Naked City

Baseball players can only wish their batting averages were as good as the city of Austin's. Last Thursday, the city continued its winning streak in court when the Texas Supreme Court sided with the city and declared SB 1017 unconstitutional.

The bill, which city lawyers called the "FM Properties Water Quality Zone Bill" after former Freeport-McMoRan subsidiary FM Properties, now known as Stratus Properties, allowed landowners with more than 1,000 acres to create zones that were exempt from Austin's annexation and water-quality protection laws. The city sued to have the law, written by state Sen. Jeff Wentworth, R-San Antonio, and passed in 1995 by the Texas Legislature, overturned because it gave "special legislative privileges" to owners of large parcels of land. The state's high court agreed, and in a 6-3 opinion ruled that the law delegated too much power to nongovernmental entities.

The decision continues the city's winning streak in court. Although it has spent in excess of $2.5 million on legal fees over the past eight years fighting water-quality battles, the city has won the half-dozen state and federal lawsuits it has been involved in.

Renea Hicks, one of several lawyers who did contract work for the city on the lawsuit, said the decision was an important win for Austin because it confirmed the legality of the city's annexation of several tracts, including areas in and around the Circle C Ranch subdivision. "If the court hadn't reached the result it did, there was a danger of the city's authority in the watershed being carved up and allowing developers to essentially secede from the city's extraterritorial jurisdiction. That's clearly what people with enough money and undeveloped land were interested in doing," said Hicks.

Although the ruling was a big win for the city, Bill Bunch, the general counsel for the Save Our Springs Alliance, has some doubts that the city will take advantage of it. "Since the City Council apparently fears another round of Austin-bashing legislation from developers, I'm not sure they'll see the court's decision as adding much leverage in their dealings" with developers in the Barton Springs watershed, he said.

Stratus Properties CEO Beau Armstrong did not return phone calls from the Chronicle. However, in a June 19 press release, Armstrong said the company was "disappointed" with the decision but was "pleased to have a resolution on this issue."