Last year, State Senator Gonzalo Barrientos’ aide Richard Hamner told
environmentalists that the US290 freeway is not driving development over the
aquifer; it’s merely supplying road capacity for inevitable growth. However,
just as the US290 Task Force was shifting into gear earlier this year, an
article in the Austin Business Journal entitled “South Austin Boom
Begins” concluded that US290 would “provide the linchpin for developments
stretching from the intersection of Bee Caves Road and West Highway 71 to
Manchaca Road to the south.”
Quoted in the article as the head cheerleader among a squad of developers
rooting for US290 was FM Properties Chief Operating Officer James J. Collins,
who crowed that rapid access to downtown and Bergstrom made possible by the
freeway would fuel growth in the southwest. “The driving distance from the
Southwest Parkway and William Cannon to the [new] airport terminal is 13
miles,” said Collins. “That is important to FM Properties, not only because it
opens access to Barton Creek, but also because FM Properties owns frontage on
Southwest Parkway and the commercial portion of the Circle C development.”
In fact, US290 might as well be called the “Oak Hill to Bergstrom Freeway.”
Fast freeway access to the airport is important for opening up the Barton Creek
watershed to development because of the high-dollar housing and high-tech
business planned for the area. A new airport team report on traffic access to
Bergstrom notes that the southwest area already has Austin’s highest median
household income ($54,200 a year.) “There is a strong correlation between
household income and propensity to travel by air,” says the report.
Ironically, the plan designed to give affluent commuters living in the Barton
Creek watershed freeway access to Bergstrom could bottleneck at I-35, where $73
million is lacking to complete the Ben White/I-35 interchange. New Airport
Project Director John Almond complains that some Ben White motorists already
sit through six traffic light changes at I-35, and that the situation will
become a “crisis” in 1999 when the new airport opens.
Sierra Club Chair Steve Beers says that the Ben White/I-35 interchange should
have had a much higher priority for funding in 1995 than the portion of US290
currently being built over the Edwards Aquifer Recharge Zone toward Oak Hill,
but that TxDOT and the ATS recommended funding the latter first because of
growing environmental resistance and the potential for the Barton Springs
Salamander to be listed as an endangered species. “From the standpoint of the
average citizen, the marginal project would be the aquifer segment, because it
serves fewer people and because it is the most problematic socially and
environmentally,” says Beers. “But for the people that spend our tax money, the
priorities are reversed. For them, the essential project is the one that might
get killed off, so that’s the one they accelerate. The more-needed project gets
delayed because they know that the political base is there to get it done
eventually.” — N.E.
This article appears in December 13 • 1996 and December 13 • 1996 (Cover).