(The following story by Ben Wear appeared on the Austin American-Statesman website on November 5.)
SAN MARCOS, Texas — It seems an unlikely spot for something so ambitious, so expensive, so potentially transforming to Central Texas.
River House, home of the oh-so-obscure Austin-San Antonio Intermunicipal Commuter Rail District, sits on a wooded bluff overlooking a gorgeous stretch of the San Marcos River. Texas State University buildings loom on the hills to the west. There’s a gravel parking lot alongside, geese squawking down on the water, and an unhurried feel inside the small stone building.
While Capital Metro has gotten all the attention for its plan to build a $90 million, 32-mile, Austin-to-Leander commuter rail line, this other transit agency to the south has been quietly working on a 112-mile commuter rail line that would run from Georgetown to South San Antonio. A clear-headed accounting of all the costs to pull this off — including persuading and paying freight carrier Union Pacific to move its track farther east of the proposed passenger rail corridor — would fall somewhere in the neighborhood of $2 billion.
If the stars all align, at least part of this line could be in service by 2010. But that constellation includes innumerable stars, and the only part of the alignment that’s even partially certain is the path of the line through the hearts of Round Rock, Austin, San Marcos, New Braunfels and San Antonio. And while the district doesn’t have Capital Metro’s requirement of a public election to build passenger rail, Capital Metro does have one important thing that the district doesn’t have: money, and a sales tax to generate more of it.
“There are so many unknowns right now,” says Austin businessman Sid Covington, president of the rail district’s 14-member board. “A lot of things have to happen, and happen right. . . . The good thing is we haven’t seen any show-stoppers yet. None of the stars have fallen out of the sky.”
The district was conceived and authorized by state law in 1997 but lay dormant for several years. The Legislature and governor went along with creating it but stopped short of giving the district the authority to levy a general sales or property tax. That glaring omission contributed to the lack of enthusiasm and, once the district actually came into being in 2002, its low profile. For most of its short life, the district has even had to borrow staff and Director Ross Milloy from the Greater Austin-San Antonio Corridor Council. Its annual budget, $300,000 or so, is supported by contributions from its six member cities, counties and transit agencies, which also contribute board members.
But in 2002 it got a $5.6 million shot in the arm from a congressional earmark arranged by U.S. Rep. Lamar Smith, R-San Antonio, and the district has been spending that money on consultants doing the early planning for a rail line. Those consultants and the district have begun the tortuous path toward getting — or attempting to get, along with hungry transit agencies nationwide — federal “New Starts” funding for the line. If the district were to succeed with New Starts — and Milloy acknowledges that only about one in four such applications are eventually approved — it would be about halfway toward the $400 million to $615 million it says it would need for stations, trains and track improvements.
But there’s that pesky other 50 percent. And operating costs after that, estimated at $28 million to $41 million a year. And, oh yes, the $1 billion or more it would take to get a new home for two to three dozen Union Pacific freight trains monopolizing the line where passenger trains would theoretically run 17 hours a day at 30- to 60-minute intervals.
“I don’t see how in the world it can be funded,” says Travis County Commissioner Gerald Daugherty, a member of the district board and bête noire for all passenger rail supporters in this part of Texas. “All you’re doing is talking about wishful thinking.”
That thinking, wishful or not, includes a number of options for scraping up the money to move Union Pacific and build passenger rail. Among those doing the thinking, fortuitously for the district, are Texas Transportation Commission Chairman Ric Williamson and Gov. Rick Perry. A commuter line that would reduce traffic on Interstate 35 even a few percentage points might be worth it, Williamson said.
“Rick’s interested in it,” Williamson said this week. And as the past few years have shown, gubernatorial interest in a Texas transportation project is no small thing. State Rep. Mike Krusee, R-Williamson County, chairman of the House Transportation Committee and a solid supporter of Capital Metro’s rail plan, is also interested in seeing at least the Georgetown-to-San Marcos portion of the line come to fruition sooner rather than later.
So, where might all this money come from?
Well, aside from that perhaps shaky New Starts money, there are other federal transportation programs the district hopes to tap, including one designed to eliminate or make safer crossings where cars drive directly over railroad tracks.
There are more than 180 such places on the Union Pacific line between Round Rock and San Antonio. With commuter trains that Covington and Milloy say would approach 80 miles per hour in some intervals, building underpasses or installing harder-to-penetrate crossing gates with four arms would be crucial.
The Texas Department of Transportation and its emerging private partners, Williamson and Krusee said, would surely kick in. If Proposition 1, an amendment to the Texas Constitution creating a railroad “relocation and improvement” fund, passes next week, and the Legislature funds it, then some of that money could go to the Union Pacific relocation project. Union Pacific itself, assuming its operations are improved by running overland freight (which doesn’t stop in the city it’s passing through) on better and more isolated track, might agree to pay a tonnage fee to the state, Krusee said.
Williamson raises the possibility of some sort of user fee on I-35. Amtrak, which now provides Austin to San Antonio passenger service that would no longer be needed, might be a source, although that agency is not exactly rolling in cash.
The district itself does have the authority to collect some sales taxes on property it owns — there isn’t any such land at present, but it could eventually collect sales tax in restaurants, say, on its property near stations — and on the increased value in property in so-called “transportation improvement zones” near the 15 stations it envisions having someday.
But creating such zones would be subject to the consent of the towns where those stations would sit. They might be hesitant to give away that revenue.
And then there’s Capital Metro and its San Antonio counterpart, VIA. Those agencies, district officials hope, will contribute along with municipalities along the line.
“To me, it’s pretty simple,” Milloy said. “This is going to have to be a financial and planning partnership up and down the corridor. It’s in their interest.”
Of course, there’s one other option: Give the district a tax to call its very own. Don’t count on it. Milloy and Covington, pointedly, aren’t.
“We’re not looking at forming a taxing district,” Milloy said. “We’re going to look at every other option before looking at a tax. I’m talking about bake sales, everything.”