No Trespassing

On June 14, Dick Droese and a couple of friends were planning to float Barton Creek. But as they were preparing to put in their canoe at the Highway 71 bridge on Barton Creek, they were accosted by Jim Fries, who heads the Austin office of the Texas Nature Conservancy (TNC). According to Droese, Fries told him and his two friends that Barton Creek was not a navigable stream and that if they put their boat in the water, they would be trespassing. After a long and heated discussion, Droese and Fries agreed to call the Travis County Sheriff's Department for a legal opinion. Two deputies later arrived but declined to take action and Droese was soon paddling down Barton Creek. Droese is not the first paddler who has been confronted by TNC officials. A group of city employees who work in the Environmental and Conservation Services Department were paddling Barton Creek several weeks ago when they were stopped by Fries, who was working on the TNC's 3,000-acre Uplands tract, which sits on Barton Creek a short distance upstream of the Barton Creek Country Club. City employees recall that Fries told them that they should not be on the creek and that they were trespassing.

In an interview with the Chronicle, Fries explained that the TNC has had an ongoing problem with vandalism and unauthorized camping on the Uplands tract, which is part of the Barton Creek Preserve (BCP, formerly the Balcones Canyonlands Conservation Plan). "We have a terrible problem with mountain bikers cutting vegetation to build trails," he said, adding that a storage facility on the property has been broken into twice. "It's really creating a nightmare for us in terms of management, not to mention the problem it's creating for endangered species." Fries said a pair of nesting golden cheeked warblers have moved off of the property, presumably due to unauthorized use by trespassers.

The TNC says it is concerned about endangered species. And it should be. But what makes all of this rather incredible is the lack of forethought on the part of Fries and the TNC. First of all, the navigability of Barton Creek and its use as a recreational stream by paddlers is well established. Second, if the Conservancy persists in this misguided attempt to limit public access to one of Central Texas' most popular creeks, it could become a public relations nightmare.

The TNC is one of the most powerful, if not the most powerful, environmental groups in the state. It played a central role in making the BCP workable. And yet Fries says the group has retained an attorney to see if there is a legal way to keep paddlers from using the stream. Fries says their attorney hasn't found anything yet that they can use. But he will let it be known if and when that happens.

Rather than wasting money on an attorney, Fries probably should have started by obtaining a copy of a 1992 letter from Attorney General Dan Morales to Travis County Attorney Ken Oden. "A stream is navigable by statute if it retains an average width of 30 feet from its mouth up," says the AG's letter. "Numerous observations of the bed of Barton Creek confirm that its width averages greater than 30 feet along its reach in Travis County."

Even if Fries and the TNC didn't have Oden's letter, there is a surfeit of other water law in Texas that declares that the streams and rivers of the state are held in common for the use and enjoyment of the public. In a 1936 case known as Diversion Lake Club vs. Heath, the courts declared that navigable streams in the state are "owned by the state in trust for the benefit and best interests of all the people." Asked if his efforts to discourage the use of Barton Creek by the public might hurt the Conservancy's public image, Fries replied, "Our responsibility is not to promote public access, it's to protect the habitat along the creek."

For Droese, who works at Advanced Micro Devices, the fact that it was an environmental group, not local landowners, who were trying to prevent him from using Barton Creek, left him nonplussed. "We were ready to deal with a redneck with a shotgun," said Droese. "Our sympathies are with the environmental movement. These were the last folks that we expected would try to run us off."

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The Cousteau File

Few people are worthy of hero status. Jacques Cousteau, who died June 25, was one of them. As Phil Gramm might have said, Cousteau was an environmentalist before environmentalism was cool. It is fair to say that he changed the world. By looking at the world as a whole, Cousteau was able to discuss the importance of the oceans to people in every country, and not just focus on the evils of one country or another. His death leaves a void. There is no one else on the world environmental scene who has his stature. And until someone else steps forward to take his place, we will miss the man who invented SCUBA equipment and changed the way we look at the oceans.

Perhaps what made Cousteau so appealing was his gentility. He talked about the ocean and its creatures with a tenderness that somehow amplified whatever he said. He talked about the plight of the oceans before the oceans became a major cause. He talked about overpopulation before that became a global issue. He made governments and individuals look into the future and begin to prepare for it, to consider ways to protect the world. Jacques Cousteau was simply ahead of his time. And that, perhaps, is the greatest compliment that anyone can ever receive.

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Boll Weevil Bonanza

The boll weevil exterminators won a reprieve during the recent legislative session. The governor signed into law a bill that allows the statewide effort to eradicate the boll weevil to continue. And while it remains to be seen if the new law will be as problem-plagued as the old program proved to be, it's clear that the real winners in the boll weevil sweepstakes are not the farmers, but the attorneys who support the program.

According to documents obtained by the Chronicle under the Texas Open Records Act, the Austin law firm of Small Craig & Werkenthin billed the Texas Boll Weevil Eradication Foundation (TBWEF) for $24,174.24 worth of fees and expenses from January 1 through April 18. That doesn't count the $400,906 the firm billed the foundation from October of 1994 through the end of last year. Nor does it include the fees and expenses the firm accrued over the course of the recent legislative session, during which name partner Ed Small (who bills TBWEF at the rate of $250 per hour) spent many days at the Capitol lobbying for the new boll weevil bill. This must be a new form of entrepreneurial democracy, where a lawyer/lobbyist can push for a program that will generate large fees for himself and his firm and then get paid by his client for his efforts... Also on the boll weevil front, Frank Myers, the state's leading bug executioner, resigned his position as executive director of TBWEF effective June 17. According to TBWEF spokesperson Teresa Eliason, Myers, who was paid $124,088 per year ($25,000 more than the governor), wanted to spend more time with his family.