Urban Transportation Commission discusses, makes recommendations on CAMPO’s draft regional plan for 2050

The Capital Area Metropolitan Planning Organization is cooking up a quinquennial update to its regional transportation plan, and for its part, the Urban Transportation Commission is urging CAMPO to reflect the city’s priorities – and trash some highway projects – in the final draft.

The UTC unanimously passed a resolution during its regular meeting April 1 that makes a number of recommendations for CAMPO’s 2050 Regional Mobility Plan. The plan is essentially an outlay of funding, and contains a list of over 1,000 projects that represent around $67.5 billion in state and federal money, according to a presentation prepared by city staff.

Among those recommendations, the commission urged the organization to remove “the 183 project as described,” referring to the ongoing work on the highway in Northwest Austin carried over from the previous plan, as well as the MoPac South expansion.

The MoPac project recently became the subject of a lawsuit over a failure to provide information by local nonprofit Save Our Springs Alliance, which opposes it over concerns about its potential to harm threatened wildlife in and around Barton Creek.

Miriam Schoenfield, who spoke at the meeting on behalf of advocacy group Rethink 35, which opposed expansion of the highway, said the group was supportive of the UTC’s resolution. She said that an analysis performed by the group on the 2045 plan had revealed that 90 percent of discretionary funds went to highway expansion projects.

“Austin just does not have as much of a say about a lot of the transportation infrastructure that we see, whether that’s major highways that are paving through neighborhoods or dangerous arterials,” Schoenfield said.

“CAMPO has a lot of say,” she continued. “And if we as a city want to have a say on what’s happening, it’s really important that we engage and advocate on a regional level.”

In a presentation to City Council, Cole Kitten of the Transportation and Public Works Department struck a similar note. He referenced the priorities identified by CAMPO for the plan, which include “prioritizing multimodal transportation,” managing congestion and reducing emissions of greenhouse gases and other pollutants.

“These are very good things that align with the objectives of what the city of Austin is supporting and trying to achieve through our own policies,” Kitten said. “But a lot of that depends on how we participate at the regional level.”

The commission also proposed several measures aimed at improving the transparency of the demographic forecasts used by CAMPO staff in drafting plans, including sharing “data and modeling methods” with the public and several internal bodies like the Technical Advisory Committee.

Metropolitan planning organizations like CAMPO are federally mandated bodies that must exist in any metro area larger than 50,000 people by law and are funded by state and federal departments of transportation.

CAMPO is governed by a 22-member board consisting of 20 local elected officials and one representative each from the Texas Department of Transportation and Capital Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Currently, Austin’s representation on the body includes City Council members Zo Qadri, Krista Laine, Mike Siegel and Vanessa Fuentes.

The new plan is being developed under the shadow of a rapidly changing environment for federal transportation, which is being reoriented under Trump-appointed Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy into an aggressive rejection of Biden-era policies intended to reduce the nation’s reliance on fossil fuels.

Commissioner Spencer Schumacher posed a question to Kitten on what the city is expecting from a memo sent out as part of that reorientation that calls on local bodies to place green infrastructure projects, and specifically bicycle infrastructure, on review for cancellation.

“I think the thing for us to understand as a city is that we are often responsible for delivering our own projects with our own funding,” Kitten responded, without addressing the content of the memo directly.

The staff presentation noted that the plan needs to be completed by May in order to comply with federal requirements. The draft plan, which is 334 pages long, is available online through a virtual open house on the project that offers “exhibits” in the form of downloadable PDFs. Central Texans can submit comments on the plan online or by mail, and get more information on CAMPO’s website.

Photo made available through a Creative Commons license.

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