When you take all those components that are existing today and you want to talk about keeping them for future generations, and you want to talk about sustainability, but you also don’t want to create new amenities that may be in conflict with them in the future, you really have to sit down, look at all of that acreage, so that way everything fits nicely together, everybody’s quality of life is improved, and people really get out into the parks and enjoy themselves.

We really want to know how can we reach the public with a message a lot better. And how can we let them know voluntary actions they can take individually to reduce their emissions.

The city has an online discussion board for people to give their suggestions on how to make the city’s air quality program better. You can throw in your 2 cents until August 15th.

It’s a transformational time. Great parks, particularly great urban parks, are driven by their context: The properties, the mixed-use development, the greater density in the downtown, begin to reach a critical mass where people are in the parks more often, doing a greater variety of things.

The city will hold a public meeting to talk about some of the ideas tonight at 6 at Ballet Austin near Republic Square.

KUT’s Wells Dunbar met with Mayor Leffingwell in his office for this weeks’ edition of Changing Austin. He explained why he doesn’t think the time is right for urban rail yet.

Mayor Leffingwell:

What’s really important to realize here is we have a plan, where deferring the election for the general-obligation bonds would not ultimately delay the actual ready-time for the rail line itself. We would still target our original completion date of sometime 2019 to 2021. We would just have the bond election at a later date. But our planning is going to go ahead just as if everything else was in place.

There’s things we’re looking at that would not impact services, that would help contain our costs and avoid having to do a tax rate increase. And then there’s things we’re looking at that would absolutely impact service levels. And it’s getting harder to find that low-hanging fruit. We’ve been at this for about three years. We saw the issue three years ago and knew that we had a structural budget gap that had to be solved. Over the course of that three years we’ve cut over 125 vacant positions, we’ve renegotiated labor contracts, we’ve established a second tier of our retirement program.

Maybe they think we should be spending more of our time on greenbelts as opposed to developed parkland, or they think we should be spending our time on small pocket parks and neighborhood parks as opposed to the Town Lake area.

The city will have a public input meeting on the plan on Wednesday next week at 5 p.m. at the Northwest Recreation Center. The city’s website will also take feedback and has an opinion survey.

“We’ve actually taken several surveys at the Austin Visitor’s Center to hit first time visitors or new visitors to the city,” said Tonya Swartzendruber with the city’s Planning and Development Review Department. “As well, we’ve talked to some stakeholders preliminarily to find what they can find, what they can’t find, what they have trouble with.”

The public is invited to weigh in on three design proposals tonight from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. at the Mexic-Arte Museum at 419 Congress Ave. Listen to the full interview above to learn more.

It’s going to be a much smaller amount, and so we’re really going to have to cut that list and pare it down to the bare essentials, and think about what kinds of projects we need to be funding, what are our highest priorities, thinking about things like what part of the city are these investments going to be in, and trying to have some geographic fairness to it, and just really looking at multiple factors as we evaluate what makes the most sense.

The city’s bond election advisory task force will have a public input workshop tonight from 6:30 to 8:30 at the Gus Garcia Recreation Center.

Austin Energy general manager Larry Weis joined KUT’s Matt Largey to talk about the rate hike.

Norwood Park, as a park site, is really on the verge of change. We have the boardwalk, which is about to go under construction along the shoreline of Lady Bird Lake. This site provides opportunity for connectivity to the boardwalk, so the house and the grounds could function as a neighborhood trailhead. Likewise, urban rail is being planned in the long term here for Riverside Drive.