by MARK JONES
Hays County Commissioner, Pct. 2,
Guest Column
In June, the Austin City Council deleted the proposed 3.5-mile State Highway 45 Southwest Regional Connector roadway project, between Loop 1 (MoPac) in Travis County and FM 1626 in Hays County, from its Comprehensive Plan. This project has been in the long range plans of the city of Austin and the Capital Area Metropolitan Planning Organization (CAMPO) for decades. The council also directed city staff to request deletion of the proposed roadway from the CAMPO 2035 Regional Transportation Plan.
That’s a bad idea for Austin’s Hays County neighbors, but even worse for Austin residents themselves.
Hays County and Austin residents are part of a single unified metropolitan economy and social network. The Austin Urbanized Area includes the city of Austin and 10 adjacent cities, including Buda and Kyle in Hays County. Of the 1.36 million people in the Austin Urbanized Area, about 800,000 (58 percent) live in Austin. The remaining 42 percent live in adjacent areas, including 52,000 people already living in Buda, Kyle and northern Hays County.
We are all part of a regional “city” of 1.36 million people. Forty percent of Hays County residents work in Austin and about 20 percent of the students commuting to Texas State University come from Austin.
Many Hays County residents use FM 1626 – a narrow, two-lane rural roadway – to reach Loop 1 via Brodie and Slaughter lanes, thus creating severe congestion in the Shady Hollow neighborhood and South Austin. No one – and most particularly the residents of Shady Hollow, South Austin and northern Hays County – is helped by ignoring this reality.
Hays County has acted to resolve the situation by putting up $70 million to expand FM 1626 into a four-lane divided roadway all the way to the Travis County line, where it would intersect with the proposed SH 45 SW Regional Connector to Loop 1. We have done all that we can do. It is now up to Travis County and CAMPO.
It is critical that the SH 45 Regional Connector be built or congestion in Austin and Hays County neighborhoods will only increase.
Critics of the project contend that it would threaten an environmentally sensitive area and “cause” additional population growth.
Environmental issues in our fragile Central Texas home are a serious concern and worthy of scrutiny. But we have nearly a century’s worth of technological experience and expertise in dealing with these issues. We value the sensitive environment in the Barton Springs area within Travis and Hays counties and believe that the roadway can be built and maintained with minimal environmental effect. A large part of Austin lies in the recharge zone, and the city has adopted some of the nation’s most sophisticated performance regulations to protect water quality and environmental resources when roadways are constructed or enlarged.
For example, the city of Austin and TxDOT are currently building new freeway flyovers at the Loop 1–US 290 interchange to ease congestion. This interchange is located in the middle of the Barton Springs/Edwards Aquifer Recharge Zone and state-of-the-art water quality structures have been installed to prevent degradation of groundwater.
A 2011 Austin city staff report states, “While development of any major roadway will alter the natural landscape, it is technically feasible to avoid, minimize, and mitigate impacts in a manner consistent with a goal of non-degradation.”
That the SH 45 SW project would “cause growth” is demonstrably false, a mere smoke screen meant to confuse the issue and a variation of the discredited notion of “don’t build it and they won’t come.”
For 10 years, Hays County “didn’t build it” and they still came. Population grew by 60 percent between 2000 and 2010 during 10 years when there was no significant roadway expansion in Hays County. We are now having to rapidly expand roadways to catch up with growth. We have all seen that population continues to grow in Central Texas without regard to whether adequate roadways are in place.
SH 45 SW can be built with access restrictions that limit sprawl along the roadway. It can be built with all of the environmental protections our ingenuity can contrive. It can be built with all the associated green space, landscaping and neighborhood protections we desire. But it must be built.
Precinct 2 Commissioner Mark Jones represents northeast Hays County.
