About the Process

Community Input – Summer 2002

Throughout the summer of 2002, Envision Central Texas gathered input from residents in all five counties through focus groups and telephone surveys.

Public Workshops – Fall 2002

Envision Central Texas hosted a series of workshops in each county during fall 2002. By considering a variety of planning elements including roads, shopping centers, business centers, housing types and neighborhood developments, the workshop attendees built growth strategies for Central Texas. These strategies generated model plans that provide an overview of how growth will affect each portion of our region during the next 20 to 40 years.

Community Test Site Workshops – Winter 2003

Envision Central Texas also hosted a series of six Community Test Site Planning Workshops throughout Bastrop, Caldwell, Hays, Travis and Williamson counties. The Test Site Workshops served as pilot projects to examine different planning tools for addressing typical issues within the Central Texas region.

The Community Test Site Planning Workshops benefited the Envision Central Texas project by serving as a proving ground for concepts being developed, and providing an excellent opportunity to examine solutions at a localized level. Each Community Test Site received an in-depth planning effort, complete with public workshops and valuable illustrative plans that will benefit the local community, jurisdictions, neighborhoods and the planning project.

Providing Feedback for Our Future – Fall 2003

From the input gathered at the various public workshops, Envision Central Texas (ECT) created four potential growth scenarios for residents to consider. In October 2003, hundreds of thousands of Regional Vision Surveys were distributed throughout the five counties, and were also made available on the ECT Web site. The surveys invited respondents to give their input on four different growth scenarios and how well each scenario would address the region's challenges. This public feedback survey and extensive grassroots outreach resulted in more than 12,500 survey responses, making it one of the broadest based surveys ever conducted in Central Texas.

The ECT Vision - 2004

The culmination of this process has been the synthesis of all the public input by the ECT Board of Directors into a regional "vision." This vision, which has been derived from the informed expressions of the desires of the citizens of the region, will guide ECT as we move forward in assisting residents, regional planners, and policy makers with voluntary implementation guidelines for working towards this common vision. In February 2004, ECT convened a workshop attended by 150 of the region's leadership to give guidance for next steps and a framework which shaped the seven initial focus areas ECT will pursue in the implementation phase of the project. The Vision was released in May of 2004 at a celebration event with citizens from throughout the five counties.

Making the Vision Real - 2005 - Present

ECT has established six Implementation Committees, which will develop tools, resources and projects in the following critical issue areas:

• Transportation and Land Use
• Economic Vitality
• Community Design
• Open Space
• Social Equity
• Community Outreach

ECT will continue to educate and engage citizens about these growth-related issues, promote regular interchanges of information among the various stakeholder groups within the region, and encourage the widespread coordination and cooperation at a county or sub-regional level. In addition, ECT will be a resource to the region on issues related to key growth trends, best practices and strategies that support quality growth and move us closer to the ECT vision.

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