Travis County Commissioners Court
April 26, 2005
Item A1
We have the item a 1. Dealing with american fireworks, should we take the executive session discussion first?
>> I think we want to [indiscernible]
>> all right.
>> okay. Mr. Davis, are you prepared to -- to make a statement.
>> yes, if I may.
>> okay. A 1 is to receive legal advice and take appropriate action on request from american fireworks for approval to construct commercial building at 5150 state highway 71 east without need to comply with international fire code and related issues. This is posted under the consultation with attorney exception to the open meetings act. We will take it in executive session, we will call up the other items. But first we would like to hear from mr. Davis, who is the opener or one of the owners of american fireworks and you have brought with you --
>> [indiscernible]
>> how are doing?
>> thank you judge and Commissioners. I have turned over to ms. Barbara the documents she requested that show the actual bills, all of the work that we started on, we actually started this project in June of last year. We began the actual improvements of the property somewhere around November the 12th, 15th. We had to use the access of our neighbor's property, terri shah to get in and out of the driveway. She has documents where we wired money, cancelled checks where we bought product, base material, culvert, took out some -- I want to say we took a few trees off the property prior in November before we had it surveyed. Basically we have been under construction for quite some time. Hopefully the documents will prove that. And I have been told that there is some confusion about whether or not someone has seen a driveway, not seep a driveway and to clarify that, I want to tell you the very day after we put the driveway in, one of my employees ran over the front end of the culvert and tore it up because they couldn't see it. I will explain why that happened. We put the driveway in, but didn't cut a hole in the gate. Until we put in the fence and kept the 250 cattle that belonged to mr. Hash, we never put a hole in the fence or put a gate in. We continued to use his gate and his access, which is jeapt to my property -- adjacent to my property to come into my property until we completely built the entire chain link fence. At that point we opened up and put in gates that would allow us to come in and out of our property exclusively, not add joining mr. Hash's property. I can understand where maybe someone did not recognize our driveway or because it was a large piece of property, we are working on one part of it, a four acre tract, not the entire 10-acre tract, it would look like our four acre tract has no driveway, the six acre tract has one driveway. That is because txdot will not allow us to have two drives. They gave us one for both pieces of property. Unless you knew specific wheal what you are looking -- specifically what you were looking for, knew that we never cut the fence open to allow us access on to our property until we closed the entire tract of land off, it would look like there's no driveway there. That driveway was there.
>> put in what now, when now.
>> January 22nd, 2005.
>> we bought the culvert the year before because we have been waiting on the permit process with gary morris with txdot. Judge, I called yesterday to txdot to try to get if they had any kind of documentation that showed if they had any call to put the driveway in, all of that. The guy that I talked to, mr. Clint duby, they had no documentation of that. They recognized that they had been out there, but they didn't remember when. I’m hoping the information that I provided ms. Barbara will help take care of it. The 21st is when I got the permit. That day is when we started the process. I think we were completely through on the 22nd, the 23rd is the day my employee drove over my driveway.
>> the question is really whether the construction started before the effective date of the international code, which was February 1st. International fire code, right? > in addition to the driveway, what other construction did you do?
>> judge, I cleared the land. I never like to admit that I take off trees off of land. I did that once in the city of Austin it was $5,000 a tree, so I respectively I don't ever comment on the tree situation. But before in November when I hired cw construction company to come council, which in fact judge clears all of my land over all Texas, they are all from the mineral wells area up north. They are working their way down from he will mont, lorena, troy, temple, Texas had been working on all of my stores doing driveways, paving, they do all of my site preparation before I build a store. All of it. And so they just came right on down with the whole process in November, because we truly thought we would be building long before now. But we are not yet.
>> anything else that we need to clarify by the applicant? Ms. Wilson?
>> finish looking at -- moo what we need to do. We will go into executive session momentarily. We will have about five or six items to discuss while in there. You may want to wait around. That way if we have questions we will be here, while we take action. Anything mr. Glen? Other than good afternoon.
>> good to be here.
>> okay.
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Last Modified:
Wednesday, April 27, 2005 7:40 AM