather thing," Pasley added in his e-mail. "It is clear to me that there was an intent and a desire, politically, for widespread grandfathering to occur and the effects of the water quality ordinance to be mitigated.
"This allowed it to appear that San Antonio was being progressive in environmental protection while at the same time effectively exempting the developers who were in the loop."
On the day Kacmar assured Lumbermen's its project was grandfathered, a formality remained.
Pape-Dawson asked the San Antonio Water System, the agency charged with determining whether projects are vested over the recharge zone, to "please verify in writing that this development is classified as a Category 1 development."
Under the terms of the ordinance Pape-Dawson helped draft, SAWS determined the project was vested.
An approval letter arrived within two weeks. That allowed Lumbermen's to seek a special taxing district that would have created a development known as PGA Village. But opponents launched a petition drive that prompted PGA of America to back out of the deal.
A second deal between PGA of America and the city not to annex the Lumbermen's land failed last year after environmentalists raised questions, again prompting the professional golfers group to pull out.
The proposal approved last week was by a different group, the PGA Tour.
While PGA of America comprises 28,000 men and women working as club professionals, instructors and in other areas of the golf industry, the PGA Tour formed its own organization years ago to supervise professional golf tournaments for its approximately 800 members.
In approving the PGA Tour project, the city agreed not to annex the property for 29 years and to forgo city taxes.
Now, this is simply a question, but one where I'm interested in peoples opinions.
When a corporation does something that obviously goes against the intent of a law, but is legal due to a loophole, should society have any recourse?
SAWS voted to accept the PGA development proposal two days before Christmas and posted the 128-page environmental management plan on its Web site five days later. The City Council, which held a public hearing Tuesday, didn't get the document on the city's Web site until the day before the hearing.
It was obvious that the public meeting was just for show. One SAWS official told Smart Growth activist Chris Brown that it would be impossible to answer his questions before the council meeting on Thursday, let alone make any changes to the agreement.
Three years ago, tens of thousands of San Antonio voters signed petitions demanding a public referendum on the first golf resort proposal. This latest proposal, hustled through the approval process in a two-week period over the busy Christmas holidays, makes a farce of citizen involvement in the important decisions of government.
No more Mr. Nice Guy while democracy is under siege! .
http://www.mysanantonio.com/columnists/stories/MYSA010905.3H.ives.7f85ea6c.html
Thats simply an opinion column.
PGA war really won decade ago
Web Posted: 01/09/2005 12:00 AM CST
John Tedesco and Christopher Anderson
San Antonio Express-News
The approval of a controversial golf resort atop the aquifer recharge zone was foretold 10 years ago, when engineers for the developer exploited rules they helped write to circumvent an aquifer-protection ordinance, records show.
Pape-Dawson Engineers Inc., a San Antonio firm, made sure preliminary plans filed before the 1995 ordinance took effect could be used to grandfather the site through the approval process, according to correspondence written by one of the firm's vice presidents.
Through its efforts, the firm essentially gave a trump card to Lumbermen's Investment Corp. — a client and the developer behind the proposed PGA resort that was approved last week.
Because it was exempt from the 1995 rules, Lumbermen's said it could build thousands of homes over aquifer recharge features in Northeast Bexar County if it couldn't develop a 2,800-acre golf resort on the site.
The City Council's approval of the resort late Thursday ended three years of debate. Supporters said they negotiated strict terms to protect the environmentally sensitive recharge land of the Edwards Aquifer.
The 1995 ordinance limits development over the aquifer, but Lumbermen's effectively skirted it when Pape-Dawson filed a development plan before the aquifer rules were adopted, giving the company "vested rights" under a state grandfathering law.
In a private letter to Lumbermen's obtained from city files, a Pape-Dawson executive said the firm had worked behind the scenes in 1995 to make sure a type of preliminary master plan could be used to trigger vested rights.
The letter noted Pape-Dawson had filed such a plan for its client days before the city's new aquifer-protection ordinance became effective.
"Pape-Dawson has worked this issue as well as we could have anticipated," wrote Stephen Kacmar, a vice president of the engineering firm, in the Jan. 31, 1995, letter to Lumbermen's.
Kacmar and Gene Dawson Jr., who is now president of the family-owned firm, had been appointed to a city committee that drafted the ordinance.
Dawson previously had downplayed any perception of his firm's outfoxing city officials in a last-minute effort to grandfather Lumbermen's property.
Reached at his home Friday, Kacmar, who now works part-time for Pape-Dawson, said he didn't remember writing the letter, but added: "I was protecting a client. That's my responsibility from an engineering prospective."
Dawson did not return messages left at his office and on his mobile phone last week.
One member of a "vested rights" task force created by Mayor Ed Garza wonders why city officials didn't ask tough questions in the 1990s about Lumbermen's initial grandfathering claim.
"We wouldn't be having this debate about (the PGA resort) if the city had done its job in the first place," said City Councilman Julián Castro, who is running for mayor. "We should have put up a much bigger fight years ago."
Castro, who previously opposed the project, joined the council majority Thursday in the 10-1 vote to approve Lumbermen's resort plan. Castro and PGA supporters point out the final agreement imposes what they describe as stringent rules to protect the aquifer.
Councilman Carroll Schubert, another member of the vested rights task force and a mayoral rival of Castro, was reluctant to discuss the project's vested status, saying he didn't know all the details. EDIT: How the FUCK can he vote approving something when he doesn't know all of the details??!??!?!?!?
But he complained that developers often are singled out for doing something every interest group does: lobby.
"I will assure you, there are lots of other people with lobbyists at City Hall," Schubert said.
At 45, the gray-haired Dawson has proved to be a charming and articulate veteran in the seemingly endless conflict over how San Antonio should balance growth with conservation.
Dawson's engineering firm says it caters to landowners with "challenging, complicated, and sometimes controversial" projects, such as the PGA resort.
To best serve his clients, Dawson has said he believes in keeping close tabs on City Hall and influencing the rules that affect their business.
"We have to stay involved in the details of ordinance writing, board appointments, and council elections," Dawson wrote to the local real estate industry in a 2000 newsletter.
In the mid 1990s, the city grappled with a proposed ordinance to protect the swath of caves, sinkholes, and other ground features in North Bexar County that allow storm water to replenish the Edwards Aquifer.
Dawson and environmentalist Danielle Milam were appointed as co-chairs in 1994 to the committee that wrote the new environmental rules.
To prevent a rush by developers to avoid the ordinance, the City Council imposed a moratorium that banned the filing of development plans over the recharge zone until the new rules passed.
But the city didn't explicitly say the moratorium covered preliminary master plans. Pape-Dawson filed 20 plans covering 7,300 acres — including Lumbermen's property — before the city caught its mistake and closed the loophole.
The San Antonio Express-News first published details of the Pape-Dawson filings in January 2002, and in a later interview, Dawson insisted there was no sinister plot.
"Everybody that owned a property tried to file a (preliminary plan)," Dawson said.
"The city was in full participation," Dawson continued. "I mean, they signed off on all the (preliminary plans). Everyone knew, when the ordinance was passed, that all those (plans) were on file."
But Kacmar's letter suggests Pape-Dawson was using its position on the aquifer committee to acquire vested rights for Lumbermen's.
"For the last few weeks, we have been working behind the scene with respect to the new development regulations over the Edwards Aquifer recharge zone," Kacmar wrote to James Lassiter, then Lumbermen's senior vice president for real estate.
Kindly note, Kacmar continued, that the aquifer ordinance Pape-Dawson helped draft says any preliminary plan filed before the new rules are approved can justify "Category 1" status, the city's term for a vested project.
"As you know, we prepared a (preliminary plan)," Kacmar wrote, and Pape-Dawson filed it "just prior to council action on the new regulations."
Kacmar attached "what we believe to be a valuable letter from city planning indicating approval of your (plan) dated Jan. 20, 1995," days before the ordinance became effective.
"Accordingly, your property is now Category 1," Kacmar concluded, underlining the sentence for emphasis. "Pape-Dawson has worked this issue as well as we could have anticipated."
Former Mayor Howard Peak, who played a key role as a city councilman in promoting the aquifer ordinance, doubted Pape-Dawson did anything unethical.
"They were taking advantage of the law at the time," Peak said. "The way the letter was worded by Steve (Kacmar), maybe for the sake of his client he was puffing it up a bit."
In interviews and an e-mail exchange with the Express-News, the city's planning director at the time took a more skeptical view of Kacmar's letter.
"Clearly the good guys got outmaneuvered," wrote Dave Pasley, who had argued against accepting the plans but lost the battle.
"The City Council could have prevented this whole grandfather thing," Pasley added in his e-mail. "It is clear to me that there was an intent and a desire, politically, for widespread grandfathering to occur and the effects of the water quality ordinance to be mitigated.
"This allowed it to appear that San Antonio was being progressive in environmental protection while at the same time effectively exempting the developers who were in the loop."
On the day Kacmar assured Lumbermen's its project was grandfathered, a formality remained.
Pape-Dawson asked the San Antonio Water System, the agency charged with determining whether projects are vested over the recharge zone, to "please verify in writing that this development is classified as a Category 1 development."
Under the terms of the ordinance Pape-Dawson helped draft, SAWS determined the project was vested.
An approval letter arrived within two weeks. That allowed Lumbermen's to seek a special taxing district that would have created a development known as PGA Village. But opponents launched a petition drive that prompted PGA of America to back out of the deal.
A second deal between PGA of America and the city not to annex the Lumbermen's land failed last year after environmentalists raised questions, again prompting the professional golfers group to pull out.
The proposal approved last week was by a different group, the PGA Tour.
While PGA of America comprises 28,000 men and women working as club professionals, instructors and in other areas of the golf industry, the PGA Tour formed its own organization years ago to supervise professional golf tournaments for its approximately 800 members.
In approving the PGA Tour project, the city agreed not to annex the property for 29 years and to forgo city taxes.
Now, this is simply a question, but one where I'm interested in peoples opinions.
When a corporation does something that obviously goes against the intent of a law, but is legal due to a loophole, should society have any recourse?