Adler promises to change building permit process

Speaking to a receptive audience at the Real Estate Council of Austin on Wednesday, Mayor Steve Adler said he and his colleagues intend to make sure that they fix problems in the city’s development and permitting process sooner rather than later.

In response to the highly critical Zucker Report on the city’s slow, complicated and difficult development process, Adler said he would be sponsoring a resolution asking City Manager Marc Ott to come up with a plan to eliminate the permitting backlog.

Adler said he expects city staff to come back with short-term fixes within 30 days and long-term fixes within 60 days from next week’s meeting. He said the item will be on next week’s City Council agenda. Staff will also present a briefing on the report at the meeting.

The mayor said he expects the staff to be able to come back to Council by June with a response to the report.

Adler voiced what virtually everyone in the audience already knew: “We have projects right now that take too long and cost too much.”

After the speech, Adler said he did not think it was Council’s job to tell the city manager how to fix the problem, but to make it clear that resolving the issues in the permitting process should be a very high priority.

“I think it’s the Council’s job to set some metrics to measure success and then ask the city manager to strive for those,” he said.

Adler also talked about the importance of fixing the city’s Land Development Code, the process called CodeNEXT. He said it was very important to have community-wide support in order to come up with a code that would allow the city to make more decisions administratively. He added that the city needs to make changes to simplify the development process before CodeNEXT is finished.

“The City Council should not be dealing with so many projects. … The City Council shouldn’t be spending time deciding what should be on the southwest corner of the street,” Adler said, adding that he would be working closely with Council Member Greg Casar, who is chair of the Council’s Neighborhood Planning Committee.

Asked about the decades-long war between developers and neighborhoods, Adler said he hoped the CodeNEXT process would help resolve that. He suggested that one way to deal with those battles would be to bring neighborhoods into the development process earlier.

Adler was asked whether he thought Austin should have a secondary metropolitan area like downtown, and if so, where that might be. He would support that, he said, but believed the market should decide where it would be located.

He also talked about saving Austin’s “cool.”

“I think there is a real significant risk that we can lose what makes Austin special,” Adler said in response to a question.

“There’s nothing sadder than the city that’s lost its cool,” Adler said. Part of Austin’s charm, of course, is its large number of live music venues. However, those venues have something in common with older affordable housing, which is being torn down to accommodate higher-priced residences.

The city is losing those venues because it’s impossible to pay for the increasingly expensive real estate under them with a cover charge and beer sales between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m. Adler said he wants the city to find a way to help save those music venues, but he did not have a plan for that.

In addition to saving the venues, Adler said one of the most important aspects of Austin’s “cool” is its environment. He stressed that it is important to remember that when planning the city’s growth.

Photo by Will Scullin, licensed under Creative Commons 2.0