The city will have to make several lease terminations with the following existing tenants:
� Liberty Lunch: If everything goes as planned, the city expects to make an announcement this month regarding the club’s new location, which could include part ownership for Lunch owner J’Net Ward and a larger performance space. Ward, being the smart businesswoman that she is, testified last week in support of the CSC deal.
� Homeless Resource Center: Stephen Meeks, candidate for City Council Place 1, suggested that the Travis State School be considered as an interim site for the center, because adequate facilities are already in place, and there’s “room for growth.” He added his request that on the project as a whole, for “any subcontracting that is done, a living wage is paid … Even to the shovel digger.”
� AMOA: Museum representatives were on hand last week to officially deny that the city arbitrarily pushed them off of their own block to a site one block north. The new location, on the state-owned block on Fourth Street, between San Antonio and Guadalupe, is actually the old and preferred location. “Before CSC was a glimmer in anybody’s eye … [it] has been our dream to get back on that site,” said AMOA board member Steven Becker. And AMOA Board Chair David Gold said that local legislators — Sen. Gonzalo Barrientos and Rep. Glen Maxey — are working with museum officials on the legislation necessary to facilitate the move.
The Fine Print and the Wild Cards
(Or, things you didn’t know we’d be paying for, and things we don’t even have a cost estimate for):
Let’s assume for a minute that downtown is a good place for CSC headquarters. As the mayor repeatedly points out, the under-utilized vacant blocks on which CSC will sit are a financial drain on the city — so putting something there is better than nothing, and the $800,000 we’ll get in property tax revenue alone is better than the $3,500 we’re getting now. But has the city driven the hardest bargain it could, without scaring CSC away?
The city’s “Goals and Interests” statement on the CSC proposal includes this objective: “Certainty — the city works within constraints of an annual budget and an appropriations process, so project costs to be reimbursed by the city must be specifically identified and must not exceed the available, appropriated funds.” Nevertheless, the city is committing to several expenditures, regardless of the price tag:
� City Hall. Assistant City Manager Toby Futrell said the new City Hall is just a glimmer in the city’s eye. How can we be assured that an as-yet-to-be designed building — and one that is of importance to Austinites — will fit within the cost limitations posed by this deal?
� Traffic mitigation. That is, as dictated by a traffic impact analysis (TIA) to be done by CSC. A TIA is the kind of thing that would have been nice to have done before this deal gets sealed.
� Landscaping. The city will pay for all courtyards, sidewalks, tunnels, streetscapes, and landscaping (including a landscaping screen for the Green Water Treatment Plant and Seaholm).
� Heating-Cooling. The city will construct a central heating and cooling plant to serve CSC, City Hall, and nearby buildings.
Then there are those areas where the city is working from cost estimates, such as the estimated costs for above- and below-ground parking, and the estimated revenue from the retail from the ground floor of the CSC buildings.
Juggling Act
Supposing all the numbers can be made to work out — admittedly a bold supposition — the CSC project deserves to happen. After all, if the CSCs of the world don’t belong downtown, where do they belong? Not at the Terrace PUD, where CSC was planning to build until the city offered them our downtown Riviera as a substitute. What we basically would have is the diversion of a huge office complex away from the Barton Springs Zone and into downtown, which will generate money to build a new City Hall — one of the last remaining unachieved collective pipe dreams of civic-minded Austinites.
Is what they’re putting there better than absolutely anything else that could be imagined? Probably not. It so happens that Austin has a larger-than-usual concentration of people who would rather eat bugs than go to work in a big corporate headquarters housed on three whole city blocks, waterfront or no. And many of those people could think of a lot of things they’d rather see done with that land — transformed into parkland, for example; didn’t the Town Lake Comprehensive Plan earmark this area for public greenspace in the first place?
Since the CSC plan was first proposed, no one has stepped forward to suggest a compelling, viable alternative. That’s not to suggest, of course, that city officials have solicited an alternative plan, or even demonstrated a willingness to consider such an alternative. It doesn’t help matters that the CSC deal, good or bad, leaves many of us feeling vaguely apprehensive about its uncertainties, and Councilmembers Beverly Griffith and Bill Spelman have said as much in expressing their ambivalence over the project.
It’s sad that live music landmark Liberty Lunch has to move, particularly with so many ambiguities about the CSC proposal. But new Austin, whatever that is, is on its way, and our only choices now are between competing versions of it — not whether it comes at all.
This Week in Council: There’s no council meeting this week, March 18. Another public hearing on the CSC proposal will be held at 6pm Thursday, March 25, at council chambers. A third hearing, along with a council vote on the issue, is tentatively set for April Fool’s Day.
This article appears in March 19 • 1999 and March 19 • 1999 (Cover).