OCA Audit Reports

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Issued: May 2006

SUMMARY

This report presents the results of our audit of Long-Term Planning, which was approved by the Council Audit and Finance Committee as part of our office’s 2005 service plan.

Cities utilize several types of planning efforts including financial planning, planning for delivery of city services, and planning for the future. These planning efforts should be integrated with one another and directed by a consistent vision for growth. Such a vision, combined with a city’s planning efforts, can have many positive impacts. Our work focused on how the City of Austin coordinates and integrates its various planning efforts.

Our objectives were to determine how long-term planning is carried out and coordinated by City departments and external entities, and to compare Austin’s long-term planning to relevant criteria, including best practices in place in other cities.

The results of our work indicate that the City would benefit from a more comprehensive planning approach that is guided by an overarching vision for growth to ensure that all existing plans are working towards implementation of the Citywide vision. These efforts would also benefit from a greater degree of integration as well as greater accessibility to all stakeholders, including the general public.

The City has many initiatives such as: the City’s Smart Growth Initiative; participation in Envision Central Texas; the Downtown Planning Study; and the 2035 Town Centers Plan, that are all geared towards planning for future growth. Extensive planning efforts for specific functions take place in various departments throughout the City, including the City Manager’s Office. Additionally, the City has a comprehensive plan (the Austin Tomorrow Plan) that is over 25 years old, and it is unclear whether all of the goals have been accomplished. Attempts to update have failed.

However, the City’s planning efforts and initiatives are not unified by a consistent vision for growth for the City; and policies that incorporate such a vision for growth in order to guide planning efforts are not in place. This results in planning that is fragmented and articulated in numerous planning documents such as: Neighborhood Plans; Corridor Plans; the Austin Metropolitan Area Transportation Plan; Transportation Oriented Development Plans; Downtown plans such as the R/UDAT and the more recent planning study; and the City’s Capital Improvements Plan.

The effects of this fragmentation are that city staff and commission members do not have an updated and unified set of guidelines to follow when making decisions that effect the growth of the City. It is difficult for stakeholders to get information due to the lack of centralized information. Additionally, there are many opportunities within the process for plans to get overturned; resulting in decisions that go against previously approved long-term plans.

We have issued four recommendations that address adopting a vision for future growth to unify planning efforts and revisiting comprehensive planning to ensure that planning information is available to the public and aligned with the vision for future growth.

Download the entire text of our City of Austin Long-Term Planning audit report (Size: 976 KB) in Adobe Acrobat. You will need Adobe's Acrobat Reader to view these files. Or request a hard copy of this audit report, No. AU05101, by submitting this audit report request form.

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