San Antonio Express-News
Fans of trees bark about city ordinance
Sitting at the foot of the scenic Hill Country, the rolling hills of North San Antonio are covered with acres of Ash Juniper, Live Oak and Texas Red Oak trees. However, one hill — in plain view of U.S. 281 and Stone Oak Parkway — looks more like a desert void of any vegetation.

Sitting at the foot of the scenic Hill Country, the rolling hills of North San Antonio are covered with acres of Ash Juniper, Live Oak and Texas Red Oak trees.

However, one hill — in plain view of U.S. 281 and Stone Oak Parkway — looks more like a desert void of any vegetation.

And with the tree preservation ordinance passed just last year, environmentalists and residents are outraged and questioning the effectiveness of the ordinance after developers stripped these 52 acres of vegetation.

"It looks like a quarry," resident Steven Griffith said of the Encino Ridge site. "It's awful. What makes it even worse is it's over the aquifer recharge zone."

The 2003 tree ordinance came after three years of tense back-and-forth compromising between environmentalists and developers that would require new developments to preserve vegetation or make other concessions to replace vegetation.

But, like Carter-Burgess, the firm that holds the permit for Laredo-Encino, developers who filed plans before passage of both the 1997 and 2003 tree ordinances are grandfathered from one or both, City Arborist Debbie Reid said.

Laredo-Encino is a 750-acre project that encompasses Encino Ridge and developers say the entire site is exempt from both laws.

During the three years both sides squabbled over the latest ordinance, plans were submitted to develop 35,000 acres of land, exempting those developers from the new ordinance, said Richard Alles, who heads up the Citizens' Tree Coalition.

Calls to both Carter-Burgess and Pulte Homes weren't immediately returned.

John Caruso, a resident of Summerglen, a neighboring development, expressed outrage at the treeless site and said he wants to see the "ugly property they created" restored.

"Who would want to live in that treeless community?" Caruso asked. "Hopefully, Pulte Homes will get that this is a total disgrace."

Reid said that in the case of the Encino Ridge project, the developer submitted plans with a permit grandfathering them from the tree ordinance because they were filed in 1996, meaning neither ordinance applied.

Reid said that before the developers are given clearance, the city has to make sure the tree permit turned in for approval matches the plans in the permit.

Unless the developers' plans radically change from the original filing, then the plans are grandfathered.

It's not clear to the city how much land will be grandfathered because what is exempted depends on the plans submitted on a case-by-case basis, said Florencio Peña, director of development services for San Antonio.

That does not sit well with environmentalists who say the loopholes in both the 1997 and 2003 preservation ordinances are allowing large amounts of land to be cleared without holding developers to preservation requirements.

"By any measure, it's a huge amount of land that is exempt from the new ordinance," Alles said.

Alles said it amounts to about 10 square miles of land that can be developed either under the 1997 ordinance or under no ordinance at all, which is the case with Encino Ridge.

Reid said a lot of projects are actually covered under the new ordinance with about 30 percent falling under the grandfather clauses.

"But a lot of times, even on (those) projects, we have people that voluntarily save," she said.

And in the midst of public outcry over the clear-cutting the Encino Ridge site, Pulte Homes pulled the Grayson Park project from the agenda of the Planning Commission at its meeting Wednesday.

Susan Wright, a member of the city's planning commission, acknowledged that Pulte's clearing of the area created a negative perception of the company and the Grayson Park project.

"This was exacerbated by the fact that it was clear cut," she said.

Pulte officials said they would like more time to educate the commission members about their intentions for Grayson Park, another subdivision planned for the Henderson Pass and Thousand Oaks Drive area, before the commission meets again.

Seventy percent of the Grayson Park project, which sits on the Edwards Aquifer recharge zone, will be concrete, asphalt or otherwise impervious. The project is about 15 to 16 acres of which 5 acres are not grandfathered, meaning Pulte had to submit a tree preservation plan only for the 5 acres, Reid said.

"We can't allow our environment to be destroyed," Alles said. "The environment doesn't know about grandfathering, all it knows is it's being destroyed."