Issues ranging from noise and litter to safety and economics arose during the Guadalupe County Commissioners Court hearing for the festival permit for the 2019 Float Fest, but it was concerns about traffic congestion that led the commissioners to deny the permit.
“That has really been the hinge point of the conversation in previous years,” Guadalupe County Judge Kyle Kutscher noted during the Thursday morning hearing.
Guadalupe County had paid for a traffic study to be conducted at last year’s Float Fest. At the hearing, traffic engineer Rene Arredondo presented the results of the study. He noted that the study was mostly to collect data.
“We were out there for a few days to observe,” Arredondo said. “It was a very big event.”
The traffic study took average daily traffic volume counts along Scull Road during the festival and compared those figures to average weekends, Arredondo said. The Friday before the festival, there were 3,000 cars on Scull Road, compared to about 800 on an average day, he said. The Saturday of festival weekend, there were between 11,000 and 12,000 cars on the road. Traffic subsided somewhat on Sunday and again on Monday, according to Arredondo.
“The issue there is can that roadway handle that traffic?” he said. “It’s a two-lane, narrow road, no shoulders.”
Engineers conducted a field visit to the festival site on the Saturday of the festival to see what traffic control was like.
“It was very well controlled,” Arredondo said. “... It seemed to be efficient. … Detrimental impacts to the roadway, I would say, were very minimal.”
He noted that traffic queues did build up but dissipated quickly.
Arredondo said that festival organizers could widen the driveways to accommodate the wider turning radius for buses entering the festival grounds and consider offsite parking.
“If we can minimize these queues even more so, I think it allows emergency vehicles to enter and exit the site more expediently,” he said, noting that the traffic conditions last year, if repeated, could cause difficulties for emergency vehicles but fixing those conditions would be easy.
Precinct 1 Commissioner Greg Seidenberger asked Arredondo if there would be a problem for emergency vehicles getting to residences near the festival grounds.
“Based on what I saw, no,” Arredondo said, noting that emergency vehicles could use the opposing lanes to go around any traffic lines. “And it’s a very low-dense residential area, too.”
Joe Stallone, lawyer for Float Fest organizer Marcus Federman, said that many of those concerns were addressed in the 2019 application. Organizers intended to clear the brush from entrances and exits to make them wider, the emergency lane would be widened to allow quicker access, and tubing trucks would be on site days earlier to prevent backups caused by trucks with a wide turning radius.
During public comments, Cottonseed Run resident Dixie Waldrip said that when she was trying to get home the Saturday of the festival, she encountered traffic congestion that was not mentioned in the study Arredondo presented.
“I decided to go the back way, Highway 80 and River Road,” she said. “Traffic was backed up.”
She said it took her 30 minutes to get from San Marcos River Ranch to Cottonseed Run — a distance that Google Maps puts at 0.9 miles.
“What I saw in that 30 minutes were large buses, I assume campers, tour buses, party buses, that were so large that people, if they were in a pickup truck, would have to pull over to the shoulder of the road,” Waldrip said. “... There is backup, and I can attest that if there was an emergency at that time it was blocked both ways and no one could get to our neighborhood.”
Michelle Rumbaut, who lives on Cottonseed Run, said that her husband is a doctor on call the weekend of Float Fest, and if he got an emergency call to get to the operating room, traffic from the festival could delay him. She also experienced the traffic backup that Waldrip discussed on the side of Scull Road coming from River Road in Martindale.
“I got stuck for 20 minutes,” she said. “I have photos of the logjam there. … It wasn’t stop-and-go — it was just stopped.”
Rumbaut said she found out that the traffic jam was caused by 18-wheelers coming in to the festival, an issue that Federman said would be resolved for 2019 by making sure the trucks followed the recommended route and came in early in the morning.
The commissioners went through the specific sections of the state law governing festival permits and had no qualms with the Float Fest application until the section of the law that considers whether the festival would create “substantial danger of congestion and the disruption of other lawful activities in the immediate vicinity of the festival.”
Precinct 4 Commissioner Judy Cope noted that the traffic study showed significant additional traffic the weekend of the festival — and that didn’t include the traffic coming from Highway 80.
“No matter how well you prepare, no matter what, people are people. Eventually there’s going to be a big problem,” she said.
Seidenberger argued that any public event creates traffic congestion on nearby roads and argued that the changes Stallone and Federman mentioned would mitigate the problems. He also said he did not think the congestion created a “clear and present danger.”
Precinct 2 Commissioner Drew Engelke pointed out that for other public events, such as football games or other traffic interruptions, alternate routes are available, whereas there is not an alternate route to access Cottonseed Run.
Kutscher said that he was not convinced that the traffic would not pose a problem.
“It’s just everybody saying, ‘It’s not as bad as I thought it would be,’” he said.
Seidenberger pointed out that there was not an emergency situation that was affected negatively by any traffic congestion at the festival last year. Kutscher asked what would happen if there had been one.
“People sit in traffic for an hour and if nothing bad happens, it’s an inconvenience,” Kutscher said, but a 15-minute delay in an emergency situation is more serious.
A motion to approve the festival permit failed 2-3, with Seidenberger and Precinct 3 Commissioner Jim Wolverton voting for the motion and Engelke, Kutscher and Cope voting against. The motion to deny the permit, based on the “substantial danger of congestion and the disruption of other lawful activities” section of state law, passed 3-2.
