Stand at Lakeway City Park today and the view east runs across Hurst Harbor Marina, a working boatyard that has looked more or less the same since 1978: covered slips, dry stack storage, boats coming and going. Within the next few years, that same sightline will include something else. A six-story condominium building, 146 units, rising 75 feet above what is currently a marina parking lot and boat ramp.
The city is also, separately, in the middle of redesigning the park itself. Both projects have been years in the making. Only one of them is still open for public comment, and it closes this week.
What's Actually Changing at the Park
Lakeway City Park is the largest single project in the city's 2024 parks bond, a $22 million package that 68 percent of Lakeway voters approved. The construction estimate for the park has narrowed as the design has progressed. The original 2024 concept put it at nearly $11 million. A more recent city estimate brought that to $10.6 million. The engineering firm's own project scope, filed alongside a $1.02 million design services contract awarded to Dunaway in November 2025, now budgets construction at roughly $9.5 million.
The plan that's emerged from that design work includes an improved skate park, a new beginner bike skills park, a boardwalk trail, new overlook platforms, and additional pickleball courts. Pillar Design Studios is handling the skate park specifically, working alongside Dunaway on the rest.
The skate park upgrade has a specific, named champion. Chase Hop, a professional BMX rider who has lived in Lakeway for three years, told City Council in January 2024 that the existing skate park at the Lakeway Swim Center is "really difficult to ride, even for someone on a professional level." He said there's a real need for something built for a wider range of skill levels, and the new City Park facility is meant to answer that.
The Comment Period Doesn't Cover What You'd Expect
The city held a community planning meeting to walk residents through the Dunaway and Pillar Design Studios concepts. The meeting notice was specific about scope: feedback at that session would focus on the skate park and bike skills park portion of the plan, not the boardwalk, not the overlook platforms, not the pickleball courts.
The online feedback form that followed carries the same limits, and it closes at the end of the day on Wednesday, September 30, the same week this piece is running. Residents who want to weigh in on ramp height or beginner trail features have a real, current window to do it. Residents curious about what the new overlook platforms will actually overlook won't find that question on the form, because the answer to that question was decided somewhere else, a year earlier, by a different city process entirely.
What's Rising Next Door
Hurst Harbor Marina sits at 16405 Clara Van Street. City planning documents describe it as bordered by green space to the north, residential lots to the east and south, and Lakeway City Park to the west. Rip Miller and his wife bought the marina in February 2022. In July 2025, Miller was appointed to the city's Board of Adjustments, the body that hears zoning variance requests and appeals.
The redevelopment plan Miller brought forward, The Creek at Hurst Harbor, covers about 27 acres at the western end of Clara Van Drive. It calls for 146 condo units at a maximum height of 75 feet, three stories of underground parking, and new restaurant and retail space. For scale, the Lakeway Resort and Spa tops out at 98 feet, so The Creek would sit lower than the resort but far taller than anything currently on the marina site.
Miller made his case to council directly, arguing the project would replace what he called an unsightly, run-down marina operation with something better, and that it would end up, in his words, "drastically improving the view corridors from Lakeway City Park."
Not everyone agreed on the fit. Rachel Mills, a Lakeway resident who also sits on the city's Comprehensive Plan Steering Committee, told council she was "respectfully requesting for you to vote no on the change of this FLUM," arguing the land wasn't zoned for a project of that scale. More than 20 people spoke against the plan at the October 20, 2025 council meeting. Council member Kelly Brynteson, who cast the lone dissenting vote on the zoning change, said the park's character mattered to her regardless of who lives nearby, calling it a place worth protecting even for people who don't live in Lakeway.
Council approved the future land use amendment unanimously and the zoning change 6-1. The approval came with two conditions: short-term rental units can't exceed 10 percent of the development, and the developer had to deliver a revised traffic impact analysis within 180 days, putting that deadline at roughly mid-April 2026, about five months before this year's park feedback window opened.
Two Clocks, Set at Different Times
Line the two timelines up and the sequence becomes clear. The marina's zoning and land use questions were settled in October 2025. The park's design contract wasn't awarded until the following month. The public meeting on the park's skate park and bike features happened this year, well after the building next door had already cleared its major approvals.
That means the overlook platforms in the park's conceptual plan, the ones meant to give visitors new vantage points along the boardwalk, are being designed with the marina's future footprint already fixed. The view they'll eventually frame isn't a variable in this fall's public process. It was set by a separate vote, on a separate calendar, before most residents were asked to weigh in on anything at the park at all.
What You Can Still Actually Weigh In On
If you use Lakeway City Park now, the open door is narrow but real. The feedback form covers the skate park and the bike skills park, the two elements Hop and other riders pushed hardest for. It closes September 30. The boardwalk, the overlook platforms, and the pickleball courts are part of the same conceptual plan, but they're not what this particular round of public input is asking about.
The marina's traffic study, due back to council under the terms of last October's approval, is a separate document worth tracking if you want to understand how The Creek at Hurst Harbor will actually change traffic on Clara Van Street once it's built out. That's a city council matter, not a parks department one, and it moves on its own schedule.
Two projects, two agencies, two comment periods that never quite lined up. That's not unusual in how cities build things. It's just rarely visible from the ground, until you're standing at the edge of a new boardwalk looking at a building that was already decided before the boardwalk had a design.
If you're the kind of Lakeway resident who tracks what's happening at your own park closely enough to read this far, Ivy Residential Group would like to hear what you make of it. Reach out anytime to talk about what's changing in the neighborhood, no transaction required.
