Travis County Commssioners Court
June 29, 2004
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Item 27
We had planned to call up at 9:30 number 27. That is to receive presentation from the vision central Texas. If I知 guessing right you would be lucky to go at 11:30. I expect -- I don't expect it to take long but...
>> good morning.
>> my in this case is mark hazelwood, I知 an executive and I知 joined today by jim walker who is the director of central Texas indicator's project. We're here this morning as the interim co-chairs of envision central Texas board of directors a project that the court through its generosity, foresight and wisdom became an investor, sponsor in the principle purpose of our meeting with you this morning is one of accountability with you to share with you what we've learned and also to convey a substantial amount of information that hopefully will be helpful to you as you deliberate on an array of different endeavors. We were supposed to be joined this morning by judge ronny mcdonald who had been the interim chair following the death of neal kaserk and judge mcdonald was unable to be here. He had a death in the family and he wanted to convey to you your his warmest apologies for not being able to be here. We would like to give a brief presentation and then convey some information to you and then we would be able to answer questions either now or in the future. There's supposed to be a presentation that is now showing up there. I知 not sure how to activate it.
>> do we have a presentation? There it is.
>> all right. Going through this, I would like to just start off talking just a little bit about the beginning because establishing the context I think helped provide insights on the importance of this project and maybe a quick reminder since we haven't addressed the court on this issue for some time, but as you may recall in the spring of 2001, a group of people came together, recognizing that we needed to find a better way of planning for the future. There's a tendency for us to fragment issues, to sub optimize the use of resource and to take a local resident regional view, so we thought what this was resulting in was a sub optimization of resources that were available to us and so we decided to go and find out whether other communities addressed these problems in a different way. What we found in our research was what we needed to be doing was to be looking at issues from a multifaceted point of view rather tan single issues, that we needed to think regionally often time, not just local, that we need to have a longer term planning rather than thinking of things only in the short-term, that we needed to involve the community, so there was a consensus of public support, and then to try to provide some mechanisms for continuity of leadership because as we had looked at other planning projects we found that once the plan was adopted, put on the shelf, it really never generated a lot of value. We held a community meeting in the spring of 2001. We decided not to create a plan but rather a vision for the future that didn't focus on recommendations for any particular thing, but tried to understand the values and aspirations of people in this region and to see if there was a continuity of interest that would provide some insights as we were making decisions for the future. A group of 8 individuals was selected. They quickly put themselves out of work by forming a nonprofit corporation. The selection of a board, we had an outside consultant that provided assistance to us, and then we went about fund raising and you were one of our investor, we raised over $2 million and that has been expended over the last year or so. We did intentionally involve a very broad array of different stakeholder groups throughout the five county region. We believe this may have been the first truly regional approach to addressing in a multifaceted way planning-related issues. As I mentioned, we weren't intending to develop a plan but rather a vision for the future that might be guiding and provide a framework for decision making going forward. We had resources provided by 23 to 25 sponsors ranging from government to private enterprise. And we'll talk about, we had a significant involvement in both the public and elected officials. One of the things that we used in our approach was a scenario planning approach, we knew we couldn't devine (d) fine future with certainty and there were decisions made over time and we really approached this from the standpoint of things that could logically happen or things that may want to happen over time and could understand the implications of those. We started off recognizing that in developing a vision, we needed to consider the interaction between land use transportation and a number of other factor, economic development, social equity, the environment and so on, an so these pictures kind of depict how we went about studying different types of issues. I won't linger on these. Please ask me to slow down if I知 going faster than you want. Engaged the public on numerous occasions and literally had thousands of people across the five-county region participate. This slide shows the six different public opportunities that began in may 2002 with a number of focus groups followed closely there after by telephone surveys that were taken in each of the five counties that were part of this project. You go on through the workshop, original survey and then the presentation of raw survey data where members of this court were invite and many people were able to at ten and see that. We undertook a number of public workshops which were quite interesting as we brought people together from different political points of the political spectrum, different passionate views about different issues and they came together and kind of worked through some of the visioning project looking into the future and using a scenario approach, we both engaged in land use modeling and transportation an factored in economic development and a number of other things and were able to kind of produce what things might look like if decisions were made a certain way out in the future. We looked at the existing conditions and extrapolation of history on kind of a course of business as usual, we developed several other scenarios that focused on different transportation land use patterns which I won't describe here in detail, some of them follow just existing transportation corridor, some thought to build the smaller towns throughout the five-county region and try to colocate jobs and housing in those areas and nonof these were really developmented as an optimal plan. They were constructed to include a lot of different choices and then as we went through the survey process, we broke down the different components to understand what people really wanted and asked them to look at scenarios overall. We had workshops which we intentionally located throughout the region, and by the way, the board has met in each of the five counties on a rotating basis again to try to involve people in the community as well as elected officials along with our board members. We did conduct a regional survey which you hopefully may have participated in or seen. There were four scenarios from the different workshops. We distributed 650,000 of these surveys throughout 31 different publications and locations throughout the region. We also were able to collect website-related information an permitted on line voting and had a questionnaire with 18 different points on it an received over 12,500 responses which was statistically significant, and i'll touch on that in a second. Now, this was the -- what the survey looked like, one of the things that we learned is that regardless of your political views or what issue you were interested in, there's an overwhelming agreement that we ought to be planning our future rather than it plan us. You can see that of the surveys that we got a good mix across the five counties, actually with Travis County representing about 65% of the total population, about 70% of the total responses were from Travis County. You can also see by this map the participation, the darker the shading, the higher the percentage relative to population participated in the survey, it's a little bit misleading. Clearly a lot of in the sense that if you look in the middle of Austin, that dark shading represented a higher percentage of a much greater population than would have been the case in the western part of bass trop county. What it did show, however, in each of the five counties there was a fairly significant amount of participation. We also were concerned on our own line that we might have people trying to stuff the ballot box, so to speak, an so we put in place mechanisms that allowed us to go through the 6,000 different inputs we received on line and excluded those where we had multiple voting. There's a number of results that come from this i've just select add few of these that were weighted results an you can see this kind of reflected on the different scenarios how people felt about it. I don't think that we came away from this saying that there was just one approach, however. What it really confirmed is that people had a wide array of different aspirations an different things would work for different folks in different parts of these regions, these county, one thing that was interesting, though, is that we did have fairly high level of consensus about what are the most important issues and those won't be surprising to you because you hear them all the time. Transportation congestion, air quality, cost of living, job, outside Travis County more concern about water quality, water availability, public education, all of these things ranked very high. As we looked at them on a county basis, you seal see for the five top issues, and it may be hard to see the legend there, but the white bar has to do with transportation congestion. Clearly that was the single highest vote or issue of great concern for folks living in Travis County. The second one, actually had to do with air quality followed by cost of living and so I don't know. So -- so on. All this data will be provided in more detail. Let me talk about the deliverables. I said this was a presentation to you an accountability for your support and just wanted to say that what we'll be turning over to you is all the local community test site results and there were two test sites I believe in Travis County. We had put together a public officials briefs packet with detailed information to you, all the scenario information and mapping data that we have, transportation scenario models which again were not designed to have an optimal solution of infrastructure, kind of reinforced notion as a survey did of multimodal transportation solutions and so there's data there that you might find interest. Also developed an outreach video, a regional vision survey which provides the more in-depth data for all the questions and the survey results. A vision document is also something we're going to share with you and I知 not going to go through today in the interest of time, hopefully you've seen it before, but I will leave this with each of you and would be happy to answer questions over time. The Travis County specific deliverables, what we just described are things that we're giving to you that actually looked at the region as a whole with the five counties, hayes, travis, williamsson, bastrop and caldwell coins, but also we have design maps that were developed for specifically Travis County. We had design standards in mapping specifically related to travis. Regulatory maps, local community test site data, final workshop presentations, the county scenario maps, and then the background data. So we're going to actually give these to you electronically on six different discs of information. We can provide more. Here is the video. Jim and I will disseminate these vision documents. I might talk briefly about next steps. We need to convene after we created the vision. We a strategic planning conference scheduled in August to figure out what is our role moving forward. We feel committed to have a continuity of leadership, but we don't want to duplicate something that someone else is doing so we need to define the niche. I think the niche that we have is to basically communicate not specific solutions to particular issues which you and your citizens will need to resolve, but rather to thank regionally -- think about multifaceted issues and how they connect and things where we might be able to make a contribution. We're going to have to go through and look at our leadership. Neal kasere ksm's death has made it important that we select a new chair, so we'll be working on that. But we need to reconsider who will be on the board of the how is this organization going to function? Do we have the right capabilities an competencies to make that work. We have already formed a number of different implementation subcommittees that have content expertise and will be available to help people on different issues. Again, not to make recommendations or be strong advocates on a particular solution, but rather help bring people together with common interest, take into account what we've learned and try to encourage people to think regionally. So with that, a is the end -- that is the end of our presentation, we would be meap to answer any questions you might have. On behalf of the central Texas envision board of directors that we appreciate your continuing support and of your involvement over the last two and a half years and I think this has created something of value, if we can make it come -- be taken into account as we move forward.
>> so the -- there's a new executive director on board?
>> barry, salas, as you know, judge, has elected to go back to school at the lbj school. We're in the process of selecting a new executive director. We've interviewed I guess two or three of the five candidates that have been identified and we hope to make a decision on that within the next month.
>> so do you need a budget for the follow-up work?
>> we currently have formed a very kind of lean budget to principally offset the cost of staff. I think until we go through our strategic planning, we won't know exactly how we want to present that and we might look for an opportunity to come back and share with you our ideas and to get your guidance to us as to what you would like for us to do. Again, we want to find our niche so we're not replicating what someone else is doing, but we do think there are many organizations that are trying to think regionally, trying to find commonalities of interest and try to have those be taken into account as you and others make difficult decisions on a variety of different issues going forward.
>> any other questions, comments, from the court? Thank you very much.
>> thank you.
>> thank you.
>> we look forward to the next opportunity.
Last Modified: Wednesday, June 30, 2004 9:28 AM