The Austin Neighborhoods Council, which advocates for neighborhood associations, plans to submit a formal response to the audit in the coming days.
ANC President David King said he believes city planners should play a limited role in the neighborhood-planning process, and the residents who live in the planned areas should have the greatest say in shaping it.
“Fundamentally, we believe it’s important to have a bottom-up neighborhood process with the city,” he said. “I think we’re not achieving that goal in any significant way.”
Friends of Austin Neighborhoods, another organization that advocates for the city’s residents, is also drawing up a response to the audit in the next week or two.
FAN member Pete Gilcrease, who is helping draft recommendations for improving the planning process, said he wants to do away with contact teams.
“People that live in the neighborhood, they mean well, but they don’t have city planning experience,” he said.
Gilcrease said he would rather see professional city planners gather input from neighbors but ultimately make recommendations to City Council based on what they think is best for the city.
Dan Keshet, who attended his first NPCT meeting in his new Greater South River City neighborhood as a non-voting member in November, said he sees a flaw in the neighborhood-planning process.
“The idea of contact teams is to create more of a participatory, local democracy,” he said. “Instead of just having 11 people at City Council making a decision, you have people who have more intimate knowledge of the area, and you have a wider participation.”
The problem, he said, is limited participation and representation of the entire neighborhood prevents contact teams from truly serving in an active government role.
“If [participatory democracy] is the goal, and you want to be making these bodies mostly a body of decision makers, then I think that this audit comes into play a lot,” he said.