I don’t have time or the will to blog on anything these days, but this was too long for twitter, really, although I sort of did it there anyways.
One of the many dishonest paragraphs in AURA’s disappointingly dishonest endorsement of the new courthouse bond is:
Others express concern about using a parcel that is unencumbered by Capitol View Corridors. Capitol View Corridors limit the height in some parts of the city so that the State Capitol can be seen from a number of angles. There are ways to mitigate this problem. One approach is state legislative action. A second approach is for the Austin City Council to expand the number of blocks in downtown or near downtown entitled for central business district-style development.
It is true that others have expressed concern about CVCs. And it’s true that getting them modified is very very hard.
It’s also true that if getting the CVC preventing full use of the blocks around the existing courthouse is hard, like, running a marathon hard, getting more blocks around downtown zoned CBD is hard like running a marathon underwater without a scuba tank or snorkel while being attacked by sharks hard.
It’s fundamentally dishonest (in the disingenous) sense to just answer, as Julio has done, “we should expand downtown” as if it’s some kind of answer to the “they didn’t try very hard to get CVCs out of the way so they could use one of the several existing blocks that don’t generate tax revenue and are already owned by the county and already on the transit spine”. It’s basically the equivalent of a repeating gag on one of my favorite new shows, modified here with my favorite tools: google image search, cut and paste, and MSPaint. Nothing but the best thing zero dollars, zero skill, zero talent, and negative five minutes can buy is good enough for the artistic sensibilities of my readers!
