Plans for Caps Over I-35 Survives Another Threat to Downsize

Council Member Ryan Alter made a plea last March that sounded like something from a Frank Capra movie. With the city’s Cap and Stitch plan at risk of being downsized, Alter beseeched his colleagues to think about Austin’s future. 

“This is not about what happens in the next four years or 10 years,” Alter said, his voice high and sharp. “This is about what happens in the next hundred years. … This is about 2050, 2070 – what our city is able to do for the next generation and the generation after that.”

Alter was defending a vision of the city that City Council approved one year ago, in May of 2025, when it promised $104 million to the Texas Department of Transportation as a down payment on the Cap and Stitch plan. Cap and Stitch is a project designed to beautify I-35 by placing three parks and two pedestrian paths over the Downtown stretch of the highway, after TxDOT buries it 30 feet below grade in its ongoing redesign. City leaders have repeatedly said the plan would let Austin erase the symbol of systemic racism that the highway represents, separating East Austin from the rest of the city. The $104 million promised by Council would pay only for the support columns for the project’s caps and stitches. Hundreds of millions more will be required at some later date to complete the project. 

The full Cap and Stitch plan escaped intact last week, after Mayor Kirk Watson withdrew a proposal that would have severely truncated it. The mayor proposed that the project be downsized by building a complete, but smaller, cap stretching across the highway near Third Street, and by constructing the support columns for a larger cap at 11th and 12th streets. Watson’s proposal would have cost about $50 million.    

Doubts about the Cap and Stitch program have grown since last summer, after the Trump administration announced that it was cutting a $105 million grant that would have paid for the support columns. The doubts grew louder after voters rejected the tax rate increase known as Prop Q in November. With the vote demonstrating Austinites’ anxiety over the city’s high cost of living, Council members Vanessa Fuentes, Mike Siegel, Krista Laine, and Marc Duchen joined Watson in questioning whether it was appropriate to allocate millions of dollars to beautifying I-35 as the city sank into a budget deficit and cut spending on social services. 

At the March 24 work session, it seemed likely that Cap and Stitch would be scaled back. But Council Member Fuentes went on maternity leave at the beginning of May, depriving Watson of a necessary vote to downsize the project. And when the mayor posted his proposal to the City Council message board, five Council members – Alter, José Velásquez, Chito Vela, Natasha Harper-Madison, and Zo Qadri – wrote that they remained committed to preserving what they called a “once-in-a-generation opportunity” to reconnect the east and west sides of the city. The Council members added that the centerpiece of Watson’s plan – the cap at Third Street – would have been too small to shield people from the noise and pollution of the highway underneath.  

Alter told the Chronicle that he and his colleagues didn’t make any grandiose effort to preserve the original vision for Cap and Stitch. “We just stuck together, [which] was really what it boiled down to,” he said. “We felt it was still worth it. We wanted to see these investments made. We believed they were investing in our future, and so we said, ‘Let’s move forward and fight for it.’”

Alter noted that Vela has also repeatedly defended an expansive vision for Cap and Stitch. At a work session last week, Vela joined Alter in invoking the future, describing an uncapped I-35 running through the center of Downtown as “a policy failure.” Although it may take years for Austin to find the money to finish Cap and Stitch, he said that it is necessary to hold open the possibility by committing the $104 million for the support columns now. 

“What we can do is plant the seed that a future City Council, with a different presidential administration, can hopefully harvest,” Vela said. “I don’t want to take that possibility away from my children and my grandchildren. So we’ll plant the seed and hopefully someone will harvest that sometime in the future.”

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