After the Flood: Retrofi tting Austin’s Urban Core to Accommodate Growth - Politics of Urban Runoff: Nature, Technology, and the Sustainable City - page 77

the simultaneous goals of fl ood control, erosion control, and water quality
are to be achieved.
In the plan, the watersheds are characterized in three groups: urban-
ized, developing, and rural. The eleven urbanized watersheds are those
with greater than 50 percent impervious cover and most of the creeks
in these watersheds have more than doubled in size due to increases in
urban runoff. Future enlargement of the channels in these watersheds is
expected to be low, indicating that these systems have already expanded
and are relatively stable. Integrated strategies in these watersheds include
channel restoration projects to reduce erosion and improve water quality,
property buyouts, and upgrade of existing fl ood control and water quality
ponds. 40 Conversely, it is the rural and developing watersheds where the
majority of change will occur, as impervious surface coverage and scouring
waterfl ows are expected to increase dramatically.
The plan offers mixed prognoses about each of the urban watersheds,
although the lower reaches are generally in need of immediate interven-
tion, due to more intensive land use and the cumulative impacts of urban
runoff volumes from the watershed headwaters. As a whole, the plan
calls for a piecemeal approach to target areas that are most problematic
(and often most costly) to be addressed fi rst. There are no comprehensive
planning visions similar to the greenbelt proposals of the past, and the
application of small-scale source control strategies is mentioned only in
passing. There is a signifi cant emphasis on the evolution of the existing
drainage network to alleviate the issues of a network under continual
crisis. One of the most interesting aspects of the plan is its explicit as-
sessment of achieving its water quality goals in the inner core. Among
the three missions, the Watershed Department estimates that water qual-
ity is the least likely to be achieved. The authors write, “Attainment of
erosion and fl ood goals may be possible with suffi cient funding. Water
quality goals are not attainable through implementation of solutions evalu-
ated in the Master Plan. Limited regional retrofi t opportunities in urban
watersheds and inadequate regulatory controls in areas outside of the
City's jurisdiction are signifi cant constraints.” 41 In other words, lack of
space in the urban landscape for land-intensive water quality controls
in conjunction with no control over upstream runoff volumes prevents
the Watershed Department from achieving its water quality goals in the
urban core. Nowhere is there a romantic environmentalist notion of re-
turning the waterways to predevelopment conditions; instead, there is an
acknowledgment that in many cases, channelization is the best and only
option. 42 Like the upstream dialog on land use, there is something of a