Naked City

Sitting through June 12's do-or-die meeting of the Capital Area Metropolitan Planning Organization (CAMPO), as the transportation board tried to finally adopt its six-months-late long-range plan, with raucous citizens tussling with short-fused leaders, with charges of last-minute back-room dealing and confusion over what the laws really allow, with ad hoc rulemaking on who could speak, and for how long, and how long the meeting could go on, one couldn't help but think: Damn, this is just like PUD Night.

But unlike that opening battle 10 years ago last week, in the Barton Springs War, misgivings about the CAMPO 2025 plan -- a much bigger deal, for the aquifer and everything else, than was the Barton Creek PUD -- only proved strong enough to nibble at the margins. The plan adopted Monday night, which outlines what projects can be built in and near Austin for the next 25 years, calls for pretty much every major road in the area to get bigger, or longer, or both, even though many Austinites, including the City Council, thought we were trying to do something else.

See, throughout the last three years worth of buzz and noise about Smart Growth and light rail and urban infill and reducing sprawl, there has been a quiet voice in the background saying "It's not good enough." That was CAMPO executive director Mike Aulick, who has been staring at growth projections saying that the metro area population will double, and that Williamson County's population will quadruple, and no amount of new-planning gospel will keep us from needing new road capacity and lots of it. Which is what the CAMPO plan calls for.

Some of the more egregious projects in the 2025 plan did end up on the cutting-room floor. South First and MLK will not be widened to six divided lanes. Instead of a far south MoPac, a far south Escarpment Blvd. -- two lanes instead of six -- will be the scenic drive through the Bradley Territories. And Brodie Lane south of Slaughter will remain a country road and not a commuter highway.

But that's small beer next to the city of Austin's wish -- that all the major roads in the Drinking Water Protection Zone, from RM 2222 south to FM 1826, remain as they are today, instead of being expanded to handle growth the city doesn't want to happen. But even though the CAMPO plan has been in process for nearly three years, and in public hearing mode for three months, the city didn't make its official request until June 8, which prompted a public chewing-out of city planning director Austan Librach by state Sen. Gonzalo Barrientos, D-Austin, who chairs the CAMPO board with a quick and mercurial hand.

Rather than trying to downsize each of these planned Hill Country highways, retiring Council Member Bill Spelman -- like Gus Garcia and Willie Lewis, making his last CAMPO appearance -- aimed to change the policies of the overall plan to make sure these roads didn't get built until they were really, really needed. This struck even some urban liberals, let alone the suburban conservatives on the CAMPO board, as a fairly dumb idea that contravened the purpose of a long-range plan; as state Sen. Jeff Wentworth, R-San Antonio, put it, "This would be putting into written policy what the city of Austin has already done for years, to its detriment." Spelman did get seven of the 21 CAMPO board members -- all from within the city limits -- to side with him. "I don't have a problem with being one step ahead" of transportation demand, Spelman noted. "But I don't want to be five steps ahead if the steps in between never happen."

Despite Spelman's lack of success on that front, his proposed policy is already CAMPO's fiscal reality. The MPO's numbers -- which, mind you, have been assailed by some suburban road warriors as being too bedazzled by Smart Growth's promise -- call for even bigger roads in some cases, but the "fiscally constrained" plan cannot propose projects that the region cannot actually afford. And the plan still makes clear that "the region's transportation needs cannot be met if only traditional funding sources are available."

Where will the money come from? Of all the jurisdictions within CAMPO -- cities, counties, the Texas Department of Transportation and Texas Turnpike Authority, and Capital Metro -- the big beggar turns out to be (surprise!) the city of Austin, which forecasts a gap of over $300 million between its funds and its share of the CAMPO price tag. Several jurisdictions, including Austin, also say they don't have money to maintain all these new roads.

Mayor Kirk Watson's ever-growing transportation initiative, version 2.0 of which was rolled out about four hours before the CAMPO meeting, includes ever more creative ways to use Austinites' taxes -- paid both to the city and to Cap Metro, which gets 96% of its money from inside the city limits -- to help pay for a regional road network. This may be exactly what we need to do, but road warriors on the CAMPO board may be surprised when their plans get scotched not by Austin's enviro-maniacs, but by Austinites who, like them, claim to be fiscal conservatives.