How much damage have the City’s violations caused?

An Opinion Piece

by Joe Carter

Draft Version 1.2

As of 8/12/2022

Revised 4/4/2024

The City Council discontinued construction at the Vine Street site during the month of July in order to study the issues further and consider alternative sites. From their subsequent presentations in Council meetings, it appears they spent the time justifying the current location rather than seriously considering alternatives. For example, the City owns a vacant lot that would be a near perfect location for a Senior Center about 150 feet southwest of the Vine Street location. This site wasn’t even mentioned in their presentation of alternatives. In spite of these considerations, the City Council voted 5-2 on August 2, 2022 to continue construction at the Vine Street location.

During their justifications for continuing work at the Vine Street site, the Council acknowledged our concern about increasing traffic congestion in the neighborhood. Their solution was described by a Council Member as follows,

“The pavement [on Vine Street] right now is 21 feet wide. … As far as ability to expand, Mr. Williams [Director of Public Works] provided this morning some maps to me that show that the city actually owns an additional 17 feet - 17.5 feet of right-of-way on the west side [of Vine Street]. So there certainly is the capacity to be able to expand should that need arise…If there becomes traffic issues in the future and quite honestly let’s hope there is because that means that’s a very busy area  which is our goal is that it’s a busy Senior Center and a busy area and  revitalizing that area we do have the right-of-way there that would allow us to expand that roadway capacity on the west side of the street so that would not cut into the tree.” 

To verify this statement, reference this video of the July 19 City Council Committee Meeting starting at the 43:45 point.

The Council’s congestion-relief plan, described so nonchalantly by the Council Member, spells financial disaster for the residents in the 5 private homes on Vine Street.  There are 2 stand-alone single family homes and 3 townhomes on North Vine Street. At the time the Council Member made his statement, one of the single family home lots was under contingent contract for tear-down and redevelopment into 5 more townhomes. What the City’s right-of-way plan means for the 8 townhomes (3 existing, 5 planned) is that the expanded street will take up as much as ⅔ of their existing front yards and driveways. The expanded roadway will be 10 feet from the front of the townhomes. This is not enough room to park a mid-sized vehicle or back out of the garage safely.  Note for example, a Chevy Malibu is 16 feet long.

For the homeowner who is under contract to sell out to a townhome developer, what this means is that his contingent sale contract with the developer has been tabled. We assume the developer has no interest in building townhomes that are due to have their front yards and driveways confiscated by the City. We don’t know for sure, but we estimate that his sale contract is in the neighborhood of $150,000 to $250,000 and his property will probably drop in value by over $100,000 if the contract falls through due to the city’s credible plan to widen the street. The 3 existing townhomes are each currently valued at over $250,000. The road expansion will probably drop their value to around $125,000 each and make them difficult to re-sell.

Even if the City doesn’t execute the roadway expansion immediately, the possibility will have to be disclosed in a real estate listing as long as the Senior Center on North Vine Street or any other City construction project is possible at the site. They will automatically drop in value as long as there is any possibility of the city building at the site, now or in the future, now that the City has threatened to widen N. Vine Street. The 2 single family homes on Vine Street do not currently have the right-of-way issue, but the City will require it if the lots are ever re-developed for new construction in the future. As a result, they will lose value immediately as well. 

There’s an open legal question as to whether the City will have to compensate the owners of the three townhomes for the property devaluations and at what amount. Even if the City does reimburse, none of the homeowners want the money and upheaval over their current living situations on North Vine Street. 

The City doesn’t currently have a right-of-way associated with the two single family homes because they are grandfathered as old construction. These 2 homes bracket the townhomes on each end. Therefore, the City will have to condemn up to 20 feet of those lots under eminent domain in order to widen Vine Street. The costs of condemning those properties and compensating the owners will need to be included in the cost of construction at the Vine Street location.

Even if the City doesn’t reimburse the owners of the townhomes, condemning portions of the 2 single family lots and expanding the street will be a major expense attributed to the Senior Center project on Vine Street. This additional cost needs to be factored into the cost of the Vine Street location relative to alternative locations. We expect that the total cost involved in expanding the street will greatly exceed the $115,000 the Council has sunk at the Vine Street site to date.

The alternate sites don’t have congestion issues, eminent domain and road expansion expenses to contend with. It’s unfathomable why the City would go to this much trouble, nonchalantly devalue homeowners’ properties and incur a major expense when there are perfectly good, much better-suited, alternative city-owned properties available. 

Justification for Legal Action

The City Council has proven to be collectively obstinate in sticking with the Vine Street location in spite of its deficiencies as a Senior Center location, in spite of endangering The Seniors Tree, in spite of devaluing nearby homeowners’ properties and in spite of official notification by a citizen that they are in violation of the City Charter. As outlined above, they appear to have broken the Texas Open Meetings Law, the Texas Municipal Procurement Laws and potentially other state laws governing City Charters and municipal operations. It’s our understanding that violating these laws have both civil remedies and criminal penalties to the individual elected officials and city employees at fault. Because of the City Council’s obstinacy, they have left us no choice other than to engage legal counsel to research the issues, discuss the matter with the city and advise us on the best path for seeking remedies.

It’s the understanding of the North Vine Street homeowners in our working group that we are forced to take legal action immediately due to the legal concept of laches. This legal principle says that if you don’t exercise your rights in a timely fashion after learning of a legal threat, you may lose your ability to exercise those rights at a later date. 

At this point, it is not a sufficient remedy for the City Council to simply go through the niceties of retroactively approving a budget for the Senior Center project. Stephenville citizens have been damaged, as much because the Council didn’t go through the process at the appropriate time as because they didn’t do it at all. Their failure to follow the correct procedures have deprived citizens of their right to challenge Council’s actions as they played out behind the scenes. Because the Council didn’t follow its own prescribed procedures and at the prescribed time, citizens have been damaged as follows:

• The Seniors Tree, a valuable publicly owned asset, has already been damaged. Although the City has killed it’s construction plans at the site, it has left a huge pad of inert, clay-based fill dirt in place over a major portion of the tree’s critical root zone. This fill dirt, which is virtually impermeable to water or oxygen and is devoid of organic matter, is rapidly starving, dehydrating and suffocating the the tree’s roots per Master Arborist Vincent DeBrock, an expert arborist we engaged to review the situation. Mr. DeBrock is a world-renowned arborist based in the Austin, TX area. He was a leader in the successful effort to save the Austin Treaty Oak after it was poisoned by a vandal. His full report is available at this link.

• By failure to follow the prescribed process for budgeting and executing a major capitol expenditure, the Council has deprived citizens of the ability to provide input at key points in the process. Many citizens feel this has resulted in a substandard facility at a substandard location.

• By threatening to widen N. Vine Street into the front yards and driveways of the homes on Vine Street, the Council has severely devalued those homes.

• By concealing the target location of the new Senior Center until construction had commenced in violation of The Open Meetings Act, the Council placed the citizens in a double bind. Citizens couldn’t oppose the location before construction started because they didn’t know about it. They couldn’t effectively oppose the location after construction started because the Council claimed they had already sunk too much taxpayer money in it.

• In preparing the building pad for the planned city structure on N. Vine Street, the City bulldozed a concrete wall and approximately 30 feet of heavily wooded greenspace along the east side of N. Vine Street. The wall and greenspace had prevented parking in the south side of the tree’s root zone. With elimination of those barriers, Bosque River Trail users and other visitors are now parking in that area, further compacting the area and damaging the root zone. Future remediation efforts need to prevent this ongoing damage to the tree’s root zone

Merely going through the motions of retroctively voting the missing approvals and cleaning up the paperwork isn’t going to correct the damages listed above. The City needs to take more substantive actions to correct the damage the Council has done. Suggested remedies and a plan that will correct the damages are described in our blog post You Decide Part 8 - Remedies.

Update on additional damages as of February 27, 2024

Background: When the City initiated their aborted construction project under the tree’s canopy, they obliterated the portion of the paved Bosque River Trail that passed under the tree’s canopy. They then spread fill dirt for a building pad over several hundred square feet of the tree’s root zone, including the area where the paved trail had been. After the construction project was aborted, several months passed before the City got around to rebuilding the portion of the paved trail they had destroyed. Rather than removing the fill dirt and rebuilding the trail on it’s original grade, they built it on top of the fill dirt. Subsequently, runoff from water running downhill began to erode the loosely compacted fill dirt alongside the trail to the point where a large ravine formed alongside the trail. The ravine then expanded to the point where it was undermining the trail pavement.

Current Situation: On February 27, 2024, the City showed up with a front end loader tractor and began moving the fill dirt to fill in the ravine. Ostensibly to prevent the ravine from reforming, the tractor operator built a long berm to contain the runoff. The City’s tractor can be seen building the berm and further compacting the fill dirt over the tree’s root zone in the video below:

Since the fill dirt is clay-based, rainwater can’t soak into the ground. A long-standing pool from recent rains is shown in the following photo:

The only way for it to dissipate is to evaporate over time. Consequently, the water sits and stagnates in a pool behind the berm on top of the tree’s root zone. In addition to endangering the tree, the pooled water will breed mosquitoes, creating a health hazard for the neighborhood and Bosque River Trail users.

In the meantime, the ravine that was undermining the trail has begun to form again. After a couple more good rains, it’s likely to start undermining the trail pavement once again. The City would have been much better off if they had removed the fill dirt in the first place.