City says Strickland brothers' dam is illegal; family says it protects wildlife.

A short, steep, rocky trail descends from the front gate of the Strickland family property to the banks of Bullick Hollow Creek. As John Strickland Jr. clambers down that trail, he complains that the City of Austin wants to punish him for being a good steward of the blue herons, ducks, turtles and other animals that drink from the creek.

"Some people think helping nature means leaving it alone," Strickland said, arriving at a small dam that the city says was built illegally. "That's not always true, and I don't think the city should be imposing that value on me."

That dam is the center of a lawsuit Strickland and his brothers have filed against the city. Technically, the fight is about whether the Stricklands needed to secure a permit before building the dam, as the city contends. For the three Strickland brothers, the dispute turns on a more philosophical question: Does the land always benefit when a governmental entity strictly enforces environmental regulations?

City officials argue that the Stricklands needed to get their dam approved, the same as anyone else, despite any previous record of environmental conservation.

"We just want to make sure the neighbors upstream aren't flooded out, or the water isn't blocking flow downstream," city spokeswoman Lynn Lightsey said.

The Stricklands live on 13 acres purchased in 1975 by their father, John Sr.. It sits in Bullick Hollow, a small canyon of limestone banks, cedars and scrubby underbrush near the Four Points Neighborhood, northwest of Austin. Bullick Hollow Creek meanders down the canyon before emptying into Lake Travis near Hippie Hollow. The land lies within Austin's so-called extraterritorial jurisdiction, meaning some city regulations apply there.



The three Stickland brothers — John Jr., a short, wiry 66-year-old retiree; Peter, a 63-year-old house remodeler with a white beard and deep placid voice; and Edwin, 57, a computer programmer — each built a house in a cluster on the southern end of the property.

In court documents, the brothers say the creek goes dry almost every summer. This kills the perch and turtles in the creek and leaves the herons, hawks and other animals to look elsewhere for water, they say.

In 2007, the brothers decided to create a pond that wouldn't dry up. They spent $3,000 to build a 4-foot-high, 30-foot-wide dam, according to court filings. The brothers say they haven't blocked off the creek water, it just doesn't flow this time of year.

"When the creek is flowing, it just flows over the top" of the pond and the dam, Peter Strickland said. "We aren't siphoning off water for irrigation or anything like that."

The Stricklands also say they didn't think they needed a permit because they live outside the city limits.

"We couldn't imagine that we needed permission to do something that's really nothing more than a landscaping project," Peter Strickland said. Plus, he said, the brothers are perplexed because they had built a much larger dam on the other end of the property in 1984 "and nobody complained about it."

But officials from Austin and Travis County determined that the newer dam was built illegally and that obstructing the flow of water could damage the Balcones Canyonlands Preserve, a 28,385-acre protected area that is downstream from the Strickland property. The Stricklands must prove otherwise.

"We need detailed information to know if it (won't) have an adverse impact. How the dam was constructed, how fast the creek flows, those kinds of things are important," said Stephanie Lott, a city spokeswoman. "Basically just eyeballing the dam tells us nothing." The city offered the Stricklands three choices. They could submit a formal site plan and hope the City Council decided to waive regulations that prohibit blocking a sensitive waterway. Or they could tear down the dam. Or they could do nothing and face a $2,000 fine for every day the dam remains.

But removing the dam could cost $25,000 because concrete and steel are embedded in the bank and covered with plants and rocks, according to the lawsuit. The lawsuit also states that obtaining the city permits would cost $30,000 to $60,000. And the lawsuit states that a city official told the brothers the dam would not meet city codes anyway.

"We weren't going to pay $60,000 when we knew what they were going to tell us. ... Either way, they're threatening my retirement savings," said John Strickland, who retired July 1 after 20 years as a systems analyst for the Texas Department of Transportation. So, instead of complying with the city, the Stricklands sued.

As they walked along the banks of the creek, which were mostly dry last week both upstream and downstream of their property, John and Peter Strickland noted that the cypresses along the banks would not survive without the pond, which is about 30 feet across at its widest point and about 4 feet deep when full, occupying only the creek bed, according to the Stricklands' lawsuit.

Their lawyer, Ronnie Jones, says dam regulations are actually covered by state rules, and that state rules don't require a permit.

Such property-rights disputes were once common in Texas. The Legislature began giving cities the authority to regulate outside of their boundaries in the early 1980s, and numerous lawsuits followed. But most ended in the cities' favor, said Buck Wood, a property rights attorney.

"These lawsuits usually face an uphill fight," said Wood, who was not familiar with the specifics of the Stricklands' case.

The Stricklands insist they are not trying to undermine the spirit of environmental protection laws. In the early 1980s, John Strickland co-founded the Protect Lake Travis Association, a group that fought a proposed sewage-treatment plant that would have discharged effluent down Bullick Hollow Creek and into the lake. The company proposing the plant eventually scrapped its plans after neighbors took protests all the way to Gov. Bill Clements, and they later helped stop almost all sewage-effluent discharges into the Highland Lakes.

John Strickland said the brothers have taken their lawsuit public — an effort that includes a public-relations agent — to highlight environmental-protection laws they say are actually undermining the environment.

"We've been here a quarter century. We're the protectors of the valley, and they're asking us to destroy something that we built with our own hands to protect the wildlife," John Strickland said. "How is that fair?"