AUSTIN Efforts to rewrite Austin's land development code advanced May 20 when Austin City Council learned about many of the problems with the existing code.

The process to rewrite the code, dubbed CodeNEXT, was initiated as part of the Imagine Austin Comprehensive Plan.

Dan Parolek, a CodeNEXT team member and outside consultant from California-based Opticos Design Inc., presented council with his diagnosis.

"Our process here is to, especially in this diagnosis phase, actually pull up the hood and sort of open up that computer and find out what is wrong with it to give us some direction as we move forward in the CodeNEXT process," Parolek said.

The new code, expected to be implemented by 2017, will seek to address several problems, he said, beginning with what he called the underlying problem to Austin's development regulations: ineffective base zoning districts.