After the Flood: Retrofi tting Austin’s Urban Core to Accommodate Growth - Politics of Urban Runoff: Nature, Technology, and the Sustainable City - page 80

stormwater management facilities as an asset to urban residents cannot
be achieved by the Watershed Department alone. Integrating the drainage
missions in the Watershed Department has been a signifi cant evolution of
the municipal approach to urban drainage, but extending this approach to
include other departments has been less successful. Collaboration between
municipal departments that are directly engaged with or affected by urban
water fl ows—including the Watershed, Parks and Recreation, Transporta-
tion, and Neighborhood Planning Departments—is a rare occurrence. 47
A Watershed Department staff member notes:
We are fi nding more and more often that the Watershed Protection and Review
Department wants to collaborate with Parks and Recreation, because so often
municipally owned open space is in parks or greenbelt. We have to ask permis-
sion to use that open space for a water quality treatment system and if the runoff
is going through active recreation areas like ballparks and things like that, we're
generally not going to get permission because parks doesn't want to lose that
function. 48
The “mission focus” of the municipal departments creates a series of
bureaucratic silos that are easily transgressed by water fl ows but not by
municipal staff members who are interested in fi nding synergies between
departmental missions. Restrictive institutional and disciplinary norms
and structures continue to favor a topographic interpretation of how na-
ture infi ltrates the urban landscape. 49
Growing In Rather than Out
Amid the struggles in the Watershed Department to balance fl ood and ero-
sion control with water quality in the urbanized inner core of the city, the
growth politics of the rural Hill Country have infl uenced these practices.
Efforts by environmental and community activists as well as the City of
Austin to limit development impacts in the Hill Country through regula-
tion and conservation development have pushed urban growth not only
outside of the municipality's jurisdiction but also to less environmentally
sensitive parts of the city, particularly the eastern neighborhoods down-
stream of Barton Springs. As described in the previous chapter, the Austin
Tomorrow Comprehensive Plan of 1980 prescribed a strategy to direct
growth to the inner core of the city by making infrastructure upgrades, but
fi scally conservative voters rejected subsequent bond measures intended
to fund these upgrades. 50 A second comprehensive planning effort, the
AustinPlan , was completed in the late 1980s in an attempt to provide
the Austin Tomorrow Comprehensive Plan with regulatory teeth, but