Chronicle: Northcross as a Failure of Policy

Katherine Gregor writes a good summary of the current situation with the Northcross development. She raises a troubling question: exactly who is steering the ship of policy in this city?

Who sets public policy in Austin? Will our elected representatives—the mayor and City Council members—stand up for their convictions about the community's best interests when the going gets tough? [...] Northcross serves as a troubling example of how council policy can get derailed or usurped by city staff—the city manager and her assistant CMs, the city legal department, even traffic engineers. Is too much power concentrated in the office of the city manager, which has nearly absolute domain over city staff?

Gregor points out that what should be a critical policy decision is instead being treated as a technical matter: counting cars and square feet rather than considering impact on health, safety, and quality of life.

The entire exercise of trying to pin this development's denial on "objective" forecast data for a single intersection is, in truth, a dismal embarrassment. The reasons that Lincoln's plan for Northcross is a bad idea—a poor land use for the city and detestable to community members—are far broader and more complex than traffic concerns, legitimate as those may be. A thoughtful determination on such a large-scaled inner-city redevelopment requires the intelligent evaluation of numerous interlocking and complex factors—a higher judgment call. That's the kind of decision that rightly should be made by City Council, after the project has been vetted by the Planning Commission and an open public dialogue—not left to a computer formula run by a traffic engineer.

Gregor notes that the Northcross developer has been particularly adept at "gaming the system", seeking approval for a development that is fundamentally incompatible with city development goals and neighborhood desires. Gregor suggests that the recent small reduction in project footprint may not have been driven by community concerns so much as a desire to make the numbers balance in their favor.

Just prior to releasing new TIA numbers, Lincoln and Wal-Mart Realty announced that the size of the supercenter had been reduced from 219,000 to 186,500 square feet. While Wal-Mart suggested in a letter to the city that the change was motivated by "being a good corporate citizen to local communities," it's fair to question whether the tweak was calculated to bring the traffic counts just out of the failure zone on the TIA.

You can read the full article here.