Graph shows disparity between funds budgeted in “Smart Corridors” bond package and projected actual cost of these projects. (Graph: ARN.)
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In past postings we’ve roundly criticized the City of Austin’s “Mobility Bond” plan as a “non-mobility” proposal – there’s no transit project, and two-thirds of the funds are allocated for makeovers (“smart corridors”) of existing arterials. (With $101 million of “Regional Mobility” projects – highways and other major roads in the region – plus $26 million of other street and road improvements, the total allocation for roads comes to $609 million, or about 85% of the total $720 million “Mobility Bond” package.)
Now, according to a Sep. 25th exposé by Austin American Statesman transportation reporter Ben Wear, the bond proposal (now designated Proposition 1) falls appalling short of even fulfilling the “Smart Corridors” projects that it’s promising to voters.
http://www.mystatesman.com/news/news/local/wear-austins-go-big-road-bond-not-big-enough-to-co/nsdkh/
The “Highlights” to Wear’s article pretty much say it all:
• The $720 million bond proposition’s greatest vulnerability is that it promises much more than it can deliver.
• The bond includes $482 million for corridor projects estimated to cost more than $1.56 billion.
As Wear elaborates:
The Austin City Council, when it passed an ordinance in August calling a $720 million bond election, was pretty specific about how $482 million of that money will be spent.
That slice of the money, the five-page law says, will pay for “implementation of corridor plans” for nine, or perhaps eight of nine, specific city streets: North and South Lamar, Burnet Road, Airport Boulevard, Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, East Riverside Drive, Guadalupe Street, William Cannon Drive “and/or” Slaughter Lane. It doesn’t say “partial implementation” or “implementation of some of the following roads.”
So a voter could be forgiven for thinking that $482 million will do it all.
It won’t.
Not even close.
While just $482 million has been budgeted, reports Wear, according to staff estimates, “The total tab for the seven corridors that have a completed or in-progress study … would be $1.56 billion ….” He concludes:
You get the picture: The corridor money will pay for something between a quarter and a third of what the studies are recommending. But which quarter or third? Which corridors? What type of changes?
In other words, voters would be “buying” a “pig in a poke” … only that’s not what they’ve been told.
In the assessment of longtime community transportation activist and researcher Roger Baker (who has contributed several articles to this site),
This makes it pretty clear that Adler’s bond package is essentially top-down, business as usual road politics. This as opposed to a cost-effective engineering solution to some well-defined transportation problem or approach. Austin can’t possibly pave its way out of congestion by raising property taxes, and a truly smart city wouldn’t try.
Curiously, a group (seemingly anonymous) has been posting large signs around the city opposing Proposition 1 and denouncing it as “deceptive” as well as “destructive”. Given the shenanigans that Ben Wear has revealed, this kind of sentiment may spread. ■
_______________Austin Rail Now 