North-Central Austin City Council & Mayoral Candidate Forum April 13, 2009

Six North Central Austin Neighborhoods will hold a candidate forum for City Council candidates, 6:30 pm, April 13, 2009 at Wozniak Hall, St. Louis Catholic Church, 7601 Burnet Road.

The neighborhoods - Allandale, Brentwood, Crestview, Highland, North Shoal Creek, and Wooten - have identified three priorities for discussion at the forum: code enforcement, minimum public open space in mixed use districts, and transportation policy with an emphasis on pedestrian, bicycle and transit connectivity.

These issues were identified as top priorities in neighborhood plans. Improvements and extensions of creekside trails are particularly popular and fit with the City's transportation vision, but have gotten minimal funding.

Open space is a new issue, emerging as part of the extensive debate over the Vertical Mixed Use (VMU) ordinance in 2006-2008. Hundreds of acres of commercial property were rezoned for apartments along Burnet, Anderson, Lamar and Airport. VMU requires sidewalks, but not plazas, playscapes, outdoor dining, trails, parks and wildlife habitat - each of which serves a vital purpose in a dense urban environment.

"You need these kinds of outdoor features to make urban apartment districts liveable, pedestrian-friendly, resilient to decline once the shine is off the brick," said Steven Zettner, who belongs to a New Urbanist advocacy group, SNAustin.org, aligned with the neighborhoods.

Zettner compared 2nd Street District near City Hall, slated for 15% public open space, to the Anderson Ln VMU corridor, with just 2% open space. "The City wants to make our older suburbs pedestrian-friendly, but they've left out the secret ingredient."

"Whether one loves density or hates it, we all agree it needs minimum open space to work as the City intended," Zettner said. "We're going to ask the candidates to help us with that."

Official Website: http://sites.google.com/a/snaustin.org/snaustin-external-site/candidate-forum