BASTROP BRIEFLY HALTS NEW DEVELOPMENT
90-day moratorium gives officials chance to review regulations.
The Bastrop City Council on Tuesday night issued an emergency 90-day moratorium on new development as officials examine whether the city’s development codes are effective enough in preventing adverse effects on drainage.
The council also approved an emergency ordinance to evaluate the potential impact of development on stormwater flow throughout the city.
During the moratorium, the city will not accept, review or approve commercial or residential development permits. Bastrop City Attorney Alan Bojorquez said there are exceptions to the ordinance for projects that are underway or that have received the required permits to get started.
The moratorium on new development in the city and its extraterritorial jurisdiction comes after the City Council held a special workshop in February to study Bastrop’s drainage patterns compared to new Federal Emergency Management Agency data and updated flood plain maps. Officials said the city’s rules and regulations should ensure development projects respect Bastrop’s ecological challenges and guarantee they will not adversely affect stormwater drainage.
During the moratorium, city staff and consultants with Austin-based Simple City Design will examine Bastrop’s development rules and regulations, compare them to new data and determine if updates are needed.
“This is a unique piece of Earth situated here on the Colorado (River) the way it is — the sands, the silts, the location of the river, the hills — all this makes for unique challenges and, as your city attorney, I’m not at all convinced that our codes and our standards are at the point they need to be to address the challenges we have in front of us right now and the challenges to come,” Bojorquez told the City Council on Tuesday night.
Officials say they need to get ahead of incoming growth and overhaul the city’s regulations before developers request additional permits for commercial and residential projects. Bastrop Mayor Connie Schroeder told the Bastrop Advertiser on Wednesday that the city has seen an influx in development requests.
The city’s Planning Department told the Bastrop Advertiser on Wednesday it could not provide an estimate of how many development permit applications it receives on average in a week or month.
The emergency drainage ordinance the City Council approved Tuesday night will add two requirements to the city’s permitting process. First, developers must have a conference with the city’s planning, engineering and public works departments before submitting a permit application to make sure the proposed project has taken consideration of drainage effects on neighbors and the community. Developers also will be required to include in the permit application a signed certification from a state-licensed engineer guaranteeing the engineer has reviewed the topographic data for the property and has made a professional determination that the project will not adversely affect stormwater drainage on that site.
“Those are two reasonable requirements that are directly related to health and safety issues we have with drainage,” Bojorquez said.
Schroeder said Wednesday that drainage concerns were the “highest priority” for jump-starting the city’s Building Bastrop smart-growth initiative and was the catalyst for the council to issue a development moratorium and approving an emergency drainage ordinance.
“As you look into it, all of the developments that take place, if they’re meeting all of our regulations but we have folks in the watershed that are flooding, it’s time to change the regulation,” she said. “And you cannot allow additional development if you know it’s going the wrong way.”
Shortly after a May 2016 flood left 77 homes damaged in Bastrop, many along Gills Branch Creek, the city commissioned a study to identify infrastructure fixes that would alleviate flooding in the city. Halff Associates, anengineering consulting firm, used hydrological and topographic models to create flood plain data to redefine FEMA’s decade-old flood plain maps.
In February, it presented the City Council with about $22 million in infrastructure improvements the city could implement to fix drainage, including improving the creek channel between Martin Luther King Drive and Texas 71; modifying the Gills Branch channel by benching, or cutting away, the river bank to widen the channel; and building a 150-acre-foot detention pond downstream of Texas 95 and a 90-acrefoot detention pond near the Bastrop Youth Soccer Fields.