Austin at Large: New Year, Same Old Stories

There is a lot going on in this "typical section" of the TxDOT preferred alternative for I-35 right in front of the Chronicle offices. Honoring community desires to go "no higher," TxDOT says, it abandoned the idea of elevating the new "managed lanes" (blue lanes in center); instead, as you can see, this cross-section is indeed 20 lanes across and swallows us whole. But look! There would also be an overpass at 41st Street from which could spring a deck cap going up to Airport, which might make our cross-the-road neighbors in Cherrywood slightly less irate. (Courtesy of TxDOT)

Hello strangers! It's been a minute. I left the country just before the Council run-off, and much has happened since, so let's get caught up.

I-35: What’s a SPUI?

It's a "single point urban interchange," one of the "innovative intersections" the Texas Dept. of Transportation is fond of at the moment, and you will in a few years be using a SPUI to get on, off, over, or under I-35 at Airport Boulevard and at Riverside Drive. That's according to the draft environmental impact statement that TxDOT just dropped for its I-35 rebuild, which I'll dive deeper into later this month. In its infinite wisdom, the U.S. Dept. of Transportation (under Obama!) delegated to TxDOT the power to approve its own EIS and give itself the go-ahead to move forward with what it calls the Capital Express Central project. Thus, it is seriously unlikely that the mandatory public hearing, scheduled for Feb­ru­ary 9 (my wedding anniversary! Sorry, honey) is going to change TxDOT's mind about moving forward with its preferred I-35 alternative ("Mod-3" or "Alt 3 Mod" if you're keeping track).

The hearing should generate some awesome theatrics, though. You can deep-dive yourself into the 517-page document and its 23 appendices at my35capex.com/draft-EIS. In brief: TxDOT rejects the Reconnect Austin and Rethink I-35 visions of a future without freeways, and is iffy on the vision co-created by the Urban Land Institute-Austin and the Downtown Austin Alliance, but raids all of these community visions for their best design features and incorporates them into Mod-3. Lots of caps and stitches and boulevard treatments of the access roads and other things for which we are still a little iffy on who's paying. At this point, unless you have a specific ask for revisions to a specific location along Mod-3 (paging Chito Vela), your activist energies re: I-35 are best directed toward holding TxDOT accountable and making certain it doesn't value-engineer all these enhancements out of existence once it starts construction. This could be a job for Mayotary Pete, assuming he doesn't bail out of USDOT after fixing whatever's wrong with Southwest Airlines.

Nate Paul: Enemies With $$$

Everyone knows that something in the World Class property empire's milk is not clean, but Nate Paul has been fortunate to date in not having an aggrieved party with ample resources who's chosen to truly rock his shit, unless you count the FBI, which has gone dark on the Paul case since 2019. He has picked fights with such people, including the FBI, and Bryan Hardeman – the local investor and Mercedes dealer who Paul thinks is out to steal his properties – but they've chosen not to engage. The nonprofit Mitte Foundation, which partnered with Paul on a deal that went sour, tried to disentangle from him quietly while still getting its money back, and Paul instead made those proceedings a circus that at one point featured Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton personally showing up to intervene. (That's when Paxton's own executive team decided that something in his milk isn't clean, either.)

Comes now basketball pro Avery Bradley, a Texas Ex and most recently a Los Angeles Laker who's earned an inflation-adjusted $77.6 million in his career. He may not be good with money, which may explain why he also invested with Nate Paul, but he likely still has enough to keep Paul busy in court for a while. The suit he filed Dec. 22, as reported by the redoubtable Paul Thomp­son of the Austin Business Journal, alleges breach of contract in regard to Bradley's $6.75 million investment in World Class in three tranches from 2017 to 2019, right before the FBI raid. According to the suit, he's been trying to cash out, as was outlined in his original deal, since January 2021 and has been getting random payouts "without any semblance of corporate formality" as Paul feels the urge. This includes $100,000 that Paul admitted in his Mitte testimony had been paid to "a pro basketball player" in violation of the court's order to lock down his funds until the Mitte matter was resolved. Popcorn time!

Is Chip Roy Speaker Yet?

U.S. Rep Chip Roy, R-Our Suburbs, who still represents a bunch of Austinites in Congress, has been a key loudmouth and flogger in the public whipping of Not House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., which as I write this has concluded its fifth miserable round. So if not the Boob of Bakersfield, then who? If we assume it needs to be somebody with credibility in the hard-right Freedom Caucus, but who is not bone-stupid like most of the wing nuts in said caucus, it could be Chip Roy! Talk about failing upward. It sure as hell isn't going to be Dan Crenshaw, R-Houston Suburbs, who said of the 20 GOP holdouts, "They need to be men and adults and say what they want, instead of playing these little games," he told the Washington Post. "Stop saying platitudes like 'Washington is broken.'" Except, you know, it is, isn't it?