Don’t listen to Herald-Leader editorial about growth in Fayette County | Opinion

Dear Urban County Council members:

Please do not expand the Urban Services Boundary. Yesterday’s editorial in the Herald-Leader, which promoted ad-hoc rezoning of prospective tracts by owners into the USB, is an insult to the 65-year history of Lexington’s planning model. It represents the opposite of planning. Do not be fooled; this satisficing suggestion serves no one except opportunistic landowners who want to sell while housing and land prices are hot. It will not address housing affordability (which is a nationwide issue not unique to Lexington) and undermines the thoughtful and methodical process we have used since the City Planning Commission was established in 1928.

As a growth management scholar and a 9.5 year veteran of the LFUCG Planning Commission, I served on the Sustainable Growth Taskforce. That document, albeit complex, provided a model for tracking absorption of land in every zoning district across the county. The model monitored development on the 113,000+ tracts of land in the county and allowed policy makers to establish thresholds to trigger considering an expansion of the city limits. Yes, it is complicated; land economics is not simple. Suggesting that landowners come forward as they seek to sell their property will create chaos. It will place the Planning Commission under unprecedented pressure. They are supposed to follow a plan; haphazard rezonings are not part of a plan.

The Sustainable Growth Taskforce learned of the costs to the city to provide community services, based on land use. For every dollar received in tax revenue, commercial land costs $0.33 and agricultural land costs $0.88 to the city. Residential land is expensive; it costs $1.69 for every $1.00 in revenue. In other words, residential land uses are subsidized by farm and retail land. Residential land costs the city, but also exposes others to costs such as noise and congestion, and more carbon emissions.

The growth machine (those persons/agencies that financially benefit from land development) know that as land becomes available outside of the USB, purchasers will seek to maximize the exchange value from that land; in other words, they will maximize their profits. Without a plan for adding land into the USB, the result will be a developers’/sellers’ feeding frenzy, based on highest returns. The result: we will get more “luxury” and “exclusive” housing that costs the city more money.

And by the way, Lexington would be just another town in the Midwest if it weren’t for the equine industry which surrounds our city. This fundamental struggle is not between “horse people who want the boundary to stay exactly as it is forever” and developers – this is a struggle for Lexington to maintain its brand identity, which makes Lexington Lexington.

Do not succumb to the dumb prescription heralded by the Herald-Leader. It abandons any semblance of order and planning, and insults the highly intelligent population of this beautiful city.

Lynn Roche Phillips, Ph.D., AICP is a growth management scholar at the University of Kentucky and a 9.5 year veteran of the LFUCG Planning Commission.

This story was originally published May 23, 2023 at 10:06 AM.