Posted: Fri, 19 Jun 2009 03:40 PM - 9,266 Readers

By: Editorial Board

West Austin will undergo a breathtaking makeover when and if University of Texas Systems regents give final approval to recommendations to develop the Brackenridge tract .

Though far from final, the plan is already controversial. As drawn now, serious construction won't begin to take shape until 2019, when a development agreement that UT and Austin officials signed in the late 1980s expires. UT System Board of Regents Chairman James Huffines on Thursday reiterated that public comments would continue to be heard. Huffines won't lack for takers judging from the number of Austinites who packed the regents meeting room in downtown Austin . Huffines emphasized that no final decisions have been made, leaving plenty of time for an Austin-style argument over how to grapple with growth.

Among the hot buttons the plan pushes are the loss of Lions Municipal Golf Course — where many Austinites, including professionals Ben Crenshaw and Tom Kite, honed their skills — and the relocation or reduction in size of the Brackenridge Field Laboratory. The golf course lease expires in 2019. City Council members will then face a choice of either replacing the course somehow or retaining it on its present site.

"Somehow" is the operative word because in neither of the two options that consultants presented to regents is the golf course preserved. Indeed, the course becomes the centerpiece of a neighborhood that includes parkland, retail space and a widened, tree-lined Exposition Boulevard.

The field laboratory is a living classroom for students of environmental biology that sits on the banks of Lady Bird Lake.

Under one recommendation, the lab is moved to a site in McKinney Roughs, owned by the Lower Colorado River Authority on the banks of the Colorado River just west of Bastrop. The other calls for reducing the acreage of the field laboratory from its current 88 to 56. The McKinney Roughs site is 120 acres.

Both facilities have champions who are no strangers to either argument or pulling political levers.

Less controversial is a recommendation to raze 500 existing student apartments but enlarging the Gateway student apartment complex. That proposal could be realized as early as 2012. The serious makeover won't begin for another decade when the UT-City of Austin development agreement expires.

Between now and then, city political leaders — elected and unelected — will find it difficult to fault a plan that incorporates orderly, managed growth, green space and green building technology all into a mixed-use development plan.

This is exactly the kind of development an array of Austin officials and residents embraced in the Envision Central Texas plan. The redevelopment of the old Mueller airport is another example of the new urbanism promoted by the city and Envision Central Texas.

The redevelopment also offers increased tax revenue from improvements on the UT property.

This plan will challenge Austin municipal officials to match rhetoric with action. A mismatch of rhetoric and action is the real catalyst for the plan. The University of Texas needs the money the redevelopment effort will bring in to meet future demand. Though legislators pay lip service to the importance of education, they haven't committed sufficient money to provide it.

The plans are far from final. The public will be heard from, but in the end the status quo won't prevail, nor should it. The city will grow. The question is whether we plan for it or just let it happen.