Advisory committee halfway through comprehensive plan update

The Cedar Park Comprehensive Plan Advisory Committee has been meeting since February to revamp the prime document that guides the city's approach to future growth.

On Sept. 30, members of the committee toured areas on the city's future land use map to view about 30 pockets of undeveloped land totaling more than 4,300 acres.

"We decided it would be worth our while, before we got into a position of trying to make decisions on all of these parcels, to familiarize ourselves with these tracts a little more," Cedar Park interim Planning Director Joe Vining said. "So we rented a bus to cruise around and look. It gave all the committee members a chance to ask questions because we have to have everybody at the same level in order to have an effective discussion."

Vining said the future land use map is an important piece of the city's comprehensive plan, which was last updated in 2006. The map is used by the planning and zoning commission and City Council when making decisions about what should be developed on the land.

"With a community like ours that is growing like it is, we have to keep updating these things," Vining said. "Williamson County is such a dynamic, growing county, and this community has positioned itself in such a manner that it's going to have its lion's share of the benefits of that growth."

During the past several months, the CPAC has developed a vision for the city through discussion, feedback from residents and a town hall meeting in May. Assistant City Manager Josh Selleck said the group is considering smaller work group sessions to get more detailed feedback from the community.

"At the first town hall meeting, the number of community members that attended actually wasn't ideal for the amount of effort we put into it," Selleck said. "So the idea we've come up with is doing five focus groups where we pick individuals to work alongside the CPAC members. We find it's better for group dynamics."

The workgroups are one way the city hopes to continue engaging with the community, Vining said, in addition to continued efforts on CPAC's website, www.imaginecedarpark.com, which launched in April. Another town-hall meeting is slated for April 2014 before the final draft is presented to Cedar Park City Council and the Planning and Zoning Commission.

The CPAC is about halfway done creating the new comprehensive plan, said Dan Sefko, group manager at Freese and Nichols, the engineering consultant group hired to assist with the process. The CPAC was originally slated to present the new comprehensive plan to City Council in March 2014, but additional questions, more exercises, and the resignation of a city staffer who helped lead the CPAC caused the timeline to shift.

"We will revise the schedule and get back into it in October. And for the consultants, all of the work tasks remain the same. We just postponed it a month or two," Sefko said. "For us, everything is still the same scope of service and the same work efforts. The city just wanted to do this tour and some extra workshops."