Hyde Park Baptist Church‘s latest expansion maneuver was met with the usual lack of resistance by the City Council last Thursday. Five residents of the neighborhoods surrounding the Northwest Austin park known as the Quarries, where the church has planned its expansion, filed an appeal against a Conditional Use Permit granted by the Planning Commission that would allow the church to develop in the area, and a crowd turned out for the hearing.
Nearly 30 area residents spoke in support of the appeal, while the church left most of the talking to its lawyer, local überattorney Richard Suttle, who has led many a developer to victory against recalcitrant neighborhoods. After several hours of testimony, the council voted to deny the neighbors’ appeal.
There was some talk, led by Council Member Raul Alvarez, of allaying neighbors’ concerns about increased traffic along Mesa Park Road by limiting access to the church’s development to emergency vehicles only. Suttle, backed by Five Neighborhoods United chair Bobbi Henley, convinced the council not to force church traffic to exit through a driveway onto MoPac.
Henley and Suttle on the same side? My, how times have changed. When the 5NU formed, all five neighborhoods were bitterly opposed to the Quarries development. Two months ago, the neighborhoods’ leaders negotiated a deal with the church that sealed the Planning Commission’s approval. That came as a bit of a surprise to the neighbors who showed up to appeal the agreement.
“The people representing us were supposed to be representing us against this and then all of a sudden with no warning, this agreement was made in our name,” said Randy Trybus, one of the appellants. “This came as a shock to me and a bunch of people.”
Sonja Eagle, former co-chair of 5NU’s 10-member steering committee, resigned when she says the committee stopped representing the neighborhoods’ interests.
“I did not feel that the Steering Committee conducted the last-minute negotiations in an open manner,” Eagle wrote in a letter to the council. “There really was a closed process under which the settlement was adopted and it was passed in a hurried manner.”
Henley says there was nothing secretive about the negotiations. “I sent out over 600 e-mails,” she says. “Not everyone is on my e-mail list. Not everyone checks their e-mail. I can’t control that.” Henley adds that she received the final agreement at 10pm the Friday before the following Tuesday’s Planning Commission meeting, which gave neighbors just three days — only one of them a weekday — to respond to the proposal.
Henley says the Five Neighborhoods negotiated and made a deal with HPBC because they believed that was what they were appointed to do, and because they thought they had the best deal they could get. Over the course of the negotiations, the church reduced the number of buildings proposed on the site from 11 to five, and also agreed to monitor traffic levels in the area and to locate any multistory buildings at least 200 feet away from houses.
Those might seem like big concessions to residents of Hyde Park, who got little or no setbacks in the five-story parking garage that was the church’s most recent major expansion project. At the same time, Hyde Park residents might be the first to suspect that these concessions are no concessions at all, especially if the church hires its own consultants to do the traffic monitoring, as it is expected to do. Hyde Park residents might not be surprised, either, to hear the tactics residents say the church used to gain bargaining power in the neighborhood: haste, last-minute changes, and intimidation.
“When [the church] wanted concessions from the neighborhood, they threatened to do something worse,” says Karen McGraw, chair of the Hyde Park neighborhood planning team. “It was a matter of choosing the lesser of the two evils.” The church demolished several old houses in Hyde Park and threatened to destroy several more to make way for surface parking, McGraw says, unless the Hyde Park Neighborhood Association agreed to let them build the garage.
“This won’t be the last time you hear from the church, because they’ll be back wanting more,” McGraw cautions. “They’re not going to stop. Whatever they got, they’re going to want more.”
Condo Concessions
A last-ditch attempt by Council Member Beverly Griffith to reach an alternative lawsuit settlement with Lumbermen’s Investment Corporation was scuttled Thursday. Under the settlement, LIC will be able to build condominiums up to what they claim is their property line. In return, they’ll build a parking lot for what may one day be the Seaholm Museum, if the revamping of the disused power plant on the shores of Town Lake ever goes forward.
Discussions that began as a three-way tug-of-war between LIC, the city, and the Seaholm Reuse Committee boiled down to the details last week. Griffith’s final objections to LIC’s proposal centered on the exact amount of land the city will get, and who has to pay to move the sewer line under the property and buy the Union-Pacific Railroad right-of-way that makes the Seaholm parking lot possible. LIC gave a little — they’ll pay to relocate the sewer line — and the city gave a little: They’re not getting quite the 1.5 acres that an even split of the disputed property would give them.
This article appears in November 17 • 2000.