RTC Land in Texas to Be Turned Into Nature Preserve

The Resolution Trust Corp., environmentalists and public officials from Austin, Tex., are expected today to announce the first large-scale transfer of land from failed savings and loans to ecological uses.

The $15.5-million deal--to set aside more than 10,000 acres of unsullied land that is home to seven endangered species--represents the first significant fruits of a campaign by environmental groups to salvage sensitive lands from the RTC’s huge portfolio.

For its part, the RTC will be unloading more than half its seized real estate in the Texas capital’s glutted land market.

Sale of the acreage to the Nature Conservancy would be a boon for all parties to the transaction--particularly in Austin, one of the areas hardest hit by S&L; failures. Real estate occupied by endangered species makes developers understandably gun-shy, because of difficulties meeting federal requirements. As a practical matter, the sale would make it easier to sell and develop adjacent lands since the law could be satisfied with one large agreement.

“Rather than every land owner going to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and getting approval,” said Rick Lowerre, project director for the Texas Center for Policy Studies, “the idea is to get all the properties, do a group mitigation and release the rest of the lands.”

Austin Mayor Bruce Todd and Rep. J. J. (Jake) Pickel (D-Tex.) have strongly favored the sale.

Completion of the sale would reflect a recent change of policy at the RTC, created two years ago to dispose of assets that the government seized in the thrift debacle.

It wasn’t until this summer--under threat of a lawsuit from the Sierra Club, the Audubon Society and the National Wildlife Federation--that the agency directed its staff to improve the screening of seized real estate for environmental, historical and other public values.

“We’ve been trying to buy land from them for three years, without success,” said David Braun, state director of the Texas Nature Conservancy, which has orchestrated the Austin project.

“RTC was not very well organized to identify properties that were environmentally significant, so we have had to locate them ourselves,” he said. “But once we found them, the transaction has been pretty smooth.”

The Nature Conservancy is hoping to resell the RTC land to Austin officials early next year. The environmental group often buys natural habitats and then either finds ways to make them self-supporting or sells them to others for preservation.

Part of the land would be for a planned Austin preserve. “They’re going to have a central park the size of a national park,” Braun said. The preserve would include watershed that provides drinking water for Austin and surrounding communities.

The Balcones Canyonlands Conservation Plan, as the project is known, would also further environmentalists’ current emphasis on the preservation of large habitats.

The parcels in the RTC sale are home to two endangered birds--the black-capped vireo and golden-cheeked warbler.