The Weingarten Example

Currently the residents of the East Side are forced to continue to do battle with Weingarten Reality to protect their neighborhood from being abutted by bad development that would have a devastating impact on their quality of life. There is a lot that can be learned from this frustrating failure to have adequate growth management in place.

One thing that is abundantly clear is a need to distinguish between the motivations that we want to drive growth in our community. Through this ordeal we have been told that an outside company who is looking to maximize their private profits has an equal place at our community table as several neighborhoods looking to preserve quality of life for all residents in College Station. This assumption is predicated on the idea that any two ideas or positions are equal. First of all two ideas are not equal simply by virtue of being different. We, our citizens and our city staff, must put motivations driving quality of life for the community above the profits motives of individuals. This is not to say that they cannot coexist, only that the profit motives of Weingarten do not deserve an equal place at our community table with the quality of life issues of several neighborhoods. We need our city staff not to be neutral when our citizens are challenged by outside business interests. In fact it appears as though Weingarten may have been given considerable advantage by being represented by a team of specialized attorneys and development consultants while the neighborhoods have been restricted from bringing in their own experts.
One of the reasons that this has happened is because we tried to restrict growth management only by growth forecasting and not by current conditions and values of the community. In College Station almost any development can happen within the zoning guidelines without restrictions based on current conditions or cost to the community. There are two important tools for avoiding these types of problems: impact fees and impact studies.

Impact fees insure that new development pays for itself thus avoiding undo taxation on existing residents who have already paid for the developments that serve them. The other positive results that come from impact fees is a reduction in urban sprawl. Sprawl happens as developments go up at the outskirts of town where land is cheaper leapfrogging other undeveloped land. Without impact fees this bad development is subsidized by all citizens who are forced to pay for expanded infrastructure and spread out city services. Impact fees insure that everyone pays their fare share and that our growth is contained geographically thus increasing efficiency. This more conservative mechanism for growth means we have a tighter, more connected, more walkable city with less traffic.

The other way to insure that growth matches the current conditions of the city and fits neatly into the overall design of the city is through impact studies. Currently, for the largest developments, College Station requires a traffic study before a project can be approved. But even that falls so late in the process that there is little opportunity to make wise adjustments. Other cities also require environmental impact studies, economic impact studies and community impact studies. Any of these studies would have shown that the Weingarten development is ill-conceived.

There are those in the development community that claim that such restrictions will halt growth. This is simply not the case. There is no doubt that such restrictions will make development more difficult and possibly even more expensive. It is also true that businesses that can adhere to such community standards will be more profitable and have less competition. Do we really want to lower the bar on our community standards so that lower quality companies are able to profit off of our compromised growth and development?

Another way that cities can encourage smart development is by partnering with developers to create developments that work for everyone. Municipalities save a good deal of money when smart growth practices are employed so it is smart for them to invest in good partnerships to promote this kind of development. The Minneapolis–St. Paul Metropolitan Council found that by using smart growth techniques, “the region overall could save $3 billion . . . , 94 percent [of which] would come from local communities saving money on roads and sewers. These local savings could be even greater by including lower spending on school construction and other services such as health care, public safety, libraries, etc.”

While Weingarten has proven in other areas such as the River Oaks district of Houston that it is not a good community steward and that it is prepared to run roughshod over community concerns. Nonetheless, it may be wise for the City of College Station to pursue a partnership that would entice Weingarten into better development practices in this south College Station project and possibly create a project that will better serve the East Side residents while initiating improved standards and a unified design for the whole Rock Prairie Greens Prairie triangle.
In the mean time the city needs to get busy designing ordinances that include impact fees and impact studies to avoid this sort of fiasco in the future.