Thank you. her presentation because she has to make another presentation to the council general government meeting this afternoon at 3 o'clock where she'll be talking about digital billboards and short-term rentals. So Tracy's not leaving us because... And think of that as a preview of things to come for you all as well. But in the meantime, we are happy to continue to update you all on the Urban Growth Master Plan, and that's what Anita's going to give us some information about. I want to give a little prelude to what she's going to report to us. And it's primarily going to be about the estimate of cost of public services in these new areas. So the 2,500 acres that they're evaluating, based on the concepts that you all have seen and the recommendations for collector road systems and that sort of thing. Working with other divisions and departments within the government, our consultants have made some estimates of what the public infrastructure will cost initially. So she's going to talk to you about that. I wanted to let you all know that we have also shared this information with the mayor and her team as well. So they're aware of this. And something else that we're working on with Anita and our consultants, and they're also working closely with our finance leadership, is not only to recommend or to understand what the cost of services are, but then what sort of revenues may be generated as a result of new development and new people moving into these areas. that's a much more challenging number to estimate because, as you all know, the direction from the council was to designate this land primarily for housing. And as you recall, housing, although that does generate property tax primarily for the public schools, it doesn't generate a whole lot of revenue for the local government. That comes through the occupational tax and from jobs. And as you recall from seeing these recommendations, there aren't a lot of that kind of job proposals for these areas. It's mostly neighborhood centers and some flex space, but with a large emphasis on residential, which was the direction that the council gave us. So while Anita will be talking about how we came to the recommendations or the, I'm sorry, the estimates for what the cost will be, We are still working on trying to determine what the revenues will be, and then there will be additional work that follows the master plan that will be, again, coordinated through finance and others to talk about financing ways for this. So we've got the exaction program from 1996. What are we going to do for 2024? And that decision will be made in the coming months. So Anita may have some answers for you, but she may also be saying, well, that's coming next, or we'll have that for you at the time of the master plan or something like that. So Chris and Hal and I will be happy to help fill in some of those questions, but we just wanted to let you all know what Anita is going to be talking about, what we've talked about with the administration, and still what work needs to come after the master plan is adopted. Okay, Anita. Thank you. So as Jim mentioned, we're focusing today on capital improvements and what's required to service the expansion areas. So as we translated the designs and the concepts into number of units, it's about 1,700 at the low end of the density ranges for each category, and almost 27,000 units at the high end. So these will have a whole variety of the sizes and types of units, and it won't be just the traditional subdivision, single-family detached subdivisions that you've seen in a lot of the other growth areas. Then as we take those, we translate it into what does that mean in terms of people. And what we're seeing is about a 12 to 18 percent increase in the area population as a result of these expansion areas when they're fully built out. Obviously that will take time, but at build out it would be 12 to 18 percent higher number of units and households. And so that's 39,000 to 59,000 residents, so almost the size of a small city that would be added to the city's population. On the workers' side, as Jim mentioned, we're talking about a relatively limited amount of commercial and industrial development in these expansion areas. They're overwhelmingly residential. So this number is small, 2,000 to 3,000 people, workers. These are only the workers who are employed in the expansion areas. It's not the residents and where they work. So we're being pretty deliberate and focusing just on people who are associated with the expansion areas themselves. And that's an increase of 1 to 1.6 percent in the employment base. So again, very small increase in jobs, which will have implications for the occupational license taxes and the revenues overall. And then 610 daily visitors, that's from the hotels that we expect will be developed in the expansion areas. So the key improvements that we're looking at, we've had Gresham Smith spend a lot of time working with the designs developed by TSW to translate those into how many feet of roads are we talking about, how many feet of avenues, and what does that mean from a cost standpoint. So they have given us some numbers. We'll show you in a moment. On the other side, on the more purely government side, the police chief has said that this scale of population growth, depending on the nature of the growth and the number of calls that they receive, would likely take two more beats. So two more cars out 24-7. So that will have some implications in operating costs, but they also have a facility need in terms of where to have roll call. So that's well located for this geography. So that's part of the program. The fire chief points to the standard that within 480 seconds, you need to be able to respond to a call at sort of the standard they use in terms of spacing of fire stations relative to development. So given that standard, he's looking at increased congestion in some of these areas, is maybe stretching out or shortening the amount of miles that a fire engine can travel within that 480 seconds. And so he's expecting that we'll need two stations, one to serve Area 2 and one to serve 3, 4, and 5 together. So Area 2 also is seeing a lot of development related to the Baptist Health Campus, And so we would expect that that fire station would not serve just the expansion area population. It would also serve that Baptist Health Center. And so we've only used 40% of the costs associated with that station and attributed them to expansion areas. We need parks in all of these areas. And we're responding to a standard that we should have a park within 10 minutes of each resident of the areas. And laying those out, we got even a little better proximity. We need about 16 new neighborhood-scale parks to serve the five areas. and then though not part of the local government we also have the public library will need to respond to the growth in population and they have a standard of how many square feet per capita they expect and in this case we're thinking that they're most likely to be accommodated within expansions of existing libraries and so that's an additional cost that would not be borne by local government. And then LexTrans is saying that to direct service along Athens-Boonesboro would take two buses in order to provide the same level of service that you have from other parts of the city, and that will have some implications for their costs as well. So these are estimated costs. They're not engineered. You know, the roads haven't been, we haven't done any soil testing. We don't know exactly how we'll cross each stream. But Gresham Smith did a cost per sort of a generic 100 linear feet of boulevard and 100 linear feet of avenues. and said, okay, for the roadway, all the pipes associated with those, water sewer conduits, the sidewalks, street lights, street trees, the whole cross-section of that road, and they gave us a cost per hundred linear feet and then applied it to the number of feet of boulevards and avenues throughout the expansion areas. They added stream crossings and they added intersection improvements as additional costs to be considered. And then because they're not engineered and we're still way out from being to the point where you get a really firm cost estimate, They added 30% for contingencies and 20% for a standard design and geotech and all the kinds of things that come with the hard cost of construction. What these costs don't include is important to understand as well. It does not have the local roads. So we say boulevards and avenues are sort of the thoroughfares into these areas, But when you pull off out into a subdivision or an apartment complex, those roads are not in these numbers. And also not in the numbers are stormwater improvements other than in the boulevards and avenues. So some really large costs that are not in these numbers, just so you keep those in mind. We did not estimate schools, and we didn't buy the land for the parks. So we're anticipating, we're hoping, I guess, that there'll be arrangements with the developers that they will earmark parkland without necessarily charging the local government. And then this last item is $47.6 million in area to sewer improvements. This is in response to the consent decree. There are improvements that will help the overall system efficiency, that help cut down the water pollution that's incurring now. But these are costs that are unrelated to the expansion area itself. So these are things that are presumably already budgeted within the budget to respond to the consent decree. So those are not in these numbers I'm about to share with you. So, nice big number. If you look at the capital costs, $570 million if the local government were to go out and make all the improvements that I just described to support the development of these expansion areas. Huge numbers. There's primarily roadways, intersections, and trails, but there is $6.7 million in sanitary sewer that we know about that is attributable to the expansion areas, but this is just area two. The roll call center, based on recent developments, looks like it would probably be about $7.4 million and then the fire stations almost 24 million dollars for the two one and a half stations attributable to expansion areas and then another 22 million for the parks so I mentioned also the 17 million there for library expansions and 2 million for the new buses but those are not all local government costs that's the good news it's 570 million is a hard number to swallow but In fact, the developers traditionally cover those roadways, intersection, trail investments, the extension of water and sewer and all of those things that make the land developable. So of the $570 million, we're looking at $517 million being covered by the developers if we proceed in the same way that we traditionally set up those kinds of arrangements. And then the actual government costs would be $53 million, so a little less than 10% of the total. So if you look at the far right columns, what you see is a range of costs per unit. And what we're seeing is that between the higher density development and a lower density development. So in the lower, if we had a range between 9 and 15 units per acre, we use the 9 in that case to generate the number of units. on the higher density, we use the 15, the upper limit of that category. You see a difference of almost $10,000, almost 50% per unit difference in costs, because you're able to use that infrastructure more efficiently to serve many more units than you can under the lower density. When we looked at the same number from the last expansion areas, we had maybe as much as five units per gross acre in those expansion areas. At that rate, this number would be close to $45,000 per unit. So again, that gives you a sense that the densities make a lot of difference in terms of the cost of housing and in terms of the cost of the local government per unit. Again, not all these costs will be incurred at once. Some will be built over time as the areas develop, but it is a big number to be looking forward to. As we go to the expansion areas, one by one, the expansion area one out in the southwest is much smaller than the others, and it is not in need of new police or fire infrastructure. It can be served by the existing facilities, and so its cost is lower than what you see for the other areas. And expansion area 5 is also much more limited in size, and so its costs are lower. But they're running basically $20,000 to $40,000 per unit, depending on the expansion area and how much infrastructure is required. And then once you have all those new facilities, you need to be budgeting monies to operate and maintain them. So to clean the roads and repair them over time, the public works is estimating that that would take $415,000 a year. Some portion of that may be offset with urban services district fees that are set to recoup road cleaning costs in each area that's covered. For the police speeds, for that additional staffing, the estimate is $1.4 million per year. Again, that's likely to take 10 or 20 years to build up to. And then the firehouses to staff two houses would be $5.6 million per year. And maintaining the parks, another $400,000. So all told, we're looking at build-out at $7.8 million in additional O&M costs to service these capital improvements. The library has said that they would generally absorb the additional costs within their budget, and then LexTrans, separate from local government, would have a cost of $939,000 per year to run those two buses. So, as Jim mentioned, we are still working on the fiscal impact model with the finance department, and we'll be back to talk with you about those at a later time. But otherwise, I would be happy to open it up for questions. Thank you, Anita. Any questions? Yes, Mr. Diggs. First of all, thank you again for the presentation. It was very informative, but I want to preface my comment with I am pro-library. My grandkids go every week to the library. But the 17 million that you budgeted for that, I was curious as to whether or not the number you used was an historical number or was it based upon the way people use the library now? Because people don't use it as much now because of the internet, because of books on tape, because of Kindle, and the per thousand usage. I would imagine it's significantly lower now. This came from their master plan, which is fairly recent, so I expect that it reflects the change in the mix of uses and the way the libraries are used, but it was .6 square feet per capita, and so that's what we used with the recent construction cost against that. Okay. Mm-hmm. Yeah, a lot of these numbers look like they come from, like you said, sources in the government. How much does a beat cost for police? How much does a fire station in Lexington cost to run? How much does a bus cost to run? And the expansion areas are proposing neighborhoods and areas that look a little different than other suburban neighborhoods here in Lexington. And I'm curious if you looked at any studies or found any resources or studies that looked on, you know, some of those example neighborhoods that TSW showed us as to what they actually cost in infrastructure. just to sort of key and compare these numbers to, to see how closely you came with these numbers to what those other communities ended up finding those costs to be. We look for differences in operating costs and things like that to see if there was any literature that could help us understand the difference between dense development and sprawl and really didn't have any hard numbers to use in that regard. It's always very much dependent on the nature of your setup, what's your union agreement look like, what's the staffing for each of those stations. But I think it's clear that a sprawl scenario where you were at the five units per acre or something like that would spread out the distances much more. And so that 482nd response time that I spoke of would be different. It would be harder to meet that with two stations. You probably have to have another one or something, depending on exactly how it all laid out, where it sprawled to. I think there are, what was another one you were talking about? some, no, yeah, we don't really have those numbers to compare. I mean, I guess I'm asking because if we're extrapolating, you know, our current poor level of bus service into these new areas and using having one bus running back and forth for two hours on the weekend as our baseline for cost, I'm curious if we're not taking our model that we're not trying to replicate and using that as the basis of the cost. So if you were to go to a more demand response kind of service, you would have a different kind of cost. I can't say that it'd be lower. I'm just not enough of an expert on transit to understand that. But, yeah, it's a legitimate issue or question. All right. Mm-hmm. Thank you for that presentation. Do you mind backing it up a couple of slides where you showed the different expansion area numbers? There we go. Okay. If there's an opportunity to make some additional data available, I think it would be helpful. and the data I'm asking about, the reason I'm asking is we're looking at $570 million with 90% of the cost incurred by the developers. Is that correct? Okay, what I think it's important for us to see is the capital cost divided by the acres of each expansion area. Because what I'm looking at is possibly $200,000 per acre. of cost incurred by the developer. I think. I mean, we're close to 2,800 acres and we're at $570 million. Yeah, that's about right. I think that's important for us all to understand as we're trying to work with developers and encourage developers to help us provide our city's needs through providing housing and services in our urban growth area. And that is a big number, but I think it's important for us to show that. And with that number being shown, we need to think about how to engage developers to make that investment worth it. Okay. Good point. Yeah. We have quite a big variation between gross acreage and net improvable acres just because of the stream beds and things that have taken floodplains out of our developable acreage. But it's a big number. It's definitely a conversation you need to be having in terms of how to approach that developer. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Any more questions for Anita? Yes, sir. One more question here. Sort of in talking about that 90-10 split that you kind of are showing, what, in some of the other areas that you've looked at or other parts of the country, What's the range that you find of that split between developers and the community putting in their own money for the infrastructure? Yeah, we don't normally see all the developer costs with the local government costs, so I can't really tell you that it's much higher or lower. I think, you know, it's probably, just mathematically, it's probably a little higher than some other areas because we don't have all the developer costs in that total. We have just the boulevards and avenues, And so if you had all the developer costs, it would probably be even lower. But it's all a function of the structure of the government, where the land is, where the existing facilities are, and whether you can use existing fire stations and police roll call centers and everything. So I would say it's probably a little higher. As we move forward, is it possible we can maybe do a survey of some similar-sized municipalities and maybe get a better idea of how we stack up? Because, again, I'm really new to the whole process. I want to see where we stack up so it's more clear to me how to proceed. I don't want to do this in a vacuum. Right. That split between developer and public local government is just not one that's typically calculated, to be quite honest. It's not common for a local government to estimate what the developers are spending. And so I don't know that we would find the base data as we went and looked for it. You'd have to start to piece it together between, well, there were eight developers here, and what did they put in as a total? I just don't think we would find the evidence to give you guidance. I think mostly that percentage is not really a very meaningful number. It's really the $53 million. Whether it's 5% or 10% of the total is not so much the issue as it's $53 million. Mr. Davis, if I could add a little bit based on some of the conversations that we're having with the development community too, and Mr. Nickel, to your point, it's not as – everybody knows this stuff costs a lot of money. I think it's the question and the mechanisms for how these things get paid and the timing. And I think if I'm – if I think I'm understanding what Mr. Nickel is suggesting about encouraging them to, you know, work with us on this process, that means the creative mechanisms we have for capital financing. And some of that is on developers, and some of that may be something that the government has a part in, and that's very common in other cities too. And that's the part that Jim alludes to with what we're working with the administration on for following this master plan is trying to come up with a total package for capital financing that is both for private developers to use a lot of an exaction program, but modernized for 2024 and 2025, like an impact fee potentially. But any other type of development financing that the government can participate in, including bonding capacity and things like that, those are all things that other cities do as part of their capital financing programs. And so that's, again, I think there's going to be a lot more to talk about on that as we go forward on this. But for the purposes of this master plan, we thought it was really important to make sure we at least outline what the costs are in broad terms and then also talk about what the fiscal impact on the government is. That's the piece we're still working on. How do we come together and sort of partner with the development community to create a mechanism for financing that works for everybody, that gets us the ability to build the types of products we're asking for in this master plan? To Mr. Mickler's point, it is going to be hard to do some of those things because we've not done them here before, and that's a different model than what we've seen. So the government has an interest in trying to ensure that we have a way to do those financially as well. So I hope that adds a little clarity. So this is education for me because I'm next to you in terms of when we got here. I've never really heard of a presentation on the exaction system, so I just want to check a couple of clarifications. is the 90-10 a figure we get because we're funded by exactions and so we have a better handle on that? No. The exaction program was a method to allow for construction. It was a financing method that we chose, but there is a more comprehensive capital financing program that is typically used by cities our size and larger to address the situations where the government may provide the infrastructure up front and the developers pay us back. We've done that before with sanitary sewer systems in the past. The government built them, and through what was called the OPSS system, developers paid back into that over time. So that's essentially a form of capital improvement program, but was only for one type of capital expense. Exaction is a broad term for anything that developers pay into, but an impact fee is another type. So there's a lot of different options, and this plan will make some recommendations about that, but in terms of putting that together, that's a whole, It's not possible for us to do that in eight months, ten months. Yeah, no, I'm not looking forward. I'm looking backwards. I'm trying to figure out how we got that figure, but we don't have it from other places is my question. Right, so it was built up from the linear feet of roads, of boulevards, of how much the sewer is going to cost, how much was the police roll call center and the fire stations. So it's not historical at all. It worked out to be 90-10, but that was not tied to the earlier efforts. And the exaction policy applied to the old expansion areas, but I don't think people are looking to that technique going forward. Yes. And only certain elements of public infrastructure were exactable under that system, and particularly the boulevards, parks, and regional stormwater, of which there was a follow-up study to identify those costs in engineering to sort of scope that out. So all of that sort of happened after the plan, too. So it depends on what you put into the sort of defined infrastructure bucket. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you for these numbers. My head's spinning with all these numbers. I don't know that much. Two questions, I guess. First and foremost, as you mentioned, we're here because part of most of what we've been challenged with is housing. We've all heard for 15 years that houses cost the city money. Where is the balancing act to be able to get that return? Certainly when you add housing, if you're also adding jobs where those people work, then it can come out. It's hard to say. You need so many acres of employment to support so many acres of residential at this point. But it does, it's sort of separating the land use questions from the economic development questions about how quickly you can grow the economy, but you would certainly expect it. Housing in general, seeing the numbers that the developers are going to be responsible for as far as just the infrastructure cost. we all can pretty well assume that they're going to try and recover those dollars. Yes, right. In being challenged with houses, affordable housing comes into play. Yeah. Has that been looked at? I know these are average numbers. Yeah, not explicitly. So they're averages across a whole different array of housing. And so when you actually take the cost per unit for an apartment, it may be half or less than a quarter of what it would cost you per unit for a single-family detached unit, and those would be then reflected in the rents and in the pricing. But what's really important is that this is a variety of housing sizes and types, and so you have much more opportunity to serve new workers and to make more affordable units to put more within reach of existing households. Thank you. Mr. Neal, thank you. Okay, thank you. All right, you have a nice day. Next up, Ms. Wade. Zoning ordinance, tax amendment. if I start talking about short-term rentals or billboards redirect me it's all kind of swimming up there right now Eve I think it's on there we go that's it all right so as we work through text amendments with the Commission we have some internal ones that are also not specifically related to new development but will help us manage our workflow and clarify some things. And so that includes some changes to Article 6. Article 6 is not necessarily an article we talk about very often, but it is something, at least Daniel and I and the staff use every week because it outlines the process for zone changes and text amendments. So Article 6 is just called amendments. So how do we amend things that are already adopted in the city for zoning cases. So Article 6 amendments was originally brought into the ordinance in 1975. Prior to that, there was a one-sentence line in our ordinance that just said, we'll follow KRS 100. So we got a little more detailed in 1975. So Article 6 establishes application and review processes for map amendment requests, which we call text amendments, or excuse me, zone changes, and then also text amendments. It starts out with identifying when a traffic study is needed. Then it goes into the application requirements for those two types of applications. Then it talks about commission and council procedures. And then lastly, conditions to granting a zone map amendment. And we often refer to this as conditional zoning restrictions. So those are all outlined in Article 6. So the staff has identified two areas in need of update. The first is related to accepting text amendment applications from, and I put this in quote, any person, because it's what our ordinance currently says. And then the second point that needs to be updated is there appears to be conflicting language about when an amendment to conditional zoning restrictions is applied for and whether that causes the council to mandate a public hearing. So what we've been doing administratively doesn't necessarily exactly match with the text, so we want to get those in line. So the first amendment would occur to Article 6.2, which is titled Application for Zoning Ordinance Text Amendments. And the first line is really what's at question. And it says, a proposal for amendment to the text of the zoning ordinance may originate with any person or governmental body. And while that has served the government well for 50 years, currently the KRS-100 does not line up with that language. And I don't know if in 1975 it did or in 1983 when we updated our ordinance. Perhaps it did then, too. But since then, KRS-100.211 has been amended and updated most recently in 2014. So procedures for amending zone map amendments are spelled out in KRS-100, and it's very specific for zone changes. For text amendment, this is the only section that talks about the text amendment. So there's like seven or eight sections in KRS-100.211. Section 3 is specifically what talks about text amendments. And most of our text in Article 6 mimics this, but not the first sentence. So the first sentence of that section in the state law says, a proposal to amend the text amendment of any zoning regulation must be voted upon by the legislative body or fiscal court and may originate with planning commission of the unit, which is the urban county government, or with any fiscal court or legislative body, which is a member of the unit. And for us, that's the council. We don't have a fiscal court. It's just the council. But what it doesn't say is any person. So what we have been doing is allowing for text amendments to be filed by outside entities and not necessarily coming from the two bodies that the CARIS says that we can accept them from. So what has been sort of floating around for a while now, over a decade, is an Office of Attorney General opinion from 2012, which presented this question from Crittenden. And at the time, the Attorney General did find and put out an opinion that, and I won't read it all to you, but it was a similar case. The city of Crittenton was allowing text amendments to be filed by citizens, but the Planning Commission, their ordinance said that they could, but the Planning Commission said, wait, wait, wait, we're not going to accept that. And so they asked the Attorney General for an opinion. Within the Attorney General's opinion, they concluded that the ordinance granting the property owners the right to propose a zoning ordinance text amendment goes beyond the statutory scheme set down by the legislator and is therefore invalid, which means in sum, well, a property owner may propose a zoning map amendment, which we call zone changes. An owner may not propose a zoning text amendment under KRS 100-211. So any ordinance conferring the power to propose a zoning text amendment conflicts with the statutory regime that the legislator has adopted. So in essence, local governments, if you're allowing property owners to file text amendments, we are giving a power. We are allowing that partaking that power that wasn't granted to us by the state. And that's in excess of what we should be doing. So the staff suggests amending Article 6 to correct that misalignment, which would then result in all of our text amendments coming from either the Planning Commission initiating them or the Urban County Council initiating them. Any questions about that? Yes. Yes. When you're talking about those that have the ability to originate a zoning ordinance text amendment, can it be one member of the Planning Commission and one member or one member of the City Council, or does it need to be a consensus of the City Council and a consensus of the Planning Commission to allow the zoning ordinance text amendment hearing? I believe because it says the Planning Commission, the Planning Commission has to act as a unit, and so you would have to vote and have a majority of the Planning Commission members initiate the text amendment. Same with the council. Tracy? Yes. So if with that change, are we still going against what KRS says? Or are you saying we changed KRS? No. KRS says the text amendment can move forward only with the Planning Commission or the council initiating it. Right. Right. So, but your thoughts is to change to let a person... No, currently our ordinance does allow anyone to file a text amendment, which is why we have the solar text amendment, why we had a text amendment about baseball fields and ARs on... So your recommendation is to go which way? I'm sorry. Well, I think our only choice currently is to follow the state law, which is only allow the Planning Commission or the Council to initiate a text amendment. So what was your next slide then? Oh, this was about the Office of Attorney General, what their opinion was. I thought there was a slide or a recommendation to allow an applicant or a person to allow. You're saying no? We already do that since 1975. We've accepted those. You're wanting to make a change to, say, only Planning Commission or Council or to be in line with KRS? Yes. Okay, I'm sorry. I misread something. Okay. Mr. Chairman, for clarification, so as an individual, if I wanted a text amendment, I could go to my Council member, I could go to the Planning Commission, and they could bring it to the table, right? Yes, they could bring it to the table, exactly. And then the commission or the council would have to act as a body to initiate that request. Right. You would need six planning commission members to agree with your proposal. Yeah. So, I mean, right now, I mean, most commonly, they're originating from counsel and what their constituents are presumably asking, which would be a similar, which would still be allowed. They're originating from occasionally a citizen like we saw with the community kitchen on Jefferson Street and something like that. But most frequently, the next categories categories would be applicants for property owners, from everything to specific ones like the air sports field to, you know, this broad sort of solar one we're about to hear. But then also from staff. So how would you all envision, because right now a lot of work on zoning ordinance, tax amendments is initiated and started and researched before the process or the planning commission even starts discussing this or votes on it. So how would you all envision your work process sort of existing if you all sort of lose the right to initiate a zoning ordinance text amendment? Does that make sense? Yes. The staff has never had the right to initiate a text amendment. I guess Daniel could, as an individual, file and pay $500 to file a text amendment. But the staff, we are here to support the Planning Commission. And so we work on things that are derived from the comprehensive plan, and those are, in essence, already initiated because the Planning Commission has adopted a whole plan that says this regulation needs to update, this regulation needs to change. And then anything beyond what a plan, an adoptive plan by the Planning Commission, is desired, like this text amendment, we come to you and say at the end of the meeting that staff is requesting you to initiate a text amendment to Article 6 for this purpose, and then you vote on that. And that's when we start our process. A lot of times we've developed the text beforehand so you know what you're initiating. less frequently. It's more of a concept, and it might take a lot longer to get through the process. But in either regard, the staff doesn't have the power to do that. We still come to the commission. Mr. Chairman, question for legal. Is the current, is the item that is on the agenda today, is it even in compliance with state law what we're doing? well i mean we're trying to make sure we're more compliant with state law but it's definitely in compliant with the compliance with the process we've been using for a number of years which it just to clarify you know if if some if an individual or an any person under what we currently have in our ordinance wants to file for text amendment they file they file an application and they pay a fee, what we would be doing is basically eliminating that so that it would come through either this body or the Urban County Council and then come back to you all to consider. But as it is right now, the way that that particular application is being handled presently is not in compliance with KRS. There's certainly the argument that it is not. Thank you. So the second change, if the questions are finished about that, that the staff would like to address has to do with the language in our ordinance about granting conditional zoning restrictions. So the way it's currently labeled, well, Article 6-7 is mentioned a lot to you in terms of the staff recommends conditional zoning restrictions, and here are the restrictions. So restrictions have to fall within these limitations, again, per KRS, that one we are in line with. So 100-203, which say that an urban county government can put conditions on a map amendment, and it can address these things, restrict the use of the property affected to a particular use or a group of use or a specified density within those permitted in a given zone, impose architectural or other visual requirements or restrictions upon areas if it's a historic zone, and then lastly impose screening and buffering restrictions on the subject property. So that's, you'll hear us talk about that sometimes and say, well, that restriction that you're proposing is not in line with this. So that's most often when we talk about conditional zoning restrictions and what's allowed. So that has been in our ordinance since 1988, and we've had the power to do that since 1988. What has become a question mark a couple times is when someone is recommending or requesting an amendment to a conditional zoning restriction. So what's the process of that? The way the ordinance is worded, it sort of sounds like any time a conditional zoning restriction is changed, the council is required to have a public hearing, and that's what's in green down here about procedure. It says the procedure for review, notice, same, whatnot, except that a full public hearing by the Urban County Council shall be required in all cases. but what we know is that they don't always hold a public hearing. They do act. They do two readings on changes, but they don't always hold a full public hearing. And so the staff feels that we should clarify that and even just delete that section so that the process is the same. It's still important that these changes go through the council because then it gets adopted in an ordinance, and that's available for the public to view. That's what we use on our development plans. You know, the ordinance is the law, but we don't necessarily want to mandate a public hearing for something. The most recent one you had was changing $60,000 to $80,000, right? If the council has to have a public hearing on that, they are spending a lot of time on something that the Planning Commission approved unanimously and the council doesn't have a concern about. It's for, you know, affordable housing. but we don't want a situation where somebody says, well, that says we have to have a hearing. And so we want to really clarify that and eliminate those conflicts. Yes. I'm going to say this is hearsay because I heard it. Somebody said it to me from the council that informally they've already adopted a procedure that if we voted unanimously, they're not going to hear it. Yeah, that's not the same. no, that's not the same thing. Yeah, I don't know that we want to, Tracy Jones is flagging me down in the back. She's going to address that. They may or may not have adopted that in regard to zoning map amendments. Oh, I didn't say that. Yeah, but that's their call, and they may or may not be, they aren't engaging in that through a formal rule change, however they may be doing that. But the difference here is that we're saying every time one of these comes up, no matter what you guys do, they have to have a hearing. And that's probably not really required. So we're putting it in the same bucket at all their other zone map amendment hearings for them to make the decision when they see what you all have done as to whether or not they want to have a second hearing or not, which they're not required to have under CARES 100. So for conditional zoning restrictions are only allowed by state law for urban county governments, and we happen to be the only urban county government. So we're the only ones in the state doing this, but it also doesn't say how they can be amended in KRS. It says the urban county government can establish a process by which we allow for amendments. And so we've kind of put this on ourselves. in 1998 the council said we want to have or the planning commission whoever adopted it i guess the council we want to have certain cases where it has to come back to us and i'm going to be honest i've only seen one ordinance that says that where it said these are the conditional zoning restaurant we want and it must if amended it must come back to the council for a public hearing i think that the council has likely not read article six in a long time and so they may not know that they have that power to do that. So I've not seen, again, since about 89, an ordinance that mandates something come back to them. And so we've not mandated it go back to a public hearing. And then this text in the next section talks about, so just to clarify, the first section talks about amendments. So restrictions or conditions designated by the Urban County Council and then it says designated by the council at the time of their adoption. So those, if it's designated by the council, have to go back to the council for a hearing if we read the letter of the law. But all other restrictions, so if the Planning Commission mandates the conditional zoning restriction and the council just adopted it without a hearing, this sounds like they can just come back to the commission without ever going back to the council, and that's not how we've done it. We've always sent them on to the council so that the ordinance can get updated, it can be included in all of the council records, and it becomes part of the zone applied to that property. So, again, I think we just want to clean up this text and make sure that what we've been doing in terms of policy aligns with the words in the book. So today we've met with the law department to discuss these two changes. And then today I'm talking to the planning commission, you all about that. So the next step would be to initiate a text amendment, to make changes to article six, and then we would schedule a public hearing for that. Ms. Wade, thank you. Do we have any more questions from Ms. Wade? All right. Yeah, good luck today. Thank you. All righty. Yeah. So. No, I was just going to ask. Mr. Duncan. Mr. Duncan. Yes, sir. I want to go back to Mr. Davis's question to legal about this particular. Let's make that clear. The Zota that's before you is filed legally. Okay. That's all. There's no question. but this is just a coincidence about this timing. It has nothing to do with any citizen-initiated text amendment on the table. So please get that out of your mind, applicant and planning commission. There is no problem with this ZODA that has been initiated by the private sector. Mr. Duncan, please elaborate. I mean, if KRS, which has been on the books for a long time, says XYZ, and it wasn't done in X. But it's in our law. The council has passed a law on the zoning ordinance that says this can be done. But does the KRS supersede local ordinance? If someone were to challenge that, that would be the way we would have to resolve that. So why? And so we're trying to get ahead of that, Mr. Davis. We're trying to get ahead of anything that we found as a mismatch in our ordinance with statute. But statute supersedes ordinance. Well, let me interject here because I think I started this. we can be more restrictive we cannot be less restrictive so where we find some discrepancies we try to be as consistent as we can and that's what we're doing here so currently I would say that our ordinance provides another level of restriction that we have had in it for a number of years and been processing that way including this particular one however going forward we're saying hey, we want to pull back on our ordinance, we think it will be more consistent if we do that. So I think under the ordinances that exist now and any tax amendments that have been filed according to that, they're appropriate to proceed. But when we change it through a tax amendment process, then we'll have a different process. Okay, Mr. Crum, I think I got my answer. Thank you all. Daniel Crum, planning staff. So the next item on the agenda, we will be discussing solar energy systems, basically how this section will kind of play out. We have the applicant Silicon Ranch and their representatives here, as well as representatives of Fayette Alliance. So for the folks in the subdivision committees that received a very truncated explanation of the proposed zoning ordinance text amendment, I'll go through that kind of hitting on the larger elements. The packet in front of you contains a number of items, the top of which is a letter we received recently from the Rural Land Management Board. They had a chance to meet, and so they sent that in for consideration. The items behind it are the proposed staff alternative language, the staff report that corresponds to that, and then the rear portion is the markup of containing staff's language, but a markup of the applicant's proposed text. So the first item is new. The rest are pieces of information that you would have already received. So staff is going to run through some of this information again, provide both the applicant as well as Fade Alliance the ability to give a brief presentation, and then really return to you all with sort of the questions that you have, any discussion, any particular changes with the text that you see before you, really a very broad kind of unstructured feel for that. But just to refresh everyone, we're here to talk about generally the solar energy system ZODA. And once again, kind of just brought through the general flow of the presentation, refreshing, allowing the two presentations and then kind of a larger discussion. But Silicon Ranch, I'm sure they will introduce themselves, but they are a solar energy system provider that specializes in agrivoltaics. so utilizing land for both solar energy systems as well as some agricultural components. They are seeking to establish a location in Lexington within Fayette County, but are seeking a change in the zoning ordinance in order to accomplish it. So they have proposed the creation of an entire new section of the zoning ordinance that deals with solar energy systems. This is everything from roof-mounted solar to larger-scale ground-mounted systems at sort of a larger scale. So here, the current framework that... Excuse me, I'm sorry. Yes. Can I interrupt just for a second? Yes, sir. With what you've given us, what I'm looking at here, it's got red, blue, and black ink. Has there been any changes to that since you put it out a month? Okay. No. So I can explain that really quickly. I'm sorry to interrupt. I just wanted to clarify that. And as we go through this, this is sort of an informal, so if at any point you all have questions, feel free to stop me before I get too much steam. But the markup that you have at the reader portion, the blue is the staff's recommended text, those red indicate deletions, and the rest of the language kind of is the existing language there. So back to this particular proposal, the framework, there really isn't one to speak of currently in our ordinance. Solar energy systems are really kind of mentioned in passing. There are some provisions that relate to attaching them to buildings and when it relates to height. But otherwise, all we really have to go by currently is a determination that the Board of Adjustment made was that ground-mounted solar energy systems were classified sort of as an industrial use. And a reminder that sort of the utilities utilizing solar energy system, those are PSC regulated, so those are not subject to the zoning ordinance. And at state level, sort of the merchant electric at a certain threshold of production has to meet its own requirements with the siting board. But this is really to flesh out how we handle solar, get requirements on the books, and have a conversation as a community what scale we think is appropriate and how we should sort of regulate that. So staff research. Staff has taken a look at a lot of information ranging from individual ordinances, model ordinances, best practices from national organizations, information the government has put up, both at the state and federal level, and took a look at this, synthesized this information, and really tried to evaluate the applicant's language based off of that. And some of the best practices that we picked up was really trying to remove barriers for sort of the lower scale solar. So making it, bringing it on paper so that it's easier to sort of implement, that it's more straightforward, and that folks kind of know what to expect when installing it. There's a lot of municipalities have talked about sort of very wildly in how these uses are categorized, whether it's based on power production, the size of the facility, other considerations. and whether or not this use provides on-site solar power or it's consumed and entered into the grid. Really striking and consistent across most of the ordinances we've looked at is sort of a different consideration for an urban, where you have developed land, and rural, where you're looking at potentially using agricultural land or land that has not yet been developed for their use. So really the literature really speaks to efficiently utilize the land that we have currently developed, and then when we're looking at areas that have not been developed, being very careful with how that is being done for future land use implications as well. And then most of the research also includes language that speaks to decommissioning plans. So what do we do when these solar farms, solar facilities are no longer operating? how do we kind of recoup any costs that are generated with decommissioning, and what happens to the land next. So there's been sort of the framework that you see on screen is pretty consistent across nearly all the ordinance we examine. And once again, there is a lot of literature when it comes to how different municipalities are handling this. But the state of Kentucky has their own model solar ordinance, which the framework in front of you proposed by the applicant really follows a lot of that language. Some of it has been excluded as it relates to some considerations for kind of avoiding prime farmland, but otherwise generally follow that same kind of flow. Many states have issued these, but really all of them speak to, at its heart, this is a local land use issue. So each municipality should have the power and the authority to tailor this to their individual communities. And then when we look sort of at the solar installations by state, you'll notice that Kentucky right here is on the lower grade as far as the amount of solar that has been installed. And so when we were looking at these sort of best practices, we also took into account that comparing how solar is handled out in the West or in areas that receive a much larger amount of solar energy or have much different kind of natural features, comparing how something like Nevada handles solar in their rural areas is not really comparable to us. So really in terms of ordinances that we've looked around really is more regional specific, but also kind of still trying to pull from best practices. So Kentucky is sort of on the lower end of the production with sort of both of the respective coasts and Texas kind of filling that out. So getting to speak on kind of what staff's recommended language. So that is sort of that second piece of information there. The first step is kind of splitting up how we are considering solar energy systems. So the first two categories are the easiest to implement. They are generally what we're used to seeing on a day-to-day. So integrated, so where solar is built into an existing building as a part of its construction, or a roof-mounted, where this is an existing structure that you are then retrofitting with panels and is something that you would see, say, on a house or an office building, but takes an existing structure to make work. Where you really start getting into the details where solar starts to become really impactful is the ground-mounted. So what happens when this is sort of the prime use of a particular parcel? How is that split up? How is that defined? The staff's language in front of you splits this into three kind of tiers. First, small scale, which would be up to 2,500 square feet. This is something that you would see, something in a residential context, not very large, but something that's still sort of accessory in scale. That intermediate is up to five acres, allowing for something that would be more tailored to a larger development, a larger site, and then large scale, which is greater than five acres. Yes, Judy? Do you know where that picture came from? Yes, yes. So the far right, that is actually a Silicon Ranch project out in Logan County. And I don't know the specific size, but it is safe to say that it's greater than five acres. But really, these are all ground-mounted solar systems, but the impacts, the implications for all of them are wildly different based on the size and really should be regulated differently. And so the staff report in front of you outlays kind of what our proposed use of solar energy system is based on zone and the type. So staff, we wanted to allow sort of the ground-mounted and the integrated as accessory uses, something that didn't require review or approval, something that could be done at very low kind of impact, low amount of involvement, and sort of pushing that as a more grassroots solution. One of the ways that we do not, however, want to use land that is zoned residential, and especially with the considerations of hearing an entire presentation about how we need to – expanding the urban service boundary to accommodate new housing means that we should still be mindful and efficient with how we use land. So within the residential context, these are not principal uses. You would have to have an existing use on the site, and then it would be allowed as a ground mounted or as integrated into the building or as a roof mounted, but we really didn't want to see principal uses of larger-scale solar. Really where larger-scale solar is most appropriate in the current context would be in our industrial zones, sort of mirroring how we've handled this in the past. With regards to the agricultural context, we wanted to allow them to continue to use any solar that was, say, put on a barn or integrated into their agricultural structures. But staff in our review of the literature didn't find really a great consensus of what happens once installed on a agricultural context, what that decommissioning does, if that land still retains all of its agricultural value or what that looks like long term, really due to kind of the rate at which solar has sort of accumulated. So here is a graph that shows kind of the solar production based on sort of the type. So we have residential, commercial, community, utility, et cetera. But you'll notice that even since 2010 has sort of been this explosion in the amount of solar production. So the solar facilities that we are seeing today really are, for the lifespan of their project, which is typically about 30 years or so, are a ways away from being decommissioned. So case studies, literature, et cetera, of what happens when you have a solar energy system in an agricultural context, you take it away, is it still productive, or how is that going to function? The literature that I have seen and the research that we've done has said we don't really know. There's some smaller experimental type research going on now, especially with agrivoltaics of can we co-use this land, but there really hasn't weighed in on sort of getting to that point, the sort of work that needs to be done in order to install a solar facility, whether that's grading, whether that's the installation of infrastructure for that, what that does to a project. So staff thought at this time we weren't able to comfortably answer what that impact would be and think it would be most appropriate if we weighed in on that as a community through a larger, more involved process that's sort of similar to the ZODA work group where we took something that has larger implications, speaking to hundreds of acres for any particular development, and provided sort of a path forward and a process for that. And so with that, this is a chart. It's a little bit dated. We reached out to the Kentucky Resources Council and asked them to provide us some guidance or information. they opted not to attend today but did send some information so we do have a map of pending this is a little bit old i think this may be from 2020 or 2021 of the general locations throughout the state of pending projects that that go before the siting board so these would be commercial developments for merchant grade solar and generally speaking that represents about 30,000 acres from that kind of snapshot in time. But that was provided from the Kentucky, from the state level as well. So once again, summary of what we've proposed with the text. So taking the applicant's language, some of it was duplicative for what we have currently in the zoning ordinance, clarifying that. We modified some of the categories to acreage that we thought would be more appropriate based on where we're going to be recommending them. Once again, focusing on accessory uses in the residential zones, allowing the commercial and industrial to have a little bit more involvement. But once again, sort of excluding the agricultural so we could have sort of a larger, more meaningful conversation with that. We provide sort of standards for the uses when they are a principal use, as well as specifying the decommissioning plan that lays out sort of how those facilities, once they are no longer generating power or beneficial, how those are sort of brought offline. So there is a lot of specifics in the text there. So as we are listening to the applicant's proposal as well as Fade Alliance's proposal, if you see anything in the text that you have questions about or that would like to kind of go through in more detail, staff is here to kind of talk that through as well as to answer any questions that you have. but it is understandably very large reaching impacts and with some very specific minutiae involved in some of the decisions that we have as a community have to make. So I'd be happy to sort of answer any initial questions. Otherwise, we'll let the folks there talk, and then we can circle back with anything that you may have. Okay. Thank you, Mr. Crum. Any questions currently for Mr. Crum? Mr. Duncan, I just want to put out there, too, This is just a work session, so we're just hearing from staff and the applicant only today, no outside citizens. That's right, Mr. Chair. There will be a public hearing for this at a later date, potentially a public hearing at the council as well. Okay. Mr. Owens? to clarify that I thought that someone from opposition was going to be allowed yes isn't that the understanding as Daniel said we invited the Kentucky Resource Council to come and they declined to participate I think they're referring to the Fayette Alliance the Fayette Alliance has to speak so they are on the agenda Okay. Thank you. I meant to say staff, applicant, failing lines, and then that's it? Yes. Okay. That's what I was, yeah. I do have a couple questions. Yeah, go ahead. Sure. Thank you. Daniel, thank you. You know, this is what work sessions are for is educating us. Two things right now. There's probably a lot, but you talked about having decommissioning information in there and practices and so forth. Do you know of any sites that have been decommissioned at this time? So, yeah. So one of the real challenges was staff was really unable to find any instances where these have sort of actually been carried through. And so that sort of consideration, we have a bunch of ordinances. This is language that has been implemented a bunch of places, but it's because of when this is established, 75% of our capacity has been since 2016. So, no, there really wasn't any recent examples that staff was able to identify of. This was a large-grade solar proposal that was decommissioned and lessons learned and really pulled from that. So that was part of staff's hesitation on including it in that context. Okay, so it hasn't happened yet. so we really don't know. The other question right now, in your presentation, going back a few slides, it really doesn't matter, a couple more where you had a large scale up there. You referred to the large scale as being a commercial use. Do you consider that a commercial use? So once again, when we look at solar energy systems, really from a national level, it varies state to state. For instance, Florida has incorporated into state law that solar energy systems are an agricultural use, and you have to regulate them just like everywhere else. So here this is a use that doesn't fit within our existing zoning ordinance. It's our interpretation that it doesn't fit anything currently. We have the Board of Adjustment sort of case history saying that sort of ground-mounted solar was best incorporated into sort of the umbrella of industrial use. the applicant's specific proposal with agrivoltaics does include some agricultural components but much like other conditional uses we have in the ar zone that don't necessarily that aren't necessarily agricultural we need to weigh that as part of the consideration as well so that was part of staff's consideration and sort of excluding it from the the ar at this time okay all right I'll see if anybody else has any. Thank you. Thanks, Daniel. Where did 50% of the floor area principal structures come from for accessory use? Let me pull up my ordinance here. yes so i believe that was sort of our standard for accessory structures so in instances where you have a residence say a single family house in a particular zone we want to make sure that the principal use of the property is still the overriding primary focal point of the site. So we have restrictions that relate to maximum accessory structure size. We wanted to make sure that on a residential lot that that wasn't suddenly way out of compliance. And so that's where that provision came from, that to make sure that the principal use of the property size-wise was still the focal point. So 50% is, there's nothing particularly magical about it. It's just a way to keep it under the predominant size of the structures and keep it from dominating in any way. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Crone. Oh, sorry. Yeah, I know. You should know better. Daniel, help me explain how we're here today doing this. I understand you educating us, but how did Mr. Turner and Fayette Alliance get involved today? So this was, I guess, a part of larger proceedings, so included in, so to walk us back. And this was presented to you at the previous month's work sessions. It was indicated at that time, due to sort of the breadth of the information involved and the presentations involved, that there was interest in having sort of an extended conversation, much of which would have occurred later at the zoning subdivision meeting. And so at that point, it was the zoning component of the Planning Commission sort of indicated that they would like some more information, especially specified by the applicant and then negotiations between our staff and the chair we thought it appropriate to invite Fayette Alliance as well to help provide additional information. Anything else Jim would like to add? Just to be more succinct, some of you at the committee asked to have Silicon come and speak to you and so the request was also made that Fayette Alliance present as well so they were bought. Okay. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, Daniel. I thought it was a great staff report, and as I stated at the zoning committee, I'm in total agreement with the staff report, and I'm happy to hear more from Silicon Ranch, but I think it's very important that we as a commission understand that while they may be one applicant, we are changing the zoning ordinance for the entire county for every other applicant that will follow. So what they may need or prefer is great, and we want to listen, but we are changing the zone for the entire county for every subsequent applicant that will come before us. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Crone. Mr. Turner? Thank you, Mr. Chairman and members of the Commission. And we're glad to be before you, and we don't intend this to be an adversarial type of situation. We're not going to lay out our case. That's coming up for the public hearing. That's not the intent. We do have Silicon Ranch. you had a number of questions at the at the earlier committee meetings and we have a great Silicon Ranch has a great deal of expertise in that area and we thought we would give you a short presentation of kind of what's involved in their locations so and and mr. Davis is exactly right this does apply to the countywide but there are there solar and there's solar so that's part of this process and part of this evolution is to educate all of us to what the opportunities are and and you know if it should be more restrictive if it should be simply agrivoltaics if it should be larger than that that's something that's That's part of the conversation. Our emphasis is agrivoltaics. Just, and I'm going to introduce Blake Spurgeon here in a minute, and he can introduce his team, and he's going to go through a PowerPoint that's got a lot of slides, but it's going to be very quick. And then we can have some discussion. to mr. Owens question about decommissioning part of the decommissioning process that goes through the state for one of these approved and is as part of the ordinance can be a part of the ordinance as well is that one that a decommissioning plan has to be filed it has to be reviewed and costed out by a disinterested, uninterested third party, engineer or whoever the person might be, and a bond has to be posted for that effect. And that decommissioning plan has to be reviewed under the state citing regulations, I think, every five years as to the efficacy of the plan and the cost of the decommissioning. what really is the question on decommissioning because it's really not it's not rocket science you pull the poles out of the ground and you go on the question is and I think the one being asked here is okay what happens to the soil what's the condition of the soil after this type of utilization and that depends frankly on what what is how the property is managed through the period And we talked at some point about being part of the process, having a property management plan being a part of this. But that, and the other thing is nothing is, you're correct. This is all new. There hasn't been any major decommissioning. But as you go through that five-year review and you get 15, 20 years down the road, you're going to have a lot clearer picture. And there's that opportunity within the state regulations as well as potentially within your ordinances to adjust those issues depending on what is good, bad, or indifferent that's found through practice. But if you wait for 20 or 30 years down the road, we're going to be going through rolling blackouts. If we don't get some of this stuff online, I'm not saying this one does everything, but these are the kind of projects that if you're going to eliminate fossil fuels, you've got to have some alternatives. And so that's what we're talking about. And what you'll hear is a little bit of scale. And merchant power at this point requires a lot of land. It requires a lot of panels. So with no further ado, Blake, if you want to get started, If we could cue up the. Thank you. Does press this button to get the slides moving forward? Perfect. Yeah. Thank you all so much for letting us come and present before you today. Like Darby said, my name is Blake Spurgeon. I'm on our economic community development team here at Silicon Ranch. And the main part of my role is engaging with the community, engaging with elected officials. I'm not a scientist, but we do have one. His name is John Rathburn. He's a senior environmental scientist here at Silicon Ranch. He's here with us today. Lauren Schallenberger is the lead of our regenerative energy operations, and that is our land management platform. So Lauren is here as well. And then Austin Roach is the project developer for this project, and he works on a lot of the pre-construction work, doing the studies, making sure that the site is suitable for development. And so as we go through today, we've got a whole team here to answer all sorts of questions, and so we're more than happy to take as much time as we need. Like we've stated, we're Silicon Ranch, and while this ZODA applies to every developer that would come to Fayette County, we're here before you today, and so we'd like to tell you a little bit about our company and how we operate and let you know we are willing to be held to a high standard. And so as we work to develop projects, we like to consider ourselves as an industry leader as far as engaging the community, taking care of our land, making sure that we're doing a good job. And so we're willing to be held to a high standard while we're here. So we were founded in 2011 in Nashville, Tennessee, by the former governor of Tennessee, Phil Bredesen, along with the former commissioner of economic development in Tennessee, Matt Kisber. and the former Commissioner of Revenue, Reagan Farr. And when they left office, they wanted to find a way to bring significant economic development projects to rural communities. And what they found was solar did just that through a number of different ways. Solar projects provide substantial capital investment. So generally what we like to say is for every megawatt of power produced, it's roughly a million dollars of capital investment. And so our project's 70 megawatts, which would be roughly $70 million of capital investment. That's on the conservative end. It creates construction jobs and increases revenues for local businesses. So during construction, we're going to bring a lot of construction workers, many of them working on a solar project for the very first time and beginning their career in solar. And lastly, it increases the tax base and supports government services such as roads and schools. And so when we develop projects, we become a part of the community. Our model is a little bit different, and then we like to purchase the land we build our projects on. And so we think that that gives us extra skin in the game to make sure that we're doing a really good job making sure we're being active participants in the community. And our project will roughly generate about $3.94 million of tax revenue over its 40-year life, which is roughly $85,000 a year. Those are not exact numbers. Those are very early estimates on the conservative end. So I wanted to hit a few high-level things about solar. I'm happy to answer any questions along the way. A lot of questions we get about solar projects, and this applies to not just us but to really any project, is are they noisy? And the short answer is no. the things that make noise on solar projects are the inverters and those are located at the center of the site. So you can tell when the inverters are up and running it they sound like your refrigerator humming and so if you're on the edge of a solar project you're not going to be able to hear anything. The cars driving by you will be much noisier than a solar project would be. Another question we often get is do solar projects produce electromagnetic fields or radiation or things like that? Again, short answer is no. They measure EMF in milligauss, which is just the way they measure radiation. And solar projects produce 0.2 to 0.4 milligauss. So by comparison, your microwave at home can produce up to 200 milligausses. Your cell phone that is sitting right next to all of us is producing significantly more radiation than a solar project would. And so we've talked a lot about, you know, we really led with our agrivoltaics platform, and I'm going to go really high level on these next few slides. I won't get too into the weeds of that, and so if you have questions about any of this we can take some afterwards, and Lauren would be happy to answer those. But we do a few things to make sure that we are actively taking care of the land we build our projects on. Our regenerative energy platform was actually started because we were developing a project down in Georgia and Will Harris, who is the founder of White Oak Pastures down in Georgia, heard we were coming and had a lot of similar questions that the community here does. He said, hey, what's going on here? Are you guys going to cause runoff? Are you going to impact my property? So our CEO met with Will, and we developed our regenerative energy platform where we practice regenerative agriculture on our projects and work to actually restore the topsoil on our projects over the lifespan of the project. So we do that by planting perennial vegetation, wildlife corridors, creating soft buffer areas between the solar array and the surrounding lands, and use no synthetic fertilizers or pesticides unless required to by state law. And this process starts even before we start building the project. As soon as we, you know, really start developing the project, we are going to make sure we're taking care of that property before construction even begins by, you know, Testing those soils, understanding what we need to do to make sure that that soil is going to be as healthy as possible throughout the entire lifespan. You can see a couple examples of projects there down at the bottom. But we understand that it's one thing for us to simply say this and just ask you to take our word for it. It's another to actually back it up. And we've started to do that by measuring the outcomes of the land health on our projects. And so one of the ways we do that is by measuring the overall land health, which encompasses many different factors, including water infiltration, overall soil cover, a number of different things. We partner with the Savory Institute to measure this, and we found, on average, land health on our projects improve 85 percent over the baseline. And so you can see a number of our different projects there have improved to varying degrees. But on average, the land health of these projects improves by 85%. Another thing we measure is soil cover. Simply put, if the ground is barren and there's dirt showing, that's not good. We want to be covered with grass, lush, green. and we've found that 82 percent or those projects increased soil cover by 82 percent over the baseline. You can see some numbers that back that up there as well. And there's a few pictures of this. One of the ways that we practice regenerative agriculture is through our sheep grazing program. We do this a couple different ways. We have a self-performed flock down in Georgia where we have our own lambing facility. We have our own flock of sheep. And then we also work with local farmers who want to raise their flock of sheep on our property. In Garrett County, just right down the road, we work with a shepherd named Daniel Bell, who, until he was able to come to our site, his lambing operation was kind of hitting max capacity. Once we contracted with him, he was able to triple the size of his flock and have his son go into operation with him. Down the line, we have a grant with the Department of Energy studying what cattle would look like on solar projects. And so that's coming soon. We're not there yet, but if anybody's going to do it, it will be us. And then last time we were here, we had a number of questions about the construction. process and so I have a couple key points I want to look at there as well. And so for our construction process we make sure that when we're selecting sites and designing sites we want to stay as close to the natural topography of that site as possible and minimize grading, minimize soil compaction and one of the ways we're able to do that is we partner with a company called Next tracker and they build a mechanism that helps our panels track with the sun and so on more rolling terrain we don't have to flatten that terrain out we can actually put those panels on the hills a little bit and those panels can track with the sun which enables us to minimize the amount of land that we grade. And again you know that this question of decommissioning has come up quite often. It's our, you know, standpoint of because we buy the property, it's in our best interest that if we ever need to decommission this site, we need that site to retain as high of a value as possible because at the end of the day that land is an asset. And so if we're the land owner, we need that land to be restored back to as high value as possible so we can sell it to a farmer or or sell it to another solar developer, or whoever else wants to purchase it. In the unlikely event that we go bankrupt, those banks would come to seize our assets, and they want to make sure that all of those assets have a high value as well, so it's going to be in their best interest to make sure that that site's decommissioned well, panels are pulled out of the ground, wiring's pulled out, and the site remains a high value. Another question we often get is like, okay, what happens if the panel breaks? What happens when you do decommission? And we've partnered with a company called SolarCycle, who's currently based out of Arizona, but they're working on a facility in Georgia that we send any broken panel to. And we do this today. If we have a panel break, we send it to SolarCycle and be able to recycle 98% of those panels to be produced to make more solar panels. I'm flying through a lot of this. I realize there's probably a number of questions. I wanted to make sure we had plenty of time. But another few key points I wanted to make specific to Fayette County here. There's a lot of talk about rooftop solar. And is that a viable option to completely rely on? The Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet estimates that the average cost of rooftop solar is $2.30 per watt. The total potential Fayette County rooftop solar electricity generation would be 1,700 megawatts AC. So this is a calculation that Google Sunroof, Project Google Sunroof, they are able to look at every single municipality across the nation and estimate if you put solar on every rooftop in the county, how much production would it bring. And if you put solar on every rooftop here in Fayette County, it would be 1,700 megawatts, which would cost about $5.5 billion if you use that $2.30 megawatt number. Now, we're not putting solar on every single rooftop. That's unrealistic. If we simply wanted to replicate the amount of energy that our project is producing from solar on rooftops, it would be $225 million for Fayette County taxpayers. So that is people investing on solar on their house, on their place of business, things like that, whereas our project cost Fayette County zero. And so it would take roughly 10,000 rooftops to equal 70 megawatts AC, which is the amount of energy produced by our project, which is roughly 15% of all the available single-family homes in Fayette County. So just to replicate our project, not to meet the county's overall goals, just to replicate our project, it would be $225 million. Excuse me. And so, you know, another question has been raised like, yes, this ZODA does not just apply to us. Other developers can come in and build projects if they wanted to. In the ZODA that we recommended, we recommended having a conditional use permit to regulate solar facilities in the agricultural zone, which gives the county a say. So 25 solar developers could come in, a file conditional use permit, and all 25 could be denied. It does not mean that solar is going to run rampant across the agricultural zone. So our project in particular, if we started, you know, everything goes smoothly. We go through this process. We go through the conditional use permit process. The earliest our project could be in production is 2029. So we currently have about 900 acres under option and no additional plans for further development. None. We have 900 acres under development, under option in Fayette County, no plans to expand. The number of projects in Fayette County in the PJM interconnection queue, so that is PJM is the regional transmission operator that regulates when projects can come online, and this data is available publicly for free online. You can see solar developers who are interested and have a project ready and lined up to go in any certain area. Currently in Fayette County there are two projects, ours and EKPCs. Other than that, there are zero coming. So if a project were to go into that interconnection queue today, it would not be able to come online until the mid to late 2030s. So that's if they entered that queue today, that's 10 plus years down the road that any project is able to come online. And so this notion that it's going to open the floodgates up for solar, given what's coming down the line, that's not happening anytime soon. Our project and EKPC's project are really the only two being proposed. And so part of the reason we wanted to talk about this ZODA and bring this here was EKPC, yes, they can supersede all zoning laws. It's not a matter of if solar is coming. Solar is coming, but we want to be able to be sure to give the county a say, give the county a voice in how these projects are developed. Because, you know, there are no regulations here. Utilities like EKPC can build projects and only have to answer to the Public Service Commission and not take into consideration anything here locally. which is why our ZOTA, with the conditional use permit, being asked to be held to a high standard, gives the county a say in how these projects are developed past just us. So happy to answer any questions you guys have. We've got a whole team here as well willing to answer questions. Who's doing? Well, I'll try. I'll try my best. I'm going to say I'll take it. Some other clarifying questions. Number one, are you all purchasing the land or leasing the land that you want? We currently have it under purchase option. So if everything goes well, diligence, we get through all this, we will purchase the land. I'm trying to gain the physics of this without, in other words, without being a physics major. So how does it work? If the sun hits the panel, then you have wires running under the ground. Explain that. Yeah, so the way that our project will work, sun hits the panels, and we're interconnected to a substation out there that is interconnected with PJM, so the Regional Transmission Operator. So those electrons will hit the panel, hit the substation, and then enter into PJM's grid. And then from there, electrons flow the path of least resistance. And so if there is a high demand coming from somewhere, those electrons are going to flow that way, just like water. You pour water somewhere and it's downhill, the water is going to flow downhill. It's the same type of thing with electrons. And so with ours being just outside of Lexington, the highest power demand is going to come from Lexington. And so these physical electrons will be used and utilized here locally. I'm trying to mention the fact that this does not open the floodgates to other solar systems as such, but what about other types of non-fossil fuels like windmills and hydrogen and what have you? Yeah, our Zota specifically is referencing solar. You also mentioned that you're in charge of the economic development, is that correct? Yes, sir. How many jobs would this bring to the city of Lexington? To the city of Lexington? Sustainable jobs. Yes, yes. So typically, solar projects will bring one to two maintenance jobs full-time and then probably two to three agrivoltaic jobs, so more on the agricultural side. So we understand that's not many at the end of the day. But what we do see solar as is an economic development recruitment tool. And so over and over and over again, companies across America are having to meet their renewable energy goals and carbon emissions goals. And so when they're looking for somewhere to locate their business, the first question that they ask Chambers of Commerce and economic development practitioners is, how can we source renewable energy? How clean is your grid? Can we account for reduced carbon emissions here? And we've seen that constantly across the country. We've seen multiple times where we build a project and a company would announce that they're coming six months later because the local Chamber of Commerce was able to use our project as a tool to attract new business. I could ask a few more questions. I'll hold off until some. Quick question. You mentioned $3.94 million over a four-year life. 40. 40. Yes, sir. So what is determining the 40-year? Why is there a 40-year life? Yes, sir. So that's strictly just solar projects are built to last 40 years. So all the technology has a 40-year lifespan. That does not mean that once 40 years hits, we're done. Over the next 40 years, there will be improvements in technology, and so we'll have the option to put new panels out there, replace the ones that are currently there, things like that. But then typically when we sign power purchase agreements with PJM or whoever that is, those are typically 20 to 30 year contracts. And so the same thing applies. At the end of that contract, we can re-up and continue going on. So that's where that 40-year typically comes from. Yep. To follow up on that power purchase agreement piece, because when we were talking the physics, it sounded like Lexington's closer, Lexington will get the power that's generated. However, if you're doing purchase agreements with other companies, are you going to guarantee that we get that power, or are you going to guarantee that whoever signed the agreement with you will get the power? So this is a very common misconception. There's multiple, I guess, products that solar companies can sell. So one is the power. Two is the renewable energy credits. And those are a credit that's created when the solar project is put online that a company or whoever may purchase. That way they can say, hey, we've invested in this project over here, and we're accounting for it as a way to reduce our carbon emissions. And so a lot of times you may hear X Solar Project is working with this big company. That company is not actually getting physical electrons. That company is getting these credits for that. And so the power itself, whoever we contract with, we will be interconnecting into PJM's line. Those electrons will hit that line and will bolster the local electric grid here. You can't ship electrons off to somewhere else, essentially. My turn? You're rubbing it. Thank you. Thank you. A couple of curious questions. You were talking about rooftop, the cost of rooftops. One, it said Fed County residents or taxpayers would have to pay that. That's only if they choose to put a solar on their roof. Correct. Otherwise, it's not going to cost the taxpayer. Correct. And there also would not be any rooftop. Do you all have no plans to do anything else other than what you're talking about? No, sir. No integrated rooftops? No. We only do utility scale. We don't do any rooftop. Go back to that cost for a second, $250 million or whatever it was. are you calculating that on just residential houses? So that number is strictly based on Kentucky Energy Environment Cabinet. Their average cost of rooftop solar, $2.30 per watt, and then we multiplied that by 70 megawatts, which is what our project is. But is that cost per rooftop based on a house? Based on any roof. That's their general average, Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet's general average for rooftop solar. That's $2.30 per watt. So I guess what I'm drilling down to, a house is going to cost more than a three-acre rooftop such as Amazon. I'm not sure I'm understanding your question. The possibility of Amazon having rooftops over. Oh, I see. Yeah, and we're not that, let me, we're kind of getting in the weeds a little bit, but it's a good question. And the issue is this is not rooftop solar or solar farm solar. Rooftop solar is very much a part of the equation, And it's going to be determined for the most part by each individual household as to whether they want to, whether it's an economic decision or whether it's a social decision to say this is the right thing for me to do to reduce my carbon footprint. The example of Amazon, for instance, is a very good one. And Amazon may well, if it makes economic sense, and, you know, you've got some credits, you've got some, it's more complicated than simply cost analysis. But they will do it, and it may help serve Amazon. It won't fully serve Amazon. Similar to Rupp Arena, I think, and we can get the numbers for you there, but you could put the total of Rupp Arena under Sola, and it won't supply the power needs of Rupp Arena and the convention center. It is a part. That's what I'm trying to say. It is a part, and it is a very important part for us to have as a community. But the other part is you've got to have some mass generators. You've got to have some commercial generators. So that's the point of these slides. is there's a cost to putting rooftop solar in it. And like you said, by the taxpayer, that's not necessary. What he means is by the homeowner and property owner. Yeah. Most of, I dare say, over half of the language that is in our text is something other than agriculture. So we've got to consider it all. That's where I'm coming from. One other question. you mentioned that the ground would have perennials and annual grasses. Does that mean perennials obviously come back every year? Does that mean you reseed every year? Lauren, you want to take this one? Yeah. You don't need that. Hey, folks. The long walk. Yeah. Lawrence Allenberger, Silicon Ranch, direct land management for the company. So, Mr. Owens, your question was, do we reseed every year? The answer is no. Once our perennials are established such that we have 80-plus percent of vegetative cover, we'll typically stop reseeding at that point and maintain the perennial base. Now, if we were to, through our monitoring protocol, see that a reduction for some reason in vegetative cover, we would look to reseed. Okay. All right. Thank you. This is just a real basic ABC little picture book question. I'm looking at the pictures I've seen in Indiana Prairie Farmer, and I've seen pictures from, I think, EKU's solar farm. Some of the panel configurations are horizontal, some of them are more oblique. What's the deal with that? Most panels and most projects nowadays have a tracking system on them that help the panels rotate with the sun. And so wherever the sun is in the sky, that panel wants to rotate to be able to capture that sunlight. When it's nighttime, they'll go into stow, which is straight up and down. Most panel systems have that on it nowadays. While some are still, I guess the word would be like still-mounted, they're just going to be facing the place where the sun is most likely to hit it. Our projects and 99% of projects today have that tracking system on them. So they'll be at different angles throughout the day. So since we're in an agricultural area, the areas that are using the land for grazing, are they grazing between the panels rather than underneath? I mean, I've seen pictures of goats and sheep underneath. Yeah, Lauren, you want to take it? Yeah, so the small ruminants in that management program will utilize all the forage. So in between the panels, under them, basically anywhere where there's grass, they are a measure of vegetation control. And they honestly prefer the shade and perform better with that incorporated into their environment. I have another question for Lauren, if you don't mind. So how would you describe the areas that are not vegetated, and how does that 20% compare to a typical agricultural land? Yeah, so typically anything that doesn't have equipment mounted on it or a roadway is vegetated coming out of construction. Typically the state jurisdiction, the environmental department, will require 70% or more, but it's typically 70% perennial vegetative cover to close the stormwater permit. we, Silicon Ranch, actually hold our contractors to a higher standard and our contracting, we require them to get us to 80% perennial vegetative cover. And as far as, you know, how does that compare to a typical agricultural enterprise, depends on the enterprise. I mean, if it's row cropping, you could have 100% bare soil at certain times of the year. Same could be said, you know, with a sod farm. What we're looking to do is create functional grassland ecosystems and have 100% vegetative cover. That's the goal, and improve soil over time. Yes, I've got a question for you on the business development side. Yep. why is Fayette County, Kentucky, a good market or demographics or altitude or whatever it may be? Why is our community, our county, a place that you are interested in putting a project? Yeah. The number one thing, the number one determining factor of if a project can go anywhere is available capacity on the electrical grid. And so there is available capacity on the electrical grid here in Fayette County. Combined with there were willing landowners who were willing to go into purchase option with us on their property. And the land was suitable. The land is relatively flat. We're close to a substation. We're close to those electrical lines. And PJM in particular, they're needing additional capacity, and this falls within the PJM territory. So those are the main reasons, but the number one reason is available capacity on the electrical grid. Okay, go on. Have you all looked elsewhere to do this? a landfill that's got 700 acres, Bluegrass Station, that's got 700 acres? Yeah, so our project is out and surrounds a landfill out, I guess, off of Winchester. We're out that way near Bluegrass Station. Building on a landfill is probably hit very, very expensive. You have to do a lot of mitigation work and get all that done. It makes the project economics not great. And so when we looked here in Fayette County, we were like, okay, well, what is going to be the type of place we can build a solar project given the long history of agriculture here in Fayette County? And getting as close to that landfill as humanly possible, being near a more industrial type use like Bluegrass Station or Bluegrass Depot, confused. Bluegrass Station. Yeah. Being out in that area and near the interstate, if there's going to be a utility scale solar project, Fayette County, that's the best location given all of those things. And most of that land has been in agricultural production, but is not at peak agricultural production currently, given how they are currently being operated. Okay. One of the things that you indicated is you had a purchase option on this particular land. and talking to the owner and what have you, we're not noted for sheep development here in this community at all. In fact, I don't know of many people that are into that. Have they indicated that they'd like to raise sheep here? Not them directly, but we have relationships with shepherds, particularly in Garrett County. But once we get further down the line, I'm sure we have a process to engage with local shepherds. Bill, historically, Fayette County and the surrounding counties, and I would say historically, I'm going back 30, 40 years, maybe 50 years, sheep were a very large part of the agricultural production of the livestock production in this area. Several things caused that to be a problem. One of them was the intrusion of coyotes and other predators that didn't exist back then. and then there was a disease issue that got involved that culled a lot of herds, and people didn't get back involved with it. But the answer to your question is this has long been, historically, been a large sheep producer in this area. There are several large sheep productions right now going over in Clark County I know of. I'll add a little additional color there. Silicon Ranch owns pretty vast acreage across the country. We're currently grazing under nearly 13,000 acres of solar panels in five different states, 25 different projects with seven different partners. And those folks are folks that are local to those communities. And that's always our first choice. we realized several years ago that we're not always going to have somebody interested in sheep production in the communities where we're looking to site and that was kind of the genesis of our self-perform program that Blake mentioned earlier that program has really evolved a lot we Silicon Ranch owns 3,000 ewes at this point and have have the largest sheep enrolled or the largest flock enrolled in the National Sheep Improvement Program. So we're looking to improve genetics, be able to share those genetics with our partners with the medium-term goal of being able to market them collectively and offset imports, frankly. 75% of the land that's eaten in the U.S. is coming from New Zealand and Australia, and we think there's a tremendous opportunity to rebuild the sheep industry in the eastern U.S. and Kentucky. Okay. Thank you guys. All right, Mr. Rothenmeier. Thank you. Thank you all so much for giving me the opportunity. I know that this is not typically how work sessions go, so I appreciate the opportunity. I think that, you know, honestly, since this application was filed, I have been doing research for four months. I'm just beginning to learn over the course of those months, and I appreciate this opportunity because I think the discussion of this land use is of such a large scale. You know, we're talking about Silicon Ranch's proposal about 800 acres with the other utility proposals. We're talking about acreage that is nearly the size of the proposed expansion of the urban service boundary. So this is a big scale of land use. It sets a huge precedent. I think what's already been touched on is that the majority of solar power in the U.S. has just been begun or developed in the last five years, I think I saw in the most recent report, and the end of its useful life won't be until the 2050s. And so, you know, this is, we're changing land uses for a generation. There's so much that we don't know. And I wanted to share with you today, I'm going to, I want to be respectful of your time, so I'm going to shrink this presentation down even farther than I originally planned to, but I just wanted to raise for consideration things that I have learned in my research that I think will be helpful to this conversation. I certainly, and Fayette Alliance certainly appreciates the importance of creating solar energy and creating renewable energy here in Lexington, Fayette County. I personally appreciate what Silicon Ranch is doing in the country, but I think for Lexington the question is going to be how do we do solar, how do we site solar responsibly, where are appropriate locations for us to do solar development. I'm going to skip over who Fayette Alliance is. But one thing I do want to hit on, of course, is that in our work to support land use advocacy and smart, sustainable, and equitable growth, one of our pillars, you know, we do advocacy at City Hall. You all see me here at these meetings. We do educational programming for the community, and we do research. And that's a huge part of what I do at Fade Alliance is this research part, is how do we ensure that our advocacy and our education is based on this objective data? And that's really what I've been looking at here. So you all know extensively in your work, and I'm appreciative for the work that you all do, the research that you all have to read, the research of the staff and the work on this, especially something like this, because it's expansive. It's detailed. It's nuanced as it relates to renewable energy. So we know that here in Fayette County specifically, we're a national model in so many different ways. And there are reasons that we have an urban service boundary. There are reasons that we protect our rural area. And I just want to briefly kind of touch on those because I think that they warrant remembering, as we consider, what new land uses are appropriate and where a principal purpose of generating mass scales of electricity are appropriate. I have provided for you all's review our position statement. It reflects my four months of research. I apologize in advance for the length. I hope that you all have either had a chance to read it or will have a chance to read it. It's detailed because this is a detailed topic. There is so much information out there. I tried to distill it in the most easy-to-digest way possible. This is just an outline of what I address in that position statement. I'm not going to get into all of that today. But, again, it reinforces that renewable energy is such a key part of our future. Offsetting carbon emissions is a priority of this community, is a priority of all of you, and is a priority of our elected officials as well. So we are always going to be looking for how we can support renewable energy development, but when uses are proposed, when zoning ordinance text amendments are proposed, we at Fade Alliance are going to be looking at what are the unintended consequences, what are the intended consequences, what are the long-term and short-term consequences. And again, I sincerely appreciate all of the work that the staff did in looking at best practices around the country, But what I want to focus on today a little bit is, again, just brief information about the land uses that our ag zones are really meant to support, the environmental considerations around solar energy systems that I have learned about through my research. In communities throughout the country, many of which who have much longer experience at this point with solar, if long experience in the solar world is a thing, than Fayette County, we have a lot to learn from these other communities and what they're facing. the jobs and economic considerations aspect, and then the national best practices as well. So this just shows a little bit about Kentucky. Frankly, this is an American Farmland Trust study about the amount of farmland that we stand to lose over the next 20 years. 57% of the 450,000 acres we are projected to lose over the next 20 years is going to be our best soils. And why, you know, is that important to us? this is information from the most recent 2022 ag census these are the top ag commodities in Kentucky as a state that are suited for our soils and our agricultural economy successes so corn, soybeans, horses, cattle and hay the annual receipts in those products range from $344 million to over a billion dollar of receipts in 2022 sheep are on the list They clock in at about $46,000 a year in the ag census. In Fayette County, in the list of products, sheep, meat, or wool are not recognized as a number to not offset things. But I just think that's important to reference as we think about what our land supports for our agricultural economy. Fayette County is the second top county in the state in agricultural sales. We're the largest cattle producing state east of the Mississippi. Fayette County actually sets the cattle market. And these economic considerations are based on one thing, and that is the quality of our soils. And that's why it's important, I think, to mention. I know you all have seen this before. This is just about Fayette County's agricultural sector. It contributes $2.3 billion to our local economy, thousands and thousands of jobs. One thing I did want to highlight we don't talk about enough probably is that the University of Kentucky researchers found that if production ag declined by just 10 percent annually, there would be an additional overall annual decrease of $26.5 million in business output and another $3.5 million in business spending. And so harm to our agricultural community and our economy has ripple effects throughout the community. It impacts our landscape. It impacts travel and tourism, which reached over a billion dollars in 2023, which is very exciting. I think we also have to talk about the soils in our rural service area because that's what this land use is proposing to impact. The Rural Land Management Plan tells us that 87 percent of the rural area is actually made up of prime soils that are recognized by the U.S. Department of Agriculture as the best soils for producing food and fiber. The proposed area for Silicon Ranch development is nearly 800 acres, and of those 800 acres, 98 percent of the land that's proposed for solar arrays is nationally or already state-recognized as the highest priority land for production agriculture. This is the land that supports our agricultural economy and entities. And so, again, I'm going to skip through a lot of this. There's an extensive section in our position statement on the comprehensive plan. I just wanted to touch on some of the environmental considerations that I've come across in my research. You know, our community, as I mentioned, is very focused on our environment. How do we offset emissions? How do we create renewable, clean energy in our community? The good news is there are incredible opportunities here in Fayette County. We're already seeing some. I'm going to show some photos of that as well. But I think that's important to recognize, that we are taking advantage of opportunities as it exists. But I think that other environmental considerations that we have to consider as we figure out where we should permit solar development are really important. Impacts on wildlife habitat, stormwater management, lack of recycling options, major erosion and sediment control issues. This is an example. In 2022, the EPA announced that there were settlements to resolve Clean Water Act violations at four various construction sites in four different states. And the EPA overall noted that solar farm construction involves clearing and grading of large sections of land, which can lead to significant erosion and runoff that can damage ecosystems and cause significant harm to drinking water systems. Did a lot of research and found a lot of information about what's been going on in Virginia. They actually have state mandates for clean energy, so they have been, as you saw on the map that I think Daniel put up earlier, they are very far along in their solar development. To me, that means we've got a lot to learn as far as impacts go. And so they have actually, as a state legislature, has gone so far as to reclassify solar panels as impervious surfaces, unable to absorb runoff because of the extensive runoff and erosion issues that they've had as a community. and that was a conversation I actually had with the planning office in Virginia to that exact point that it was because of issues that they'd have with runoff that they were changing their policies in where and how they permitted solar developments. The Virginia State Department of Water Quality found that as of 2022 70% of existing industrial scale solar facilities were out of compliance with rules and regulations and that posed serious water quality, sediment control issues and more. recycling is another issue there is lots of ongoing research about how to environmentally and sustainably recycle solar panels I think we're going to have a lot of questions as a community and as a country about how we do that moving forward Washington State just implemented a law for environmentally sound recycling practices that doesn't even go into effect until July 2025 these are evolving technologies there are a lot of questions that are unanswered at this point and I think that that's something that that we have to consider. And so when we think about the job piece, I think something that was important to consider is as we look to promoting economic development, we can look to existing facilities, whether it's Silicon Ranch's facility in Garrard County or what East Kentucky Power, frankly, is projecting for their facility in Fayette County. Those records are public with the Public Service Commission right now. for East Kentucky Power Cooperatives facility in Fayette County, which is going to be about 400 acres, they have projected two to three full-time jobs split between Fayette County and Marion County. So that is the type of economic development that we're looking at. Why is that problematic in these cases? Because of the huge scale of these land uses. We're talking about so many acres of land and very few jobs. I think other economic considerations that I looked at, again, that are further detailed in my position statement, are impacts on community property values, tax implications, the decommissioning considerations that I think you all heard quite a bit about before. For example, North Carolina, also a state that's much farther along in solar development than Kentucky, they just directed state officials to study economic impacts of decommissioning these type of industrial-scale facilities because the long-term effects are relatively unknown. Just once again, I think there are a lot of questions that still need to be answered. Industrial solar siding recommendations have been studied here in Kentucky and across the country. I know Daniel mentioned a lot of this. I don't want to be too repetitive here, but as we know, it's incredibly complex. I've looked at recommendations from sources ranging from conservation, environmental, state policy organizations and more, and so many of them are the same. And their recommendations are protect prime farmland, prioritize siting industrial-scale solar on brownfields, in our built environment, on parking lots, on rooftops, and more, and then on marginal farmland as needed. I think the thing about Fayette County is we don't have a lot of marginal farmland. Our farmland is nationally recognized as prime for agricultural production. Municipalities in Indiana, Virginia, Maryland, our own neighbor Clark County have all prohibited large scale solar on prime farmland and in agricultural areas as a result of their own research. This is not even a totally exhaustive list of everything that I've looked at over the past few months to look at other communities who are also grappling with these same issues to say, how are we approaching this? What does the research say? What does the experience say? And I think it's clear that after, you know, extensive research and public engagement, a lot of communities have enacted responsible regulations to prohibit and discourage location of these industrial-scale solar developments on agricultural areas and on prime farmland. The discussion of agrivoltaics, I think just to elaborate on that a little bit. A lot of that research is ongoing. Again, I applaud Silicon Ranch for the work that they're doing in this space. I do think that so much of it is unknown. We do not know what the impacts are going to be in the long term because we have not seen them in practice. This is just another example of just some of the studies that are currently ongoing about the impact of agrivoltaics in this country. And I think that we're going to have a lot to learn and a lot to see in the coming decades about what that looks like and still where it might be appropriate. There are so many great examples of creative and innovative opportunities for solar. These are a few that are in Kentucky. There's some in Hancock County on existing farms, rooftops and things like that. There's water powered on the river. We've got coal mines. companies are using existing environmentally stripped land, frankly, to accommodate solar development, which is really exciting. But we've also got examples right here in our backyard. So this is just to say we can do solar. We can do it right. We can do it responsibly. And we can do it thoughtfully. Hallway feeds, I'm not going to play this video, but it's an example. I hope maybe you've seen this or would like to check it out on our website. We did an interview with them. They have covered 20,000 square feet of rooftop in North Lexington over on Loudon Avenue and built solar panels on a floodplain that they had previously just been mowing next to their facility. It's an acre and a half. It powers 75% of their manufacturing facility, which is so exciting. And I think, again, this is just the beginning of, I think, what we can see in Fayette County and how we can work together to meet our goals and look to see solar in our community specifically where it's going to be appropriate. This is Locust Trace. This is part of the Fayette County Public School's school system. This is out at East Town Road. This campus is a 70,000 square foot footprint. They were built to be a net zero school and produce more energy than they consume on an annual basis. So that's exciting. Again, these are prime examples of, I think, what's possible. This is the parking lot at the Cincinnati Zoo. It creates millions of dollars in savings for the zoo, it reduces thousands of tons of CO2 commissions, and it also reduces heat island effects, which I think is an incredible attribute of parking lot solar specifically. A recent study by the Yale School of Environment found that in Connecticut, parking lot solar canopies could provide a third of the power for the entire state, which is incredible, to help them meet their state goals and environmental justice goals as well. And again, this is just to show that in Fayette County, we have these opportunities. They exist, and I think it's incumbent upon us and hopefully you all as well to say let's put in place good policies that cite solar responsibly in our community that utilize the assets that we have to do that. You know, our own greenhouse gas emission study, that was one of the things that was recommended by the Comprehensive Plan, which includes numerous policies and recommendations to address carbon emissions. You know, I certainly give so much credit to the planning staff for the detailed policy recommendations they've made within the comp plan that we haven't even begun to get to to address our climate needs. But our own greenhouse gas emissions study found that cars and trucks and transportation alone make up 23 percent of our emissions in Fayette County. So how can we begin to address that directly by looking at parking lot solar arrays? This is Evansville, Indiana, at the airport. their regional airport, they're generating 50% of the energy needed to power their terminals, which is incredible, 62,000 square feet of parking lot solar. And again, this is just a huge example to say we need to incentivize our community to look at these opportunities. And so again, I appreciate the opportunity to chat a little bit with you all. Again, I'm sorry for rushing through this. I just want to be respectful of your time. I just wanted to offer some of the information that I was able to find in the extensive research that we've been doing at Fayette Alliance to say we want to support solar and renewable energy in our community, and the biggest question is where do we locate solar responsibly? We support the staff's really thoughtful and well-researched recommendation of the prohibition of ground-mounted solar in our agricultural zones. We've also done research related to setbacks and decommissioning compliance and enforcement, and I have outlined those recommendations in our position statement. Those would apply to the other zones where solar would be applicable. I certainly ask for your all's consideration as it relates to those as well. I think the good news is that renewables is not an all-or-nothing proposition, and we've got great opportunities to do it. And I think here in Fayette County, again, it's just evaluating what's appropriate in our community because we have a lot that makes us unique and economically productive in our rural areas. And again, the question is never if we grow, it's always how. So I appreciate the time, and I'm happy to answer any questions if you've got them. Thank you, Ms. Rothenmeier. Do we have any questions? I guess you did a good job. That makes it easy. All right. Thank you all. Thank you. I do have one. Is this information that you were going to show is going to be someplace where we can access it? Yes. So this information is all in our Fate Alliance position statement. That was an issue that hopefully you all have all received. If you haven't, please let me or planning staff know, and we'll make sure and get you a copy. We've also had a separate document that will be listing all of the sources where all of this information came from. So if you would like to dig into any of this other information on your own, we'll make that available. again, tried to just gather it in the most organized way possibly could. All right. Thank you. Thank you all. All right. Mr. Duncan, let's wrap it up and move it over to you. Okay. All right. Let's go back to item number one, Mr. Chair, and put our UGM hats back on. We want to tell you all that we are prepared to set the public hearing dates for the Urban Growth Master Plan. Now, we can't do that today at a work session, but we just wanted to announce that to you, and we will formally do that on September 12th at your next meeting. So we are looking at converting the two work sessions in October to public hearing dates. So on October 17th at 1.30 in council chambers, we will hold the presentation hearing portion of the public hearing, where the consultants and staff will make the presentation about the master plan and where the planning commission then can take public comment at the public hearing, ask any questions, of course, that you all want to. And then at that time, you can direct the staff and consultants to follow up on any comments you heard at the public hearing or any questions you had yourself. Then we would come back to you on Thursday at 1.30 on October 31st, two weeks later, with any changes or updates that you all have requested, any new information you have, and then have final deliberations for the master plan. Would not expect to take additional public comment. That would all be done on October 17th. But then the final deliberation and decision would be made on October 31st to consider adopting the master plan as an amendment to the 2023 comprehensive plan. Mr. Duncan, for those of us with young children, October 31st is kind of a big day. I have to make sure, because I have several people dependent on me being out of here by 4.30ish. And that's a good point, Mr. Davis, and that's why we believe if we take the public comment on the 17th and then just come back really with Planning Commission deliberation on the 31st that we should be able to wrap up. I concur, yes, that we don't want to lose that opportunity. Mr. Davis, that was done on purpose to make sure we did our duty as quickly as we could. I think that's great. That's a great motivation. But he's not lying because I'm already signed up to give candy, so I'm already out. I have a Queen Bee costume to wear. And in the interim, we will be providing you all additional updates and drafts so that you can see this in advance of the October 17th hearing and anything else we need to sort out. So by the time we get to the hearings, we want these to be as efficient as possible. We want the citizens to know what it is that they want to speak about. And we want you all to be able to be prepared to ask us to do anything we need to so that by the 31st we are prepared to make a final decision. We appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you, and the staff. Thank you for everybody today. Ms. Rothenmarsson, she was the only one that spoke. And Silicon Valley, thank you guys as well. Appreciate it. And this meeting is adjourned.