Travis County Commissioners Court
May 3, 2005
Item 20
20 is to consider and take appropriate action on guidelines for county participation in public/private partnership agreements for arterial roadway construction. There were a couple of citizens here earlier. Do you want to take a minute and lay this out, joe?
>> yes, I do. The -- we have participated in five public-private partnership agreements to date, and I have a summary of those agreements here that i'll pass out. Derived from that experience of negotiating five of these agreements over the last four years, what would be a good point at this point now that we've had some experience under our belt to bring back to the court some draft guidelines if we intend to continue doing this type of construction with the private sector. We have 2005 bond election. We have -- let me back up here. We have appointed a citizens advisory committee to consider whether or not to have a 2005 bond election. As part of the candidate projects that were submitted to that group, we have probably the potential for anywhere between 12 and 15 public/private partnerships. And I think it's important for us to go into this consideration with a set of guidelines, some understanding with the private sector on what are our terms for an agreement. Because lacking that, we're going to be all over the place and spending a lot of time trying to negotiate agreements with all these private parties. We've had some successful partnerships, and we've had some that have taken a tremendous amount of time to finally get nailed down. We spent more time talking than building roadways, which I would like to avoid next time around. So what I知 recommending is basically getting down on the table a set of giet lines adopted by the Commissioners court that we can convey to the private sector and say if you want to participate with the county in a public/private partnership, here are the guidelines. If you can -- if you can live with these guidelines, then we can move forward. But if you're not interested, if this is not going to interest you, then that's fine too. There's no obligation on anyone's part to enter into an agreement with the county. So what we've done is basically set out a couple of principles. First of all, we're looking to improve mobility. We're not interested in collector streets, we're not interested in arterial streets -- local streets. We want to move traffic. We want to increase our mobility. So we're after the higher level type of roadways. Because of that we make -- one of our principles is that an arterial would have to be an arterial in the campo transportation plan to be eligible for a public-private partnership. There are projects -- there are participations, the county's financial participation would be limited to those projects that are in the unincorporated area. Now, i've added to that as a matter of question. What if we should add near term annexation areas to that limit? If the city is proposing to annex a property within a short period of time should the county be spending capital improvements dollars in that area? As you may recall under our 1445 agreement with the city, we backed out of any subdivision review and inspection in areas called near term annexation because it was under the understanding that the city would take over that infrastructure right after it was platted, within about a three-year period it would be annexing the area. So all the infrastructure would be the city's. The county under those terms said, if that's the case, then our interest? Looking at the standard of construction in that area is less because the city has the higher interest in how that stuff is constructed. Praif so in this case I would be testing the notion of whether or not we should, the county should be also investing millions of dollars in infrastructure in areas that are likely to be annexed by a city in a short-term.
>> let me ask you a question on that. And I guess this is basically where we are trying to be headed, in that direction. And of course, we have each particular precinct here, and I haven't seen the total list, but probably do have road projects that may be impacted by this so-called near term annexation. I really don't know what all -- I really don't know what all of the roads are at this time, and the magnitude of these road projects, so my question is does that mean that limited purpose annexations in the near term? Does it mean that there's a certain area that the city is anticipating to annex and just holding this particular category of near term annexation over an area and they really don't do it, then where does that leave us? So I really don't understand the magnitude of near term annexation, especially when we have projects and road projects that may be involved with the cities in any municipality, intent to do near term.
>> first of all, the limited purpose annexation area is a different animal altogether. It is an area where the city governs by regulation, does not tax, and typically those areas stay unincorporated for decades. Their interest primarily is in regulation. And then they have the five-mile extra territorial jurisdiction that they can annex anything within their five-file e.t.j., but history shows that they will more likely annex within the two-mile e.t.j. And we're not even including that. We're not creating a do not invest zone in the e.t.j. We're specifically talking about is where we have been told by the city that it entindz to -- intends to annex an area in the short-term. We have defined those by interlocal agreement. They're a finite number right now of near term annexation areas. And we have a map that shows exactly where they are. Those are the areas that I知 speaking to. Anywhere else that there's a city that has put us on notice that it intends to annex for full purpose an area, and that is where the question I知 laying on the table is whether or not we should continue to invest in those areas or not.
>> well, I guess I知 getting a different -- I don't want to run into semantics. Tom, can you explain --
>> on the interlocal, there were certain areas that the city had already annexed for limited purpose. And the landowners there had agreed to waive the normal requirement that the city annex them within three years, so there's that category of near-term annexation areas which joe referred to where basically the city regulates they're under no obligation to annex. They probably never will annex for full purposes. But also under the interlocal there were two categories of future near term annexation areas that could be created. That's any area the city adds to its three-year municipal annexation plan and any new limited purpose annexations where the landowners don't waive the requirement that the city annexed for full purposes within three years. The areas where the city has annexed for limited purposes long ago and has never done a full annex those, those were set out as an exhibit in the interlocal. But also any area that they annex for limited purpose and the landowners don't waive the three-year requirement or any area that they add to their municipal area annexation plan and again there's a area for annexation there. There may be areas of the city that fall into the near term annexation area, but it's all areas where the city is going to full purpose annex within three years. That's what joe is saying about should the county invest its capital funds there knowing that the city is about to take that over.
>> I wanted to get some clarity on that because it didn't appear that limited purpose annexation was part of the near term. And that's what joe was alluding to and it's not. And it is. I needed some clarity on that. And I understand the magnitude of all this, but again, we have projects that may be impacted by this. I don't have them out all over the county as far as what we do, but I know that there are probably projects that we are looking at as far as my precinct is concerned and I知 sure the other precincts that may be impacted by what we're doing here today. So I just wanted to bring that up. Thank you.
>> do we have any input from potential private parties?
>> no, we have not.
>> any questions or concerns from the court? Do we want joe to continue laying out?
>> there are some major issues that I want to make sure is covered here before we move on. Let me move to the major issues here because I think they're probably more in the requirements than they are in the principles. The main issue is striking a balance between the private financial participation and the county financial participation. One is what is a fair share? And the way we can define that is basically on the notion of how much travel our trips in private property would generate. When we call that vehicle miles of travel, if you get in your car, you travel one mile, that's called one vehicle mile of travel. We know from campo's forecast of future growth how many millions of additional vehicle miles of travel we're likely to get in the next 20 years. What this tries to do is say, your fair share of the costs of building this arterial is equivalent to the number of vehicle miles of travel you produce versus the total number of vehicle miles of travel we're expecting here in the next 20 years. It's basically saying that's your slice of the pie. And to the extent that we need additional capacity to service that future population, this is going to be your proportionate cost of that. In some cases that may be for any individual property, that may be more or less than the cost of the arterial in that property. For a small landowner, it may be that the county pays for them. In a large landowner, it may be that the large landowner pays the entire thing. But in no case are we saying would the private participation be less than half of a four-lane divided arterial, meaning you can't very well develop your property unless you have two lanes of roadway. It just doesn't happen. So as a minimum you have to have a two-lane roadway servicing your property. What we want have under this agreement was basically the private property owner contributing the land for the right-of-way and contributing 50% of a major arterial. And when I say construction I include all includes, whether it's storm water, sidewalks, bicycleways, bridges, whatever may constitute the construction cost of that arterial, that would be included in the cost, 50% private secretary sector, 50% public sector. Unless we had some way to verify that the vehicle miles of travel that this developer was producing was more or less than that. It would -- basically the private property owner would have to lock in a land use plan upon which we could measure how much was trip generation. It would be done at the time we signed the agreement, and we also wanted the private sector to post fiscal for its share of the cost of the project. So that we're assured that there's money in the bank and we can draw on when it comes time to pay for the project. We don't stipulate in the requirements whether or not the private sector bids the project or the public sector bids the project. Quite frankly, we've been successful both ways. And as long as it's competitively bid, we had some initial concerns when we started this that if we let the private sector construct the project, that somehow we'd be done by his favorite contractor and the rest of the industry wouldn't get a chance to compete on it. And if we've overcome that, I think everybody now, even when we go with a private partner, they competitively bid the project as we would in the public sector. We have also had some issues with the hiring of the engineer, and that's one area we probably need to tighten up a little bit. Under several of our partnership agreements, the private sector hired the engineer. The engineer was working for the private sector not only for designing the roadway, but also for developing the development plans for the private land. And it just brings up issues with regard to who -- which master are you serving? Will you have multiple private clients as well as a public sector client that's trying to build a roadway. You can get into some trade-offs that are uncomfortable. So we believe that we need to firm up much better how we hire the engineer and who he reports to and that sort of thing to make sure that we get a good roadway project out of the mix.
>> shouldn't we get some input from potential private partners before we act on this?
>> that would be a good idea.
>> that makes sense to me. I can see where it's written from our best experiences, so certainly no problem, but if we're taking care of the county here too and we tell the public when we spend dollars we're spending public money, but these end up being public arterial projects which provide better transportation for all of us, then I think we ought to get some input if not from potential future partners, then maybe some of the ones we work with already. Do you know what I知 saying? We have a hard time identifying those with whom we may work in the future, but maybe two or three of those that we've worked with in the past and see what their initial responses are.
>> and I知 hopeful, judge, that's exactly what we can do. We have an adopted draft statement to then take out into the community and get some feedback and we get it tweaked. But one thing I have learned from -- my accident or design I have worked on all five of these. And three of them were just accidental, dream situations where we didn't really talk about it going in and were able to leverage the anderson mill road money into great things have happened on behalf of the taxpayers. The howard lane model is one that the issue there was it took longer than it should have because the documents weren't locked down when we went into the bond issue. And then I have worked on the -- the challenging one there on wells branch where we've got some of the people, but not all of the people online, and what I have figured out is that the words, well, we'll just work it out later, doesn't work. And quite frankly, the leverage to get people to the table and to lock down what their commitments are and where their points of comfort are is before it goes into the bond issue and not after it goes into the bond issue because we have had situations where people go, well, that's not what I thought you meant by that, where people try to change what the deal is. And I think it's real important that we have some kind of standards, rather than a deal specific kind of thing, that we have some kind of standards that say, this is where we're going to land more or less in terms of other than some minor tweaking because somebody's always going to say, well, I want to do better than that. And we ought to be consistent in terms of what we tell people and if somebody thinks, well, gee, if I wait honker i'll be able to squeeze a better deal out of Travis County. And we need to do this right now. And i've already had discussions with some of my potential folks here saying not going in until we have the stuff locked down because it is taking debt space that could have been released to somebody that's ready to rock and roll, and I move approval of the draft.
>> seconded already.
>> (indiscernible).
>> if the landowner is giving away the right-of-way that they would really like the government to do the road. That's the first thing that they want. So what we're saying is that our policy is going to be very different from that.
>> our practice is much different from --
>> our practice.
>> is there ever a time that we want our roads so badly that we'll just go ahead and build it, but just simply for the right-of-way or are we always going to have whoever owns the property on either side or whoever along the way, do we always put them in a spot that they need to build at least -- because generally you build four lanes, is that what you like to build?
>> yeah. We have situation on existing roadways that get upgraded on arterial where because the county already has responsibility for maintaining the road, that we can't wait for a private partner, we have to move forward. And we do that under threat of condemnation.
>> joe, these are some -- these are some fantastic guidelines. I知 not knocking it, I just want to make sure that everybody that's involved in this process, they have them. Does this motion include the input that's been drafted from the people impacted. Are we going to approve the guidelines as such, which I don't have a problem with it, but there may be other things that need to be included in this.
>> my intent was that this was a draft, that we authorize joe to be able to take this draft, that these be approved as draft guidelines, which would enable joe and tom and any others to be able to take them to, i'll call it, the community, the development community and any other interested parties, to see if there are some things that we need to tweak or not. And once we get that feedback, that it be brought back to the Commissioners court for us to finalize these guidelines and then they be presented to the citizens bond committee, that it be an active document, a legally controlling document, and then weigh and measure what's ready to go into the bond election.
>> I wanted to make sure it was clear a little bit more as far as clarity. I know there's been challenges as far as getting folks to to some things that I think have not been very effective for Travis County. So I can support -- (indiscernible). [overlapping speakers]
>> i'd make sure they get copies. I know how to reach them, although I haven't talked to them in a long time. Any more discussion? All in favor? That passes by unanimous vote. Joe, should we give you two weeks or have you let us know when it's ready?
>> no, i'll let you know when it's ready.
>> okay.
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Last Modified:
Wednesday, May 4, 2005 10:33 AM