Alexandria’s planning department has hired a consultant to get anonymous comments from citizens on the city’s hotly contested Braddock Road Small Area Plan.

City officials have looked at the warehouses, parking lots and garages between the Metro line, U.S. Route 1 and Oronocco Street as potential sites for mixed residential and retail redevelopment for more than a year.

But plans for high-rise buildings clustered along the eastern side of the Metro station horrified residents.

Protests about increased traffic and dwarfed homes led city staff to delay the area planning process. At a community meeting Monday, planning staff and consultants will work with residents in small groups to prioritize concerns, according to the planning department Web site.

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The consulting firm, Annapolis-based Kramer and Associates, will also conduct anonymous interviews to get the “widest possible range of interests and points of view,” from stakeholders, Planning and Zoning Director Faroll Hamer wrote in an e-mail to concerned resident Mark Freeman.

“It’s incomprehensible to me that the best way to do this is secretive,” Freeman said Thursday. “It leads to speculation. Openness is more likely to produce an outcome everyone is happy with.”

In the letter, Hamer wrote that releasing the interviewees’ names would taint the responses.

Summaries of the interviews will be published without names, she wrote.

Planning and zoning staff did not return calls Thursday, and the consultant was also unavailable to comment.

It is unclear how many interviews the consultant will conduct.

Freeman, who authored a petition against the plans in April, also disagreed with spending taxpayers’ money on consultants. The city, he said, already knows residents’ objections.

The best way to get diverse opinions is in small groups or one-on-one interviews, Hamer wrote. It is also important to get the views of stakeholders outside the neighborhood, she wrote.

“The Braddock Plan affects not only the surrounding neighborhoods, but because this is a plan at a metro station, and because it involves public housing and public facilities, it will have impacts well beyond the boundaries of the Small Area Plan,” Hamer wrote.

Freeman disagrees, arguing that only those who will have to live with the consequences need to be consulted.

Hamer’s intention is to revise the plan over the summer and complete it in the fall.

The community meeting will be held 7 p.m. Monday, at Jefferson Houston School, 1501 Cameron St.

mhegstad@dcexaminer.com