City Council - workshop

Okay, is that better?

And project.

And project. Does everyone need to have one in front of them?

There's not enough for everybody.

Okay, all right. Spread out strategically. Very good, very good. All right, well, thank you everyone for coming today. This is, I mean, this is probably going to be fairly informal, but we haven't had a retreat in a couple years, and I believe at the last one we kind of set some direction, I would say. And we've had recently some suggestions and thoughts, individual counsel with staff. And so I thought if we could just kind of get everyone together and let's get more of a consensus on which direction we're heading with not only development but anything else staff or council has interest in. So this is pretty informal, but I don't know. I was talking with council president recently and just kind of maybe establishing some direction on our development, strategic development, and where in the city we want things located, where we want it located, pursue. So I know we've got the map here in front of us. We can kind of maybe even go through different areas. But this is pretty informal. So I know Steve's got some information there. Uh-oh. OK. So you may need a few minutes for that. Yeah, go ahead, Mark.

2018, beginning of 2018, the new council at that time set out a goal to get across 935. We've obviously done that. Maybe limited, but we're over there. And then we tasked Jim with securing our border. And as you can tell, it's pretty good. Normally a comp plan would last more than 10 years, but the last one was finished and approved in 2016. It started out in 2014, 15-ish. But we've gone through COVID. The entire landscape has changed with how much we have growth in our neck of the woods, not just in the city, but around us. So it would probably be in our best interest to start figuring out where we're going next. What are we doing? What should we task people? So obviously, we want to fill that in. But do we want to go north where that pieces up there at 159. Do we want to go fight DeSoto farther north?

And if so, what do we want to put up there?

Do we want to go further west? Wow, that's loud. And deal with Edgerton? Or are we just giving that up? What do we want? How far southeast do you want to go? So those are things this body has to figure out, and we have to give direction to staff. Because we've done a good job, staff has, And we've been approving things, but I feel like we're a little bit complacent now. And we need to know what the next goal is. So that was kind of, Steve had some concerns. I'm not sure what he's going to show, but he had some things he wanted to bring up. So he had called me. I called Todd. I said, how about a work session that turned into this? So it's kind of open to everybody to throw out feedback and see where we want to go.

So we've looked at the areas you're talking about. There are severe limitations with what we can do with wastewater. So the drainage bases don't allow for us to do, I mean, we could do septic developments to the west, but otherwise we'll have to build another plant. So that's a severe financial restraint. Going east is the same thing. We've had properties that are east of where Strong is, and they would be very, very difficult to sew up. So that's why we haven't pursued growth either further west of Four Corners or east of the strong property.

Right.

And that makes total sense. I guess my question is, is the cost worth going out there?

So we're talking $70 to $100 million to build a new plant. So, I mean, that's significant. Yeah. It would have to be, I mean, we don't have anything that is driving growth in that direction. Can we bring that forward a little bit? And we've got maps that will show the drainage basins and what I'm talking about.

As soon as Charles can get off of there.

That would be helpful.

Yeah, if we can.

Yeah, you want to?

We can move that right up here. Would you move it up here? We're old. We can't see. Right. I left my glasses in my car.

So let me weigh in on, since we're talking about a potential change in strategy, my direction has always been to pursue commercial and residential growth. And we have collectively pushed industrial to the side, mainly because of truck traffic and what it would do to the quality of life, putting trucks through the middle of town, putting it on clear road. 199th Street, so that's why we haven't pursued industrial since I've been here. So you put it out to the west, you're going to put hundreds of trucks through the middle of town. So if that's a decision, if the council wants to do that, we can, industrial's always available. But you also have to consider that we would be competing with Edgerton and DeSoto and Commerce Center, and even though industrial has a higher tax rate at 25%. To compete with them, we're talking about abatements of 80% or more. And also competing with Olathe. So we have the Panettone development, which has a spec warehouse that hasn't been leased. And a lot of that is because Olathe matched our incentive. And we matched the airport. So we would be competing with them on abatements And so the 25%, you've got to factor that in. Now, commercial is also 25%. Commercial retail, but you also get sales tax from that. And that's what we've been aggressive in pursuing.

How far to the west did you say before we... Essentially, the...

Kill Creek Basin has three sub-basins to it. So there's three fingers, one that goes into Gardner Lake, then a middle one, and then there's one west of Four Corners Road. So there's a boundary line in that sub-watershed that skirts Four Corners Road. It kind of weaves in and out through there. And then when you get a little further south, between 175th and 183rd, that's when the Bull Creek watershed comes in. And that's when things start heading south versus north. So that Four Corners area, to get into that sub-basin west of that area, which would open up a significant area, all the way from 159th all the way down to 175th, essentially you would be talking about putting a plant further north. I would say north of 143rd would be your best situation, mainly because you could potentially then use that and the two fingers of Kill Creek And then from that perspective if you had to do future expansions and things like that It's cost effective at that point, so you'd be down there at the confluence or near the confluence of some of those creeks that are sub creeks of Kill Creek The the area that you see in blue above 159th Street Currently has dry sewer lines in it that were there for a long time. They've been there I think from maybe more than 20 years and But they were done when a proposal for development was there. The interesting thing about that is, though, it's tied to forcing it all the way back to our plant at 159th by celebration. So that gives you an idea of what the problem is. The further north you go, if you keep going development by development and keep forcing it and having force mains coming back to that plant, it's very inefficient and costly. So you're essentially looking at how do we create a plant that serves that basin, but to maximize the cost that you would have or the expenditure of the cost there, you could look at it from the perspective of how does it serve the rest of Kill Creek. That's the hard part on the west side. We have some limitations there.

So for DeSoto or Edgerton, then, is that, for them, it'd be an easier... project because they're on the other side of that?

Not necessarily. So Edgerton's plant is south. It's at the south of I-35 there. It's in the Bull Creek. So most of the Edgerton area flows south towards Hillsdale. So when it does that, here we go.

Yeah, for them to go north of 56. Let me see if I can.

Charles, you got it up there for a second. I'm going to switch the slide for a second. Right. So just real quick, the red lines that you see on here, the one that's going left to right, that is a major basin shift in the sense that the flows above that line go north to the Kansas River. The flows to the south of that line go south into Hillsdale. So the Edgerton area that's in there where it says kind of Bull Creek and everything, that area is all flowing south into Hillsdale. It goes through that plant. Then there's KDHE requirements that have to be met because there's Hillsdale Lake jurisdiction there, the KDHE. monitors very closely and it's one of the things that limited us on the east side of I-35 also because if you look to the east you'll see the two red lines extending down. Little Bull Creek is essentially the area that we're in right now just above where it says Little. That's the area that we're in on the east side of I-35. At one time KDHE was considering the building of a plant for us and had given us one capacity number Then they reduced that capacity number, and that's when the decision was made to put the lift station in near 191st Street to lift the material back to our main plant at that point. Just to give you insight into how my mind works, that's the map of my mind when we get development proposals. The three red circles that are hollow The one to the north up there is the main plant near Celebration Park. The two that are down at the lower part of the map, that's where our lift stations are currently either planned or in place that are the major lift stations that will get sewage from that portion of Gardner back up to the main plant. So then we have transmission lines or major lines that have to get to that point. Anything kind of to that southwest goes into Bull Creek would have to flow through there a Lot of our area of town right now because we got off of that plant you remember a few years ago We got away from that contract on that plant so all that sewage is lifted and brought back to our main point So we're geographically in a location That's great for preventing floods because we're at the top of the watersheds for different watersheds all flowing different directions and The problem is, from a sewer standpoint, the most efficient way to do sewers is gravity flow. And the most efficient way to build out an area is from the bottom of the watershed upward, not from the top of the watershed downward. In a lot of our situation right now, we're running about, on average, we have one lift station per thousand people in this community. So we're running about 23, 24 lift stations right now. We're trying to consolidate some of those because they were done by development by development. So we're trying to get some of those offline. But because of this geography and the nature of it, it causes higher maintenance costs, higher operational costs, things like that. So to avoid that in the future, the best thing to do is to try to find solutions in these watersheds that would take care of things hopefully independently.

How are we capacity-wise with our expansion? where we have still plenty of room to grow or add.

Once the expansion is completed this fall, then we're going to come to the council yet this fall to start phase two of the wastewater treatment plant expansion. And then once that is completed, we'll be in pretty good shape. Our big concern is our I&I problem that we're trying to work on.

Didn't we go through a whole program with that a couple years ago?

It's been an ongoing program. The problem with I&I is there's a lot of low-hanging fruit that's easy to get to, but it takes a lot of time and effort to find the big problem. And that's where we're at right now. We're out, the guys are out, they've got a camera program that's needed where we're out trying to camera all the sewer lines, trying to identify the I&I. We're working with Danica now on a campaign to try to educate the customers. Get their sump pumps not connected to the sewer system.

Yeah, INI, the interesting thing about INI, and I can equate it to what you're doing with arterials, trying to have that arterial asset management program, there's constant maintenance in the sewer system. So INI is an annual program where you can get so much done and you keep moving through the city. We're still in the process of identifying some of the bigger problems, just trying to get that targeted so we can have priorities to go ahead and start addressing those things. As we find them, they're addressed, but that's part of that budgetary process.

Is there any restrictions right now with wastewater as far as capacity for growth?

There can be, again, for high-end water users. I mean, if you're talking about industrial growth that uses high water as a part of a manufacturing process or other, yeah, we could run into issues with that because the stormwater or not the stormwater, the sanitary sewer system is built on a series of projections that were based on land use assumptions that may not have been as intense as some of those things. I'll use the example, one of the discussions we had during the data center side when they were looking at water cooled versus air cooled, one of the issues was what was the discharge amounts that were coming out and also the quality of that water. Because if it comes out so sterile that it surges into our system, it can kill the bugs that are actually working in the system itself. So there's elements of that that we have to watch for. So when you say there are limitations, there will always be some type of limitation based either on capacity and a user who may want a high-end water usage scenario. And what is the output that they're putting into the system, and how fast is that hitting the system? Because some of it's surge flow, too. As we've been talking to the airport, some of their issues that we're working with them on is sometimes their demand is at a high surge point versus something that's over a prolonged period of time.

And for example, the proposed development on the northwest corner of the interchange would have taken all of our capacity if we would have served that.

And then, so that's not, the stuff to the west is not realistically served by anyone.

Not at this point. And that doesn't mean I mean, there's a situation or there is a possibility out there that at some point, and we kind of watched DeSoto on the side mainly because of what's going on there. I would say they have capacity issues and things like that. Is there ever a scenario where the two communities could sit there and say, let's do a joint project to something that serves both our communities? You've been in that scenario with Edgerton before. Those things can work. It can be done. It opens up a lot of basin, but land use out to the west of Four Corners is going to be really driven by what's the availability of sanitary, and there's no community right now that's prepared to do that from my understanding. There's talk back there, but there's always talk back there. Part of the discussion was once when they were When the county was doing the study on the potential bypass route going from DeSoto down to I-35, they were making some land use assumptions within that study because they were trying to look at it from a traffic volume standpoint. And that was one of the points that everybody at the table was making, that without sanitary sewer there. And that included multiple jurisdictions. Right now, we're not aware of anything where Olathe is planning to go west to Cedar Creek because it requires a new plant and significant investments. It's the same issue for all the communities there.

David, I was told earlier that...

I'd have to look at that. I do know they have some area north of 56 already that's been previously annexed.

That was up around, and I'll talk about that later this morning. But what I've been told this week is that they have annexed in on the north side of 56, and they have it annexed in from four corners all the way back to their community in the hopes of being able to get onto the north side of 56 highway with sewers.

I think some of that's been there for a while. I don't know of a recent annexation, but if it happened real recent, I may have missed it. But they've been there.

There's some city limits and jurisdictional elements.

Let me see if I got the Johnson County map here real quick. I want to go... Yeah, you can see barely here. 51.5. So the Edgerton City Limits, you can see where the red line is, that's that north-south watershed. So this is a watershed map of the region. If you go to the map that is on your right, it cuts through Gardner, which is in the sand color or tan color, but below that, what's in blue, is the Edgerton City Limits. And you can see there's portions of Edgerton that are north of 56. Those have been in Edgerton for a while now, I believe.

I was told that just recently they have it all the way across. If that's true, we may have some concerns.

Well, right now it's just that small. There's a sawtooth element there. There's a couple of them, and that's all I know of at this point.

Okay, so you have no knowledge of anything like that? Not right now. No, we labor the point then. Yeah.

The hard part with, let's see if I can go back here and get, this will be another interesting map we may talk about too. The other part of this for Gardner is the service areas. This is just water and sewer service area. I didn't bring up anything on electric or any of the other stuff. In the past, we've had an interesting relationship with Rural Water 7, where as our service area expanded, they were similar to Evergy. They were allowing us to basically take over portions of their service area as we annexed and things like that. Rural Water 7, as of recent, has been more aggressive about keeping its boundaries, and so developments even like Lone Star and things to the southwest that we've been developing there remaining in rural water seven so our water service area is actually kind of going to be holding to the boundaries you're seeing because water seven is not willing to give up service area and we all know water one is not going to give up service area it's just one of those elements so from a water provision standpoint Our service area is going to be somewhat constrained. It's not going to be an overly expansive area We're going to be dealing with multiple utilities with our customers on water Sewer we do have a small area right now. That's in John Not Johnson County is in the Olathe area, and that's the panettone development. That's being served through Cedar Creek so if I go back to this area where you see Cedar Creek there and The arrows that are kind of pointing off to the upper right corner in that area, that's all flowing through Olathe systems. So that has nothing to do with us from a sewage standpoint. And the airport is served by Johnson County Wastewater through Forest Mains. And they're not interested in necessarily expanding from that because of the geography that's here.

So just out of curiosity, I'd like to understand, let's use Lone Star as an example. They're on Rule 7 for water, and they're going to be using City of Gardner for waste? For wastewater, correct. How do we measure that wastewater?

Well, we can meter it, and the way we can meter it, I believe, and Dave, you'll have to help me with this potentially, so... Just to give you an idea of the problem, Lone Star came in and then Horizon Point, which is the arise homes, just to the west of it. As things were coming in, the way that the sewer was getting expanded, again, because we're getting close to that basin boundary and we were actually crossing the basin. So Lone Star was initially planned as having its own lift station with a force main that was coming back to connect to our area. Those lift stations, we can do some metering at the lift stations. We can do some elements there. Dave can talk more in detail to that. But what was intriguing was when Arise came in, while Lone Star was being planned and going through their process, instead of us doing two lift stations, we were able to work with both developers to get a combined lift station on the Arise property that then, for Horizon Point, that would serve both of those and come back through that force main. The problem is it's that stair-stepped approach. When we get past that boundary, if you will, we're finding ourself, development by development, resolving problems which creates potential operational issues. But metering, I think, Dave, you were indicating, I think we could do something either at lift station metering or something like that to get flows.

We're currently negotiating with Water 7 and Johnson County Water to get those actual meter readings. They're both in the middle of a billing program change out. So until they get that done and see how their system works and whether they can transfer those readings to us, which then we can incorporate into the billing.

So we're actually gonna get the customer water usage just like we would do here off the water meter

So Dave's talking about getting it right at the point source, right there. I was talking about more of if we wanted to actively monitor the waste discharge, we could find a way to meter that.

So Dave, if I understand this correctly, what Dave is talking about, we would import data from Johnson County, our indoor rural seven, as far as water usage, feed that into our billing software, and it would be just like everybody else in town. And what you're talking about is on a, on a gross usage out of a lift station, and then equally billing it back to every lot, or how would that work?

Well, it wouldn't be billed back. Right now, it's based on water meter sizes. So, Dave, you want to talk about that? Yeah.

That lift station serves we should be able to do a one-to-one comparison and see where The usage is so we got ten homes using a thousand gallons We should see ten homes at a thousand gallons at the lift station if we're seeing higher numbers And that's telling us we have an I&I problem we can get that identified and then try to solve that problem.

Right now, our water and sewer rates are based on water meter sizes and things like that. Okay.

So, Dave, if I understand what you're saying correctly, then we would still have the ability to get fairly close. And assuming that these new developments, we shouldn't have any I&I problems with them as well, is that correct?

Well, you know what assuming does to all of us. Sure. But hopefully we can get a handle on it and see what the numbers are. And that's how you address I&I.

Thank you. I will point out one other thing, Mayor, that as we're talking about the rates, it's not just the rates, it's also our system development fees that we collect. So, for instance, when we're over, and I'll use Prairie Trace, for instance, they're on Water One's system, so we do not get a water system development fee from those folks at all. We get the sewer system development fee, again, based on the meter size that's coming online. So we are collecting that because they're on our sewer system, but we do not collect all these systems Development fees anybody who's on those outside services has to deal with water one or water seven or whoever the provider is Does Johnson County wastewater serve these other areas as well could they could they be set up to serve that? They have the same problem. We do most of their system is flowing in different directions, so let's Make this even a little more interesting I What is really interesting, so where the red line ends in the map that's on your left, and the red line that's going across there, where it's ending in the Spring Hill area, which is the purple down there at the bottom, that's Spring Hill city limits. The basins there, if I was to draw a north-south basin line right through there, all those basins that are to the right of that line flow eastward into the Blue River. So you have an eastern flow, a northern flow, and a southerly flow all converging right in that area. And so Johnson County wastewater that's off in that area, all their systems are built to flow to the east and go into those basins. So expansion into these areas would require them to build a new plant to put in a system just like it would us.

Well, the reason I was asking is... Maybe you can answer, Dave, maybe you can answer this question. Is it more expensive when a new subdivision comes in, let's say like Lone Star, for example, and they go to Rural 7 for water and they're using our wastewater system? From a development and expensive operation point of view, which is more expensive, to build out the sewer or the fresh water?

It's about a flip of a coin. They're both buried pipes. You know, depending on the development size, the size of sewer lines needed, the size of water lines needed, I would say they probably run 50-50.

And I'm going to differ a little bit.

Okay, I was going to say, so that's the case, and why are sewer rates so much higher than fresh water rates?

Yeah, the reason I'm going to differ a little bit, especially with Lone Star, I'm going to say this. Lone Star had to extend a Horsemane had a lift station had some other things that they actually had to do through a benefit district as well So there's some assessments in that development that are not reflected in sewer rates But because they were responsible for expanding the system out into that area They had to pay for those costs, and so that's how they did it so there is a there is a difference that occurs sometimes the city doesn't always see the difference and the developer will see that difference.

Okay, so that's on the back of the developer and ultimately the homeowners.

And ultimately the homeowners, because it usually goes as a special assessment on the property tax. Now, the developers are very sensitive to that. They'll know... their performance will tell them what they can and cannot absorb in their anticipated marketplace. So we have had situations where a developer has looked at it and gone, oh, these are just going to be too high of a burden, so we're not going to do this at this time.

Specialists can get to a point to where it makes that developer's subdivision not as attractive as someone else's. Yes, it can do that.

Here in Johnson County you see that more frequently when I worked for Wichita almost every development was done with benefit districts because The size of the builders was so small that in order to do that they had to spread those costs Well that made an equal playing field throughout, Wichita They were able to do that basically because if I went to any development out there I was going to have specials here you have a choice in the marketplace and that's a developer's choice and as to whether they want to bring something online that way or not. And some of that has to do with price points perform as things that we don't ever see.

Thank you. Steve, did you have some stuff teed up over there?

Well, I'm close, but I'm using a different laptop because we had to be able to be compatible with the recorder. Charles, can you help me get this turned on? We'll see what we can do. Sure. Thank you, sir.

So when we look just to the south and east in the undeveloped area there, with our improvements we've done with the sewer and that area we've built, we're pretty close to having capacity, correct, for that entire area there?

Say that again?

We doubled the size. Right, the sewer capacity over there. Correct.

So we still, yes to that. There's still, though, the issue of passing all the way through the system as we do this because we will have to, the lift station and that line that's going up along Clare Road, I'll say just to the west of Clare Road and hooks up in there, that's all been sized for a certain level of intake. There's another branch in there that goes up the middle portion of that south area that will have to come and be brought into that. I assume that will probably cause expansions to occur. So as things happen, there will have to be expansions. I just wanted to qualify that.

There's actually a Y. Yes.

It's not all one creek that's in that area or one drainage basin. There's two subbasins in there. The other thing I'll just add, Councilman Baldwin started out talking about the land use plan. The interesting thing about the land use plan was back in 2016-ish when it was adopted, that southeast area was identified as really an area that they didn't put land use in. They just identified it as market-determined growth area. which is kind of interesting to us because it does, as a staff, it basically says, well, as you bring things in, we will evaluate those and look at them, which means we could get all different kinds of proposals in there. The two sub-area amendments that occurred in 2018, was it?

I think it was 18.

Those two sub-areas which are around the interchanges actually indicates industrial, commercial, and other elements into it. The hard part is today decisions that were made with Prairie Trace put residential into areas that were suggested to be industrial at that time. So there's things where the land use plan, again, here in Kansas is a guide. It doesn't mean you strictly have to follow. It's not adopted as an ordinance or a law. It gives you all the flexibility to evaluate the appropriateness of its application given changes in market conditions or time wherever we're at. So the reality of it is you've made some decisions and you've seen some things where different proposals have come to you in light of those kinds of land development or land use map patterns that have been shown there. So it doesn't restrict you from considering different land uses in different locations, but it also creates that flexibility that can be very confusing at the same time.

Do you think we need to update the comp plan? I mean, is it time?

Well, here's the double-edged sword of updating the plan. Updating the comprehensive plan, there is a process we need to follow by state statute, so we would have to go through that through the Planning Commission and public hearings and things like that. It can be done. It would take us a little while to do it in-house. We've been looking at the long-range plans, Maggie, myself, and the other planners, trying to do a little bit at a time, look at updates and what are needed there. We would have to look at that future land use map with you and in that sense as we're determining that What's nice about today's land use plan for me? I like having that flexibility so that we can entertain different thoughts and ideas if we do the update to the plan and Again, depending on ownership and how you look at it, some people take that as a mandate that you're now going to do exactly what's there. So we have to be very careful about the messaging that goes with future land use maps so that people understand that. It is only a guide. But when you spend the money that you do to update the plans, there'll be a belief that everybody's going to follow exactly what that says. Right now, you've got a little bit of flexibility because of the aging. I would probably get slapped around by other planners for saying what I'm saying but because they always want they always want the most up-to-date plan they always want to spend the money to do that long-range plans can live for a long time if your goals in those plans are good because that's what we're really following we're really following what are those established goals that you have the land use plan we know will age over time every zoning decision you make that does not conform to the comp plan just makes the land use plan that much older i don't know if that i don't know if i've explained it correctly but it's a policy document we can certainly do that and look at it and give you suggestions on what that future land use pattern may be there we'd have to in-house it'll take a little bit a little bit of time It would not be something I could turn around in 30 days.

No. I do think it would be beneficial, because in the next five to 20 years, we're going to fill in the southeast, whatever you want to call it, segment. And there's been different ideas thrown around. But in 2018, we talked about New Trails Parkway, right? And you're going to put commercial and everything right along I-35. And then the idea was maybe a little bit of residential behind that, right? Okay, but is there going to be other commercial on the very south side? We haven't really talked about it because that's the kind of open-ended, right? Right. So we need to look at that and figure out what we want to do in the next five to 20. But then I think you have a 20 plus that says, All that white area on that one picture you had, yes, it's expensive, and yes, everybody has a problem, but there's going to be a fight for it eventually, right? So we have to figure out which piece we want to go after, and maybe that is partnering with Olathe or Johnson County or whatever, but we have to have a goal.

Right. And so what I would say to that is, You really have two options. Every community really has two options. You either grow by expanding physically outward, or you grow by density, increasing density and intensity of land uses and things like that. You have had the luxury up to this point, and I'd say probably for a short term here, you have the luxury of some physical expansion that you can still take on that's non-threatening to others and things like that. There's only so much of that left. That's exactly what you're saying is somewhere there's a timeline. We're out of that. We're now going to have to look at growth from the standpoint of how do we increase intensity or density of the community if we want to continue to grow beyond where we're at. So there's an element of that that's absolutely true. Is the cost of physical expansion to the West worth pursuing at the potential infrastructure improvements you'd have to make? versus the idea of maybe we hold that and there's areas that we could sit there and say we're better off on Main Street with more intense mixed use development with a higher intensity of living environments from apartments and things versus or condominiums versus the traditional single family home. That's a policy guidance decision. I'm just throwing those out to say that's kind of the dichotomy that you're looking at here is how does this community deal with yes, I have a certain of growth here physically that we've secured. We've got some that we can get past and utilize still as physical expansion, but the days coming closer where your boundaries are going to be pretty well set. And those could be set by other communities or they could just be set by the fact that the natural barriers are going to stop them. That western Johnson County area is an interesting area. To the south, again, I'm going to say from Edgerton, because of the limitations they have as to the amount of effluent that can go into Hillsdale, and also because of what it would take to actually get those sewer systems extended that far north in that creek area, very costly. DeSoto going south. They've got a lot of commitments on the table right now with Panasonic and some of the things that were done financially and economically for that. So I think it's going to be a cost factor that's going to take some time for them to really weed out and see what's the worth of going any further south and what that would really entail. I mean, they're annexed all the way to 143rd with the munitions plant. There's a lot of area of that that's being set aside as park and open space. There's a lot of area within that that they may be able to grow into. How soon they could go beyond that, I don't know. Olathe is very limited, again, because the Cedar Creek Basin sitting there in that next basin to the west is not that easy to deal with terrain-wise. And there's some elements there. And they've also got some larger lot developments that have now started filtering into those locations. And that doesn't make it lucrative for sewer customers because you're limited on the amount of accounts people like Matt don't like Don't like sewer lines being put in at high cost and only having a few customers They don't they just don't pay back so that that's the context there Southeast it's really Spring Hill's been pretty aggressive with some of this stuff. We were in a different environment when I first got here in 2020 We were in a different environment because we all had growth agreements with all our neighboring jurisdictions. About two years after that, a year and a half, two years after that, the Kansas Supreme Court heard the case between Spring Hill and Olathe and tossed out all those growth agreements. And that's what set up the motion for the Panettone problem because When we looked at that development initially or that location, we were pushing, as Jim was talking about, getting that commercial, getting that sales tax, getting things. We were really pushing that we wanted commercial on that frontage and at that intersection, that hard intersection. That property owner didn't like it. The situation with Spring Hill and Olathe unfolded. The growth agreements disappeared. And they ran off to Olathe, and Olathe annexed it in. We were going to be stuck with whatever Olathe was willing to approve at that point. So with that situation in hand, it unfolded a little bit differently, because they weren't able to come to an agreement on the financial package with Olathe. That's a whole different scenario that you don't really want to have happen. It would have been great if we still had our growth area agreements. We had, what, all the way up past 100 I think we were past 143rd Street in our growth area agreement with DeSoto and stuff. We had some things in place where when the comp plan was done and the sub-area plans were done, people were looking and going, well, this growth area is a huge physical expansion area we can go into. You're correct. There's the possibility that these other jurisdictions now could creep in and do some things there too. Hard to tell. But it's costly. It's going to be costly for whoever does it.

Was that the area where they maybe still are looking for the solar field?

We had the bottom 3,000 acres.

The sewer situation is going to be the driving force for anything more out in western Johnson County. That'll be the driving force. If it becomes available, there'll be growth demand for it at some point. And that's the hard part when we're talking industrial commercial. I think part of what we focused on, Jim in particular with me, we've talked about it for years. We've talked back and forth about what is the strategic position of this as we get different proposals. And one of the hard parts for us on the industrial side of things, part of it is the competition that we have to get into financially. It's not just a matter of physically finding places necessarily that work. It's also that commitment to sitting there and going, are you ready to get into some of these tools and the abatement levels that some of these other communities are having? And with commercial, from the standpoint of retail, restaurants, things like that, we generally don't get into that discussion. And we see that as a very important component because as employment's increasing, As it's increasing at the Airport Commerce Center, as it's increasing in Southern Olathe, as it's increasing down at the Logistics Park, all of those elements as people are now commuting from their homes to these places and they're coming through 175th Street, things like that, that visual exposure to Gardner businesses means that's a potential customer that could stop in Gardner, spend some money on their way home, or could be doing something where they're taking advantage of what we have from a quality standpoint. So that's where we've We've really niched this into that commercial side of things to sit there and say, okay, we don't have to compete with these three other groups. And then when DeSoto came online, the interesting thing with that is if you take that northwest part of Gardner, that very far north there up by 159th, in that area, that's less than six miles as the crow flies to the DeSoto plant. So commuting, the idea of living in Gardner, going up there for your employment. All these employment centers are surrounding us, and we have the potential to have these people living here, shopping here, doing those things. And there's nobody else really in position to do that. DeSoto's small. They're focused on their industrial development. Edgerton's small. They have infrastructure issues and other elements. So we're in a nice geographic niche to take advantage of that. But we have to be patient for the marketplace to see it. Jim's having great discussions in the last year with a number of the retail elements of this. And a lot of it is, again, rooftops and visibility, traffic visibility. The 175th area from Clare Road towards the interchange and things. It's part of the reason we've worked hard with KDOT to look at redesign of that interchange. It's part of the design that we're currently in on 175th and Clare Corridor to support that commercial traffic. Much of that traffic isn't Gardner generated. Much of it's coming from as far as Missouri, the other side of the state line. I have an employee who commutes from over in Belton to here every day, and they're coming down 175th. They've got one in Overland Park that's coming down 175th. So that traffic is increasing, and we know it. And we have had talks with property owners and developers in that area. That stuff is driving things towards us. But we also know historically Johnson County has had commercial growth along its transportation corridors. 175th is the next interchange to fall into the commercial bracket. It's just a matter of market recognition at this point. and accessibility. That's why the KDOT project was so important, trying to get accessibility to that northeast quadrant of I-35 and 175th Street. That's why that's critical, because there's a lot of highly visible commercial potential land that's sitting right there between Clare and 175th on that kind of northwest side of I-35. But trying to, you know, It's that balance game. How far do you go with enticements? And you also want to get good quality. So you don't want to entice something that doesn't live up to its label, right? You want to entice the right thing at the right time and that element and that mix. It's getting there. We're close. We're getting stuff. And it started a few years ago. There are a lot of things that have happened in the last two, three years out around that interchange that are very critical to this community as far as commercial development. But we also have a utility problem out there, too.

OK. One of the things I wanted to bring up today As Jim mentioned, over the line.

You want to do a quick break for lunch before, because you've got a whole thing.

Yeah, that would be good, Todd.

That way we can group and, yeah. We'll do a quick break and then. OK.

One of the things that I've noticed here recently is some of the activity on the west side along 56 Highway, most notably in this area right here. If I bring up imagery, this area right here is a very large substation with four natural gas power generation units on it. And I'll bring up some other tools here in just a little bit that will show us what that capability is. But as we look at this, all this farmland, these next sections and back down to 56 Highway, Most all of it has been listed. If you take a drive out that way, you'll see the listing signs. And as I followed up with one of the agents that has that listed, I'm told that a lot of that is already under contract. So what that leaves for us, over here is the intermodal. This is the intermodal over on this side over here. And so when we start looking at this from a real estate perspective, Let me bring up open grid works. This will show us some things that are pretty interesting. That area where that substation is right here. As you'll note, there's a 345 kilovolt line here and a 380 this way. This orange line is I think either a two or four foot interstate running natural gas pipeline. As is, this is where we had over here is where we originally proposed or where the data center had wanted to come in that has backed out. Again, the same type of infrastructure, 345 kilowatt line. I don't know what the hell happened there. Charles, can you get me figured out here? He's not here. I don't know how that switched. Anyway, we'll figure it out. So... Okay, here we go. What we got over here is the intersection that happened right over the... piece of land that the data center was proposed to go on. That's got all the... Thank you, sir. Can you get me... You need to spin it. I don't know if I do.

Yes, in bottom right.

So, while Charles is working on that,

Just refresh it, Steve. It'll start back from the beginning.

Where's refresh at?

Just hit F5. F5?

Okay. Let's try that. Hello.

Give me back to where you were.

Okay.

Start from the beginning.

I'm trying to find Gardner on this way. You're heading west.

Okay.

This?

Yep.

It's got me a little disoriented.

Go there.

Here?

Mm-hmm. Type in where you're looking for it. Is that where you want us, West Gardner, Kansas?

Yeah. It'll take me there, and it'll get me close from there. All right. It's called opengridworks.com.

It's just a website is all it is. There we go. Thank you. We can get in here pretty close now.

Okay. Does that mean hydro? OK. If you look at Kansas, I'll get back in here and just, OK. These are all 345 kilovolt lines. This is the backbone of the state of Kansas. And as you start zeroing in down to our area, you're going to find out that right here, and this is also showing the natural gas pipelines that are interstate as well. So those are the two things that industry in medium to large commercial and small to large, medium and large industrial or manufacturing needs to have more than anything else to develop. Yeah, thank you, sir. So as we go in, you can see right in here, this is where the property was on the east side of town, southeast. And this is the area that I was showing you just here a little bit ago. But when you look at this from an infrastructure point of view, it's set up, the natural attraction to that land is, and those resources is, commercial, industrial, from light to heavy.

As we start, let's go back to the other one here, to the Johnson County map.

As we look at this, this is the intermodal over here. This is, this substation, with the natural gas back here, hold on. That natural gas power generation is... It'll tell me here.

What are you looking for, Steve?

Just the capacity.

400 megawatts.

400 megawatts? Thank you, sir. So that's a lot of power. 400 megawatts on site. Every north side, it's got six... major power transmission lines coming in and out of it. So we've got a ton of power. And when you start looking at that from what's going on here, this is the same area. That's the substation right there that we're talking in power generation plant that we're talking about. This piece here is Edgerton. Jim, this is us. Is that correct? Or is that Edgerton as well? Okay, and now they're annexed all the way down into, they're annexed all the way past 199th, as I'm told. So what's happening is the only thing that's been holding Edgerton back from developing that into an industrial base is jumping 56 Highway to get wastewater services across the highway from where they are now. Going back to this, No, it's a major distribution. Transmission and generation. And the gas is 400 megawatts. It's different than generation. There is a gas generation power plant there. This can be brought up. 400 megawatts is a pretty good chunk. There's four of them. These things are massive. But what I'm trying to kind of point out here is all this land up in here is listed. as commercial and industrial. Some of it is already under contract. And the question becomes, who do we want to have control that? When we look at a revenue per acre, housing rooftops generate about, probably in today's market, $2 to $3 million an acre in value in residential. Industrial and commercial like this, probably 100 million plus per acre. And then when you start taking the differences in valuations, and you look at the difference in assessment at 11.2% for residential, and you look at 25% of a much larger number for commercial, there's a lot of revenue on the table here, guys. And more importantly, when I was asking staff a little bit a month or so ago, I told Steve the problem with that is we've got a lot of trucks. And trucks, trucks, and more trucks. Well, here's the problem, folks. If Edgerton takes that, what we're going to end up with is more trucks. Whatever happens, we're going to end up with trucks. It doesn't matter whether we develop it. and annex it in and get it developed, or Edgerton does. The point is the land is already sold and under contract. So with 175th Main Street being a federal highway, US 56, we, Gardner, have no control over what kind of truck traffic goes across that highway or downtown for one mile either side. We have to allow it. We cannot restrict it. So what's happening, guys, is this is coming at us regardless of whatever we do. And the question is, do we want to take the revenue and have control and say on what's going on here, or do we want to pass that like we did 25 years ago to Edgerton? The lesson that I'm talking about is right across 56 Highway.

So is this, though, part of that issue, though, with the wastewater, right, and that land there? That's difficult to sewer at this point. At this point. It would be.

And it would be difficult for them to sewer as well. And they have land south of that. They have land other places. They are not growing like they used to. There is no guarantee that Edgerton's getting to that property. And the property that's under contract now is for a Gardner project. It's not for an Edgerton.

Okay. So is this land up here, Jim? Is this already annexed in? No.

We control the triangle at 183rd Street. Right here? So we control 183rd over to the highway. And then that other blue triangle up there.

What I'm talking about is these four sections here. Right. For the most part are under contract at this point. They're actively listed and under contract.

Right.

Somebody, either Gardner or Edgerton, is the only two that can touch this. And whoever annexes this in and welcomes this industrial use is going to get the money and the control.

That's if it's ever developed to industrial. So the choice is that we could make it industrial and put trucks on US 56.

Or we could not.

Or somebody could potentially do it in the future.

And with Edgerton.

Well, hold on. There's lots of options there, right? Edgerton could turn that into houses. We could turn it into houses. It could be industrial. It cannot be industrial. It can be industrial that has 1,000 trucks a day or two.

And it's not zoned industrial. It can be a whole lot. It's listed as industrial because that's the highest return for a real estate agent to sell.

I understand, Jim. But in the conversations I've had with the agents that are involved. I know who they are. It is under contract. It is not residential. I did find that she would not tell me what it was specifically. She said, no, it is not, it is absolutely not residential.

Right, I know who it is, and I've already talked to them, yes.

Okay, so the question is, guys, do we want to take control of our future? And if you're looking at 10x evaluation per acre or more, and you're looking at 2.5x evaluation, on that valuation, that's a lot of revenue. And the reason Edgerton annexed that strip back to them is so they can jump the highway with their existing infrastructure and lock us out. And the plan is they're going to go all the way up here along four corners north, probably up to about 159th, which is going to landlock our community. And the question is, Is that what we want to do as a governing body?

What would the solution be to prevent that?

It would be very simple, direct staff to get this annexed in. And that's really all we've got to do.

That's not how it works. Why would they want to annex it, I guess, first?

Well, the people that are listed right now are going to have to annex into somebody. Or they could go with Johnson County. They could do that too. But the issue is the land is listed. The land is under contract. There is development interested in it. And we are either going to be able to cash in on this and have some control and some say in what our future is or not. It's that simple.

And there's land listed all over the place around the intermodal that's been there for years.

Is it under contract here?

Years and years. Is it under contract? It's under contract, and they approached us about a development.

Okay. So are we entertaining that, or what are we doing?

It hasn't got to that point yet. We're just having discussions on potential use.

I guess as a governing body, my question is, what do we want to do with it?

Well, I mean, it would just depend on it. A lot of things. I'm not 100% sure what your question is, but if we're talking about it at a high-level picture, the goal, in my mind, would be that we secure every piece that we can because land's a finite resource. You only have so much. And we know, as we already heard, how expensive it is to develop certain pieces. So you've got to get every low-hanging fruit you can And then you have to have the ability to either work with others or have the cash to take care of the expensive parts in the future, 35 years from now. As far as like this particular piece, zoom out for me. Okay, so you've got the airport right there, right? And our housing developments to the west. You've got the intermodal on the south side of 56. Where you're looking is southwest, just north of 56. That area right there, county, today.

Yes, sir.

Could that be a great spot for industrial? Sure. It's right next to industrial. It's across the street from industrial. You've got the power plant right there and transmission lines. Makes sense. And natural gas. Yeah, I see your point. If that's us, I think that's better than if it's Edgerton. Because we get zero say if any other entity has it. It doesn't matter what they put there. We have zero say. We could have it, and it could be Who knows what? That's the question. That's what the development is that staff goes through. Hey, here's what somebody presents to us. Because that's the other thing. A lot of people think that we just call up people and go, hey, will you go stick this thing here?

That's not how it works, right?

They approach us and say, we identified this location. We have an interest of putting XYZ there. Staff looks through it and says, OK, well, with zoning of this and the infrastructure needs of this, Okay, and then you want to do it for that. Okay, how can we make this work, right? So it's got to be financially worth it. It's got to be environmentally safe. It's got to be good for our residents, right, from a safety perspective, from a cost perspective. So at the highest level, though, yes, I agree that no matter what, I'd rather it be ours than anybody else's, sure. Is there something else that we want to go through, though, on that specifically? I mean, Jim, we're not ready to talk about it. That development, yeah.

Right, okay. But what we do know is this. The infrastructure resources point to industrial and commercial, heavy commercial and industrial. Across the highway is heavy industrial with the intermodal. We know that the land is listed. We know that the land has contracts pending. We know it's not residential. And we know that it's either going to be us or Edgerton that's going to have control of that and control of our downtown traffic, control of the revenue, and control of what happens. So the question is very simple. Do we want control of that? Or do we want to let Edgerton have control of that? That's really what comes down. It's pretty much that simple.

I think that question is simple.

Are we going to do that to preempt the possibility that somebody else...

Or, Jim, do we want to have control of how many of those trucks actually go up and down 5600? What? That's not my point. My point is, do we want to have say as to what that looks like, or do we want to have Edgerton cram it down our throat again?

Edgerton may not have the capability to get up there.

They're already across the highway, Jim.

Yeah, but that's... You both have points, right?

Yes, we need to be the one to control it. Yes, they may not put a bunch of trucks on there ever. Agreed. But we can also help dictate that we don't have a lot of trucks there, depending on what that development is.

Right. Exactly. That's what I'm working on.

Right.

And it could be industrial that doesn't produce truck traffic.

Exactly. I mean, that's the ideal scenario, because we need industrial. If we go back to that one map that shows the land use Almost all the purple is not us. If we took it off, everybody would go, where's the purple? We need the purple. We need to put it on the outskirts of town. We want to keep our residential base intact. And we can't be silly and just throw it in the middle of some place. Yeah, if we control it and we can get industrial and not have a lot of trucks, bonus, right? That's the best scenario in my mind, right? A whole lot of revenue for dealing with some pain points. Obviously minimize them as much as possible.

And those are the sensitivity points I immediately communicate. Don't want a ton of truck traffic on 56 Highway.

The problem is, Tim, we don't control that.

But I think your question isn't to Jim. It's to us.

JIM LEHRER- Right. Here's what it comes down to, guys. We cannot say you can't drive your truck on 56 Highway. Can't do it. Federal law says we cannot control that. So at best, the only thing we can influence on that is what kind of development gets put onto there and what the rules are. If Edgerton gets a hold of this land, and controls the development, they control our future, just like they did with the intermodal.

I mean, if you want to go back to the east side, it's a little bit more solidified, not completely, by any means. But go look at where the strong property is.

OK. And that's also the other piece of it, guys, is when we go back over to where the strong property is.

Zoom straight in.

Okay, right here.

Right, so you got Clair Crossing up to the north, right in the middle.

Mm-hmm.

Okay, so just to the south there is the Strong property, right?

Right.

Okay, what's that to the northeast corner? Up here? Yep, just to the right of Epic. All that blue right there.

Right here?

Nope, to the right.

That's Olathe.

That is Olathe, correct. It is annexed Olathe. And their comp plan says that's industrial.

Right.

Today.

Today.

So if you want to talk about a spot where we really have a problem, it's right there.

Yeah. And we also have the land to the south of that. Sorry, guys. Going down to the strong property is, there's a strong property there. This chunk here is critical for our future. And as a buffer, if Olathe and Annexat in, they could very easily put a data center right here, which is just a flip the page in a notebook. And now we are dealing with a data center that can effluent right down into our drainage basin and our water supply. And we have no say, no control on that whatsoever.

KDHE would never allow that. KDHE wouldn't.

We just don't have any control over it. And we heard the pushback. We heard the pushback on right here.

Yes, there are certain things that are mitigated already by other entities, EPA rules, KDHE rules, et cetera. So yes, there are certain things that are probably off the table for anybody. But there's other aspects of anything they put over there that we can't control. That point is valid.

Well, and the strong property could very easily be suggested to be light manufacturing, for example, which would be a good use of that property, not a real heavy use, but something that would be a light manufacturing type of an operation where there would be local jobs generated. It would not be as intrusive and intense as a data center. It would make use of the infrastructure resources that are already there. It's a natural use. That whole strip along that east side of Clare Road is going to be industrial whether we like it or not. Just the same way out west on 56. That's all going to be industrial whether we like it or not. The question for us as a governing body is this. What do we want to do? Do we want to have our our future controlled by Olathe and Ederton, or do we want to take control of our own future? It really comes down to that.

I totally get that. I wouldn't have a problem with mine industrial there. I think that's kind of a buffer down. So you're saying we need to control the property just to the east? Yes, sir. Strong?

Mm-hmm. And I heard that the Mackie's are already entertaining stuff with Olathe. So, guys, what I'm trying to tell you is the time is now for us to act or not.

Correct me if I'm wrong, we can't force Annex.

No, but we can sure try, though, can't we? No, to try to advise them to come in to us.

I've talked to Susan a bunch of times.

The problem is there's no hook to bring them in. They want an advantage. It's to their advantage not to be annexed into jurisdiction until they have a development that has them under contract. So there's no advantage for her to come in.

Right, which all of this, I mean, it comes before us, but the governing body wants, you guys have done a lot of your work, and the property owners have done a ton of work. I mean, I guess I keep hearing that we should go do something, and I mean, I don't have a Gardner flag that I can just, walked down there and placed in the middle of it and said this is gardeners i mean i think it's that all of this is kind of academic until something is proposed well i mean we're seeing the land is available to us and i don't think that we're limiting staff or anybody else from saying yeah i see the potential for that i think the more broad discussion maybe we should have is How do we better prepare the city, like sewer and storm water and water and whatever for these types of properties? But maybe we don't need to make those decisions until it starts to more solidify.

Olathe has limitations coming south of 175th too far because of sewer. So they may develop along 175th, but they're not going to keep coming south. on 175th Street. Without spending a bunch of money. The return on investment has to be there for that as well. And there has been residential interest in the Strong property. So it's not just industrial that is interested there. So we've always thought of the Strong property as a buffer to the industrial that's going on in Olathe, not to make it contiguous with that.

As you go further west, you're going to butt up against a bunch of housing when you hit Spring Hill. I mean, it's not, what, another half a mile?

Mark, to your question, what is it that we, the governing body, need to do? We need to be able to direct staff, whether to continue rooftop in these areas or to pursue working with the people that have this land listed to bring it into Gardner. Because in all cases here, this land is listed. Most of it's under contract. And they're going to be looking to come to somebody. And at this point, our real question is whether we want to direct staff to aggressively go after these areas and work with the agents and developers to get this into our community and make it attractive for them to come to Gardner. Like you said, we can't go force them. And then the other piece of this, when you go back out west, in the areas to the north of that substation. Very quickly, and on Four Corners Road, the east side of that area, on the west side of Four Corners Road, a lot of that land is listed under contract. And just a little bit to the north of that substation is the new MABE project that's up there, 175th and Four Corners. And the question's going to be, do we want to protect our residents there, or do we want to let Edigent Park Industrial right next to them and have nothing to say about it?

What is the incentive that we usually use to get the current property owner to say, yeah, I want to annex Edigent Gardner?

So along 199th Street, that project was based on truck traffic. And I told them that if we could get all the way over to Claire, that we would make efforts to close it to truck traffic. Before that, it was just enforcement, because it was only a partial, and there was nowhere for them to turn off. Now, on the Strong property, it was we provided sewer to serve that property. So, you know, the Sudendorf property saying Strong owned it, he wanted it to be all his property to be in, so we took that. Grotta was a bigger negotiation, you know, to jump the highway, and we did things with the Grotta development we haven't done since and probably wouldn't do again because that was planting our flag on the other side of the highway. So what typically happens is, like, if a property that's not in Gardner is put under contract, then they come and talk to us about uses, about potential incentives, and, you know, you try to come to a term sheet agreement, and then for us to process an application, it has to be in Gardner. So that's the point where they would annex into Gardner. So for instance, on the Baker property, that is, there's three Baker properties by the municipal airport. One of them is under contract for a multifamily development. And they're at the point in the application where they have an annexation agreement. So they would come in. We would process the application. So that's how it always works.

So are you proposing then that in some of these locations that aren't under contract yet that we go ahead and try to incentivize them to annex before? That's a good question.

What I'm proposing is this. We can't make the decision. Jim is the guy that has to do the annexation negotiations. That's a given. But what we have as a governing body is what I'm really asking for is for us as a governing body to direct staff to do everything possible to get these areas annexed in as they go under contract and to do everything that we can possibly do as our city staff to do everything that they can possibly do to keep this from going to an area where we don't have control of the situation. That's what I'm asking.

When you say everything possible, how much money do you want to spend on putting in sewer and water lines?

And honestly, we don't need direction of staff to do it. That's what we do. I mean, when they approach us, that's what we do. We make our best effort to get them in and work with them on the development. I mean, that's what our job is.

Yes, but going back to the very beginning, one thing we do need to do is kind of tailor what we want where. If we want to stick to, and we should, that we're not going to let trucks on 199th Street, we could codify that. And so you cannot have an entrance or exit off 199th Street, right? Which now means we move truck traffic because you're going to, unless everything down there is residential, you're going to have some truck traffic, even if it's just delivery trucks. I mean, I'm not talking Amazon, but bigger delivery trucks. That is now at 195th that doesn't exist, or 191st, or we're going to have to make an east-west transition. thoroughfare for truck traffic. Which is 175th Street. Right. But that means you still have to have a north-south, which is probably going to be clear. Because you're going to have something on the east end of town. We can't go any further today. But clear would have to be improved.

Clear would have to be improved. Six to 12 million dollars a mile. I know. And you'd put truck traffic next to the grotto development, the intersection of 175th and Claire, which we're trying to improve, you start stacking trucks there, and that changes the whole dynamic of that.

It does some, but we don't have another place to put it. We're going to have to put it somewhere north-south. Put what? Truck traffic.

Only if we add industrial. Yes. I'm assuming that we're not going to only have residential. Really, that's the direction. If you want to change direction to staff, then tell us to start welcoming or soliciting industrial that's going to produce truck traffic to put on Clare or 56, because that's not what we're doing. When people call us and say, hey, would the city be interested in this, I always tell them, you know, we're not interested in putting trucks on 56 Highway, not interested in putting trucks on Clare Road. So if you want me to change that, I mean, I could fill, I could probably get development in here within two months if we're going to put industrial that produces truck traffic on those roads. Because in my whole time here as police chief and as CA, that was taboo. We weren't doing that.

But like we've said, we can have industrial that doesn't have a lot of truck traffic.

Right, but that's different. We haven't said no to them. We've said, yeah, if you don't produce truck traffic, then that's something that we will consider and look at.

But what I'm saying is that coming down Clare could be industrial. It's probably going to be on the east side of our property, right? Olathe is going to be there, Spring Hill is encroaching. Right. Everything up there right now, except for the very top, was planned to be commercial slash industrial, right? In the last four years. We've got a couple different things there, right?

Three different things that I'm aware of, at least.

So...

I'm not following. What are you talking about?

Well, Strong property had two different things, and the Sudendorf property had a thing, a development that was being looked at. But not industrial? Not industrial. I mean, well, Strong's was. I mean, high medium manufacturing, light industrial maybe for the first one, and then maybe the same for the second one. So anyway, there are options that we can put, but we need to be strategic and put our industrial that we don't have. We need to have some. We need to embrace the residential that we've been doing. We can be that spot in the middle of all of this. But we do need to have some industrial. And it should behoove us to find some that doesn't have a lot of truck traffic to meet our existing agreements we have with people. But we need to have it to diversify our tax base and be able to offset all of that residential growth. Because every time we bring in residents, We bring in costs. We have to serve them with sewer. We have to serve them with electric. Commercial does the same thing, plus it adds sales tax. But it gives us some sales tax.

So for the industrial and strong property, I mean, we've always considered that a buffer to industrial. But I mean, we can put industrial there. But then you're going to have the buffer being clear road versus them having the buffer of the strong property.

Jim, would you have a problem with us asking or directing staff to aggressively go after commercial and industrial in those two areas as a buffer to what could be shoved down our throat and say, Aggressively go after that, guys.

I don't know what aggressively pursue. They come to us. I mean, we've got a retail recruiter we're working with. The mayor and I have been working with brokers on the side that do commercial. I don't know how you aggressively pursue.

Well, when land goes listed as a commercial or industrial, we should be working with those agent or agents to be friendly to them and help them guide commercial traffic, those types of customers into our camp instead of the Edgerton or Lathurst Spring Hill Camp.

Do you want direction on whether or not we're comfortable with industrial, full industrial development on like strong property, for instance? Because that's not really what we've been pursuing, correct? You're saying that's what you would like to see there?

I'd like to be able to have it all of the above. I'm going to jump in. I can't. I can't still. So part of this is understanding the full process of these things. Right now, what generally happens is it's market-driven. Let's use the strong property. There was potentially residential. There was potentially the data center. There was potentially we can go all day with all the proposals. Staff's job has been to entertain those proposals. To see what's the best situation we can get from whatever the property owner and the developer is trying to propose there to see if it's acceptable. And acceptable at a high quality. I'm going to put that on there. I don't, as a director, I'm not sitting there going anything that walks in the door gets an automatic yes stamp. And that's why sometimes your decision making takes on some of the forms of discussion we do, is because there are times when we're in disagreement. And that's fine. We've got no problems with that. The problem I have with this idea of us aggressively pursuing anybody for particular uses is, you're going to expend or have staff expend a huge amount of time potentially bringing people to the table that through the planning process might get rejected after they spend hundreds of thousands of dollars pursuing that idea. So you've got to be careful what you're directing staff to do or not. Because if you're going to use those staff resources in that manner, under that kind of a direction, then staff's looking and so is that applicant and everybody else is they're looking for that positive. And when the public shows up, we don't make those decisions. That's in front of you guys. So that's why I'm a little bit frustrated with this discussion is it's not about aggressively us going out and pursuing these things. It's us about being open to conversations like Jim's talking about with whoever comes walking in the door for us. And many times they're talking to multiple jurisdictions. They're talking to us and the adjacent community and the county. And so we're trying to give them whatever we think is an acceptable deal. And many times there's conversations that staff has behind the scenes, that staff has with council leadership, things like that, that help guide us as to how far we're willing to go. If you're going to... put us in kind of what I'll call the old Southwest Johnson County economic development mode, where our job is just simply recruit everybody in here and bring them in, which is a very aggressive approach to things. We're going to be looking at situations when we have things before you that you're going to be making some really tough decisions after some people spent a lot of money.

I think we've been there and done that. And the folks I've talked to... Dave, in regard to the data center that just went away, was, and I've talked to people on both sides of the issue, was the people that were against the data centers were okay with the outcome. But the conversations we've had is we should have pursued the due process all the way to the end and then made decisions. And that's what I'm trying to prevent or preempt here is that we don't get into wars with agents or whatever to say, we're not taking it to Gardner. We're taking this to Edgerton. or we're doing this or we're doing that. And what I'm trying to relay is this. What I'm hearing is that that whole west corridor is Edgerton setting themselves up with that annexation on the north side of the highway. They've set themselves up to be the guy that gets control of that. And Mayor, I can assure you Don Roberts wants to shove that down our throat.

And that was annexed years and years and years ago.

I agree. Jim, that can be used. My concern is that we're going to have this shoved down our throat and we're going to have an intermodal 2.0 right across the street.

I may have used the term aggressive. I didn't mean aggressive. I'm saying are you wanting direction to be open to industrial in that area, open to industrial?

Well put.

Are you warning that direction?

If that's the change that the council wants to make, that you want us to entertain industrial, then we'll entertain industrial. That's what I... That was the whole point of today. You have to keep in mind the consequences of that and the quality of life issues that are going to come up with the additional truck traffic. Because even though we don't have the intermodal, you still have complaints about truck traffic every day. We're talking about reviving downtown, doing a potential road diet, and then we're going to add trucks to Main Street. That makes no sense to me.

And I'm not saying either way.

I would say we need to refine it further because industrial is a broad, broad category. It is. And when we're looking at that, there's a difference between a high-level industrial manufacturer that brings in jobs versus a warehouse distribution center. So there's some differentiation that I think warrants further discussion, because the broad classification of justification or of which type of industrial they want can make a very big difference. And again, even these warehouse distribution centers are getting those large property tax abatements. They're getting the large incentives just like other manufacturers. If there's payroll targets, if there's elements that we think are important to creating jobs, that helps us to tell a person before they spend tons of money going, well, they're open to industrial. We'll just propose this. We can sit there and say, hey, with the guidance we have from the policymakers at this point in time, if you're not meeting these thresholds, you're just not on the table. Sorry. It's the way it is. And, yeah, you do risk losing it to Edgerton or somebody else who's willing to give those abatements and all those incentives and everything else and pay the cost. But, again, we're talking about what's best for the community in the long term. And, honestly, warehouse distribution is cherry picking. I would not advise giving any abatements to any warehouse distribution center. I agree. That's just me. That's my personal feeling for what they bring back to the community. Now, you start talking about offering jobs and real industrial type elements, there's something I can say that's a benefit of the community. What I'm saying right now is just my personal thought. I'm not going to say I have data for that or anything else. But I think if a city is going to look at how it uses those tools, you need to be selective about those and you need to get something in return.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. What restaurants are going to go out to those areas?

I was just going to say, that's the other element to this, right? This is the locational piece of it. I agree. Because again, commercial is going to be driven by rooftops and visibility from traffic. That's where it's going to be driven. And you're right. There's those elements. All I'm saying is if you all decide that you're looking at something where you're open to it, I would even argue to the point with the data center, We have classified that as basically an industrial use as we were going through the review process. And we were open as a staff as they were going through the discussions with us to that being there. But they had to meet some performance requirements that we were developing and things like that. So the element hasn't been that we haven't been open to it. We're open to it. If you tell us in certain areas, Yeah, well, we can be open to that. That's part of the economic development policy. We'll see what we can do. But I would love to have those thresholds that help us so that I don't have to turn to a developer or to a potential buyer. after they spend thousands of dollars of consultant money and go, oh, well, now we've discovered this. Or now that, you know, I'd rather begin doing that in an upfront discussion that may cause them, yeah, to walk away. But they're not going to meet our quality standards. What do we want?

This kind of comes back to the comprehensive plan discussion we had at the very front end of this. Maybe we need to designate a couple of areas that could be very open to industrial commercial and that are going to become those types of areas anyway because of the natural use of the land. And then direct staff to say, in these particular areas, we want you to be very open to commercial and industrial development.

I think what you're trying to say is that we want staff to bring everything to us.

Yes.

But as I've already said, Part of that is on this body, because we just had a development that the staff went through. Now, we also had, at the 11th hour, we, well, actually it was before there's even hours. We did it so early. We have an executive session. Public doesn't get to see what happens, and the deal is gone. We didn't work through the process. Planning never got to weigh in on it. We never got to see a final agreement from staff.

That's on us.

It certainly is. Maybe a little bit, staff, if you guys were like, hey, I think we should kill this.

Because otherwise, Mark, what you're doing is that when they say, do you think the city would support this? And if we don't tell them what we think as far as the policy that we've heard from the governing body, then they're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on engineering and architecture and all these things that, I mean, you're gonna go through that once or twice, then nobody's gonna come to us. Because they're like, yeah, they told me they'd consider it, and this isn't going anywhere. So if we bring a development, they say we're going to put 400 trucks a day on Main Street, and we know that that's not acceptable, and they go through that process, we're going to get shut out.

Right. Agreed. That's what I'm saying. Part of this is this body has to make it clear what we will accept. Right. so that you have direction. Not that we need to direct them, but they have clear direction so that then they know we will tolerate this so that it can go through the process. Maybe it still doesn't go through, but you can go through the process to actually find out what you're looking at.

That's what I was trying to do. Mark, I agree with you because here's the thing with the Beal decision that they decided to back out. We don't know what the development agreement could look like. And our job as a governing body is to represent the citizens of this community and to have their general welfare in place. And we heard from a vocal probably 20%, 25% of the community at best. Not even close. What? Not even close. Not even close. But let's say 1,000 people out of 25,000. That's probably closer to being accurate. But pick a number, any number. It doesn't matter. Vocal minority dissuaded the whole process before we had an opportunity. And the rest of the community had an opportunity to see exactly what was on the table for the entire community to make a decision on.

Right, but to be clear, there was a few people making a little bit of noise, several, the majority, not even from Gardner. And then this group was fickle. We said, well, we'll entertain it. And then we threw it away without ever even looking at it completely. So that's on us. We don't get to blame those people, necessarily.

I don't know why we want to go through this again. Every single meeting, we talk about the fact that we decided that we were going to entertain it it away because of the citizenry came to us and said this is not a good idea for our city and We didn't get a chance to look at everything. We didn't get a chance to do development agreement We I'm what I heard from Dave and Jim today was that they look at it from a standpoint of whether there's jobs involved and what the incentives should be and everything associated with that and the incentives are should not have been there based upon that sort of idea. And the decision was pushed in that way, and it fell apart. Whether it comes back again, I don't know that I would have made a different decision. I'm OK with it.

And that in the falling apart of it, Beale ultimately saved money, too. Because had it continued forward, they would have continued to pour hundreds of thousands of dollars But that's on them. Yes, while it would have been nice to be able to show everybody what the pros and the cons and the whole project would be at the same time, if we were headed to a no, to let the old know that ahead of time, the sooner the better on their part as far as their finances are concerned.

Does that make sense? And I completely agree. And I think we're to help wrap up what you're asking for, I guess I'm, we have to decide if we want to develop Clair Road differently, is what I'm hearing, and we have to decide if we want the character of Highway 56 to change through the center of town. Correct? That's what I'm hearing. That's what Jim is essentially asking.

Mark, the other piece of that is that what we have to decide is who do we want to be in control of what the center of town looks like?

I don't know if it's that straightforward. Go ahead. I just don't know if it's that straightforward. I mean, like we can just say we want that land and then we can control it. I mean, projects come forward. If we're directing Jim to say, you know, we don't want a project that's going to bring a lot of trucks to 56... How are we going to communicate that up front?

Or communicate that with the governing body and let us make a decision for the citizens of the community. But as opposed to an entity outside of our staff, outside of our governing body, making the decision for us, and we have to live with the consequences. We learned that lesson 25 years ago.

But you're also saying that in order to entice those developments, We have to kind of accept what we're going to get on 56 Sinclair and or give them tax incentives.

Didn't say that, Mark.

But we're talking about how do we entice them to annex in the garden.

That's staff's job.

Well, that's the home. But no, we have to vote on that. Steve, we have to vote on that. That comes before us as an incentive. You can still vote no.

Yes, you can. Absolutely. You said anything possible. What?

You said anything possible to get them to annex in. I asked you how much you wanted to spend, and you just went like this.

We don't know. It's a hypothetical. We can spend a little bit. We can spend a lot. It depends on what the benefits to the community are, Casey, as to how much we spend. If we spend a bunch and it's strategic, great. If not, fine.

Your point is well taken, but here's two cases. I think what you're trying to get at and the point that I'm trying to hit home is that we have to be clear to staff what it is we're willing to accept. And yes, we don't need to play all these what-if games, but if a development came and it's going to go in one of your spots, And it's going to put 50 trucks on 56. And they come to Jim and say, do you want it? Or is it going to Edgerton? We will give it to him tomorrow. What's his answer going to be? That's what he needs to know from us. He needs to come to us and ask that question. He needs to know, what do we want? Because at that point, that development is coming. Not a what if, right?

Right.

We need to be able to make it clear that he's like, yeah, okay, we're going to take that because we don't want them to put more trucks. Or we're going to restrict this. Or we're just going to whatever. Or, oh, well, they're going to get it and they get 50 trucks. Whatever. Right?

But he needs to know that. Right. Well put. That's better than I could have put it on the table. Thank you.

And, Mark, I just want to be clear on this, too, because sometimes when we talk, that's the other night. Remember, there's two different things going on here. There's development agreements and there's the planning aspects of these things. They're not always going to be in alignment. I mean, that's the other element of it. I've got a code that requires certain minimum things and different things like that. The key in that, though, what aligns it is really the decision-making, right? Because staff can come to you with a recommendation, even though you've gone through the development agreement process over here, I'm doing that independent work over here where I'm looking at it in light of our codes, in light of the conditions that I think are reasonable to have that quality that we're looking for, right? But that still gives you the authority as decision makers when it gets to you to do those things we've talked about before where, hey, I may have 10 conditions here and you might go, that one's overstepped and balanced, this is blah, blah, blah. And that's all great. That's that completion of the process element. So understand that when we talk about development agreements, like Councilman Weems mentioning here, these are two different guidance kinds of elements, and the discussions are two different arenas running somewhat parallel, if you will. So I just want to remind people of that, because that gets tough with some folks where they don't see that differential, and there is a differential. you may have a threshold on incentives and things. Planning Commission doesn't care about what any of that is. Right. Their job is the land use side of it.

Right.

So I guess to Steve's point, I mean, in a general sense, I mean, from a council standpoint, I mean, you know, are we satisfied with the direction that Jim has moving forward? I mean, being careful.

This would not be a change, but if it's industrial with little or no truck traffic, we've entertained that before. Right. So, I mean, that wouldn't be a change.

But then to Steve's point, though, are we willing to allow more, allow, you know, greater concentrations of trucks or whatever the case may be, more than you have? Yeah. help to secure some of those pieces of property if it came up to that situation.

And before you answer that, think about, we've talked about destination downtown for a long time, for the amount of time that I've been here. You put more trucks down 56 that go down Main Street, you're going to blow that up? I don't know about Claire. I mean, there's other agreements that happen down there. In 199th, you hear a lot about 199th Street all the time. To me, that's just slightly different. I'd have to think more about whether industrial in that area is the right land use for what we've been trying to do. I understand there's a need for us to expand our tax base. I get that. I just don't know that I'm on board with loosening the tolerance on the amount of trucks that we'd be wanting to take down 56.

Mark, let me ask you a question. If the free market says let's go out west, okay, around that substation, if the free market on listed land says I want to do this, and we've directed staff, no trucks in town, and they say, okay, fine, Gardner, that's your position, And they go to Edgerton and they say, heck yeah, you can put 1,000 trucks down 56. Where do we benefit there?

I hear you. And I think that there are other barriers to entry for Edgerton. I hear what you're saying. I absolutely hear that they have land annexed across 56. They have the ability to go annex more land across 56. They just don't have the ability to service that. And the price for them to do that may be a barrier entry for anybody to do a development. Because they may say, oh, it's going to cost me $15 million to put something across there. And I'm going to give you 100% tax abatement. I have to find $15 million to go pay for everything.

I agree. But we can't control what they do. They may make that choice.

And it's a lot of ifs and I agree. I would assume, and Jim can correct me if I'm wrong, if at some point there is a developer that comes into that area and we're probably going to be cheaper because we have infrastructure already over on that part of 56, they're going to come and say, this is what we want to do. And They're going to give us an indication whether it's going to happen, whether they're there or not. If it's another intermodal, which the intermodal is its own special. I would expect Jim to raise that issue back with us and say, well, we've tried, and this is the best that we can do. It's going to go to Edgerton otherwise.

And I guess what I'm asking, Mark, would you be okay with directing staff to be open to this kind of stuff? And if it takes more truck traffic...

I don't think I have to because I think there already are.

But if it takes more truck traffic to look at each opportunity as a one-off. And that would be our decision to make. They would bring it to us and we'd say, yeah, maybe not. Or it could work. Knowing that if we don't, It's going to go the other direction, and we're going to deal with it. My point is, some of this land out there, we're going to have to deal with truck traffic one way or the other.

I don't think Jim needs that direction. No, I don't. If Jim and Dave were going to do that otherwise. I mean, they're going to bring it to us just like the data center was. I would think. I mean, your initial response may be, I've got to take this before the governing body, and let's see what I can get done.

I don't think it's like they walk in and We need to know today. If you don't say yes, you know. Right.

And honestly, I mean, Todd and I communicate every day at least once. And he's a great sounding board for, hey, we probably need to take this to the governing body. I mean, we're not doing this in isolation. Todd is representing the governing body. And we always have those discussions every day. It's not like I'm making those decisions unilaterally without any input from the mayor. And if it's controversial, you can guarantee it will always come to the governing body, just like we did recently two or three times.

We've already had proposals come before the governing body that were contentious between everybody involved.

That's our job.

And that's their job.

I do think, just to get a little bit away from this, I do think, feeling one of Council Member Baldwin's frustrations here, part of this is the limited opportunities we have for some of these things. I mean, honestly, geographically, we have limited opportunities. Market-driven-wise, we have limited opportunities. Unfortunately, we're not this independent community out in the middle of the hinterland of Kansas where we can say, hey, this 600 acres, this square mile, we're designating that as our industrial park for the future, and we can walk away from that. We are in the midst of a county that is growing and expanding by many jurisdictions, is eating up land, is doing things, and the land use pattern isn't all under our control. And that's part of your frustration, too. It's the same thing. And we're trying to figure out the means by which that could be comfortable. Honestly, if we had the growth development agreements we had in place a while back between the cities, a lot of this discussion is at least with a few of our neighbors. Not all of the neighbors, but a few of the neighbors. And so we're in that midst of how do we compete? How do we do what's best for our community while also recognizing that? We have a certain amount of resources and a certain amount of capabilities and limitations on the staff side. We can only go so far with that. And you're feeling that pain. I know for sure he is because we've had enough discussions about planned development and other things as we've gone through the years that it's one of those, OK, how do we balance that? How do we figure it out? The system right now, Jim and I talk about things from different perspectives. And there's times we disagree on something that's in the table. And we'll sit there and have that debate. And then that debate gets into, like Jim was saying, it may go to the mayor first or however, because we're looking for that guidance to say, OK, where does this? Where are we going too far in light of what the council as the policy board wants? So that's a constant given for us. Every day, everything we're doing. But the frustration, it's hard for us even as planners because we know we want to diversify the land use. We know that. We know that probably our best opportunities are still commercial at the two interchanges. Those are our best opportunities, and we need to make sure we protect those areas and don't have those eaten up by lesser land uses, if you will, because the highest and best uses around those interchanges going to be sales tax driven activities. So we know that for a fact. The industrial side, there is a real difference between different levels of industrial. What's a real good package and what's one that isn't, it's almost a case by case decision with guidance by you guys.

Dave, I completely agree with what you said. And the thing that brought this to my attention was when I saw the resources in the grid and natural gas infrastructure, when you're looking at that kind of infrastructure already there, that is nirvana for manufacturing. And when you look at that and say, that's going to naturally attract that type of land use, then we need to be a little more open to what it's going to be. And sometimes it may take truck traffic. And we may not want to do that. We may say too much truck traffic for us. But we also have to be ready to go and let somebody else make that decision for us and have to live with it.

I think the phrase that Jim banters around a lot with us is the community has to get something in return I agree. Right. And we've been hearing that message for a while now. And I think that's a key message is any of those items, what's the benefit to the community in the long run? We may have to tolerate some things that we don't like giving up on, you know, a little bit or a reduction of what we thought. But if the benefit comes back outweighing that, that's what we're looking for. We're looking for that balance.

Dave, I don't think this would ever happen, but I'm going to just lay this scenario out. What if Olathe comes on the east side of the strong property, and he says, right down to the back side of that strong property, and a data center says, hey, guys, Olathe, we want to do this. And they say, yeah, we've got four data centers. Let's go. Let's do it. And they plant the thing right where it was going to be, 1,000 feet away. And we still have the same issues with the same people, but now we have no say. How do we address that?

Some of it. So jurisdictionally is what's our role as a city at that point? Do we go out and interject in part of the public process as far as going to those planning meetings and everything like that, stating the position of the city and trying to influence those communities as far as buffers and different thresholds and things like that? That's the element we look at when we're trying to protect our citizens from adjacent development, because we do go through that periodically. I'll use one that's really not a big one, but recently Rural Water 7 had a proposal into Johnson County for a new water tower near one of our Boundaries and so we were looking at okay. How does that affect the potential residential development that we might have in this area in the future? And so we make decisions about how to interject or at least try to influence those things you're absolutely right We don't have control of their decision-making ability We don't have that but we do have the ability to interject if we feel like it's necessary to help protect Citizens interest or the community's interest at that point and we will do that we're informed by Johnson County and I mean, we talked to the Olathe people a lot, especially along 175th Street. They have a very different view of the 175th Street than we do for a number of reasons, not just the reasons for land development, but also for reasons regarding traffic flow and the way they designate that roadway. And so we're constantly trying to figure that out and work with it. I will say this with the Strong property. We would hold those regulations that we have in place that would buffer the land, and we would expect Olathe to do those kinds of things too. Now, will they? That's up to them at that point, and I can't speak for how anyone would look at those things. I can tell you that as we looked at the strong property in this proposal as planners, I don't want to deal with development agreement, I don't want to deal with any of that, but as planners, We did a lot of research, a lot of looking into the impacts. We heard a lot of actually things and ideas that came up that surfaced through public discussion, came through council members about DBs and DBAs and DBZs and DBCs, CAs, whatever the heck, you know, where we were. And we were prepared with conditions and things that we don't know if they ever would have accepted or not accepted at that point in time. It doesn't matter. That's up to them. That's part of our engagement, though. And it's the same when we hear about a proposal in another community. We're looking at it. And it's not unusual that I'll give a call to that planning director and sit down and say, I need you to walk me through this because I'm going to get questions from council. I'm going to get questions from Jim. What are they doing over there? What's going on? And how is that going to impact us? And we do that actively. That's all I can assure you of from that perspective.

That's really all we can ask. I don't want to be us versus them or this side's right or that side's wrong. What I'm trying to get to is how do we protect on the boundaries, on the peripherals, when we see these kind of natural uses of land and the attraction to certain types of development, and it's on the cusp it can go to us or it can go to another community, how do we protect our community, our citizens, and the investments that have been made already within our boundaries on stuff on the periphery. That's really the question.

The boundaries are hard. This is quick. With the intermodal, we had a situation there with a new warehouse recently, I'll say recently, within the last year or so, that was put up there west of our boundary, just adjacent to it. And we had discussions with the staff at Edgerton regarding buffers and visual blocking and things like that. So that's where we try to at least engage on those boundary discussions. That's about the best we can do.

I think with 56, I mean, I think there's some geographic restrictions there. I think it's going to be tough to develop there. If it was under contract, they're probably going to play both sides. They're going to come to us at some point. That's, I think, when we can then talk. We can have that discussion. But, I mean, I don't think there's a way to go out there and just take it all up and put it in Gardner and hope something comes there. I don't think that's an easy one.

Well, half of what's under contract is already.

Right. I mean, I think it's almost on a case by case, but I mean, I think there's time, if that develops, that we can then sit down and have those discussions. I don't think we'd say, no, Edgerton, just take it. If something actually did come, I think we absolutely would be in the middle of those discussions.

I think, Todd, what we're going to probably see, especially in the west area, is we're going to see something that's going to have some level of truck traffic. And that's going to have to come down to what level are we willing to tolerate and say yes to, and what are we going to say no to, with the full understanding that if we say no, somebody else may say yes, and we may pay the consequences of it.

But I think that happens on a case by case basis. Do we have any more thoughts on Clare Road?

It's actually both areas.

I think if you wanted to compare and contrast the two areas. you would choose Clare Road over the western side because the western front, then you do have more potential for the trucks. Yes, you'd have trucks on Clare Road potentially, but at least they're going to either go east on 175th, that's as far as Olathe is concerned, an industrial corridor, or they would possibly go south and end up on 199th outside of our jurisdiction, which will be an industrial corridor. Or they would go west and grab I-35. They're probably not going to go through town a whole lot. So I would think if you want to compare and contrast from a truck perspective, you would prefer Clare Road by a mile. It has the same infrastructure, essentially, from the stuff Steve was talking about. There's not a whole lot of residents in that area. We still have the ability to decide to put things there that will also be against Latho or Spring Hill, and then you can buffer that up into our residential that's going to be behind our sales tax, New Trails Parkway. So if you're choosing the two, that's my perspective.

Well, to that point, Mark, we need to make a decision as to which east-west road, besides the 130-150, we want to start kind of nudging towards a thoroughfare. Claire Road, I agree, is probably going to have to become one.

I mean, it would be great if it was actually between Claire and Hedge on the eastern half. That's not our decision to make. So between Claire Crossing and Olathe, but... which is doable, I guess, but east-west would depend on what we want the rest of the south side to look like. But I do think if you're going to put industrial anywhere, the southeast corner is an option because it's away from everybody.

You're going to have the same pushback we had a month or two ago, too.

Sure. But that's people that are out of town that we're encroaching on their farmland, right? That's going to happen regardless of which city it is.

And that's why I'm also concerned about us being in that same position. Some other jurisdiction is making decisions for us and our people.

But I think, again, in the same scenario, we're going to be We're never going to just say flat no. We're going to say, all right, what is it? Is it under contract? OK, well, they're definitely making some effort to move forward. Let's talk. Let's bring this in front of council, that kind of thing. I agree. I've got to leave here in about 10 minutes. I've got to get back to work.

Do we want to figure out what we want to do?

I think it's similar.

I mean, we can give direction, but we can't take action. Right.

That's our crossing. So Claire would definitely have to be significantly improved probably. Well, again, depending on what traffic.

light, industrial. I think that's always been the key. There is a sweet spot of commercial, industrial, multi-family, lots of things that have lots of vehicles. Some are just lots of vehicles, some are trucks. There is a sweet spot of putting things where maybe it is industrial, but it has a few trucks. Maybe it's 4,000 apartments, and it's a ton of vehicles, but it's not trucks. Either way, you've got to deal with the traffic somehow. It just depends on what kind it is. MALE SPEAKER 2.

KC, do you have anything else?

Mark, did you want to?

We're looking for maybe more specific though, more direction.

It would just be if, I don't know if there really is, but it would be if this group had certain criteria that we wanted to say, hey, three trucks is fine, but eight is too many. Do we want to draw a hard line? I don't know. I'm not saying we have to.

I think a hard line is difficult.

It is because we do it case by case.

Yeah. the max I'll accept for this project but maybe the max on this project 10 is okay because of what it's giving to our community.

Right. Where I was going with that is I don't think we can necessarily nail it down. I just think we as this body has to be continuously thinking about if Jim comes to us what is your answer going to be in various scenarios so that we can actually address something so that we don't have a hey, we're willing to do this, we're not willing to do this, but we just don't know. We need to be able to give you an answer. That's all I'm going to say. And it needs to be uniform from one development to another. Maybe not the exact same values, but it needs to come from the same perspective of we're protecting the residents in this way. Or we don't want to allow this thing because of X. That's all.

Mm-hmm.

I have a parting thought, but it actually has nothing to do with the strategic plan, just something I have on my radar that I wanted to share. After our conversation a few months ago, I got sidetracked by data centers, but I wanted to go back and I have, I would like to, I have reached out to several agencies in the area, had some people contact me. I would like to put together a a meeting with if there's anyone in the city who would like to join somebody from the police department, if anybody else from the governing body, plus some residents of Gardner, some representatives from the various churches in the area, from Hope Market, Joy's Closet, to figure out what resources we have available for unhoused and struggling people in Gardner and take what is now kind of a scattershot list that's spread out all over the place put it all together into one central resource so that when people come to various locations and say, I need help, we all have, all of those resources have access to the fullness of what various people in Gardner and companies and churches in Gardner and throughout all of Johnson County have to offer to make it easier to be able to assist people when they need it. So if there is anybody on the city staff who would like to be part of that, just email me. Somebody from the police department, I would love to have there. I'm looking at probably a month or two out, maybe even three, because I know coordinating that many schedules can be difficult. But I do have that on my radar, and I will be actively working to put something together.

So that's a wonderful thing. kind of segues. Jim, years ago, Todd, you might remember this, we were trying to consolidate just helpful resources. I mean, like the Snow Angels program, you know, people, elderly that needed help with various things, people picking up groceries, et cetera. And we were going to put it on the website. We had it at one point, and then we were going to expand that. But then we kind of put it on hold because we were going to redevelop the website, and then we kind of just shelved it. Do we need to revisit having that site, that page, that is more involved? I think it's still on there. It is, but has more resources, to her point, that we keep evolving?

We can do that.

OK. And the information you have from this meeting or whoever would be good to keep adding to it. My point has always been with the website, we should keep pointing people back to it. It shouldn't be, oh, I saw this on Twitter. I saw this on Facebook. I don't know what is what. That's the source. And if it's consolidated, right, just like when people were getting stuff handed to them at Aspen Place, I got this sheet, but I didn't get this sheet. Okay, well, we'll have everything.

I think that could be good to tie into the Be a Good Neighbor campaign. Yep, we could do it with that. All the community resources as part of being a good neighbor and, you know, kind of expanding that campaign and driving people anytime you need something to be a good neighbor and drive that home.

Yep, yep.

Let me know. OK. Anything else from staff? Jason, you have direction now? You good? OK. We'll meet at the pool.