A Nearly Accurate History of Sunrise Beach
By Dick Hart (deceased)
Written for the 25th Anniversary Celebration of the City in November of 1998
recovered and updated in 2005 and continued by others (I hope, hjs)
Page 10 of 19
start taking law classes along with elected JP's. We decided then and
there to hire an outside, properly schooled JP to handle the judge's
responsibilities. Seems to have worked out quite well over the years.
The birth of the city was now history, and now, it is 25 years old. The
city has grown tremendously and I hate to think what it would look like
if there had never been an incorporation. Chaos, that's what. Instead
of a nice community in which to live it would have been a mish-mash
of ticky-tacky buildings and everybody would be mad at everyone. You
would have no civic center or a fire department or an Auxiliary or a
CCAA and property values would be in the dumper. Its that simple.
A good example of having the power of a city involved the airport. Its
always been there, it was zoned as an airport in 1974, people bought
property in Sunrise Beach because it was there but; the city didn't own
it. As the remainder of the unsold properties in the city was passed
from developer to developer, one realized one day that they had been
paying taxes on the airport. He actually came out here and looked
around to see what he owned. Next thing we knew here he came up
with a proposal to sub-divide the airport into lots and sell them. Being
a city, he had to bring the proposal to us before he could take any
action. We learned later that he had already sold a piece of the airport
to someone. He had to return the money because we told him to put
his proposal where the sun didn't shine. Well, this went on for 3 or 4
years. I told him once that if
he managed to sue and win, we would
zone the area for no structures over 18 inches high. Next court battle
would be when we allowed 2 feet high structures and so on. Finally, he
got the message and asked "what do you want". It was laid out for
him, we wanted at least two access lots for fire fighting if necessary,
the airport would remain an airport, he could sell adjoining lots, except
for the city's access lots, and he would deed the airport strip to the
city, and we the city would incur no legal fees. He offered to give the
airstrip if we would pay for their street paving assessments (which had
never been paid), again we said no. He sorta grunted but in a few
months here came his proposal with exactly what we asked, and more.
Gave us 5 access lots one being large enough to use for visiting
aircraft. I remember Ed looking it over and saying, very calmly, "this
will do nicely". What an understatement! As soon as the guy was out
the door, Ed flew out himself. drove to Llano with the proposal,
probably breaking every speed record, and filed it with the County
Clerk before anyone had time to think about it. Ed paid the $3 filing
fee.
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