I had some computer problems yesterday. This is quite a report. It’s 28 pages. It’s more of an inventory, but if you would allow me… This is very much a working draft.

You can use this to submit to the City Board. Under the law, they’re required to submit a plan to the Coordinating Committee provided that Oakland or some other party here in the county wants to open the Coordinating Committee issue up.

I’ve provided a new map.

(Map passed out to Planning Commission members but not displayed for the public.)

In approximally your existing Urban Growth Boundary is 24,000 acres. The study area is 48,000.

At the time that I got your agenda out, I was able to provide some very basic information.

Again, I hope you won’t think this report’s a plan. It’s more of an inventory.

I will go into the methodology to talk about the accuracy. It’s based on the tax card information because you gave me a month to turn it around. So it’s only as accurate as the tax cards are to the state computer. There’s probably some farms that are coded “agriculture” in the back. If you look at the May (?) data in this report, the land uses and the percentages about housing, you’ll see that the acreage, uh, the residential use didn’t change.

I just want to let you know that, again, a farmhouse wouldn’t be picked up either, even if it was on the same data.

Mr. King [city engineer] provided information. Again, this is very much a projection of, I believe, it’s a 142 million for sewer and roughly 54 for water.

A lot of these requirements were strictly because of the statute. Some of the assumptions in the report, which I don’t know how many of you were members back when the first Urban Growth Bounday reports came out of our office, but there’s an assumption that if you essentially have vacant land, you’ve got to use it, re-use it, before you can meet one of the criteria in the law.

We don’t make recommendations. If you do study this and come back next month, I can add your own local justification.

Most communities did say, “we are the municipality better able and prepared to serve that area.” Sewer and water are pivotal. That’s the difference between county and city, is sewer and water.

Mr. Chairman, I’d like to comment that the reason that is drawn as it is, is I’ve got a good number stacked up of petitions to be brought into the urban growth boundaries for several different reasons.

I don’t know about that working draft and before it’s over it’s got to be approved by the county’s Coordinating Committee and everybody else so it could very possibly be changed.

But, these are requests from people from the south and the southwest end of Fayette County. You’ve got those boundaries stretched out that far. Some of the people who petitioned for annexation are far out.

There’s a lag. In our office, we can’t do these. We actually check towns when they do them so there’s a lag in between when the city conducted it and then we do it the preceding, the next, before July 31st. If you did your census in December, the information will be December old. Our office comes in, normally in April or May, and checks it and sends it to the state and it’s certified.

I hope not, sir.

Check my math and my figures. You can grill me. You know, I’m a paid critic so I’ll try to stand up to your criticism.

Again, our office takes the position, reading the law, and I explain it, that vacant land is essentially a reason not to.

Most people did load on to “We’re the city. We have utilities.” You can talk about policies, about starting with adjacent properties and building out. A lot of my towns said, “Agriculture. We can’t force somebody to quit farming.” You can’t either.

My apologies, again.