This is a little less of a problem than it was before, but from 2014-2022 especially, Austin had a massive leadership vacuum on the council, and they generally expected their appointees on the sovereign commissions like PC to act as surrogates. That’s not how it’s supposed to work and not how good commissions run. A Sovereign commission should make defacto final decisions on about 80-90% of what they see the first time it comes up with the expectation of council approval on consent. And council should use commissions to soak up political heat on controversial issues.
Instead what was happening was that staff would present a sound recommendation, and if the issue was politically hot the commissions would delay as long as they could, indulge anyone with connections, blame staff for not taking enough input, and then send it to council much watered down. Then council would repeat the delay/indulge/blame dynamic until they ran out of process to conduct, and if the issue hadn’t died on its own (or if it had died of misinformation like the Zilker plan or sabotage like Code Next), they would blame staff for not taking enough community feedback, and either restart the process over again or do something halfass (Northcross) and blame staff for not taking enough community feedback.
What staff learned from all this was that they could not trust council or PC to take the heat for their own policy decisions and adopted a practice of slow rolling projects until either the applicants or opposition collapsed.
It’s slightly better for the land use plans than it was, but the teens were a lost decade in terms of land use and public safety still very much appears to be operating in that dynamic