Special Guest Speak's Out

Last Friday, the 19th of October, Speaker and Technical Research Director of AGUA, Elyzabeth Earnley came and spoke to our Humanities class. One of her main focuses was the City Council in San Antonio and how it represents who we are, the passing of ordinances, and how the budget pays all employees here in San Antonio. The City Council has a variety of decision makers which are located in San Antonio and their job is to decide what exactly goes on. These members meet every Thursday during the day and all of the meetings that are held by the council, are always open to the public so that everyone has a chance to speak their opinion and to see what goes on. There are ten different districts that can be found in San Antonio and the council itself, gets help by Developmental Services and a review by the San Antonio Water System (SAWS), in which they ask a variety of questions.

Her second key point was the 1995 Water Quality Ordinance (WQO). This group preserves recharge features, such as buffers and has limited impervious covers in the Recharge Zone (ERZD). An impervious cover is the covering of the natural land surface and is a good proxy for the intensity of development. The Water Quality Ordinance also mandates detention, sedimentation, and filtration for commercial and multi-family developments, which has over 15% of the impervious covers. She also mentioned the recharge features which are normally located, beneath the surface or on top of the surface. An example would be an enormous cave or possible sink holes.

What I found to be extremely interesting, was when she had put us into groups and gave us a variety of handouts, in which I was absolutely clueless as to what many of these things meant. The different forms that she had given us were a zoning staff recommendation, SAWS staff recommendation, zoning codes and a water quality ordinance. The main task was to review the rezoning cases and make a recommendation for the City Council, in regards as to what we had thought that it had meant overall. The main idea was that it was about the approval of land in which each group had stated their own opinions.

Now that she has told us about the city council and the districts in San Antonio, Elyzabeth Earnley has taught me what she does for a living as being a director of AGUA and what she focuses on. She showed us pictures of where many of the Recharge Zones were to be found here in San Antonio, along with directions on where the City Council holds their weekly meetings. Overall, this does not seem very important to many people, including myself at first, because I was completely lost and had absolutely no idea why zones like she has mentioned are even important. So all I can say is hopefully people might actually take some time out of their busy lives to read some factual articles about AGUA or possibly attend a City Council meeting.

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