This new plan will guide growth in Fayette County. Why some voted no.
A plan that will guide growth over the next five years in Fayette County received final approval Thursday, despite push back from some developers who have said parts of the plan are too restrictive.
After months of debate, the Urban County Planning Commission voted 8 to 3 to approve the Comprehensive Plan Thursday after making some minor last-minute changes.
The plan keeps the city’s current growth boundary, which has not been expanded since 1996. Whether to expand the Urban Services Area is typically the most controversial part of the five-year plan.
A second part of the plan outlines the plan’s goals and objectives and transplates those into rules developers use when they seek to change the land-use zone on a property to make way for a new development. Concerns about a section of that part of the plan — called Placebuilders — delayed a final vote on the plan last month.
Placebuilders incorporates the goals of the comprehensive plan into a guide for development. Those principals include emphasizing density, pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods and commercial developments, encouraging multimodal transportation, and boosting infill and redevelopment.
Chris Woodall, director of long-term planning for the city, said Placebuilders was the result of a comprehensive and exhaustive public engagement process over two years. More than 11,000 people participated, he said.
“This plan is built from the ground up with the best interests of the public in mind,” Woodall said before the planning commission’s final vote.
Jim Duncan, director of the city’s planning department, said the plan “is the most inclusive plan ever undertaken in Fayette County. It is a plan for growth — growth in housing, growth in jobs. But it does have some constraints.”
The plan includes 27 land use categories with separate development criteria. Some of those land use categories include “downtown developments suitable for high-density residential” and “corridors suited for medium-high density development.”
Developers and some in the business community argued there was no map to help developers understand what land is in a particular corridor or suitable for a downtown development. Moreover, the development criteria was too restrictive, they argued.
Bob Quick, president and CEO of Commerce Lexington, said the Comprehensive Plan would make it difficult for businesses trying to locate or move to a different location in Fayette County.
“It is already hard enough to find properties for existing businesses to expand or new industries to locate in Lexington due to the limited inventory of available, shovel-ready land inside the urban service boundary,” Quick wrote in a Jan. 9 letter to the commission. “The Placebuilder creates a new development checklist that is very challenging in today’s market and will make it harder to do infill and redevelopment.”
The commission did make some tweaks before final passage. In one instance, they made changes to language that would make it clear that neighborhoods with a mix of housing-density is preferred. But single-family neighborhoods are not prohibited under the new comprehensive plan.
Builders said those changes did not go far enough. During Thursday’s meeting, the group pushed for amendments that would have stripped some of the guidelines from Placebuilders and would have also removed design guidelines for apartments, duplexes and town houses.
The amendments backed by builders and developers failed to pass the commission.
Woodall and planning staff said the plan already has flexibility.
“There is a flexibility within the design guidelines and the development criteria,” Woodall said. “We have done a lot of the hard part for the applicant.”
Urban County Planning Commissioner Frank Penn, who was on the commission when the 2013 Comprehensive Plan was passed, said Placebuilders isn’t perfect but the current Comprehensive Plan has been too flexible. That meant there were a lot of inconsistencies regarding which zone changes were approved or denied.
That was often frustrating to neighborhoods who could not understand why the commission would approve one development but not another, he said.
“For four years we have been a ship with no rudder,” Penn said.
Mike Owens, who has also been on the commission through several comprehensive plans, agreed with Penn. The current plan was too flexible, he said.
“We could have done better in providing more guidance,” Owens said.
Planning Commissioner Karen Mundy, one of three commissioners who voted against the plan, said she couldn’t vote for it because she felt “there was too many criteria.”
The planning commission will have several workshops for the public and for builders over the next several months to show how Placebuilders works.
Woodall said the zone change process will remain the same, though the underlying criteria have changed. It won’t take longer for a zone change to go through the process, he said.
Commissioners who voted against the plan
Mundy, Will Berkley and Bruce Nichol
Commissioners who voted for the plan
Owens, Penn, Graham Pohl, William Wilson, Patrick Brewer, Headley Bell, Carolyn Plumlee and Larry Forester
