Planning Commission reverses city rejection of university-area site plan in an unusual case

The Planning Commission voted unanimously last week to reverse a decision by city planning staff to reject a site plan for a 142-unit student-oriented development at 2610 Hume Place, on appeal from the applicant, marking a rare use of the commission’s sovereign authority.

Usually, city commissions have the power only to make recommendations to City Council, who make final decisions. The Planning Commission is unique in that it has the authority to make final decisions in some cases, including this one.

The prospective development, to be called Avalon Pointe, had already broken ground when Planning Department staff notified developers that their site plan, which had been approved by the city in January 2024, didn’t comply with requirements for developments under the University Neighborhood Overlay, or UNO, for certain streetscape design elements.

The required streetscape elements in question are street trees, lampposts and a “pedestrian clear zone,” or sufficiently wide sidewalk. The Planning Department discovered they were missing from the site plan by an unusual route: an on-site visit, related to a separate issue.

Hume Place is a small street, resembling an alleyway, that bends around and behind a 7-Eleven at Guadalupe and 26th streets just west of the University of Texas at Austin. The lot slated for development holds a disused commercial building that was previously a restaurant called “The Tastegasm,” which appears to have closed in 2022.

Representatives of several businesses on Guadalupe Street that back up to the proposed development – Kerbey Lane Cafe, a tattoo and piercing shop called Diablo Rojo and Roppolo’s Pizzeria West Campus – complained to the city that the footprint of Avalon Pointe under the approved site plan would extend over half of a 10-foot “private way” stipulated as an easement by a deed restriction on the property.

Deed restrictions are legally binding and covered under the jurisdiction of the county, rather than the city. Usually, municipal planning decisions respect deed law. In this case, the “private way” exists to ensure access to a shared sewer line, which runs along the edge of the lot. The Avalon Pointe plan would make the sewer line inaccessible.

So they contacted the Planning Department, who came out to the site. It was only then that they noticed the missing design elements and informed developers that they would need to either bring the site plan into compliance or risk having it revoked. That was in October.

Walter Wukasch, a real estate agent and tenant representative on behalf of the landlords of Kerbey Lane Cafe and the primary speaker against the appeal, asserted during the March 11 meeting that the “private way” was absent from the final version of the site plan reviewed by Planning Department staff, despite having been marked clearly on earlier drafts.

“I don’t know if (the removal) was just an accidental oversight or was intended to mislead city staff,” Wukasch said. “But I would encourage everyone to respect and encourage compliance with the recorded private way easement in anything that goes forward.”

Wukasch referenced complaints submitted in writing by Tim Finley, who Wukasch identified as a representative of the landlords for the other affected businesses at 2604 Guadalupe St., next door. Finley included copies of the draft and final site plans in his written complaint, with the removal of the private way marked in yellow highlighter.

“Don’t give waivers to a project that should never have been approved,” Finley wrote in the margins of one of the forms, along with incredulous questions: “Why? How? Where did the private easement go?”

When offered a chance to rebut the critics, development consultant Leah Bojo, who spoke at the meeting as a representative of owner Sudhakar Allada, declined.

The firm undertaking the development, Rivera Engineering, submitted a request for three waivers, one for each of the missing streetscape elements, to the Planning Department in February. Director Lauren Middleton-Pratt denied all three.

In a letter explaining her reasoning for the denial, Middleton-Pratt said granting the waivers would create “interdepartmental conflicts” and that voluntary design decisions, like the inclusion of a driveway to access a ground-floor parking garage, were responsible for the project’s noncompliance rather than the inherent limitations of the site.

With the future of the project in limbo, developers chose to halt construction. Bojo said that the delay has so far cost the project more than half a million dollars.

Commissioner Casey Haney posed a question to Keith Mars, assistant director of the Development Services Department, about the circumstances of the case coming before the commission.

“Is it standard practice to go through and review these, ex post facto, and say, ‘Yeah, did we really get this right or not?’’” Casey asked. “Or is that just kind of an arbitrary thing?”

“Sixteen years, I’ve never seen anything like it,” Mars said, adding, “But Hume Place is not like any other street in the city.”

In response to questions from commissioners, Bojo said the owner and developer would be open to incorporating design features to try to comply with the spirit of the UNO requirements, if not the letter. Chair Claire Hempel introduced a motion to approve the appeal with conditions related to that commitment.

However, after conferring with the city’s legal staff, they concluded that they could only reject the appeal, approve it and grant all three waivers as written, or reject some waivers and approve others as written. In any case, they couldn’t attach any conditions to their decision. So Hempel’s measure moved forward without them.

In explaining her vote, Hempel stressed a desire to avoid delaying the project any longer, alluding to the constantly rising costs of construction, and also expressing trust in Bojo’s verbal commitment that they would work on the compromise.

“I really would hate the thought of this project pausing or going away, especially given where we are with tariffs and price increases in everything every day,” Hempel said.

Questions about the easement, which staff noted was outside the purview of the Planning Commission, remain unresolved.

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Posted In: Planning, District 9