The plan would see new guidelines included when deciding which smaller roading projects in Dunedin - such as new roundabouts, traffic lights or seal extensions - would proceed and which would have to wait.
Infrastructure services committee chairman Cr Andrew Noone said the initiative could help take some of the heat out of debate between council staff, who judged projects on technical merit and "the bigger picture", and community boards, who had greater local knowledge.
Under the plan, additional criteria - such as the availability of external funding, or the number of nearby homes that would benefit - would be given a ranking when weighing the merits of similar projects in, for example, Port Chalmers and Mosgiel.
The additional information would feed into the existing process, whereby community boards prepared a priority list for capital works in their area, which was submitted to the council, prioritised against projects in other areas and included in forward planning, Cr Noone said.
If adopted, the new system would give the council additional transparent measures to point to when explaining how it arrived at its priority list, he said.
"Nearly every year there will be one [community] board, or more, that are dissatisfied at where council has put the emphasis on a certain project. There has always been a little bit of tension," Cr Noone said.
The draft plan was put to this week's infrastructure services committee meeting in a report by council policy engineer Pieter Besuijen, who said changes were likely after community boards had considered the plan.
The city's six community board would consider the plan at a workshop and their own meetings over the next few weeks.
The system would not be used for ranking larger projects, like the planned upgrade of the Caversham highway, but aimed to ensure works programmes were "more universally accepted", Mr Besuijen said.
