I'd like to call this meeting to order. This is September 26, 2024. Welcome to the Zoning Items Public Hearing Meeting for Planning Commission. First on the agenda, we're going to skip Agenda 2, Item 2. We do not have approval of minutes today, so we're going to move on to Agenda Item 3, Postponements and Withdrawals. Good afternoon. Matt Carter, Vision Engineering. If you turn to page two in the agenda, item B, PLNMJDP 24-56, Red Mile Mixed Use Development, I'd like to ask for a one-month postponement. The reason is they want to change the location of the hotel on the plan, push it back further, and redo the driving aisle in front of it now. So asking for one month. I believe it's October 24th. 24th. Yes. Sorry. Chairman Forrester, would it be possible to move it back to a subdivision or development plan date? October 10th meeting. Or November 14th? Mr. Carter said that the 14th is better than the 10th for him. November 14th. November 14th. Okay. Mr. Chairman. Yes. I move that we postpone PLN MJDP 2456 to November 10th? 14th. 14th. November 14th. Okay, we got a motion by Mr. Zach Davis, second by Jonathan Davis. Please vote via Granicus. Thank you. Okay, thank you. Robin, you got your vote. I agree with that. Okay. Okay. Mr. Gross. Good afternoon. Brandon Gross on behalf of the applicant. And if you could turn to page 10 in the agenda. Item number 2, PLN ZODA 24-6, regarding the revisions to the economic development zone. We are working with staff right now, and we would like at this time a one-month postponement until the October 24th hearing date. Okay, thank you, Mr. Gross. The floor is open if there aren't any questions. We're in motion. Wilson. Mr. Chairman, I move for a postponement to October 24th for PLNCO Zota 24-6, revisions to Article 23A-10 for the Economic Development Zone. Okay, thank you. We actually got a second by Ms. Wirth, but her system's not working. Now it did. Okay. All right, please vote via Granicus. All right, the motion passes. Thank you, and Godspeed today. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. He is, you know, he gets to go home. That's it. Okay. Ms. Wade, is that it? That is it. We didn't have any other postponements, but we do, I believe, have at least one item that qualifies as an abbreviated hearing, but we can wait to get to that until we finish the subdivision items, if that's okay. Okay. That's fine. Okay, so that will then put us on agenda page 2, PLNMJDP 24-49. Okay. For the commissioners, we do have revised staff recommendations here in the orange paper. Good afternoon, Chairman Forster, members of the commission. Our first item this afternoon is, again, on page two of your agenda, PLN MJDP 24-49. This is an application for property known as the Collins, Orwell, and Wiggins property, but now the Don Franklin Auto Mall. It's an amended final development plan for property at 3390 Richmond Road. So the subject properties on this development plan make up the Don Franklin Auto Mall and they encompass approximately a whole city block here between the Eagle Creek intersection with Richmond Road here. And then there's an entrance along Richmond Road into the subject property. And then the next intersection, just a little bit off this plan, is Squires Road. And again, the subject property does have frontage on Squires Road as well. And there is a shared access easement and private street that serves the auto mall use between Eagle Creek and Squires Road. So the applicant has requested this amended final development plan to address a few things. First, a revision to what is happening on what's labeled as phase three. and that is an updated building to replace the previous Hyundai building on the site. And that is all the way here on the north side of the plan. And the building is approximately 32,000 square feet along with its associated display parking. Another change that they're proposing on the site is to add a car wash, and that is behind the new Hyundai building here. And then the third item was to revise parking and a new dumpster location also to the rear of the Hyundai and Genesis buildings here. When this was first reviewed, we also identified a denotation on the plan about a helipad. And since that was noted here, we asked to discuss that with the applicant. And I'll just show you where that is. Here. We found that in this zone, the B3 zone, that a helipad is not a listed principal use, nor a conditional use, or listed as prohibited. And so we did a little research on where it is permitted, and we've advised the applicant that at this point we cannot ask the commission to approve a helipad since it's not a listed use in the zone. but it is specifically listed in other zones in our community and they have agreed to either seek a zone change for that area or a text amendment for the B3. So at this point, they've also agreed not to use the helipad. I assume that's good. That's what he told me. So with the proposed changes, the staff is now recommending approval of this request. With the standard conditions, which are number 1 through 11, on your handout, and then three new conditions because of the revisions to the plan recently. First is just denoting the open space that's listed in the site statistics for phase three. And again, phase three is this new GMC and Buick building here at the northern end of the property. Although there's information in the site statistics about open space, there's no note where that's located. Number 14, correct the square footage is proposed on this particular building. It's listed as 29,000 and some change, and in the site statistics, 32,000. And then if we can dimension all the walls, that gives the staff the ability to calculate that square footage as well. And then lastly, if we can update the information in the site statistics to denote the lot coverage. And in fact, this particular addition in Phase 3 meets the new B3 lot coverage requirement of 30, it's actually at 35%. So if we can note that it complies with the ordinance, that'd be great. Again, the staff's recommending approval. Thank you, Ms. Wade. Any questions for staff? Thank you. Thanks. Applicant? Rory Keeley at VA Partners we like the recommendation and request approval Thank you Mr. Keeley any questions for the applicant at this time? Thank you sir is there anyone in the audience that would like to speak on this particular application please do so by stepping up to the podium not seeing any we'll bring it back to the commission The floor is open for a motion. Ms. Wirth. Mr. Chairman, I move for approval of PLNM JDP 2400049, Columns Oral and Wiggins, with the attached 15 conditions from staff. Second. Okay. Thank you. We got a motion and a second by Mrs. Johnston Davis. Any further discussion to that motion? Seeing none, please vote via Granicus. All right, motion passes. Thank you. Put us on agenda item number C, page 3, PLNMJDP 24-64, Hamburg Place Farm. One second. I think I need to discuss the fire code. Do we want the citizens to sit outside in the available spaces? Mr. Horn? Okay. If you do not have a seat, there's two seats up front here. Actually, if someone wants to sit up front, there's two more seats there. I'm not sure if there's any other open seats around, but... You're not allowed to stand up inside. You have to go outside. And if you could, please silence your phones. If you could. Thank you. Okay, staff. Okay. Okay. This is plan MJDP 2464. This is Hamburg Place Plot at Place Development. it, plot three for Chick-fil-A. This was presented to you all last week. The Chick-fil-A is located right in here. This was presented to you all. Here's another copy over here. Let's see, there we go. And we presented it to you at the last meeting and there was a discussion about the number of access points off of Plotted Place. They submitted a revised plan, and what they did is they just narrowed the driveway for the parking area to create a larger vehicle use screening area along the parking lot. But there was a lot of discussion as to the number of access points on the Plotted Place. And at the time, you all asked for them to go back and asked for a continued discussion for them to go back and review this to reduce from three access points to two. And when they resubmitted, they had not done that part. So this is, I guess, a continued discussion for you all. They have not revised the plan as you all had suggested. So with that, we still have the same conditions on the agenda that we had from the last meeting. Okay. I think Mr. Mickler had the most questions, so Mr. Mickler had a question. Okay. So the applicants here, they can probably answer some of your questions, but I can answer anything you might want to ask. Well, I do have a question for staff's sort of opinion on this. One of the reasons that at the last meeting I was vocal in asking that they go back was in part because they were at the cusp of being required to have just two. And it was staff's opinion that two would be better. in terms of keeping that pedestrian continuity and things like that. I noticed that these entrances are also nicely curved, which help traffic flow but not sort of pedestrian continuity. So you have these sort of three curved auto sort of oriented entrances and exits. What is staff's opinion on them sort of using the in and out of the roadway for three access points instead of maintaining it internal to the parcel? Well, I believe Dave Filiatra from Traffic Engineering was able to speak a little more on this. So I'm going to allow him to comment on this. We know it's an issue for public safety. Thanks, Cheryl. David Filiatra, Traffic Engineering. So we met with the applicant during the early BOA process as well. So they had to go to the Board of Adjustment for, I think, their landscape buffer. But anyway, before that, there was a pre-app submittal where we just discussed items. And I think I mentioned this last time. On that, they had two access points, the drive-thrus as they've shown, and then an in and out on the page right of this, what we're looking at. We were fine with that. Obviously, they came back. They increased the size of the building. And my presumption is to maintain the number of parking, they needed to change the flow and add another access point. we were pretty clear early on that this is not something we're in favor of. Just because it's, again, it's 151 feet, like you alluded to, 150 is kind of the limit where you can even request three. So we just think, in general, it's good practice to maintain two in this instance. It limits your number of conflict points. And, again, they showed us a plan that had two access points that at least, I guess, for a time they thought would work. Now, again, things change. I understand that. That's their prerogative. But we still kind of stand by that, too, is a better practice in this instance. Thank you. I appreciate that. Any other questions for staff? Applicant? Mr. Chairman, I'm Dick Murphy. I'm pleased today to be representing Chick-fil-A. And with me today is Matt Zipinczyk, who's with Chick-fil-A, and Cheyenne Day with Interplan, our designer. This was before you two weeks ago. I wasn't involved at that point. I did watch the video of it. I know what the issues are. And we just want to take a minute to explain to you what we're doing here and why we think this is a very good plan for the site. Got two overheads here. Chick-fil-A is concerned about the safety issues on this property. There's two issues here. One is that traffic backs out onto plot at place and blocks plot at place often during busy times at the restaurant. Second is pedestrian safety, especially inside the parking lot, for safety of pedestrians going from their car to the restaurant. The new restaurant, they're going to tear this down, demolish the property. The new building will only be about 200 square feet larger than the old building. It's going to be rotated about 90 degrees, which I'll show you in a minute. and it's actually going to have less pervious area. There'll be less paving, more green space on the new plan that they've come up with. But here's the issue on the current plan. What's happened here? This is plotted place. Manowar is up here. Walgreens is over here. I think there's a Starbucks down here and a Chipotle down here. What happens is when you come in, off of Plotted Place, you come in and all the traffic has to circle the building twice. They come in off Plotted Place, this is the pickup window, so the traffic comes in here, circles around, orders here, they have to circle back around, come around and pick up, circle back around and then come on out. And we've highlighted some of the conflict areas that that results in. what happens is three lanes of traffic here come into two as they go around the back corner. Then coming back around, they go back into three, back around, you've got two coming around here. When I went out to look at this Friday night, just after I was called by Chick-fil-A on this, I parked back here, and you really have to be aware of your surroundings there to cross from here to the building because you've got traffic that's merging from three lanes into two, and the drivers are watching the other cars and maybe not watching the pedestrians as much as they should be. And there is no parking space on this site that doesn't require the person, after they get out of their car, to cross at least two lanes of the drive-through window. That is a major concern they have out here. We are concerned about pedestrians on here. I did talk to Pat Madden, who's the owner of this property. Chick-fil-A leases it from one of the Madden companies. And I wanted to ask, before I got out any farther than saying Chick-fil-A, he said, yeah, they're back out on Plotted Place. They're backing out and blocking traffic. And then he said, this is an auto-centric area. There's very little pedestrian traffic. Like he said, there is a sidewalk along Claudette on both sides, he said, but he'd say there's probably the greatest number out there per day is five people per day using that sidewalk. So he said what Chick-fil-A has proposed to you is a much safer situation than what we have. If I could go to the second one, which is our proposed plan for you, which is just an enlarged version of the development plan you have before you. It's oriented a little differently here. Here's Manowar Boulevard here. Here's Plot-Up Place here. The Walgreens is right here. What we have is we've eliminated all parking on the Manowar side. The building will present itself to Manowar, so it has sort of a front-along man-of-war like many of the other stores and restaurants do through here. But we've eliminated all parking through here. Comes back out here and back out. The result is that the parking in here, it's much, much safer to get from your car to the store, and it encourages people to eat inside because it's so much easier to get there, and it's vastly safer than the arrangement they have right now. Now, I want to point out, too, two sidewalks. One is, as you know out there, if you drive down Manowar, Chick-fil-A and all the other stores along this stretch are located about 8 to 10 feet above the level of Manowar Boulevard. There's no way to get from the sidewalk on Manowar up to the stores. However, Chick-fil-A is showing a sidewalk entrance penetrating the retaining wall, getting up into the property. When I saw this, I said, well, you're probably going to have to use steps, aren't you? And they said, no, this is going to be an ADA compliant ramp, allowing people to, for the first time, to be able to access man-of-war into this block along Plotted Place and come into the store. We've highlighted the sidewalks in blue here, and this is the most important sidewalk I want to show you here. It's a five-foot wide ADA compliant sidewalk. But that sidewalk separates our drive-through traffic from the dine-in traffic. And it allows those people who are pedestrians on Plotted Place to walk into the site all the way into the store without encountering a single conflict point with automobiles as they come on in. In other words, you're not going to get backed into by somebody backing out of their place. You're not going to be getting hit by somebody coming into their place. You're going to be separated from all the traffic here and not have to cross a traffic lane at a single point and come on into the store and dine in the store. Similarly, these people parking here can walk directly into the store without crossing the drive-through lane. So it's a tremendously better plan safety-wise. As I mentioned to you, there's less paving on this. There's more green space that we have on here. The question was raised last week about, well, why don't we do the three? And I know there's been discussion about that. First, I want to point out that the ordinances and regulations do allow three entrance points here. The other thing we have to bear in mind, this is an existing site. This isn't a new site where we could make it bigger or whatever to accommodate what we need. We have to work with what we are given and the dimensions of the site. So why can't we do three here? I want to, if we did, if we eliminated this access point, which is an entrance point, our entrance would come in here and we'd have to cross this sidewalk here. We'd be making another conflict point in the site by requiring somehow to get from the drive-through lane in here. If we're to eliminate this point, I asked these questions when they first called me late last week. And I said, well, why don't you eliminate this one? They said, or excuse me, why don't you eliminate this one and just use here? So if we just use here and eliminate this one, and make everybody come in here and out here, you notice we've got a one-way traffic system. All the traffic comes out here, or you come in here and go out here. If you make this the entrance and the exit, people coming in from Pleasant Ridge up here, which is a continuation of the road across Manowar, they come in here and turn right. They're going to have to turn right, and their tendency is to go straight down the wrong way down the one-way system where they'd have to make a sharp right turn to get around here. Similarly, if they're coming in from Pink Pigeon, they're coming in here making a right, excuse me, a left, and they're going to have to make a quick right to come in here. It's creating additional conflict points by doing that. What we're doing, we're able to separate our traffic out here so you don't have the drive through traffic going through the parking lot except as it exits and that's a one-way exit coming out. As I said, we have more green space, less impervious service. So in summary, we're presenting a plan to you which I think is a tremendous, tremendous improvement in traffic safety. Chick-fil-A is spending a lot of money to accomplish this. They're closing down operations for six months. They're totally rebuilding the building, spending the money to do that. And they're doing it primarily for those two reasons. So they don't back traffic out onto a plot at place and so they can increase the pedestrian safety in particular. It also increases the traffic safety just going through the drive-through window. I was talking to the people at Chick-fil-A and they say that often they have done this a couple times in other parts of the country where they've had to improve the traffic situation and they just tear down and rebuild. They said they always get comments, people coming back saying, sorry your business has gone down after you spent all this money to make the improvements. And then the question is, well, why do you think our business is going down? And they say, well, because you're not backing up the road anymore. You're not getting as much business as you did before. And actually they are. Their business is not going down. They're just handling it better. And it looks like there's less business there because they can do it a better way now. So I guess what I'd ask you on this one is to not turn this down because it's perceived to not be perfect. I'll help you recognize that what we're doing is a lot of thought, a lot of engineering has gone into this about removing those conflict points. And it is a tremendous, tremendous improvement as to safety for people who are on foot and people who drive through here. So I have a lot of experts. I have Cheyenne and Matt here who can answer any questions for you on that. We appreciate your consideration of this very much, and I truly think this is a much better plan than what we have now and is a very good plan and has been very well thought out by the designers here. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Murphy. Any questions for Mr. Mickler? Mr. Murphy, thank you. I don't think at the last hearing any of our questions or my question earlier to staff was directed at whether this plan is an improvement in terms of circulation to the last plan. The questions were focused on one very specific aspect, which you did address. It was the fact that the three entrance and exits take the majority of the width of the property along plotted place, leaving very small segments of sidewalk along plotted place, no room for on-street parking, and an orientation towards our city's road network that is a really vehicular in-and-out orientation. You sort of note that very few people walk there and that this is an auto-centric area, and I'm not going to contest the estimates of pedestrian activity, but I will contest that as we redevelop sites, as you point out, this is a redevelopment, We want to improve those things. And as our traffic staff noted, really the only hindrance to dropping to two entrance and exits, from their perspective, wasn't pedestrian safety on the site. It was that it would cost a few parking spaces in terms of the circulation. You know, as I look at this plan, this is optimized for the maximum flow of the drive-through, the maximum amount of parking, and the pedestrian safety as people exit their vehicle in the parking lot and enter the building. Those are all good comments. But I don't think that trumps the orientation along the city roadway. And as we move forward as a community, approving developments that open in and out and really relegate the common sort of public sidewalk to second tier is not the orientation I think that we were asking for. And it seems, from my perspective, not that we are the ones sort of being asked to turn it down. It seems like your client is sort of really digging their heels in about essentially what amounts to some of those few parking spaces up front that would have to be sacrificed to get a good coherent flow with dropping and exit. So those are sort of my comments I would like to hear your sort of response to. Well, as far as on-street parking, I don't go out to Plot at Place every day, but I've been there fairly often. and I don't think I've ever seen a car parked on Plot-It-Place anywhere. There's the auto dealer, the Audi dealer, there's Gordon Food Service, there's Fast Food. I don't ever recall seeing a car parked on the roadway. As far as the percentage of where we have non-paving against Plot-It-Place versus paving, I don't know the exact percentage. It seems about even to me on that, about 50-50 probably. But I think the, because I asked the same questions you were doing when they first called me last week. I said, why don't you just do this? Why don't you just do that? And they said, they continue, came back to safety. And the fact that by having this configuration, they have this sidewalk here. And we talked about closing one of those. And as I said to you, what they pointed out to me was, well, we're going to have to either have an opening here, which will create another issue for people walking in from the street. or we're going to have an issue here, both a pedestrian and an automobile issue, where we have people coming in. We'll have it two-way for a short stretch. We'll have it one way for another stretch. We'll have people going the wrong way, which is not going to be good for either the drivers or the walkers. Never did they tell me, and I hear this from some clients, never did I hear oh but that will cost me four parking spaces it was always upon the design and the safety issues that they have here on it and they were very proud to point out their pedestrian access to Manowar Boulevard and they were proud to point out that they have less paved area on this than they do now so So I don't think this is all about the number of parking spaces. I do know, for I've talked to several people in the Chick-fil-A organization, both their designers and their people in their headquarters in Atlanta, and it's been all about the safety issues for them on it. Mr. Murphy, I don't see any other questions right now, so thank you. Thank you. Is there anyone in the audience that would like to speak on this particular application? I'm not seeing any. I'll bring it back to the commission. Further questions for staff or the applicant? Statements? Yes, Ms. Mickler. Well, I would just note that, you know, I think when we're offered an option and then it's compared against two poor design choices that that is uh... a little misleading because i don't think that those are the only alternative circulation options that they have and i don't think that our cities transportation and traffic staff would make a recommendation to have to entrance and exits there wasn't a safe way to do that. I know I was really the only person questioning things today, so I'm not sure how other people feel. I know it's probably no surprise here that I think that they can look at the site holistically and figure out a good, safe way to have two entrants and exits, which will, while they've increased green space along the back, it would improve the continuity along the front as they redevelop. And I hope that's what we do. Those are sort of my comments. Thank you. Davis? Yes, my comment is probably more anecdotal than anything, but I'm very familiar with this site. It's in my neighborhood. and the issue that I find, I tend to agree with the applicant that the issue is the circular design where you have to go around the building twice to be served here. And as far as parking, it's probably been 10 years since I've seen the parking lot full. It's almost all drive-thru traffic out there. It's very little walk-up traffic. For the most part, it's an issue where cars are coming in and they're having to circle the building twice. It is a danger. I think to pedestrians, to my brother councilman here, to his point, there is a dearth, though, of walkability out there. So I do like the fact that we are trying to address that. But I don't think the issue is about the parking spaces themselves. It's really more about trying to address circling the building so many times. So I think that the applicant probably is on the right track as far as changing the, I guess, the direction of the building itself. Thank you. Ms. Boxfield? I've got a question for staff. So is your approval based on three entrances or what? I think our condition still includes discussing the drive-through lanes and access because we were concerned that three was really obviously taking up the entire frontage of plot at place and then knowing that there are also two additional access points directly adjacent there that obviously don't serve Chick-fil-A but they serve the adjoining properties and so you really I think Mr. Filiatri mentioned last time we really have five access points within about 200 feet and so it's again we might be helping the circulation on site but three access points creates more conflict points on plot at place so we're reducing it on site but but the plotted place issue remains so I think it's the staff staff's recommendation in concert with division of traffic engineering that they can move it to two and I and I don't think as Mr. Mickler said that the two options that Mr. Murphy mentioned are the only options I guess the the conversations we've had was to merge the the parking lot entrance into one. Leave the drive-through solely for the drive-through and then merge the other two back together. Okay. Mr. Michler? Well, I don't want to interrupt anybody, but I would have a motion if if everybody Hold on one second. We've got a couple of questions, but then Mr. Murphy stepped up too. You want to get Mr. Murphy first? Mr. Murphy. Well, the problem is if we merge those two serving the private parking into one, that puts two-way traffic in there and all our exiting traffic is now having to go through the parking lot there. We're trying to encourage people to park and eat inside. We're trying to make it safer for the people to do that, and also safer for the handful of people that might walk up there. And I think by doing a design that, again, shoves all the traffic through the place where everybody's parking to try to go eat, does not accomplish that, and it is not good for the site. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Murph. Mr. Davis? Mr. Murphy, just looking at this plan, could it – I guess it would be a conflict of direction, but I was thinking, why couldn't you make the drive-through and the entrance, one entrance, eliminate just a few parking spots and have it where vehicles could pull in and choose either the drive-through or the parking lot? so pull in to the drive-through lane but have an opening where they could immediately turn left into the parking lot and still maintain the flow as presented. Well, that would eliminate our ability to have the sidewalk going all the way from the street into our building without a conflict point there. You're just, to me, it's making a worse conflict point inside than it is what you're preventing outside there on it. Well, but if, like you said, you have such low pedestrian traffic on Plotted, how many people do you have walking from Plotted? If, rather, at the very beginning of the drive-thru entrance, have no parking spots right there, but rather a left turn where the vehicle can decide drive-thru or parking lot. there wouldn't there'd be virtually no pedestrian conflict if there are truly only five pedestrians a day well I think it's because you're adding you're adding turn movements if somebody is doesn't want to go through the drive-through they got a pull left and they got to make some turns and to go in there again confusing to people who don't go all over there every day and going again through that portion of the parking lot where we've tried to shelter our dine in people from that kind of traffic. I think it's a really admirable plan in many, many ways, and it's very, very attractive, and I think it will work in every way. But I tend to rely on traffic quite a bit. And just looking at it, I just don't see how that couldn't be accomplished, again, without, I mean, you'd lose maybe, I don't know, two parking spots, three parking spots? To have a turn from the drive-through into the parking lot. It's the flow and the safety that's the key here. And I just want to point out, you know, Chick-fil-A is known as an innovator in flow, traffic flow, and drive-throughs. And they're very proud of that, and they're making them safer, too. They have more experience probably than any restaurant in doing this, and they're trying to do it safely here. So there may be a hundred things we can discuss, and I'm betting they've thought of them all and worked through them. I can't tell you whether they looked at one particular thing or another other than what I showed you on it. But I'm confident that their experience with this shows that this is a better way to go on the property here. Okay. All right. I'm bringing it back to the commission. I'm going to close this portion out. The floor is open for a motion. Mr. Michler? I would... I'm looking here. Do we have revised, or is it the original on the recommendations for this one? No, no revised. original no revised so what we would just need you to do is um number 23 is really the issue um so i would move to approve uh changing the staff condition number 23 from discuss width of drive lanes and access to plot it place to limit the number of drive lanes and access to plotted planes to two with sign off from traffic. Okay, so we have a motion on the floor. Do we have a second to that motion? We got a second, okay. Thank you, sir. Mr. Owens, any further discussion to that motion? Just a question. Yes. So this is, will this come back to us or? No. No, this is it. This is final, yep. Okay. No, nothing, nothing, nothing comes back to us. This is it. Okay. All right, we can vote via Granicus. Oh, Mr. Wilson, you had something? That didn't come up, I'm sorry. Just one clarification. Would you restate that motion is to resolve the width of the drive? Well, restate the motion for me, please. I move to approve PLN MJDP 24-64 Hamburg Place Farm Plotted Place Development Lot 3, Chick-fil-A. with the 23 staff conditions changing condition number 23 to limit the drive lanes and access to plotted place to 2 with sign-off from traffic. Okay. All right. I'll give a vote via grant. I don't know. Okay. The motion passes four to three. Is that right? Yep. Five to three. Sorry. Five to three. All right. Motion passes. All right. Go ahead. Ms. Wade, you have zoning items now? We are ready to move on to zoning items now. And so for the audience's purposes, we have three zone changes today on the agenda. Two of them do qualify for abbreviated hearings. And so an abbreviated hearing gets to go ahead of the full hearing. So I'm going to ask if there's anyone in the audience that wants to speak on either of those two. And if they do, we'll have a full hearing. And if there's no one, those items will go first. So on the agenda, on page 4, the first item that qualifies for an abbreviated hearing is Shadeland Investments, LLC, zone change, and its associated development plan, also called Shadeland Investments Property, for property located at 185 Eastern Avenue. Is there anyone here today that wishes to speak in opposition? We're not in opposition. Mr. Hodge, are you in opposition? No. Is anyone else in the audience here for 185 Eastern Avenue? And we'll see if we get anyone from the audience in the hallway, too. They can still come in. Okay, so at the moment, I think that one qualifies for an abbreviated hearing. And then the second one appears on page three. I'm sorry, not three. Page 8, item 3, for Brook Properties, LLC, and Springhurst Subdivision, Unit 2. And that is for property located at 2094 and 2098 Harrodsburg Road. And do we have anyone that's here today in opposition to this zone change request? Again, 2094 and 2098 Harrodsburg Road. Okay. So I didn't, we can give that one a minute. if someone else is coming in. Sir, are you here in opposition to a request? No. Okay. So those two items will qualify for abbreviated hearings, and we can hear those fairly quickly and then move on to the contested item. Sounds good. Staff. James Mills, planning staff. This is my first time. I'll be trying to be very quick because I know that this is supposed to be abbreviated, but I'm not as quick as Daniel. This is a zone change request by Shadeland Investments LLC for the property located at 185 Eastern Avenue. The applicant is requesting to change the zone at the property from planned neighborhood residential R3 zoning to a neighborhood business B1 zone. The applicant chose second tier urban as their place type and medium density non-residential as their development type. The purpose for this request is that in order to continue a longstanding non-conforming use and to construct an addition to the existing structure. Looking at the vicinity map here, you can see that we're in very close proximity to downtown. Here is Midland Avenue as it goes down to Maine. It's so close that this is about a 10 to 15 minute walk from where we are right now. Getting a little bit closer to the aerial, you can see that right here is East 2nd, and here is Eastern, and it's located right at the corner of the intersection between these two roads. This brown area right here is residentially zoned, R3, and down here we have a little bit of downtown showing how it's pretty close to downtown. Despite this residential zoning has operated as a commercial nonconformity for decades, at least since 2009, it has gone before the board four times, and as recently as a year ago in September of 2023 to continue as a nonconforming structure. Looking at the land uses, you can see down here, we have kind of more intense downtown uses. And as we get further into the neighborhood, we have more of that residential, still tightly packed, but residential uses. Next door is Alano, and then down here on Eastern, you have Martins. So here's the view of the subject property from East 2nd Street. Here's a better look at the structure and its length from looking down eastern. Behind the structure you have the parking area, which I recall has seven spaces currently. And then this is the look down East 2nd Street, and you can see Alano right here. So the proposed change by the applicant is to add an addition to the northwest side of the property right here. This addition would close off access to East 2nd Street vehicular access and a proposed kind of patio open space area in front of that new addition. There will also be a reconfiguration of the parking from seven spaces down to five spaces down here. The proposed uses is to continue the current office use and potential for community spaces or other types of retail or office uses. This request would fix the zoning to keep it from going before the Board of Adjustment. this is kind of an infill and redevelopment that was proposing to reuse the current existing structure while adding an addition for a more substantial commercial development. The applicant did have public engagement on August 29th virtually, which staff attended, but due to low attendance they also had another one with the neighborhood association that staff didn't attend where the neighborhood could vocalize their support for this application. Next we'll get a better look at kind of the renderings of what this addition will look like with the proposed open space patio area and kind of how it's going to look with the structure that is currently existing. With that, staff agrees with the recommended place type and development type. It is a second tier urban. is within the infill and redevelopment area and the expansion of a two-story commercial structure puts it in the medium density non-residential. With that, it recommends B1 as a zone. With that, staff recommends approval. We find that the request meets the goals and objectives, policies, and development criteria put forth in the 2045 comprehensive plan. This is an infill and redevelopment site that's going to propose to reuse an existing historic structure with constructing an addition that will create a more walkable streetscape while allowing for a more substantial commercial development that can serve the community. And with that, any questions? Okay. Do we have any questions for staff? Thank you, sir. And Ms. Wade will be on for the corresponding development plan. Good afternoon. This is MJDP 2461 Shadeland Investments property. They submitted a revised development plan, so you will have revised conditions on a green sheet. As it was explained to you, the property is located on Eastern Avenue and 2nd Street. I'm sorry. 2nd Street, the existing building is shown here and the addition located here with the patio. With the revisions, we were able to remove a lot of the cleanup conditions. So we are just left with four sign-off conditions for approval. And we have the last condition as discussed place builder criteria, as it's been explained by James. After this, we could possibly remove that from the list of conditions. But as you can see, they have the building in the front and then the access for the parking to the rear for the parking for the structure and the business. So with that, I'll open it to you all to see if there's any other comments or questions. Any comments or questions? No, ma'am. Thank you. Applicant, do you want to add anything, Mr. Woodall? Quickly. Quickly. Quickly. All right. Thank you. John Woodall, on behalf of the applicant, Shadlin Investments. With me here today is Chad Bowman of Shadlin and Rory Cayley with the eight partners, our design. I don't have much to add just in the way of engagement. We initially had a Zoom meeting with Mr. and Mrs. Hodge here, Vivian and Robert Hodge, here on behalf of the William Wells Brown Neighborhood Association. And after that, Mr. Bowman met actually on site with some additional members of the association and then again at their neighborhood meeting at Martins. And what came out of those meetings was some great dialogue and support for the development, but I'm going to have to ask you to do one thing you probably don't hear very often, and that's to add a condition to our zoning approval. The Neighborhood Association has requested that we not allow any retail alcohol sales or distribution at the location, which we've agreed to. I think that's a fair request, given some of our neighbors, especially Al-Anon. So beyond that, we're in agreement with everything staff says. Mr. and Mrs. Hodge, you all want to say anything or not? Okay. Their letter of support should be in your packet. If it's not, I have a copy. You want to see it. Okay. So thank you for having the meeting. I'm glad everything worked out. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Hodge. Any questions on the commissions? I'm going to bring it back for a motion. So, Mr. Forrester, to address adding a conditional zoning restriction, we do need another finding for the zoning item. So right now it's 1, 2, 3, and 4, and then typically we will have one that references Article 6-7 of the zoning ordinance, and we recommend a prohibition of a particular use or list of uses on the property and then give a reason why. So we can do that. And what I heard was the reason was to provide, well, the applicant offered it, so that's a valid reason to. Okay, the neighbors are working. Yeah, and that it would be to protect the established neighborhood, adjoining neighborhood. Okay. Mr. Wilson, you want to tackle that? I'll try it. I just want to double check. In other words, we don't need for the findings. I can just add that particular sentence in at the very end of the motion. It's not associated with the development plan. It's going to be associated with the zone change. That's what I meant. Yeah. So in other words, if we approve the zone change, which we're subject to do here, then it would be under item five, and we'd simply say prohibit alcohol sales to protect the community as a finding portion. Yes. Okay. And we'll go with that. Okay. Mr. Chairman, I move for approval of PLNMAR 24-13 Shadlin Investments, LLC, with the reasons provided by staff adding one additional condition that no alcohol sales will be allowed as a part of the findings that would be for the purposes of protecting the community. Second. Thank you, Mr. Wilson. We have a second. Mr. Davis. John. Okay, thank you. Any further discussion? to that motion. Please vote via Granicus. Okay. Mr. Chairman. Motion passes. Uh-huh. Getting ready to go to the second development plan. Okay. Mr. Chairman, I move for approval of PLN-MJDP 24-61 Shadeland Investment Properties with the six conditions provided by staff. And also, let me check the staff on it. I can change number 13 from discuss to resolve? Number 6 there can be deleted. Just drop it? You can delete it and then we would just ask that we denote the conditional zoning restriction on the plan. Okay. So we'll go with the five conditions. Is that correct? And then if the applicant is agreeable to denoting the conditional zoning restriction that you just denote that on the development plan. Okay. We'll note that on the development plan. Let me go back and revise this and simply say approve the PLNMJDP 24-6-1 Shadeland Investment Properties with the six conditions provided by staff adding, well, five conditions provided by staff adding the six conditions of no alcohol sales for the purposes of protecting the community. Thank you, sir. We have a second. Second. Second by Mr. Davis. Jonathan Davis, please vote via Granicus. Okay, our motion passes unanimously. Thank you. Okay, so we're going to move around on the agenda here since we've got another abbreviated hearing agenda item 3 on page 8, PLNMAR 24-15, Brook Properties, LLC. We've got two action items on this one as well. Mr. Crum? All right. Good afternoon, everyone. Daniel Crum, planning staff. The next item on your agenda is a request to rezone the properties at 2094 and 2098 Harrodsburg Road. This is the change from the existing zoning of planned neighborhood residential, R3. The applicant in this instance is seeking a neighborhood business B1 zone. The applicant is seeking this zone change in order to utilize the existing buildings for neighborhood business uses. In this specific case, the applicant is seeking to locate an insurance office at these locations. As far as the size of the properties, it's 0.602 net acres. As far as the argument for place type and development type, the applicant is seeking to place this on a corridor and is seeking to develop this as a low-density non-residential use. Staff will go into greater detail. We find that the place type is appropriate, and the proposed development type, while not recommended, builds towards the density we're looking for in the future. But just to orient everyone, we have the subject property here outlined in white. It is located on Harrodsburg Road as it heads downtown, but it's also located at the corner of a residential neighborhood. So Springhurst Drive intersects with Harrodsburg Road at this particular property. Zoning-wise, you've got commercial development that was in the former Turflin Mall, so that B6P. Further as you go down Harrodsburg Road, it's a transition to more commercial-oriented development, including the adjoining property, which is shown as R1C here. It is currently in the process of being rezoned to B3 as well. It is in sort of the final stages of the council proceedings for that. But the surrounding areas are all this solid yellow color, single-family residential. This reflects the time of development for this neighborhood that really predated a lot of this commercial development. So this single-family residential is now in an area with a roadway that has become much more intense over time and has developed really into one of our most intense corridors. So the applicant in this letter of justification and this application in general is seeking to try to balance the interests of the surrounding neighborhood with the intensity that's called for on a corridor. Here we have the aerial view of the subject properties. Currently, they consist of two structures, both of which are currently utilized as a daycare use. And so between the two structures, they are utilized for that. We have the residential development in the neighborhood, in the Springhurst neighborhood behind them, as well as the commercialized Turflin Mall development here, the former Springs Motel site that has since developed into B3 business, and the adjoining site here that was recently approved for the Dutch Brothers Coffee drive-thru use. Here we have some views of the subject property. So this is the first of the structures. You'll note that this paving in the front is a result of an existing driveway that is just off screen here. It is not a circular drive. This pavement ends here. Here we have the view of the second property. This is the closest to the corner. This is the structure that is proposed to be utilized as the insurance office. And here is a view from the side. So operations from the site, they are really keeping most of the development kind of the same. They are proposing a small addition to this particular building to serve as a check-in point for the adjoining daycare use that is going to continue to operate. But the existing parking areas, the existing site circulation is proposed to remain the same. And so this parking area would serve both the daycare use as well as the insurance office use. And it's a little difficult to see on the screen, but located to the rear is the fenced and enclosed play area that serves with the daycare. Here we have a view of the intersection where really the primary traffic is coming to this site. So we have Springhurst, which is a dead-end street that cul-de-sacs, intersects with Harrodsburg Road here. and the subject property has two access points that connect to that rear parking area. Here we have the view of Harrodsburg Road, so there is an existing sidewalk network. Once again, this portion of the driveway is just sort of a remnant stub, but they do have a curb cut here that is primarily used by employees of the daycare use. And this is the adjoining residential use, So directly to the left of this photo is the rear portions of the property. And so the relationship between the development on the corridor with this particular single-family home and the other homes in this neighborhood is something that the applicant and staff were trying to kind of look to balance with this request. But as far as the development plan, it's much of the existing elements that you saw previously. The aforementioned addition that would serve as sort of the check-in area for the daycare use would be located right there. The applicant has indicated that they are going to reduce some of that existing paving in the front yard area. It is worth noting that with sort of redevelopment of the adjoining property, there will be opportunities for cross-connectivity. And in a graphic I'll show in a moment, it illustrates kind of how these developments kind of line up. But otherwise, the site is proposing to be maintained as it is existing. Now, single-story commercial development doesn't really meet the medium density or higher. that's called for on a corridor. The applicant in their letter of justification note that the B1 would allow them, if the property is redeveloped in the future, to kind of build up, while also kind of maintaining enough connectivity with the neighborhood. So the B1 is limited in uses and intensity relative to the B3 that's in the area, but would allow them to build more and more effectively utilize the site. So understanding that this is a property that is being used kind of as is now, while allowing in the future for that to kind of build out, and staff was in agreement with their particular arguments. Here we have kind of an illustration. Apologies, it's not a color rendering, so it's a little bit difficult to see, but the adjoining property, this is the development plan that was approved as a part of that zone change, which is currently being finalized, but it shows a connection, and they will make that connection if approved to the existing commercial development with the Baptist Health here, but would allow for essentially an access road to serve these properties that may allow them to close access to Harrodsburg Road here and provide sort of an alternative access point for the site moving forward with redevelopment. So just wanted to provide some context of kind of how this would fit with the proposed coffee shop use here, as well as retail that was proposed on the adjoining parcel. With regards to neighborhood engagement, a large number of the same folks that were involved in conversations with the applicant here have been in contact with the applicant on this particular case. Staff did attend a virtual meeting that a few of the neighborhood members attended, but once again, very similar to the last case, there were subsequent efforts from the applicant and the property owners that contacted them more individually and were able to kind of share their vision for the site. Once again, when we're talking about place type and development type, it's located in fronts on Harrodsburg Road, which is a corridor. And so trying to massage the corridors call for medium density development while also keeping the neighborhood scale and context in mind. So in this instance, a B1 at this proposed scale allowing for future development staff found to be appropriate. At this time, we are recommending approval, finding its agreements with the goals and objectives of the comprehensive plan, calling for allowing opportunities for future redevelopment, allowing opportunities for future intensification of the site, as well as providing a B1 zone, a neighborhood business zone that could benefit the adjoining neighborhoods and is connected to those same kind of pedestrian networks that have served the existing site. In our review, we found that it was an agreement for the criteria for land use, transportation connectivity and walkability, environmental sustainability and resiliency, site design as well as building form. We did, staff is recommending one conditional zoning restriction, prohibition on outdoor loudspeakers. This was a condition when the R3 zoning on the current site was implemented. We felt that it was appropriate to continue that forward for the same reasons that they had previously. So recommending approval with that one conditional zoning restriction. And would be happy to entertain any questions you will have of staff at this time. It is always subject to the approval of the corresponding development plan, which the rest of staff will present momentarily. But I'd be happy to answer any questions about the zoning component of the site. Thank you, Mr. Crum. Any questions for Mr. Crum at this moment? Thank you, sir. Ms. Wade? All right. So the development plan associated with this zone change is, again, for the two properties or two lots here, one with a proposed insurance office at the corner, which is approximately 1,800 square feet with, I think, an 80-square-foot addition, and then a 1,500-square-foot building, 1,600-square-foot building with a daycare. And Daniel's really covered most of what's going on on the site, including the circulation is primarily from Springhurst Drive for the use of the property, but they are requesting to maintain an access to Harrodsburg Road for employee parking out front. And while it's a daycare center, that may not be an issue, but if the site does redevelop, the staff believes it's important for there to be a connection between this site and the adjoining site so that they can share an access point to Harrodsburg Road. Really, the goal is to reduce access on our arterial roads to be shared, and the subdivision regulations actually recommend a service road. So in essence, that shared access and a shared point on Harrodsburg Road really serves as a service road. I understand that they don't particularly want to remove anything at this point because they're not redeveloping the site. The staff suggested a condition that the existing access noted here at 2094 Harrodsburg Road be removed at the time the adjoining property develops. And it may be more appropriate for that access to be removed when this property redevelops. This particular use isn't creating too much traffic for that particular access point, maybe four or five entrants and exits per day. But if it redevelops for a higher intensity use, which obviously the B1 zone allows, that would really be the time to provide that closure and access through the adjoining property. The few discussion items that remained on our staff recommendation were about the addition to lot one. And I think we talked about this both in the subdivision committee and the zoning committee. The addition proposed is to lot one, but the use is really associated with lot two. And so just to be clear, their intention is for the daycare parents to come through the small addition on lot one, check in, sign in, and then escort their children to the appropriate room to be dropped off and then come back out to the parking lot and leave. The staff just questioned why there would be an addition to lot one that was really associated with lot two. And they've explained, currently the children walk through what's going to be an insurance office, so they're just trying to kind of work around that and yet not change anything on lot two necessarily. The other two discussion items, the first one was discuss a turn lane along Harrodsburg Road frontage. Again, if we're going to share access in the future, that may be a future development issue. If this site redevelops, having space for a turn lane along Harrodsburg Road that can then share that access point on the adjacent property. And then the last item is discuss the place builder criteria. The rest of our recommendations are either cleanup conditions or sign-offs for this final development plan. I will note final development plans have to still be certified within two weeks, and so the applicant will need to work with all these divisions to address their sign-offs within a short period of time. Okay, Ms. Weak. Thank you. Any questions for Ms. Weak? Thank you, ma'am. Applicant? Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. John Woodall, once again, on behalf of the applicant, Brook Properties. With me today representing the applicant is Clint Conrad of Brook Properties and Scott Southall with Earth Cycle Designs. Just to elaborate a little bit on what Daniel and Tracy said, agree with about all of it. Mr. Conrad came to Lexington originally from Pendleton County and has started his own business. He's a state farm agent and has a dream of owning his own office and growing that office and is in business now. And so when this site became available, it was really a perfect match for he and his wife to try to secure it and to grow with it a little bit. So, you know, the idea here, there's two properties together, as you've seen on the depictions, that have been operated as a daycare for a long time. I think one side was probably an infant daycare, and the other property, I think, at 2094 was a pre-K daycare. And we've entered into a long-term lease, a five-year lease with two extensions, to keep 2094 a daycare for that time period. And then Clint will repurpose the building at 2098 for his office. and that's correct. The reason you see that addition there is currently when the parents come in off of Springhurst, which is a good, safe way to exit Harrodsburg Road and then come in there kind of unmolested, if you will, into that parking lot, they currently, it wasn't a problem to let your kids go through that first building to get to the second one. There's also a little bit of an elevation change between the two buildings. But once Clint occupies that first building, it doesn't really make a whole lot of sense anymore. So the notion was to put that addition where it is. And the reason why it's not on what will continue to be the daycare, not on that building, is because of the increase in elevation, and it's farther from that immediate drop-off point for the parents. And as far as our neighborhood engagement, I was a little afraid when we got into this that that particular neighborhood, which I know well because I'm in it a lot, going back and forth taking kids to school, is they've just been through this coffee rezoning. And they've had a lot of pressure on them. So the first engagement, what I like to try to do is have an initial Zoom and to make sure we've got everybody that we need to have contacted. And nine times out of ten, we don't, and that gets us in the right direction. So we had an initial meeting, which then got us with T. Bergman, the Neighborhood Association president. And we had a meeting then on site with the neighbors. We had good attendance at that meeting to just go over what we were going to do. And the predominant thing, and some of the folks actually already knew Clint, so that made it a lot easier. They knew who he was and what he was telling them was true. But what they don't want or didn't want was a service road. I guess you all probably heard a lot about that in that zone change process. And it may become prudent at some point if Clint, if his office grows like he hopes it does, and he ends up using that second building as a state farm office. But right now it just didn't make any sense. and the neighbors don't want it. So that's not a fight that we wanted to have. So initially, as Tracy just said, they showed that access point into the daycare, which you see off of Harrodsburg Road there. Sorry. There we go. Well, it may be mine. I'm having a – there we go. Right there. That is the point she's talking about. And this is fenced off right here. It was a circular drive, but it's fenced off. And initially, staff was talking about closing that drive as soon as this developed. And that didn't really excite us very much because we can't do much about what's going on over here. We don't have a cross-excess agreement with them. So we just like what we were going to propose is what staff just proposed, which is if we do decide to bump this property up in terms of a new, more intense plan, we come back and we'll have to deal with that at that time. And that's entirely fair. So, you know, with that said, I'd be glad to entertain any questions. We're fine with the conditions that staff's imposed. Thank you, Mr. Woodall. Any questions for the applicant? All right. Thank you, sir. All right. Thank you all. All right. We'll bring it back to the commission. Close this portion out. The floor is open for a motion. We have two motions on this application. Ms. Worth? Here we go. Electronics going here. Mr. Chair, I move approval of PLN MAR 2415 Brook Properties, LLC, C with the attached five conditions. Okay. We have a motion by Ms. Worth. We have a second by Ms. Boxdale. Please vote via Granicus. Okay. Motion passes unanimously. And a second motion to approve PLNM JDP 2465 Springer subdivision unit 2 with the attached 18 conditions. Okay, and we got a motion by Ms. Worth, a second by Ms. Barstow. Do I need to indicate the changes? Go ahead. Changing number 15 to say shall be removed at the time of redevelopment of 2094 Harrodsburg Road. And we're eliminating 16 through 18, is that correct? Yes. Okay. You got all that? Yep. What was the scribe? I got it. Everybody's good? Okay. Thank you. And the second still holds by Ms. Boxtel so we can vote via Granicus. That motion passes as well. Thank you. Okay. Now we're going back to page six of the agenda. PLN MER 24-14. We also have revised staff recommendations for the preliminary development plan. First up is the zoning. Dennis Crum. All right. Daniel Crum, planning staff, once again. This is a request by Subtex Acquisitions LLC to rezone a number of properties located on South Limestone, Pearl Street, and Montmolen Street from the planned neighborhood residential R3, single-family residential R1E, and neighborhood business B1 zones to the new corridor node, CN zone. This will be the first request that you all have heard that will utilize the CN zone that was approved as a part of the UGM ZODA. The applicant is seeking this zone change in order to construct a mixed-use development that is oriented towards student housing. The applicant, in their choice of place type and development type, have chosen to locate this on a corridor, South Limestone being one of our most significant corridors within town, and a high-density non-residential development type. The applicant's proposal more than meets the criteria for high density. Staff finds both the place type and development type can be appropriate at this location. So just to orient everyone, this is a series of properties that are located, once again, at the intersection. So we have South Limestone as you're heading into downtown, Prawl Street here, and Mottmullen Street. A series of properties located along those three road frontages. Zooming in, you get a little bit better idea of kind of the layout of the properties as well as their context. This area, this larger area, is a part of the Peraltown neighborhood, which is a historic African-American neighborhood established in the 1800s. Over time, this neighborhood, partially due to some urban renewal efforts, as well as the development and the kind of growth of the University of Kentucky, really in the 1950s and on has experienced kind of a transition from that owner-occupied predominantly African-American neighborhood to a neighborhood that was redeveloped really in the 1980s towards a focus on providing housing for students. While there are still existing single family residences from the kind of original development period within this area, a lot of this area's character has sort of changed over time. The zoning in the area reflects kind of a mix of zoning. We have the red B1, which is applied along this corridor here and affects the front properties. Those are currently commercial mixed-use developments with restaurants and other uses on the ground floor and apartments above. We have R3 zoning, which was the residential zoning was present in much of the Prawltown neighborhood. There was an effort in the late 90s to kind of restrict land uses within the Prawltown neighborhood with a R1E rezoning that applied to a great number of properties in the area. This was sort of in response to the pressure to redevelop this area into multifamily housing and the like. That was back in 1998, so that yellow you're seeing there is a result of that time. Directly across the street, we have R4, which is the University of Kentucky, and bringing up the aerial shows kind of the context that we're looking at. This is really dominated by the University of Kentucky along this major roadway. We have these remnant residential development that really borders between South Limestone with this railroad and Settlers Alley really serving as the backbone. So this was at the time sort of marginal land that was due to redlining and some other race-based discrimination really ended up being one of the few places for African-American neighborhoods to kind of settle. So that initial context is where we're kind of situated now. Since then, the growth of limestone, the growth of University of Kentucky, has sort of created this development force that is calling for kind of greater density along this corridor. So we have the existing commercial development that kind of fronts the south limestone, and then residential as you're going further back with a mix of single-family residences as well as some smaller-scale multifamily. Here we have views of the subject properties as they exist today. So once again, the South Limestone, first floor activated uses with apartments above. Here we have a view of the subject properties, so they'd be on your right looking in. This is some of the redevelopment that has occurred. So this is on Montmolin Street as you're looking down towards South Limestone. These are parcels and properties that really have redeveloped since the 1980s into really two-story residential uses that are primarily occupied as student housing. On Prawl Street, you have a little bit of the older existing development. So we have the commercial further down, some parking lots that are sort of difficult to see but interspersed in there, as well as sort of the older, more traditional type of single-family residential development that's kind of early 1900s in character. The applicant would be proposing to remove these structures in order to establish the multifamily residential and mixed-use development that they're proposing. Here we have a look at some of the intersections as they exist today. So this is the intersection at Montmolin and South Limestone. Currently consists of just the stop sign with the two-lane traffic. There is a light at Pearl Street, and it is actually able to be accessed from Montmolin with Sellers Alley to the rear. So you are able to go from one roadway to another to get to an active light as a part of this redevelopment, as well as some planned improvements for the Nicholsville Road Corridor. So that light and its sort of signal are planned to be improved in the near future. Here we have a view of the development plan for the subject property that Ms. Wade will be able to go into a little bit more detail after my presentation. But, oh, it's Ms. Galt, apologies. So what you are seeing here is a large multifamily residential development. So this is 799 beds in total, accessed through an internal parking garage that will serve the site. So it'll have access to Montmolin Street here with the ability to circulate through onto Prawl Street. Once again, internally accessed parking. They will have an open courtyard type concept that sort of aligns with the University of Kentucky. So a number of improvements along South Limestone that are aimed at sort of improving that pedestrian experience, giving folks a little bit more room, providing a little bit more straightforward access to the crossings that are primarily located here at Pearl Street, as well as giving activated first floor uses with proposed retail areas and amenity areas. The way that this is currently set up is that the first floor is going to be that amenity space with six floors of residential above. So this is a tall structure. The top of the development plan here shows the rooftop area is actually proposed to be activated. That is where they are putting some of their amenity space that will be used by the applicants. Now it is worth noting that there are several places on this development plan where this larger structure is going to adjoin development that is smaller in scale. The most, and I've got a picture of it later on in the presentation, but they are proposing a, there's a 15-foot setback here, but this would be a jump from a single-story residential use here to the proposed six-story and height at the rear structure. Staff has, in the staff report, kind of highlighted that in those contexts, it is sometimes appropriate to use step-downs or other kind of development tools in order to kind of soften that transition. But the applicant in their letter of justification is really seeking to place this within the context of this corridor as well as in the context of the University of Kentucky. So this is an area due to its proximity to downtown, proximity to transit, proximity to the entertainment and employment opportunities, is an area where the comprehensive plan is calling for an increase in density. Put the density in the needed housing in the areas most suited to accommodate it. And so this is the applicant's proposal that they are showing. We have several renderings that kind of illustrate what this looks like, because I know looking and considering a multi-story structure is difficult looking at kind of a two-dimensional aspect. So this would be the view basically from the University of Kentucky looking in. Once again, you're seeing first floor amenity space with kind of the expanded pedestrian areas. There will be a slight overhang for the upper floors of the structure to afford those pedestrians on South Limestone additional space. They're proposing some street tree plantings that are not currently present. So really the pedestrian facilities along all three of these roadways are proposed to be improved under this particular request. Here, once again, a view from a little bit further back. This would be the tallest structure in the immediate vicinity. The University of Kentucky has currently the largest amount of development. So this would be slightly larger than the largest buildings in the immediate vicinity. But once again, density is what we're calling for within kind of these downtown contexts. Here we have renderings as you go back. It is worth noting that this is a very long building. What you're seeing from the renderings is essentially the first portion up to about here, with the rest extending back further into the neighborhood, primarily on Munt Mullen. There is an existing property that would be located about here on Pearl Street that limits the structure's ability to go back. So looking at that, trying to find a balance for the size of the structure, what its impact would be on the surrounding properties. As a request at the zoning committee later on in the presentation, we do have some renderings for what the proposed impact would be as far as the amount of shade generated by this. So a solar study the applicant has submitted with response to the committee's concerns about what this impact would be on some of the surrounding uses at this proposed scale. So here we have the other elevation. So this is what would be present. Here we have the west elevation. So this is at the very end of the development on Montmolin Street. So this portion here is where that single-family residence would adjoin. This portion here is where the multifamily, which I'll show in just a second, would adjoin as well. Here we have the Pearl Street adjoining property. So here is not part of the current request. So the properties to the rear here and along the sides would be included. So it would sort of encapsulate that on two sides. Here is the adjoining property on Montmullen Street. Once again, the single family residential. The property to the left would be redeveloped. So essentially from the property line, there would be a 15-foot buffer and then the six stories of residential. So that was one of the areas where staff highlighted as a potential area where something like a step-down or some other type of calming measure could be implemented to help reduce the impact of single-story residential to a large higher-intensity use. With regards to the property's location, it is located on South Limestone, which was the subject of the Imagine Nicholasville Road corridor study. Essentially, the plan for the corridor study, and just to orient ourselves here, we've got Pearl Street here and Montmolin here, so these are the subject properties. So this is within the study area. This is an area that the plan called for improved transit. So the plan proposes bus rapid transit station here. And then accompanying that as a way to kind of help support the transit that's needed is a call to increase intensity all along this roadway. So calling for higher structures, higher number of beds, higher number of active uses to help tie into transit and make the transit service more efficient and better connected. So this was an area that that plan called for increased utilization. It is a little bit difficult to see on the screen in front of you, but included in your application documents is the solar study. Essentially, this can be a little bit difficult to decipher if you haven't seen one of these before. But we have the top portion of the site, or the top layer here, is what the shade would be for these surrounding properties at the morning, at 12 o'clock noon, as well as the evening. The main implications in what it's showing is during the winter months, basically from morning until the late afternoon, there would be significant shade for the properties kind of north on Mount Mullin Street. So this gives you an idea of kind of what at that particular height that impact would be as far as the amount of sun or shade these buildings are getting. So once again, those are in the Granicus items because it can be a little bit difficult to see kind of from this particular rendering. There was a traffic study conducted in conjunction with this particular application, and we do have representatives from traffic engineering in the vicinity. So they looked at the proposed design, proposed access, the number of beds, the amount of commercial space. And the findings from transportation staff was that the impact both during the morning and afternoon is negligible compared to the current conditions. So the pure amount of traffic that is involved on South Limestone and in this area during a.m. and peak hours, the traffic study did not find much of an impact at all. So the traffic study does note that kind of Prawl Street and Montmolin Street currently experience delays that would continue with this particular application. Their recommendations speak to kind of reassessing the timing of those lights, some pedestrian improvements, as well as kind of a 10-foot sidewalk. But as far as kind of larger changes, road widening, other types of transportation improvements for this particular plan weren't warranted at that time. And then keeping in mind that in the future, the corridor is expected to redevelop in conformance with that kind of transportation and corridor study. So the traffic impact study did not find any major recommendations based on the bed count for this particular development. With regards to place builder, this is a somewhat unique case as the CN zone is not recommended anywhere within the place builder because it was created subsequent to the place builder's creation. So moving forward, the CN zone will be recommended in corridors. It is the corridor node zone. A corridor is the optimal place for these to be located. This development, with its close proximity to downtown, to employment, to the University of Kentucky, to the existing transit service and the transit hub, make it kind of a prime candidate for increased utilization with a corridor node type development. Staff at this time is recommending approval of this request. We find that it's meeting this very real need for housing. It is doing so on a corridor where we are trying to tie into these existing transportation systems to make more efficient use of our land and to provide the housing that is needed and a density that is reflective of this area that is near UK as well as the downtown. We found that it was in agreement with the policies of the comprehensive plan, speaking to many of the same things, respecting the context of that corridor, creating kind of that high-density residential that is called for. We found that it was meeting the criteria for land use, transportation connectivity and walkability, environmental sustainability, site design and building form. And our recommending approval subject of the corresponding development plan, apologies, but would be happy to entertain any questions you have of staff at this time regarding the zoning. With regards to public engagement, the applicants held a virtual meeting with members of the surrounding neighborhood. There was a handful of folks that attended that meeting. Staff was not present at that time. However, the applicant has kind of provided a summary. Once again, with this area primarily being characterized by no longer being owner-occupied, but rather rental units, there really wasn't as much of a participation at that particular time with that public meeting. But the applicant can provide some more information if they've had any subsequent talks with the neighborhood or the neighborhood association. but yes at this time staff is recommending approval and I'd be happy to answer any questions you have. Thank you Mr. Krohn. Any questions for Mr. Krohn? Mr. Mickler. Yeah I have a few questions. Sure. The first has to do with the place type and the zoning just to sort of understand your thinking a little bit more on this recommendation. This is the first CN zone we've had, right? Yes. And in my recollection of the discussion of the CN zone, as well as sort of the way reading, the way the intent is, you know, this limestone corridor is kind of an ideal prototype for this zone. So seeing that come through and seeing the rendering of that front facade along limestone really strikes me as sort of that example that was sort of thought about when we were creating this zone. I do have some concerns about the zone change and it really has to do with that long reach back into the neighborhood because when we were talking about the place type and the zone change our view is really oriented towards that corridor And on Montmullen Street, I count sort of 11 parcels that were really oriented towards Montmullen Street instead of Limestone Street. what what discussions did you have since this is sort of opening up a new item on the intent of this corridor and how far back it reaches into the neighborhoods itself because in those sort of prototype discussions we're really looking at those parcels facing the corridors, and here we have those parcels facing the corridors, but then we go 11 parcels deep, deeper than those first ones. Yeah, and I think part of the discussion, and I'll bring up the map just so we can kind of, so kind of in evaluating this, this does extend kind of further back in the neighborhood, and really in essence, especially this portion right here. When staff looked at this though, So these properties would sort of front on Mount Mullen here, but sort of access to the site, the meaningful activity, really is going to be funneled kind of closer to this portion that's sort of closest to the corridor. So essentially, pattern of access where pedestrians are really coming and leaving, kind of that aspect of it really is tied closest to the corridor. We see what you're referring to as far as going further into the site, you start losing some of that connection to kind of that corridor concept. But staff didn't feel as proposed that that really was creating any issues here. It's still functioning as kind of one homogenous development instead of kind of a series of scattered developments. So based on how this is going to be accessed, really utilized, the main intensity of this site kind of coming here, that's really what staff was looking at as far as being fine with this being considered sort of entirely in a corridor and to knowledge I don't know if we've had sort of a test case for having a development kind of split between multiple place types so we found the corridor kind of being the most important element of this as far as sort of the bulk of activity for the site but still recognizing that further in you're looking at closer to the character of a neighborhood and trying to kind of soften that if possible, it was something that we were trying to thread the line on. So within staff's estimation, you know, this would still fit within a corridor place type. In a similar way that we had a corridor place type earlier with the rezoning on Springhurst, where you've got that residential context kind of adjoining, those kind of both weighing in and kind of being considered as a part of the analysis with Place Builder, but really the corridor being the kind of lens that we were looking at. And then the other two questions I have really have to do with the direct impact to the adjoining neighborhood related to the scale of this. and also just sort of understanding this zone and how we add this density that we're looking for, but in a way that's not rude. With the Sun study in particular, this is, since I've been on here, this is sort of really almost unprecedentedly long. And then also sort of its orientation on the south side with no sort of step backs as it goes up has created that condition where those houses on the opposite side of the street would not get sunlight during the darkest season of the year, which could have impacts both on people's enjoyment of life and also their psychology and all sorts of, and their ability to keep their houseplants alive. I might add that. And gardens. And gardens. You know, if I recall some zoning history correctly, sunlight and requiring buildings to step back was one of the first sort of conditions that people called for zones and changes to sort of the building code. that hasn't really been much of an issue here in Lexington because we have so many setback requirements and have had so many height requirements and have so many floor area ratio requirements that all of a sudden as we're taking these down and we're seeing proposals coming up to the property line the way that we are and as long as we are, I think we're for the first time sort of seeing conditions that create these sort of permanent shade sort of situations like we're having here. And I'm curious at whether, I mean, I understand the need to add density, but I also know that there are toolkits from dense urban areas that are very old as far as stepping buildings back as they go up in order to ensure that that light gets across the street. And so I sort of wonder why we're not insisting upon that in this case. Well, we've got, as a part of the staff report, we've mentioned that step backs, alterations to the height, although it is absolutely within the Planning Commission's purview. Really, we're looking at this, the fact that the impact is exasperated based on the link of the building, but even if we're looking at just the kind of the core component, that core piece that's on South Limestone there, getting any type of density at all is going to produce some of those impacts as far as the adjoining properties. Now, really, we're looking at this sort of a longer-term lens of, you know, as this development pressure to build necessary housing is really not going to go away anytime soon. So it's really anticipated that along these corridors we're going to see redevelopment kind of building up from there. So to speak to this particular impact, there are impacts when you build larger structures. The Planning Commission absolutely has the ability to limit that. If it's thought that six stories is too much in this particular area, they have the ability to go down. But in this instance, we were really looking for a site that was utilizing kind of the best extent possible some of the flexibility we were affording with the CN zone. I think part of the applicant can speak to their design considerations, but I think part of the constraints to how they sort of have or have not stepped back the structure probably is to do with the integrated interior parking structure. But they can speak to their design considerations and flexibility with that. But we really looked at this as a way to sort of meet sort of that intense call for intensification with alerting the Planning Commission that you have the flexibility to kind of modify that as needed. Well, I understand that we have the flexibility. I was trying to get at your recommendation. So are you saying that you recommend that we ask that the building setback, or are you saying that you recommend prioritizing density over allowing sunlight across the street? So in the instance that staff's really talking about setbacks or, you know, kind of building up from a particular height, Really, we were focused mainly not across the street, which has got that existing buffer, but rather these properties here that are sort of the closest and the most direct. Now, their orientation relative to this particular sun instance, due to their location, that affects them differently than directly across the street. But that's really those properties there with that particular aspect was really what we focused on most with the understanding that... Excuse me, ma'am. It's not your time yet. You have your time, though. Thank you. So I guess to circle back around here, we were recommending taking a look at this interaction as a particular way to step that back with the design considerations of the integrated parking structure in the amenity area, creating issues with stepbacks from there. Additionally, the fact that there was a street interceding between those made that buffering less necessary than considering it here with these two properties. If that addresses that a little bit more clearly. Well, I think what I'm hearing is that you all really didn't bring that SUN study into the analysis as far as that setback. Is that what I'm hearing? That is accurate in the sense that we do not require it and it's not something to date that I've seen as a part of an application. Okay. And then my final question is just on your all's understanding and just whether there's anything sort of as we move this forward. You know, this color up sort of shows that space along Prawl Street as green. Is your all's understanding that that would be free of HVAC equipment? That came up at the committee level. I think the applicant can speak to that particular space. I'm not seeing anything shown on the plan, so I would assume that that's green open space, and I think they're counting it as such in their development plan. Okay. Thank you. Those were my questions. Appreciate it. I'd like to talk to traffic, if possible. Okay. Yes, sir. Yeah, I'd appreciate if you'd elaborate a little bit more on your traffic study that you did at this intersection. The comment was made that traffic would be negligible. I guess I need a definition of what that means. So, yeah, so the traffic it generates is obviously not negligible, but generally they're making a comparison to the overall traffic. So a traffic study, you get your background traffic, so it's present today, and then you generate using the ITE manual essentially what the expected traffic trips would be for this, and then you add them into your existing model. You also grow up the present to the future. But anyway, generally that is generally the case that, especially in these large corridors where there's already a pretty high ADT, 25,000, 30,000 cars a day, that even a building such as this wouldn't significantly move the needle as far as how much traffic the whole corridor experiences on a given day currently. Again, traffic studies aren't also supposed to recommend ways to mitigate that impact. One of the issues when you're in really an urbanized environment is that there's not really a lot of space to do those traditional mitigation techniques like lectern lanes. There's already a signal, things like that. So that's probably also why they resulted in saying no significant changes were recommended because it's difficult to get to that when you're at a built-out environment such as this. Did you or when you did your traffic study, did you look at the, I'm trying to get a comparison about what it is now compared to what it might be. Just for the fun of it, I drove that avenue today. I tried to come out of there in several different ways. I tried to come out by Mount Mullen. There's no stoplight there. There's just a stop sign. The only hesitation in the traffic, at least coming my direction, was one down near the university as such. The same thing with Colfax. So in other words, those people in the community, I don't know how they come out of the community. They come all the way around to Prawl Street and take the light, or whether they just take their chances as I did this morning. Now, I have to say that the traffic coming toward me on the left-hand side was okay, but to get back over to the other side to make that left-hand turn, that was not what I would consider a very comfortable position to be in. Now, that's just a personal observation. But I guess my question is, in terms of the traffic study, how much more did you project? Do you have a number in mind? So it's a calculation generally based on population or previous. I can't remember precisely because this is their traffic study. We just reviewed it. but there's a background traffic generation. So you may take toward the past 15 years, what's the typical increase in traffic? Sometimes it's not a lot. Usually it's 1% to 4%. And then they add that. That's how they build up the limestone traffic effectively. And then the development traffic is a calculation, like I said, from the IT generation map. And then there are assumptions made on how people will enter and exit that development. So for Prawl Street, I'd have to go back and look again. A certain percentage, they would make an assumption on who would leave and use Winnie Street to access Virginia, things like that. But that's like more of an exercise in kind of a thought experiment as much as anything, because obviously it's hard to tell the future you're trying to gauge it through this type of study, though. Okay, thank you. Anybody else? Mr. Filiotro, before you leave, your traffic study, do you include pedestrians in those studies? Traditionally, that's not as something that's as highly focused on. They're counted in the trips and things like that, but typically they are more vehicular focused. They rely on level of service. It's not terribly pedestrian focused. I will say Daniel alluded to it about a year and a half ago. We started to stay. UK has plans to basically renovate their their corner, which is opposing on the south of this. And so as part of that, we're also there were funds dedicated to UK during the land swap, which is a whole nother deal. But that was three or four years ago. Effectively, there was funds set aside for pedestrian improvements. And as part of that, we're revealed in the intersection, creating more sidewalk space and hopefully going to clear clean it up a bit. just at the Brawl Street intersection. And that's in conjunction with a project they already had planned, UK meaning, meaning UK. Okay, I think we talked about this in the subdivision committee, but there are plans. I'm asking this because, like Mr. Wilson, I drove by there. I happened, not by design, I was there at 3 o'clock yesterday, and it was an island of students crossing the road right there. Yes. And so talk a little bit more about those improvements and the impact of this. So, yeah, this along with the two other, There's two other intersections on Avenue of Champions have exclusive pedestrian phases, so where all cars are supposed to be at a stop. There's no only pedestrians are allowed to cross. And that's another thing. In this given area, especially during the school, whenever UK is in session, we really want to worry more about pedestrians anyway. I mean, we obviously don't want to cause undue congestion, but the greater concern is how do we get pedestrians to and from where they're trying to go safely. So that's another thing. These traffic centers are generally vehicular focused, but in some instances you're not necessarily, again, without introducing undue congestion, you're still not necessarily most concerned with traffic, but pedestrian traffic. And that's really the focus is cleaning up all the utility poles, things like that. UK, that's their desire. Their long-term desire is to clean all the utility poles up. So you open more sidewalk space up, you clean those things up as well. And that's one of our goals with our rebuild of the intersection is to get our signal poles out, put in mast arms so that it's one or two poles rather than four or five. Any more questions for staff? Okay, Mr. Davis. Thank you again for your comments. Your traffic study, does it only or primarily encompass traffic along the main road, which I can imagine that this additional 800 beds would probably be negligible if you included traffic along the main road, but does it also include study of the side streets and how it impacts the people that currently live in that area? Just those people there, 800 more people affecting them specifically, not the main corridor. It does, yeah, that's part of their network. They created an traffic study. That is included. So those going, like I said, mentioned maybe going up Prawl and then going to Winnie Street, there are attorney movement counts, like how it will be impacted by the number. And those, again, sorry, trying to go through all the traffic study caveats, it's typically peak hour concerns. So you're looking at the peak hour, which might be different with, because it's primarily student housing, there's another land use code for generating, for when parking is generated. So it's going to, because people, they don't typically have, you know, nine to five jobs like most of them. But, yeah, so there, as part of the traffic study, the whole network in the vicinity is included and studied. All right, thank you sir. Ms. Gow. Good afternoon. Let's see if we can get back to similar. Okay, we're at MJDP 24-61. This Hazen property, Montmullion Street subdivision, and J.A. Prowl property. And then the new area is going to be called Verve, Lexington. As you can tell, it was several different pieces of property, and that's how we like to keep our titles with our property names. As Daniel explained, this is the layout as far as limestone, Montmullion, and Prowl. and this just kind of gives you a quick glimpse of what several of the floors are. going to look like as they stack up. They came in with a revision on the plan, and I believe Daniel also spoke about this. When they did the revision, they came back and did a 15-foot setback off of the adjacent property here to get a little more space for that single-family home. So the revisions, as you can tell, we have them on a lavender sheet of paper. They're down to, provided that the council, Urban County Council, approves its own change for the CN. And then we have just a couple sign-offs, engineering traffic, and they did a cleanup and cleaned up a lot of the conditions, cleaned up all their conditions. So the last condition being discussed place builder criteria, Daniel had gone through all of that. So we believe we can have that removed at this time. This is a preliminary development plan. And when we review the preliminary development plan, we review this preliminary development plan as if the zoning is on the property. So we look at it with the zoning ordinance as the zone being the CN zone. So I just wanted to say that we review it as the zone is in place. So if there's any other questions, I'd be happy to answer. Any questions? Thank you. applicant, Ms. Nicholson. Good afternoon. Nick Nicholson here on behalf of the applicant subtext. There are several members of the subtext team here with me today. Ryan Bum, Mitchell Court, and Jack Cavanaugh. Rory Kaley with the A Partners is also with me. And I'm actually going to bring up Ryan right now to kind of give you all an introduction to the developer because they are new to this area and kind of talk a little bit about what drew Subtex to this property. Hey, good afternoon. I'm Ryan Bone with Subtex. As you can see from our photo here, we are a St. Louis-based real estate company. We developed multifamily and student family housing with a goal to help residents live their best life. We've done projects across the country. Here's some examples. We've got projects in West Lafayette, Knoxville, Tennessee, Ann Arbor, Michigan, all the way out to Tempe, Arizona, and Eugene, Oregon. We think this project brings a number of benefits to the community. really helping to meet critical housing demand. We know UK's enrollment is outpacing its dorm capacity. They're having to switch dorms into shared bedroom conditions. Private multifamily developments are over 98% occupied in the area. So we're proposing to add 600 new beds to a location that already exists, consists of student housing in a location that's approximately 90% student rentals already today. That proposed density will free up traditional single-family dwellings for homeownership in the areas further out from the university where the students are currently getting pushed to. Additionally, we're going to advance Lexington's goals for density along corridors, as we've talked about, adding a variety of transportation options, which I think is key to Lexington's goals, increasing pedestrian safety along South Limestone. So to these questions that were had, you'll see some specific design choices that we've made that increase the areas for people crossing the street to queue up, as well as pushing the building back off limestone, providing street trees as a buffer and really wanting to increase that sidewalk capacity and safety as much as we can. And additionally, just increasing the tax base. So I'm going to hand it back to Nick. As was, what's that? Neighborhood engagement. Yeah. We had our neighborhood engagement on July 29th. We had our virtual meeting. Since then, we've been able to be in contact with a handful of members and representatives from the neighborhood. And we've had an open-ended invitation to sit down and talk with all of them. We are here, and we will continue to be here to discuss any of the concerns that the neighborhood has. And that's an ongoing opportunity that we're happy to have. So I'll pass it to Nick to continue to get into the proposal itself. Thanks. To echo Ryan's comments, I even had my first site visit, or my first in-house neighborhood site visit. I was able to sit down with the neighbor for pretty much about two hours in order to discuss this project and kind of the history of the area. I did mean to, at the very start of this, to go ahead and, for the record, introduce a copy of the presentation and also two exhibits from the PVA that backed up the information that was on the last slide with regards to the rental percentages in this area. When you just look at the blocks that are on our sides of the Prawl and Mount Mullin Street, 88% of them are either parking lots or current rental sites that are being confirmed as rental on various different websites. And the PVA information, when you look at all of Colfax, Prawl, and Mount Mullin, 90% of them have a listed address of the owner different from the site. And while that's not perfect information on is that a rental, it is somewhat indicative of the status of this neighborhood as far as the homeowner occupancy. Since several of you all drove this corridor today, I know I don't need to introduce you too much to where we are talking about. This is the South Limestone Block in between Prahl and Mount Mullen. It's kind of most notable neighbor as far as square footage and kind of acreage go is certainly the University of Kentucky. In this area, there is a substantial amount of student housing and retail that is based on kind of, you know, serving students and other neighborhood kind of uses. And there are single family kind of residential uses in this area. Now, the proposed development, we believe, is the exact type of development that is called for in our comprehensive plan. It is ensuring that we are basically able to meet the high demand for student housing in this specific area without having to further encroach into houses that were traditionally owner-occupied. We've heard time and time again at these type of hearings that neighborhoods are very frustrated that they have been overrun by students. If this type of development had been more welcome in the past, the hope would be that those houses would still be owner-occupied. They would not be trying to meet the demand of the student housing based on the proximity of the university to this property. As you all kind of had previously seen, you kind of know this area. This is that mixed-use development that is at the corner of, kind of this is Prahl and this is South Limestone Street. You can see pedestrians already queuing up there. This was a Google Earth picture. I did not wait out there to have students queue up before I took it, but Ms. Wirth, I'll take your commentary as testimony that this does in fact become a reality in this area. These are some of the houses that we are proposing to basically redevelop. Mr. Crum already said a lot of these houses that we're talking about today were redeveloped even as recently as 2014. There was a large push in the 80s, and then there was a substantial push in basically the late 2000s going into 2014 to build houses specifically directed to trying to get as many students in these houses as possible. When best we can tell from all of the properties that we are talking about redeveloping today, it is 60 total beds that are for student housing today. So we are proposing to come in and build a development that I think gets to the absolute emphasis of our latest comprehensive plan. It is pushing density to our corridors in such a use where the housing is very much needed and on underutilized parcels that basically in close proximity to the corridors. Now, the Verve Lexington, what we are proposing is 251 units with a total of 799 beds. This would replace those 60 beds that I'm talking about. And so when we said in this conference of plan that we want density, this is exactly what we are trying to go for. There is a reason why there are only now three, I believe, conditions on this development. I believe that is a record, and I commend Mr. Cayley for being able to do that. But I think it goes to the notion that if the creators of the corridor node zone were to draft up an ideal development, this is exactly what we're talking about. And these are not easy to develop and they require density. And that is unfortunate part of the reason where we are looking at the building kind of design. Now, we wanted to point out this perspective in particular. And those of you all who were at the committees have heard me say this, that when we were looking at this site, we looked at what are the defining characteristics of the university based on who our residents were going to be. And we just got so lucky that the major pedestrian infrastructure, the major multimodal infrastructure that kind of defines UK in this area in front of Memorial Hall points directly into this building. And so we wanted to kind of take that into consideration when we were looking at designing this building. We wanted to design the entire building around the pedestrians' mindset and the bicyclists' mindset. And that's exactly what we did, and that's why you'll see the corridor that basically goes right into the first floor. This kind of type of stacking that we are wanting to do into the interior, I never can remember which one. This basically lines up right with that pedestrian escape that goes into the development. It adds to the pedestrian stacking that we're able to do, the bicyclist stacking that we're able to do, in order to further help the safety of this intersection. These are the typical floor plans. You can see the interior courtyard. You can see the first floor amenity areas. and then we are kind of wrapping the units around the interior parking structure. As Ms. Galt said, since we did hear about the concerns that was mostly based on the setback from this house, that's kind of what we've had time to kind of take a look at. We've increased that setback substantially and put in 15 feet now. That will allow us to add substantial privacy screening as far as landscape goes. and to kind of the earlier discussion, we acknowledge the fact that we are going to have a step-down conversation, some type of screening conversation at the final development plan stage. We are more than welcome to have that conversation. The reason why we have not went ahead and done that now is we need to know what the corridor node zone looks like and what the development kind of can look like. This is one of the first times we've ever had minimum floor area ratios. We have a minimum floor area ratio in this zone. And so before you kind of can know what this development looks like, you need to know what the kind of parameters are for development in this zone. Also, there is a minimum of one and a half acres to be eligible for the corridor node zone. We're just over two acres of this site. this is the type of size and scale that is demanded by this zone and demanded by the comprehensive plan. Again, this was the current status. As you can see, there are a substantial amount of utilities that are very visible. As part of this development, we are trying to bury all utilities in this intersection. This is in conjunction with the state and kind of local with regards to the proposed improvements to this roadway. Some of the reasons why the traffic study is able to say what it says is because there are substantial improvements to this intersection that are planned today to take place. And I'll get into those a little bit later when we're talking about the Imagine Nicholasville Road kind of study. Now, this is what is there today. This is more of a shot of what we are kind of proposing. On this kind of the previous location, I did want to point out what Ms. Worth already did is that you have pedestrians queuing up here a lot. you have a lot more than this than normal, and you have virtually no type of kind of, you know, safety provisions. There's no type of division between vehicular traffic and pedestrian traffic, and this is one of the major crossing points for the university. And so we wanted to make sure that we substantially kind of address that. You'll also know that the sidewalk there is not large in the least bit. And so we took that in consideration. We wanted to go ahead and add kind of a safety barrier in between the vehiculars and the pedestrians. And that's exactly what we're trying to do. So the overhang where we are showing it on the second floor, that is further back than what the current building face is today. We then added another eight feet to that in order to create a much, much safer environment for pedestrians in the short term, regardless of what happens with the future planned kind of bicycle lane that's going to be right in front of this development as well. This kind of gets at the queuing that I talked about. There's much, much more room in order to make sure that you are waiting safely before the stoplight. And also it is right next to our bike storage facility for all of our residents. So you will be able to grab your bike and then go over kind of to campus directly there too. And that kind of leads to one of the principal justifications in this request. Our community, or this development kind of gives our community a chance to introduce the exact development the comprehensive plan talks about so much. It is densifying the corridors and increasing mass transit and ridership. It is echoed time and time again throughout all of our themes, throughout the entirety of the comprehensive plan. The comp plan even notes that studies such as Imagine Nicholasville Road have concluded that increasing the intensity of land use along these corridors, particularly for residential purposes, is necessary to accommodate population growth through more efficient land utilization. That perfectly describes what we are trying to do with this development. We believe that this is an absolute ideal location for this type of student housing complex because it is within the exact area that's been studied by the state and by LFUCG to try to address issues with this corridor and increase residential density. This exact intersection is specifically looked at as a way to try to increase vehicular traffic, try to, or excuse me, to more safely deal with vehicular traffic for pedestrians, for bicyclists, and for transit. If you look at kind of the segments that are being talked about and the type of improvements they read like a wish list from our comprehensive plan because that's exactly what they are. And this development is able to actually implement a lot of what is being requested by Imagine Nicholasville, and it's doing it on private dollars, not through state funding. But even off-site, the state is looking at doing exactly what we are trying to do with this development, do exactly what we're trying to do with these corridors by putting mass transit right outside a major, basically user of mass transit, which would be this development. So we believe that all in all, we are adding substantial pedestrian infrastructure, mass transit infrastructure, and safely addressing vehicular by keeping it entirely inside of our site with the proposed parking structure. Now, this ties in kind of perfectly with all of the different design policies. If you all read my justification letter, and I'm sorry if you did, but I address more about design policies than I normally do. I talk a lot more about that than I even do kind of the goals and objectives. Because we tried to look at what this comprehensive plan was when we looked at how to design this project, as opposed to what often happens, I want a drive-through, drive-through is allowed in B3, how do we design a site to make sure that we can get this done and get it approved? We took a different approach on this one by looking at all the policies that are in this new comprehensive plan to try to bring this brand new zone into fruition. I highlight those two just because I think they're very encompassing of what this development is really talking about, but I do want to kind of take a look at just a couple of other ones. because what we are really providing is the people first pedestrian friendly street pattern design that will improve the area's safety and connectivity and creating inviting streetscapes. I'm reading this straight off my sheet because these are comprehensive plan words. They are not my words trying to fit the justification for it, but they perfectly fit what this development truly is calling for. By providing interior parking, you're ensuring that the vehicular use areas enhance walkability and bikeability. comprehensive plan stresses the need to increase density intensity on our corridors the area surrounding this basically you know property it is dominated by single by student housing and single-family structures this proposal will introduce a true multi-family development into this area as called for in the enhanced neighborhood sections of this and called for in the corridor study. Now, we've talked a lot about kind of, you know, the different kind of amenity area inside. There are several different amenity areas scattered throughout this. There's also 21,000 square feet of usable open space. We're also within half a mile of a city park, and that doesn't even get into the substantial usable open space that is directly across the street with the University. We also looked at sustainability in here. We are putting substantial amount of green infrastructure on the roof itself and the interior courtyards. And to answer your question, Mr. Mickler, amongst that interior green infrastructure will be the HVAC units. Those are going on the roof. They are not going in the green space on Pearl Street. But also, Subtex designs all of their developments to be energy efficient as a main principal feature. Here is just kind of a quick little rundown of all the things that they do in each different unit and throughout the hallways of this project. They have energy efficient LED light fixtures throughout. There's low flow plumbing features. There's high efficiency HVAC system. We have Energy Star appliances. There's low VOC paint and wall coverings. There's occupancy sensors for lighting in various high traffic areas and lighting controls for reduced lighting throughout the day. They weren't just looking to increase density, they also were looking how to do this in a respectable manner as called for in the comprehensive plan. Now, while the corridor node is not a recommended zone, it does, well, it will be, I believe, next month when the comprehensive plan does get formally updated based on what the urban growth text amendment was basically recommending for place builder. I believe staff has already indicated that is the case. But if you look at what the corridor talks about, if you look at the site priorities and the most suitable development types, it is the encapsulation of the corridor node zone. And it is not a surprise that in the urban growth text amendment that we just went through, the justification for the corridor node zone was the implementation and creation of the zones that could handle this type of density. Here is a direct quote with regards to this small little language up there that none of us can actually read at this point. The overriding emphasis of Imagine Lexington 2045 is significantly overhauling the intensity of the major corridors. The future of Lexington's corridor lies in accommodating the shifting retail economic model by incorporating high density residential and offering substantial flexibility to the available land uses. If you look at the site priorities, yeah, site priorities, excuse me, it is transit oriented development. It is high density residential. It is community gathering spaces and redevelopment of underutilized properties. That is a checklist for what the corridor node zone is and what this development is. And when looking at the most suitable development types of the kind of recommended zones, you have every mixed use zone Lexington has and you have high density residential. That is the combination of the corridor zone is why we believe that it is in keeping with this particular place type. It also, the corridor zone talks about exactly how you integrate substantially high density residential adjacent to existing single family homes. This is exactly what it's talking about. And you will see it also is in kind of an L shape because the only way to get some of this density usually is by creating that kind of long arm. So I will wrap up here. We are in complete agreement with the staff and we are committing to working with the staff through the final development plans process in order to make sure that your concerns about the impact towards neighboring properties are addressed. We would just ask for time to do that in order to figure out how to meet minimum FARs, minimum density requirements, and minimum acreage requirements. We believe that this is a very well-designed project that upholds the urban service area preservation strategy. It's an appropriate infill on underutilized properties on our major corridors. It is also an area that is almost entirely dominated by the exact type of use we are asking for today. Retail-focused ground floor, basically commercial uses, and student housing. And so we would appreciate approval, and I'm happy to answer any questions you all may have. Thank you, Mr. Nicholson. Do we have any questions? Yes, Ms. Worth. I may be speaking too early on this topic, but could you talk a little bit about what's envisioned for the retail space? It will be some form of the type of retail you see in vertical mixed use here in town. It would be designed for kind of any of the pedestrians coming along South Limestone. We do have dedicated parking to the rear in that kind of interior courtyard that someone could directly access the retail spot. And so it's not just pedestrian. It can be for someone that's driving home. Okay. I'm putting in a plug here. This morning, or last night, I can't remember when, I heard on the news about the farmer's market that's being operated at UK because so many students are hungry. and many of them do not have cars to access grocery stores. And I remember years ago, Phillips Market, which will be eliminated in this process, used to serve as the major grocery store for a lot of people who lived in Prawl Town and on campus. And listening to students today talking about their concerns about food access, if they don't have cars, we, as part of our comprehensive plan, said we want to get rid of food deserts. So I want to put in a plug to you guys doing the development to think about grocery access in your retail space. Absolutely. Any other questions? That would be an ideal use. Mr. Mickler. Thank you for your presentation. I also want to thank you for responding with the questions and concerns I had over the light at the zoning committee by having the study done. You probably heard my concerns when I was speaking with staff. You know, I think this orientation you're showing sort of here on your slide and that orientation towards the corridor really speaks to the intent of this zone. My concern is really not whether you're meeting the intent of the, of, it's that connection and that interface. And particularly as it relates to the, how the scale affects the sunlight on that north side of your building. And I'm curious, when you all did the sun study, I'm sure you noticed as well the sort of seasonal impact in the winter. Did you all do any sort of simulation on what it would take to bring, to get light to those houses across the street in the winter? Did you see what scale or how many feet back or how many stories up? Because I assume, I'm guessing here, but given where that shadow falls, I'm guessing, for example, you know, the height on one side of the building isn't the issue, but it's the fact that it goes all the way to that street edge. So I'm sort of curious if you did any simulation with that. So in talking with staff, kind of the conversation really was directed towards the house those directly adjacent to it. And so all of our kind of, you know, tinkering with the models was kind of directed at that. And so I can't say we did any simulations to see what one story off on the entirety would do. I guess one story off or like we've seen in other projects where it steps back after a certain number of stories. I guess I meant the one story on the leg was kind of what I was referencing there. We had not had a chance to do that, but it is like, again, when you are blessed with only like truly three conditions on a development plan, it allows you to focus on what the overarching question was at the zone change. And so we're more than happy to kind of look at all that on the final development plan stage. Yes, thank you again for your comments. My question is, does the site allow for the building to be pushed back so that the shadow does not, I guess, encompass the houses across the street? So it kind of runs, you know, fairly north to south. And so the issue would be eliminating kind of the entirety, like just pulling it back off Mount Mullen. I don't know if that would achieve that. Yeah. Our two constraints that we can show, the floor plan, I think it's right there, yes. So here you can see where we wanted to wrap the garage because we want the garage, we were trying to get the garage to be concealed from the street. We like to do that. And because of that, you really cannot move those units further away. But you can see on the leg that goes into the neighborhood, we were able to pull that back and allow an extra, I believe it's 25 or 30 feet, that that leg is pulled back there so you get kind of a U-shape. And that's as far as we were able to pull it back to get to the adjacent property line. So that is where we took that context, and we tried to give that a little buffer. It gives you articulation in the building and more sunlight to the properties on that side. where the garage is, there's not a lot that we can do about that there. You're kind of pinched on both sides. And that is the side as you move down, you get to more of the commercial use that's along limestone. So there is, I believe, a couple residences, as you can see in the SUN study, that could be impacted at the shortest days of the year. But that's what we were able to do, and you can see our constraints from this plan. One more question. Have you done projections to see is your project still viable if you were to lower it by another story? Is your project still viable? It is not. We've done that study. We started with something that was smaller. It was not viable. We've gotten here and we've got a project that we think works great. And I don't believe it would work if we were to take the whole building down a story. Well, I would just note that I think the toolkit that you have in the SUN study is helpful because it would illustrate essentially how far back it would need to be lowered in sort of a more scientific sort of approach rather than the one story or nothing approach. I applaud you wrapping the garage. I like that concept. But again, though, as we're looking on that one side, whether that has to be wrapped to the very top story, if that impacts the sunlight on the opposing sides, those are the kinds of things that I think are going through my mind as I weigh the benefits of that garage being wrapped all the way to the top versus shading the opposite side of the street which is certainly more than a couple houses all righty do we have any other questions for mr nicholson at this time if not we will move on to public comment unless staff has anything that they'd like to add oh mr simpson i'm sorry and i believe mr forrester you discussed 20 minutes Okay. Okay. Yes, sir. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the Planning Commission. I'm Bruce Simpson. I'm here today on behalf of the Prowltown Neighborhood Association to speak on this particular matter. Obviously, Mr. Nicholson made a very fine presentation, as he always does, about the merits of this particular request. I'm sure it will be successful if it gets approved. And I don't dispute that the comprehensive plan does have language in it that calls for increased density. But as I was preparing for my comments, my 20 minutes, I do like I ordinarily do and go back and look at the comprehensive plan. The comprehensive plan is kind of like scripture for you guys, for the staff. For the public, it's usually the first time they get a look at it when they have to deal with a zone change. But those of us that have been in it a while, which I have, are familiar with it. And as I was looking at the guidelines that you all will need to look at before you make a decision, it occurred to me some of the language that I saw in the 2023 plan. is the same language I saw in 1988 when I first did my first zone change case. And the same language was in the 1996 plan, the 2001 plan, the 2007 plan, the 2013 plan, the 2018 plan. Pretty much the same language when it comes to goals and objectives. particularly with regard to equity, anti-gentrification language. Been there, in my case, 36 years. Worded a little bit differently. I would suggest there's more emphasis in the current version. A little more specificity, if you will. But that will be the theme that I will discuss in my 20 minutes. Now, I didn't hear any of the staff report comment upon any goals and objectives relating to equity. I didn't hear any of the developer talk about it and his legal justification to get this project approved. I do have to take exception at the request of Betty Boyd, who you'll hear from shortly. Betty is the president of Prowltown Neighborhood Association. She's been there, I'll let her tell you exactly, but I know 70 years plus. You may know Betty's grandson, Shane Boyd, quarterback for the University of Kentucky. Prairie Town's had quite a history of outstanding citizens. Lou Johnson, who played for the Los Angeles Dodgers. T.D. Young, the greatest blues man in Kentucky, if not Southeast United States, world-renowned. If you want to get good entertainment, go to his place on Monday night starting at 9 o'clock. T.D. Young, he loves the blues. Prawntown has been in existence since the mid-1800s. And what I need to take exception to in the first line of the staff report, the subject property, subject properties are located in the Prawntown area, which was an historic African-American neighborhood. It still is a historic African-American neighborhood. And just so you know, some of the folks, I grant you. Gentrification has taken some of the houses. But there's still a lot of Praultown current residents, former residents and supporters, and I'd ask them to stand now just to be recognized. Some of these folks aren't going to speak. If you're here on behalf of Praultown, if you would just stand up. Thank you. The history is going on as we speak, And that is important for reasons that I will get to in just a moment. Prawl Town has been fighting for its existence. It's been fighting to survive for decades. I have an article in the Herald Leader from 1998, 26 years ago. It's captioned, Protecting Prawl Town. You can put that up. Protecting Prawl Town. They've been fighting at least since 98 and Betty will tell you well before. Prawl Town, the memories, the history, the legacy and current residents are continuing the history of Prawl Town. one of the special historic African American neighborhoods in our community. I also didn't hear any reference in connection with this entire case to what I would contend is the biggest missing participant that ought to be here, which is representatives from the Office of President of the University of Kentucky. Because the reason we're having this conversation is because University of Kentucky says, go develop student housing in the neighborhoods around us. We don't want it on our property. Notwithstanding the fact they have acres and acres, hundreds of acres of property, Coldstream, Kroger Field, South Farm, where student housing could be. How many times have I been in front of you representing a developer and you've jumped on me immediately and rightfully so, Simpson, you've got a sea of parking, man. How about the Commonwealth Stadium, now Kroger Field? Talk about a sea of parking. How about that for student housing? You can still have parking, just elevated above the cars. UK being the entity they are and I will say this I've got three degrees from University of Kentucky I'm a big UK fan Jonathan Davis left I cheered for Jonathan Davis when he played for University of Kentucky basketball team but the University of Kentucky has been a horrible neighbor to the neighborhoods around it been a horrible neighbor to Prawl Town It was a horrible neighbor to Adamstown who used to be located on the site of Memorial Coliseum. Another African-American neighborhood now extinguished because of gentrification. And so here we are today with the last remnants of Prawl Town. Betty Boyd and the other folks that you'll hear from shortly. And as I read through all the comprehensive plans dating back to 88 and looked at equity and principles of anti-gentrification, it wasn't always worded that way, but the principles were the same. Because number one goal has always been to enhance and protect existing neighborhoods. Goal number one, theme A in our current plan says that. Always. That's the first goal. But I've noticed that over the years that the principles of equity and anti-gentrification, when they come to actually being implemented, enforced, always get pushed aside in favor of other principles, other goals and objectives of the comprehensive plan. Increased density, we've got to have it. passion for it. I mean, it's almost a necessity. We have to have increased density. What about gentrification? Well, you know, it's not important. It's not that important. And I've heard people say, well, Proud Town, you know, there are not that many people live, so what difference does it make? It makes a difference to the people that are here. It makes a difference in terms of your all's legacy of following the comprehensive plan goals and objectives. The number one goal in every comp plan is protect existing neighborhoods. Every comp plan. Protect them. Now, over the years, from 1988 and even before, we've seen gentrification take place in Prawl Town with student housing. Predators have come in and paid money to buy people out, put students in there. Comprehensive plan says, you know, be careful about that. What have we done about it? We haven't done nothing about it. It's been ongoing in plain sight, at least in my case, 36 years. Now, it's a collective responsibility. It's a collective responsibility, and I'll admit, I claim my share of that responsibility. I've been doing this work for 36 years. I could have stood up during some comprehensive plan update and said, well, wait a minute, what about gentrification? We got this goal. We got policies. We're not enforcing them. We're trumping those with high density. Why? Don't they have any meaning? Do we just keep ignoring them? I never said anything. I confess, too, when I was at law school in the UK, I parked on Prowl Street. I was the first one there in the morning to make sure I got a parking spot space. Three years. I come here as a sinner for sure. So the resident of Prowl Street, they're saying if it's been every comprehensive plan to push back against gentrification, why hadn't it happened? And that's really the fundamental question that we're here today. I don't blame the applicant. applicant's taking advantage of what he sees as an opportunity where the anti-gentrification principles have been ignored for so long, they're going to seize upon it. I don't blame it. You know, if they want to take advantage of the situation, that's what they're doing. They're asking for your stamp of approval. Now, what are we talking about with this building? Mr. Chair, I can't see the clock, so how much time have I got left? About eight minutes, nine minutes. How much? Eight minutes. Okay. My vision's not as good as it used to be, so please give me a heads up. So the building, I haven't heard this mentioned yet, is 102 feet tall. It's 563 feet long. 37 feet short of two football fields. Huge. Nearly 800 rooms. 799 rooms. Almost 800. Parked right on the corner. 800 students. All of them have to walk across limestone. I put my life in my hands many times walking across limestone for three years. And these students are going to do the same thing. All 800 of them. all 800. You can put setbacks and all this and say, well, that'll be safe. We all know students. I got to get to class. I'm running late. I'm going to stand in the island like I used to. And only by the grace of you know who am I talking to you today. Human behavior is not going to change. So imagine a building of this size. Is this the largest apartment building in Lexington? 563 feet long, 102 feet tall. Can you imagine that coming into your neighborhood and saying, yeah, we got to have more density because that's what language in a comp plan says. Well, what about gentrification? We want to maintain the residential housing and the historic character of the neighborhood. Well, I know, but we've got to have density. It just gets shoved aside, shoved aside. And we're all, not you all specifically, but generations of planning commissions in the past, nobody's stood up. I never stood up. Me. So here we are. The social cancer that is gentrification has been encroaching in plain sight, incrementally. And Proc County has been peeling off. But there are still survivors and you'll hear from them. So, when I look at the comprehensive plan, I look at the goals and objectives under theme A. And what I see are some introductory comments, one of which I agree with, from Reverend Desmond Tutu, the late Reverend Desmond Tutu. We inhabit a universe that is characterized by diversity. And I agree with that statement. And I'll come back to Reverend Tutu in my remarks later, but I ask you to keep him in mind. He fought apartheid and gentrification in South Africa for decades. And this is in the comp plan. This is one of the first sentences in your comp plan under theme A. We go on under theme A. We have language that says, thriving communities are established through the success of their neighborhoods, which serves as the fundamental building blocks of an appealing community. In Lexington, the neighborhoods, and more importantly, the neighbors themselves are the very essence of the city. That's the first paragraph in your comp plan. It's about the first paragraph in every comprehensive plan probably has ever been printed in our community. And it goes on to say your comprehensive plan. In the planning process for these neighborhoods, it is crucial to consider those who are facing housing insecurity. This approach nurtures a sense of belonging, fosters active community participation, and promotes sustainable growth, thereby cultivating a flourishing community. Prowl Town is still a flourishing community. In the third paragraph, before we even get into the policy provisions, Lexington is undergoing a period of significant growth, and it's imperative to direct this growth towards fostering any sense of community, especially as the urban services boundary is expanded for 2,700 to 5,000 acres. The continuous urbanization of this one small college town requires careful management and a strong emphasis on enhancing neighborhoods. Third paragraph. The United States is facing pressure of affordable housing. particularly concerning is the fact that lower income households express the highest level of concern, particularly among citizens of color. Particularly among citizens of color. If you approve this monstrous project, and let's be honest, it's fair to say it's a monstrous project, you're setting the principle and the foundation for the next one to come. It's a series of big boxes. It's going to be marching up Prowl Street. Marching up Mount Mullin. University will love it. Oh, yeah, sure, absolutely. Keep the parties on your side of the street. I don't want them on mine. No, sir. You take care of them. Make the money. Gentrification in plain sight. Why? Why do you reward the University of Kentucky for being a bad neighbor? Why? There's no basis for that. Have them build these apartments at Commonwealth Stadium. They don't have to worry about risking their lives crossing limestone. How much time do I have, Mr. Chair? Right at two minutes. Two minutes. All right, thank you, sir. So we look at the principles of equity in your comprehensive plan. just under theme A enhancing and preserving and sustaining neighborhoods number one goal always has been and you look at all the principles of equity and they're really outlined in the mayor's commission for racial justice and equality that was published four years ago. Four years ago they looked at this issue of gentrification What about existing neighborhoods under threat? What do they say? Well, let me share with you. Recommendation. The city must put in place mechanisms to keep housing affordable. It is possible to stem the tide of gentrification while creating more housing opportunities for all of Lexington. The city must financially invest in gentrifying neighborhoods and neighborhoods that are in risk of gentrifying where displacement has occurred and is occurring. The city must guard against putting money into stopping gentrification where displacement is occurring. It's occurring in Praultown. It has been. All these goals and objectives and recommendations have been right part of this plan since it was adopted and even before on a concentrated effort by the mayor and all the citizens of Lexington. Stop gentrification. Stop wiping out the last remnant of Prawl Town is the issue before you today. Stop it. The city must issue an official statement regarding gentrification, displacement, and affordable housing and launch an education campaign regarding the history of housing in Lexington. And finally, the city must implement actions to curb predatory investors. Now, I'm not making any accusations against the applicant. They're taking advantage of the situation. A situation that because of benign neglect by previous planning commissions and this before you today on whether you continue it, to wipe out the rest of Prawl Town and put up this monstrous 102 foot tall building, 563 feet long. I suggest to you, with all due respect, it's high time to follow the equitable principles of your comprehensive plan that have been in existence at least since 1988, and more specifically, reinforced by the Mayor's Commission on Racial Justice and Equity and say no to this development. And I thank you for your attention. Thank you, Mr. Simpson. Mr. Simpson, I'm going to use the list you gave me and go in that order for public comment. And then there are a few others who signed in and they will be called as well. Betty Boyd, please, for everybody, please approach the podium. State your name and address. And everybody has three minutes. And it is the policy of the Planning Commission that we do not lend time. But everybody does have three minutes. Good afternoon. My name is Betty Boyd, and I'm the president of Prawl Town Neighborhood Association. And I'm going to start out by giving you a little history, my history. I've lived in Prawl Town 70-plus years, and I've loved every minute of it. So for starters, we've had many, many things to happen to Proud Town, but we kept our head up and kept getting on. The worst that I can recall is urban renewal. Urban renewal came in, tore down houses, left vacant lots, run down houses with the promise of building single-family homes. That never happened. So we had to deal with what was dealt to us. And during that time, we had to go through many, many changes. I might have repeated myself, but anyway, I wanted to say that I like Prowl Town. I still do. We knew that Prowl Town, people were looking at Prowl Town, And at one time, we noticed that we needed to go and do a change as far as getting our neighborhood zoned for residential only. And that was good. We wound up with the permit parking. The permit parking that you see now was instigated by the Pralytown Neighborhood Association. That relieved us from having a lot of trash and a lot of cars parking overnight and so forth and so on. and that really helped us out and now I know that they use it in other areas as well. And let's see. But my question to you is to say would you want this in your neighborhood? Because it could happen to any one of you the way things are going. And I think your answer would be no, you wouldn't want that in your neighborhood. But it's okay for us. And I don't see that being the right thing to do. To say that you get a zone change. In my mind, I'm thinking, okay, we're good. But then they can change it. What's the use of even having one? If you can go back and change it to be whatever, whatever soup of the day. To where I can come back and say, now, I want to get it back to zone R1. or B1 or whatever. Can I do that? Tell me no, I don't know why I couldn't go back and request another zone change. So I I just fear that what's going to happen to Praudown is more talking about what's benefiting the students. There's going to always be Student House in Shortage. always as long as I can remember if you parked in Prowl Town three years ago they're still doing it and they don't mind because they get a ticket they run them up more money for the city they get a boot on it their parents are paid to have it taken off I mean it's horrible you've come to some of the ones that drove through on the wrong time to say come at night both streets lined up bumper to bumper. They say two cars to every person? That doesn't work. I mean, to say that they're a building with 800 parking spaces, 400 parking spaces, 800 students. Is that about right? Each person is going to have a car. They're not going to catch the bus. they're not going to catch the bus. They're going to drive their cars to go downtown or wherever they want 3 or 4 o'clock in the morning. So it's not the overflow. What's going to happen to the overflow? I haven't heard anybody talk about the overflow. It's going to be where they're going to park. So I'm saying and I'm saying I'm really upset right now so I probably won't get to say everything that I feel and I think but I'm giving you the pretty much gist of it they wanted to make light of the fact that they had zoom meetings I didn't get no information about coming to no zoom meeting they asked who they wanted to come to the meeting. Some of them don't even have access to the internet to do a Zoom meeting. I mean, it's just very sad that the way things are happening here. And I'm pretty much mad at myself if I don't get to say everything that I feel here. So just give me a little minute now sit down. But in most of this application is very little say it about the neighborhood. We still there with small in numbers but we're mighty and I'd appreciate it if you look at us it being that way instead of it just two or three people you know it's the heart that's out there. I think I've seen all I want to say. Thank you. Thank you. Next on the list is Teresa Lopez. Teresa Lopez. Yes, please. If you're just... Okay? Mm-hm. Proud of you, baby. You get it. And if you would please approach the podium, state your name and address. Yeah, I just wanted to be polite. Thank you. My name is Teresa Forbes Lopez. And I'm here because I'm very concerned and I'm very disappointed at how my community is being targeted again. And I can tell you right now I'm really pissed. That may not be the correct word to use right now, but that's where I'm at right now. As a resident and a homeowner of Prowl Town for over 20-some years, I strongly oppose the zone change in my neighborhood. All I want to do is to continue to live in my neighborhood and not to be interfered with any more developers, planners, turn down, and building student housing for the university. The university needs to take care of their students by making sure that their students are housed and not putting it off on someone else. They can utilize the existing hubs, complex that is within walking distance, and or build the needed student housing on their UK land. They have it, so why not develop there? Why do we have to repeat the ugly side of history at the expense of financial gain? The Prawl Town area is why I selected to have my house built, because it met the need of a single family dwelling, and it was what I felt comfortable with for my family. For the last 20 years, Prawl Town has been my sanctuary of peace and knowing that I have a home to come to at night. Ever since I received that letter about the zone change, my heart just dropped. Because it meant that the neighborhood was in jeopardy and of being non-existent and the long-term renters, students, and homeowners would face displacement. Another black community that has a lot of historical worth would dissolve. My community has no negative vibe with students. The zone is fine without changes. On my street, we help each other during the cold months, we check on the elderly, we help with yard, and we offer guests the use of a driveway to prevent unnecessary towing. Our community is diverse, but we know who lives on the street and where you belong in our community. Praudown is unique, and we do not need a six- or eight-story building to overshadow our neighborhood. Will I be able to see the sunlight or will I have a picture of a view of a building's backside? I don't think I want to see that. Will I be able to get in and out of my neighborhood or will I be stuck in traffic? How does it make you feel knowing that a black community's lives will be disrupted because the residents were not invited to implement their thoughts? We understand the need for responsible and impact development. We get that. However, such development should enhance, not diminish our living standards. The approach should be to ensure that the support of the residents' interests and fit the character of the surrounding area. If you approve this zone change, then you have resurfaced what is now called gentrification. And the death warrant and the executioner would dismantle the Praudown community and the connection that is in place now. Just like UK did Adams Town, Smith Town, Davis Bottom, and how the Lexington Fair Airborne County did to Esmondale and Charlotte Court. We will no longer be valid but just a mist in the air because financial gain takes over and the neighborhood gains nothing but heartache, displacement, dismantle, and maybe homeless, which we're dealing with right now. Thank you. Thank you. The next name on the list is Haley Medarios. Again, please approach the podium and state your name and address. Haley is not here. Dylan Mears. and if everyone can please hold your comment to as close to three minutes as you can because that will allow us to hear from as many people as possible practiced so we'll see all right hello i am dylan mears and i live at 545 south limestone this right here is omari we both oppose this proposed zoning change. As a resident of the building along South Limestone and someone who is currently preparing for grad school, I honestly find this idea of the proposed building being affordable housing for students to be laughable. I took a look at the other buildings created by this company, helpfully provided on their little website, and the average price in these apartments is about $1,460 per person. Where's the equity in that? I'm wondering. My current rent, and yes, I rent, and the people who own the houses in this neighborhood are incredibly important to me. For example, I had a lovely breakfast this morning with the vegetables that someone gave me. My current rent is $1,550 split across two people, so I only pay $775. And even that's kind of pushing it, to be honest. I understand the appeal of these sorts of buildings. As a disabled person, this is sort of multi-purpose usage of space, residential business, and recreation is something I do think should be more common. I can't drive, I can't walk as far as I'd like, and it'd be lovely to have all of these options in one place. If you want this sort of multi-purpose uses of space, good news, we already have that, and with local businesses, not from San Francisco or wherever. Some of whom are represented here tonight, or today. Of course, there could be improvements, but none of these would require tearing down the last historic black neighborhood in Lexington, because guess what? Black families need housing too. There is no way I would ever call this proposed building accessible or helpful towards living my best life. People on disability are only allowed to have a total of $2,000 in their bank accounts at a time. How would someone like me ever be able to afford to live here? And what full-time student is being paid enough to afford $1,460 a month on rent, especially when you factor in other costs of living and then textbooks and other materials for classes? I also have an issue with the way that these apartments are built. They're paid by the bedroom, but you still need to get friends together to agree to be roommates with you. Otherwise, you'd be rooming with strangers. The whole appeal of having friends as roommates is that you can get together and cut the total housing cost down. That's not possible with this arrangement. And I know for a fact that all of my friends would rather live with someone in a regular apartment and split rent and other expenses than paying $1,500, whether you have roommates that you like or not. The option of leaving your roommates up to fate, since none of your friends want to pay that much money, isn't accessible to people like me. I'm trans. I was born a female. And I'm Jewish, if you couldn't tell by the little kippah. If I don't handpick my roommates, I'm putting myself in a lot of danger and threatening my ability to keep a kosher kitchen. I shouldn't have to compromise on my religion to get an apartment close to campus. This proposed change won't affect those living in this hypothetical building. Something like this won't just affect those people, it'll make the property taxes in the area skyrocket. Homeowners in the area will struggle to keep up, and already are, by the partial gentrification of this neighborhood that's already happened. In spaces being leased out, renters, mostly students, will bear the brunt of this change in our rent. I don't even want to think about how much the price of these leases would increase. I fear for the small businesses and other organizations in the area, like the Lexington Islamic Center, which is very important to the UK Muslim student population. I oppose this zoning proposal for a myriad of reasons, including the ones my friends and companions are bringing up today. I hope y'all take our stories to heart and vote not to recommend that this proposed zoning change be brought to fruition. Thank you. Thank you. Next, the next name on the list is Dana Wilburn. Hello, my name is Dana Wilburn. I am here in support of preserving Smithtown, I'm sorry, I'm nervous. Never did this before. Preserving Plowtown. Um, Pearl Town is historical for the black community, for the people in the black community. Um, most black communities in Lexington are just little towns or just two streets, two or three streets. African American people lived in different parts of the town, and they named them their little town. But Prowtown is especially, means something to me. My grandmother, my great-grandmother, name was Marty Kavanaugh. She moved to Prowtown in the 20s, somewhere in the 20th century. Over, what, a hundred years and a century and two decades. And my grandmother, as well, was born and raised in Palltown. My grandmother fought until the day she died to preserve Palltown, to keep Palltown there. It's historical to my family, and there are still events that take place in Pearltown. For instance, there's a day called Pearltown Day, as well as in other African American communities, where this gentrification thing is wiping us out, wiping out our history. And I'm sorry, I'm really nervous, but I feel like that I had to come here and support preserving Proud Town. Maybe it's the, like I said, my great-grandmother, oh, my grandmother, Geneva Dunn, she served on the development committee for many years to preserve, to keep Paul Town. And like I said, I'm here to support preserving it. It's historical to African-American communities. and I ask that you take that in consideration that a lot of people, including my ancestors, struggled and my grandmother fought many years to keep Falltown. So I'm here in support to preserve it. Thank you. The next name on the list is Rolanda Woolfolk. Mr. Chair, could you ask the next person to come get in line? Oh, sure. After Rolanda Woolfolk is April Taylor and then Austin Zinkle. And you can just maybe we'll form a line for speakers. All righty. Ms. Woolfolk, please go ahead whenever you're ready. Rolanda Wolfork, Lexington Historical Black Neighborhood Association Council President. I'm here because when Teresa called me, she said, I got this zone change sent to me. What is it? She said, I'm scared. Am I going to lose my house? I just got here. I've been here for 20 years and I fought for it. When we went to go visit the students and let them know that the zone change was coming about, a lot of them didn't even know that their housing was going to be taken away. They were scared. When is it going to happen? How soon is it going to happen? What do we need to do? We didn't even receive anything letting us know that this is going to happen. is gentrification. Our students are scared. Our seniors are scared because they see this big old building, this barrier, come to their neighborhood. And once it does come to the neighborhood, it's access. It's open doors for the next developer to come. the store that they used to go to probably won't be there anymore. Stoner's Pizza won't be there anymore. Hibachi Grill probably won't be there anymore. How much longer are we going to keep taking from people? We asked on the Zoom call, are you going to be doing any blasting? They said no. When I look up the CN, it says multifamily. But all we hear is student housing. Where is the multifamily? I used to work at UK in the dormitories. And this is exactly what it is, a dormitory. When in 2006, they decided to change everything that they did, They decided to tear down Blandon Towers, Kerwin Towers. They transitioned Kingland, took out Ronald McDonald House and moved it over to the baseball field area. And when they did that, people lost jobs. UK doesn't even own the building, the dormitories. They rent the land. So we're asking how much more can UK do? They cut off Rose Street, the main corridor, the main artery to the hospital. Well, it's open space. It's high density area. Put that building there. Thank you. Thank you. Next is April Taylor, followed by Austin Zinkle, and then Rabbi Amir. I want to start out by calling out all of the city officials who are realtors who are involved in real estate because the level of corruption in this city that has allowed housing to increase in cost at a level that breaks records for the entire country. country, okay, for the last three years we have broken records for how the price of our housing has increased in Lexington, okay, and it is because people in power within the city government stand to profit off of it and do not care if Lexington creates a bar of affluence that means that already more than half of the workforce in Lexington must drive in from outside of Lexington to work here because they can no longer afford to live here, and you all are working doing this on behalf of a city who is so corrupt that they are peddling maps of former black hamlets around town through their sense of place project that is supposedly meant to save these black hamlets in black neighborhoods where they intentionally leave out the black hamlets in neighborhoods that are inside of New Circle that they have already gentrified. Many of you probably drive through one of those corridors. It's part of the same corridor where you're trying to do this. They have been able to gentrify the North Limestone Corridor, which is a former black Hamlet called Brewstown. That park over there is a former lynching site. Okay? So people with power and prestige in this city being able to turn sacred places in this city, places that should be preserved into their playgrounds, it's something you all have done for decades. It's literally what you have done with Cheapside, with the old slave auction block that should be preserved in something sacred. People show up there to drink and party on Thursday and Friday nights with no reference for the sacredness of that site. that families were torn apart there, that the literal whipping post for people in this town stands at the corner of the old courthouse. The things that our ancestors have gone through, the things that people in this city continue to go through of impacted identities, and not just black people, brown people, people who are refugees from other places. Lexington has more Congolese refugees than any place in the world. You all, we are human beings. We deserve to be able to preserve our history, to reach back and touch it. My grandmother is from a black hamlet. It's now a frickin' park, Hunter Town, because the state decided to build Bluegrass Parkway through there. And so it floods. And the last people who lived there, the last elders who lived there had to move out in the year 2000. There are graves in these places, you all. Graves, we carry four generations of our DNA and our blood. I can't even go visit the graves of the people who go four generations back because of what this city has done. If this city and UK had been able to get away with taking over and moving the graves at the African Cemetery No. 2, I never would have been able to go back there after I took care of my grandmother when she died to know that that is where her father is buried. That is where my great-grandfather is buried. Please don't continue to be a tool of the people with power and prestige in this city because I promise if you allow them to come for us, one day you will look up and it will be you. Thank you. Thank you. Austin Zinkle, and then Rabbi Meir, and Reva Russell English. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Dr. Austin Zinkle. I am a historian living here in Lexington. I do not live in Prawl Town, but I am deeply concerned about the erosion of this historic neighborhood. I feel compelled to speak today in an effort to persuade members of this committee that it is not in the best interest of all Lexingtonians to move forward with a zoning change that will deeply harm the people and community of Praultown. As others have already noted, Praultown is one of the oldest African American neighborhoods in Lexington, dating back to just after the Civil War in 1868. Prawl Town residents encountered racism and discrimination, but the neighborhood preserved and grew from at least seven residents in 1868 to 26 in 1876, 559 at its height at the turn of the 20th century. According to a history of Prawl Town from the University of Kentucky Libraries, quote, Prawl Town was a community working together during tough economic times in a city with segregated housing and discriminatory employment. But the idea of community continued to be maintained, end quote. But by the second half of the 20th century, Prawl Town faced battle after battle against city and university officials to redevelop the neighborhood. But this redevelopment was violence against the human beings who called the land home. A 1953 proposal from the Lexington, quote, slum clearance and redevelopment agency resulted in the loss of 187 residential units. In 1969, the University of Kentucky purchased 30 lots and demolished them into a parking lot. Between 1970 and 1972, 42 more homes were demolished. But in 1975, in an article from UK student newspaper, The Kentucky Colonel, quote, a university administrator assured residents of Pearltown there will be no further university expansion in the Pearltown neighborhoods, end quote. We are approaching the 250th anniversary of Lexington, of which this city will have much to celebrate. But this historic milestone also calls upon all of us to reflect on the challenges and mistakes of our past. I ask all of you on this committee to consider this moment right now and reflect if a position that involves further diminishing the history, relationships, and yes, lives within the Prawl Town community reflects positively what this city wants to be known for in the eyes of future Lexingtonians. Let us take a bold stance that will work with members of Prawl Town and chart a future for this community that all of us can be proud of. Thank you. Thank you. Good evening, council and community. My name is Amir Moesh. I live at 152 Woodland Avenue. Don't ever come to see me. Thank you. My name is, so basically I'm a UK graduate student who studies human capital management and business analytics and I strongly oppose proposing the zoning changes for Prel Town. And here's why. I moved to the Lexington community three years ago from deeper south because I believed in the values of this community. There were hospitality history and the promise that this place would welcome everyone regardless of the background or heritage. These are true commonwealth values. What this proposal represents is far from the Kentucky I was drawn to. Because you have to understand, I drove up here. I saw the grass. I thought it was pretty, and I thought the people were nice. So that's why I stayed. This is not about housing for students. No student is looking for that kind of housing. We're out there, and we're finding housing. I happily live over 152 Woodland. Woodland Avenue is a wonderful community. It's not about development. This is about displacing the black community that has lived here since the Civil War. UK and Subtext LLC are using students like me as a scapegoat to justify ethnic cleansing. Ethnic cleansing is a tenant of white supremacy. I'm sorry, ladies and gentlemen, but don't do it in my name. Don't. The students don't want it. Nobody asked us if we supported a gentrification effort. And I can say safely that this project is not for us at UK. We students have values. We were raised with values. We're wildcats, and we value all people. And we don't agree with this house cat way of thinking. We just don't. Here in the Commonwealth, y'all means all, but by destroying Prailtown, you're erasing Lexington's last historic black neighborhood. How does that align with the values that we supposedly hold dear? It's a slap in the face to every black resident and to every Muslim who frequents the Islamic Community Center and to every student who cares about our history here and who has ethics and values. Would this ever happen to white neighborhoods like Chevy Chase or the woodlands where I live or multi-million dollar houses that are surrounding the area? It wouldn't. Absolutely not. It would never do that. that's never been proposed. There's never a proposal to bulldoze multi-million dollar homes there. We're watching the systematic removal of people of color from their homes, from their histories, and this proposal is yet another insidious chapter in a long history of gentrification in Lexington. You've all seen this before. We've seen it over and over here in Lexington. And let's be real. This is not about housing students or affordable housing. Charging $14.60 at the low end per bedroom is not affordable by any stretch of the imagination, especially for students like me who scarcely are able to make ends meet so that I can continue my studies. So tell me, what type of student is this for? Is it for a student who has daddy's money? Because my dad's dead. You know, I don't have daddy's money. Students with more privilege than I, I guess. Students that are different than me. I know that my tuition dollars are being funneled into this project. And frankly, I stand here in complete disgust for this lack of moral fortitude in this proposal. The people in this room need to understand that if this is proposed, if it's approved, you're setting a precedent. You're saying that it's okay to erase communities of color, you're saying that their homes, their lives, and their histories don't matter. Well, I'm standing here today to say that they do matter. That ain't Kentucky. I'm sorry. This is who we are. And I heard you to vote against these insidious efforts to ethnically cleanse yet another black community of Lexington. The decision we make about other people's lives speaks directly to who we are as people. The decision on this matter calls to question a very special question. And then I'm done. Do you accept ethnic cleansing and gentrification as your moral values? And if you do, do you teach those values to your kids? Because if you do, we have a big concern. So anyway, I believe firmly that we are all good people, and we need to do the right thing, and that's not too hard. So thank you, and God bless the Commonwealth. Thank you. Thank you, Commission. My name is Reva Russell English. I sometimes ride my bike through Peraltown, and it's a nice place to ride my bike through. I want to start just by noting, in some way as Mr. Simpson did earlier, that in the planning staff's presentation, there's a lot of acknowledgement of the racial history of Prawl Town and also of Lexington. That's actually part of our comprehensive plan also, is acknowledgement. The unfortunate part, though, as Mr. Simpson spoke to, is that that acknowledgement has mostly just been lip service. Acknowledgement that doesn't lead to action is not beneficial. It was also noted that the character of the neighborhood has changed over time, which it has. And it has in part, or mostly, because of moments like these where our planning commission didn't stand up and stop an action from taking place. And so the residents of Prawl Town were displaced. Change happened that they didn't want to see. Their concerns, their desires were not taken into consideration. I know this has already been mentioned, but I think it bears repeating. How many black hamlets will we let UK absorb because we let it happen? UK can't have this land unless you say they can have it. I want to point out one other thing, just because I think it's important. Language is really important to me. A lot of the language that has happened in the presentations today include euphemisms like urban renewal, which is urban removal, the removal of people deemed undesirable, and also redevelopment, and redeveloped has been used, that is bulldozing and displacement. There's a book called The Plague of Doves by a Native American writer named Louise Erdrich, and she says in it that if you let an unpleasant present go on long enough, it becomes your entire history. that's what we've done we have let an unpleasant present go on by Mr. Simpson's accounting for 36 or 38 years much before that of course because most of us know our history we can stop it now, you can stop it now it won't make you the most popular people but it will make you the people that you can be proud of at the end of your lives say no to this and keep saying no to it thank you applause thank you and that is the extent of the folks I have on the list who signed up, but if anybody else would like to speak, again, just approach the podium, state your name and address, and we'll keep it to three minutes, please. I'm Tanya Whitfield, and I did register. I don't know why my name wasn't up there, but it's okay. I waited three hours, so it's worth it. I've been here 20 years, and I just don't understand why a company from a whole other the state that don't know nothing about Kentucky, that don't know nothing about Prout Town even coming here. I don't even know why they think that they should come here. I don't even understand. I mean, I understand, I guess, a little bit because they have a lot of money, so they just think they can just use their money wherever they want. They can just bulldoze their way into any state, any city, do whatever they want, and not care about the people that live here, not worry about the people that live here. There were questions asked directly by this panel to the guy in the blue suit. He didn't answer them. The other guy, he got to be VIP CEO or somebody over there. And he wasn't answering questions. He said supposedly there was a Zoom for people that lived in that neighborhood. Half of them people don't even know what Zoom is. Half of them people don't even know what the internet is. So how was they able to even be on a meeting? And I know I live in housing and I remember the board, they had an open meeting on Zoom, because I do know what Zoom is. And I was the only one represented. And we have about 400 apartments. And I told them that even though I was the only one represented because I was the only one there, I was representing all of them. Because when you speak for your community, you're not just speaking for yourself. And a lot of those older people, they don't even know about the Internet in a full way where they can actually set it up. And I just think these are companies that do this sneakily so they can do whatever they want, and then they can lie and say, well, we did have a meeting. Well, we did have this. Well, we did have that. Yeah, but if people can't come and actually speak up and actually fight for what they believe is right, you got enough money, go somewhere else. Go find a fancy neighborhood. Go fix that neighborhood. Why you got to mess with our neighborhood? Why you got to mess with Praudtown? I don't even live at Praudtown, but it's my neighborhood. It's my community. And as a constituent, as a community leader, no, I don't have a lot of money. I'm not wealthy in the sense of I'm like Jeff Bezos needs something. But I am important. And my vote as a constituent is just as important as Jeff Bezos' vote, as this man's vote, as that man's vote, as your votes. We are all important, and y'all have the biggest power in the world right now. Y'all can make the right decision and protect Proud Town. It is not about race. Yes, it's a black community, but it is not about race. It's about doing the right thing for the right reasons, and it's not about how big the dog is. It's about the heart, and this heart right here, these people right here, they really love their town. They really love where they live. And it is wrong of these rich people to come in and mess with their town. It is wrong. It should be illegal. It should be, as I call it, a class A felony. It should be wrong, and they should be locked up for it. Thank you. Thank you. Mr. Gaffield. I'm Walt Gaffield. I'm president of the Fayette County Neighborhood Council. And I have some remarks to make. The proposal is really a continuation of planning history, whereby historically African-American neighborhoods have been eliminated and people displaced. This is not a happy day for people who believe in equitable development. The planning commission, you know, have you asked the question, you know, you can have dense development, but is any of it affordable? We have an affordable housing crisis. has the planning commission or staff asked them about diversity in their existing buildings what is it the cn zone is interesting it's based on work done in buffalo new york where buffalo put in these transit stations to to improve transit but what actually happened Buffalo had been running buses every 10 or 15 minutes, and after they built the transit stations, the buses basically came every 20 or 25 minutes, and the next year, the number of people riding on that particular route, the people riding the bus declined by 27%. So we don't really know that this is going to work. There's no proof of concept, and yet the CN Zone is based on that. It's one of the pillars of it. There are other problems with LexTran. There's really only one large transfer station in the entire city of Lexington, and that's a major problem. I'm concerned about safety with students crossing limestone in that location. It's not so much a traffic study. will the cars affect it? Not so much, but if students are crossing the street, there's going to have to be a lot of red lights, and there's going to be more traffic congestion there because of red lights with students going back and forth. I think there's a student bubble usually when people attend university. I don't expect they're going to ride the bus. They're going to stay around the campus. Only very rarely will they ever ride the bus. That's yet another problem. There were dorms built on South Broadway, and it flooded nearby neighbors. I think there needs to be some consideration of that. And if it happened once, it can happen again, so you have to be very careful of that. The proposal is completely out of context with the surrounding area, and that gets into the height, the mass. You have 500 feet on one dimension and 100 feet in the other, and we've already talked about shade and that sort of stuff. That's concerning. If this is the first time we've done the CN Zone, we have to be very careful how we do it and how it's used. Finally, and in conclusion, the Urban County Government needs to encourage the University of Kentucky to use more of its own property to house its rapidly growing number of students. I think the university set a record of 35,000 students on campus just this year, and it's going to continue to grow. I mean, that's the plan, and the plan is to allow the private sector to do the housing rather than the university, and that's just not right. Thank you. Thank you. Good afternoon. I'm Amy Clark of 628 Castle Road. I want to dwell on one theme only, two themes. The first is provide varied housing choice. And I bring this up because it's in neighborhoods, A, design, one, policy number eight. So it is exactly, precisely a policy that you may cite in judging, in approving, in denying a zone change. It's the comp plan that is to guide your judgment. The applicant here offers 251 units, 799 beds on just over two acres. There's no dispute that it's high density. There's no dispute that in general we need and welcome high density and especially on corridors. But this is a special purpose, single use housing design. It is student housing and it's student housing of a particular high density sort that is incapable of conversion or adaptation for a wider range of uses, whether later or sharing a mix of uses today. And by uses, I mean a mix of residential densities and types of residence. Commission members, please ask the key question as you review this rezoning request. Is this housing leased by the unit or rather by the bed? Ask further, is there what's called roommate matching? or are the units leased to parties as a single household long term? Are these one-year leases? Are they semester? How often can they go week to week or change in the middle? I believe this housing block is not designed and used as a multifamily complex with 251 wholly independent dwelling units, but as a quasi-dormitory with lavish communal amenities. These units are not designed to accommodate children, families, or single parents with children. They offer no accommodation to support seniors. They have a single target market. Current Prawl Town dwellings run roughly 500 to 600 per student bed. You heard one that was a little higher. It was just two apartments shared for two. Current UK on campus, REIT, Real Estate Investment Trust, housing on land leased, are very little, very few of them are under a thousand a month and some run considerably more. I just lost my thing. Hang on. I ask you to call on the university and the state legislature to make affordable student housing available on campus. As commission members, you're not authorized to allocate state funds for on-campus housing at affordable rates. Your only power is to deny a proposed zone change because it isn't in agreement with comp plan policy. Provide varied housing choice. I would add that I have not heard mentioned the Scott Street connector, which connects to the interstate via Newtown Pike extension, has been authorized at Scott Street. So from the north, it's about two, three streets up. It's right where the two meet, Upper and Lime. And it's already under design at 41 million. How is that going to do multimodal transportation and how will this development and that transportation improvement interact? Thank you. Thank you so much for the time. Any other citizen comment? Pardon? Citizen comment? I apologize. It's been a long day for me. I have a question off the bat in that their timing here is based on the legal representation for the developers and the legal representation for the neighborhood. That is correct. Yes, the developer has an allotment of time. Mr. Simpson asked for an extended amount of time in advance of today's meeting. Okay, okay. My question to you is who represents the citizens of Lexington that are not represented by counsel of either party? Well, we have... When I see the statement, it's like, oh, you get three minutes, but who represents the people that probably should be here, that probably have no idea, and as the taxpayers, they'll be paying for it. That's, I guess, sort of. And I don't know. I just got all this information. I've got a backpack full of stuff now. There's still more I'd like to. I really would like to get this postponed because I think there's a lot of information. And we've got a turnover in council. And if you push this through, we'll have a new council or not. I'm not able to show you. I'm sorry, sir. Could you please state your name? And if you are here representing anyone, would you please state that as well? My name is Duval Headley. The blood that flows through my blood was the blood of the first president of the University of Kentucky. I am very disturbed at my university and my state. I was born here. I was raised here. I am a native. I have seen Teresa appointed me to the first land trust. We were on the steering committee. The vision we had for this town would make us as unique as Mr. Nicholson's father's and uncle's governance of two great assets that we have in this community. I don't think anybody would doubt the value of his father and his uncle and the institutions that they represent. I think it's terrible that we sort of all push this off and get the neighborhood to fight with a developer, and nobody represents the rest of us. So I guess that's why my question is, if you only represent two sides, what if there's a third side who represents them? And I guess, which one of you all is legal? Which one's legal? Which one? Can you raise your hand? Are you legal? She's a lawyer. I'm legal for the law department at the Urban County Government. LFUCG legal. Okay. I've got a couple of questions, and they're a little bit off the topic. But this is as a taxpayer and a citizen of the city that's seen the history of this town probably since before most of you guys. Bruce, I think you're a little older than me, so you'll have to. I'll let that pass. And Betty, you're looking way better, and I know how old you are. But what I'd like to say is I've got some questions for LFUCG legal, Mr. Simpson legal, and Mr. Nicholson legal that haven't been addressed at all, and I really wish they would be. My questions, in short, are, first of all, America is Freedom of Information Act. I think the state of Kentucky falls under Kentucky Open Records Act, correct? Mr. Chair, we take our questions from the Planning Commission. Am I not doing it correctly? No, anyone who would like to speak has three minutes to do so. Okay, I would like to know that postponement until we get some of this stuff settled. The other thing is I would like to know from the three legal people here, if you can't speak and they can, I'd like to let them re-speak if possible. Number one is the concept of due diligence. It's usually used in financial dealings, but it should be used by each one of you because you represent the taxpayers, the citizens, the ones who may not live in Prawl Town and may not live out of state. That's who you represent. Am I correct on that? Second of all, the concept, I didn't know this, and I'm not a lawyer, and I apologize. One of the first judgments in the United States was about nuisance. You never really think about it. You think of nuisance as your next door neighbor, but apparently nuisance applies to multiple people, multiple things. What if the nuisance in protecting a group of their citizens is actually the University of Kentucky and or the city of Lexington? Is that correct? we've gone about maybe four or five minutes. There's no... It's not fair, but I do think that some of these questions, before anything moves forward, stop, take back. This is a big deal. I don't know what the budget is on this. I don't know how many jobs are going to come here. I don't know how many permanent jobs will be here. There's a lot of issues that I haven't heard addressed at all. Well, thank you for your comment. And as a tax-paying citizen, as you guys are too, that should be kind of important. Thank you for your comments. Thank you, guys. Certainly. Would any other citizens like to speak on this particular application? If not, Mr. Nicholson, I'm sure you have some thoughts. And we do have to vacate this room at 545. So we'll try and move over to the Phoenix building. So we'll try to do that at what everybody feels is the most appropriate moment. But for now, Mr. Nicholson, please. Thank you all. I will be very brief since I did kind of give an elaborate presentation. The development community can only look at what the adopted comprehensive plan actually calls for when trying to look at the type and the location of developments that the community is calling for. And for a long, long time, I know that infill and redevelopment has been the primary focus on all of our development efforts. For the past, I would say, eight to ten years, we've heard specifically corridors are where we want to see development as the principal focus in order to allow for density to basically occur. All of the properties that are subject to this particular zone change, our student housing has been student housing for a very, very long time. We are trying to meet the housing demand that has gotten us into the position where our community would feel it would be necessary to create something like a corridor node zone in order to ensure that we are trying to approve the type of developments that take thousands of individuals out of existing single-family neighborhoods and put them on the corridors where they more properly can handle density. There's a reason why all of the student housing in this area, in the kind of larger complexes, is 98% full. We're not building nearly enough of it, and that's why these students are sprawling throughout our neighborhoods all surrounding these areas. So we believe that if you look at what the conference of plan policies and the goals and objectives that are thoroughly outlined in our justification letter, and certainly the staff report in a very objective manner, it calls for justice type of development. If we have to kind of work on the design of the building, we can do that. And that's exactly what the final development plan is for, because this process doesn't stop here. It doesn't even stop after council takes final action on this zone change. Thank you for your time. Mr. Simpson, just a few minutes. Is that okay? As I shared with you earlier about Reverend Desmond Tutu, I looked up what he might have to say about this case in light of a comment that he previously made. And I want to be clear when I'm talking about the missionaries here from Desmond Tutu's quote, I'm talking about us, us including me and our community with respect to comprehensive plan and the impact on African-American neighborhoods. Mainly white people. Mainly white people. Almost all white people. Be honest. What Desmond Tutu said was, just substitute missionaries for us and the comprehensive plan for the Bible. Said Desmond Tutu, when the missionaries came to Africa, they had the Bible. We had the land. They said, let us pray. We closed our eyes. When we opened them, we had the Bible, and they had the land. Missionaries of the comprehensive plan have been coming to Prowltown, at least since 1988. They've asked them to endorse the comprehensive plan, which they did. They prayed over it. When they opened their eyes, they had the comprehensive plan and the gentrification was right on top of them. The comprehensive plan has not been honored with respect to this African-American neighborhood, nor a number of other African-American neighborhoods, and it's time to stop. It's time for the University of Kentucky and its leadership to take responsibility for its impact of all the students it's creating and put them on their property and not force them onto private people who are developing their heart, soul, and legacy into their neighborhoods. They're being selfish, and it's time to stop, and you all can stop it. Thank you. Okay. Thank you, Mr. Simpson. I'm going to defer to my majority of my, or I'm sorry, Daniel, please go ahead. Daniel Crum, planning staff. Just wanted to provide, I guess, some clarification and some, I guess, to kind of quantify some of the information that you all have heard tonight. When we talk about gentrification, we talk about kind of the act of displacement. We talk about new development coming in, these original communities being moved out, no longer being able to live in those types of areas. The Pearltown neighborhood was developed almost exclusively as an African-American neighborhood. That's its genesis. That's its history. But at this point in time, that's not reflective of what is in this area. If you look in the census tract that this property is located in, it is 76% white. The median age is 22, with over 80% of the population under 29 years old. We are looking at properties that have already been developed. We are looking at properties that are characterized by student rentals, characterized by not owner-occupied. So we are looking at a population. There is not an African-American presence that is being displaced with this application. This is existing areas that has been redeveloped, and it's going to continue to be a target for redevelopment in the future. When we look at the impacts of this property, there are real impacts on those adjoining property owners that the Planning Commission needs to consider. But phrasing this or orienting this as development that is coming in and moving out this particular population when it's already happened, They talked extensively about what happened in the 1950s, the development that's occurred since the 1980s, and how it has kind of continued to develop. This particular property or these series of properties have already undergone that, so we can't unwind that clock with this particular application. So looking at this, your job at the Planning Commission is to look at this and see how you can synthesize this with the existing neighborhood, But the existing, still existing single-family residents, the folks that are in there and do not want to move, do not want to change their zones, it is not going to impact their ability to continue to live on the street. Planning staff stands by the recommendations that we have in the staff report. And if you have any further questions, we're here. All righty. Looking at the clock and looking at the logistics of what the staff has to do to relocate us to the third floor of the Phoenix Room, without objection, perhaps this is a good time to adjourn for the moment or take a recess, not adjourn, but take a recess. And shall we, 20 minutes, Mr. Duncan, is that, I don't. Information for a lot of these folks, they don't know where the Phoenix building is. If we could have staff outside to educate, and some of my folks are handicapped, I'm not sure they'll be able to get there, but to whatever extent we can accommodate, I'd appreciate it. Let's make it a clean break at 30 minutes. At 6 p.m., we'll reconvene without objection. Thank you. Thank you for your patience as we had to move. Thank you, Mr. Duncan. We are ready to reconvene our meeting. and where we left off, we had heard public comment. We had heard from Mr. Nicholson and Mr. Simpson. So now at this point, the commission has a chance to discuss, offer comment, perhaps ask questions. Would there be any? Mr. Wilson. Well, first of all, let me express my appreciation for you all hanging in there as long as you have. And to our canine friend here, he or she, she's been really wonderful in hanging in there as such. Just a couple of clarifications. Once a neighborhood is given a historical designation, that does not change predicated on the demographics of the neighborhood. So it could be 80% white and it wouldn't make any difference. It would still be classified as historical. The best example would be historical black colleges and universities. Most people think they all had to be black. No, there are some predominantly white universities that still carry the historical designation. So I don't want to refute the point about, I don't want to leave it hanging that if a community has had a historical designation, that they lose it by virtue of what's going on. I've had the pleasure to serve on a committee called the Neighborhoods in Transition. And this issue of gentrification came up, and we've decided, in effect, that there's actually two types of gentrification. One is positive gentrification, if you can hear it, know that. And what that means is people move out on their own or they decide on their own that they're going to leave a particular community. Then you have the negative gentrification, which is involuntary displacement. This is when you're forced out, and there are many ways that that can take place. You can raise the rent on people. You can raise their property taxes. You can put them next to a skyscraper. You can run a highway through. But we were concerned. One of the things we came out of this committee, and I remember distinctly, we had some help and assistance from the University of Kentucky in terms of what neighborhoods in Lexington were being gentrified and what were the predictions for other neighborhoods to be gentrified. It would surprise you that here we sit today, we had already discussed Prawl Town as one of those areas that was on the line for gentrification. There is a report that is put into the mayor's office about what we thought and how we thought and the recommendations that we had. This committee was chaired by our vice mayor as well as Councilman James Brown. And we met for approximately 18 months, and we went through quite a bit in terms of what gentrification means, the impact to the community, and what have you. And I just laid that as groundwork for the fact that as a commission member, I am always put in a position, not just me alone, but we're put in a position of trying to work with the different elements in the community. For example, the University of Kentucky is going to continue to try to do everything they... possibly can to bring more students to the university. And yet we know that there's not enough dormitory space on the campus to handle that situation. I've heard today that some people said that if they had that challenge, what they could do, quite frankly, is build more dormitories on the space that they have. But in some instances, they have allowed the community to kind of make up the difference or private developers in the community to make up the difference. That is an issue that we're still having to grapple with because we're trying to find that rightful balance between supporting the university as one of our major producers of education here and the communities for which we live. We want to welcome our students in, make them feel accommodated, but at the same time, we want to protect our neighborhoods as well. That's the confliction that we have. Now, as it relates to Prawl Town, I indicated earlier that I had a drive around Prawl Town. In fact, the matter is, I don't know if anyone in here from the Prawl Town community remembers the Prawl Town Cafe. Does anyone remember? Oh, you remember the Prawl Town Cafe? Most people don't know that. They also had a community center there. And in fact, there was a church here in Lexington that recognized what potentially could happen to Prawl Town. It was Central Christian Church. And I give them a lot of kudos because they hired a fellow by the name of Billy Bingham to help revitalize Prawl Town. And this church stood behind it, and they put in a lot of resources. And they did it very quietly. It was not something that they advertised or whatever, but they stood behind Prawl Town to protect the community. And I was at many of those particular meetings as they were trying to go through and work through the urban renewal concept and also bringing about new elements, new housing to the community. So that's the part. The other part that we're wrestling with is we need in this community affordable housing. And we need housing that is affordable. We need both. And we're stuck with that. But we do need to figure out ways that we're going to have to wrestle with that particular activity. So at this stage of the game, I'm going a long way around to just simply give you some thoughts about it. This is our time for general discussion, is that at this stage of the game, I am very much on the side of the community. Let's just put it that way and put it out there. And I am so because I understand the impact of gentrification. Someone gave us a history lesson about what was going on in Prawl Town. I'm going to give you all something, a quiz to work on. And it's the house number 169 and a half. I don't know if any of you know what that's all you do. There are a couple of people who know that. In that house, there lived a gentleman by the name of Frank Lucas. Now, Frank Lucas was not mentioned today, but he turned out to be one of the great drug lords in New York City, in Harlem. He was all over the place, and he gained a great deal of fame. In fact, he was making over a million dollars a week in doing his drug business as such. But they interviewed him, and he indicated that he lived at 169 1⁄2 on Colfax. So in addition to the Lou Johnsons, we've had other people to come out and gain distinction, not necessarily all for the right reasons, but they have gained distinction. But the point of it is we are looking at not only trying to preserve Prawl Town community, but there are other communities in and around we, in my opinion, need to take a look at and try to figure ways to preserve. Now, there are some other areas in town where they have come forward and asked us to build the University of Kentucky, wanted us to build housing and what have you. And we have done that. And some people say, well, why would you do it there and not here? And part of it has to do with the fact that the reason we have Prawa Towns, the reason we have the Smithtowns, is because of segregation and redlining. That was not the case for people in some other areas. They had their choices to make on that particular issue. Well, I'll send my little sermon here, unless you all want to sing one verse of Just As I Am, and allow my other colleagues to make comments as they will. Thank you, Mr. Wilson. Mr. Owens. Thank you. I think what Mr. Wilson said was very true and very appropriate. I just want to clarify a couple of things in response to what was said earlier. I guess, even though I don't look like it, I'm probably a senior member here at the moment. It's been a few years that I've been here. We come and everything we do, we take seriously. We don't get paid. You know, just like you, we've been here for four and a half hours. We'll probably be here for another hour and a half. We represent everyone here. It doesn't matter sides or whatever. We represent everyone here. And we make some hard decisions at times. We hope that they're not all hard, but we do make hard decisions at times. We've sat here before and agreed with the staff. And also we've taken opposition with the staff and gone the other way. We've done the same thing with applicants. We've taken the applicant side. We've taken the citizen sides at time. So, I mean, we take everything very seriously with what we do here. I know Prawl Town in a, I could say previous life, 45 years ago I was doing a different job and I was out and I got to visit the people of Prawl Town. Prawl Town, as we all know it, has changed. We all know it's changed. So we've got a difficult decision here to make. It's a delicate balancing act. Pro-development, pro-students, rural, we fight it every day here. And I've often said, hopefully at the end of the day, we do a little bit of good for the city. We're looking at it for the city as a whole. Not one individual. So, thank you for your time. And I'll let somebody else speak if they want to. Thank you, Mr. Jones. Commissioner Parkstead. This is always kind of the tough part about this position is that you can see things from each side. And I really like the idea of maintaining the historical significance of the communities around Lexington. And, you know, they're not huge communities, but very, you know, very deep roots, deep feelings that run through these communities. And so I think it's important for us to, at some point, figure out how do we permanently protect these types of communities. I know our planning staff had mentioned that it's already being used for student housing, and I can see that, yes, the houses that are being directly impacted, but at the same time I also see the impact that it could have to the other houses that have not been turned over for student housing. So I'm really kind of conflicted. I just felt like I needed to just say something because that is an issue. And we tend to kind of throw around affordable housing just as a term. But $1,400 or $800 or whatever the cost per room, it's kind of hard for me to see it as being affordable. But at the same time, I understand, you know, from a business standpoint, you've got to price things to where, you know, you're getting your investment back. So it's a, you know, as a real estate agent, it's really hard because I see that and I see the improvements that can be made in areas. But I guess it's always, you know, at what expense and, you know, at what point do we draw the line? So I'm I'm still conflicted, but I'm just, you know, I see in here both sides. I'm also conflicted. I came here today thinking I wasn't going to be thinking that things were sort of inevitable. Although I didn't like that, I felt like in the particular situation we're in, this is what the outcome is going to be. I will have to say those of you who live in Prawl Town have made very impactful presentations. And I love the development, and I wish we could put it someplace else. You know, I wish none of us were in this situation right now. So I'm like with Commissioner Barksdale. I haven't quite figured out what I'm going to do yet in terms of a vote. But in terms of the community, I think it's hard not to see down the road and see appreciation of prices, increase in taxes, people being priced out of their homes. and that's not just for this neighborhood and it's not just for the rural hamlets that's for all kinds of neighborhoods all around town so that's kind of where I am right now Thank you Ms. Worth Commissioner McCool Yeah, thank you You know, I can't help but having some of the same thoughts that I had when we were discussing the Maxwell Street Project, which is a project that was approved that is in the neighborhood where I grew up and we have our business and most of my family still lives. And I was conflicted there, and so, you know, and my conflict sort of comes down to that the historic fabric, both the built environment, but then also the cultural fabric of these neighborhoods is very important. And in a similar sense, while there were not many residents or homeowners left in the Maxwell Street area along Stone, those that were left were people I'd been to neighborhood meetings with, people I knew, people I knew from our business who were customers of ours. And so they weren't simply a small percentage. They were people from my neighborhood. And then the other part of my thinking has to do with it is important to me that as a community, we provide places for people to live that are in walking distance of where they're trying to go or along transit corridors because giving housing for students or for other people directly, walking distance from where they're trying to go is an important thing to do. I think this development presents a lot of positive things along that corridor. and in many ways is a good example of this new zone that we're trying to create along what is likely to be Lexington's first significant transit corridor that we eventually develop. Where I still have strong lingering concerns, as I sort of voiced in the questioning, was over that intersection with the neighborhood. And, you know, that density is one goal, but preserving and being respectful to the neighborhood and the historic built environment is something that I don't think we can ignore. And this development, as proposed, pushes the limits to what they can do on one property. I think for me to feel comfortable supporting it, I think we need to, I would need to see significant step backs as that property approaches the neighborhood to the extent that it does allow sunlight in the wintertime to come into the opposing side of the street. and come up to its sort of full corridor sort of size as it engages the corridor. So those are kind of my thoughts for what it would take me to feel comfortable supporting it. that doesn't mean that I don't still have that strong feeling of the importance of history and also the pain, if we were to approve it, of the loss of some of these historic lots, even the scale, even if the houses are built, it changes the nature and also the home of many of those local businesses along the limestone corridor. So I definitely share the conflated feelings of many of you on the commission here with me. Thank you, Mr. Mickler. Personally, there's a lot I very much like about the design, especially being on the corner and how it can interact with the campus across the street. But I have very deep concerns about context, the scale, traffic, pedestrian safety. So, yes, I would have to agree with what I think is sounding like a consensus. Is there anyone else who would like to speak or the floor is always open for a motion? Or, Mr. Nicholson, if you have any final thoughts before a motion. If you would like us to come back and kind of provide additional information, more of the kind of SUN study, what we can do on that leg, we're more than happy to do it. I've kind of already said we're committed to doing that at the final development plan stage regardless. So we can do that as a condition to resolve that at the time of the final development or if you would like to basically suspend today's hearing and wait for a month, we can do that. We're committed to this project, and we're committed to making sure you all are happy with it. So whatever you want to do. Well, one aspect of my hesitation is this is our very first corridor node vote, and I want to make sure that I personally have all the confidence that I need to cast that vote as I do on other votes. But for this one, I'm not quite there yet personally. I'm not speaking for the commission. But are there any other thoughts? Well, because that's kind of my concern when we look at this corridor node. How, you know, how deep is the corridor? You know, I mean, you know, when we're saying, okay, this is, you know, what, 500 feet deep. And, you know, is that still corridor? At 500 feet away from the corridor, is that still corridor? You know, so it's, I think we've got to kind of get comfortable with what it really means. And, you know, I don't know if the staff has an answer for that, but I don't know. It's, you know, because what's to keep, you know, in the next few years, somebody from coming back and saying, okay, we want to extend the corridor back even further, and how far do you allow that to go is kind of my question. And I think that's a very good question. Does that ordinance address depth? So, again, with this being the first, I think that's a good point, Ms. Barksdale. Ms. Worth. Yeah, I'm not sure what I'm getting ready to say, that this is the right forum for this, but because we're talking about land use, we're talking about taking something and putting it into a context that's already established. But the way we talk about it is that it's going to operate on its own territory, its own rules, and the rest of the context gets, at least the neighborhood context, gets ignored in that process to a great extent. So I'm asking the developers to think about, is there any way to think about this development going forward where not just serving the university and serving the students, is there a way to envision this development where you're also doing something for the neighborhood? And that's not a question to answer now. That's a question to think about. Well, I appreciate Mr. Nicholson's offer. I think that he has a track record of following through. So from a trust perspective, I trust it, whether it was delayed today or on the final development plan. I will say I lean towards delaying it because as part of the zone change, that's typically the part of the process where the public is the most engaged. And I think given the neighborhood engagement that we saw today, that having that delay happen as part of the zone change, I would be in favor, but I feel comfortable with either approach. And for clarification, Ms. Jones, would that be technically a suspension? A continuation, thank you. Just by way of what a continuation means is that if you choose to do that, you continue it to a date certain, and you do not rehash everything you've heard today because you're just continuing this hearing. So what you've already heard is this hearing and then anything that you are continuing it for is what you hear, but you don't come back and do this all over again whenever you continue it to if you choose to do that. Mr. Chairman, there are a couple of things. First of all, I think our attorney was spot on in terms of what I felt, not that I'm an attorney, but you need to be clear as to why the continuation. Now, if we were to do a continuation, there would be two requests that I would have. One is for the developer to go back to the neighborhood and try to work with the people, number one, and then see if there's some accommodations that can be made, and then secondly, to my colleague here who's asked a very specific question, that could be addressed perhaps in this continuation. So I wouldn't have a problem with continuation, but those are the kinds of two conditions that I have. Number one, I don't wish to rehash, but I would like to put some of the responsibility, because I think Ms. Worth said it well in the sense that we know what the students want, and we know what the developers want, but nobody ever came and put forth what the community wanted in that sense. So if the community is willing to work with the developers and the developers are willing to work with the community, that's good. But I'd have to hear from the community whether or not they thought that was a good idea. Well, Mr. Wilson, again, the floor is open for a motion. There could be further discussion if necessary. Could I ask one other thing? Yes, sir. Mr. Simpson, you're the representative? Where is he? I'd like to ask your opinion about what we were deliberating here and the continuation more specifically. Is there a possibility to work out some things to come back to before this committee, before we hear it again? Well, thank you, Mr. Wilson, for the opportunity. Obviously, I've got a fair number of people I'd have to consult with first. I would say there would have to be a radical change in the amount and size and scope and scale of this project from what it is now. I don't know if the developers would be willing to compromise to that extent. This is so disproportionate to anything in the history of this neighborhood. Certainly we're willing to meet and talk, but I want to be candid with you. They're going to have to reduce the scale and size of this substantially. Can I make one comment to Mr. Simpson? Mr. Simpson, it also, in terms of a negotiation, means that the community may have to give up something as well. I understand negotiations, Mr. Wilson. I do. Thank you, sir. Mr. Owens? What I've heard as much as anything is that the applicant is willing to consider setbacks, step-downs, and so forth when he comes back to his final development stage. I'm of the opinion that we probably should give them that opportunity. I'm ready to move forward with a motion whenever one's ready. A couple of comments. And I'm not a precedent-setting sort of a guy. I've never believed in it. Every situation is different and every circumstance is different. With that said, Mr. Mickler brought up Maxwell Street a moment ago. We did approve that. That was 275 units, which is more than this one has. This one has more beds than that one's, but they're similar in size and so forth. It's not a favorable motion, I'm sure, for most in here. but I'm willing to move for approval. My motion would be for approval of subtext acquisitions, LLC's owner map amendment, and Hazen property, Mount Mullins Street subdivision, and J.A. Prahl property development plan plan, MAR 24-14 subtext acquisitions with the four reasons provided by staff. Thank you, Mr. Owens. There's a motion. Is there a second? So there is no second to that motion, so it does not. So we're going to try another one, or you're going to try another one? Yeah, Mr. Wilson, or Mr. Wilson. Okay, then I go back to this. I don't particularly mind a continuation on this for additional information, but I'm always hesitant to do that type of thing unless there's some agreement that something's going to come out of it, because as our attorney has indicated, We don't want to go back and rehash this as such, but if it gives the people a chance to work out things, I would much rather for them to work it out there than just as kind of a vote. To that end, I would move that we continue this conversation date certain. Let me see, when? Mr. Wilson, your next zoning hearing is October 24th. Okay, then I would move that we continue the hearing for PLNMAR. what is it, 2024-14 until October the 24th. Thank you, Mr. Wilson. I have just a scheduling question. We've got some long meetings coming up. How does the 24th look? And is that enough time for Mr. Nicholson to even, and the neighbors to accomplish what they want to do in sitting down and talking? It doesn't like me. We do have two new cases for October and then a carryover of the text amendment that you postponed earlier today. That was a development plan. They were off. They had postponed a development plan to a zoning item case. Mr. Chairman, if you want to make this next meeting short, just have it on October the 31st. Yeah. Okay. We'll say thank you, Mr. Wilson, for your motion. Is there a second to Mr. Wilson's motion? Thank you, Commissioner Barksdale. Okay, so we have a motion and a second. Is there any discussion to this motion of postponing to, I'm sorry, continuing to October 24th for the reasons outlined by Mr. Wilson? Yes, ma'am. Is the president of the Neighborhood Association still in the audience? Okay. Will you be able to meet with people before then? All right. Mr. Chair, let me just clarify one thing with this motion. It has been said, but our continuance in a month is only going to be for new information that's been brought forward. New information. So, thank you. Do you want specific information? New information might be interpreted a little broadly in terms of, you know, do you want it continued for more information about specific things? If you do, I think you should state that. Mr. Bickler? I would say, as we discussed, we were looking for what modifications it would take to bring sunlight to those 9 to 11 houses behind that office building across the street in the wintertime. I'm sure there's some simulations that could be tested to see what modifications that would entail I think Ms. Worth also asked about the thoughts for that retail space in the building and suggested that that would be an area where some thought about the intersection in terms of use with the neighborhood and the project could be placed, and it would be, I think, beneficial to hear if that was indeed possible at the next meeting, too. I guess I would add to that is anything other than something like a grocery store that the neighborhood would like to see if they were willing to see this project move ahead. and maybe there isn't anything. Maybe they're not willing to see it move ahead. But if that were on the table, what would you want to see happen? All right. Mr. Chairman, I call for the question. All right. There's a motion, a second. We've had discussion. We'll go ahead and put that to a vote. All those in favor of Mr. Wilson's motion, raise your right hand. Any opposed? That carries unanimously. Thank you, Mr. Nicholson, applicant. Thank you, neighbors and stakeholders. We appreciate your presence and your words. All right. After we catch our breath for a second. Ms. Wade, does that get us to page 9 for our ZODA? Our first ZODA? Or I guess it's our only ZODA tonight, right? That's right. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Daniel, if everyone who is planning to leave could please exit, and we'll continue on to this next item. Daniel, several of the commissioners have expressed a desire to take a 10 or 15 minute recess to read through this. So without objection from any other commissioners, we're going to adjourn for, let's do, I'm sorry, recess. Words matter. Let's take 15 minutes. Okay. Thank you. So, Chair Davis, there's also one copy of something that someone brought to us, so I'll make that available, too. We can read it. Thank you. reconvening our hearing. With that, there will be opportunity for public comment later in the hearing. Mr. Crum? All right. Daniel Crum, planning staff, and just to once again orient everybody to the various documents you have in front of you, there are two staff reports that are associated with this request. The first one, the smaller, original, was a postponement recommendation. Later, staff submitted staff alternative language along with a staff report recommending approval of that. So you should have both of those documents in front of you along with the aforementioned comment list, the written comments submitted by the community as a whole, as well as a copy of the applicant's proposed updated language. Staff is still recommending our alternative language at this time. But without further ado, this is a discussion of a zoning ordinance text amendment, 2304 solar energy systems. The applicant here is Silicon Ranch. They are a solar energy system provider based out of Tennessee. They specialize in agrivoltaics, so larger-scale solar operations that are used in conjunction with agricultural operations. Their proposal for you today is the creation of an entirely new section of the zoning ordinance that codifies, clarifies the different types of solar energy systems, as well as the locations where they are permitted and any requirements kind of applying to those. but ultimately with the goal of allowing a pathway for large-scale solar within the agricultural rural zones. That's really the emphasis of their proposal. Our current framework on solar is a little bit lacking. Article 15 of the zoning ordinance mentions height limits for when you mount solar panels on a structure, but don't mention solar energy systems as a use. There's no clarification on what scale or size they're appropriate. no differentiation between the different types of systems. And so this particular Zoning Ordnance Text Amendment would sort of provide a lot of clarity in that it would categorize the uses, it would spell out the uses as they are related to the zones, and give us firmer standards to kind of move forward and encourage solar energy systems. As it currently stands, there was a Board of Adjustment determination that sort of ground-mounted solar energy systems were an industrial use. But once again, not really much as far as actual language within the zoning ordinance. A reminder that utilities, when they utilize solar, they are not subject to the zoning ordinance. They are regulated by the PSC, which is a separate body. And that merchant scale electric is also subject to the Kentucky Siding Board requirements. So there are, at its largest scales, additional requirements imposed by the state. So as we reviewed this language, the applicant's proposal, we took it on ourselves to review kind of best practices, other state and local legislation, and literature regarding solar energy systems, and really encompassing both urban and rural context. In staff's review of the different approaches, there's been a wide array of different approaches towards solar energy system that varies by geography, vary by scale and scope, as well as kind of context. So really everything from how these uses are classified to the distances they should be set back to how closely they're regulated, whether they are permitted outright, varied wildly based on the context. But there were a number of key features that were kind of present throughout all of the reviews in the staff literature. And the first was kind of taking an approach that removes barriers towards solar energy systems in the context where they're most appropriate. So in more urbanized context, that means that these generally were recommended to be accessory, not requiring terribly large amounts of review. But as they kind of increased in size and scale and scope, that's when the kind of caveats and additional review was kind of required. There was municipalities that varied in how they kind of looked at the use. Some looked at how much power was being generated. Some looked based on the footprint of the use. The applicant's proposal in front of you is based on the footprint of the use itself. or whether the energy was being consumed on-site versus off-site. So different places regulate these differently based on how they've chose to categorize the use. But here, the staff's approach, the approach chosen by the applicant, revolves around the footprint of the use itself. There's also separation in many of the ordinances for urban versus rural considerations. There's understandings that placing these on buildings or in built contexts that either have impervious surface or haven't already been developed kind of vary or differ in how they should be treated when they are sort of in green areas, areas that are devoted to farmland, especially prime farmland, and how it creates when this is sort of the first utilization of a property and the scale and scope involved with that. All of the literature talks about mitigating potential impacts, so at its larger scale, what does that mean as far as setbacks, as far as managing view sheds and the like. And then decommissioning. While decommissioning plans are somewhat rare in the sense that a lot of this development has occurred recently, and so these projects built to last 30, 40 years have not really been decommissioned, but setting a sort of standard or a framework that would allow for those to be removed in the future, both financially and from an environmental kind of perspective. And when we're looking at solar installations, especially when it relates to decommissioning, it's kind of important to know where we are generally within the scale of kind of solar as a larger kind of phenomenon. So as you can see by this chart here, the vast majority of the solar installation solar capability has been recent. So I think 75% of the current productivity has been constructed since 2016. So this has been something that has been growing very rapidly. but the end result or the end process of decommissioning once these developments are done and no longer are able to kind of be productive is still somewhat unstudied. Here gives you an idea of kind of where solar has already been installed with that darker color representing areas or states that have higher concentrations of that solar development with the lighter kind of representing less involvement. So really the the crux has been in areas like Texas, California, further west But when we're looking at those as sort of models for what we should do with our zoning ordinance It's important to note that the conditions in Nevada or Arizona as it relates to say rural solar developments Differs very greatly from what it is here in the bluegrass So in in looking at municipalities and what has been implemented staff really tried to keep to this this general region looking in Virginia, Ohio, Tennessee, Indiana, Illinois is somewhat similar geographically in order to kind of help get a better idea of what fits best for our general region. Here we have a graphic that shows, and this was provided to us by the state, of existing applications pending with the Kentucky Sighting Board. And then the green on this map here kind of designates the areas That seem most suitable for a kind of larger scale solar operation So that's proximity to transmission lines environmental factors and the like And so they provided us that information in generally speaking 10 acres of land will power one megawatt of energy And so the proposed projects that currently are in front of the board represent about 30,000 acres So as far as recommendations and for how staff evaluated the text Many municipalities, including Kentucky, have generated what are called model zoning ordinances. So these are a sort of conceptual framework for thinking about solar that many municipalities use to kind of set as a background, making sure that all the different components, how these are categorized, where they're allowed, what conditions apply to them, and how are they decommissioned kind of stay consistent. The applicant's language borrows heavily from the Kentucky model ordinance. It does make a couple changes when it comes to the model ordinance recommendation for kind of avoiding prime agricultural soils, but otherwise kind of keeps to the main character of that particular document. And so staff used that and kind of built off of that with some changes to develop our own staff alternative language. And that language breaks solar energy systems into three kind of main core parts. The first is integrated systems. These are systems that are actually built into the construction of a particular building. The second are roof-mounted. These are post-construction. These are, you know, what you think of when you think of roof-mounted solar. They require a building to actually be attached to. And the third is ground-mounted, and that is really where staff thought it was most important to kind of draw distinctions and categorize or subcategorize these uses. So based on the size and the scale of the operation, from a small scale, which is up to 2,500 square feet in area, an intermediate, which is from that point up to five acres, and large scale, which is greater than five acres, we have set different use allowances, different requirements as far as siting, as well as the zones that they are allowed to operate. The smaller scale solar, once again, being something that could be sort of accommodated at a neighborhood scale, maybe needs less oversight, where when you get to large scale, you're talking developments that span hundreds of acres, include land disturbance, include other considerations from an environmental perspective that really have kind of a community-wide impact, where a small scale can be limited to a particular property or a particular neighborhood. So a summary of the staff alternative text you have in front of you, there's small technical and formatting changes, as well as sort of reducing some of the duplicity. We modified the categories for ground-mounted units So lowering that down in the intermediate level to something we thought that was a little bit more appropriate Really from our staff's perspective. We looked at this as a way to kind of within commercial and residential context Allow smaller scale solar as an accessory use, but the larger scale really still remained an industrial kind of context We thought when we evaluated the inclusion of ground mounted solar within the agricultural zones staff's real concern was really with the fact that we are early in the stages of sort of solar development and the question as to when these developments go into say Agricultural land what the impact is say after this has been sort of developed So the installation the other facilities necessary in order to establish these hundreds of acres developments What is the impact? Is it still going to be as suitable for agricultural for kind of the prime agricultural purpose that the zone is based around in the future? Staff looked at the literature, looked at what we could find available, and didn't find a good answer to that question because we are so early in the process that that has not been fully studied. Additionally, with kind of the wide scale and scope of the impact of such a decision, staff recommended that they be part of a larger conversation, a larger process that has a little bit more opportunity for community involvement, community buy-in, than sort of the limited scale and scope that we're looking at within the formal zoning ordinance text amendment process. From the framework of not allowing the ground-mounted solar in our agricultural zones, for the remaining zones we established kind of standards for the use, conditional uses, setbacks, buffering requirements, as well as decommissioning plans that spell out sort of the length of time, as well as the provisions for how the land should be treated once a solar energy system is no longer functioning. So here is a graphic and really one of the more impactful kind of sections of the staff alternative text. It lays out exactly where the different types of solar energy systems, integrated, rooftop, and ground-mounted are allowed by zones. Once again, within the urban context, emphasizing that in the residential areas, within our areas that we're wanting to use for community business, this should be a component that we encourage, but it shouldn't be the primary use of land. We want to really focus on maintaining residential and business context in those areas, and then opening that up in our industrial-based zones, our more intense zones. And then as far as the agricultural zones, leaving them to utilize existing structures, existing impervious surface for these types of uses, but leaving the question on ground-mounted solar to a time where there's more information on kind of how those play out long-term, as well as a larger process with more buy-in from the community. So we think that that process would probably look something like the recreation and tourism Zota from 2014. That spawned a number of meetings, stakeholders, a larger process, a larger time for as a community to come together on a particular item. That work group ultimately was implemented and adopted by the Urban County Council, but really pushing for kind of a larger conversation with that moving forward. So staff is recommending approval of the staff alternative text. we have that in front of you along with its corresponding language I'd be happy to entertain any questions that you have of staff at this time and yes. Thank you Daniel. Are there any questions for Daniel at this point? Yes sir Mr. Mickler One question what was the reason that it seems like a lot of those issues or questions you had pertain to sort of larger projects. What was the reason that you had for not allowing the, like, if the small scale is... In the rural zones? Yeah, if it's allowed as an accessory in, like, R1, you know, why not if... Because that would be, like, the scale of, like, basically personal farm use almost. Sure, sure. We wanted to just set the ground-mounted solar, kind of setting that aside as a topic for kind of larger community-based discussion, not reflecting on whether 2,500 square feet or less, but we thought as a whole, really the bounds of, okay, well, is that going to be suitable for AR should be sort of a larger conversation. So at this time, we sort of excluded the ground-mounted solar and the AR entirely to kind of fit within that particular conversation. But the Planning Commission, as always, has the flexibility with any of this. If you think that that is appropriate, we are absolutely able to make that change. All right. No other questions for Daniel. Thank you. Mr. Turner. Let's see if that works. Can you all hear me well enough? Good. I think we're off the air. Yeah, I think the council's preempted. Oh, okay. Man, we're getting high tech. Well, I appreciate your attention. It's been a long day, and I know you've got more to go. We're going to be pretty short. History here is we have been talking about this with some of the stakeholders, the staff, for several years, going back three or four years. And it culminated in what we had proposed in terms of our original presentation, our original ZODA application. We've also had a field, we have one operating agro-voltaic facility in Anderson County, Lawrenceburg, Kentucky. It's about 375 acres, I think, of solar panels. It produces about 40 megawatts or so in that range. It is agrivoltaic. One thing that you haven't heard and we're going to present to you tonight is the sheep herder who operates the herd on that particular project. And I think you'll find he's up to about 700 head of sheep on that property and see some of the pictures related to it. So in answer to your question, too, Robin, you know, probably as long as any solar is used in a particular agricultural, particular farm, it's covered by the ag exemption. You all don't have any jurisdiction over it. They can do it. as long as it's used as a part of their farming operation. So I don't know that that's a big issue here. But although when you get into the question of whether you get a plus and minus on the grid, you get credit for your bill or you pay and so forth, but the agricultural exemption I think would cover it. One of the, with the, we filed several days ago a revised ZODA to the staff recommendation. And it does basically two things. It provides that any large-scale solar or ground-bounded solar in the ag areas, AR or AU, would be agrivoltaic, which means it would have a dual use. You would have to have dual use of agriculture and the solar, along with the solar. We also provided a provision for a land management plan that would have to be submitted along with the application that would be reviewed every five years as well as the decommissioning plan. as a part that's that's that review process under this this proposed ordinance as well as under the siting and state board requirements is that a decommissioning bill plan be filed and approved it's to be determined the value or the amount of decommissioning that it would take to the cost of the decommissioning is determined by a third-party engineer not associated with the developer and a bond has to be posted for that determined amount that is reviewed every five years and the bond and it is adjusted accordingly and the bond would have to be increased same process with the land management plan That would be reviewed every five years and adjusted accordingly, if need be. So I guess the main criticism we've had with regard to this is prime soils, our concern about prime soils. Frankly, what we're proposing alleviates that. You're utilizing and protecting prime soils. You're continuing agriculture on them. You're providing a decommissioning plan that provides for the continuation, continued use of those prime soils. Silicon Ranch, I think you heard during the work session discussion, also has ongoing studies related to this as to the quality of the land as it continues under this agrivoltaic approach. And they're very revealing. The land is improving. You know, there are a lot of things that are agriculture. Sod farming is agriculture. Well, you're taking a couple of inches of topsoil every time you do that. Every time you take that sod, move it somewhere else. You're taking that topsoil. So there's not a perfect system, I don't guess, But as long as you continue to pursue agriculture on it and do something else, I'm not sure what the rub is, where the concern is. And in Kentucky, agriculture's got a very broad definition, as you all know. You don't have to do a thing. You can let your land grow up in forests, and that's considered agriculture under case law. so there's a whole this is a very innovative approach and I like to say this wouldn't be done but if a sheep herder wanted to go out and put up shelter for the sheep in the pasture that would rotate and let the sun get to the pasture he could do it right now under the he or she could do it under the ag exemption and if you did that And then later came along and said, well, I could put some solar panels on that. You might be able to do that, too. You wouldn't do it because the cost is so high. I mean, the cost of putting this operation in is approximately $70 to $80 million. But if you think about it, there's really nothing to be afraid of here as long as you continue to use the land for agriculture. And that's what we propose. I'm going to introduce to you Daniel Bell. Before I do that, I failed to introduce the other folks here from Silicon Ranch. You've met Blake Spurgeon at the work session, along with Blake is Hannah Norton and Jeannie Brown, both from Silicon Ranch sitting back there with Blake. And, you know, they're available to answer any questions that you can. But who I want to introduce to you right now is Daniel Bell, who is the shepherd who owns and runs the flock at the Silicon Ranch facility in Anderson County over in Lawrenceburg. And I know some of you had an opportunity to go. I know a number of the staff went over to that facility. And, you know, we can arrange other visitations as well. But it's anyway, Daniel. Mr. Turner. Yes. I'm a little confused. Garrett County or Anderson County? I'm sorry. Garrett County. I don't know. It's been a long day. It's been a long day. I'm sorry. Excuse me. Thanks for the correction. Everyone. Can you hear me? I don't know how to make this thing work. Yeah. Okay. I'm Daniel Bell. I'm your neighbor. We're just about an hour away in Garrard County, Kentucky, in Lancaster. Okay. I don't think it's ready. Yep. They're pulling it up. There you go. Awesome. And so I'm the owner of Hazelbrook Farm. We're a small farm. We have 170 acres on our personal farm. We had a sheep flock of 300 to 350. And then we literally just drove down the road one day and saw the solar farm. I was like, oh, wow. So we reached out to them and partnered with them to run our herd over there. And we have already got to 700. We're going to be at around 1,000 next year after we land. So I'll just tell you it's been great for us and our family. This partnership with them has enabled us to go from zero paid employees to four employees. One of them is my son. Over there if you want to wave. And Kanan has got a young family. He's working full-time on this solar farm. we also have actually I have another son who's 18 and he is working part time, he's going to college but he also works there in the summer and of course when we work in sheep or whatever he gets to come, but he's getting paid and then we also have another two part time employees, so went from zero employees to having four employees and also just being able to increase tremendously our production. So it's been a great thing for us. It's provided financial stability for not only our farming operation but our family. So, and I wanted to add this too, it's really strengthened our bonds. You know, my son here, he's got unique strengths that I don't have and I have strengths that he doesn't have. So we can, you know, this farming operation and being able to work together like this has really strengthened our family a lot. I didn't know really how the sheep would take going into the solar panels. I just didn't know what to expect. They've never been in a solar farm. When I turned them in there, I was blown away. They love it. And the reason, I figured out why, not only is the grass was really good, there was so much clover, and I don't know if anybody's a farmer here, but those are good things but the clover was there was so abundant that I thought they would bloat which is like their belly just swelling out and so but but luckily they had they had lambs and when we turned them in had plenty of room after having those lambs in their bellies but they did great they stayed fat all summer long this is the first year we've had them into the solar panels but yeah so the reason they like the solar farm is because it provides shade now that's a game changer when you're running livestock most farms have like one shade tree or they have a creek down at the in the valley or something like that and and if you've ever farmed you know all in during the day when it's hot they're just like us they get hot and they want to go lay in the shade and so all their manure and urine and everything goes in that shade tree or down there by that creek that's facts in this situation all throughout the day they're able to stay spread out and all that manure stuff is going right there on the ground so for us we really like it because they're comfortable they because the temperature you know they're not hot they're able to graze throughout the day more so than they would otherwise. So which means they eat more, stay healthier. And when you're raising lamb, that's important because we need them to milk. And then the last thing there is just those panels will offer protection. You guys have seen we've had just like freezing rain just show up out of the middle of nowhere. And when you're running 1,000 sheep, it's hard to find shelter just like that, especially if you're on an 800-acre farm. You got to get them from one side to the other. So this provides shelter. It's a big deal for us. So as a farmer, I love it. And I know there's a lot of discussion about soil, but when you're returning all the carbon back to the soil, that's how the Great Plains were made. When the buffalo would run through in a herd and trample the grass, eat some, poop a lot, And all that carbon just kept piling up, building organic matter. So that's exactly what these sheep are doing. Silicon Ranch will not allow us to hay it and take the hay and sell it. We don't do that. So everything stays there. It's going to be there as long as that solar farm is going to be there. All that grass is going to stay on the place. And we do mow. We do maintain the place a few times a year. we have to go through and mow just because the sheep will always eat what they prefer to eat, and then you start getting stuff that's not preferred growing, and it'll seed and stuff. So you have to keep that from seeding out. Also, I put on here that you're preserving that farmland. I don't know if you guys live out in a rural community like me, but when farms go up for sale, they get split up every time. They never grow. I mean, I have never seen someone buying farm and buying another farm. I mean, it just don't happen that way. They always get split up. This farm isn't getting split up. It's staying together. And so I can say that's a big deal. And it's also not going to be a Walmart parking lot or anything else. So, and I think Darby already mentioned it, but the dual purpose, how many farms create power and raise food, you know, so that's a big deal. Most of them are either raising crops or whatever, but even if you're doing crops, especially cropping, you're removing stuff. You're taking that organic matter away, and that's why you have to add fertilizer every year, because the fertility goes away. And that's not going to be the case here. And then lastly, I just want to say I think Silicon Ranch gets it. They have been extremely supportive to us. I mean, I just, like, and they want to be good neighbors. We have a neighborhood that joins us. And when we were in discussions with them, I said, look, I can't have 700 or 300 sheep in someone's yard eating their bushes and pooping in their lawn. So I would like to add another fence. So we already have a perimeter fence, and then they have like a solar array fence. But we also graze them on that perimeter, you know. And so we came back 50 foot on that perimeter, so it's like an extra perimeter. But anyways, we put another fence. And the reason we did that is just so that there was no risk, you know, that they would ever get into that neighborhood. And so they're very supportive to us, and they spent a boatload of money just making the farm better for us to be able to use. So they are supportive of us. I think they do care. And I would just say our neighborhood, they love seeing our sheep. When we have lambs in the spring, they get to come through right by that neighborhood, and it's very pastoral to see a field full of sheep. And they like watching them little lambs run around. So it's worked out in our community. We like it. Obviously, our family has greatly benefited from it. So that's really all I have to say. Any questions that you don't like to have for Daniel? Seeing none. Thank you, Daniel. I guess what I'm, you know, I'm a little frustrated, I guess. in the sense that this is a very innovative opportunity to address the concerns for renewable energy that all of us have a responsibility for. And there are many ways to do it. There's rooftop solar. There's parking lot solar. Lexmark's done a 10-acre solar site in the middle of their campus. We just, they're making, they run bees in that and have a beer, a bee beer, honey beer, that they have made from that. So there are many ways to do it. It's all parts and pieces. But in the overall scheme of things, large-scale solar, when it can be done, is hugely impactful. and when it can be done correctly and innovatively to preserve the land and utilize the land for food and fiber, for agricultural purposes, what's the deal? You know, I don't, that's the best of both worlds. Can anything bad happen? Sure. Anything can happen bad on a farm. I remember one farm was over towards Scott County. The guy was grading. He was taking the whole farm down and cutting out rock and basically made it a quarry. You have bad actors. You have people that don't maintain the land. You have people that don't do the proper thing. But there's always risk. There's risk in anything. do. But the rules and the framework are there to make this work, to make this work, to provide the necessary regenerative energy that we all need and is inspired to in the comprehensive plan, and to continue to use the land for food, fiber, and agricultural purposes and protect the land. So that's what we're about. And we think the revised ZODA that we presented does that and gives you the opportunity to move along with what is absolutely coming because we're, as a national policy, we're going off fossil fuels. So we've got to come up with something. So I respectfully request that you all consider the revised ZODA that we, text amendment that we presented to allow the opportunity to dual use the use the land in a very productive way and any questions you have i'd be glad to thank you mr turner mr ovins mr turner uh help me one one question right now um Mr. Bell in speaking a moment ago talking about grazing and he kept talking about the grasses wasn't allowed to cut it for hay or anything like that uh sheep loved it two weeks ago the gentleman you had that was here and speaking in regards to grazing and so forth he clarified and When I asked him, he said, no, it's predominantly perennials. So perennials is a lot different than grasses. So which is it? It's different on different of their application, of their facilities. I thought two weeks ago, I thought we were talking about the same facility in Garrett County. Yeah. I'm an ag major at UK, by the way. So anyways, grasses are perennials. And then there's annuals, which is like flowers that will die in the winter. And you need seed to grow them back. Okay. I heard something different, though. Yeah, I mean. Sure. Thanks. One of the criticisms that I've read that you probably could address, but maybe not some of the others because we're not there yet, is water pollution from installation. Can you talk about what happened when they installed these? So we didn't see anything like that in our community. But, you know, you can see the space here, right? So if it rains when they're like this, it's like they're not even there. No, I'm talking about the process of installing. When they're making it, yeah. I can't speak to that. I really don't know the details on that. You weren't there when it happened? to be honest, this is God's honest truth. I drove down the road and it was built. I was like, what? Where did that come from? You know? So like, um, yeah, that's how, for me, that's how it happened. Like I, I literally drove down the road and saw, saw the solar farm and then just reached out to some contacts that I thought might, might know who, who they were. So, would you mind repeating your question just one time? Yeah. I think you addressed this a little bit in the work session, but in terms of one of the criticisms that I have read, and I think it's been circulated to us, is that soil disruption and water pollution that occurs when these are installed. And I think you all had some mechanism for installing. Yes. It's mitigated that. Am I remembering that correct? Yes. We partner with a company called Next Tracker that they build a system that helps the panels track the sunlight, which helps us eliminate the need for grading. and so if there's like a rolling hill or something like that, we don't have to grade nearly as much as we would if we didn't have that system on there. So that helps mitigate water runoff and things like that and helps keep more of that natural topography of the land. So when we have panels, we just pile drive them in. There's no drilling, there's no concrete or anything like that. We just have a pile driver that drives the steel straight in. like driving fence posts. Yeah and I think the other thing is too as a part of the process you would have to go through you know you have to meet all the grading requirements related to construction, water control, so forth and so on. So you'd have to have that plan to get to go through. All that is already in place, basically. Mr. McClure. I have kind of a related question and concern, and this has to do with the grading. I was, you know, we have these prime soils here, And when we do a new subdivision, at the end, they have some of the worst soil in the country over and over. And we can see that sort of dichotomy in our older neighborhoods here where there was, you know, minimal gradings. Houses are up on hills still in our newer neighborhoods where the hill's gone and the soil's gone with it. I was sort of curious, and I'm by no means, you know, academically informed on this, but I did sort of do some searches on it. And I did find pretty quickly some sort of industry publications that were talking about it, some of which were talking about what you're sort of talking about, ways to minimize the grading and sort of talking about getting away from the extensive grading that had been kind of defined as part of a lot of these early projects. And, you know, as you're sort of talking about, you know, merging these two, as I'm thinking about it, though, in the context of Azota, you know, when we're really looking at it beyond, And we're not really looking at it in the context of one specific project. And you sort of hit on this earlier that the soils were sort of one of the main sort of criteria. I see in your amended one that there has to be sort of a plan. but I guess that seems a little vague to me, so I guess I would want you to maybe speak to that, in particular with that sort of concern about, you know, basically the impact if we were to have a project to flatten these sort of hills, because that, without question, would significantly impact the soil quality. Oh, that's a very fair question, and I know exactly what you're talking about, particularly in residential subdivisions. The first thing the developer does is scrape all the topsoil because topsoil is not very good load-bearing. So you've got to get down to clay or whatever to set your footers and so forth. They're supposed to return that topsoil, but they, you know, it gets pretty thin at times, and sometimes they just say, well, the topsoil on the side will take care of it. You and I know when you've dug in, you try to put a bush in, you dig down, try to dig a foot-deep hole, and you're in the middle of clay, and you've got a clay pot. So that's not what we do here, because there are some structures that have to be built, which are basically the transformers and the inverters. The power comes in as DC current, and to go on the grid, it has to be converted to AC, which is the inverter. and then you have to have the transformer transmission facility there to get it in, to collect it, put it into the pipeline. So there are a few structures that go along with this, but you see from a lot of photographs, they're not very invasive and they're pretty small. But other than that, it's very important as a part of agrivoltaics to have the prime soils there. That's one of the big attractions to this type of project, particularly in this part of the country. The land management plan is actually it is a little vague in there, but it talks about the elements that you're talking about that you would want to see. That's the function of kind of the conditional use process of saying, all right, what do we want to see is a land management plan because it's going to be different. It may be different in different locations. But the general topic of what type of grasses, what type of fertilization, what are you doing for pest control, how are you rotating your livestock, what is the plan for the utilization of the soil, what are you doing. if you have any water issues what are you doing to maintain the streams so forth and so on it'll all be tailored to the satisfaction of the Board of Adjustment through that process to whatever is whatever they think is required for a particular site but the idea is to say how are you going to manage this land and protect the prime soil Thank you.