Bastrop, Tx–The city council held a workshop session June 29 focused on what issues the council wants city staff to focus on both in the near term and longer range. One topic that kept resurfacing during the meeting was the need to develop a vision of what the historic city on the Colorado should look and feel like in years to come. It should be a vision shared by elected officials and citizens, some suggested.
True, such a shared understanding could be a politically safe anchor and guide for decision-making far into the future. The impulse to create or codify such a forward looking set of goals is essentially sound and fully laudable. Better late than never, I suppose; but the search for such consensus and vision may be 25 years or more behind reality.
One pressing issue at present is how to link and blend the commercial area in Bastrop along Texas 71 with the historic downtown business district and its adjoining tradition-rich residential neighborhoods , as council members noted last week. Such a linkage might give Texas 71 drivers and passengers some sense of the historic and unique community they’re passing through. Good idea.
Trouble is, Texas 71 through Bastrop is largely indistinguishable from similar freeway segments in Austin (US 183 between I-35 and MoPac), Temple (along I-35) Waco or San Marcos, Round Rock, Georgetown, etc. How all those areas look to visitors of all sorts has been driven almost entirely by the trends and fashions of highway commercial development across the nation from Newark to San Diego over the past 30 years, not local visions, culture or traditions. No more in Bastrop than in Round Rock.
The evidence of local cultural patterns and influences? Missing. It could take another 30 years to make the Bastrop freeway area look or feel different, more connected to the past or a future most folks would look forward to.
Could previous city councils have made a difference in this pattern? Certainly. Will this council begin to make a difference and set a new course? We’ll see.
But can that happen without the kind of communal vision some council members suggested they’d like to pursue? Maybe that’s a role the council itself should assert. As I said, better late than never. Good luck.
Here’s why. Even if the council seriously pursues a consensus/vision building effort over the next year or two or three, it already faces a serious series of decisions which will affect the shape, size and ambiance of the Bastrop community for many, many years into the future, decisions which cannot be delayed for too long.
On July 13, for instance, the council will hear (at City Hall beginning at 6 p.m.) a presentation by developers of the proposed XS Ranch project on almost 10,000 acres north of the city between the Colorado River and Texas 95. Centered on the former 6,700-acre Steiner Ranch, the XS project envisions some 7,000 new residential units going up over the next 20-30 years plus perhaps 300,000 square feet of commercial buildings (roughly the size of Burleson Crossing). Effectively that means a new city larger than Bastrop and only partially under the city’s control and supervision. The council, however, has substantial leeway to guide and affect what this development looks like and how it functions within a larger social and economic context.
Even delaying action on current proposals will constitute real decisions with real consequences, for better or worse.
Also waiting in the wings is the 550-acre Colroado Bend project on the city’s south side between Texas 304 and Tahitian Village. This council will also make crucial decisions about the shape and feel of that project if it matures–or if the council allows it to mature.
Already out of the barn are other major projects including The Colony (maybe 1,200 acres) between Texas 71 and FM 1209 and FM 969, not to mention The 700-acre Bastrop Village project at Texas 71 and FM 20 on the city’s western border. The current city council, however earnest and forward-looking, can do little to affect these projects. Those still on the drawing board are even larger, however, and have the potential to foster even more dramatic transformations.
I applaud the city council for even trying to imagine how it can play a role in guiding the future of the rural county seat town they live in and love. It will affect that future, no matter what it achieves or fails to accomplish.
I look forward to seeing how quickly the council can focus its vision and energies to help create a vital and attractive prospect for Bastrop for the decades to come.