The Austin American Statesman featured an article about a greenway and trail planned for southeast Travis County. The idea is to create a greenway that would "connect the dots" of existing parks and public property and thereby "transform the southeast end of Travis County." The 21-mile greenway would run along Onion Creek and eventually offer a kayak launch, picnic and play fields, camping, and wildlife viewing areas.
Not mentioned in the article is the value this greenway will provided for interconnecting the habitat and improving the watershed. They did explain that a buy out of flood prone properties will be completed by the Corps of Engineers. This initiative was made possible with the approval of park and open space bonds by Travis County voters, but money from a variety of other entities will be deployed over the next few years to realize the dream.
This endeavor, along with Walk For a Day Trail extending from Zilker to Kyle, are elements that could become part of a network that achieves significant ecologic, recreation, economic, and transportation improvements to counterbalance the impacts of urbanization.
San Marcos has an ideal situation for creating a greenway system having secured some of the "dots" (parks) to be connected along our watershed features. If we can secure the greenways along the Blanco and San Marcos rivers and Sink and Purgatory creeks, we could see our dots connect to others across Central Texas. Such a system of greenways would be an extremely important part of the long term health of our community and give us another reason to be pleased and proud to call this place home.
