Public input has led to some proposed changes to development limits in the city’s comprehensive plan, but many affected residents are not yet on board.
Once again, a number of landowners from the city’s extraterritorial jurisdiction packed the Jan. 12 city council meeting to find out more about potential modifications to the Envision Taylor Comprehensive plan, which limits development in the ETJ based on the high cost of extending and maintaining infrastructure there.
Many landowners say this limits their land’s value.
“You changed some jargon, and you changed some wording, but I don’t see a whole lot of the nuts and bolts,” said Bill Albert, who owns land in the restricted growth sector and who is a frequent speaker at meetings. “We don’t totally understand what you are talking about.”
At the meeting, consultant Rebecca Leonard, the CEO of Lionheart Places, the key developer of the plan, gave city leaders and the public an overview of proposed changes based on a number of public input sessions held over the late summer and fall.
“A key takeaway was we really need to clarify what the restricted growth sector is,” Leonard said. “The horizon for this plan is approximately 20 years, and the idea wasn’t that growth would never happen out there, it was just not needed to accommodate the growth projections that the plan was anticipating, so maybe restricted growth sector was not the right words for it.”
According to Texas law, cities have the authority based on population size to manage growth patterns in their ETJ, which in Taylor’s case, is one mile out from the city limits, except for some areas that petitioned to be included Proposed changes mentioned by Leonard included changing the name of the “restricted growth sector” of the map to “future growth sector” for areas that lack infrastructure and differentiating areas within it that have a better likelihood of development into tiers, modifying the map’s boundaries, and being more specific as to requirements for Municipal Utility Districts, which developers use to finance infrastructure, among other changes. But several residents expressed their continued dissatisfaction with the process at the meeting.
John Kitsmiller, who owns land on County Road 405, also voiced his frustrations.
“Given the huge amount of demand for land out in the ETJ because of Samsung ... why isn’t the city using this lift in land values as an opportunity to give potential buyers comfort that they are going to be able to develop the land for commercial, industrial, high density residential use if whomever is doing that development is willing to do the infrastructure?” he said.
After the presentation, At-large Councilman Dwayne Ariola recommended that the owners get organized, for their own sake as well as the city’s.
“My recommendation is that this change ... instead of dealing with hundreds of owners, request that they come together as a single point of contact and leverage all this energy so that we are not dealing with oneacre owners and ten-acre owners and 5,000 acre owners but they come together to have recommendations to the city to you as a planner, to us as a council so that we don’t pay for the infrastructure, but they come to the table with solutions.”
District 4 Councilman Robert Garcia said he thought it was the developers, and not the city, who were trying to lower the value of the land through hardball negotiations.
“We will work with developers who are serious about installing infrastructure if they come to the city with a plan, correct?” Garcia asked Assistant City Manager Tom Yantis.
“Oh absolutely. We do it every day,” Yantis replied. “We are working with a number of property owners that are in the controlled growth sector.”
Leonard plans to provide a public draft of the changes to the plan on the city’s website at the end of this month, with the intention of introducing a new ordinance at the Feb. 23 regular meeting.
