The fight starts while the field is still empty

Westlake created the planned development district in 1998, permitting retail, office and heavy commercial near highways 377 and 170, and the subdivisions whose residents are now objecting to a data center had not been built. That is how permission survives without scrutiny: a field stays a field for two decades, houses go up nearby, families move in, and the land across the fence keeps looking uncommitted long enough that everyone treats its current condition as its likely future.

I learned this from the wrong side of a backyard fence. Nearly seven years ago a friend called me over because something large was going up behind his property, and by the time I got there several neighbors had gathered by his pool to ask why the city had let it happen. I was on the Southlake council, which made me the nearest available representative of government and not much else. I thought then that their problem was notice.

It wasn’t. People buy houses after checking school ratings, tax rates, resale comps and the commute at 5:15 p.m. on a Wednesday; almost nobody asks the city secretary for the originating ordinance on the undeveloped land across the road, and the few who do find it amended four times, with the operative rules scattered across staff reports, exhibits and meeting packets.

Which is a problem no council can fix.

Texas residents have zero standing over land-use decisions in a city they don’t live in, however close they live to the consequences; and the authority to change that sits in Austin. Armin Mizani, Keller’s former mayor, is the Republican nominee in House District 98, which takes in Keller and part of Westlake, and he is heavily favored in November.

Residents who believe the system failed them will shortly have an unusually direct place to make the argument, and they should arrive with the specifics: what notice, how far across the line, and at what stage — before an application, or after one is filed and the answer no longer matters.

Excerpt from my Dallas Morning News column below.

“Drive any direction out of DFW and you pass vast swaths of open land, much of it pasture beckoning to a herd of grazing cattle. Most folks have accepted it won’t stay that way, but many of them assume it’ll hold houses or, at worst, a strip center with a Starbucks, a nail salon and a Tex-Mex grill. Few assume a data center. Or a transfer station, a truck terminal, a concrete batch plant.

“And almost no one checks, because empty land reads as undecided land; it usually isn’t. In most cases the permission was granted years ago and simply hasn’t been exercised yet. The field is waiting for a market, not a decision.

“The meeting where a use gets locked in looks nothing like the meeting where the building gets fought over. The changes happen in text amendments—height, coverage, setbacks, permitted use—which draw a fraction of the attention a rezoning does, because on paper nothing is being rezoned.”

Read full column: Smith: Westlake data center opponents are 28 years late