Naked City

Mueller Neighborhoods Coalition spokesperson Jim Walker (Photo By John Anderson)

Spring is here, and wildflowers and wild ideas are popping up all over the shuttered confines of Robert Mueller Municipal Airport. Which is exactly what neighborhood leaders and planners were afraid of. Even though the Mueller redevelopment saga has made ample sacrifices to the local God of Process, with less than a month to go before Mueller's first birthday as an ex-airport, its future still seems up in the air.

It wasn't supposed to be this way. The Mueller neighbors have spent 15 years envisioning a post-aviation future -- as a mixed-use, pedestrian-friendly urban village -- for the 711-acre site, and the city of Austin has officially spent five years working on Mueller redevelopment. For more than two years, San Francisco-based Roma Design Group has been master-planning, then master-replanning, the site, having to backtrack when the New Mueller's original anchor tenant, the state of Texas, lost its taste for the deal. The revised Roma plan is due for delivery to the City Council in late May or early June, right after the probable runoff election.

This second draft of the Roma plan, unconstrained by the need to accommodate a few million square feet of state offices and their occupants and their cars, promises to be a lot lower-impact on the surrounding neighborhoods. For example, in the first plan, all the new streets through the site were at least four lanes wide; the new version includes only one four-lane arterial. The working draft also accommodates the two projects that have already been welcomed aboard at the New Mueller: a new regional emergency communications center, and the Austin Film Society's proposed soundstage complex.

Other than that, the New New Mueller looks about the same as the Old New Mueller. More pressing on the public mind, right now, is how the New Mueller plan can be translated into bricks and mortar. For all its hateful qualities, the state did bring to the deal cash on the barrelhead and a putative commitment to finish what it started. Without the state, it appears likely that Roma's economic-development partners will recommend that the city find one or more master developers to take charge of the site, with some as-yet-ill-defined oversight authority by the city.

Hence the recently outed not-quite-negotiations between the city and Stratus Properties about swapping Mueller for land over the aquifer. Like the CSC deal, this makes more sense as a political fiat than it does as economic development. The master plan authored by Roma depicts a purely of-the-moment New Urbanist showpiece project. Any one of a hundred developers would give a gonad for the chance to build on this site, 10 minutes from the Central Business District of one of the world's hottest real-estate markets. To think, as both city staff and City Council personages have suggested, that we need to jump the broom with Stratus to make sure the New Mueller gets built is, at best, evidence of a self-esteem deficit.

Now, Stratus may indeed be the best developer for the job, but the CSC deal is not a comforting precedent for the Mueller neighbors who have invested so much in the slow, steady, careful process that is almost, finally, ready to turn some dirt. There was a process for downtown development, too, that got blown by the wayside by CSC. And even the Save Our Springs Alliance, which invested much time and stroke to get CSC into the CBD, has joined with the Mueller Neighborhoods Coalition (MNC) to urge the council "not to act quickly on propositions which may create the perception of undermining the open, good faith and inclusive decision-making thus far undertaken on Mueller redevelopment."

"We get nervous whenever people tell us to just trust what the city's doing," says Mueller Neighborhoods Coalition spokesperson Jim Walker. "It's not that the city isn't trustworthy, but we trusted the state, too. Nobody's going to scream that Mueller can't be swapped with anybody who might get the project off the ground, but we want to make sure the safeguards are in place before lawyers start talking with lawyers."

Foremost among those safeguards is the creation of some citizen oversight for the New Mueller, whether a standard-issue city board or a public corporation. The MNC, and before it the city's RMMA Redevelopment Process and Goals Task Force, has been calling for such an entity for about four years, and the City Council actually considered establishing an oversight group in mid-April. But now the decision has been punted by the council until 90 days after Roma presents its formal plan, safely after the council elections.

In the interim, the MNC itself has become the de facto citizens oversight committee, having emerged as what every grassroots community group wants to be: a more-or-less full partner with the city on issues affecting the New Mueller. "About once or twice a week, I get a call from developers who want to tell me their ideas for Mueller," says Walker. "And these people are directed to me by council and staff, which is the good part. We have as reasonable a role as I could hope for."