By Karen Gleason
The 830 Times
County Judge Lewis G. Owens Jr. says donating to the county some of the land he and his wife own in south Del Rio will benefit the county by allowing better access for heavy equipment needed to fight fires there.
Owens spoke to the 830 Times about the property donation after Val Verde County Commissioners Court approved it during a recent meeting. The court voted 4-0-1 to approve the donation, with Owens abstaining.
Owens explained the donation in a recent interview.
“Sylvia and Lewis Owens bought a piece of property in south Del Rio, a little over 23 acres, on Qualia Drive, at the end of the relief route. (The property is) on Qualia, and the property goes up to Vic Bolner Lane,” Owens said.
The county judge said he and his wife are planning to subdivide about 10 acres of the property into half-acre lots.
“When we were going through this process, we’d already talked about giving the county a corner of the property because the corner of the property actually sits out in the middle of the road. Then Commissioner Wardlaw came to me, and he said, ‘You know, we’ve always had problems with that road,’ and he said, it’s a 30-foot easement right now and he wanted to know what could we do to expand it, and I said, well, we’ll just give the county 20 more feet, which is normal, a 50-foot right-of-way is normal.
“The reason we’re going to do this, is that anytime we have a fire or something down there, we can’t get trucks back up in there, big trucks and trailers. So this is going to take care of that issue. They’ll be able to go down there,” Owens said.
When contacted by the 830 Times, Wardlaw corroborated Owens’ recounting of the events that led to the property donation. Wardlaw agreed the donation would benefit the county by providing more space to move heavy equipment into the area.
Owens said since 2011, in his time on commissioners court, the county has had to fight about seven large fires in that area.
“These were big fires, and we just couldn’t really get to them,” he said.
“Right now, you just can’t get a semi-truck pulling a piece of equipment back up in there,” he added.
Land development is a business Owens has been in most of his adult life, long before he became either a county commissioner or the county judge.
“In all of the pieces of property that we’ve developed, I’ve never, one, been asked (to donate right-of-way) or two, freely given anything up,” Owens said.
“I can tell you, though, when we bought the SE Ranch, one of the reasons we bought it for what we paid for it was there was other value to other things we were getting that we weren’t paying for, so therefore the developer ended up with a tax write-off, basically. In this right here, we’re not asking for that, so if you’re asking is this (type of right-of-way donation) common, it’s not. I’ve never done it before,” Owens said.
Owens also dismissed chatter on social media that he would receive any direct or indirect benefit from the donation.
“As a matter of fact, if you look at the piece of property, if you look at what I’m fixing to sell the lots for, the 20 lots that are part of this property, and you take the square footage of the property that I just gave up, it’s going to be about a $60,000 loss, because I don’t get to use that property.
“I will tell you, people say, well now he can sell lots off the street, that’s going to be the comment, and I’d say that I could have sold them off the street before because there’s already a street there,” Owens said.
“There is absolutely no benefit to us personally at all. Is it a benefit to the county, yes,” he added.
He reiterated Wardlaw spoke to him about the property when plans for the subdivision landed on Wardlaw’s desk.
Owens said all of the county’s four commissioners review subdivision plans for land development in their individual precincts.
“And he said, ‘It would be nice if we had a 50-foot-wide right-of-way.’ And he said, ‘Judge, what do think about giving us another 20 feet so we have a 50-foot right-of-way? You’ve been down there fighting those fires just like all the rest of us and seen the problems’,” Owens said.
Owens said he took some time to think about the suggestion, saying he had to determine how the donation would affect the rest of the subdivision.
“The lots on that one side are just not going to be as long. They’re going to be 20 foot shorter, and we’ll have to sell those lots for a little bit less,” he said.
“Are Sylvia and Lewis Owens going to benefit from the road being wider? No. Because if I wanted to sell lots off the street, the street’s already there,” Owens said.
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