Coalition report calls for widening road but protecting creek, trees.
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Tuesday, November 28, 2006
Politicians, neighborhood groups and urban planners all have had their say on the debate over Texas toll roads.
Now environmentalists are weighing in.
The Texas Department of Transportation expects nearly 160,000 vehicle trips per day by 2030 at the U.S. 290 and Texas 71 intersection, shown looking east with Texas 71 rising from the lower left corner. The agency has proposed expanding to 12 lanes, six with tolls. The Fix290 Coalition says eight lanes could handle the traffic.
The Fix290 Coalition report, released last month, argues that a proposed highway interchange in Oak Hill at the intersection of U.S. 290 and Texas 71 would destroy too many trees and turn a stretch of Williamson Creek into a drainage ditch.
Parts of the interchange would sit above Williamson Creek, which feeds the Barton Springs portion of the Edwards Aquifer.
"Tolling is not the issue here," said the report, written by civil engineer Bruce Melton and backed by some neighborhood groups and nearly 2,000 people who have signed petitions supporting Fix290's alternative plan. "Responsible use of resources is the message that the Fix290 Coalition wants to convey."
U.S. 290 and Texas 71 would be tolled in the area as part of a state plan, and the Fix290 report appears to be gaining traction: In October, the Capital Area Metropolitan Planning Organization, which decides which roads may be tolled, voted to study the plan.
The state transportation agency's current plan — expansions of the intersection have been batted around since the 1980s — would expand the four lanes of U.S. 290 and Texas 71 to 12 lanes (six toll and six frontage), some of them elevated, on a right of way as much as 400 feet wide. In the process, the state would remove dozens of live oak trees, according to the report.
Don Nyland, an engineer with the Texas Department of Transportation, said the agency would have to remove trees but would try to relocate them.
The department's project is based on estimates that vehicle traffic will grow from 59,000 trips per day in 2004 to nearly 160,000 by 2030. The agency says elevating the lanes is a way to keep local traffic separate from through traffic.
The project "is designed to move traffic efficiently from the Oak Hill area out 71 and into the Hays County area heading south," said Marcus Cooper, a Transportation Department spokesman.
The Fix290 coalition calls the traffic projections the department uses very aggressive and claims that the nearly milelong portion of elevated highway the state plans to build would create an aesthetic barrier that would block views of the bluffs of Oak Hill. Its report also cites a 2001 article in the Journal of Planning that found that elevated highways increase noise levels at least 77 percent.
Fix290 has proposed what it says is a less expensive alternative project that would be less than 150 feet wide with six ground-level freeway lanes and two more for bicycles that eventually could become freeway lanes. Melton said the eight lanes could accommodate the traffic projections of nearly 160,000 trips per day.
The group says its plan would preserve the creek in its natural state, save at least 90 percent of the remaining Oak Hill oaks and decrease light and noise pollution. The Fix290 report comes as the interchange project is under new scrutiny for environmental reasons. Cooper said the Transportation Department last filed updates with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 2002 and is working on another update.
Because the state plan would increase impervious cover — asphalt that doesn't let rainwater seep into the ground — it requires that more than a mile of Williamson Creek be transformed to accommodate runoff and fend off flooding.
The 20-foot-wide creek would become a grass-lined channel as wide as 80 feet, said Melton, a resident of Oak Hill. About 1,500 feet of the creek will be directly under the project's elevated lanes, the Transportation Department says.
That part of the project sparked a concerned e-mail from the Army Corps of Engineers, which is responsible for reviewing the project's potential effects on waterways. The project might need an additional permit to go forward "based on the more than minimal adverse impacts to the aquatic environment," Jennifer Knowles, a member of the Army Corps' Forth Worth office, wrote in September to Dennis Nielsen, a water quality specialist with the state Transportation Department. (The e-mail was provided to the American-Statesman by the Save Our Springs Alliance, a group that works to protect Barton Springs.)
Nyland said that despite the asphalt that would be added, the department's plans include techniques to protect the creek's water quality, such as detention ponds that keep downstream water from being polluted. He also said the agency is considering "benching" the Williamson Creek channel, or creating a stepped slope on which it can replant trees.
"Technically, we're improving water quality in the 290 corridor," Nyland said.
Ed Peacock, an engineer with the City of Austin's watershed protection department, said the city is concerned about water quality in the creek and is trying to work with the Transportation Department to improve the plan for the interchange.
"It's in a state of flux," he said.
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