Wynn calls for 2008 rail election
Second phase would include a line to airport and North Austin.
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By Ben Wear
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Thursday, October 25, 2007
Austin Mayor Will Wynn today will call for a November 2008 election to build a Central Austin passenger rail system connecting the airport, downtown and the University of Texas, along with the Triangle and Mueller developments in near North Austin.
Unlike the current commuter rail project, which Capital Metro is building with its own, diminishing resources, Wynn will propose creating a task force of several jurisdictions to work out plans for the city and other governmental entities — and possibly developers and private companies — to pay for the project. This could include, Austin City Council Member Brewster McCracken says, selling bonds to be paid back with general city tax revenue as well as profits from Austin-Bergstrom International Airport.
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Wynn said he would hope to avoid using general obligation debt, which would require a property tax increase.
"I'm going to try to build the case that now folks, we have to begin the next and obvious phase of our desperately needed comprehensive transportation system," Wynn said. "It should be our goal to do it with no new taxes."
Wynn said he hopes that the task force could conclude its business within six months, allowing the beginning of a rail election campaign by the summer.
Selling bonds would require permission of City of Austin voters (or Travis County voters, if commissioners decided to throw in some borrowed money as well), and Capital Metro under state law cannot build and operate additional lines without voter approval. This could mean simultaneous elections by the two sets of mostly the same voters, McCracken said, one to borrow the money and the other to allow the project.
No one knows what this would cost at this point. Capital Metro in 2006 proposed spending about $230 million to build a streetcar line from downtown to Mueller; the agency has revised that cost downward to $210.4 million. But what the mayor is discussing would be much more extensive, including a spur to the Triangle and a several mile run out to the airport that would have to include crossings of Interstate 35, Texas 71 and U.S. 183.
McCracken, in fact, has another extension in mind, this one to Zilker Park.
The technology — streetcars, electric-powered light rail or perhaps the same diesel cars that will run on the commuter rail line — is also a major unknown at this point. That task force Wynn envisions might address that as well as specific routes for the lines.
Capital Metro, under the mayor's scenario, would cover the operating costs for this second phase of rail. The agency has said in the past couple of years, however, that under its current financial projections it will go into the red in about four years, so it is not clear how the agency could cover the additional hit for rail.
Wynn will make his announcement at a noon meeting of the Downtown Austin Alliance, an advocate of building rail in downtown. Wynn has talked of having 25,000 downtown residents, about four times the current population there, a scenario that could create traffic and parking problems.
The airport's role in this plan carries a number of complications. McCracken said the airport, which struggled financially in the wake of the September 2001 terrorist attacks, is now profitable again. The city had even explored the idea of harvesting a windfall by signing a long-term lease with the private sector to run the airport. That showed, McCracken said, that the airport has an intrinsic value of $500 million to $1 billion, money that could be tapped for rail.
That would require, however, permission from the Federal Aviation Administration to use airport revenues for investments off the site. McCracken said the hope, as well, is that the project could get federal transit funding. Those grants have become increasingly harder to land in recent years.
"The City of Austin is going to have to significantly juice up its federal lobbying effort," McCracken said. "It's going to be complicated."
McCracken said that one approach being floated has the line coming in from the airport along Riverside Drive. He said the thinking is that there is enough available right of way, even as Riverside runs past the Travis Heights neighborhood, to have the train line outside the current curb line and thus not remove lanes for cars.
Travis County Commissioner Gerald Daugherty, a long-time opponent of passenger rail plans in Central Texas, scoffed at the plan. With money for road construction becoming tight, local policy leaders recently approved five more toll roads.
"It would be the most ridiculous use of money that I can think of," Daugherty said. "If you really know what the ridership was on the Dillo, which is a free means of transportation, that should tell you something about how people feel about public transit being their mode of transportation.
"How many more statistics does somebody need to have in front of them to realize that it is not the way that choice riders elect to get around?"
Wynn said, however, that a metropolitan area due to have about 1 million more people in a generation cannot depend only on roads.
"We kid ourselves if you look at the future with twice as many people that we can get there with a single transportation product," Wynn said.
[email protected], 445-3698
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