Downtown Commission wants updated downtown plan draft in six months; Council vote next summer

The Downtown Commission wants the city to approve an updated version of the Downtown Austin Plan by next summer, with a draft document expected early next year to allow the commission to make needed budget recommendations next spring.

At a special meeting last month, the commission considered how to best move forward with the new version of the 10-year plan that expired in 2021 and is seen as out of date for the current state of downtown Austin. A pair of snapshots from the recommendation note that since 2010, the downtown population has grown by two-thirds to ​​15,360, while the number of residential units has more than doubled to 10,300.

With major projects such as Project Connect, the Interstate 35 expansion and cap-and-stitch efforts and the reconstruction of the Austin Convention Center set to have a major impact on the downtown core, commissioners considered asking City Council for an aggressive six-month timeline for adoption of the updated plan. As another example of the many intersecting interests at play in the downtown core, the recommendation also noted more than a dozen existing city planning documents that would need to be incorporated into the revised Downtown Austin Plan.

City staff said they were best prepared to deliver a draft in 12 months, with adoption six months later.

Commissioner Spencer Schumacher pushed for a timeline of up to two years for the revised plan. He said a quick turnaround would prevent it from including specific details of the caps and stitch planned for I-35, or any considerations for major infrastructure projects that could be covered by a bond proposal package expected to go before voters in 2026.

“Six months is fairly aggressive given what the Planning Department has to work on with all of the big Council items that have come through – which, a lot of them are very important in downtown. I don’t necessarily want to disrupt that work,” he said. “I love that it’s focusing on these other plans, but a lot of these are probably gonna come after that six-month period, like the Great Streets Master Plan. We’re also not gonna have the Project Connect design decision until probably late 2025, which will include possibly one additional station in different alignments in downtown.”

Chair August Harris said waiting more than a year to update a document that is already out of date would leave the city without certainty from the commission and Council about the priorities concerning downtown growth.

“Is it the tail wagging the dog or is the plan being written to satisfy all the other plans that are going through?” he said. “One of the advantages of … moving as quickly as possible is that we want as a commission to be in a better position – and staff might be in a better position to make funding requests in order for us to get that into our budget requests in March to the Council.”

As a compromise, Schumacher suggested an amendment for the six-month draft, with Council considering the related ordinance in one year.

The commission also added amendments from Commissioner David Carroll to include the city’s urban design guidelines as one of the guiding documents, as well as including equity as one of the priorities for the updated plan.

“I would encourage some language in here about using equity as a lens as part of this process because the original downtown plan was so inequitable,” he said. “There’s multiple examples, but it calls for preserving the residential character of northwest district downtown, while at the same time also calling for the Rainey Street district to be turned into high-density residential use.”