Tagged: Imagine Austin

"Imagine Austin" is closer to becoming a reality.

Last June, the Austin City Council passed the Imagine Austin Comprehensive Plan, which will guide city development for the next thirty years. The plan is to make Austin more connected and compact.

Now, people who live in South Austin are invited to weigh-in on how the South Austin Combined Neighborhood Plan is implemented.

An admittedly wonky but far-reaching undertaking at the City of Austin is getting started – and the question of lobbyists’ roles in what happens next is putting pressure on the Austin City Council.

All development in Austin is governed by city code – zoning, land uses and just about everything conceivable in the built environment. The Imagine Austin Comprehensive Plan – the recently-passed blueprint for the city’s long-term growth – calls for a revision of the city’s dense, endlessly-amended development code, and in December the council obliged. Late last year, it passed a resolution calling for an 11-member advisory group to craft changes and revisions to the code.

Austin City Council members voted unanimously early this morning to adopt the Imagine Austin Comprehensive Plan, a blueprint for the city's growth in decades to come.

A public hearing on the plan lasted past 1 a.m.

The Imagine Austin plan was created from thousands of ideas submitted by residents about how Austin should develop over the next 30 years.

The Austin City Council meets today. And in a respite from the long slogs of recent meetings, the council faces a comparatively light 60 item agenda – but likely multiple hours of public testimony on the adoption of the Imagine Austin Comprehensive Plan.

Item 58 is calls for a public hearing and possible adoption of Imagine Austin, a long-term plan for the city’s growth and development which has been in the works since 2009. You can view the plan here.

The hearing won’t start until at least 6 p.m. this evening; the last time the council solicited testimony on the plan, it received four hours’ worth.

New Contracts Consolidate State Data

The Texas Department of Information Resources announced it has signed new contracts consolidating the state’s data management and IT operations, dumping an existing contract with IBM.

The largest contract goes to a Dallas-based unit of the Xerox Corporation, known as ACS State and Local Solutions. In a press release on its website, the company says this is the largest project of its kind in the country.

Under an $848 million, eight-year contract, Xerox will help the Texas Department of Information Resources (DIR) streamline IT operations of state agencies by refreshing technology and combining operations from 28 separate facilities to two centralized data centers. The transformation will reduce the cost of running multiple data centers, and improve security and disaster recovery capabilities.

Think about corporate retreats, and you’ll likely envision team-building exercises. But no zip-lining or “trust falls” are on the Austin City Council’s retreat agenda today – just policy planning.

This morning, the council is decamping to the Palmer Events Center for a “policy retreat work session,” a chance to meet and discuss upcoming topics and initiatives. Five topics are on the agenda:

• Using the upcoming Comprehensive Plan “for policy guidance and planning,” a topic from council member Laura Morrison.
• Fostering collaboration with counties and school districts in the city limits, sponsored by council member Kathie Tovo.
• A “review of past and existing City youth programs,” also from Tovo.
• “Community public safety goals and resource allocation priorities,” from council member Bill Spelman.
• A discussion of the structuring of council committees –  groups tasked with delving into specific topics like public health or city finances – as proposed by council member Chris Riley.

The City of Austin has been working on a long range blue print for years that it calls “Imagine Austin.” Now, city staffers are extending a deadline until November 14 for you to use this online tool that lets you rank eight city priorities by dragging color blocks from the “idea farm” onto a list.

These are the eight issues you get to prioritize:

Austin City Council members will hear from Austinites this afternoon on the Imagine Austin Plan Framework. Imagine Austin is the city's comprehensive roadmap to what Austin's will grow up to look like by 2039. As SXSW crowds swamp Austin this weekend, take note; then imagine five SXSW conferences going on all at one time and you'll get a sense of the 750,000 additional people planners expect Austin to absorb by 2039.