Of David Hartman’s 63 unique cases, 49 have concluded — reached a Planning Commission or ZAP decision — and 48 of those ended in approval at their final hearing: 98.0%.
Postponement is a clock, not a verdict: of the 30 concluded cases postponed at least once, 29 still ended in approval (96.7%). At least 29 of these cases are confirmed adopted as Council ordinances (Council records run only through 2026-05-28, so this is a floor, not a rate).
Counted once per case, not once per hearing: a case postponed several times before approval would otherwise read as several losses and one win.
Approval rate 37.8% — below the field (48.7%) by 10.9 pts.
At the hearing level every appearance counts, so a case postponed N times adds N postponements and one decision. Hearing-level approval-of-decided is 37.8% (vs the field’s 48.7%) and postponement is 60.8% — both far from the case-level figure above, for exactly that reason. Two stages, two denominators: these are commission-stage outcomes (approve vs. postpone/deny at the Planning Commission or ZAP hearing), not the City Council vote. Once a Commission-recommended case reaches Council it is approved in the high-90s%, so a low commission-stage approval rate reflects strategic postponement, not defeat.
Coverage note. Hearing counts on this page are FLOORS, and percentages are ESTIMATES computed over the hearings we hold. Measured against the City's own meeting record, the certified store carries 6,712 of the 6,728 hearing items its source documents describe since 2016 — 99.8% — with coverage weakest in 2020 (98.7%). A firm's true hearing count is therefore at least the number shown, and a rate is the rate within the held sample rather than the full population. Coverage is measured, not assumed, and this note is derived from that measurement on every rebuild. A second step sits between these rates and the population: of the 6,667 hearing items read from the minutes, 5,513 (82.7%) state a disposition this record can classify and 1,154 do not. Unclassified items carry no outcome and are absent from every rate above, so a rate is computed over the classified part of a sample, not over the sample and not over the population. THIS LIMITS COMPARABILITY BETWEEN FIRMS. The unclassified items are not spread evenly: engineering and surveying practices carry about 75% of the named ones (Southwest Engineers, LJA Engineering, Perales Engineering, Stantec Consulting Services among them), because subdivision dispositions are recorded in grouped consent motions rather than per item. Those firms' rates therefore rest on a smaller classified subset than a zoning practice's, and a high approval share at the top of the table may reflect which of a firm's matters could be classified rather than how its matters went. WE MEASURE OUR OWN ERROR AND IT IS NOT UNIFORM. Re-reading every minutes block against the stored disposition found 8.2% disagreement across 3,073 independently-written rows before correction — 6.03% in 2017-2019, 11.73% across the remote-meeting years 2020-2022, 6.12% in 2024-2025 — and about 1.56x as high on Zoning and Platting as on Planning Commission. All of it has been corrected against the minutes and logged; the shape is published because where a record is weakest is a fact about the record.
Austin Development Watch · every figure traces to a certified record · hearing data through 2026-08-25 · Council outcomes through 2026-05-28 · gate-certified · generated 2026-08-31