Diolch am wylio'r fideo. Diolch am wylio'r fideo. Diolch am wylio'r fideo. Diolch am wylio'r fideo. Diolch am wylio'r fideo. Diolch am wylio'r fideo. Diolch am wylio'r fideo. Diolch am wylio'r fideo. Diolch am wylio'r fideo. Diolch am wylio'r fideo. Diolch am wylio'r fideo. Diolch am wylio'r fideo. Good afternoon. I'm going to assume that the rest of your cohort is probably betting on ponies would be my guess. So most of you know me, Samantha Castro. I am the consultant for the Blue Sky Small Area Plan. It's a collection of us. It's Tynell Spangler Walsh & Associates, Gresham Smith, Strategic Location Advisors, and Partners for Economic Solutions. So we've got a good group that has helped us, and we are sort of in the homestretch now of our final recommendations and pulling together the final small area plan report. So this is really a lot of this will be sort of a rehash of what you've already seen, and then some new things that we've developed along the way in response to stakeholder input or community input. So just to bring us back. So we were able to go back out to Blue Sky maybe a few weeks. There we go. April 14th. And we had another barbecue event out there at lunchtime, and it was great because we probably got, I would say, two-thirds of the same people came out again, and then we got a third of new folks, and a lot of that has to do with Eve has been working really hard behind the scenes to go business to business and invite them to events, et cetera. So I really want to give a shout-out to Eve and to planning staff. And it was really good because what we heard were confirming a lot of the sort of big moves that we're working on. So there was a lot of support for the idea of sidewalks out there. A lot of them work. Of course, the people that were there at lunch are oftentimes the people that are walking, trying to walk between buildings. So they were very excited about just even the thought and inclusion of sidewalks. They really liked the idea of the park space or the stormwater amenity that we'll get to later as, you know, a place where they could, you know, go and sort of get away from their jobs in the middle of the day for a little bit. It was also really interesting to hear some of their priorities. So, you know, they were talking a lot about everything from, like, snow and ice removal and that being a big concern of theirs. They don't often, the roads back there don't often get plowed and it's very hilly. So they have a really hard time getting to their jobs. So I think that that's something, that was something that was very good for the council member to hear because, you know, that's quite a big employment generator for people to not be able to get back to where they work. Some other things are issues with power and internet reliability. Like I think I mentioned the last time, power goes out pretty frequently, even on a nice day out there, because there just isn't redundancy in the systems yet. So us putting these recommendations in the small area plan will just help to confirm those needs. And then also, you know, they were very much in favor of the idea of slowing traffic down and safety features along the roadways because obviously trucks mixing with people walking or even in your personal vehicle are not the best thing. Those trucks go pretty fast back there. We also ran this really fun exercise with them where we gave them $10 and they could spend those $10 all in one place or spread out among different items. And really the number one thing that sort of won out over everything was really just giving them other food options out there, which they said if they eat McDonald's or that one more time, they were going to lose their minds. So, you know, just anything. They would love more. And then, like I said, network and then on down to sort of those passive recreation opportunities like the pocket park and shared use trail along the creek were big hits for them. So I already covered these framework concepts with you all the last time, but I will just kind of briefly touch on them. So as a reminder, the study area is right next to the sub area four and across the street from five in the UGMP. So while right now it kind of is sitting out there in its own isolated bubble almost, we really have to think about this like a long-term plan and the fact that 20 years from now there could be 6,000 people living across the street in them in the nose. And then we've already started to see all the energy that's happening in terms of development around the soccer stadium. So thinking about that happening on all four corners of the highway, I think is really important to think of this not in isolation. And you all know, even though you've already started seeing some development plans come in along cane break as well. So connecting to those and how that works. Again, the initial phase for the framework is thinking about the real low hanging fruit. So what's easy, and I say easy, this is very much air quotes, you know, what is attainable in the near term. And we think one of those are sidewalks and some safety measures along blue sky parkway in particular, working on the amenity space in that stormwater area. Right up here where cutters Hill court and blue sky parkway intersect. And, and then also connecting those side paths along Athens Boonesboro where the connections that in the archive improvements, you know, slowly work side paths and that bike ped infrastructure along Richmond road out, out Athens Boonesboro. And so the connection, you know, keeping that going out as far as blue sky. The second phase is obviously the more aggressive phase of the two. And again, that involves the, that sort of new addition of, of a central road spine that helps to, to provide more frontage opportunities for some, to continue the, there's some really good small light industrial businesses that are out there. And so the idea of continuing on that legacy of encouraging that sort of development is what we were, we were really wanting to push because the, there is very constrained by topography and stormwater, et cetera. So we think that this would be a really great way to connect and also provide an infrastructure outlet through, through the middle of the site. Again, like we showed in the UGMP, we have lots of road connections, future road connections shown along the edges. And that again, it's just to continue to think about connectivity long-term. So I will hand it over to Matt McLaren from Gresham to run through real quickly. Some of the transportation improvements. Apologies. There we go. All right. So a few of these slides are similar to what we saw the last time, but just kind of to recap a little bit of that. If you guys have any questions as we go along, please do not hesitate to interrupt me. Alrighty. How, which would be fun. This is the best thing I've learned through this entire project is how to use this little clicker. Okay. So again, phase one, blue sky parkway, this is kind of the low hanging fruit, the easy stuff that we can do. One of the most well-received things from the public engagement meetings was the conversion of Cutters Hill blue sky to a three-way stop condition. As you can see now that with my nifty-difty tool, I just learned providing safe pedestrian crossings at that intersection as well with the associated side path and sidewalks that were posing along blue sky parkway and Cutters Hill. We are showing street trees, street lighting, those sorts of things as part of this. These are all kind of an a la carte thing that we can pick and choose about what seems the most implementable and most appetizing to existing landowners because all of this would require coordination and work with the landowners to secure permanent and temporary easements. As Sam alluded to, phase two is a much heavier lift because we're going to have to be constructing a new road that goes through the center of the park through multiple existing parcels. With that, we would propose a very robust street section with the same side use path, sidewalks, street trees, street lighting, all that same stuff. Then that would convert Cutters Hill from a three-way stop to a four-way stop. Along Athens Boonesboro, phase one, we'd be looking at fully implementing a three-lane section, one lane each way, center turn lane, along with a side path on the blue sky parkway side of it for the most part. Again, just setting up for that future pedestrian connectivity between blue sky and other adjacent uses as they come online. And as I alluded to, blue sky parkway, we'd be looking at a side path on the outside of it, a sidewalk on the inside. And today there is a fair amount of pavement, about 30 feet, because this does have a lot of truck traffic. Through the use of paint, visually restricting those lanes down to a more typical 12-foot lane. But we do realize there's truck traffic. We have to allow for it. It's an industrial area. But just trying to give that visual cue to drivers to slow down, narrow that up visually without losing the functionality of the road. Additionally, as Sam mentioned, power and telecom redundancy is a big issue out here. So we would be looking at go ahead and putting PVC conduit under the sidewalks with this work to allow for a much more simple install by KU, Metronet, Spectrum, whoever, Windstream. You'd just be able to pull the conduit. They wouldn't have to go out there, secure new easements with the landowners to be able to do that. It would be much more minimally invasive. Yeah, again, street lights, street trees, all things that would be part of this overall kind of menu. Very similar, west of Cutters Hill, very similar. One thing, though, that we did want to talk through, or we would need to consider is how do we keep golf carts, ATVs, things of that nature off these 10-foot multi-use paths? So through a lot of other project experience, we've had permanent solutions, such as curbing at the drive, and I've got another slide that we can touch on a little bit more. But just knowing that we have to do something to keep that 10-foot concrete path from becoming a secondary roadway for private people. Cutters Hill, very similar to Blue Sky, except only on one side. We'd be doing the side path that crosses over the creek. Again, that same paint treatment to kind of narrow it up. Street trees, street lights, those sorts of things. Also, one nice thing about Cutters Hill, we also are looking at proposing to raise the road over the existing culvert to provide safe passage in the 100-year storm event. I was talking with one of the business owners that works on the backside, and he said in the approximate 50 years he'd been there, it's flooded about twice, which makes a lot of sense for the design frequency for that culvert. But again, two flooding events where emergency vehicles could not get to the rear of the site, right? That is a problem. So when that work is all being done, we can promote a better visual and physical connection to the area that Sam was referring to earlier, kind of down there in the corner where LFU CG already owns property. This is the proposed roadway should it happen in Phase 2, 12-foot lanes, curb and gutter, side path, sidewalk, very typical street section to what LFU CG would provide today. This is one of the more challenging parts of sections of Blue Sky Industrial Park. There are a lot of areas where you have existing businesses that have parking and basically full frontage driveways, right? And so this is one of the biggest challenges we have on the inside of the loop. On the outside, it's kind of clipped off, but you can see over here there's a lot of space where we could pull that side path through, and that's why we chose to put it on that side. On the inside, it's a little more challenged because you're really having to work to not impact these existing businesses' operations as you put that sidewalk through. One of the other challenges is how do you define the pedestrian area versus the vehicular area, not only for keeping people from running a golf cart this way, but also just providing, you know, how does this vehicle know where the driveway is versus where the sidewalk is? So through other projects, we've had a lot of good use of different colored concretes, different finishes on the concrete, and then also a lot of signage, paint, and then also, like I was saying, you know, considering right there and right there, using something like reflective bollards, whether they be temporary or permanent. Curbing, we've seen that used. It really comes down to a lot of the different considerations for are you trying to train the existing users and then let those go away, or is it something that's very permanent and keeping it from happening in the future? The I-75 interchange, so a lot of the slide deck before I think was a recap from the last time, but this is, I think, new information. So if you have questions, please let me know. I managed to leave my notebook over there, but I think I'm okay. So Gresham Smith was tasked with looking at the existing interchange over I-75 in Athens-Boonesboro and looking at a couple different options for how we can promote not only safety but looking at future road volumes and really making this interchange suitable for all users. We looked at several different configurations and layouts of different types of interchanges, types of intersections, and the diverging diamond interchange rose to the top for a couple of different reasons. The most important are it accommodates the future road volumes very well. This is also very similar to the New Circle Road-Harrisburg intersection. Sorry, just for those that don't speak engineering, that's the type of intersection that you guys have out there. It would be very similar. It's really good at separating your pedestrians and your vehicular traffic. It utilizes the existing bridge and its current width, so we didn't have to widen the bridge out. It reduces the number of conflict points with pedestrians by a significant number, which really promotes a lot of safety improvements out here. I'm going to stop there just in case anybody has questions. Do we have any questions so far? I have a couple of questions. Excellent. Are there presently sidewalks along Athens-Boonesboro? Not that I know of. You could maybe say there's one on the bridge, but it's really just the shoulder. So there is no pedestrian. Let me go to the next one. There's no sidewalk connectivity into the bridge from either side. The Blue Sky-Small Area Plan calls for sidewalks and side-use paths to come from our side, and then the R-Cut side, it would just be this project would connect to the stadium and other infrastructure. Okay. And how far down do or would sidewalks go if you're going outbound Athens-Boonesboro and Blue Skies on your left? Would it just go to Blue Sky and then stop? That's going to be a lot of clicks. One minute. It would go all the way. All right, I'm just going to walk out of here. So I-75 is here. On this side, on the Blue Sky side, it would come all the way down to the road front, basically. Okay. On this side, we would propose it comes down to the ball field. Okay. And then on the sidewalk bollards, would they still-I guess they would still allow the free flow of if somebody is pushing a cart or stroller, they could get through, but a golf cart could not. Correct, yeah. So this is just one example of what I've done. This is not necessarily the best example or the best case for this. That's really a very detailed analysis, right? But on one particular project, what we're doing is we're either going to build curb. So that's a 10-foot section. And we're going to take the center one foot, so at least four and a half feet on each side for clear passage, and literally just pour a little curb island that's raised by six inches, paint it yellow, and put a reflective post on top. The concern there was we need something that's going to last long-term. It's not just-because in that particular case, we'd also considered just doing the, like, lane delineators. You might have seen where they can just be literally bolted to the concrete. After a year or two where you've got users trained, don't drive on this, you could take them out. But in this particular case for us, we were like, we need something long-term. There's enough turnover where you're not going to learn it. It's not going to become a learned behavior. I don't know what would be the best for this in this case yet, but you would still have clear passage on both sides for that. Okay, great. And then the last question. On the bridge pedestrian area, what sort of-I can imagine walking over that bridge in the middle of four lanes of traffic. What safety measures are there for the pedestrians? Sure, yeah. So I'll kind of zoom in on the next-so the next slide is a little bit more zoomed in on both ends of the bridge. It's a great question. So by taking the traffic and moving it to the outside and centralizing the pedestrians, it gives you a much wider area that is-I'm going to say grade separated, but, like, a six-inch curb you could lift it up. And then you could also do-again, these are all parts of detailed design, but one consideration would be a traffic barrier similar to what's out on Town Branch Commons where you've got, you know, like a jersey barrier, for lack of a better word, to kind of form that edge so that you feel safer. Also, it's just a lot wider. So instead of two five-foot sidewalks, you have a much wider space in the middle for pedestrians going both directions. Right here, this is at the nose here, these lights are designed to keep traffic moving efficiently through the interchange. So these would be timed. So pedestrians would have to wait for their phase. Over here, though, these would be push-button activated so that you have free flow of traffic into the on-ramp or the off. But if a pedestrian did need to cross, they hit the button, light turns red, you have a protected crossing. Does that answer your question? Cool. So like I said, we are showing multi-use paths on side paths, multi-use paths, shared paths on both sides here. There's a lot of challenges with topography separation and things of that nature once you get off the bridge, but they're all just things that can be worked through in design. On the other side, very similar situation with your signal configurations providing those safe pedestrian crossings. And like I said, then these would continue on down to blue sky and then the ball fields. Other questions or things Sam might have missed? Yes. The diamond. Yeah. Okay. The one you mentioned that we have is out there on Harrisburg Road and Newsork Road, I think. Statistically, has that proven, I suppose it has, that it has reduced accidents in that area? So I haven't studied that particular intersection, but I can speak to this type of interchange holistically, yes, does provide a much safer situation for pedestrians and vehicles while still maintaining very adequate volume of traffic moving through it. Will you be able to quantify that and say that it has reduced traffic or reduced accidents by X number, whatever it is, or will you just simply say it does help? I can get that information. I don't have it here. I'm sorry. No problem. But, yeah, I mean, that is part of the study that we did that led us to this particular configuration. We looked at no-build. So basically, you know, you've got Area 3 to the left, you've got Area 4 to the right, and then Area 5 all surrounding this interchange. So we looked at what is the anticipated traffic volumes at full build-out of all those areas, and then looking at both delay of vehicles and then, I don't want to say anticipated pedestrian issues, but we looked at the traffic volumes and the delays of doing nothing, this, and a few other configuration options, and then we looked at, okay, in each of those configurations, how many pedestrian conflict points are there? Statistically, in the studies of existing intersections that have been converted, whether that reduction been and those sorts of things, I could absolutely get you that all information. I can get it to Sam, and she can provide it out if you're interested. Well, I'm really interested in whether the Harrisburg Road thing works. Then I would direct that question right over there to that gentleman. I would say it very much does, and we can get you the specific numbers of what it was before we made that change and what it is now. Oh, okay. Good. Thank you. It's very confusing for people who come here on a weekend basis. They've never hit that. The diverging diamonds? Yeah, because it puts you on the wrong side of the road. It does. Very similar to roundabouts, right? They're hard to use the first, second, third, fourth, fifth time. It's becoming a more common interchange, so there is a learning curve. Completely understand. Fully agree with you. But it is becoming more common, so I think that more users will get used to it. Oh, we've come a long ways. It used to be roundabouts were things that had Europe. We couldn't definitely. In fact, we had a famous developer say it's a deal killer. If you put a roundabout there, we're not going to do this. Well, guess what happened? We didn't do it, and they built one inside their own property. So, you know, it wasn't such a deal killer effort. So I do go through that intersection every day at Harrisburg New Circle, and it does seem to also be more accommodating or more efficient. Like you can get more volume through in a quicker way. Mr. Owens, did you have a question? Yeah, I'm going to say sometimes historical knowledge can be dangerous. Sam, I think, mentioned in regards to the new central road. I think I heard new street frontage. Or is with the building of that road, does that mean each side is going to be new developable lots for new businesses? Yeah. Sam, is there? There we go. That'll work. Can I speak to it? Yeah. Okay. So, yes, out there today the parcel depth is very deep if you look at it from one side of the loop to the other. So when you bring that road through the middle, it creates a much more typical depth parcel to be able to load on each side. So it would create a lot more road frontage. The parcels would be smaller but much more typical of what you would see out in here. It's working great for the users that are today because they need those huge, deep lots where they can have all that on-site maneuvering. But as you look at, like, a traditional redevelopment pattern, especially for the land uses and the types of development they're trying to incentivize, that depth is much more appropriate. Okay. That's kind of what I thought you all were referring to, and I totally agree with it. Would that have to come back to us in any sort of way to create different zoning, different whatever for lot frontage? You wouldn't need any new zoning. What you would probably see is a landowner, like one of the larger landowners out here, Odessa, coming through with a subdivision plat, and we would probably be working with them on that roadway or that would be part of the subdivision process. Okay. Very good. Thank you. Can I ask this question? I want to ask it to the staff. So is that where our supportive uses are going? I would say that right now what we're seeing within the I-1 zone, and they'll be talking about the code reform here, is different from what you're seeing with the ED. We're not getting the same kind of supportive use ask out of our I-1 that you're getting right now with your ED, and I don't think we would be ever really responding to talking about residential in our I-1 or I-2 or B-4 land. Well, that just always comes up, and I just want to make sure. Thank you. Okay. And just from an aerial, it looks like the majority of that land is paved in the middle. All right. If we don't have any further questions, we will continue. I'm going to let you click forward through there. Thank you. Want to pull this closer to me because I'm short? One thing that is interesting, I've done enough transportation planning adjacent that I can definitely say that part of the reason why a diverging diamond works so well is because you don't have the really dangerous T-bone collisions, and you get the more glancing collisions off the rear end or the front end of the bumpers, and so it just takes down your fatality rates significantly. Even if you still have accidents, it takes that down. And then, Mr. Penn, to your assumption, people not knowing how to use the intersection helps because they drive through it slower and they pay a little more attention. We don't have a plan. I mean that too. So now I get the fun piece of just rolling through some. We were tasked to look at a few catalytic sites, and in this area it was actually really, you know, this was a fun exercise for us to do because, you know, typically in a small area plan, we'll work with our particular property owner or developer to look at their site, but in this case we were looking at pieces that we knew just needed some help and some work, and the idea being that now we can pass these images off to planning, to the council members in these districts, and even to the folks there in Blue Sky to help with marketing efforts in the future. So this is what the current stormwater area looks like. Matt told me I'm not allowed to call it a pond because ponds have certain, you know, things attached to it, so it's a stormwater treatment area. It had been a former pump station site that's back there, but we think that there's a lot of latent opportunity. Even when we went back in there, you know, a bunch of deer got up and ran in front of us. So there's a lot of wildlife, and it really looks like a great space, but obviously the thing that it does is it's the low point, and so the entire site, you know, there's a hundred foot of grade change from Athens-Boonesboro back to this area. So just think about all of the stuff that is sheet flowing off of all of these many surface parking lots. So part of the idea is to really make this a performative landscape and make it something that can work to help slow and treat that stormwater while also turning it into an amenity for the users back there. So we think that there's a way to put in, you know, a fairly small walking loop, maybe some boardwalks, places to sit, and even, you know, like we had heard from the employees out there, maybe using some of the parking area to, you know, encourage food trucks to come in once a week or whatever and help feed these folks something other than McDonald's. So again, there are some, you know, opportunities for seating spots, and the idea being that this all has to be fairly durable because the idea is that it is still an area that is expected to flood during certain parts of the year, so it has to function like that, so it has to be, you know, real durable, easy to maintain. Again, walking loops and then the boardwalk through the potential stormwater features. Do you want me to cover this, or do you want to do it? Why don't you come up? Okay. So with the development in Area 4 that we anticipate, it makes a lot of sense for us to look at, you know, how can we move pedestrians or non-vehicular users between Cane Break and Blue Sky? So one of the obvious locations is the stream that runs between the two, and so we looked at a couple options of how we could develop a shared-use trail through that section. There's, you know, kind of two big alternatives. One is to keep the user down by the stream as much as possible, but what that results in is usually more grading because you're on the more steep parts of the slope. Usually it's more vegetated, so now that larger grading area has to be cleared and replanted, and then you just have to stay outside of your floodplain and your stream buffers to just make it permittable. So that's kind of the bottom option. The top option is keeping the trail closer to the existing development where the development has already flattened out the slopes. They've already cleared the land. Now obviously the challenge there is going to be you're asking the existing landowner to provide you an easement, and they're going to be concerned about people on the trail being closer to their property, being closer to their developed land, and what's that interaction going to be. So both options have some significant pros and cons. The orange that you see more on the right side of the graphic, as you can see, the orange on the top is your clearing limit, so it's a much more condensed and isolated to just where the trail is. On the bottom where the trail is closer to the stream, you have much wider clearings because you can't just, well, I guess you could build walls, but it's very expensive and cost prohibitive, but by the time you chase grade out, you end up clearing a lot more. So in section view, this is kind of what we're looking at. You've got a stream down here at the bottom. That bottom option was putting the shared use trail right at the edge of the floodplain and stream buffer and then chasing grade up and down. The upper option would have been keeping it up here where the natural terrain is already flatter. You can catch that grade faster, and you're going to have less of a clearing impact. So, again, two very different options, and those are the sorts of things that we love to get into during final design and start to negotiate with landowners for things of that nature. Questions? So that just goes to, you know, that's more sort of land within the floodplain that we would have access to. It's the city that actually falls behind property lines. So it would take a lot of coordination long term with those property owners. You know, there's a shift in thinking in terms of trying to put trails behind somebody's property. So it would, you know, it would involve conversations, but we think that it's got some good potential. The other site is looking at Athens-Boonesboro Road and what that could look like long term. So, you know, this is what it looks like out there, like wide amounts of pavement that basically just makes it, you know, a speedway. So, like Matt walked you all through, we think there's a way to slow traffic down, including a roundabout, and this would be the new intersection with that new central roadway spine. So there's opportunity to, you know, who doesn't want to fit in a blue horse wherever they can? You know, some signage for Blue Sky Works. The area that we're looking at here is actually the part of the land that is already zoned as commercial. So we just think that there's an opportunity that we wanted to show and highlight, especially those property owners, that they could be sitting on land that could be used for something like a mixed-use development that could house everything from restaurants and retail to sort of daily needs of both businesses and business owners in here, but also, you know, the potentially 6,500 households that would be living across the way and all of that new energy that's coming along with the stadium. So the idea is, like, how do we think about this being less of, you know, a highway business that you just get off and get your gas, but more of a place? We even included, you know, bus stops over here, hopeful, really hopeful bus stops. And, you know, the idea is that this would be for not just the folks out in Blue Sky, but for the entire area. This is – this shows what the area – there's a – if you've been out there, there's a Teamsters building that's kind of set back from the road. But this is the existing, like, first corner that you hit of the intersection of Blue Sky and Athens-Boonesboro. We really think that this goes to highlight, like, how different it could look out there, especially if you start to bring buildings up towards the front of the road and those buildings start to create, you know, a sense of place. So really quickly, I just want to touch on the implementation recommendations, like, how do we do this? And there – in the sort of current economic ecosystem, there's three areas that we're looking at, and it's the Lexington-Fayette Industrial Development Authority, the Economic Development Investment Board, and then, of course, you have the public and private partnerships. But as you can see, a lot of those are really focused on downtown businesses and not so much out here. So we worked with strategic location advisors to sort of look for recommendations of how – what they thought could help boost this area and, you know, start to get at, you know, how do we actually get money to do some of these things? And so some of their recommendations were to establish a 501c3 that would create an industrial development authority. And so to that – you know, to that end, that's part of the reason why we created this brand of Blue Sky Works, the idea that, you know, we could pass that brand off to an industrial development authority for them to use in the future if they so wanted. At the moment, most of the sort of energy that's happening out there is from Elliott, and we talked to them briefly about, you know, about this as an option, just mentioned it, and I think further discussions need to occur. Number two is establishing a TIF district. It's been a while since the city's used a TIF district, and, you know, I know there are lots of thoughts around it, but it's a powerful tool that's used across the country. And then in tandem with that, establishing a business improvement district out in the area, and that would help with a lot of these – you know, a lot of the big moves out there are really – really have to do with infrastructure and operation and maintenance out there and less so about, you know, the private development of the land itself. So that being said, my fun part is over, and I'm turning it over to Caleb. Thank you, Sam. Good afternoon. My name is Caleb Rosico. I'm a principal with TNL Springer Walsh & Associates, and I will be talking about the zoning and land use recommendations. So the first thing I wanted to mention is that as part of Blue Sky, we were asked to also look at potential updates to the city's industrial zoning districts, really to accommodate two purposes. The first was to make sure that they align with the vision that Sam has just shared with you, and the second part was just to look at them in terms of clarity, best practices, and sort of ways to improve usability, not just for Blue Sky but also for the city. I did want to say that everything I'm about to present to you is very high level. There will be a corresponding ZOTA that goes into much more detail on everything, but I do want to touch upon some of the main points to let you know what we're thinking and to get your preliminary feedback. Now, in terms of a little bit of background, the Blue Sky area today is primarily zoned I-1. This is the city's light industrial zoning district, which you can certainly tell if you've driven through that area. We do have a couple of other zoning districts in the area. Some of the commercial on Athens-Boonesboro Road is B-3, and then there's some professional offices also throughout that particular area. Now, generally speaking, as we looked at your zoning code, we noticed several things very early on relevant to both Blue Sky and the greater usability from the city. The first thing that we identified was that your code today is set up such that if you want to know what types of permitted uses are allowed in a given district, you have to go to the district page, and then there's going to be a reference to another zoning district, and then there's going to be a reference over here to a use that is not permitted. We felt that that was very problematic for several reasons. First of all, it is not user-friendly to potential investors. They have to look in multiple places before they decide whether they can open a business in certain areas. One of the other things it does is it takes away the ability to tailor uses. For example, there may be things that are allowed in B-4 that we don't want to allow in I-1, or we don't want to allow in I-2. One of our first recommendations is to just reformat the way we handle uses in the I-1 and the I-2 zoning district. Rather than referencing the B-4 or some other zoning district, we would like to recommend just actually listing them in the code, so you only have to look in one spot, and you very easily know if I'm looking to open a daycare, for example. I know by looking at the I-1 district whether it is or is not allowed. So our first recommendation in the ZOTA will be to do just that. The second thing, and this is a much more important consideration, is that today your zoning regulations in your industrial areas are really based on where in the manufacturing process a type of activity occurs. If it is the manufacturing of a product or a finished good, it is primarily allowed in the I-1, and if it is the processing of raw materials, it is primarily allowed in the I-2. Now that was very common 20, 30 years ago when your ordinances were written, but it really doesn't reflect the changing nature of manufacturing. We are seeing more and more companies that are able to do what one would usually consider a heavy industrial use in a way that really has no impact. And so as part of the change to I-1 and I-2, we are recommending to regulate industrial uses based more on their off-site impact than on the type of product or good being manufactured. And we're proposing to do that as follows. We have recommended to consolidate your very long list of industrial uses under light industrial and heavy industrial uses into primarily two categories. The first category is what we're calling low-impact industrial and manufacturing. This would be any process, production, manufacturing, that does not have any impact off the property. So what that generally means is it's going to be completely enclosed in a soundproof building. There will be no noise, dust, smoke, vibration, radio signal interference off of the premises, and we don't really care what they're doing. They could be manufacturing computer chips. They could be working on furniture. They could be producing other products. Now, as part of that, we've also recommended creating the alternative category for uses that do have those off-site impacts, and we're calling this high-impact industrial and manufacturing. These would be types of uses where there is a significant outdoor activity, so things like tractor-trailer repair or some sort of outside process, crushing of gravel, that kind of thing. Now, why this is important is that, again, in order to be economically competitive, Lexington-Fayette County's zoning regulations regarding industrial processes really need to provide much more flexibility in terms of the kind of processes than they currently do. I've worked in jurisdictions where the zoning code has said battery manufacturing is always heavy industrial, and what that means is that if a company wants to come in and do a very, very high-tech manufacturing facility, a clean industry, they have to occupy the heavy industrial areas because we've sort of assumed that battery manufacturing is going to be a dirty, filthy industry like it was 20, 30, 40 years ago. And by updating the standards so that if you're a clean, internally consistent manufacturing process, you get to go in I-1, and if you have outside impacts, you get to go into I-2. It means that your zoning code, your industrial districts, are going to be ready to accommodate more of the high-tech, cleaner industries in your I-1 areas without having to worry about whether they need to seek a rezoning or that sort of thing. So it makes the community much, much more business-friendly. Now, in addition, there are a couple of uses that we are recommending actually creating some additional recommendations, additional zoning definitions. The first issue is the issue of data centers, which I'm sure is certainly something you're all very familiar with. Today, data centers are not clearly defined in your zoning ordinance. They are sort of implied by reference under certain use provisions, but it's not clear. What we're recommending to do is actually define data center as a particular use in the zoning code. And data center for this purpose would mean something like a server farm, meaning a building with a bunch of computers in it. It could be an AI center where you may have a lot of technology associated with it, but it's any building that is basically filled with nothing but computers. That's the way to think about it. And then what we would recommend is we would actually recommend creating two types of data center. The first data center would be what we're calling the minor data center. This would be a use up to 50,000 square feet that would have, generally speaking, wouldn't have a substation, but sometimes they could. Would be much more compatible with, say, for example, some of the tech companies coming out of U.K. or some of the tech work doing U.K. And we would recommend allowing this particular kind of use in the B4 district, which is your sort of warehouse distribution area, and in the I1 district, but by conditional use permit. And I'll talk about that in a moment. Anything else, any of the major data centers, these are the ones that are over 50,000 square feet. They tend to be for things like Facebook or Google or Microsoft or Apple. These would, as proposed, not be permitted anywhere in Lexington-Fayette County in the industrial districts that's part of this proposal. Now, as part of that, we have also recommended to develop some review criteria and use standards associated with how you would review data center proposals. We are developing procedures that allow you to look at things like utility impact, impacts on adjacent land uses, noise impacts, water impacts, as you consider whether or not data centers should be permitted. Additionally, we did put in place, or we are considering, standards relevant to the actual design of data center properties. We are recommending a significant separation from adjacent residential data centers, whether you may know this or not, can be extremely loud, extremely, extremely loud. We're also recommending some buffering that will apply as part of mitigating that noise and, again, would give the planning commission some guidance in terms of how to review these particular proposals. Are there any questions about that particular provision? I know. You've talked about protection of the residential. Livestock don't like loud noises. You're absolutely correct, and I think we certainly need to look at that, especially the noises with equestrians. It can create a lot of issues. I don't understand Lexington and where this is located, even talking about large data centers. I mean, what is that going to do? What is it going to do for the community? Part of why we have recommended outlawing them over 50,000 square feet is because of that. I mean, it's just not possible. Yes, sir. To put an option in there to do it is just going to create questions and problems that you can't handle. Well, again, the large ones we've defined as 50,000 up, and certainly that is a point of discussion, and we don't believe that those are appropriate anywhere in the community. But one of the things we did as part of this process is we did look at other research institutions across the country, and it is not uncommon for places like UK, for example, to have spinoff private technology companies that will need some sort of minor data center or computing center associated with that. So we felt that there may be conditions, again, longer term, sort of thinking about the whole city, where you might want to allow that in a very limited condition. And, Mr. Penn, we are getting questions about these as a primary land use, and this project, the small area plan, gives us the opportunity to have this conversation to modernize our I-1, I-2, and our B-4 zones. And if we don't get into this now, I think we might get left behind. The work that Caleb and has been doing, along with Eve, over the past couple of months, this is getting us to a place that we can have that public conversation after the small area plan and really find out what the community finally wants on something like this. Well, I'm just here to ask. Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, my question ties back a little bit to your classification about the indoor versus outdoor. And a lot of our outdoor uses are daytime uses, whereas a lot of the indoor uses might be 24 hours a day. So in comparison, like the data center you just mentioned, you know, that's making noise 24 hours a day. In North Carolina, feet from the back door, there was a sawmill behind me along the railroad tracks. You could, without a doubt, hear the saws running. Those were open buildings. But they, you know, worked a classic day, and then they headed home. And so really, in most days, it didn't affect me at all because I wasn't home, or most people weren't. And even if you were, it was daytime noise as opposed to nighttime noise. And so I guess I just wonder. I mean, it makes a lot of sense to me to look at these uses that we want to allow more flexibility and more uses in our I-1. But I guess I just wonder a little bit, like, if somebody is repairing, for example, semi-trucks outside, I highly doubt that's the kind of operation that's going to be going around the clock. So I just wonder whether that's that. I'm just trying to think about that low impact, high impact as it relates also to the, like, timing of the operation and thinking of a lot of our outdoor uses as daytime operators. Yeah. I would say that I probably misspoke on the semi-truck repair because that is a specifically defined term that we have now put in the code. We've called it a freight terminal, and it includes a whole bunch of categories that are in there. But there is a day and a nighttime piece, but I would say not. What is really important, right, this is the primary goal, is that you should not have to list every possible product that is produced in order for the city staff to be able to know how to classify a potential business. And this idea of does it have an off-site impact versus having an off-site impact, does it have it or does it not have it, that that is a really important distinguishing attribute. I would mention, though, that in addition, particularly in Blue Sky, there is a lot of office use, and we'll be talking about that momentarily. And so it's not a heavy industrial district by any extent of the imagination. So I think that when we ultimately do release the ZOTA and we have the list of permitted uses, that it does grant a little bit of flexibility for uses that may be entirely off-site. For example, the term storage yard, which I was going to get to in a moment. But I wouldn't say it's entirely based on hours of operation. It wasn't about hours of operation, it was about, I guess, wanting to make sure that, I mean, having a little bit of aversion to just saying if it's out, I guess I want to just caution about saying if it's outside, that means that it has an impact and that means that it's heavy industrial. And so just wanting to be more mindful that some of our outside users may not be that much of a nuisance. No, and you're absolutely correct. And it is not the outside, it is off the premises, which is a very different thing. There are, you know, if it's screened, if it's not visible from the property, if I can't hear it on the next property above a certain decibel level, then it would be permitted. But things like, for example, again, I'll use gravel crushing. You're going to hear that several lots away. Versus if it is a more contained use and it does most of the procedures indoor, you're very unlikely to hear it as far away. Here in Lexington, we make sure to do our gravel crushing in a very highly residential area. Which is not a joke. So here is, if you would like, I do have the draft, which we have not obviously published yet. But the criteria for low impact manufacturing are the majority, the majority is the operative, of manufacturing or industrial activity takes place indoors. So the majority, but not all. There is no significant heat, noise, sound, vibration, odor, or particulate detectable off the premises. That's an important one. Significant, which is obviously we do need to work with the law department to make sure we have that clarified. No significant use of dangerous or harmful chemicals. There is a current provision in your code today that anything that uses those is immediately a special land use permit. I'm sorry, conditional use permit. There is no significant use of highly combustible or flammable materials, liquid or gas. So again, I might have a generator, but I'm not a refinery. That kind of level of detail. And then there is limited or no outdoor storage of materials. So again, we will certainly work with the law department to figure, do we have to define limited as up to X percentage? Which we probably do under some recent state legislation. And then what we do is we actually go in and we give a list of typical examples. So we talk about processing, fabrication, packaging, or assembly of prefabricated parts, consumer electronics, bakeries. There is a whole list of sort of technical criteria and typical representative uses. And so I hope that when we do release the draft for review of the code, that it will address many of your concerns. And then conversely, the heavy impact is majority of the activity as outdoor. There is significant noise, heat, sound, vibration, etc. There is a significant use of dangerous chemicals. There is a significant use of highly combustible or flammable materials or gases. And there is a significant use of hazardous or explosive materials. So a little bit of discretion, but again, we have to determine what significant means because of the state law. When we finalize the draft. So Lexington is home to the largest peanut butter manufacturing factory in the world. Food is always a challenge. How would it, if somebody wanted to propose another JIF factory? You know, I would, I will say that food is one of those areas where people don't worry about the smell as much. But technically that would be, that would be the heavy industrial category. Yeah. I live next to a coffee roaster and next to five, six hundred feet away. And it's wonderful. But I always think, you know, technically they're violating the zoning code, but no one's going to complain about it. And having not seen your draft, I may be premature, but does it also address distilleries or breweries? Yeah. The way your current code is, distillery, winery and brewery are all actually a separate defined term. So in the definition, we specifically call out anything that is treated differently otherwise in the code. You have that, you have microbreweries, you have a bunch of strange things related to like the roasting of, the drying of grain. So we certainly call out any of the exemptions in the code. Great. All righty. One comment on that, just a, this is a small detail, but I don't see why in an industrial area in Lexington it is a problem, like industrial or like, or heavy, that there's companies are storing materials outside. That just seems like a, we don't need to build boxes to store materials that can be outside. Okay. Would that be, can I ask a follow-up question? Would that be exposed material, meaning not in containers, not in some sort of protective covering? Things like gravel, tires, pallets, you know, that kind of thing? Or would there be? Yeah, like if you're using gravel, you could have a pile of gravel. If you're using, I mean, as someone who uses soil and pots, I'm just using those examples because I'm familiar with that business. We store soil and pots outside. It does not hurt them. I don't see why we would need to build a building to put around soil and pots. You go to Landscape Corner, you know, you go to Southern Estates, whatever, are they going to have to be in an I-1 use because, are they going to be prohibited? So we do have current standards within the commercial zones that talk about outdoor storage of materials. So this is a slightly different circumstance. It would not need to go to an I-2 or an I-1. Those are still available. One of the new terms, though, that I think is, I'm going to skip ahead here, is this idea of a storage yard. Because today your code does talk about properties that are only used for storage purposes. It doesn't have a clear definition. We have defined this as a use primarily intended for the outdoor storage of new materials, new equipment, or new products greater than 24 hours. So this would be allowed in I-1 and I-2. There are screening requirements associated with it, but it specifically excludes storage of gas or flammable materials in a gaseous form, unless otherwise allowed by the zone regulations. And basically that means that if you're storing flammable material, which is in your current code today, they need a conditional use permit. So, thinking about Blue Sky, there's an area out there, and I can't remember if it's actually in Blue Sky or outside, where you have a large number of heavy construction equipment out there. Would that, would this impact that? Would it require some screening that it doesn't currently have? Just sort of walk through that. Well, again, it would be allowed, but there are, let me go to the draft again, which is not fully specified, but there would be screening requirements around it. That's actually in the city's, you may be able to speak on this. There is the provision about the general screening for sort of industrial areas. Can you talk about what that requires? So, we currently have buffering requirements both for industrial areas to other land uses or other zoning uses, but we do have established criteria for the buffering of outdoor storage specifically. That's correct. And those areas are outlined. I think we need to bolster those just a bit, modernize those a bit more. I think one of the elements of this that we wouldn't want to talk about is removing rights of property owners. Eve has done a tremendous amount of work on this, working with those property owners out there to ensure them that whatever we do now is not going to restrict those rights and not going to add added burden upon them, but for the future, do you want to talk about that a little bit? Okay. But for the future, really what this would do is allow us to make sure that any new users, especially if we create a roadway along the back, we're giving them some flexibility, but also making sure that we're modernizing the standards by which we are looking at them. Yeah, and I did want to add one more thing to this sort of idea of the definition of the storage yard. When ultimately the draft is released, you'll notice that we were very careful about distinguishing between sort of the new product versus what I would call a junkyard, right, where the products are just laying there. So there are two different definitions. They have to be new product, of course. If they're used product, they immediately fall under this new term waste-related uses that I'll talk about in a moment. And then there is a particular call-out for any vehicular storage because that is treated differently in the code. You basically don't allow it unless it was holding a permit before some date in the 80s, I believe. And so that is also in the draft that we've carried forward. With that said, there are a couple of other uses I wanted to point out because, again, while they don't really apply much to Blue Sky, they may eventually have citywide consideration. We have pulled out self-storage as a newly defined term such that if there are parts of the city that, after this code is updated, that may want to look at restricting self-storage, it is now sort of its own animal. So you can outlaw self-storage while allowing other types of uses in those particular areas. We've also created a new definition called research and development. Again, this applies in Blue Sky, but this may also one day have wider citywide application. This is basically an office use that may have some auxiliary manufacturing for the production of new products and prototypes on premises, which today you cannot do unless you are in an industrial district. And then finally, we did completely rewrite your waste-related use standards. These are things like incinerators. I know landfills are not allowed. But we felt that it was a bit too open-ended, that it needed some more clarity to actually specify what was and was not permitted. And I'll take everyone else's comments certainly into consideration. I think you raised some very good points about the outdoor storage and uses. And then the two final additional changes related to zoning. One is, as Sam mentioned, there is a recognition that you may have more campus environments in Blue Sky. And I think we already certainly do have some of that in there. And so one of the changes that we're recommending to make is in how you calculate the 60% office allowance provision in the code. Currently, the code reads that you can have offices in an I-1 and I-2 zoning district, but they cannot exceed 60% of the building. We have recommended to change that to 60% of the development plan, which means that if I am a property owner and I own five parcels, five lots of record, five buildings, I can aggregate all of my office into a single building and have the rest for sort of true industry uses. That is how Elliott has been handled today under the current procedures, but it isn't as clearly enumerated in the code as it could be. So we have enumerated that by changing the term from building to development plan in the proposal. And then finally, one of the things that I think is also very popular today among sort of smaller scale manufacturing uses, like you may eventually get more of in the Blue Sky area, is the phenomenon that certain types of food and beverage manufacturing often work very well with a restaurant co-tenancy. So what we have recommended is we have actually recommended to, let me back up, today you can have restaurants in I-1 and I-2, but they are only for employees. And that is really hard to financially make sense, right? Can you imagine opening like a restaurant or a cafeteria and only expecting 100 customers to patronize it? So what we have recommended doing here is we have actually recommended allowing up to 30 percent of a food and beverage manufacturer, which does include distilleries, wineries and breweries, to also have a food and beverage restaurant basically within them. Again, we have seen a lot of examples around the country where that can often be the financial piece that makes some of these things make financial sense, and it is just very compatible with the vision that Sam set forth about having a little bit more creativity in types of retail and restaurant uses in the Blue Sky area. So those are effectively the five changes. Again, we are going to be working with staff to prepare a ZOTA for your consideration that goes into this in much more detail. Certainly we will address the comments from Mr. Mickler about outdoor storage and make sure that that is clear, but would love to answer any other questions you may have about potential zoning updates. Mr. Penn? Mr. Penn, did you have a comment? I would assume that the current businesses there will not have to reapply to be legal. Yeah, absolutely. They would be all legal. They would be all legal. I wouldn't even say legal and nonconforming. I think it is very important to stress that this is not about restricting what property owners can do today for the most part. We are going to make sure that we accomplish that. In some ways, it actually expands the ability to attract new types of businesses that weren't envisioned when your code was written all those years ago by, again, not specifying particular kinds of industries. For example, what is a high-tech industry? If you have a 3D printing facility, that is not anywhere anticipated in your zoning code today. Staff could look at it. They could say, okay, they are making stuff, they are printing it, there is no off-site impact. We are going to classify that as low-impact manufacturing. That is very different from having to say, well, we can't allow you because you are not one of the products specified. We think that this gives a lot more actual flexibility to property owners than they may have today in the I-1, and then, of course, in the I-2, it would continue to allow pretty much anything goes as it currently does. You know, when you talk about Blue Sky Works, you could talk about changing Athens to Athens. I am not going to. Because there is a culture in Athens that doesn't work in Athens. I'll see what I can do about that. I have a question. Okay, one quick question about, this is very interesting. I think this is very intriguing. Commerce Lexington, how much do they know about what we are doing here as it relates to that? Have you all worked with them on it? Okay. That is a great question. Actually, we have them represented on the advisory committee, and we have met with them several times outside of those committee meetings just to discuss one-on-one how they feel about this proposal. And they have stated that they are comfortable and excited with the upcoming ZOTA that we are developing. So, so far, so good. Did you get that in writing? If I may have one more thing, I failed to mention another provision that we've put in here, a new definition that I think may be really interesting to citywide application. We have actually written a definition for what we would call indoor growing systems. Indoor growing. This is, again, one of those trends that we are seeing more and more of where, no, not necessarily that, sir, but it would basically be a definition that would allow things like hydroponics, aquaculture in the industrial districts because, and we've actually enumerated them as a different use because, again, thinking long-term, we're actually seeing that kind of thing go into some downtowns where they want to allow, you know, the hotel to have a garden on the roof or something like that. And so there are a couple of other new definitions that are not as important to Blue Sky but I think would potentially have citywide application. I do want to mention that everything I've talked about today would only be amended in the B-4, the I-1, and the I-2. So we're limiting the applicability of it. But because these are citywide zoning definitions, when the Unified Development Code is prepared, there may be an opportunity to think about allowing them in more places. I'm going to throw this in here because I don't know where else to put it in because this is new thinking. I heard a program on the radio last week about places in Europe where they're using infrared lighting for public. Anybody familiar with that? Yeah, well, and their concerns were more bird migrations, you know, dark skies kind of stuff, where they're able to use the infrared lighting to take care of the human needs but do it in a way that has less environmental impact. Has anybody been hearing about that? For security? No, just regular lighting, particularly like in an area that we're talking about where there's a huge potential industrial area. So I'm just raising it as something that we as Lexington should investigate, talk about. I'm not recommending that we do it. I'm just saying do we even know that it's going on anywhere? And if we're doing some experimentation, is this a place to do it? This is primarily being done in Europe with some different lighting codes, I'll say. We can look into that and get you some more information. Absolutely. And we also have the benefit of the lighting ordinance that we updated. Was it last year? Two years ago? Two years ago at this point. And all of that would apply to the I-1, I-2? Yes. I was going to say, one of the things we did not put in the draft of the data center ordinance, you know, they can have a huge lighting impact, but we didn't put anything in there because of that recent code update. Okay. Mr. McClure? Yeah. Just to come back, because when you sort of like restated my comment, I wasn't super clear that. Okay. I enjoy, when I go places or when I am places, seeing activity, seeing people work, seeing things made, and I hesitate to support concepts that say everything needs to be inside. And so I really agree and appreciate the idea that we want to make manufacturing easier to do in more places, especially types that aren't noxious or a problem. But I do hesitate with this idea that we say, inside, inside, inside, put it in a box, because we think that putting it in an ugly metal box is going to make our community nicer. And I suppose ultimately, just following that, the planning commission would still have that discretion to, if they did get an application that made a lot of sense, that did involve engagement with the outside environment and was not environmentally or in any way detrimental, or is that an unintended consequence? Let me check something in my draft here. I think most of these are just by right, so there would be no review process. In the I-2 district, there are certainly conditional use permits that are required. But if somebody wanted to request a waiver to that particular thing? So we do not allow for waivers for land uses. So it gets into, if we are establishing this perspective of things being contained within buildings, or, and I don't perceive this as being fully as contained in buildings, I perceive it as more contained to the lot. Much of what has been described as no light, air, sound, noxious impact past the boundary of the property. So I believe that when we have that discussion, when we look into that, we can look at other ways to allow flexibility. I would say that while this is going to be brought into the plan as a red line document and we'll be making changes based off of these comments, we do have a full scale kind of conversation as it goes forward, which Eve will be leading following the adoption of the plan. Great. One other thing. It hadn't been that long ago, I went to the Pendleton Factory in Oregon. They wanted their stuff inside because it acted as a marketing tool to get people inside the building. They could have done a lot of their things outside, but they said people would pass by and then the issue became traffic, people slowing down and watching and not paying attention to what was in front of them and accidents occurring, what have you. But if I were a business owner, I think that's something that would be good to ask the business people, how would you like to do that? Because, quite frankly, I see marketing advantages of having people come into my box, quotation marks, and meander around because in there I'm going to have a gift shop. And I'm going to sell you something. And then a little, just going back a little bit, Caleb, to the data centers. You mentioned residential buffering and agricultural buffering. I didn't know they were as loud as you said they are. Would buffering just be on any data center or would it just be if you are close or in the proximity of a residential use or an agricultural use? So without getting too into the detail, we have put a very significant buffer, almost a quarter mile up from residential. Basically, not to get into the weeds too much, but there was a proposal for a landscape strip and basically the thought is that every 100 feet of landscaping reduces a decibel level at the end of it by about 5% or by 5 decibel points. I'm sorry, not 5%. But we could certainly think about a buffer from adjacent properties. Well, I'm just thinking if, for example, you have, I don't know, a Starbucks and then you have I-1 land or I-2 land very, very, very close, does it negate the point of sitting on the patio at a coffee shop? Yeah, yeah. And I don't know whether this factors into this discussion or another part of city government, but the data centers, in my understanding, the requirements for cooling and the impact on water is a huge, I don't know, does that conversation belong here or does it belong elsewhere? It belongs here and I believe that we'll be bringing you some text in the next coming weeks that will kind of go through some of those. Yeah, we've, you know, a lot of this is very, very new. So what we've recommended in the, again, the in-process draft is they have to submit a water consumption plan just because utilities are one of the things, even though not necessarily controlled by the city, they are within the purview to consider zoning decisions. They have to submit an energy consumption plan. And that's another one of those things that has a huge impact. They have to actually submit a transmission line impact plan, although probably wouldn't be much of an issue for a 50,000 square foot facility. And then they have to submit a noise plan for your consideration before, as part of reviewing the conditional use permit. Thank you, Kayla. And as part of your work, and this may just be in our code, I believe it is, but for example, on the north side of Fayette County, we have the Royal Springs Aquifer. What are the impacts on groundwater? Where would that discussion take place? Or do we already have built-in protections? So we currently have recommendations that are made by the Royal Springs Wellhead Protection Committee. There aren't any written protections at this point. However, that is something that we wrote in our comprehensive plan to look at. What are the things that we want to bolster to protect our groundwater and protect our environment? If we're talking about the I-1, I-2 zones, critically, can we also talk about the possible adverse effects of development on our water table? We can definitely look at that, yeah. Just curious, when we're talking about mentioning buffering and possible noxious sound, light, blah, blah, blah, I would presume that would be for protection of neighboring property for financial reasons as well? Yeah, I mean, part of, well, I actually don't know. Are financial considerations a legal zoning criteria under Kentucky law? I'm going to play ignorant here. We will be looking at it. So there is an impact that someone can say is having on their private property rights. I think we would want to be making sure that we're looking at that within a framework of law, and we'll probably be checking in with them as we go along. And I say probably, I mean definitely. There are ways to talk about things without framing it in those terms that are legally defensible, and so we'll certainly do whatever we need to to comply with Commonwealth law in that matter. Any other zoning questions? Are there any other questions about anything that we've talked about? This actually concludes the slide deck. Wow, so much for 30 minutes. I'd just like to say this is exciting. I mean, I think you've taken a part of our community that was not the most appealing part of our community, although there's a lot of productive things happening out there, and turning into something that's really an asset. Thank you. We figure out how to pay for it. Thank you. And yes, I'm very glad that two years ago we set aside the intention to do this study. I think it's been very, very productive. If there are no final questions. Thank you, Caleb. Thank you. Mr. Chair, before you shift to the next one, if Eve, you wouldn't mind just giving them a preview of what is to come over the next month? So this morning we had our final advisory committee meeting. We presented, of course, to all this afternoon, and we will have a final draft presentation on May 21st, which is a Thursday at your next work session meeting. And then on May 28th, another Thursday, we're planning on having at your zoning public hearings a public hearing to add the small area plan to the comprehensive plan. And we've begun the mailing process for that committee. And then I will hopefully be following up in the month of June with an official zoning ordinance text amendment filing for the B4, I1, and I2 zones. So we are rapidly wrapping this up. And if you have any additional comments or feedback, please let us know. Great. Thank you, Eve. Okay. Our next item is the complete streets manual update. Good afternoon. I'm Kenzie Gleason with our outreach and strategic planning section. I actually wanted to give you this update in March, but we got canceled. I can't remember. Was it electricity or something? Yeah, yeah. Let me move this down just a little bit more. There we go. I'm in the Sam height club. I know. So anyways, yes, this is just a quick update to let you know where we are with the complete streets design manual. And as a quick refresher, this is basically a complete rewrite of our roadway engineering manual, which hasn't been updated in just over 20 years. As well as looking at combining some of the different regulations and guidance that's provided in our neighborhood traffic management program, as well as the subdivision regulations. So some of the elements of that that will be updated are our standard cross sections, incorporating traffic calming features into our new roadway designs, and for retrofit projects as well. Addressing, sort of modernizing some of our intersections design. For instance, our current standards don't address traffic circles or roundabouts or any of those types of intersection controls. And utility placement is something that we've looked at, particularly as it relates to new development. You know, are there different ways that we can try and make that more efficient for repairs or other things that might need to be done in the future. And then access management also has a big role to play in safety and how we sort of control access to our major roadways and make sure that we're reducing conflicts with all users wherever possible. The design manual, as one of the core engineering manuals that the city adopts, would then be applicable to private development, public infrastructure projects, our neighborhood traffic calming program. It will govern some of the operations and maintenance that the city does on our roadways, which means there were a lot of stakeholders involved. Planning is, again, just sort of coordinating this effort. This is technically an engineering manual, but all of these different divisions had input and had a role to play in helping formulate the recommendations along with our consultants. And then, of course, our private utilities. We have some public, some private, and then our private developers. So where we are currently, we released a draft to our local engineering firms, our utility companies, and our developer contacts. Engineering maintains a distribution list that they use to notify anybody of any changes to the engineering manuals. I think it had about 350 email addresses on it from firms, not just inside Lexington, but others that even do business with us sometimes from the Louisville area or elsewhere. We held a couple workshops this past month with those groups to just get their initial feedback, see if there were certain pain points or things that we hadn't really considered or weren't understanding about how it sort of works in real life. We have good feedback. We're working through some of that right now, and we'll prepare a response to all of the comments that we receive just to make sure that people are aware that we understood their concern and that we have either made an adjustment or we haven't, and for what reason. I'll be providing, well, not me, the consultants will be providing an update to the Environmental Quality and Public Works Council Committee on May the 12th. On that day, we'll also release a draft to the general public. The council will have that posted on their Engage Lexington webpage, which is kind of what the council uses to keep a public input loop going through that platform. In June, we'll come back to them, present some revisions. I don't know if that will look like a final draft or not. It'll just kind of depend on how much consensus that we have, and we would then ask them to look at reading that out of the committee, maybe as early as June, but certainly no later than August. They go on break during July, but August is kind of our drop dead date to have it approved in order for us to then move on to initiating a subdivision regulation update to comply with the engineering manual, because there are some things that overlap in both the subdivision regs and the roadway manual. So once we initiate that with you, there would again be another public process, and then we would look to hopefully have that completed all the way through the Planning Commission approvals and then the council's re-approvals by the end of this year. And that was all that I had to present. Get you back on track. The manual applies primarily to new development, or does it apply to infill and redevelopment as well? It would apply to infill and redevelopment, and we try to be very careful in the language to explain if it's greenfield development, the expectation is that you would meet the standard, and that there would be very few justifications for not doing so. I mean, there are always environmental concerns and other restrictions. In infill, we recognize that we have to be much more flexible. Same with city projects. We're always working in existing and constrained environments, and so we try and set some sort of minimums, even if you can't meet the preferred specific facility or width or whatever. We've established some minimums, and then provide some guidance on how you sort of navigate that trade-off and decision-making process. I'm picking up on something we heard when we were talking about the blue sky development and the installation of, I presume, some sort of pipeline where they can run fiber optic cables. We have so many problems. I mean, I went without power for 13 hours this week because we had tree limbs down on the lawn, and we always hear it's not possible to schedule all of our updates, whether we're talking about electrical lines, whether we're talking about sewer lines, all that kind of stuff. Is there a way to build in a request to be able to install some kind of lines for both overhead power lines and for fiber optic cables as we're doing these other kinds of, you know where I'm headed here, that we create the option even though we don't do the option at the time being? Is that a possibility for this? If you can elaborate, if you are a little more familiar with the conversation. Absolutely. The hardest part of getting these all done is with the older areas. Our new projects are all underground. We are very prescriptive, and I think that, and I think this is a project that is really necessary, especially for the areas that are outlined in the urban growth master plan. Before we have development there, we want to make sure that we have the roadways right, which is what we did in 1996 as well. I know that the mayor's office is looking at trying to make sure that utility companies are working at the same time as we are working at the same time as other people are working, so that we can get these things done in a more, both financially feasible way, as well as a way not to tear up the sidewalks or the roads every single time. So that is something that they're trying to collaborate with, specifically within the complete streets framework, but also just within engineering and the utilities. Yeah, the utility placement that we identify is really more preferred, and again, what applies especially to Greenfield redevelopment, but you never know what you're going to dig up, usually, is how it goes. I can't speak to the private development side, but I do know in some of our public projects, when we're redoing a road, I am aware of times where they've placed a conduit for future fiber optic cables or whatnot. So yes, understood. Okay, do we have any other questions for Kenzie? If not, we are moving on. Thank you very much. To the residential zoning lab report. Hello, commissioners. I'm doing well. Thank you all for hanging in there. I promise this will be brief, and we'll get you out of here soon. So you all know, my name is Eve Miller. I'm a senior planner for the Long Range Planning team, and I've had the pleasure over the last two years or so working on growing our Imagine Lexington Analytic Research Center, or the ILARC, and I'm here to briefly walk you through our lab report that we published in the fall and that I wrote about residential zoning here in Lexington. So this lab report is a series of three, and this one talks about how zoning developed in the United States, as well as Lexington, from its early origins to our modern city residential land use policies. By understanding how zoning began and how it's evolved over time, we can better discuss policies and how they continue to shape where and how people live today. And if you haven't read it already, it's around 1,700 words, about a 10-15 minute read, and we encourage you all to check that out if you haven't already done so. So, what is the definition of zoning? Zoning is the regulatory method by which a government outlines how land, particularly private property, can be used. Although in some recent internal staff discussion, we had a back and forth about what really is zoning, like what is that definition? And so Mr. Bailey believes another definition is that the government's use of police power to restrict what people can or cannot do with private property. So those are two ways to kind of shape this discussion. The earliest form of government regulation land use in the United States took shape in the early 20th century with the passage of the New York State Tenement House Act of 1901. And we know that this law set requirements for improving light conditions, air quality, improved ventilation, plumbing, and emergency access for residents. Other states began to follow suit with legislators in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Illinois also creating legislation for residential properties. In the 1920s, the United States Department of Commerce set the foundation for zoning laws with the publication of the State Standards Zoning Enabling Act in 1921 and the Standard City Planning Enabling Act in 1927. And so these two standard acts were the model legislation that states and cities used to create zoning laws. They provided the legal structure and a lot of cities still continue to use those today. As we know, zoning was created to originally protect public health and safety, especially in residential areas, separating them from industrial use. However, it's worth noting that historically, racially exclusionary zoning policies and regulations have taken place all at the federal, state, and local levels, which restricted groups of people from living in certain areas, segregating our communities. Examples of zoning classifications, which you all are very familiar with, include residential, agriculture for farming or livestock, commercial for restaurants, business, and industrial zones for manufacturing, which we've talked a lot about today. In Lexington in particular, as we became more urbanized in the 19th and 20th century, the lack of regulation of various land uses presented public health issues. In a housing survey of Lexington completed in 1924, the city's Lexington's Board of Health shared that the effect of dilapidated, damp, filthy, disease-infected houses, which are shelters, but not homes, in producing the lack of thrift, bad working habits, criminal standards, low earning ability, and improper living standards cannot be measured in dollars. The Lexington Public Library still has that document today if you want to check that out at the Central Library. Recommendations in the housing survey called upon the city to create laws to help encourage public health facilities, including sanitary sewer, clean water, and emergency access. In response, Lexington created the first Planning and Zoning Commission in 1928, and then in 1930 we passed the first zoning ordinance that we have, which was called the Building Zoning Ordinance, and then we completed our first comprehensive plan, as you well know, in 1931. So the Planning Commission is coming close to your 100th anniversary. We'll have to think of something to do. Shift to modern-day Lexington and the residential zones are organized in a few different ways in our zoning ordinance, which I know you all are very familiar with. So very quickly, we have single-family detached, which is one detached structure per lot, and we also allow for some other structures to be permitted, such as accessory dwelling units. We have multi-family, which refers to a building structure that has two or more independent living units, and they typically share an entryway or green space, parking, things like that. And then we have high-density residential, which is high-rise apartments or multi-story dwelling units. In 2025, a large portion of our urbanized land in Lexington was zoned for residential use. So as we know, Lexington spans 285 square miles, and 30% of that land is in our urban service area. And currently, more than 95% of our city's population lives within that 30% area designated, and approximately 70% of that land inside the urban service area is zoned for residential use. For context, in 1989, it was around 40% of the land within the USA was zoned residential, and by 1996, we had the expansion, Hamburg area was added, we had some new growth, so residential zoning grew to about 62%, and then currently, it's hovering around 70%. So within that 70% of land that is zoned residential, currently about 40% of that is zoned for single-family zoning, which as we know, limits the opportunity for multi-family dwelling units, town homes, duplexes, things like that. And this is the map that I created to accompany that residential lab report, so if you check out that website, you can play around with the map, zoom in, have a little more interactive features, but the yellow signifies single-family use, and the orange signifies for allowance of multi-family residential. So like I mentioned, this is one of three. So we are currently in the part one, the history component. Part two will explore how zoning has shaped housing patterns and development over time, and how national and local efforts have looked at modernizing residential zoning, and then part three will look at the city's comprehensive plan and kind of break down what we are calling for and looking to do in the long-range future. So we are working very diligently to publish and write more lab reports, and my colleague Iris Dooling in the back is keeping us very accountable with timelines, so please take a look at that website if you haven't already, check it out, we're adding more information to it week by week, but I hope you've enjoyed this very brief recap of that lab report, and I'm happy to answer any questions you all have about it. Thank you. Thank you, Eve. Mr. Penn. I've been wanting this to be done forever, and the reason for it is that the more transparency the vision of planning can have, not only with numbers, but with ideas and down the road, the less questions that we have about process, about the number of land that's available, how it's being used, because lack of information creates a vacuum that people fill with their own needs and desires. So, if this can be tied into our numerical numbers of how we go forward, and my hope would be that it would be at least published, at least spoken about on an annual basis. Life would be faster than that, but certainly on an annual basis, because the history of this community has been, we only talk about this when we're getting ready to do a comp plan, and that's just, that puts undue strain and undue questions on the table that don't need to be there. You know, if everybody looks at the same facts, they can come to a little different conclusions, but they can't accuse one side of being unfair to the other, and we're going to always have this. I mean, it's just the nature of the beast and how we live and what we want this community to be. There's a conflict there, and this and the numerical balance, if it's done consistently every year, then it doesn't back up against that wall and create all that tension, and I salute you for doing it. It's very well done. Thank you. And Mr. Penn, while this is the first one we are doing like this, as new lab reports are added to the website, you will be getting an update off of those lab reports at this meeting every single time. Great progress. Great. Do we have any additional questions? Seeing none, thank you, Eve. Okay. Thank you all very much. Okay. Other business? Mr. Bailey. Mr. Chair, I am just sitting in for everybody else that give you this information every time we have a work session. This is an odd one in the fact that we had two in one month, so you will be on to your committee meetings next week, the 7th, and you will have your subcommittee meeting in the morning in the Zoning Committee. So I'm putting you on the spot because you don't normally speak to this. In our original request to have more dialogue about affordable housing, where are we on that plan, on that timetable? We did receive some communication from the market rate developers who are interested in having you out in other groups just to come and discuss with them. They were not particularly interested in coming at this time to have this on an open mic so that they could provide you with other information. So we are currently going to be working with their representatives to try to set something up in the future for you all. We will be presenting some of our lab reports are focused in on the cost of housing in our community, specifically looking into what are the rates of permitting in our community, the cost of construction across the United States, because I think when we have these discussions, much of the things that are lost is not just the underlying land that has become quite expensive. The cost of construction has become extremely expensive. So over the next several months, we'll be continuing that conversation. It might just not be directly with the builders. So that's the development part, and we had some conversation about the financing part. Where are we on that? Yes, we had a conversation with one member from the financing sector, but we were moving on to that after we figured it out with market rate developers. So we're now going to start making that outreach. One other quick thing as it relates to it. I know that they want to meet with us in smaller things. I assume that's so they don't go on the record officially. What I'm struggling with is how do you keep that? I mean, the minute we meet with them, somebody's going to tell them that we met with them, and they want to know what the information is in the spirit of transparency. One of the questions I'd be curious to know is what's the point of this doing it in this fashion, because it's going to be public anyhow. I cannot comment on their perspective on it. All I can say is we did our due diligence to try to bring something here, and that didn't come to fruition. You know, I want to speak to another subject, but on that one, we didn't have anybody wanting to come in here and build student housing either in the local development community. I know I don't like work sessions on the mic, but that's what we decided to do. But all of a sudden, we needed student housing, and people were willing to come in from outside this community and build it. Why can't affordable housing be done the same way? I believe we're seeing more and more affordable housing developers enter our community. I think Winterwood, which is local but also national, is one of those firms that has really done quite well. AU Associates, another bigger firm that works throughout the state, not looking across state lines as much. I think you get a lot of affordable housing and workforce housing developers coming online now, but with all affordable housing, workforce housing, you're also competing for the same funds. So I think Lexington has done very well to add more and more funds to affordable housing and direct it to those groups who need it. I think we are probably going to continue to look for more avenues because when funds start to diminish, you have to look at other strategies to support affordable housing. Not to get too deep, but if you take 1% of the budget every year and put it in affordable housing, we're supposed to have been doing that since several years, the budget's $550 million. 1% of that's pretty strong, and you multiply that by 8-10 years, there's got to be a lot of money sitting in that affordable housing trust fund. I would say that it's not sitting. They're out there utilizing that money. If you talk to Commissioner Lanter about it, he's working really hard to get that money out there and to get these projects developed. Well, it would be nice if we knew about that. That is something that we can work from an internal standpoint to talk to you about what has been done and what is being expended. I think the additional piece of that is what have we learned so far in this community about public-private partnerships and how can we expand on that because we're never going to get it all financed through sitting aside tax revenues 1%. If we can learn more about how to do the other also, I would like to see us spend some time thinking about that or learning about it. We can definitely put something together on that. I'm afraid if I remember, I can't remember. Did we ever put to bed the issue of using that 1% as a bonding mechanism to create a bond fund to help, I guess, finance the houses? Let me get back to you on that. I'll dig a little deeper and get back with the Commission at the next work session. Tell us where we are about this solar thing and when is it coming to us? Tonight, at the Council's meeting, they're going to have, I think, have first reading of a resolution to initiate the text amendment changes. We're going to have a meeting with the Council to initiate the text amendment changes back to you all. They have to give it two readings. I would love to tell you exactly what they're going to do, but I have no idea having sat through their meeting on Tuesday. They could suspend the rules and give it two readings tonight or they could let it run its normal course and wait until their next meeting and give it a second reading. Once it gets two readings from them, that resolution will send the text that they are proposing to change to the Commission. Once the second reading date happens, you all will have 60 days from that day to get it, process it, have a hearing on it, and send whatever recommendation back to them that you would like because that's how the process works statutorily. Once you send it back to them, it's like every other text amendment. They'll get it back. They have no deadline by statute. They could put it back in committee. They didn't sound like they were going to want to do that, but they could. They can change it. They can adopt what you send forward. They can adopt something they change. They can sit on it. Basically, either tonight or two weeks from tonight, you will have it and you'll have 60 days to do something with it. Well, I may be premature, but I am so tired of being reactive. I'd rather be proactive. It seems like anything we get into here, we wind up trying to take something out because it was put in without any public hearing. Therefore, I'm going to ask our chair to think about developing a working group just like the council did. Being as the Attorney General's group said that the working groups are legal, I think we need to have a working group and start working on this and then whatever we send back to them, we don't have any choice over that, but we want to send the best information we can back to them. This is an issue that can be culturally changing for our community. I want to hear from the people that absolutely are the experts on it. I'll be glad to give you a list of them if you want to hear them. You can do that, but you since they are initiating this formally by resolution, whatever, if you choose to move forward that way, you will still have to follow the statutory provisions about the 60-day deadline, the hearing that you'll have to have. Not that they can't be going on parallel simultaneously, but you will still have to return something back to them. I just want to be sure because in the work group, I would just encourage you to maybe touch base with us if you do that so that we don't get sideways with open meetings and those kind of things. How are we going to get sideways with open meetings when they didn't? Okay, just for lack of having a better way. Just because they maybe did or didn't do it the right way, I don't think means we just do whatever we want, however we want. We need to try to be I mean, I understand what you're saying. There's a lot of questions surrounding that. We have that opinion, but we just want to be careful. Well, I want to be careful too, but I don't want to be caught in a box where 60 days Oh, by the way, you only got a week and a half, you got to get back to the council. And let me tell you what I'm thinking here. And again, I wish this was not on tape, but it is. We need to hear from Charlie Farmer. We need to hear from Bill Justice. We need to hear from Mary Quinn Raymer. We need to have representatives from the council and representatives from this. Because this is an issue that is way more important than the council believes it is. Now, that's my opinion. That's what I'm asking the chair to do. And I did not want to wait until you say to me, oh, we only got a week. We only got a month. We only got three weeks. Then we become reactive rather than proactive. And I will tell you that it doesn't change your timeframe on the 60 days, but because of the timing of this, it is very likely that your recommendation on the 60 days is going to go back to the council while they're on their six or seven week summer break. So, they start taking a break sometime the first week in July and they don't come back until the middle of August. So, even if you send it back, which you'll have to do to be compliant with the statute, they may not actually take it back up until they get back. Yeah, but we don't have any control over what they do after the 60 days. That's true. Our control is in the 60 day period. Right. And so, I'm just talking about what we do with our 60 days. I don't even control what the council wants to do or don't want to do. Their only remedy is the election box. And that'll be their problem. Our problem is to be able to learn about these things that I just brought to you. And I don't believe from what I can read that there was a whole lot of discussion about tourism, western soil quality, tourism, economic values of land that were in sight of what these things are, what to do to property values. These are our concerns. And unless we do something to have that, we can't have a public hearing and give everyone of them three minutes and say, we've done this. Well, I mean, you are welcome to form a work group and I will tell you that they did, I don't know what happened at the Environmental Commission because I don't staff that, but they did send their, what they were proposing to put on, to initiate tonight to the Rural Land Management Board and they discussed it at their meeting last week. They sent a letter expressing their concerns about some of it and one of the council members who led this process through the council came to that meeting and answered some pretty pointed questions. So I feel like that, you know, you can probably get some input from some of those folks as well who have some knowledge about some of the things you're asking in addition to what you're asking because they're considering, they considered some of the things you're talking about. They mean the council? No, the Rural Land Management Board. Well, yeah, but the Rural Land Management Board is not sending something back to the council like we're returning charges. Right, they are not, but they have sent them a letter. So I just wanted you to be aware that that had happened and apparently the Environmental Commission also discussed it, but I don't know what that discussion was. I'm not trying to put you on the spot. All I'm trying to do is say I want to use every time that we have to get this right. I understand and I think if, you know, if the chair and the director or the commissioner, you know, want to get together and try to go ahead and try to set up some kind of work group, I think you can do that. Just building on that, can we get access to that letter or do we have to have a separate pathway to Environmental Commission and Rural Land Management Board? Well, I mean the commissioner of this department is also over the Rural Land Management Board. I don't think he can get you the letter, but we can get you the letter. I don't think that's going to be a problem. I think we should, I don't know about the Environmental Commission, but I think we can probably find out. It was a public meeting, so whatever. I'm not sure what they did or how long their discussion was. I doubt it was as long as the Rural Land Management Board's discussion, but I could be wrong. I chose to do this at a work session and not at a subdivision hearing or at a regular hearing because I want us to talk about it. I want you all to be aware. I'm not trying to do anything to anybody. I just want to get the kind of research we need to make a decision, to give them to try to make a good decision. Thank you, Mr. Penn. Mr. Rhodes. Thank you. Tracy, help me a little bit to clarify. I heard you say a moment ago it could come to us in two weeks. If they have a first reading tonight, when would be the next opportunity for a second reading? I think their next meeting is in two weeks. Sometimes they double up, but I don't think they're doing that in these two weeks period. I just don't know what they're going to do. They have handled this different ways at different times. Our last impression, at least that we have in our department, is that they're not going to try to double read this tonight, but they can if they want to. If someone makes the motion to do that and they get 10 votes to do it, they can. But I don't think that's where they're going. Again, I hate to try to predict where they're going. It could be as early as 60 days from today, or it could be as early as 60 days from two weeks. Whenever they give it the final reading and approve that resolution, that's when your 60 day starts running. That's where I was headed. You just answered that. Whenever they pass with the second reading, that's when our clock starts. Does our chairperson, which I think I'm correct in saying this, does he have the ability to form this committee prior to a hearing of ours in two weeks? I believe so, yes. And they can meet? I believe so, yes. But again, I would definitely want you to touch base with Commissioner Horn and the law department. We'll be glad to be of assistance. Just because I don't want you all to deal with some of the same questions that the council did. I think there's a way to do it. We just want to make sure we do it that way. I'm in agreement with Frank. I'm in agreement with Frank in fact that whenever it starts, 60 day time limit, we need to be moving on it. Can I have one minute actually? Because I wanted to, before we left, address some of the questions that I heard from Mr. Penn regarding the affordable housing fund, since I also represent that board as well. I can tell you the ordinance change that you're referring to with the 1% was actually not enacted until I think it was maybe two years ago. Previously it was $2 million each year and it has been spent every year. In fact, there's money that's in the account right now that already has a contingent approval for a project. We're just waiting for HUD to approve it before the money can be spent. There's not a bunch of money sitting around waiting for projects. It's constantly coming for that fund. I believe Mr. Davis, I'm not sure about bonding exactly. There's a $20 million loan portfolio in this program because most of it is done through some form of loan. Whether it be repayable, deferred, or in some cases forgivable loans. I hope that addresses what you were asking. It does not? Are you talking about taking the money that's in the budget and using that to do debt service on a bond so you could have more money? I don't know the answer to that. I don't know all of the ins and outs of affordable housing. It's a little different than the PDR program. That's a good question. You're fine. Go ahead. The goal of the fund is to leverage public funds with private money as much as possible so that we aren't the ones doing the projects and paying for it. We're trying to get as many units as we can for the dollar. I may have to think about your question a bit. We've just never done it that way with these funds. We've never used it to bond. The question is, can we find out whether we could? Yes, we'll have a conversation with law as well as the Commissioner. I'm sorry, one other question. With solar, am I correct in saying that language that the council is proposing could change up until the time that they make the vote and send it to us? Yes, it could. I don't know if it's going to. I will tell you, we were asked to prepare some motions that would have changed it when they reported it out on Tuesday. I'm assuming because there was some internal discussions amongst them that that language on either side did not get utilized, but yes, they could change it tonight if they have a second reading. Until they take a final vote at a second reading, they can change it. I think the major changes that you would see coming to you right now, if it stays as is, the biggest one being large-scale solar is now being permitted with a conditional use permit in the ag zones, which was prohibited previously. Also, they added a section, a larger section about decommissioning. I don't really know what to say about that. It's pretty standard. They added some definitions about prime soils and soils of statewide importance, but they just basically used the ag zones that we already had. And then they also added a section about community benefit agreements where they're encouraging anybody that wants to do those, but it's not required. So those are the major things that you would see right now, but yes, those could change until they take a final vote on this resolution to initiate. Would it be appropriate to disseminate that information to the commission or wait until they make their decision? For you to see it, you mean for you to see what they right now have on the table? Yeah. We can send it to you, we just need well, I mean we can send it to you. I had to draft it, so I can send it to you, but you just need to be aware it could maybe not look like that if they change something. But if you'd like to have it, or we can give it to your chair, who may want to, if he's going to address the work group, he would have it for that purpose. Okay. Good deal. Thank you. Okay. Thanks, Frank. If that's the sentiment of the Planning Commission, I'm happy to form a work group and I'll email you, Tracy, any communication I send to Commissioner Horn about how this starts. My guess would be because of the timeline, it would probably be a one or two meeting thing to get the findings that the commission potentially needs, or the information. So I'm happy to do that and I will copy you on anything I send. Okay. Yes. Go to Mr. Bailey on this one, I guess. I don't know if Tracy wants to weigh in or not. Just with the assumption that this comes to us first of May, well, we're in the first of May, within a week. Do we have time to have a public hearing? You have to have a public hearing. Yes, it is required and your notification period allows for that to occur. Okay. Good deal. Thanks. Just kind of following Mr. Owen's line of questioning, Mr. Bailey, if they do have second readings tonight, what's a reasonable expectation of the staff report completion? So I'm jumping into planning services a little bit here, but with the filing, the 60-day filing, we have a schedule that is set up. It would still go through your normal procedure of being advertised. We would send out all notification to neighborhood associations for a zoning ordinance text amendment. You would hear it at your next month's committee meetings, specifically the zoning committee, and then you would have it at the zoning public hearing associated with anything that is filed this upcoming Monday for a zoning case review. We typically do that within the 60-day period. It matches that period, so it would not be abnormal. Right. But we would get the staff... I guess my question is, when would we expect the staff report? That would be at your zoning committee meeting. Okay, which is roughly a month? Yes, the start of next month, so the beginning of June, if it was to this time scale. Okay. Can that be pushed considering the fact that we're waiting on a staff... I'm sorry, I've got to ask the question! I don't want to presume to answer for Ms. Wade's staff and the workload that they have. I believe that they would want to keep it within the same kind of scale that we currently do and the process that we currently do, so that you would get it at that meeting that still gives you the time to kind of review the staff report and recommendations leading into your public hearing at the end of that month. Okay. Okay. If we don't have any other questions or any other business, we are adjourned. Thank you very much. Thank you.