A conditional use permit requested by the city was approved by the Zoning and Platting Commission during their Sept. 2 meeting. The permit was nearly rejected, and eventually postponed, during an earlier meeting of the commission.
The approval will allow redevelopment of 8301 Johnny Morris Road in Northeast Austin into a 131-acre, $253.5 million hub for Austin Resource Recovery and Fleet Services. Construction is expected to begin this year and run through 2027. Commissioners had questioned the project’s potential impacts on neighbors, especially the Colony Park development, during the initial hearing.
A refueling station next door to the new Mueller?
The Colony Park project, which broke ground in April, will see the transformation of a large tract of city-owned land into a 200-acre planned community in a partnership between the city and Catellus Development Corporation, the firm that built the Mueller complex at the site of the former airport.
During the August 19 hearing, Commissioner Lonny Stern questioned the placement of the service center near what will become a massive, densely-populated neighborhood expected to include up to 3,000 residences. Stern sparred with Commissioner Luis Osta Lugo on the issue, who argued that the placement of the service center could give city workers the opportunity to live near where they work.
“I get concerned when we talk about putting new industrial property on that side of town, because this is what we do as a city and then we say, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, the land was inexpensive and it was available,’ and it’s not acceptable for us to keep doing that,” said Stern.
“If you have an apprenticeship or a high school education, there is simply no option where you can have mixed-use living and be reasonably connected to your workplace, right?” Osta Lugo said. “How do you balance wanting industrial sites for people to be able to work at, and wanting mixed-use developments in those parts of town also?”
Responding to Stern, Hollis Scheffler, the civil engineer for the project, said that the service center would have “more of a campus feel,” and that the most industrial uses of the property, including vehicle maintenance and refueling, would be at the back of the site.
Meg Greenfield, a senior planner with the Development Services department, explained that the project to redevelop the site had already been in the works for years, with the conditional use permit as the last step.
Part of that process included a zoning change that had been approved by Zoning and Platting itself in 2024.
“I do have a problem with coming in now and saying, after they’ve spent all that time and money with a commission’s recommendation to approve the zoning, to now stop and say, ‘No, it’s not appropriate here,’ after we’ve told them it is appropriate here,” Chair Hank Smith said.
Commissioners voted unanimously in August to postpone a decision on the permit to allow more time for city staff to prepare a presentation with more details.
An “attractive” service center with unanimous approval
The city has been looking at the site since 2000, when Austin Resource Recovery was scouting for a location for a solid waste transfer station.
That idea was abandoned following outreach with the community, according to Andrew Moore, a program manager with the Financial Services department who gave a presentation on the project at the September meeting. But, by 2013, the city had purchased the land with the intention of building a service center instead.
Moore pointed to nearby sites including Flint Hills Resources, which is the city’s main repository for ethanol and liquid propane, as context for why the city thought the site would be appropriate for a service center. He noted that the intended uses for the city project would technically be commercial, rather than industrial.
He then went over the process that the city had gone through to get ready to break ground, including winning, approval from Zoning and Platting and City Council to rezone the property to “public” zoning in 2024. He said that the city had spent over $14 million on planning and design over the last 18 months out of the $253.5 million that the city has already appropriated to fund the project.
Finally, Moore walked through some of the details of the plans for the site, which include solar panels, rainwater collection, noise and light pollution mitigation, publicly-accessible green space and fully recyclable building components.
“I think these are attractive designs,” Moore said. “We want to be good neighbors.”
After Moore’s presentation, Stern struck an apologetic note, but also said that he felt the commission hadn’t received enough information about the project ahead of the original hearing to make an informed decision about whether or not to support it.
“We had no line of sight about what was being requested, and so the knee-jerk reaction was, this is an industrial use in a neighborhood,” Stern said.
Following Stern’s comments The commission voted unanimously to approve the permit.
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