Larry DeMartino Interview, Part 2 of 3

DT: When we were talking before, you were explaining one of the most important building decisions is not how to build, or what materials to use, so much as where not to build.

And I think you gave building in a flood plain as an example of a mistake. I think locally here in San Antonio, one of the concerns is building in the recharge zone. Can you explain some of the examples of how that's played out here, and your role?

LD: Well, we have a different kind of aquifer here than most people are familiar with. You know, most aquifers are sand aquifers, so that if it rains the sand filters out to a certain degree the impurities that enter the aquifer.

But here we have something called a karst aquifer, which is openings in limestone. So basically, where the rain falls and hits the ground, the water in the aquifer is not is the exact same contains the same contaminants that the rainfall has,

and it picks up the stuff the surf the contaminants of the surface runoff, and it goes into the aquifer directly. And then once you put a well in, you get essentially that kind of thing.

Now originally I had talked about the role of grasses. And of course, grasses that are over the, in the, thin layer of soil, or the soil over the aquifers, absorbed and purified some of that water.

You get rid of the grain, the dense grass covers through grazing or burning or urbanization, you get rid of that the filtration process that it provides for making sure the waters clear, or clean water quality, but you also get a reduction in the amount of water.

But we have this vast system of aquifers that surround San Antonio. Actually, San Antonio is an island between two huge aquifers. The Greenwood on the south side, and on the north side, the Edwards Aquifer.

So you know, the the Spaniards and the Indians weren't stupid. They came here for two things. They came here, one, for water, because this was really an oasis out in a desert,

and they came here for pecans. Pecans grow in the estuaries and in the flood plains of where all this water was collecting. And they came here for the water to drink, and to harvest the pecans. They got fat on pecans. Pecans are very nutritious. But in order to get pecans to grow, you've got to have surface water.

And here we have this interesting thing called the San Antonio River that just comes up out of the ground out of our Edwards Aquifer, and makes its way down to the estuary, and in the bay.

DT: What was the concern about building on top of the Edwards Aquifer, on top of the recharge zone?

LD: The issues a multiple one. Water quality is directly related to impervious cover. And the more impervious cover you have, it has the tendency to do two things. One, lower the volume of water that goes into the aquifer. Its carried as surface runoff and goes directly to the stream.

And secondly, if you have an asphalt surface that's polluted, and you take it as natural runoff, then the polluted water goes directly in. Also, there was a whole problem in that we had here in San Antonio with a bunch of wells, derelict wells that people were throwing all kinds of things in. You know, dead cows, their garbage, and everything else. One of the big things we did in San Antonio is to get those wells capped. It was direct infiltration.

So what we have here is a two-fold problem. One of water quantity, maximizing the surface water to go into the aquifer as a storage tank, or directly into a stream and go down to the bay, the Gulf without going into the aquifer, and then also the other important of water quality.

And as I said, water quality is directly related to impervious cover, or the amount of impervious cover. And the more impervious the surface, the less water quality you have entering the, the, and that's just a matter of urbanization.

So that's why this whole issue of impervious cover in terms of building over the top of the aquifer is important. In a way, you know, given all circumstances, aquifers, particularly karst aquifers, are so sensitive you shouldn't build over the top of them at all

because you should try to maximize the amount of water that's recharged so that you can pull it out of a well, or it can go to the stream, or you know, store it so it doesn't evaporate, and to maximize also the water quality that you pull up in the wells. And so you shouldn't build at all.

Well, the issue then becomes, well, be reasonable. How much are you going to allow? You cant just say none. Well, you know, if it was up to me, knowing what I know, Id say none. But...

DT: What did you say? I mean you served both on the Water Quality Committee that wasand

LD: Yeah. Well, I said some things that I thought were reasonable. One of the things I said was you had to plug all these wells, and all the wells had to be permitted, so that you had to know where the holes were that were possible pollutant sources.

The second thing that you said was that filling stations, its a real problem with leakage. I mean we have here in San Antonio, no necessarily over the aquifer, a major problem with filling stations whose underground storage tanks leak. Every time you go to fix a street in this town to repave it, and you go into an environmental study that the government requests, you find out that the soil is infiltrated with gasoline from some old filling station that isn't there anymore.

So you have to deal with direct source pollutants first.And then that means that you have to look at your zoning laws. That certain kinds of things you can't put over the top of an aquifer. You obviously can't put a drycleaning, industrial drycleaning, facility over the top. You obviously can't put a plating, something that plates, you know, tin and metals over the top.

Were talking about keeping those things that are direct pollutants through the zoning laws from ever being located on top. I mean the whole issue came up about funeral parlors. Well, embalming fluid is very dangerous. I mean you do not want, you know, that stuff getting in your drinking water. So what were doing here in San Antonio is trying to find something that's reasonable and, you know, what is the impervious cover?

Now if you talk to the scientists, and the people who really know what they're doing, they'll tell you no. Well, you could put it on a committee, like I have been put on, you've got to find out what the level of tolerance is, and you've got to do it quickly, because in the absence of that, you get nothing.

And when you have nothing on the books you have nothing on the books, the problem still goes on because you have to understand, if you don't have a water quality ordinance on the books, unless you have a moratorium, that buildings going on anyway.

The developers in this town have always believed that their solution was to delay, delay, delay everything, so that they can get in there and build whatever they got to build, while people like me are sitting around the table arguing over what they should build and what the ordinance that's going to restrict them ought to be. So you have to understand the game that you're playing.

And you can say, well, I'm going to go to, you know, scientific data. The scientific data says don't do anything at all. So I get stuck with this you know, with the politicians and the elected officials in this town putting me on these committees, putting me on this committee to go and deal eyeball to eyeball with some pretty unfriendly people who don't want any ordinance at all.

What we've got now works. What do we need any ordinance for? You know, its the takings. You know, you're going after my American God-given right to do you know, whatever I want to do. If I drill a well, I have, own all the water that I can suck out of there, you know. Or I can do anything I want to the land. I paid for it. Its mine.

Well, you know, at what point do you say you have a social responsibility, because isn't that part of democracy is all about? And so it's hard always to rely on scientific data, because in some of these areas, particularly karstic aquifers, and some other issues that you're dealing with, the data says don't build over there at all. But you have to find a reasonable thing.

So if you can slow it down if you can slow it down, say there's only so much impervious cover, you can kind of spread the pollution out to the point where, you know, if there's so much water in the aquifer, its going to dilute those pollutants. And maybe it, you know, at a certain point I mean then you see, this city has no sewage water treatment plant. No water treatment plant.

All we do is take water out of the aquifer and chlorinate it, because its required by federal law. Now, you're talking about having to all of a sudden build the first water treatment plant that's ever been built in San Antonio. Now, we process our sewage here for reuse water, and and that's been a huge step forward.

But scientific data is not on these peoples sides. But they don't want to listen to scientific data. They'll sue you. And then its a problem. Its a problem for people like me, who with a strong science background, a strong academic background, believe that stuff.

DT: Speaking of a lawsuit, can you talk a little bit about the litigation that arose over construction of the UTSA [University of Texas at San Antonio] campus?

LD: Well, its interesting how that happened. The UTSA was actually built, or located before a lot of this stuff even happened. The interesting role that UTSA played, the lawsuit involved a new town being built over the aquifer called Ranch New Town. It was one of these 60s new town programs where were going to go in and build these new urban developments as satellite cities.

And there was one here that was going to be called Ranch New Town. And it was not only that over the top of the Edwards Aquifer, it was over the hot zone of the Edwards Aquifer. I mean you could drop a cow down those sinkholes. They went directly in you know. So there was a lawsuit toward Ranch New Town. And it went to court.

And if my recollection is right, the current mayor of this town, Phil Hardberger, who was an attorney back then on that lawsuit, the environmentalists or whatever you want to call them, won, ah, lost that lawsuit. Ranch New Town is still there. Never got built because of economic times. But they lost the lawsuit. But the basis upon which the judge made the decision is really interesting.

The judge said the State of Texas went here and built UTSA, and they built it knowingly over the top of the Edwards Aquifer. Yeah. Why should private enterprise, i.e. Ranch New Town, be held to a higher standard than the State of Texas? The State of Texas should be showing leadership. The State of Texas went and built this campus over the top of the aquifer, why should you hold private enterprise to a higher standard than the leadership that government shows?

He says that's a problem in my courtroom, and I understand that point of view. So interestingly enough, you know, they went out there. That whole thing was in a interesting thing, the, that was Mary Ann Smothers Bruni. Mary Ann owned that land. The governor at that time wanted it. She gave him a section in the middle, held onto everything else, and they built it out there.

O'Neil Ford was the architect. I remember them running around the office trying to figure out late in the game, after the buildings were up, what they were going to do with the surface runoff of the parking lots over there. But it became a hot issue. It became a hot issue.

Subsi, and interestingly enough, the person who was in the leadership of this lawsuit was Cathy Powell, who's teaching urban studies at Trinity University. Her husband was Boone Powell, who was working for O'Neil Ford that was the architect for the buildings. Isn't that hilarious? You know?

So, but its interesting, and that's why I say where not to build is so important. Government needs to show the leadership. And that's why we write ordinances, and that's one of the reasons why, you know, when they call me to work on these things, I'm interested in the leadership that the city holds.

But I'm also interested in the fact that if you, the City of San Antonio, put these ordinances on the book, every ordinance that I write, or work on writing, I tell the city, you cannot exclude the City of San Antonio from any part of these ordinances because we've had history of that in San Antonio, where the city says they're exempt from their own ordinances. Can you imagine?

In order to get an ordinance passed in San Antonio, the somebody from the city will stand up and say, well, the City of San Antonio has to be exempt from it? And my answer to them is always the same. If you exempt yourself from this ordinance, the ordinance, if it goes to court, will not stand up.

DT: Can you give us some examples of where the city has sought to exempt themselves from an environmentally related ordinance?

LD: Absolutely. We have an ordinance here in this neighborhood along the River Walk, and now its extended for the entire length of the City of San Antonio, RIO-1, RIO-2. Its an overlay talking about development related to the river.

And here in this neighborhood, all our development related to the river is part of Brackenridge Park and Brackenridge Park Golf Course. So this neighborhood association was established to protect Brackenridge Park, not the neighborhood. That's in our charter. We've been to the Supreme Court on that and prevailed.

The city wanted to be exempt. In the original draft of the ordinance, the city was exempting itself from the zoning laws of RIO-1, RIO-2, and the city was the major property owner along the upstream section of the San Antonio River. What did they think we were working on those ordinances for? It was to bring the city and the Parks Department into alignment.

They built on the banks of the San Antonio River inside Brackenridge Park next to the golf course this huge barn of a building. Big metal barn of a building. Looks like a church. You know what that thing is full of? Chemicals to put on top of golf courses. Its their central storage facility. Its two hundred feet from the banks of the San Antonio River. Major storage facility.

And they come in here and build this thing without asking anybody in my neighborhood. And they wonder why I get upset. I don't just get upset about the chemicals that they've been putting on that golf course since day one, we finally got them to stop, but they have the chemical storage facility right next to the river. And they want to be exempt from those kinds of actions.

Now supposing you wanted to build a chemical storage facility as a private guy on the banks of the San Antonio River. Do you think you'd have any you think you'd have any problem? Well, the city wants to be exempt from those rules and regulations. And they don't want to have to move that thing. Well, they're going to move it. They ain't going to store that stuff in there anymore, or they're going to end up in court, and they know it.

So its those kinds of examples. The city also wants to be exempt from Historic and Design Review Committee. Can you imagine that? When I was on the Fine Arts Commission, the Fine Arts Commission had to review the design of every project built on public land. They hated us. They finally got rid of us. But they want to be exempt from their rules and regulations.

You know, the city owns lots of historic preserva..., historic buildings. But they want to be exempt from the same rules and regulations that they put on private enterprise for historic structures. That doesn't work. And, but it was the precedent of of UTSA and Ranch New Town that says judges are not willing to hold private enterprise to a higher standard than the government that puts these rules and regulations in place.

DT: Lets talk a little bit about the rules that are imposed on private enterprise, and some of the attempts to freeze those regulations. I think that there's been a long debate about grandfathering, and vesting rights. Did you have any role in trying to understand those (?)?

LD: Well, yeah. The two, the, these were issues of course in the billboard ordinance, and in the sign ordinance. And they kind of prepared me for the work later on in working on the drainage regulation, and the water quality regs. There are always issues of vested rights, and free speech, and on and on and on. And these are good things. But you have to deal with them the way you would deal with them in a contemporary American democracy.

Getting down to the issue of vested rights, people think that they can do whatever they want with land, and that they have a vested right. In San Antonio, it had to do with the fact that they sent some letter that they had some intention of developing.

And no matter what they did to that land, by virtue of a one page letter that they intended to develop the land, freedom from whatever rules and regulations forever that the city might impose on that piece land subsequent to that letter of intent.

That means that were supposed to freeze society for their benefit, you know. Some of them got up at City Council the other day and said, well, I went away to college, and it was X number of dollars when I was a freshman. By the time I was a senior, it was this number of dollars. How come I couldn't be grandfathered on my, on my senior tuition versus what I paid when I was freshman?

So vested rights is a big deal for the lawyers who are involved in these situations. You see, a lot of people think that, you know, who makes the money off the land are the property owners, and the engineers, and the this, and the that. Let me tell you, the big bucks are the lawyers, the litigants. These guys, they're in there suing, sometimes rightfully so, sometimes not rightfully so. And sometimes these people who own this property or developments don't even know the diff..., the deal.

Its like Jarndis versus Jarndis. I mean I'm going to, you need a lawyer, you know. You can fine, you can have an engineer and all this kind of stuff, but you need somebody to represent you down at City Hall because the City of San Antonio and the staff down there are out to screw you, and you've got to have a lawyer. And you don't want to go down there and deal with those people. And that's the kind of stuff that goes on here.

And vested rights is a big issue. And its going to be a bigger issue in Texas than ever before, because we have a land commissioner right now. I mean an Ag. Commissioner right now, Susan Combs, who's going to be running as Land Commissioner. And this woman, Susan Combs. This is more than a year ago, April 14th, 05. This is her plea to run for Ag. Commissioner, I mean to Land Commissioner.

Of course, she was going to run for Kay Bailey Hutchinsons spot before that, until they told Kay she had to stay on. Texas Turning to Ledge (Legislature) for Protection of Public Property. Her ending sentence is The legislature has an opportunity to reaffirm a right we've all taken for granted: owning and enjoying private property. The time is now and the stakes are great. Lets preserve the value Texas hold dear. No taking of private property without just compensation.

She's running. And this is a woman who's a rancher from West Texas. And God bless her. But she believes that any time you want to do any time somebody puts, if a municipality wants to put some controls on a piece of land, and it restricts the value of the land, they want compensation. And that's what she's going to carry forward as the states Land Commissioner.

And she's going to be elected. And municipalities all over the city need to be organizing now to see how they're going to deal with her. She is funded by the Texas Cattlemens and Ranchers Association. And these are people with a very rural mentality. And they are the curse of the major metropolitan areas in this state. And basically, what's happened here is that the urban centers, the urban counties don't even have land use control.

In other words, you go to Bexar County outside the city of San Antonio, no land use controls. You can do anything you want. You go to Houston, the counties surround it, no land use controls. You go do Dallas, the counties that are surround it, that are not within municipalities, if you can find any anymore, no land use controls.

So the counties cannot even begin to think about any kind of rules and regulations involving land use. Even the efforts by legislators to have counties declared urban counties, based on population, has failed because of the rural vote in Texas. And these county judges, and these county commissioners are going crazy trying to find some basis for legislating what goes on in these areas which will may eventually be annexed in some cases by cities with no infrastructure.

You got to go in and put them. They're built in flood plains. They're hazardous. They're this, they're that. The streets don't meet qualifications for thickness. And they cant put those controls on because the state legislature wont let them, and its going to get worse with Susan Combs in there. Her cousin lives down the street, and her stepsisters the next block over. So I can talk freely.

Now, where are we going, and what direction are we, are we headed in? In terms of San Antonio and this vested rights, we had it taken care of when we wrote those rules and those regulations. We thought we had. But the lawyers find loopholes, and the city gets upset about the loopholes. While the loopholes are being discussed, the development is going on, because the staff gets scared in terms of handing out building permits that the city's going to get sued.

And like in the words of Ken Brown, The cities out there handing building permits over the top of the Edwards Aquifer like candy. Like candy. So Thursday I was at City Council. And I expressed my frustration with serving on these committees. And, the, if I wasted my time because no matter where you drive, you can find flagrant violations of these ordinances.

And I says I'm wasting my time. And, you know, and in the matter of vested rights, the big issue is whose rights? Whose rights? The guy who's out for a fast buck? Or your children and my children and their children, who are going to have to pay for this mess? Vested rights and purchase,

let me tell you something about the State of New York trying to protect the watershed of the Adirondacks where all the water comes from, but goes into the Hudson and supplies New York's water supply, the states water supply. The state had to go in and buy private property inside the Adirondack Preserve. That's been going on for thirty-five years. They've spent billions.

Goes back to you going to buy it developed, or you're going to buy it undeveloped. The most progressive thing we have going on in the city right now is buying up sensitive land, because if you don't buy it up, these idiots are going to go and build on them.

And eventually the destruction that this is going to cause to the environment, and to the livability of the city, is going to require the taxpayers to go and buy it developed. And how much more times the cost? That's the inevitability of all of this. And so that's why vested rights are important. To bring people to the table to say what's reasonable in terms of development.

Now, we all have this thing about fifteen percent impervious cover versus thirty-five percent impervious cover versus forty percent impervious cover. But let me tell you something. You know, what's impervious cover? Just what is impervious cover? Here's a report from the Texas Water Resources Institute. You know, people are talking about this Golf San Antonio, and the PGA, and this and that, and putting these subdivisions in.

And they get up there, and they tell you, well, its going to be lawns, its a golf course, its going to be peoples front yards of St. Augustine grass. That's pervious cover. Oh, yeah? Well, let me tell you something. I hate to flitch through this, but I want to get it right. Bear with me a second. Here. Research Report.

The pervious areas in an urban watershed can also contribute to an increase in runoff. The infiltration rate for maintained laws can, lawns can be as low as one-sixth of that for land remaining in native vegetation. That's measured. This reduction is very significant because thirty-five to eighty-five percent of the total surface area in an urban watershed may be maintained in lawns.

The decrease in infiltration rate may be caused by compaction during construction, or by disturbance of the natural soil profile by adding or removing topsoil during landscaping. What the hell is this all about? See what I mean? You can take scientific data to the table, nobody wants to listen to it.

These people spend years on this stuff. Measuring. (?). To them, or to a standard engineer out there, whether its native grass or St. Augustine grass, its the same. Grass is grass. Well, grass is not grass. (misc.)

DT: So far we've talked a little bit about landscape design, and about flood control, and about water quality, and recharge zone issues, and this problem of grandfathering and vesting. You had a good point when we were off tape about another strategy for trying to control inconsistent land uses. And I think it involved nuisance law. Can you talk a little bit about that?

LD: Yeah. We don't know where we are with this vested rights issue, no matter how many rules and regulations that we passed here in San Antonio. We do know that the rules that we passed on Thursday are not more stringent than state law, although the developers in the development community are complaining that they are.

We have to make very sure in San Antonio that we do not pass laws that conflict with state law or are more overbearing than what state allows. Of course, these people also go to the state legislature and get these laws passed on the heels of local ordinances. It seems the state legislature will pass any cockamamie law for these for the lack of land use controls.

Of course, we cant get a school funding bill passed, but we can get these cockamamie vested rights bills passed with great ease. But the issue isand

DT: Do you think that the common law of nuisance might be able to trump or at least augment the positive (?).

LD: Absolutely. Texas has very weak environmental laws. But we have some the strongest public nuisance laws in the state, and in the country. So there was, when we passed the water quality ordinance, the attorneys on the opposing side told the city attorneys that these, this rule, these rules, these water quality regulations would not stand up under a lawsuit utilizing the states environmental laws.

But the attorneys that our side brought in said that we could argue them on the basis of public nuisance laws, which were very strong in Texas. And that seemed to that was the only way that was the argument that allowed us to take that to City Council, and give them some reassurance that we could argue these cases when and if we were going to get sued under the public nuisance law.

And I think we still need to continue to do that because polluting water, doing a lot of these noise, visual, a lot of these things can be looked at as public nuisances, and we need to start looking at them and arguing them in law as violations of public nuisance. And as you get into an urban area versus a rural area, public nuisances become more and more important.

DT: Lets talk about another aspect of this effort to try and find ordinances that will be effective and wont be challenged in court. I think that you worked on the sign ordinance here. The (?) sign ordinances. Can you talk about some of the balances you had to find?

LD: Well, we took a multiple approach on that. One of the first ones that we passed had to do with proliferation of billboards. They were going up all over the city. And just as soon as the Highway Department would get through building the stretch of roadway, like 1604, they were there were like the last contractor in was the billboard people.

And of course, they started going up in areas where new development was happening. And these people who were going to develop along 1604 didn't want these damn billboards in their front yard, you know, or like Burma Shave signs. So we had to come up with a billboard ordinance.

And we looked at a number of other ones. And actually, the most restrictive one in the country was Houston. Said no billboards shall be built at all. Well, the minute you tell somebody they cant do anything at all, you end up in court, because that's the way it is. So you have to be reasonable. And you also, besides being reasonable, you have to come up with rules and regulations that treat everybody the same. You see, you cannot be arbitrary and capricious.

And then in terms of billboards and signage, you have the whole issues of freedom of speech. And these billboard companies, at one time before Clear Channel bought them all, they were all owned by a company called Metromedia out of Secaucus, New Jersey. And they had a staff of lawyers that were defending lawsuits on billboards all over the country, and winning.

So we had to be very careful with our lawyer in San Antonio that we didn't end up in court with Metromedia who owned most of the billboards in San Antonio. Of course, if you're going to get them to come to the table to discuss a meaningful billboard ordinance, you're wasting your time. Metromedia of Secaucus, New Jersey is not going to show up at City Hall to discuss being reasonable.

So we had to do this sort of without their benefit, but there were local billboard owners who were in competition with these out-of-towners. So you have to come up with something that's good for them because they're being squeezed out by these big guys. So once you understand the politics of the situation, and the legality of the situation, you can sit around the table and start trading, which is what any ordinance involves.

By the time it gets to City Council, you're lucky if you have a bare minimum of standards. You're just hopeful that you got the foot in the door, and that over the years ahead you can amend ordinances once they're in place to make them more restrictive. But quite frankly, the stuff that's going on out there is like a giant elephant. Well, the only way you eat an elephant is one bite at a time.

So basically, what were involved in is one bite at a time. In terms of the billboard ordinance, we couldn't do what Houston did because the day we put the thing on the books, somebody'd filed suit and the ordinance would be held in abatements until the suits resolved, which is what happened in Houston and other places.

So you have to come up with something that's reasonable that lawyers don't feel comfortable about suing on and winning. They don't want to lose because they'll lose their clients. The billboard industry's a big client. The whole sign industry's a big client for attorneys. So we decided somewhere along the line that, how about if you want to build a new billboard in San Antonio, you have to take two down?

Well, everybody thought that was a horrible idea. But Gene Camargo at that time, who was head of Building and Zoning for the city, and one or two city attorneys said, hey, that's pretty intelligent. If you want to put one billboard up, you have to take two down. Two of yours, two of somebody else's, you can trade around. And once we were able to get across that hurdle of two down for one up, were able to solve a lot of problems.

First thing is that the billboards that were going to come down were the older ones. And most of them were concentrated in the inner city which is where we wanted to get rid of most of them, because that's where there were too many of them. Back to back, illegal.

So then once you come up with something that's reasonable in that, like that, then you can start looking at other rules and regulations. Like spacing, size, height, all of that stuff.

DT: On the new ones.

LD: On the new ones. But what, once you deal with the proliferation issue, and get everybody to agree to that, because the big problem is the numbers, then once you've done that, then you can start dealing with the other issues.

Now, in terms of other sign things that we've done, we've gone in , we did that was the first ordinance, which was the billboard ordinance, and that's become famous all over the country. Two down for one up. Everybody's doing that now.

The second thing we did was start looking at other signs in areas related to high density corridors that we thought ought to have a scenic look. So we came up with something called The Scenic Corridor Ordinance, where a group of folks who wanted to control billboards or any kind of signage in a certain area, could all get together and come up with their own rules and regulations as long as those rules and regulations were the same as the rules and regulations that we came up with, or more restrictive.

So that was an enabling ordinance that a group of businessmen and a group of neighborhood associations, and a group of parks advocates could all get together and create a zoning overlay that's called an Urban Corridor Ordinance that controls signage in that area. That was easy to pass because it was an enabling ordinance, and folks had to get together to do it.

The third one that we passed was the touchiest, actually, which was on-premise signs. And this is the city telling people what kind of signs they can put up on private property. Not in the public right-of-way, on private property. And man alive, that was a bloodbath. An absolute bloodbath.

I was co-chairman of that committee along with an attorney representing the sign industry who was the co-chairman. You never, I never saw so many participants at a meeting on any issue in my life in San Antonio. But we got on-premise sign control, and good on-premise sign control, and we strengthened the board that does on-premise signs.

Issues of safety. These are electrical appliances by and large, have been addressed. Them falling over in windstorms. Businesses vacating and leaving the signs up, and then a new one goes up, and the old sign stays there. I mean they get to be ch-ch-ch. I mean you go all over town and there's old signs from years ago still up. How do you deal with them? How do you take them down? And what the responsibility is?

So in a way in drafting ordinances, for those kinds of issues, prepared me really for the cutthroat dealings on the Water Quality Ordinance, and on the Drainage Regulation Review Committee. And if, and in fact, the Drainage Regulation Review Committee had already started. And the, this sounds very egotistical, but the water quality reg. thing was falling apart.

The mayors Water Quality Taskforce was falling apart. And one of the councilmen came to me and said can you serve on that committee? And I said, no, I'm doing drainage reg. Well, well put off the Drainage Regulation Review Committees work for a year if you'll go work on that thing. So I did. I went there. I mean it was a mess. They had no ground rules.

The public and the lobbyists were sitting at the same people with the mayoral appointments. No ground rules, no organization. I don't know how the hell they were able to come up with anything. So I says, you get you know, you got to have ground rules. You got to have ground rules. You cant all talk at the same time. These simple kinds of things.

So after about a year of that kind of finagling, and getting serious, we got a bite out of the elephant on water quality. So here we have mechanisms to deal with water quantity, storm drainage, and water quality, but its going I'm going to be dead before those rules and regs are going to be what they ought to be to protect the health and safety of the people who live in this city.

DT: It seems like these ordinances are always influenced really strongly by the politics in San Antonio. And I thought one of the really striking things you've been involved with was the neighborhood associations to try and build the political support, the grassroots support, to make these things happen. And I was wondering if you could talk about your role in the San Antonio Coalition of Neighborhood Associations.

LD: Well, you know, I've always been concerned about environmental issues. It was obvious that the City of San Antonio was going to grow when I came here. And grow phenomenally. It had all the characteristics of cities that are going to grow. The most important of being that it was undiscovered, you know.

Houston and Dallas had already been discovered, but boy, this was the place, you know. And quite frankly, I was upset about it ending up like Austin, which I think has turned from one of the most beautiful cities in Texas, if not the world, into one of the ugliest places I've ever seen. And that happened, you know, over ten or fifteen years, which is a small timescale.

If that had ever happened to San Antonio, we wouldn't have a tourist business. But anyway, looking for, in, try to create an environmental body of people was tough back in the 70s. The members of the Sierra Club and the Audubon Society, and those sort of folks, were quite frankly middle class and upper middle class white folk. And that's a relatively small percentage of the population in San Antonio.

So we had to find a political base. And a political base. And the base basically that we identified was the neighborhood movement. So this neighborhood here, River Road Neighborhood, was the first cities, the first city neighborhood association. There'd been a historic district here, or there, but this is something, first thing called a neighborhood association versus a historic district versus a homeowners association. A neighborhood association. Not a homeowners association, not a historic thing, but a neighborhood association.

And what is a neighborhood association? First thing, a neighborhood association is a neighborhood. And that's any group of people in a geographic area that decide that they're a neighborhood. And they have boundaries, and they have definitions. And they have a charter, and bylaws, and a 501(c)3, and they're set up to do business under the laws of the State of Texas. And we accomplished all of that.

And so River Road Neighborhood Association got together with a couple of other neighborhood associations, and we said we need to have a mechanism for getting together to talk about citywide issues. And so we formed, many, many years ago, the San Antonio Coalition of Neighborhood Associations, which was an organization that became huge, and became a political force. A lot of people didn't like us. Henry Cisneros did not like the neighborhood movement in San Antonio.

DT: What was the threat that he saw from the Neighborhood Association?

LD: He was used to politics as, Henrys an old time politician. He was brought up by a bunch of old-towners, old-timers and power brokers. That's who he owes his allegiance to. This allegiance that we were creating to, creating, was a grassroots, people in neighborhoods who were going to start making a difference at the polls.

And our big issues were all environmental issues. Code compliance, flooding, tree preservation, all of that. The environmental movement, which is large and growing and expanding in San Antonio, started with the inner city neighborhoods which had mixed ethnicity, mixed economic standard, common problems, and nobody ever paid any attention to them.

And they started today, in this city, if you want to become a councilman, you do it through the organization of neighborhood associations in your district. If you want to get elected mayor, you appeal to the neighborhood associations. And the neighborhood associations take those issues directly their issues directly to council people and talk with them everyday.

This is one of the vast, the biggest and vast transformation that this city has ever had. And it put an end, they have brought time limits to how long you stay in office, so that we get rid of these crooked dynasties that we've had. Every time somebody, I mean I have noble politicians come to me asking me to support extending term limits.

And I tell them, why, so we can have Frank Wing back? So we can have these people back? So we can have these people back that fought us for years and never got off the bench there, and got reelected year after year because they were a hero among a minority establishment, like a Patrone? Neighborhoods got rid of the Patrone system in this city. They got rid of this city being run, having council meetings at the San Antonio Country Club. Grassroots enabling and empowering people to have a voice in local government.

It is the biggest, San Antonio became one of the most important cities to visit in terms of two things, historic preservation, and neighborhood movements. National meetings have been held here to see how we did what we did. Now, that's not to say there aren't people out there doing better than were doing now. But the neighborhood movement, and historic preservation in neighborhoods started here in this community. And that's, to me, why its livable.

Now, if you look at a lot of people involved in the movements in these issues related to water quality and the other issues, they did not come up from the Sierra Club, they did not come from the Audubon Society. All those people came out of neighborhood activism.

DT: What were some examples environmental problems that the neighborhood associations really took under their wing to work on?

LD: Historically, the big issues have related to drainage, and to water. The reuse system that we have now where we take reuse water and treat it, takes sewage and treat it, one of the first things that I did as chairman of the San Antonio Coalition of Neighborhoods Associations, was stand up at a SAWS meeting and promise the support of all the neighborhoods in San Antonio (?) a program of reuse water.

There wasn't one developer at that meeting. There wasn't one person from the Chamber of Commerce. Me, and a bunch of neighbors getting up, and SAWS, San Antonio Water System, they said you know, where's everybody else? And you actually want this? You want us to go and spend millions of dollars of rate-payers money to put in and interrupt neighborhoods with these waterlines were going to be digging through your streets and in your right-of-ways? You want that?

This is, it's reuse water. Its the only water we own. Its the only water we own. Once its taken out of the ground, as long as its in the pipes and it isn't discharged into a stream, its the only water San Antonio owns. So lets use it, and reuse it, and reuse it while its ours, because the minute we get rid of it, it belongs to the State of Texas.

So one of the first things we did was bring in line the Reuse Water Program. And we fought for it over and over and over again. Of course, later on, a lot of other people joined on the bandwagon. But we were the first. And I had become chairman of that organization two days before that meeting was held, and I got a phone call from the previous chairman saying you got to get down to the City of San, out, down to SAWS and talk in favor of this.

I said, talk in favor of what? I don't know what I'm talking about. Well, you know, Larry, just go, be there, and get up and say something. Sign up. So were very proud of that. As, you know, not just the political thing, but in terms of drainage, the amount of flooding in this city, and the loss of life due to flooding is a disgrace. Is a disgrace.

And we have the rules and regulations in place to begin to assume that situation, but its going to take the neighborhoods to get the city to enforce those rules and regulations. There was a hundred year flood plain defined for this neighborhood years ago. It has now been updated. They have tripled the number of houses inside the hundred year flood plain. Tripled.

A neighborhood south of here on the San Antonio River on Symphony Lane over by San Jose Mission, there's maybe a hundred houses there. Every house is in the flood plain. Subsequent to rules and regulations, flood plain insurance, the federal government, city rules and regulations. Can you imagine?

Subsequent to all of these things the hundred year flood plain, which FEMA says you cant increase, is going up. Well, you know, what I've told River Road is that you've got to do something about this. And were going to be polite it for a while.

And then when we cant be polite about it anymore, were going to have to go to court and sue because quite honestly, when you're dealing with issues like this in the City of San Antonio, and the River Authority, and all these other agencies, and most of the water comes from the City of Alamo Heights, by the way, this bedroom community just north of here, that has no impervious cover regs, no rules and regs it's where all the rich people live.

And they take all their runoff, dump it in the river, and it flows by my neighborhood and puts my neighbors under water. Well, you know, this is a dicey situation, so you deal with these people, you know, in a reasonable fashion. And then when it gets unreasonable, you take advantage of the fact that you already have standing to sue which costs you a big bunch of bucks in the first place, so you have to go out into the community, join with other neighbors that are getting flooded out, and sue.

You got to sue somebody, sue the city, sue somebody. But that's the reality of the situation because were at the point right now where the Public Works Director blows us off. Were at the point where one agency blames another agency, and then you pull them together in the meeting and they get in a fight. And here's my neighbors sitting there watching these department heads, agency heads fight. And its our taxes that are paying their salaries, and they're calling each other nasty names.

So those are the kinds of issues that neighborhoods get involved in. And I know were going to have to sue. And its probably going to cost us a half a million to three-quarters of a million dollars, or maybe more. And you're talking about a hundred property owners who are largely elderly, and middle class or lower middle class having to go out and raise that kind of money. But we did it before. But what are we going to do?

The hundred year flood plain has doubled the number of houses with all these rules and regulations in place. So you draw a new line. And then twenty years from now, they'll get a new line. And where is it? How many houses are going to be gone then? And how much more of the city is going to be flooded? With these regs in place?

And you go and talk to these people about why haven't you done something about it? Ah-ah-ah. You know, in the old days, you could go complain to FEMA. I sat down with FEMA the day after Katrina over at St. Mary's University in a meeting. And I'll tell you, even before all this stuff happened about FEMA, the words out of my mouth to those people up there from FEMA, this isn't the agency it used to be, and its not carrying out its individual, it's original mandate.

What the hell is going on? You're not to provide insurance to communities that do not put in place and enforce ordinance within your guidelines. And that is supposed to protect me and my neighbors from increased flooding over those Army Corps of Engineers lines. And here its not working. Well, were not going to do that. We don't think were in that business anymore.

I says, who told you you weren't in that business anymore? Did you go to Congress to find out you weren't in that business anymore? Well, we've had one correction over in, and and, I says, I got a copy of that damn thing. Its right here from the Federal Register. It doesn't say you don't carry out that mandate. Well, you're talking to a bunch of ribbon clerks over there. They probably all been fired by now. [End of Reel 2351]