Council appears to support revised plans for South Central Waterfront District

City Council appears to be supportive of staff’s recommendations for how to revise the planning and density bonus programs for the South Central Waterfront District, in effect rejecting some of the Planning Commission’s most substantial ideas for the area.

This week’s work session meeting included a presentation from principal planner April Geruso that recapped staff’s concerns over the Planning Commission’s recommendations, with the same points that were shared at a joint committee meeting last week.

Geruso said the biggest objection came on the recommendation that the city extend the existing Downtown Density Bonus Program to all four subdistricts south of the Colorado River rather than a more fine-tuned program made to accommodate the more residential uses in the immediate boundaries of the district.

“The Downtown Density Bonus Program simply does not meet the South Central Waterfront’s needs. In part, we as staff are asked to accomplish on-site affordable housing, maximizing infrastructure for pedestrian transit and transportation, incentivizing open space and parks – and the Downtown Density Bonus Program just falls woefully short in these areas for this district,” she said. “We’ve expanded the boundaries in the district and modified the subdistricts in a couple of areas, particularly in support of transit-oriented environments and reducing density in the west.”

Council members expressed thanks for staff’s work on the district, with Council Member Zo Qadri saying he’d submitted a series of questions to staff that he wants answered prior to Council voting on the district plan at the end of the month.

Council Member Chito Vela asked how the recent court decision that likely removed the use of a tax increment reinvestment zone, or TIRZ, to fund infrastructure needs in the district would impact or hinder development plans. Deputy Chief Financial Officer Kim Olivares said the city has a variety of financial tools available to use throughout the district, with alternative funding options being developed to present to Council.

Staff’s opposition to the Planning Commission vote mirrored that of the South Central Waterfront Advisory Board, which met last month and made its own handful of suggested revisions to the planning mechanisms for the district.

Board Member Isaac Cohen said the environmental and open-space needs of the area could not be met with an extension of the density bonus program.

“This is an area that has certain unique environmental constraints, which the Rainey district and downtown do not. A lot of work went into dealing with that in a thoughtful way. There are a lot of on-site – or at least within a region close to the site – expectation of benefits that do not exist in the downtown district,” he said.

“Downtown and Rainey are both on a tight grid. This has some lots that go into many acres. The (density distribution area) mechanism that was put in there was designed to create a grid where one didn’t naturally exist and to force there to be walkable paths between them. If you want this area to be walkable, we’re either counting on the good grace of developers to subdivide their lots and add a bunch of roads that will be public.”

The advisory board also asked the city to take steps to persuade developers to reconfigure some of the smaller pocket parks contained within their projects into larger combined open spaces that could benefit the community as a whole as well as residents and visitors to individual buildings.

“I don’t understand why somebody in the Parks and Recreation Department couldn’t look at applications that come in for a new developments and then contact the developer to say we’re trying to get some parks in here, and work politically about making sure that we could do transfer of development rights or something like that in order to pool all of these pocket parks into something that looks more like the original vision,” Board Member David Sullivan said. “I’m not sure if it’s legal to do that, but it seems like somebody in PARD could try to work this and talk to anybody who wants to build here about the fact that this is the vision. Would you be willing to move some of your development and build taller over here in order to save the space?”

Photo made available through a Creative Commons license.

The Austin Monitor’s work is made possible by donations from the community. Though our reporting covers donors from time to time, we are careful to keep business and editorial efforts separate while maintaining transparency. A complete list of donors is available here, and our code of ethics is explained here.