Beside The Point

Although drinks are banned from City Council chambers, Austin Water Utility director Chris Lippe trotted in last Thursday with a 170-foot glass of water.

More precisely, it was a storage tank – in the city's 50-year water plan, it's the first of several such towers in the works. Holding 2 million gallons of recycled wet stuff (i.e., processed wastewater) for industry, irrigation, and water pressure, the hope is to supplement ecologically Austin's future water purchases.

Yet if anything in Austin trumps a conservation love-in, it's neighborhood aesthetics. Folded into Mueller Airport's ongoing redevelopment, the planned tank would reside at the plot's northern tip, towering over East 51st and Bartholomew Park. Since learning of the enormous incoming bladder, Mueller neighbors composing Water Tower Project Advisory Committee banded together to fight – not the tower's presence, but for a decidedly less-dowdy-than-conventional design. "After working for more than a decade to ensure that the Mueller redevelopment will be a model of urban planning," says a letter from the PAC to the city, "we were stunned by the utilitarian design lacking any sense of grace or landmark status."

That affront surfaced in Lippe's four-fold presentation as the dread "composite tank" – an Eighties-era throwback composed of a concrete column and a squat steel top. Unlike the composite, alternatives 2 and 3 use elongated, bowl-shaped metal tanks. Both would shimmer in the daytime and be lit at night; 3's column is striped with alternating bands of color, but the rainbow party costs $3.2 million, compared to 2's $2.8 million price tag. Alternative 4 – less a water tank than a postmodern sno-cone ready for liftoff – was the PAC's preference. Featuring a white, bowl-shaped tank atop an exposed, webbed steel skeleton, it is, admittedly, pretty cool.

And pretty expensive – at least in the soft-number summaries delivered by Lippe. Despite the bowl's deconstructed chic, Lippe balked at the projected $4.75 million price, pushing for the $2.8 million, no-frills bowl design – in stride, no less. "I'm pleased to recommend an architecturally enhanced water tank," he beamed, "that will be an attractive landmark, as well as representative of Austin's reclaimed water program."

Alas, poor Lippe got hosed moments later by a visibly irritated Brewster McCracken. Cutting into the numbers, the dais' resident designista reminded everyone of council's charge that day – ponying up nearly $998,000 for Camp Dresser & McKee's engineering services, which include the tower and piping infrastructure (architects Cotera & Reed dreamt up the designs). "We have not requested proposals for hard bids on these designs," clarified McCracken. "I guess we apparently had a miscommunication," he told Lippe, "because when you came to my office about a month ago, you committed to me … that you would actually submit the proposals for hard bids on the designs, including the one that is the overwhelming preference of the property owners in the area. … I, at a minimum, expect we will get a hard bid on the 100-year piece of infrastructure smack down in the middle of these folks' neighborhoods to know what it really costs."

Lippe admitted that designs weren't yet ready to be released for bids. "I know we have talked about the possibility of firming up estimates," he said, "but I have always recommended that alternative 2 is the utility recommendation." Indeed, the city Web page on the project characterizes the $2.8 million tank as the "alternative at maximum utility funding." Ultimately, council added $100,000 in additional engineering funding with the provision it go to more effective cost estimates of alternatives 2 and 4 – and more ingeniously, an appraisal of the tax impact differing designs would incur, on the theory that Brewster's sno-cone will send nearby housing prices rocketing, thereby indirectly swelling city coffers, thereby amortizing the initial expense.

In the big book of battles between neighborhoods and city planners, the tower tussle looks (for the moment, at least) like a victory for the stakeholders; and Lippe got caught in the crossfire. Let's see if the momentum applies to projects less trendy than airport redevelopment – like the proposed relocation of the Green Water Treatment Plant to Guerrero Park. Otherwise, that shimmering tower might come to look like a 170-foot middle finger, pointing East.