We can’t keep undermining rural life to grow the Texas Miracle
One year ago next month, a dozen Bastrop County landowners gathered at a hill-top home overlooking the green pastoral beauty of Wilbarger Bend in late spring. No one was smiling. One irony of rural life in modern America is that your neighbors often remain strangers until some disaster brings them together. Bastrop has had more than its share lately — drought, fire, flood, rise and repeat. The disaster this time was less widespread but just as destructive: their new neighbor, the richest man in the world, was digging a tunnel toward their beloved river. No one was required to tell them.
Today, only three of those neighbors still own their land. The rest, including a well-known filmmaker, a legendary veterinarian, and a sixth-generation Bastrop family have chosen the path of least resistance — take the money and run before things really get bad.
And just how bad have things gotten in the unincorporated areas of Bastrop and dozens of other counties around the fast-growing cities in Texas? Bad enough that our newly elected state representative, Stan Gerdes, a staunch Republican, has introduced a bill this session that calls for what was once unthinkable in this state: give unincorporated counties some of the same tools employed by cities to control and shape their future. Zoning, that bane of urban developers, is suddenly on everyone’s lips out here, although you probably can’t hear them repeat it for all the noise from bulldozers and 18-wheelers tearing up this fertile land.
Since those distraught landowners organized and descended on the Bastrop County courthouse to protest a massive warehouse for Elon Musk’s Boring Company, similar gatherings of quiet desperation have been playing out across the county. Residents of upscale Colovista subdivision have been regular speakers at the commissioners court, too, seeking help in stopping a proposed sand and gravel mine from spilling dust and diesel fumes into their neighborhood. In Elgin, it was the school board that faced the wrath of blindsided landowners besieged by an Austin renewable energy company wanting to level an adjoining 2000-acre forest for a solar factory that would create only one full-time job.
More recently and more threatening, it is the white-knuckled residents along FM 969 who are pleading for help. An 18-mile stretch of treacherous curves that mimic the river it follows, this farm-to-market road has become a trucking thoroughfare for the gravel mines and concrete batch plants that provide the foundations, literally, of our homes and highways. A three-mile stretch of this road has seen three fatal accidents in two months — more than in the past five years.
Gerdes’ attempt to create county planning commissions that have some of the same smart growth tools as their city counterparts would address, albeit it too late, the Wild West land grab that has made Wilbarger Bend ground zero for stupid growth. In less than two years, more than 2000 acres of prime farmland and unspoiled river frontage has gone from farming and recreation to mining, tunneling and manufacturing.
Green Gate Farms moved to Wilbarger Bend not just for its beauty but those two essentials for sustainable farming — good soil and reliable water. This Bend was destined to follow the lead of innovative food hubs like Vermont’s Intervale and Tennessee’s Bell’s Bend. The owners of the six farms and ranches who moved here to grow clean healthy food for surrounding cities are now watching their investments and dreams undermined for lack of regulatory protections these cities take for granted.
All it took was one landowner, an Austin businessman now deceased, who sold the 70 acres that gave the Boring Company its foothold here. Three months later, he sold his remaining 530 acres to Tex Mix Concrete Company. The same domino-like transfer of land across the river has been mirrored inside our bend as the sand and gravel mining footprint has now grown to nearly 900 acres. A similar collapse is happening on the opposite side of 969 now that Travis Materials has moved in, too, forcing the county’s premier agrotourism venue, Barton Hill Farm, to look for a new home.
In less than two years, this nine-mile stretch of the river has been degraded into something that was never planned nor wanted — a full-blown industrial site. Not only farmers and ranchers are devastated but the owners and investors of other established businesses and attractions here, including the Lost Pines Hyatt, LCRA’s McKinney Roughs Park, actor Zachary Levi’s glamping and movie studio, and Sharaz Gardens wedding venue. The Capital Area of Council Governments land-use plans identified Wilbarger Bend as a high priority for recreation and agrotourism. Its designation as having highest quality water protections is what has attracted so many anglers, kayakers and birders out here. Those plans may as well be tossed out while county officials watch in dismay at what this open-arms invitation to unregulated growth has wrought.
Texas is the only state where the vast majority of its land remains a blank slate for industries and developers to carve up and parcel out with such limited restrictions. Wilbarger Bend is only the latest of countless rural “ecological paradises” sacrificed for the Texas Miracle. Gerdes’ bill would allow voters to approve seven-member planning commissions that could create districts and design rules to preserve their character, promote their general welfare, and ensure growth that is planned rather pushed down our throats. Bills similar to HB 3398 have failed over the past two decades for being too broad or heavy handed. These zoning powers would be limited to counties next to cities with populations of 1 million or more. Without a more sane approach to land use, out-of-control development and rural living will keep colliding like the vehicles on this long and winding road.
Sooner or later, life imposes limits, even for the world’s richest man. Let’s make it sooner while we still have time to shape our future and offer a more hopeful and deserving legacy for these beautiful yet vulnerable places we call home.
Skip Connett is co-founder of Green Gate Farms and Friends of the Land.
