Response to Derek Dictson 2 0f 3

I have been enjoying an exchange with candidate for College Station City Council Place One Derek Dictson. In the comments section of another post on this blog Derek provided an explanation of some of his positions on development in the Extra Territorial Jurisdiction (ETJ.) I will use three posts to comment on Derek’s comments. I have left his comments in full. They are in red. My comments are interspersed and are in blue. Derek and I have very different views on this subject and I appreciate him taking the time to engage in this exchange. Hopefully readers will find it informative.

While we can’t control land use beyond our city limits, we can enforce our thoroughfare plan (which should be driven by realistic land use assumptions) and extend our subdivision regulations into the ETJ, which will expand from 3.5 to 5 miles once we reach 100,000 people. We can even collect park fees in the ETJ, which was only recently implemented. Even if the 20-acre minimum is legal, which I seriously doubt (and will cost the city millions in legal fees to prove), it will do nothing to prevent people from building whatever they want on their property, including multiple homes/duplexes/apartments/etc., they just can’t subdivide and sell individual lots that are smaller than 20 acres. I don’t even want to think about what unforeseen consequences this might lead to in a College town.

What are you basing your doubt of the legality the 20 acre lot size on? This recommendation is coming from our city staff based on suggestions from comprehensive plan consultant Kendig Keast Collaborative. No doubt city planning laws in Texas are convoluted but I would not expect that these folks would lead us into litigation. It seems to be a common ploy of the development community to either threaten or warn against litigation if we do not do as they wish. While it is true that people could build multiple buildings or a whole compound on a twenty acre plot, it is more relevant to the city’s recommendation that it would restrict the spread of uncontrolled subdivisions. In a memo to City Council and the P&Z senior planner Jennifer Prochazka explains this as being an issue of of density control, and a need to limit package sewer units in the ETJ. You may not want to think about the unforeseen consequences of restricting growth in the ETJ but the rest of us do not want to look at, or live with, the all too obvious consequences of not controlling that growth.

What is certain is that our low cost of living would end very quickly as the supply of affordable housing comes to a screeching halt. The only way to avoid this would be to embark on an extremely aggressive annexation schedule in order to maintain a steady supply of developable land inside the city limits where it would not be subject to the 20-acre restriction, and we have all seen how painful annexation can be recently.

There is no doubt that a low cost of living is nice to have but it is only one variable in what should be a rather complex equation for what we want in our community. Most of the communities that the citizens of College Station said that they would most want to emulate have higher costs of living than we do many of them are well above average for the country. You should appreciate this as it is largely a function of supply and demand. You build a nice city and they will come. I recently heard that 38% of land inside the city limits is not developed. It will continue to be undeveloped as long as developers are allowed to push out into the ETJ where there are few regulations.

In-fill and re-development is good, but it is also very expensive and almost prohibitively over-regulated at the current time. Our overly prescriptive, inflexible, control-based policy is why Northgate, the most valuable land in our city, has seen almost no creative mixed use development despite plenty of opportunity and a number of very innovative plans on the drawing board.

Yes infill development is prohibitively overregulated when you can just as easily go out into the ETJ and build with no regulation at all. If we constrict development in the ETJ infill development will begin to happen. And don’t forget that sprawl drives up taxes for all of as infrastructure and service are spread over a larger area. This is just one more way in which citizens end up subsidizing poor development.

To be continues tomorrow