Chron Missing the Big Picture
Grateful for today's Austin Chronicle coverage of the Reimers-Peacock Road issue: but they seem to miss the forest for the trees. The road will create its own demand for services.
With a number of subdivisions like Sweetwater on an imminent horizon, Travis Co. feels it can no longer ignore the need for a substantial north-south arterial through the area. Right now, getting from one end of the proposed road to the other, for instance, requires a circuitous round-trip – nine miles east on Hamilton Pool Road, then six miles back west on Highway 71. The Reimers-Peacock Road connection turns that into a 3.5-mile trip. That makes a difference to the local emergency-service districts and Lake Travis Independent School District, which expects to add 1,700 students in the next 10 years. Lake Travis school officials predict they eventually have to build schools on both Highway 71 and Hamilton Pool Road if the route can't be shortened.
Give me a break. First, Sweetwater has nothing to do with it: Nobody from Sweetwater ever will user that road. They're not heading south -- where would you go? Dripping? This road will almost exclusively be used by commuters living along it. There are no destinations to visit, traveling south along that road. We don't want any, and we don't need any. What now, a big box at the corner of RPR and HPR?
Second: emergency districts. Guess what: we get fire and EMS service from Hudson's bend, not Spicewood. They don't travel that nine mile leg of 71. Here's an idea if you want to help: put a fire station on HPR.
Third: Schools. I don't have a big problem if LTISD wants to put a school out here. But they won't need much of a school if we don't build the road. Get it? It's the road that creates the people. (Interesting concept, that.)
This is what a friend of mine had to say about the Chronicle today:
...They are a Chamber of Commerce tool and they are very sensitive about being called on it.... ever since The Statesman started actually printing their rag.
... Ten years ago The Chronicle was one of SOS's biggest pushers, now they trash them any chance they get.
... I have come to loath them as class and values traitors.
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This road is just what it looks like; a developers highway.
I am unable to figure out where exactly this road intersects HPR from the Travis County maps online. Is it just above (east) of the rifle range road and the plastic fence ranchettes at HPR? No way in hell is this anything but a developer's road. I knew what he really meant when I read this in the Statesman December 17 :
Frost Bank Regional Chairman Bob Huthnance was one of several local landowners who backed a failed bid in the Legislature last year to require governments to compensate landowners for value lost from new regulations.
Huthnance and his wife have no plans to sell their 1,500-acre Peacock Ranch on Hamilton Pool Road but worry that Travis County's new water quality ordinances will greatly reduce the value of their land.
Frequently dry tributaries of Lick Creek meander through the property, and the 200-foot setback requirements would remove many acres from development.
"I'm all for preserving ranch life, but you shouldn't arbitrarily take someone's land," Huthnance said.
Tell me all you know about ranch life, pard'ner; it shouldn't take long. Wonder if you're on the frontline defending the Grumbles?
Have no plans to sell "the ranch", but you want to build a road to nowhere through it? Reminds me of the argument I read that there was no need to build erosion controls for the clearing that was being done along the road for ag purposes, just before the plastic fence went in, you know, where the "Ranches at HPR" are now?
This area is doomed to destruction. In ten years, it will look like the Y looks now.
Yes -- it is pretty near across the road from the rifle range.