Travis County Commissioners Court
Tuesday, June 15, 2010,
Item 31
>> number 31 is to receive presentation from the city of austin on draft waller creek master plan and take appropriate action.
>> good morning.
>> good morning, judge and commissioners. I am very, very proud to be here with the presentation of the master plan. I think it will --
>> what's your name?
>> [ laughter ]
>> my name is councilmember sheryl cole.
>> welcome.
>> and i've been working hard on this project and actually led on it together with mayor pro tem betty dunkerley. And i don't think we've been here in two or three years. But that does not mean that we do not appreciate your support on this topic because it simply would not have been possible without it. And we have an army of professional staff working on this project all the way from land use to waterway corridor to economic development, and they are all here today in some capacity to make a presentation to you. But the thing that i can't emphasize enough is that in 20, 25 years as people think like they do now of san antonio and the riverwalk or chicago and millennium park, they will think austin waller creek. And i also think that in that same time period that probably commissioner eckhardt and i or some of the others who will be sitting in waterloo park arguing about which one of us, whether it was the city or the county, was supposed to do something about the interstate 35 and the traffic for trucks. And we'll look up the past and our sons and daughters and their grandkids will be walking from the university of texas and they will say we'd like to buy this. And for the first time in an austin park there will be concessions. And we'll give them money and sarah will say get two because i see an older guy over there that you can go offer him. And he's in a wheelchair. And they'll go over there and there will be two of them and then they will look at them and they will say, you know, your grandmothers worked hard, the city and county, came together on something. And we thought that we needed to help them, so we came together and really at that time we did it for them. And with that i will turn it over to staff to give you a dazzling presentation.
>> [ laughter ]
>> oh no, dazzling. No pressure there. The pressure is on. Thank you very much, councilmember cole, for the hype. I'm jim robertson, i'm with the city planning and development review department. I'm the project manager for the waller creek district master plan project. I'm joined here today by joe pantalion, an assistant director of watershed protection department. Joe is the project manager for all things waller, which includes not only the master plan project, but the waller creek flood control tunnel and adjunct efforts of the city. I'm also joined by tanya schwartz, one of my colleagues, who has done a lot of work on this project, and george adams, an assistant director of my department, the planning and development review department. I do have hard copies of the presentation, if you would like i can send them up.
>> let's do that.
>> this is the executive summary and this -- before you have you, judge biscoe is an executive sum i of the master plan itself. The master plan document is about a 60 or 70 page document. We had a couple of copies of that here today and if any of you want the full version of that, we would be happy to follow up with you in that regard. I've given this presentation a number of times and a few times i jumped right into the master plan and i realized a number of people said, why exactly are we doing a master plan for waller creek? What is prompting this? And what's prompting it in large part is that of course the city and the county have been funding partners and committed the money, the finance plan to create a flood control tunnel that would take a major portion of our downtown out of the 100 year floodplain. So i'm going to use this -- take the liberty of using this occasion to allow joe pantalion to give you a little bit of a briefing on -- on that project where it stands. So with that, joe, take it away for a few minutes. And then it will come back to me to give you a summary of the master plan itself.
>> all right. Thank you, jim. I want to give you a brief update on where we are with the tunnel design and construction effort. As a reminder, the tunnel project scope, the tunnel is about a mile long and it will be 60, 70 feet underground and average about 24 feet in diameter. Mostly because it's underground, hopefully it will be outside, out of mind, but the tunnel will be taking flows out of waterloo park where the inlet will be constructed and the flood waters will enter the tunnel at that location and then exit the tunnel or be discharged at waller beach at lady bird lake. There are also some surface amenities associated with the project, namely because the tunnel is being built in parkland. So to meet our chapter 26 state law requirements we're having to provide for mitigation. And those include the waterloo park restoration, some public restrooms at waterloo park and at waller beach, and then two projects i want to get into a little more detail about, the boat house project and the new bridge upgrade on lady bird lake. This is a rendering of the proposed project at the outlet once we're done. You can see waller creek coming in on the right there. And there will be a tunnel outlet, a natural lagoon constructed there just to the west upstream of the mouth of waller creek. And you can see the two projects i'm talking about, one is the bridge upgrade in the lower right hand portion of your screen and that's the lady bird trail bridge overwaller creek and then the boat house just to the west. To the left on your slide.
>> so will that be a new bridge?
>> that will be an upgraded bridge. And actually i'm going to talk about that right now. The bridge upgrade is fully designed, permitted, bid and has been awarded for construction by city council last month. So we are formally in the construction period for this project. What will happen here is the bridge will be upgraded and widened. Right now it's about a six-foot deck, not a.d.a. Friendly at all. And we'll be keeping the substructure, but essentially smoothing out the approaches, putting on a brand new deck, making it a.d.a. Compliant and adding some solar powered illuminated handrails. This will be a brand new looking upgrade, brand new bridge when we're done. This is one of the early out projects required by our chapter 26 mitigation plan. Now, the second early out project is the boat house. And this is a boat house, a single boat house that will replace the two existing boat houses that are currently located at the site of the outlet facility. There are certain deficiencies with the current facilities that are being approved with this structure. Certainly it's a benefit now that the structure will be elevated above the 100 year floodplain at lady bird lake. It's also being pulled back out of the waterfront overlay set back, whereas the current structures right now are very close to the water within the overlay set back, and also within the critical water quality zone. This new location having been moved back will now be above the floodplain, out of the overlay and out of the critical water quality zone. The structure is fully designed, permitted, and started to be advertised for construction yesterday. So we hope to have bids in july, july 20th, and hope to have a construction contract by the end of the year. So in essence we have two early out projects starting construction this year as part of the waller creek program.
>> then the boat house, the -- correct me if i'm wrong, my understanding is the boat house will now have concessions and also like an event renting capabilities?
>> well, the parks and recreation department for the city of austin has released a request for proposals for the operation and management of the boat house. And it's their expectation that whoever is the successful proposer on that project would allow for it not only to -- the rowing concession, but also vendor opportunities. There will be public access to a very large deck and concessions there. The intent was really to make this more of a public friendly boat house as opposed to a single user facility.
>> then what i would like to do is review the rest of the projects on the schedule. As you can see on the top of your schedule there are the two early out projects. The very next project will be the large project, the tunnel project. And we are hoping to have that permitted, fully designed and permitted and advertised and starting construction next year. So next year is really our big year for construction when we will start the inlet project and the tunnel project. After that then we'll have the outlet and eighth street project. Once those projects are completed, the tunnel for all intebts and purposes is operational. Now, there will be some cleanup around those sites, some smaller restoration projects that we've broken out separately to enhance the ability of local contractors to get those jobs and we think it's a better scenario where we have the restoration projects where, for instance, landscaping, tree plantings, what have you, being done by a local contractor, that will be very responsive to our needs as opposed to the larger national or international contractors that will be bidding on the tunnel and the inlet and outlet projects. But i'm happy to report that the tunnel currently is working within budget, within schedule. And with that i'll turn it back over to jim unless there are any questions.
>> what is the budget for the tunnel?
>> the construction cost in the financing plan just for the construction was 94.7 million. And in $2,006. In $2,009, the current estimate is about 100.7. So it's very little inflation over the years and it's within the financing plan forecast. Overrule the program is -- overall the program is 127.5 million. I say that $2,006. Right now it's with inflation it's grown to about 132, 133 million. We're working within the expected inflation anticipated within the financing plan.
>> i believe it was in september of last career when i presented to you our draft master plan and goat your feedback on that. Since that time we've gotten more public feedback in the form of more stakeholder meetings and town hall meetings. We've produced our final -- proposed final master plan. We had a big town hall meeting in april of this year. We've also been briefing city boards and commissions. The planning commission, we've had a briefing before the city council, just last week. Of course, we're here before you today. And then our city council is posted for a public hearing and potential action on the master plan on june 24th. One ongoing source of feedback for us has been a city council created committee called the waller creek citizen advisory committee, which is structured to provide feedback from a wide variety of sources and points of view within our community. And they have monthly meetings every month and have been a constant source of feedback and reflection for us. This is -- this next slide is only a partial list of some of the stakeholders that have been involved. You can see it relates to -- it includes bicycle interest, the university of texas we've coordinated with, the parks foundation. It goes on and on and on and this is only a partial list. The project roughly has three broad components. And i'm going to use those broad components to sort of structure my overview of the project. One element is what i've called the master plan. Of course the entire thing is called the master plan, but for right now i'm going to use that as a sort of piece of it. The second being a framework and the third being a recommended budget. I'm first going to turn to the master plan. What this was is a path of the entire master plan document, the 60 or 70 page document. It's devoted to both images, maps, graphics and words that articulate a master plan, that articulate the community's vision and ways of effective communication nateing that -- efek twaiting that vision. This is an overview of pretty much all the physical improvements recommended by the master plan. We've also used section drawing both as tools during the project to look at floodplain issues and trail locations and so forth as well as a way of beginning to articulate in graphic form the character of our recommended improvements in the character of the creek and different locations along the creek. There are -- essentially we identified -- i shouldn't say we. The community brought to us and we had to do not a whole lot of drawing out -- three guiding principles where we have landed today in terms of the master plan. The first of those three principals is environmental restoration. It was made clear from day one of this project that we want -- that the community wanted the walk of 2025, 2035, as councilmember cole projected, we wanted it to reflect austin values. And of course one of the core austin values is environmental protection and restoration. And that was very clear to us in almost all the feedback we got from the community. So we've looked at that from an ecological point of view. How does the creek function as part of the broader austin ecology? From a hydro logical point of view, how does waller creek function? How does a hill country creek function? And though this is going to be in part a controlled environment along the creek, there are still opportunities to have the creek behave and have the character of a true natural creek. And then of course there are significant open space opportunities along the creek, and those open space opportunities not only take the form of several large publicly owned parks, waterloo park at the north end, palm park in the midsection of the creek, and the park along lady bird lake at the south end. There are also a whole lot of park -- there is a lot of parkland in fragments of various sizes all up and down the creek. So there are enormous vast open space value opportunities along the creek. Just a couple of slides here on the environmental restoration, this image is now at the mouth of waller creek. It already is quite a precious resource, good bird habitat as well as aquatic fawna. We are one of the core values of the project is that there be a pathway system, that this can -- that our improvements can create a pathway that allow what councilmember cole was talking about, somebody to move smoothly as a pedestrian from the university of texas all the way to lady bird lake. As with almost all things in this project, that involves a delicate balance. We want a pathway to accomplish our circulation goals, we want a pathway because we want people to be able to experience this wonderful resource that we are going to restore and create. And yet we don't want those pathways to overwhelm the very thing that we are showing off and proud of. So there's always been a balance in terms of where the bath ways go on -- the pathways go and where they're constructed. The second guiding principle was connectivity. The idea that we would not only have north-south connectivity, but the improvements could fek twait greater improvements than a pathway along the creek. East-west connections, begin to go mend or contributing to the mending of sort of the divide between east and west in our central city. We've done that through several means. This image here just represents the core of our bike and pedestrian circulation concept. It includes the continuous pathway -- you want to think of starting at lady bird lake, from lady bird lake up alongside the creek, through palm park. What we've proposed in the master plan there is that the main circulation is fine for pedestrians and bikes, would be along sabine street roughly from third street to seventh street. And we think that there's an incredible opportunity along sabine street, which is really functioning as a sleepy little sort of driveway with some park along it right now, to make an incredible urban space. Lively with shops and restaurants and businesses and so forth. And then that main pathway would then return to the creek side at seventh street. And proceed north to waterloo park. You've seen this and i won't take the time to do this right now, other illustrated pathway systems. Then you can overlay that with a lot of secondary pathways and bike paths and so forth as shown in this image. And this begins to capture some of the things that the city council approve on the bicycle master plan at the city of austin. This is looking south. I believe this is just below sixth street, but that's probably -- i'm not sure. I would have to be precise on that. This is the area where if you're familiar with waller creek it's highly constrained. Just south of here is where the creek passes in a slot between two existing buildings. What we're proposing here is that sabine street over to the right of this drawing would be the main area for circulation of bicyclists and pedestrians. It would not -- we would not propose that cars be prohibited, but it would be a more pedestrian scale that oriented space. In this area we envision our great opportunities for businesses to back right on to the creek. A little photo in the upper left of this image is roughly that same area. You can see efforts from the 70's to try to get a pathway through here. That is by no means any way accessible. It is up and down, over a ramp, over a bridge, back over the creek and so forth. This is an area that we feel earlier tests did not strike a proper balance between getting a pathway through and respecting the resource of the creek itself. We've also proposed just some minor -- not a whole lot of roadway revisions. This next slide illustrates those. The lines in red -- what we've proposed and i want to bring that to your attention. One of the existing resources within the waller creek district is the palm school area. We are proposing and i believe the city parks department is already moving in this direction, significant improvements to palm park. There is talk of doing a master plan for the park and then moving from that into improvements to palm park. We think that's an incredible opportunity in and of itself as well as to contribute to waller creek. There are several things we propose -- a couple of street connections we've proposed in order to increase the ability to move around this area as a pedestrian, a bicyclist or an automobile. One would be to extend rainey street northward, coming up from rainey street across sesquicentennial and up to -- across cesar chavez and up to second street. Second street is the line that goes up and down in this image. That extends along a north face of the land owned by the county. That's the palm school land. This is not -- it's only a partial right-of-way. The county owns the south half of that right-of-way. The city owns the north half. So if we found our interests aligned on this, that would be a potential way to increase connectivity in this area. It would also make for a great frontage, a street frontage on to palm park for that parcel and for the parcel to the west of it.
>> does the master plan provide as to the ownership of the palm school site?
>> we do not propose that it would change hands. We think it's a great opportunity for the opportunity for the county, if the county chooses for avail itself of it. It's of course an historic structure and we would not propose any changes to the historic status. In fact, one of our development standards -- this is getting into a high level of detail -- actually proposes that along the cesar chavez frontage at the palm school that there be no new development anywhere sort of south of the north face of that palm school building, there by prrveg the historic structure. There is land -- there is some land north of the palm school on county owned land between the school and second street. I think that's an opportunity that the county might choose to look at for county facilities new development, i don't know what. We're not proposing tinkering with the palm school site, but we do believe it's probably an opportunity site for some good things to happen in addition to the preservation of the school itself. Does that answer your question, judge?
>> it sure does.
>> okay. Thank you.
>> i don't know that i like the answer, but it answers it.
>> what would you propose?
>> i'm here to receive a presentation.
>> [ laughter ]
>> i'm just asking.
>> let me get back to you later on that.
>> [ laughter ]
>> i see this as only -- where we are today is only the starting point of starting this vision. We intend with your permission to intend to have the county as a partner in this and that would apply specifically to the palm school as well as in general.
>> request granted.
>> thank you, judge.
>> [ laughter ] the third guiding principles are activities and investment. Of course the funding mechanism, the tax increment finance district, is premised upon the possibility and probably the likelihood of redevelopment, but we believe that redevelopment above and beyond the financial terms of redevelopment, would be a wonderful thing for this area. This is an area of downtown that has suffered from disinvestment for decades and the removal of the property from the floodplain, from the 100 year floodplain, the improvements that we hope to be able to effectuate along the ground, long the creeks and parks and so forth, we believe will really set the stage for potential redevelopment. This is a 3-d image that we've developed in the downtown plan for the entirety of downtown and you can see the waller area in the foreground of that in sort of color. The brownish roseish looking buildings represent new building opportunities. We project -- i want to emphasize this is a physical development capacity analysis. This is not a market analysis. This is not a projection of what we think the market will produce. All we did was take land, parcel sizes, entitlements and essentially figured out square footage from that. We estimate that there's about 11.4 million square feet of development capacity within the tax increment finance district. We're not tasked with doing a market analysis to figure out what the market would produce or in what form that would be produce understand the form of retail, real estate or whatever. That is a significant amount of retail capacity. There are a number of factors that will influence, we believe, what development occurs n a minute i'm going to talk to you about some proposals we have to be strategic about the development standards for new development. But we also believe that there are a lot of factors in place that will cause the development to really vary over the district. And one of those factors is the capital view corridors. And i don't have to tell you all about capital view corridors because you're highly familiar with them and you just heard a little bit about them in the prior briefing. But there are extensive capital view corridors that go across the top of this waller creek district, especially in the middle area, roughly from about second or third street on up to about 10th or 11th street. They limit building heights -- there are several different corridors, so there's no one height, but building heights will probably be limit understand some areas to 40 to 80 or 100 feet. The south end of the waller creek district is not capital view corridor limited and we would expect that there would be, as there already have been some, some hi-rise type new development there. Another factor is parcel size. The parcels in this area tend to be pretty small. Unless they're aggregated, we would expect that redevelopment might occur in sort of a fine grain, incremental matter, which we think is probably a good thing in part. It will allow opportunities for people who don't have as much capital to bring to the table. It might produce a building types that are more affordable than a hi-rise building and so forth. So we would imagine that there might emerge just through market forces a variety of uses and scales. We believe there are tremendous opportunities for new residential and we believe that would be a good thing to get people living here and becoming users and constituents of the new and wonderful waller creek. The second broad element of our master plan and my presentation speeds up here, so don't panic that i'm only on the second of 30. This is our proposed framework for development standards. We do believe -- well, let me back up here. The current city of austin land development code is a really blunt instrument. When it comes to the zoning categories that are prevalent in this area, central business district, downtown mixed use and a few others, there are really only a few things that it regulates. It allows a whole variety of uses and it has a floor to area ratio limit, if it's vum it has a-- vmu, it has a heightly. It talks about where you with put the building on the site. That's about it. We believe in order to fek twait this vision of a wonderful creek corridor that provides recreational and natural space benefits to our downtown that we need to bring a little more to the table in terms of shaping that development. I got asked about a month ago at one of our briefings, i don't get this. You're proposing an air where we want redevelopment to occur, but then you're talking about putting development standards on the sites. Why are you doing that? Well, so after that i went out and took these three slides. These are all fairly recent projects of the last decade. I'm not going to name names. They're along shoal creek. But they all essentially turn their backs to the street. It's blank walls, that sort of thing. Even in the decade when we think of ourselves as being more enlightened in the way we develop land, there have been this type of development along one of our great downtown creeks. So what we've proposed is to be strategic, to not be overwhelming in what we propose to do in terms of refining development standards. We've identified just a handful of key issues that we think are important to touch on. The physical relationships of the buildings to streets, where should they be set with regard to the street or a creek front if you're lucky enough to own land right along the creek? Can they go up a ways and step back a little bit in order to provide some breathing space and light to the creek, that sort of thing? Streetscape improvements, just like you heard with regard to your campus master plan, we believe it's important that the streets in the waller creek district really be pedestrian friendly. And not only in their form, but in their use. We've proposed that certain uses ought to be prioritized for down at the street level and at the creek level. How parking is treated, parking structures and so forth, where it's placed. How buildings are master planned, how bringing can they be? Where this he be put on the parcel and how to treat things like service areas and curb curb cuts and so forth. These are not standards we're ready to put in the land development code today. What we propose to do if council moves -- directs united states to do so in a week, would be to develop through public input and through the boards and commissions, planning commission and council process, a set of development standards that would try to sort of surgically go in. The third element of the master plan is the -- it's hard to see. You may even see in your summary have a larger version of this. I can -- certainly we can follow up with you. And i should say here that these are only recommendations in the master plan, but essentially we've laid out all -- we've aggregated into what we believe are logical groups, the physical i improvements that we are recommending in this master plan. The area in tan, which extends from the existing and wonderful lady bird lake park on the left of the slide and extends up to fourth street is what we've recommended as sort of first out project. That it would include stream bank stabilization and restoration, removal of exotic species, introduction of indigenous and native landscape as well as the pathway improvements that we've proposed at all these accouterments that come with the pathway. That's what we've proposed as the first out project. In summary, our logic of that -- of making that our first recommendation was as you know, lady bird lake is really our -- perhaps one -- probably one of our communities, if not the number one of our communities that best loved natural asset and open space. And there's a tremendous amount of use to bicycles, pedestrians, runners, rowers, and so forth. And we've always felt like if we could only get some portion of those users that are there on the ground today to begin to use this south end of the creek and that's really a nose under the tent, if you will, in beginning to create this broader waller creek vision. Project two in blue would be the sabine street improvements that i've identified. Project 3 would be the area sort of in a brown color extending northward from sabine street to guadalupe park. Another two important projects would be waterloo park at the north end, the tunnel project because of its mitigation work, will already be setting the plate for significant improvements at waterloo park and there's a master loop master planning process underway and coming close towards closure right now for waterloo park. We've proposed to do the same thing for palm park as well. So we've aggregate whad we believe are logical projects to do, knowing that this entire thing would be unlikely. To be authorized and funded to move forward all at once. So we've tried to group them together in logical segments. Where do we go from here? As i said we briefed council last week and we're posted for a public hearing and for hopefully adoption with councilmember cole's help june 24th. We're here today to talk to you and then we've -- and then there would be a very broad implementation program of which i've only identified a few points here. One of the next steps would be to develop a finance plan for the project. Almost everything i've talked about here today is not currently the subject of funding that has been allocated and set aside for waller creek. We'll have to figure out how to pay for all this. And one of the near term things of that will be we would love to be able to move directly into design and engineering of some of these recommended improvements. So that we can take the next two or three years prior to 2014 when the tunnel becomes functional, get these projects ready to bid and award so that when the tunnel becomes functional, when construction and work alongside and in the creek corridor becomes feasible, we can hit the ground and get going on these improvements. As i said we've also recommended code developments, the proposed development standards, which we think would be a good idea to have in place to shape the form and use of development. And then there are things that really we, and i use the collective we here because i think the sit ens, the community, the city government, the city council as well as travis county and others, there are certain things we can begin today today. We can program events along waller creek at palm park and so forth. Because let's be honest, the image of waller creek today is not entirely positive. We can begin to turn the tide on that now, programming enhanced maintenance, and policing. The city has already stepped up its efforts in this and we recommend that those efforts continue. And then finally we can continue to make progress and the department is already working on this, towards improving the quality and the nature of storm water flow that comes in to waller creek. So these are some of the just a few extracts fm what will be a broad implementation plan. With that i conclude my hopefully something close to dazzling presentation. And we're here to answer your questions and receive your input.
>> let me ask this: i want this to be as successful as the riverwalk is in san antonio. I mean, it's a real big deal down there. Of course, i think this can possibly be as successful. However, i would like to know exactly the extent of the stakeholder participation, especially going east as far as neighborhood associations are concerned. And the reason why i pose this particular question is because the fact that right now as you heard in the earlier testimony when we listened to an earlier presentation, parking was a real key -- key, key component. And the challenges that we're experiencing now east of i-35 is when there are major events that occur on the university campus, for an example, whether it's football or baseball or whatever. The community is overwhelmed with parking challenges, persons that do not live in the area parking in the area. And i did hear you mention stakeholders and i'm just wondering how deep did you go into the -- seeing that these are some of the folks that will be having significant challenges, not only in my precinct, but in commissioner gomez's who isn't here with us today, but the same challenges are frequently visited in her precinct. So i just want to hear what you're doing and i guess i don't know what san antonio has done as far as some of the parking challenges they have. You just have to fit in where you can fit in i guess on some of the situations. And i'm just wondering what the city is going to do to ensure that there is minimal impact on participation of those persons. Because it will be a tourist deal also. Folks will actually, if it's done right and stuff like that, we will actually be competing with the riverwalk in san antonio. So if we're going to do that, i think there ought to be some situation whereby the residents that probably have to endure whatever goes on, whether it's on the u.t. Football, baseball and then this, whatever they have to endure, their concerns are being met as far as what they're requesting to mitigate as much as possible the parking crisis that is a serious challenge in this community as we sit here today. So i'm just wanting to make sure that those particular concerns that have been brought to my attention are something that you're going to address vigorously to make sure that we do something about that.
>> let me take a stab and then let jim follow up. I think i made it clear when we first came here that i made the rounds in the east side community, and i also have monthly meetings with several of the east austin ministers and local leaders. And i briefed them on the master plan actually yesterday morning at 9:00. And we do have east austin representatives on the water street advisory committee, and --
>> are they affiliated with neighborhood associations? You may have representatives, but are they actually affiliated with the people who live in the community? That was what i'm trying to figure out.
>> well, you have a representative, the county does, that i believe is affiliated strongly with the neighborhood association. And i know that my planning commissioner appointee is an officer in the austin neighborhoods council. And so there's no doubt that we are making an effort to include the neighborhood association. You know our council. It's not like that we don't want them included.
>> right.
>> but your specific question i think is, you know, very, very pertinent and timely because we have actually been talking to a potential developer on waller creek actually at the mouth of lady bird lake and waller creek, and some other people interested in the area. And they are bringing up the parking issue. And to be absolutely frank and honest, i don't think that we have put the thought into the parking that needs to be done and we need to do that in collaboration with you guys because like i said them, i never anticipated a project four years before we even contemplate completion. So that's good news, but it's kind of bad news because we haven't addressed really adequately that. So we have been scrambling within the last two weeks on the parking issue because we're kind of anticipating plans for expansion of our convention center. We -- we kind of get a sense that the market is coming back, there's interest in waller creek way earlier than i anticipated. We have development along rainey street and i was thinking that might be what you were talking about, that it is just a booming area with a big parking issue. And also there's parking at the mexican-american cultural center that is an issue, and they are also anticipating growth. And all of those things when we were talking about the project, the magnitude of the potential visitors, i don't think -- we've got to partner to work with you on it i guess is the bottom line.
>> okay. If you can, update me as much as possible so those folks that bring this to my attention that live within the boundaries of my precinct that i represent, i may give them an answer knowing that you're looking into the issue. I would appreciate whatever update information that you have in the near future, please bring it forward to my attention. I appreciate it.
>> will do.
>> thanks.
>> yeah. I might just add a couple of points to what councilmember cole has already told you. We do -- although i didn't touch on it today in my quick summary of the plan, we do touch upon parking because as councilmember cole said, it's going to be critical. One of the -- as i mentioned, a lot of the parcels within the waller creek district are fairly small. As you know, it's hard to do any form of structured parking or really any type of parking on a small parcel. So having said that and having identified that as basically a characteristic of the district, we think there's going to have to be a pretty strong role for sort of creativity and thinking outside the box in terms of parking. Because we can't reasonably expect those parcels to redevelop unless we can figure out a way to serve them with parking. So we have recommended that the city faishly creative and even aggressive in terms of exploring opportunities for, first of all, making available the public parking facilities that are over there, the convention center parking garages, perhaps addition of new public parking facilities or even perhaps even more likely public-private partnerships. The city now does have a parking enterprise that is designed to go into sort of public-private partnerships, so that perhaps the city or actually the enterprise.
>> i think it would be funded itself, could in essence pay for some or all of the parking on a private facility and then lease those spaces to the facility as well as to other users of the area. So we have identified the need to get fairly creative in parking here, not only to meet the needs of what we anticipate within the district, but the needs hopefully play a role in addressing the problems that you tion, commissioner davis, identified in terms of what happens when special events occur up at the stadium or at disch-faulk and so forth.
>> do you know today -- i guess the figures on the seven tunnel riverwalk. Do we have any information on them as far as the number of people that actually visit that -- the number of tourists that visit that on an annual basis?
>> i think it's a widely available number. We can certainly get it.
>> i'm just trying to compare two things here, and tourism is a big deal, but then again you've got folks right here that would like to know also.
>> nobody likes to say this in austin, but actually parking downtown is an area where maybe san antonio is a bit ahead of us. They actually have done a pretty great job in the last decade or two at creating rather large and integrating image of their downtown parking facilities. And so not only have they upped the amount of parking that is available to visitors to san antonio for the riverwalk to major events at the alamodome and so forth, but they've made it easier for people to find those parking garages and to know whether there are spaces in them and so forth. That's one of the areas that we're working not only within waller creek, but also within the downtown plan because we actually have a lot of parking in downtown austin. I'm straig a little bit from strictly waller here, but we haven't done a good job at making those spaces available to the public. A lot of private garages close down at night and on the weekend. And so one of our major efforts moving forward needs to be to do a better job of getting people to even the existing parking we have today.
>> thank you.
>> did i understand you to say that this is up for adoption by the city on the 24th?
>> yes.
>> is this presentation or something similar available on the city's website?
>> well, let's see. We certainly can. There have been various -- what we'll probably do, we've done about 16, i'd say, of these presentations in the last six weeks. And each one is a little bit tailored for its audience. If we haven't already -- and i think certainly we can put the presentation we gave to the city council, that's probably the best sort of benchmark presentation. And it varies only slightly from what you saw today. We probably could put that one on the website, and that would be the sort of best benchmark. And the logical one to give the community the same briefing -- to provide to the community the same access to the same briefing that we provided to the city council last week. So if we haven't already done that, then we can do that. And the website --
>>
>> [inaudible - no mic].
>> the website is www.wallercreekplan.org.
>> this has been enlightening and informative. Thank you very much.
>> thank you.
>>
The Closed Caption log for this Commissioners Court agenda item is provided by Travis County Internet Services. Since this file is derived from the Closed Captions created during live cablecasts, there are occasional spelling and grammatical errors. This Closed Caption log is not an official record the Commissioners Court Meeting and cannot be relied on for official purposes. For official records please contact the County Clerk at (512) 854-4722.
Last Modified:
Tuesday, June 15, 2010 2:35 PM
