This lawsuit seeks in invalidate the approval of a zoning ordinance that provides the landowner exemptions to the City's watershed protections, including creek and lake buffers and setbacks to the City's Waterfront Overlay that protects Lady Bird Lake from overdevelopment. The zoning ordinance modifies the amount of impervious cover allowed near the lakefront and permits the developer to remove the dense forest of trees that line the existing hike and bike trail.
This action is about protecting parkland and the riparian zones that provide natural filtration of pollutants before they enter Lady Bird Lake and Bouldin Creek. It also would help us ensure that Lady Bird Lake remains publicly accessible and supports open, recreational uses for all of Austin. Read more about the lawsuit in the Austin Monitor story from May 2024. Next Steps:
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 I-35 Expansion / Won't Work: In August 2023, the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) self-approved its own environmental analysis and compliance with federal laws for a proposed expansion of I-35 through Central Austin. This 8-mile stretch of highway would expand the number of lanes to over 20 lanes in some sections, displacing over 100 residences and businesses. The highway expansion will increase the accumulation of air toxins within neighborhoods along the corridor, already suffering from 62 years of proximity to the highway. And, as part of its final design, TxDOT will divert the polluted highway runoff through East Austin and dump undertreated runoff into the pristine waters of the free-flowing section of the Colorado River, east of Longhorn Dam.
The Save Our Springs Alliance, in partnership with Rethink35, PODER, the Austin Justice Coalition, and several environmental and neighborhood organizations have filed a suit against TxDOT challenging the sufficiency of TxDOT’s environmental review under the National Environmental Policy Act. If this lawsuit is successful, TxDOT would be forced to reconsider the environmental impacts of the proposed highway and hopefully reconsider some of the community-supported alternatives that would better heal the damage that the current highway has done to Austin’s communities for the last half century. Next Steps:  Mirasol Springs Development: We are representing Lew Adams in a case against a large development planned to surround Roy Creek Canyon, near Hamilton Pool and the Pedernales River. The ecosystem in and around Roy Creek Canyon and the proposed development is fragile and drought prone and is home to the endangered golden-cheeked warbler, Guadalupe bass, the newly listed Texas fatmucket mussel, and Pedernales River springs salamander.
The sprawling Mirasol Springs development includes a hotel, two restaurants, a farm, and over 50 houses and threatens water quantity in the entire area with plans to extract 105 acre feet of water per year from the already strained Pedernales and 56.7 acre feet of water per year from the dwindling Trinity Aquifer. The development also has plans to dispose of 30,000 gallons per day of treated sewage by irrigating fields near the Pedernales River, threatening water quality too. We are fighting the permits that would allow the development to pump water from the Pedernales River and the Trinity Aquifer and irrigate sewage so close to the Pedernales River; we are also fighting to get protections for the Pedernales River springs salamander under the federal Endangered Species Act. Next Steps: |
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