Response to Derek Dictson post 1 of 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.

I would suggest that a well designed comprehensive plan would go a long way toward controlling the negative aspects of uncontrolled development in our ETJ without an undue destruction of property rights or trying to micro-manage market forces through regulation.

The first thing that I assume we can agree on is that controlling uncontrolled development in our ETJ) is definitionally a destruction of someone’s property rights. Property Rights has become a buzzword among those who seek to limit community management and design. This typically includes extreme idealistic libertarians and those who want to conduct business unencumbered by restriction or regulation. But it has an appeal for all of us. We are, after all the nation of the great frontier and rugged individualism. But at some point, as more people move into the frontier, the rugged individualist must learn to get along with his neighbors. If you live on a thousand acres you are probably free to step out your back door naked and shoot a rifle. If you live on a quarter acre lot in town probably not so much. This is because property rights collide. One person wants to have the right to be naked and shoot his or her rifle but the neighbor wants the right not to look at a naked person and risk being shot. There is no way around it, as more people move into an area there has to be more rules that in essence destruct someone’s sense of their property rights. Weingarten wants to put a Super Wal-Mart on their tract of investment property but the residence of the East Side do not want their property values and quality of live degraded in order to preserve Weingarten’s property rights.

At some point individual property rights give way to community values. But it is not an either or, black and white issue. While the people of College Station do not want uncontrolled sprawl, neither do they want complete uniformity with no individual expression. As a community we have to decide what is best for us. In all likelihood these decisions will be based on concrete quality of life issues and not an idealistic concept of property rights and market forces. As if the only market forces were supply and demand. At least since the time of the first cities over 5,000 years ago community regulation has been a part of market forces.

If we would create a realistic land use plan to accommodate a doubling of our population over the next 20 years and implement a corresponding thoroughfare plan to support the traffic, and then extend both plans through the ETJ and into the county we would help solve many of the problems that the 20-acre minimum lot size is attempting to solve through a “sledgehammer” approach.

The citizens of College Station were unambiguous in declaring that we want to stop sprawl development. In Texas there are very few ways of legally controlling development in the ETJ and, given the amount of vacant space that we have in town, anything in the ETJ could be considered sprawl. It is interesting that you call the ideas of our consultants and city staff to achieve the stated goals of the people of College Station a sledgehammer. Many of us feel that having cheap, ugly, destructive development shoved down our throats to be a sledgehammer approach. When one person feels that they can do what they want, because they have property rights, regardless of community concern, that is like hitting people over the head. Just take a look at what has happened on highway 30 in the ETJ and you will get a sense of why we want to take measures to slow development in the ETJ.

This series will be continued tomorrow.