South Austin residents have until Dec. 4 to try to make the best of what almost looks like an inevitable situation: the addition of a Wal-Mart Supercenter — and all of its trappings — to the 78704 ZIP code.
Today (Thursday), the City Council is expected to move the requested zoning change for a portion of the proposed Wal-Mart site — on Ben White between South Congress and I-35 — forward (on consent) on second reading only. This will allow for more haggling time on environmental and neighborhood design standards; final approval of the case would come before year’s end.
In truth, many among the South River City Citizens neighborhood group would prefer to see no super big-box retail at all on the 23-acre Ben White site. The southern tip of the property is roughly 500 feet from the headwaters of Blunn Creek, a unique jewel of an urban waterway that meanders through South Austin neighborhoods, along the eastern edges of St. Edward’s University, and gently slices through Big (and Little) Stacy Park on its journey north to Town Lake.
Given their slim hopes that Wal-Mart will bow out of the picture here as it did at MoPac and Slaughter, residents have retained their own environmental consultants — Lauren Ross and Matt Hollon — to push for a design they believe would be more compatible with the Blunn Creek watershed.
“We need to have some enforceable standards to protect the environmental features in this area of town,” said SRCC President Tim Mahoney. Similarly, Pat Murphy of the city’s Watershed Protection and Development Review Department told the council that Wal-Mart could do a lot more on the environmental front, such as managing and mitigating storm water runoff “to the greatest extent possible” to avoid hammering Blunn Creek with pollutants.
Hollon said he’s more optimistic than some of the residents that Wal-Mart’s engineers, Doucet & Associates, will keep making adjustments to its site plan to ensure that the creek’s base flow and water quality aren’t jeopardized by the development. “It’s a very achievable plan,” he said. “It’s not going to be a good case for them to come back and say it can’t be done.”
Wal-Mart attorney Richard Suttle said that while the two sides are not any closer to reaching an agreement, Wal-Mart is trying to tackle the issue of infiltration — helping keep runoff from the store’s vast parking lots from flooding Blunn Creek while maintaining a steady flow at other times. “Infiltration has never once been an issue in Austin because we have always focused on water quality.” Now, he said, the engineers are trying to figure out a way of “letting the water percolate into the soil and pop out into the creek” year-round.
Meanwhile, SRCC reps are redoubling their lobbying efforts at City Hall in the event the neighborhood comes up short on the engineering end of the deal. Chief among the residents’ fears, where council votes are concerned, is the fact that some council members have expressed interest in the project as a tax-revenue generator, while overlooking its potential impact on local businesses. Also, the council is reluctant to flat out reject any retail project in a well-traveled commercial corridor — as evidenced by its recent approval of a Wal-Mart Supercenter at I-35 and Slaughter.
South Austin residents were also perplexed by Council Member Betty Dunkerley‘s motion to rush the Ben White zoning case through on all three readings at the Nov. 6 meeting. But Dunkerley later explained her actions as a misunderstanding. “I wasn’t sure how many readings we were ready for that Thursday, since I had been on vacation for two weeks, returning on Tuesday and running to catch up,” she said. “I originally thought this neighborhood had reached some compromise with Wal-Mart and learned on the dais they had had some discussions but were not through. I was then happy to change [the motion] to first reading only.”
One bright spot on the horizon for opponents of the retail giant’s invasion of Austin: The council today will square away the estimated cost and scope of a study that’s supposed to weigh the pros and cons of big-box retail and its impact on the local landscape. Council members Daryl Slusher and Raul Alvarez met Monday with City Manager Toby Futrell and came up with several focus points for the study, including: national and regional retail trends, the findings of other similar studies, public safety issues, traffic concerns, shopping comparisons, and business-to-business buying practices.
This article appears in November 21 • 2003.
