B and B

Obama's new direction?

How is Obama going to handle the Republicans who are virtually unanimously out to destroy him?  As Paul Krugman relates, his recent words and actions are not a good sign.  I hope this changes very soon.

Mr. Obama’s [freezing federal workers'] pay ploy might, just might, have been justified if he had used the announcement of a freeze as an occasion to take a strong stand against Republican demands — to declare that at a time when deficits are an important issue, tax breaks for the wealthiest aren’t acceptable.

But he didn’t. Instead, he apparently intended the pay freeze announcement as a peace gesture to Republicans the day before a bipartisan summit. At that meeting, Mr. Obama, who has faced two years of complete scorched-earth opposition, declared that he had failed to reach out sufficiently to his implacable enemies. He did not, as far as anyone knows, wear a sign on his back saying “Kick me,” although he might as well have.

I do remember that there were times in 1995 after the last Republican takeover during a Democratic administration when I was about completely fed up with Bill Clinton.  His signing of the salvage logging rider, suspending environmental laws to permit accelerated logging in U.S. National Forests, was almost the last straw for me.  Fortunately Clinton realized his mistakes and turned things around in time.

Lost Maples State Natural Area is growing

From the San Antonio Express-News today:

For centuries, people have been drawn to the twisting limestone canyons that make up Lost Maples State Natural Area.

Lou Waters was one. Now 70, he can hop across white boulders to explore the grottos like a 10-year-old.

On Friday, he plans to sign paperwork to transfer more than 600 acres of his neighboring ranch to the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department to be added to Lost Maples. Another 100 acres will be transferred this fall.

Agency staff said the public should have access to trails on the new addition — which is a third of the park's current size — by 2012.

State appraisers valued the land at more than $2 million, but Waters is selling it for $1.5 million because he wants to see the land and its Can Creek watershed protected forever.

Land acquisition funds from the Parks and Wildlife Department and a $400,000 federal conservation grant will pay for it.

“You see it and you just want to take care of it,” Waters said.

In a memo explaining the sale, Waters said walking through the Can Creek canyons in the fall under the native big-tooth maples was like “hiking in a golden-red cathedral.”

His wife, Wanda Waters, said, “It just makes you feel so good that other people are going to be able to enjoy it.”

Lost Maples is about two hour drive west of here and a spectacular park as it is.  Excellent news that it will soon be about 30% larger.

Texas Parks and Wildlife offered land next to two state parks. Will they take it?

From the Hill Country Planning Association:

The Hill Country Planning Association asks that you please consider sending two e-mail letters (samples provided (below) to support Tx Parks & Wildlife Commission purchasing 732 acres adjacent to Lost Maples and accepting 3000 acres adjacent to Government Canyon.  My understanding is that the state needs to hear public support, or the default position would be to decline these opportunities to meet budget cuts.  With sufficient support, they have a good chance of being passed.   Thanks 

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Land Purchase - Bandera County:  Lost Maples State Park
In a meeting on May 27, 2009, the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission (the Commission) will consider the purchase of approximately 732 acres of land adjacent to Lost Maples State Park in Bandera County. At this meeting the public will have an opportunity to comment on the proposed transaction before the Commission takes action. The meeting will start at 9:00 a.m. at the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department Headquarters, 4200 Smith School Road, Austin, Texas 78744. Prior to the meeting, public comment may be submitted to Ted Hollingsworth, Land Conservation, Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, 4200 Smith School Road, Austin, Texas 78744 or by email at:  [email protected]  or through the TPWD web site at www.tpwd.state.tx.us .

Dear Mr. Hollingsworth: 

I will not be able to attend the May 27, 2009 meeting described below.  I wish to submit my opinion for public comment.  I strongly support purchase of land adjacent to Lost Maples State Park in Bandera County.  Lost Maples is a popular destination and is at risk of having its natural resources decline through overuse.  Purchasing an additional 732 acres of land adjacent to Lost Maples will help protect more of this invaluable and rapidly vanishing habitat.

 

Sincerely,

(name and address)

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Acceptance of Land Donation - Bexar County:  Government Canyon State Park

In a meeting on Ma7 27, 2009, the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission (the Commission) will consider accepting a donation of approximately 3,000 acres adjacent to Government Canyon State Park in Bexar County.  At this meeting the public will have an opportunity to comment on the proposed transaction before the Commission takes action.  The meeting will start at 9:00 a.m. at the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department Headquarters, 4200 Smith School Road, Austin, Texas 78744.  Prior to the meeting, public comment may be submitted to Ted Hollingsworth, Land Conservation, Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, 4200 Smith School Road, Austin, Texas 78744 or by email at:  [email protected]  or through the TPWD web site at www.tpwd.state.tx.us .

Dear Mr. Hollingsworth:

I will not be able to attend the May 27, 2009 meeting described below.  I wish to submit my opinion for public comment.  I strongly support TP&W Commission accepting donation of 3000 acres adjacent to Government Canyon State Park in Bexar County.  Government Canyon State Park is a wonderful asset that the public is just starting to utilize.   With such close proximity to San Antonio, it is expected the park will be heavily utilized.  The City of San Antonio Parks and Natural Areas are already over-utilized and crowded.  Accepting donation of additional land adjacent to Government Canyon will help protect more of this invaluable and rapidly vanishing habitat.

 

Sincerely,

(name and address)

After 15 years, Congress returns to the job of protecting our public lands

I wasn't able to pay it much attention at the time due to all the excitement surrounding Obama's inauguration and the major concern over our economic downturn, but about ten days ago, the Senate passed a measure that purports to protect large areas of federal lands in numerous states. 

According to at least one news article (from ENN), it provides "the largest expansion of the National Wilderness Preservation System in 15 years."  The one 15 years ago must be the California Desert Protection Act, passed in October 1994 as one of the last acts of the Democratic-controlled Congress.  The Gingrich/DeLay GOP, and their antipathy to the very concept of land that belongs to everyone in the country, took over Congress a few weeks later.

Virtually ever since then, we've had to play defense in public lands protection, including numerous fights over preventing the Bush administration and the Republican-controlled Congress from selling off our lands to developers and other special interests.  It is nice to be on the offensive again.

Express-News exposes developer tricks to evade tree preservation law

From front page of the Sunday Express-News:

When the City Council approved San Antonio’s first tree-preservation ordinance in 1997, there was no question the rules applied to real estate developers.

But what happens when a property owner claims he’s not a developer, and hundreds of acres of trees are bulldozed on his land as part of a ranching operation?

In the case of Hugo Gutierrez Jr., the answer is: nothing. The tree ordinance didn’t apply to him — and it might not apply to developers who try the same thing.

The case highlights a potential loophole in the preservation standards that can be used by other real estate developers, many of whom criticize the city’s rules as excessive and expensive.

Environmentalists complain San Antonio’s tree canopy is rapidly disappearing. They said Gutierrez’s case illustrates a way around the city tree ordinance, which requires developers to save trees and pay mitigation costs.

As if the state legislature hasn't hobbled local communities enough with the vast loopholes that fit under "vested rights."  Read on for the gory details, and plenty of them.

The response today, from Mayor Phil Hardberger:

"My suggestion of what we'll do, and I intend to talk to our City Council about it, is that we create, by ordinance, a provision that when an agricultural property is cleared of trees, and then sold to a developer, then that becomes a taxable event. So that you have to pay the mitigation damages. Because it's no longer being used for agricultural land."

Hardberger acknowledged his proposal will be challenged in court by the real estate community.

"It's certainly possible it will be challenged," the mayor said. "I would anticipate it would be challenged because it's a pretty sweet deal now."

Hardberger said he will also ask Bexar County legislators to write a bill that would amend Texas law to help the city's cause.

"I doubt when the Legislature was trying to protect agricultural land, I doubt if they envisioned that (ranchers will) clear all the trees and sell it to a developer. That probably was not envisioned. I think there will be legislators who will be willing to close that loophole."

Hardberger said he will also direct lobbyists who represent the city to support such legislation.

"One thing I'm not going to do is just to sit here for the last year of office and watch trees be cleared on a grand scale and feel like there's nothing we can do but wring our hands," Hardberger said. "I'm not going to do that. I'm going to take action."

Will the Legislature block any attempts to rein in the bad practices of real estate developers yet again?

Developers' land-trashing behavior near San Antonio now threatens U.S. Army's Camp Bullis

The rate of land-trashing by real estate developers in northwest Bexar County has reached the stage where it threatens the continued existence of an amy training ground, Camp Bullis.  This threat has compelled both the City of San Antonio and the U.S. Army to act, which, finally, has brought some attention to the issue -- though, alas, not in a general sense.  Plenty of formerly beautiful Hill Country terrain and wildlife habitat has been scraped and blasted into nothingness in recent years without raising much alarm from anyone but those of us in the immediate area.

From the San Antonio Express-News over the weekend:

A federal judge Friday ordered a San Antonio-area developer to cease road-clearing operations for a new subdivision adjacent to Camp Bullis, giving wildlife experts time to evaluate the project's impact on golden-cheeked warbler habitat.

U.S. District Judge Xavier Rodriguez granted a temporary restraining order against INTCO-Dominion Partnership and set a hearing for 10 a.m. Wednesday on an environmental group's request for a permanent injunction that would halt development next to the range.

The lawsuit, filed Friday by Aquifer Guardians in Urban Areas, contends that INTCO is destroying dense trees and brush that are home to the endangered migratory bird that nests each spring and summer in the Hill Country. Destroying warbler habitat is a violation of the Endangered Species Act.

“This is an early victory. It's not the end,” Aquifer Guardians President Enrique Valdivia said. “But if we didn't get the restraining order, the bulldozers might work through the weekend and there wouldn't be anything left to litigate over.”

INTCO has been clearing trees and brush on the 340-acre site near Bullis as it prepares to build a road for a high-end subdivision. The company's Austin-based attorney, Allen Glen, said it was “a safe assumption” his client would follow the order and suspend work.

...

Critics of INTCO say the project, and others like it, are driving the warbler onto Camp Bullis, and that if the trend isn't stopped the Army will be unable to train on the 27,994-acre range. As growth has exploded in the area, the warbler population on Bullis has nearly doubled from 672 in 2001 to 1,086 in 2007.

Fort Sam and top city and county leaders say any reduction of training area raises the risk of the Army moving 37,250 military and civilian workers to be on the post by 2011.

“The issue is bigger, of course, than the fate of the warbler. It's concern about development around Camp Bullis and, of course, the impact on the aquifer recharge zone,” Aquifer Guardians' Valdivia said.

Federal law and Defense Department policy forbid the Army from taking legal action, forcing it to rely on groups such as the Aquifer Guardians and the Greater Edwards Aquifer Alliance, which had considered seeking the restraining order.

...

Post spokesman Phil Reidinger said court action is the only way to stop work on the site while biologists take a closer look, and added that Fort Sam “cannot shoulder the conservation burden alone” — a view shared by its advocates.

“The really big problem with this is Camp Bullis is really the only one in the area that is observing the law,” Greater Edwards Aquifer Alliance Executive Director Annalisa Peace said. “If everybody was observing the law, it probably wouldn't be a problem for Camp Bullis.”

Hill Country Planning Association, aka "Hill Country Militia," rises up against developers' land-trashing

For a little story on the animosity that real estate developers are engendering in our neck of the woods due to the way they manage to transform bucolic hill country vistas into moonscapes of destruction, see this recent article in the San Antonio Current by Greg Harmon of harmon on earth (emphasis added):

[In early 2007] Reports that the San Antonio Water System was seeking to expand its authority across the city’s entire 5-mile extraterritorial jurisdiction, and that a new high-density development straddling Medina and Bandera counties was seeking SAWS sewer and water service, had rattled a broader geography of turf warriors. Many of them were already members of the non-profit Greater Edwards Aquifer Alliance, whose mission is specifically focused on protecting the Edwards Aquifer.

In a galleon of a ranch house outside Helotes modeled on Yellowstone National Park’s guest quarters, they debated just what they could do to stop the quickening pace of sprawling development. While SAWS officials argued that extending their pipes would better protect area water supplies by limiting the creation of smaller, less-professional water-company operations or, worse, the explosion of septic-tank communities, the consensus in the meeting was that the lines would only ensure the continued rush of concrete, sheet rock, and tarpaper.

The mix of political persuasions was bridged by a collective, dawning environmental consciousness, perhaps best illustrated by the retired neurosurgeon from Quihi, busy battling plans for a quarry in his hamlet.

“I never considered myself an environmentalist. I really didn’t,” said Robert Fitzgerald. “But once you start looking at what people are doing down there, if you have any feeling at all, you become an environmentalist.”

A member of the Edwards Aquifer Authority publicly confessed the agency hadn’t been willing to act on many issues out of fear. “It’s fear of what the legislature will do. Really, it’s fear of what the developers will get the lege to do to us,” he said. “Some think it’s time we called their bluff.”

Then Bebe [Fenstermaker] shot off from the front of the room. “We’re losing Texas. I don’t know if you know that,” she said. “I can’t stand to drive anywhere anymore … We look like New Jersey.”

A woman at the opposite end of the stone and timber expanse shook her jaw. “New Jersey looks better.”

Some attendees compared the motivation behind the night’s meeting to the survival ethic of the early Texians. “We’re kind of like the pioneers 200 years ago,” said one. “When there was a fight, they all left their homes and came together.”

No surprise that in such a charged environment when prospective names for the group were floated the combativeness of the moment seeped out. “How about militia?” offered one. “Hill Country Militia?”

It took time, but eventually the more mundane Hill County Planning Association was adopted.

Early versions of the group’s Master Plan struck one prominent participant as a rewrite of the Communist Manifesto, though it read more like an early American Revolutionary screed. A trace of those rhetorical flourishes remains, particularly the opening “We the People.”

After lengthy defining of place and purpose, the group’s Master Plan comes to a solitary demand: “An immediate moratorium is called on all development in The Hill Country to assure compliance with all local, State, and Federal laws and until a comprehensive cumulative environmental impact study is completed.”

...

Group members were still working out the final language of the Master Plan when developers at Sonoma Verde were blasting and excavating their way to the perfect limestone tabula rasa, a blank slate devoid of any living thing, atop that cherished Edwards recharge zone.

...

Today the [Fenstermaker] sisters watch as Post Oak Development blasts a hill flat on the backside of Crownridge Canyon Natural Area off Kyle Seal Parkway. It’s like nothing they’ve ever seen before.

“This is like West Virginia coal mining,” Mary Fenstermaker says.

“We’ve seen land raped, but we’ve never seen that,” Bebe says. “I’ve never seen Texas treated like that.”

For much more, read the entire article.

Geoengineering: Rolling the dice with the only planet we've got

If "geoengineering" is truly becoming a mainstream concept, as suggested by Chris Mooney at the Intersection (based on a recent mention in Time magazine), then we are truly on a dangerous path.

Time writes, "Geoengineering has long been the province of kooks, but as the difficulty of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions has become harder to ignore, it is slowly emerging as an option of last resort."

Are we already reduced to thinking about last resorts?   If we ever reach the point that we have to say, Let's purposefully try to mess up our planet's extremely complicated climate system in order to restore a poorly understood equilibrium that we lost a while back," then we are truly f****d. 

We don't have a planet to practice on.  We've never done anything like that before.  What are the odds it would work as intended?

If we reach that point, it's far worse than the equivalent of a Hail Mary pass at the end of a football game, or pulling the goalie at the end of a hockey game.  After all, those strategies have been tried before and we know they can work, if rarely.  In the case of geongineering, it won't work.  To even think of attempting it is to think that we're doomed anyway so we might as well have some fun on the way out.

We're not there yet, thankfully, so let's send the talk of geoengineering back to the science fiction books where it belongs.

Mayor Hardberger and SAWS take a stand against rampant development over the Edwards Aquifer

San Antonio Mayor Phil Hardberger and the board of the San Antonio Water System took a stand against the rampant development of the Hill Country landscape earlier this week.  This is a decision that deserves wider recognition.

From the Express-News, Dec 5:

Taking a rare stand against a developer to protect a pristine watershed that drains into the Edwards Aquifer, trustees of the San Antonio Water System unanimously rejected an agreement Tuesday to provide water to a planned subdivision in the remote hills northwest of the city.

Baruch Properties wanted water for the Hills of Castle Rock, a 1,766-acre property near Texas 16 and Park Road 37 in Medina County. The nearest SAWS water main is 7.5 miles away.

Environmentalists and neighbors argued that SAWS water service would allow high-density development that otherwise is not likely to occur because of a lack of available water supplies.

High-density development, they said, would bring polluted runoff and downstream flooding to San Geronimo Creek and an on-site wastewater treatment plant whose effluent would be added to the creek that drains into the aquifer a few miles downstream.

“Density development in a sensitive zone simply is not a good thing for the citizens of San Antonio, for our city, for our neighbors or for our water,” said Mayor Phil Hardberger in explaining his motion to deny the request.

...

Hardberger said he recognized that to get a SAWS water main to the site, the developer made concessions such as scaling back from 3,500 homes to 2,700, but he said the city's policy should not be to diminish the harm but to do good.

He said the city's “irreversible mistakes” in planning over the aquifer's sensitive areas are on display by driving out Loop 1604 North and U.S. 281.

Later in the article, the developer suggests they can simply go the state agency (TCEQ) and leave San Antonio and SAWS out of the process entirely.  Given how the state government works, they would be likely to get their way via that route, so I am unsure how this battle is going to work out.

But I am happy to see that the city government of San Antonio is in no mood to encourage  destructive development of the Hill Country and the Edwards Aquifer.

Water pollution report should be an embarrassment for all Texans

Water pollution is still a major problem, particularly here in Texas.  The Express-News reported yesterday (emphasis added):

Texas leads the nation in the number of treatment plants and industrial facilities that fail to meet pollution standards for the wastewater they dump into rivers and streams, according to a report released Thursday.

The report, Troubled Waters, found that 318, or about 53 percent, of the state's major industrial and wastewater plants failed Clean Water Act standards in at least one of 12 reporting periods in 2005.

...

The data were compiled by U.S. PIRG and released by Environment Texas on the banks of the San Antonio River in Brackenridge Park on Thursday. Nationally, the groups are lobbying for Congress to pass the Clean Water Restoration Act, which would strengthen water quality protection.

Although Texas tops the nation in the number of facilities that violate water pollution rules, it falls in the middle of the pack when looking at the percentage of facilities that do so. The list is topped by smaller New England states like Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and New Hampshire, all of which had more than 75 percent of their plants earning violations.

Locally, Environment Texas has been leading efforts to change state pollution laws that, the group claims, makes it profitable to pollute in Texas.

A 2003 state auditor's report that looked at 80 pollution cases backs that contention. The auditor found that state fines for the pollution cases totaled less than $1.7 million, but the facilities involved benefited more than $8.6 million by not complying with regulations.

Glenn Shankle, executive director of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, recommended changing the regulations to address the profit issue in 2006, but the commission has not adopted the recommendations. Agency spokeswoman Lisa Wheeler said the commission will likely take up the issue again early next year.

Rep. Mike Villarreal, D-San Antonio, who attended the news conference, promised to sponsor legislation next session to "take away the incentive for these worst polluters to make a profit at the expense of the rest of us."

It would be the fourth consecutive session such legislation is introduced, Environment Texas Director Luke Metzger said.

"Each time the Texas Chemical Council and others have been able to defeat the bill in committee," he said.

This state of our waterways should be an embarrassment for all Texans.  I hope we can do better.

For the full Troubled Waters report, visit Environment Texas.