Special Public Hearing on Grandfathering Ordinance

While the grandfathering ordinance has been controversial from the beginning, City attorneys and staffers added fuel to the fire by drafting their own ordinance that largely scrapped a year of work by Mayor Garza's Vested Rights Task Force. Staff included recommendations from environmental groups that were rejected by the Task Force. They will be revising the ordinance until February 15th at noon and are considering additional changes requested by developers and environmental groups.

We support a requirement for developers to submit more specific plans before their grandfathering clock starts. This will make it harder for developers to get exemptions from aquifer protection and tree preservation rules. Big landowners are opposing this, because it delays when they can file development plans, makes it easier for them to lose grandfathering because of development plan changes, and makes it harder to sell grandfathered rights (aka "vested rights") along with the land.

We support elimination of a loophole in the aquifer protection ordinance that makes it nearly impossible for developers to lose their grandfathering. This leads to absurd situations where a project (see picture) is exempt from the 1995 aquifer protection ordinance but NOT exempt from the 2003 tree ordinance.

We believe the City should require developers to start construction within 3 years, or lose their grandfathering. Under the proposed ordinance developers can keep entitlements for 25 years (or more) without starting construction.

Unfortunately, the ordinance grandfathers CPS electric contracts and SAWS "category letters", neither of which are grandfathered under state law.

Much of the new ordinance deals with two bills passed by the 79th Texas Legislature in 2005. Both bills expand entitlements for developers seeking exemptions from modern development standards. Senate Bill 848 adds water/sewer contracts to the list of grandfatherable permits, and provides that grandfathering starts when a landowner deposits "fair notice" of his development in the US mail. SB 574 limits cities' ability to expire development permits and slaps some north Texas municipalities that tried to limit exemptions from their tree preservation rules by placing them in their zoning regulations.

We want to thank Councilwomen Elena Guajardo and Patti Radle for making this special public hearing possible, and all of Council for voting yes on Councilwoman Guajardo's motion.