Planning and Land Use advocacy is most effective when it’s done early in the life cycle of a development proposal.

As a Neighborhood Council member, you should be receiving the Department of City Planning’s Early Notification Report, which lists all the planning entitlement applications that have been filed in your area, and is sent every 2 weeks. This is the earliest notice you will receive about projects coming your way, and contact information is included for each applicant so your Land Use Committee may reach out to ask questions or invite applicants to present their projects to your Board.

Many of these applicants will eventually send a packet of materials to whomever your Board designated as your Planning Liaison, but the Early Notification Report will be your first opportunity to know what’s coming your way. Since Planning and Land Use cases can take 2-3 months to be processed by a Neighborhood Council, it’s a good idea to get started on cases as soon as you hear about them in this report.

The report lists projects by Neighborhood Council, in alphabetical order. If yours isn’t listed, that means no new applications were filed in your area for the past two weeks. (Please note that not all development projects require community input from groups like Neighborhood Councils as part of their application process, so the only proposals that show up on this report as the ones requiring that sort of feedback.) 

You may post the report or details drawn from your Neighborhood Council’s section of it to your website or social media accounts, or include it in newsletters, to help keep your stakeholders up to date.

How to subscribe to City Planning reports and updates

You may also let your stakeholders know they can subscribe to receive City Planning notifications directly. Click here to subscribe to regional planning notifications; click here to subscribe to non-geographically determined reports, including the Early Notification Report (called the “Bi-weekly Case Filing” on this page) that you receive as a Neighborhood Council member.