Just another day at the office for Capital Metro — angry neighbors who don’t trust the agency’s intentions, feel excluded despite Cap Metro’s attempts at inclusion, and think the transit authority is putting the neighborhoods at risk. The setting, as often, is the Eastside; the project, not for the first time, is the redevelopment of the Cap Met-owned rail yard along Fourth and Fifth Streets; and the angry neighbors are primarily members and supporters of the East Cesar Chavez neighborhood-planning team.
That’s right — not El Concilio, the usual sparring partner for ECC in the barrio turf wars and typically Cap Metro’s most strident community foe. In recent months, at least as ECC sees it, their group — whose neighborhood plan, adopted in 1999, includes the tracts between I-35 and Comal that Cap Met acquired in 1987 — has been deliberately cut out of the loop, in favor of other Eastside voices, as the transit authority has sought community buy-in while drafting a request for proposals for a developer/consultant to reinvent the rail yard. “In all my years of doing this,” says one ECC supporter, “I’ve never been fucked over as badly as we have been on this Metro deal.”
What ECC wants is “a fair, open, and public process, sponsored by Metro, that includes the planning teams and the small businesses and the taxpayers,” says ECC activist Lori C-Renteria. “To date, we don’t feel there’s been a good process.” The several community meetings held so far have been sponsored not by Metro, but by neighborhood groups — El Concilio and Con Ganas, the latter led by ECC defector Ray Ramirez — with whom ECC is or has been at odds. Even leaving aside the question of which group truly represents the neighborhood, Cap Metro did not have a draft RFP (request for proposals) for review until last week — so at prior meetings “nobody knew what they were giving their input to,” says Renteria. “We didn’t know the scope of the contract.”
Though ECC and El Concilio have fought for years over what constitutes the right kind of development on the Eastside, all sides say they support, in principle, the redevelopment of the rail yard — indeed, of the whole rail corridor, including land in private hands, eastward to Cap Metro’s headquarters at Fifth and Pleasant Valley — as some sort of neighborhood-friendly urban village. (The “study area” specified in the draft RFP stretches north to Seventh and east to Pleasant Valley.) Recently announced projects in the area — like the Pedernales live/work project, UT’s charter school, and the Nuevo Mercado — are, so far, more-or-less consistent with what neighbors have identified in both the ECC plan and the El Concilio-driven Holly neighborhood plan.
The sotto voce fear is that Cap Metro, or those with influence over the transit authority (like veteran “El Clique” powerbroker Andy Ramirez, whose designs on the rail yard have been the stuff of rumor for years), have something quite different in mind — even though, as a major property owner in the ECC planning area, Cap Metro gave its assent to the neighborhood plan. “We want to make sure this land in our neighborhood is not used for huge buildings and parking garages,” reads the latest edition of the ECC newsletter The Grapevine, “and does not become an extension of Downtown, serving commuters and tourists.”
Capital Metro’s draft RFP says all the right things about wanting an urban village — “an overriding goal“ [emphasis Metro’s] for the project “is to encourage construction of a model, highly visible compact community showcasing the quality of life it is possible to achieve.” The project resembles the city’s approach to Robert Mueller Airport: The RFP seeks a consultant team to master-plan Cap Metro’s 11-acre tract and the broader “study area,” work out financing details, and oversee public involvement — in that order, which is a sore point for ECC. “It appears now,” says Renteria, “that the consultant will come up with a master plan and then try to sell it to the neighbors.”
The RFP, though, also includes as an “assumption” that the master plan will be consistent with the city’s adopted neighborhood plans, and that the winning consultant “will work directly with all the neighborhood stakeholders to define the long-term development plan.” “We’ve got a lot of different groups who want to participate,” says Cap Metro’s Sam Archer, “and we’re trying to let them work out, between themselves, their own relationships. I’m hopeful we’ll end up with a stakeholder process that can allow those historic divisions to dissolve in the face of a common goal. That’s the best-case scenario.”
City Hall is also now joining the fray; the City Council last week kicked off work on an interlocal agreement with Cap Metro to provide the transit authority with both technical and financial support as it undertakes a planning and real-estate venture larger than any in its past. Mayor Gus Garcia, who has taken a keen interest in the project, “wants to reassure the community that any development has to be consistent with the neighborhood plans and with what the community and businesses want,” says Garcia’s aide Paul Saldaña. “So he’s wanted to make sure the city has a role in this project.”
This article appears in December 13 • 2002.