1. INTRODUCTION

Despite promises made by state leaders and the Texas Transportation Commission that the rebuilt I-35 would be “no higher & no wider,” the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) recently announced that they plan to take 142 properties (32 acres) of Central Austin homes and businesses by eminent domain.

The cost of acquiring these properties, coupled with the additional damage to the city fabric, the cost of a wider highway footprint, and the opportunity cost of refusing to consider potential value creation, represents significant issues that should be resolved before advancing this project forward.

The most fundamental issue at stake in this “chance of a lifetime” is what is accomplished with each worldview and what the city of Austin walks away with at the end of over six decades of living with the I-35 barrier. This comparison deals only with the major elements of the costs: land acquisition, excavation, retaining walls, caps & stitches, and lane miles proposed. There will be hundreds of other costs involved in the completion of the project. The relative benefits of each proposal are vastly different and have been documented in other reports.

TXDOT’S CURRENT ALTERNATIVES WOULD:

• Consume 32 acres of valuable and economically productive land in Central Austin. These are homes and local businesses that currently contribute to Austin’s tax base and quality of life. These are integral pieces of our social fabric and will force out renters and businesses that cannot afford the extremely high costs of relocation.

• Leave the lowered main lanes as an even more substantial barrier than exists today.

• Eliminate the enormous opportunity for economic development in the form of new taxable city fabric worth billions. New development would contribute taxes that not only pay for the full cap but would pay for schools, parks, sidewalks, tree planting, affordable housing and “Great Streets” like Second Street.

• Push the new barrier further into East Austin.

The calculations presented here are based on the very limited information published by TxDOT on August 10, 2021. The schematic drawings they presented to the public are naive to the point of being childish, as well as misleading. There is no scale on the sections presented, no dimensions are called out. We used TxDOT’s schematic “roll plots” to measure dimensions.

After reviewing the limited information available, we created the enclosed estimate of the costs of the project, comparing the RECONNECT AUSTIN vision to TxDOT’s Alternative 2. We have broken down and compared costs; making our best reasonable assumptions to analyze the real cost of TxDOT’s concept for their I-35 rebuild. We used the same assumptions and unit costs for both concepts to compare TxDOT’s Alternative 2 with the RECONNECT AUSTIN concept, highlighting the differences.

Overall, TxDOT’s latest brainchild is a lose, lose proposition any way you slice it. It also costs more than RECONNECT AUSTIN. It is worth noting that those costs are not just monetary. The long-term cost of failing to restore the city at the surface, in favor of a huge highway canyon, will impact Austin’s future for the next 70 years. Our city leaders are beginning to recognize this and stand up for Austin’s future.