Please come forward. The third twenty twenty five welcome to the planning commission work session. First on the agenda we have a book presentation climate miss Judith humble. Okay all right. There we go. It was pointed out to me that this is the first time we have been apart but you all may recall we converted October to urban growth and then we don't schedule them in December and November. So it's good to have you all back in this setting so that we can have a conversation, talk to you all about some things that are coming up, and hear from you all as well before we then get back into the formality of next week. And then I also wanted to point out, and I'll say some more about this at the end of the meeting, but leading our meeting today we have two new managers that have been in the division of planning for quite some time but they're in brand new roles as of the end of December. We have Hal Bailey who is the manager of the long-range planning section. And we have Kenzie Gleason who is, she comes to us from the transportation planning and she's been working for the government for more than 20 years and she has truly worked her way up. And now she is the manager of our brand-new section, outreach and strategic planning. Now, Mr. Jackson is back here. We used to have a strategic planning section and he was the manager of that. And then we lost that and Kenzie worked for Mr. Jackson at that time. And so now we've kind of come full circle and here Henry is a guest in our office and Kenzie is the manager of a newly reconstituted section. So we'll say more about our personnel at the end but just wanted you all to know who's going to be part of our meeting today and to welcome you all back to the work sessions. Thank you. Is this mic live? Okay. Can everybody hear me in the back row? Okay, great. All right. Well, we appreciate the opportunity to appear here today. We've come bearing gifts. So as Jim said, we're going to give you a very special book. I'll take a couple of minutes to just explain who we are. I'm Judy Humble. I'm the chair of the bluegrass climate action team here in Lexington. And as Jim said, my colleague and very valued team member Henry Jackson is here with me. We formed about four years ago in response to just increasing worries about climate change and reading in the news about how it's advancing. And we wanted to work with cities because we think a lot of solutions are going to come from cities. So we do climate outreach and education with city governments in our region. We want to enhance awareness of climate change, get cities inspired to do things and also generate discussions about strategies that we can enact to protect our communities. At present, we facilitate what I think is a very important and unique group. It's a work group that combines members of city government with leaders from the community who are interested in climate change and we meet quarterly to discuss what Lexington can do to mitigate climate change and protect our citizens and our land and our resources. We share information about what's happening in the community, what the city government is doing, and we create projects. So one project we're taking on in 2025 is a task force that will look at how we can reduce carbon emissions in the boundary expansion as that project begins and gets underway and we add more paved surfaces, more buildings to our community and risk increasing our carbon footprint. We're very excited about that and very appreciative of the fact that this is probably the only work group of its kind in Kentucky that has regular meetings with city government to problem solve. We see the planning commission as important gatekeepers in the challenge as our choices about land development and the qualities of our buildings will have a significant impact on our carbon footprint. We now have a goal of net zero emissions by 2045 embedded in our comp plan. We are very happy about that. That's going to come around pretty fast and so we think that all of our decisions from here forward need to be evaluated through that lens. So the book we're bringing is here's my show and tell, it's the climate book by Greta Thunberg. It's a compilation. As you know, she is one of our most renowned activists in this arena. And it's a very useful book. It's a collection of about 70 very short essays on every aspect of climate change from why we know it's really happening to what solutions are working, what we need to be doing. It's extremely readable. So if you read one essay a night you'll have it finished in a couple of months. There's a blurb on the inside cover that's kind of a guarantee about this book and it says we still have time to change the world. From Greta Thunberg comes the essential handbook for making it happen. So we want everyone to have this book. We gave it to city council last year and they have a book discussion group so they brought it to their book discussion group and divided up sections and some of them shared with me what they thought about it and what they thought was readable. Our appreciation for what you all do for the city has been greatly enhanced by sitting through meetings, sometimes in their entirety and just realizing how many challenging problems are presented to you each day for solutions and hopefully wise solutions and we know you're a hardworking group. So thank you for all you do and for your time today. Henry has a box of books with one for everybody. So if you have any questions, I'll address any questions and otherwise we hope you enjoy and use these books. Thank you. Any questions? Henry? Should we, Jim, should we just leave the books back there for everybody to take one on the way out? Okay. Well, we thank you. Appreciate you allowing us to come today. Thank you for coming. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. All right. Tracy Wade. House bill 443. Good afternoon, chairman Forrester, members of the commission. As a refresher we'll do a couple of slides to kind of remind you, I guess, back from September, August when I spoke about house bill 443 previously. I wanted to give you a chance to look back at house bill 443 previously. And then let you know where we are going and kind of at what point in that process we are today. So as a refresher, house bill 443 was adopted last spring, April 4th of 2024, in order to create a new section of KRS-100 that will or mandates that local governments really update their policies, in order to have objective standards and a ministerial process for development plans and final subdivision plans. So that law states that we must have any changes or any process updates in effect by July 1st of 2025. So we are focusing in now and aiming to meet that effective date and deadline. KRS specifically these two changes are listed. So except as provided in subsection 2 below, this section of KRS-100 now requires that ordinances, rules and regulations must be adopted pursuant to KRS-100 for subdivision plans and development plans to be in the form of objective standards and applied ministerially. I would say that the majority of our zoning ordinance, that's fine, the majority of our zoning ordinance meets those requirements. Their objective standards meaning there's a distance required for a setback or a maximum height. So those are objective. People can measure those and know exactly what the limits are for any development. And then applied ministerially for the most part we do that as well. There are some exceptions. And then the second part of this particular new law says that where these rules, ordinances and regulations are present, the deciding body, the planning commission, may have discretion when, under two circumstances, when an applicant seeks a deviation from the objective standard or where there's, it's been determined that there's a, if we apply a strict ministerial evaluation of an objective standard, there will be a specific threat to public health safety or welfare. So that is the onus to prove that. It would be on the staff and presenting that information to the commission in order to allow for some discretion to be used by the commission. So, again, that regulation went into law in April and takes effect in July. So the three things, again, I mentioned I think in August or September were three key terms that are important as we move forward are understanding what objective standards are, so measurable, specific, and I mentioned setbacks, height limits. Those are equitable and unbiased. So there are examples in our ordinance that need to be changed to make sure that we are meeting those requirements. The applied ministerial part is a little more complicated. That addresses our current process. So ministerial means that it is an administrative review and there is no personal discretion involved. That is how we treat final record plats currently. They go to our technical committee for review. If they meet all of the requirements of the zoning ordinance and the land subdivision regulations, then they are approved at that stage and the planning commission does not see them. The only time you see final record plats is if they are asking for a waiver of the land subdivision requirements. And that's where your discretion comes in when there's a waiver. So again, setting out conditions for applicable or application of discretion, we need to be able to do that so that all the applicants understand what criteria or what basis the planning commission will use to apply that discretion and make decisions about changes. So we need to establish the parameters for the commission and then this would be similar to how we evaluate a waiver of land subdivision requirements. So currently our staff has drafted text amendment language for the following chapters, and we're going to go over that. Not the specific language, but broadly go over that today. Some updates to definitions. Article 6, which deals with amendments to the zoning map or text amendments. Article 9, which deals with amendments to the zoning map or text amendments. Article 10, which deals with amendments to the zoning map or text amendments. Article 9, which deals with our group residential projects, and again, those are those multifamily projects, more than one residential structure on a lot. Article 11 and 12 are two particular zones. B5P, which is our interchange service business near the interstates. Our commercial centers, our B6P zone. Article 15 has some language about dealing with process, but there's a vagueness or confusion in a section of the ordinance that the board of adjustment has struggled with, so we'd like to update that particular section. Article 16, we need to update some requirements for drive-thrus and drive-up windows and also provide for some commercial access standards from traffic engineering. Probably the biggest change we'll see is in article 21 for development plans, and those are going to be updated as well. There's a possibility that we will have some changes to article 18 as well. We're working through those with the division of environmental services. They had a few requested tweaks, but they weren't very specific, so we'll see if we can squeeze those in, too. But a more general update on development plans and process changes. And then article 23 and 28 both refer to article 21 about development plans and process changes. So that's a general overview of the changes, so we want to update some zoning ordinance definitions for clarity, consistency, and to address process changes. Update the ZOTA filing process. That's something that I spoke to you about also in the fall, not allowing outside entities to file text amendments and instead follow the attorney general's opinion about only governmental entities can file or request text amendments. So updating that information. And then we also found some confusion with our ordinance about amending conditional zoning restrictions and whether that requires a second council hearing, so changing some of the text for that to provide clarity. Third, removing some discretionary criteria and the process ease and replacing them with objective criteria where possible. If it's not possible, we're striking some of the what appears to be non-subjective requirements. Creating standards in the ordinance for items that traditionally were part of other division sign-off processes like DES. I mentioned they are requesting some small updates to article 18 and then traffic engineering adding commercial access standards for article 16. Reducing the number of items that require hearing and implementation of our updated development plan process. Before I jump into the current process a little bit deeper, we do have a handout that gives a more detailed list of the changes we're bringing to you. And, again, that's still very generic. So if we want to talk about any of them, we'd be happy to cover those briefly today. But this is just a kind of brief overview of what we're doing. This is just a kind of a summary of the changes that we expect to process in the coming months. I think the biggest change is to the process for development plans. Obviously that's the section of House Bill 443 that says discretion really isn't going to be on the table anymore. And I want to be clear, the commission has been using discretion. We've been using discretion throughout this process. The commission has been using discretion. Frequently. In fact, I would go so far as to say last week we used quite a bit of discretion in evaluating a development plan related to the Mr. Nichols nodding in agreement, a development plan in evaluating whether the rendering matched what was proposed at the zoning hearing. So, yeah. I think that's it. Thank you. I think we should be careful and maybe law can follow up on that, but the amount of discretion we're using has, I think, pushed our limits and could be why the state is now saying no more discretion. So, yeah. Okay. So, in that instance, when a development plan was proposed, what was proposed in the development plan was a discretionary plan. So, the commission has been using discretion. We've been using discretion. We've been using discretion. We've been using discretion. We've been using discretion. So, the question is, when a developer or an applicant brings us something as part of the sale, this is what it's going to look like, and that substantially changes between that yes vote and the subsequent follow-up vote, yes on the zone change, now here's the development plan. So, I guess what I'm getting at is if they introduce it into the zoning, I guess that's what they're going to do. I'm going to let the law department answer that. Okay. So, we're talking about a couple of different things all at once right now. So, let me try to separate them out and see if it's helpful. What you're talking about in terms of what happened at the hearing last week and how that went, that is a little bit different because in that case we're talking about the development plan that was agreed to at the time of the zone change that the development plan, the building, the layout, would be substantially the same as what was shown and sold as part of the zone change to both you guys and to the council. So, that's a little bit different. How that's going to play out going forward, we'll have to see. We don't know because we're not sure how the development community is going to react to this in the way that we are. But going forward, well, let me say before we talk about going forward, where we are right now, you're all's responsibilities are still in regard to development plans, subdivision plans, plats, except where it's specifically outlined otherwise which is the result of having to do some of these changes. Then we're going to have to make some of these changes that we're going to make are still largely ministerial right now. And so in instances where there's not some specific note or something like that, we might need to tread a little more carefully in how far we go with our discretion on something that is not a zone change. A zone change has very much more wide discretion. The hearing is handled differently. It's much more quasi-judicial in terms of what we have in our ordinances and in our regulations. If an applicant meets those, we need to be very careful treading forward on that and make sure we don't get too far afield from that. Now, right now, until July 1, you still have a little latitude there because of the way our zoning ordinance is written. Going forward, after July 1, you're going to have a little if any. And so that's going to be a shift for all of us. And we don't know how that's going to play out. The planning staff, they deal with these people that are coming in asking every day so they may have more input into this than I do. But we're trying to lay out criteria that meets with the legislation in House Bill 443 that makes things very objective. If the developer meets those standards, you know, it has to be approvable, right? That's basically what the ordinance is saying or the legislation is saying and what our ordinances are going to have to say. So where the not definitive line is going to come in is when the developer comes in and says, okay, well, I meet all these things except I want to vary this one. So that's going to be a little bit for your discretion. But we're not exactly sure what that's going to look like right now because obviously nobody knows. The other thing is, you know, what is going to happen if they come in with a plan and it doesn't meet it? I mean, I think our answer is going to be on the flip side of that, doesn't meet it, right? I mean, we're required to have a plan. I mean, it's going to flow both ways is what I'm saying. So from now until July 1, we've gotten a little far afield in some of our hearings. And particularly in situations where there's no note taking it to a different level or there's no, we need to try to stay within our ordinances and the discretion that is allowed in them right now. After July 1, we're going to have a very different process and a very different analysis going forward and we'll have to see how some of those tweaks and different circumstances play out and deal with them the best that we can. But we're trying to set up a system so we're ready to do that because we have to. I mean, we're mandated by the state legislature to be compliant by July 1. I think the fuzzy part there from your perspective is that information is different than yours, Ms. Ward. So we all, you know, are evaluating and looking at that information in a different way. And bless Graham Pohl as an architect, his vision and how he interprets that information is different than me, than Mr. Nichols, than all of us. So he was able to share that information with it and the applicant agreed to it. And even before we get to the new world, that substantial compliance was volunteered by the developer. Are we in a position to be able to ask going forward if they show us renderings to ask for and I know we're getting into creating potentially subjective territory. I'm going to give an analogy. We have laws against pornography. We don't have cut and dry definitions for what pornography is. You know it when you see it. What you say and what I say may be different. So we still have legal standards for pornography. Do we have the ability to ask for substantial compliance even though it opens the door to some subjectivity in constituting and defining what constitutes substantial compliance? I would say no. That's a great question and I tend to lean towards the no as well. That's why it is important that we get these standards and these ordinances as clear and concise as possible and the planning staff is really working hard on this. I have them. I haven't reviewed them near to the level they have yet. That's why we're trying to get those as objective and clear up front because I think if we go to that route where we ask for them to do something that is going to open the door for an interpretive of what does that mean, we may run afoul of the statute. In my mind the bigger question is going to be when you have a situation like evolved last week where they volunteer that, then what are we going to do with it? I don't know. I mean we'll have to talk about that. We may have to find a way to make the note less flexible. In other words, if you're asking for us to put that on as a note, the note may be more inflexible so it doesn't use terms like well, whatever, substantially compliant. It may be very, very objective and that may not be something that people desire. It's going to be a new thing for everyone. It's going to be something that I think is going to impact everybody on both sides. At least until we understand how that works. Because it's not the system we've been using. Let me push that a little bit further in that the notion of substantial compliance, as I understand it, is not a system we've been using. It's not a system we've been using. It's not a system we've been using. The notion of substantial compliance, as I understand it, came about because, and I'm talking about a time before I got on the planning commission, but I know people around this table who have complained about designs that have been built now and feel like there was bait and switch. What they approved and what got built. I know on the development side there's been a lot of discussion about that. I don't know if you can answer that question. But in the new world we're going into, will these objective standards protect us from bait and switch kind of operations? I think we have to be careful because you're approving a site plan, which is the layout of a building, where is the parking, where are the access points. Nowhere in our ordinance does it say how much of a building should be brick, how tall a story is and if it needs to be that tall all the way around or only on this frontage. If the ordinance defines something, we can hold an applicant to that. If our ordinance has no reference to design standards like that, then there's not really a way for our staff at the government or the planning commission to mandate those things. Those are subjective. They are no longer an objective standard. In that frame, we haven't shared them with the applicants. Any of the people coming in to develop, how are they to know what the expectations are if it's not written in an ordinance or regulation or a rule. There will need to be process changes. That's what we're taking a stab at first. If there needs to be updates and design standards enumerated in our ordinance, that will have to be a follow-up text amendment. Just to further to that, hypothetically, like I said, we don't really know what it's going to look like. Applicants and people coming in are going to have a different playing field as well. How they handle that, I don't know. It may require more in order for them to get their desired outcome. It may require them to do more work up front than they're used to doing. I don't know. We're going to have to see how that goes. We can't go outside of what is going to be in hard and fast objective on here. We'll see how that happens. We're going to try to address it as best we can and see what happens on July 1st. Hopefully, we'll have some clarity before then. The current development plan process, this is just a cut out from our handbook, the development handbook for the Planning Commission development plan process. It's informational on the left-hand side and then the right-hand side has the flow chart. If we zoom in a little bit, the preliminary development plan occurs first. Most often, those are associated with our zone changes. That's where we hear some of those promises of, yes, at the next stage, I will be substantially in agreement with something. Or, I'll address a trail that's required by an adopted master plan. I'll address the trail at the next stage. I think what Tracy Jones just mentioned is we might have to have more clarity up front for the commission to say, yes, that agrees with the comprehensive plan clearly. We don't want you to wait until the next stage to demonstrate it because that next development plan might not be coming to the commission. It might be approved at a staff ministerial level. In terms of the preliminary development plan, we would expect no change there because your zone change is discretionary. You're evaluating that plan and the request for a new zone against the comprehensive plan. Those preliminary development plans will stay the same. That meaning, every zone change development plan should come to the commission for evaluation. For a final development plan, which is that next stage, our process change would be still applying, still going to our technical or staff review, and then still going to our technical review committee. At that stage, the technical review committee, instead of it being a recommendation to subdivision committee or the planning commission, they would say, are you meeting all of the requirements? If the answer is yes, it can be approved. They can go to have a year still to get it certified and move forward, and the planning commission may never see it. If they come to the technical committee and say, no, we're not meeting everything, we would like to give them another month to decide, yes, I can meet it. I'll make these changes. Now that I know clearly all the requirements and have discussed, sometimes there needs to be negotiations to meet traffic engineering's requirement. I might have to make a change over here to something else on the plan. If they can meet it, again, it can be approved. If they choose not to meet something, they could ask for discretion, discretionary review at the planning commission, and at that point, we would move it forward to the subdivision committee and then on to the planning commission for evaluation, and that would include a waiver request. We do need to lay out the waiver request requirements, but we anticipate Louisville already does this, so anticipate using their ordinance as a model and clarifying that something the board of adjustment already grants for a dimensional variance can't be considered by the commission. We already have a body that does that, but there might be locational requirements or something that might be discouraged in essence by our ordinance. For instance, double drive-throughs. If you want a double drive-through, you're going to the commission because that is in addition to maybe some normal circumstances. Not every drive-through needs to have a double drive-through, and we think that creates public health safety conflicts, so we want the commission to evaluate those. Okay. Tracy, that's exactly what I was just questioning in my head is ultimately there will always be discretion because we're human beings, because who determines if a requirement would pose a specific threat to public health, safety, or welfare? Who makes that determination? The staff would have to evaluate the plan and come to the commission with substantial evidence that we as a staff think there's a public safety issue with the applicant's development plan asking the commission to hold them to either a different higher standard, a different standard than what the ordinance says. That's really on the staff to come up with those referrals. Thank you. Yes. Let me ask you this. Just trying to figure this out as you are, too. Being in subdivision committee, being on the planning commission, the staff will bring either the committee or the commission a development plan with 17, 18 conditions, two or three discuss items. Are those discuss items going to be there for us to come to still? I anticipate they won't be quite the same on the staff report. It will almost be like requested waiver and then list the elements of the waiver that the applicant or developer is asking for that need your consideration. I think you answered the question, but if it's something that's different on sidewalks, because we discuss sidewalks or trails, it's going to come to us, but it's going to say they're requesting a waiver for this reason. Right. Okay. Again, not every development plan will need to come to the commission for review. The discretion doesn't need your evaluation if it meets all of the ordinance requirements. It still needs to be certified that it meets all the ordinance requirements. Jim will continue to sign plans that meet all the regulations. One other question. Just running through my head and so forth. What we have as a consent agenda now, those things wouldn't be coming to us. Right. The other items, we're going to have to inherit as a waiver request. Yes. Just as an example, right now, your waivers of land subdivision requirements do not have any notice. We don't notify adjacent property owners. The applicant asks for it. We converse with the relevant divisions and draft a staff report for the commission on that. Louisville notifies adjacent property owners if there's a waiver request. Again, it takes a little more time for the staff, but does provide then adjoining property owners to know, oh, they're asking for a waiver to change X. I can come to the meeting, hear more about it, see the plan, and either support or object to it. I think that provides a bit more transparency to waivers. Are you saying that you will provide that notice to the neighborhood? To adjoining property owners. That's how Louisville does it. As a staff, we've talked that that seems like a reasonable approach. In terms of timing, as I mentioned, there is a deadline for making sure that we're following that state law. What the staff would ask for is next week an initiation of text. We will provide that to you Wednesday by 5. As you know, it's a process. That initial text will be available, but we'll be working through making changes to it, reflecting your recommendations as well as the public recommendation as we go through the process. We'll send notices out in February to provide notice to our registered neighborhood associations. Our goal is to have March zoning committee discussions and also public hearing. That gives us time to refer that back or send the final reports on to the council. Then they have an opportunity to make any changes or review it in May and June. It can be adopted by July. At this point, we're finishing up compiling the initiation text for you for next week. We are planning to be available at the monthly development open houses that the commissioner's office hosts, which is the first Friday of the month here in the Phoenix building. The staff is also available at any time via phone calls or meetings to discuss with citizens these changes. We anticipate making adjustments again through the process. Then if necessary or desired, we're willing to come back and talk about the specifics next work session if that's something the commission desires. Again, we'll mail the notices out and post the text to the planning website and then be prepared in March for zoning committee and then the public hearing. I'm happy to answer some more questions about specifics of text. If we want to get into any of that or if we want to wait until February, that's fine, too. Yes, sir. Yes. Can you provide us any commentary that was made available regarding the state's reasoning behind voting for introducing and voting to approve House Bill 443? My understanding is that the discretion that Lexington and perhaps other communities are using, just the sense that that goes beyond what the KRS 100 regulations are meant to do. Were there any comments on how that overreach led to delays in development or could have contributed to the housing problems that we're having in these communities? I'm sure that's possible that there's been delays because of some of the maybe back and forth discussions. Mr. Woodall came to the planning commission twice for his development plan and postponed once before that, so obviously that took longer than they were probably hoping or anticipating. But I don't know, I'm not sure about the last part of that. Do you know? Mr. Nichol, as Tracy said, we're basing on what we've heard. We weren't at the committee meetings, we weren't at the legislature when they discussed this, so we only know what's been told to us second-hand. The specifics of what you asked were not relayed to us as the reason, but we do understand that this legislation was targeted because of Lexington. But I don't know if that creates, I mean, obviously time is money, so if projects are delayed, that does increase the overall cost, but I'm not sure if there's a direct correlation to increased housing costs. Does that make sense? Okay. Another question regarding the timing. We're looking at six to seven months now from initiation of application to building permit, or let's just say approval. Are there areas that you all have looked into to try to reduce that time frame, or do you see any places where we could make an effort to reduce the time frame? Well, I think that taking out the discretion questions eliminates some of the delays that perhaps developers have been seeing, but we haven't looked at changing or reducing the length of the application process. It would still be time to go to the tech committee for the applicant to evaluate whether they want to meet the ordinances or ask for a waiver, so that takes about a month, and then planning commission. If anything, we would lengthen the process. Okay. Is there anything that we can do to speed up the process once it hits city council? Looks like there's a month between when a report is submitted to when council can make a decision whether to approve or to have a hearing between five and six. Is there anything we can do to speed up that process, or is that outside of our bounds? So the final report schedule is based on when the council meets and when you meet, so it's really dictated by when they'll accept our final reports to them from your decision to them, and then we are hoping that they will schedule a committee meeting if they need to and go ahead and know that now that May is an opportunity to discuss this if they want to and pencil it in on their schedule if possible, then that allows them to act in June so that we are on track to implement in July, which again is a bit of a brain bender for our staff in getting behind process changes, and it will be for applicants as well, I think. Mr. Nichol, the statute also makes an alternative provision for zone change approval by the Urban County Council, but they would have to initiate that change in our zoning for us to adopt that, which would essentially complete the zoning process within three weeks, 30 days, maybe three weeks to 30 days of planning commission action, but the council would have to choose to adopt that process, and so far they've been given that option, been presented over the years and they have chosen not to do that. So just in this context, following up on Mr. Nichol's question, am I remembering correctly that we had a consultant study a couple of years ago that looked at our process and made some recommendations about how to make it more efficient? And we have made some of those changes internally and I think some of this will help with the process changes as well, and the commissioner's office does have that study and is I would say one of your responsibilities is to evaluate it and find ways to make improvements. We're doing something with the results of that study, is what you're saying. So I had just a couple of questions and one of it has to do with the hearing last time, but I think I see it as a different perspective. I see those properties being in a second tier urban neighborhood with our comprehensive plan calling for recommended zones which were already applied to those properties as R4 and or upzoning R5. So you have sort of a ministerial process where they could have designed an apartment complex and put it in on that zoning, but we've allowed people flexibility to do more innovative and creative projects and bring in density and in the process sort of stipulated unique conditions like last time we stipulated the conditions that they needed to implement what they proposed and also stipulations which we wouldn't normally see like minimum density was also a stipulation on that particular one and I guess I see development I see I mean I fear if we go back to something too rigid that people will check the boxes but then we would end up with another R5 apartment complex on parcels like that instead of something more creative if you take away a lot of the discretion. Now I know that's a zone change, but even small items like conversations about dumpster placement as to how far across the parking lot are people at midnight walking to throw away their trash you know the dumpster placement may meet the ministerial guidelines I mean I'm just sort of wondering how we I mean I would like people to be able to do creative things so I want like more creativity allowed but those have been done through sort of conversations with discretion to some extent yes so with a zone change I think there won't be the opportunity to just say substantial agreement it'll have to be are you if you've submitted a rendering are you willing to match that rendering going forward and the applicant would either say yes or no if they're willing to match it and they say yes then there's not we can uphold that they've agreed to it and they've signed the development plan saying I am agreeing to the graphic and textual representation shown here where they don't agree to it that's where we're stretching and I think that's where with the discretion you're saying well if you're not willing to go the extra mile or provide a building that is contextually sensitive here then maybe we don't think it's in agreement with the plan you know that could be where we end up there could be less approvals because you find that the lack of a contextual development is the problem I mean and how do you how in terms of removing the development plan review process I mean I just have I mean we review I mean we're seeing presentations and we review you know city development plans that we also have no control over but those sort of public forums of of conversations like we sort of brought up with the parks department not meeting the tree plantings in the parking lot or the you know cutting down of street trees in order to provide a beautiful dumpster on the sidewalk on Jefferson Street like Fayette County Public Schools intended to do are still I think have a role to play sure and those are public ones where we haven't had discretion either in the actual sort of plan and so I guess I wonder about removing the development plan completely from the public review process well and I guess what is important to think about is the planning commission and ultimately the council have adopted our zoning ordinance and so they have laid out the guide for the expectations of development and and if an applicant can meet those requirements why should they not be approved right they should be they should be I guess I wonder if there should be like like a step to implement that sort of theory where they're still reviewed for one or two years because I think with this change a lot more things will come up and that we'll need to put in there so you know for example like right now the only things in there regarding dumpster placement really have to do with where waste management wants the dumpster not where we as a city want the dumpster and so if we're removing those public hearings and review of the dumpster placement then it's almost like we need to see it for one or two years and see all the horrible dumpster placements that are happening in order to get the list toned in and I think the staff will likely see some of those conversations happen and we will bring them forward as text amendments in order to address those issues it just won't all be in one fell swoop in fact the council asked one of the council members asked a question about you know is there do you anticipate coming back and looking at the regulations again and I do and I told them yes I think it would be a great idea for us to on an annual basis make sure we're getting the development that our community wants needs you know to meet the requirements but also is it meeting the quality of life piece of the comp plan too it won't be easy I know that much it'll be hard at first change is hard so any other questions so next week we'll send out the text and I encourage you all to read it and suggest changes or yeah we can get there well miss Wade thank you thank you that's a lot to take in I know for our first work session for 2025 thank you yeah well you've missed us right I mean I've been saving this all up from October November December all right so miss Gleason Kenzie imagine Lexington 2045 he's doing well he's out there riding his bike like a wild man Larry was my son's baseball coach so that's how we know each other well good afternoon everyone and welcome to my debut as the outreach and strategic planning manager for any of you that don't know me I'm Kenzie Gleason I've been a transportation planner with the city for over 20 years and I'd ask if you bear with me I was telling Chris Taylor earlier I'm quite fluent in transportation speak but I'm a little rusty in land use and long-range planning speak so I'll get used to it here in a little bit and since I've been on the job for a whole three weeks Chris Taylor said he thought it was a good idea that I give you our year in review report since I assume that's because I was the least involved of all the managers in each of these very impressive initiatives so with that Rachel oh I guess I gotta do the clicking here we go alright well the first thing that I learned in preparing this presentation is that y'all have been really busy over the last year or two in fact I think we maybe even missed doing this presentation in the last couple years one because the first year was spent updating the comprehensive plan and then the next year was spent creating the urban growth master plan and identifying areas of new growth so kudos to you but as we look forward to what's next we wanted to kind of take a deep breath and reflect on what has been accomplished over the last year and a half or so since the comprehensive plan was adopted and what we know is coming on the horizon so first despite how busy the last year or two was there's still been a lot of work done on many of the tasks from the comprehensive plan first I want to point out that we have 117 implementation tasks identified in the comprehensive plan that is about double what were identified in the former plan not that anybody is counting but about half of those are already in some way shape or form in progress or there's some sort of activity or action or work being done on implementing those tasks about 11% have been completed so far and then you know roughly 40% we still haven't begun any substantial work on those so not bad for what was already a very busy year and when you look at the implementation tasks they generally seem to fall under kind of certain topics or efforts so we often have recommended regulatory changes different studies or plans that have been suggested to advance a particular issue or topic our education and outreach efforts some of them are sort of government wide issues that extend beyond the division of planning others might be new programs that have not been established yet or some of the implementation tasks even involve outside agencies outside of government that we would be coordinating with and you can kind of see the distribution of those generally in the chart I believe the gray is the ones that have not been started yet blue represents those that are in progress and green are those that have been completed so we do lean towards the regulatory and the study and the plan side of it so let's talk about some of the studies and plans that we've completed over the last year, year and a half obviously the urban growth master plan master planning as I understand it identified that we should be able to achieve a minimum of 16,000 dwelling units by implementing that plan, you all adopted that in October, we are still working to then master plan the blue sky area which wasn't green field development similar to the other areas the MPO also did our five year update of our master plan for transportation it's also a long range plan stretching to 2050 identifying the priorities for transportation for our community, we continued our emphasis on complete streets in that plan and then I think even upped our emphasis on safety and equity in the last iteration that was adopted in April of last year and then shortly following that they updated their transportation improvement program which is updated every four years it's a four year program of projects meaning it identifies the funding for the projects that will advance over the course of the next four years the first pass at that was mainly including funding for a continuation of projects that were already in the pipeline both local and state projects they are working currently on a major amendment to the TIP and what they have done is issue a call for projects for all of the funding that we have direct discretion over, the funding that we get to determine how it's spent a lot of the other decision making happens in Frankfort that call for projects placed an emphasis on complete streets projects as well as design phases so that we could position ourselves to be more competitive for projects being funded through the state highway plan and or through discretionary funding sources at the federal level they are presenting that draft list of projects to the policy committee at their meeting next week and then there will be a public input process with the anticipated approval date coming in February there are a number of projects from our planning efforts that are in that recommended list for funding this is one example the campus to commons plan was developed, if you look at the area between Leastown road and Nicholasville road those arterials across old Frankfort Pike Broadway, there are very few, if any, crosstown connectors so really you've got New Circle road or Oliver Lewis Way extension, there's no crosstown connections between the two and those roads, particularly Forbes, are very hostile to people who are biking and walking so this became known as the campus to commons plan because of the Turner Commons development there at Forbes and Leastown road as opposed to calling it the Virginia Red Mile Forbes road study, which was a mouthful so again the goal was to improve safety and comfort for people biking and walking to provide connectivity from Meadowthorpe to the town branch trail that parallels old Frankfort Pike and to the University of Kentucky so that plan identified what are the specific improvements that are needed, what is the cost of making those improvements and what is the recommended phasing of those there was also this one is a little bit older than the campus to commons study, it stretches back into the end of 2003 but this was a goal to connect our downtown core to rural Fayette County on the eastern side of Lexington if you're familiar with the Brighton trail that is out in the Hamburg area over Manowar Boulevard heading towards Liberty Elementary and Starshoot Parkway the state has a project outside of New Circle Road to improve Liberty Road that will include a trail extension and the city has a project inside of New Circle Road along Liberty that will further extend that trail, so our study was really to look at how do we get that last couple miles of connection into downtown the preferred alignment was along the Henry Clay and then sort of weaving through the Henwick neighborhood and included a connection to the warehouse district which would also connect to the new development as well as the coming development at the corner of 3rd Street and Midland Avenue so we'll have a continuous quality high comfort trail facility all the way from downtown to rural Fayette County hopefully in the nearer than long term future again phased improvements identifying the cost of those and the feasibility we're also still working on the Imagine Nicholasville Road feasibility study this was a critical action item from Imagine Nicholasville Road if we want to try and advance the policies and the plans that were presented there, this is a effort both in terms of coordination but also financial contributions from the city, the MPO, the Transportation Cabinet and LexTran what our consultants are doing is sort of modeling the infill and redevelopment scenarios that we have in that plan, what happens if we continue at the status quo what happens if we have more moderate infill additional residential units versus more of a high intensity uses, how does that change the corridor and the circulation along the corridor taking a deeper dive on the complete streets concepts identifying their true feasibility right of way constraints recommending phasing and identifying costs, those are all part of the study and then one requirement for what they call new starts federal funding for transit programs is that you have to have done a study of that transit service what is the expected ridership what is the capital cost for initiating that service and then what is the ongoing cost for that operation and how can you continue that funding going forward so this is a pretty extensive study we've been working on it for probably nine months now probably have another nine months, six to nine months to go. And then some of you may have heard, I don't think I did any presentations about the complete streets action plan. The city adopted a complete streets policy several years ago. One of the first tasks or recommendations from what that was that the city needed to develop a complete streets action plan that really identified government wide things that we need to do to institutionalize complete streets through all of the work that the city does across all departments so that we're maximizing our opportunities to make improvements for bicyclists and pedestrians and other street users in any work that we do, whether that's sanitary stormwater work, et cetera, repaving program. There are 39 tasks identified in that action plan that sort of fall under the categories of planning, prioritizing and measuring progress on achieving complete streets, how we design and construct our streets, how do we operate and maintain those to have safe and comfortable access for people biking and walking and then sort of just overall safety planning as the assigned lead for 15 of those tasks. Um, we have a number that have started, but a number that haven't and many of them or some of them will certainly involve interactions with you all in the planning commission. Um, the first is, or one of the more prominent ones is the complete streets design manual, which we're leading at the moment in partnership with engineering and traffic engineering to really revamp, um, our street and roadway design manual. It has not been updated since 2002 five. Um, and then we've also been involved in the comprehensive climate action plan. This was funded through an EPA grant. They made funding available to metropolitan statistical areas. That's why it's more regional nature nature with the exception of Madison County, which is its own MSA. Um, environmental services is leading this effort. We've been involved. Um, it does include a greenhouse gas emissions inventory, what sectors and what particular activities are emitting the most greenhouse gases, and then identifying ways in which we can reduce those, what they call reduction measures and specific targets, um, for, for doing that, whether that be a timeline or, or specific action. One thing that's really neat is this, this dashboard called climate view. The city of Cincinnati already has one posted if you're curious about this particular topic. Um, and what it allows you to do is look at, okay, how many, how much reduction do we need to achieved net zero between now and 2045, which I think is the established goal in the comp plan. What are the specific measures that we could do? There are calculations of how much emission reduction you can achieve through those based on scientific data. And you can kind of tweak those different initiatives. You know, we want to set a goal of reducing vehicle use by 10% or something like that. And it'll tell you how much you can expect your emissions to be reduced as it relates to that. And you can map and see how far, what, what, how far you need to go in each of those different reduction measures to reach net zero by 2045 or whatever predetermined date, uh, that will continue through 2025. I'm not quite sure about the, the target completion date, but I assume in the next six months or so. Okay. And then finally the Greenway master plan environmental services has been, um, working on this fun fact. When I was an intern with Mr. Henry Jackson and strategic planning, this was the first, first plan I worked on as an intern for the city. And frankly, what got me hooked on planning. So, um, they have since had a staff change in environmental services. The person who was leading this project is no longer with the city. So it looks like maybe long range will be taking the lead on this to see it through, uh, completion. Um, a couple of the outcomes of that, you know, a suitability map that will identify what are some appropriate areas to acquire as new Greenways. And then a guidebook on best management practices. A lot of our Greenways are in private ownership, um, in terms of making residents and neighborhoods and homeowners association more aware of the goals and the best practices around Greenway, um, maintenance and development. From the regulatory changes side, uh, there was of course the urban growth, management Zoda. That was a big one. You all approved that this past summer. You know, essentially the goal was provide more flexibility and make it easier for us to incorporate more housing into different zones and to intensify, um, or utilize our land more efficiently, as well as to sort of focus our business zones more towards the neighborhood or towards corridor type development. Uh, the landscaping and tree protection Zoda, I guess if you didn't, haven't met since September, that was probably, well, I guess that's when it went through council. It usually hits the planning commission first, but that has been officially adopted by the council. Um, that was updating some landscaping regulations and tree protection requirements, uh, solidifying some of our enforcement, uh, actions and regulations, the lighting Zoda, looking to, um, restrict lighting from, you know, reflecting into residential zones, providing more pedestrian scale lighting with height limits and so forth. And while I don't, I understand, I don't think we updated anything in terms of the regulatory piece of 80 use, but there was something that we've been sort of tracking. And that is that when you first, or the council first approved 80 years in 2021, there were certain restrictions. And then over the course of the next two years, there were only seven units that were either applied for completed, um, as it relates to 80 years, whereas in 2023, the council then reduced or changed some of those restrictions, remove the owner occupancy and deed restrictions. And then in this, the following year, which is half the amount of time that had passed prior to that, there were 21 units that were either applied for or constructed. So this is one of those examples where you can kind of see in real time how a policy or a regulatory change can influence, um, actions in the community. And then finally public outreach. Um, let's see, that seems to be stuck here. Okay. Uh, planning attended or hosted 44 public engagement events in 2024, which if you take out holidays and a summer break, that's roughly one a week. Um, of course the urban growth master plan, there were four major outreach events associated with that. I calculated knowing what I know about the other plans. I think we probably had 30 plus, uh, public engagement activities associated with all those other plans that have been under development. And then we also do a substantial amount of outreach with our ZOTAs, um, long range planning and others really focused. And I think planning services too, and going to more and more neighborhood meetings, anytime we're invited, we always make it a point to make sure that, um, we can be there guest speakers and so forth. Other, other types of interactions. I clicked away from it too fast. I don't know. Now I see now, now I can't go back. Oh, was it a stock photo? Let's see. No, that's, I know the guy. Yeah. That's a, that's Roger Mulvaney from traffic there with his hand up. I mean, I've been guilty of using stock photos though. So I'm going to, um, and, and one of the things that I think, um, we've really been trying to focus on is engaging more with youth and getting them involved in the planning process. I mean, they are the future of our community. Um, civic Lex has held expos at four of the high schools. We've had great interactions at those as I understand it. Um, we attended the Fayette County college and career fair. We've hosted some interns recently, a few high school students and a college students, um, and have been working with civic Lex and our public, uh, engagement team and environmental services. They're doing some, um, uh, environmental academies with teachers that are working this type of information into their, um, curriculums. In fact, um, they're getting ready to start one on sustainability and there's a lot of information about the comprehensive plan and that, that, um, lesson plan. And one thing we've been working on, but would like to expand on more or something called the neighborhood snapshots. Um, the goal is to engage with different neighborhoods, get a better understanding of sort of the history and the diversity and the interesting facts about their neighborhood and what makes them unique. Um, we hope that by creating these sort of one pager snapshots that try to articulate that, um, we'll meet some new friends that will hopefully continue to engage with us moving forward. Okay. And then in sort of a snapshot of our social media and digital reach, and I have notes so that I don't butcher this, um, SB provided to me. Um, she points out that our Facebook reach has lowered, but that's because it's just losing users. Um, not surprisingly, even I have laid off a good bit. Um, but you can see that the content and their interactions and number of visits are higher. That means that there are fewer people out there, but they're engaging with us more. Um, and then at Instagram, um, same thing. Let's see. She said fewer people visiting our page, but they're interacting with our content a lot when they do visit the website. I found out, did anybody know what the bounce rate means? This is kind of cool. So she said, that's how many visitors leave our site after viewing a single page, meaning they bounce. It's like, you know how you always say, let's bounce, let's go, let's hit the road. I had no idea. Um, anyways, our bounce rate is high, but we designed our website to be that way. You want somebody to come to the page, find that one page that they need and then they, they take off. They don't dig any further. Um, so that's intentional. Um, but you can see our overall visits and views between 2023 and 2024, like more than tripled and quadrupled and more than that. So substantial, uh, interest and engagement on our website, probably because of all the activities that we've had going on over the last year. And the big news, we created a new section, outreach and strategic planning. Um, you know, our goal is to, you know, provide some additional focus to those areas. We want to try to increase just basic understanding and awareness of urban planning and design principles throughout the community. Um, keep, make sure people feel like they can find the information that you need and be informed about planning related activities, reach, you know, a broader audience than we have been, um, in the past, which essentially means engaging people in new and perhaps unique ways. Um, and then of course, trying to work continually to implement the plans. Um, once they've been developed, we really just geared up first of January. We have filled two of our four positions and, uh, we'll continue to work on that. And then finally looking ahead, of course, we want to complete the plans that are already in progress. The Greenway master plan, then the Nicholas road study and the climate action plan. We want to, um, initiate the blue sky small area plan. I believe the RFP will be issued tomorrow. So we're trying to answer the question, how can blue sky help Lexington meet its current and future, uh, industrial land use needs? What infrastructure improvements are needed if, if land use and, um, changes or intensifies in that area. And then how can we better connect blue sky to the rest of the urban service area, including, you know, roadway improvements along its frontage and the connections to the, the other expansion areas, Eve Miller and our shop or long range shop will be the, the, the main point of contact for that study. And then a downtown master plan. We'll, we'll start issuing an RFP in February. That's just to guide development of the urban core, help identify, um, some unique characteristics, try to connect other districts that are satellite to downtown more directly to the downtown area. I think of like the warehouse district or the distillery district. How do we, how do we make connections between the downtown and those, those areas that are also, um, busy and vibrant, um, Boyd will be leading that and be our point of contact for that going forward. And then finally, uh, we've done the new circle road. Um, imagine new circle road plan, as well as the imagine Nicholasville road plan. We're ready to move on to Winchester road. So this will be a comprehensive transportation and land use plan for Winchester road from Midland and third street out to main award Boulevard. Um, that's still pending funding funding in the fiscal year 26 budget. But if that is, um, provided we would begin work on that and around the middle of this, this year, um, regulatory changes house bill four, four, three. Uh, there will be more that come from the urban growth master plan. Uh, we're working on a parkland dedication ordinance with some outside partners. And of course the complete streets design manual will have an associated subdivision regulation amendment with that as well. And just generally our focus is very much going to be on the urban growth master plan. There's an infrastructure funding plan that is being held by our being, uh, chaperoned by our commissioner's office that will engage with, uh, continue to work on complete streets, the design manual and also all of the tasks from the complete streets action plan. We are in the process of hiring a vision zero coordinator and we have a safety action plan as well. And then a lot of different, we have a major grants, uh, safe streets for all grant, which is improving new circle road. This was a direct outcome of the imagined new circle road project. Um, or plan was, um, a discretionary grant that we applied for to implement many of those recommendations, uh, that is coming to the city, uh, net zero and sustainability initiatives. We're always interested in how we can partner and be a part of those types of efforts. And then dabbling in sort of, I guess re-imagining the civic commons is the name of the program. I think civic Lex is the lead of this and partnership with us and the mayor's office. But I'm trying to bring demonstration projects to public spaces to talk about, you know, how we can live in those places up. Uh, we're sort of experimenting with it to figure out how can we use that in different ways to educate and engage with the public going forward. And you know, obviously major goal to increase and diversify the ways that we do community engagement. Okay. So I have all the other managers here who actually had a role, significant role in many of those efforts. If you have any questions for me or them. Okay. All right. Before Ms. Lisa bounces out of here, do we have any questions for her? Did back to your first slide, about half of the items were completed or started in progress, right? Yeah. And is there a list of the other half of the items? Yes, we have them not with us, but we do have them that we could share. That didn't make the prison. Um, yeah, I'd be interested in seeing both the completed started sort of, and then also sort of what, I mean, this isn't questioning that the group did a ton this past year. I'm sort of just curious what, what, uh, is still sort of on the, on the docket. And I think we had a pretty version of that chart in the comp plan. We just haven't updated, dated it with the latest started in progress, not started yet. So we can update that. I think that the intent is to put that up on our website anyways and share that with you all. Just a little for a little more information about that. Imagine new circle road. It sounded like what you were saying was that most of the activity there is really focused on transportation. Have there been other activities in the imagine new circle road that have to do with land use and, you know, other kinds of things that have started happening in that with the UGM Zoda. We did take some of the recommendations that were made with the imagine new circle road and put them into place within our regulations. So really targeting new land uses or more concise land uses along a new circle road, which is heavy, heavily utilized. I think that was one of the aspects of that study that people didn't really recognize, which is that that area is lively, is economically viable and is doing quite well. It's, it is really what can we do to improve access and usability and lift up some of those things while also trying to infill and those infill guidelines, the UGM Zoda really hit at a lot of those. And I really do have to bounce, so to speak. I have a meeting in the other building at three o'clock. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. Next up we have Eve Miller, blue sky, small area plan. This is difficult. Okay. I think I got it. Does this sound okay? Wonderful. Oh, I'm okay. Thank you. Ms. Gleason did Ms. Gleason did a wonderful job introducing this topic during her discussion. But once again, my name is Eve Miller and long range planning, and I'm here to speak with you all today about the upcoming blue sky, small area plan that we have going on. So as you all are aware, in the fall of 2023 during discussions about the comprehensive plan, imagine Lexington, 2045, the area known as the blue sky activity center was identified as part of the overall acreage to be added to the urban service area. In the fall of 2024, the planning commission approved the urban growth master plan to guide future development of these new growth areas, except for the area of the blue sky activity center. And this area was left out from the UGMP because of its unique history and the current land uses on the site. The planning commission instead recommended a small area plan for the site and funding for the project was allocated in the amount of $500,000 in fiscal year 2025 for the project. An RFP for the project is scheduled to be released tomorrow, January 24th and to solicit proposals. The goal of the small area plan is to provide an analysis of existing conditions and to identify opportunities for the blue sky area to help Lexington meet its current and future industrial land use needs, as well as economic development goals for Lexington for the next 30 or so years. Tasks for the consultant include developing objectives and strategies to guide future economic development in the activity center, while also protecting the environment and utilizing sustainable building techniques. We want to achieve community consensus and provide clarity on the desired land and industrial uses in the activity center. And we hope to evaluate the existing conditions of the infrastructure in the site, including sanitary steward, storm infrastructure, public safety and emergency services. As well, we are interested in looking at how to integrate the blue sky activity center with the areas identified in the UGMP, especially areas three, four and five. Okay. So this slide exhibits the area of study located off of Athens Boonesboro Road, near the I-75 highway interchange. The 301 acre site is outlined by the red line that you see here on this map and has a few different zoning designations, but primarily is zoned for I-1 for industrial uses. Other current zoning includes B-3, B-5P and P-1 uses. For context, in 1999, the rural land management plan was accepted as part of the 1996 comprehensive plan. And that document was the first effort dedicated to the planning and management of land uses of the four activity centers in Lexington at that time. So that includes Avon or Bluegrass station, the Bluegrass airport, blue sky activity center and the spindle top research park. The rural land management plan was updated in 2017. And as we mentioned on the previous slide in 2024, the blue sky activity center was moved from a rural activity center to the urban service area. So as far as the timeline goes for the small area plan, we have been working with the division of purchasing to release that RFP tomorrow. And we are looking to have the proposal published to the public for about three weeks and they will be due on Friday, February 14th and then staff will have two weeks to review those proposals and select pending contract approvals and acceptance by the urban County council. We're aiming to have our notice to proceed with the desired consultant on April 24th of this year. And then planning staff aims to have the project completed within one year timeframe with periodic updates being presented to the planning commission throughout. And with that, I'm happy to answer any questions or feedback you might have for the project. Thank you. Yes. Um, did I hear this correctly that the RFP out for the small area plan, is it going to cost the city $500,000? That was the amount of funding allocated for the project. So we don't necessarily have to. Okay. So by including the blue sky small area into the urban growth management plan and then making a decision not to have our consultants who put together the M U N U G M P not include the blue sky area is costing us $500,000. I will let my manager answer that question. This is good. This is, I'd like to hear that. Yeah. The, the urban growth master plan was intended for Greenfield development and the inclusion of the, um, already fully developed blue sky was, it was not feasible to have the consultants. The timeline was so tight to do the urban growth master plan that to give blue sky what it needed based off of its heavily utilized and industrial focus already was not something that the consultants could do within the timeline that was, that was, uh, that we had. And so I think we communicated early on that that part, that piece was going to be taken out, but that because it was inside the urban service area now it needed a master plan and master plan recommendations. So that was really the, the options that were left to us. And when we were asked how to proceed, that was the advice that we gave that it needed to be taken out of the master plan part and address later and counsel through the funding process, allocated funds to finish it up. Okay. What percentage of the blue sky development that is included in the blue sky SAP has been developed as of right now? We can provide you that information later on. We are and have updated our vacant land use numbers, but I can't give you that specific amount for that location right now. Is it greater than 50%? It is not greater than 50% vacant. Okay. It's not greater than 50% vacant. Correct. It is being utilized heavily right now. So everything that for the most part, and I don't want to give you numbers right now because I can't give you the exact until I look at it. But the vast majority of blue sky is not vacant. It is currently being utilized as light industrial land uses. And in those portions that are B3 or corridor business zone or P1 professional office zone, those are being primarily utilized as well. Understood. What I'm getting at is we increased the urban service area by 2,800 acres, which was the minimum that was required by the council. We added 301 acres of over 50% developed property. That's now costing us an additional half a million dollars to put together a small area plan. Thinking back on that decision, there was a reason I voted no. And I think we're seeing the financial repercussions of that right now. Okay. Any more questions from Ms. Miller? Yes. What are some of the themes you're putting in the RFP to sort of try to target for the direction you want the consultants to be going? That's a great question. We have a few goals ranging from urban development. So the land use designations, how can we look at redevelopment opportunities to really expand our industrial impact here in Lexington? We're also looking at how we can do that sustainably and maybe look at the ways we have industrial sites that interact with our environment. We're also looking at the infrastructure components. So currently the site has constraints for sanitary sewer. So how can we expand those efforts to allow for redevelopment? And also for transportation wise, you know, across the highway, we have a new soccer stadium. How can we increase pedestrian opportunities, bicycle opportunities, and fright movement in and out of the site to benefit everyone? So those are just some of the goals that we are looking at. But obviously it is more detailed in the RFP. Yeah. Thank you. Okay. Thank you. Thank you so much. Mr. Bailey, you bringing up your microphone this time? No one else is going to use it. I have to. Good afternoon. There we go. Thank you very much. Good afternoon. Every year the division of planning comes to you to review what the division of planning does overall. What we do, what you do and what you see and some of the things that you don't see. You've seen several presentations today that talk about some of the things that we'll be doing over the next several months and that we have been responding to from the state through Tracy's presentation. Eve just gave you a great presentation about what we'll be doing in the next coming months with blue sky. Kenzie gave a great presentation of what we did within the comprehensive plan, but I will be just reviewing some of the actions that you took, some of the things that you don't see that the division of planning continually does. This is work that is often done ministerially. And frankly, done by other boards as well. So there has been a significant amount of uptick in work that has been conducted by planning services, largely tied to different changes that we've either made in the zoning ordinance or that we've been trying to respond to over the past couple of the past year, really. At the end of this, typically Tracy does do this presentation, but we have a add in that the division of the long range planning section is trying to add in as a continual update to this process. And we'll review that towards the end of this presentation. So just overall this is a great scattershot that we are seeing a lot of different applications for a lot of different areas throughout Lexington. It's not just located in one spot, but we're seeing different things happen throughout the city. In terms of zone map amendment requests or our zone changes you received a total of 18 cases, 13 were approved over the past year, three were disapproved and then two are still in progress. When we are talking about zone changes, the connection of the zone change to the comprehensive plan that they were adopted under, it's quite important to kind of look at that over time. What are we doing with our comp plans? Are things being discussed in a different way? In terms of how we look at our zone changes now, it is really important to take a look at what happened in 2013, which shifted us away from a land use map and to a more policy based approach to zone changes and planning for our community. Looking into 2018, the 2018 comprehensive plan in which we were seeing the shift to the place builder in which we were getting more focused on the applications and the things that we were requesting of applicants coming into our community. And then leading into the 2023 comprehensive plan, our most recent comprehensive plan had its first year this past year. And you can see that we're moving along with those cases a bit of drop, but not significantly when you're looking at the longevity of each of our comprehensive plans. And we do like to see that there are various different conversations. Every time we are focusing on infill and redevelopment or even greenfield development, there's going to be a significant amount of conversation. And I think the UGMP, the conversations that were held along that master plan just highlight the fact that it does not need to just be an infill and redevelopment aspect to be somewhat, I'm not going to say controversial, but talked about in a significant way. In terms of development plans and subdivision plans, some of these things are the ones that you see at each of your second Thursday meetings. So your major development plans, there were a hundred applications this year. This is along the same lines as what you're seeing historically. We had a significant amount of those ministerial actions with our final record plats, minor subdivisions and minor development plans that are coming through that aren't really changing much and are done ministerial in our office. And then we had 11 major subdivision plans that were coming through. The Board of Adjustment saw a significant increase in work this past year. If you see your Board of Adjustment planners, Dalton Belcher and James Mill, pat them on the back. I thank Tracy for sitting through significant amounts of meetings over the past year's time. This is largely due to the changes that we made in our ordinance associated with short-term rentals. You'll see that if I can get this to work, there we go. Maybe not. You'll see under the conditional use permits, 107 applications were specifically tied to short-term rentals within our community. That is a large portion and a lot of discussion associated with those conditional use permits. This also leads to conversations of what do we need to change within our zoning ordinance to look at what is working and what is not working. The planning commission, the urban County council just addressed some new changes to that and hopefully we'll see a dip in the amount of cases that are coming through so that we are regulating our community in a more comprehensive way. Jumping into the zoning compliance permits. This is another aspect that you do not see that often and Planner Stephanie Cunningham in the back there has been doing a significant amount of work. Again, this is really tied to short-term rentals. A zoning compliance permit is given whenever a CO is not necessary for someone to go through a process to prove that their use is allowable on the site. So we think when you have a building that has a specific land use that's been there for a long time, they want to make sure that their next use is going to be okay on that property for short-term rentals. We're seeing a dwelling unit. It's already received that certificate of occupancy. They want to come in for a short-term rental, that conditional use. They'll have to say, this is why we're doing this. We're in line with the regulations and we're moving forward. I'll also point out you'll see that there were a significant amount of those applications in the 2010s. We made modifications to our zoning ordinance at that time, specifically about home offices and that drops off tremendously. So we're seeing different things that we're modifying in our zoning ordinance to make things a little bit easier, especially for those tasks that are not necessary for plan review or not impacting our community negatively. Accessory dwelling units. This is probably the least flashy table that I've ever constructed. But I think it does a good job of talking about what Kenzie was discussing earlier, which is those modifications that we have made within our zoning ordinance has led to an uptick in applications and the construction of accessory dwelling units within our community. There were 25 new filings that were done in 2024. That does not reflect the amount that were constructed, just that the filings that were reviewed when brought in. Also a very unflashy slide, but something that we'd like to report, the new cell towers that have come through for review. We had two applications this past year. Regulation amendments. All too often we hear from our community, there's just too many regulation amendments coming through. I thought this table was specifically important to highlight the fact that this comes in ebbs and flows. We have been looking at modifying our zoning ordinance, which is a living document that represents what we want out of our community throughout time. So you'll look at what we just saw from this past year. There were nine new submissions. Now, granted, one of those submissions, the UGM Zoda was significant. So it impacted a fair amount of different aspects of our zoning ordinance. The House Bill 443 will also be just like that. It'll be a fairly significant text amendment. So all too often, those numbers, they don't speak one to one with what's going on with our zoning ordinance. One of the aspects that we have heard throughout the comprehensive plan, as well as a lot of the public input that has been going through with our community is that how do we get the information like this out to our community to become more transparent, more clear and more educated about how our community is growing, how our community is changing. One of the things that the division of planning has been working on for the past several months is the Imagine Lexington Data Research Center. This is going to be a location for the division of planning to update that data that we typically put in the front of our comprehensive plan every five years. However, us updating a comprehensive plan every five years does not represent the dynamic change that is happening in Lexington. With this data research center, we are trying to update our data on a monthly, quarterly or annual basis so that individuals will have the information that they need to make decisions, whether it is an appointed or elected body to make decisions about development if they are a member in our community who seeks to develop in our community or someone coming into our community, enticing them to build good products within Lexington to serve the needs and the wants of our community. So we're going to jump to the website right now. I will say this is just going live today and we are still working on a few bugs and making things look a little nicer, but this is our splash page. This is the entry to the Imagine Lexington Data Research Center. If you scroll down, you'll see we're providing a few different areas for data research. That will be our community demographics, land use and environment. Those were the three topics we really pulled out of our comprehensive plan so that we can start to put the different data into different buckets. Another aspect of this will be the lab. So we don't want to just put out information, just put out raw data so that people can pick and choose or talk about things. We also want to be having a conversation about what that data means. When we are looking at the median level of income of Lexingtonians compared to the price of housing, how does that work? What does this mean within Lexington? How does this compare to surrounding communities as well as communities that are like us outside of the state? So we are going to be adding more information as we go along building out this website so that we can provide analysis of what is going on in Lexington throughout the five years that we're trying to implement the comprehensive plan. We also hope that this will inform people when they make their decisions, inform people when they are coming out to speak and educate the public about what you all really deal with on a week by week basis. So if we want to jump into one of our areas, we can jump into land use. This is broken down into a few different categories right now and right now we have it set up as commercial, residential and vacant land. We are in the process of updating our vacant land numbers. This is something that really came out of the sustainable growth task force that was being set up with a consultant at that time. The long range staff will be taking over that sustainable growth report that was being conducted previously by a consultant and utilizing this space to inform the public more frequently about what is going on in our community. In terms of just looking at the data, we'll hop into the residential section and here we get into some more of the specifics about what is going on in our community. So each of these have a source identified. It is scrollable so you can go over each of the different charts there. It'll pop out. It is accessible to the community. So a word reader can get through all of this and help individuals that might have some vision impairment. There are also ways to download the specific data that we are showing here. So you'll see that in the bottom left hand corner of each of our tables. SB, if you want to scroll down a little bit more, we can just see how this flows together. Each has a brief description about what the data is or are. And we see this as a really important clearinghouse of information so that again, people are more informed. We're more transparent about the decisions that we're making and we aren't just updating our data once every five years. So that is a brief review of that. I will also stress that SB in the back and Eve over here have been working tirelessly on a lot of the data. Long range has been working at a very fast pace with Boyd in the back and Quinn with strategic has been helping us out with writing up much of this. So this has been a kind of whirlwind effort to try to get this out there for this meeting. But we will be adding to this throughout the next coming months. And we see this as being something that will grow with time to help our community learn more about the ins and outs of what you do. Can we have the URL? Yes, we can give you that. Uh, it is up on the screen. It is actually, I will send it out to you in an email. How about that? I'm going to jump into your defense real quick. This is very much in draft. You're going to notice a pile of things. We are working through a ton of them. It doesn't mean we send us anything you see that looks out of sorts, but odds are it's on our list. So there's a lot of things that are going to look funny in terms of the graph representations. There's a tremendous amount of technology learning that our staff is doing with enterprise tools that the government has at our disposal. And so there's internal training going on, there's internal learning going on. And then amidst the other projects that staff is working on, this has taken on a lot of their time. So, uh, keep that in mind, set your expectations accordingly, but it is something we're working on daily. Yes, ma'am. Yes. I mean, this seems, um, like a really important project. Um, a couple of years ago we had, uh, a presentation on the Lexington data hub and they loaded some preliminary information and we talked about how they were going to keep updating it and improving it and adding information. I checked on it recently. I think it has fewer layers in their GIS file than there used to be before. I mean, I think if you can make less data available, I think the data hub for Lexington did it. And so I'm, I'm, I'm, uh, bringing that memory of that presentation back here today, just to say like, how, how do we not make this the data hub? A large portion of that is you. Um, we are the staff to the planning commission and, uh, we saw this as an important element to implement aspects of the comprehensive plan. And, uh, we see this as an important element of continuing education. So working with Kenzie and the new office of street strategic planning, as well as making sure that the conversations that we are having about sustainable growth, uh, about preservation in our community are really being brought to the forefront, making sure that everyone is informed from real numbers that we can provide. And that conversation is being done by about data. So it is very important, not only for you all, but from us in maintaining what we see as the real push for our community to grow and be more educated. So please keep pushing us if, if things are, what's the database behind? I mean, I obviously see ArcGIS in the URL. Yes. Um, um, which is normally associated with spatial data. What sort of, and then, and then, um, you know, you mentioned enterprise sort of resource planning sort of database, uh, as well, and which is normally associated, you know, with, uh, numbers or business or transactions. So, I mean, is, is there sort of, is there, uh, something in the background that's in managing both the spatial data and the, and the non-spatial data or how is that? Yes. So with what is going on with Esri as well as with ArcMap, which is a program that is utilized that you hear us talk about quite often for mapping, they have immensely expanded what they do. So they're not just a mapping program any longer. They host data. Uh, they are utilized. So frankly, what is happening is we are going through our GIS program. It's currently being done in collaboration with the GIS office, but is being operated by the division of planning right now. We are generating all the tables. We are generating all of the graphics. We will be generating some more maps that will go in here, but we are going through that process of developing all of what you see on the screen, getting the clear from GIS to make sure that, uh, what we did did not break anything or is not misrepresenting anything and then uploading it so that the public can see. So really the genesis of everything we're doing is through the division of planning that is being pushed, uh, through their platform. And they are, they have been wonderful. Uh, the division or the GIS department has been indispensable in creating this and a very collaborative with us throughout this process. Uh, and, and very frankly, patient without, with us throughout this process, even up to 30 minutes ago, I think we added some more data on here. So, um, this, there is a division of planning. We'll be running this primarily in coordination with them, but it is utilizing the programming of GIS. I think I got to your answer there or your question there, but if I didn't, please let me know. Correct. Yes. So ArcGIS, uh, the question, sorry, I gotta get on the mic. Uh, the question was, is it able to pull from other resources? ArcGIS or, uh, Esri profiles now have a living Atlas function, which pulls from the U S census, which pulls from other elements. We can pull those all in. We also can push our own information, generate our own data, put it onto ArcGIS and get it uploaded. Okay. Testing. Oh, okay. Great. Uh, I'm curious to you, I'll keep some backroom data related to the number of appeals from the board of adjustment to us and likewise from us to the city. So you shouldn't be getting any appeals from the board of adjustment to you. You do get appeals from the board of architectural review. Okay. And we do keep those, that information. That is something that we could add to our website. If that's something that you'd like to see. Um, I know that those are typically few and far between, uh, every once in a while we'll have a spurt of them in a year and then we won't have any, I think we didn't have any in 2023, right, Daniel? That's something that we could report on. The only reason I brought that up is I thought we would have probably have had more appeals from this, from us, from the actions we took to the city when we went from to the place builder. And I don't know whether that, because to me that's somewhat of an indication that people may or may not agree with you, but they will accept what you have as long as you have a logical explanation for what, what you did. So just an observation. That's something that we can get with the planning services staff, because I know that Tracy keeps up on all of that. Okay. I'm going to ask a question. It's not specifically to you, but it links to the data collection. Um, and I can't remember if I read this in civic Lex or the Herald leader, uh, but the council has now started the process of redefining the process for the update to the comprehensive plan. Uh, I think what we, we will be talking about a, the process, uh, essentially theme Eagle Ford in the next presentation. So I'll be given that just one second. Great segue. Uh, and we'll pull that up right now. All right. So the next presentation that we have is, uh, Lexington's preservation and growth management program. This is specifically associated with theme Eagle for, of the comprehensive plan. Uh, this is, uh, an element in which the government is seeking to develop a new growth management program that is meant to establish a process for urban growth within Lexington, as well as preserve the preservation of agriculturally significant land or areas throughout Lexington. So just to bring you back, uh, to a couple of years ago, which it doesn't seem like that long ago, uh, the urban County council adopted the goals and objectives. And, uh, specifically within those goals and objectives, there was one to expand our urban service boundary. That was theme E goal three. We went through that process. We hit that deadline. We have adopted a new urban growth master plan, which we are putting into work now, but there was another element. Uh, that other element was specifically for us to go through and reevaluate how we expand, uh, specifically the process by which we make the determination that it is time to expand and then how we review either the applications or how we go through the review of where, how, uh, how much land we go through and expand. Uh, one element of this at the last objective incorporate the urban County council input and adopt the process as an amendment to the elements of the comprehensive plan by August 1st, 2026 and establish a mechanism to immediately implement the process. Now, uh, we are still working through what that means and really that, uh, that has been going on for some time. Uh, the, the, the division of planning, the urban County government has had this question about how do we do a review of our urban service boundary for quite some time. Uh, as you know, our first urban service boundary, uh, in the United States established in Lexington, 1958, that's what you're seeing on the right side of your screen right there. That was our initial urban service boundary. In 1979, there was a conversation of how do we update this? And then in 1996 we had a more robust conversation of how do we go about this process? Uh, in 2018, I think a lot of people in the government were starting to see that there was increased calls for expansion of our urban service area. And at that time there was a goal and objective added into the, uh, comprehensive plan to look at the process between 2018 and 2023. In 2023, there were two different, uh, work groups tasks force that went through the sustainable growth task force and the goal for work group. Those while they went through the process did not come to a final determination on how the urban County government should expand in its urban service area at any point. And then in 2023, we have the reiteration of that goal and objective with a deadline. And that is where you're going to see us coming to you quite a bit over the next, uh, coming months into the next year and working very closely with the urban County council to determine how this process will be constructed. Uh, there are challenges, uh, with our current and previous approaches. Uh, much of that is associated with how do we project or forecast the need of land going into the future? Uh, it is very hard. And we've seen this with 1996 to, uh, to plan out that far and make sure that we're utilizing all of what we need into the future. Uh, we also have been going through the process of using speculative growth locations. Uh, we've expanded several times throughout our community and there is still land that has yet to be developed, uh, even from 1958. So, uh, Hamburg farm is a great example. Now it was added into the urban service area. The first zone change for Hamburg farm wasn't until 1988 and some portions of the farm were not developed until relatively recent. Uh, in, uh, 1996, I will say that this is a projection off of what has been rezoned, not what has been developed. Approximately 73% of the 1996 expansion areas have been rezoned. Not all of that has been developed is closer to around 50% of that area has been developed. Uh, now that it gets into property ownership who is able to develop a timing of developments. And that goes back to our speculative locations for growth. I'll also say that population projections changes over time from a policy perspective also impact these things. So in 1973, 1973 they were saying that we needed to expand our urban service area to 116.4 square miles by the year 2000 to deal with the population projection at that time. Uh, we have not expanded to that distance, nor should we. Uh, we do need to make sure that we are looking at things comprehensively. We're looking at policy changes, changes to infrastructure, changes that we can make on a zoning ordinance level. And that is why currently, even with our most recent expansion, uh, we are just South of 90 square miles. Our population currently is a little bit below what they anticipated in 1973. But, uh, we are at a, uh, there's a real difference there. And that is largely due to changes in perspectives of how we should be developing our community densification and infill as well as shifting land use values. If everything in Fayette County was an acre lot or something like that, it would be a lot of money to develop that from an infrastructure cost. And then also from an underlying land value cost. Uh, there are also, uh, some real things within our community that this will also will always be a conversation point, uh, with all zones or with all comprehensive plans. This has been a significant conversation and it will be no matter what the process is. Uh, it does currently dominate the conversation of our comprehensive plan. I think you all have experienced that, uh, whether just with this last recent comprehensive plan or, um, the various other ones that you've been a part of, it is a conversation every single time. And that takes away from some of the really important things that we need to be discussing within our comprehensive plan, like equity, like environmental sustainability and like equitable transportation options. Uh, one of the aspects that came out of the 2018, uh, comprehensive plan goal and objective was that sustainable growth task force.  this was meant to develop a baseline of data that we should be keeping up and adding to so that we have the information that we need to make, uh, data driven decisions and, uh, make our community a little bit more educated about why we are doing something or why we are not. Uh, this established a protocol for reporting on those ongoing development trends. And this really does get into why, uh, another reason why we are developing the imagine Lexington data research center. This is a really important component for us to continue to go through the process of providing information about our community and informed decision makers about whether we expand or do not expand our urban service area. The goal for work group, uh, net in 2022, this was organized by then vice mayor Steve K. It has set the stage by establishing areas of growth and, uh, areas of future of permanent preservation. Uh, it built upon some of the data baselines that were developed out of the sustainable for sustainable growth task force. Uh, and then it pushed for a further information regarding the needs, trends, other aspects of data. Uh, it pushed for a call for different master plans, a competitive process, uh, and then really necessitated public review and input in terms of the next steps. That's a good review of what's been done. Uh, the staff is going to be working with the vice mayor who has placed this into the general government and planning committee, uh, and the GGP chair to establish and refine the scope of this project for, uh, continuing the work that has been done in the past to get to an end result, uh, establish the framework for the public input on this process, and then, uh, schedule a committee reports and updates to the general government committee. Uh, it is really important that though, that you all are involved in this process and we are, uh, reporting out to you regularly about those meetings. So that is a quick overview and the same presentation that was provided to the urban County council at their most recent meeting of the general government and planning committee. Uh, if you have any questions right now, I'd be happy to try my best to answer them, but this is very much in the early stages of the conversation. how this will continue forward. Yes, sir. I mean, the one question, the question I have is this, these sustainable growth committee, the goal for objective was supposed to be an alternative to the large multi-thousand acre expansions all at once. Which is what we just did. Yes. So what is the, I mean, it's sort of like, I mean, we just did the multi-decade, I mean, is the question being asked, did we not just do the multi-decade expansion the same way we'd done it in the past, and why would we, why would we create a process for incremental expansion if we've already done a several thousand dollar, I mean, several thousand acre expansion? So, I'll give that on two different answers. The first answer is it is a goal and objective of the adopted comprehensive plan and we have a deadline to complete, and we in the division of planning take that very seriously. The other aspect of that is as a urban planner, I like to have a plan. The way that we have gone through the process of expanding our urban service area has been to identify a need and then do a very large expansion. That large expansion has those challenges that we just, that I discussed in a previous slide, really talking about speculative growth locations, slow growth, those types of aspects. We've had this conversation about the process now several times over, and since 1979, and we have not gotten to the point of having a more robust data-driven process for having these conversations. And frankly, during a period in which we just expanded, might be the best time for us to do that because there is not the need right now that has been identified, but it gives us the ability to have the conversation about how we expand as a community, what are the things that we are looking for, and if we do expand in the future, how do we do it in a way that is more targeted and we ensure that something is going to be done in a near term rather than waiting, like in 1958, now over 70 years, or close to 70 years to get something developed. So, can I tuck in an additional piece, which as I understand it, the first question that gets asked on a regular basis is not, how do we expand, but is it time to expand and how do we know? And from there, and that doesn't mean that expansion will occur, it means we're looking at the data and the data tells us whether we need to re-examine that question. And then related to that, I should have asked this earlier, but I did not see a category for industrial in the database. Oh, that is, so we've kind of grouped that into commercial, and that is largely due to much of what we are pulling from is not just planning documentation within our database, but we're also pulling from our building inspection files. So, one of the really interesting aspects that we're getting at is, what is the new construction that is being done in our community? And what does that mean for our industrial retail market overall? Another aspect that I did not bring up, we do now have access to a new platform that will provide us greater amounts of information regarding the retail market, hospitality market, industrial market, rental prices, a few other things that we have just purchased. So that will inform many of the other information that we're looking at. Thank you, Hal. Any time you have an expansion, you generally, generally expand into the AR zone. Is there any AR data on, for example, the, you know, billion plus dollar economic impact? That is a significant portion of why this is called the Preservation and Growth Management Review, because much of this needs to balance a preservation and growth management perspective, so that we are maintaining the areas of our agricultural community that are important, not just to the cultural aspect of Lexington, but to the economic and environmental aspect of Lexington. So, whenever talking about these developments, what is happening, a conversation needs to be a balanced discussion of preservation and growth. That's great. Sometimes AR, or farmland in general, can just be seen as a blank canvas that's not necessarily contributing anything as it is right now, but in reality, it's contributing significantly. Absolutely. Absolutely. All right. Thank you, Hal. That's the question coming back to, green fields out there are doing environmental work for us, and we still don't have a way to calculate that into our computations. Thank you, Mr. Bailey. Thank you very much. Mr. Duncan. Mr. Chair, I think this shows the importance of getting you all together more frequently than once every four months, so thank you all for sticking with us and receiving this information, and we are certainly looking forward to continuing the conversations over the next few months about all of these topics. As I said earlier, I wanted to also finish up the sort of the personnel review with you all. I know that's not directly your concern, but it does have an impact on your work. So we promoted Hal and Kenzie out of their positions into managers. That leaves principal planners vacant, and those are extremely important to us, as we saw in both of their roles beforehand. So just to let you all know, we will be filling those positions, we'll be advertising to fill those in probably the next few weeks. We've also been down a couple of admins, particularly in planning services, and we have a new admin starting on Monday. Now Katie Haynes is her name, Katie Haynes. She's not directly in planning services, but she will provide a lot of relief to the other admins in the way of the daily office tasks. But I tell you all about her, about Katie, because she also maintains the attendance log for the Planning Commission Board of Adjustment and the training log. So she may be reaching out, you may see her name in the future when she reaches out to you to tell you that you're about to run out of time to get your training in or something to that effect. And then, as Kenzie mentioned, we have a Vision Zero program. This is very important to the mayor. It's federally funded, but it is a significant safety program for the people who use our transportation system, pedestrians, bicyclists, drivers, all levels. And we hope to be filling that position in the next two weeks. So I do hope as this winter recedes that we are just pretty near full staffed and able to provide some relief to all the good folks here who have been doing double duty with the vacancies. We haven't missed a beat as far as I know, but the work is taxing, especially in planning services because statutory deadlines, council expectations, community expectations, a hot spotlight on Tracy and her team. So we appreciate the work that they've been able to keep this moving, and we do hope some relief is in sight. And then also, Mr. Chair, to say that we do have a Planning Commission zoning hearing scheduled for Thursday, January 30th, back in the council chambers. And at that time, also, we expect to initiate the 443 ZOTUS, but we do have other items on that agenda, and we'll keep you apprised of those as the days come ahead. One question in terms of vacancies. We have a vacancy on the Planning Commission, and the question I have is, has the clock started ticking for the Mayor to make the call? Yes, it has. Okay. Mr. Pohl's official retirement was December 31st, and by statute, the Mayor has 60 days to make that appointment and get that fulfilled through the council. So she's about midway through that almost timeline, still have until the end of February for council to make that decision. Did we by any chance pass along those applications that came in to us to the Mayor? Every single one of them, yes. Okay, I'm not saying that she has to take any of them. That's right. We provided her that packet immediately. Okay. Now, if she does not in 60 days do it, we're back where we started. Oh, Mr. Wilson, take back those words, please. That's why I was afraid of you saying we had to work out the process. And speaking of that, Mr. Wilson, we have talked about some updated training and review of the bylaws and that sort of thing, but we did want to wait and see if we could get our 11th person in so that everybody kind of starts with the same footing on that. Mr. Chair? Anybody got anything else to say? Mr. Wilson? No, I'm through for today. And Mr. Owens didn't speak today, so I'm concerned. Give it time. Not much. Just one time. Well, this meeting is adjourned. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.  Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.  Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.  Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.   Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.  Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thank you. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thank. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thank you. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. On this edition of Lexington NOW, a new council task force, Safe Haven and Winter Safety Tips. I'm Neal Noah and welcome to Lexington NOW for the week of January 20th, 2025. House Mayor Dan Wu announced the formation of a task force dealing with road safety in Lexington. Here's what it's about. We called this press conference this morning to announce the formation of a new task force committed to addressing and improving ongoing concerns about road safety in our community. This is an issue that council members and city staff hear about a lot from residents, especially during and after severe weather like the snow storms we are still recovering from. Lexington takes the safety of our community members very seriously. Over the last several years, we've seen a concerning number of pedestrian safety incidents and incidents of dangerous driving. While we have taken the bold step of adopting a complete streets policy for our community, we know that it may take many years to see the full impact of that vital work. The Street Safety Task Force, and that's street with three E's, stands for Shared Travel, Requires Engineering, Education, and Enforcement of Traffic. This task force is made up of council members, community members, LFUCG staff, and public safety professionals, and will focus on short-term solutions in three key areas, engineering, education, and enforcement. We live in a community that has historically focused on the needs of vehicles and drivers to move traffic quickly. The current designs of our streets reflect this focus on efficiency and speed for cars and trucks at the cost of the safety of residents who get around by foot, on bike or stroller, wheelchair, or any other form of transportation. I look forward to working alongside my colleagues and other expert members of this task force to identify cutting-edge, data-driven solutions being used around the country to help address immediate pedestrian and traffic safety challenges. I am particularly eager to explore temporary traffic calming designs such as quick art installations to help make our roads safer while we work to implement our local complete streets policy over the next several years. Education and engagement are critical to any community-based effort. As part of our task force, we plan to work on a public information campaign that will help to create positive change and shift behavior in our community. We know that we have a lot of work to do in Lexington when it comes to distracted driving, red light running, and fostering more respect for those moving at a human pace along our streets and our sidewalks. Through targeted education initiatives such as workshops, community meetings, school programs, and interactive digital campaigns, we aim to reach residents of all ages with practical tools and reinforce our shared responsibility to safer streets. To be successful with the overarching work of our task force, we need the active participation of our entire community. Along with my colleagues, I look forward to sharing the work of this task force with the public, spreading awareness about best practices, and encouraging our drivers to remain aware of their roles in keeping our residents and our visitors safe as they travel through our city. A little over a year ago, one of my constituents was killed in a crosswalk by someone who ran a red light. I decided to be the leader on this task force because my constituents are tired of risking their lives competing with vehicle drivers who are distracted and have little regard for the law. With that in mind, I plan to lead a group on this task force that will focus on the improvement in enforcement with an intent to curb the bad behaviors that put law-abiding citizens in danger. I'm excited that we've collected really a great group of experts that should be able to make noticeable change in the timeframe that we want. We must be successful. Streets make up a large majority of public infrastructure and public space in our city and need to safely and effectively serve everyone who uses them, no matter how they're getting around. Lexington streets can be places where neighbors take walks and get to know each other and where kids can learn to ride bikes and explore their neighborhood, or depending on how fast and unsafe traffic is, can be thoroughfares that are highly disruptive, destructive, and deadly. Lexington residents are ready for innovative, best practice, short-term solutions to create safer streets that work for all of us and that support healthy, thriving communities. I'm looking forward to the work of this task force and I'm excited to see the possibilities that emerge from it. The fire department officially announced the opening of its first Safe Haven baby box. We were there for the announcement at Station 2. So I do find it very fitting that as we celebrate our 250th anniversary and our health and wellness month this month, we are here opening a potentially life-saving baby box at Fire Station 2. And the Safe Haven baby box program has brought a hopeful future to newborns across our country When mothers are in crisis, or you mentioned fathers too, and unable to care for their newborn, the surrender of their infant could be what they feel is the last option to keep their baby safe. I am so happy that Lexington finally has this. This Safe Haven baby box right here at Fire Station 2 is a perfect place and provides a safe environment for a surrendered newborn until emergency medical care can come to the child's need, usually within a few minutes. It can also mean a hopeful, promising future for a child. And I'm thankful to our local Knights of Columbus for its donation, which made it possible for us to install the Safe Haven baby box right here. With hundreds of Safe Haven baby boxes across the United States, we are thankful to the organization that has taken a step to protect these newborns, providing a 24-hour hotline for mothers in crisis and educating our community about the Safe Haven law. CEO Monica Kelsey saw this box in the site of a church in Cape Town, South Africa, when she decided to take this back to the United States. Once she did that, she had an opportunity to grow that here, went to her state of Indiana and started legislation to be able to put these boxes all across America. Through that and her own experiences being an abandoned infant herself, this movement has started and grown to a nationwide community. I've been honored to watch the dedication, persistence and passionate for these innocent lives that Safe Haven boxes possess. We want to try and raise awareness and educate as many people as we can on the Safe Haven law and the Safe Haven boxes. We have 55 box surrenders now and over 151 Safe Haven handoff surrenders. We're just getting started and we want to let parents know that they now have the anonymous option should they choose it to safely, legally surrender their infant. We hope that one day we can stop infant abandonment across this country. We want to thank any parent that has already utilized our box for keeping their infant safe. For any parent that might be struggling right now, please call our hotline at 1-866-99-BABY1. We can walk you through a plan that works out best for you. So represented behind me are some of the members of our organization and the men and women of the Lexington Fire Department come to work each and every day with a very simple but profoundly important mission, saving lives and protecting property. We are so grateful to the leadership, including Commissioner Ken Armstrong, CAO Sally Hamilton and Mayor Gorton, as well as our Urban County Council and all of our partners in LFUCG leadership, as well as the Knights of Columbus and everybody else who partnered with us to make this a reality. We can now provide our community with a new and innovative way to fulfill that mission of saving lives and protecting property. Cold weather safety tips after this. Hello, I'm Lt. Chris Van Brackle with the Lexington Police Department Traffic Unit. Today we are talking about disability accessible parking and the aisles between those parking places. Accessible parking is a valuable and necessary resource for people with disabilities and that includes the striped area next to accessible parking spots. These are access aisles and it is illegal to park here even if you have an accessible parking permit. Police in Lex Park will write tickets when they see vehicles parked in an access aisle or parked in an accessible space without a placard and the fine is $250. Know where and where not to park, keep the access aisles clear, thank you and drive safe. Welcome back to Lexington Now. Winter has unleashed its icy fury and it's important to take precautions to prevent cold weather injury. Here are some tips. Like it or not, winter is upon us and it often brings hazards like snow and ice. But there is another danger that is not as frequently addressed and that is the cold. During especially cold weather it is best to stay indoors but if you must venture out Here are some guidelines you should follow to stay safe. Dress warmly in layered clothing including a hat, a scarf or knit mask to cover your face and mouth, sleeves that are snug at the wrist, mittens, a water resistant coat and water resistant boots. Avoid exertion as cold weather puts an extra strain on the heart. Those with heart disease or high blood pressure should follow their doctor's advice about shoveling snow or performing other activities in the cold. When outside, avoid walking on ice and keep your steps and walkways as free of snow and ice as possible. Be on the lookout for signs of hypothermia and frostbite, two common cold weather related health problems. Warning signs of hypothermia, which is an abnormally low body temperature include shivering, exhaustion, confusion, fumbling hands, memory loss, slurred speech and drowsiness. If you detect symptoms of hypothermia, seek medical care immediately. Get the victim into a warm room and remove any wet clothing. Warm the center of the body first with an electric blanket if available. Otherwise use skin to skin contact under loose, dry layers of blankets, clothes, towels or sheets. Warm beverages can help increase the body temperature but do not use alcoholic beverages. Warning signs of frostbite or an injury to the body caused by freezing include redness or pain in any skin area, white or grayish yellow skin, skin that feels unusually firm or waxy and numbness. If you detect symptoms of frostbite, seek medical care immediately. Get the victim into a warm room and immerse the affected area in warm, not hot, water. Do not rub the frostbitten area with snow or massage it as this can cause more damage. Do not use a heating pad, heat lamp or the heat of a stove, fireplace or radiator for warming as the frostbitten areas are numb and can be easily burned. These procedures are not substitutes for medical care and all emergencies should be reported to a physician or health care provider. If you follow these simple rules and exercise caution, you can weather the worst winter has to offer and come out healthy on the other side when the warm breezes of spring start to blow. Frozen pipes can be one of the costliest problems this time of year. The folks at Kentucky American Water give us some advice on avoiding this headache. Kentucky American Water suggests for all of our customers that they take a few minutes to go ahead and prepare their homes for the cold temperatures. Check around your home for any water pipes in your home inside that are on outside walls that may be susceptible when the weather does get cold to freezing during those colder temperatures. You also want to check things like basements for pipes that are exposed in basements that get very cold because again those pipes can freeze and potentially burst and that causes huge headaches and obviously some damage and cost for you in the winter. We don't want that. So go ahead and take some time, maybe check out some options for insulating those pipes at your local hardware store. And then the last thing that I would say is a really significant step to take is make sure that you and everyone in your home knows how to turn off the water to your home quickly should you have a pipe freeze this winter. And to do that you want to know where the main water shut off valve is located in your home. It's often in a basement or a utility room, sometimes in a crawl space, and it's typically on the side of the home where your water line enters your home from the meter. And so you want to look for that valve and when you find it, when you identify it, go ahead and mark it with a ribbon or a piece of tape or something to let your family members know that should there ever be a burst pipe in your home, that's the valve to turn to quickly turn off your water. This winter if you were to have a pipe freeze and burst, certainly if it bursts you want to go ahead and again shut off that water with your main water shut off valve until you can have time to check with your plumber, etc. But you want to keep that water turned off so that you don't cause more problems in your home. But the other thing you can do to prevent colder temperatures this winter is if you go away, for instance, if you're out of town for the weekend or you have an extended stay away from your home, make sure that when you adjust the heat for your home, don't go any lower than 55. It may be tempting to turn that heat all the way down, but if you do that you risk your home getting really cold and causing those pipes to freeze. So you want to prevent that by going no lower than 55 degrees. You may on certain nights when the temperatures are getting really cold to have just a trickle of water dripping from your faucet to help that water keep moving and again prevent it from freezing. If you do have a frozen pipe, you want to, for instance, if it's under a cabinet, you want to open those cabinet doors, let the warm air of your home help to thaw those pipes out. You could take a hair dryer and blow those pipes. We don't recommend taking any kind of open flame to thaw your pipes because that can cause you other problems. But certainly sometimes it's time is what it takes and again, if there's any indication that there's a leak that's being caused by that pipe, you want to turn your water off. More live meeting coverage is coming your way this week on LexTV and streaming online. And remember, you can also find the most up-to-date information on non-televised city business at LexingtonKY.gov. Here's this week's meeting coverage. That's all for now, but as always, you can keep up with us on social media, check out the latest traffic updates on ExitLexRex, or catch our live traffic cams on LexingtonKY.gov. For all of us at LexTV, I'm Neal Noah and that's it for now. With a gun in my hand, lead light line, gun down ten, gonna ride like the wind. And I've got such a long way to go, such a long way to go, make it to the border of Mexico, so I'll ride like the wind, ride like the wind, gonna ride like the wind. And I've got such a long way to go, such a long way to go, make it to the border of Mexico, so I'll ride like the wind, ride like the wind, gonna ride like the wind. And I've got such a long way to go, such a long way to go, make it to the border of Mexico, so I'll ride like the wind, ride like the wind, gonna ride like the wind, gonna ride like the wind. Ride like the wind. Ride like the wind. Across the street, the river runs, down in the gutter, and I've been slipping over the edge. And I've got such a long way to go, such a long way to go, make it to the border of Mexico, so I'll ride like the wind, ride like the wind, gonna ride like the wind, ride like  the wind. I know my place is home, where the ocean meets the sky, I'll be safe. I'll be safe. Ah, yeah. Oh, I've got lightning in my veins, Stripping like the handle of a slot machine. Love may still exist in another place, I'm just yanking back the parent, no expression on my face. Our rhythm of my heart is beating like a drum, With the words I love you rolling off my tongue. I'll never win, I won't, for I know my place is home, Where the ocean meets the sky, I'll be safe. Our rhythm of my heart is beating like a drum, With the words I love you rolling off my tongue. I'll never win, I won't, for I know my place is home, Where the ocean meets the sky, I'll be safe. Our rhythm of my heart is beating like a drum, With the words I love you rolling off my tongue. This is going to be our last episode for season one. And you're probably wondering, where is my co-host? Well, Baj is on sunny, so we are out here at the Lexington Police Department mounted barn. How you doing up there, Baj? Well, they actually found one of the horses that I feel comfortable getting on. So far, staying calm, everything's good. So, but as you would expect, Lexington, Kentucky, horse capital of the world, you would expect us to have a mounted unit actually known all over the country. So this month, we're going to be looking at all about our mounted unit, going all the way back to the early 1900s, up until now, and what's going on on the streets of Lexington on horseback. Hey, we are here with Sergeant Byron Creekmore with the Lexington Police Department mounted unit. Thank you for joining us today. So can you tell us how you became the sergeant over the mounted unit? Funny story, actually. I was sitting in the office on patrol, and I was working with another sergeant at the time. He was an acting sergeant. We were working on some paperwork for that day, and he left. He called me about five minutes later and said, hey, I have a random question for you. I was like, all right. And he said, you like horses? I was like, this has nothing to do with what we were just talking about at all. So kind of one thing led to another. I came out here and met with the sergeant that was retiring from this position, and the more information that I learned about it, it seemed like a good fit for me. And so I put myself out there and interviewed and got lucky enough and got the spot. Well, you know, you think of Lexington, you think of horses, right? And how we got to where we are today goes all the way back to like 1905 is when they first started talking about having a mounted unit here in Lexington. And then 1907, it came about, started, and it was basically then because officers couldn't respond to things like that. They couldn't respond to things in the outlying areas quickly, whether it would be livestock thieves or whatever. And then it was disbanded in 1909. 1973, they thought about bringing it back, but 1982 is where you're at today, all started, correct? Right. Okay. And how many officers do you have in the unit? Now we have three officers and myself as a sergeant, so four total. And what kind of training goes into becoming a mounted officer here with Lexington? So there's no requirement of any prior horse experience at all. We've had a few that have had experience.