Wear: Will new law spur transit in Austin suburbs? By Ben Wear - American-Statesman Staff Mass transit supporters around here have some big dreams. Their vision, set out in a “Project Connect” regional transit plan finalized last year, includes several passenger rail lines crisscrossing Central Texas, long-distance bus lines, express toll lanes on several area express ways open to buses, and of course the interconnective tissue of shorter bus routes. All of this will take decades, and several billion dollars, to make happen. But it can be a chore to create a regional network when you have a transit agency whose jurisdiction is overwhelmingly Austin-centric and does not include most of the area’s larger suburban towns. Capital Metro, with a boost from a little-noticed bill passed by the Legislature this spring and signed by the governor, hopes to solve that problem over the next few years. Capital Metro’s borders are defined by the cities and county areas that voted to be a part of the agency (and stayed in, unlike the four cities that bailed out), and thus agreed to give Capital Metro receipts from a 1 percent sales tax. The club is dominated by the city of Austin but also includes Leander, Manor, Lago Vista, Jonestown, parts of western Travis and Williamson counties, and the tiny burgs of Volente, Point Venture and San Leanna. Conspicuously missing from that list: Round Rock, San Marcos, Pflugerville, Dripping Springs, Lakeway, Georgetown, Cedar Park, Hutto, Buda, Kyle, Bee Cave, West Lake Hills, Elgin and Rollingwood. In other words, virtually all of the area’s fastest-growing suburbs, at least 400,000 potential passengers and a huge amount of potential sales taxes that do not go to Capital Metro. That regional plan includes service to or through almost all of those towns. But Capital Metro can’t afford, and wouldn’t want, to provide service to those towns at its own expense. This is not a new problem. Capital Metro at various times over the past few years has attempted to work out what are called interlocal agreements with some of these towns, essentially contracts under which the agency would extend bus service (or in the case of Cedar Park, add a MetroRail train stop) and the city would pay all or most of the costs. These efforts have yielded little. A bus route that passes through Cedar Park stops at the Austin Community College campus there, and Cedar Park residents can board and pay for a ride. But that contract is with the college, not the town. Elgin has a bus route, provided by the Capital Area Rural Transportation System, that connects to Capital Metro service in Manor. And Capital Metro is trying to work out a contract with Buda to extend service there from Southpark Meadows in South Austin. That’s basically it. That’s where Senate Bill 276 and “local government corporations” enter the picture. That newly minted law (it will take effect Sept. 1) would allow Capital Metro (and several other Texas transit agencies) to create these mini-governments, which would have a board of directors with representatives from the agency and the participating cities. Money would still change hands, with the city (or cities) involved paying the agency for service beyond its borders, and there would still be a contract. The underlying arrangement, in other words, remains the same. And the basic problem is unchanged as well. Suburban towns in Central Texas evolved mostly to serve people in single-family homes who have access to one or more personal automobiles. And like most governments, the towns’ revenue is already fully committed to the services they’re providing now. Finding space in their small-town budgets for transit inevitably would mean raising more revenue, or ceasing to do something that has a constituency. Todd Hemingson, Capital Metro’s vice president for strategic planning and development, told me the meaningful difference might arise if several clustered cities, such as Round Rock, Pflugerville and Georgetown up north, or Buda, Kyle and San Marcos to the south, came together and jointly created local corporations with Capital Metro. The ability to form them, Capital Metro said, is critical to fulfilling the Project Connect vision. Maybe so. Earlier this summer, the Georgetown City Council voted to pull out of the Lone Star Rail District, which hopes to build one of the linchpins of that regional transit vision: a commuter rail line running down Central Texas’ spine from Georgetown to San Marcos (and on to San Antonio). Round Rock has never joined Lone Star. What is really critical to make Project Connect happen is to persuade the leaders of all those nontransit towns that what they’ll get in service is worth what they’ll have to pay. Changing the format of the agreement probably will not be all that persuasive.
Posted on: Mon, 15 Jul 2013 19:06:11 +0000
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