Thank you. Good afternoon. Today is July 9th, 2026. Today is July 9th, 2026, and this is the meeting of the Lexington-Fayette-Urban County Government's Planning Commission, subdivision, and zoning items. First item on the agenda today, and we're going to go just slightly out of order. We have performance bonds and letters of credit. There's a memo in our packet from Mr. Fairchild dated July 9th. The floor is open for discussion or a motion on the performance bonds and letters of credit. Mr. Penn? Mr. Chair, I move for release of bonds as presented by a statement on white paper. Thank you, Mr. Penn. Second from Mr. Wilson. Thank you. Any discussion? Seeing none, we will take that to a vote, please. Mr. Penn? Okay. That carries unanimously. Thank you. Next item on the agenda today is postponements and withdrawals. Afternoon. Scott Schutte on behalf of the applicant for PLN MJDP 26-30. That's on page 4, item A. We're requesting a one-month postponement. All right. Thank you. And is one month August 13th? Yes. Okay. All right. Yes, sir, Mr. Mickler. I've got a question on this one. According to some reports that we've seen in the paper on this one, this one's already constructed. Is there a reason we keep postponing? There's quite a few reasons. there's some discussions about the vegetated open space and whether or not there's going to be a design, some reduction or some change in the plan to accommodate that open space and then also some issues outside of the zoning that will be resolved before that August deadline. Okay, thank you. Okay. Do we have any other questions for the applicant or the floor is open for a motion? and this is a request for one month to august 13th okay mr chair i move for postponement of plnmjdp 2630 to august 13th as requested by the applicant second thank you commissioner worth second from commissioner pin any discussion seeing none we will take a vote on that motion Thank you. Thank you. Okay. Do we have any other postponements and withdrawals from today's agenda? Good afternoon. Yes. If you would turn to page three, item PLNMJDP 2430, Greendale Hills, Unit 3, Downing Property, Parcel 2 and 3, Oakdale Development amended. I received an email yesterday afternoon from a Mr. Duffy. I'm trying to talk. I received an email from Mr. Duffy yesterday, the applicant for the property, and he asked that this plan be withdrawn. Okay, Cheryl, thank you. And this is number 3A on page 3? Yes. Yes, okay. So that's just a request to withdraw entirely. Okay. Any questions on that front? If not, the floor is open for a motion. Mr. Davis. Per applicant, PLN, MJDP 240030. I'd like to have this withdrawn per applicant's request. Thank you, Commissioner Jonathan Davis. Second from Commissioner Barksdale. Any discussion? Seeing none, we will go ahead and take that to a vote. Okay, that carries unanimously. Do we have any other postponements or withdrawals? Okay, that I believe takes us to our next item, which is on page two, PLN FRP 2614 Glenmore Farm. Good afternoon. On page 2, item 1, PLN FRP 2614 Glenmore Farm Incorporated amended. This property is located at 615 and 625 Gentry Road. It's located, it's a piece of property that's owned AR for agricultural rule. And we're cutting off, this is approximately 20 acres. This plan was transferred by deed several times by October 17, 1998. It was done by deed. And so therefore now the applicant has come in and asked that we create a record plat for this property so that they're able to do some work on the property. The property does not meet the minimum requirements of the AR zone of 40 acres. But with this being done in 1998 prior to the moratorium, changing the AR zone from 10 acres to 40 acres, this plat was transferred at that time. So with that, requirements not met. We have denote per KRS 100.292, PLATS filed pursuant to this section may be filed by the latest transferee in the chain of title, including holders, deeds, which may otherwise void KRS 100.277. Denote steep slopes are present on the site. Any development of these areas will comply with Article 6-11. Denote that no building permits shall be issued until a health department has issued a septic tank permit. Denote development shall comply with Article 19 of the zoning ordinance. They have a little bit of a floodplain along the rear bottom portion here of the property. An addition of addresses on the plan phase, identifying and label sinkholes and springs on the property, depict and denote required floodplain information requiring regulatory flood elevation, depict vegetative buffer, label street names. We do not have any waivers, design considerations, or plan questions and concerns. But the subdivision committee recommended approval with the following sign-offs, engineering, traffic, addressing, urban forester, environmental quality, the utility and streetlight easements, and then number seven to correct all note deficiencies listed as requirements not met here on. So I will open it to the committee, see if there's any other comments or questions. Thank you, Cheryl. Do we have any questions for staff at this time? Mr. Penn? Cheryl, can I assume that there's no current house on this property? They have a home on the property. It's my understanding they wanted to get a building permit to do more for the house, and they weren't able to do that. They might be able to. They do have access to the house off the property. Right here. They're showing a structure here on the property. They have a building line that's not meeting the AR zone, But it's the way the AR zone reads is they can set the building line where the structure is or at 300 feet. So they have a structure on the property at this time down in this corner here. You can see it better here. All right. Thank you. All right. Do we have any other questions on this plat? Seeing none, thank you. Cheryl? All right. Is anyone present representing the applicant today? Yes, sir. Mr. Rowland. There you go. Mr. Chairman, members of the commission, I'm Gary Rowland with KM Surveying. We're in agreement with the conditions that the staff has recommended, and I'd be happy to answer any questions if you have any. Thank you, Mr. Rowland. Do we have any questions? Thank you. All right. Is there anyone from the public who would like to speak to this plan today? Seeing none, the floor is open for any commission or discussion and or a motion. Sure. Yes, sir. Mr. Forster. Mr. Chair, I move for the approval of PLN FRP 26-14 as presented by staff. And subject to the conditions? And subject to the conditions. Okay. And then second from Commissioner Wirth. Thank you. Do we have any discussion on that motion? If not, we could go ahead. Could I ask a question, Chair? Sure. Thank you. Is there a precedent for this happening when we have a 40-acre minimum on lots in Fayette County? There is because it was actually subdivided by deed before we changed that rule. So in that case, if they can demonstrate that, that's what they're trying to do here. And pursuant to the statute, they can do that. Thank you. Okay. If we have no further questions or discussion, we can go ahead and take a vote on that motion. That carries unanimously. Thank you. Next item on the agenda is preliminary subdivision plan. PLN MJSUB 26-4 Lane Allen Park. And Ms. Wade, if you would offer any context on this one. Thank you, Chair Davis. I would just, before Chris gets ready with his presentation, note that the applicant did not postpone, even though the subdivision committee recommended postponement. But we do not have a revised plan to review with you today because it was submitted after the two-day deadline. In essence, we have a 48-hour deadline on Tuesday at 1.30. The applicant did not submit their information by then, both on a cell or in paper copy. so we don't have a revised recommendation. I just wanted to make the commission aware of that before we get started. So to put the question to the commission, Mr. Penn. What did the subdivision committee recommend? They did postpone that. I'm sorry. So I guess the question is, Mr. Chairman, is it appropriate to postpone again? You do have time to postpone this item. They are not due for a decision. Basically, the commission has 90 days to consider these applications, so there is still one month before your 90-day period ends. So the question is, does the Planning Commission want to spend time hearing from staff, hearing from the applicant, but knowing that we don't have the complete? We think I know the applicant is here. I believe the applicant is here, but staff, Tracy, am I right that you've not had a chance to revise your report based on? They haven't submitted anything. Yeah, because they didn't submit it on time, the staff did not have the time to revise a report. Okay. Well, I mean, it's the prerogative of either the Planning Commission or I suppose the applicant can. I'm a little confused. Has the applicant presented the application, but it was late? Is that what you're saying? Yes. Okay. Based on that, then, it would be appropriate to postpone if a guest member, but of course, you as a staff, you can make that call, but I'd postpone. Based on the fact that the application has been filed, it just wasn't filed all the time. Let's take a moment to hear from the applicant. Thank you, Mr. Commissioner, or Mr. Chairman, members of the Commission. Thank you for the question. It was a timing issue. Last week at the subcommittee meeting, there was discussion, at least from our perspective, for the first time about moving the entrance to this proposed subdivision by 11 feet east to line it up with Lane Allen Road and to do some other improvements that might help in the future with the widening of Parker's Mill. I believe Matt Carter from Vision Engineering is here. He can address that. he was only able to meet with the person in planning he discusses with at like 11 o'clock on Tuesday. The revised plan was submitted as soon as he could make the modifications that he understood would garner agreement with the staff. So it's a timing issue in our perspective. We were going to ask for approval anyway, but given the discussions already occurred, we'd request that there's a postponement. It would be two weeks to July 23rd because from our perspective, it really is a timing issue. And the plan has been submitted that we think is exactly what the staff wanted in terms of that relocation of the entrance to the subdivision. Is that a request? We'll request at this time, given a discussion of a two-week postponement. Just one other comment. And as I recall, there was some discussion of a waterway that needed to be determined whether it was intermittent or ephemeral. Will you be prepared to address that in that two weeks? Yes, Ms. Carter is prepared to address that today. I think there's almost, we're very, very close on that. There's some tweaks that need to be made. We were going to ask that to be a condition anyway. Okay, Mr. Penn. Yeah, you ought to file for a clomer. How close are you on that? The CLOMER cannot be filed until this plan is approved. So we've got the CLOMER ready to go. It's just a pretty enormous expense to file one. And the state, they prefer it to be after a development plan is approved. And so we're ready to file it, though. Okay. Thank you. Okay. So we have a request from the applicant to postpone to July 23rd. Are there any other questions for the applicant at this time? Okay. Yes, sir, Mr. Wilson. If it's agreeable, I can make a motion then to postpone PLN MJSUB 26-4 Lane Island Park, Lots of 2 and 3 for two weeks. What's the date? I forgot. That's July 23rd. July 20th. Okay. Thank you, Mr. Wilson. Second from Commissioner Marley Davis. Thank you. Any discussion on that motion? Seeing none, we will go ahead and take a vote. All right. That carries unanimously. Thank you very much. Have a nice afternoon. Okay. So that, I believe. Mr. Chair, while you're collecting yourself for the next item, could we remind the Planning Commission to make sure that turn on the mics and pull them close to you since we do have a full house and sound is precarious in this room to begin with? Thank you. Certainly, Mr. Duncan. I believe our next item on the agenda would be page 4, PLN-MJDP, I'm sorry, no, that was postponed. Okay, then we are over on page 5, PLN-MJDP 2639, Lexmark International. Yes, we're on page 5, MJDP 2639, Lexmark International, Section 1, Lots 9 and 10. This property is located out off of Newtown Pike and Freight Boulevard. It's part of a, on this plan here you can see it's a slot up here 9 and 10. It's part of a larger industrial area that we've seen coming through the division. They are proposing a structure of 28,915 square feet with parking and circulation for trucks to come in in the rear. You see this dashed line here is a proposed detention, underground detention on the property. Also, we have Legacy Trail that runs parallel here to Newtown Pike coming up this area. We have showing a row of hedges in between the trail and the development on this property. The reason this plan has come to you all today is due to the Royal Springs Aquifer Wellhead Protection Committee's recommendation for no underground detention. The plan must be reviewed and approved by the Planning Commission per Article 21-4 of the zoning ordinance. This shows you here the aerial of the property undeveloped with the trail system and the hedge line and the property. So with that, the requirements not met, provide dumpster enclosure and concrete pad specifications, update lot 7 per MJDP 2491, complete outdoor lighting plan, provide VUA interior landscaping required, proposed and interior landscape tree canopy required and proposed for the lot 10, upload open space exhibit to Acela, depict all existing and proposed easements, depict tree protection areas to scale. At this time, there are no waivers. The design considerations that were mentioned were to see Acela comments for the Division of Engineering, move sidewalk off the curb to increase pedestrian comfort, and design does not preserve the greatest number of trees. There are several trees in the front area. They are working with our urban forester with removal of those trees. The planned questions and concerns discuss the width of the vehicle use screening, discuss underground detention in the Royal Springs of Wellhead Protection Area, update the right-of-way detention and freight boulevard and corresponding sidewalk. What is the plan for the relocation of the storm line? Discuss who will own and maintain the stormwater management. Address sanitary sewer capacity and access. Clarify notes 19 and 14. And tree removal justification is not explicit and proposed mitigation is not sufficient. So as I said, with that, the subdivision committee recommended approval with the following sign-offs, engineering, traffic, landscape, addressing, the urban forest, or department of environmental quality, bike and ped, open space, the division of fire, division of waste management, division of water quality, and the U.S. Postal Service. And the last one is to correct all note deficiencies listed as requirements not met hereon. And I'll ask if there's any other comments or questions. Thank you, Cheryl. Yes, sir. Mr. Mickler. Was this reviewed by the Royal Springs Aquifer? Yes, sir. And what was their report on this? I was going to allow the applicant to explain I was not in the meeting. Anyone else? Well, I looked in Excel. I don't see their report. Is that available to us anywhere? We do have a note under the title, due to Royal Springs Aquifer Wellhead Protection Committee recommendation for no underground detention, the plan must be reviewed. So their recommendation would have been, I'm assuming, in the negative. I believe there is a note on the face of the plan. I'm looking for, yeah, Greg, in the right-hand lower corner, which indicates what the recommendations were. And so because, again, as Chair Davis mentioned, because the committee generally recommends no underground detention, that then triggers this planning commission to evaluate that in more depth. and Greg from Banks Engineering explained pretty in-depth at the subdivision committee how he had met with the Division of Engineering and felt confident that the Planning Commission could approve this. Okay. Thank you for that context. Do we have any other questions for Cheryl before we get to the applicant? Just to make sure I understand correctly, if there is the Royal Springs Aquifer Well Head Protection Committee says no underground detention, yet this plan has underground detention shown on it. I believe PR means private underground detention. Commissioner Worth. Can I address that as somebody who heard the presentation? Sure. They routinely, the aquifer folks, routinely rule against that. So we ask engineering to explain what standards they used. And so I think it would be helpful if engineering gave you a quick overview of what they proposed because the underground detention has to meet certain standards to be approved. And we have approved that in other cases as long as it met those standards. Thank you, Judy. Okay. Do we have any other questions for Cheryl at this time? If not, thank you very much. and we can now hear from the applicant. Good afternoon. My name is Greg Smorstad with Banks Engineering. So we'll take care of the cleanup conditions that were mentioned in the staff report. We also have a few other items that are under plan, questions and concerns. I believe we address these in subdivision committee, but I'd be happy to answer any of those questions if you all would like me to. But I think the real reason that we're here is because of our proposal to use underground detention in the Royal Springs Aquifer recharge area. So we met with the committee, and they recommended, like it was stated earlier, that they do not recommend underground detention anywhere in the entire Royal Springs Aquifer area. Now, this is not specific to our site. It's just kind of a blanket. They don't ever recommend it. The same thing goes for gas stations. They don't ever recommend any gas stations. However, after we got that recommendation from them, we went and met with LFUCG Engineering. We explained to them the kind of detention system that we would be using, and they were in favor of it because of the ease of maintenance that's associated with the system, and they believed that the system we were proposing would meet the LFUCG Stormwater Manual. So we would just like to ask for your approval today, and I'd be happy to answer any other questions that you have. Thank you. All right, Commissioner Molly Davis. Thank you, Chair. I draw your attention to the design considerations, number three, where it says the design does not prevent the greatest number of trees preserved. And then under planning questions or concerns, number eight, the tree removal justification is not explicit and proposed mitigation is not sufficient. Correct. So that was the original comment we got during TRC. Since that meeting, I have met out on site with the urban forester. We discussed a couple of the trees that are out there, why they need to be removed from the site. And then we also talked about ways that we are planning to try and more heavily plant the area around the Legacy Trail to mitigate those significant trees that we have to remove. And so he was okay with kind of the plan we have going forward. So that is still on the staff report, but we have met about that. I'm sorry, that is still on the staff? What did you say? Right. That's still an item that's on the report, but we've met with the urban forester to address that. Okay. Thank you. Okay. Do we have any other questions for the applicant, Mr. Mickler? Yeah, and regarding the detention, I mean, one of the reasons why we get these recommendations from the Aquifer Committee is because unlike other parts in the county, this is Georgetown's drinking water. So this is a little bit of an awkward situation because you've gone to this committee that oversees Georgetown's drinking water. They say they don't want this, and then you come here in Lexington, talk to Lexington engineers and the Lexington Planning Commission, and say, well, it's in our design manual. Sure. I would assume that where we're talking about drinking water, that the standards would need to be higher than maybe a county-wide stormwater detention standards. Could you go into a little bit of detail for us today as to why you're confident that the water that we're putting in this can be put in basically a drinking water system? Yeah, so there's a couple things. first of all, the use on this property is proposed to just be a warehouse. So when we talked with engineering, they were comfortable with the fact that a warehouse use is typically low probability for any groundwater contamination, as opposed to something like a fueling station or somewhere where we were going to be storing heavy equipment out in the parking lot. So that was the first thing. And the second thing is we are proposing to have an underdrain system under the underground detention system. And what that means is any water that percolates into the ground through the underground detention system will basically be picked up in a perforated pipe that is beneath the system that takes it to the nearest storm drain. So in essence, what the engineer agreed with us on was that having an underground detention basin is not significantly different than having a surface basin in this location. And so that's why we're confident that we don't think that it will impact the aquifer. Thank you for the clarification. Mr. Penn. Just for the record, this is not the part that was bought for a data center. This is not the Lexmark property that was bought for a data center. No, yeah. Greg probably is like, no, that parcel is on the north side of New Circle. This is on the south side of New Circle at its Lexmark property where it fronts onto Newtown Pike with Freight Boulevard. I just want to be sure we were talking about the same. Different parcels. Thank you. Okay. Do we have any other questions for the applicant at this time? Seeing none, thank you very much. Is there anyone from the public who would like to comment on this application or this plan today? Seeing none, do we have any final commissioner comment, discussion, or the floor is open for a motion? Mr. Mickler? Well, I would appreciate hearing from our engineering staff on this one. Sure. Good afternoon. Vaughn Adkins, Division of Engineering. I wasn't involved in these specific conversations, but Greg explained it very well as to how this is similar to if there was a surface detention pond on the area. I was involved with one of the adjacent projects where there is storage of large vehicles and trucks and things, and we had to do specific drainage liners for those systems in that area, which they're not storing those types of equipment and things on site. So my co-worker, Josh Desarm, probably felt like the probability of this being an issue was as stated. If you have any questions, I can answer specifically. Thank you, Ms. Atkins. Do we have any questions for engineering? Mr. Mickler? Do you all have an estimated lifespan of those perforated pipes underneath? Like with any type of system, maintenance is critical. And as Greg stated, if this is very easy to inspect, then it's also going to be more easily maintained. So if there is an issue, you can see it, take care of it, and address it right away. And this system has that capability. Okay, thank you. Okay. If we have no other questions for engineering, thank you very much. Okay. Do we have any other commissioner comment? or the floor is open for a motion. Mr. Chair? Yes. I'd like to move, to make a motion rather, to approve PLN-MJDP-26-00039 Lexmark International Section 1, Lots 9 and 10, located at 985 Freight Boulevard, with the subject conditions, which are on page 5 and 6 of our agenda and number 13. Okay. We have a motion. Second from Commissioner Jonathan Davis. Thank you. Any discussion? Motion to approve. Okay. We will take that to a vote then. Mr. Forrester. Thank you. Okay, that carries unanimously. Thank you very much. Next item on our agenda is PLN MJDP 2648, 2914 Clays Mill Road. This is MJDP 2648, Samuel H. Brown, Track 8, Carnes Property. We just saw this not just within the last few months, but for a zone change. This property is located out off of Clay's Mill Road, north of New Circle Road, underpass here. We have Holland coming up here to T-Bone into Loretta that will connect to an existing neighborhood to the north and then to the south. It's right now, it's currently an undeveloped piece of land. And this gives you a little closer. The proposal is 48 townhome lots with an HOA open area here with a sidewalk for a trail going around for the residents of the neighborhood. So this is to show the layout. It's a final development plan for the townhomes and then a preliminary subdivision plan for them to be able to build the streets and do the improvements to the property. The requirements not met, traffic common features to be added in accordance with the land subdivision regulations, provided justification for removal of proposed mitigation of significant tree loss, upload open space exhibit to identify common areas, addition of new site statistics box, correct label of ESA limits to reference note number 16. The ESA, there was a lot of discussion that there was possible sinkholes in the area of this development, and so that ESA line is this area here that they have marked on the plan, And there's a note on the plan that talks that if during any type of construction on the property, any type of land disturbance, that they are supposed to stop and work with the Division of Engineering for geotech information on this property. There's no waivers at the time. Design considerations. Sanitary sewer easements will be needed parallel to Clay's Mill Road. Sewer capacity in this area is low at this time. and the design does not protect the greatest number of trees. Planned questions and concerns. Will there be on-street parking? If so, 20 feet of clear road will be maintained. There was a lot of discussion about this. The townhomes are together showing a shared driveway, so the apron for the driveway for two townhomes and then you have two more townhomes adjacent. It does not leave a lot of parking, so the parking will not be along the main drive, but they'll be able to have a little bit of on-street parking along right at this area and then down here at this location. So that'll be their location for that. The subdivision committee recommended approval with the following conditions, engineering, traffic, landscape, addressing, urban forester, environmental quality, Open Space, Division of Fire and Water, Division of Waste Management, documentation from the Division of Water Quality for the Capacity Program, U.S. Postal Service, and then note 12, correct all note deficiencies listed as requirements not met here on. I will open it to you all to see if there's any other comments or questions. Thank you, Cheryl. Commissioner Mickler. Well, this is, if I remember correctly, there was discussion since there's no on-street parking that the applicant was requested to reduce the width of the Holland Drive. Am I remembering that correctly by traffic? This appears to be. They've done it to meet the minimum to allow for passing on the width of the street. That is the minimum? Yes, they make the minimum. Okay. With traffic engineering. Mr. Molly Davis. Thank you, Chair. I apologize, Cheryl. I could not understand you when you said if something happens, construction has to stop immediately. If they are doing work on the ground and they should possibly find some type of what looks like a sinkhole, I'm not, they're out there doing any type of grading work and they come across something that could be similar to a sinkhole. I've not done anything like to look for sinkholes. Then they are to stop and work with the Division of Engineering with geotech studies to be able to move forwards for any construction in that area. And is that a typical note or is there something about this property that has been noted before? There was just some discussion that there was possibility of some sinkholes in this area. There was no sinkholes at this time. I don't believe they found any sinkholes, but there could be a possibility from the mapping from the state that it was brought to our attention that there's a possibility that there could be some sinkholes. And so that's why we're trying to cover it and make sure that it's labeled here, that this area here, if there should be any problems, then they must need to work with the Division of Engineering and have geotech studies done for them to be able to move forwards. Okay. Thank you for that clarification. In subdivision committee, we also talked about the comment that sewer capacity in this area is very low at this time. Could you explain how that gets handled in this process? I would be happy to explain that. So since the county was under the EPA consent decree, we have developed a capacity assurance program, which involves the division of water quality, analyzing the capacity of all of our sewer lines, storm sewer, sanitary sewer lines, to ensure as the planning commission and developers propose new development, there is enough sanitary sewer capacity to accommodate those new projects. When the Planning Commission approves a new project, the applicant then goes and applies for that capacity that they need in the existing system. They pay a fee for that, and that capacity is held for them until their project commences, and then no one else can then access that same capacity. When we started, we had 52 banks, sanitary sewer banks, and we've now consolidated those as improvements have been made to the system. And each bank has a, I guess, just a list of projects that have occurred since the bank first was created to ensure that additional capacity is being added through different projects. Once it gets low, that means we have less capacity to offer to development. And if a project wants to come in after the capacity is gone, they have to make the improvements to the system or wait for the improvements to be made by the city. Okay. Do we have any other questions for staff at this time? Again, and maybe this is better left to the applicant. Again, it says provide justification for all the tree removal and the design doesn't protect the greatest number of trees. I'll let the applicant explain the trees. This was a discussion at the time of the zone change also, so I'll allow him to go further. Okay, I'll postpone that, pause that. All righty. Thank you, Cheryl. We will now hear from the applicant, Mr. Carter. Good afternoon. Matt Carter, Vision Engineering. First, to start off, we're in agreement with the conditions. presented by the staff. I'd like to kind of address some of y'all's comments y'all were talking about. One on the sewer capacity. And if you're not familiar with it, the developer, he kind of buys the rights to reserve capacity for his project. So even if other places develop sooner, if he's got it reserved, it's locked in. So we have to go through that process and reserve sewer capacity. It's not typically done until the plan's approved because you don't want to reserve something that didn't get approved. but let's say they do go apply for their capacity and there's some but not enough for it then it'll be up to the developer to you know he'll have to decide how many units can I build on the capacity that's currently available and he can't build more than the capacity they give at the time. So it's a process he has to go through and this will just be handled as soon as the plan is approved. So hopefully that helps with that. As far as the environmental sensitive area, we had a geotechnical investigation done on the site to determine if it was a sinkhole. Based on what was found, it's not a sinkhole. It's a depression. The report stated that based on old historical mapping of the area that actually predated Clay's Mill Road right there, that was kind of a swale area and so we can only speculate why it's a depression now but we think there was some material borrowed and it was placed where Clay's Mill Road is and the berm from Clay's Mill Road created a closed contour. Kentucky Geological Survey when they map and they see a closed contour they flag it And that's what we think happened here. But the investigation, we drilled, we cored rocks. We looked at the soil types that are there, and none of those showed anything that would lead you to believe it's a sinkhole. We do have notes, and these are standard notes. They're not just special for this project. There are notes that go on plats when there's a sinkhole in an area. And it basically says that if something is encountered while they're building these homes and it's a possible sinkhole, you have to do more study on it. And if it is, you've got to do some kind of mitigation to fix the problem. Worst case, you'd have to eliminate a unit or whatever's in the way, but you really don't know that until you start digging, and we can't dig up the entire site to determine if there's a sinkhole there. So we're handling it with the notes. Any questions on that? Okay. Oh, go ahead. Please educate me on one simple factor. What's the difference between a sinkhole and a depression? A depression, well, let's back up. A sinkhole is where the rock, the underlying rock, is limestone. And just basically the rain is like acid rain to limestone. And as it kind of percolates through the soil and it might get in a crack in the rock, and over time it dissolves the rock. and deep down under the bedrock there might be a cave system and if there is, that erosion eventually gets big enough where the soil above it collapses. And in that case, you would see, basically it looks like a cone. I mean, I know you've seen sinkholes. And they're characterized, they have a throat where water goes in. And over time, they don't get better, they get worse. So it just keeps growing and growing. So the other thing is just a depression. That could be just a closed contour. Who knows how it was formed? It could go all the way back to when glaciers were here and as they were pushing through, they dug up areas, and what was left over had depressions on it. But there's no way to know for sure. In this case, we feel pretty confident that it was man-made when they built the road. So that kind of helps. As for the trees, so I don't think Eric's here. I talked to him earlier today, the urban forester, and he said he was not going to make it today. But I wanted a level of comfort with him that what we're proposing he was okay with. And he said, I am comfortable with just, before I do my sign-off, walking the site with him. He's done it once for the zone change, but he wants to revisit it, and I'll walk with him as part of the sign-off. And what he said was some of the trees, he just wants better, I guess, documentation on why we feel that tree should be removed. And a lot of the trees that he's talking about are in the proposed right-of-way or within the limits of where we would build it. so they would have to be removed. In this case, just given the shape of the lot, it's deep and real narrow, and we have existing road coming in, so we're kind of stuck on where we can put the road. So anyway, I hope that answers some of the questions on why we're removing the trees. Some of them are just falling within the limits of the building, and there's just no way to avoid it. We are saving quite a few trees and definitely keeping a good perimeter on the south side. On the north side, there's just not many trees there. There's a lot of growth, but it's honeysuckle and things like that. But the trees that are on the north, between the neighborhood to the north, we're saving those, with the exception of where the road comes in. But I will say we're doing our best to save the trees. With that, I'll be glad to answer any other questions. Thank you, Mr. Carter. Do we have any other questions for the applicant? Ms. Worth? I may have this confused with another plan, but am I recalling that there was a provision for one side only parking on this side and some barriers and some things like that? Yeah. Is there a pointer up here? Oh, right here. So where the townhomes are, there's just no room to park in between the driveways. Each townhome has a garage and a pretty decent sized driveway. The driveways are roughly like 25 to 30 feet deep. So two cars can fit on each lot. But like I said, we're on all this area here, all this area here, and then from here to here. We're just, there's just no way to park there. Now, where we do have this open space here and then here and here, parking will be allowed. When we talked to the fire department, their concern was they wanted 20 feet of clear room on the road. before you're allowed to park. And so we set our road width to 27 feet wide. Now, you did bring up, I think you brought up, that wasn't the road going to be narrowed. And I think originally it started out at 31 feet maybe. and then we did narrow it to 27 and that was as narrow as the fire department was comfortable with and I think they're here. They can talk to that if they want to address it in more detail. But in any case, there is the three areas I pointed out you can park. Okay. Do we have any other questions for Mr. Carter at this time? Seeing none, thank you very much. Thank you. Is there anyone from the public who would like to comment on this particular plan today? Seeing none, any further commissioner discussion or the floor is open for motion. Yes, I'll make a comment, Chair. Sure. It seems like in many cases we make space for fitting the most properties or sites into a plan to maximize profit and to also allow the most houses to be built. And there are other ways you can design things so that you don't have to obliterate the tree canopy. It's just my personal feelings. Okay. Floor is open for a motion. Mr. Forster. Mr. Chair, do we have 12 conditions on this? I believe so, yes. Okay. I'll give it a shot. I'd like to motion for approval of PLN MJDP 26-48 based on the staff's 12 conditions. Thank you, Mr. Forster. Second from Mr. Wilson, thank you. Any discussion on that motion? If not, we can take a vote. Okay, that carries unanimously. Thank you. Next item on our agenda today is a waiver report from Mr. Young, PLN WAV 2617. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Jeremy Young for Planning Staff. The first item is PLN WAV 2617, and it is for Masterson Station Center, also in a citation village. And the waiver request is for land subdivision regulation, Exhibit 6-3, which is cross-section of the road. and the area where this is requested. I know it is a little bit difficult to see on this plan, but is the roadway here along Ferndale Pass between Citation Boulevard and Robinson Way here. So the request is to construct an alternate roadway cross section. The original plan showed at the top here a 20-foot roadway with a 5.5-foot grass strip, and then four feet of the proposed multi-use trail would be in the right-of-way, and then four feet here, and as you can see, the multi-use trail easement. And the proposed alternate right-of-way is now a 20-foot roadway, and the trail would be 9.5 feet, and it would be directly adjacent to the roadway. So just to give you an overview of where this location is, this is the Greenway plan here. This area is right along here, this large, the red line here, that's Citation. So this would provide sort of a link in the chain, I guess you could say, to the trail network that's supposed to connect to Masters and Station. and you can see a little bit better here during the initial planning phase that greenway was originally drawn you can see here on the other side of robinson way it was originally intended to connect and then follow the the creek here and then ultimately connect to citation when this area that's now zoned for residential was initially B1, the applicant came in and said, well, they would rather have the trail, instead of going behind the townhomes, they wanted it to go along the front. So that's when the eight-foot trail plan was approved. And the reason for the request is, as you can see, So what you have here is there's a four-foot sidewalk existing, and the trail was supposed to be another four feet in this area here. But as you can see down the sidewalk there, there are numerous electrical boxes that have been put in the trail easement. So the applicant's solution was to shift that trail from that area on this side of the sidewalk over to this strip here, the grass strip between the existing sidewalk and the roadway. And as you can see in this picture and then subsequent pictures, there are a few concerns. There are existing fire hydrants as well as water utilities that are currently located in that grass strip that would have to be either relocated or accommodated for in some other way. And there are 14 water meters as well in that area. Some of them are quite a bit below grade, so those would have to be raised up to provide a smooth transition for the trail. And additionally, staff has concerns about the way the interaction between the trail and this curb cut for the entrance of the subdivision or the townhomes, how that transition is going to be smooth and meet ADA requirements that limit the cross slope to 2%, as well as there are concerns about maybe some of the different materials and different angles might create some vertical separation and tripping hazards as well. And ultimately, after meetings with engineering and bike ped coordinator, as well as traffic engineering, ultimately staff is recommending approval. We feel the waiver will not negatively impact health, safety, and welfare. And relocating the electrical boxes and the utilities would be a significant hardship on the applicant. But we do feel that there are some conditions that are required in order to ensure that the trail operates and functions as intended by the ordinance. So the conditions of approval would be the bike and pedestrian planner's approval, engineering's approval of the revised construction plans, including some mechanism to ensure the trail surface is minimally impacted by the existing utilities and fire hydrants. The applicant must obtain a land disturbance permit to construct the trail, and applicant must record updated plat to show the amended cross section and include a note referencing the waiver. and if you have any questions I can answer those at this time. Thank you Mr. Young. Do we have any questions on this particular waiver? No? Thank you very much. Mr. Chairman, Members of the Planning Commission, Rory Kaley with EA Partners. I agree with staff's presentation. request approval, and I might want to add, as we work with engineering and pedestrian planner to feather in these slopes and stuff, we might want to add the word meander in there somewhere as we come close to the fire hydrants. I think they were talking about us pulling the sidewalk away from them a bit. We've got a final record plat that is pending this waiver already, so the cross section can be shown on there once we're done and built. I just wanted to make sure that And since we have to work with both those divisions, we have a little bit of leeway over the exact section that is shown here. Okay. Thank you, Mr. Cayley. Do we have any questions for the applicant at this time? Okay. Thank you very much. Just a technical question for me. If the Planning Commission chooses to honor that request within the waiver, is it best practice to make that part of the motion? Yes, that would be helpful. My question would be how much deviation from the 9.5 foot width are you anticipating? I mean, is it going to go down to 4 feet at one point? No, no. We'll be trying to maintain that minimum 8 foot width that we had. The question will be how much clearance they want us to put at the fire hydrant, and then as that moves, what obstacles we would run into where those utility boxes are already positioned. So we don't want to go below that minimum, but we know we've got to add some clearance for the hydrants. We haven't planned for it yet. Okay. So could that be a motion? If the Planning Commission chooses to grant the waiver, could that be included in the motion and the understanding that the applicant will work with the appropriate LFUCG engineers to meet standards. Okay. Okay, Mr. Chair. Yes, sir. Is there anyone from the public who would like to speak on this particular waiver today? Seeing none. Yes, sir, Mr. Forrester. I just want to make sure I understood you correctly. that you wanted to add the applicant will work with LFUCG engineers on the sidewalk. To stay within the standards, is that satisfactory for you, Mr. Kahn? I think so, yeah. Okay. All right. Okay. That was my question. Thank you. Just to clarify, the trail would never be less wide than eight feet. I hope not. Okay. Tracy, are you suggesting that we add language that says ensuring that the trail will never be less than 8 feet? Yes. Okay. All right. Thank you, Ms. Worth. With all that, the floor is open for a motion. You got it. Ms. Worth. Do you want a motion? I'll make a motion. Okay. All righty. Oh, do you have something? Oh, sorry. You want to make a motion? You have it written out? Okay, all right. I'd like to make a motion for approval of the requested waiver for PLN-WAV-26-00017 Masterson Station Center Citation Village, a requested waiver for the street cross-section in association with PLN-FRP-26-13 for property at 129 Ferndale Pass with the following conditions. That the trail number vary, be less than eight feet minimum, and that the applicant work with LF's UCG staff, including the bike pad planner and in traffic engineering to allow the trail to meander at some places where there needs to be some variation or deviation from a straight line. Okay. And. Oh, and the other, sorry. And we've got some. Excuse me, I'd like to add the other conditions that are part of the, I guess the staff, sorry, the findings for the petition of the waiver, particularly the conditions of approval on page three of the report. There are A, B, C, D, four conditions of approval. Okay. Thank you. And we have a second from Mr. Forrester. Is there any discussion? Thank you. Yeah. We have it on tape. Okay. If there's no further discussion, we'll go ahead and put that to a vote. Motion to approve the requested waiver. Okay. Thank you, applicant. Thank you. Next waiver request today is PLNWAV2618, the Church of the Good Shepherd. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Jeremy Young again for planning staff. This is PLN WAV 2618 Church of the Good Shepherd. They're requesting a waiver of zoning ordinance, Article 26 for tree canopy requirements. The address of the property is 533 East Main Street. They are intending to construct an addition on the existing church, and that's requiring the removal of some trees and the planning of some additional trees to mitigate that. The property is zoned R2, and the zoning ordinance requires any residentially zoned property to have a 30% tree canopy. Currently, as it exists today, I think it has around 25%, but any time there are any improvements, then they're required to bring the site up to current standards. So that's what triggered the 30% requirement. And it's a little bit light on this plan, but so this is the existing main church structure. There are a couple of fairly large additions on the rear. The area in question is this portion here that I'm outlining with the pointer. They're wanting to construct that addition on the property. and this will give you a little better idea of what is there. And they're wanting to construct in this area. And as you can see, there are a row of fairly large trees in that area, and some of those will have to be removed to facilitate this construction. So the tree mitigation plan has shown additional plantings, generally along Belcourt here in this area and some in the front lawn, but they can't quite meet the 30% requirements. So they are requesting a waiver of that standard. And Section 25F waiver standards, it's slightly different than the subdivision standards. It requires that one or more of the following have to be met, that full application of the standards would constitute a unique hardship on the property by not allowing reasonable use of the property. Restriction of some use of the property in order to preserve the trees shall not be deemed as an undue hardship on the property. Number two is the full application of the standards would constitute a safety hazard or other danger to the public welfare. And number three is the full application of the standards would preclude necessary public facilities that no other reasonable alternative exists. So it has to meet at least one of those criteria. And during the review process, the applicant met with the urban forester. There is a fairly prominent white oak tree in this area here. And it was originally on the tree protection plan showing as being removed. And during discussions with the urban forester, the applicant has agreed to preserve that tree. And they've also agreed that they would be willing to plant some additional trees off-site to mitigate the deficiency in the 30% requirement. So with that, the staff recommends approval of the waiver. It does not adversely impact public health, safety, or welfare. It is the minimum needed to reasonably accommodate the parish hall addition. strict application of the 30% requirement would impose an unnecessary hardship. And the conditions would be the applicant must submit a revised development plan that complies with all of the requirements of Article 26. The applicant must submit a revised tree protection plan that reflects the preservation of the white oak. And then final coordination with the urban forester on the off-site plantings. And if you have any questions, I can answer those at this time. Commissioner Wirth. Just out of curiosity, I don't remember seeing the off-site mitigation before. Have we done that before? Yes. Mr. Young and I discussed this. There was a zone change behind Tates Creek Library several years ago that removed quite a few trees at that point, and they agreed to mitigation as well, and the commission approved it because they had a specific tree canopy waiver request to go below the standard. I'm just curious about where the off-site mitigation would occur. In that case, it occurred at a nearby park. Okay. In this case, I think the urban forester would work with the applicant to find a... Figure out a place. Usually it would be on public property since we would have control over trees being planted there. But I'm sure if there was another private property where you could ensure the tree would be taken care of, the urban forester would probably be open to that too. Okay. That would be my question. Who takes care of the tree after they generously plant it somewhere else? Well, they would continue to have a one-year warranty on trees planted, so probably parks would need to be part of that conversation to ensure that they are ready to take on the maintenance of a young tree. And where do we find what kind of trees they are? There are some citizen comments in our package. Do we know what kind of trees that they are taking down? As far as removal, I don't have the tree protection plan in front of me. I'd have to refer to that. The landscape architect that attended the subdivision committee did give us some information about the types of trees. I want to say hackberry. Is that not? Was there a few hack berries on the property line? Or what were the trees that are going to be? Black locusts. Black locusts. Okay. And Jeremy, could you do one thing for me? Could you go back to the development plan and again point out the outline of where the addition is? I think it looks bigger on here. Yeah, it is a little bit faint. So the existing structure is this outline there. and then this line right here and sort of that rectangular shape is what's proposed to be an addition. Thank you. Okay. Do we have any other questions for Jeremy? Seeing none, thank you very much. At this time, we'll hear from the applicant. Good afternoon. Katie Beard with Prime AE. I'm the civil engineer. Good afternoon. My name is Kevin Kinney, landscape architect with Lord X Sargent Planning and Design. And I think staff presented it very well. We are in agreement with their report as well as willing to work with the urban forester to determine where that mitigation would occur. Like they said, we were at 28% canopy, just short of the 30% canopy requirement. requirement. So a minimal waiver and I'll let you kind of go into more of the trees that are being removed and replanting. Thank you, Katie. To go a little bit more into detail, as mentioned, the site is currently at 25% tree canopy coverage. We will be increasing that to 28%. I think we feel that we've done the most we can to maximize the tree canopy. Our main concern is obscuring the facade of the historic church and key views. To talk a little bit more about the existing trees that will be removed, there are five black locust trees along the property line on the north side of the page. And then one smaller birch tree closer to the north side of the existing church. generally the black locusts are in moderate to poor condition i would say and as a species are generally not very desired thank you do do we have any questions this time no all right thank you very much is there anyone from the public who would like to speak on this waiver request seeing none the floor is open for commissioner comment or a motion be assured mr wilson okay uh mr chair i move for approval of cln wav waiver of course 26-18 good shepherd church and do so with the three reasons provided by staff along with the three recommendations for the additional requirements for the waiver to go into effect thank you mr mr wilson second commissioner worth is there any uh discussion to that motion if not we will take a vote see how many vote okay commissioner molly davis got trouble you're free thank you all right that carries unanimously thank you applicant mr young There we go. Our final waiver for the day is PLN WAV 2619. It is for Turner Property Meadowthorpe Community Business Center. The request is for a waiver of Subdivision Regulation 4-7 that requires substantial completion of public improvements prior to final subdivision plan. And the area in question is for 125 Turner Commons Way. and this is Turner Commons Way. This is the roadway in question, and the request is to allow them to subdivide property prior to realigning this intersection with Clyde Drive, which is on the other side of Main Street, which is right here. So currently they're offset, and it's creating a less than ideal situation as traffic increases to that entertainment complex, which is located in this area. And it's under development. There are some areas that are completed, so traffic continues to increase in that area as people do visit that site. So let me give you a little bit better idea of what we're looking at here. So this is the current condition of the property, And you can see the area where it's misaligned. And the proposal is to bring this over in line with, I called it Clyde Drive. I guess it's Clyde Street. But so the reasoning for this is the applicant is requesting to subdivide the property for financing reasons prior to making these improvements. and staff is in support of this request. It would not adversely affect public health, welfare or safety because the improvements are scheduled to be completed just at a later date. Although staff would like to kind of get a general timeline of when those will be done. And granting the waiver is consistent with Article 1-5A, A, of exceptional hardship, but we do have a couple of conditions. And one is update the plaque to reflect the cross-section depicted on the certified final development plan. And the applicant shall post bond for any improvements that aren't completed at the time of final subdivision. All right. Thank you, Mr. Young. Do we have any questions on this waiver for the applicant? I'm sorry, for Mr. Young. Seeing none. Thank you, Jeremy. Mr. Billing. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and ladies and gentlemen of the Planning Commission. My name is Nathan Billings with Billings Law Firm, and it's my pleasure to continue to represent Turner Property 4, which is the developer of the old Vaughn Tobacco Warehouse property. We've come before you on a number of times, including a Zoda to create a new zone for this, several development plans. Currently, we're in the process of trying to create a subdivision plat in order to create parcels for various buildings and a private roadway. And we're also in the process, we'll come back to you probably in two or three months with two more parcels of land, actually, sorry, three more parcels of land added to the PUD3. Our goal for this, this is the last step we need to get the final record plat approved, which is the waiver. We anticipate that these improvements, which are largely on a private street, but they do intersect with the public main street, will be made within the next two years, specifically as the next three parcels come in. Can you put up the aerial view? Can you go back to the aerial view? Okay, let's see here. So you'll actually see, I always get confused when I look at here. So there are here, this is the Turner Commons Way intersection now, And a development plan is already approved to realign it, so it's right across from Clyde Street. But there's an entrance to the Stuttgart, I guess, old garage here. There's an entrance to the Stantec storage yard here. There's an entrance to the Stantec garage here. And there's an entrance down here to basically an unused house. There's five entrances along Main Street there. And when we come back to you all in the future with the next zone change and adding three more parcels in, and we're trying to figure out what these roadways look like, and we have to work with Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. The applicant continues to talk with Kentucky Transportation Cabinet with the preference of having a light installed at this location, and the improvements are really dependent upon what Kentucky Transportation Cabinet allows us to do, which is, of course, dependent upon how many entrances we have there. Our goal is to limit that to two, not to five. So that's the sort of long-winded answer to the question of when these improvements will be made. We're in total agreement with the staff report with respect to updating the final record plat to crosshatch the improvements as well as to post a bond for the improvements which of course the subdivision regulations require. Other than that, this is I hope a fairly easy task for what is a small piece of a much bigger puzzle going on. I'm happy to answer any questions you may have today. Thank you. Do we have any questions for Mr. Billings at this time? Yes, Mr. Mickler. Just to clarify, you said you're still working out the details of the plan with the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet? Yes, sir. Would that not create a potential problem if those plans were, like, moved where the roadways were or after we created a subdivision plat? Well, I don't think it's going to create a problem. The Kentucky Transportation Cabinet has given, I guess, verbal approvals the right way with the engineering firm from our development plan where we realigned the road. What has not been finalized is when we bring on 1305 or when we file 1305 to bring it into the PUD 3, 1307 and 1309, along with a new major development plan, we're trying to realign all of these entrances and trying to get a light here. They have not approved a light at this location. that light would actually require us to redesign that entrance from what we have today because of crosswalks and lighting features, poles, stuff like that, things that I don't know that I understand all of them. So with respect to what's currently been approved in the development plan, that alignment has been signed off on. We don't have an encroachment permit yet because we haven't filed the actual construction plans, but the location of it has been approved by UOL and KYTC. What has not been approved is all of the improvements that will go along this path here and whether a light would be allowed at this location. And it doesn't seem to make sense to try to install improvements at this intersection today until that sort of full, probably about 400 feet development plays out. And just so that I make sure I understand this correctly. And then the area you want to subdivide, is that east corner there? So that's an excellent question. So the subdivision plat takes the existing commons property, which is our – so let me sit back. The subdivision plat does not require planning commission approval. It is recommended for approval by the Technical Review Committee and pursuant to House Bill 443, it goes through a ministerial approval process, except to the extent there are waivers, and the waiver is regarding the infrastructure plan. There are a number of parcels. For example, this is the new rail building right here, which is the rail event venue site. You can see it under construction in this picture. This is a green space open space parcel. This is the station building. each of those would have their own lot, so to speak. But the roadways are private roadways that you all have given a prior waiver to. They're not easements. So the roadways themselves are their own lot as well. So there's sort of a number of lots that go through the process. I think there's, I may have this wrong, I didn't look at it before I came in, I think there's maybe eight or nine lots throughout the property. Some of the lots that exist today were consolidated in order to subdivide them out. The goal of it is we're able to start having individual buildings stand on their own with respect to financing arrangements instead of having one loan with one lender across the whole site. It's a much easier structure to begin to parcel these out individually. it was approved by staff the staff level of approval but this is the RD1 building there's the water tower this building right here it was announced but I don't think you all have seen it yet the OBC restaurant has now been approved there's an amended development plan for that site I think it got signed off and certified in early June so these are all these little pieces that are going on it's sort of a complex site Okay, do we have any other questions for Mr. Billings? If not, thank you, Nathan. Okay, is there anyone from the public who would like to speak to this waiver request today? Seeing none, is there any final commissioner comment or the floor is open for a motion on the waiver request? Mr. Chair? Yes, sir, Mr. Owens. I'll move for approval of the waiver for plan PLN WAV 26-19 Turner Properties and Metal Corp Community Business Center for the reasons provided by staff. Thank you. okay all right and the conditions with with the two conditions okay thank you commissioner owens and that was seconded by commissioner jonathan davis is there any discussion to that motion seeing none we will take that to a vote Okay, that carries unanimously. Thank you, everyone. Now, moving into zoning items. Our first item on that agenda today is PLN ZODA 26-4 Amendment to Solar Energy Systems. I've had a request for a break before we begin that very possibly lengthy discussion. Is the Planning Commission inclined to take a 10-minute break? Okay. Sure. Thank you. We will take a 10-minute break, so we're going to recess. 10 minutes have elapsed, and so we will re-adjourn our hearing. And when Ms. Wade is ready, we will begin her report. Good afternoon, Chair Davis, members of the Commission. Our next item is found on page 8 of the agenda at the top, and it is PLNZOTA, so ZODA, Zone Ordinance Text Amendment, 26.4. And this is an amendment to Article 31, which is our solar energy systems article. Article 31 was only recently adopted, so this is a topic that the Planning Commission has been investigating and reviewing for the past two years now, along with the Urban County Council. The Urban County Council in May of this year initiated this text amendment, which means that it comes to the Planning Commission for 60-day review. And then the Planning Commission makes a recommendation back to the Urban County Council about any amendment to the zoning ordinance related to this topic. And then the council doesn't really have a timeline because it's a legislative action. They can put in committee or review it in a public hearing context, and then they can elect or not elect to adopt legislation. The text amendment that is before you today began really two years ago in 2024 when we had a citizen-initiated ZODA. That applicant was seeking a pathway in order to allow merchant scale or large scale solar energy systems within our agricultural rural zones. And within that text amendment, they proposed a larger framework that really addressed solar for the entire county in all of the zones. And set up some rules for decommissioning as well as definitions related to the regulation of solar energy systems in the county. When they did that, they identified really three main types of solar energy systems. The ones that are mounted to your roof, ones that are integrated into a building, and then the third type are the ones that are ground-mounted. So ground-mounted can be of various heights and sizes, and then our ordinance further defines those into three categories. small scale, which means that the solar panels would occupy up to 2,500 square feet on a lot, intermediate scale, which is between 2,500 square feet and five acres, and then large scale, which is above the five-acre mark. As discussions related to the text amendment progressed, the planning staff actually recommended that the framework move forward, but not to address the agricultural zones at that time, and the Planning Commission did recommend that onto the council. So that text amendment that we heard two years ago did not address the agricultural zones. When the council received that text from the Planning Commission, they elected to make some changes. They created a pathway for small and integrated ground-mounted solar energy systems in the ag zones. They also shifted small scale, again, that's less than 2,500 square feet panels, like in your backyard, from an accessory use to a conditional use for our residential zones. And then they also created additional site considerations for conditional uses and included text regarding community benefit plans. And that text was adopted in September of 2025. At the end of that process, it was clear that there still needed to be more investigation into the agricultural areas of our county and whether they would be suitable for large-scale solar energy systems. So the council created a work group to inform the general government and planning committee. that work group was comprised of Council Member Sheehan, Council Member Civigni, Council Member Morton, and Council Member Boone, and then also supported by the Division of Planning. So myself, as well as Mr. Crumb, attended all of those 11 meetings held by that group. During that group, we heard testimony from several experts and stakeholders about really the topic of large-scale solar and how it might impact our agricultural zones and our land. that generated recommendations related to creating a brownfield exemption for solar, addressing stormwater and other utilities on the land, clarifying what the community benefit agreement would encompass, and then creating a pathway for the large-scale solar in the ag zones as a conditional use. Those recommendations were then incorporated into a text and initiated by the council in May. Once the council initiated the text amendment, that text, I think I mentioned earlier, comes to the Planning Commission, and the Planning Commission only has 60 days to review that text. So in order to facilitate some stakeholder input early on, Chair Davis created a Planning Commission solar committee, which included four of the Planning Commission members as well as three council members. and that committee met twice in May and June and heard information or testimony from our several stakeholders and groups listed on the screen here. I won't go through all of those, but many of the people here in the audience today. The Planning Commission Solar Committee heard information about soil quality and protection, our economy and tourism, brownfields and what that looks like, transmission and siting information, as well as decommissioning and then presentation information from Solarize Lexington. Part of the information that was presented to the planning commission or the small group work group involves some mapping information, which the planning commission has on the Granicus system, so you can zoom in as you need to. The map on the right is the existing solar projects and brownfields, but it also incorporates the existing transmission lines that run through the county in yellow and blue on the map, and then includes the prime and agricultural soils for the county. I'm going to look at my map because it's a little bit closer, as well as PDR farm easements that are both enacted and under contract. And I believe that's it. So the zoomed-in photo, our map here on the right, is the same information, but it is a closer look at the eastern side of the county. The roadway that goes through the middle, well, sorry, lower is Winchester Road. And then Haley Road going north-south. And so the items shown on this map are just indicative of where solar projects have been incorporated into the county already. The yellow is the Eastern Kentucky Power Cooperative Project with an electric transmission line that runs right through the middle there in orange. That also includes the LFUCG Haley Pike property, which is a dark blue and then has some hatching over it in the northeast section here. And then a third area of a thoroughbred landfill, just for reference here in the lighter blue, and some other negotiated usable land for capacity for the landfill just to the south of that in purple. In addition, the Planning Commission Solar Committee heard information about brownfields and the exemption that is proposed for brownfields. So there is a list within the Race to Net Zero Plan that identifies all of these brownfield sites within the county. Most of those sites are within our urban service boundary with just two that I'm aware of that are located outside of the urban service boundary. three, perhaps, yeah, two, the Bluegrass Airport, and then, I take that back, three, Bluegrass Army Depot Station, and then the Haley Pike Landfill. In terms of the staff taking the next step after this committee met and heard information from stakeholders, it's the staff's responsibility to review proposals, whether it be for a text amendment or a zone change or a development plan and provide a recommendation to the Urban County Planning Commission. In doing so, we review primarily for text amendments the comprehensive plan, which is adopted. This particular version was adopted in 2023. And then also, because this proposal utilizes rural land, we review the rural land management plan, which was adopted in 2017. Let me make sure I have the right information here. So Imagine Lexington 2045 does encompass, obviously, a broad range of concepts for the county. But when diving into the goals and objectives, the staff identified both two years ago and again this month, that theme B, which is called Protecting the Environment, does provide goal two and then several objectives related to the idea of creating a community that has a smaller carbon footprint, which where we would reduce greenhouse gas emissions and commit to a countywide net zero greenhouse gas emission goal by the year 2050. So in order to approach that goal of zero, net zero, the community and the city need to make changes. And one of the changes proposed is to utilize more solar energy and or renewable energy within the county. Other goals are to reduce the amount of electricity that we use to lower our emissions as well. So when reviewing the proposal, the staff identified this particular goal and its objectives as relevant to the proposed text amendment. And increasing the amount of energy that we can produce using renewable resources like the sun and wind reduces the demand on other energy sources like coal-fired plants, thus reducing our greenhouse gas emissions. So naturally, more solar power generation will improve the city's chances of meeting this net zero goal. The goals, objectives, and policies that are identified in the plan, though, do not generally identify a location where those goals should be met. They don't specify whether they should be met in the rural area or the urban area. They're just neutral to the location. In addition, within the comprehensive plan, theme D, improving a desirable community, identifies both goal three and... Nope, just goal three. About protecting and enhancing the natural and cultural landscapes that give Lexington, Fayette County, its unique identity and image. And in reviewing this goal, as well as two goals from Theme E, which speak more to protecting the rural land versus urban land and enhancing our agricultural brand and ensuring the county remains the horse capital of the world. So some of those ideas are also found within our rural land management plan. And there are five particular goals of the rural land management plan. Here they're listed as an A, B, C, and D. E is really more about implementation that the staff found were relevant to this request as well. and diving in a little deeper into the rural land management plan, there are specific recommendations that relate to utilities as well as if existing non-agricultural land uses are to expand, how does that get addressed? So in this particular case, if a non-agricultural case land uses it to expand, this recommendation refers you to another spot within the small area plan or the rural land management plan. And then specifically talks, again, more about ensuring that our accessory and conditional uses, which these are proposed as, are appropriate and compatible with the surrounding environment. Continue to support agriculture and our equine farms and protect natural areas and cultural landscapes to keep bluegrass tourism strong. and I'll let you read through those if you'd like. But the rural land management plan also really kind of sets the stage for there's always been a core urban area within Lexington and a surrounding agricultural area. And so those two areas do work together. But in essence, the overwhelming public sentiment has always been since we instituted our urban growth area was to preserve the rural areas and support properly designed urban growth. And the last recommendation there from the Rural Land Management Plan, again, has to do with protecting the rural settlements, viewsheds, cultural resources, landscapes, infrastructure, et cetera, to ensure that changes or impacts from development are minimized within the rural area. Based on the goals and objectives of these two plans, the staff has come to the conclusion that although they support our use of solar and wind and other renewable energies and reducing our carbon footprint, more so the long-term goals have been to protect the rural area. And so the staff recommended making modifications to the text that the council sent us. First, removing both intermediate and large-scale solar energy systems, removing those from the agricultural zones in order to protect the agricultural nature of our county and the areas that we have historically proposed for preservation. In doing so, that would also remove several of the criteria referenced about agricultural SESs and conditional uses. The staff also suggests relaxing restrictions on small-scale solar in the urban residential zones. I mentioned earlier that the council had changed the small scale here from an accessory use to a conditional use. The staff feels that it's really more appropriate as an accessory use. Again, remembering that small scale is less than 2,500 square feet, which would likely be the entirety of someone's backyard. So one or two solar panels would be more realistic for our residential zones, and likely it would discourage that if we were asking them to go to the Board of Adjustment. The staff also suggests keeping the brownfield exemption that was proposed, the battery storage changes, the changes to the decommissioning, and then also the community benefit plan text. So keeping those, but then making a small change to how we measure the distance of the panels from the property edge, which is identified in Article 31-6C. and let's kind of come back to the staff's perspective on this proposed text amendment. Again, although we recognize the goals of reaching net zero emissions by 2050, that should not be addressed by impacting the other parts of the community that also have goals in terms of preservation of the land and the characteristics that it has that are unique to our area. So staff provides these three findings for approval of the staff alternative. And again, it's a fairly large change from what the council proposed to the Planning Commission. When the Planning Commission presented this to the Zoning Committee last week, the Zoning Committee had some comments and questions. And so in looking at this text, there was conversation about how it might be appropriate to allow at the very, although I guess let me go back, in the table for our agricultural zones, the council split out the AR and the AU zones. So the staff alternative would be to combine those back into one column. The zoning committee asked more information about this particular category, which is the intermediate scale between 2,500 square feet and five acres, and investigating if that could be returned instead of being prohibited to a conditional use. in looking at that the discussion centered around making sure that it was really an appropriate scale for the lot it's on obviously in our agricultural zones we have a wide range of lot sizes each zone has a lot minimum size but beyond that many of our farms are hundreds of acres and some of them are non-conforming so there's a quite a quite a range the purple sheet that the staff has handed out is our attempt to address that request for the zoning committee. So at the top, I have the zoning committee. What we felt was the request, which was to approve the staff alternative text with one change to the table in 3-4 to permit intermediate scale ground-mounted solar, but put a limitation on it. So this table no longer shows the X, but actually shows the CUP back there, Conditional Use Permit with an asterisk. And then the asterisk identifies some limitations for intermediate scale ground-mounted. the staff again in terms of addressing the concern expressed by the zoning committee drafted this language so that if an intermediate ground mounted scale project was desired that it would only be permitted again by the board of adjustment when located on a lot that complies with the minimum lot size of the zone and then when the footprint occupies no more than 12.5% of the lot. And I know your next question is, why 12.5%? So I can see it. In looking at those zones, we've listed the zones on the left-hand side, bottom of this, and it's also on the back of your purple sheet. Each zone has a minimum lot size. In our AU zone, only four uses have a minimum lot size of 10 acres. All other uses in the AU zone do not have a limitation, so they can be of any size. When you factor in the 40-acre minimum lot size in the AR zone, in order to reach five acres of intermediate-scale ground-mounted solar, you would be at 12.5% of that 40 acre lot. So if you were to max out the intermediate level scale solar on your 40 acre lot, that's 12.5%. So the staff would suggest applying that same ratio to the other zones, which have smaller lot sizes, 10 acres primarily for A, B, A, N, and A, U. and just as a reference, 1.25 acres is about the size of a typical outlot that you will see for a shopping center and it's also about the same size as a Publix grocery store. So if you've been inside that Publix grocery store, you're probably like, oh, 50,000 acres or 50,000 square feet is what that is. I will note in the AU zone with no limitation, it's really hard to gauge how far that would go, but it would still be limited by the five acres. Again, I just want to reiterate, this was a request by the zoning committee, so we attempted to address that and share that with the commission. but the staff recommendation was that there be no ground mounted within the intermediate or large scale within the ag zones. I know you have a few other items at your desk today, and so if you have questions about any of those items, I'd be happy to discuss them as well. Thank you, Tracy. Okay. Do we have any initial questions for Tracy at this time? Could you clarify one thing for me? The 1% of solar, is that 1% in the entire county or just the rural areas? So the text that came from the council, actually the text that got adopted by the council in September of 2025, added that particular provision of a 1% cap on the entire county. And so they were factoring in the urban area as well, which is 182,000 acres divided by 1% or multiplied by 1%. Then the cap would be approximately 1,800 acres of large-scale solar within the ag zones. Ah, okay. So they're factoring in the urban area and calculating the maximum, but then assuming that that 1% is applied within the agricultural zones. That's the current text. Okay. But I think there may be some other conversations that have been had about that. Okay. Thank you. Okay. Do we have any other questions for Tracy at this time? And yes, we do have quite a bit in both Granicus and attached documents and several items placed in front of us prior to the meeting. So we'll have a chance to. Of course, I'm here through the entire hearing if you have questions that come up. Okay. Thank you. All right. If we have nothing else for staff at this time, typically we would hear from, if there was an applicant, we would hear from them now. and I did receive a request from Silicon Ranch to have a few more minutes to speak today. Are they present? You're welcome to address the Planning Commission at this time. Thank you. My name is Bob Corney, and I'm with Silicon Ranch. My colleague and I are here today to speak in opposition to the staff alternative and in support of the Urban County Council work group, ZODA, regarding solar, and to clarify how agrivoltaics can maintain lands and agricultural production through dual use or dual cropping. I think the main thing I want to point out is that the reality is commercial solar will be developed outside the urban services area. The question is by whom and under what regulatory framework. With the Council's draft, private development is limited. There are clear regulations and restrictions on how to develop that land, including an agrivoltaics requirement. And it helps provide guidance to the PSC on other development, utility development specifically. mainly I think the point to say to all of y'all is that solar development does not have to be a choice between energy or agriculture. It can be both. Agrivoltaics has clear benefits to soil health ecosystem improvement. And my colleague Jim Malouli here will walk you through our experience and how we develop projects at Silicon Ranch. Thank you. Thank you. Good afternoon and thank you for having me. You'll have to pardon me. My typical audience on a normal work day walks on four legs and does not ask questions at the end. Excuse me, what's your name? I'm sorry, my name is Jim Maluli. What was that? I might have misheard something. So I'm just going to offer a little bit of a different perspective on how I landed at Silicon Ranch and what I see as opportunities for farmers, which is my cohort. My education was in engineering. I'm a first-generation farmer. The USDA recognizes beginning farmers as disadvantaged, along with people of other classes, whether a veteran, a particular gender, race, whatever. They recognize that there's significant barriers to entry in agriculture and farming and food production for our country, the most important of which is land. And so my wife and I had left corporate jobs, spent 10 years building a successful sheep and cattle operation in Tennessee, and actually sold all of my lambs the last few years right outside of Lexington to an aggregator that then channeled them into Whole Foods. So I know your rural area well. um i'll also mention that i found out about silicon ranch in the same way that many of you probably did i read about a project coming to my area in the newspaper and i was kind of put off and so i reached out to them and i wanted an opportunity to farm it or or i wanted to oppose it and see that land stay in agriculture. And that was the beginning of my education of how agriculture and solar can come together. And I did end up obviously agreeing to join their team and never looking back. And there have been a lot of benefits to the communities we work in. So our regenerative energy platform, it's our land management. We usually start operations at least a year before construction, where we're preceding the ground with warm and cool season, diverse mixes. We're improving the fertility. We're setting that land up for long-term livestock production. And the awards there are not to pat us on the back. They're to demonstrate sincerity. sincerity. We apply ourselves and we bring a lot to the ag communities where we operate. We partner with a lot of farms in 14 states and those family businesses are agricultural businesses that operate under solar. Our commitment to stewardship is, well, it's the same thing that we did on the family farm and that my colleagues and my boss did on their family farm because we're farmers first in the regenerative energy department. And I like to use the example of Woodrow Wilson in World War I wanted to free up men to enlist. And he brought sheep to the White House lawn and rotated them for vegetation management from 1918 to 1920. And that was the first practical application of what myself and my team do every day now. But the impact from intentional grazing builds organic matter. It improves the water holding capacity of the soil. It increases the aggregation of it. It increases the fertility, the ecosystem, the microbes within the soil, which then translates to above ground life and biodiversity and a thriving ecosystem. them. We like to say that we have two layers of solar panels, and just like we can raise cattle and sheep on the same acre of land, we can raise cattle, sheep, and electricity on those acres, too. It's just another commodity that the farm is producing. Again, this is, you know, one of our vendors, Will Harris down at White Oak Pastures. He has built an incredible business to save his family farm through regenerative agriculture, and he saved his community. He's increased the population of Bluffton, Georgia, brought businesses back. He turned agriculture into the foundation of the community and that's something that we seek to replicate and a way that we do this is by becoming members of the community vendors do it and we do it on our self-perform but when we come in we don't have jobs for our people we have careers and there's a difference when you're farming. One's minimum wage, and when you're too old and broken to work, you're done, and that's the end of your story. The other is an opportunity to work hard, learn, and advance, and have the benefits that a city job offers without having to give up the lifestyle that rural life draws us into. And, you know, that is a driving principle of what we do is how can we be a rural economic engine. And so by having the agribusiness there, we, I'm going to see if there's, so I apologize. A lot of these are, so I do want to talk about how it's evolving and how it benefits the community and I'm sorry for taking so much time. The farms that surround us become our partners and our neighbors. We buy hay from another producer. If we have land outside of our fence that we aren't cropping, we lease that to another producer, they increase their business. We do the flip side of that, and where folks have a fallow field in the winter, We plant cover crops and then we graze them and they get the benefit of the animal impact and the fertility to their next crop cycle. We buy our equipment locally. We have it serviced. We buy our parts. Same is true of our seed and fertilizer and feed and inputs. We strengthen the livestock markets by bringing scale, by bringing an opportunity to market at key times of the year together. We really do try to intentionally strengthen the ag community where we operate, and that looks different in each town. We also recognize that agrivoltaics is not a one-size-fits-all solution. We run sheep. We run cattle. There's sites that are not conducive to grazing. Those will get native plants for ground nesting bird habitat, pollinators. We have neighbors that set up beehives and turn that into a business. When you offer scale, access to land at scale, it takes the biggest barrier of entry to starting an agribusiness out of the equation. This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity for farmers, and it's a once-in-a-generation opportunity for folks who aren't farmers to make a career change into it. The environmental benefits, I'm not going to bore you to death on them. I touched on the soil health, but the whole theos of regenerative agriculture is to improve things. It's to restore the land, restore the ecosystem, restore the water nutrient cycles. It is really every move that's done is a carefully choreographed dance. We don't just turn the livestock out. We are managing the land for measurable outcomes. Increased carbon sequestration I left off. This is all able to be documented. It's well studied. University of Georgia, University of Colorado. There's a lot of interest in how this can bolster the ag economy. At a time when farmers and ag economists, the majority of ag economists in the country today say we are either in or on the precipice of an ag recession. It's related to input costs skyrocketing and commodity prices collapsing. And in this climate, the unexpected shining star is the thriving sheep industry. industry. And that's been the case for a number of years now as we've seen access to solar increase and we've seen the national flock increase. So I just wanted to speak to the sincerity of it, to the opportunity that this presents to our young farmers, our disadvantaged Farmers are ag businesses that are looking for more customers for an increase. You know, growth attracts growth. And you guys are doing this thoughtfully. Do we want to grow ag? Do we want to grow, you know, other businesses? But that you are thinking about this demonstrates that it can be done and be done to achieve the goals that Fayette County has. People get excited about cattle. We do talk mostly about sheep, and that is our bread and butter, but we have deployed the first utility-scale solar project that's purpose-built for grazing cattle under it, and those cows are grazing in Christiana, Tennessee. And that is just one more tool. It's one more option on the menu to offer communities. Agrivoltaics works. Thank you for letting me speak. I appreciate it. Do you guys have any questions? Okay. At this time, do we have any questions? Commissioner Mollie Davis. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Mr. Mollie. I just have a kind of a basic question. Where does the energy that gets created from the solar panels go to? I can answer that. Well, I'm not an engineer or a physicist. The energy produced at those facilities in that particular location will serve this load. Physics dictates that electrons travel to the nearest load. That will be the communities around the solar facility, but also the large load inside Lexington Fayette County. What is a load? So demand. A light bulb. Yeah, light bulb, computer, refrigerator. Just to put this into context why solar is necessary to meet your net zero goals and why large-scale solar is necessary, Kentucky Utilities' integrated resource plan estimates or forecasts that load growth in the next 10 years, so demand for electricity in the next 10 years, will be greater than the growth over the last 40 years. And that's because we're electrifying more things. We have more manufacturing. If you want net zero, you have to start eliminating the uses of or finding better uses for fossil fuels, for transportation and other things, but also electrifying more of what makes a community work. Our homes, our businesses. That's why demand is growing so fast. And I guess the other point that is, is how does the energy created in your solar panels get to those other people? So it goes through the grid system. So all utility-scale solar projects interconnect with the grid system. So transmission lines have to be part of whatever you... Transmissions lines are, but still the physics will bear out. It's like water finds its lowest path. Physics dictates that electrons go to load. We can't steer them like you might steer a boxcar on a train. Some will be transmitted to further distances, but typically that load is served in the nearest vicinity. Okay, thank you. Okay, do we have any other questions for Silicon Ranch? Yes, Commissioner Worth. A couple. You mentioned your project in Tennessee, and I read online that that is a 20-year study, is that correct? The one with cattle? The cattle tracker. We are, the cattle deployed this year after three years under development, the design and the controls under development. I'm not sure what the. It's part of a broader program with the Department of Energy. We received a special project through the Department of Energy to explore the possibility of doing this and what the team has done. What I read was this was a scientifically designed study that would run for 20 years. Yes, University of Colorado, University of Tennessee. And you're into what, about three years of it? Is that where that is? Yeah, so we are three years in, and University of Colorado is the one, they oversee the research. I don't administer the grant and the relationship there, so I don't want to speak incorrectly to it. But all of these environmental claims that are made and need to be corroborated, they all have long-term. So I'm aware of several other initiatives that I am part of where we monitor the health of the project throughout the life of a summer plan for 35 years. And we're approaching our decade mark on the most mature of those. And so we're measuring microbial respiration rates in the soil under the panels and in an adjacent farm room path. You know, so yes, we are doing rigorous. I think it's good that you're doing it. I'd say three years is pretty early into that project. A second question I would ask is, have you ever decommissioned a solar farm? No, not at this point. And we've certainly had cases where we've had to remediate, say, from a storm or where there was some design feature that we needed to change. I think the thing I would indicate, and I think this is a misconception a lot of people have, is that when they think of an industrial solar or commercial solar plant, they envision lots of concrete and lots of gravel. The reality is that's not true. Ours look more like pasture land with solar panels on top. The tracking systems are driven into the ground to a specific engineered depth for stability, security. Concrete is the pad underneath the transformer, which I'm going to guesstimate is 10 by 10 or 20 by 20. That's where you'd see concrete on one of our solar facilities. But it's not concrete everywhere, and it's not much of this is very easily pulled out of the ground. And what is significant about Silicon Ranch is we are a long-term asset owner. We own the underlying land under our project. So the land is another asset of ours. And so we're designing these so that that asset is as valuable or more valuable in the future than what it was when we purchased it. Okay. Do we have any other questions at this time? Seeing none. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you so much for your time. The Planning Commission also received a request for an extended time to speak from Council Member Civigni. And if you would like to present now, you are most welcome. Thank you. Good afternoon. I'm Dave Civigni. and thank you to the commissioners for having me speak here. You might know that I have a few passions about the environment. I believe that science supports carbon neutrality goals so much that I'm the council member who added it to our comprehensive plan. And I just want to note that it passed unanimously. I'm not a person that sets goals and forgets about them. I tend to act on them. I believe the red line version of the ZODA you have from Council will better facilitate our goals, allowing every parcel of land to help in the best, most efficient way possible, without any pronounced effect to all the things we love about our community. It's not out of line with other parts of our comp plan. I also think that every community in Kentucky needs to do their part, and we are not exempt in Fayette County. We should not be saying, oh, they can do that in Jessamine County or in Scott County, but not here. I'm going to go through a few quick slides with you. Last year, we passed a modified and more inclusive version of the solar ZODA that you guys had back in the fall of 2024. The biggest hang-up the council had was on large-scale solar in the ag area. Surprise, surprise. Because it's a controversial area, we needed a little bit more time to study it. So we did form our small work group, and those are the members of the work group. And the council members each gave us some of their ideas of the things that they wanted us to investigate. The one thing that I want to just correct from the beginning, this ZOTA that you are receiving is a council-led ZOTA. It is not, the applicant was not the presenter this last time. So our red line version, I just want to give you a timeline for when we started meeting as a work group. We had the 11 meetings. Those are all the topics that we covered. I also want you to understand that we've been working on this for a year, so we've been working on it for a much longer time than most people have. And these are the people that we dealt with. Our redline version comes to you from recommendations based on expert testimony and research from these groups and others. We use best practices to decide how to best answer the areas of council concern. and community concern. As you know, emotions and noise can run high in conversations like this. Our red line reflects well-vetted answers to some pretty difficult questions. Not listed in this group, we did actually have a conversation with the PSC, who you know is the one who manages utility sightings. While they're not obligated, they did tell us that they tend to lean into local land use regulation. So that's why this ZODA is an important piece of the puzzle. And the 1% restriction that's already been approved in the last version of the ZODA, that has already been in some different state legislation that has been proposed over the last two or three years. This slide just kind of tells you while rooftop is a great way for a local user to do solar, when you look at the cost per megawatt, you've got to get to scale in order to make a project actually pencil out. And there's strictly, when you go up to, it takes about a 300 acre farm to actually make something work. And we don't have any real 300 acre industrial tracks. And I don't think the council or the community wants us to expand the USB to create those. These were the perspectives that we really contemplated quite a bit. And this is what's going mostly through Council's mind. First one is, do we want to limit how we view farming? The decision to have ground mounted on farmland came from listening to a varied group of perspectives and voices rather than just one population. Understanding their small scale farms, large farms, production farms, horse farms, utilities, and labor. The working group was inclusive of all these varied perspectives, both from subject matter experts and council members to get a bigger picture. The language proposed by the group was based on these best practices and research. Do solar farms attract tourism and new community members? I've heard that and we've heard that argument a lot. The argument really here seems to be a false choice. I go to a community and see solar on a stripped and gravel lot, and I think one thing. I go to a community and I see a rolling pasture with solar and crops and animals, and I think another. One percent isn't going to drastically change any other industry in our community. The farms that attract tourism will continue to thrive. tourism will thrive, but we'll also be considering climate refugees who start to show up in a community like ours because we provide a supportive environment and it matters to them when they decide where they want to live. What about large-scale solar as a land preservation tool? Solar may be a passing fancy, but it's existed for 40 years or so. Typical lifespans are 25 years. If we allow it to be done correctly, we've just preserved land and soil up to 1,800 acres in Fayette County, and there's no cost and no PDR for that. On the next one, we often hear about agriculture's impact on our county, but estimates are that it's about 10 to 15 percent of our GDP. Not insignificant, but keep in mind it uses 70% of our land resources. 70%. We should consider just using 1% of our total land, still use it for agriculture, but maybe also provide some clean energy. We would like the opportunity for the 70% to actually be part of the solution. On Haley Pike, the last statement there. The red line from Council states that the National Resources Conservation Service is the site to use to identify soil types. I use their tool to map out myself the land that we are allowing Edelman and Associates to use at the Haley Pike for a solar farm. Most of us think it's a great project, but it's mostly zoned agricultural already, and it's outside the urban service boundary. And the NRCS data map says it's close to 70% prime farmland and farmland of statewide importance, even though we know it's a brownfield. Do you think it's fair to have one set of rules for ourselves and how we do business and one for farmers and everybody else? Our red line version allows a level of fairness that most people would understand or might even expect from us. Council's red line version before the blue line corrections. Our red line places a 1% cap even for utilities regulated by the PSC. We agree with the COMP plan by setting a goal of net zero for 2050. We acknowledge our LFUZG goal and how all land types can play a role in the goal to the best of their ability. We address soil and runoff through plans, monitoring, and management. Those have been currently struck with the blue line. It promotes a new innovative farmland conservation tool, and innovation happens everywhere, including in our farm community. It includes an additional safeguard, the conditional use permit via the Board of Adjustment. I will not like to be the person who has to go do that meeting at the Board of Adjustment. It's going to be difficult to get these deals done, but there should be a chance to do the right thing and be fair when it's appropriate. And I left one of these one off. It allows for the expectation of a direct community benefit, which we are seeing in all sorts of other creative ways currently in planning and in Fayette County. So I find that sometimes it's easiest just to ask you to do a specific thing. I'm going to ask you to accept the council red line of the ZODA. Thank you. Thank you, Council Member Savigny. Do we have any questions at this time? Yes, sir, Mr. Forster. Council Member Savigny, just one question. Do you support the 1% piece that we have in here now, or do you not? Yeah, the 1% is currently in there now. we put it in council put it in in the last version um and one percent is still in there now okay all right now that's the whole county that's that's what i'm asking the county does the one percent include the full fayette county yeah so there's about yeah there's about 182 000 acres so it's It's about 1,800 acres in total. Thank you. Okay. Do we have any other questions at this time? Seeing none, thank you. Thank you so much. All right. We had a few other requests for extended times. Is Blaine Early present? Dr. Early has been called away to a meeting, so if I may speak on his behalf. All righty. Would you just state your name for the record, please? Yes, Patrick Mason. All right. Thank you. So good afternoon, all. My name is Patrick Mason. I am the policy director for the Environmental Commission, and thank you for having us here today to provide a few remarks on the solar zota that we have before us today. I was not expecting to speak today, so please forgive any stammering or stops as I move through some of our presentation, but we were asked by council to give some of our feedback as a similar commission to this one. We are an all-volunteer appointed by the mayor commission, and we're focused on advising officials such as yourselves, such as council, and promoting sustainability in Fayette County. We also facilitate environmental awareness through various events, and we try our best to represent residents who have environmental concerns. We have 25 members. We're representing all the districts of Fayette County, and I'm personally from District 1 right here in downtown. So, as we talked about today, there is a lot of different views on the use of solar energy systems. And one thing to consider is that as a community, we still have an over 90% reliance on fossil fuels for energy generation. And the commission was very thoughtful in reviewing this red line ZODA that was brought to you by council. And overall, we wanted to be supportive of solar energy systems in general, but also being mindful of our agricultural and conservation requirements here in Fayette County. So we've already talked about Imagine Lexington. We also have several commitments through Empower Lexington, as well as our Metropolitan Climate Action Plan. So we leaned into those strategic goals as Councilmember Savigny wisely stated. We want to have these goals, but we also want to follow up on them and implement them as we're able to. So we did provide you all a white paper about a month ago, and we did speak to the working group around that time as well. So we hope you had a time to look at our thoughtful comments. Because it's not just a one-sided issue, we wanted to take a very technical approach to it, and there were various views represented in the commission, some focusing very strongly on conservation, others on advancing renewable fuels. So the first area that we wanted to direct your attention to is Section 31-2, and that is the definition on intermediate and large-scale solar energy systems. we wanted to note that the current ordinance has a five-acre limitation on intermediate scale, and the Kentucky Resources Council's model ordinance actually has that at 10 acres, leading large-scale energy systems to be 10 acres or more. So the commission recommended to make that update. Additionally, we wanted to recommend that new transmission infrastructure be considered as part of the footprint for large-scale ground-mounted systems, as they are a critical part of the infrastructure would be necessary to be built in order to support a new solar energy system, especially in ag land. So we wanted that to be considered as part of that calculation, just as when we're talking about that 1% cap. it is a recommendation that we include that in there as well. We wanted to note our support for the definitions for farmland of statewide importance, as well as prime farmland from the NRCS. We think that is a great addition in there to recognize those. And we are also supportive of the brownfield property inclusion that makes some exemptions to allow additional solar use on those properties. Now, over the next few slides, we'll be talking about this matrix of zoning that we've already seen a couple of times. This is as it stands in the current red line, so I'm going to be referring to that in the next couple of slides. So, as you can see, it recognizes all forms of SES. It's not just the ground mounted, it's also the accessory use as well as what's on the buildings. we would like to recommend that council have a process to track the implementation of all of these systems and the measurable impacts that their use has on providing solar-generated electricity and renewable electricity to the urban county. It actually shows how we're getting closer to that net zero goal by 2050. At this time, we are not measuring that at the council level. Additionally, just as staff had recommended, we also wanted to recommend an accessory use for small-scale development, particularly in residential areas, as we felt that the conditional use permit would be just too arduous for a single homeowner to actually want to go through that process with the Board of Adjustment. further we also recommended specific types of ground cover so not just ground cover for food production for humans and livestock which is is pretty common here in Fayette County but also to have native species so not just putting down a species that's non-native to the area but actually being mindful of what will grow well here in Fayette County so we would like to add that as a requirement for development as well. Additionally, we were also looking at particularly the large-scale SES in agricultural areas. And so we want to be able to see the before and after of that site. So we want applicants who go into these areas to document the current agricultural production at the site. and be able to demonstrate that continued agricultural production is actually happening. Right now, we don't see that there's a mechanism for that. So we want to make sure that we're actually holding accountable to the zoning requirements, not just at the beginning, but as we go on, since these systems do tend to last multiple decades. Additionally, we've been talking about the community benefits plan. we would really like to see a bit more teeth added into the community benefits plan, especially since it's going before the Board of Adjustment. We want to make sure that there are clear guidelines in that community benefits plan that these developers are bringing to the table. We understand that there might be some legal considerations, but since this is part of the overall package that has to be brought to the Board of Adjustment, We want there to be a firm and understandable framework to bring that to them. With decommissioning, we, so as you've mentioned, we've not seen too many decommissionings of this type of development before. But in considering how some of these energy productions work, we wanted to note that there could be times where it may take a bit longer than six months to decommission one of these sites. So we didn't want it to be too prohibitive on that back end. So we would like council to take another look at that time frame because they're extenuating circumstances such as disasters that could cause a large scale or any type of solar energy system to come down and not just a regular decommissioning process. Again, I wanted to reemphasize that we support the brownfield exception. And now if you all have any questions, we'd be happy to answer those. Okay. Thank you, Mr. Mason. Do we have any questions at this time? Seeing none, thank you very much. Thank you. Okay. All right. At this point, we can move on to continued public comment. If any citizen would like to speak to this ZODA today, you may do so now. it is the policy of the planning commission that everyone would get three minutes and if you would please approach the podium and state your name and if we have multiple people who would like to speak we can kind of we can form a line of two or three people at a time just to keep the the flow going and i forgot to mention after council member svigny spoke we do have several letters both in our on our screens here we have a letter from council member boone in front of us and then a letter from the commissioner of the kentucky department of agriculture in our public comment PDF as well. So we'll just do two or three at a time, please, just for fire safety. So please go right ahead. Thank you, Chairman. My name is Justin Kinder. I live at 5451 Haley Downs Drive. It's just north of the Thoroughbred. I'm sorry to interrupt you. Could we please just have two or three people in the line at a time just because of fire safety. We can't obstruct. So can we have some folks sit down just for a second, and then we, as the line goes, you can certainly cue. Sorry to interrupt you. Sorry. I live on Haley Downs, just north of the Thoroughbred dump site and just west of where the Silicon Ranch is proposed to put in their field there. I'm here to oppose large-scale solar on agricultural lands. Part of the reasons are, especially out where Silicon has their proposal, that land has already been rated as top 100 soils in America. The pictures they show doesn't depict what our soils are. It's showing 1% organic versus 5%. So there's a lot of birds out there that there's people, birders are every day of the week are out there that they're not finding anywhere else in Kentucky, especially the Vesper, Sparrow, and Horned Larks. One of the things we haven't heard much about here is the composition of the solar panels. And with the weather that we have and the hailstorms and stuff that we have, that composition is poisonous. And it gets in our soils. It gets in our streams. That land has two streams running through it. I'd like to know more about the plan of the perimeter and protecting the perimeter and what kind of insurance the farmers next door have whenever there is a disaster. That land is, it's landlocked. So getting that energy out of there on those lines, is it going to go through our farms? There's a railroad track behind. I know they won't allow it across that. It's going to decrease property value around a lot of these lands. And the big question that I had at some of the open meetings is, how does Fayette County benefit from this? They say that the energy goes onto the grid. The grid goes a path of lease resistance. We use it in Fayette County. Fayette County benefits from it. No, we would buy that. Fayette County would buy that energy. from the grid. It doesn't just go to us. Oh, and other places, a lot of the birds, they will dive into these panels, and so it's a big concern. There's a lot of trees out there as well, so I'm not sure what all the plan is. I just wanted you all to take that in consideration when you're making your recommendation. Okay, thank you. And I'm sorry, this is an error on my part. We had another party that had requested additional time that I unintentionally omitted. Would the Fayette Alliance be prepared to speak at this point? Thank you. I apologize. That was my oversight. And Mrs. Rothmeier, if you would just remind me the amount of time you requested. I requested 15 minutes. 15 minutes. Okay. Thank you. Thank you so much. Good afternoon, members of the Planning Commission. Brittany Rothbier on behalf of Fayette Alliance. Today I'm here to share with you all once again Fayette Alliance's position. It's not on whether solar energy is appropriate for Fayette County. I think that we have a number of programs that are clearly supportive of renewable energy. We currently have 750 acres of proposed solar projects in the rural area. I think we need to be really clear about all the efforts for solar energy that are already going on in our community. But we're really here to talk about at what scale solar development is appropriate for Lexington, not whether Silicon Ranch has a good business model or how models have worked in other states, but what's right for Lexington, what our policies say, and how those fit together. Fate Alliance supports the planning staff's report and the staff alternative language. I think that they make really clear that ground-mounted, large, intermediate-scale solar is an industrial use, and it's not one that's appropriate in our agricultural zones. And in addition to that, because a lot of the conversation has been around large-scale solar on agricultural land, we believe that some of the other key parts of the ordinance should be strengthened to further protect our community and ensure that we do hold developers, whether those be private or utility developers, accountable, including strengthening decommissioning and enforcement requirements as well. So just as a foundational matter, industrial uses are expressly prohibited in our agricultural zones. That has been the case in our ordinance for many, many, many years. And those policies are in place to promote our principal use in our rural area of production agriculture. We have these plans and we have these policies in place for a reason. You all dedicate an inordinate amount of time to enforcing them and reviewing them and ensuring that the applications for these different policy changes comply. And following those plans and upholding these principles that are in those plans ensures that the public has trust in the policies that the city makes and enforces. Permitting utility-scale solar development in the ag zones goes directly against our comp plan and our rural land management plan, as you all heard from the staff. And those are two adopted city plans that are driven by our community priorities and that our community puts hours and hours and hours into creating. Our plans emphasize over and over the importance of our soils and our farmland for agricultural uses in this community. Not in another state and not in another county, but in Fayette County. I know that you all have seen this graphic. Fayette County is approximately 180,000 acres, and the rural service area outside of the urban service boundary is about 124,000 acres. But we know that that's not all farmland. I do think it's important to note that outside the urban service boundary includes Blue Sky Industrial Park, brownfields like capped landfills. It includes places like the Bluegrass Airport and Keeneland, and more than 50 residential neighborhoods. Within the rural service area, what's really notable about Fayette County in particular is that we have 112,000 acres that are ranked as the best farmland in the state and in the nation. 112,000 acres. Those soils make up the core agricultural land category. This is pulled directly from the Rural Land Management Plan, and this is the primary category for ag here in Lexington. And these soils are frankly the reason that we have a Rural Land Management Plan at all. and it's been in place, as we know, since 1999. And this category of core agricultural land makes up 87% of our rural service area. The land use is predominantly ag, and it has a very specific policy emphasis for preservation and enhancement of the land for ag purposes to ensure the continued viability of the agricultural economy as a whole. The key recommendation in this plan is for this area and this land to most importantly keep non-agricultural conditional uses to a minimum. What we've heard and what you'll see on the screen is a video of a large-scale solar development in Harrison County. This particular, they have two large-scale developments that we saw laid eyes on. This one is about 650 acres. We know that these developments are industrial in nature. They're not agriculture. They're energy production developments. And the primary use of the property is energy generation. Again, as you can see from here, this type of use is very clearly industrial. And I think we have to be really careful, as we always are in making these policies, if we permit something like this and violate our established city policies and allow an industrial type of use on our most sensitive and most finite resource that we have in this community. Solar developments like this are proposed to have a life of 30 to 40 years. Hundreds of important jobs and construction happen up front on a development like this. This is another overhead depiction of the 650-acre solar development in Harrison County. I think it's really important for us to understand the scale of these types of developments and what they look like on the ground. It's important to keep in context as we think about the economic development piece of this, how large the amount of land is that is supporting these jobs and that after about year four or five, the amount of jobs that's supported by this many acres of land reduces significantly. We have to weigh these factors when we're evaluating what types of land uses are appropriate and where they're appropriate. The profits of a private energy company supporting a minimal amount of jobs for 25 to 30 years won't stay at Fayette County after the development is completed, but we will pay the consequences. Using this much land for solar development also removes it from the greater agricultural economy, which puts at risk the existing jobs that are associated with agriculture and farmland that are supported in our community. Another graphic I know you all have seen, but the ag cluster, and it bears repeating, in Fayette County it generates $2.6 billion in economic activity every year and $1.1 billion in money that goes directly into the pockets of Lexingtonians. It supports 16,000 jobs and contributes $13 million to the local tax base every year. Those economists that did this study at the University of Kentucky also found that a reduction in agricultural output has significant ripple effects through this community. And what's really impactful about this study is we're not talking about just on-farm jobs that are supported by our farmland and by our ag industries. We're talking about retail and hospitality and trucking and manufacturing and insurance and professional services. All of these jobs are supported by the resource that we have in this community. The economists at UK found that just a 10% decrease in agricultural output has more than a $20 million impact on our economy every single year. The most recent census told us that in Fayette County we have 682 farms. The market value of products that are sold in this community exceed $300 million, and we rank third in the state for ag product sales, and at the top of more than 3,000 other counties across the country in the production of our products. We have a strong ag industry because our land uses and our policies ensure that our ag land can be used primarily for agricultural purposes. And once we begin saying that we can use that land for industrial uses with a little bit of ag, we start to undermine this foundation that we stand on. We begin to impact the number of ag operations that want to be located near an industrial use like a solar development or whose businesses are impacted by a multimillion dollar corporation buying up ag land that was previously available to local people. The Kentucky Department of Ag Commissioner Jonathan Schell mentions this in his letter to you all. Hopefully you all received that. I know it's on Granicus. I thought it was really impactful that the Department of Ag reached out to us trying to understand the conversation we were having about solar here locally. But Commissioner Schell and his very passionate opposition to large-scale solar and agricultural land talks about this very thing. He says that converting land to industrial solar accelerates farmland fragmentation, making it harder for current and future farmers to remain viable, and it risks our economy not only locally but through the state. Commerce Lexington just highlighted the impact of tourism on our local economy in their last magazine edition, reported out the $1.7 billion annual economic impact of tourism, supporting nearly 12,000 jobs, and they noted that horse farm tours and distilleries are still the most requested experience. Fatalines believes that large-scale solar goes against our national best practices, which are very, very clear. Avoid prime farmland, prioritize other areas first and foremost. Even the Kentucky Resources Council model ordinance has a paragraph specifically dedicated to farmland protection that was left out of Council's draft. American Farmland Trust, the Kentucky Conservation Committee, the Nature Conservancy, the USDA all say the same thing. Avoid land designated as prime farmland or soils of statewide importance. We have extensive and vast opportunities here in Fayette County for solar and continuing to reduce our carbon emissions on land that cannot and will not be used for agriculture. Parking lots, warehouse rooftops, brownfields, and industrial areas are all huge opportunities for us here. Other states are making policies requiring industrial and warehouse rooftops to be solar ready if they're over a certain size. National studies demonstrate that warehouse rooftops offer enormous opportunity to offset energy usage. We've got to get creative. We've been so thoughtful in this community, and you all have been a huge part of that as planning commission members, about ensuring that a limited amount of conditional uses are permitted in our ag area since we have an urban service boundary put into place in 1958. In addition to the local impacts, our soils are recognized nationally and globally. The Bluegrass region is even considered an endangered cultural landscape by the World Monuments Fund. This week, I received the email that's here on the screen from a national advocacy group called Greenlight Action, which is a D.C.-based organization pursuant to my online search that supports advocacy to accelerate the clean energy transition. Strangely, this email ends with, thanks for standing up for Lexington's farms. For people that don't really know what's being proposed in these nuanced policies, this is incredibly misleading. There are absolutely issues that could use national advocacy support, but where to allow large-scale solar is one that is dependent on the unique characteristics of a community. It doesn't strike me that a D.C. advocacy group or even out-of-state companies are asking the questions that are required for a local policy decision. Have they read our comprehensive plan? Have they been part of this local conversation that we have about land use? Have they looked at our rural land management plan? The plans that our community created and believes in and trusts. I think we need to be very wary of these efforts when we're making really localized policy. We've got a responsibility to protect our resources and identify places where large-scale solar is appropriate, like existing industrial areas and the built environment, and where it's not appropriate. And I don't believe that Washington, D.C. and private for-profit companies should have a say in that. It's important to note that the council work group who proposed these most recent efforts omitted some key points from their findings. These discussions were not open to the public, so we don't have records of what research was presented, what the stakeholders said, which makes it a little bit more difficult. But I think it's important to note just a few things here. They didn't propose any way to measure energy created by private developments or note that there's no way to guarantee that energy is benefiting local customers. There wasn't discussion about additional urban initiatives, considering we just added 3,000 acres of urban development to our urban service area, which is going to significantly increase our carbon emissions. National research also demonstrates that regular stormwater regulations are not adequate for solar development, and this study was done by the Department of Energy. We've got to update our regulations to reflect that as well. They didn't report out on the long-term job impact for a large-scale land use, or incorporate any feedback from Fayette County farmers who stand to be most directly impacted, or the research that exists statewide and nationally about the negative impact on property values that these developments create, specifically when they're done in a rural setting. They didn't address whether it was appropriate for the Board of Adjustment to make decisions on energy generation developments that could exceed 1,000 acres by a single developer. And these discussions frankly seem inadequate to support a major policy change to allow large-scale solar and agricultural zones. Again, I mentioned that we did have some additional policy recommendations to simply strengthen this policy. We'd like to more accurately define the footprint of a solar development, give the Board of Adjustment more finite recommendations for increased setbacks to protect neighborhoods and neighboring land uses. The KR, Kentucky Resources Council, and the Environmental Commission have both recommended requiring Kentucky native plants, pollinators, and food production crops and things. And notably, the Kentucky Resources Council also recommended that 85% ground coverage was not sufficient. Reduce the percentage of acreage available for ground-mounted solar in the rural area as guidance solely to the Public Service Commission. As I mentioned, we already have 750 acres of large-scale solar in our rural area that's moving forward. Let's be cautious about how much further that number continues to rise. Again, national research is clear that existing stormwater regulations are not appropriate. We need to update those to reflect best practices and believe that we need to strengthen decommissioning requirements and standards. As you all heard from Silicon Ranch representative, and frankly across the country, there have not been decommissioning of these large-scale solar entities. And we need to make sure that Lexington, present and future, frankly, is protected when decommissioning does come to pass and ensure that the right people are held accountable. This picture shows the real implications if we don't do these policies right. our soils and our community and our agricultural economy and our identity. These things are too important to risk when we have other creative and important solutions to address solar energy. We can support renewable energy while protecting our land. We know it's a finite resource. And again, this is not a vote against solar. This is a vote about what types of solar are appropriate, where, and how. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you. Okay, now we can resume public comment. Good afternoon. My name is Brett Faulkner. I live at Haley Downs Drive, so my property would actually border, my home would actually back up to the solar farm. We have several of our neighbors here who live in our neighborhood. That was developed about 10 years ago. I want to start off today just by reading the Division of Planning's mission statement. Now, I understand you all are the Planning Commission, but it's still targeted and should be fairly aligned. Planning's mission is to provide a vision and strategy that will allow Lexington to grow and prosper while preserving, protecting, and enhancing existing neighborhoods, downtown, and the rural bluegrass cultural landscape. I'll read part of that one more time. Preserving, protecting, and enhancing existing neighborhoods downtown and the rural bluegrass cultural landscape. So when you are making your decisions today or whenever you vote, those are some things that you really have to take into account. So number one, does this preserve, protect, or enhance existing neighborhoods out there that border these properties? The answer is no. There's no logical conclusion that you can come to that defends that it actually does benefit communities and neighborhoods that right now our backyard is our farms and rolling hills and cornfields. And then potentially in a year or two, it'd be solar farms. Okay? So big red X on that one. then you have to ask yourself does it preserve, protect or enhance the bluegrass cultural landscape absolutely not taking farmland taking our cultural landscapes, cattle horses, hay fields corn fields, beans, right now it's bean fields is where the proposed solar farm would be for us so these are things that you have to consider based on the mission statement from division planning. In addition to just a couple things, I'm not going to get into the soil, but the trees. Ms. Davis, you mentioned multiple times about trees and asking about a few trees here and there. We're talking about thousands of trees, acres of trees across 900 acres that are existing mature trees right now. Where are those going to go? you think they're going to leave them there or they're going to clear them out i think they're going to clear them out that's where they're going to go acres of trees we're not talking about a couple of trees we're talking about acres okay and lastly i'll leave you with this um 10 years ago is whenever we bought our property and built our house my wife and i literally spent every penny we had so we could raise our two sons out there. So whenever you're voting, keep us in mind because we literally spent every penny we had. So thank you. Thank you. Hello. My name is Jeremy Jenkins. I'm the business manager for Labor's Local 189 here in Lexington. We support the proposed solar ZODA as written by the Council because it established clear local standards for how large-scale solar projects are developed. We especially support the requirement for dual-use agriculture, such as grazing sheep under and around solar panels. It's one of the strongest part of the proposal. This approach keeps land in agricultural use while also generating clean energy, helping protect farmland rather than removing it from production entirely. We also shouldn't minimize the importance of job creation. Every project brings opportunities for local workers, contractors, and supporting businesses. Even if a project creates only one job, that one job can make a real difference. It can mean health insurance for a child who needs medical care, food on a family's table, or the ability to make a mortgage payment without worrying about falling behind. Those opportunities matter, and they have a ripple effect throughout our local economy. Without a ZODA, Lexington has fewer tools to guide where and how solar development occurs on local land. This ordinance provides a balanced framework that supports renewable energy, creates economic opportunity, ensures consistent standards, and protects agricultural land for future generations. Thank you. Thank you. Good afternoon. My name is Don Robinson. I live at 4153 Military Pike here in Lexington. I'm a third generation thoroughbred breeder and farmer here in Fayette County. I have over my career raised two Florida Derby winners. I've raised two Arlington Million winners. I've raised two Breeders' Cup winners. be one of the best horses in my lifetime named Zenyatta. I'm not alone. I'm just one small enterprise. But I've been concerned that apparently the workgroups had no one from the thoroughbred industry. It is, we are the global center of the thoroughbred business, Lexington, Fayette County. I mean, we're the center of the universe. and the protection of that I think is it's our signature. So I urge you to keep that in mind. You'll see the illustration there. I wanted to show you that there's plenty of application for solar. I have solar on most of my farm, and if I could do it on a couple other buildings, I'd be 100%, but I have solar panels on three different barns if you'd show them. I would never consider putting them on the ground because my ground is too rich and too good. There, if you saw the blue, that generates basically most of the power for my farm. And if the other meters were closer to transmission, I could make them work too. I'm sorry to see that the government incentives and the encouragement is off, but that was a big deal for me doing it. But I've had this now for going on seven years. So that's an agricultural use, and it works really well. Thank you very much. Hope you'll consider. Thank you. And honorable mention to Mr. Robinson, who is a former member of this planning commission. Thank you for your service. Chairman? Yes, sir. We have one question. Mr. Robinson. Donnie. Excuse me. Just one second. You showed pictures. How many square feet of solar do you have? Oh, yeah. It's really not. I've got 350 acres in terms of the solar footprints. Not very much. 20, maybe 5,000? Okay. All right. Thank you. Maybe. Good afternoon. I'm Judith Humble. I'm chair of the Bluegrass Climate Action Team, and I'm speaking for that team today. We are here in support of the council's redlined version of the ZODA. We believe that that ZODA offers strong protections for agricultural land while also supporting progress towards our comp plan's net zero emissions goal. We think it is a win-win for Fayette County, and these are our four primary points of support. First of all, the ZODA restricts the use of agricultural land to 1%. That is a very small amount. Given the history of this ZODA, it is very hard to imagine that amount being expanded without significant effort. And we think it is also protective that the land used for solar arrays has to be close to transmission lines, and that exempts a lot of our farmland. Secondly, there are strong guardrails in the ZODA for protection of the soils. Second, agrovoltaics, which are called for in the ZODA, are unique in their protection of farmland. Those experienced with agrovoltaic models incorporating livestock have noted actual improvements in the soil quality over time. I think the benefits were well supported by the earlier presentation by Mr. Mullooly of Silicon Ranch. This looks like a very exciting trend for agriculture, and the benefits are outlined in a handout that I provided for the Planning Commission. Third, the risk of development by electric utilities is very real. As our energy future involves and climate change advances, it is a certainty that electric utilities will seek to develop large-scale arrays adjacent to transmission lines. They are required to satisfy only the conditions of the Public Service Commission and do not have a history of investing in agri-voteic models. Without the Council's redline version of the ZODA, there are no guidelines to advise the PSC on Fayette County's goals for farmland protection. And finally, this has not been mentioned previously today. Our comp plan's goal of net zero emissions by 2050 means that we will need to take dramatic steps in Fayette County to reduce our carbon emissions in the coming years. While it is all well and good to talk about rooftop solar, there are entrenched barriers in the policies of our state and the policies of our utility companies against rooftop solar. This explains why we are stuck at 1% in our energy profile and why it is so difficult to incorporate rooftop solar on a wide scale in this community. The work of challenging these policies will be an uphill battle requiring many hands, and it is not easily done, and that's a challenge that we face if we want to transition to renewable energy with rooftop solar. In closing, we see the Council version of the ZODA as an opportunity for the Planning Commission to support the climate goals of our comprehensive plan while also protecting our prime agricultural land and soils. Thank you. Thank you. Good afternoon. My name is Andy McDonald. I'm the director of Apogee Climate and Energy Transitions and the chair of the Kentucky Solar Energy Society. Although I live and work in Franklin County, our organization has many members who are Fayette County residents. In addition to these comments in support of the overall solar ZODA, which would allow large-scale solar in the agricultural areas, I have some specific recommendations for the ordinance that I'll share in a separate letter. I support Lexington's commitment to farmland preservation, environmental protection, and achieving net zero carbon emissions. Despite recent actions at the federal level to roll back U.S. climate commitments, the urgency to decarbonize our economy is as strong as ever. Climate scientists advise that we must cut our emissions in half by 2030 to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. Here in Kentucky, more than 90% of our electricity comes from burning coal and natural gas. In a community like Lexington dedicated to environmental sustainability, the need to rapidly transition to renewable energy is clear. Solar energy is central to that transition. The question of whether large-scale solar should be allowed in agricultural areas should center on whether that development would be harmful to the land and community or beneficial. The Planning Commission has developed a set of ordinances to ensure that any large-scale solar development would be compatible with the agricultural community and protect the soils and local environment. The proposed redline version of the ZODA requires agricultural production to be maintained on any solar project site. Soil protection plans are required, and there are clear decommissioning requirements. In addition, Silicon Ranch has built their business model around the integration of agriculture and solar energy, as Mr. Malouli shared. They purchased the land where their projects are developed, so they are invested in the place. Their existing operations in Kentucky demonstrate their experience combining solar energy with regenerative agriculture and livestock production. some opponents of solar and agricultural areas say we don't need solar on farmland because we could just build it on all these rooftops and parking lots i fully support the expansion of solar on buildings and brownfields it's been a main focus of my work these past 20 years but this argument fails to reckon with the major barriers to small-scale solar in kentucky low capacity limits on net metering that greatly limit the market for non-residential solar State law which allows utilities to stop offering net metering at just 1% of their annual peak load. KU may reach that limit in the next year. Restrictions on third-party ownership of solar, such as solar leases and power purchase agreements, major tools that have helped solar grow so fast in other states. Small-scale solar is essential to the energy transition, but it alone will not enable us to meet our decarbonization goals. I urge the commission to support a solar zota that allows large-scale solar in the agricultural areas carefully developed to support both farmland protection and the city's net zero commitment. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for the time today. My name is Lane Boldman. I am a citizen of Fayette County. I live at 114 Woodford Drive. I also run an environmental policy nonprofit that deals with both energy issues and land conservation issues. I also formerly worked with the thoroughbred industry. So a lot of these arguments can be very conflicting, especially when they're looked at in isolation. What the challenge is for you all is to think of it comprehensively. I think that the red line ZODA has done a great job trying to manage all the interests involved. And we're talking about 1%. I hate to see any Fayette County land go away to production. I live near Keeneland. So I don't want to see that change. Nobody does. I hate to see so many apartments in other areas being built. But we need housing. So these are challenges that you all are wrestling with. But I do want to say, in my experience, I believe that the red line ZODA did a good job trying to weave through all of those conflicting situations, and we are only talking about a 1% situation. So we've been following the progress on the ZODA. I do want to address a few things that have come up in what other people have been saying. a gentleman that spoke about the impact to birds and things like that. The National Audubon Society supports PV solar. Why do they support that? Not because of the threat to birds. They find climate change the bigger threat to birds, impacting one-third of the species in the United States. So you do need to consider the larger picture as well. I support the revised Zota, which has that clear 1% limit. But also, we need to figure out how to make all these things work together. I just spent my vacation in Holmes County, Ohio, tourist area. One of the largest tourist areas in Ohio. As a matter of fact, it was named the largest. And this is Amish country. They have learned how to integrate farmland, medium-scale solar, rooftop solar, and large-scale solar, and it is their number one tourist destination. Now, I'm not saying that Fayette County is the same, but it is also something to think about on how you weave all of these aspects together. People come and they enjoy the landscape, the farm animals, the tourist opportunities, And they've learned a lot about solar. So I urge this committee to think about the fact that the Red Line Zoda, I believe, is attempting to do all that. And I want to thank you for your time. Thank you. My name is Kathy Clement. I'm a Lexington resident to 12 Preston Avenue. and thank you for listening today. I am also here to support the council-led ZODA, allowing limited large-scale solar on agricultural land. I came because I know what fossil fuels are doing to our health, to our climate, and to our pocketbook. Kentucky's unnecessary level of dependence on dirty fuel makes me furious, so I'm grateful that we have an alternative. Solar is being built out worldwide, and renewables are now the least cost source of energy, both nationally and here in Kentucky. So it is time to welcome that. Large-scale solar energy is doable, and locally, with the Council's plan, we have a viable plan that integrates solar with our bluegrass environment. With the revised ZODA, which limits large-scale solar to 1% of county land, the Planning Commission and the county can protect our soils and our farmland and protect the public welfare by reducing fossil fuel use and emissions. Until recently, I had not heard of SOX, NOx, Vox, PM2.5, or ground-level ozone. It turns out that these are pollutants arising from electricity generation with fossil fuels. They cause respiratory disease, heart disease, neurological disorder, birth defects, and tens of thousands of premature deaths a year. These pollution effects are increased by extreme temperatures, which also result from fossil fuel power generation. The climate chaos resulting from greenhouse gases threatens public and environmental health, with increased disease, pests such as widespread ticks, crop loss, and deadly extreme weather. We can't turn away and see these as future threats. These horrors are here. We have seen them in Kentucky in recent years, and we just saw them with last month's flooding deaths. But the great news is that solutions are here for the taking. No new complicated technology or multi-billion 10-year research plans are needed. Renewables, including solar, are ready now. We just need the policies to embrace it. With this ZODA from the Council Work Group, we have a great opportunity to grow renewables responsibly. Many here are rightly concerned about farmland and prime soils. So am I. We are fortunate that thought and hard work created a ZODA that fully recognizes that concern. It limits solar on agland to 1% of county property. Further, the ZODA has protections on that 1%, requiring crop production, soil testing, and protective decommissioning. There is no threat here, but there is a terrific opportunity to live up to the comprehensive plans, emissions, and pollution reduction goals to protect our soil and take a step toward protecting public health and welfare. Thank you. Thank you. Good afternoon. My name is Dick Levine. Fifty years ago, I gave up on Lexington and I gave up on Kentucky. I realized two years after the Arab oil embargo that as an architect, I would have to be involved with solar energy. I went national. I went international. In 2010, the American Solar Energy Society gave me their Lifetime Achievement Award, the Passive Solar Pioneer Award. In 1994, the European Union held a European-wide conference called the European Conference of Cities and Towns Toward Sustainability. It was a response to the Earth Charter Conference in Rio de Janeiro two years before, and it localized the global agreement on sustainability to Europe. I wrote the charter for that conference, and I was asked to give the keynote address at that conference. I was the only non-European there. That charter that I wrote was acclaimed and passed by acclamation by 2,000 of Europe's most progressive cities and was the foundation of all of the fantastic work that is going on in Europe and is not going on here. I came back to Kentucky. I built my house 50 years ago. It became the first net zero house in Kentucky. Later, I built five net zero houses in Whitley County using a modest amount of Obama's recovery funds. They were bought by five single moms, and they were built to the specifications that proved that they could get money back from their utility every single month if they were a little bit careful with their kids to keep the windows closed in the wintertime and not running in and out all the time. I proved that the cheapest way to run a house, a new house, in Kentucky or anywhere in the United States is to make it 100% net zero solar. Even in the first year, there's a return on investment, and not many people know how to do that. If I can continue for just a minute. I know how to do that. I was thrilled at every speech I heard here today. I was thrilled on both sides. But I beg you, don't stop here. Don't make this a yielding to one company and one project to do something on one piece of land. Lexington is on a roll. Fayette County is on a roll. There's a lot more that you can do that you've already started, and bring in all of these objections. The company that's doing this sounds like a great company, but it's on the wrong site. We have other sites that sheep don't need our best farmland to graze. We don't need to stop here. The utility companies, all of the things that have been mentioned, particularly by Fayette Alliance and the people supporting them, are things that can happen easily now that you've got the ball rolling. Let's keep the sheep here, but put them someplace else. Let's do more planning and more structure. Don't just yield on this one project on this one site. It's a big mistake. I beg you to ... I've worked in China. I've written two books, one on the fantastic things that are going on in China. I'm sorry to interrupt you. We have to treat everybody equally. I would be happy to share what I know with these committees that have done a fantastic job. I'm really impressed with everything I've heard here today. But keep it going. stop here. Thank you. Hello. My name is Brandon Lee. I live on Haley Road that borders one of the proposed sites. I love Fayette County. I think we're all here because it's beautiful. My question is, why trade in our agricultural land? As Silicon Ranch showed earlier, If a cow can graze under a solar panel, I think a car can park under a solar panel. And also, just another thought before we make a decision, what are we trading our acreage in for? Is it to run a microwave or 10 houses? I haven't seen anything that gives a guarantee for what we're trading our acreage on. Thank you. Thank you. Hey, good afternoon. I'm Matt Partymiller. I operate a company called Solar Energy Solutions. We're based here in Lexington. We have a couple dozen Fayette County residents that are employed off Nandino Boulevard. We've been in business 20 years installing solar throughout the region. I also am president of the Kentucky Solar Industry Association. Get the chance to work with all the folks in solar across the state. And then I'm the gubernatorial appointee to the state's Energy Planning and Inventory Commission. We're tasked by the legislature to advise on power plant retirements as well as advise the legislature on matters of energy. So I come to this today and I guess I want to step back and of course you know this, but the issue at hand is staff changes to Council Zoda and I think the particularly egregious and controversial change seems to be around this removal of the conditional use permit for large scale solar. And I certainly agree with that. This isn't really a referendum on what Silicon Ranch is proposing or any specific array. That comes later, and those projects will be presented later and have a chance to be heard later. But what I'd like to encourage everyone today is to retain Council ZODA and retain the conditional use permitting for large-scale solar, because there will be sites where it's appropriate for Lexington. And I would say that if Lexington really has net zero goals by 2050, and if that's part of the plan, the only possible path to get there is with the adoption of renewables. And this is a necessary stage. So without large-scale solar, which is the cheapest form of renewable to deploy right now, I don't see Lexington hitting your own goals. And I would hope that the Planning Commission is not going to stand in the way of such a critical goal as reducing carbon and getting to net zero. So thank you very much. I appreciate your time. Thank you. Hi, my name is Allison Helsinger, and I live off of Haley Downs Road, which is sort of where we're talking about this happening. And to me, as we have these conversations, we have to consider about the precedent that we're setting. Just a few years ago, my husband and I met with the planning and zoning in hopes of carving out a small portion of a family farm. And we were told under no circumstance could an exception be made to the rural land management plan and sort of the concept behind that. We were told that maintaining the integrity of the farmland was vitally important to Fayette County and its future. We were talking about taking a family farm and keeping it a family farm. and that went against sort of our vision for the community. Now we're talking about taking this agricultural land and essentially making it industrial. I understand that there are sheep or cows or whatever on the land, but the land already has that. We already have cows on that land. We already have farms on that land. We already have trees on that land. Like Council for the Fayette Alliance mentioned, we aren't speaking against solar. we're speaking about the precedent and the historical importance of agriculture to this community. If splitting 10 acres off a family farm for a family member of the same family is against our rural land management plan and our community's future, then it is unfathomable how this policy isn't a massive deviation from our precedent. It's a slippery slope and one that should be thought through very carefully, especially because you're talking about a private company owning the land. It's difficult to see the real benefit to the community when we're paying for all of it. We've heard a lot about some other options and some other ways that we can do this, and I think that those really need to be considered. So ultimately, I think we can all agree that renewable energy is a direction that we have to go. But I support the changes made by the staff, not only just for me, because this solar farm would be in my backyard, but for our entire agricultural community that we, including y'all, have very seriously prioritized for our future. Thank you. Hi, I'm Henry Jackson, retired urban planner. As a longtime supporter of both the Purchase Rights Development Program and the Fayette Alliance, I support approval of the proposed red line zoning ordinance to develop a maximum 1% of the land in the county for use for larger scale solar energy systems. The preservation of Fayette County's magnificent ag landscape is the top priority of the nation's oldest urban growth boundary. But today we need to balance the competing needs of ag rural preservation and an accelerating weather crisis. The proposed maximum 1% limit on larger scale solar is more than fair and cautious. In the final analysis, passage of the proposed OTA is a reasonable first step in reaching the city's comp plan goal of being carbon neutral by the year 2050. It is only a matter of time when new market conditions are going to switch to cleaner, cheaper renewable energy, and LFUG as a result of this proposal would have a model regulatory structure as the flagship Ag County in Kentucky. And two, the proposed ZODA would yield significantly greater local control over otherwise exempt public utility site development. Publicly owned utilities are only subject to public service commission regulations and thus exempt from local land use rules. Relatedly, as I have proposed before this podium, the Bluegrass Region will likely prove very much to be a climate haven sometime in the next 5 to 25 years. I've distributed a second copy of my Herald Leader May 25, 2025 op-ed that explains that idea and how to prepare for that possibility. Thank you. I'll be quick because I know we're all tired here. I know I am. My name's Dan Graves. I live on the east side of Lexington. Born and raised out there in farm country. Let me be the first to say I'm all about green energy. Energy needs of this world are vast, especially with the onset of AI and all these data centers. They, solar, wind, water, everything that's renewable energy, they're all coming to every small township in America. And they're here now. And they're going to. And they're going to continue to because they need to. What the good Lord has given us below the ground is limited. We just have to face it. So there's lots of power needs. But let me start you out with this, and I'll leave you with this. Everything has a place. Industrial buildings are industrial parks. Grocery stores are where the vast amount of people live. and Lord knows there's a lot of grocery stores going up in Lexington these days because we've got a lot of new people. Gas stations are on the side of the interstates for a good reason. Lexington, Fayette County is defined, as the gentleman horse farmer said, to the world. It's beautiful horse farms, cattle country. Used to be a lot of tobacco, beautiful burly tobacco. Now we have grain and hay and horses. And if you're in the cattle business, you're in a great business these days, especially if you're selling. And that's vastly the 12th district of Fayette County. When people go for a drive in the country, when they go out to Windy Corner, they're driving out in the country to get away from the city. and they're going out there to see, I don't even have to tell you, you may be one of those people. I'm lucky enough and blessed enough to live out there and drive out in it every day. I don't see this as a choice. Or no, let me get off here. Now, there's a generational change happening right now, and that's the only reason we're talking about this. And what that generational change is, is a new generation that was born and raised on a farm or had a lot of farmland, and now they don't want it. And that's okay. That is okay. They have that right. So that's why we've got land in our 12th district. Lord have mercy, I only have three seconds. Wow. Well, you could take an additional minute. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. If we let this happen today, we're basically cracking the window on it to happen on a lot of different tracts of land. Because there's a lot of people that just aren't going to want the land. And again, that's okay. I don't see this as a choice between solar energy and farming or agriculture or regenerative agriculture, as I heard it earlier. In fact, I don't even see this, I don't consider it farming. Solar farming is, just think about that for a minute. These panels are put out there and they're left. Now, if you have cattle underneath of them, or goats or chickens, your chicken farmer, or your goat farmer, or your cattle farmer, you're not a solar farmer. You put them out there and you leave them. That's not farming, so let's not pretend here. And now, to say it's a choice of a farmer not, well, you know, they're opposed to solar energy or regenerative energy. That's not true at all. Farmers have been in step with Mother Nature since the beginning of time. Providing jobs, providing food. Back to everything has its place. Lexington cropland is not the place for solar panels. Mind you, I did not say solar farming because it's not farming. It's great for the outskirts of Las Vegas. It's great for floodplains. It's great for massive rooftops and industrial zones. It's great for lots of places, but not for this beautiful area in our 12th district. It would be a little crazy to build Calumet Farm on the outskirts of Vegas. A little crazy to cover the 12th District and solar panels. I heard, are we going to limit farming again? I'm sorry to interrupt you. Just to be consistent and be fair, I'm going to have to hear from the next speaker now, but thank you very much. I'll leave it with that. Thank you. Thank you. We appreciate your thoughts. Yeah. Good afternoon. My name is Logan Foster. I live at 3120 Clintonville Road in Winchester, right out at the juncture of Clark, Fayette and Bourbon County. This project, along with the landfill, are our neighbors. It's been part of a continual attack on this area, first with the large-scale industrial solar project in Clark County the bluegrass station airport deal just seemed like a continual attack to degrade our area a lot been said here I'm gonna ask a few questions or present some ideas and then I'm gonna make an appeal and stay within my time limit number one This is an industrial solar project. It's not a farm. Who's building this? Silicon Ranch. As I've heard, they have connections with Amazon. So be it. Why are they doing this? To make money. Who's going to get the power? Yes, this power will stay here, but it goes into the grid. And it's my understanding primarily for the northeastern states. Kentucky is an electricity exporting state. This is for power for the Northeast. The two big questions I'm going to ask is what happens when technology marches on and there are small-scale nuclear plants that are already being developed for data centers? The eastern Kentucky power solar field, in my understanding, is already obsolete. Here's the big question, and this happened over the last two years. One was in Florida, one was in Texas, and I believe the other was in Oklahoma. And you had freak hailstorms, softball-sized hail, baseball-sized hail, destroyed major sections of these solar panels. What are you going to do with them? understanding I think they just dug a big hole like they do with the windmill turbines when they're done. My last is my appeal. The settlers that came into this land, my ancestors among them, this was known and I get very emotional. I'm a farmer, I farm every day. I raise 175 cattle, I've raised sheep in the past. Pardon me. Damn it. The bluegrass is a goodly land. It is vanishing. It is being destroyed. We're losing it. And not long we're going to say, where did it go? we're losing the heritage of the bluegrass and this goodly land once you put the solar panels up it'll never go back it'll never go back and you have to think of your impact on bourbon county the only reason the bluegrass airport bluegrass station airport deal stopped is because Arthur Hancock and another large landowner got in Andy Beshear's ear and said we don't want planes flying over some of the prime thoroughbred nurseries in the nation. I apologize for my emotion, but I would urge you to vote no and vote to preserve what's left of the bluegrass. Thank you. Thank you. All right. At least I'm not the only one who gets emotional every once in a while. My name is Carol Ware. In 1781, 13 individuals shared the name Darnaby, settled in the area of our district. They settled in Bryant's Station. It was still too dangerous to live out and out in the area. But they settled that area. And again, my name is Carol Darnaby Ware. my son over here, Dustin Darnaby. And we've lived in this area since 1781. We have farmed this land. We have owned a lot of it. And over generations, it's changed and moved, and we're down to where we are there at the corner of Haley Road and the interstate, which destroyed my farm in 1968. and one of the biggest problems with farms nowadays is passing it on to the next generation. Do they want it? Am I going to have something that my son's going to want? Is the value going to be there? Or is he going to say, I'm not going through all that trouble you went through? And he loves farming. It's rare. I also have a daughter who would live sustainably fully on the farm and never leave again if she could. Also on Haley Road, there was a gentleman born in a log cabin there at the corner of I-64 and Haley, and his name was Carol Haley. Again, my name is Carol. Darn to beware. This land means a lot to me. I've not seen any numbers. Talking about the zero emissions. I've not seen any numbers of how close that takes us. what is the risk I'm taking for how much towards that zero emission? Have we been through a full business cycle? Has there been a model that shows a full business cycle of this solar panel project? If they've not decommissioned any, how do we know that they can properly clean the area if they were to have to leave? Is the model sustainable? Is it profitable without government intervention, without government grants, without the tax dollars that they're receiving. Would these projects be profitable? No, they wouldn't. They took our flying field out at the landfill a few weeks ago for that solar project. And, you know, if you didn't improve it that day, they wouldn't lose it. It wasn't going to be sustainable. It wasn't going to be profitable because they'd lost their tax dollars. This is not a sustainable business model that will allow these farms to continue and thrive. I was a little offended when somebody said, well, the city does their part, the farmers need to do their part. Well, we do our part. I planted 14,000 trees on my farm a few years ago, 20-some years ago. Put fences down every creek line, 30 feet off the creek, for preservation of water. We do our part. We're a few, but we do our part and we choose to live what we do. And it's a choice that could easily go away. Thank you. Thank you. Good afternoon. Almost evening. I'm Gloria Martin and I'm the current chair of the Rural Land Management Board. I wanted to give you a little background of the letter that you all have received from the Rural Land Management Board. When this first came up two years ago, we immediately put it on our monthly agenda and started looking into this. We were determined to do our due diligence. I wanted to make sure that you all understand that the Rural Land Management Board, by ordinance, thanks to Tracy and some others 20 years ago, made sure that everybody on the Rural Land Management Board was a stakeholder. They are Fayette County residents, and they are stakeholders. They represent the Kentucky Thoroughbred Associations. They represent the farmers, the general farmers like Farm Bureau. They represent the neighborhoods. In fact, I'm the person on the board who represents the rural neighborhoods. So I have to look at it and dovetail. I've got to look out for Athens and Westmoreland and Avon and all those little historic hamlets throughout the area. All of those stakeholders looked into this, and we have a standing committee that looks at the legal aspects that come to the Rural Land Management Board. Margaret Graves, who is here, has been the chair and is the current chair of that committee. And this group did their due diligence. They brought in people, council members, to explain. We had the ZODA committee together who looked at all of this. By ordinance, this group is diversified. So they do represent every stakeholder in Fayette County. You didn't see, when they listed the stakeholders, you didn't see the Kentucky Thurber Association or the Farm Bureau or the Rural Land Management Board or the Rural Fayette County Neighborhood Association Group. So there were stakeholders that we did talk to and look at and represent when we looked at this. The Rural Land Management Board, and in the letter you have, we support solar. We do it on our own farms and encourage it on the farms that have the agricultural conservation easements. Don Robinson that spoke to you is one of those. We have granted that to numerous of our 300 farms that have easements on them if they want solar. We do realize that this is a really big deal because Fayette County is unique. It is truly unique. It is, for the right reasons, the worst capital of the world. And people who've had the advantage know that it is unique to the world. And please look at the letter. Look at it carefully. May I say one more thing? Certainly. Is that two of the people who have spoken today, one talked about McMinnville. I happen to know that very well. My great-grandfather and great-great and great-great-grandfather all farmed in the Warren County-McMinnville area. That is known as the nursery capital of the world. They are raising bushes and trees and shrubs. It has its own type of agriculture, but it is not like here. And also, he talked about Russellville and my first cousins are farming the family farm in Logan County, Russellville, have for years in the Trenton, Christian County, Logan County area. It is entirely different. When you're planting beans and soybeans and nursery plants, it is entirely different from what we have here. Sitting at the top of this Cincinnati Arch is the only place in the world that is like what we have here. And like several of the farmers have told you before I came up here, it is unique and we really need to take care of it. Because it is our golden goose in every sense of the word. tourism, economic development, farming, quality of life for everybody in this county. So if you dovetail it all together, it is really worth saving for all of us. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for all your attention. My name is Phillip Meyer. I live on Shady Lane. I'm a retired farmer. I'm an officer of the Fayette County Farm Bureau. I'm on the Rural Land Management Board, and I'll be very brief. One thing, what makes Fayette County great is our agriculture area. For the last 60 years, we've been fighting very hard to preserve it and keep new things infringing upon it. And I want you all to keep in your mind when you make your decision. And if you approve the council's plan with the 1% limitation in the agriculture area for large solar, you're establishing a very rare precedent that would allow something we don't even know about yet. It might come up five years from now, and they want to be an exception to the rural area, to be allowed in the rural area, and they have a precedent already established because we let solar in. Solar is not farming, as has been said many times here, and please keep it out. Large solar has no place in our fine agricultural lands. Thank you. Thank you. Good evening. My name is Margaret Graves, and I serve as the chair of the Bluegrass Land Conservancy. The Bluegrass Land Conservancy is a non-profit regional land trust established in 1995. We currently work within the Bluegrass region to conserve farmland. We currently hold 184 conservation easements in 19 counties, conserving nearly 39,000 acres of farmland. Of those conserved lands, 30,000 acres is prime farmland or farmland of statewide importance. In Fayette County, we hold 19 donated conservation easements, conserving over 3,000 acres of productive farmland. The proposed text amendment, as drafted by the Council, is in direct conflict with the Comprehensive Plan, the Rural Land Management Plan, and the intent of the AR Zone. It puts at risk our incredible farmland, which is the factory floor of our equine industry, our ag industry, and our tourism industry. It sets a dangerous precedent that will impact and hamper our efforts to conserve farmland in Fayette County. We support the recommended changes as proposed by staff, and we urge you to conserve farmland for the benefit of Fayette County and reject industrial-scale solar in the rural area. Thank you. Thank you. Is there anyone else present who would like to speak before the Planning Commission? Okay. Then we will close public comment for now and entertain Commission discussion, questions. Sorry. Mr. Penn or anybody else? Robin? Well, I was just going to bring up for the rest of the commission that wasn't at the zoning committee, The focus of our discussion, as Tracy sort of touched on, was about the intermediate scale in the ag area. And I was one of the members who had some concerns about removing that as a conditional use. largely because I do consider farming a business that, whether there's walk-in coolers, other equipment, and enabling farmers to have some flexibility, whether they're maybe a different type of farm that doesn't have large barns or they're positioned wrong or just giving a little bit of flexibility that's given to neighborhood businesses in the table. And so I appreciate the staff taking the time to put this alternative text, which sort of, I think, thoughtfully adds that conditional use permit back in in a way that does recognize that there's very drastically different sized parcels in the rural area. And so I thought I would just, for those that weren't on the zoning committee, sort of bring that up and also just say that I think the staff did a really good job of capturing what the essence was in that discussion of what we were trying to still enable while agreeing with the general staff position in alternative text. robin as you know i'm on the other committee so i didn't get the benefit of hearing what you're trying to do but i will tell you that solar wind are good goals there's no doubt about it but the one thing that you've never mentioned here today is the thing that's going to change all this is hydrogen. And I won't get into that, but I will tell you that solar and wind are great things to generate electricity. But what it does do, it cuts down all your trees. It leaves you with a blank canvas that won't be replaced in 100 years when solar goes out, and it will go out. My concern is that the finite that we have, the finite land and soils that we have here, and I've made my whole life digging things out of the ground. My mother called me a dope dealer because I raised tobacco. But I still did it because it fed my family. We've been in a lot of different businesses. my family has. We've been not afraid to fail. Gosh, we made some bad ones at 75 years old. I planted 50 acres of CBD oil hemp. The integrator went out of business. I got nothing. The fundamental rule of agriculture, if you can't sell it, don't raise it. So I'm not afraid to fail. But I will tell you that I don't want to buy 800 acres that has solar panels on it and try to put it back into agriculture. And I'm an optimist. What Don Robinson said about what he could do on his barns and stuff is true. But most everything that happens down that road, it happens because it has government subsidies. And I'm the first person to tell you that farmers have been some of the greatest recipients of government subsidies in the world. It's called ethanol. It's called corn. your food would be a lot higher if it wasn't for that. I'm not proud of that. But there's no way you can buy a farm in Kentucky right now and pay for it raising corn and soy beans. You better have a lot of other land to combine it with. But getting back, the reason I say that is farmers live on two things. They live on depreciation. They survive on appreciation. All of us that own land in Fayette County either have inherited or bought it a lot cheaper than it is now, and I've done both. But right now we're at a state in Kentucky and other states as well to where the investment in land will not return one dime on it. So why do you own it? You own it because you love to farm. But the byproduct of that is, is that if you say, okay, let's just let five acres go into solar. You know what you're saying to your neighbors? I don't care what it looks like. Five acres of solar panels, if I can't see it, it doesn't bother me. Well, it bothers me because it is industrial use in the AR zone. And I've said to staff all the way through that if you really want to do this, if this is not a zone change, I don't know what it is. To even consider letting this be a conditional use, when you're taking agriculture and putting an industrial use on it, Just imagine what other industrial uses can come in here. So don't set that precedent. I don't want to preach anymore. I don't have a man on my left said he didn't have a plate to pass to collect any money. But Robin, thank you for thinking about that. I think that is a dangerous precedent to do. I think if you want to do anything that's not ground mounted, but we don't know what the damage to the soil is for the chemicals that come off when they break, store the batteries, all that type of thing. But if you don't do it for any other reason, don't do it because you don't want to insult your neighbors because you're not going to make enough money off it. It'll help you defray some bills, but you're not going to get the good neighbor award. So that's where I am. You know which way I'm going to go. I'm going to support the staff alternative. And I'd like to hear from the rest of you all. Commissioner Worth. Unfortunately, a lot of the people that I was hoping to talk to have left the room. But I'm going to go ahead and say some of what I was going to say anyway, simply so that it's on the record. I think we've heard people say that in these conversations, we have shown not as much respect as is due to the skilled trade people. And I'm going to talk personally here. I have a godson that I sent to welding school four years ago. He finished his program. He joined a union. He went to Ohio and he started helping build an expansion for a factory. And in that process, he created a lot of jobs. Skilled workers are important. They're important here in Fayette County in a lot of other ways. I was in a meeting the other day where I heard that Coal Stream Research Park, which is 750 acres and it's not fully developed right now, and had a lot of jobs for skilled tradespeople, has created jobs for 2,000 people out there, and it's not fully built yet. So don't think that we don't respect your work. We do. We're being asked here to balance the resources that our community has against what the community will gain. And so I want to talk a little bit about the farmland resources. I'm not a farmer, obviously. I've learned a little bit from hanging around a few of them over the few years, and I served with a farmer on the expansion area work group. One of the things I learned from them is that when you drive out one of our rural roads and you see that grass out there, that's not fallow land. That's not land that's not creating value. I used to think agriculture meant you had to see a cow, you had to see a horse, or you had to see a crop. Well, the reality is that grassland is probably going to be used for hay. And if you're going to have cows and you're going to have horses, you're going to have to have hay. That is productive farmland, and it has an economic value, and we need to factor that in. Another thing I want to say about that economic value is that in this county, we don't talk about the environmental benefits that we gain from our agricultural land. That farmland absorbs heat. I watch Bill Meck on television give us the temperatures from around the county. Always, the center of the city is multiple degrees hotter than the farmland because it's all paved. It's concrete. It's hard service. It's absorbing heat. The farmland around is reflecting heat. The farmland around us is absorbing that heat. It's doing work for us. It's absorbing stormwater. We've had major problems with stormwater around here lately, but our farmland helps us deal with that. And the other thing it does is it sequesters carbon if it's managed right. We've got people in Extension that are here helping farmers learn how to manage their pastures so they do a better job of sequestering carbon. Am I saying the right stuff here? Is this true of what I'm saying true here? Keep on preaching. Yeah. All of that has a dollar value. In some parts of the country, that dollar value is calculated and shared in terms of the value of agriculture. We don't do that here, but I think we probably need to do. So I want to wrap this up by saying in terms of balancing these resources, Number one, I have heard twice on video that the folks from Solarize Lexington say we can meet our target zero goal without changing our zoning for the agricultural land. They say we don't have to do that to meet that target, so we need to, I think, consider that. And the other thing I would say is I think probably their long-term solar is not a solution. I support sailors. I grew up in Texas. West Texas, if we were talking about industrial solar on farmland out there, I'd say put it there. It's a good place to put it. But when we're talking about Fayette County, we're something that's probably going to be a shorter-term solution to our power shortage. If we're going to do it, then I'd say, for goodness sake, preserve our prime soils, our significant soils. Let's do regional planning like we're doing with industry. We've got a five-county program going to put industry on land that's more appropriate for the industry. Let's do our solar on land that's not our prime soil. That's what I've got to say. Thank you. Mr. Wilson? Well, first of all, I think what we ought to do is pause and take up a little collection. Our partners here have expressed a lot of my feelings and sentiments. Let me also say to you all, thank you all for coming, and thank you for your patience, and thank you for your resilience. And I can understand now how we won the War of 1776. It was through people like yourselves who stuck it out for the most part and for the better part of it. Let me say this. I am going to be brief by simply stating that I am going to support the staff's recommendation on this. A couple of years, in 1996, we expanded our urban service boundaries to about 5,000 acres. I found out later on we only used about half of that. And I guess about in 25 was it that we expanded our acres again to about 5,000 acres, 2,800 acres. 2,800 acres, and it's going to take us five to ten years before we use up all of that particular land. So when we were sitting here discussing this, I'm going back to Judy's point about balancing. I got to thinking, it's not a matter of if we're going to have solar, it's not a matter of when, but the question is bugging all of us is where. And we've got land right now that is available that could be used for solar. So the question becomes, why are we here talking about using agricultural land? I cannot in good conscience mess around with a $2.6 billion industry for a hope and a prayer. Now, I might take the prayer off. That might be a little blasphemous. But the bottom line is I don't think that's the right way to go on this. So, again, I support the staff's position on this. I hope for those of you who disagree with me understand that that's the nature of the game. We're trying to do the best we can to balance what we have, but I have no fear, no concern about the fact that we're doing the right thing. I have some friends coming in here from Michigan, and one of the things that I have sold them on is a tour of the Bluegrass area. I cannot envision them riding around looking at solar panels. That is not what they're coming here for. They're coming here for the fact that we're high in tourism, and they understand the beauty of what we have. As my grandmother would say it, we can know the price of everything and lose the value of all the things if we're not careful. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Wilson. Any other discussion? Mr. Owens? Thank you, Mr. Chair. And, yes, thank everyone for being here today and voicing opinions. that's what makes this work. Sometimes not the way you want it, but that's what makes this work. Fortunately, going towards the end, my comments may be shorter than if I'd been at the first. But what I saw with this throughout the process is one, we saw this two years ago. And in those two years, nothing has really changed. Nothing. Nothing physically has changed. Two years ago, it was an application request by an applicant, a private entity, and this time around, it was generated by the council, but still nothing has changed in a physical nature. I do believe that it's contrary to the comprehensive plan in numerous ways. And I do believe that this is an industrial use. I'll back up just a little bit. With this request, this is a ZODA, Zone and Ordnance Text Amendment. which has county-wide implications. It's not supposed to be site-specific. We've heard a lot about that today in an indirect way, but it's a county-wide situation. And that's very important. The comprehensive plan looks at the whole county when we're doing this. Unfortunately, I can feel for Robin here, but unfortunately I have not heard anyone generate any interest for an intermediate scale ground mounted solar. I personally just don't think it's feasible. We did hear rooftops, you know, two to five thousand square feet. business is making it work larger he he wants his land for for other production and that's what it's supposed to be you know prime soils is the key here and I looked up and I found Mark Twain said it pretty good they don't make this stuff anymore you know land isn't made anymore and once we take it away, it's gone. I can say that, you know, a lot of what goes on here in Lexington is with livestock and equine. I do know of a 125-acre thoroughbred farm that was put back into corn and soybeans for the last seven years, though. And, you know, that's what this land does. It's so prime, it's so invaluable that it will produce what we need to. And personally, I don't think it's solar. I'm going to close by saying we're looking at an economic impact here of $2.6 billion. Breeders' Cup is coming here in November. And that's going to have an $80 million impact for one weekend. One weekend. And that's important. And I think it's important to everybody and it touches everybody. Colleagues mentioned, what do you do if you have visitors coming? You take them on a tour. You drive them out to Old Frankfort Pike. You drive them out into the county. You let them see these horse farms. That's what's important and that's why they come here to see what we have and why it's so valuable to us. that land is our Florida beaches or Vail ski slopes. That's the only thing we can do with it. And I think we do a very good job with it. I am going to support the staff 100% in their recommendation. and most of y'all know I usually do, but sometimes I don't. But this is an important thing. They've got it 100% correct here. So thank you. Commissioner Molly Davis. Thank you, Chair. I don't want to repeat anything anybody else has said, but I do think it's worth saying a couple of things. One is that Council Member Savigny said that the landfill was on prime farmland. I believe it may have been when it was created, but it's not prime farmland now. It's considered a brownfield. And I think it's important for folks to know that because it could lead people to thinking that we allowed there to be a solar farm on prime farmland, and we did not. The other thing that I want to say is I was on that zoning committee. I am on the zoning committee, and I attended the meeting. It came from a concern by Commissioner Nickel that a person who owned a farm and wanted to run their operation on their farm, he used the example of, say, being a hemp producer. I don't know if that's valid or not. He said, what if they needed 3,000 square feet of solar to run their production, and they wanted to use that? That's where the conversation began about changing the value of the intermediate-scale solar farming. But he's not here to defend it, and I am in agreement with others who have said they will support the staff recommendation. Thank you. Thank you. Mr. Nickel. I do have one follow-up. It was not just Commissioner Nickel. I've really struggled with this, I'll be honest with you, and I think it's interesting seeing so many of you who are normally on the same side come and speak on opposing sides here today. When I think about our farmland and I think about farming, I think about how we're using resources, we're using water, We're using land. We're using soil. We're using sunlight. We're using sunlight to grow plants. And increasingly, we're using sunlight for energy. And I have thought about it as a small business owner who's made decisions on equipment that are primarily gas, but I'm thinking electric because I'm thinking that, you know, one day I can add solar to help offset my own energy usage. And I can easily see that as a farm, which increasingly needs to integrate different methods because you don't want to rely solely on what the cattle price is today or what the Keeneland auction does tomorrow. You want to have different streams of income. It makes sense that farmers are looking at growing crops with livestock, or it makes sense that farmers are looking at energy that's coming from the sun onto their farm. I share my fellow commissioner's view on industrial solar, that that does not belong in our farmland. But as I look at multi-generational farmers that have lost one crop after another in hopes of things like winemaking and hemp fizzle, I do wonder, and we come here and we block vacation rentals in the farmland, we come and we block solar in the farmland, I do wonder what options we are giving people in the rural area. So I was on that committee, and Commissioner Nichols isn't here to defend it, but I do think an avenue for intermediate solar for some of our farmers to help run their operations, to help offset their energy costs, is an important factor. I don't think we're going to see a lot of it because, as my fellow commissioners have noted, it doesn't make economic sense. But I can speak here personally. I have to make big, when I make business decisions, operationally, it has to make economic sense, but it doesn't have to maximize profit. We can choose, as long as we're profitable, to spend more on alternative energy. And I think taking away that choice of essentially all of our farm operations, if they don't have barns that are large enough to support their operation, is a mistake. I think that this is a resource that's available to our farmers, and I have a hard time saying to them that they don't have the same choice that a neighborhood business owner would have. I just want to make sure I'm understanding our options for today. The staff alternative text with regard to the intermediate scale has that as not allowed. And then I'm looking at another page from the zoning committee that uses conditional use permit for intermediate zones. Are we entertaining both of the, you know, trying to decide between both of these or is that exactly it? Okay. Yes. And then there's obviously the council initiated text, the base text, the red line. Do we have the chart like this for the, I may be over it. Yeah. So it's minus the blue text. Okay. Okay, I got you. Okay, I just want to make sure I'm looking at everything correctly. And I have to echo what Robin said about the intermediate scale and giving options as we look in the future. I think that it does make sense that a farm operation may need to save costs or do what they need to do to have their own solar capacity within their own land. And giving them an opportunity to do that, I think it makes sense. So I like what the zoning committee is putting forward here. Okay. All right. Can I put an request here? I, you know, I'm torn here because I don't feel like I have enough information on this particular point to make a decision. I'm sorry? I said I'm torn here on this particular point because I don't feel like I have enough information to make a good decision. I understand the pros. I'm not real clear about the cons. Well, you know, my con to it is that it's putting industrial use on AR land. And if you're going to do that, it needs a zone change. because if you don't do that, just think of any other industrial use that might come along, and you set a precedent to put it in the AR zone because we allowed solar in there. It's not a question of size. It's a question of the fact that you are allowing an industrial use on an AR zone without a zone change, and that's about as far away from ag as you can get. It's an industrial use. now the difference is putting it on the soil versus putting it on the building or putting it anywhere the difference is that you're putting ground-mounted solar in an AR zone it may or may not help the use you don't have any idea what his electrical use or anything else is I'm more concerned about allowing the industrial use in the AR zone than I am about the size and the scale. And the reason for that is that you have opened the door to say any other industrial use, if they can make a case, can go into the AR zone. What is more intense than industrial in our zoning orders? Well, if I may, if we approve the staff alternative text, we're allowing it as an accessory use in B1 neighborhood business. Yeah. Not just in the staff alternative text and the council text. We're allowing it intermediate in a lot of zones that are not industrial. That's true. It is true. Right. I can already say it again. But my question to you is, why would you do this with a conditional use permit? If you want to change the zone, change the zone. But don't do it with a conditional use permit. Well, the conditional use permit was in reaction to some of the concerns we heard about siting and location and soil management and that sort of thing in the rural area. and that could be reviewed at the time of the application, which I suppose we could say that those same concerns, maybe over a parking lot or in the urban area, weren't as strong. So my question then is, what would keep someone from building a structure to allow themselves to have solar on it? Nothing. Nothing. I mean... Nothing. Nothing. So they could build a structure, take up that same amount of land. Yeah, but they're not putting it in the ground. Okay, I guess I'm kind of lost on that because if I'm building a structure, I'm going to cover the ground with something, most likely concrete, as opposed to a post for standing solar. So I'm not really understanding. I'm just going to say on the fact that I don't want industry use. I don't want industry use in that Arizona industry. Okay. It is an industry use. And open to go for any other industry use. It may not need five. It may need two acres. But guess what? What's the difference between that and so on? But in the process of filing for a conditional use permit, you would understand what the scope of the usage is, right? Yeah, I just don't know that that's necessarily an industrial use at a smaller scale. Maybe it does, yeah. I'm learning. Okay. All right. Frank, can you use your microphone? Did you break it? No, it's not broken. Use your mic. I said if I've learned anything else in planning commission in 20 years, it's called unintended consequences. Do you hear that? I did. Good. Okay, Mr. Owens. I'll be brief. In talking about what Ms. Barksdale was asking as far as putting solar on a rooftop if you build a building, we're talking about agricultural land. Somebody's going to build a building and use that. It's going to be a multi-use type situation. Whatever the barn is, whatever the building is, it's going to have a multi-use on it. And the benefit is that you've got a large rooftop that can supply solar. and that doesn't need a conditional use aspect. You know, Mr. Robinson spoke about, you know, his situation. You know, he's got 3,000, 4,000 square feet right now and he's producing all the electricity that he needs. You know, but we're talking about agricultural land and if you, you know, you're going to use another building, you're going to use that building for some other purpose as well. So. Thank you. I think the other thing that I'm having trouble understanding is the level of ground disturbance. When you have a 2,500 square foot ground-mounted solar energy system, it's very different compared to five acres of ground-mounted. I would imagine to get five acres of solar panels in consistently, you've got to do some grading. and grading any prime farmland, once you graded it, the soil tilth is gone forever. You cannot get it back. So that's the thing. All right. Just my own thoughts. And when we were asked to begin this process, Mr. Penn very, I think, wisely said, let's form a work group and try to get ahead of this. and be as diligent as we can. And so I'm very grateful for the volunteers that served on that work group and presented in front of the work group. The entire purpose of the Planning Commission's solar work group was to collect scientific data, evidence, and have enough of that to present to the Planning Commission so that the Planning Commission with our staff can make a decision on what we do want to send back to council to complete this request. As far as, we learned a lot in the solar work groups. One of them, I had to note that Mr. Penn a few years ago reminded me that the reason our urban service boundary on the south side of the county goes all the way to the Jesmond County line was that the soil quality on that side of the county is nowhere near what we have on essentially the rest of the county. And so there's been decades-long decisions based on the quality of our soil, and I think those are precedents that simply have to be respected. What was very impactful to me was a representative from Hallway Feeds on Loudoun Avenue testified, and Hallway years ago voluntarily began installing pretty significant solar panels on their lot and building to be part of the solution. I don't believe they received any funding or any incentives to do that. They did it entirely on their own. And they actually had to come down here and get a zone change to do all of that solar installation. So they really, truly believed in it. And as I was talking to this representative during our work group, we were discussing the different types of solar they have on their site. And he moved to the ground installation solar. And I asked him, in your opinion, was the installation or even the current use of that land right now, would you call it industrial-level use? You are already on industrial use as a feed mill, and your zoned industrial, was that process an industrial-level use? And he didn't hesitate at all. He said, oh, yes, it was absolutely an industrial-scale installation and now use. But he, of course, is in an industrial zone. And he did supply some numbers that those panels do offset significant numbers of their electric usage. On the zoning committee, I voted with Robin to take this to the Planning Commission just because I thought there was room there for something, and I thought it was worthy of further staff review and discussion. hearing what we've heard today combined with everything we heard in our work groups unintended consequences is the exact phrase I was contemplating and I think we just don't know enough about it yet to go that far so I am inclined to support the staff's recommendation we did have some additional language submitted to staff earlier this week regarding decommissioning and the amount of land that can be used. So again, that was sent to staff. Yes, that's exactly right. that was sent to staff earlier this week for consideration, possible inclusion if the Planning Commission so desires. Okay. I think that is all I personally have. Does anyone have any other thoughts? Commissioner Ward? I would like to, I mean, I came down pretty hard on the Council's version. I would like to say that I think they added some things that were particularly the definitions and what they did add about decommissioning was valuable. I think they've improved the ordinance by those additions. I don't think we're completely there yet in terms of this ordinance, in terms of even the decommissioning piece and some other things where I think we need more detail in water quality. But for now, given whatever we're saying about these proposals, I think we've moved ahead. Okay. I think we've moved ahead in terms of what we've added with decommissioning and the definitions. How do you want to address, sorry, Chair, there's more things that other people have mentioned, like on the right post-it, how we measure the footprint, the process to measure and track, which I know applied to a large scale. I'm assuming this would require a motion. Am I right? Yeah. But there are some other things that the Environmental Commission recommended, some other parts that I don't think are yet in anybody's version of a ZOTA. I'm sorry, I'm not. I'm not understanding your question. Tell me the beginning part of what you just said. My question was, I heard some things from the Environmental Commission when they made some recommendations. And I can't remember who else made some recommendations, but there are some things that are not either in council's version or the staff version, I believe. So how do we address those things? I get it. Question. I think the straightforward answer would be if somebody wants to make a motion including something, we could get a feel for if it has support or not. And if it does, then we would have to write out any additional language or make any changes very specifically before we take a vote. Might that involve consulting with the LFUCG attorneys who are here present? I mean, is there anything? Are you proposing all of those changes from the Environmental Commission? I don't know if I am, but I heard some good ones and I made some notes. So if I could add just a few things. if a solar energy system is a conditional use, regardless of the zone, and it goes to the Board of Adjustment, the Board of Adjustment can consider some of these things, like the type of vegetation planted. The Board could dictate that it be of a certain species or compatible with Kentucky bluegrass or those types of things. That's kind of a site-specific, very granular recommendation. Yeah, I understand, but I would feel more comfortable if we could, as a planning commission, say things that we would like to have in there, such as it should be native species for any kind of ground cover, so that we prevent... I just worry that we're getting a little granular. I just want to remind you, and I don't want to discourage anybody from putting something in here, but this is a zoning ordinance text amendment. So there must be text. You cannot make, like, I'd like to have this general provision. It can't be that. And you have to do it today. We're under a 60-day deadline. You have to do it today. It's statutory. It doesn't have anything to do with whoever initiated it or that you have it or anything else. The council initiated it. The statute says you have to make a recommendation of the text back to them within 60 days. And if you don't do it today, you won't meet that deadline. So I'm not saying you can't do that, but I'm saying if you are going to do that, it may require some discussion. and it's going to need to be specific. You can't amend the text generally. And so that just so we're clear because, you know, we are on this clock. Tracy, can you talk a little bit? I mean, one of the things that's bothered me about this in terms of it going to the Board of Adjustment for these decisions is there's no criteria, nothing's really spelled out for Board of Adjustment about how they will make these decisions. What will be the process by which that happens? Maybe that will make us feel a little more comfortable. Just real quick, clarification. The only, am I reading this correctly, that the only conditional use permit that would go before Board of Adjustment would be industrial solar in the B4, I1, I2, ED, is that correct? In the staff's. In your? In the staff's alternative text, yes. Okay. So to Judy's question. And I would let Tracy Wade expound on this a little bit, but when things go to the Board of Adjustment under a conditional use permit application, the staff does do the same kind of research. They present a recommendation to them, and so they can consider those things depending on what the application looks like. It's difficult sometimes when you don't know what it is they're asking you to do. They're each individual. Tracy may want to expand on that a little bit in terms of how they handle that at the Board of Adjustment. Because I haven't staffed that for a number of years. Just again, speaking for myself, I think that the staff on this particular ZODA report really did extraordinarily well. and I was very proud of the work they did. I thought it made a lot of sense. I think they improved upon everything as a whole. Again, I'm inclined to stick with their work and consider the language that we had sent in earlier this week for inclusion. Yes, sir. Just remember, this is a recommendation we're making to the council. Sure to goodness, if this goes through much on the council, the decommissioned part can be looked at. All we're saying in the record we're making here, all we're saying is we think the decommissioned part needs to be stronger. We don't have to write that today. They can take that as a recommendation. They cannot. Anything else we pass here, it's the same thing. We're going to send it to them. they're going to consider it and then decide what they want to do with it. So I don't think you want a wordsmith on this as you go. Just Claire. Am I on or I'm on? Are you suggesting that this go forward as recommendations to the council? That could easily do it that way. I think what Tracy Jones recommended is that we have specific text written as opposed to this. I think this is almost there. And so we've drafted something to show you if these are things you want to include. I will say the one thing that's difficult to include was the note about enforcement and noting the correct body who's authorized to bring action for injunctive relief to enjoin a violation of the ordinance. I think that's likely covered by Article 5 of the zoning ordinance in terms of enforcement in general. And our law department might not want us to specify a particular manner by which that happens since it's governed by state law and other parts of the zoning ordinance. So I'd be reluctant to add something in this particular section about that. But the other items we can incorporate and we can show you text if you want to see that. Okay. Mr. Chair, let me also add, if you don't mind, if you believe that the work of the work group that you convened is generally reflected in the staff alternative, then you have before you the work of the work group, and you all can make a motion on the staff alternative as it is without any other recommendations to council, and just advance this onto council and let them then do what they're going to do with it. Okay. Yes, sir, Mr. Wilson. Are you ready for a motion? Okay. What I will say, Mr. Wilson, is to everyone who came, it is very important to the Planning Commission that we hear from you, and we do hear you, and what you say does have an impact on how we see things and how we think about things because we welcome any and all perspectives before we make a decision like this. And Mr. Wilson will make a motion. There may or may not be a second. But hopefully we get a second. That's a possibility. At least it will be on the table. Hopefully we get a second. And when we do, we will take a vote. And for those who would like to stay for the rest of our meeting, because we're not done yet, you're welcome to. But if you do choose to leave, please do so efficiently and quietly so we can continue our agenda and go home to our families. Just for the record, we're not getting paid for anything. I just thought I'd let you know. We've had to struggle for a parking place, but that's another issue. Mr. Chairman, I move for approval of PLN ZODA 26-4 Amendment to the Solar Systems for the three reasons provided by staff. As written in the staff's report? Yes. to the Planning Commission. Okay. Thank you. And Mr. Penn made a second to that. Is there any discussion from the Planning Commission before we take a vote on this? Mr. Mickler. You have two items. One, just as a clarification, this is the staff alternative. I had a second to think about how I was going to vote because I could hear kind of the feelings of my fellow Commissioners. By and large, I'm going to vote in support of this because of the work that our Chair did and fellow Commissioners with the work group, and by and large, I support the text as a whole. I do still feel that closing this one area is closing off an opportunity for innovation, and I fear that we do this maybe a little too often with our zoning where we fear the worst, and so we close opportunities for creativity and innovation that supports the small-scale local sustainability initiatives that people are trying to do in the community. Thank you, Robin. Okay. Matt? May I ask a question of Mrs. Wade? Does the staff alternative contain anything about the percentage cap that Chair Davis brought up? And does it also mention anything about, I know it can't include enforcement, but what about requiring the community benefits plan? And what about that the decommissioning plan has more tooth teeth to it and that the conditional use permit is not transferable? Those would all be additions except for the 1%. I think the change in the text that you had shared earlier changed it from 1% of Fayette County, which is how it reads in the adopted ordinance today, to 1% of the rural service area. That's the change that was proposed. But none of those changes are in the staff report. That information came after the staff recommendation. But, of course, the staff can take that and use some of it for context if they so choose. while preparing to take this to council. So, okay. Great, and thanks. All right, so we have a motion and a second. If there is no... This is what? The staff report is what is going to council. Correct, yes. There's not going to be additional things added. Right. I just wanted to clarify. Okay, so this is to support the staff report and recommendation and recommend that to the Urban County Council. We will, after a lot of work, we will put this to a vote. All right. That passes unanimously. Thank you. Thank you, everyone. Our next item on the agenda today is the election of officers. And the Planning Commission had a nominating committee. The nominating committee recommended a slate. There was a very, very, very minor confusion. No big deal. Molly, you could just take a brief moment to elaborate on that. Sure, happy to. So the nominating committee consisted of myself, Bruce Nickel, and Larry Forrester. And since they are not here, I can say whatever I want. So while your agenda reads that the nominating committee recommended the following slate, Chair Zach Davis, Vice Chair Ivy Barksdale, Secretary Robin Mickler, and Parliamentarian William Wilson, Mr. Wilson has subsequently withdrawn his agreeableness, And Mrs. Judy Wirth, who already is a parliamentarian, has agreed to be the parliamentarian again. And so that is the slate we'd like to put forth. Zach, Ivy, Judy. Although I did my best to talk Mr. Wilson into doing this. Good luck. Okay. And Mr. Mickler as secretary. Okay. Okay, so technicality, since it's, Trace, Mrs. Jones, since that is technically different than what the nominated committee reported to the Planning Commission, does that need to be made in the form of a motion from the floor, since it is slightly different? Yeah, I think I think it moves a slight. Okay. I mean, I think Ms. Davis giving you the report that that's what she wants to do, you all can just adopt. Okay, I just wanted to make sure. As a parliamentary rule, you have to open up the floor for nominations from the floor. Yes, sir. Anybody out there? I'm not talking about it out there. I'm talking about it out there. We wanted you for the job, Bill. Okay. So, thank you, Molly. The slate has been presented with the slight amendment of Parliamentary and Commissioner Worth continuing in that role. Is there any discussion or motion on the floor to approve the slate? Have we made a motion? What you should do is open it up for any other nominee. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. You're exactly right. Are there any other motions from any other planning commissioners? I move the nomination to cease. You move to nominate. You can take a shortcut and say without objection, nominations are closed. Okay, without objection, nominations are closed. Now, do we have a motion to approve the slate? Okay. I'll make it up. Thank you. Thank you. Commissioner Marksdale moved to approve the slate. Mr. Owens seconded. Any discussion? If not, we will put that to a vote. Am I allowed to vote no? No. You've already said yes. Yeah, I know. All right. Take that vote. Well, it was actually me, but it doesn't matter. You can't stay either. Okay. Now, we now have to move on to the delegation of secretary's duties. Yes. So can that be in the form of a motion? Yes. Yes. Mr. Chairman, I move that the staff be allowed to take the secretary's duty. Thank you, Mr. Pence. Do we have a second? Second. Thank you, Mr. Wilson. Don't you want to oppose that? I'll support it. Yeah, okay. Motion and a second. Any discussion? We will take a vote on that. Okay, that carries unanimously. Are there any final commission items tonight? If not, Mr. Duncan. Wait, where's the pizza? Mr. Chair, another remarkable meeting. Thank you. Thank you all for this. We will see you again next Thursday for Planning Commission work session at 1.30 in the Phoenix Building. Okay. Thank you, Jim. Without objection, we are adjourned.