The Tuesday, October 21, 2014 city council agenda has an item on it that proposes changing the zoning of a city owned parcel from R-5 residential to S-D special development.
The backup material shows virtually every city department either recommending the change or at least not opposing it.
Neighborhood opposition
According to the backup material:
“The San Juan Neighborhood Association was opposed to the rezoning request citing concerns over commercial uses close to their existing homes and submitted a petition with 32 signatures from the association members. The petition did not trigger a 211 based on State Code requirements.”
Well I guess if the petition did not force a 211 then the city ought to go right ahead and ignore the neighbors. By the way Texas local government code section 211 gives property owners near a proposed zoning change the right to protest the change. If they meet the requirements of the code city council would have to have 75% of it’s members vote for the change in order for it to take place. Since the petition did not qualify council can do this with a simple majority.
In order to have qualified the petition would have to have included signatures from the owners of 20% of the property area within 200 feet of the land in question. In other words this is not one man one vote, this requirement is based upon a percentage of the area around the land in question.
Wonder why?
Take a look at this graphic:
It’s nice to know that oil refineries have rights too.
It is interesting to note that four of the people who signed the petition gave their address as TxDOT and their phone number as a TxDOT office. Which office? A TxDOT document lists the phone number in a list of district environmental coordinators.
The people promoting the petition probably did not know that the signatures had to be from property owners within 200 feet of the land to be rezoned and that they would need to get about 40% of those owners to sign since about half of the land appears to be owned by commercial interests. Somehow I doubt that our city staff went out of their way to explain this to the San Juan Neighborhood Association.
We deserve better
Brutus
elpasospeak 
Since this property is adjacent to the refinery and some of the signatures were associated with TxDOT, I wonder if it is just a coincidence that the TxDOT transportation czar is Ted Houghton, who also just happens to be closely aligned politically and personally with the key shareholders of Western. I’m sure it’s just a coincidence.
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The 211 definitely advantages larger land owners and not necessarily those who have made significant capital investment on smaller land parcels, such as home owners.
City staff does a very poor job of telling residents what information is available to them on request.
In the case of a 211 petition, the most helpful is a request for the property parcel map of the properties which fall in the 211 zone as well as the list of those property owners names and addresses. This helps the residents identify whose signatures they need to get on their petition.
Planning GIS staff generate this for all rezoning and it is readily available unless someone on staff wants to jerk the opposition around.
Also many times only a partial part of the property falls in the 211 so the residents need to clarify whether the whole parcel is counted in the calculation or only a percentage.
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Those were not petition sheets, those were our sign up sheets for the association’s monthly meeting. TXDOT just happened to be the keynote speaker for that month. The Association took a vote in July, August and September, regarding the rezoning of the said property. All 3 times it was unanimous against rezoning. The city asked me to supply them with a list of members attending the 3 meetings, hence the sign in sheets.
The city postponed this action yesterday for 8 weeks. This gives us time to see if we can move with a 211 petition, since the city did not notify the association or give us a list of the 211 circumference.
Also, Yes Western Refining is the one who is interested in that property. They are buying all the property that becomes available on the eastern end of our association. It is something that we need to be aware of.
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If the city asked for a list of “members” attending your meetings, why would you give them a list with TxDOT signatures on it?
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We just have one type of sign in sheet for all our association meetings. Everyone that attends signs in, members , visitors and speakers. Maybe, I should had redacted speakers.
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