The likely demise of the Mountain City ILA

Last night’s elections for the Mountain City City Council may have secured the final nail in the coffin of a proposed agreement between Mountain City and Kyle involving, to put it simply, selling water for land.

I’m going to try make this explanation as bare bones as possible and, in doing so, I will, admittedly, being omitting a lot of details, but the situation is basically this. A developer proposed the construction of a trendy residential district it called Anthem on property located in Mountain City’s Extraterritorial Jurisdiction (ETJ). In order to provide water for the subdivision, the developer reached an agreement with an outfit known as Electro Purification which proposed to drill wells near Wimberly in an area that was not regulated by any water district. Residents around the proposed drilling feared those wells would drain water from their water supplies and they took their complaints to county and state government officials. The result was legislation enacted that placed the disputed area under supervision, having the effect of limiting the amount of water Electro Purification could extract from their wells. As a result, Anthem still had no water source.

So the City of Kyle decided to saddle its white horse and ride to the rescue. It told Mountain City it would provide the water needed for Anthem if Mountain City would cede jurisdiction of the Anthem property to Kyle which, probably sooner than later, would annex the territory into its city limits. There was more to the agreement than that and, originally Hays County was part of the deal, throwing in some free road reconstruction for Mountain City, but recently I have heard that the county is out of the deal and the city of Dripping Springs has become the third party.

The populace of Mountain City was sharply divided over the proposal. (The populace of Kyle, as usual, didn’t seem to care one way or another.) I don’t want to say the Mountain City population was "split," because that would infer there were as many Mountain City residents for the ILA as there were against it. My feeling, from attending a couple of town hall meetings and one city council meeting, was that there were far more people against the deal than there were those for it. I didn’t realize just how overwhelming those numbers were until I saw the results of last night’s elections, which basically was a referendum on the ILA. Those that are against the ILA are divided into two camps. The first, under no conditions whatsoever, wants to cede any land to Kyle — they insist a "buffer" must be maintained to protect them from Kyle. The other camp just thinks Mountain City is not getting enough in return for ceding the property. (Back when Kyle Mayor Todd Webster was not afraid to talk with me, he said right after the ILA was proposed that, had he been in Mountain City’s shoes, he would oppose it.)

Last night’s Mountain City City Council election featured five candidates all running for three positions on the council — the top three vote getters would win. Three of the candidates — incumbent Lee Taylor, Suzanne Halam and Ralph McClendon Jr. — had either expressed dissatisfaction with the ILA or said they hadn’t reached a final position on it. The other two — Eva Brown and Thomas W. Brown Jr. (wife and husband) — were solidly in favor of it. The Browns, together, tallied only 8.8 percent of the votes cast. That’s not 8.8 percent each, but 8.8 total: 5 percent for Thomas Brown and 3.8 percent for Eva Brown. That’s astonishing. From where I sit, the folks in Mountain City spoke loudly, clearly and resoundingly about how they feel about the ILA and they don’t want it. And since any proposed agreement would have to be approved by the Mountain City City Council, I can’t see how this deal has any future.