Council to consider pilot program to extend zoning deadlines

The city’s Planning Department staff have been pushed to move a record number of zoning applications through the process in time to beat current deadlines at the city’s land use commissions and City Council. At the same time, the department is dealing with numerous vacancies, increasing the workload for each member of the zoning staff.

In order to ease the burden on staff and the land use commissions, Council adopted a resolution in June recommending a six-month pilot program to give staff and the commissions more time to work through zoning and rezoning applications and neighborhood plan amendment applications. Only Council Member Mackenzie Kelly voted against the resolution.

A city spokesperson told the Austin Monitor on Wednesday that the Planning Department has a total of 70 full-time employee positions. Of those, 51 are currently filled and 19 are vacant. However, one of those vacancies is filled on an interim basis. The city is currently interviewing and recruiting for 11 new positions that were approved for the Fiscal Year 2024 budget.

A memo from Planning Department Director Lauren Middleton-Pratt to Council in June said, “The resolution proposes a six (6) month pilot program extending new zoning application deadlines for public hearings at Land Use Commission and City Council meetings as well as the timeframe for a zoning application expiration due to delayed public hearing action. At the completion of the pilot program, the expectation is to have a fully trained and operational Planning department and discontinue the public hearing extensions.”

She added, “The pilot program is intended to be an exception, not the rule, while staff utilizes all available resources to meet current deadlines prescribed in the Code to expediently advance zoning applications through the review process.”

Council will hold a public hearing and vote on the proposed new deadlines at today’s meeting. One proposed deadline change is that the Planning Commission and the Zoning and Platting Commission will have 120 days to hold a hearing on an application for zoning or rezoning. The current regulation gives those commissions just 60 days to hold those hearings, resulting in numerous postponements. The deadline for City Council to hold a public hearing after either commission votes on the case will be extended from 40 days to 80 days.

Because of the heavy volume of cases and insufficient staff to review them, cases often must be postponed during land use commission and Council meetings. According to a memo from staff, “In 2023, the Zoning division has postponed a high-volume of zoning and rezoning applications, the most prevalent reason being the need for continued interdepartmental review.”

One of the most important changes for applicants is the extension of the expiration date of a zoning application from 181 days to 362 days if a hearing has not been scheduled before one of the land use commissions – or if one of the commissions or the City Council grants an indefinite postponement.

At the Planning Commission public hearing on Sept. 26, commissioners unanimously recommended that they and City Council review the pilot program before it is either extended or terminated. In addition, the commission requested that staff provide an update on the pilot program three months after it is adopted.

Commissioners also said they should have priority for meeting room reservations to ensure that public hearings are conducted in a timely manner. They said staff should introduce improvements to their process to streamline operations.

Staff provided an affordability impact statement for the proposed changes in regulations. According to that statement, the impact of the change on housing costs should be neutral: “Temporarily increasing the amount of time in which staff reviews zoning applications may appear to increase the development timeline. However, historically high volumes of zoning applications coupled with staff shortages render a shorter timeline infeasible. This change will thus result in the city providing realistic expectations to manage the unprecedented situation, and provide staff, applicants, and neighbors with time to address any concerns before the applications are officially noticed, scheduled and reviewed.

“Doubling the amount of time that an application may be ‘active’ before it expires will lower the number of applications that will expire because they need additional review time,” the statement concludes.

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