Recently the College Station City Council, who has done great work in trying to get a handle on our run away development, missed important opportunities to turn that work into important working results.

There seems to be consensus from everyone but the development community that, given Texas’ lack of regulations at the county level, controlling sprawl development will require aggressive annexation and measures to slow development in the Extra Territorial Jurisdiction (ETJ). This approach represents a new paradigm with lots of resistance from the development community so it is understandable that the City Council, unpracticed in such initiatives, missed these opportunities. There is no doubt that most of our City Council members are intent on fixing these problems.

One of the reasons that this approach is so difficult is because there is not a simple check list with boxes to check off, there are important relationship between these items. For example, without control in the ETJ, council members who represent the development community can continue to claim that measures in town will only push development into the ETJ, even though these are the same people who have fought to avoid measures to control development in the ETJ.

The Council recognizes that they have much more control over development in town and they have sought a more aggressive annexation plan to bring more area into the overall plan. Unfortunately that process has become flawed because, rather than making decisions for the city as a whole, Council opened the discussion up to consider individual circumstances. The problem with this seemingly empathetic approach is the imbalance of representation. In situations like annexation, the people who show up to be heard are only the few most directly affected. Who does not show up to influence the conversation are the rest of the community whose individual impact is less but whose cumulative impact is much greater. This is exactly why we have a City Council – to represent the city as a whole, especially when single interests are pressed into action. This is the difficult leadership that we ask of these dedicated volunteers.

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Once annexation was opened up for individual considerations council was put in the very awkward position of deciding whose petition to honor and whose to ignore. Mostly what got ignored in this process was the overriding need to control development.

Most disappointing was council’s failure to impose the 20 acre subdivision rule in the ETJ. Without this kind of control other efforts become fruitless. This is the only means given to the city to get a handle on sprawl development in the ETJ. Without this measure developers will continue to go just outside the city limits where they are almost entirely unregulated. Without this measure the city will stay behind the curve, annexing land that already has lots of bad development on it. The other thing that happens as developers push cheap developments into the ETJ is that it will take much longer for us to reach the 100,000 population mark that extends the ETJ to 5 miles and provides better protection from sprawl.

For an example of why these measures are important drive out to the intersection of Highway 30 and Bird Pond Road. You can also drive from College Station all the way to Millican and see the many subdivisions that have gone in without regulations. These subdivisions will eventually have to tie into city infrastructure; the city will assume maintenance of poorly built streets.

This constant effort to catch up to leapfrog development means that city and county taxes will have to go up to provide infrastructure and service to a spread out population. By allowing uncontrolled development, we are, in a very real sense, subsidizing the very development that we seek to limit.