So, what about that old airport? A whole summer has gone by, the grass is growing tall around the Robert Mueller fences, and the ambitious plan to turn Mueller into a central-city urban village has spent the warm season in state-induced limbo. As the city and the ex-airport’s northeast Austin neighbors get ready to crank up the New Mueller machine for Round Two, many things we thought had been decided may still be open for discussion.
Back in its frenzied final days, the Texas Legislature — distracted by ultimately futile attempts to keep Mueller open to general aviation — abandoned the deal it had made with the city two years earlier to buy 40% of the airport site for a new and grand state office complex. This leaves the city’s consultant-prepared RMMA Redevelopment and Reuse Plan — which was “accepted” but not “adopted” by the City Council — with a 282-acre hole in it.
Or maybe more. City staff have invited the consultants, Roma Design Group of San Francisco, to come back in October to rework the plan into a state-free and viable project. Since nobody but the state really liked having its five million square feet of office space clustered into one giant blob on the north side of the airport, expect that, even if what’s in the plan remains unchanged, how it’s arranged within the 711-acre site will be different.
But it would be astonishing if that mix of small-lot homes, multi-family projects, pedestrian-friendly retail, and office and industrial space, all clustered around a town square, remains unchallenged. During the Roma plan’s long gestation, when Mueller was still open and was not absolutely certain to close, the post-aviation future seemed a lot more abstract than it is now, with the site shuttered and sprouting weeds. Already, neighborhood leaders and city staffers are fielding requests to use the Mueller site, on both an interim and permanent basis, from citizens and institutions who were apparently napping through the last two years of focus groups, task forces, and public hearings.
Plus, without the state, many of the planning assumptions that guided Roma and its citizen advisors about traffic, density, urban design, and financial viability will be re-examined. Especially the last of these: Though many New Mueller backers were both wary and weary of the state’s land-use practices, they needed the state’s money (the purchase price for those 282 acres) to bankroll the massive infrastructure improvements that will turn an empty field into a small town. So one of Roma’s charges is to come up with a Plan B for financing the proposal, since the city has no money to begin building anything on its own.
Those state funds would also have paid for demolishing all buildings on the site, as soon as possible. Originally, Roma discouraged the city from allowing any interim uses at all. Now that total demolition seems a long way off, however, Mueller-area leaders (organized as the Mueller Neighborhoods Coalition) have been working with city staff on principles to govern temporary use of the site. Much of the Solid Waste operation from Hargrave Street, along with a lot of stuff in storage, is already moving to Mueller; they’ll likely be joined by at least some of the displaced occupants of the Municipal Annex, soon to be torn down and replaced by CSC-Land downtown.
Right now, the Neighborhood Coalition is the only forum for discussion of the New Mueller project, pending the re-formation, if it happens, of the city’s RMMA Redevelopment Advisory Group. (The chair of that group, Jim Robertson, has since been appointed to the Planning Commission.) If you want to speak your piece, head on down to the Thompson Conference Center at UT, Room 2.102, on Tuesday, Sept. 21, from 6:30-8:30pm for a meeting featuring “informal” presentations from all and sundry city staffers working on the project.
This article appears in September 17 • 1999.