Texas 45's end begins debate in Cedar Park

What is worth more: The houses where young children scramble on backyard slides, the streets commuters crave or the businesses that strengthen the cities they call home? Disagreement over that question is driving one of the most hailed highways in Central Texas into the sticky realm of all-around unhappiness.

At issue is Texas 45 North, a 15-mile proposed toll road to help traffic jams in northern Travis County, southern Williamson County, Cedar Park, Round Rock and beyond. Residents, politicians and planners all agree they want this road. But the issue of where the lanes should stop on the western side, near Cedar Park, makes people grumpy.

Texas Turnpike Authority engineers drew Texas 45 ending on RM 620 just west of Anderson Mill Road, but Cedar Park objected, mainly because that would have required bulldozing 33 businesses and taken land only from Cedar Park. It would have spared dozens of homes on RM 620's south side in Austin but erased a sizable chunk of Cedar Park's sales tax base. So engineers redrew Texas 45 to end at El Salido Parkway, about a mile east of Anderson Mill Road. The homes are still spared. Cedar Park is still unhappy because it still would lose 17 businesses and no one else would lose land. But now it has company: Neighborhoods and turnpike planners don't like the El Salido ending either.
Several subdivisions use El Salido Parkway as their primary route. Commuters fear that what can be a two-light wait to reach RM 620 will grow even longer with Texas 45 traffic, as an expected 67,930 vehicles flow past each day by 2020. The state agrees and says the highway's rush-hour traffic will back up to the U.S. 183 interchange if Texas 45 doesn't continue past Anderson Mill Road, avoiding the lights. "They are just boxing us in," said Brad Garrett, who lives in the Anderson Mill West subdivision off El Salido Parkway. "When we talked to (the turnpike authority) about it way back when, they acknowledged that."

But, this being a complicated tale, Cedar Park also agrees, and if traffic alone is the worry, the city would rather see Texas 45 end where the whole conversation began: Anderson Mill Road. "If it's going to happen, it needs to be pushed on the west side of Anderson Mill Road," said Jane McAdams, Cedar Park's planning director. "If it stops at El Salido, I think it is going to cause all kinds of problems with traffic." But there is nothing anyone can do about it -- at least not for several more years and not without several million dollars more.

Tricky transition The six lanes of Texas 45 North would end at U.S. 183 east of Cedar Park. The highway's elevated ramps and bridges would need a transition area to get traffic onto the three lanes of RM 620, which Texas 45 essentially follows from near Round Rock to Cedar Park. That transition portion is the worry. Two ramp lanes will flow west off the interchange as it nears El Salido Parkway. The state will need 400 feet of right of way at the beginning of the transition, narrowing to zero feet at El Salido Parkway. That same amount of right of way would have been used at Anderson Mill Road, but the extra length would have wiped out more, and newer, stores.

"By ending at El Salido, I think the Walgreen's didn't have to get nuked," said Cobby Caputo, Cedar Park's mayor pro tem. The city will lose gas stations, fast food joints, auto repair shops and other stores. No one's calculated precisely how much tax money Cedar Park would lose. Estimates fly wildly, from $20 million for the lost taxes and business buyouts to $33 million for the buyouts alone to $50 million for everything. Cedar Park won't wind up buying out the businesses -- that is up to Williamson County or the turnpike authority, said Duane Smith, Cedar Park's transportation director. The city's cost might be more along the lines of $200,000 a year in sales tax revenues, Caputo said. "But that's 10 percent of what we generate right now," he said. Property taxes make up $3 million of Cedar Park's revenues, plus $2 million from commercial sales taxes and about $1.5 million from building permits and fees, Caputo said.

Taking homes might be cheaper, Cedar Park Mayor Bob Young said. "I'm trying to make a point of cost," Young said. "I don't want anybody to lose their home. I don't want to see that. But at the same time, if somebody were to offer me three times the (value) of my house, I'd say show me the money."

Sharing the costs No one is really talking about homeowner buyouts, though. Federal rules, which govern Texas 45 North because the Federal Highway Administration controls the project, say businesses vanish first, homes last. But because Cedar Park officials feel they lost the first round, they are determined not to lose again, saying that the eventual extension to Anderson Mill Road must use land on Austin's side of RM 620 -- some of it now vacant -- as well as their side. Garrett said he doesn't feel as though his neighborhood won this time, either.

Neighborhoods thought their worries were over when a regional planning group adopted the Anderson Mill Road ending in June. What they didn't realize was that the state, trying to meet its deadlines, had already sent the Texas 45 plans with the El Salido Parkway ending to the federal highway agency. "Which sounds to me like they (the turnpike authority) had to make a choice between one group or the other -- and we were the ones who lost," Garrett said. It was too late to go back, the state says. "It puts us in a real ticklish position," said Phil Russell, director of the turnpike authority. "I was not willing to put the rest of the entire 45 project (on hold) to work out this transition." Texas 45 would need at least another year of public study to change the ending point. That process won't start until the turnpike authority is certain Williamson County can pay the $30 million and Travis County the $7 million in expected costs for the Anderson Mill Road right of way.

Texas 45 North, which could begin construction in 2004, remains a wanted project. Traffic estimates predict 60,000 to 150,000 vehicles a day would travel the entire the highway in 20 years, relieving U.S. 183 and Interstate 35, among other roads. "Ultimately it's for the greater good for the region, so we are just going to deal with it," Caputo said. "It's just we would have preferred something other than this."