Officials mum on tunnel project’s legal issues

City seeks $1.8 million for legal help with Waller Creek Tunnel.

The city of Austin wants to spend $1.8 million hiring private attorneys for help related to the Waller Creek Tunnel, a huge, nearly finished flood- control project that will open up downtown’s eastern edge to redevelopment.

Is there a design flaw? A construction delay? A problem paying for the project?

Austin’s Law Department won’t say, nor will it explain why it will seek the City Council’s permission Thursday to spend the unusually large sum on outside legal advice.

But a city employee who is familiar with the $149 million tunnel project said the tunnel’s intake facility in Waterloo Park sits in a “Capitol view corridor” — potentially violating a decades-old state and city policy that prevents new structures from obstructing views and sight lines of the Capitol.

The city might need to seek a waiver from the state for the mistake, said the city employee, who asked not to be named because the matter involves a legal issue.

City offifficials would not confifirm whether that is the problem, whether construction work on the intake facility is fifinished or has been suspended, or how the error was made. Information was not available Wednesday on how tall the fifinished intake facility

would be.

According to the website of the nonprofit Preservation Texas, there are 30 corridors along which views of the Capitol can’t be marred by tall, new buildings. Formulas are used to determine if a proposed building is too tall, city planning staffers have said.

City attorneys said they won’t make more information public until they brief the City Council on the issue Thursday behind closed doors in executive session. Several City Council members either didn’t return calls or said they don’t know why outside legal help is needed for the tunnel.

Austin’s Law Department regularly hires private lawyers, but rarely is any one such contract as big as the $1.8 million it wants to pay Austin law firm Reeves & Brightwell for advice on the tunnel. By comparison, the total amount the city spent in the past year on outside legal counsel, from several firms addressing numerous issues, was $2.6 million.

Waller Creek runs along downtown’s eastern edge, through a channel that tends to flood in heavy rains. For that reason, little has been built along it.

The intake in Waterloo Park will catch floodwater during rainstorms and send it down a 70-foot vertical drop. The floodwater will then flow down a subway-size tunnel beneath Sabine Street and into Lady Bird Lake.

Freed of flooding risks, land along the creek — roughly 11 percent of downtown — will be ripe for redevelopment. Developers and city officials imagine the area becoming Austin’s version of the Riverwalk in San Antonio, with a mix of parks, retail, offices and housing.

A flood-control tunnel along Waller Creek has been a dream of city leaders for decades. Austin voters approved $25 million in bond money for it in 1998, but the price tag kept rising as the project languished.

The now$149 million tunnel will be paid for partly with a drainage fee that is charged to Austinites on their utility bills and partly with some of the property taxes generated by new projects built along the creek.

Construction of the tunnel began in 2011, and it is on-track and on-budget to finish up later this year, according to the city’s written responseWednesday to several questions from the American-Statesman.