Bus Riders Union of Austin, Texas | El Sindicato de Pasajeros

By Roger Baker
Austin Chronicle
July 1, 1994

Nowadays, more money is made in Texas off real estate than oil. Discovering oil under your land takes dumb luck, but a friendly Texas Highway Commissioner can make your land skyrocket in price by building a road nearby with free federal money. That in mind, some lessons can be drawn from [section missing] held recently on the UT campus: on June 20 for I-35 and June 22 for MoKan. These meetings are a brand new federal requirement under ISTEA, with federal highway officials in attendance; they are designed to give the public the right to decide if they wish to spend over half a billion public dollars ($535 million estimated for MoKan; The Texas Department of Transportation (TxDoT) will not release any estimate on I-35) on important Austin area roads, whether they want to spend it all, and who, perhaps even including the Austin city council, should be in charge.

Although the public comment was mostly about the central city portion of I-35, the total project limits for federal planning purposes are actually between Buda and Georgetown. A quick version of the alternatives presented on I-35 is that the highway bureaucrats are boxed in, don't intend to buy much if any new right-of-way, don't foresee upgrading capacity very much, and have only a few conceptual drawings. Advanced Project Development Engineer Glenn McVey acknowledges that "we're not going to try to satisfy projected demand on I-35 - we can't afford to."

TxDoT and other political entities such as the feds, ATS, Austin, Capital Metro, and a little known group called the IH-35 Interagency Development Team, decided on a do-a-little-bit-of-everything-that-might-help "Goals/Visions" statement and outlined a range of policy options that the public might build on - curative-sounding goals like "Develop strategies to move people/goods efficiently" and "Develop interfaces to major destinations." Therefore, the illustrated plans for I-35 represented only about a lane or so - of new high occupancy vehicle or roadway capacity squeezed into about the same right of way. In essence, the bureaucrats have already decided on a band-aid, but they are willing to let the public help choose its color. Although no public involvement activities had been started up to the I-35 meeting, the IH-35 Interagency Development team will meet in mid-July to discuss public input from the scoping meeting and will decide how to proceed.

This is proposed against a backdrop of short-sighted, greedy transportation planning that takes Austin residents trying to get downtown to the main library, and throws them together with ever increasing hordes of trucks trying to get cross-country to Mexico, all funneled into a downtown I-35 bottleneck. The current increase in vehicles at the river, roughly 4% a year - or 40% over the next decade - makes I-35 an insoluble problem short of dynamiting a bunch of downtown buildings or putting in a high capacity rail line.

In effect, TxDoT is saying, "Here's a proper range of solutions for polite citizens to request, don't ask how we got into this mess, and we wish you the best of luck." The public seemed to understand the depressing situation and response at the public meeting was decidedly and preponderantly unfavorable. What the planners probably have to fear the most now is that the public might start questioning links connecting the deteriorating I-35 situation to the assumed continuation of sprawl underlying the current ATS planning. This can only seriously add to the I-35 problem over the next decade.

The June 22 meeting on MoKan was even more revealing. It started off with the room packed, largely by a flock of small city chambers of commerce and county commissioners, etc., who were there to say they wanted it built as fast as possible. Since the unwritten rules of Texas good ol' boyism maintain that the lowliest chamber hack outranks the most distinguished private citizen, the first hour of "public" comment was solidly in support of immediate construction.

The second hour and more of testimony was different, with a sprinkling of landowners in favor, but at least half of the general public - many of whom left and didn't get to speak - opposed to the concept, as sketchy as it was, for a number of reasons. The outlying areas tended to support it and Austin area residents tended to favor it less. There are also legitimate environmental issues involving endangered species, endangered patches of prairie grass, and the like.

The first big problem with MoKan involves its tainted origins. It was initially promoted by a group of private land development interests who got together and formed the MoKan Transportation Corporation. Franklin Savings put in $50,000. They lobbied the project through the Highway Commission in March 1985 on the basis of a lot of grand promises of how the road could save the public money by providing free right-of-way, among other things, Mayor Ron Mullen actually made the right-of-way promises before the Commission, while lobbying for MoKan on behalf of the MoKan Corporation, as Travis county commissioner Bob Honts lobbied for the Outer Loop.

Subsequently, the MoKan Corporation went broke in the bust, officially dissolving in January of 1992, and the special interests got busy shifting their burdens to the public. Texas Highway Commissioner Robert Dedman bought Franklin Savings together with its real estate holdings. Now that the dust has finally settled, the various affected counties have ended up responsible for providing all the MoKan right of way. How much would Travis County have to raise property taxes to pay for MoKan right-of-way? Good question.

The problem with the process now is that the political clout, the same land investment interests that promoted the highway back in 1985 around Pflugerville, Round Rock, and Georgetown, are naturally still pressing to promote the northern end of the highway, known as segment A. In essence, those pushing hard for MoKan are interested in it as a way to make money off suburban development, and this implies dumping a lot of suburban commuter traffic from the northeast into East Austin. This is more or less the original project supported by the MoKan Corporation, running from north of Georgetown down into East Austin where it is now shown intersecting US 290.

The District 14 State Highway bureaucracy tends to reflect the interests of land development as accurately as a compass needle senses the earth's magnetic field. In this case, the interests are reflected in the environmental "Overview Environmental Assessment" on MoKan, dated August 1993. This document candidly explains that "because the no-build alternative would be unresponsive to projected needs for additional roadway capacity in the area, and to the roadway plans of local and regional transportation planning authorities, the no-build alternative would not be considered feasible." Rough translation: we can't not build it, because communities like Round Rock want it too much.

So now we've set the stage for the big underlying contradiction that haunts MoKan. If it were promoted solely as an easy route for Round Rock commuters to get into East Austin without ever driving on I-35, then the public would see all too clearly that it is a thinly disguised real estate bailout to benefit the same general interests who started MoKan Corporation - but with the private funds guaranteed by ex-Mayor Mullen now coming from higher Travis County taxes.

For political reasons, MoKan has to be promoted, especially to Austin residents. as a bypass road; a way for cross-country trucks and car traffic to get around Austin and to unclog I-35. For this reason, the Overview calls MoKan a "proposed I-35 Alternative Facility." It is divided into three sections: section A, which has the political clout; section B, from East Austin past Bergstrom to south of Mendoza near Lockhart; and section C, from there to just north of Seguin.

The problem is that peddling MoKan as a bypass around Austin strongly implies that it should terminate somewhere else than in East Austin. If only section A gets built, then new traffic from suburbs to the north have a brand new highway to get into East Austin and many will end up as part of the downtown bottleneck plaguing I-35.

At this point, the logic of promotion breaks down and clearly reveals the underlying political agenda. In order for MoKan to appear to be a bypass, the planners have stretched it into an 86-mile, half-billion-dollar project. But as the overview states, "Individual segments of the I-35 Alternative facility will be built as warranted by traffic demands and right-of-way and funding availability. Right-of-way and funding may not be available for some segments."

The "some segments" which may not be built is a thinly disguised reference to sections B and C. Unfortunately, all three segments would have to be in place at one time for MoKan to function as a bypass and get cross-country truck traffic out of Austin's downtown area. Actually. the politics are such that the TxDoT bureaucracy would probably find some way to get it extended south at US290, at least to the proposed airport at Bergstrom.

Federal law prohibits the segmentation of big roadway projects without first considering them as a whole. Since there is no money to build MoKan as designed, the planners are obliged to break the project into three segments, anyone of which might be affordable, and to make the bizarre claim that each segment can be equally justified as a separate project on its own merits. The Overview states. "Thus, each segment must constitute a complete and independently justifiable project on its own without reliance on the construction of any other segment."

The contradictions in the bypass concept therefore require that grown planners pretend that people want and need to get from near Mendoza to near Seguin as much as they want to get from Round Rock to Austin. But is the money to build MoKan likely to drop out of the sky to make it into a bypass, or is it more like a dagger of traffic congestion pointed at the heart of East Austin?

Don't say you didn't know. If all this sounds great, fair enough, but if you have nagging doubts about either project, the cutoff date for receiving public comment on I-35 is June 30, and July 5 for MoKan. Send comments to District Advanced Project Development Engineer, PO Drawer 15426, NEAS, Austin. 787615426, or fax 218-0026.