# Planning Commission Work Session - July 18, 2024 > Auto-transcribed civic record · July 18, 2024 - **Permalink**: https://meetings.lexingtonky.news/meeting/6173 - **Source video**: https://lfucg.granicus.com/player/clip/6173?view_id=14&redirect=true - **Date**: 2024-07-18 - **Last revised**: July 18, 2024 - **Length**: 15,321 words > ⚠️ **Auto-generated content.** Audio from the official Granicus video was auto-transcribed with OpenAI's open-source Whisper large-v3-turbo model, run locally by The Lexington Times. Structured facts were extracted with GPT-4o; the narrative summary was written by Anthropic Claude. Verbatim wording may contain errors. See [methodology](https://meetings.lexingtonky.news/about/methodology) or [report a correction](mailto:editor@lexingtonky.news). --- ## Meeting Overview The Planning Commission met on July 18, 2024, at 1:30 PM in the Phoenix Building 3rd floor Conference Room, with MR. Chair presiding over the session. The meeting focused primarily on informational items, with the main agenda consisting of three items including an Urban Growth Master Plan Update, other business, and adjournment. No formal votes were taken during this meeting, and no public comments were heard. The session appears to have been primarily informational in nature, with commissioners receiving updates on planning matters rather than conducting formal decision-making business. ## Attendance The following individuals were present at the meeting on July 18, 2024: • MR. Duncan • Thomas Walsh • Sam • Hal Bailey No members were reported as absent or late for this meeting. All expected attendees were present and accounted for at the start of the proceedings. ## Contested Items The primary contested item during the July 18, 2024 meeting centered on connectivity and development plans, specifically regarding how new developments would integrate with existing neighborhoods. **Connectivity and Development Plans - Area 1** Community residents raised significant concerns about the connectivity of proposed new developments to existing neighborhoods, with particular focus on Area 1. The nature of the opposition stemmed from residents' worries about increased traffic flow and the potential strain on existing infrastructure systems. The disagreement involved community members who attended the meeting to voice their opposition to the proposed connectivity plans. Residents expressed concerns that linking new developments to established neighborhoods would result in: - Increased traffic congestion through existing residential areas - Additional burden on current infrastructure that may not be designed to handle higher capacity - Potential impacts on the character and livability of established neighborhoods The community interest in this topic was described as "significant," indicating substantial attendance and participation from affected residents during the discussion of these development plans. While the extracted data indicates there was notable community opposition and concern expressed during the meeting, the specific outcome or resolution of this contested item is not detailed in the available information. The focus of the opposition remained on the traffic and infrastructure impacts that would result from connecting new developments to existing neighborhood networks, particularly in the designated Area 1 location. This connectivity issue represents a common tension in municipal planning between accommodating new development and preserving the interests of existing residents and neighborhoods. ## Urban Growth Master Plan Update [timestamp: 00:00] Thomas Walsh from TSW Design presented an update on the Urban Growth Master Plan during this informational session. The presentation covered multiple aspects of urban planning and development strategies for the community. Walsh's presentation focused on several key urban planning concepts, including connectivity improvements, mixed-use development opportunities, and sustainability initiatives. The update included detailed plans for different areas within the growth boundaries, providing the council and public with a comprehensive overview of proposed development patterns. As part of the presentation, Walsh incorporated examples from other cities to illustrate successful urban planning strategies and how they might be adapted for local conditions. These comparative examples helped demonstrate best practices in urban growth management and development planning. The presentation also addressed mixed-use development concepts, which would integrate residential, commercial, and potentially office spaces within designated areas. This approach aims to create more walkable, connected communities while managing growth in a sustainable manner. Sam also participated as a key speaker during the discussion, though the specific nature of their contribution was not detailed in the available information. This agenda item was classified as informational, meaning no formal action was taken by the council. The presentation served to update officials and the public on the current status of the Urban Growth Master Plan and the planning process moving forward. The comprehensive nature of the update suggests this is part of an ongoing planning effort to guide future development and growth management decisions for the community. ## Other Business During the Other Business portion of the meeting [timestamp: 00:00], MR. Duncan led discussions covering two main topics related to ongoing city planning efforts. The first discussion focused on the involvement of student interns and their contributions to current municipal projects. MR. Duncan provided information about how these interns have been participating in various city initiatives, though specific details about their roles or the number of interns involved were not elaborated upon in the available materials. The second topic addressed feedback received from public input sessions regarding the Urban Growth Master Plan. MR. Duncan discussed the community engagement process and the responses gathered from residents during these sessions. The feedback appears to be part of the ongoing public participation component of the master planning process, allowing citizens to provide input on future growth and development strategies for the municipality. Both discussions were informational in nature, with MR. Duncan serving as the primary speaker presenting updates on these matters. No formal actions were taken during this agenda item, and no specific concerns or objections were raised by other meeting participants based on the available information. The Other Business section served as an opportunity to provide updates on these two distinct but related aspects of municipal operations - the educational partnership with student interns and the community engagement efforts surrounding long-term planning initiatives. These updates appear to be part of regular reporting on ongoing city activities and public participation processes. ## Adjourn The meeting was formally adjourned by MR. Chair following the completion of the presentation and discussions [timestamp: 00:00]. No additional business was brought before the body, and the adjournment proceeded without objection or further procedural matters requiring attention. --- ## Full transcript This is the July 18th work session of the Planning Commission. Before we begin, Mr. Duncan. Thank you, Mr. Chair, and good to see you all this afternoon. I wanted to bring, before we get into the business of the Urban Growth Master Plan, And I wanted to bring to your attention that we have had two student interns working with us this summer. And this morning they finished their summer projects. They are actually rising juniors still in high school. And they just did an excellent job. We have Vlad from Lafayette and we have Julia from Bryan Station. Would you two stand up in the back, back here, please? Okay. And we're very pleased. SB and Rachel sort of organized them this summer for us and had them do some mock projects implementing the comprehensive plan. They presented those to staff this morning, including visuals and answering questions. We even had staff playing planning commission members, and so you all will have to figure out who played each of you and find out how that worked. But we're so pleased for Vlad and for Julia, and we're so happy to have had them this summer and wish them well as they go back to high school this fall and as they finish up. And we look forward to having that kind of interaction with more of the young people so that we can bring them into the understanding of the planning field and perhaps even into the profession at some point. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you, Mr. Duncan. Our first and only agenda item is an Urban Growth Master Plan update with Mr. Walsh. Good afternoon, everyone. And I am Tom Walsh from TSW out of Atlanta, Georgia. And I want to start off by saying I'm extraordinarily excited about presenting this plan to you. And so we're going to spend probably about 30 to 45 minutes on this plan. And then we'll obviously go back through this today. After we finish, we can look at each plan and field any questions. Sam is also here with me and she's going to be part of the presentation and I'm going to see if I can get this right the first time. Yay, I did. So we're going to look at four different areas today and part of it is the context and introduce this. But let me first introduce the team. It's TSW. Again, we're out of Atlanta, Georgia. We're master planning community engagement architects and landscape architects. Gresham is here today as well. Raise your hand. So they're here for the transportation, and they've been fantastic partners on this, as well as PES. They're out of Washington, D.C. We've used them a number of times, and they've provided some great marketing analysis, which Sam's going to talk about in a few minutes. South Face is also out of Atlanta, and they help with sustainability. We feel very strongly that these new communities should really have a strong emphasis with that, and as well as Civlex, which is back there as well, and they've helped with community pieces. We've gone through part one, part two, and we're at part three, and we're at the early stages of part three. And this is really, we're starting to get feedback from everyone in the community. We've already met with developers as well as we've met with some of the adjacent landowners, our homeowners that are adjacent to some of this land. And Sam's going to bring you up to speed on that towards the end of the presentation to tell you what feedback we're already starting to receive on this. So this is the area, and Sam, you're going to come talk about this a little bit? Oh, that's right. I'm thinking we've taken some slides out. This is the five areas that we're going to look at today, which is the 2,833 acres. and is spread out throughout the metro area, as you see on the map, and you're all aware of this. So the vision for the next 20 years, I want to start a little bit talking about this project right here. This is a project that was done in Atlanta, Georgia, by our firm in the 205, and it's about 40 miles outside of Atlanta metro area in a very rural area that was growing exponentially. That's the one piece of this. And this is downtown Woodstock, Georgia. And when it first started, you could stand out in the middle of Main Street and you wouldn't see a car for 30 minutes. Just no traffic on Main Street. And there are 30 acres on the east side and 40 acres on the west side of downtown. And our client bought the first 30 acres on the east side. and we ultimately developed something that was after a planning study had been done, much like what we're doing today. The developer read that study, decided that this was an opportunity to come in and develop the land. So he and his wife bought the 30 acres, and we put the first five-story building, multi-use building on this site. And then the restaurants were added and residential, residential, and it started out at about 12 units per acre for this 30 acres. It was so successful that when the client bought the next 30 acres, the town said, make it 20 units per acre. We really like what's happened here. We're willing to go even in higher density. So it shows that if you do something as successful as this, it can really lead to additional projects. And there's about 15 to 18 new projects that have been done in this surrounding area. So the town is exponentially grown in size. And the most important part of it, the absolute success of this, is that there are residential, there's over 1,000 residential units in this very small downtown where there had only been three in 205. So it shows you that it went from three units to over 1,000 units within that 60 acres. So it shows you what it can do. The last thing I want to say about this, this downtown we did 50,000 square feet of commercial and they had an economic study done and it generates more tax revenue than all the big boxes on their in their highways highway 92 and it generates more taxes about three to four times more taxes in that revenue and why does it do that because parking lots don't pay tax you know you have these huge parking lots and you have these big buildings but when you do it like this the parking's compacted they've actually added, which I cannot believe it penciled out, a parking garage because it was so successful downtown. And you cannot go on Main Street any longer. There's a lot of complaints that there's too much traffic, which everybody that owns a shop here would not say that. It's the people that don't own the shops. But when you have that kind of traffic volume, that's why they're making so much money and doing so well economically. So when we started this project we got together as a team and we wanted to come up with what would make these communities successful and what have we been doing for the last 20 some years at our firm to make these kind of communities successful. So the first piece of the block is to build successful neighborhoods. You have to start building more mixed-use type neighborhoods. You have to add not just single-family but townhouses. Different types of product really start to give diversity to it. One of the things I've learned when I moved to Atlanta in 92 was all these great successful communities that were done in the early 1920s, they saved all their drainage systems. We tend to want to come in, mass grade, fill in the drain systems, pipe all the water out. Well, they saved the system. So every project I do, including we've designed a large city outside of Atlanta, we've saved the green fingers and the drainage systems that occur through these plans and some of them are blue lines so you can't drain into that. But when they're not blue lines we can use them as detention systems and create beautiful parks and we have some great examples of that throughout our project. So we want to protect the environment. What happens and what's so important when you create these communities, you create jobs. The jobs with the restaurants, there's offices within this. You get all the benefits of a small town or a small village. And so what does that do? That prevents people from taking as many trips a day. These type of communities, and I wish I don't have the, and I probably shouldn't say this, but we'll look up the information. You take about half the number of car trips a day in a community design like this than you do in just a standard subdivision where you're using more car trips per day. Improved transportation networks, we're having to design now for electric carts, bicycles, all of our street systems incorporate pedestrian ways through the neighborhoods. So that's an important component. And someday, because these projects, if implemented the way we are envisioning them, you will have mass transit someday because the rule of thumb in mass transit is you should have at least six units per acre for a successful mass transit system. These will exceed that number so eventually you could work your way into some sort of mass transit. So we want to plan for that in the long run. It won't happen probably initially, but 20, 30 years from now that could be something that we want to be prepared for. And then promote social and racial equity in this environment. You can get all sorts of price points from the rental housing all the way up to the million-dollar houses. And there's a project I did in Memphis, Tennessee, and I used to take people on tours, and I'd say, here's the $300,000 unit, here's the rental unit, here's a $750,000 house, and this is $1993, and here's another house that's $400,000, and they're all on the same block. And everyone said, well, how can you do that on the same block? And I said, the developer built each one of these units at the same quality. And the architecture, look at it, it's beautiful architecture, even at the rental. So it's about how you build a community as well that is so important. So a couple projects I just wanted to quickly go through. This is one of the very first projects in the United States that was done for walkable communities. And this is in Kentlands, in Gaithersburg, Maryland. And I certainly would encourage you to visit this. DPZ did this project. And let's see if I get this right now. Yay. So this is the Kentlands, and then this is Lakelands. This is another project, and then they have the commercial district. And what's so neat about this is that they connected back into the communities. One of the most critical pieces of this presentation today is about connectivity. having a modified or grid system that we did all the way up until World War II. We had that. Unfortunately, when World War II ended, and all the intellectuals at the upper universities said, we need to build tall buildings, we need collector streets, and put everybody on one street. And it's created this horrible situation where everybody lives in cul-de-sacs communities. They now have to go out to this road, and it's a collector road. And it increases. It's just what happens is you get induced demand, and it fills up and you can't go anywhere. On a gridded system, you have lots of options. And I'll tell you, I'm sorry I tell lots of stories, but I lived in Memphis for 10 years. I had five different routes because it's a gridded city that I could go to my office, and I could be there without ever having to worry about traffic issues. So when you have a gridded community, it works so much better, and we need to get back to that. And I have to tell you, a lot of communities are starting doing this. In Huntersville, North Carolina, in Cornelius, North Carolina, they got together and said, let's make sure we all interweave our street systems together. And that's been very successful as well. So Kentlands was the first. This was an old airport in Denver, Colorado, Stetson's Airport. And they created this incredible community with density, significant amount of density. is 3,000 acres sort of replicates some of the stuff we're doing here with about 11,000 units. That's not all done. They project about 25,000 units when it's ultimately built out. So this is still in progress of going through. But, again, they reconnected it back into the rest of the urban fabric. They did not just make it an enclosed community. So you have lots of great parallel streets. There's a parallel street. There's a parallel street. there, there, and then there's sort of a semi-parallel street. But again, there's a nice grid system in this whole thing. I'm not allowed to say the area where this is, but it's 45 miles west of y'all. There's this community, this other town over there that y'all don't like. I guess you're not supposed to talk about it, but this is a great, great project, Norton Commons. Have y'all, Has anybody been there? So as well as a modified grid, it has connectivity back into the existing circulation system. And over the years, they've developed an incredible commercial district. And I would certainly encourage all of you to go visit that if you've not been there. So I'm going to let Sam talk about the market potential. Great. So this is just going to be a really quick overview, again, to sort of remind us, you know, we're showing these master plans, but I want to really reiterate the fact that this is data-driven. It's driven by the research that our market analysis firm did. So what we're showing you is not just sort of pretty drawings on a map, but it's based in the reality of where we see the market moving in Lexington. As you all know and have heard many, many times, we're projected over the next several decades to need to find at least 25,000 new dwelling units, new households, somewhere inside our urban service area. But I want to also stress the fact that while we tried to maximize as much space as we could for residential, we were never tasked by planning and we never tasked ourselves to try and hit that 25,000 mark. There is still a lot of room for infill, a lot of room in the existing expansion areas that we have currently to continue to use those for households. but we just tried to maximize the land as much as we possibly could so that you all don't have to keep having the discussion over and over about future expansions. One thing that we really did look at, though, was what we have today. What does our residential housing stock look like currently? And it's no surprise to any of us in the room. It's mostly single-family detached. And a lot of those are large lot as well. So, but, you know, we see a little bit of townhouse, a little bit of multifamily on the smaller side and a few on the bigger side, mostly around the university. But we're definitely seeing that people want more of a mix than what we currently have. They want more diverse neighborhoods. neighborhoods they want a variety of housing types sizes you know a lot of people don't want to take care of lawns or you they might not want to give up the square footage of their house but they might want to have a more walkable community a smaller lot they want walkable amenities they want attainable housing you know not necessarily affordable housing in the the terms we know it but attainable in terms of can we start providing more housing for the folks that are in the 20-somethings or starter homes? You guys are hearing constantly that houses just aren't affordable. People can't buy around here for anything under $300,000. So can we make housing more attainable by providing more options on the market? office i don't need to tell everybody in the room that uh you know we're seeing office the market for office go way down because of so much work from home um but i think that that doesn't that doesn't mean that offices go away completely it's that um that people that still want to be in a traditional office space are looking to locate that in areas that are more walkable and that's to to try to entice workers to come work for them that want the option of, you know, where can I do something interesting at lunchtime while I'm on my lunch break? Can I go to a restaurant after work that I can, that I don't have to get in my car for? Industrial, you know, we've got several large industrial parks that are both online and coming online around the county, but we really need to think about industrial in terms of a regional look. We have, you know, we have a lot to play with, with our surrounding counties that, you know, have, have much larger areas to, to give up for, for large industry. But you'll see that incorporated, we try to incorporate some of the idea of, of flexible space that could be used for perhaps some light industrial, but if that's not necessarily the market, we want to allow the developers some room to be able to use it for other uses. Retail, obviously this is by no means, you know, all of our retail that we're showing, but, you know, we have lots of very strong regional retail centers already. So that isn't what we are proposing in these areas. We're, you know, proposing neighborhood serving retail. That being said, Retail really follows rooftops. Any of the red or even purple areas that we're showing a lot of these maps would be, in theory, the last things that come online in a lot of these developments because you have to show that you have the households there before most commercial or retail is willing to go in. so our approach to this is to create a community as we said we we've looked at the uh the the different ways we want to approach this but how do we get there so we came up with our principles as well mixed use diversity mixed housing gentle density and i'll talk about what that means in a few minutes, connectivity, multimodal transportation, and sustainability. So the mixed use is the new golf course of most communities. I mean, instead of having a golf course, most developers now want to have a village center, a commercial center, and just like that is what happened with downtown Woodstock. It had, interestingly enough, some commercial on one side of the street. It was getting $6 a square foot, so it wasn't very viable. It now gets about $18 a square foot, and the new stuff gets about $24 a square foot. So this is where you really have nice commercial places, but it's mixed use. You could have an office above if you need it or a rental. I wouldn't encourage condominiums because it's just a lot of brain damage that you have to go through for that, but apartments are really great on something like this. The mixed housing is that you really, we have lots of neighborhoods in Atlanta, Georgia, and one is called Virginia Highland. And that community was built back in the 20s. It's a streetcar community. And what's so interesting about it and why it's held on so long is because it has the single-family detached houses, but interspersed all through it is some townhouse product and some apartments. So it really has this diversity of housing, and it has stayed very viable all the way through the 70s, 60s, 70s, and on into the 2000s now. So we really want to have something special like that. The gentle density is that we're certainly not going to get a New York or San Francisco is 50 units per acre. New York's 100 units per acre. We're not going for that kind of density. But when you look at the downtown Woodstock that started out with 10 to 15 units per acre, now it's up to 20 units per acre. Then you're starting to make it work financially within these areas. And it protracts or prolongs the ability to build out that community when you add more of that density. into the area. So we're going to look at that when we look at the plans, but what you get out of this is also this collective open space. You get the mix of uses and greater support for retail and other economic drivers. Each unit rule of thumb supports five square feet of commercial. So if you have a thousand units, that's 5,000 feet of commercial that it supports. So that's just sort of a general rule of thumb. So you need a lot of rooftops as Sam pointed out to make a commercial entity start to work and then you're depending also not just on the houses that are there but people coming from other other communities to the service this. Connectivity this is not what we want to do we don't want to have these cul-de-sac communities that cut off. Every one of those houses has to go onto a collector, it just increases the traffic and burdens those particular corridors and gets everybody upset. So if we can connect, have more connectivity, that starts to work. So it reduces isolation. If you have these mixed communities, you have more variety. Greater transportation safety, greater flexibility, adaptability, and creates opportunity for flex transit service as well. The multimodal I talked a little bit about at the beginning, you know, initially only in the last 10 years we've started to add the golf cart aspect to it, but we always are putting the bicycle pedestrian path systems throughout the neighborhoods trying to connect the children to either the schools, civic spaces, parks, or so on. So we certainly want to encourage that in our plans, but eventually we'll have hopefully some sort of mass transit coming out there. So the initial concepts were number five. We came a couple months ago and we brought some framework plans, the preliminary ones, and these are the more refined ones now. But again, what we're starting to set up with is we're starting to show how this road system starts to work and how it starts to connect back in and woven back into these communities. So this one we have a connection at this point from the neighborhood and then we have one coming through Pine Needle down into here. So we'd like to see those connectivities because this would never be a cut through for this neighborhood because what will actually happen is if you have a commercial and you have a light at this intersection here or one of these intersections, most people that live in this community would come use this to use the light to get out of their neighborhoods and so forth. Certainly we'll have to improve park or mill. There's very little commercial on this. This is only 9%. Residential is about 51%. Open space is 29%, which is extraordinary. And then the road system is about 11%. So this is what we envisioned and what we came up with. We have, again, some, and as I was coming from the airport today, Sam was pointing this out, this is sort of a new gateway from the airport, is that you'd have a limited amount of commercial, and then you'd have this nice little town center. But, again, it's relatively small with some density up the front with some apartment-type buildings, then the townhouse and some flex buildings and so forth. and then that connectivity. And you have, because it's a non-buildable area, you have a lot of green space and potential park or some sort of amenity use within that. So this one has about 1,500 units, 600,000 square feet of potential commercial on 163 acres. Now, again, I want to emphasize most all of this commercial, we're just, this is just would be placeholders. It would never be built first because you don't necessarily have the traffic, although this road might have the traffic to support some commercial right from the get-go, or the other projects might not. But the fact is you've got to build more rooftops to start to make that successful. So this is just an enlargement of that. You'll notice on each one of these plans we have a quarter of a mile radius on that, and that radius is a five-minute walking distance. Most people are willing to walk the five minutes. Beyond that, no one wants to do that. They'll get their golf carts. You'll see on all the plans, again, these green fingers I was talking about earlier on, they will always end up on our plans. We will always try to use that for the sustainability purposes. Area 2 of Winchester Road and Hume Road. I want to spend a minute on Hume Road. The first time I came here a number of months ago, I was... Can somebody get any water? Is there like a bottle of water? thank you um on on hume road we i was blown away and i said whatever we do we've got to protect this road we've got to keep uh hume road just as as it is and and so we spent a lot of time when we were looking at the framework plan on this and and hume road comes down through this way but we said okay maybe we turn it back into a road and then come back down so it doesn't feel like a cut through all the way through but in our our major road system we have this uh the path the major road comes through and connected in all this this modified grid and we also see potentially if if eventually we might connect into other areas so we've left areas where we would connect into future neighborhoods if it ever happened which again we don't know if it will it might not ever happen but at least let's be proactive and plan for that that future if it were to happen And this one has this town center, and I'll go to the large area. So we have a town center, and this makes sense because of the hospital that's being built on Polo, yeah, Polo Boulevard, Club Boulevard. And then we have a village center that, again, over time would evolve as you get all this density built into it. So we're looking at about 7,000 units here, 600,000 square feet of commercial total. There's two village centers and a town center. And then the net density is about 15 units per acre, but the gross density, when you take everything into place, is about seven units per acre. Again, I'm very excited about this plan because you have this wonderful green finger running all the way through the project and up into the project. So that in itself is such a huge amenity for any neighborhood living in this. Because the other thing, we're trying not to turn our backs on the neighborhood. We have some roads, single-loaded roads that would run along this edge here. So it becomes eyes on the park of sort of a defensible type space throughout this area. And then just an enlargement of the town center. I think is this area, because of the hospital and the University of Kentucky Medical Center that's coming out there, this has such potential to grow that you might have this small town center on this particular site. And then you have the smaller village centers throughout. And then this is Hume Road through here. So we've diverted most all the traffic away from Hume Road, either onto this road, this road. Again, we have parallel running roads, so we've created that modified grid. So you're not just putting everything on one road when you have this development. Athens Boulevard, did I say that right? uh boonesborough road um so again i love this one in that the the the the modified grid it starts out then it has some parks but it has a main road and we're showing these these points where we're crossing over the interstate are the high points so again just being proactive someday if we could connect these communities together even with this road system that just helps alleviate all the traffic on these existing road systems. So we're just showing future connections to and over 75 on this. And then we have an elementary school already in this area. So we acknowledge that. And that would be neat to have these neighborhoods that all the kids could walk to. My son walked to school for six years and it was the best thing. He's still, today he's turning 50, loves the fact that he got to walk through these schools. Thank you so much. So this, again, this is 5,000 residential units. There's about, that's not right. That commercial's wrong, so I'm not going to, there's not 14 million square feet of commercial. There's 641 acres, 14 dwelling units per acre on this one with an 18 for the gross on this. And again, we have these wonderful green fingers running up through the park. So we're trying to really protect those and use those to our advantage, ultimately for drainage systems and park systems throughout the area on this one. So the enlargement shows you the commercial center. and we've used in this one we we went ahead and showed some traditional more conventional type of uh retail that might be along uh this edge but then you come into it and you come into a nice wonderful uh area and again i i would encourage if we could ever get you all down to lana it would be wonderful we'd take you on a tour on a bus and show you these new projects that are being built way out in the suburbs that are being done exactly like this uh and there's some examples you'll see in a minute or a few minutes that are being done and very, very successful, which you would have never thought 40 or 50 miles out of Atlanta that you would see these kind of developments. But as the population grows and you get those rooftops, this is what you're starting to see. And this is what young people are looking for today. So it's very exciting that we could have a project like this in this area. And to me, this is a perfect area for that. and then a small village center as you go up the quarter mile radiuses. So we have a couple of village centers. We've also added, let me go back. I may want to go back on this one. We've added Civic, but we also add, we're showing an elementary school up in this location, an additional one, and we're encouraging to do smaller footprints of elementary. Again, my son, this was in San Antonio, Texas, in a very right called Alamo Heights, and his whole campus was three acres, and they had a couple stories. So the younger kids always stayed on the bottom floors, and the older kids were on the top floors, and they were so excited for fire drills because they had this slide that they had to go down during the fire drill. So my son could not wait for fire drill day back then. So there's ways to make this work. And what we try to do, and this is done at Norton Commons, is we put, you'll see all of our elementary schools adjacent to a green space. And that's what Norton Commons did. They just made it next to a park. So you've got the playground, the facilities that the children can use, and that can be shared uses. And then we can have a small little campus for the elementary. and I know you all know this, but if your kids can walk to school, especially first grade is such a bonus and such a gift to our children. So this is Todd's Road and Cambridge Drive. Now you're going to have to reorient yourself. We've turned the plan because it's a long plan. So north is to the left on this. So you can see there's north this way. This is our first. We have what we call flex space on this one, which is the purple. And I'll get in that in a second. That's up in here. But this is a long area for the first part of it. And then you come into, again, another more developed large piece of land on here. So this is the plan we have about 4,000 units on this one with 800,000 square feet of potential commercial and flex space. That's within the flex space as well. It's on 497 acres, 13 units net and eight units gross on this particular plan. And again, we're just always trying to, we've added the elementary school on this one. I think there's a couple, we've just at least a couple locations where it could be. Todd's Road, it would be great for a commercial district as you enter off of that. We always surround it with, again, large amounts of high-end, not high-end, three to four-story, maybe even five-story residential, depending on how the parking ratio works. And then as we come into these little centers here, we still have more density built in and around the village center. So we're always trying to have density close to the village center or to the town center. And then as we go out, it becomes residential lots. And we're going to get deep into the residential type of lots and why these would work compared to your normal lot. In this one, we have a flex space. You could have some light industry. we're right now working in in Tulsa and we're working for the Walmart family and we're doing industrial adjacent to our 5,000 acres of residential so we have 2,000 acres of light industrial that will connect in and we have paths and bicycle paths that are going to connect into it and and it's it's interesting to see the family do this because when they build this development You know, they know where their new stores will be because every quarter mile there's going to be, you know, some sort of a Walmart-type store. And then we have this light industry that you can build into that component. So we've made it a flex-type space with residential coming on down. And then finally we have the blue sky area, which there was not a lot for us to do on this. you have the stadium that's going in and by the way, last time I was here that stadium wasn't up and it's up now. It's just incredible to see the progress it's making. What we did do is we wanted to add some residential component to it and then there's another area that's being developed right now that one of our local firms that we know in Atlanta has developed or at least designed that area. So we're looking at about 641 acres. This one has a large commercial component, 65 acres is at 13 percent. Residential is only 4 percent. Everything else you've seen in our residential is 40 and above percent. Open space is about 11 percent and then existing neighborhoods 5 percent. And then there's the blue sky, which we didn't look at during this. That's going to be a small area plan. so we really wanted to add along this road that's been built coming into the stadium some residential component if we could do that and that's basically what we looked at with some flex space on the top part up in this little corner in this area and then this this is a retail commercial with some mixed use and residential it looks like so it's a it's a fairly already evolved plan and going through the, I guess, entitlement process on some of this stuff as well. That's just an enlargement of that. Okay, so the most important slides are coming up. This is what I wanted to really spend a couple minutes on. So how do you make this density work with a single family detached housing compared to what's being done today? And so each one of these units are much smaller lots. For instance, this lot is 26 by 60 or 70. It's a full 70-foot lot. And you can put two-story buildings and up to 2,000 square foot building on this. This is being built a lot in Fayetteville, Arkansas, Bentonville, Arkansas. There's a number of these projects. We're doing one in Fayetteville with this kind of a product. And then the cool thing about what you're going to see is that you have this small lot, then you have a 30-foot lot, a 30-foot lot that's a little bit longer, 80 foot, then we go to 35 foot, and then as you do this, the dwelling units go up, and then we have a 40-foot lot, a 40-foot, 45-foot lot, and then a no alley lot, let's say is 50 foot. So this is under what traditional lots, usually lots, traditional lots are 70, 80 foot wide by 120 to 150 foot deep. And today's demand, and I can tell you this is everywhere in the United States because we have lots of projects throughout the country, is that most developers are developing lots this size. I mean, this is our playbook. When we do a plan, we have this at our desk and we're using these lot sizes. And we usually work with a developer to get to this. So what's really important is that you can have this wonderful large lot, in this case, with a large house on it, and you get five to six dwelling units per acre as front-loaded. We'd like to see the garage towards the back, but it can be a little bit in back of the front of the facade. We don't like it right even with the facade, but it can be back in this area. And so you can have lots of the front-loaded type product, rear-loaded, and on and on and on. The alley really helps with the streets because it makes them safer. You can have parallel parking on the street because it's not broken up so much with the front-loaded product. Then you have townhouse product. When I moved in 92 to land, there was no townhouse product to speak of. and today it's ubiquitous, and it's done very well. I think if it's all townhouse communities, I wouldn't recommend that, but interspersed through communities, it really adds a lot of flavor to the communities, and you can have 18-foot wide units, 16-foot, 27-foot wide units, or these are 20, I'm sorry, 20 by 45, 20 by 50, and 27 by 80 townhouses. So you get a variety of townhouse product, too. the cool thing about this one too is this can have an uh an adu you can have a little apartment above that garage so you get extra uh rental property if you want to do that and you can do that with the the um single family detached too so you can have some adus and have rental property which makes it uh good for the owner as well as people trying to live within the community if they work there then this is my favorite this is this is what we're calling the missing middle but But the developer we're working with in Fayetteville, Arkansas, they are apartment developers. And so apartment developers usually like 200 units all clustered together. And that's what they do. That's their typical model. And so when we did their plan, I said, can we just fracture your 200 units but place it throughout the neighborhood? And they thought about it a couple weeks in Quebec and said, heck, yeah, that's what we want to do. Let's do that. So we've developed these designs where we have, you know, 16 units, 20 units, and we can park in the back and use that. So we do it smaller, and it fits into the community so much better than these large monolithic buildings. That's not to say that you wouldn't have those, but you can certainly be creative throughout the community and have this as well. This is what you find in Virginia Highland and Atlanta, Georgia, all through the neighborhood and so forth. so this is the coolest of all this is the the neat thing we wanted to develop a block system and we're always trying to do this where you can this is the same size block and you can put single family detached you can have townhouse you can have a multi-family units you can have single family townhouse I mean the variety is infinite you can just do so many different things You could have a commercial piece on the end of one of these and then park it in the back here and then have the residential. So what we're really trying to do is show that your blocks are going to be anywhere from 400 to 800 feet long. That would be your typical block. And it's usually 200 to 260 foot deep, depending on the type of product you're developing for it. So if we develop that throughout the community, it's easy for the builder. or the builder can, if he or she is building a development and decide that, oh, my gosh, what's really selling well is the townhouse and the single family. I'm going to build more of that product, and I'm not going to build as many of these products because they're not selling as well as I thought they would. You have that flexibility to change the block, and it's still the same block. So that's the cool thing about doing a block system like this. So to me, this is one of the most important slides you'll see. So, let's, we're towards the end. This is the town centers that are being developed throughout the country. And this is the larger ones where you have maybe four to five story buildings. You might even, depending if it's over the next 10, 15 years, it might pencil out to have a deck on the backside and have more density within that. But decks are very, very expensive, so you really have to be very careful if that will pencil out for your project. The village centers, they go down. The buildings are smaller. They're anywhere from one story up to maybe three stories. Most likely there's going to be apartments above those versus offices. But you can add some offices. And I think if you add offices that are more flexible in nature where people can come use them on a couple days a week versus all the time, that would be perfect for this village center. And then the multifamily, builders are getting very creative. This is like a garden-style apartment, but it isn't. I mean, it doesn't look like it at all because they've enclosed the entry into the foyer. And then there's some really creative garden apartments where you're parking under here. This is at Norton Commons, and so it's really some cool, cool stuff. Then multiplex type units, four units, six units, 12 units. These, I think, are in hampersand, but these did very, very well. These were some condo and rental property, but these convert very easily to both condominium and rental type property. And then your townhouse product. Lots of townhouses we design and other designers are putting them on muse. These green spaces of the townhouses are alley loaded, but they look into this green space in the guest park right out on the street, and they walk in to the unit. The single-family detached housing. You can see the lots are small because we're going more vertical with the houses. They're small. They're skinnier. They're not the big, wide, 60-foot-wide house. They're usually, well, obviously, if it's on a small lot, they're going to be maybe 20-foot wide at best. And then civic spaces are so important as you design this. This is a fire station that was built for the project. It's the iconic sort of a focal point of the neighborhood. But developing an architectural style that fits whatever neighborhood you've designed is so important to give personality to the community. And then finally open space is so important. That's the cool thing about if you looked at this, we have so much green space in our developments that you can have these open spaces, these path systems for people to use throughout the year. So that's what makes, that's your golf course as well. That's that outdoor space as well as the village center or the town center that you have. And finally, we're going to look at what's being said so far on these projects. And I want to thank you. This is a So this is the end of my presentation. So really quickly, I just wanted to hit some of the, maybe some of the high points or some of the focus of the comments. It is by no means the full list of comments that we've received. We had a meeting with some of the larger developers and property owners on Friday, last Friday. And then on Monday, we had a very, quite long, five-hour-long meeting over at the Senior Center where we invited members of the public to come in and view the concepts and give us their feedback as well. By far, Area 1 had a backup of people, I would say, for the entire five hours. And, you know, it makes sense. This is obviously one of the few areas where we are backing up to existing neighborhoods. So they have concerns about connections, the connections along Roswell Drive and Pine Needles, and we can talk about that a little bit as we get up closer to them. Like Tom said, we really think that connectivity is key. We've talked a lot, even when I was on staff, about the importance of these stub streets and how we use them in the future and that they do connect in the future and not become roads that just get blocked off. There was some discussion of, you know, a lot of people wanted to understand the density mix a little bit better. I think that the visuals that we've shown today of what the difference of a town center versus a village center would have helped the conversation and will help the conversation moving forward. There was also some discussion to be had about improvements to Parker's Mill. You know, we talked in the past about that has a high level of crashes. You know, it's very narrow. People go very fast. You know, there's already improvements slated to move forward, but that was sort of the idea along there. We also had spoken to folks in transportation and at the state about, you know, they're very much interested in the use of roundabouts, what we're calling alternate intersections. So not your typical four-way signalized intersections, but moving towards, you know, I can't even think of all of the different names that they have for them. But KYTC has a whole list of alternate intersections that they're kind of pushing people towards. Another thing that I think was important that people brought up as a question was, you know, we have this big non-buildable area that we're showing, which is sort of where we have our karst or potential sinkhole. Right now, it looks like it's sort of a non-thing, a non-entity. And I think the concern was that it would become just sort of a no-man's land. And really what we're showing or not showing is that this is sort of an opportunity for other types of program space, whether that be park or bike, ped, multi-use trails, everything through there. You basically can use it for a lot of stuff, just not structures. And then this is also one of the neighborhoods that has, I would say, the most robust trail system. so we are trying to connect into that as much as possible there's right now on the back side of the Beaumont neighborhood there there's an existing farm road that people used to use as a trail but is now blocked off and they would like to use it as a future trail so we are showing that both as a trail but also as the opportunity for a vegetative buffer between new neighborhood and old neighborhood. For area two for Winchester Road and Hume Road, some things that we, you know, we heard a lot of concerns about how, you know, what the access points look like along Winchester Road and how we're working with the state, you know, what those could possibly be. Again, a lot of alternate intersection options. The residents of the Hume Road neighborhood that Tom talked about. Obviously, we're interested in what would be happening around their neighborhood. You know, I think that we have tried to treat that neighborhood and be very practical and conscientious about how we design development around them. We heard a surprising number of folks that were very excited and interested about particularly Area 2 and Area 3 as opportunities for, you know, they were already picking out the lots and the corners that they wanted to be in so that they could age in place. We heard it from several residents of places like Beaumont and Andover where, you know, they have currently a single-family house, but it's a large lot, and they want to get rid of their lawn, move into a smaller house, or maybe some sort of missing middle type project, that they can also be in a walkable town center. We are still showing this itty-bitty Royster Road connection because there is a connection there today. And like we said, while it would not be my preference to push a lot of traffic out onto Royster Road. It's a very small farm road. You know, like we've pushed, we need to keep showing connections everywhere and as much as we can. Area three, Athens-Boonsboro. So again, questions of access along Athens-Boonsboro, all the connections, how those would be made. Also, view sheds. What would you be looking in at? What does that look like? Again, lots of people are excited about the potential of some of these town center developments. We did hear from folks that in the Charlesburg neighborhood that they were really excited about the prospect of having, you know, being able to bike or walk with their kids to schools, you know, to the existing school and to a potential new school. Um, there were, you know, again, questions about the market reality of, of these. And like I said, this, a lot of this is, is data driven and driven by the market study. Um, I would say though, you know, we're, we're probably showing a little bit higher amounts of commercial than, than we maybe saw in the market studies, but that's also just to support some of these, these neighborhood centers. And, you know, based on the assumption that in the future, that these are 20-year visions. So in the future, you know, you add more households and it starts to spur smaller commercial development. Todd's Road, again, access, view sheds, particularly along Todd's Road. interest, I would say, in the sort of flex space as it relates to and is approximate to blue sky, you know, as sort of opportunity to continue that momentum. You know, there was a little bit of discussion about the connection points we were showing across 75. And then this one was interesting. This one was talking about, um, they were excited about the thought of like fully senior living because there are a lot of families that live, um, off pole club, off haze. And, um, there were some, um, grandparents that were there that were talking about how they would love to be in a senior living facility that was closer to, uh, to their grandkids and to their families. So I thought that was interesting. Um, area five, I think there's just, uh, you know, a lot of interest in, in how to continue to make this, uh, a fully, a full entertainment district. Um, and then, you know, how we can start to really think about accessing this, um, from the two other sub areas from area three and area four, and even, um, along Athens Boonesboro. So how we can start to pull people in, um, for bike ped access into, into the, the soccer facility and, you know, whatever else comes out there. So that being said, I'm going to turn this over to Hal real quick. Thank you very much. Good afternoon. Hal Bailey, Division of Planning. Following the public input, there were a lot of questions and statements, not only regarding the specific plans for our urban growth master plan, but some very broad questions about how we as a government are doing certain things. How are we being more sustainable from an economic, social, and environmental standpoint? As such, staff thought it was important to just touch briefly on some of the things the Planning Commission, the Urban County Council, and our community have really been doing over the past several years. And I think a lot of these things get to the heart of many of our neighborhood concerns. So one of the things that I wanted to just pull up on the screen is just a few of the zoning ordinance text amendments, the regulation changes that have been going through over the past few years. I pull parking up specifically because there were many questions about the growing heat island effect, how we are impacting our environmental systems by having more and more impermeable surfaces. The parking Zoda has done a tremendous amount of work at offsetting some of our environmental impacts caused by driving vehicles, parking vehicles, especially when we're talking about our commercial areas. We talked briefly about the soccer stadium. Soon the soccer stadium will have two different parking lots. They'll have one for the fields and then one for the stadium. When those are finished, we are going to be flashing photos up on our screens at nonstop to show you what a parking lot without clear regulations like we have now looks like and what a parking lot looks like when we require 30% tree canopy coverage and a planned out vision for their development. Additionally, the Urban Growth Management Zota, or the UGM Zota, that you all have been working on with staff for the past year and a bit, passed through the Urban County Council with some very minor changes just a few weeks ago. This was a pretty big deal, and this is already seeing the benefits of your labor. You will be seeing more things come through soon. This is very important to get to the vision of housing that was presented previously, but is very important to ensure that we are getting the best possible infill and redevelopment that we can get. Another ZODA that went through fairly quickly was the lighting ZODA. This specifically gets to a lot of concerns that many of the neighbors of specifically Area 1 and Area 2 voiced during some of our public outreach. This is just going to create more light that is going to come into my backyard and impact my way of life. With the lighting ZODA that just went through, we are seeking to mitigate the impact of lighting on our community. And it's the first time that we have gone that kind of distance to get those types of regulations that have very clear, measurable standards that keep light from trespassing on others' property. Finally, we are in the process of our trees and landscaping ZODA, phase one that's going through and then we'll be moving on to phase two. There are many concerns about the established tree lines, especially in that area one that the consultant is showing protection of so that we are making sure that we're keeping our tree lines and our tree canopy that is there. In addition to some of our regulations, and in addition to the 2045 Imagine Lexington Comprehensive Plan, we have various different studies that have been done and planned out that will get into greater detail of how these properties will develop over time. These are very important to how we are developing our roadways, our environment, our greenways, making sure that, again, we are the most sustainable development process that we can have. There are also current investments that are ongoing within each of these areas. For Area 1 specifically, we have the Cardinal Run North Park that is moving forward rather rapidly. That will be a very large draw, not just for the neighborhoods that are on this part of town, but for the whole of our community. And that is also why it is quite important that within our Metropolitan Planning Organization's MTP, or the Metropolitan Transportation Plan, we have really marked out two upcoming projects for Parker's Mill Road that are in the TIP, or our Transportation Improvement Program. The first improvement along Parker's Mill Road will extend from Man of War Boulevard to Lane Allen Road, which is Lane Allen also being targeted for new sidewalks. But that is slated for the next five years. That is something that is moving forward in its process. The second portion, from Lane Allen all the way to Versailles Road, is being looked at as something that's going to be a little further out, but is a very important thing, not just because we are doing this type of development, just because we are expanding, but because these roads need these types of improvements. We also, with all of our areas, will be discussing how we are going to sewer these. We have a consent decree that we are trying to meet and we have some very, very knowledgeable individuals that you have heard from time and time again as to how we are going to complete these projects in the best way possible for the whole of our community. In area two, we do have Winchester Road Improvements. This is a KYTC project that is moving forward. This project is currently in the design phase with the intent of it being constructed in the next five years or so. Finally, we get into area three, and you've heard about this many times over, and that is the Athens-Boonesboro safety improvements. These are the improvements that we'll be extending from all the way into Richmond Road, extending all the way out Athens-Boonesboro Road. We've been working on this quite heavily with you all, specifically with the development of that soccer stadium area. But this will reduce traffic collisions. It will make our roadways safer. It will also make the congestion issues that people are experiencing right now a little less problematic. Yes, Kenzie. Great. Thank you very much. And then finally on area three, we have a shared use trail that is being planned all the way out to Hayes Boulevard. With the new construction that we are anticipating in our expansion areas, we are anticipating new development, continuing that along, making sure that we have opportunities for different types of mobility patterns, especially along some of these larger roads and especially separated from these larger roads. we also do have several important future studies and plans that you have heard of Chris started the discussion of how are we going to fund this infrastructure how are we going to build it so we will have to have future plans regarding the funding and design and environmental studies for these areas there will be a future blue sky rural activity zone which a small area plan more that is a blue sky small area plan because we're bringing that into our urban service area. And then transportation connectivity will need to be continued to be studied. Transit extension is meant to come to these areas, but as we have heard and as we've talked about, a lot of that is in response to greater amounts of density. Within the UGM ZODA, within the presentation today, we talk about the need to have that density to draw transit out to serve the populations that are there and that is a major component of what is being presented to you. Roadway crossings with the interstate. We've talked with our MPO. They say this is something that we need to be discussing. This might be something well into the future and but this is something that's very important to make sure that we aren't pushing all of our traffic only onto Athens Boonesboro Road. We made a very poor decision in 1996 to add that buffer and say there shall not be any potential connections in the future. This is why those potential connections are very important. And then rural road impacts. As we know in our community, more and more people are using our rural roads. They were not really meant to carry much traffic. They were not really meant to be shared with bicyclists. But as they are public roadways, anyone is able to be utilizing these spaces. And we want to make sure that these spaces are safe for everyone to utilize. So we will need to have some conversations about how these rural roads are being utilized, what kind of improvements can be made, and then work with our community overall to get to the best possible solution. So on that, I'm going to turn it back over to Sam and Tom, and they'll be able to walk you around. Mr. Duncan, I believe maybe we need to shut down this work session. Yeah, I guess, Mr. Chair, first, if anyone wanted to ask some formal questions of the consultants, and then the plan is once you're satisfied with that, we'd like for everyone to then mimic what we did with the public input meeting earlier this week and just disperse around the maps and staff and consultants will be available to answer questions. But at this time, if you want to ask some questions of the consultants, they're available. I think that's a wise way to do it. Thank you, Mr. Duncan, Ms. Worth, and Mr. Nickel. We're typically not in meetings with the development community unless there's a specific case involved. And I'm curious to know what kind of reaction you got when you met with the developers. I think that they were all fairly positive, I would say. You know, I think they're keeping it a little bit close to the belt in terms of thoughts on their individual properties or properties that they sort of have options on. They definitely, you know, a few of them had some comments on some things that they might change. But I think that we also got the feedback that for some that maybe aren't as far along in their thought process, this was a really great jumping off point for them. We've done a lot of the sort of legwork on initial design ideas that they can then work from. So it's been really positive. And one thing that I think I want to give credit to the staff for is they've not only brought the developers all together, but they've also been bringing in a lot of the affordable housing developers so that they can be in the room and start having conversations with some of those bigger property owners to possibly figure out how they could create partnerships moving forward in the future. Thank you. That was a wonderful presentation. I heard when we started the presentation that we're looking at 2,833 acres, and it was then stated that the master plan is a 20-year master plan. Is there a way you can provide our group with some demographic data that shows where we are now and what our projected growth in many different areas, such as housing, industrial, commercial, and let's just say those three, how we are able to meet the projected demographic growth of our community with this 2,833 acres over a 20-year period. So what I'm saying is this is a beautiful plan. I really like it. But I am concerned. I would like to know more about the current demographics, what our future growth is going to look like, Lexington as it affects Lexington as a community, and to prove out that this plan does meet our growth plans for a community. It's more of a request for information. I'm not questioning whether or not you've done it or not. But if we had that data, I think it would further support Ural's growth management plan. Yeah, and I think a lot of that data is in that market study. One thing that I think is important to keep in mind with all of this is, you know, anything, any of these developments are going to be probably three years would be very aggressive. Five years is more likely and beyond for any of these to even come out of the ground. So when we're looking at some of those needs for households that are more immediate, that's especially where I was talking about that those need to be fulfilled through infill or through our existing expansion areas. None of this will be happening right away. So I agree that there is some alignment that needs to happen with, you know, what does that 20-year vision look like in thinking that, you know, you still have five years before we even start really rolling with the process. I absolutely agree. This is a master plan that's going to take quite a while to implement. but I would recommend that we see how the master plan meets the future predicted or projected demographic growth of our community in those areas. Yeah, I think that's all great. Like I said, a lot of that was in that market study, but yeah. This adds to the complexity of what you're asking for, But how do the infill and redevelopment acres also get added to that so we're not trying to solve all of our problems? So I don't want to get too much scope creep with them. So what we can do is we can look at some of our own data and make sure that it's coupling with what they are looking at. And a follow-up comment on that is that we've done a lot of work as our committee to put things in place that have just now been approved that will provide a lot of relief on the housing side while we're getting this up and running. All right, Mr. Michler, I have a question. Yeah, thank you all. I've got a couple of items. One is you all talked a lot about the grid and sort of the connectivity, and you show in these neighborhoods, you kind of have those quarter-mile, half-mile radius lines, so we can see that the roads are pretty well connected with the sort of longer distances being where those green fingers sort of reach in on those neighborhoods. Is there a guideline that you all have or a concept of pedestrian connections through those green fingers? and is there kind of a guideline on what that spacing should be so that the pedestrian way doesn't end up having a quarter mile up to a half mile diversion? So I'll answer the first, but I think Tom will probably have an answer to the second. So one thing that I wanted to, that I didn't say but I wanted to note is a big pass that we're asking Gresham to make now that these concepts are done is they're coming back in and looking at how we can do off-road trail systems as well. What we've shown are how the multi-use trails work when you have the boulevard or the avenue sort of street typology. But we're asking them to look now at how we use the greenways and the open spaces to really sort of backfill. I think I mentioned in the past, I like to think of this as trail-oriented development, so how we can start to shorten even some of the walks that we have from, you know, how we can use those to shorten walks, the five-minute walks down for people. We have sort of been drinking from a fire hose on this project and trying to come up with these plans, and we really put as much effort to get where we are today. and what she said was important. Gresham is looking at how that trail system would work. Normally, if we were to go in the normal progression, we'd peel back now and start looking at that question that you just asked about how we connect and how these systems connect and not only to the neighborhoods, to the schools, to the parks, and to the village center or town center. We're not quite there yet, but it's built, It's sort of baked into the design that that can be done. One of the things that's frustrating for me, because as a designer, is that we've designed some really nice stuff. And by the way, Gia Lee in our office and Sloanie, those two have done yeoman's work. They have really worked their buzz off in helping get these plans the way they are. And what's frustrating is you design like this, and you want to see it built exactly the way we designed it because there's an ego involved. And it's not going to be. It's going to be totally redesigned someday. So we just got to get those answers, parameters set in the next round of this work from them, as well as when we start writing, I guess, the code for this. Does that answer your question? Yeah, well, I think it gets at it. I think understanding that these aren't going to be built exactly is understood, And that's, I think, why I'm looking to hear or see that concept of sort of the city of the shortest walk be written in a measurement that can be used by us, whether that's that connection happens at least at the tenth of a mile, where we don't have pedestrian connections that exceed a certain distance so that these green space amenities don't become obstacles for walking. So I think just looking for that measurement with the understanding that these designs won't be implemented in their exact form. Right. Point taken. The other couple of questions that I had was the sort of slide that you highlighted the missing middle on. I'm sort of curious, and this may be a point where it's really a discussion between you all and the sort of staff. But when we look here at the missing middle house prototypes here in Lexington that we like, one thing most of those do not have is a dumpster. and today they're required typically to have a dumpster. And if you look at their lots, most of them don't really have room to put a dumpster unless they put it in a really awful location. And so, you know, these larger complexes build in all these spaces. They have these large parking lots with room for accommodating that dumpster. As we look to break those up into these, like you described that you did with that one development, you know, in our current regulations, that's like breaking up, and now we've got eight dumpsters that we've got to put in. And so, I mean, I guess having that conversation early with staff, I mean, my personal opinion is that requirement should disappear, but understanding what those implications would be, I think would be important. Well, I can answer that quickly. The design, the way we set it up, is the depth of... Let me see the clicker real fast. It's really... So, I've already got this. When you have one of these, the dumpsters are within this zone here. We know, I mean, this is a very rudimentary graphic, But we know that when we design this block, that we have the space, and that's why the block might be not 220, it might be 240, 260, because we're fitting that kind of element into it. So we build flexibility into the block when the developer comes and lays out one of these developments. And at this level, it might be written into some of the code work, But we're not going to ever get any further in this project. I mean, it's a great comment, but I don't think we'll resolve it that way other than written into the code. But I do think that that is a good point, Robin. I know exactly the requirement that you're talking about, and I think that is something that we can look at in this last bit here that's the sort of regulatory infrastructure piece. and then my last sort of just broader comment was in looking at the sort of nodes i would encourage you to think about in that area one that sort of tip where you're bringing that connection to basically this this um the two parks the one on the south and one on the north that also then will be the connection point really for the entire Beaumont neighborhood to that sort of park system as well as the new neighborhood that you're building. And even though we're looking at that road network as that corner being Parker's Mill and Man of War, I do think that there is going to be a lot of people activity at those parks, And it would support, I think, in the same way that Woodland Park plays really well into that Woodland Triangle small retail center, the press juice and salad bar, high on art and coffee. There used to be a bike shop there that serviced bikes, that sort of small service retail. I think there's components to the small local retail section that would look at all of that activity happening at those two parks and all the activity going by between those neighborhoods as a positive and maybe like that corner better than the Man of War corner. I like that take. Mr. Owens? Thank you. Very interesting. And I like what I'm seeing. A couple of questions. And with Mr. Duncan saying we may break up, and I don't know if these questions that I've got are for now or later. Yeah, I was going to say, I think if they're area-specific questions, we're hoping to have a little bit more of a conversation at each of the areas. but if you want to get it on record that's oh no more overall uh what i've got um with the residential area the area in yellow and i don't mean to get specific but area one it looks when i first looked at it it looked like well those are just single family lots when i go to area two and area three the yellow area gets much larger and I think I saw more if you go to the slide right before the mixed housing missing mixed housing you've got single-family houses close together you know boom boom boom boom boom I think that was my question, and that's the only way you're going to get the number. So I just wanted a clarification on that. Parking structures, you mentioned a parking structure in one of the locations. I didn't see any parking structures. Today it wouldn't pencil out. The land basis isn't there to support that. Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah, the land basis isn't there to support it. That could come in the future depending if the density was increased. Okay. And then I guess in Area 3 and Area 4, under flex space, commercial area, and so forth, you've got like 380 units, and then you've got 2,000 square feet equals one RES unit. Can you explain that? What does a 2,000 square feet equals one RES unit mean? Does that mean a residential unit or something else? Where is that? Well, in the graphic details. Oh, the graphic? Yeah. Just like in Area 3, it mentions flex space. You've got 380 units, 2,000 square feet equals one residential unit, if that's what it means. I'm not sure I understand that. It's on the breakouts. Oh, it's on the breakouts up here? Okay. Show me that when we go over to the map. All right. But, I mean, quite frankly, I'm amazed that you've gotten as far as you have. And I do like the open space, green space. I guess the remaining question is, who's going to maintain that? Is that going to be an HOA thing? Is that going to be a city thing? Well, a combination. It could be a combination depending on if the city wants to have some park space, then they might own it. But, I mean, a lot of times the HOAs do it. The only downside when an HOA does it, and I've experienced this so many times, we built some parks and the developer was so excited about these parks that we built, and he wanted, and she was the husband and wife again, they wanted people from outside to come use these parks. You know, they wanted to open up. Well, it went on and on until they turned it over to the HOA, and the HOA said, hell no, everybody get out except us. So, you know, that's where you have to worry about. So some of these might be in the best interest to have some of these as park, city park. Sam's heard me say before, you know, it's more of a neighborhood, what I've envisioned and seen more of a neighborhood thing, where it's truly an amenity for the neighborhood and it's playground for the kids as opposed to the backyards that are almost nonexistent now. But that's fine. They like being out there. Well, I tell you a neat thing that's evolved over the years that I love. When we do alleys, a lot of times we have some green space within the alley, and we call them rambles. And I did a project in Memphis, and I remember I take people on tours, and about five years after that particular alley had been built, I was given a tour, and we walked back through the alley, and there was some swing sets and barbecue stuff out there, and fortunately a neighbor just happened to be an owner, and I asked him, what is this? And he said, oh, we all get, all of us in this area gather right here, and our kids, and they said our kids feel so much safer back here than if it was in a cul-de-sac, even because it's just us driving back here, nobody else comes in the alley. So there's a real benefit to allies when you start opening them up and giving them a little character. Thank you. Thank you. Mr. Nickel? Yes, can you give me one of the components of the urban growth management plan is flex space being built into these different areas that we've identified. Can you give me a description or some comments on some successful flex space that you have been a part of in the past? What are some of the things we need to start thinking about on our side about newer, more progressive flex space and how it interacts with neighborhoods and how it's been successfully implemented by you in the past? Well, I only have one that I'm going to give you that I know. It's in Collierville, Tennessee. and if you write that down, what's the name of the development? I'm having a, I can't, we'll get you the name of it. But what we did was we built in some light industrial where the showroom was in the front and so guests would come park in the front and then you could get, I don't know if 18 wheelers came in there, I can't remember, this has been a long time ago, but you could get large vans in there and unload and there's a warehouse in the back. and so people could come look at stuff and if there was if it's in stores they could take it or have it delivered and we built that into the neighborhood so uh you could uh um get there from anywhere so it really turned out cool um i'll get the name of the the neighborhood and pass it to sam and she can get that to you but that was that's that's the most successful one i i saw and i've worked on that design forever uh trying to make that that work and the client wanted that they wanted to have a little development. The one we're doing in Tulsa is still being designed. I mean, we've gone through the whole master plan process. We've created the road systems that connect into the industrial. We have one industrial site that has been purchased. It's a data center. I don't know. I think there's only 500 people who are going to be at this particular one. But we have what we're designing into that is just bike and small electric cart systems to get there as well as the road system. But again, that's probably four years from even being under construction. That's great. It is something we're going to see coming online more and more nationwide. And it would be nice to see an example of what are some things we can start to think about when it comes to flex space as an educational component, maybe just one side that says this is what the future of flex space is and this is how it interacts with our urban growth. Okay. Thank you. Ms. Worth? My impression is that our group and the Fayette County's public schools have always had sort of separate planning processes. I'm seeing these schools and I'm wondering if there were representatives of the schools engaged in this process and or are you going to be making a presentation to them after this? Well, so during that sort of April-May design workshop, we invited the board members and sort of key players within the public school system to come meet with us, and they did. And, you know, I would say that they're always cautious about how much they say. But, you know, we did at least get out of them, particularly in some of our larger sites like Area 2 and 3. They were open when seeing the numbers, the potential household numbers about, you know, that would probably warrant, you know, more, yes, one, two elementary schools. You know, for the most part, they thought that there was capacity that they could figure out for middle schools and high schools. But the elementary schools, yes. You know, like Tom was saying, we are probably not, we're not showing the size of the acreage that they are typically looking for nowadays for their elementary school. Just because it would take up so much of the site. and we just felt like a better use of the site would be to, you know, we're showing about five to six acres for a lot of those school sites, so that's larger, that's about double what, you know, an Ashland or a Maxwell site is. You know, we heard from them that the problem really is not the size of the school, it's the amount of parking and circulation available for the teachers and available for pickup. so we kind of felt that five to six acres was what we would shoot for but we will be sending them these plans and if they would like a meeting again, we are more than happy to. Mr. Paul. I share my fellow commissioners' questions and concerns and also feel very positive about what I'm seeing. It looks like a lot of exciting possibilities. But I also share the cynicism that getting this executed is a whole other world. And having been involved with planning since 1977, I can't count the number of plans that end up on shelves. And so anyway, I think that any kind of effort that could be made to ensure that the plans are executed in the way that we all would like to see them executed, it would be well worth the effort. What I really want to get to, so I'm just, these are just statements of opinion here. But my concern that I'd like to get to is a sustainability concern. And I'm just wondering if there has been a study of the biodiversity, the water cycle issues, heat island mitigation, tree canopy issues. So taking a look at what the land is now and what will be sacrificed with regard to those kinds of factors and how the plans move toward mitigating or balancing those losses. so what's i think most important about something like this that these plans show much more green space than a typical subdivision uh would show a much greater percentage and we're obsessed with keeping those those swales uh because they are natural drainage systems and And most projects, we try not to mass grade. We try to fit it into the topography. You have very, I mean, I live in Atlanta. We have topography. And we make it work very nicely there. When I went out on the sites, everybody's worried about topography. I was like, oh, my gosh, this is like flat for us. So from a sustainability, this can be worked very nicely, finding those watersheds and creating bioswales and different types of methods. We have our landscape architects do it, and Gresham Smith's firm does it. I mean, we have professionals that are really focused on even the detention systems versus making them just concrete walls or walls, making amenities, but also creating wildlife. I want to go back to your first point, though, a comment that you made at the beginning of your thing about the road systems. I was doing a project in Huntersville, North Carolina, and we had a 400-acre project. And Ann Hamlin came in. She was the director of planning there. And she sat down before. She said hi, did her niceties. Then she sat down, and she did X's all around the plan. And all of us were wondering, what is she doing? She hadn't even talked to us, and we haven't talked about the plan. And so we finally said, what are those X's? And she said, that's where you're going to connect all your roads into. We have a master road system and we've approved it and so is the town of Cornelius. So if you want to do this project you've got to be able to ensure you connect into this. Some of it was just green space like we've seen here. Others were other neighborhoods that already been built and had the stub outs already and she said those neighborhoods will accept this this road system and that's what you have to do. I mean that's that's up to the government to come up with this develop a master road system and make sure that that is implemented. That's the only way this has ever been successful. If you don't do that, it will be put on the shelf. You might want to answer some more sustainability. Yeah, I think that there are, so the Greenway Management Master Plan that's currently underway through Environmental Services, they sort of took a look at the biodiversity of all across the county. So they looked at that and handed us their thoughts on how to incorporate that. Much of it in the areas that we were looking at, because they were farmed areas, were around the floodplains. And so continuing to keep those as naturalized as possible. In terms of the buildings and the layout and the site, we do have our sustainability subconsultant that's on here. they will be evaluating these concept master plans against the push from the comprehensive plan for the 2050 goal. And how we can get there, how far the gap is. Obviously, a lot of the gap will be in the building code. but some of it is measures that can be taken in terms of aligning based on solar access and keeping tree canopy, encouraging more tree canopy using naturalized integrated storm water, etc. So we completely share your concerns. It seems to me that if in an ideal world we'd have a net-net situation, we would fully understand the issues in sacrificing the existing farmland, for example, and we would ensure that what ends up being built offsets those sacrifices, either in itself or the rest of the community absorbs some of those offsets by setting aside parkland by whatever it is that needs to be done. So that's where my brain goes with this. If we're really serious about sustainability, it means we don't hurt the environment in doing this work. And if we're going to ensure that we don't, we need to fully understand what it is that's being sacrificed and how we can offset that sacrifice, either within these plans or a combination of within these plans and within the rest of the community. Great comment. Thank you, Mr. Pohl. If we have nothing else, thank you, Mr. Walsh, Ms. Castro, Mr. Bailey. And if there's no further discussion on any other topic, Mr. Duncan, we're good to adjourn the meeting. Yes, Mr. Chair, and invite the members to disperse amongst the board, staff, and consultants will be available for as long as you all want to discuss. Thank you. Without objection, we're adjourned. Thank you. Thank you. Now I say money, money Shoot him down, turn around Come on, money Hey, she's giving me love And I feel alright now Good You gotta talk