Corbin Graham

@neighborhoodatx - Austinite and evil developer that's not so evil afterall. I make parks, affordable housing and water quality happen.

[Corbin Graham @CGrahamDev]

What assurance do we have that the County will meet its obligations this time, when it has failed to do so in past 52 years of violations?

At this scale, the public deserves answers.

Austin needs to put it on the agenda!

- City of Austin watershed should opine on the scope recommended by engineers.
- Invite Travis County to provide testimony.
- Invite landowner and environmental advocates to give testimony.
- Ask for detail questions on the record and get precise timelines for action.

@KirkPWatson, @NatashaD1atx, @VanessaForATX, @joseforatx, @RyanAlter, @cmkristalaine, @MikeSiegelD7, @PaigeForAustin, @CMZoQadri, @Marc4AustinD10, @RiseupAustin, @AleshireLaw, @chaya_tong, @CandiceBernd, @ostalugo, @aura_atx, @transit_forward, @AshikaForAustin, @Susanna4PCT4

[Corbin Graham @CGrahamDev]

@JenRobichaux Careful about them buying parks with park dollars. In this video Andy Brown talks about buying landfills with 50 years of violations for parks https://t.co/lwUfzxjkEQ

[Corbin Graham @CGrahamDev]

Travis County’s defense against state prosecution is to remove the whistleblower – me.

They claim it is necessary or convenient (not a legitimate reason to steal property from someone) for two excuses:

Excuse #1 - That they need the land to maintain the landfill.

They have had 52 years. Why now? This is a lie with zero support from any engineer. To the contrary, licensed environmental engineers support our proposal.

Excuse #2 - The land will be for parks.

Qualities of this “park”...
- Next to an active landfill
- On top of a toxic landfill
- Next to a strip club
- No connectivity to neighborhoods

Costs:
- Remediation $30 - $80 Million
- Acquisition $3.6 - $45 Million
- Takings Lawsuits $0 - $50 Million

It may rank as one of Texas' most expensive parks, without any features of a park.

Context:
- Total annual for Austin Parks and Rec Capital Projects are $439 Million
- Total budget for Travis County - $80 million in 2023 Park bonds

Dear @heartoftcparks and @AustinCityParks,
Do you want this Landfill TC calls a "park"?
What else could you do with this money?

[Corbin Graham @CGrahamDev]

Agreed with this statement:

“If you can do the basics really well, then the voters will support and trust that you can do the extras as well.”

From my perspective I saw the City deannex from its responsibility to oversee Travis County’s landfill they knew was failing then when private attempts were made to fix it, COA continued to skirt its responsibility.

We need an Austin that makes sensible hard decisions in the basics. I do not see that being done in my case.

[Mayor Kirk Watson @KirkPWatson]

Latest #WatsonWire: Behind the Wire, Behind the Budget. Thanks for all of you who took time to complete my survey last week. There were lots of good responses, and they’re helpful to me. One reply especially struck me. A 36-year-old, lifelong Austin resident said:

“If you can do the basics really well, then the voters will support and trust that you can do the extras as well.”

Something else that struck me was how much folks want to engage and to learn about what’s in the budget and how it works. That’s why I recently sat down with Kerri Lang, the Director of Austin’s Budget & Organizational Excellence Department, to talk more in-depth on the ins-and-outs of budgeting. I call this going behind the Wire.

Read more: https://t.co/F0Qa63qAeg

Watch Behind the Wire: https://t.co/Qu8G5to8z3

[Corbin Graham @CGrahamDev]

The State and County have been delivered an engineered plan to remediate the Travis County Landfill. The County's engineer has read it and recommended the county to meet with me.

Instead, the County ignored that advice.

The State buried the engineering.

They are both pursing the most expensive, slowest and least assuring path to a stopping the toxic material coming out of the Travis County Landfill.

Judge Eiserloh on Friday granted their request to remove me (the landowner) from the lawsuit determining the scope. Instead, she gave me a path to a different lawsuit.

These people practically speaking have no idea how to solve this problem.

The answer SO SIMPLE:

Put my engineer and the county's engineer in a room and set a scope of work agreed to by both. I believe they already know what that is, they are just being blocked by these lawyers.

Then let me move LKQ to the landfill post remediation and bond against the increment of my development, which forces the development to pay for the landfill instead of the taxpayers. Done.

The OAG, the county and the court are wasting huge amounts of time and money doing otherwise.

[Corbin Graham @CGrahamDev]

Taxpayers should ask, “Why would the county refuse to allow the owner to pay for the remediation that taxpayers are liable for?”

Yes they want to raise taxes and at the same time complain about affordability.

https://t.co/ea38iXeDSm

@RobbyMontoya
@statesman
@MitchFound - Save Our Springs cares about white neighborhoods to the detriment of non-white. You should pull funding NOW. It’s NIMBYism not environmentalism.

[Jason Scharf @Jason_A_Scharf]

Austin brainwashing with startup & venture data.

Austin is growing across capital invested, local vc fund formation, national dollar share, & Series A valuation.

The flywheel is accelerating. 🤠🚀🦾
https://t.co/lQgeMxTGAk

[Corbin Graham @CGrahamDev]

The Hearst corp crushed The Wasp as the railroads were gutting the farmers and taking over California. The railroads legacy after surviving trust busting moved into utilities. We have an aristocracy in this country who will sell us out in a heartbeat. That kind of business shouldn’t be tolerated in this country.

[Corbin Graham @CGrahamDev]

@ATXVideos @statesman They killed a story about Travis County polluting the water which their own reporters documented.

[Corbin Graham @CGrahamDev]

As expected the Judge was sympathetic to the county attorneys saying that we obstructed cleanup. Deborah Trejo went as far as to say that we might really interfere in the case if we are allowed into discovery.

This is “environmentalism is my backyard but not yours”. This is on the east side and it benefits west side donors so don’t get involved. That’s the county’s message.

Just more of the same institutionalized prejudice.

[Corbin Graham @CGrahamDev]

@chaya_tong @ToddJeffries @statesman @chaya_tong can you let us know what your editor after you were given the complete file on the Travis County Landfill why did your editor kill the story?

[Corbin Graham @CGrahamDev]

These dashboards can be made in publicly available for a couple hundred dollars a month with new technology if the data is kept. They simply are not keeping the data. Same story with the Travis County Landfill surveying the toxic seats and when they decided not to Travis County, all of a sudden was guilt free.

There are no consequences for failing to deliver on promises and maybe that is the problem.

[Corbin Graham @CGrahamDev]

@statesman & @thebesta,

In April, a Statesman reporter and photographer stood on the closed Travis County landfill at 9500 E. Highway 290 and photographed leachate seeping toward a tributary of Walnut Creek. Your reporter then questioned County Judge Andy Brown about it at Commissioners Court. Then the story went quiet. I assume the reasoning was the one every government offers: it is in litigation, wait for the courts.

I have spent two years in these courtrooms, so let me tell you what the courts will actually deliver. Judges give governments broad deference on their policy choices. The rulings, when they finally come, will decide liability and valuation. Narrow questions, years from now. No judge will ever rule on whether Travis County made good decisions for its taxpayers, for the neighborhoods downstream, or for Walnut Creek. That is not what courts are for. Policy is judged in public, or it is not judged at all.

And the policy questions here are the story. Why did the County promise in writing in 1977 to fix seeps first cited in 1973, seeps now in their 54th year, and never do it? Why do the County's own annual reports admit, five years running, that "the County is still responsible for the landfill" while nothing is fixed? Why did its own staff request $2.6 million to buy the site, citing three TCEQ violations and leachate collection "in perpetuity," only to see the request die unfunded? No court will ask a single one of these questions. Only the press will.

Follow the taxpayer money, because the courtroom will not. Taxpayers have already paid roughly $5 million in repairs and pay about $200,000 every year for leachate collection the County says must continue forever. We offered the opposite: a $33.8 million remediation funded by private growth, no tax increase, no general-fund dollars, the developer taking nothing. The County refused to even let TCEQ review the application. Then it moved to condemn the land instead, a choice that starts at $5.5 million, the award already on the books, with exposure as high as $90 million once the land's true value is litigated, because this land is genuinely valuable. That is a pointless risk taken to defend a veto the County's own agreement says it does not hold, by a government that cannot plausibly claim it is finally cleaning up after half a century of not doing so. A county that meant to fix the problem would not refuse a free fix and spend millions buying the problem instead.

Here is the limit of the courtroom in one sentence: the case can end without the problem ending. The State needs a judgment it can call compliance. The County needs the cheapest terms it can get. Neither lives downstream. If they settle on a patch and a court signs off, the press release goes out and the leachate keeps moving toward Walnut Creek, exactly as it has after every prior order since 1973. The people who inherit that outcome, the landowner and then the neighborhoods, are the ones the litigation does not represent.

That is why public exposure is not optional here. "Pending litigation" has already silenced the City's Watershed Protection Department, a council office, and the Environmental Commission three times, down to refusing to test the water. The press is the only institution left whose job is to ask the public's questions, and the only one litigation cannot silence. Unless it silences itself.

Your newsroom saw this firsthand, and the story disappeared. Something is off. "Let the courts sort it out" is the reason governments give. It should never be the reason a newspaper accepts.

Every document behind every sentence above is a government record. I will send the full set to anyone who asks, your newsroom first. The hearing is Monday, July 13. The seeps do not wait for rulings. Neither should the Statesman.

[Corbin Graham @CGrahamDev]

Travis County tried to have me arrested today while showing @andreeball at Austin Current the 54 year seeps at the Travis County Landfill.

The State of Texas is suing Travis County over the leaking landfill at 9500 E. Highway 290. That sounds like good news — and it could be. But look at who's at the table and what each of them actually needs to walk away satisfied.

The County needs the cheapest fix it can get approved. Every dollar of remediation comes out of the county budget, so the County's incentive is to do the minimum that makes the lawsuit go away.

The State needs a judgment it can call compliance. TCEQ has been issuing violation notices on this landfill for decades — the same seeps have been documented since 1973 — and each time, the County submitted a plan, the file closed, and the leaking continued. The State's job is enforcing rules on paper. It doesn't live downstream.

Nobody at the table has to live with the result. Not the AG's lawyers, not the county's contractors. If the two of them agree on a patch job and the court signs off, the case ends, the press release goes out — and the leachate keeps seeping into the tributary of Walnut Creek. Ask what happened after every previous order, because that's exactly what happened after every previous order.

That's why the property owner is fighting to get into this case: the owner is the only party who bears the consequences if the fix doesn't actually work.

And the neighborhood is the very next in line.

The water doesn't stop at the fence — it moves toward Walnut Creek, past homes, parks, and schools. If the remediation standard gets negotiated between two governments who both benefit from settling cheap, the people who inherit an inadequate fix are the owner first and the neighbors immediately after.

The owner isn't asking the court to slow anything down. The owner brought a licensed engineer's remediation plan — one thorough enough to actually stop the leaking, not just patch it until the next violation notice — and offered to help fund it so taxpayers wouldn't carry the whole cost. The County's own hired consultant recommended that the County, the City of Austin, and the property owner sit down together and align on the fix. That meeting never happened.

Fifty years of orders written without the people affected in the room produced fifty years of the same seeps. The question in this case isn't just whether the landfill gets fixed — it's who gets a say in what "fixed" means. If the answer is "only the two governments negotiating with each other," the neighborhood should expect what it's always gotten.

[Corbin Graham @CGrahamDev]

Where are all the nonprofits?
@sosalliance
@EnvironmentTex

Where is the City of Austin? They are asking Travis County for permission to regulate their own landfill. Austin taxpayers overlap.

The Austin Environmental Commission is waiting to test the leachate until the owner's lawsuit is resolved? That's about the county taking the property... why does that have any impact on the Enviornment of the AEC's watershed? Seems to me they failed to enforce in 1973 and continue to do so...

The legal department is obstructing public exposure to the issue!

[Corbin Graham @CGrahamDev]

@andreeball @DanteMot_
You came and saw the landfill twice and with a photographer. You wisely pursued Judge Andy Brown for answers and got nothing but evasive peculiar responses. Why did your editors (@thebesta & make you drop the story and cease communication with us?
@statesman

[Corbin Graham @CGrahamDev]

The "free" market has a variety of participants, many no better than the public leaders who have lost your trust. So I philosophically disagree on that point.

I'm midway through a research project analyzing a 10-15% incremental bond of some kind on East Austin developed property over the last decade with the attempt to quantify the public benefit if that money were plowed into community development corporations (CDCs) ie hyper local, incremental growth funded, avoidant of the general fund council drama...

Those CDC's could be use land trusts with specific terms to be wound down and the CDC's themselves could be wound down.

Personally I like that because otherwise it would become a nepotistic fiefdom.

[Corbin Graham @CGrahamDev]

@kyle_e_walker To be optimally useful you need to make this available via API so ai can run analysis.

[Corbin Graham @CGrahamDev]

For the record @andreeball, were we interloping or interfering with landfill management? Because that’s what the County Lawyers are going to tell @MayaForJudge or whichever judge hears this case on Monday.

Travis County is trying to remove me, the owner, the jointly and severally responsible owner, the one who brought light to this pollutant point and tried to fix it after 54 years of failure.

No one at the county acknowledged the seeps.

I so hope you bring this decades old injustice of selling out black and brown neighborhoods so west Austin can have more of the civic resources.

@MisaelD1Ramos you saw it. Will you be silent? Or will you be like the precinct one commissioner David W. Samuelson, who when blocked from fixing the landfill in 1976 said,
"I cannot and will not submit to the continual harassment or attempts at intimidation which emanate from the Court regarding the operation of the Precinct One landfill... the Travis County Commissioners' Court cannot provide [the best possible landfill service] when opposed in my efforts by the majority of the Court."

At least he can say he tried….

[Corbin Graham @CGrahamDev]

@andreeball Get used to it when it comes to the TCL. Next your editor will be approached by Brigid or a lawyer and say to stop talking to us. But if you stay on the documents you’ll see the obvious - they are FUBAR