Ms. Jane Booth
Chair
City Planning Commission
1300 Perdido Street
New Orleans, LA 70112

Dear Ms. Booth:

It has come to the attention of interested members of the Master Plan Citizen Advisory Committee that the Audubon Nature Institute’s golf course plans recently approved by the Audubon Commission on October 24th were received by the City Planning Commission, but there is uncertainty about whether or not they have been reviewed for conformity with the Master Plan, as required and stated in section 5-404(3) of the Home Rule Charter.

In as much as the 1992 New Century New Orleans Master Policy Plan does not provide much clarity about the scale of importance of professional review and public scrutiny of all plans affecting the use of land in the city, we fully appreciate that the Blueprint for the New Century New Orleans Master Plan, adopted as a draft directive by the City Planning Commission in 1999, corrects this deficiency with numerous references to the necessity for integration of all plans pertaining to the Master Plan’s elements and public accountability in the planning process and performance of services. Whether or not the golf course plans have been reviewed yet, we believe that the issue of public comment on these plans has to be addressed by the City Planning Commission regarding this matter.

This matter is of utmost concern to us now, because I was advised by Collette Creppell, Planning Commission Executive Director, that the Audubon Commission, the Audubon Nature Institute’s client, was created by state legislative act and therefore is not a public body directly answerable to the city’s administrative, legislative or policing powers. But the very existence of the park and its management is inseparable from the city itself, and therefore its planning and the city’s planning are likewise incapable of being conducted in a manner discrete from each other. Indeed, the actions taken by the Audubon Commission and its management entity the Audubon Nature Institute in the development and implementation of its golf course plan go directly to the heart of the central issue that has informed the entire body of work performed by the Planning Commission and the Master Plan Citizen Advisory Committee for nearly four years and hundreds of hours in developing the Master Plan Blueprint. To the point, can planning in New Orleans be integrated, open to maximum feasible citizen participation, and based on a rational assessment of needs and publicly enunciated goals about our city if the Planning Commission does not review the golf course plans to determine their relationship to these three imperatives?

Whatever the Audubon Commission’s legal relationship to the city, there are strong, compelling arguments for this needed review in the very nature of the strategy for revising the Comprehensive Zoning Ordinance approved by the City Planning Commission in 1995. This strategy relied on the development of a land use plan based on public input workshops conducted in 1998, resulting in the Land Use Plan adopted by the Planning Commission and the City Council in 1999. The Land Use Plan makes numerous references to the preservation of multiple use green space in all parks, including Audubon. If the Land Use Plan is the cornerstone of both the new Zoning Ordinance draft currently being developed and of the goals of the Master Plan Blueprint and its elements, then it is unavoidable to conclude that all planned projects by the Audubon Commission and the Audubon Nature Institute involving the use of city land for park use are subject to review by the Planning Commission. Also noteworthy is the clearly stated intent of the City Council, referenced in the statement of intentions in the Purposes Section of the Comprehensive Zoning Ordinance currently being drafted, to have the zoning regulations implement both the Master Plan and the 1999 Land Use Plan.

The City cannot assess the nature of the current golf course project’s relationship to city planning without reviewing the project plans, and if the city does not review the plan in question, then it inevitably follows that the Master Plan that is approaching completion in 2002 will be rendered useless as a Master Plan that was intended to address the shortcomings of the 1992 Master Plan as described earlier.

When asked by the Planning Commission to step up and defend the strategy for drafting the Zoning Ordinance and Master Plan this past summer, the Master Plan Citizen Advisory Committee did not hesitate to do so because it recognized the importance of how the strategy addressed our city’s pressing needs along with developing a democratically based planning process for the future. Now, interested members of the Advisory Committee ask the Planning Commission to schedule at the earliest practical opportunity a review of the golf course plan as adopted by the Audubon Commission in order to determine its compatibility with the Blueprint for the New Century New Orleans Master Plan and its foundation instrument, the 1999 Land Use Plan.

Please advise us on how the Commission intends to address this planning issue.