Quarries Qualms

To many Hyde Park residents, moving part of Hyde Park Baptist Church into Northwest Austin, where most of its congregation members live, sounds like the answer to their prayers. But to residents of Balcones Woods and Mesa Park ­ whose neighborhoods surround the Quarries property just southwest of MoPac and Duval Road in Northwest Austin ­ it sounds like their worst nightmare.

Neighbors have known since 1997 that the church planned to build on the 58-acre Quarries property, which is currently undeveloped parkland. Since mid-fall of that year, Northwest Austin residents ­ banded together as Five Neighborhoods United, an umbrella group for the neighborhoods that would be affected by the development ­ have been fighting the church's proposal. The plan calls for as many as 11 separate buildings on the land, which borders more than 70 single-family homes. Those 11 structures, most of which church representative Bob Liverman says will probably never be built, could include a 40,000-square-foot recreational Christian Life Center (part of HPBC's Forward Forever campaign), a child care center, and, most contentiously, a three-story senior high school to replace the one in Hyde Park.

Bobbi Henley, a member of the Mesa Park Neighborhood Association (MPNA) and an opponent of the plans, says the proposed high school, which would bring around 600 students to the area, would inundate the neighborhood with traffic and put additional strain on an already overburdened Duval Road, which, she says, "can't handle more than 1,200 trips a day." Church representatives insist that a development the size of the one they are currently proposing would create fewer trips per day than a single-family subdivision; neighborhood members dispute that claim, saying that the Quarries property lacks sufficient access to MoPac, the nearest major thoroughfare, and would force church members onto crowded residential streets. According to a survey of neighborhood residents conducted by MPNA, an overwhelming majority of residents opposed to the plan cited traffic and overdevelopment as their main concerns. Only 2.3% of survey respondents supported the Quarries development.

Neighbors also worry that the level of impervious cover created by such widespread development and surface parking could wreak havoc not only on the spring-fed lake for which the Quarries are named, but also on neighborhood residents' homes, many of which are located in a flood plain. Although church representative Liverman says the church will be taking 70 homes out of the flood plain by raising the lake level and allowing it to hold more water, Henley says that won't be enough to prevent the kind of floods that large-scale development will cause. "We've already seen flooding so bad out there that it comes up to some of our front doors when it rains really hard," she says.

Adding to the problem, Henley says, is the fact that neighbors feel betrayed by what they see as a campaign of misinformation by the church. Back in 1984, when the city granted the church a conditional use permit to develop the Quarries for recreational use, the church told neighbors that the park, with its pavilion and softball fields, was the only development planned for the area. "Then three years ago, they told us they were only going to build the Christian Life Center," Henley says. "Then six months later, they sat us down and presented this plan for 11 buildings, and we were in absolute shock." Instead of giving neighbors time to adjust to the site plan changes and negotiate the terms of the development, Henley says, church representatives announced that the church would be finishing construction on the Christian Life Center within just three years. After more than two years of discussion, she says, neighbors have gotten nowhere. "They said the plans were non-negotiable. All we could fight was things like lighting," she says. "To me, that's not any way to deal with a neighborhood."

But church representative Liverman says HPBC's quarrels with Northwest Austin stem from the fact that the neighborhoods there, unlike Hyde Park, lack a history with the church. "The Hyde Park people are really all our friends. We always liked each other; we just disagreed sometimes on church growth," Liverman says. "With the Quarries, we don't have that kind of a relationship."