Should Spring Hill pay $2 million for a road project in the next three years that could spurn more development in the long run?
That is the question the Spring Hill Board of Mayor and Alderman will decide on Monday night when it votes on a non-binding letter of intent to form a public-private partnership between it, Crestwood Partners and Cornerstone Land Company to extend Rice Road by up to 1.6 miles.
The road sits on Spring Hill’s southeast side and would connect Jim Warren Road to Kedron Road.
Crestwood and Cornerstone will build the road, while the city would pay for its utilities, including a 12-inch water line and 18-inch gravity sewer line, with costs not to exceed $2 million. Crestwood and Cornerstone will pay for construction, roadway lighting and right-of-way acquisition, which will make up the rest of the potentially more than $8 million project.
The benefit to Crestwood and Cornerstone, both residential developers, is obvious. Crestwood owns 133.82 acres east of Rice Road, while Cornerstone owns approximately 182.3 acres west of it, and the new roadway would give them access enough to develop.
“These properties do not have the road access required for the type of developments that each company intends to develop,” Alderman Jonathan Duda said.
If the Rice Road project, which has been planned since the Spring Hill Major Thoroughfare Plan of 2007, is built within the required three years of a definitive agreement passing, several residential developments would be able to get in the pipeline perhaps years sooner than otherwise.
The benefit to Spring Hill is important but more nuanced.
“The benefit to the city is the city will install larger water and sewer infrastructure to accommodate development in the entire area, and development would construct a collector road that will be needed in the future as a key road network connection in our Major Thoroughfare Plan,” Duda said.
Crestwood has also agreed to deed the city 24.8 acres of property adjacent to the project, south of Rutherford Creek. But that is not contingent upon the passage of this resolution.
Alderman Amy Wurth, perhaps the only hard opponent of the resolution on the BOMA at this point, sees it differently.
“It will get done without us,” she said. “At some point we have to draw a line in the sand. It is different than Reserve Road, the last time we had a public-private partnership. We had multiple partners, and the connection of Port Royal Road to Kedron Road was a high priority.”
Each January, the BOMA retreats and creates a list of that year’s and the next four years’ priorities. Wurth said the Rice Road extension was 20th on the list this in 2016.
“This was the last road on our priority list,” she said. “I don’t see that all of a sudden it jumps to number one.
“We all want roads quickly … but we have other roads utilized by most folks who pay taxes in Spring Hill that we need first, such as Buckner Lane and Thompson’s Station Road. With the new school coming in, we have priorities we haven’t even addressed yet.”
She ceded the points that the project’s proponents make: it is a way to get Rice Road, important for future development, done now, and in a way that ensures a sewer line capable of containing that future development.
“But as great as this sounds, it will still cost the city nearly $2 million for a project that is not a high priority and that would take care of itself in the coming years,” Wurth said.
The money for the project would come out of the Sewer Fund, not the General Fund, and thus will not explicitly take money away from higher-priority projects.
Mayor Rick Graham said he saw it as not the binary issue of “do it now for $2 million or later for free” as it has been framed.
“I would suggest that it’s a much more complicated issue,” he said. “Up until now, the BOMA has rated it a low priority. However, that was always assuming it was city dollars that completed all of it.
“The city would need to evaluate it with the potential contributions from the developer, and determine if, at the reduced cost to the city, it becomes a higher priority than other roads. In other words, if we were going to spend X number of dollars to build that road, what could we get for that money, and where would it be best spent? What we may find is that it still ranks as a low priority, and therefore the city should wait for private development. However, we might find that for the reduced cost, it’s worth it economically to have the road constructed sooner, so that it encourages more development in that area.”
He said that in January discussion will be had over Rice Road when they do their annual prioritizing.
Zach Harmuth covers Spring Hill and Williamson County for BIGRMedia. Reach him at [email protected].
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