Growing up in rural Texas can be an ugly affair

An ugly dispute in Collin County over a planned housing subdivision serves as a cautionary tale about the lack of transparency in local governments, especially those in the path of the North Texas building boom.

City officials in Parker, a rural community of 6,000, were recently heckled by angry residents at a City Council meeting. On the agenda was a possible vote on a settlement the council had secretly negotiated with the housing developer before seeking any meaningful public comment.

As North Texas grows, the region needs more housing, and communities cannot be closed to development. But process matters, and what happened in Parker is an example of how not to build a neighborhood.

The city of Parker and a group of residents had fought the proposed 600-home project and accompanying wastewater treatment facility for the better part of three years. Some of those residents even went to court just hours before the April 23 council meeting, seeking a temporary restraining order preventing the council from voting on the deal with the developer.

Residents accused the council of signing off on the dense, new neighborhood without giving the public a chance to fully scrutinize it.

“This whole thing was done under the cloak of darkness,” Lindy “Buddy” Pilgrim, former president of Pilgrim's Pride Corp., told the council. and a residential opposition leader.

The developer has strong financial ties to the politically powerful Huffines family and is doing business as Restore the Grasslands, an odd name that many residents find misleading.

All of this could have been avoided if Parker city officials had simply acted more transparently and not tried to rush a potential vote on the settlement.

Parker Mayor Lee Pettle told us in an email that city officials were as open as they could be and that the agreement was reached over many weeks of negotiations. She noted that a city attorney presented the agreement in open session to residents at the April 23 meeting.

However, given the controversy surrounding the subdivision, the city should have given residents more time to digest the deal and present the plan at a well-publicized town hall meeting. in advocated for negotiations in the spirit of compromise last summer.

Instead, this evil war is not over. Restore the Grasslands has opposed the neighborhood group in the restraining order case. And an appeal of a state agency's decision to grant a sewage discharge permit to the developer is pending in an Austin court.

Restaur the Grasslands director John Cox told us he recently put the 100-acre tract up for sale, but would still prefer to find a way to build the project himself. He said he is discouraged since he has already agreed to significantly reduce the size of his development and remove the treatment facility in exchange for the city of Parker allowing the subdivision to connect to existing sewer lines.

There is a lesson in all this mess for rural communities on the way to progress and for developers who see dollar signs on large tracts of land.

Property rights must be protected. When the rights of developers appear to conflict with those of rural homeowners, everyone must work together and in good faith to avoid costly and protracted legal battles.

In particular, elected officials have a duty to serve their constituents with transparency. It will be difficult to reach a compromise if their constituents feel they are being deceived.