While the city of Austin argues about how to get billboards out of Downtown, another argument is boiling about where those billboards should be made. The land in question is a 2.3-acre wooded tract at the northwest corner of I-35 and Woodland Avenue, and the argument is about what Reagan National Advertising is really planning to do with it. The billboard company says it wants to turn the site into offices – but local residents say Reagan plans a billboard-printing plant that would violate zoning ordinances and to which the city is turning a blind eye.
The city approved Reagan’s site plan on May 8 as meeting all administrative and zoning requirements, but that was just the latest step in a long process. The firm first approached residents in 2004 with its proposal to develop the property for commercial purposes; residents said no. What concerned the South River City Citizens and Travis Heights neighborhood associations was the original plan for a 16,000-square-foot office building and a 6,000-square-foot warehouse on the site. With 900 billboards in the area, Reagan is Austin’s biggest advertising firm, and it currently produces and stores the billboards at its site west of the city on Highway 290. Residents are concerned that the plan would allow Reagan to move the production into a residential area, using the warehouse structure as a manufacturing plant. If this did happen, residents fear an increase in heavy traffic, noise, and the potential for leaks of paints and solvents. “Their site isn’t zoned for the industrial use they want to put there,” said Pat Roeder, an architect who lives on a neighboring property.
But the company says the residents have nothing to fear from the development. “This is less about Reagan as a business operator and more about them as a property owner,” said Nikelle Meade of Reagan’s attorneys, Brown McCarroll. The plan, she said, is not to move the Reagan manufacturing facility to Woodland but to develop the new site for rentable office space; a hotel and retail development had also been considered, but those plans were abandoned as unviable. There are no plans to move any of Reagan’s operations or staff there, and even if Reagan did, Meade expects the company to keep the old site as well. While she was concerned that the residents still oppose the plan and felt they had misconceptions about Reagan’s intentions, she said she understands why they’re worried. “They don’t like billboards, and they don’t like Reagan National because they make billboards,” she said.
Roeder argues that the proposal does not answer questions about what Reagan intends to use the warehouse for. The permit allows for the site to house a printing-services facility, like a copy shop or blueprint production facility – but neighbors are worried that Reagan intends to turn it into a full-scale print works with large industrial presses. “The city has never asked them what that equipment would be,” he said. “It’s almost a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy. It’s like letting a liquor store move in next to an elementary school and saying we didn’t know they were going to sell liquor.”
The city argues that the permitting process has worked and that they’ve imposed enough restrictions to make it impossible for Reagan to move its works there. The city’s approval includes watershed protection requirements, restrictions on removing established trees, and additional landscaping requirements. Most importantly, said Donna Galati of the city’s Watershed Protection and Development Review department, the approved site plan includes specific restrictions on the proposed printing facility. “The note is included on the site plan,” she said. “It says that the use may not exceed 5,000 square feet or produce pollution or noise, and there can be no outdoor storage. The use is limited to printing equipment typically allowed in a printing service.”
The next stage for Reagan is to apply for a building permit, a process that Meade expects will be completed within four months, allowing construction to start early next year. But neighborhood residents have their own plans. They have already written to City Manager Marc Ott expressing their concerns. But fears that Reagan might be planning to violate the permit’s terms are not enough to block its permit. “We have to go by what they ask us to approve,” said George Zapalac of Watershed Protection and Development Review. “They asked us for an office and a printing and publishing facility. We can’t presume that they’re going to do something else.”
This article appears in June 13 • 2008.
