Tagged: waller creek

City officials say they're making progress on the Waller Creek Tunnel Project.

Construction crews at Waterloo Park have wrapped up excavating the tunnel and are moving on to building a treatment plant that will help filter floodwaters.

The City of Austin and the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) are asking the public to come out tonight to be involved in finding solutions for cleaning up four Austin streams.

Walnut Creek, Waller Creek, Taylor Slough and the Spicewood Tributary of Shoal Creek all exceed the acceptable standard for E. Coli. The high levels of fecal bacteria make the streams potentially unsafe for people to get in the water.

In May, the City of Austin invited members of the news media into the Waller Creek tunnel.

Meeting at the construction site at Fourth Street and I-35, reporters traveled down a 26-foot wide shaft, in a metal box lowered by a construction crane. At the time, some 1,300 feet had been excavated. When we checked back in in September, over 3,200 square feet had been excavated.

Above ground, the tunnel is designed to keep flood-prone Waller Creek in its banks. And just what to do with the acres of land pulled out of the flood plain is a hot topic: in October, a design team was named to plot the transformation of the Waller Creek area.

Good morning. After yesterday’s warm weather, Austin’s facing much chillier temperatures today with regional highs in the 60s. Here’s some stories KUT News has been working on:

• Why Doesn’t Austin Have a Subway?

“The Waller Creek tunnel project downtown is digging up an old question: Why not a subway for Austin? That thought was on the top of Downtown Commissioner Jude Galligan’s mind after he saw the inside of the tunnel.

‘During the tour, I overheard discussions of people saying, why don’t we have subways in Austin?’ Galligan told me. ‘For a lot of us who have been following transportation, that’s a decade or two decade old discussion of why don’t we. Well, we don’t, because everybody believes it’s prohibitively expensive.’ But Galligan isn’t convinced by that argument. “

• Some Lawmakers Want Budget to Stay Cut

“By law, Texas lawmakers can’t increase state spending by more than the rate of increase of personal income. A couple of weeks ago the Legislative Budget Board set that rate at 10.7 percent, or about $7.5 billion more than the present budget. But immediately Republicans on the board, led by Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, said they would use a different standard to cap state spending – which won’t account for the cuts made last legislative session.”

A winner has been named in the Waller Creek design competition.

The team of Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, Inc. and Thomas Phifer & Partners was named by the Waller Creek Conservancy and approved by the Austin City Council this morning.

As KUT News reported in our live blog of presentations from the Waller Creek design finalists, the team envisions Waller Creek as a chain of parks. They propose blowing out the concrete structure supporting Interstate 35 from Fourth to Sixth Street to allow more East-West connectivity.

“If I lived in East Austin I’d be mad as hell about that highway,” Valkenburgh told KUT News. “We’ve taken very seriously this notion of blowing out this section between Fourth and Sixth street, cutting out all the underneath and liberating Fifth Street as a new aperture, but also to redesign Waller so it’s accessible and friendly from the east.”