Travis County Commissioners Court
Tuesday, November 8, 2011 (Agenda)
Item 20
>> item 20, consider and take appropriate action on request for Travis County to appoint a representative to the technical advisory group of the waller creek serve anisi to help evaluate design proposals.
>> we will be really brief.
I am stephanie mcdonald, executive director of the waller will creek conservancy and with me is the architect that is also serving at the competition manager of design waller creek.
that site launched last night and we are now hoping to have 40 to 50 international teams of landscape architects and architects take a look at waller and think about the design possibilities that will meet some of the challenges of that area.
we are really excited and fortunate to have don with us on our competition team and he can tell you a little bit more about the technical adviser group and kind of the scope of work that we hope they will consider when evaluating these design proposals.
like I said, we are hoping to have this competition attract 40 to 50 people.
it's a pretty aggressive time line.
we are going to have a finalist in this fall, but we hope that you as a financial partner in the waller creek tunnel project will consider appointing someone to help represent the needs of the county and to kind of consider all of the challenges in the area.
so don, can you maybe tell us what the technical advisory group will do.
>> good morning.
thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak here.
I have been running design competitions for about 30 years and have managed over 50 national and international competitionings.
I say that not for anything other than to say we've learned a lot during that time about how to get the very best from the folks competing within the competition.
a lot of the competition issues are -- deal with how removing, if you will, the designers from the client.
and so you have a constant control of information flowing back and forth between them that everybody is treated equally on both sides of the bar.
the issue that we run into, however, is that the -- we give the designers a program to start with.
and many times a designer will come to a conclusion or concept very early during that time, and if they don't have a way to check that, they could be wasting a lot of time.
so we've introduced this idea of a technical advisory group which we insert into the process in a number of different areas.
which then gives the way for the designers to have a candid conversation with people that can give them not a go or no go but can establish what the risk might be for certain ideas.
the technical advisory group that we put together, first of all, identifies the technical design issues that should be addressed during the competition process itself.
we then have the technical advisory group meet independently with each design team for a period of time where they can candidly discuss the designs as they are evolving, the designers can make a decision as to whether they want to proceed with a certain concept or whether they want to shift or evolve that.
then we also have some technical advisory group at the end to do a evacuation of the design screams and be advisory on the jury.
the injurely knows what they are looking for.
in this particular case we are looking at developing a technical advisory group of about eight people and we really wanted to have representation of the county on that team.
it's a very integral part of the design process.
it basically ensures that at the end when we have the four designs that they are all doable, that they all meet the basically criteria and address the criteria as we go through.
>> what professional skill sets are you looking for from a standpoint of this appointed person?
>> the -- someone that can speak authoritatively about what the issues might be depending on that particular area.
so issues that are important to the county.
which might be -- they might be use issues, they might be maintenance issues, those kinds of things would be very important.
it is necessary for the person that is selected to be able to give direction immediately because it isn't the type thing, well, I'll take it back to my office and think about it.
it has to have some sort of standing ability to discuss things intelligently and give direction on a case-by-case basis.
>> Commissioner Huber, it could be a planner, it could be someone who understands the intricacies of t.i.f.
financing because part of this is going to have to be a really development scenario that's going to support the t.i.f.
it could be a hydrologist or someone who understands the nature of the creek and you do a lot of work with flood plains so that's, of course, a critical aspect of this.
we certainly would, you know, encourage any number of of the disciplines, it's not limited to one.
>> the October 25th, 2011, letter says that the committee will convene in may and September?
>> they will be times along the time line between now and October of 2012 where they will convene.
the key points where they will be asked to really evaluate the design proposals will be in may and September.
there are other times that they are going to be invited to come meet maybe potential designers as well as participate in the actual -- the process of the competition.
>> you would like for us to make this selection by when?
>> very soon.
because we want to integrate them as we can as early in the process as possible.
we launched the website last night and so that is stage 1.
we will go through two stages and it is the third stage when we will actually incorporate the technical advisory group into that.
however, we won't start working with them -- we want to start working with them now to identify the issues so we can get that into the documents as we proceed.
>> is very soon within a week or a month is this.
>> a week.
>> a week.
but I'll take a month.
>> I just kind of want us to remember the reason Travis County got into that was because of the flooding issue that was right through the precinct there.
and so I would think that we would want to keep that alive and make sure that that gets done.
the other thing -- idea that has been mentioned is because instead of making it a barrier between east and west, that it would be -- there would be some kind of way to open the gate, kind of like a gateway back and forth from east and west.
so those are things that, you know, certainly are -- were at the bottom of the discussion when it first came up.
and that area is in precinct 3, it's not longer if precinct 4 but flooding is the issue.
>> it is separate from the tunnel project.
you are right, there is a technical advisory group that is looking at the tunnel itself.
but the east-west connectivity issue is very much one of the ten nets that we're hoping to address.
>> that's where week kind of talk about the barrier, make sure there's no barrier.
>> perhaps we should ask transportation and natural resources to take the week to identify someone, because we do have our central business district master planning team that we might want to ask t.n.r.
as overseeing facilities and being a member on that team to identify an appropriate candidate.
>> the central business --
>> I was thinking t.n.r.
would be the appropriate one to take --
>> was the central --
>> -- to take the lead on this.
>> the central business district.
>> steve manila from t.n.r., we would be glad to do that, sure.
>> and the team with regard to the central business district includes t.n.r., p.b.o., facilities, auditor purchasing,.
>> that's a good memory, Commissioner.
that's what I can remember as well.
>> let's have it back on next week and discuss it further.
I had a plan of attack in mind, but either one would be fine with me.
we'll give you that week.
we'll give you that answer in one week.
>> thank you, sir.
>> this is Travis County.
we can do that.
>> thank you so much.
>> thank you, Commissioners.
>> thank you all.
>> thank you for your presentation.
>> my preference is to go to lunch.
>> I'll second that.
we do have the application, sorry about this, from on item 22 that we can look at over lunch.
I would feel better if I could take a few more minutes to look at it.
that shouldn't take us long this afternoon, but whatever questions we have we might as well go ahead and ask them.
if we need to chat with legal about 22, we should be going into executive session fairly soon this afternoon anyway.
mr. Mcdonald, as to the txi item, if there is a preferred time or date and place for a public meeting regarding county land acquisition and txi and that added item.
we added that because we got telephone calls from residents wondering what was going on.
if you could let us know that this afternoon, that would be helpful to us ourself.
>>
>> [inaudible].
>> this will be brought up and we can have an open court discussion on part of it.
some of it is still legal.
that's why I posted it for open court that we may take into executive session for legal issues.
so we will have an open court discussion first.
okay?
today.
and if I -- my guess is we would call it up at 1:40 or 1:45.
there are a couple corporation that ought to take ten minutes.
so 1:40 or 1:45 we should be pulling up a 1.
>> a little bit earlier than that?
>> no, ma'am, we won't get back from lunch until 1:30 and normally we take the corporations at 1:30.
that's just ten minutes.
>>
>> [inaudible].
>> okay, but it would matter if we took it at 1:30 instead of 1:40?
let's do it.
we'll do it at 1:30.
>> thank you.
>> with that I move rerecess until 1:30.
all in favor?
that passes by unanimous vote.
>> judge and Commissioners, we just handed out the latest version of the application in spanish and english as well as water purification document if you want to look at that over lunch.
>> this is different than what we have in the backup.
>> it should be the same except you don't have the spanish version in the backup.
>> okay.
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