Waco may toughen infrastructure rules for new developments

The new criteria could include increased requirements for parkland dedication, road durability and sidewalks, which could significantly increase costs for developers while decreasing long-term maintenance and repair costs.

Parks and Recreation Director Jonathan Cook opened a presentation to the city council last week and said proper design guides for parks and other infrastructure are the key step in guiding sustainable development that would stand the test of time, decrease maintenance costs over time and align with the council and community’s needs. Residents currently shoulder the financial burden of repairs to infrastructure due to insufficient design standards, and the standards themselves are unclear and difficult to administer.

From a parks perspective, Cook said the current city visioning plan, formalized in 2016, suggests creation of a parkland dedication ordinance that could fund new parks.

The city’s current subdivision ordinance allows the city council to require up to 5% of a subdivision’s area to be dedicated for recreation. Cook suggested strengthening the dedication requirement and offering a fee in lieu of land dedication, with an amount determined per housing unit based on needed park improvements around the city.

For example, the city of Temple requires 1 acre dedicated per 133 dwelling units, or a fee of $225 per unit.

Sidewalks are another issue, Public Works Director Amy Burlarley-Hyland said, with a survey conducted earlier this year by the company Fugro finding that bringing all poorly rated sidewalks in the city to a safe, usable standard could be a $96 million investment.

Currently, Waco only requires sidewalks to be built along both sides of arterial and collector roads and along one side of neighborhood collectors, leaving many streets completely without sidewalks. The gap in sidewalks represents a $57 million investment, she said.

Burlarley-Hyland proposed a requirement for sidewalks on both sides of all streets, which is what Denton, Plano, San Antonio and many other large cities in Texas require. With the average cost of about $25 per linear foot at the very low end, just a half-mile stretch of sidewalk could cost a developer at least $66,000.

Current street design criteria are inadequate to provide drainage, unsafe for pedestrians and allow for unsustainable street design, which taxpayers pay for in the long run through maintenance costs, Burlarley-Hyland said.

The city currently employs no criteria for drainage, creating cul-de-sacs with water ponding in them, she said.

“We end up with sections of street that hold water and new driveways and sidewalks … that the city’s going to have to go back and fix at some point in the future,” Burlarley-Hyland said.

She said many streets are built too narrow to provide parking on both sides, and many have curbs and gutters that suffer from upheaval or settling. Especially on streets with no sidewalks, there is no safe place for pedestrians pushing strollers or cyclists to travel, Burlarley-Hyland said.

The burden of streets built with design lives that are too short has also built up maintenance costs, representing “$1.2 billion in need that we have for all of these roads to get them up to current standards,” she said. The city’s street budget is already significant, but savings could be accomplished if longer lasting design and construction criteria are enforced, she said.

Burlarley-Hyland suggested shifting from the current standard of a 20-year design life for roads to a 50-year design life. Although the upfront cost of materials and design may be greater for more durable streets, the cost over time to maintain and reconstruct those roads would be reduced significantly, she said.

“You are going to have to do maintenance along the way to your 50-year design, which has some cost, but it’s not nearly as expensive as the reconstruction with the 20-year design,” she said. “… That gap at the end there becomes quite incredible once you get up to the 50-year design life of the road.”

The city’s storm drainage design manual dates back to 1959, with slight updates from 2013. However, new policy is needed to protect public health, prevent harm from flooding and preserve the environment, including Lake Waco, which can take damage to its capacity and water quality from storm runoff.

Burlarley-Hyland presented several examples of insufficient stormwater management, including subdivisions and neighborhoods built in the last 10 years where streets become so flooded the water engulfs cars and mailboxes. The city even had to buy a house on Granada Drive in China Spring where water flooded in through the front door and out the back door, a $270,000 job, she said.

The city recently updated its Federal Emergency Management Agency Flood Map, finding that some new houses have been built in areas now considered to be flood plains. Without criteria prohibiting lot-to-lot drainage, neighbors bear the burden of runoff from new houses onto their property, Burlarley-Hyland said.

“Taxpayers should not have to shoulder the burden of fixing flooding issues that we could have prevented by building it differently when we first built it,” she said.

Waco’s current stormwater criteria calls for a five-year design, which is meant to handle a flood of a magnitude that has a 20% chance of occurring in any given year. Burlarley-Hyland proposed an increase to a 25-year design, which is meant to handle floods of magnitudes with only a 4% chance of occurring each year.

Austin, Fort Worth and San Antonio each have a 25-year design requirement, while Wichita Falls, Denton and Dallas require a 100-year design that protects against floods of magnitudes with only a 1% chance of occurring.

Council Member Jim Holmes said this week that when he joined the city council seven years ago, less than 30% of roads and sidewalks were in good condition. Over the years a large amount of the city’s tax-fueled general fund budget has been put toward deferred maintenance, but keeping standards the same will only raise the cost in the future.

Holmes said the city must strike a balance between the useful life and durability of infrastructure and immediate and latent costs. Either the price can be paid upfront with improved standards, or the cost can be incurred later by residents, he said.

However, the issue is a double-edged sword, as the burden falls to the development community who build the city and its tax base, Holmes said. Those increased costs to develop would eventually be passed on to consumers.

He said it will be critical to listen to developers’ and builders’ concerns with increased costs as the city finds a path to reasonable and effective guidelines.

Local custom homebuilder Steve Sorrells agreed that developers need to have a seat at the table to make things last. He said it is hard to make housing more affordable by making it more expensive.

City staff anticipates presenting ordinances and amendments to council early next year.