City Council Takes a Field Trip

The newest incarnation of the City Council resumes public brainstorming this week, although the next regular meeting is not scheduled until Jan. 26. This week’s interim is devoted to two Council procedural workshops (up the road at UT’s AT&T Center on Wednesday and Thursday, 9am), and a special-called meeting (Wednesday, 4pm) for a staff update on the CodeNEXT process, at which Council will be joined by the appointed Code Advisory Group that had been working on developing the code during 2016.

Although, in late December on the Coun­cil message board, Mayor Steve Adler laid down some policy markers concerning Downtown projects and music industry matters (“New City Council, New Battles,” Jan. 6), little of that looks to surface in this week’s work. The workshops are primarily devoted to Council/staff process matters, and the CodeNEXT meeting will address next steps in the code development process.

This CodeNEXT installment is specifically focused on public outreach still to come, after the initial draft of the new Land Use Code is released (currently scheduled for Jan. 30). Five broad “themes” have been selected as underlying the new code: Process and Procedures; Character; Envi­ron­ment; Mobility; and Affordability. In a document released Jan. 6 (also designated a draft) – “CodeNEXT Outreach and Public Engagement Plan” – staff and consultants have reported the steps they plan to take to include as many people as possible, and frankly to overcome public inanition. “We are aware,” the authors write, “that very few residents are willing or able to read the new draft code in its entirety and attend meetings in Downtown Austin.” (Austinites generally don’t attend to such arcana until a zoning case hits their neighborhood – that’s the moment to pull the torches and pitchforks out of the broom closet.)

In that context, there will be several strategies and tools intended to address varying levels of public interest. City media staff is creating an introductory video, laying out the whole process, and the CodeNEXT website (already in operation: www.austintexas.gov/codenext) will be regularly revised and updated. The “Survey” will be a brief online or in-person series of questions intended to gather quick input of land use preferences from folks just checking in on the process. The “Code Comment Tool” will allow more extensive commentary on the draft Code itself (requiring registration for accountability). The “Mapping Tool” will be linked to the map to be produced later this year, indicating actual land uses proposed across the city – those responses will be depersonalized, in the expectation that people will most want to comment about their own neighborhoods or even their own properties. Finally, the “Group Position Papers” will enable collective commentary from particular interest groups, those with a more intense level of interest in specific land use matters. There will also be an “Outreach Toolkit” available for neighborhood associations and other groups, along the lines of the Budget Toolkits distributed during those annual preparations.

All of this accumulating commentary will be provided to the boards and commissions considering the draft code, and be made available as well to council members, who will begin to review various pieces of the draft in April.

Strategic Planning

The other projects this week are Council’s off-site workshops, aka (in the staff materials distributed to Council) the “Strategic Planning Workshop.” In the wonky conception provided by Accenture consultants, the two-days of six-hour sessions will include (Wednesday) discussions of “Oppor­tunities & Challenges for City’s Strategic Planning Efforts” as well as the slightly less abstract “Citywide Priorities and Indicators of Progress.” Day 2 (Thursday) is said to be devoted to “Using Governance Levers to Improve Alignment to Citywide Priorities,” which in English appears to mean “working with staff to get things done.”

Presumably, the actual substance of the workshops will be brief staff presentations on various topics generating Council responses and discussions, although the agenda indirectly acknowledges the serious risk of collective eye-glazing: “Be fully present when at the table; please handle email or texts away from the table.” Those of us absent from the table will be on our own, texting like mad.

Whole Lotta Process to Process

This article appears in January 13 • 2017.