Rezoning

Urban planning has become a hot topic in College Station. This Thursday February 1 at 7:00 at Our Saviors Lutheran Church on the corner of the frontage road and Wood Creek Drive, Weingarten will bring before the Planning and Zoning Commission yet another proposal for rezoning at least a part of the tract of land at the corner of Rock Prairie and SH 6, which will bring more strip center development and an eventual big box with its traffic and sea of concrete parking lot to the gateway to our city.

East Side Champions

Through this battle, good zoning in College Station has been advocated by an unlikely brigade of east side champions. But they are not championing good zoning in College Station so much as they are fighting to protect the value and tranquility of their own neighborhood. God bless them for caring. Without them there would be no resistance to big boxes and strip malls and clear cutting of trees. The east side residents have set a good example.

This is somewhat of a new chapter in College Station. This battle is not just between the residents of our town. This battle pits the citizens of College Station against outside developers.

While we should all be grateful for the impressive efforts of the east side folks, we would do well to expand our scope of perspective and think about development and planning as an aspect of protecting, not just a few neighborhoods, but our whole city. This requires a holistic approach whose focus includes, not just traffic and barriers, but an integration of development to culture, esthetics and economics.

It does not make sense for each area of town to band together to protect only their very local interests. This approach weakens citizen strength, and it leaves many of our larger common interests unconsidered. These interests include traffic patterns throughout town and our appeal to outside businesses and visitors.

This should not be a fight at all. It is possible for citizens, city staff and developers to all be on the same page. For this to happen, we must articulate a clear and precise plan that works for the long-range benefit of all. While many developers lack the patience or civic mindedness for this more deliberate and long-term approach to development, there are those that do. We should recruit those developers just the same as we would recruit any other quality business. We should form partnerships with developers who are willing to be concerned and creative partners in the planning process and help make their efforts profitable.

New Paradigms

We are facing many transitions that require paradigm shifts. The better we are at anticipating the changes associated with our growth, the better job we will do at planning for our future. We must have foresight.

All across town we hear the lament of the wholesale loss of trees, and the spread of strip center developments, not to mention the indignation about having much of this development subsidized with our tax dollars.

There are still those among us who believe that a city has no authority to direct, much less plan, its growth. They believe that a pure concept of capitalism should prevent cities from interfering in a business’ right to seek profit by whatever means it deems necessary. This view is incomplete and inconsistent.

Why should a business have any more authority to organize and pursue its mission and goals than a community? Is the individual profit motive somehow more sacred than the goal of community? A city is not a business, but it is like a business in the sense that it is a form of organizing to pursue common goals that include growth and economic health for those involved.

Economic Development

Economic development and growth are important functions for the city to facilitate. This is exactly why it is important that we not allow a haphazard approach to development that is dictated by the disconnected short-term goals of single businesses. Those who favor long-range community planning are often labeled anti-business by those who do not wish to be inconvenienced by such democratic processes. Yet most, if not all, MBA programs extol the importance of this sort of long-range planning in the business world

It is exactly our ability to function as a community that will provide long-range economic health for our businesses. We can all recognize that business in general would suffer if we allowed a refinery to go in at the gateway to our community, even if it were advantageous for the refinery. Few would argue that it is not our right as a community to keep that from happening. The issue is not, then, that we allow restrictions on what businesses can locate where, or even at all, within our city limits, it is to what degree we do this. As a city grows this equation must change.

Development

To this point College Station has, for the most part, taken a crayon approach to city planning. That is, to color blocks of the map with consistent colors to create a separation of functions. Designing a city with this approach is a little like designing a house using Legos. It does not allow for a more sophisticated understanding of the ways that functions integrate and facilitate each other. This approach to urban planning has caused sprawl, traffic and congestion as people have to drive across town to get what they need out of the purple section of town and then in another direction to get what they need out of the green section of town. It also results in increased taxes to support this expanded infrastructure and the services that go along with it.

For some time now there has been a move to re-urbanization and mixed-use development across the country. For obvious reasons this is often referred to as Smart Growth. We see this happening to great effect in Northgate and in downtown Bryan. And, if we look to the original body of College Station’s last Comprehensive Plan, we see that a fair amount of emphasis was put in this direction, especially as it applied to development on the east side of town.

There are some on the east side who are willing to settle for traffic abetments and berms separating them from the sort of pernicious development that is not appropriate for their neighborhood or their community. No offense to those good citizens but this is a little like burying your head in the sand. Even if it is hidden behind an earth berm, even if the traffic is not dumped onto your residential street, it is still unhealthy development that we do not have to allow. Sadly some on the east side have also suggested that this sort of development should not go here because these are affluent neighborhoods. What, the poor don’t deserve any better? If these good citizens do not want this development in their back yard, we should question putting it in anyone’s back yard, or, for that matter, in our town.

The Comp Plan that nicely addressed this issue was developed, as it should be, with a great deal of citizen involvement. Those citizens seemed to have understood the power of Smart Growth and wrote a Comprehensive Plan that encouraged this type of development for the east side.

Unfortunately citizens only get this sort of involvement about every ten years. Between those times things are interpreted and run by the city staff. The staff faces a huge amount of gravity toward the perspective of developers. Part of this is due to the natural course of business because our planning department is also our code enforcement department. Developers have daily contact with the “planning” department. Day in, day out they are getting plats and permits and at the same time pleading their case for conditions that allow quick turn around without a lot of effort put into considering the overall design of the city.

Within a year and a half of the last Comprehensive Plan being pinned, calling for mixed-use development on the east side, city planners (most of whom are now consultants to Weingarten) wrote an amendment to the Comprehensive Plan, with little or no citizen involvement, stating that mixed-use development, while a nice idea, was not feasible for College Station. Weingarten quoted that document in their last request for rezoning.

The Greens Prairie/Rock Prairie triangle small area plan and land use map was added to the comprehensive plan with practically not citizen involvement.

Attorney’s Whining

Now Weingarten’s attorney wants to tell the people of College Station that they have to honor that land use map as if it were actual zoning. But no amount of blustery posturing will make that the case. There are two main fallacies in this argument.

First of all there is the matter of process. A land use map is distinctly different from zoning precisely in that it does not make this promise. And it does not make this promise because it is developed as a preliminary idea lacking the scrutiny or checks and balances afforded by our elected, and appointed, officials.

The other reason why this land use map does not constitute a promise to Weingarten, or any other developer, is because of the obvious conflict of interest at play in this case. All of the principles of the consulting company representing Weingarten used to work in the city of College Station’s planning department and were, in fact, instrumental in creating this very land use map. In many states this conflict of interest would have likely drawn the attention of the Attorney General. It is an obvious indication that the city needs to include a clause in its hiring contract that will keep key employees from later trading on the trust that the citizens place in them.

College Station has grown rapidly and many citizens are startled by what appears to be hasty, not very attractive development. They are dismayed by the clear cutting of trees. And they are alarmed about the connections between past staff members and this developer. There are many, including some inside city hall, who think that it is past time for us to have an independent planning department. We are in the process of rewriting our comprehensive plan. Most feel that College Station is sprawling out of control. For all of these reasons it is appropriate to avoid facilitating additional sprawl by denying this request for rezoning.

Team Building

Several citizens, including myself, have reached out to Weingarten to ask how we could help them create a development that the citizens of College Station could live with. They have been unresponsive to an appeal to a cooperative approach to development. This is probably because they have a formula that they are unwilling to deviate from. College Station is rapidly loosing its identity to businesses that are stamping their formula on us. There is nothing that says that we have to grow in this way.

I have many clients who are former students returning to retire here because they remember a unique community like no other. More and more they are finding a city that looks, and acts, like every other town. We do not have to settle for this.