KEVIN C. CONNER
May21, 2008
San Antonio, Texas
Martha Doty Freeman, Interviewer
San Antonio River Authority Oral History Project, Phase II
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This is Martha Doty Freeman. The date is May 2ls1
, 2008. I am interviewing Kevin Conner
at the San Antonio River Authority in San Antonio. The interview is part of the San Antonio
River Authority's Oral History Project.
Give me some background biographical information.
Okay. My full name is Kevin Charles Conner, I'm 44, is that right? Yeah, I'm 44. And I'm
a landscape architect by training. I graduated from A&M, bachelor's in landscape
architecture, and I've been doing this for 22 years now and thoroughly enjoy it. I lead a
urban design and planning group for a company called Jacobs. That urban design and
planning group is about 15 people, and we're part of a much larger 70-person planning and
landscape architecture group, which is then part of a 59,000-person architecture/engineering
/ , big whopping hair~orporation. The company itself does architecture, engineering, program
~consulting, -basically CV'erything b1:1:t hHil~ And the reason I bring that up is it's from that
perspective we got involved in the Mission Reach project.
I lead a practice called the Urban Watersheds Practice, and we started that group some nine
. years ago. From that, like a lot of great things, or at least I eeasider it to be great, I gHess,
nn being a little I guess a little arrogant a-boat that-there's a number of us who are
I) landscape architects, p&tj engineers, civil engineers, environmental scientists, and we're all
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basically kind of- our practice revolves around rivers and lakes and streams and that sort of
thing that knits the community together on a number ofbasic levels. And we all have our
own different ways of looking at it, but we all came together and decided we were going to
start pursuing these projects, and we starting winning them.
Now, was this within the umbrella of Carter Burgess at the time?
It was, it was under the umbrel~ of Carter Burgess at the time.
And we started winning. And because we took one of the ideas from one of the
environmental scientists that said if we were able to craft together a holistic approach that
looks at all ofthese balances, all of these functions from one end to the other because that's
the difficulty in an urban context, everything's a balance of competing goals.
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have your environmental guys that sa " ~ a costs, and I don't care how many
And then you have your engineer side, that says,
The solution is always a mix of those things and how you look at our rivers within our
communities as a real balance of- certain cases, we can't get away from a very heavy-handed
approach to drainage. In other cases, we're going to look at this as an urban
riverfront much like downtown San Antonio has. How do we get the biggest bang for the
buck out of the river? And what it really comes down to is examining all of these different
pieces and figuring out how to maximize the context and the potential of the river within the
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community according to the community values. And for all the projects we've worked on,
every one of them has been sufficiently different, pretty vastly different to where one doesn't
look anything like anybody else, and it's really kind of unique.
Which is the way it should be.
The way it should be in our min£ So anyway, I digress. That whole urban watersheds
A.
practice is how we came to the Mission Reach. I was working in Austin at the time. I spent
ten years in Florida, got out of school in '87, which explains why I went to Florid~that
whole mess here with the S&L crisis and all of that made me go out of state. And then in '96
we had an opportunity - I sold my partnership and had an opportunity to move back to
Austin - or back to Texas and Austin..-my wife was a (inauditJle) nt the time. And then /
Carter Burgess called and we started this whole dance. When we started wmmng these- _.--
""13rojeets and we started putting these balanced approaches together -
I still have all my contacts in San Antonio. My parents are here, my wife's parents are here,
anybody my wife is relate~ to living or dead is here, so we've got some roots here. And we
. V/Sit:1T'--- . . ~
/ had watched the-ma:stef plat1AMgthe Mission Reach and Museum Reach come together,
and we started attending some meetings, getting familiar with the project, and it really
. b~ '~:;J {'~~fi_._Q~· ,.--
became kind of an effort to =·JNe we oing to getT 1s, that was g&g to be the effort.
There was a lot of good firms that went after it. There was a lot of intense competition,
which I think made it really good for the River Authority and the f,ity and the Jl'ounty to
really get a good team that worked for them, which was exciting to them, I'm sure.
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Was your approach fundamentally different from that of the other teams?
I believe so. And it was that same balanced approach that we have used pretty much
/ throughou;__ ~~·
It sounds as if in a lot of way it mirrors what goes on here at this agency.
~
/ That's what I've been toldrBut I've been told that am I've been working with the River
Authority now for five years, since 2002. And I haven't been privy to all of the internal
workings, but I've had a number of people say the same thing because we have the same sort
of lively discussions internally, kind of this - I don't want to call it an argument, but it's a
good sounding out of the issues, and we all kind of come out of the room on one path, but
getting there is a little bit like making sausage sometimes.
Well, it 's the integration of all these different concerns and emphases and understanding how
they all work together, is what I'm hearing. It sounds similar.
What I think most people don't understand is that rivers by themselves are not a singular
. . - ~
element. They're much more, instead, a single element within all of the elements that make
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up the city. The way that we've kind of come to think about it i'it's one thread in the urban
fabric, and the thread serves a certall_} ;;:;ifferent function depending on which piece it goes
through and many times serves multiple functions. So it's difficult to get your head wrapped
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around it, particularly for our younger staff that are joining us. I tease them all the time. I say, Q
• I j
':You're six months from being effective," which is a lousy thing to tell somebody. But
literally it's true because it's that complicated to understand.
So was the structure of it already in place in terms of how it was divided up into these
different segments by the time you got involved, or was your experience part of organizing
how it was segmented?
No. It was segmented prior to getting here. S\VA did seffiethin~prepared a concept
master plan and did a great job of getting everybody on the same page in terms of how they
thought about it. It was a good stab at that. There were a lot of technical hurdles and a lot of
design hurdles, I mean, just context-driven stuff that we had to overcome. But one thing I
didn't have to do is I did not have to unify a group behind the concept. By the time I got here,
they had a pretty concrete idea which way they were going, and they were very clear to me
, that it was ~d my team's job£ further this concept along those lines. And
we loved it, it was great, and we were well set up to do that.
You talked about a river representing different things as it moves across geographical space.
How well did the organization that you found reflect- would you have organized it in the
same way, I guess is what I'm trying to ask?
Wow, that's a tongh question because I've worked with it fer se long this xvay, I've gotten
-kind ofus~G. te-it.-No, I wouldn't have done it the same way, I don't think. There's lots of
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r~asons the way it ended up being organized the way it was, and I'm not saying that the
~~ /' reason that I would want it differently eclipses all those reasons. If it were m~-Mhi~ and
we had to go back and do it all over, the Eagleland Reach, which was a panoply of different
funding sources and different projects and different timelines, ultimately, I think, turned out
to be too much to manage, should have been included with the Mission Reach Project.
And for what reasons?
They're linked at the ~ip, they really are. The pedestrian and recreation spaces and
connections play so well with the Mission Reach that the breakpoint of Lone Star Boulevard
from one to the other always seemed to be kind of artificial and problematic to me. However,
I understand the River Authority's wanting to break that project out separate because the
intent was to get something on the ground early. And you know what? It was - at the time,
that was the best way to go about it, and I signed on to it. I was like, "You know what? That
makes a lot of sense." Hindsight being perfect and 20/20, in a perfect world, I think we
would have done it differently.
Do you think over time it will - the river will assert itself in that sense and it will become one?
Yeah. Let me give you a great example. The River Walk was started - basically started in
the )30s with one small set of improvements. "1tltd-themvecut:o1f'tl'Itri~~m:Trm-LelrrteH:u:u:l..
other stuff around the convention center loop, so really you
· er's. Yeah Fisher
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- .
• !'leek is his finn, I'm sorry@isher's book on that whole ~evolved over time.
Great parks evolve over time. It's never just one big thing. We all sit there and marvel at
Grant Park and Millennium Park and that whole complex of waterfront along Chicago's
lakefront along the Miracle Mile. You understand that the only reason that that particular
chunk is there is because Montgomery Ward and Daniel Burnham just decided they were
going to sue the pants off anybody who tried to build there.
(Laughing.)
It started back then, and it's evolved into what we see today. We look at this, we g<) "Wow."
pj~Je .....
But if you go in the back, you've got these big~ ofhoney locusts that somebody
planted 50, 60 years ago. So parks are organic. They tend to grow with cities, and I think
this will do the same thing.
The Mission Reach 50 years from now grows up, we've got - the river has responded to -
within its sideboards that we've set for it, we've got all of this vegetation growing, there's
( going to be some parts of it somebody's going to redo eeealise it was like, "Damn, that was
~ And I would love to fast forward 50 years, I'll be in my 90s at that point, and it
would be fun to listen to the community go, "Hey, this was great, but what were they
thinking over here," to see how all of that goes by.
Because unlike other pieces of infrastructure, police, fire, water, sewer, schools, all that, all
the other pieces of infrastructure that make a city run, parks are the only thing that get
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changed organically over time to reflect the needs and the desires of the people. Streets 'are
only replaced when they don't function anymore. Pipes get replaced when they fail. Parks
are different.
How we develop8 Park this year as a city would have been totally different 15 years
ago@ears ago, they would have plowed the entire thing over, :,_my opinion, and turned
it into a pile of playing fields. But today what we want as a city is sort of another
" McAllister-type park, must more passive arrangement. So it's interesting. I'm sorry. We've
stepped on this button that I always get kind of excited about. It's pretty neat. I think it's
going to be tremendously different.
So do you see it primarily as a park project?
~
' ¥eah, I really E:io. It's an ecosystem restoration project,knt we have to start there. Great
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parks and wild spaces, and Central ParkVa great example, has its own ecosystem that
functions well within its urban context. We want to do the same thing here. Most people
don't get that. I shouldn't say most people don't get that, that's not true. I say a lot of people
don't get that.
Let's look at McAllister Park, let's don't go to Central Park. Let's talk about McAllister
Park. What is the lure about McAllister Park? They left big chunks of it alone. There's tons
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of little footpaths in there, looks like a bunch of little yntrails. But large parts of it are
basically left alone. As we've become a denser and denser and denser city, these pieces of
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urban wilderness of which people are part of that environment in my opinion are going to
become more and more essential to the livability of the city. The real impact of the Mission
Reach probably won' t be felt for 50 years, probably the biggest frustrating part of my
profession. (Laughing.)
Y7z,tst have to have faith.
/ Well, faith in the people maintaining~ oddly enough.
So are there other consultants who are doing the other segments?
~
Yes. I think it's Bender Wells Clark, Larry Clark, is working..Ht Eagleland, and I haven't
seen everything he's done there. I normally like Larry's stuff, so I imagine that's going to be
pretty neat. Ford, Powell and Carson and HDR, I think it's Joru@is leading it for Ford,
Powel11~arson, are working on the Museum Reach.
So with three different designers working here, how is all this going to interface?
Well, you know how we've talked about this thing being a piece of the fabric?
Uh-huh.
In between the Museum Reach and the Eagle land Reach is downtown. If you look at the
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context for the Museum Reach, it is far more urban than most ofthe Mission Reach. It's
interesting, both have been neglected but neglected in different ways. The Museum Reach,
the river was just forgotten. We didn't even know it was there.
(Laughing.)
Most people in San Antonio couldn't tell you it ran behind the San Antonio Museum of Art.
They knew it ran behind the Witte only because it came through Brackenridge Park and
that's where the zoo was.
And there was that old dairy that's there.
Yeah. Most people can't tell you that it goes right behind the AT&T buildings there. And
it's funny, the real scale ofthe original San Antonio River~ a creek, so it's real easy to
miss. So that's totally different now. If you go south of the tunnel outlet structure to the
Mission Reach, that part just south of the outlet tunnel is- I think we scaled it off one time ­seven
times in scale in width of what the upstream is. It's just different places, it's different
contexts, and that's the reason that we say as you look at that thread within that urban fabric,
it depends on where you are on the fabric.
And it requires different visions.
It does, it really does. Going back to - if you look at the Arkansas River through Tulsa, the
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upstream portion right at the Tulsa County line is Keystone Dam, and that controls all the
river south through Tulsa County. So you've basically got I think it's like a 78-mile stretch
down until we get some bigger tributaries coming into the Arkansas in which the Arkansas
River can go from being a 50 cfs trickle, nothing, to bank full to some 400-footacross river
1(,
in about eight hours. It depends on when the dam is making power. That context is totally
different than upstrea~1t's totally different than the Arkansas River in the middle of Little
.......
Rock, Arkansas, where they just completed that~ not just completed, but they're
working on the riverfront and really doing some pretty good stuff there. So when we look at
rivers in that context, it really makes a big difference as to where you're at.
How south side of San Antonio has historically treated the San Antonio River is totally
different than downtown on the north side. Downtown on t1ie north side, and I'm
paraplnasing, generalizing m big terms, and tf this makes it to the San Antonw Express-News, - /
.thsy'll pillory ms, elcay'f. But as a planner, the river in downtown and up in the north part is
an amenity for economic development and a quality-of-life driver for people. You go down
south of town, San Antonio River is what the kids used to swim in. It's totally -
Well, it was an historic economic generator, but it doesn 't serve that function in the same
way.
Not in th0 same way, no, by far not the same way, although people still own the water righfs """
in the hope that one day they'll be sellin-g water out ofthe tivet. Yeah, right. I suppose the
missions are still using it the same way. San Jose is still using it to drive a grist mill.
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So how much - what is your sense of how much of an historic landscape is still present in the
Mission Reach?
/ · Obviously,--esnter gro~he four missions. I need to predicate this by saying I studied - I
was going to be a history teacher for two years, and if I were left to my own devices, okay, I
probably still would have been one, so what I'm going to call this is a big tangent alert. Here
we go. I' 11 get back to the point.
Sure. That's okay.
We're fortunate in San Antonio that we have four shining examples of ties to our history and
origin. In my opinion, if you go to a city like Miami, which is a nice place, but it's sadly
lacking in a sense of permanence. Their version of old is, what, 1940? And having lived
down there for a while, it always bothered me, it was like - I had a student describe it to me
one -
Need to go to St. Augustine.
- there's no "there" there. There's not - a sense of place always has history to it at some
point, otherwise the sense is that it's kind of a shallow fas;ade. So you have to fmd some
sense of reason, I think, for most people, particularly if you don't want a population that's
very transient.
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So we're very, very, very fortunate to have that, and thank GQd that Mayor Cockrell and a
number of other community leaders basically pushed through having the Missions National
Historic Park. That's one of the hardest parks to administer in the whole U.S., by the way,
-~Wh.i0el/
because of the way it's set up. That's the reason I think Stev~heaetie1 got .!"
promoted, one of the reasons he got promoted, because he's had to deal with these kind of
thorny issues. But because we have the missions, I think we have an awful lot ofhistoric
context.
Now, the funny part is, or the perversely funny part I suppose, is when we asked the Corps to
channelize the river beginning in the late >5os going into the )60s, they did a marvelous job
when they channelized it, okay, the whole reason for the missions being there kind of left
them. So as the river has this 1.8 to 2.2 sinuosity factor and it wound back and forth and the
missions are on different parts, we've channelized it. Guess what? The river ran away from
the missions.
,)-
So that was one of the parts that we struggled with. Mission Trails start to solve part of the
problem. In fact, when this whole thing is done, there really shouldn't be a big difference
between any of the Mission Trails Projects and the River Improvement Project; it should all
just be Mission Trails, and that should be it. Be a giant complex network of trails and a big
linear park kind of connecting all of them. But I think there's a huge amount of historical
context from the missions. I think there's another large opportunity that the National Park
Service is trying to put into play with this demonstration ~creating some of the old
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l~
~e) along the San Juan Acequia. I think there's a lot of great opportunity for history
if you're bent towards that. ben if you're not, I think it ought to be a - and it will b-;;;
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wonderful place to go play, one of those large linear parks where you can start at one end and
end up in downtown if you like.
It's kind of funny, when you think in terms of nine miles, which is a long bike ride for me,
but if you were to start at, oh, I don't lmow, San Jose, what's to stop you from pedaling up
into downtown, having a couple of cold adult beverages and lunch and then kind of meander
your way on bike provided you can find your way back to San Jose if you didn't have too
many. That should be an easy thing.
The missions' draw is pretty apparent. They get - I think the latest figures I saw were 2-
point-some-odd million visitors a year, I think. My numbers may be way off, it's been a long
time since I've talked to Steve about that. It's a bunch. But it's mainly capture off of folks
who have already to come to San Antonio. So I think it's kind of a natural. It obviously is a
strong design influence, but even if the missions weren't there, would this be a great thing to
do? Yeah, but it probably wouldn't be nearly as strong.
So what does the ecosystem's restoration mean? What does that encompass in this project?
Okay. This won't be .a short answer either. In short, when the Corps channelized the project,
!tv
what they did was - n'fact, let's go look down here, this is a good example. What they did
~
was they dug a trapezoidal ditch - wish I'd brought my lktte drawing now. They dug a
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trapezoidal ditch some 30 feet deep in a number of places. But, you know, the San Antonio
River itselfs only - well, you know what the Northern Reach is like, right, the Museum
Reach?
Yeah.
It wasn't terribly different down here. So it's what we call a plains river in its
geomorphology. It's got a fairly shallow pilot channel, mostly U-shaped. Its floodplain,
however, is immense, it's very wide, shallow in a lot of places. s
channelized it, there's only two ways to address
as, which is horrible because now you've got to go up and over
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et to your river, or they did the next best thing which was dig it downward here.
And I'm glad they dug it downward.
/ Why is thet?
of dirt on both sides lining this, and it become
So what
~
By the way, when we dug the ditch, we stripped any riparian [Qree'out of there that :ron can
ima-gine; and we took out a lot of the natural profile, which is this riffle pool, long complex
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which allows for fishes and that sort of thing, a lot of aquatic organisms to make the river
itself sustainable. You don't have those aquatic organisms in there, then you're constantly
fighting a losing battle with, oh, I don' t know, algae blooms and all sorts of stuff. So we're
going to lay the banks back, we're going to restore an indigenous riffle pool (inaudible)
complex into it~~ have to keep the same flood control parameters that we currently have.
I was going to ask how you do that.
Okay. · The way that we do that - let me see ifi can do this, describe this the way I normally
do with a sketch. When we lay the banks back, we increase the cross-sectional area you're
looking at, right? So instead of something like this, it's much bigger. Well, when we look at
how a river works, the mathematical simulation of how a river works is called a hydraulics
and hydrology model; hydraulics is what water does, hydrology is how much water is
flowing in the river. One of those components is called roughness, and like all good
engineering formulas, roughness has an actual real meaning to it. Roughness is the amount
of resistance by either natural or - well, living or dead things, living or inert things to water
flow. So if you put a bunch of trees in a channel, it's a very rough channel; it doesn't carry
water that fast. It carries it, yes, but the water movement is much slower because the
roughness of the channel slows the water down.
So in order to keep the same flood protection that this narrow ditch does, because there's
nothing in the ditch, it's a bunch of grass, it's very smooth to water. In order to carry the
same amount of flood protection that this cross section does, we have to make it much bigger
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if we're going to add trees back into it. And that's what we've done. It's a simplistic way of
looking at it, but it's still very true.
This river - this stretch of river will still go from 200 cubic feet per second, which is kind of
the flow today in a hot May, to - well, no, at the lower end, it's some 80,000 cubic feet per
second, which is bank full. So some 6-, 700 feet across, 30 feet deep running bank full in
about six hours, so it'll go up and it'll go back down, so we still have to carry the same
amount of flood protection. That's part ofthe ecosystem restoration component.
In order to make this - in order to make a river sustainable, you have to allow this natural
system to react to all the different stimuli that's put upon it. Let me kind of draw a parallel
for you. We're all very familiar with dunes and what dunes do on a barrier island. And the
dunes move back and forth, and we allow them to move back and forth, and it's a natural
cushion.
Correct, exactly. Well, the river valley in which any river sits has a very similar function; it's
that cushion that allows the river to adjust geomorphically to all of its different inputs. Some
of those inputs include the grade, in other words, how steep it is, what sort of geology it~
flowing through, whether the river is bimodal or not, whether it carries a lot of runoff, or
whether it's spring fed has a lot to do with the flow, how much sediment it carries, what sort
of fish and so forth live in it. All of these are different stimuli upon the river and ~~t
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back. The fish is more a function of the geomorphology.
But anyway, if you change any one of those, you will end up with an ensuing change in how
the river reacts. So for example, if we have this - you can see what part of the river
,.;..., +i-S,_,~ L-...tt."""~
geometry looked like aati tfie (in:tt~ible) oftt, this thing just used to go back and forth, back
and forth. If you added a lot of water to that without the channelization, two things happened:
The water backed up tremendous})) flooding downtown in the 1950s, and you started to see a
lot of these extreme oxbows get cut off because the water'lljust blow right across them. The
river is trying to adjust itself to a broader, deeper channel.
_vrJ
Not even geological time, but just ...
J\
No, happens in a big storm. In fact, the biggest way to see this if you want to get into what
urban changes - what you can see urban change is doing to a river channel, get Jim Blair on
the SARA staff to take you down here past the project, because, remember, we're still
'·
carrying all this flood flow. This is the natural channel down here, and you can see how that
channel adjusts and morphs itselfto the urban influences across it.
So what we're trying to do is add vegetation back into the river, allow the river to meander
more, as much as we can. I'm not sure the federal government prints enough money in a
year to turn this back into a natural river mainly because we have this huge urbanized
watershed upstream of us which sends down these very large slugs of water that - I don't
care what people say in terms o('we want our natural river back like it was before the Corps
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0 channelized it;' You can't get there from here. The hydrology has changed too much. But
~
what we' trying to do is restore the river's habitat to be reflective of an indigenous river in
Texas that has an urban context. It's a 20-minute answer to what you asked, but it's a
complex thing because I can't tell you that we're restoring it to the way it was because we're
plainly not. But we're making it natural for its urban context.
(End ofTape 1, Side 1. Beginning ofTape 1, Side 2.)
That's what the project's really about. And it's not - like a lot of things on this project, it's
not explainable in one sentence. Just like it's not explainable in one sentence to somebody
who's not from here. Why we would spend the amount of time and attention that we spent
on both the Museum and the Mission Reach, that's not explainable to most people,
particularly if they come down here an~big the river really is. But they don't have to get
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it, it's a San Antonio thing.
(Laughing.) They'll come around to it eventually.
Well, they don't have to, just go buy some margaritas and go home.
So if you do all this work, does it essentially - does it have the effect of slowing the flow?
It does.
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And what impact does that have on downstream, then, and how does that get balanced out
since there are all these downstream partners here?
Okay. It slows the flow, but it doesn't reduce the flow. And when I say it slows the flow,
that is measured in feet per second, and there're some cases we don't slow the flow very
much. Because we have a commitment to all the surrounding landowners and to the City of
San Antonio that we will not increase the flood level that's embodied by the 100-year flood.
"1 So it's a very complex exercise involving us landscape architects and our ~&~engineers
and civil engineers, and it literally is a - I keep calling it a "do loop." You propose
something, and you test it and evaluate it, the other two groups do, and they propose a
solution, and then you evaluate it. And you kind of get this "do loop" done until you end up
with a really strong solution that works for all the parameters, well, for most of the
parameters because, like I say, it' s a balance of competing goals a lot of the time.
So it doesn't slow it down a lot.
I meant to ask you, how do -I was going to ask you if you do testing on this and you just
used that word. How do you test? I mean, the Corps has their lab in Alabama or wherever it
is.
It's Vicksburg.
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Vicksburg does the Mississippi River.
We thought about doing that for this, and the Corps didn't want to go that direction because
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it's difficult to model in a tabletop model and conform to the schedule that River Authority
""
wants. And realistically, most of this stuff is done empirically, so when I say "tested it,"
we're doing that with empiricalJ&~odels and advanced programs called HEC-RAS,
which stand for River Analysis System, I think. It's funny, I've used that word for years, and
really - I think it's River Analysis System. We also use GEO-RAS, which ties a lot of the
upstream land uses int~GIS database so we can model ultimate flows and that sort of ./'
" ~' and we can model what the river does under flood conditions.
We also have a couple of real specialists in the group, fluvial geomorphologists, whose real
responsibility is to help us mimic a natural - a river's natural mechanics given its context at
that base pilot channel level. So we've got a whole series of models for the flood
components, we've got a whole)nother series of models for just that reaction within the pilot
What do you do about drought?
Drought happens. There's just not much you can do about it.
So how do you factor it in?
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Doesn't really factor in much. The biggest thing for dealing with drought on a river where
we're going to have a lot of people is making sure that, you know, do we have water flowing.
~
And you've touched on an issue which ifl put 50 people in here anctput everybody in here
J\
from the River Oversight Committee, you're going to get at least that many different
opinions.
' I'm going to try and categorize them for you. =Fhcre tlfe a large nHmb~ of and th8y'n~_,__
~ ~~tive Texans or native to South Texas, ~derstand that the Guadalupe can
I /eM-~
get down to i:OO ~and it's, quite frankly, a stream of stagnant pools, and you just don't
J
spend a whole lot of time on the Guadalupe in the middle of a drought. That's just life. I
kind of fall in that camp, somebody who was born and raised here.
There's a number offo that think there needs to be 300 cfs, which i
lf
/ model flow, 200 cfs base mo el flow on the river. We do ' care what happens. ,I, f you have
to augment it with something else, s to look that way all the time. And those
'sa balance of competing goals. The riffle
structures that we've had to tin the river to 'nd of get the good profile back actually have
olding pools upstream ~ th , which are good. But in the time of a
, · 's going to look like a river in the middle of a ught, just like the Guadalupe
does.
I always love that when we have friends come down from Kansas, all these relatives, and
they like to come in June and July, and they go, "Gosh, it's hot down here." I'm thinking,
22
"You're coming to Texas from Kansas. What were you thinking?" I don't say that, it's kind
of hard to say that to your grandma. But they're always amazed because they come here, and
it's like, "Wow, the river's really dried up." I say, "Yeah. It's kind oflike what they look
like in Kansas, too, right?" It's true. When we have droughts down here, our rivers dry up.
The Nueces disappears completely, and I think that's what'll happen here.
So how does that -
Or it'll dry up, it won't disappear completely.
How does that interact, then, with a planted vegetative landscape?
Aha. Everything we're setting uiJand we've gone to great pains to do this, we have some
folks with the Ladybird Johnson Wildflower Center, and they're great folks, but it's - I
mentioned earlier that a lot of times that we have these lively conversations on the design
team, and we' ll have one part ofthe design team that has no clue and has no interest in what
the other part of the design team is in. One of the great parts of the design team has been this
Ladybird Johnson Wildflower Center, and they are faced with the challenging task of
reestablishing a native landscape where one hasn't existed for a long time. The only plant
material that's there, the only biotic mass is basically invasive exotics, and they've been there
for a long time, so they've got a hell of a foothold. So when we're pulling out all this stuff
and we're doing this massive regrading of the river, we're going to have exposed in a lot of
places fairly sterile soil, soil that has never seen the light of day.
23
How to amend all that and get a native regime in there. So it falls in primarily two parts. We
have a understory, and let's call it a land cover, of grasses, ofperennial and ann~nd then
of a bunch of- I've always call it understory, midlevel shrubbery, but it's brush, I've heard
A
that. One of our committee members continues to refer to it as brush, and we all kind of
cringe, and we just kind of go on about our way. But it's that sort of stuff that's below the
canopy, and some of it, quite frankly, you're going to look at it and go, "Oh, that's brush, I
recognize it. Okay." Getting that established.
And then we have an overstory canopy that we're trying to establish. That gets done in
different densities driven primarily by context and hydraulics. That is all going to be
irrigated on an emer- - we call it emergency irrigation. And boy, we had a big head-knocking
with the Corps of Engineers over this one, and even the Corps themselves were, the
staff themselves were fairly evenly split as to what makes the most sense. I come at it from
not a philosophical perspective because your philosophy people are going to say, "It
shouldn't be irrigated. It's native."
Okay. I'm a pragmatist. This is South Texas. We're starting from scratch. We want this
stuff to be established, and we all don't want to wait 200 years for it to happen, and we want
to keep the invasives out. That means you've got to give the natives a fair shot at getting
established, and in South Texas, that means water. We've got~river nearb)) le're going
draw from it, we're going to establish it, we've got a system set up for that. But the goal is to
have that sucker turned off in as early as t};;years.
24
Wow.
Now, during the establishment period, and let's just project ahead and say five years from
now we get hit with some just whopper drought. The goal is to have effluent water put back
in the river - just like it's done there in the convention center loop - upstream, and then we
draw it out downstream to water all this with to make sure that it survives because that
planting signifies a significant investment by the community. So we don't want the stuff to
die.
I'm not willing to make that sort of an investment based on - or put it at risk and say, "Just
based on the fact that we shouldn't have to water it, we're not going to," okay. You know
what? Putting that stuff in is a big number, and if you had to write it out of your personal
checkbook, would you put that much at risk? And the answer always is, when I'm
confronted by somebody like that, the answer is always, "Well, no, of course I wouldn't."
"Then why are you asking us to?" I think it's the smart thing. It seems to be going against
the grain, and I firmly believe that the minute that stuff is established that the River Authority)
who's going to be managing thi5 is going to shut that stuff off and just wait.
Yeah, because they'd get objections from the downstream if they didn't.
Well, but the water is different. Remember, I said we're putting it in upstream and we're
ak.~d t mg It ownstream.
/\
25
Right, right.
We're not affecting the water rights in the river. We ~t. It's not our water to take.
How well does this interface with, say, the irrigation companies that are there, the acequias?
Shouldn't affect them at all. Doesn't affect them at all. We're putting in water upstream,
we're taking it out downstream. It's almost using the river like an oversized irrigation main.
That's how it's supposed to work. Jim Boenig and his staff, who have been extraordinarily
good to work with, that's their task of this. What we're tasked with is coming up with points
that we pull out of the river to hook up to the different irrigation sections. See, there's not
even a permanent pump for this thing, it's on a trailer moved up and down.
Wow.
J.,
So I mean, when I say it's emergency irrigation for establishment, it's design and set up that
-1.
way. But I can't in good faith tell a community with a straight face that we're going to put
all this stuff in and we'll never have to irrigate it. I think that's kind of silly. It's a park,
okay, and like a lot of parks, in dry times, people want to go to the park.}lou've got to help
the park along.
So I was looking at this historic Mission Reach map and seeing these different vegetational
26
zones, Are they fairly reflective of what's -
Wow, glad I drew those. (Laughing.)
(Laughing.) Are they pretty reflective of what's going to happen?
Yes, I think they are very reflective. It's funny because I forgot I drew those. I've got five
('years' worth of drawings and graphics..so there's some stuff I (maudibl~But I think it's
fairly reflective.
So how did you come up with that selection of four vegetational zones?
Actually, there were five. And the SWA plan started that thinking, which I thought was a
good place to start from. We found a lot of technical hurdles in how they really laid it ou4
but the averlying eoneept was g~. That's where we started.
So as we - remember, I've got all thes~&;{ engineers on the staff, and always when we
start one of these river projects, there's always a long discussion, generally afterhours
because it's somewhat of a philosophical discussion, as to how we're going to set up this
design loop I described earlier, this do loop. And a lot of it centers around their model
because in order for us to do a good job for whoever we're working for, that do loop has to -- be very - at a gut level has to be really indicative o:,- has to address the key issues, has to
relate very closely to the problem that you're trying to solve. And like I said, they're all
27
/
pretty different. Vegetation plays a huge, huge role here.
So in order for us to really do the best job in terms of trying to figure out densities of
vegetation and have it be provable to our clients, who is the River Authority, the way that
the - the best practices now from the USGS has to do with defining density of vegetation to a
roughness coefficient in the Manning's Model, and this is where we start to get into
categories of density of vegetation. That's how that stuffs divided up.
Has nothing to do with what's in it; has everything to do with how dense it is in terms of
water resistance. That's the driving metric. So when you get down to the root issue of the
driving metric, then you can start to formulate a solution where you can prove it to the
environmental commtmity, prove it to the recreational community, you can prove it to the
engineering community and that sort of thing. And that's the reason - kind of going back to
how we started all ofthis, we've always viewed it as a hol~is~t~ic~p~r~o~~e~c~t~~tt&~!:fte~~
~
o see my point.
So that's how we ended up with those different vegetation zones because that's kind of how
you have to figure it out so that you're not flooding a whole bunch of people. If you overlay
the original 1950~d over this area, it's staggering. It's a big blue footprint, and there's
an awful lot of people and houses and offices and all sorts of stuff within it. So you can't
..
minimize the flood control benefits that the River Improvement Project has.
28
. . \
Everybody wants to say, "Oh, we hate that damn Corps ditch." I'll bet you didn't hate that
ct going?" I kept telling them we're putting a
Right, right.
Parks being reflective or infrastructure somewhat being reflective. Well, how we've treated
our rivers is reflective of our current ethic. That was okay in the Jsos and ;60s, but it's damn
sure not okay now.
Now, at some point SARA went back in and did some modifications to it, didn 't they, to try
and kind of soften it or ...
No, not soften it. Just trying to make it sustainable. That's my take.
Okay. Tell me how - describe that to me in the same terms that you've been using.
Okay. When the Corps channelized the ditch in theJ6os, channelized the river, created this
29
/ ditch, they did not leave a pilot channel. Hang on, let me pHt this in eategOiie.i_ They did
not - they didn't know as much about rivers then as they do now. And whenever you
channelize or affect a river, like we talked about earlier, the river will try and respond
I '
geomorphically to what you've done to it. So if the planned form ofthe river, the sinuosity~
how much it goes back and forth - I'm sorry. Did I explain this earlier? Do you know what
a sinuosity coefficient is?
Uh-huh.
It used to have about 1.8 to 2.2, which is a pretty wide range, but basically it's a very windy
river. When you channelize that, you're still taking up the same amount of slope, but you're
doing it in a straight fashion. So the river's going to adjust and it's going to do one of two
things: It's going to go sideways to flatten itself out, or it's going to go down to flatten itself
_, out. Pick one, bttt it's going to do one or the other.<
41f«:A'i''"..~~~~~ .. ~- .
/"
And over - I want to say almost pretty soon after the channelization was done, th0ty and
the River Authority noticed that, "Gee, we're getting a pot load of downward erosion." Well,
no kidding. The river was trying to respond to itself, and that's the reason you see a lot of
these large banks of concrete rubble. And it's mostly a sustainability issue to try to keep the
river within its banks and not let it move. We're not the only people to have done that, Most
cities in America have done it that way. Actnally I thottght it was a pretty mnovative wa~
30
, . '
That's the reason I say that when we look at what they did in the }60s and what we know
about rivers today, which is a huge leap since the)60s, what's the next look going to be in 50
years? This is the best that a lot of bright minds know how to put it back together. What are
they going to think in 50 years, which is kind of a humbling thought, you know.---'We all
think we so smart." Let's just wait and see.
Okay. You've got this area that you control that you can do something about -
Yes.
- and then outside of that is this other much larger area that you don't control that has its
own independent development going on, and it may be even difficult to predict what that 's
going to look like in 50 years, although you can guess it'll be more dense. How do you plan
for that and its impact on what you're doing now?
We didn't have to do that. Thefty and ac her of community leaders, and to
/' name some of the~)cG!o orks for the /ity, lrb Hightower who I deeply respect
as a community le~d~lylVe put in place this River Overla
District. And it
,Now, we can't- this is t
---
/' we're kind ()
31
.semebeay what they can do with their proper~ However, in the interest of the public, and
this being a public facility, I damn sure can have some good ideas about how that interface
between that public land and that private facility nee~to happen. We don't necessarily- we
A
plan for a lot of connections in how I think people will use this in terms of getting from what
I call street level, which is top ofbank down into the project. We think a lot of people_,~ J.lc.._
~,ft.
you've seen adjacent riverfront development1will take advantage of having this asset in front
>o~v~~ /
of them. \lt'kiek we'll. start to se)
jnstead ofthe river being treated as a ditch like this is in the backyard, you will start to see
establishments have two front doors: the front door that people arrive at and then the face
that fronts the river. A microcosm of that on a very close, shallow scale is what we see at the
River Walk, but that occurs over like eight feet or however wide the River Walk happens to
be in front. This'll be a lot bigger distance.
Some of the newer developments - let me back up. My parents' house over off of Green
Spring, it's off of Wetmore Road, big creek goes through the back. This thing's - I think the
floodplain for this is probably 3-, 400 yards across; it's big. But the entire back of the house,
the entire house, windows and all, are oriented to that creek. The house was built in '90.
Some of these houses in the (inaudible) neighborhood, I'm thinking are built in theJ7os after
the ditch came through don't even look at the river. Look at some of the other uses that have
popped up along here. We've got a CPS lay-down yard -
Actually, if all I showed yo\l was the outline of the river, if you're looking at it with a
32
planner's eye, you could tell that this river wasn't much to look at by what fronted on the
river. You've got all this CPS and SAWS stuff, the back end fronts on to the river. We've
got a big utility yard right across from a .power plant. And I understand the power plant
being there from a water point of view, that lay-down yard shouldn't be down there, though.
So you can start to see what sort of land uses were here. You know, put it on the ditch. If it
has to be there, put it on the ditch. We will start to see that change.
There are some land uses along here that have been there that are transient enough that a
single person controls that as this project goes forward, I submit they're going to change
)
pretty quickly ~cause we're going to take something that's not an asset and tum it into an
asset, and all of a sudden it's going to be, "Gee, now, this is something I can take advantage
of," and you want to talk about something the private sector's all about, something to build
off of and take advantage of it. .U:·,; e use this same idea when we mo.~ tlrurrth Ri¥er
Nertir, which is tlre you're familiar with the River North Pr~ject?
l:Jh.hulz. -
Guess what that's about? That is all about that portion ofthe San Antonio R1ver being
- restored and turned into an asset. River North wasn't going happen cmless the San P..ntonio
- River got fixed. Srr it's taking something that's not an asset and making it into an asset. You
· can use the same mental approach to the Pearl Brewery. Not an asset until I think it's Kit
Goldsbury decided, "Well, I can tum that into an asset." Similar thing.
33
/
How would you characterize the neighborhoods that are there around Espada and San Juan?
)
Those are tough because, you know, I feel for'tRem. They're seeing change coming, and
they're not real sure how to respond.
I mean, this is so entirely different from what you were just describing.
Yes. The neighborhoods around San Juan - yeah, and what I was describing is primarily the
north half ofthe river. What we're seeing around San Juan and Espada, and indeed most of
~
South San Antonio, I was chair for South San Antonio Chamber of Commerce last year,
2007, was blessed with that honor, and I have had a long affiliation with the South Chamber.
amber than the
outh Chamber's far closer to its community than the other
~~~!!,lS;~~.... ....The southern part of San ~t~nio, by and large, as a general statemen;..is far,
far less transient than that in the northern part. It is not -
.. -. ~~ ,, ... :.
How interesting. I would never have (~hat.
~ ····· ..
- terribly unusual to find children living in a one-mile radius of the house that they grew up
in. Now, there's an awful lot ofpeopl~ up on the north side that grew up on the south
1\
side, okay, and a lot of them occupy some key positions here in Bexar County, Nelson@
for openers, Tommy~' whole bunch of people, but there's a whole bunch of people
who still stayed here. And it's not always been - the south side of San Antonio has not
34
always been - still is not the "it" place to be in terms of living in San Antonio, but it's not
terribly transient. And we're finding a lot of people down here that have been here for a long
period, and they're there because they want to be there. And they're watching change
coming, and it's kind oflike "Here comes change big time." A&M, Toyotespada,
all of the different Toyota suppliers. I mean, that's kind ofthe beginning of the list. And
they're not too sure what to do.
What I'm hoping that they see in the river project is an asset- instead of just change being
all nasty because the land use changes around them, I hope that they see this as a positive
asset that, quite frankly, in a perfect world we'd have done the first time in the; 60s when we
needed the flood control project.
~ ~~
-' What we did in the )60s is we gave the entir0ty yf asset, but we took their asset away from
them. In real cold, callous terms, that's kind of what happened. They had a river before, but
then they got a ditch. What we're hoping to do is give the river back to them and still keep
the flood control for the rest of the city. It's a much more balanced, humane approach,
although a lot more complicated because -
It suddenly becomes attractive and then it 's attractive to more than just them.
Yes.
So have they been part of the conversation to any extent?
35
Yes. We had a bunch of public meetings throughout the preliminary design, and I've been
/V-associated
with the project for five years, so I~ a whole bunch of those meetings in the
first two years. They have had representatives on the River Oversight Committee and the
Mission Reach Design Subcommittee. I think they've been pretty fairly represented. And
the nice thing about a project like this taking a long time, it's frustrating on a lot of different
levels, but the good news is there is always an opportunity to get involved and shape the
decision. And there certainly has been a lot of that.
What 's been the character of their end of the conversation about it?
"We want our river back." That's by and large it. The growth issues are going to happen
regardless just because San Antonio is growing, and we seem to have this penchant for "I'm
going to leave here and I'm going to live 30 miles out of town." Then we gripe about living
30 miles out of town and there's no H-E-Bout here, so then we want the H-E-B to show up,
but we don't want anybody else to come, and they don't understand the basic mechanics of
retail. I'm sorry. That's a longer diatribe than you were asking for.
But because the urban area tends to grow and there seems to be a renewed focus in southern
San Antonio, growth is going to happen. So as a planner, there's very little you can do to
stop growth. You don't want to do anything to stop it because it's, quite frankly, a function
of a city growing and maturin& ~t you do want to try and manage that as best you can. I
think the best thing we can do for those folks is give them the river back. If you decide to
36
stay and live in the neighborhood, much like I live about a mile from my parents. We
decided when we were coming back, we were coming back to places I was very familiar with.
~
I imagine a lot of people ha,! the same sort of attachment to their neighborhood and where
they live and that sort ofthing. I'm hoping that the river project adds to that one more reason
to stay.
So you ideally see it as assisting in the long-term stability of the demographics of the area
and the social -
It's a quality of life thing. I forget the guy's first name, but his last name is Fredricks, book,
The Rise of the Creative Class. He talks about the competition among cities to attract bright
people and attract industries and keep the brain power that they have there. In a larger
context, I view the entire River Improvements Project, Mission Reach, Eagleland, and the
Mission Reach,Ber Park, the downtown plaza, all ofthat is part ofthat larger civic effort
to retain our best and brightest here. It's a quality-of-life issue. At a gut level, that's what it
is, so that's kind of the bigger context that I see the River Improvements Project fitting into.
There's a big - ifl had my environmental scientists here, Randy Alexander and those guys,
they're going to come back with a totally different take on restoring the ecosystem and what
it means to South Texas, equally valid, totally valid. My engineers are going to say
something differen~totally valid as well. But that's kin~ of the network that this river kinds
of fits and fills and why it's so doggone complicated and why we're all kind of fascinated
with it. But in a bigger sense, that's what I think they get out of it; they get an asset that they
37
as people can use day in and day out, and it's kind of our cool little piece of our play space in
San Antonio.
(End ofTape 1, Side 2. Beginning ofTape 2, Side 1.)
- to an urban area that should have heterogeneity.
Yeah, actually -
- where you've got really readily identifiable differences.
I don't understand what you're meaning by that, but I think it's going to add development
opportunity down here and help the area to grow with grace. Does that help?
Yes. But that it grows in a way that continues to emphasize what makes this different from up
here.
Are we going to end up with venture development around the rivelfeah, I think we're going
to end up with venture development in South San Antonio, period. But what will be different
is that this will be a thread that will have been there first. And then the context around it
conversely can begin to respond to that as opposed to the ditch being there and we'll respond
~()..; Go
to the ditch accordingly by just~ back on it. Tg ge~to the Buffalo Bayou in
Houston - are you familiar with that?
38
(Recording turned off and turned back on.)
You know, in San Antonio, Buffalo Bayou is not as well-know a project, but one ofthe
interesting things that we saw with Buffalo Bayou, and my brother's lived there for 20-some-odd
years now, you go downtown and you look at Buffalo Bayou, and it's like, "Ooh, it's
just a bayou." A lot of things had its back turned on it, and as we're watching a lot of the
regeneration portion of downtown Houston, I'm not going to cal1 it the restoration of the
bayou because that's not a ecosystem restoration-based project like this one is. Theirs, quite
frankly, is just a- hey, it's a St. Augustine grass park. They don't make any bones about it,
it's exactly what it is. And we're saying for the same reason it's now an asset and the fronts
are now turning onto the bayou; before the backs were to it.
But they sort of have a vision that's similar in scale, in fact, if not larger going all the way
out almost to the county line.
Yes, it is larger because, quite frankly, they've got a longer way to go. And if we got - once
we get serious about parts of River North and we resolve some of these I'm going to call
them access issues, and that probably sounds like too technical a term, but how do we extend
some of this perhaps up San Pedro Creek and jestside/reeks because San Antonio River
starts at the Incarnate Word, so we're almost up to the headwaters as it is. I think we will see
another largerscale project. But it's interesting.
1\
39
/ family that does what I do.
rTrU,_,..,.T volume of water." That's a logical response.
But what it does point out is that if you look at the San Antonio River and its tributaries, the
urban San Antonio, we can create something on the same scale as Buffalo Bayou through all
the creeks, the }ifestside/reeks, and the Salado and the Cibolo and do{:;;~~~
think there is a lot of ground to say, "Yeah, it could be that big." I think what we're focused
on at this moment is making these projects work. And once these projects work, I think there
will be an equal degree of excitement to, "Gee, let's do some other places."
Extend it somewhere. This is completely off of the subject and not the area where you 're
working, but there's this enormous amount of money that's going into Fort Sam with
redevelopment and all that kind of stuff, and I suppose a certain amount of that is going
impact the Salado Creek Watershed -
Yes.
- as opposed to the San Antonio River. Has there been - and that's been a fairly recent
injection of hundreds of millions of dollars coming down the pike. How is that- do you see
an impact from that in a water sense and then in a development sense?
40
Sure. Let's talk abou~ater sense first. I don't think it's going to push any - a substantial
I}
amount more urban runoff into Salado Creek. Is it Salado that goes by there or is it Cibolo?
It's the Salado.
The Salado, you're right. Mainly because a lot of what they're taking up is already kind of
paved over. So I'm not necessarily worried about that. I don't think it's going to affect it all
that much. Will there be additional runofr"'!~s.
What I'm far more excited about is developing a strong constituency for a linear park along
the Salado River, and it will be a river, it's going to look like one, and in fact in some
respects, probably more of a river than the San Antonio River does. And it's going to be key
because I think there's a bunch of recharge features and so forth along the Salado that, quite
frankly, we need to protect.
And if you're ahead ofthe game as opposed to having to come back and fix something, it's a
whole lot easier to work with something that's already there as opposed to having to do an
entire overhaul like we're going to need to do on the San Antonio River. I'm excited about
the Salado and the Cibolo for the simple reasons that there is something to work with there.
We have tremendous hydrological impacts on that creek that it's changing the
geomorphology of that creek. Just like we continue to shove more and more water down it
faster, what's the creek going to do? It's going to try to flatten itself out.
41
A certain amount of that runoff is going to go into the San Antonio River side of it, though,
just because Fort Sam is on that ridg)basicallY)that drops off to both drainages.
What we're working with, though, on the hydrology end is what we call ultimate
development. And it's a projection of what the entire watershed looks like when ils totally
developed out. So it's not necessarily going to hurt us in the ultimate condition here.
Okay. Now, Karen implied you had some good stories about this project.
Yes. I've got tons of stories.
(Laughing.)
I've got more great stories than I've got time to tell you, and I need to take off in a few
minutes. But one of the funny stories, and it comes to mind because I was being interviewed,
and this is more a play on what you shouldn't say to reporters. But it directly relates to how
complicated this project is. I am continually asked to make it simple when I'm explaining
things to people. And it's bad because at the Oversight Committee meetings - in fact, I've
got a good story about that one, too.
At the Oversight Committee meetings, when you get asked a question, you have a choice.
As a technical professional, you can give what I consider to be the complete answer. But in
42
the process of giving the complete answer, when it's generally five minutes long or so, you
can just watch the person asking the question. You can watch their eyeballs roll back in their
head, going, "Oh, my gosh, I didn't ask for this." Or you can give the one-sentence answer
and see if they ask any follow-up questions. Sometimes they're just asking because they like
to hear themselves talk or they've got some point to prove or something. Most of the time
you give a short answer, and if they ask the follow-up question, okay, brother, you get the
complete answer now.
One of the funny things that happened when I was getting interviewed by a reporter for a
magazine publication is, "What was some of the most difficult parts of the project from a
people space perspective?" And I said, "Well, that's easy. The number one thing that
bothers me is the bridges. You know, you're going underneath the bridges, and those things
were never meant to be people spaces. They're highly utilitarian, they're paved in such a
way to keep erosion down~t's it. People aren't supposed to be down there." In fact when
1\
we did the site visits, I think the count is 28 different rattlesnakes I have seen when we were
doing all of our different site visits. I think we're up to 28. Some of them are probably the
same snake, but it was 28 different times.
She goes, "Well, couldn't we do something with the columns, maybe paint the columns or do
something with the railings?" They were fairly cosmetic suggestions. And I replied that
"That's all true, we could do that. But until we attack the underside of the bridge~ is
/ -part ofwhat th~ visitor tax is gging tg ao by th@ \l,'a;',~address some of these spatial
concerns with what they look like when you're walking through there so that you as a person
43
feel safe and secure and there's great opportunities for art and making it a good space
walking through there, painting the colul1'iThs is like putting earrings on a pig."
Now, guess what quote made the magazine?
(Laughing.)
None of the other stuff made the magazine, but the quote "earrings on a pig" made the
magazine. So she pulls a part out of here, a part out of here, and it makes it sound like all
TxDOT bridges are pigs and we can't do anything about it. Well, guess what Carter Burgess
designs? We do work for TxDOT. That caused a lot of internal consternation and some
explanations. And what I have learned is that you don't talk~ a reporter longer than five
minutes. And it makes no difference what a reporter asks, they get the long answer, they
don't get short answers.
One of the other funny stories, it was ve
paying attention
been a very intimidating figure to me, which is kind of interesting.
/ &Jrt oft he uber mgther. (Lttttghing.) e
/
44
I
[
1
And she can cau she's pulling strings.
We were having an issue early on in the project when I was tr 'ng to verify all the cost
information, because that was huge, trying to get real cos mformation, from CPS. I just
couldn't get CPS engaged. They were supposed to b ng $3.2 million in the project, just
couldn't get an answer. And I'm on, like, my tw tieth person and nobody wants to talk to
me.
So she asked the question, "Mr. Conner " and it was C'Mr. Connerl? for three years, by the
way. I think she finally called me K in, I distinctly remember that because it was like,
"Ooh, it's not Mr. Conner, it's Kev n." "- is there anything that is preventing you from
moving forward?" And I said, " t's funny that you ask, ma'am. I'm having some difficulty
engaging the right person at S, and if anybody on-" and I'm speaking to a board of 30
people. I mean, this is kin of a who's who of community leaders. I figured somebody on
this board had a name th could get me in there and we could figure this out because I don't
po~~ . ~..-'1~
need to (iR.auQie:l,- a I said, "If anybody's got any bright ideas, I'd be glad to hear about
them."
So they get done, nd I get in the car and I go home. And I'm on my way home, and I get a
phone call. I do 't recognize the name, I don't pay attention to call-forwarding anyway.
You call me, I ick up the phone, that's how it works. I picked up the phone, "Hello, this is
5I'-"
Kevin Conner." evin, this is Milt Lee.:_"~·~· W),-Sffil!....f?.rn--dumtffil'"lffiilllrpicrs
Lee? (Laughing.) And he explained who he was. So now I'm pulled off the side of the road,
45
an him - I at least
have the presence of mind not to ask him the question because he
need the name of a guy on your staff, and I'm y, I didn't mean to get anybody in trouble."
Apologizing all over myself.
/
was pretty humorous. But all's well that ends w
There are tons of similar stories to those, and they all kind of revolve around trying to get
through the complexities of the project.
We have so many interesting things. Somebody asked me one time, "How many people at
Carter Burgess do you have working on this?" I kept getting asked that question. And at the
height of the preliminary design, it was some 48 people, and they were from all walks of life
and ali different things. We have a bunch of good team members from other firms that have
really helped out a lot, and there's a lot of interesting stories in there, mostly all revolving
around the design people being passionate about w,hat they believe in and what they think to
·,- ·~·
be right for this.
So we have so many people that have really turned this into a labor of love. So from a
managerial standpoint, you don't want to smother that, but at the same point in time, you've
46
got to get stuff done and you've got to move forward. There are things that have happened
on the project only because it has been a labor of love. Look at all of the committee
members, lrby, Lil•ynd Jef~to start, who've been doing this for ten years. So
that's a big deal, and they, unlike me, they don't get paid.
Is there anything equivalent or similar to this going on anywhere else in the country right
now?
They started a similar thing in Tulsa. We did the vision plan for them. I think that one's
going to go through because it just didn't go through the first time. They have five different
municipalities to play with up there, so they've got a little bit different control problem.
But all over the United States, there is a renewed focus on, really, urban watersheds. This is
the largest ecosystem restoration project in the Corps right now with the exception of the
Kissimmee River. The largest urban based ecosystem restoration project, period, because the
A.
Everglades restoration's obviously not urban. But as you look at cities across the u.s; middle, 0 ;f
small, and large, cities are looking at what happens when we tum our face to our rivers
versus our backs. And probably the biggest one you can point to right now, which is not a
restoration, but it's the L.A. River. Remember the Terminator movie? Actually, there's been
a.-
a bunch of movies with the cars driving through the middle of)Jle"concrete ditch. They're
going to tum it back to a river.
My gosh.
47
Yeah. That's a big one. Little Rock, Arkansas, 200,000 people, nice riverfront. Seguin,
35,000 people, that Walnut Branch was the reason for that city being there, really, it's not the
Guadalupe, it's that set of springs along the creek there. ~!::heir face to the creek
again. There's - Laredo is looking at their 1iverfront, and that's a vexing project because it's
being treated as a border, not a riverfront. But the Rio Grande when you get through West
and South Texas means an awful lot because there ain't a whol~yplace else.
And that requires some vision on Laredo's part. Even - well,~attdible) is doing the same
thing.
Yeah. Well, they've got that major branch on the east side of Laredo, I guess, that goes in. It
kind of ..
Well, Chacon Creek and@ Creek, and they come in on the - both of them come in on
the east sides. Chacon is the one that's - well, ~ames in on the east side of downtown,
and they rna~ well channelize that. Chacon we managed to save in its natural state
~~at's the one with a little bit of de~&~ work, a little bit of a creative
solution, we kept that one in its natural state. I'm going to claim credit for that one; that was
one ofthe ones we did. That was good. That one didn't have to be channelized. The
original design showed a 14-mile long concrete channel all the way up that thing. Didn't
A
need that, there was a different way to do it. So there's a number of cities all over the place
that are doing that -
48
(Recording turned off and turned back on.)
- Creek?
Uh-huh.
They're doing some things there. Cherry Creek in Denver, along the Platte River in Denver.
That one is significant. If you're going to do any research, do the Platte River in Denver
because the Platte River was a sewer.~r~~reenway · ·
And speaking of broad.
Yeah. The Platte River's a great study in how a community came together and got that done-
/ and aid it in ~hat I weald call charactenstlcally Denver style, wh1ch 1s a pretty heavy-handed -
·"iop dewn way efdoing it. And you know what? It works for them, and it got it done in a lot
shorter period of time that ours got done, by the way. Hot Springs Creek Greenway, Hot
Springs, Arkansas, that was a - 1920s everybody goes to the hot spring. Since that kind of
fell out of favor, became a sewer, and now they've kind of turned their back to it.
Chattanooga River through Chattanooga, Tennessee, that was another one, big heavy metal
lead concentrations, I think. They got water-quality problems in the Chattanooga that they
5
had to solve before they could make it desirable. Same thing with the Three River - it's the
1\
Monongahela, the Allegheny, I forget the other one, in Pittsburgh, big water-quality
problems that they had to solve before those riverfronts would become attractive.
49
--
The one - in an urban watershed situation, the biggest thing to fix, hardest thing to fix, is not
real estate, it's water quality because water quality -
So you were really starting a step up here -
Yes.
- because water-quality issues had been taken care of
Water quality is not a big issue here. I have had other projects where we had water quality as
a big issue. They're thinking it's a land-use problem, I go, "No, no." Hey, real estate is a
money issue, you can fix it with money. Water quality, that's a much trickier issue because
usually it's nonpoint. It's a regulatory issue that takes years to fix. So I mean, the San
Antonio River we were blessed here in a lot of regards when we started this thing. It has
been and continues to be a -
t.-J~
-finaathbt\). had been all that integrated approach through this agency, I think.
Yeah, yeah. San Antonio River Authority has done a phenomenal job, a largely unheralded
phenomenal job. Really has - you start digging into the details, and there' s a lot of things
that the agency has done quietly that they really don't get any thanks for. That's kind of-not
being on the radar screen sometimes is a great thing, but to not have your good story told,
50
that's really kind of a sin.
So anyway. That's it.
(End of interview.)
51