Early design plans for the River Road Aquatic Ecosystem Restoration reveals the project will likely include the removal of Avenue A and several low water crossings from Brackenridge Park.
The project has reached the 30% complete milestone in its design phase and is set to reach the 90% mark in the spring.
San Antonio River Authority staff, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, project engineers and landscape architects presented a first look at the project’s designs on Tuesday at a public meeting held at the DoSeum.
Avenue A is set to be replaced with a trail which will be set farther back from the San Antonio River, and bridges will be constructed at low water crossing removal sites to provide connectivity, said Danny Allen, a senior wildlife biologist at the corps’ Regional Planning and Environmental Center.
The project could also include improvements to Davis Park and the addition of more parking in the area, officials said Tuesday.
The project will see the creation of fishing access points, bird viewing locations and access controls, Allen said. The aim of these changes will be to: balance the sediment transport dynamics and restore the natural run sequences in the river; and to provide enough room to plant more native trees, Allen said.
“The primary habitat is strained and degrading,” Allen said. “We have stream degradation due to excessive erosion, and then on the flip side of that, we have stream degradation due to excessive sedimentation.”
The River Road Aquatic Ecosystem Restoration project is a $13 million, federally funded collaboration between Bexar County, the City of San Antonio, the San Antonio River Authority and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The project seeks to restore and maintain the native life in a half-mile section of the San Antonio River along River Road, stretching south from Mulberry Avenue toward U.S. Highway 281.
A feasibility study for the project, which took place from 2018 to 2020, found significant erosion issues on the river’s banks, stream degradation issues, and that several invasive species have moved into the area, including giant cane reeds, chinaberry trees and elephant ears. Part of this project will be the removal of these invasive species, Allen said.
Earlier this year, the project’s collaborators announced they would be seeking public input for the project as it entered into the design phase.
About 50 local residents who said they either live near River Road or frequent the area were present at Tuesday’s meeting voiced their concerns about possible native tree removal.
Since January 2022, the possible removal of some trees and the addition of a retaining wall to parts of the San Antonio River within Brackenridge Park as part of a city-led, voter-approved 2022 bond project has been hotly contested by a small group of residents who oppose the city’s bird mitigation efforts in this area and others who believe the river’s bend near Joske’s Pavillion is sacred.
Residents also experienced a shock that same month when trees along the banks of the San Antonio River’s Mission Reach segment were removed and mulched by the San Antonio River Authority as part of a systematic update to help control floodwaters.
For the River Road project, native trees are not planned to be uprooted unless it is for equipment access or safety reasons during construction, said Brian Mast, the river authority’s government affairs manager, adding this is not like the Mission Reach project in either scope or magnitude.
