Haylley Johnson

After stopping by the Pearl Brewery Farmers Market, I took a morning stroll down the riverwalk extension with my organic coffee in tow. Sadly, most of this was spent sweating and hiding under a shady overpass alongside fellow San Antonians. While beads of sweat fell into my eyes, I looked out at the plants stuck on the scorching hillside and realized in horror that the plants could never join me in the shade. Drought resistance only takes you so far.

Thankfully seven years of tedious effort, planning, and design created the Museum Reach riverwalk extension. “The project itself stared as a vision as far back as 1998. The San Antonio River Authority, the City of San Antonio, and Bexar County created the San Antonio River Oversight Committee [the citizens’ stakeholder group],” Steven Schauer, manager of external communications for SARA, says. When the design and construction phases of the project began, Ford, Powell, and Carson (an architectural firm) designed the extension, and Zachry Construction Corporation implemented FPC’s design – a plan that took our rain-filled Texas weather (just kidding) into account.

“[The landscape] was always meant to be irrigated, but even with a lot of irrigation, you still have to have plants that can stand full sun. They tried to select a lot of plants that were colorful and drought resistance because that’s what you want to see,” says Mark Sorenson, SARA’s project manager for the San Antonio river museum reach urban segment.

Although right now drought resistance seems the only important feature, other important elements are the plant’s aesthetics and their ability to prevent erosion, according to Cullen Coltrane, the landscape architect employed by FPC. No one wants to see an ugly garden, especially one that cost 61.1 million dollars. “As you move further toward Pearl Brewery, you get less tropical and more hill country in style,” Coltrane says.

Yet keeping that lovely hill country garden alive is another story.

Now the extension is open to the public, and the ISS Grounds Control (employed by Zachry to maintain the landscape) works tirelessly to inch the landscape along during our painfully extended drought.

“They will actually be maintaining the whole system for a year. Zachry was required as a part of their bid to insure the entire project for a year,” says Sorenson. “At this point, ISS is taking care of plants for the year [because they were the subcontractors].”

“We have one full time gentleman that is down there every day,” says Chris Pais, ISS project manager for river extension project. “He is in charge of basically maintaining it to the owner’s standards.”

With a degree in landscaping and golf course management from Carleton State University, Timothy Devries is the on-site go-to guy. “We’ve had to pull weeds by hand because the chemicals dilute and are not effective with the way we’ve had to water,” he says. They water daily for shorter periods of time instead of four days a week for longer periods – this process lets the water sink into the ground more effectively says Devries.

For those of us who can only water our lawns once a week, don’t worry, you aren’t getting cheated. “Luckily the water that we are using is recycled water, so the water restriction doesn’t affect us until stage three,” Devries says.

“Our irrigation system has control boxes throughout the river walk . . . if it notices something is not functioning properly, and then it sends me an email,” he says. It’s something out of the Jetsons – plants that harass you when they are dehydrated.

Even with ISS’s unflagging vigilance, a few plants simply can’t take the heat. “Some things might look happy going in but they might not be as happy as they look,” says Coltrane. “You are going to have some [plant] decline from transplanting the material, and you are dealing with nature as well.”

“90 percent of it is drought tolerant,” says Pais. But drought tolerance doesn’t happen as soon as roots hit dirt. “Once it is established it needs less water, but we are still in the establishment phase.”

Around the time of the extension’s grand opening, a 50 foot stretch of Cardinal Flowers died, and Pais is uncertain of the cause. However, he wants to eliminate one possible cause for their death – Pais is waiting until the replacements are fully grown before he puts them in the ground. “We want to make sure the plants are at their proper growth period,” he says.

Overall, the plants are plucky and have stuck it out. Less than 8 percent of the plants struggled, according to Devries, and he takes heart in the irrigation, hard work, and the sky. “As long as things stay wet, we can limp it through the summer,” he says. “Let’s hope god blesses us with some water.”

Published online by the San Antonio Current on 08/05/2009. Read it here.

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Simplification is key. If you take a complex idea and condense it into something comprehensible, everyone can move on with their lives just a bit easier. Yet in the effort to simplify the city’s convoluted tree ordinance, the main goal behind the Tree Canopy Preservation Ordinance revision, simplification could be considered a death warrant for San Antonio’s older trees.

At the stakeholder committee meeting on Tuesday, July 14, no one probably intended a death warrant. People from both the developer and the conservation perspective make up this committee. According to a Development Services official who helped select the committee, Fernando De Leon, City Planning works frequently with the groups that provided the committee members: the Independent School Districts, The Citizens Tree Coalition, The Greater San Antonio Builders Association, etc. “We feel that we’ve created a balanced committee,” said De Leon. The committee’s schedule indicates that the revised ordinance should be submitted to the City Council by February of 2010.

The revision was proposed to tidy up the ordinance and preserve our tree canopy, according to Tom Carrasco, the committee’s mediator from Development Services. “There are a couple of issues. We had the tree canopy study that was completed by a private firm, American Forests. That report said San Antonio had to reach a certain canopy percentage to maintain our tree preservation,” said Carrasco. “Our current ordinance, right now, is somewhat confusing, and PDSD staff has spent a lot of time explaining what the ordinance means.”

“[Simplification] is important in that everybody needs to understand the rules, so that we can actually enforce the rules,” said Michael Nentwich, a committee member and a city forester from San Antonio Parks and Recreation. “There were some confusing components of the ordinance like sometimes the counting aspects of it. Legal terminology can be confusing.”

One central change is that the percentage of trees developers must preserve is based on the tree canopy alone. While it might not appear too dangerous at first glance, many environmentalists are wary because this adjustment potentially allows for favoring new trees over the older more beneficial trees.

Since the amount of trees preserved will be based on the tree canopy instead of tree species and trunk width, developers have the option to consider details such as the species and age of a tree if they feel the monetary savings warrant the preservation of older trees. At last Tuesday’s stakeholder meeting, only Paul Johnson, the regional urban forester from the Texas Forest Service, voiced the potential negative consequences. “Species have a lot of impact on how much that tree does for us. A big tree cleans more air, filters more water, and captures more water than even a small collection of newly planted trees,” Johnson said.

“Looking at the tree canopy is one of the things that [foresters] do as an initial stage, but what you really want to know is what size and species there are to know what action to take,” said Johnson. “You have a better idea of where a building should go if you know that on the east side of the property you have a stand of smaller shorter-lived trees and on the west side you have larger longer-lived tree species which are those that will give us the most environmental benefit.”

“The forest service has realized that kinds of trees are be important not merely canopy,” Loretta Van Coppenolle, conservation chair for the Alamo group of the Sierra Club, said.

Since specific tree measurements will not be mandatory, “It leaves it open to too many abilities to not know or not care,” Johnson said.

The cost of a lost tree can be very applicable to San Antonian’s daily life. In an article titled “Trees Can Bring Us More Rain” written by Van Coppenolle, the ability of trees to reduce pollutants is emphasized. Trees absorb particulate matter and other pollutants which decreases the formation of ground level ozone.

“Ozone is a much bigger threat to San Antonio [than other pollutants],” Brenda Williams, a projects manager who focuses on air quality for AACOG, said. “Government EPA sets standards for how much ozone is allowed into our air. For a year now we have been really close to that standard, which could mean violation,” said Williams. “So far, we’ve managed to avoid it.”

Despite the worries of environmentalists, Norman Dugas, a former Greater San Antonio Builder’s Association board member and local real estate developer, remains confident that residential builders will still try to preserve trees due to incentives and humans’ the natural desire to not cut down a tree if they have a choice. “In the residential context, we save every tree that we practically can because every tree we save makes the lot more valuable and the house easier to sell,” Dugas said.

If they preserve a heritage or champion tree, they get more canopy cover credit than if they were to plant a new tree, and preserving trees saves them money. In general, “[the revised ordinance] adds a lot of cost to every site because of the huge increase in planting requirements that are in this proposal,” said Dugas. While they used to only have to plant two trees per lot in the original ordinance, builders would now have to plant six trees per average residential lot, according to Dugas.

However, the simplification could save on housing costs. “[The original ordinance] was complex and convoluted in the process of compliance. It was very expensive to go through the process,” said Dugas. “It is important to understand the cost of all this is born by the new home buyer.”

There are threats and there are benefits from both sides of the line. “No one I know wants to remove trees, however the fact is, it is a balancing of needs,” said Dugas. “The need to preserve verses the need for roads, hospitals and the benefits of urban society.” The divide might not be as severe as Dugas suggests, and as to which need is greater, the opinions vary significantly.

“It could work just fine or it could be a real disaster,” said Johnson. “We won’t know until after the changes occur and they will be extremely difficult to reverse.” What appeared simple at first could create some very complex problems.

The date of the next stakeholder meeting is still unknown because the committee asked Development Services for information concerning how the revised ordinance would affect the city of San Antonio. Until this research is finished, the meeting will be delayed.

If you want to have your voice heard, attend the next committee meeting whose date, when determined, will be posted on http://www.treecoalition.org/canopyordnce.htm.

Published online by the San Antonio Current on 07/17/2009

http://www.sacurrent.com/blog/queblog.asp?perm=69837

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To the great surprise and dismay of Texas Campaign for the Environment members and the Texas House Representatives involved, Governor Rick Perry vetoed the TV TakeBack bill. However, the legislature cannot override Perry’s decision even if they wanted to.

By Texas law, if the legislature presents a bill to the governor less than 10 days prior to the close of the legislative session, the governor has 20 days to take action. A bill is considered “dead” if it is vetoed after sine die because a veto must be overridden within the same session it was created.

Officially, the 2009 TV TakeBack bill is dead, but it lies in the minds of its creators. Rep. Leibowitz has already distributed his personal response to Perry’s veto, and he plans to keep this initiative going in the next legislative session. “He intends to work with the stakeholders and the governor’s office to find new legislation that everyone can agree to and pass,” Rob Borja, Leibowitz’s Chief of Staff, said. “I assume it would be with joint and co-authors, the senate, and then the senate sponsors and co-sponsors . . . It’s just trying to find the language that everyone can agree to.” And that includes the Governor.

Published online by the San Antonio Current on 07/02/2009. Read it here.

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Since the 81st regular legislature closed up shop June 1, environmental organizations here waited to hear Governor Rick Perry say yes and officially sign HB 821, otherwise known as the TV TakeBack Bill, into law – or at least let it slide by unconfronted. The TV TakeBack Bill was based on the 2007 Computer TakeBack Bill (HB 2714), and it would have created a widespread recycling system less reliant on taxpayer dollars, according to Jeff Jacoby, Director of the Texas Campaign for the Environment’s Dallas office. Everyone was ready for the yes.

The digital transition that took place on June 12 was one motivator for the creation of this bill because consumers are expected to dump their old TVs en masse. “Ninety-nine million TVs are currently sitting in storage in the United States. If you look at the number proportionally, eight million TVs are sitting and gathering dust in Texas,” Jacoby said. “With the switch, we estimate about 3 million TVs could be sent to the landfill.” Even so, not everyone decided to dump their TV’s.

But Perry vetoed the bill, June 19. Before the TCE found out about the veto at 4 p.m. that Friday, “all indications from his staff were that he was OK with the bill,” Jacoby said.

“At the end of May, that’s when we got a very strong message that the Governor would be fine with this,” Robin Schneider, TCE Executive Director, said.

The office of Representative David Leibowitz seemed similarly confident of Perry’s support. Prior to the veto announcement, Rob Borja, Leibowitz’s Chief of Staff, noted that Perry signed the Computer TakeBack Bill, so there was a high probability he would sign this bill as well.

Rep. Leibowitz himself was stunned at the announcement. “It did nothing but help people, then out of the blue, he vetoes it. It absolutely boggles my mind,” he said. “Of all the missteps and all the screw-ups in this session, this is probably the most tragic.”

The bill’s author, Leibowitz, is taking the veto personally. “It’s as if somebody said ‘Who cares about your hundreds of man hours?’” he lamented.

Governor Perry’s statement concerning his veto was full of reasons why this bill was not beneficial for Texas – many of which are seen as contradictory by the TCE and Leibowitz’s office. “Although House Bill No. 821 attempts to make it easier for consumers to recycle old televisions, it does so at the expense of manufacturers, retailers and recyclers by imposing onerous new mandates, fees and regulations,” his statement said.

Schneider assessed the statement as “strange, because these groups worked with us [to create the bill]. The retailers were not necessarily for it, but they were not opposed.”

“The first draft of the bill that we worked off of, which was provided by the television industry, included these fees,” Borja said. “The industry said the $2,500-a-year fees were fine. It was a trade-group and TV-manufacturer proposal.”

“All the different perspectives kept meeting until we came up with a compromise everyone agreed on,” said Leibowitz. “It was very unique in the sense that all these different groups worked together . . . I know we even met with a Baptist organization.”

Schneider received no better answer when she confronted Perry the morning after the veto. “The weird thing was he said he vetoed the bill because it was an industry-backed bill. He said it was backed by GE,” she said. “What he failed to mention was that the [Computer TakeBack bill he passed] was made by computer manufacturers like Dell.”

Perry recommends “that the next legislature look at this issue and maybe look at ways to make [the TV TakeBack Bill] like the computer recycling bill,” Perry’s Press Secretary, Allison Castle, said.

Yet after looking at Perry’s statement, participants in the creation of the bill were again confused. “[Gov. Perry] put it in the veto message that the bill needed to be more like the Computer TakeBack Bill,” Borja said, “but that was the bill this was based on.”

Even with the veto, the fight is not yet over. “Well we can’t override a veto if we are not in session, and the governor has not called a special session,” Leibowitz said. He believes the Governor might have waited until the session ended on purpose, but he said “[I am] working on a response to his veto right now.”

Check out this link for a point by point rebuttal of Perry’s explanation of his reasons for the veto provided by Robin Schneider, TCE Executive Director: www.sacurrent.com/blog/hb821rebuttal.pdf

Published online by the San Antonio Current on 06/23/2009. Read it here.

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A father gets up in the morning to make a cup of joe and watch the news before heading off to work. In preparation for the analog to digital switch, he had purchased a TV converter box for his old analog TV and set up his rabbit-eared antenna. Nothing should prevent him from watching his favorite morning broadcast. But the TV only displays static – even after wires are twiddled and buttons are pushed.

This was one problem that hit San Antonians on June 12, 2009, the official date of the transition from analog to digital broadcast signals. Patricia Gonzales, Senior Vice President of the William C. Velasquez Institute said that the main difficulty people experienced this past weekend was that they already had the converter box, but it was not set up correctly. The Velasquez Institute provides English and Spanish speakers to answer questions over the phone and to help individuals acquire the government-issued coupons for converter boxes.

With the switch to digital signals, people need to buy a new digital set or have the mirepoix of electronics – the analog television, the signal converter box, and an antenna – but “[people] didn’t know that once the transition occurred you would have to rescan [reset] your converter box” Wesley Zernial, program coordinator for the Alamo Area Agency of Aging, said. All the puzzle pieces must be there, and one has to know how to hook them all together.

Since electronics are so easy to not understand, the phone calls and requests came flooding in on Friday morning and continued through Saturday. The WCVI received a substantial amount of calls for help on Saturday, according to Gonzales. “Saturday was our ‘whoa’ morning,” she said.

But Friday was a particularly crazy day for the FCC-funded South Texas Resource and Assistance Center – a nonprofit organization that, among many things, sends technicians to install converter boxes and antennas for free. “Our call center crashed twice because we got so many calls . . . We couldn’t keep up with the volume,” Adam Rodriguez, vice chair, board member and grant writer for the Center, said.

The Center received approximately 150 calls per hour for the first two days (phew!), and Rodriguez says the Center needs more bilingual volunteers. “There are three demographics [of people calling us],” he said. “There are folks that were prepared, but they didn’t know how to rescan; there are ones that weren’t ready and were calling for coupons; and then there were some seniors and disabled who didn’t understand what happened.”

“We were stretched,” he said, and no wonder. The FCC placed the Center in charge of aiding all of South Texas, Houston, Baton Rouge, and New Orleans.

Many other companies around San Antonio felt the heat – indoors that is. Bjorn’s and Best Buy experienced increased customer demand over the weekend. Bjorn’s had heavy phone traffic on Friday from people calling to get information on how to rescan their converter box, said Joey Martinez, assistant sales-floor manager. Ernest Rangel, manager for the Best Buy in Selma, said “Not too many people came in looking for new TVs; they came in for convertor boxes and antennas.”

Prior to the switch, the NTIA identified seven cities that would need extra assistance during the switch. “[San Antonio was] at risk due to the high level of low income, elderly, Mexican [Spanish speaking], and deaf populations [who would need help],” said Deanne Cuellar, Project director for the Texas Media Empowerment Project. A June 10 Nielsen Media Research press release projected that 3.17 percent of homes in San Antonio were still not ready for the change.

But now, most coordinators for groups aiding San Antonians with the switch believe the transition went well, all things considered. “I think it was pretty smooth . . . there will always be people that need help, [but] I would give it a B if I were to grade it,” says Rodriguez.

However, Zernial sees it a bit differently. “I think the transition has been really good . . . we were ranked as number 2 in the nation for DTV preparedness” he says. “What makes San Antonio different is that all of the DTV grant recipients have been very cooperative and worked together . . . We share resources,” Zernial says. “San Antonio has done a really great job.”

Published online by the San Antonio Current on 06/16/2009. Read it here.

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With the date of the analog to digital television signal switch looming closer, reality has become more prominent – millions of unused analog televisions have the potential to wind up in Texas landfills. Alongside this threat, recycling has risen higher on many individuals’ to-do lists, including the Texas Legislature’s.

Even if it might not be yet in vogue to recycle one’s television, HB 821, otherwise known as the TV TakeBack bill, was approved by the Texas Senate. Since May 31, it has been waiting on the desk of Gov. Rick Perry for his signature of approval.

If it officially becomes law, the TV TakeBack bill will obligate all TV manufacturers to provide a free television recycling plan for their customers if they want to be able to sell their products inside Texas borders, said Rob Borja, chief of staff for San Antonio Rep. David Leibowitz.

Borja said that the bill’s first draft required some changes because TV manufacturers initially opposed the bill which, in its early stages, added televisions to a similar computer-recycling bill passed in 2007.

Televisions have a nasty habit of sticking around for a truly extensive length of time, even outlasting the lifespan of their own manufacturers.

To deal with this problem, “the manufacturers wanted a market share set up” Borja said. If a manufacturer only sells 20 percent of its televisions in Texas, then it will only has to recycle 20 percent of televisions turned in for recycling, while televisions beyond that 20 percent are given to other manufacturers in the market to recycle, he said.

“The enforcement mechanism [for this bill] is that retailers are not allowed to sell any TVs from manufacturers that do not have a recycling plan,” Borja said.

Manufacturer recycling plans must be approved by the Texas Commission of Environmental Quality no later than May 1, 2010.

“We are going to use a stakeholder process” in which everyone who is impacted by this legislation will be sought out for their input prior to the formulation of the rules, Director of the Small Business and Environmental Assistance Division for TCEQ, Brian Christian, said. “The stakeholder meetings would be a part of the overall rule-making process.” The process of creating the regulations can take anywhere from six to nine to ten months.

While these TCEQ rules are yet to be laid down, Sony appears to be getting a jump start at Bjorn’s on US 281.

Assistant sales-floor manager Joey Martinez said “Sony is getting ready to launch a recycling and environmental awareness program specifically in Bjorn’s because we have a Sony gallery.”

With the switch from analog to digital television signals coming up on June 12, the importance of TV manufacturers’ recycling program is growing. Jeffery Jacoby, Texas Campaign for the Environment program director for Dallas/Fortworth, said “we anticipate that there will be millions of TVs that will be rendered obsolete . . . we have a responsibility to prevent these TVs from making their way to landfills.”

Yet the bill is not perfect. “The problems with the legislation are that the bill will not be enforced until after the switch from analog to digital [and that] there are no incentives in the bill for manufacturers to begin their programs early,” he said.

“While there are shortcomings if you look at the long term, this is a great investment in our future,” Jacoby said.

Published online by the San Antonio Current on 06/04/2009. Read it here.

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