One of this reporter’s disappointments of the last week was that, after (voluntarily) relinquishing my post as chair of the Central East Austin Neighborhood Planning Team, I cannot crow about how our neighborhood plan was supported unanimously by the Planning Commission on August 28. (Well, all right, I just did. Sorry.) See, these days “neighborhood planning” and “unanimous support” never appear in the same sentence. Which is why neighborhood planning is dead.
Okay, you’re right — it’s not completely dead. Maybe someday neighborhood planning will regenerate like the Treaty Oak and become an ornament of the policy landscape. Like it was four years ago, when policymakers couldn’t possibly hug the Neighborhood Tree hard enough and fast enough. They didn’t watch out for those nasty thorns.
Today, neighborhood planning has no friends. The neighborhoods that have gone through planning are, at best, exhausted (mine included), especially when they go through implementation battles that throw back on the table the issues that the plan was supposed to have resolved. The city’s organized neighborhood associations, and the umbrella Austin Neighborhoods Council, have been at best ambivalent, and often openly critical of the process.
Meanwhile, planning staff are crisp around the edges, and other city staff have balked at changing their standard procedures to match neighborhood plans. And the Planning Commission and City Council — sometimes with great reason — have not accepted that the neighborhood plans that hit their desk really represent the will of the people. So the kind of floor fights neighborhood planning was supposed to eliminate have, if anything, become more arcane and unpleasant.
Witness the Aug. 24 throwdown, latest in a long series, between Hyde Park Baptist Church and the Hyde Park neighbors. The church, as a major property owner, wants to be removed from the zoning district Hyde Parkers have created to implement their planning goals, a neighborhood effort that actually began before the city got involved. That would effectively mean the church would get to opt out of the neighborhood plan itself, which is in theory impossible, and which would be a neat trick for controversial projects. (My neighborhood plan, for example, covers the Bennett Tract and recommends development standards for that Eastside parcel that are different from those recently put in place by the City Council.)
And the church — whose own existing custom zoning district would be incorporated into the neighbors’ plan — handled its new challenge the old-fashioned way: It counted to four. Actually, it counted to six, since the Hyde Park neighbors would need six council votes to rezone HPBC against its wishes. They have only five, with Mayor Kirk Watson and Council Member Danny Thomas holding out as the council approved the Hyde Park plan on first reading only. Church and neighbors were set to meet, yet again, last week.
That’s just one of too many examples of neighborhood planning not doing what city and citizens, probably unrealistically, thought it should. Plus, it takes a long time and costs a lot of money, resources the city can now ill-afford to squander. So staff have rolled out a third incarnation of How We Do It In Austin, hoping this variant of neighborhood planning will make someone happy. (Just so you know: NP1 was when individual neighborhoods got together and applied, as did Hyde Park. NP2 was when the city assigned planners to neighborhoods on its own schedule, which is how my neighborhood’s was done.)
Let’s Go to Plan C
In NP3, there will be no neighborhood planning teams, chairs, or regular meetings. Instead, there will be a survey and three workshops where city staffers get input and insight from neighbors in a planning area. (Yes, you can call them “charrettes.”) Before and during the process, the city’s Neighborhood Academy will offer classes to neighbors on how zoning works, how to organize themselves, and so on. In between meetings, the staff will develop the land use, transportation, and urban design plan for the neighborhood — the three areas covered by NP2 plans. NP1 plans could and did cover the whole range of city services, which is something neighborhoods still want, so NP3 plans will also come with service plans that tie the neighborhood goals back to the budget, capital investments, and service structures. Whadda concept.
Back when it was first conceived, oh, six years ago now, Austin neighborhood planning was supposed to come up not only with better plans, but with new and better ideas for how the city should do its thing, for which the proposed system doesn’t allow much room. And it’s been a key tenet so far that staff and planning teams need to bring everyone — even the people they don’t like — to the table and try to keep them there through the planning process. And the proposed system doesn’t provide a mechanism for that. (Not that NP1 and NP2 were very successful on either of these measures.) What the city is now contemplating is a perfectly good way to do a citywide comprehensive plan on the installment plan. Neighborhood planning is something else — or it was back when its seed was first planted.
The Usual Suspects, cont.
If the Hyde Parkers can drag their deal out until November, Mayor-in-Waiting Gus Garcia could be their sixth vote. We don’t know about Leslie Cochran, who having no fixed address would likely be left off the city’s notification list, or Jennifer Gale, whose name should simply be engraved on the voting booths themselves to save the cost of ink, or the other two announced mayoral candidates.
As for people who are taken seriously, Council Member Beverly Griffith is still weighing her options and still very much interested in getting Garcia or someone else to sign off on her platform. Former SOS board chair Robin Rather is still not running, and former SOS board chair Mark Tschurr is still talking about running to further his jihad against Smart Growth corporate subsidies, even though SOS has been a crucial player in backing Smart Growth as a whole. This might make Tschurr a half-issue candidate.
Former (as in back in the 1970s) Council Member Bob Binder — who last ran for mayor in 1981 against Carole Keeton McClellan-now-Rylander — has also made noise, though In Fact Daily reported that when Binder asked über-fundraiser Alfred Stanley to be his aide-de-dinero, Stanley (a Garcia supporter) turned him down flat. And then there’s KVET radio star and Geezinslaw Sammy Allred, who announced his intention to run last week in a KVET press release, which says he’s serious although many observers (including Garcia) think he’s not. We won’t know until the last possible moment, since the KVET release says federal rules preclude Allred from filing officially until October 8. 
This article appears in August 31 • 2001.