Fixing this Comprehensive Plan mess

You’re sitting at home one day and your friend comes up pushing this beat-up jalopy and tells you "I need you to fix my car." You look at him somewhat bewildered and reply "Hey, I’m not a mechanic. I don’t know the first thing about car repairs." And your friend replies: "Hey, you drive a car, don’t you." And as he walks away he looks over his shoulder and tells you "By the way, I have absolutely no money to pay for parts."

For the last three months, on the fourth Tuesday of these months, I have followed the members of the Planning and Zoning Commission as they leave the City Council chambers following their regularly scheduled meeting and trudge to a conference room on the second floor of City Hall to try and figure out what to do about fixing their friend’s car the city’s Comprehensive Plan — the city’s blueprint for what it wants to be when it grows up. Much like the friend with the jalopy, the city just dumped the Comprehensive Plan on the commissioners and said "fix it" and then added "We don’t have any money to pay for the expert consultants and demographers we know you need to do this the right way." And so, on the fourth Tuesday of these last three months the commissioners have sat around this conference table getting absolutely nothing accomplished. And that’s not their fault. P&Z chair Michael Rubsam and his second-in-command Mike Wilson have done an admirable job as far as it goes, but they are the leaders of the troops in the trenches. There has been a total lack of leadership, a total lack of direction from the war room. These commissioners have been told to not only win the war but come up with their own strategies for accomplishing the victory without the aid of any intel. What a mess!

What P&Z has ultimately decided is that, given the conditions, there is no way , with the resources (or lack of resources) they have, they can make any qualitative changes to the Comprehensive Plan. What they plan to do, as far as I can tell, is to, in effect, take a yellow highlighter and mark those sections of the plan that the commissioners believe need to be changed in some way, shape or form.

But there’s a problem with this. None of the commissioners know where to get their hands on an up-to-date Comprehensive Plan to highlight. You go searching for a Comprehensive Plan on the city’s website and, if you’re lucky, you’re likely to stumble across this and this is an absolute disaster. It’s laughable. To take just one example go to page 132 on which the characteristics of a Riparian District are described: "The Riparian Districts are characterized by the primary waterways of Kyle and surrounding flood plains, seeking to protect them from encroaching development." Then you go to the next page that contains a table illustrating the "existing zoning categories and their applicability to the Riparian District." And, according to this table, an Urban Estate District is recommended zoning there. Now, I’m not sure what an Urban Estate District is (I picture this), but it doesn’t sound like something you want in an area you are seeking to protect from encroaching development.

But there’s more. On Page 136 you’ll see a description of the Old Town District complete with a picture of that block of Center Street that includes the Texas Pie Company. And on the following page, you’ll find a table that tells you Retail/Service zoning is not recommended with the Old Town District. WHAT????

Same thing on Page 160, the one that talks about something called a Super Regional Node. This page features a pretty picture of an urbanized shopping area that includes a Dick’s Sportings Goods store as well as a Barnes & Noble bookstore. And again, the accompanying table says Retail/Service zoning is not recommended in the Super Regional Node. ARE YOU FREAKING’ KIDDING ME????

I mentioned these discrepancies to someone who worked on a long range planning committee assigned to make fixes to the Comprehensive Plan and she told me not to worry, all those glaring errors have been fixed. But where are the fixes? The P&Z commissioners admitted at their most recent meeting Tuesday night they had no idea where they were. Their staff liaison, Community Development Director Howard Koontz basically said "Don’t ask me. I just got here." Even the person who worked on the long range planning committee hasn’t a clue.

Here’s the ultimate kick in the head, however. At this most recent get-together, the P&Z commissioners decided they would host at least three public sessions to seek community input into what sections of the Comprehensive Plan the citizens feel should be changed. But how in heaven’s name are citizens going to have any frame of reference if they don’t have at their disposal the actual document that needs to be changed? Plus, in line with P&Z’s modus operandi, the citizens are only going to be asked what sections need to be changed, not what the specific changes should be and that’s not going to be a concept that can be easily grasped in a public meeting.

There’s a lot of blame for this complete lack of leadership to pass around. Some does belong to the City Council which decided to spend enough money this fiscal year to guarantee Kyle homeowners had the highest property tax in all of Hays County, but never thought of setting aside a single penny for long-range city planning. But the lion’s share of the blame lies with the city staff.

Here’s what should have happened. City Manager Scott Sellers should have instructed Koontz and perhaps the city’s economic development director to spend the next year meeting with small groups of community influentials to seek their input on how they want the city to look, say, a quarter of a century from now. These meetings should be held on both a macro and a micro level. For instance, get together with Kyle Chamber CEO Julie Snyder and the chamber’s officers and board of directors to talk about the city as a whole. Then meet separately with smaller groups to talk about their neighborhoods of influence – downtown merchants and business owners, the managers of all the stores in the H-E-B center and another meeting with the managers of the stores in the center cross Kyle Parkway. Meet with all the indvidual homeowner associations one at a time. Meet with the staff, faculty and students at the Kyle ACC campus. Go to PTA meetings. There are dozens and dozens of small groups like this to meet with and to solicit information about what they would like to see in their specific areas. Prepare large maps of each group’s "neighborhood" and bring Monopoly toys — blocks representing big box or small box retail, office buildings (high and midrise), mixed-use projects, single and multi-family residents, manufacturing facilities, schools, parks, restaurants, etc. — and let each group place the boxes exactly where they would want them to be in their neighborhoods. And most important of all, go out to meet with them at a location convenient to them; don’t ask them to come to you.

Based on all this input, the city staff could draft a detailed plan that could be presented to Planning & Zoning Commissioners for their input, revisions, what-have-you. They would also host public meetings to solicit additional community input on that specific plan.

It’s probably too late in the process to do anything like that now, even if the city wanted to, which, truth be told, I doubt they do.

I do wish, however, someone could step forward and do something to give these struggling commissioners some sense of direction.