Fort Worth agreed to spend almost $1 million on a land plan it sometimes follows. Why?
As Fort Worth strains to cover the costs of its rapid expansion, city leaders agreed April 8 to pay consultants up to $759,598 to analyze, chart and post about the city’s growth.
The City Council has enlisted the services of national urban planning firm Moore Iacofano Goltsman Inc. to complete Fort Worth’s 2050 Comprehensive Plan, a compilation of maps and proclamations meant to “establish a shared vision for the City” over the coming decades.
Fort Worth officials overseeing the plan’s development say the city has already paid consultants $158,300 to help piece together public workshops and web pages designed to solicit the public’s input on the strategy.
The total potential consultant bill (almost $918,300) could finance protective sealant for 33 to 230 lane miles of road, or pay for a block of sidewalk and street lighting in a residential neighborhood.
What exactly is the city getting out of these contracts?
What is the Fort Worth comprehensive plan?
Fort Worth describes its comprehensive plan as “blueprint for the orderly growth and development of the city and its environs, created in partnership among the City, its stakeholders, and its citizens.”
The tome of charts, maps, proclamations and pledges is designed, planning officials say, to guide the gamut of municipal governing decisions, including budgeting, annexation and zoning.
“The Comprehensive Plan is an important source of information about the city and its desired future, as well as a source of policy guidance covering a wide range of community decisions and City actions,” Eric Fladager, the assistant director of Fort Worth Lab, the city’s planning and budgeting office, wrote to the Star-Telegram.
Fort Worth published its first comprehensive plan in 1965. It released a wholesale update 35 years later, with intermittent, neighborhood-specific tweaks in between. The city has slightly altered the plan every year since, releasing the latest version in 2023.
What is Fort Worth paying for?
The creation of the comprehensive plan is, at least in theory, a democratic process — a fusion of civilian feedback, business input, and bureaucratic expertise.
The city paid Public Information Associates, a Plano-based public relations firm, $158,300 to develop a “community engagement” plan for the 2050 Comprehensive Plan, according to Fladager.
In exchange, the consultants helped the city:
- Organize 14 workshops where residents mingled with planners and shared their vision for the city. About 0.037% of the city’s population (359 people) — or 1.94% of Farrington Field’s seating capacity — attended these workshops.
- Coordinate a “vision summit,” a beefed up workshop hosted at Will Rogers Memorial Center featuring remarks from Mayor Mattie Parker. The city says 286 people attended this event.
- Set up least 50 pop-up events — “casual ways for the City to interact with the community by setting up a kiosk, table, or event easels in a centrally located place on a weekend or evening at an event with lots of foot traffic,” as a December 2024 summary of city engagement efforts describes it. The city says more than 3,200 people engaged with the events.
- Conduct 30 interviews with stakeholders, including the mayor, City Council members, “key city staff” and school superintendents.
- Organize four focus group meetings with developers, the Greater Fort Worth Real Estate Council, and two other unspecified organizations.
- Host five meetings with advisory committees, groups of city nonprofit and industry leaders and council-selected community representatives.
- Garner just under 5,000 page visits and 377 contributions on Connect FW, a city website where residents can post many of the same opinions and preferences they’d share at in-person events.
- Engage 390 participants and collect 441 thoughts shared on ThoughtExchange, an online survey site.
Participants in these events were disproportionately wealthy, educated, and old compared to the city at large, according to the engagement summary.
Almost 28% of participants (for whom demographic information was collected) made at least $150,000 a year, which represents earnings of about 18% of the city’s population. One third of surveyed participants had a graduate degree; 11% of the city’s population possess that educational credential. Almost a third of participants were over the age of 65; only 10% of city residents fall into that age group (27% of residents are younger than 18, according to the city).
Fladager says the $759,598 earmarked for the next cohort of consultants will pay for “a continued focus on public participation, with additional data analysis and policy development components.” Arlington’s City Council voted to pay the same company $640,000 for similar services in November.
The Star-Telegram requested an itemized budget for Fort Worth’s contract. In response, Fladager provided a long list of tasks the consultant would be responsible for; the list included no descriptions of the tasks or corresponding costs.
“The work described above would take a significantly longer amount of time to complete if we were only able to use City staff to complete the work, given the many other projects that we are working on,” Fladager added. “This scope of work already entails a great deal of City staff time over the course of this effort to complete the work. In addition, the consultant brings additional capabilities and capacity that existing City staff would need to develop or hire to offer the same proficiency and advanced technical expertise.”
Moore Iacofano Goltsman Inc. did not respond to a request for comment.
Do city leaders use the comprehensive plan?
There are few public venues where the plan’s guidelines play a more prominent role than in zoning debates.
Every time a property owner wants to change their land’s zoning designation, city planning staff must judge the transition’s consistency with the comprehensive plan’s “policy” — its suggestions for sound land use — and its map detailing how every bit of land in the city should be zoned in the future.
“While it is true that not all zoning decisions are consistent with the Fort Worth Comprehensive Plan, the vast majority of them are, as are other growth and development decisions that do not involve actions by the Zoning Commission or the City Council,” Fladager wrote.
A Star-Telegram analysis of 2024 zoning outcomes found that City Council members voted against the comprehensive plan’s policy recommendations in just over 18% of the cases they heard last year. The zoning commission strayed from plan policy roughly 14% of the time. (In two instances, not counted in the calculations, zoning staff determined that the proposed zoning change was partially consistent with the comprehensive plan’s policy.)
The City Council made decisions that deviated from the comprehensive plan’s land use map in 38% of cases. The zoning commission’s recommendations contradicted the map 29% of the time. (Zoning staff concluded that six cases, not counted here, didn’t involve or only partially followed the map.)
The comprehensive plan’s suggestions sometimes seem to contradict each other. In 29 cases last year, for instance, city zoning analysts determined that the property owner’s proposal was consistent with the plan’s policy but not its map.
Community engagement consultants asked council members if they felt the existing comprehensive plan aligned with council’s strategic priorities. They reportedly received “mixed responses, with many indicating misalignment or unfamiliarity with the plan,” according to the December community engagement summary.
The Star-Telegram asked the mayor and every council member if they regularly consulted the comprehensive plan when making day-to-day decisions relating to the city’s growth — zoning cases, road construction, and so on. It also asked if they considered the price of the consultant contracts reasonable.
Council member Carlos Flores said he found the contract value “a little high.”
“I trust staff to spend city funding wisely, but I also know there are opportunities we can take to always stretch every dollar,” he wrote to the Star-Telegram.
Flores, for his part, also described himself as “intimately familiar with the comprehensive plan,” adding that he exercises “good practice to review current and future land use and what the comprehensive plan calls for within any zoning change requests.”
Mayor Mattie Parker defended the spending but didn’t comment on her personal engagement with the plan.
“Getting growth and development right over the next 25+ years means that Fort Worth residents will continue to enjoy a high quality of life and our communities will continue to thrive,” her office said in a statement. “This is a substantial contract because it was critical that the City engaged external expertise with a proven track record for a charge of this scale and importance.”
No other elected city leaders responded to questions.
Who benefits from the comprehensive plan?
Fort Worth’s 2000 comprehensive plan designated large chunks of southeast Fort Worth as an “Industrial Growth Center.”
Residents and community activists argue the label justified and encouraged decades of largely unchecked industrial expansion in the area — at the expense of the well-being of those who lived nearby.
A sustained grassroots campaign has, in recent years, gradually scaled back parcels of industrial zoning in Echo Heights and surrounding neighborhoods.
To many residents and their advocates, deindustrializing is a reversal of unsound, unjust land use sanctioned, at least in part, by city leaders and the plans informing their decision making.
“The best thing about a ball dropping? You can pick it up,” Perry Williams, a Village Creek resident told council members in May before they voted to block a warehouse proposal behind the neighborhood community center. “Some of you council members weren’t even born when this occurred. Well, you’re here now.”
This story was originally published April 21, 2025 at 3:32 PM.
