Naked City

By Doug Potter

Smart Growth. Downtown revitalization. Cleaning up Waller Creek. The City Council had an early Christmas on Thursday when software designer Vignette, which plans to locate its world headquarters across from the Convention Center in downtown's neglected east side, made the city a slew of promises that sounded an awful lot like the Watson council's original wish list. The company even (tentatively) threw in a couple of stocking stuffers, like building energy-efficient buildings and encouraging employees to live downtown and find alternative transportation to work.

Vignette, founded by two Austin entrepreneurs in 1995, has added some 2,500 employees in those five years, according to Senior Vice-President Charles Sandbury, making it "one of the fastest-growing companies of all time." Currently, the 1,000 Vignette employees who work in Austin are housed in five different buildings up and down MoPac. When completed, the new site, which lies in the city's Desired Development Zone, will include 22,000 square feet of retail space and will accommodate the 2,300 Vignette employees expected to work in Austin by 2002, says Austin's redevelopment director, Sue Edwards.

"Vignette could go anywhere it wants to go," says the company's attorney, David Armbrust. "It's in a very rapid growth mode with a growing global presence. It has elected to support the city's Smart Growth initiative and locate downtown."

Having Vignette's headquarters downtown has a lot of advantages. They aren't building over the aquifer, for one. And it's hoped that Vignette's location on the east side of downtown will bring a spark of life back to a rundown area. "My hope is that their employees and their money will bridge the digital divide," says the Reverend Joseph C. Parker, of David Chapel on MLK Boulevard. "Vignette is a homegrown company [that] understands some of the issues with regard to the historical neglect. They recognize the impact they could have."

And of course, the Vignette site is bordered by a particularly trash-strewn stretch of Waller Creek, which the company has pledged to help the city clean up. A Power Point presentation Thursday night showed Waller's littered banks miraculously covered with green grass, neat paths, and cafe-style tables, with one of Vignette's two (or maybe three) proposed office buildings towering in the background.

Their hearts are in the right place, according to everyone from the Downtown Austin Alliance to the Save Barton Creek Association. (Words like "flexible," "human," "first-class," and even "inspiring" were thrown around Thursday night.) But they aren't building downtown for love -- it took $25 million in city incentives to get Vignette downtown, including $4.5 million in waived development fees, and $20 million in reimbursed property taxes over the next 20 years. As part of the deal, Vignette would make several improvements to downtown public property -- including widening Cesar Chavez and building a right-of-way from Red River so its employees won't generate excess traffic, spending $7.9 million to clean up Waller Creek, and making its parking garage available on evenings and weekends to downtown visitors.

Under the incentive program, implemented in accordance with a never-used chapter of the local government code called Chapter 380, the city will make payments to Vignette only in years when the company makes agreed-on improvements to its property. As the improvements generate increased property tax, the city will reimburse the amount of the increases until the reimbursements add up to the promised $20 million. That way, the city won't have to worry about paying for promised improvements that never happen, or making lump sum payments that put a strain on the city's budget. Still, $25 million is a lot of money, and Council Member Beverly Griffith refused to join the chest-thumping Thursday night. Griffith maintains that the problem is not Vignette itself -- "They've been accessible, they've been open, very impressive, very professional," Griffith says -- but the mammoth size of the incentive project, which Griffith worries may set a dangerous precedent. "When we started the jump-start program for downtown, we didn't know how successful it would be and we didn't plan an exit strategy," Griffith says. "We didn't decide when enough is enough."

Griffith abstained from voting on the Vignette incentives, but the rest of the council swallowed the $25 million price tag on Vignette with little complaint. "Philosophically, I would prefer that we not have to do these kind of packages," said Council Member Daryl Slusher. "But I also want to protect the Edwards Aquifer. I've had to acknowledge that it costs a lot more to build downtown than it does to go out and build in the outlying areas."

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Zoned Out

Zoning changes corresponding to the already-adopted East Cesar Chavez Neighborhood Plan passed over loud protests Thursday night. Protest from somewhere might be said to be inevitable, considering that there are around 14 neighborhood groups laying claim to the smallish strip of land bounded by I-35 and Chicon to the west and east, and Town Lake and East Seventh to the south and north.

Opponents of the neighborhood plan cried foul over the city's rejection of petitions they filed against the plan (too few signatures to be valid, said city staff) and the ballots by which the neighborhood adopted the plan. (As in Palm Beach County, the final ballot count did not change.) While opponents pushed for postponement until February, some neighborhood residents pleaded with the council to pass the plan, on which the East Cesar Chavez neighborhood planning team has been working with the city for the past three years.

The politics of the neighborhood plan have been split since several groups -- El Concilio and PODER (People Organized in Defense of Earth and her Resources) among them -- broke away from the planning process in its early stages.

The plan includes considerable rezoning -- rolling back industrial zoning on many sites to "mixed use" infill zoning -- in order to allow for developments like garage apartments and buildings with offices or residential floors above commercial space. The zoning rollback prohibits some currently permitted businesses, such as warehouses and recycling plants, from locating in the area.

Representatives from El Concilio and PODER called the plan a land-grab and threw out the now-familiar accusation that it would "open the floodgates to gentrification and the displacement of the people."

But the hope of the neighborhood planning team is that zoning which allows for small residential uses like garage apartments will not appeal to lurking gentrifiers or builders of pricey housing. And limits on the height of commercial buildings are meant to keep high-rise office buildings out of the area.

"The neighborhood would [maintain] its strong residential character," said Carol Barrett of the city's Planning, Environmental Services, and Conservation Dept. "I don't think there's any scientific data that says that if you have a plan, gentrification is going to occur, or if you don't have a plan, gentrification is not going to occur."