This Blueprint Houston process that’s surging in the City right now is one of those lump-in-your-throat American experiences that surprise you – or at least surprise me – and maybe embarrass you at how corny your heart is.

Watching an 80-year-old Chinese man sitting at a school desk and sharing his ideas for Houston’s future with a 25-year-old Hispanic mother of three who doesn’t speak English and an angry middle-age Anglo woman who thinks Houston would be a great city if they’d just repair failed infrastructure without her having to call 311 causes the thought to pass through your mind that this could only be happening in America.

About 800 people have offered their ideas and opinions in the Blueprint Houston public events so far. The hundreds of big sheets of paper that are being transcribed as we go contain thousands of ideas about how to make Houston a better place to live. The exit questionnaires used in the round of five public meetings that were held in April are now beginning to show a picture of attitudes about a variety of big issues in the City, and of who, demographically, the people are who hold those opinions.

If Blueprint Houston is not a familiar term to you, it is a broad citizen-driven effort to build community support for a planning process to improve the quality of life and place in the City of Houston. Its first project is to achieve the following two-part mission:

1. Establish the vision, values, goals, and priorities of our citizens through a broad and representative public consensus-building process;
2. Define the best approach to planning for Houston’s future that addresses the major issues, opportunities, and challenges facing the City in the next 35 years.

Blueprint began as an initiative of 1000 Friends of Houston, a project of the Gulf Coast Institute, which launched a call in 2001 for the City to begin creation of a general plan, a business plan, for Houston’s future. Today it is supported by the City of Houston and has received a $350,000 grant from Houston Endowment. Blueprint Houston is governed by a diverse group of more than 50 steering committee members.

The public events have met their goals in numbers of people, and while it is not clear yet whether the participants match the demographics of the City it’s certainly been diverse. As a result, the emerging ideas cover a broad range of issues from jobs and education to sidewalks and transportation.

Blueprint’s next and defining event will be a Citizen Congress, to be held on May 31 (see box). That day, more than 1000 people will use high-tech interactive tools to sort questions about planning and strategy and to prioritize their goals for Houston’s future. The event, like all the Blueprint events, is open to all citizens of Houston.

A final public meeting in the fall will present the visions, values, goals, and priorities of Houston’s citizens - a citizens’ agenda for the future. That material will be circulated widely and it is assumed it will be the subject of much discussion in the campaigns for local elections to be held in November.

What have the meetings yielded so far? One previously skeptical civic leader told me after one of the sessions that he was astonished by the wisdom of the people in the room, people he’d never met or heard of, people who care not only about their neighborhoods, but about the whole city and region.

As various values are put forward for consideration, we are seeing some amount of consensus about broad concepts, and the goal of the next session is to work toward specifics, to determine the kind of planning process the citizens want and expect. Additionally, questions arising from the public meetings will go out for a scientific survey of registered voters. This survey, which will be demographically significant, will test the attitudes of the general public about the ideas generated in the meetings.

Some feel that the “values” that are evolving are too vague. For example, one core value is “A city with a strong, sustainable, diverse 21st century economy with economic and employment opportunities for all.” Who could disagree? But that is followed by a long list of specific questions that will be answered by specific solutions. Some of the questions are tough, such as “How do we integrate minorities and accelerate the process and effectiveness of bringing the immigrant and non-literate populations into the economic mainstream as functional players and not just labor?”

Or this one: “What changes in fiscal and regulatory policy need to be adopted to ensure high bond ratings so that we can stem the loss of revenue that results from lower bond ratings?” That’s a pretty sophisticated question, and its answers will challenge the existing paradigm of growth and governance in the City.

The Blueprint committee will soon begin to grapple with how to develop the leadership and advocacy machinery to support the initiative over time. The committee is determined that this will not be another report that gets put on the shelf and ignored. With any luck, there will be immediate challenges to the existing Mayor and City Council to act even before a new Mayor and many new Council members are elected. This is serious business, and there is considerable excitement among the participants so far over the value of the exercise and its possible outcomes.

I strongly encourage you and your family and friends to come out on May 31 to offer your ideas and to make some far-reaching decisions. As they say, “public policy is made by the people who show up.”

David Crossley is president of the Gulf Coast Institute and a member of the executive committee of Blueprint Houston. The thoughts expressed here are his and are intended as a statement of the Blueprint governing committee. For more on Blueprint Houston, click here.