06 C14-2024-0071 - Thornton Road Multifamily; District 5 Letter of Opposition — original pdf

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To: Planning Commission, City of Austin From: Lorraine Atherton, Zilker NA zoning committee member Re: August 27, 2024, agenda item 6, Thornton Road rezoning, Case C14-2024-0071 Planning Commission Chair and Commissioners, In 2015 and 2016 the Zilker and South Lamar neighborhood associations opposed attempts to upzone the 2300-2400 blocks of Thornton Road, as described in the following letter. I have sent the South Lamar NA letter in a separate attachment. The 2016 rezoning case was withdrawn before the City Council could finalize its approval of MF2. Item 6 on your current agenda is essentially a revival of the request for VMU that was denied in 2015, only much worse. Today, ten years later, implementation of the South Lamar Mitigation Plan is proceeding very slowly. Two eminent domain cases, involving the acquisition of drainage easements on either side of the 2300 block of Thornton Road, are on the City Council’s August 29 agenda. It would be wise to put off any rezoning of these properties until after construction begins on the drainage projects. Note that point 4 in the ZNA letter is relevant to your agenda item 11 on changes to residential drainage requirements, and that the street improvements proposed in the South Lamar Mitigation Plan have not been pursued. Here is the text of the 2016 Zilker NA letter: The Executive Committee and Zoning Committee of the Zilker Neighborhood Association agree with the South Lamar Neighborhood’s position on the rezoning case C14-2015-0047 (Thornton Road). The main points are: 1. The VMU overlay is not appropriate for properties that are not on a designated core transit corridor. ZNA studied this issue in connection with our successful VMU proposal in 2008, and we concluded that VMU was not appropriate on Oltorf west of the railroad track. If it’s not appropriate on Oltorf, it is certainly out of the question on a street like Thornton, with no possible connection to South Lamar. 2. Properties within the South Lamar Mitigation Plan should not be rezoned before staff has "enhanced tools to better anticipate the cumulative effects of increasing density on a neighborhood’s natural and manmade infrastructure," as proposed in the mitigation plan. The South Lamar Neighborhood Association has described a potential 1 analytical approach that tries to capture methods to determine what the infrastructure can support. It or a better method should be implemented before any of these properties are upzoned. 3. The rezoning proposal threatens affordability, neighborhood character, and small businesses. Again, the South Lamar Mitigation Plan recommends that planning in this area should "incorporate methods to define and protect a neighborhood’s character, infrastructure and safety." Those methods should be implemented before any of these properties are upzoned. 4. The rezoning proposal threatens to overwhelm the watershed of West Bouldin Creek and exacerbate existing drainage and flooding problems downstream, where hundreds of new residential units have been built within ZNA’s boundaries on the banks of West Bouldin Creek. The Watershed department should be required to perform specific analysis where density can affect upstream, downstream, and neighborhood drainage collection points. There are no analyses that we know of that require new developments to help with mitigation efforts other than a buffer of 10% additional retention. 2