Council moves to expand Urban Service Boundary

At the final Committee of the Whole (COW) on the “Imagine Lexington 2045” Comprehensive Plan Goals & Objectives, Council voted to expand the Urban Service Boundary (USB), which restricts development of Fayette County’s rural land.

To read more about the conversations leading up to this vote, click here.

While several amendments changed how this expansion would happen, the final vote was 10-3, with Vice Mayor Dan Wu, 3rd District CM Hannah LeGris, and 10th District CM Dave Sevigny voting against the expansion. 12th District CM Kathy Plomin and 2nd District CM Shayla Lynch were absent from the meeting.

CMs voting in favor of expansion expressed concerns about affordable housing and housing costs more broadly as their reasons doing so.

This change to the Comprehensive Plan’s Goals & Objectives will require the Division of Planning staff and the Planning Commission to identify between 2,700 and 5,000 acres to be added to the Urban Service Area, prioritizing areas that are adjacent to the current Urban Service Boundary and/or along any of Lexington’s major corridors or arterials. After an area is chosen, Planning Staff & Planning Commission will create an Expansion Area Master Plan to set a vision for development of the acreage.

When the USB was last expanded in 1996, LFUCG created an Expansion Area Master Plan (EAMP), which you can read here. The 1996 expansion and EAMP led to the development of what is now Hamburg, and a significant portion of the land included has yet to be developed

Original language for this year’s expansion recommended land around Athens-Boonesboro Road and Winchester Road be considered by Planning Staff. These specific locations were eventually removed from the adopted changes, but it is likely those areas will still be top of mind for Planning Staff and the Planning Commission.

The new Expansion Area Master Plan (EAMP) will help set up guidelines and targets for how this expansion should be managed. There will be several opportunities for public input in this process, and will ultimately be approved and adopted by Council. The Comp Plan language requires the EAMP to be delivered to Council no later than December 1, 2024. It would go into effect immediately upon adoption.

In the absence of an EAMP by that date, language in the approved Goals and Objectives will trigger an automatic expansion, but it is unclear how that would proceed.

Once expansion is underway, new Theme E Goals & Objectives language states that the longtime project of creating a data-driven evaluation plan for future expansion should resume.

Development of a plan that would help assess the necessity or urgency of future opportunities for any expansion of the USB has been underway since 2018. Past efforts to do this have culminated in the Sustainable Growth Study that reports yearly data to Council, and last year’s Goal 4 Workgroup Growth Management Plan. The Goal 4 Workgroup plan was never adopted by Council and was referred to as “unfinished” by Council in Thursday’s COW, but that plan would likely be a starting point for further work.

This long-term Growth Management Plan must be finished by August 31, 2026.

For more information and background on the Comprehensive Plan, previous G&O discussions, and the Urban Service Boundary issue, visit our website.

The Comprehensive Plan Goals & Objectives as amended will be voted on again at Work Session on Tuesday, June 13th at 3pm in Council Chambers, and again on Thursday, June 15th at 6pm. You can attend in person or watch live on LexTV.