As homebuilding booms in Hill Country, the gold rush is on; dire warnings from infrastructure and environment.

The Texas Hill Country is officially discovered and there’s no turning back.

Connie Barron, a Blanco city councilwoman and a member of the Hill Country Alliance’s board, stated that there is a Gold Rush mentality in Hill Country development. Unfortunately, this mindset is not well-respected for the future of the region.

Hill Country Headlines: Get the top stories from the region delivered to your inbox

According to the 2020 census, Texas Hill Country is one the fastest-growing areas in the country. Leaders of small towns in the region are becoming more concerned. Developers are flooding the Hill Country, often destroying small towns and threatening the Hill Country way to live.

The Hill Country Alliance is a non-profit that covers more than 11,000,000 acres in 18 counties. Its name region is named after its founder. It works to preserve the environment, strengthen conservation efforts, and counter rapid growth. The region is home to 12 Texas rivers, in addition to San Antonio and Austin.

The Hill Country is seeing a lot of development as a result of the rapid growth in major metro areas. Texas homebuilders are buying up land in rural counties, often in unincorporated areas, that don’t have much government oversight. They then build subdivisions of thousands of homes that test the infrastructure as well as the environmental resources of small towns once quiet.

Katherine Romans is the executive director at the Hill Country Alliance. She stated that the pandemic only has accelerated the rate for fragmentation in the area. This includes the splitting of large tracts to make way of dense development.

She said that we knew that the loss of ranching land and the subdivision of large tracts wildlife habitat and open space would be a problem. It has only gotten worse over the past two years.

Blanco, for one, is trying to stop Blanco’s 1,500-home subdivision, which would more then double the citys population, which currently stands at 1,800. Buda is planning for a 2,500-home subdivision within its extra-territorial jurisdiction. This is despite the near universal opposition of city leaders who claim they are unable to handle the additional stress on their infrastructure.

Dripping Springs Ranchers are preparing for the possibility of Hays County exercising imminent domain over their lands to construct a four-lane highway through Dripping Springs to accommodate the increased traffic caused by the population boom.

Developers who build the homes often clash with city leaders who want to preserve the once-quiet Hill Country lifestyle. Colin Strother, a political strategist, lives in Buda and served for 10 years on Buda’s planning and zoning committee.

These developers don’t give a damn about us,” he said. They don’t care.

Cities cant manage growth

The Hill Country Alliance (or HCA) has closely tracked the population growth in the area over the past 20 year. The most recent figures from 2020 are stupendous.

Nearly 3.8 Million people reside in the Hill Country, which is almost 50 percent more than 2000. According to the HCA as of 2020. The region is expected grow by 35 percent in the next 20 years and reach 5.2 million people by 2040.

While some growth has occurred within city limits in cities like Fredericksburg and Boerne, most of it has been in unincorporated areas that aren’t subject to city regulations and rules.

According to the HCA, more than 864,000 people lived unincorporated in the Hill Country in 2020. This is a jump of 103 per cent since 1990.

Bandera and Medina counties show the highest levels of mass migration to unincorporated areas within the Hill Country. The 2021 State of the Hill Country Report, which the HCA examined the region using metrics such as population growth, water quality, conservation efforts, more than doubled the population in Bandera County’s unincorporated areas since 1990. The population of Bandera remained almost the same. Medina County has seen a decline in the population of several cities since the 1990s, but an increase in the overall population.

Because counties have fewer tools than cities to plan and manage responsible growth, the growth of unincorporated areas can be important. Texas law says so. Developers can build subdivisions without the need to comply with city density, zoning and wastewater regulations.

Romans stated that Texas is only state that doesn’t give counties tools to plan and manage growth. We are seeing an increase in growth in our region, with more incompatible land use coming in close to one another.

It could look like a concrete or brick plant is coming into a hospital. Or, it could look like an amphitheater with large lights coming into a quiet neighborhood.

Representatives of the Greater San Antonio Builders Association and the Home Builders Association of Greater Austin did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Many leaders in cities point to House Bill 347’s 2019 passage as the catalyst for a lot more Hill Country developer takeovers. House Bill 347 eliminated involuntary municipal annexes, which allowed a city to annex unincorporated territory into its city boundaries without voter approval. Many hailed the bill as a way to allow residents of unincorporated areas to remain in control of their city and not be subject to increased taxation and regulations.

Some say that the bill has had an unintended effect of preventing cities from having a better control on development coming in close to their boundaries, most often in their extraterritorial jurisdictions (ETJs). Developers will use the little county oversight to build large subdivisions in an ETJ city, while being close enough that a city still requires its water, wastewater, and public service resources.

Barron, Blanco’s city councilwoman, stated that the bill effectively stripped cities from their ability to exercise more control and protect them, as well as the opportunity to generate the revenue necessary to sustain small towns in the Hill Country.

She said that it also empowers developers to enter these unincorporated areas and create their own infrastructure to create dense communities right on our outskirts.

Strother, the Buda strategist, said that House Bill 347 was similar to the state Legislature giving a meat cleaver city’s ability to control growth and develop.

Strother stated that they just cut off a section of the code that provided cities with the power to manage their own growth.

Water Supply: The Impact

One of the major concerns about increased development is its impact on the environment, especially with the strain that all new houses are putting on the Edwards and Trinity aquifers, the two main aquifers that supply water to the entire Hill Country region.

Barron compared the current water supply situation to the Hill Country to a glass with just one or two straws. It now has 10, or 11.

We can’t keep adding more straws in the same glass of drinking water and expect it not to last as long, she said.

Simply put, more subdivisions and houses means more groundwater pumping from aquifers which could lead to some wells that pump from the water source to dry up.

Jacobs Well is one of the most famous and important spring wells of the region. It was dry for the first times in the late 2000s after a combination of excessive pumping, drought, and it had never been dried in recorded geographical history. Roman said that it has been dry several times since then.

We know that the Hill Country was once home to 1,100 springs. But, unfortunately, we don’t know how many are still running. The point is that once we start losing those springs we see dramatic and irreversible effects on the surface waters.

Water permits are managed and capped by local groundwater conservation districts and the Edwards Aquifer Authority. They have been working on a case by case basis for many years to manage the new water permits issued so that new homes and businesses can be built.

Roland Ruiz is the general manager at the Edwards Aquifer Authority. He said that developers and environmental interests can sometimes be at odds. He stated that it was up to environmental stakeholders and developers to consider things such as groundwater supply, endangered species, and conservation efforts when planning for new development in the Hill Country.

Ruiz said that it’s complex and difficult. But we believe there’s a way forward. We do our best to make sure we move forward together.

Strother, the political strategist, stated that the Hill Country’s appeal is still its rolling hills and starry skies, as well as its proximity to major cities.

He said that the Hill Country will eventually be destroyed by the big-city people who want to live there.

These actions do not just impact the small communities. He said that it is affecting the entire region because there is not enough infrastructure to handle it. This uncontrolled growth is causing havoc in the entire region.

Annie Blanks is a writer for the Express-News via Report for America, a national program that places journalists into local newsrooms. ReportforAmerica.org. [email protected].