Now there is a significant new dynamic in the long election process: Blueprint Houston.

Blueprint Houston is a civic initiative with the goal of building community support for a planning process to improve the quality of life and place. That is, it is intended to build the political will necessary to launch the City into a long-overdue, well funded effort to create a business plan for future growth, a comprehensive set of strategies and policies to greatly reduce inefficiency and conflict, and make Houston a better place to live.

The City of Houston and Houston Endowment (the city’s largest philanthropic foundation) are supporters of this idea, and the Center for Houston’s Future - a nonprofit creation of the Greater Houston Partnership - is a collaborator for part of the project. It is the biggest civic initiative since Imagine Houston about 8 years ago, and the failed attempt to introduce zoning more than a decade ago.

Blueprint Houston’s mission is twofold:
• Establish the vision, values, and goals of our citizens through a broad and representative public consensus-building process
• Define the best approach to planning for Houston’s future that addresses the major issues, opportunities, and challenges facing the City in the next 20 years.

You and everybody you know will be urged to participate in public events, and surveys will make scientific sense out of the demographics and opinions of a statistically valid pool of people. You’ll be asked for your ideas and your opinions, you’ll engage in facilitated and unfacilitated discussion, and you’ll be asked to make decisions.

Along the way, the process will reveal and explain the prioritized visions and goals of the City’s residents, and will spell out how – or even if - the people want to proceed with long-range planning for the City in which all of us live and in which a great many of us work, learn, and play.

While the initiative is focused on the political and corporate entity called the City of Houston, most issues have implications and impacts in the entire metropolitan region. So Blueprint Houston will collaborate with the Center for Houston’s Future, which will include the outcomes of the Blueprint effort in a summer-long citizen “convocation” to write the stories of three or so possible or probable scenarios for the whole region’s future growth.

The documents from both efforts will be published under the overall title “A Civic Agenda for Houston’s Future.” On the one hand, all this information will be used to inform the fall election campaigns to the greatest extent possible. On the other hand, if we all do our jobs to spread the word and encourage thousands and thousands of people to participate and learn, we will also be standing by in large numbers watching to see how candidates respond to our shared declaration of vision and values and goals, and our call for immediate action that will require elected officials to commit public money and energy.

The Blueprint Houston process is already underway. By mid-December several hundred people knew about it, 70 or so have already conducted warm-up exercises, by the beginning of February perhaps 1,000 people will have participated in some aspect of it, and a Chronicle article will probably have been published about it, so at that point some tens of thousands of people will know about Blueprint and perhaps be thinking about it, looking for a chance to participate, to contribute. Thirty thousand people receive the publication you’re reading now. This is not coming; this is happening now.

This initiative started in September, 2001, when 1000 Friends of Houston ran an ad in this publication to launch a call for a comprehensive planning process (houstonplan.org). Blueprint Houston grew directly out of that, and continues to call for a planning process based on citizen values and goals. Among other things, the ad said, “We call on the wisdom and values of Houston’s citizens to make our city a more attractive place to live and visit.”

Everyone involved in creating Blueprint Houston is aware that one of our city's difficulties is the relatively fast turnover of Mayors and thus the frequent junking of the previous Mayor’s initiatives. Blueprint is designed to be “termless” in the sense that it not only looks out for the short term, but also the long term and to institutionalize the process to provide seamless continuity, regardless of who is Mayor. Blueprint Houston is intended to be a continuing process exemplifying the long-range nature of strategic and general planning in Cities, and to provide a permanent forum for the public debate and creativity that is necessary to create a great city.

This, of course, is what democracy is all about, and such a forum and framework has been needed in Houston for a long time.

We voters have a responsibility, first to be sure to vote on behalf of the vast majority of the City’s citizens, who don’t vote but only complain about the elected officials.

Second, we have a responsibility to learn as much as possible about the issues, about the City’s general position, and about the knowledge, positions, and beliefs of the people who are running for office.

Then we have a responsibility to tell these candidates what we want to see happen in the future, and to ask them if they share that vision.

Then, of course, we go into the booth and vote.

That process has begun. Stay tuned and get involved. www.blueprinthouston.org.

David Crossley is President of the Gulf Coast Institute, which leads the Livable Houston Initiative. For more information, go to www.livablehouston.org