For the first time in almost four decades, San Antonio has a road map that could help lead this rapidly growing city into the future, but only if city leaders choose to use it.

City Council members on Thursday approved SA Tomorrow, a three-pronged master plan to guide development in anticipation of a 50 percent increase in Bexar County’s population to 3 million. The last time the city truly reworked its master plan was in the late 1970s.

Yet despite the nearly 40 years since then, city officials and leaders still found themselves tangled in the same old story, caught between developer interests and those of environmental and neighborhood groups, a decades-long push and pull.

That was evident in the weeks leading up to SA Tomorrow’s approval, when the city’s Planning Commission cut two environmental proposals from one of the plans at the urging of the Real Estate Council of San Antonio and others in the business and development community. There were other surgical-like edits to the plan prior to the Planning Commission’s vote late last month because the language was perhaps viewed as too stringent and regulatory.

On Thursday, City Council restored slightly tweaked versions of those two environmental provisions, which open the door to eventually broadening city ordinances that limit light pollution created by more development and that protect water quality by mitigating impervious cover.

However, District 8 Councilman Ron Nirenberg failed in his bid to restore several other provisions he believes would have given SA Tomorrow more teeth. Nirenberg was a tri-chair of the SA Tomorrow committee, and many believe he will challenge Taylor in the upcoming mayoral race, though he has yet to announce his candidacy.

The unanimous votes brought to an end almost two years of planning and discussions about what San Antonio could and should look like in the future and how to correct decades of imbalanced, sprawling residential and commercial growth to the north and relatively little of it to the south.

Broken into three individual plans that cover comprehensive planning, multimodal transportation and sustainability, SA Tomorrow is designed to help the city prepare for an additional 1.1 million people expected to live in Bexar County by 2040.

“This is not about this being a city of San Antonio organization plan. This is a communities plan,” said Mayor Ivy Taylor.

The three plans together total more than 1,000 pages, with goals that come down to ensuring San Antonio can accommodate more people, vehicles, housing and commercial development, without seriously damaging the environment or making this a miserable place to live.

The way to do that, the plan asserts, is by pursuing better and more transportation options, making sure development occurs citywide and not just on the North Side, increasing affordable housing options and maintaining clean water and air quality.

The plan also focuses on 13 regional centers across the city, but mostly on the North Side, where officials want to see a healthy mix of jobs and residential options.

The plans will be updated every five years. Already, SA Tomorrow guidelines are being considered as the city plans its annual budget and the 2017 bond, which will go to voters in May.

Implementing the plans will be key. SA Tomorrow is a nonbinding document. This and future City Councils will have to codify the proposals if it’s to have any meaning. For example, the sustainability plan currently does not include a climate action plan, a means by which a city sets a goal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. City Council would have to vote to set that goal. The transportation plan looks at the possibility of light rail, but that would require a citywide election.

The costs to make SA Tomorrow actionable will be high. The transportation five-year action plan alone will cost more than $304 million.

The ‘people’s plan’?

On July 27, the city’s Planning Commission voted 5-4 to strip references to two proposals from the sustainability plan that suggested possibly expanding the impervious cover and dark skies ordinances.

The San Antonio Real Estate Council and the development community objected to the proposals because they said their industries weren’t asked to help develop the sustainability plan. The dark skies and impervious cover provisions would raise the cost of meeting regulations, they said.

The planning commission decision caused an uproar among environmental groups and local military leadership, which support expansion of those measures.

Dark skies ordinances are meant to limit light pollution that results from increased commercial and residential development. The city’s current dark skies ordinance regulates light pollution around the military bases, but the sustainability plan had suggested expanding that to other parts of San Antonio, something military leaders said they supported.

Robert Naething, deputy to the commanding general at Fort Sam Houston, spoke in favor Thursday of keeping the two measures in the plans, saying both were crucial to protecting San Antonio’s military missions.

Many cities have what it takes to support military installations like the ones in San Antonio, Naething said, but what they lack are large training areas like Camp Bullis. Keeping those large areas viable military facilities depends on preventing increased light pollution from adversely affecting night training exercises, he said.

The San Antonio River Authority and environmental groups pushed for retention of the impervious cover measure. Impervious cover is hard surfaces, like pavement, that prevent water from seeping into the ground and can increase flash flooding and hurt water quality. SARA leadership has said the agency isn’t asking to replicate the current city ordinance, which limits impervious cover over the Edwards Aquifer Recharge Zone. Rather, the idea is to make sure new developments mitigate impervious cover through other means, like low-impact development.

Several people spoke in favor of the environmental proposals Thursday.

Ultimately, the city came up with a compromise: The new sustainability plan language suggests that the city consult “broad” or “representative” stakeholder groups to “study and consider” whether or not to expand the city’s impervious cover and dark skies ordinances. The impervious cover provision adds the caveat that the study will be a “science-based assessment.”

Nirenberg’s proposed edits, on the whole, were focused on restoring language that the Planning Commission had recommended be removed. For instance, the planning commission had suggested removing the word “regulations” in several instances and instead using the word “incentivize.” He also moved to beef up language related to the city’s tree ordinance, which had been revised.

“I think we’re looking for a document that is realistic about the challenges that we face and aggressive about our ability to manage them,” Nirenberg said in an interview Wednesday. His edits, and others, were sent to council on Wednesday morning in an emailed memo, 24 hours before the council vote. He argued these provisions had been in the plan for months and had only been removed in recent weeks to appease the Planning Commission and developers.

But twice, the majority of Nirenberg’s colleagues voted against him: they rejected his edits to the comprehensive plan and later his proposed additions to the transportation plan, saying many were made too last-minute for them to approve the measures. There were cries of “No!” in the audience after the first round of amendments failed; a “Boo!” could be heard after the second batch of edits also failed.

Later, a visibly disappointed and frustrated Nirenberg said his colleagues didn’t come up with legitimate reasons to oppose his amendments. Their arguments that his edits had been made at the 11th hour were, he said, “a distraction.”

In both votes, District 1 Councilman Roberto Treviño, District 4 Rey Saldaña and District 5 Councilwoman Shirley Gonzales sided with Nirenberg.

Without specific, vigorous language, past master plans have opened the door to developers building as they pleased, Saldaña said. There was a sense that the development community dictated what was in the plan and so determined how the city would grow.

“We didn’t get to the point of an imbalanced city by accident,” said Saldaña, who represents the Southwest Side. “It was a question of who was calling the shots.”

“The question is, is the plan we’re voting on today the people’s plan?” Saldaña said. “We need to understand our history when we ask that question.”

Treviño’s edits to the plans, which passed unanimously, focused mainly on making sure single-family neighborhoods were protected from higher-density development, a major concern of many neighborhood leaders, who said the city did not include them in the SA Tomorrow process. He also proposed adding language to ensure existing neighborhood plans will be “respected” and integrated into bigger community ones — also of importance to neighborhood leaders.

Speaking after the vote, Taylor said SA Tomorrow is a first step “that provides a platform for us to ensure we have safe, stable mixed-income neighborhoods spread throughout San Antonio and everyone has the opportunity to live a great life here.”

But that will take action.

“We’ll briefly celebrate today,” the mayor said, “but tomorrow we’ll be back to work.”

vdavila@express-news.net

@viannadavila