Balancing the changes seen to the Wimberley Valley

Every morning I wake up in Wimberley I start the day one step ahead of the rest of the world.

Do you feel that way, too? If you do, you’re sharing something with over 18,000 other full-time residents and however many visitors are here at the same time. If you live in Wimberley, you live in perhaps the most unique—or, at least, one of the very few truly unique—places in the world, so it’s no wonder you wake up, look outside the breakfast window, and feel satisfaction in where you are.

In the many years I’ve volunteered at the Wimberley Chamber Visitor Center, talking with visitors has been great fun, teaching me as much as I teach them about the Valley, what it is, what it means, and where it might be heading.

For a while, a bumper sticker was available playing on Austin’s unofficial city motto, Keep Austin Weird, that said: Keep Wimberley Weirder. Visitors always got a laugh even as some of my co-volunteers took exception; I think their reasons might have been more political than anything else, but I often offered up my argument why it actually applied.

Consider, first, the numbers: depending on which source you use, the Wimberley Valley has somewhere around 18,000 residents. The City of Wimberley is about 2,800, which means the rest of these people, some 85%— over 15,000—of the people who call Wimberley home, don’t actually live in Wimberley. Including me.

In fact, even though Woodcreek was an incorporated municipality over 20 years before Wimberley got around to it (and about 152 years after the first settlers), most people in Woodcreek certainly know that, but still say they’re from Wimberley when asked.

And, it’s nothing against Woodcreek, it’s just the collective identities are rooted in Wimberley.

We visited Wimberley, but when we moved here we bought outside the city limits, sometimes without even knowing it.

Also consider that while that 85% of all of us in the Valley call Wimberley home; we shop here, eat here, go to plays and ballgames; none of us can vote in Wimberley City elections. Every single one of us are impacted by everything the city does, but other than being able to voice our thoughts in public forums, including the city council meetings, we’re not voters in the community and have no real voice in the direction the city moves. In other words: we might be listened to by an interested council, but we are not their constituents.

This has been most troublesome in the past when we have had city councils that shut out most of us and listened only to a small group of business people, some of whom didn’t even live in the Valley, never mind in the city. But we currently have a more open city government, willing to listen, even respond, and it shows.

For the most part our voices are listened to even though we aren’t actually constituents, because most city council members recognize how weird it is that so many depend on—and identify with—Wimberley the City, even though we don’t live in Wimberley.

One of the collective ideals most in the Valley agree on is to not become another municipality of chains and name brands, because that’s tantamount to the destruction of what we all see as Wimberley, the Village (technically we are) and the Valley.

Indeed, when Wimberley incorporated it wrote into its charter language to keep chains out of the city limits. With the exception of HEB—which many opposed even though most of us shopped at HEB in other towns—the chain names you see in town are grandfathered in place since they were here before incorporation. The idea of keeping things as local as possible has remained intact for over 20 years, with the exception of HEB, and some are worried the HEB exception might have opened a can of carnivorous worms.

Last year it was a farm supply, recently it’s a multiuse facility just south of the river that drew overflow crowds to a recent meeting at the Community Center. Things were said that night in the developer’s need to get people on board: it’s good for the community, it will expand the offerings to Wimberley residents, and one thing that stuck out: it’s all inevitable.

But, is it?

There is much to be said for Wimberley, The Community That’s Growing, and little to be said for, Wimberley, Meh, Another Blah Blah Town. The idea that all this is going to happen anyway calls to mind the remark that killed Clayton Willams’ run for governor; it was a clueless and self-serving thing to say then, and to say that about Wimberley now remains clueless and selfserving, especially that those who will profit the most have invested nothing into what makes

Wimberley Wimberley, and what they’re proposing is about as anti-Wimberley as it gets.

So, with that in mind, remember: this Wimberley City Council listens to the Valley, so don’t be silent if you support or oppose action items going before the council. I may be wrong, but I don’t see much support for things that will undeniably change Wimberley in ways that might actually kill the Wimberley Way.

HEB, to their credit, gauged that well and nestled into place complimenting us rather than using us to just reap more profits. No doubt their marketing easily showed how often 78676 showed up on credit card receipts in Dripping, Austin, San Marcos and New Braunfels, showing the city during their application process they actually have a place here. That’s not something this latest group can show anyone.

Clay Ewing