Pat Loud, the mother in the 1970s reality show, “An American Family”. I touched on this at greater length when Bill Loud, her husband, passed away in 2018.
I’ve been holding this for a few days: Jim Bob Moffett. He was a prominent oil and mining magnate, and a large donor to UT.
He also made a whole lot of people angry back in the early 1990s when one of his companies planned a development in Southwest Austin.
Environmentalists argued that Moffett’s development would wash building materials, dirt and pollutants that accompany everyday human life into the aquifer, ultimately fouling the springs. Rather than treat the situation as a political dispute in which both sides had legitimate interests — an approach that many activists said had led them to compromise too easily — activists framed the issue as cruel business interests threatening Austin’s most beloved civic feature.
The fight culminated in a City Council meeting June 7, 1990. It is widely considered the high point of Austin civic participation: 17 hours of songs, poems, threats and pleas persuaded a glassy-eyed City Council that had seemed likely to approve the proposal to unanimously reject it. From that decision rose the Save Our Springs Coalition (now the SOS Alliance) and landmark rules that limit development in that portion of Austin.