So, Corporal Woodrum, I hear that you have a distinguished honor that I would like to hear about. Would you like to tell us what your distinguished honor is? I am the state of Kentucky's first certified jail officer as recognized by the American Jail Association. What exactly does that mean? So it means a lot of things. It means that I was able to sit for a national recognized test to test my skills and my proficiency level to ascertain whether I know what I need to know to be great at my job. And how many other officers in our Community Corrections Department are? Eighty-six. We have eighty-six officers? Eighty-six. Eighty-six officers. That makes us number one in the nation. And that doesn't happen without the training that we receive here. And it doesn't happen without the encouragement of the chief to his executive command. It doesn't. That means something that we have a leader in the chief's spot. Somebody who got a national designation and then instilled in us that we could do the same thing. That they could test our competency. And we come out as number one in the nation with eighty-six certified jail officers to date. And again, that doesn't happen without good leadership. That's amazing. Eighty-six of y'all being certified is amazing. I appreciate you talking to us today. Chief, thanks for allowing us to come out here today and spend some time at our detention center. Is there any last words you have for the folks before we wrap this up? No, we just really appreciate the opportunity. Councilmember Beasley, it's one of the stated goals that I told the officers that I would concentrate on getting done for them, which is wrapping all the good work, the hard work, the brave deeds that are happening behind these walls and these doors and get that out to the community. So I just want to thank you for giving me a venue and an opportunity to do just that. So I know the officers will appreciate this. Thank you. Thanks. We appreciate you having us. Thank you. Welcome to Code Enforcement or Not with your host, 6th District Councilwoman Denise Rae and her special guest, Director Lee Steele of Code Enforcement. Hello everyone. It's me, Denise Rae, your Councilwoman for the 6th District. Today in my second council comment of 2025, I'm glad to bring to everyone Director of Code Enforcement, Lee Steele. Hello. Good to be here. Lee, I'm just so happy to have you here today. Over the past year, you and I, we've done many town halls together. And I just want to say before we get into this conversation, thank you. You're welcome. It's been a pleasure working with you. I enjoy every moment of it and looking forward to what's on the horizon. You're new to this position. I have been in this position since fall of 23, just a little under a year and a half. So Lee and his team have made some amazing achievements and changes here in the Division of Code Enforcement. They've been working so hard to implement some wonderful changes and we will learn more about those changes today. But first, time to play a game, Code Enforcement or Not. Woo! I don't know. So I'm going to ask you some of the questions that my office has received from residents around Lexington regarding code enforcement. And oftentimes, many of the things are not covered by code enforcement. So in this game, I'm going to give you some of those scenarios and you're going to say, let us know if it's code enforcement or not. Okay. We'll start off with a really easy one. Ready? Yes. Okay. You ready, audience? Let's do this. Okay. My neighbor has a giant pile of trash in the middle of their front yard. It's been there for over a month. And they have three junk cars parked there in the front yard too. Is that code enforcement or not? It is split. Oh. It is code enforcement with the trash and debris. And the cars parked in the yard falls to Lexpark. Okay. Lexpark or even our traffic safety. Our non-emergency public safety. Yes. Yes. Awesome. So here's another one. You ready? Yes. Are you ready? Yes. Get ready. Here we go. I heard that property owners are responsible for their sidewalks. I broke my ankle on a sidewalk in front of my neighbor's home. Uh-oh. I tried to tell the neighbor about it, but they did nothing. Uh-oh. Is this code enforcement or not? It is. It is. Oh. Please report all those sidewalk cases through Lexcall 311-425-2255. We'll inspect, mark, and ask for replacement or repair of the damaged sidewalk panels. Did you get that question correct? No. Applause to you if you did. Do better on the next one if you didn't. Okay. Here it is. There is a business next to my home that has placed a huge, brightly lit billboard that shines right over into my yard and through the window to my bedroom. Is this code enforcement or not? It is not. Oh. Wow. Who is it? Right now, Lexington is still crafting light pollution ordinances, but at this time, it's a use of the property problem, and that would fall to zoning within the division of building inspection. Oh. That's a good one. So, remember, for a building inspection, you just call 311, and you ask for a building inspection if that is your issue. Well, you're educating us all today, and thank you. You're welcome. Yes. Okay. Okay. So, this right here is my final question. So, are you ready? Yes. Are you ready? Yes. All right. Let's go. Here it is. My neighbors behind my house have so many chickens, loud barking dogs, and big trash bonfires, and their gutters are broken. Every time it rains, it runs down into my backyard. Is this code enforcement or not? It's not entirely code enforcement. That's a pretty big bunch of things going on there. We can break it down. Right now, Lexington hasn't put a definitive number on how many chickens. We just recently started kind of overlooking the roosters. As long as they're semi-contained in the backyards, we do know they can get out anytime they want or choose, but that's not been a problem here of late. You mentioned in that comment about the burning of trash. That's definitely going to fall, too, and you're going to actually call emergency 911, and LFD is going to come out and see if you've got a burn permit. Mostly inside the city, there's not going to be anything larger than a fire ring acceptable, and it's not even meant to be used then as a trash burning pit at that point. It's for just ambient lighting fire. We mentioned about the runoff of water coming from possible gutters. Obviously, a property maintenance issue would fall to code with the gutters, and if the gutters are so bad or the drainage system has caused water to run onto another property, what code needs to see is that water is impacting the surface area of the neighboring property by cutting ruts, and then eventually it'll cut its way all the way down to the street, and usually it makes a deposit of debris onto the sidewalk, and that's how we track it back, and that is something that we can help with. Awesome. So that was a doozy. It was a multifaceted question, yeah. Yes, it was. And we get that a lot, and that's why I emphasize the customer service side of our phone calls. We need to make sure we know where these calls go, and not only should we offer to give them the number, we should probably connect them and get them there. And that's what we do here. All the staff up front has been cross-trained with LexCall, with myself, and all these kind of questions you're asking, and I think they do a wonderful job getting people at the right parties when it's not code. Right, and I just want to go ahead and say thank you all, because since you've become the director, the transparency from the Division of Code Enforcement has been night and day, and your leadership is why all these positive changes are happening here, and the environment that you have created. I mentioned to you back in September of 23, customer service would be the paramount thing for code, and in our business, if we think about it like a foundation, an engineer will tell you, if you don't build the foundation perfect, you can't have anything above it worth anything, because those little cracks become fractures, fractures become big problems. Think about that the same way with your staff. If you don't train them up from the beginning, from the foundation, and get that mindset set from the beginning, you're looking problematic for the future. And now that this game is over, we're going to go to a commercial. Well, thank you for returning after that commercial break. Well, now it's back to work. We have some big questions for Director Lee Steele regarding code enforcement that can help the people of the 6th District and all over Lexington. What's the best possible way to report a code enforcement or a nuisance issue with the Code Enforcement Division? Well, we definitely want you to use the City's Lexical Division, 311-425-2255. We want to do it for multiple reasons. It's a great start to the tracking ability of the case that you've established. The citizen will get their case number, and they can follow it through then the process. Yes, so 311 is our one stop for City Hall for all things. And also something that I'm working with Director Kendra Carter up, Lexical 311, is making sure that once the complaint is put into Salesforce, that not only you receive the first initial email, if you put your email address in, but you'll also receive an update as the case progresses. There have been many changes that you have brought in and brought like a new light here in your division. What are some of those changes that you and your staff are doing now? We didn't have a formalized professional training program here. Formalized training program just starts from the week before you get here. It takes you all the way through about your fifth week, get into your testing phase, all the way through until you go to your state certification levels. You're with somebody for the first nine months you come in here. That's one of the major things we made a change in. A couple of things that I did on the procedural level that have made differences. Previously, we were issuing multiple fines when we had the opportunity to abate. And an abatement is something that can make an immediate impact and solve an issue. If you can abate it for what you can give a citation for, let's get the problem out of the way, stops the phone calls to 200 Main, stops the phone calls to us, and the same amount of damage is done. The abatement versus the fine are about the same. And what we do now is we go and notice an order, we do a citation, and we assess. Can we abate it for the next step? Fine. If we can, we go after it and get it done and get it over with. We finally achieved abating five sidewalks now. I know that doesn't sound like a lot, but we've gone from 20 years of zero to five in less than now six months. And what that does is in the sidewalk world, the fines are $10 a square foot. And they can add up so quick that you can put a house in foreclosure over a few sidewalk panels. And I thought that was ludicrous. You know, one of the big issues that we heard during our town hall is about issues regarding abatements and lessening the fines for our residents. And I really like what you came and have done to make it basically more customer service oriented and making sure that we actually help people instead of punish them. I'm curious, after our town halls that we had, we had basically many of our residents are fearful once they get the citation. What if a resident receives a citation from code enforcement, what should they do? I like to tell everybody they should do three things. At the bottom of the notice, they're going to have the officer's phone number, his name, and his email address. They should go ahead and do a blast, in my opinion, write out one statement that they want to make contact to talk about this case, and they ought to copy and paste that into an email, and they ought to text the officer too. That gives them complete confidence that they've reached the individual they want to talk to. Once they open up that line of communication, the door opens wide open for them what can be done. There's compliance schedules. Copyright © 2019, New Thinking Allowed Foundation © 2019, New Thinking Allowed Foundation © 2019, New Thinking Allowed Foundation © 2019, New Thinking Allowed Foundation © 2019, New Thinking Allowed Foundation © 2019, New Thinking Allowed Foundation © 2019, New Thinking Allowed Foundation © 2019, New Thinking Allowed Foundation © 2019, New Thinking Allowed Foundation © 2019, New Thinking Allowed Foundation © 2019, New Thinking Allowed Foundation © 2019, New Thinking Allowed Foundation © 2019, New Thinking Allowed Foundation © 2019, New Thinking Allowed Foundation © 2019, New Thinking Allowed Foundation © 2019, New Thinking Allowed Foundation © 2019, New Thinking Allowed Foundation © 2019, New Thinking Allowed Foundation © 2019, New Thinking Allowed Foundation © 2019, New Thinking Allowed Foundation © 2019, New Thinking Allowed Foundation © 2019, New Thinking Allowed Foundation © 2019, New Thinking Allowed Foundation © 2019, New Thinking Allowed Foundation © 2019, New Thinking Allowed Foundation © 2019, New Thinking Allowed Foundation © 2019, New Thinking Allowed Foundation © 2019, New Thinking Allowed Foundation © 2019, New Thinking Allowed Foundation © 2019, New Thinking Allowed Foundation Mr. Mickler? I move to postpone PLN MAR 24-17, Rose-Holding, Lexington to April 24th. Thank you. We got second by Mr. Jonathan Davis. Please vote via Granicus. Motion passes. Then I move to postpone PLN MJDP 24- Oh, wait. Is that not directly following that one? Yeah, it is. Page four, item B. Oh. Sorry, I had my pages mixed up. 24-81 Lane-Allen Park, lot 2 and 3 to the April 24th meeting. Thank you. Seconded by Mr. Jonathan Davis. Please vote via Granicus. Thank you. Motion passes. Thank you. Okay. Staff, page 2. And it's PLN MJDP 24-56, Red Mile Mixed Use Development. Hi. Hey. Hello, everyone. Good afternoon. We've got revisions on a blue copy. I'm sorry. Sorry about that. We have on blue copy. So this is PLN MJDP 24-56, Red Mile Mixed Use Development amended. We've been reviewing this for quite a while now. This is Red Mile Road heading over towards Broadway. And what we're proposing to do, we're looking at this area here. This is the Red Mile Casino. They're proposing to put in a hotel and a restaurant on this property. When we looked at this before, there was some concerns and issues over the number of trees that were being removed. And so you all asked for a mitigation report. And so they have the close-up. Whoops. There we go. We have a copy of the mitigation, which shows where they're locating some of the trees on the property. A lot of them they're going to put down through the center and then again over here by a pump station, adding a few back in this area. And that's up in this area here is where a majority of the trees are being removed. And so they worked with Eric Southerland, Urban Forester, on this. But at this current time, last time we were here, we were talking about the rule of 40% commercial that they had to start with mixed-use buildings. And so on this plan here, this shows the area of some of the mixed-use buildings that were proposed. We haven't seen a plan to do any type of development on this. We did add a condition stating that after so much square footage that's being built now, they have to come back in and do some of the mixed-use buildings before they can move forward for additional square footage. This plan here shows a little bit closer up. That area right there, currently this is what they're proposing to do out there in the area where the mixed-use buildings are proposed right here. It's a difference of about 115, 116 spaces from this area of showing the buildings to propose just all parking. We're not sure when they're going to come in with the buildings, if these will be the buildings that they want to build or if it will be a different building on the property because we do have some additional mixed-use further into the corner here. So with the revised plan that you see in front of you, we have the first 12 conditions as our typical sign-offs. We have one condition, remove drive aisle from the required landscape buffer per conditional zoning restrictions. The restriction is there's a drive aisle that's coming through here and that is not to be allowed within a setback and that's still showing within that setback. Then as I said, we have provided the planning commission accepts the tree mitigation. I can let Matt Carter, the engineer, and the urban forester, Eric Sutherland, give you a little more information on how they came up with the tree mitigation plan. But as far as the building square footage, we have the last note. It says a mixed-use building, 27-28, which are the ones up in the corner, and then 32-36 shall be constructed prior to issuance of a building permit for commercial uses exceeding the 40% maximum established by Article 28. As of March 27-25 today, there's 88,963 square feet for commercial use available to be constructed prior to the mixed-use building. And they are showing a proposal for their hotel that square footage had changed, so it's now 84,000, so that will allow them to build one building and then they will have to build mixed-use buildings before they can do any additional commercial areas. So I'll open it to you all to see if there's any other comments or questions. Mr. Chairman? Yes, sir. So those trees are already gone, right? I don't know. That's why I got Matt Carter here. No trees have been taken. And I have the urban forester so you guys can talk to them. My primary question, though, is this. I thought there was supposed to be a parking structure built. Just because we're building one building, we're going to all have surface parking? The parking structure, there's a parking structure over here. Prior to this plan, they had copied this building over on this side, and it was going to have a parking structure also. But they have removed that building and created this building layout right now with deleting the parking structure. And, like I said, they still have one parking structure located on the other side of the main entrance coming in. On the plan? On the plan, right. But it's not within their area of amendment today, so we're not sure when they're going to build that. I'll accept. Thank you. Just to clarify, you said the urban forester is here today? Yes. I'd like to hear from him. You said, I heard that they worked with him. I'd like to know that he's approved this or not. Thank you for having me again. So I was approached by Vision back in February kind of via e-mail, not knowing kind of what the status of this plan was, since I had met on site with the company last year to look at the trees in question. And I'm not sure if you're familiar with the site, but the area between Red Mile and the historic barn is a nice, mature canopy green space. I've seen concerts there. It's one of the only really shaded areas out there. And at the time we looked at the trees, I helped measure, we assessed condition of trees, and I clearly stated that why can't we design that differently to change the impact to the trees? Across Winback Way there, there's another grove of nice trees, and the restaurant is being proposed to be put right there. So a little back story. So that was my stance from that point. So I get this query to, I need to talk to you about a mitigation plan. Well, I wasn't sure what was going on. So Mark McCain and I started the conversation. They proposed a lot of trees similar to the Herzberg Road project that you all are familiar with that we went through last fall. Initially, I didn't know if it had been approved for the trees to be taken out, because I never signed off on that. So I initiated the conversation for a mitigation plan. Obviously, losing trees, a mitigation plan is always going to be acceptable. My stance on this is my first preference is to look at a different plan, a different design for the site. They're talking about saving the rest of the trees near the hotel, but what is now a green space, there's a parking lot, and it zigzags around the trees. So I just think that that would be a significant impact to that grove of trees there, which would change that site. If I'm at the hotel and I want to go out and get a fresh breeze or something, I would want to walk right out the door and head over to the little grove of trees that are already there. There's parking already there. My stance is in lieu of a site design, mitigation would be acceptable because, again, we're getting something as opposed to what we've historically gotten as nothing. With that, I'll take any questions you have. Mr. Nickel. I just want to confirm something you said with a little bit of context. So during the development process, it is a constant battle between what can be developed and what can be financed in order for it to be produced and delivered. You have to deal with the existing conditions that are in place, including the trees. I believe what you have said is that if trees need to be removed, a mitigation plan is acceptable. Is that correct? That is correct. Okay, thank you. Ms. Wirth. You good? Ms. Davis. Hi. Is that better? Can you give us some sense of maybe the tree mitigation plan is the right tool? Perhaps it's having a better idea of the number, size, and species of what the trees are that are being removed and in terms of the rest of the area or in Lexington, how rare is it to have something like that within Lexington and how much effort needs to be devoted to ensure that they aren't demolished? So most of Lexington doesn't have – I mean, this isn't an old-growth forest by any means, but it's been there for a long time, and so it's actually developed. There's like five or six, let's see, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven trees there. Out of the seven there, there are two that one is the closest to the hotel, the Sycamore. There are some issues happening in the upper crown of that tree, probably starting to retrench and die back. That would be my least concern if that tree had to be taken out, but when you look just – Can you use the pointer or something to help? I can try. Okay, thank you. Top button. Okay, you're asking an arborist to use technology here. Okay. Yeah, so here's the Grove area, and it's a mature – there's six or seven trees there. There's a gorgeous Sycamore right beside the barn. Can the technology focus in on that area for us? While they're working on that, you know, it is becoming rarer to find on development sites larger trees that exist, and kind of where urban forestry is trying to push Lexington forward into a modern tree protection standard. We made some inroads last year when we got the significant tree size reduced. Currently, we don't have an official mitigation codified. Now, it's mentioned in language in Article 26 about removing and providing justification for removal of trees and then possible mitigation. So there is an avenue to get these things done, but most of these development projects, if the trees are approved to be removed, there's no compensating for that loss. So from my perspective, a very unique site. You have a couple of areas of larger trees. There's plenty of space there to be creative in our design. I don't – you know, especially with that sea of parking, and there's already parking up here by the track, all that's being turned into the root zones of all the trees that are being saved. So we know as arborists that if you pave root zones, you're going to have backhoes in there cutting in curbs and things like that. There's going to be a significant impact. So even if they're saved, you're creating a heat island under the trees and disrupting the root zone. So are you also saying that there is no legal framework within the city of Lexington for us to protect these trees? Because simply planting a one-inch caliper tree in exchange for, I don't know, a tree that has been healthy and growing and has an established root system, that's not an exchange. That's a detriment to our tree canopy, which we already know is lower than it should be for a national standard, according to the Davey Resource Group study. Right. Swapping a 50-inch diameter tree for a 2-inch diameter tree is not comparable to what the environmental services are being provided. Right. But we're also talking about – you're talking about an entertainment center, a place where you're trying to get tourists to come and stay. I mean, having a mature little wooded area outside the hotel and the restaurant makes sense to me. I mean, it seems like that would be aesthetically pleasing. I'm not an architect, but I know there are architects on this board. It seems to me it would be feasible, if there's an open pallet there, to design something that would work to preserve those. We're also enhancing the space, right? And if it's going to be a showcase development for the future of Lexington, you know, why don't we try to save trees along the way? Now, you said something about legal. No, we have Article 26, which is the tree protection standard, and that allows us to call these trees significant and to push for their preservation. Now, we haven't taken that to where we want it to go, and that's going to be the next amendment phase, where we want to strengthen these and modernize these standards to what other people are doing across the country. But as it currently stands, you know, I can push for mitigation, but beyond that, there's no framework to say they have to be mitigated to this level, you know? So I was pretty forthright at the beginning saying, you know, I think a design change would be better for this site. Again, if it's approved, then I would rather have 33 more trees planted to compensate somewhat for the loss of what's lost there than nothing. So, you know, that's the difficult spot that we get put in. So I don't know if I've answered that the way you would. Do we have any quantifiable information that we can look at before we have to vote on this? Because it seems like we're doing this in the absence of information concerning the significance of the trees, if that is a concern that I believe the subdivision committee also expressed. Is that not right, Mrs. Worth? Very well. But I think we have trees listed on the development plan. Is that right, the existing trees? Yes. Do you know how to pull that up? Yeah. Okay. I guess seeing the circles of existing trees and what they are sized, we have 41-inch basswoods, 38-inch sycamore, 44-inch hackberry, 51-inch American elm. Those are enormous trees. They provide a lot of ecosystem services. And I think to simply expect 20 new trees to replace those, it doesn't make sense. There is so much surface parking in this plan. It exceeds what is even required as a minimum, I believe. Why is there so much surface parking at the expense of trees? Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head. I mean, you know, a four-foot-wide diameter is showing you the width of the tree. Those are large trees. And, you know, it's a decent mix of species. And you've got a historic building there. And it's, like I said, if you go out there in the middle of the summer and you've got all that cement and one really nice bur oak over in the middle of the promenade coming up the way, that's one place where you get the cooling effects of trees and a feeling of well-being and serenity that you would expect in a place like that. So, you know, my office is saying we would rather see a different design with the trees in mind. In lieu of that, which I'm not the designer, and I don't have that authority in urban forestry to push for a redesign, I can say I'm not going to sign off on the plan. That is our preference. In lieu of that, a mitigation is better than losing all those trees and nothing compensating for it. Thank you, sir. Thank you. Just for clarification, when you said to the developer that you would prefer a redesign, am I correct in that, did anybody ever ask you what that would look like or offer any alternative redesign? No. Like I said, when I was on site last summer, early fall, and we were going through it, you know, I was just kind of going, you know, these are like amazing sites. And what I was told was, well, this area has got to be filled in. Well, I mean, if it's not an approved plan, then it doesn't have to be filled in, right? And then I didn't hear about this until February. So that's kind of the way the development process typically works. I have to sign off on plans, and I see tree protection plans and tree inventory maps and that kind of thing, but then it disappears. So I was never – and then this going back and forth, my stated preference is for a redesign of the site to try and save that tree canopy, and there's never been any alternative pushed back. And I don't know if planning has received any alternative design or not. But, I mean, if you've got an open palette, it seems like a design professional would be able to at least attempt to do that, right? But, again, that's out of my purview. Thank you. So right now we're going to ask for the applicant to come up. Mr. Carter. Good afternoon. Matt Carter, Vision Engineering. First off, the conditions I'm going to start off with, we're in agreement with these 15 conditions, so we're good with that. I do have a really brief PowerPoint. I just wanted to go over some of the history of Red Mile. So back in 2009, Red Mile had a small area plan done. In 2012, they asked for a zone change, and they had the property rezoned to MU3 from agricultural. 2014, the first final development plan was submitted. And then in 2015, the gaming building, it was constructed, and they had the grand opening on that in September of 2015. More recently since then, Rail Bird, I'm sure you all are familiar with that. It's a music festival in the summer. It was previously held at Keeneland, and they've now moved that to, well, for the last two years, it's moved to Red Mile. And then also in September of 2023, Cesar's sports book opened at Red Mile, where you can do sports gambling for any sports. Some history on the gambling side, the Kentucky Horse Racing Commission in 2010, they defined horse wagering to allow instant racing. In 2014, the Supreme Court authorized parimutuel pool betting on historical horse racing. So historical racing, if you're not familiar, that's the slot machines that are out at Red Mile, and each slot machine shows a little historical race on it. That's what makes it legal in Kentucky. I don't know if it was a lawsuit, but people had questioned if what they were doing was actually parimutuel betting, and in February of 2021, Senate Bill 120 was signed by the Kentucky government, which defined what parimutuel wagering was and how they're allowing historical racing to make it where you can do this kind of gambling. And then in March of 2023, House Bill 551 was signed by the governor, and it legalized sports betting, so any sports in Kentucky. This slide here is just to kind of illustrate the volume of income they do out there. So on live horse races, that's the actual horses running around the track, they have 32 race days. They bring in $938,898. That was for the year 2024. Simulcast horse racing, that's where you're betting other tracks, watching it on the screen, that brings in $11.7 million. Historical racing, the slot machines, brings in a stunning $1,014,000,000. This is at Red Mile. And then the on-site Caesar sports betting brings in $17.4 million. So it's a billion-dollar industry out there at Red Mile, believe it or not. This just talks a little bit about Rail Bird Festival. It's a two-day event. It has, in 2024, they had 45,000 people in it. So if you're asking is there a need for parking, you know, as long as they continue doing Rail Bird, there's definitely a need for parking. It's a two-day event. Last year I think the admission was $245 for two days. Some of the apartments that are built around Red Mile, former Tattersalls, that's where they used to do their sales and they had horse barns there, that's been redeveloped. So that was Red Mile property, and they've redeveloped that into apartments, 150 units directly across Red Mile. Red Mile Village, it's student housing that was put in. It's apartments. Anybody can go there, but it's predominantly student housing. 168 units there. The old Grogan's building at the corner of Virginia and South Broadway, 257 units. 840 Angliana, which is directly behind Red Mile. It's the most recent apartment on Angliana. That's 150 units. I'm just bringing that up to say there is a housing component that's going in all around Red Mile. This is just a chart that shows UK's enrollment over the last 10 years, and, you know, 10 years ago it was around 30,700. Today it's almost 36,000. So there's a trend of UK growing, which amplifies the need for more housing. Talk a little bit about the small area plan. Real quick, I was just going to read the overall goals and objectives. There's just three of them here, so it'll be quick. The Red Mile development plan should lay the groundwork for additional development that would support and enhance the existing racetrack and ancillary operations at the Red Mile. Two, the Red Mile development plan will create a model for mixed-use development in Lexington and the region and explore innovative zoning regulations supporting mixed use. So the MU3 does have a lot of innovative things built into it. The Red Mile development plan will improve connectivity and access to Red Mile and the surrounding communities. So those are the main goals overall. And to address some of those goals, Tattersall's Way, that was the old sales pavilion they had, and Barnes, again, it's Red Mile property. It was redeveloped as residential. The way Red Mile, where it's situated, it sits between Angliana, Versailles Road, and South Broadway, so we have connectivity to all of those roads. We have traffic lights at Red Mile, traffic lights at, well, both ends of Red Mile Road, and we have connectivity to Angliana, so we have connectivity to the traffic light there. Additionally, we have, let me go to the next slide, the Campus to Commons Trail, it talked about kind of some connectivity, multi-use trails, and so Red Mile, you see the kind of the pink color or magenta. Currently, Red Mile has built what you see in pink up to their main entrance, so that's built. As it develops, they'll finish out their part of it here. They've also constructed to the rear of the apartments at Tattersall's, they've constructed this road over to Curry Drive. It has sidewalks, and it has access. It was gated for a while, but the gate's now open, and so you can drive from Red Mile Road over to Curry Drive, which will ultimately get you to Angliana. So, just wanted to point out that Red Mile's working on multimodal connectivity. Now, I'd like to talk a little bit about the trees mitigation plan. Can I put some of these on overhead? Can you rotate it clockwise? Yeah, perfect. So, I think this is a good illustration. You weren't able to see it up close earlier. So, this has the trees identified and the sizes of them. I've highlighted two trees in yellow, and those are the trees we're proposing to remove. Let's see, I guess the pointer doesn't work with the overhead. So anyway, tree number five, that's the sycamore that was discussed earlier, and that one, there's just no way to avoid not taking that tree out. Tree, the 44-inch hackberry that's in the driving aisle has a worm beside it. I don't know if y'all have been out and looked at the side of the trees, but I went out, these are pictures that I took today. So can I put this up just real quick? So that's, it's not a great picture, but it's hard to see, it's dark on that, but that's the tree that we're removing, and that's the tree that we're providing mitigation for, even though it's not required. We're doing it as a compromise just to get past this, but that's the tree. Those limbs weren't taken down by red mild, they're taken down by storms. Red mild gets hammered by storms, so all the trees suffer out there. Can you go back to that previous one? Okay, the, let's see, number three, or the 41-inch basswood, that's the 41-inch basswood. It's, you know, storms knock the top out of it, it's just, it's not a handsome tree. Yeah, when the leaves come out, it might be, look fuller, but the reality, it's a tree that it's probably not going to live another 10 years, I mean, it's, the wind, everything out there is just too hard on them. So that's the basswood tree. Okay, can you go back? Oh, the, it came up about redesign, and why we didn't redesign, well, we did redesign, and this is the redesign, and we were taking out more trees before, so we have, we had, well, I can't point, but where the 38-inch sycamore is, there used to be an entrance coming in there, we've reconfigured that. I think we were taking out four trees before, and now we're taking out two. And let me put up one more picture for this slide. So this picture, the 51-inch American elm that you see, can you slide it up just a little bit, okay. That's the island that that tree's in today, it's, and that's the way it's been since 2015. And what we're proposing makes that island bigger, so we're giving more green around that tree. Another thing that you can't tell by looking at this is this tree's heavily damaged to the, one of the limbs running up the middle, well, two of them, and when I say limbs, I'm talking about the major structure of the tree is dead. So that tree is, you know, it's days are numbered, too. It's probably could live another 20, 30 years, but it's just slowly going to start dying off, okay. Now we put this up. Okay, this is the area where the trees were down next to Red Mile Road. There's four trees, the ones in yellow, that we're proposing to remove, and I just wanted to show you the shape these trees ran. I'll start with tree two. I don't know if you can tell, but that was a multi kind of trunk tree. When I say multi trunk, what I mean is when you get about chest high, limbs start coming out on it. A big chunk of that tree was blown off, and I'm not sure when it was, but that tree is not a good tree. It's going to continue to do that. It's going to get rot in there, bugs, and it's just an ugly tree. It's an eyesore. So that's one of the trees we're proposing to remove. Okay, this is tree one. This is a tree just in front of that. As you can see, that tree, I don't know if multi trunk is the right word, but really close to the ground, it starts splitting into other major limbs or trunks. The tree that you see behind it is the one I just showed you that had the damage. This tree doesn't have damage, but it's going to happen. When you get the trunk, I mean, when you get where the tree limbs split that close to the ground, it weakens the tree. It's more susceptible to rot. That tree, when it was planted, it should have been pruned and thinned out some of the limbs, and when you don't do that, this is what happens. So yeah, is it pretty? I'm sure it is in the summer when all the leaves are on it, but that tree is going to be damaged too. It's just a matter of time. This is another one of the trees in that same grove. You can see the top of it's blown out. So my point is, all the trees we're talking about aren't in good shape. They're just not good trees. They might look good in the summer, but because of the health they're in, they're just not going to last. And again, I just want to point out that really, this is what I'm going to conclude with on the mitigation. Are we required to do mitigation? Well, according to the current ordinance, no. We're just required to show you the trees that are significant, according to today's standards on there. But are we required to do mitigation? No. Have we cut any trees down? Is it a compromise, what we're proposing to do mitigation? Yes. I think it's good faith on our part that we're taking down trees that aren't going to survive and we're going to put them in a new location, you know, put trees in a new location. It's going to be 30, I can't remember the number, 32, 33, it's on the plan. And they won't be inch caliper trees, but I think it's a good compromise and I think you ought to approve it and not keep, you know, debating on whether these trees should be saved. So, with that, I'll just, I'll open it up to questions. Thank you, Mr. Carter. Mr. Mickler, you had something. Yeah, I've got a couple things. This I'm adding in after your presentation, but, you know, to be fair, I feel a little insulted because I think if you drive around town and find trees that have stood for one or 200 years and have three, four, four and a half inch, four and a half feet trunks, that yes, you will see storm damage, yes, you will see damage from standing here in our community for one or 200 years. And coming here and saying that a tree that has been here for 100 years has storm damage, I'm not sure why you just did that. But I'm going to come to my question now. We have a proposal in front of us that calls for the addition of a hotel and then several other mixed-use buildings. My understanding from staff's presentation is you all are only intending on building the hotel in phase one and then the other buildings would follow? Yeah, I mean, well, right now the intent is the hotel. So who knows what the future holds, but that's the intent, just the hotel. But the parking build-out is intended for the hotel and what would later serve all of the mixed-use buildings? Yes. So we're proposing fully building the parking for the entire project, but only building one component of the project? Well, we need that parking. The hotel's 150 rooms, the casino is, I mean, there's not enough parking out there now for what they do. Well then, are you saying there's not enough parking to build the other buildings you're proposing? Right now, the parking we're proposing is for the hotel and the gaming facilities. In the future. Well, we're looking at the development plan as a whole, though, so are you saying there's no parking for any of those other buildings? No, I mean, I'm not sure I'll follow because we show parking all over the plan for every building. The only thing that's changed is we removed a parking garage and probably some of you all are wondering why don't you build a parking garage? Well, a parking garage, one space in a parking garage is probably ten times what a paved space costs. So when you're doing a project that's phased, you've got to look at what it's costing me. You're going to build pavement, paved parking now, and you'll tear it out later as you develop buildings before you'll go build a parking structure. I mean, it just doesn't economically make sense to go be building parking structures right now. Until you have buildings that need them. Okay, well, I'm concerned that we're approving what is essentially a permanent parking lot in replacement of both of this green space and trees for what will just be a hotel and we'll never see the other buildings. So I would feel more comfortable if you all would phase the parking in in conjunction with the other buildings. So limiting the number of parking that you have until we see the other buildings built. We need the parking we're showing to be built is needed now for what's proposed. Thank you. Mr. Penn. Matt, I hate to admit that I was part of that original small area plan. I'm sorry. I said it's a little disturbing to me to realize that I was part of that small area development plan that you referred to. And you have way more parking now than that small area development plan envisioned without a parking garage. And when you add what you're going to add now, and you're adding more than you need for the hotel, you're going to use that for BrailleBird that only happens there once a year for two days. That's the same logic that Fayette Mall used to reduce their parking space because they didn't need it but a week for Christmas. So I'm having a hard time saying I don't need the parking garage now because it costs too much, but I need this parking because we can do it on land that doesn't cost as much. So you're telling me that that land is going to come out and when the parking garage is built, are you just putting off building the parking garage until you absolutely have to build it? My name is Jihad Hallani with Vision Engineering. In addition to what Matt is saying, the hotel, the purpose of the hotel is to tie it into the gaming floor. So the intent of it is basically to have, with the drop off, a person has the option either to go to the hotel or to go to the gaming floor. So that's the idea of combining them close to each other. And part of this combination to build this five-story hotel, they had to demolish something they recently built two years ago, a smoking area on the outside. So it's going to be demolished to create this connection between the hotel and the gaming floor. So when we construct the hotel, we're going to lose a lot of parking spaces, mostly the handicapped parking spaces and the most accessible parking spaces that's close to the floor. So this place has to be relocated in front of the other way of Wimback Way. So that's the addition of the parking we are asking to be built right now, the areas that we are losing to kind of build the hotel, plus the 150 beds that's required for the hotel to require at least for one parking per bed, almost additional 150 parking spaces. So the parking garage, it's not like we're saying we don't want to build the parking garage. Building parking structure right now, without knowing exactly what's going to be on the site, it's kind of hard to move it, not like parking, surface parking. Surface parking can be moved anywhere like we're doing right now. When you build the parking structure, it's kind of fixed location, and we like to kind of have more definite user that are going to be on site so we can tie the parking structure to this user. So that's the intent of now. So you may see another development plan coming back with amendment that show maybe additional multi-tenant building or multi-mixed use building with parking structure adjacent to it, similar what we're showing to the other site. But you just answered to Mr. Vickler that you need the parking now and not just for the hotel. Yes, sir. The parking that we are building right now is for two purposes. Number one purpose is to compensate for the parking spaces we are losing where the hotel is going to be constructed, plus we need additional 150 parking spaces for the number of beds that we are adding for the hotel. For the events they do, basically they deal with University of Kentucky, they rent the parking spaces next to the stadium, and they haul people into their event for the two-day event they have with the railroad. I'm very familiar with that. Yes, sir. So the parking that we are building is not for that event. So the parking we are building is basically to replace what we are losing and the additional 150 parking spaces for the hotel that's going to be constructed. Let me finish with this. If you're generating a billion dollars worth of economic impact out there, and we're building off a small area development plan that I remember enough of to know that it doesn't even resemble what we're doing now, but that's for another day. But sooner or later, you're going to run out of ground to put surface parking on. I agree. So why build temporary parking? Well, the temporary parking right now is built basically, they're not knowing which kind of mixed-use building is going to be so that they tie the parking structure to it. So the intent for the parking structure is to tie into a mixed-use building, and then to kind of hide the parking behind the building instead of showing the parking structure on site. And second is that as long, I mean from economic point of view, as long as they can serve their user with the surface parking without having a need for parking structure, they're going to keep using surface parking because, again, it's much cheaper to relocate parking structures than relocating surface parking than relocating parking structure. I understand where you're coming from. I just don't understand why we spend all that time doing an area development plan. I mean, the area development plan, it's not like we are shining away from it. It's basically, it's market-driven. And so far, the only users that have been able to attract over there is now maybe they're going to have a restaurant, like a Drake restaurant is one of the options. They have been trying to get some kind of nice restaurant into that location. And now they are building this hotel, which is kind of complement their use, what they're doing. And the only users they have been talking to, it has been student housing. And they don't want to have student housing on campus. Basically, they want to have something more than student housing. And that's the only, I mean, that's one of the few people that have been talking to them so far. They're trying to build an entertainment facility next to, on the other side of the gaming floor. And this is going to be like big entertainment facilities, going to be four-story. They're still in the negotiation phase. I'm not sure if it's going to materialize or not, but this is something in the making. Let's talk about the development plan we're looking at now. Yes, sir. I'm not trying to debate the small area plan because it's not being followed at all. Thank you. Thank you, sir. Thank you. Mr. Owens? Sorry. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Matt, John, I think I heard one answer to what I was going to ask. You originally had two, what's been said as mirrored buildings. Right. And you're pretty much moving one now. Was that a hotel to begin with? No, it's always been, it's a mixed-use building. Ground floor was commercial, and then two floors above it was residential. And then one of them has a parking garage connected to it, and then it also has some kind of, like, retail component. I'm saying originally. Originally. And what's on this plan is still the same. We just didn't mirror the garage over on it. Originally wasn't one of those two buildings a hotel? No. No? Okay. There was a hotel, wasn't there? There was a hotel that has been approved on previous development plan, but it was not certified because the deal did not go through. You're right. It was heard before. No, it was in the same place as this hotel. Okay. Okay. All right. You know, I'm not going to reiterate the parking concerns because I'm in agreement. The colored version, which I like the colored version, but walk me through what are each one of these red buildings are proposed to be. Is it loaded? Okay. So this existing gaming facility's proposed hotel, this is what Jihad referred to as a Drake's type restaurant. Don't know yet. This building here, let me close it for a second so you kind of reorient where you're at. So this building is the mirror of this, and it is commercial on the ground floor with two floors of apartments above it. It just doesn't have this parking garage and this retail component. As you go down the plan south on these two are mirror of each other. Ground floor, these are commercial, and second floor, they're two-story. Second floor is multifamily or apartments. Then as you go south, this building in red here is commercial ground floor offices, second floor. It's a two-story building. This one didn't change. The only thing that changed was these two buildings here. The second floor changed from office to mixed use, to residential. Okay. So that was changed in the past week or two weeks? And why was that changed? Which ones? What you just said had just changed. The two mirrored smaller buildings. These two here? Yes. Well, the requirements of the MU3, they require for all your commercial, you can build 40% of it before you build mixed use. And the way I interpreted it, which was actually I interpreted it wrong, I could have left those commercial up above, but I didn't want to, it was too late, so I just left them for this plan. But my understanding was that I had to do more residential than I had shown, but it turns out I didn't, that what I had was enough. The only thing I had to meet was our next building constructed out here after the hotel has to be a mixed use building. So it'll have commercial or office and then residential in it. So hopefully that explains it. Okay, thanks, Matt. Ms. Wirth. Yeah, Mr. Carter, when you first met with the urban forester and he mentioned that he would like to see that green space preserved with the trees in it, did you all ever attempt to design a space that would allow that preservation? In this area here, yes. I mean, that's what I said earlier. We did change our design. No, no, no, no. I'm talking about leaving entirely green space in the area between the hotel and the Stable of Memories. Did you all ever contemplate a design that would preserve all that green space? Well, no, because a lot of that is existing parking now anyway, and so what you're seeing there is just kind of a reconfiguration of the existing parking, and by doing that it takes out two trees. So those trees are, some of them are in green areas and some of them are in parking areas now, but yeah, I mean, to answer your question, we didn't try to just totally eliminate the whole area because parking was becoming an issue. I know you all think we have too much, but we don't think so. But in looking at that area, it's hard to count, but it looks like maximum we're talking about 50 parking spaces in that area. Is that a decent estimate? I'll take your word. I don't know. Okay. I mean, one of my concerns, and you mentioned the comprehensive plan, and I think we're all supportive of the economic development aspect of this and the housing aspect of this, but the other piece of this is the environmental issues, and particularly our comprehensive plan talks about reducing the heat island effect, and what we've got there is a huge asphalt pond, and so we're improving some things on the one hand, not improving them on the other hand, and I think what we're trying to get to is there a way to design this so that we reduce the heat island effect. Part of that's preserving trees, part of it's just eliminating the amount of asphalt we've got out there in a way that still allows parking. So I'm going to call this the triangle area right here. On that area, we haven't really changed the asphalt. It's always been that. It was asphalt on the first plan you all saw. The only thing that's changed is these buildings right here. Now the parking's been reoriented and configured, and to be honest, there's more islands internally in the parking lot than there was before. So more than likely, we've reduced the pavement. I can't tell you definitively, but I know we were trying to make this more walkable than it was before. We've got sidewalks and islands everywhere in there. It's probably going to be the most walkable parking lot in Lexington. So I think what you're saying, we're doing on here. And then as far as this area up in here, you know, it currently is paved, and we've taken out an entrance. We've taken out a lot of parking. So the net of it is it's probably less pavement on here than it was before. Mr. Chairman, just Mr. Carter, thank you, just a factual question. How much parking, how many parking spots are you losing, and how many are you adding? I'm not, I don't know if I have that. I'm going by memories. And the way we configure it, I can tell you how we came up with the configuration. We are shooting for 150 parking spaces for the hotel and 700 parking spaces for the gaming floor. There's 1,000 machine ratio, it's .7 per machine. So we're trying to shoot for 850 parking spaces to be located as shown on the site. Okay. Well, I just ask because you say you're compensating for lost parking, so how much are you losing? Correct. 800. We are adding 150. So net. But we are losing almost 100 parking spaces where they are used for handicapped spaces, almost like 60 handicapped spaces, and there's 40 parking spaces located on the side of the handicapped spaces. So we are losing almost 100 parking spaces. Okay. So you're losing 100. Yes, sir. So you're adding, I guess, immediately 150? And then? Net will be on that plan, it should be close to 850. 850. Yes, sir. Plus or minus. Not that we're adding, that's the total. The total. Okay. All right. Thank you. Thank you. Mr. Nickel, you have something? I think that this parking question is you meet the parking requirements and the standards that are required through the zoning ordinance, but just for my benefit, there's a couple of other institutions here that we are so proud of that are only in operation a certain period of time in each season. So what I'm getting at is just as we're looking at calculations of parking, even though I don't think it's necessary for the conversation or the approval of the development plan that meets the requirements that are necessary, when you are putting together, I would say, parking numbers, right now you gave us 0.75 per machine. When you're putting together something, another racetrack facility like Keeneland, how are they determining the number of parking spaces that they are putting at Keeneland? Because I do understand that that's a seasonal, a lot of that parking is seasonal. And it's nice to have parking available when you want to go and seasonally participate. So my question for you is, are we, how do we associate seasonal parking in some sort of parking requirement like other organizations do? Yes, sir, that's a good question. On the 0.7 parking spaces, it came based on, we did the work on Turfway, Red Mile, we did Derby City, we did Oak Grove, I don't remember which one, and Terre Haute. So all this number came, the 0.7 came based on Churchill Down numbers and Red Mile numbers, and the average is 0.7. Usually it's a little bit lower or a little bit higher, but the average is 0.7. And that's what the number we applied over here. And then we added 150 for the hotel. So it came up with 850. On the racing days, so basically they have additional parking. Some people park, I don't know if they're allowed or not, they park on the grass area. This is usually they accommodate for. And the timing of the racing sometimes is not the same as the timing of other things. So, but they like to have close to 850 parking spaces on the Red Mile available. That's what we have been instructed to do, based on their use. Thank you. All right. Thank you, Mr. Cotter. Thank you, sir. Mr. Cotter, we're good with you now. Thank you. Thank you. Is there any citizens that would like to speak on this application? Okay. Hold on a second. I see the urban foresters standing up, I'd like to hear. Yeah, you were standing up for about ten minutes. I'm going to be brief, but I just wanted to follow up on a couple of points. You can clearly see on the colorized plan that all those trees are in a green space. They're not in a parking lot. So that's just false. The elm tree that was discussed is in a parking island on the edge of the green space, and I'm sure that that was carved out when they put in the parking area. Those trees weren't planted there. I'm sure they're remnants from when that was a farm and that stable was there. Just a few things. Pictures are wonderful, and I appreciate pictures. As Mr. Michler pointed out, a tree that's been standing for 150 years with no maintenance, even a healthy tree, is going to have damaged branches. So that argument that these trees are somehow not serving us environmentally is false. The larger the tree, the more environmental services it's providing. That's why the little twigs in the parking island are not comparable. So I just wanted to address that, yes, we're going to see damage in trees. And I would gamble, if I could go place a bet over there at Red Mile, that those have never been maintained. So when we're considering this, sure, if we don't maintain a tree, it's going to fall apart eventually. And we can't keep storms from damaging trees. Lots of healthy trees have been damaged in Lexington in the last three years. Basswood, 140 to 200 year lifespan. Sycamore, 200, in some cases, 500 to 600 years. American elm, before Dutch elm disease, 300 plus years. Now with Dutch elm, 175 to 200 years. Red maple that he was saying were terrible. Those are some of the largest red maples I've seen. Have you all seen 40 inch red maples? They have opposite branches. They're going to fall apart if we don't maintain them. So we can't assess the health of a tree by its poor structure that has never been maintained. Those trees, 100 year lifespan. In ideal conditions, they can live up to 200 years. As far as what authority the Urban Forester and Division of Environmental Services has, I just wanted to address that. In Article 26, Section 4C3, Final Development Plan and Preliminary Subdivision Plan requirements, a tree preservation plan shall be required. Okay, we know this. Part of that is proposed tree removal areas, including justification for removal and any mitigation measures to be taken. So we don't have an official structure of how many inches of caliper you have to put back. But here it says that we can ask for mitigation. And in fact, they should be proposing the mitigation when they're taking out significant trees. So I just wanted to address that. If we scroll down to D in 20 Section 4, Review of Development Design. The basis for review of a TPP shall be the design of a development so as to protect and preserve the greatest number of trees as is reasonable and practical. I'm a fair person. I have worked with folks on trying to balance what we develop and what we save. But here it is in writing. Individual trees should be removed only as necessary to carry out permitted development under the approved zoning of the site or achieve the objectives of the comprehensive plan, such as to provide continuity in the design of collector streets, stormwater facilities, etc. The Planning Commission may approve waivers of street layout and grade requirements, etc. So there we have, we will be reviewing this based on what is the best plan for preserving the most trees. If we move down to 26.8, and I appreciate the extra couple minutes here. Approval of Tree Protection Plan. The proposed TPP shall be reviewed by the urban forester and their recommendations sent to the planning commission prior to their action of the related major subdivision or final development plan. And any requested waivers in connection with this article. So I am giving you my disapproval of this plan. No grading, filling, or other construction activity shall commence on the property until the TPP has been approved by the planning commission. So, changes to a TPP shall be reviewed by the urban forester and their recommendations sent to the planning commission for approval. That's probably something we need to work on to make that official. But me showing up, I guess, is giving you my recommendation. And so, I just wanted to point out that we do have in Article 26 the authority to review these and to make our recommendations and to not approve of these plans. And I just wanted to make those few comments. Thank you. Mr. Carter, do you want to say anything? Yes, sir. I understand the point of the urban forester. But my understanding was Mark McCain, he met with him on site, and they agree a mitigation of 350 square feet per tree to mitigate for what we are removing, and that's how we can base our mitigation plan. And we submit the mitigation plan for urban forester and responded back to us. He said, basically, he approved our mitigation plan in lieu of we are not of redesigning of the site. And the site is not like, as Matt, Mr. Carter mentioned, we tried to redesign the parking lot, but the building itself, the hotel itself, the requirement, the ways I want it to be required is basically five story, X amount of square footage has to be connected to the gaming floor. And a lot of criteria led to the square footage and the footprint of the hotel, and regardless how we move the hotel, it's going to impact at least one tree. And this is a design where it will at least impact one tree on the structure itself. And we reworked the parking, and my understanding, we have an approved mitigation plan from the urban forester. So, that's based on 350 square feet per tree. Okay, Mr. Nickel. Is what you're saying is that the urban forester provided you with a acceptance of the tree mitigation plan, is that correct? Correct, based on 350 square feet per tree. Okay, so it's been accepted that the tree mitigation plan has been accepted. As I'm looking at this right now, it says staff's recommendation of approval, because it has met all the zoning restrictions that are required, that is the way we get to an approval from staff. Then it says 14, provided the planning commission accepts the tree mitigation plan. What you're saying is that the urban forester has accepted your mitigation plan, is that correct? Correct. Okay, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Ms. Davis. But the urban forester is here, and he has just said he has concerns. So, which the urban forester told Mark McCain that he had concerns. Has Mark McCain communicated those concerns to you all? Yes, ma'am. We have an email actually where Mr. Urban Forester mentioned that he's okay with approving the mitigation plan in lieu of the redesign of the site. And do you mean Eric Sutherland, the urban forester in the back, or a different urban forester? Yes, ma'am. Yes, ma'am. That's what my, if I read English correctly, yes. I didn't hear that. I believe, though, according to Mr. Duncan, the urban forester approves a tree preservation plan. As part of this, he doesn't have a tree preservation plan to review yet. He has to look at this document and make comments, and he's saying the comments now. We're talking about two things. We're talking about tree preservation plan and tree mitigation plan. The tree mitigation plan, my understanding, it's approved. It's based on 350 square feet per tree. And that's how we designed the mitigation plan. And the being, if my memory is correct, 32 trees, additional tree to be planted. And we can spread them on site with mitigation plan. But I think the urban forester is also saying he would take that mitigation plan in the worst case scenario. And a far better scenario would be to have what you had originally shown, or what's approved in 2022, which are parking structures and fewer parking in that area to the stable of memories. What the email we have says is, he says it's not my preference to take trees down. But I will approve tree mitigation and that he finds this plan acceptable. He gave us total canopy that we're replacing. We've got 12,000 square feet of canopy we're putting in. It's 32, 33 trees. Normally for a large tree, you get 700 square feet or 750. We agreed to do half that. But so when was that emailed? When did that occur? This year. This year, so it's March 27th now. And he's had time to consider it, perhaps. Hold on one second. I guess the other thing is, is Mr. Carter- Ms. Davis, hold on one second. There's too much back and forth going on, and it's starting to get confusing, too much back and forth. Staff hasn't said anything, and I would like to hear from staff. If it's, I don't care if it's Ms. Jones, I don't care if it's Ms. Wade, somebody. But somebody needs to step up and say something, because there's too much back and forth right now. And it's getting out of hand for the applicant and us. And we're not here for that, because we got another item we need to listen to. And I'm sure they don't want to be in here all day. So Ms. Wade. Yes, Chair Forrester. The ordinance does give the urban forester the authority to provide and approve a mitigation plan. And that assumes that the planning commission is approving that those trees be removed, right? So if you accept the tree protection of how I'm reading this, is that there are 11 trees in that area, and it looks like four are really being protected. Potentially five, but four, I'm going to go with four. So you're saying, if you approve this plan, you as the commission are agreeing that seven trees can be removed. That would then trigger the urban forester to say, okay, the planning commission approved those seven trees to be removed for being protected. What's your mitigation plan to make up the canopy that has just been approved to be removed? So that leaves the planning commission in the hot seat to determine if we want to, you want to remove those 11 trees, or remove only three of the 11. It really is up to you in terms of approving this development plan. And I know you've gotten a lot of information from both the applicant and the urban forester. But we just, our community trusts you all to make the best decisions for development. So that's where you are. And we also have a revised approval staff recommendation too, so. Yes, and again, that's contingent on you accepting both the tree removal, right, slash preservation, and then the mitigation plan. All right, thank you. Mr. Carter, you can sit back down. All right. Let's close this portion out, and bring it back to the commission. I know there was a lot of internal conversations. We talk amongst ourselves, but Ms. Davis? I will just want to be respectful and thank you. What I was trying to get to was the fact that Eric Sutherland is an arborist. He has a career in that profession. He is a good evaluator of trees, and he has said he is not a designer. Mr. Carter, on the other hand, is a designer, an engineer, and not an arborist. And I think we should take the opinion of the arborists concerning these trees. Thank you, Ms. Davis. Mr. Mickler? Well, as I'm looking at it, as I was sort of asking the applicant, I see that we're proposing not just replacing the parking that we're losing for this building, but we're also proposing the addition of a lot of surface parking. And we're also proposing buildings that we are not planning on building right now. And as I see it, as I see it, the trees that are in the surface parking of which we're proposing 850 spaces would not be a huge burden at the moment since we're not even building all the buildings to say we're not going to do service parking on those spots right now. We're going to hold off on this version of the development plan. And then, if at a later date it comes back where there's more intensity, or there's parking structures, or more buildings, I think we could reevaluate that then. Thank you, Mr. Mickler. Mr. Owens? Thank you, Mr. Chair. You've got something, you've got something. Okay. We're here. Of course, when we're talking about trees and parking spaces, it sounds like. I've got concerns about both. I feel like we're just remembering what's going on. My main concern is the fact that we as a planning commission, the city as a whole, has to do better. We have to do better with parking. The easy fix is surface parking. But we've got to find a better one. We've got to get away from that aspect. I'm sorry that it's $10 to $1, or whatever, $10,000 to $1,000, whatever it is, for structure parking compared to surface parking. But we cannot just simply keep taking good land and make the surface parking out of it. This land is too expensive. We own density. I can appreciate moving the hotel to some degree. I didn't have a problem with the narrow two buildings, especially with the parking structure. I've got concerns about this at this point in time, so. Thank you, Mr. Owen. Any further questions, discussion? The floor is open for a motion. I'll make a motion. Mr. Nick, I'm sorry. I'd be happy to. I would like to make a motion for approval of PLN MJDP 24-56, the Red Mile Mixed Use Development, with the staff's recommendations for approval. The 15 staff recommendations that we have reviewed. Therefore, approving the provided tree mitigation plan. Okay, we have a motion by Mr. Nickel. Do we have a second? No, we have a second by Ms. Boxdale. Any further discussion to that motion? All right, not seeing any. Please vote via granulars. All right, that motion fails. New motion. We move for disapproval, is that the? Do we move for disapproval? You gotta have findings for disapproval or you can, Mr. Mickler had an idea too. Mr. Wilson? There's possibility of one other thing and that is maybe the possibility, I've taken my chart down, and that is to suggest that some trees can be removed and others not. I've forgotten the configuration, but some of those trees were already in green spaces to begin with. Yeah. So then the question becomes, do we wish to remove the trees that are in the parking area? But my question is, is there a possibility of indicating which trees we want to have moved? And then vote on that. Can we bring that back up? Yeah. Or preservation plan. Whatever. The one Mr. Carter had was a little bit better. Mitigation, yeah, he was taking, it's what are we going to keep versus what are we going to let go of, okay. The mitigation got rid of, it just shows what's being added. Mitigate, yeah, but it doesn't. So the one on the overhead right now, it is on the screen. This is the mitigation plan. We want a preservation plan. Well, it includes which trees are being identified as to be removed, right? Okay, and then we also have the black and white version that Mr. Carter used on the overhead, if that is easier, because it's- It would be easier for that. Smaller. Yeah, that's the one. So here's the proposed restaurant at the corner. It looks to me like the red maple is proposed to be maintained at the corner, and then four trees are set to be removed. That's their proposal. So maintaining or preserving. That's for the ones at the bottom. This tree, the one tree. Yeah, okay. And removing, because there's a building on top of it, and parking these four. Can we get the rest of that so we see the top part where the elm is? That won't, no. So this. This one shows, again, I don't think this one will live, I'm just going to tell you, because of the drive. This one is definitely leaving, this one could be saved, definitely a parking space, saved, saved. With their plan, this one would go away, right, this would be preserved, theoretically this one, this one, this one, and the Hackberry would be removed. You lose two trees, I'm trying to get my count straight here, you lose two trees at the top, right? Okay, two trees at the top, all right, now go through the bottom. Four, these four, so they're showing six being removed and five being kept, again, we can ask, but I don't, this doesn't really, in terms of preserving a tree, doesn't meet the ordinance which says you're supposed to provide a tree preservation area one and a half times the canopy. So clearly there's pavement right underneath and adjacent to the trunk. So that doesn't really meet the ordinance in terms of preserving it. Arguably this one might have a problem too. Obviously this one's already in a landscaped area, but as the urban forester said, currently this land is, my hands are not great, is open space. And so the root system has the ability to get water and nutrients from that side. But yes, six trees, four and two are proposed to be removed. So the commission can either, say, move the restaurant to protect all of those? Mr. Chair. Or some of them? Yes, sir. My mentor across ways often said we don't need to do this on the fly. Is it possible to continue this and let the applicant and our wonderful arborists work on this and come back with a better plan? The floor is open for a motion, if you want to carry it that way. Is that doable with the time frame involved? Mr. Chair, I'll move for a continuance of plan MJDP 24-56 Red Mile Mixed Use. Currently with 15 conditions, however, the continuance is to allow the applicant and our arborist to work on- I'll second. Okay, thank you. Tree mitigation plan. Yeah, and this is a continuance. This is a continuance. And we got a second by Mr. Jonathan Davis. Yes, Mr. Wilson. What I want to do is to try to get clarification from the commission and my colleagues as to which tree, I mean. All of them. You're saying to keep all of them. I don't, I think there needs to be a better. But you're communicating to us about the impacts and what can be done to preserve them. The maximum. Well, okay, that's fair. I mean. Yeah, but hold on one second. We're continuing it right now, so they can work it out. So we don't have to get involved with this conversation anymore. Right, and I was just trying to clarify what it was we were continuing, why we were continuing. You can do that after. We've got, is it 24th? Mr. Chair, I'm game with. Two weeks? Two weeks. Okay. In the 10th or the 24th. 10th is fine. I'll go with the 10th. Mr. Davis, you're still seconding your motion for the 10th. Okay, all right. We have a motion for a continuance to April 10th. When we have a second by Mr. Jonathan Davis, please vote via Granicus. Okay, that motion passes. All right, before we get to the big one, I would like to move the commission items, the public facilities review. I'd like to take that next. The representative has been waiting patiently. We don't want to leave him to the end. So, if we could, can we do the public facilities review next, which is page five. All right, good afternoon everyone. Daniel Crum, planning staff. The next item on your agenda is a request to amend some development at the property located at 1138 Finney Drive, that is the location of fire station number ten. And the purpose of this amendment is to construct a approximately 5,000 square foot accessory building at this location to be used for the storage of equipment and materials. Here we have the subject property, so it's shown in here approximately an acre and some change. Here we have Georgetown Street, New Circle Road, and then Finney is a primarily industrial road that serves some industrial users that kind of branches off of this. So this is the location of fire station number ten. We have the existing fire station here, and then an existing building here used for the storage of their vehicles. The proposed building that they will be constructing or requesting to construct is going to be very similar in appearance, material, and size. From a zoning perspective, we have an area that's once again a mix of B4, which is that wholesale and warehouse business. That purplish color is industrial, light industrial zoning. Once we go further down Georgetown Street and on the opposite side, we do have B1 and then residential as you're working kind of closer to the core of town. So this serves the entire area and also includes storage of vehicles that are used at other sites as well. Here is sort of a canted aerial view, so you see the existing structure, the parking located to the rear, the existing storage building, and then a concrete pad that shows the approximate location of where this new 5,000 square foot storage building will go. And shown approximately there with the star. This is a plot of the property with the proposed boundary shown. So once again, to the rear of the site where we have existing trees, it's adjoining existing industrial users, and is proposed to store vehicles. Here we have a view from street view. Once again, the design will be very similar to what we're seeing here with that existing accessory building. And then this is a view down Fenny Drive. Once again, to the left, you've got the onboarding ramp for New Circle, industrial users on multiple sides, and the existing location is screened with existing trees that will remain. Staff in their review put that as an industry and production place type based on the location, the adjoining uses. When we're talking about these types of locations, usually we're talking about, are there sufficient roadway connections to handle what we're looking at, and is there adequate buffering? In both cases, staff found yes. Within that, it fits within the existing development type as well. Once again, situating these in areas where existing industrial development is present. When we talk about the comp plan, the comp plan calls for making sure we have adequate community facilities. That means both in kind of size as well as capacity. So this will improve the ability of fire and emergency services to respond to these various areas. There's proper roadway connections in place. Utilizing the existing facility, existing parking, existing roadways to provide this additional service and kind of expand their capabilities. We find that it's an agreement with the comprehensive plan. We found that there was no goals and objectives that were in opposition to this and recommend that the planning commission finds that this is an agreement with the comprehensive plan. We do have a representative from fire here to answer any type of kind of operational questions. But accessory building on an existing lot with an existing fire station, staff recommends that you all find it's an agreement. And I'd be happy to answer any questions of staff. Thank you, Mr. Crum. Mr. Pinn. You're going to, okay. No questions. I want a motion. That's great. Mr. Chairman. Yes, sir. I move the PLN ZOT 8251. PFR. Did Mr. Wilson give you the wrong? Yeah, he did. He did that on purpose. Gave me the wrong thing. Mr. Wilson. That's what happens when you move me. So if you wanted to go ahead and approve that, you could. I move that PIFR 20251 fire station number 10 is in compliance with our regulation. Okay, do we have a motion? Do we have a second by Mr. Wilson? You sure about that, Mr. Wilson? Okay, all right. Please vote via Granicus. Okay, see, it's nice. Ms. Davis, are you locked out? No, she's okay. All right, motion passes unanimously. Thank you. Thank you. All righty, Mr. Crum, we're up. Page four of the agenda, PLN ZOTA 25-1. Yep. Okay, and we have a handout here for us in our packet. All right, Daniel Crum, Planning Staff, once again. You should have in front of you all language that is dated 3-24-2025. That represents the most up to date version that staff has generated. Corresponding with this was a handout or a document that got sent out and sort of explained the changes relative to what you all had looked at at the beginning of the month. So just to kind of go through how planning staff had sort of anticipated our presentation going was, I was going to spend some time just reorienting the commission to what we're here to look at, what the implications of that are, how we have to change our ordinance to be in compliance with it. And then was going to provide sort of a broad overview of the changes by article, not delving into the particular language that would then leave you all with the ability to sort of on a individual article by article go through, answer any questions, or make any changes that you all have taken a look at in order to kind of keep the process moving. So once again, big broad strokes on staff's presentation. You'll be able to hear any public comment, and then we can kind of go through section by section to make sure that we're kind of staying on topic and kind of facilitating this process along. So House Bill 443, which is really the genesis behind these required changes, created a section of the KRS 100, which governs the operation of the planning commission and our review and local planning. And it deals with the subdivision plots and development plans. Really, the core concepts that we're going to be talking about today are objective standards, ministerial action, and discretion. So we'll get to that in a minute, but essentially it causes us to have to rework how our zoning ordinance functions. If the zoning ordinance is not updated, this will take effect on July 1st, no matter what we do as a local government. And so, in order to ensure that we do not have gaps in the ability or a reduction in our ability to kind of effectively plan for the community. We need to update our zoning ordinance prior to this time in order to make sure that we have those on the books and we're on firm footing for the requirements of House Bill 443. So it requires that the regulation and review of development plans as well as subdivision plots are objective and applied ministerial. That means that there's no longer an avenue for discretion except for in instances where they request waivers or there is a elevated health, safety, or welfare issue. When we're talking about objective standards, these are things that are measurable, specific, unbiased, and equitable. These would be able to be applied regardless of the person that was reviewing said plan and should allow them to come to the same conclusion as to whether a development plan does or does not meet. When we talk about ministerially, really we're talking about a manner that doesn't allow for discretion. So in the same way that you all have, under your current process, reviewed development plans and had the ability to use discretion in reviewing certain elements, personal judgment and the like. Here, the House Bill 443 changes are going to mandate a significant change into the way that we review development plans. And I'll show a graphic in a moment that kind of outlines this. You do all still have the ability to review plans and apply discretion. Those are when, similar to the way we handle waivers currently, applicant could suggest relief from certain provisions of the zoning ordinance or the staff would elevate as a health, safety, or welfare concern. So the big picture implications of that are really kind of three main aspects that need to change. One is the updating the process to reflect the new ministerial review. If this is a ministerial process and it meets all the requirements, they are not requesting waivers, it would not be reviewed by the planning commission. These would be objectively have been found to have been met, they would have been approved. And so this would result in a shorter, more efficient timeline for those plans that come and kind of meet that high quality up front. The second is when we look at our current zoning ordinance, and much of these current zoning ordinance, things like setbacks, things like prescribed buffers, those are objective standards. Those don't need to change. What we are really looking at are instances where subjectivity was built in, in order to apply things like flexibility or the discretion of staff members in kind of working with applicants. Those need to be objective so that moving forward, we can make sure that these are being applied equally and consistently across the board. They're not subjective, because if they are subjective, then as of July 1st, those would be unenforceable. The applicant would not have to meet them, and whatever kind of portion or intent of the ordinance that was previously existing, and that the planning commission, as well as the urban county council thought significant enough to include, would no longer be enforceable. The third is that we have to create standards and instances where we were reviewing things that were a part of, say, the sign-off processes, or weren't a part of an adopted manual as of yet. Some of the more significant examples are how traffic engineering typically reviews plans. You all delegate the sign-off and the condition for them to review the plans. That's based on their professional guidance, professional literature, as well as their guidelines and manuals. But if they have not been formally adopted, they have not been created or crafted to be objective, those would not be able to be applied moving forward. So some of the things that we set out a little bit later on in the presentation, talking about standards for pedestrian connectivity, standards for drive-through, standards for commercial access. Absent those provisions, there is sort of going to be a gap in what we have the ability to kind of review and ensure that we are getting a safe and effective product when we're reviewing these types of plans. So here we have a graphic of kind of how the current processes work. Now notably, this is not going to apply to, say, preliminary plans. So the development plans that you all review in conjunction with the zone change, you still have discretion in your review of those plans. However, when we get to the final development plan stage, is where the process is going to kind of fundamentally change. The portion that we have currently, where it proceeds from staff review and technical review to the planning commission committees, as well as the planning commission itself. For a plan that meets all objective criteria, that would no longer occur. It would go to the technical review committee. The different sign-offs would evaluate it, meeting all of the objective standards, all the objective manuals. And if so, it would be approved and then certified once all those conditions had been met. If there is a elevated, or a case where the applicant can't meet a particular standard, wants relief from a particular standard, or finds that they have a proposal that will meet the standard in a more efficient or effective way. They have the ability to request waivers, at which point it would proceed to the subdivision committee as well as the full planning commission. So you would still have a subdivision committee, although the breadth of the plans is anticipated to be reduced. So instead of seeing all development plans all the time and having to go through this, the process is going to be kind of markedly different. And the type of plans that you all will even see are only going to be those where there is an exception or a special case, rather than every time a development plan is filed, as it is under the current situation. One of the most profound impacts of House Bill 443's requirements is that shift to a ministerial. So an objective process that regardless of who is reviewing it or the circumstances behind their review, that they are coming to the same conclusion that yes, this does or does not meet the plan, doesn't allow for discretion and the ability for sort of public comment in that same way. And so House Bill 443 is essentially going to eliminate the ability for public participation and input in the final development plan process. This is not to say that this eliminates all avenues of public participation. It still is available and in present during the plan making stage, at the text amendment stage. Any time that we have a preliminary development plan, so once again, new development or development in conjunction with, say, a zone change, still follows that same window. If they request a waiver, the waiver will require that they notify the surrounding property owners. It comes before you as a body, you are able to apply that discretion, you are able to hear testimony from the public with those items. And then items that staff elevates due to a specific health, safety, or welfare concern on a particular item. So those are the instances where you still conduct your subjective review of a sort of an exception, a corner case, something that is out of the ordinary, but for the vast majority of plans, this is going to limit the ability of the public to weigh in when we're talking about final development plans. And unfortunately, it's just a function of how House Bill 443 is written and the process that it prescribes. So I was going to go through, just generally speaking, through the articles that we are talking about today. I was going to go through all of them, just generally update kind of what we are changing. Really focusing on changes from the last draft. And then once again, if it's agreeable to the Planning Commission, after public comment, we can go through section by section. We have the text that can be put up on the projector. So any individual comments, any individual concerns, any individual questions about particular text in the section, we would be happy to answer. So the first one deals with definitions. These were updating definitions for clarity, consistency, and to address process changes. The changes that most recent to your last draft was we updated the definition for the engineering manuals. So they've added an eighth manual that we needed to cite to. And we clarified some drive-through language to make sure that it was workable. With respect to Article 6, we clarified that the council process for amending conditional zoning restrictions. One of the more impactful changes in the entirety of the changes that staff has made since the beginning of the month was we removed the prohibition against non-governmental entities applying for the ZOTAs. Once again, that is still something that staff is looking to address. We acknowledge that within this particular process, regardless of kind of what House Bill 443 requires, this is something that we're looking to apply moving forward, but didn't need to be explicitly a part of this process. And could benefit from its own period of public input and consultation. So that has been removed from the text, that is the most significant of the changes in Article 6. With regards to Article 9, once again, talking about process-related changes. Any time that previously a planning commission hearing was required, we have to remove that language. Because if it meets now, then it will go through the technical review committee and then not proceed any further. Once again, discretionary review in identifying things like open space. One of the changes that got made, and this was the request of our emergency services staff, was quantifying when a third access point is necessary. Essentially, there was a threshold where a second access point is required once you've reached a certain number of units. They have asked us to update that to require that when a third, when it is greater than 600 units. So very large scale, kind of limited in scope. But once again, they want to make sure that that's in line, so that if we get a development with 601 units moving forward, they can have the authority to kind of apply the guidelines and the requirements that are fulfilled for them. When we talk about 11, once again, updated the review procedure. We removed a reference to the, I know we are considering it as a separate part of the, or a separate zoning ordinance text amendment. Unintentionally, the lot coverage requirement that is currently on the books and that you all are looking to possibly amend or change was being applied here through reference. And so we have removed that. It was really never intended to address the B5P zone that way. There have been no changes since the last draft for this section. Article 12 is our B6P regulation. So that had discretionary language regarding location standards, multimodal provisions, things like guidelines are not really applicable moving forward. They have to be standards, codified standards that are objective in meeting those criteria. So that took some working and playing around with that language in order to make it objective and applicable and not require, say, the sign off of a particular staff member. Because once again, a ministerial review, it has to be objective, it has to be straightforward. There has been no changes to this section since our last draft. Article 15, that addressed the deep building setback provision. This was something that has caused a lot of internal delay when we're looking at projects, especially within the infill and redevelopment area. So this was something that we were looking to address as well in the spirit of sort of streamlining that process. We have no new additions from the last draft for Article 15. With respect to Article 16, this is one of the areas of most significant change. This and Article 21 probably are the largest areas of change. And that's once again, as I indicated earlier, some of our division's review of these had been using guidelines or professional staff expertise to dictate some of these things on a contextual and site by site basis. House Bill 443 requires us to put those in the form of objective standards where they apply and applying them equally across the board. So some of the changes that these have been put forward as being codified have been sort of standard practice for how we've been reviewing plans for some time, this is simply getting those on the books. So they included changes to internal pedestrian connectivity, incorporation of some more fleshed out drive through standards, incorporation of commercial access management, as well as some solid waste location and screening standards. There have been changes to this section since the last draft. Once again, we've kind of cited those on a page by page basis. Essentially, we made a change to the crosswalk height in order to reflect ADA requirements. We clarified some language about bike parking requirements, especially as it relates to being within a parking structure. We fleshed out a little bit better the access point width and management in instances where that may need to be wider than the prescribed 30 feet. We then also clarified language regarding gated access points based on some conversations that we had with you all as a body on some of the blind spots that that language at first proposed kind of had. Once again, as we kind of go through after hearing the public comment, we'd be happy to kind of dive into those with greater detail. Understanding that those sections have a large amount of change and there may be tweaks that we would like to make moving forward. Article 18, we were talking about landscape and land use buffers. Once again, these are getting things that would have been part of the sign off for the Division of Environmental Services. So making sure that we are on the same page about the required island widths and plantings, criteria for redevelopment, and removing discretionary items, such as the innovative design landscape plan, which once again, just unfortunately doesn't work within the confines of a ministerial objective system. One of the changes that we made since the last version of the draft was kind of based on some of the commentary. There was a requirement for spacing for trees within utility strips, within utility easements rather. That language is something that we can revisit in the future, but once again, it is not something that was really, we had been applying up to that point. So really, the intent was not to add new provisions that had never really been fleshed out, but really trying to codify that existing practice, and then further down the line, if there are new items that need to be added or as a response to the changes that we make today, we have the flexibility to do so. Once again, this language was oriented towards making sure we continue with the level of review and care we have today within our ordinance. Article 21 is development plan, so once again, a number of substantial edits had to be made with the process. Now reflecting ministerially, updating required notes and required contents, incorporation of a waiver process, and really just fleshing out what it looks like to submit and review a final development plan in a way that meets House Bill 443. So there were changes that we made since the last draft. So we removed the requirement for a pre-application meeting with staff. Once again, we are always available to address questions from developers, questions from the public. But as far as requiring a pre-application meeting when the plan could be submitted and meet all requirements, essentially was adding kind of an additional barrier, an additional step that wasn't necessary to kind of mandate. We added information regarding an appeal process, so how to appeal kind of the new process that was being borne out. At the request of law, we are actually going to recommend that that language be removed. We've got an existing process that deals with that, that's governed by state law. The appeal process is currently not mentioned in the zoning ordinance for our process now. So at the request of law, that portion that we added on page 33 is being proposed to be removed. The last real change since our last draft was removing language that's sort of as prohibiting cost as a consideration in granting a waiver. And also in order to kind of accommodate that, we, staff noticed that in the section that followed that, 29 DB3, that language actually pops up again. So it will need to be amended to be removed in both places. Essentially, the thinking on that is the staff did not want to limit the planning commission's kind of consideration of waivers. If they are asking for a waiver and it meets the requirements, if cost is being cited as opposition against that, that you all kind of have the flexibility to determine when that is reasonable and when that is not. But essentially, anything that is being asked to be waived generally would have a cost component. And so we are trying to essentially afford you all the flexibility to reasonably kind of look at each of these sites and determine when this is or is not an appropriate consideration relative to their request. Article 23 deals with our expansionary zones. These had mandated public meetings for subdivision plans and plats. Those have to go. Those only will now come to you all as a function of the waiver process or the health safety welfare process. And then once again, no changes since last draft. And last but not least, and I appreciate you all bearing with me as I sort of powered through these, mixed use zones had to once again process changes, subjective criteria, ironing those out. And we cleared up a prohibited use discrepancy on page 48 that dealt with animal kennels. So you all have the text in front of you. I am happy to answer any questions you have kind of right now, but once again, staff thought it would probably be most productive if we could kind of take all of the comments, questions, concerns on an article by article basis after you all have heard public comment. But open to anything that you all have at this time. Just a quick question, Daniel. Did you all receive a copy of Mr. Gaffield's document? Yes, just now. Yes. Normally in situations like this we, well, more often when the public is here for a hearing, we get other documents that have been submitted to planning prior to the event. Are there other documents that we need to be looking at? Yeah, so there's public in Granicus there. There should be your public comments, links to those that have been scanned in. We also have written copies up here. Not a ton of actual public comment was kind of distributed for this particular item. So we do have some comments, but not really a ton that were submitted. Hey Daniel, do you know how the public comment would be labeled within Granicus? Yeah, let's take a look. Mr. Crone, I don't think he's in there. We can either, yeah, so we can distribute those copies. We have hard copies here, so we can put those on the projector, or we can distribute them for you all to take a look at. That wasn't included in the part of the comment, was it? That's not the, that's not, that's not, that's not the public comment, no. Do you want it anyway? I'm trying to decorate my house here. Okay. Yes, Ms. Davis? Thank you, Chair. Daniel, I had a question that kind of relates to our conversation before. We were having a discussion about tree preservation, not mitigation, but tree preservation. You know, number five, it says urban, about the Red Mile Project. It says that urban foresters approval of tree preservation plan. Am I right in understanding that a tree preservation plan is not required in future? We cannot, is it because we can't- So, we'll still follow the requirements of the zoning ordinance there. Now, where that may sort of differ in the future is if a plan gets put forward that meets the requirements of what is prescribed by that. I think that may limit the ability of the planning commission moving forward to sort of make a more subjective call. So in the instance that they say, these are the criteria, this is what can be mitigated. This is us meeting this mitigation standard with that, then you have less discretion. What is the tree preservation language that we are adopting or have? Is it, can we say we want to preserve trees or we will preserve all trees? Or how do we make that so it's measurable and has metrics associated with it rather than, I just don't know where we're going with that. So I would say that article 26 is already in place and it may need some amendments. But the division of environmental services is already working on those. And so it'll be a separate text amendment. I think perhaps most of the planning commission remembers when we updated things in article 18 recently also for the division of environmental services. And that was what they considered kind of their phase one text amendment. And then they will, I expect in the next year, follow up with their phase two. And I think that will get more concrete criteria for. Okay, and then Daniel, could you go back to the slide that mentions when public input- Yes. Will be possible? Because it seems like there's a lot less of it than before. Let's see. There we go. Yeah, in the sense of we will still, that second bullet point, those all remain. But as far as for every single development plan coming in, the public having an opportunity to weigh in on that, that doesn't unfortunately exist in it. So how would the public know about being involved at the plan making stage? Yeah, and I think perhaps Director Duncan can speak to some of this. But I think this is sort of speaking to the crucial efforts that are long range planning, our strategic planning, and our other initiatives moving forward. This is something that we're going to have to kind of work that much harder to make sure that we are kind of engaging these communities. And making sure that when we go through and have each of these avenues, whether it's text amendment, plan making, or otherwise, that we are really reaching everybody. And we understand the difficulty in sort of evaluating these types of language at 10,000 feet when it's at a plan stage, versus the difference when it's right next to you, and kind of the immediacy of that. So will two of these planning commission meetings per month still have topics the public can have input on? Well, sort of in conjunction with your normal meeting schedule, if you look on the agenda, there's the ability for the public to address and have comments for anything that isn't directly kind of included on here. Now the catch is, if they want to weigh in on a development plan, that development plan may not even be heard by this body. And so that's sort of the difficulties of navigating public participation in a post House Bill 443 world is sort of that disconnect there. Ultimately, it can absolutely give you all guidance for future plans or plans that come through when you have the ability to apply discretion, say with waivers, say with health, safety, welfare concerns. But how does the public, what is their guarantee as citizens, tax paying citizens, what is their guarantee that they have a voice in this stuff? Ms. Davis, let me step in here. I understand the question, and your cohorts have been asking the same question for the past two months as well. And our answer has been consistent, that the plan making process still remains, and that is extremely important for people to be involved in. And as Ms. Davis pointed out, people are not necessarily engaged at that point, and they need to be. And so for, I mean Ms. Worth, Ms. Worth, I'm sorry. Ms. Worth, looking right at you, Ms. Worth pointed out at an earlier meeting about this. And so that remains the same, but the bottom line is, this is the direction that we have to go. This is what the legislature said they wanted to do, and I believe that was their intention, to speed things up. Not necessarily to cut the public out, but to speed things up. And so that's what we're complying with, and we will continue to be engaged in the community. And at that point, the community, for the certainty you're speaking of, Ms. Davis, that's where the rule making process comes in. When those rules are made, and it says shall, and it says ex feat, the expectation of the public is that that will then be met. And if the applicant cannot do that, there will be a public venue for then, for people to address that concern. Last question. I went through the document yesterday and the day before, kind of with a fine tooth comb until I got exhausted at about halfway through. And I shared my comments with you, Daniel. And I don't know if they make sense or not, but what's the process for sort of sharing those with people, with these other people, to see if they make sense or not? I mean, I don't think we want to debate all of those things, but what's going to happen with those comments? Yeah, so we have the ability once again, and ultimately, however works best for you all as a body. Some of those seem, were somewhat clerical in nature to address kind of the, and I believe that those comments were included in the documents that are circulating around now. Some of the things, like the lighting, got addressed other places. So really, it boils down to, there's a couple definitions that if once we start looking at the text, you would like to make a motion that we tweak or modify those. We absolutely can, and kind of take it through that. So there are a number of comments included with that, but staff is able to, if we wanted to take that point by point, or kind of go through there. What staff wanted to avoid generally was creating basically another version of the document in between what you all have been evaluating since Monday. And toss another version in the mix, and kind of add to any more versioning confusion or anything like that. So all of that to say, we can address any and all points. We could go through every single one of those, if you would like. Well, I only have one that really stands out to me, and that was about the landscape and landscape buffers. It seems to me that before someone is given permission to, do something else on their site, there needs to be some certainty that the site is in the condition it should have been in when it was constructed in a year later. Because there are plenty of places around Lexington, I can think of Trader Joe's parking lot, Kroger on Regency Road parking lot. There's no planting left. But well, they take out interior landscaping and don't maintain the exterior landscaping very well. So that, I don't know if that's a code enforcement thing or what, but that should be, I believe, codified somehow. Okay, Mr. McKinley? Sorry, Bruce. Go ahead, Mr. McKinley. Yeah, I've got a couple of questions. The first one has to do with that final bullet point. When we were looking in work session at the sort of text of the law, and it was brought up as specific health, safety, or welfare concern, could still be considered. Walk me through here. What came to mind after that meeting was an example in our recent past. And this isn't to predict what the future one would be, but it didn't take me thinking that far back to think of a case where we were looking at a project where the staff report did not bring up a health, safety, or welfare concern, but citizen comment did. And that was that the proposed project would have created a shadow. And that shadow would have been 24 hours a day for 11 houses in the winter time. And thinking back to sort of my history of zoning and thinking back to 1916 where one of the first zoning motions or ordinances was created in the country, specifically calling that a health, safety, and welfare concern to eliminate light down at the street level in New York City. And so that was a case where that concern was specific. It had to do with a real and measurable issue. And it was brought to us as the planning commission by citizens, not by staff. And I guess I want you to maybe, I guess I have some concerns that as we, especially as we look to expanding the use of zones, like our corridor zone or our downtown business zone, that allow far more extensive buildings, larger with fewer setbacks. Because we want to increase density. But allowing those zones to be in more areas are going to create more instances where there may be specific health, safety, and welfare concerns that we see more frequently. And how do we on the planning commission bring those to ourselves? Or how do citizens bring those to us if they are not raised by staff in a staff report? Yeah, yeah, so I think that is a valid point. So as currently the process is laid out, it's staff, it's your technical staff, it's us that would have sort of the ability to raise those issues. As far as the public's ability to kind of reach out to us, we take calls every single day that kind of revolve around the projects. Now, it is a tight timeline between when these plans are submitted and when technical review occurs and kind of meeting those thresholds as well. But any concerns about a development can always be raised with staff, and then staff can evaluate that. It does put, to be quite honest, a large responsibility on staff to kind of elevate those. Especially with something in the aspect of, say, a sun study, which is not really incorporated into the ordinance currently, but was raised as a specific issue with that zone change. We were able to use you all's discretion at those junctions and evaluate that. As far as it relates to the zone change process, that could still be raised at any time by you all or by a member of the public. So really, this relates to development plans when we've either had a preliminary already that we would have been able to discuss some of this at a discretionary manner, or if something was specifically raised by a staff. So on a case by case basis, it's something that we'll have to take a look at. But including, I mean, once again, you spoke to it, the tenement acts, air, sunlight, etc. Those have history of being a health, safety, or welfare concern that we could potentially raise, and that you all could evaluate the appropriateness. Thank you, and then I guess I would say that this, we've sort of talked about how when we're changing a zone now, and an issue isn't visible in a preliminary plan that will not preclude the person from doing that in the final. I do think that I do not see how the law prevents us from crafting this with language that allows either the public or the planning commission to raise a concern about health, safety, and welfare if that concern is specific. Yeah, and I think part of that is just due to the timeline. So the way that it's set up currently with it being a sort of that ministerial review, if you're seeing a plan, it's already been elevated for one reason or another. So basically, it would involve planning commission kind of being present earlier. I'm not entirely sure on how that process within the, and maybe legal can weigh in on some of the conversations that you all have had about, can we as a body look at these plans, still reviewing them ministerially, still see them? I think law has taken a look at that, and that may speak to sort of the window or flexibility for you all to say, no, we think there's a health, safety, welfare issue under that kind of timeline. So, let me just say that the way the statute is written is that the development plan. We're only talking about development plans, we're not talking about zone changes, so just keep that in mind. But is that, if it can be elevated to you all to consider, which would allow for discretion to be applied, if based on substantial evidence, is the way it's worded, that strictly applying the standards ministerially would pose a specific threat to public health, safety, or welfare. Now, so, if you're asking me legally right now, sitting here, do I know what that's going to look like? No, I do not, and neither does anyone else in this room. So, I mean, somebody else can tell you that they do, but they do not. So, we're going to have to, and that's all the statute says, that's all the legislature gave us. So, we're going to have to look at things as they come through. We're going to have to consider the law of what constitutes specific threats to public safety, health, and welfare. And we're going to have to look at whether or not, in each instance, there's substantial evidence before we raise that to the level of your all's review. So, I mean, there's a lot of things about this. We're trying to nail down as many things as we can to protect this community and move forward the goals and the desires and what this community has told us they want as we can. But that being said, there are going to be things as we go along that we're going to have to deal with. And we're probably going to have to deal with them on a case by case basis. So, that's not a great answer, but it's the best one I can give you right now. Mr. Nick, I'm sorry, Mr. Murphy. Yeah, this question is, we understand what we're responding to here is a request by, or the law that has been enacted by House Bill 443, where we're moving from subjective standards, which we see quite often here, to objective standards that we need to make up ministerial decisions based upon. So the text amendment we're looking at is updating the zoning ordinance in order to meet this HB 443's requirements. During this process, we have got to get this done before July 1st, 2025, so we're in a tight spot trying to get this done. What was initially requested was to change the text in the zoning ordinance from subjective to objective. We understand some of the items didn't necessarily have an objective definition, and those have been codified in the staff's report that we're looking at now. Understanding that there will be unintended consequences through the passing of our ZOTA. How are we going to deal with the unintended consequences? For example, what we've seen with the B3 zoning ordinance that we're readdressing with the ZOTA. Will we be readdressing unintended consequences on a ZOTA basis? Is that the procedure we're working with? Yes, so I think it's important to kind of take into account two things. The first being the, as we are kind of creating objective standards out of what was subjective or on a case by case evaluation by staff, the waiver process, I think, is going to serve as a safety release valve for some of these instances where new language may become an issue. Now, if something kind of, in the application of this, we find a, yeah, this was written and it had this intent, but it's really achieving something different, or it's not doing what it's intended. There most certainly will be subsequent ZOTAs to address some of the language that's generated today. But we need to make sure that we have some language in place in order to make sure that by that July 1st deadline, we are doing that. So this is something that staff has taken a look at, your respective agencies, the public, the development community. And so where we've heard sort of inconsistencies or areas of concern, we've tried to address those. So staff has, as the best we can, kind of put forth to you all a text that we think is defensible and meets the intent, the spirit, while kind of holding true to the review that we've had. But most certainly, there will be necessary tweaks coming down the future. And in the interim, once again, the waiver acts as sort of a release valve if there is a particular provision that is sort of behaving in an unexpected way, and we can address those. Okay, thank you, and also I do want to acknowledge the fact that this is a monumental task that you all have been able to respond to in a short period of time. So thank you for your difficult work. This has been a major effort, and I appreciate the effort that you all put into it. So what I'm hearing is the two ways to address this, the one that I assumed was through ZOTAs for unintended consequences. Now, you brought up another potential way to address unintended consequences, and that is in the form of a waiver. Give me an example of how that would occur. Actually, I will provide an example, just a brief example, and tell me if I'm on the correct path. So let's just say there's a condition in Article 21 that has been changed through the ZOTA that we are hearing today. If it is approved, it becomes law. If there is a development plan that comes through and the applicant can say, I would like to request a waiver, because in the ZOTA that was addressing House Bill 443, Article 21, there was a change from subjective to objective, and I don't think that that was the correct change. Is that the release valve that is used in the waiver process? Or is there a possibility of unintended consequences, delaying projects even further until a ZOTA is initiated through a vote by the planning commission? And then staff works on the ZOTA and presents the ZOTA back for us to vote on. Yeah, so to weigh in on that, I think the conceptualization of the waiver needs to change just a little bit. So an example of something, say we over-regulate a particular aspect, say we write a provision that makes it very difficult in a certain scenario to install, say, a sidewalk. Say the way that that was written makes the developer, and once again, not subjective, where a staff member previously could have said, okay, that's an incredibly steep slope. It's not going to be compliant with ADA, it's going to be extremely cost prohibitive, topographically it's a challenge. We have to have that rule on the books, but the applicant has the ability to request a waiver saying, hey, these are the circumstances that apply. This is how I'm still going to meet the intent behind this, but requiring this, the ordinance as written, as applied to my property, would negatively impact my ability to utilize this land. They would have that ability to make the case to you all, and you all could evaluate that in a subjective manner, weighing the kind of totality of the evidence there, and make a determination. So what we want to avoid is a situation where they are waiving the same thing over and over and over again because we've created an unworkable standard, we want to make sure that this is really just addressing corner cases. For instance, developments, there's a provision that relates to the spacing requirement from a at-grade railroad crossing as far as access management. There are a couple developments that that is going to kind of consistently come up with, but as a whole is sort of a rule that can be applied across the community for safety. So there will always be corner cases when it comes to waivers, that's the reason they exist. It gives them a release outlet for situations where they are not able to comply with the new text that we have just generated. Okay, that's wonderful, and that's understood. And that does provide an outlet available in the immediate term. Yes. Where a waiver can be requested, heard by this body. And as this body, as the staff, if we continue to see waivers addressing the same issue, consistently we may want to address those that possibility of a waiver in a ZOTA, is that correct? Yes. Okay, so the waiver process will allow for the planning commission to make decisions to advance the project without having to wait through the ZOTA process. So thank you for clarifying that for me. I do. Go ahead. As a follow up to Mr. Nickel on the waiver process, the way I read the text here, it says the division of planning maintains current listing of items that have been determined to be variable or waivable. This list shall be updated periodically by the division of planning as determinations are made. What if one of those unintended consequences that Mr. Nickel's referring to is not on that list? Yeah, so really what we're looking at is we're still bound by a couple different things. So one, if it's a say dimensional thing. So you have a property, your setback is 20 feet, you want that to be 10 feet. That still needs to go to the board of adjustment. The waiver process is designed to accommodate things like there shall be a sidewalk along all road frontages. That's something that you couldn't vary before. It's not a dimension. It's just you have to do this. The waiver process would kick in there. There are certain things that we can't waive because it's part of another process or it's baked into state law. Things relating to density, and I think we spelled that out a little bit earlier in basically the prelude of 21-9. And then also addressing things that are handled in another manual. Things like storm water. There is a built in process, waiver, relief process. We do not want the planning commission to have to kind of step in in an area that is so specialized. And so those will follow those same process. This will provide a relief valve for the great majority of other things. But specifically, the lot coverage requirements is not something that as proposed would be allowed to be waived. Once again, kind of holding to what we can do with density, what's baked into a zone. Another aspect of the waiver we also have to kind of consider as we look at this process is we don't want waivers to become essentially de facto zone changes. So there's some aspects of this. If you want these changed, you'll need to get a new zone to reflect that. Some of these you'll be handled with a variance or another outside entity. But then the remaining things that once again will be kind of. We want to be kind of up front with the applicants as they navigate this process. And so there's not any kind of confusion as to what the appropriate outlet is for relief for any of these provisions. It's worth. You're good? Okay. All right. Mr. Crum, I don't think we have any more questions. Nope. Mr. Penn. While we have the people in the room that we have that we're going to hear from, I'd like to take a look at 10,000 feet and talk to you about the ball that we've opened up here. In the last two days, we've seen more and more specific bills being signed or sent just to address one issue. And that issue was in the rural area, can you put restrictions on STRs? How far they can be, wherever they can be. We have opened up a Pandora's box here. If you don't like what happened, get a legislator to file a bill and we'll change it. That thing's out of the box. The reason I bring that up today is we have the representatives in this whole room that are, part of them are the reason this happened, part of them are the reason that we're reacting the way we are. And part of us are the ones trying to figure out how we go forward. Letting the legislature in Frankfurt tell you how you're going to run your city down to how many rules and regulations you can put on conditions is a dangerous, slippery slope. I don't mind House Bill 3433, because I can, in my own mind, see how this happened. We changed the intent of the zones, and we did place builder. Now, we don't need to throw stones, we don't even need to talk about who, what, when, or why. But if this city of Lexington is going to operate, and every time something happens that we don't like, we get legislative relief from Frankfurt. That is a dangerous slope to be on. So we have this document, we're going to try to make it work. It's a living, breathing document, it's going to be changed as we go, it has to. But I'm not going to spend the rest of what life I've got left afraid of some dead legislature filing a bill in Frankfurt that's going to turn us upside down. Because that's not the way communities need to operate. And I say that with all the respect of everybody sitting in this room, and the effort that's been put into it. But be careful what you wish for, because a genie can't be put back in the box. And when you have a legislative situation like we have now, where you can get most anything passed you want to get passed, you're in a dangerous situation. So we're going to make the best we can out of this, we're going to have to adopt it as we go forward. But we're all going to have to live with the consequences. And I will make a prediction going forward, that in two years, you'll be asking for relief for some of the things you asked for. Because there's no way to anticipate all the unintended consequences. Let's just make the best we can out of what we've got and learn to live with it. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Penn. Mr. Crone, thank you. This is now public comment time. Walt Gatfield, you're first up. You have three minutes per speaker. Yeah, before my time starts, you've got a handout from me. It's labeled House Bill 443. The items in green are possible changes, or at least something we think you should look at. Wanted to thank the chairman for more or less stopping that lengthy conversation that was going on about the red mile. Much appreciate that. And I also wanted to thank staff, frankly, and the commission for working on House Bill 443. Because frankly, it removes discretion for the final development plan. And if you don't write it down and put it in ordinance, it's gone. And that's really important. I'm Walt Gatfield, and President of the Fayette County Neighborhood Council. If you'll note the language on the document labeled 443, it gives the planning commission discretion if an applicant seeks a deviation from established objective standards. Now that's all covered in section 21-9. And all I'm going to talk about right now is 21-9. And I want to list some of the things that we think need looking at. One, we'd like the planning commission to approve the planning staff waiver list and all changes to it deviating from objective standards. And we think that's important. We think you should weigh in on that. Two, there were some things deleted from 21-9 that were there earlier. We think you need to look at putting them back in. And we've got them on the list that you've got in front of you. Three, well, there are a couple of things that should go back in. One is on additional cost involved in making planning decisions. And the other one is we think it's important to look at the adverse effects on adjacent property owners. And in fact, the word adjacent bothers me a little bit. But anyway, you can see the suggestions in green. The planning commission has clear authority to establish standards under which to allow deviations or waivers from objective standards and to determine the level of due process and public engagement. And I think the commission needs to step in and have the authority beyond health and safety, which is what seems to be left right now. Because health and safety, it's either healthy or it's not, and it's either safe or it's not. But there are a lot of other factors that you need to consider in your waivers. If you want to consider blotting out the sun for 24 hours, you put it in the first part of the document that you can't do that, and then they have to ask a waiver and come back to you. If you want to look at trees, you write something in the first part of the document dealing with trees. And if they can't conform with it, they have to come back to you as a waiver. And that's how you kind of have to look at it. It's a very complicated subject. The development community has been engaged in it for a long time, and that's where a lot of the changes came from that you see in the document. We'll continue to participate, and one of you mentioned public participation. What I've noticed is everything is today a ZOTA, and it affects the entire urban area or the entire county. Neighborhoods don't pay attention to 65 pages of legalese. Now, if you've tried to make a zone change in their neighborhood, you'll find out a lot, and they'll participate. Thank you. Thank you. Mr. Gross. Good afternoon, Brandon Gross. You should have received, I hope, comments from March 3rd. And they have about five pages of comments that were gathered from the Commercial Property Association of Lexington. I won't rehash those comments here today. The one thing I wanted to just mention is that I think, I feel that this ZOTA is essentially five ZOTAs wrapped into one, and not trying to shift blame or say people didn't do anything. But this law was enacted in April of 2024, and we got essentially five ZOTAs in January of 2025. I have concerns that you guys have not had an opportunity, and neither has staff or the community to study some of these regulations, which I do find them to be new and not ones that we had prior existence, and if I could just throw this up here. And this goes directly to what Mr. Crump talked about, which was the railroad access. And I'm not sure where they came up with 100 feet from the railroad cross section, if that was studied. It looks like it may be a solution in the search of a problem. And, sorry. And so it's a little hard to see, does that work? No, I can't do it on that, yeah. So it's a little hard to see, but if you can see here, this is the area at Rosemont Garden. The 100 foot right of way will take essentially all the commercial buildings that exist there now. Those businesses, many of whom I know the owners, they live in my neighborhood, they will all be affected by this. You also notice there's a public street right on the right of way. I went and I did the search for three years on the traffic impact study. There have been two accidents in this stretch over the last three years. So I don't know if they actually studied whether or not we needed this new regulation or if it was something that was thought it would be good. But this is one of those where we now have a number of commercial businesses that will need to seek a waiver if they ever want to do anything. From you, and I'm not sure if that's even necessary. The second item I wanted to bring to your attention is also with commercial access standards. We can go down to the very bottom where it shows H, it's highlighted. This is a new provision, says existing parking lot shall be revised to meet current standards when there is a zone change or an addition made to a principal building. So any commercial owner who has a building that wants to put on an addition, no matter what size, now has to upgrade their entire parking lot. The cost of that could be immense. That will keep development from occurring. Zone changes, I've had zone changes where I've taken a P1 building, can I have 30 more seconds and I'll complete, sir? Okay, where I've taken, for example, a P1 building, professional office, which is a use that is not in favor right now in the economy, and changed it to a B3 or a B1. We made no changes to the structure of the parking lot. We just wanted to change the use because we could not have a retail store in a P1 building. Underneath this, I now have to upgrade that entire parking lot. That may make that project unfeasible for small business owners who cannot afford tens of thousands of dollars to upgrade a parking lot, and all they want to do is just switch a use from A to B with the zone change. So that is all my comments. I would ask that this ZOTA be split up into separate ZOTAs. The commercial access, the drive-through, some of the other items be studied individually over the next few months, where we can all participate and have these issues fleshed out rather than rushed through. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Gross. Mr. Murphy. Thank you very much. I'm Dick Murphy. As you know, I represent a number of commercial and residential developers. I wanted to give a little perspective. I wasn't part of the process that passed this bill, but House Bill 443 is a new statute, but it's not new law. 50 years ago, the highest court in Kentucky made a ruling saying that plats are ministerial items. That was a leading case, it was 1975, and that led to the doctrine in Kentucky where it split up. You have two separate functions, and it's tough for planning commissions. You wear a discretionary hat, which is zone changes, comprehensive plans, and ZOTAs, and you wear a ministerial hat, which is development plans and subdivision plans. And that's been the law for about 50 years in the state of Kentucky. I guess people have drifted away from that and caused some concern. But what HB 443 does do is it does clarify that you have the power to grant waivers. That wasn't clarified before. And it gives you the power to come in when you perceive a specific problem to the public health, safety, and welfare. So when I saw this bill, I said, nothing new here, except it gives you some more powers. But I guess a lot of things, I know a lot of things have been unwritten through the rules, and it's those unwritten rules which are the problems. We've met with the staff, and we've made a lot of progress. And I appreciate the time the staff has spent on this, and I appreciate the progress we've made in pointing out specific things to them. I still feel there are two areas, which Mr. Gross mentioned, the drive-through standards and the new commercial entrance standards, largely which are new. And I think those ought to go through more of a process in the text amendment before you all amend that. If you choose not to postpone this, I hope you will take out for now the provisions relating to commercial access standards and drive-throughs. I think you're going to see a lot of waiver requests. You'll have a great volume of waiver requests. For instance, there's a provision in here that says if you have property on a bus route, you have to build a bus stop, bus shelter with seating. And we talked about that at the meeting we had, and I said to the staff, does that mean what I think it is? Yeah, it does. And I said to them, well, is that waivable? Say you've got your neighbor has built one 100 feet down the road, and are you going to have to build one that's not really a bus stop, that Lextran doesn't stop at? Well, I can ask for a waiver from you, okay? So you're going to have a lot of people coming in just waiving that type of thing. You're going to have people coming in and waiving, not building the sidewalk along the street, making a path a little farther away from the street on that. So, thank you very much. Thank you, Mr. Murphy. Brittany Rothenmeier. Good afternoon, everyone. Brittany Rothenmeier with Fade Alliance. I just wanted to kind of echo the things that I think has been expressed already to the staff and frankly to the commission for the extensive conversations that you all have had on this bill and all the effort the staff has put in for this very lengthy ZOTA, which is, of course, is in response to the mandate from the legislature. It's Fade Alliance's understanding that many aspects of the ZOTA, as we heard from Mr. Trump earlier, have actually been removed in response to a lot of the robust feedback from the community and will be addressed separately, which, of course, seems appropriate. And we also understand that compliance with this mandate for objectivity in approving development plans is obviously required. And we appreciate the staff's attention to revising the ordinance to comply, while also ensuring that we're still putting in place best practices for development to support the best results for our community. We're, of course, deeply concerned about the removal of the opportunity for public input in many aspects of the development process. But we also understand that concerns about this need to be raised, not with the staff or with the planning commission, but with our state representatives in Frankfurt. So we are going to move forward and encourage people with concerns about the public participation aspect of this ZOTA to make their voice heard and reach out to the representatives in Frankfurt as well. Opportunities for public input with regard to growth and development, as you all well know, are so essential to community supported growth. The democratic process, frankly, and just a high quality of life here in Lexington and Fayette County. While it can make development more difficult in some ways, the ability to express valid concerns about the impacts of development must be prioritized. Or I think we all realize that we risk something far greater than just bad development in the community. Local control over planning and zoning policy is vital to ensuring that Lexington continues to see responsible, sustainable, and equitable growth, as Mr. Penn spoke to before. And we hope that concerned community members will make their voices heard with their elected officials in Frankfurt. So thank you all for your time and effort on this. Thank you, Ms. Rothenmeier. Ms. Clark, are you speaking today? Okay. Amy Clark, 628 Castle Road, and I, of course, had decades at this point of experience working with communities and growth and development right here in Lexington. Thank you, Mr. Mickler, for raising the question of how can the commission come to know of a threat to health, safety, or welfare, save through the staff? And I would repeat what I suggested in committee, that we have a consent agenda process already for the more ministerial subdivision regs. And I wonder if one could limit the possibility on the listed consent agenda items to testimony on a specific threat to public health, safety, or welfare in the affected area. And with three minutes, I can't think that it would consume your whole meeting. I would also like to see written in a promise I've heard that I'm very glad of, that the Acela records for these plans will remain open, the application records and so on. That could easily disappear, in my view. I'm looking at the second column here. The first is just convenient references to have. So in my A, just the legislative mandate directs that standards be made objective, I get that. We all get that. We know that needs to be done. But I don't believe it removes the obligation to show that the text amendment you are making is in agreement with the comprehensive plan. And I find many, many conflicts, and I've listed several of them. And in general, I will say that in general, it looks as though the soft and green infrastructure thrust to the back and hardscape has really gained advantage. So I would second the requests of some of the attorneys here that these be a separate soda. The commercial access, the drive-thrus I think are a mess. If you conceive a Chick-fil-A drive-thru, there's nothing like that, controlled or regulated or conceived in this. They have rovers who do free form orders and deliveries in a little sort of pedestrian aisle. And how many lanes is it, and is the bailout lane drive-thru lane? Because you don't need to bail out but from anything but a drive-thru. So I think it really does need to be a separate soda, and I'm very concerned by the many things that have gotten more, to my mind, less restrictive on this auto-intensive use. I also think you're going to have to look at really revising the comp plan as such. If I could, I would like to address one other matter. Thank you so much. You remember the Wheeler study, and one of the things they brought out was this conditional approval process. The curtain goes down, everything goes dark, a bunch of things are, well, we don't do this at the approval stage. We do it afterward, but it's before the certification stage, or it's after the certification stage, it belongs to the DP, and so on. So I would ask that in the ZOTA Article 21 plan approval process, you clarify exactly when and where there shall be conditional approval, if at all. Because it seems to me, you have outlined the possible circumstances, and if the staff is approving it, there need be no conditional approval, it'll just be approved. The other thing is, please look closely at the language of approval and certification. It's different for the two sorts. If it's a planning commission approval, the secretary says something like the planning commission has approved this plan. If it's what I would call a certification, if it's a ministerial, they say this meets all the requirements of the zoning ordinance. Is the ministerial approval even an act of the planning commission? And why does the secretary of the planning commission sign it? I think that covers a lot of it, and I'm grateful for the extra time. I will say that three minutes for 66 pages, it's no wonder there aren't more people down here. It's so discouraging and daunting. It really does need to be broken up. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Clark. Mr. Nicholson. Thank you. Nick Nicholson here, and I do apologize, I did not sign up. This is now the second meeting in a row that I forgot to sign in in advance, and I do very much apologize for that. To Ms. Clark's point, this is a lot, this really is. And I think we need some more time to kind of take a look at a lot of the different aspects. Because as I think we all just kind of realized during the Red Mile hearing, sometimes public hearings aren't the best kind of vehicles in order to work out very granular issues. And there are still kind of a lot of granular issues that we have had that we continue to talk with staff, and I think we're making a lot of progress. I kind of raised this during the zoning committee meeting to show all of the different places that I flagged individual language that I had kind of great concerns about. And staff has been wonderful kind of working out those concerns, but I don't think we're quite there yet. I don't want to get into the weeds, but I have countless examples of where I don't think we're quite there yet. And so to kind of Mr. Murphy's point originally on kind of separating these out, I think it does make a lot of sense when we're talking about standards that have only existed inside of reviewers' heads and not ever written down. Let's take some time to make sure that we actually look at those rules to make sure that they are the right rules, as opposed to acknowledging that we're probably going to have to come back in a couple months to do another ZOTA. And so I think that we can move forward with full compliance with House Bill 443, while we also work on what these standards that are kind of governing. Mr. Penn, I know we have had many conversations over the years about the difference between zoning and planning. They are incredibly different things. And what this is kind of getting into the weeds is, it is affecting planning, it is not affecting zoning. This is not stripping any power of the planning commission in any way, shape, or form. As Mr. Murphy said, this is just a codification of what already was the existing law with regards to development plans. If someone owns a piece of property, the rules are what the rules are. If they can meet the rules, they're allowed to move forward. And it gives kind of full notification for all property owners, for all neighbors, that here are what your community's rules are. And if you can meet them, you are allowed to do something with your own private property. So I thank you all for your consideration, and I look forward to continue to talking about this. I hope you take the zoning committee's recommendation and go ahead and postpone this just one more month. Thank you. Before you sit down, Mr. Nicholson, may I ask you a question? Since I'm not on the zoning committee, I don't know what you presented. We've heard comments about the drive-through standards and commercial access. Absolutely. Were your comments focused on those two areas, or are they spread throughout? I had submitted to staff and to legal basically a kind of 13 page version of this ZOTA that kind of trimmed it down to what actually is talking about objective and subjective standards in implementing kind of this development plan and waiver standards. In order to kind of give us more time to talk about drive-throughs, talk about the kind of commercial access in order to make sure we have the right rules. For example, if you just want to look on the very first page when it talks about the definitions of drive-throughs, it has a multi-lane, means multi-lanes, or also multiple order points. It differentiates that a single lane drive-through can also be just a single lane, but if it has multiple order points, that suddenly is a multi-lane drive-through. Let me ask you- I don't understand how, it's one lane or two lanes, it is what it is. Apparently, previously we heard it would be better to split out those two categories for separate ZOTAs. Are you saying you have concerns about other parts of the content in this ZOTA, or are you primarily focused on those two topics? I think, honestly, 90% of the concerns that I've raised have been entirely about things that are not talking about objective or subjective. They are entirely about what these new standards are that previously were being dealt with during the certification process, but were never written down. And so, it was very difficult for developers to respond to what these nebulous standards were when they were never written down somewhere. And so, all of them mostly are considered, are kind of about that. Sure. I'm not sure if it's a question or if it's more of a comment. In our zoning meeting last week, I believe it was explained pretty fully that we, the planning commission, don't actually approve the ZOTA. We simply can give our recommendation to council that we approve it, as presented to us with some changes, but we do not ultimately hold the authority to enact it, I guess. And I believe we were also told that council is on a very strict schedule, and we are really at the last, not last minute, but we have very little time to go back and do things like separate this into multiple ZOTAs and things like that. So, I guess the question would be to planning staff, Mr. Duncan, the group, planning commission, how do we go forward? Mr. Duncan, you want to hold off before I, I think we may have a couple other citizens, then we can get to that question. No, you're fine, that's fine. I see Ms. Todd Johnson, Mr. Todd Johnson, Ms. Andy Johnson. Both of you want to speak? Neither? Okay. Yes, ma'am. You're next. Good afternoon, I'm Patty Drouse. I live in the Joyland neighborhood and have been here before you many times before. I understand the ministerial requirement came from the state legislature. It's really kind of sickening. It doesn't seem, I looked up what does ministerial mean. I'm not a lawyer, and it doesn't seem that the term ministerial means block public comment. Ministerial gives more objective check off boxes to hold the developers to account and check them off on. But considering the complexity of many development plans in our city, there will always be a degree of subjectivity. And you just can't anticipate everything in check off boxes. So, with this proposal, the decisions will be made by planning staff, possibly by one person, not the planning commission, and without public comment. There will be some subjectivity. And an example that I can give of where the planning staff idea of meeting a criteria in the comprehensive plan was interpreted way differently, and that was with the Joyland Crossing Apartments, multi-modal connectivity, or whatever the wording was to address different forms of transportation. To them, the connectivity, the transport thing was okay. To them, it meant within the development property that it was multi-modal. But to everybody else, to the neighborhood, we looked at it, and it meant, how are they going to cross the street? How are they going to bike across the street safely? How is a bus going to get over there and stop? So, staff don't live everywhere. One person, not any of us, live all over this city and recognize what those neighborhoods already know. They know, they're the specialists for their neighborhood. And whoever the planning staff is, they're not going to have the benefit of that information. When it is decided to block public comment at the final development plan, it will basically leave just the one opportunity for public comment on the development. I would ask that a measure be included to require the planning staff to send a postcard to all citizens in the neighborhood when there's an application for a zone change or preliminary development plan. Because people are busy, they don't go online to look at when things are coming up. And if we don't notify them, they'll have no chance. And even as it is, with the opportunities we have now, all the time I'm running into people in my neighborhood saying, what is that development on Russell Cave? Well, how many years has that been going on? Okay, they've had no idea. Just two more sentences, I'm sorry. These, so yes, it'll have to be publicized somehow. And if you have any discretion in figuring out how to add allowing additional opportunity for public comment, please use it. Please look at what the definition of ministerial is, and it doesn't say the public can't put in their two cents. Thank you very much. Thank you. Yes, ma'am. Rolanda Woolford. Mr. Penn, I thank you for that comment. I did reach out to our legislator and the one who second sponsored the bill, Mr. Hall. And I asked him about public comment, and he said, I don't understand why they feel there can't be public comment during those sections. And he said, they need to check back with our attorneys. And so I'm like, well, your pillar states that we are the community that knows the neighborhood, and that we should be able to be spoken to. So we're still trying to figure out why is that silence in any form? Even with the notices coming, people still don't know what that notice is for. It's just showing that a zone change is happening or something's going to be built. There's no notification going to the neighborhood association like it really should be, unless you live within that radius form, but the lack is already lacking. And so how you plan on fixing it with this issue now, we don't see that happening. And it's not like we don't want to be engaged, and it's not like we're saying, not in my backyard, that people want to use all the time. We're saying is, let us be a part of it, even if it is in the beginning, but there is no pathway for that to do. And you have to put that pathway in, even with your little packet that you give them. They're not using that packet to come and talk to the community until the end, when they have to. After you didn't ask them, hey, have you talked to the community? And nine times out of ten, they just come to a neighborhood meeting and say, well, we told them what we was doing. There's no input. Then we have to come up here, and then y'all get mad, because we out here. Thank y'all. Thank you, is there anyone else? Okay, Mr. Duncan, you want to tackle that question Ms. Davis had? Thank you, Mr. Chair. As a reminder, this is a zoning ordinance text amendment that's before you, and you've addressed many of these over the years. And the statutory process is that the planning commission reviews the zoning ordinance text amendment, and makes a recommendation to the urban county council, just the same as you do for a zone change. So, Ms. Davis is right, you all don't have the final say in this. This will appear in about a month, if you take action today, this will appear in about a month on the council's docket, at which point they have a decision to make. Do they want to receive more information, either from staff or through a public hearing like this, which they can schedule, if they choose to do so. They don't have to, statute, this is the only public hearing that is required for a zoning ordinance text amendment. However, the council can certainly hold one if they want to. It is staff's recommendation that the planning commission give the council the opportunity to decide whether they want to receive more information about this, or hold a public hearing. And still be able to take action on this before the end of June. So that, as Daniel said, there is not a gap in the way that development is reviewed and approved. And so there's continuity in what we've been doing for years with our development guidelines that will now be standards. So that is why it is staff's recommendation that you all proceed with this so that council can make the final decision and we can have continuity with the development standards now. Thank you, Mr. Duncan. What are you going to, hold on, Ms. Clark. Ma'am. Hold on, hold on, hold on. How brief are you going to be? Okay, I'm feeling good today. I'm just, we've already been here three hours, so I might as well give it 30 seconds. I'm just going to plead with you. As the commission, I really would rather you made some fixes into this soda. Then send it straight off to the council. It would be so much more political. You have worked with the zoning ordinance and the people and the processes. It just doesn't make sense if so many different parties feel there's more work to be done to pass it off. And I have to say, you've only had it for two, three days in the most final form. If the staff could just be as hasty in pulling all this together in preparing the report afterward, maybe you could catch another week from them and they could still get that report typed up in time for the council. I'll say also, I would welcome so much the opportunity to have a conversation. A conversation with some of the commission, some of the staff, some of the development community, as they're called. There hasn't been that. Three minutes just don't really work very well. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Clark, Mr. Davis. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you for all of the public comment today. It's not often that we hear such agreement, particularly with something as controversial as this. For what it's worth, I would agree with the comments about taking just a little more time. I see some fixes now that I think are simple but necessary before we recommend approval. Thank you, Ms. Davis. Ms. Davis. Mr. Chair, is it possible for us to, we could make any motion we want to, of course. But could we kind of enumerate some of the things that we're hearing today? For instance, Mr. Gross, I never got your comments that you have of March 3rd, so we have had no time to look at them. Maybe I missed them. Did you all get his comments? One. Okay, so sorry. Right, so it seems that there are some, like Mr. Gaffield's, several of his recommendations make sense, several of Ms. Clark's make sense, several of Mr. Gross's. Can we do a long meeting and say which things we would like to have changed, or do we hand it over to our trusted planning staff to have them be responsive and include all of those things in them? I'm just wondering what is the best way to approach this? I don't know if we want to, Frank, Mr. Penn, you had something, or Mr. Wilson? First of all, I agree with Mr. Davis's comment, and that is I don't see any problem unless there's a timeline specific to address some of the concerns that I too have not had a chance to digest some of the stuff that has come through. To have a continuance of a month, maybe, or something along those lines where some of these things that have come before us can be digested. One of the other things, I'm just going to cut to the chase here. There are a couple of things, there are many things, I thought Mr. Nichols' point was something I listened to very carefully, and that is we can still be compliant with 443 while at the same time work on some of these other elements if we've got the time to do that. A lot of this is going to come down to how we educate the public as it relates to this, because this thing started as a legislative matter, and it could end as a legislative matter if people would call their council members and what have you. So I appreciate the comment of continuing to work on the people, especially if they didn't know what they were doing, or hadn't read or digested the impact of what they were, in effect, passing. So what I'm suggesting would be for the committee, and if you wanted a motion, that would be fine. That is a continuance over a certain period of time, maybe a month. Mr. Owens. Mr. Chair, thank you. Two parts to this, I guess. One, I would agree with what I'm hearing from a couple already, that I think a continuance of this would be warranted. From what I've heard, there was some tweaks to this, just in the last couple of days after a meeting on Monday. We've got some information before us that, I don't know, has, I don't think has been reviewed yet by the staff. Mr. Gross mentioned some information that we just barely got to scan here while listening to others and so forth. So I've got some questions myself. I don't want to continue with my 30 minutes of questions. I'd much rather do it with the staff and go from there. So, simply put, a continuance, I think, would be in order. It's up to whoever makes the motion as to how long. The second part of it is, I am really troubled with the fact that, to me, whether we like it or not, at times we do have long meetings, at times, for citizens to come and express their concerns. That's part of it. To me, that is a fundamental right that should not be taken away. I would offer, as others have, at this point in time, our law staff cannot do anything about it. We cannot do anything about that aspect of it. The only thing that we can do is suggest to let your legislators in Frankfurt know about it because, as I said, to me, that's a fundamental right to let people have a voice. So we're doing an injustice there. So those are my two thoughts right now. Okay, thank you. Mr. Duncan and staff, just kind of forward looking, what do we have in front of us right now? If we continue this for two weeks, that's going to push something back. If we continue this for a month, that's going to push more things back. That's on your plate. That hasn't got to us, so it's a scene that the sentiment is a continuance, so I just want to get an idea of what we're looking at. I understand, and that certainly is the planning commission's prerogative. I think as you were saying, Mr. Chair, any delay just cuts the council's time out further as well. You've already continued a project that we don't know where it's going to go on to April 10th. And you do have, at this time, a very, very big zone change scheduled for April 24th. And at that time, the council meets that evening as well. So if it's a long meeting, we will have to break up, as we've done before, and move to another location to finish the meeting. All right, okay, that's fair enough. Okay, so Mr. Penn? After listening to this today, you know, you can analyze and analyze until you paralyze. But the other side of that is, is do you want the council to get into the weeds of this? And none of them had any planning experience, and very few have had any planning attorney experience. Or do you want to postpone a month and let us work it out here the best we could, and all sides take it as a plan to the council and say, this is what we want? I kind of tend to lean toward the latter than the former. But don't miss the side of it that the legislatures that voted on this had no idea what they were doing other than what they were hearing from certain people. They had no experience with this at all. They had no experience or any consequences. And to the man or woman, they will say they had no idea they were going to cut out public comment, even though they used the word ministerial. That's what we're dealing with here. You're not going to change that. Maybe you can educate them by dropping a note or line or talking to the ones you know. But I don't think anybody wants to do that. They didn't understand what ministerial was, except for what they were told. And I've lobbied over the years, and a good lobbyist doesn't tell the whole story. So, okay. We'll close that portion out then and bring it back, you know, floor is open for a motion. Mr. Wilson. Yes, sir. If the body is ready for a motion, I don't know whether to pass or not, but I would like to move for a postponement of PLN's 25-1 ministerial review of development plans for one month. And that's April 24th. April 24th. Is it 24th? Yeah. Just for practicality of it, Mr. Duncan, what is the zone change on the 24th? When is the zone change? No, you said we have a significant zone change. Yes, right, at this time there is a downtown zone change for Lexington Avenue, Maxwell. Okay, all right. And that's the 24th. And the Parker's Mill is still- In the Rose Holdings? Yes, yes. What's going on? Mr. Chair, Mr. Wilson, I understand the sentiment, and certainly staff will do whatever you all want to do on this, and we try to give you the best advice that we have. If you are going to continue this, I would recommend until April the 10th, because the council does not meet that night, and so we can conclude all of our business in this space. And that separates this from potentially two very high profile zone changes on April 24th. Okay, Mr. Penn? And just remember that the staff has been working with some of these people in the crowd. It's not like they're starting from scratch. So that's a lot more important. I mean, I think that's more reasonable. Okay. Mr. Chair, I would modify my motion then to have a continuous until April the 10th. Yeah, okay. Mr. Davis-Jonathan, you still second the motion? I'm sorry, I'm sorry. April 10th? Yes, please, thank you. April 10th, because if it's not, we would just have to come in here on a different day. But I don't think nobody wants to do that. Okay, thank you. All right, please vote via Granicus. Okay, the motion passes. Mr. Duncan? Can I put in a request that the things that were passed to us today, the different documents that we didn't already have hard copies of, could we get those either physically or get them emailed to us so we have a chance to look at all of them? Yes, we will do our best to compile those and get those to you all. Okay. Mr. Duncan, have you got anything? Thank you, Mr. Chair. Is this everything on the agenda? Are we there? Okay. Okay. Your ordinary meeting is one week from today for your committees back in the Phoenix building at 830 and 130. Thank you. Okay, thank you, Mr. Duncan. This meeting is adjourned. If you want me, twice on the pipe, if the answer is no. Whoa, my sweetness, means you'll meet me in the hallway. Whoa, twice on the pipe, means you ain't gonna show.