Williamson County, Texas

FM 734, more commonly known as Parmer Lane, is a heavily traveled roadway, serving as a major thoroughfare between RM 1431 and SH 45. The puropse of the proposed expansion project is to reduce congestion and improve mobility by providing additional roadway capacity to meet future traffic demands from population growth and increased traffic volumes.

The Texas Department of Transportation Austin District is proposing these improvements to a 4.4-mile segment of Parmer Lane in northwest Austin and Cedar Park.

The proposed project would:

1. Expand Parmer Lane from four travel lanes to six travel lanes, three in each direction within the existing right of way.

2. Improve intersections with additional turn lanes, where necessary.

3. In cooperation with the city of Austin, improve water quality for stormwater runoff.

4. Provide sidewalks throughout the corridor and a dedicated bicycle/pedestrian path connecting Parmer Lane to the Brushy Creek Regional Trai.

For more information, visit http://www.txdot.gov and enter the search keywords FM 734 from Rm 1431.

The Texas Historical Association claims that Texas has at least 3,000 caves. Make that at least 3,001.

A cave—first incorrectly called a sinkhole—was discovered underneath Cambria Drive in the Woods of Brushy Creek neighborhood on Feb. 8, 2018.

While it was reported initially that a broken water pipe contributed to the collapse of the cave roof, there is no evidence of that. There was, however, a relatively thin cave roof under Cambria Drive where the water line trench had been dug.

Caves can be fun and mysterious, but they can be a bit disturbing when they’re right smack in the middle of a subdivision and reach underneath the yards of three homes.

Chief Appraiser of the Williamson Central Appraisal District (not part of county government) Alvin Lankford said the homes’ values will be impacted, but we may not know how much until and if the homes are sold. 

Mr. Lankford worked mightily helping these homeowners by discussing their valuations over the past several months. His decisions on values are restricted by the property tax code.

Cambria Cave was thought to consist of four chambers, but in early August, when the cave floor was cleared of debris, a fifth chamber extending into Ephraim Drive was discovered.

Cambrian Environmental (company name coincidental) geoscientists mapped the cave in February and measured it as approximately 230 feet long by 40 feet wide, with a maximum floor-to-ceiling height of about 23 feet in the largest chamber.

Only about 10 percent of the cave was affected by the collapse that occurred in the early morning hours. Neighbors said it sounded like a bomb blast.

Cave experts said that the closed cave is prehistoric, close to 40 million years old. When authorized personnel entered the cave, they found no evidence of previous human entry. They were the first!

The Texas State Historical Association reports that caves and sinkholes are distributed in karst areas covering about 20 percent of the state. Karst is terrain formed by the dissolution of bedrock.

After county and outside experts started entering the cave, sections of asphalt roadway and concrete curb on Cambria Drive began moving downward, and the sides to the entrance of the cave began crumbling. The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality approved a request from the county to allow our contractors to open the cave entrance 20 feet longer, making the entrance more stable for workers going inside.

The neighborhood where the cave is located was developed between 1986 and 1990, and there are other caves in this area. In 1986, during development of Ephraim Drive, which runs perpendicular to Cambria Drive, a cave was discovered but at the time, TCEQ didn’t exist and the developer just dynamited and filled the void, and then completed the road.

However, no previous knowledge of a cave at the Cambria location was known until now.

It required five months to conduct evaluations and pass TCEQ approvals to fill the cave per the designed plan. We now know about preservation of cave critters and water flow to the Edwards Aquifer – gone are the days of bomb-fill-go.<

August brings on the hard work of refining a county’s budget as the beginning of the fiscal year begins on Oct. 1. So, what does a county government need to spend taxpayers’ hard-earned cash on?

Your taxes pay for infrastructure, such as buildings to house county offices, county equipment, maybe utilities, airports, parks and museums; elections support so each of us can exercise our right to vote; and a court system with county attorneys, prosecutors, courtrooms, court administrative support, judges and juvenile justice services.

Other services you pay for include public safety, requiring fire stations, emergency medical services, law enforcement, jails, probation services and justices of the peace. A sizable portion of funds for transportation support — building and maintaining roads and bridges, drainage, on-site septic system planning and approvals and long-range highway planning — are also on the taxpayer.

Emergency management with hazardous materials mitigation, swift-water rescue, emergency conditions planning and response teams — including our 911 emergency network — is funded by taxpayers.

Your tax dollars also pay for public health, especially provisions for indigent and emergency conditions, solid waste management and social services.

And finally, you help fund community oversight with tax assessing and collecting, vehicle registrations, and recording and records retention of births, deaths, marriages, divorces, real estate property, contracts and real estate platting.

But beneath all this are support functions to keep a county running, such as facilities and fleet management and technical services for computers, radios, cameras and other electronic equipment and data.

Then there’s the landshark at the door — unfunded legislative mandates — requiring more people, more equipment, more work and more room but no funding to help counties do what the law requires.

The Texas Association of Counties conducts a biannual survey of county spending specific to those functions dictated by statutes but not funded by the state Legislature. They show that the costs to cover these between fiscal years 2011 and 2016 rose 20.9 percent.

One classic example of an unfunded mandate is the Michael Morton Act. Morton, who was found guilty of killing his wife in 1987, spent 25 years in prison until it was revealed that evidence corroborating his innocence had been suppressed.

The Michael Morton Act requires all evidence — including police reports and witness statements, regardless of whether the evidence is material to guilt or punishment — to be available at any time to the accused and all defense teams.

Longtime community volunteer Jane DiGuesaldo has served on numerous organizations from PTA when her children were in school to the Chamber of Commerce. Her interest in history has led to the establishment of an Oral History and Archives collection at the Round Rock Public LIbrary. She has been a member of the Williamson County Historical Commission and the Williamson County Sesquicentennial Commission.

She's a member of the Daniel Coleman Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution.

Described as a wealth of information, Jane has participated in historical groups and organizes excellent field trips to various historical sites. The Tonkawa Springs HOA Board member can be seen around town almost daily visiting multiple nursing homes and assisting seniors with transportation and other needs. The wife, grandmother, gardener and caregiver once owned and operated an automatic repair and body shop. As an Indiana transplant, Jane has been in the Round Rock area since 1974

Some of her biggest contributions to the area's history are a book she authored on Round Rock and numerous history columns she has written through the year for various publications, along with recording interviews of historically interesting people.

Jane looks forward to serving on the Williamson County Historical Commission once again and will be a tremendous asset to preserving and restoring the area's history. 

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Tina Steiner-Johnson has an impressive genealogical background as a descendant of Wade Sauls, Sr., an African American landowner at the turn of the century renowned locally for his successful farming techniques. Tina is an active member of the Round Rock Black History Organization and the Round Rock Preservation Committee.

Her interests and community support are varied. She is also a volunteer with the Ambassador and Operations Committee of Rodeo Austin.

The middle and high school teacher holds a Master's degree. Her combined interests, activities and talents will serve Wilco highly as a new member of the Williamson County Historical Commission. 

NOTE: The Williamson County Historical Commission is dedicated to the preservation of the history of the county. For more information, please visit http://www.williamson-county-historical-commission.org/default.htm

Long before Tuesday’s vote of 4-1 in Commissioners Court to end the Taylor-based T. Don Hutto Residential Center contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and CoreCivic, Inc. (formerly Corrections Corporation of America), much has been written in newspapers and more disseminated through social media concerning this facility.

Why do we have it in Williamson County? Well its history is a circuitous, disjointed story.

Jose Orta, past president of the League of United Latin American Citizens Council in Taylor and an advocate for immigrants, said, “This facility sits on land (Welch St.) originally owned cooperatively by Mexican workers before the 1950s. Denied a place in town to park their trucks during cotton season, the workers pooled their wages to purchase the land, which also became a place to congregate and hold fiestas. Part of this land became Hidalgo Park.”

Between the 1980s and 1990s, Orta said the workers were unable to pay the property taxes and donated the land to the local Catholic Church, St John Vianney, with the understanding that the land would be parish property. Orta explained that the Archdiocese actually owned the land, and in 1995, sold part of it for revenue to CoreCivic, a private prison company.

County records show that in 1995, CoreCivic sold the land to a new subsidiary, Taylor Detention Center Corporation, to build a private minimum-security prison. CoreCivic bought back the prison the following year at the end of July. 

In July 1997, the prison became the T. Don Hutto Correctional Facility, named after one of the company’s founders. According to Orta, in March 2004, CoreCivic announced it was closing TDH, citing low inmate demand in the region. This was one of several times TDH would be “mothballed” as CoreCivic sought prisoners to house.