This transcript is from a **Lakeville Planning Commission** meeting. The presiding officer is the **Vice Chair** (a female commissioner). The key staff members present are **Zach Johnson** (City Engineer) and **Chris Jensen** (Planning Department). The applicant for the second item is **Steve Troskey** from Lennar. [0:48] **Vice Chair**: I call the September 19th Planning Commission meeting to order and ask you to stand for the pledge of Allegiance. [1:13] **Vice Chair**: Thanks everybody. Um, Secretary Morrow, will you please take the roll? [1:13] **Secretary Morrow**: Zac? **Commissioner Zac**: Here. **Secretary Morrow**: Travis? **Commissioner Travis**: Here. **Secretary Morrow**: Tinsley? **Commissioner Tinsley**: Here. **Secretary Morrow**: Zimmer? **Commissioner Zimmer**: Here. **Secretary Morrow**: Mike? **Commissioner Mike**: Here. **Secretary Morrow**: Swanson? **Commissioner Swanson**: Here. [1:13] **Vice Chair**: Thanks. The next item on the agenda is the approval of the minutes. Does anyone have any changes to our September 5th minutes? Seeing none, those minutes will stand. And do we have any announcements from our planning department, Miss Jensen? [1:13] **Chris Jensen**: Thank you, Vice Chair. No, I do not have any announcements or handouts for you today. [1:13] **Vice Chair**: Thank you. The next item of business is from the City of Lakeville. We will have Zach Johnson with the city staff present to us the Capital Improvement Plan for consideration. [1:58] **Zach Johnson**: All right, good evening everyone. It's my pleasure and privilege to share with you tonight the 2025-2029 Capital Improvement Plan for the City of Lakeville. Just a little bit of background: this is an effort that took about nine months. This is an annual project that we do each year and it really has three main components. One is to identify the framework for the infrastructure needs to meet our city, both short-term, long-term, and our development objectives, which you see when you have your Planning Commission meeting to see all the growth that we have. The second, then, too, is it provides our policymakers and our community kind of a map or a plan to implement and administer these Capital Improvements. And then finally, it identifies the financial resources that we use to finance and pay for these. With that, today I'd like to highlight a couple of the significant projects, but please note that in this 5-year plan there's over $300 million of Capital Improvement projects. So we'll highlight a few. If you have any questions, let me know. It's pretty exciting for me; I've been working on this for quite a while. But we'll kind of go through it step by step. So the first item is annual maintenance and rehabilitation of our roadway infrastructure. We have a reconstruction project where we go through and fix roads, either that have extended through the end of their life cycle or those that we need to extend them through. We calculate those by having what's called an OCI. So we try to maintain an OCI of 75, and I really have been able to maintain that here for a couple of years. We do have expansion with growth. We do need to widen some of our roads. We work carefully with our partners at the County. So this project here represents 185th Street expansion between County Road 50 and Ipava Avenue, widening that existing roadway to a four-lane divided section. We are on schedule to be in construction of that next spring. This is a last-minute change, actually—I had to change this slide about an hour ago. We are proposed to partner with the county to construct a single-lane roundabout out at the intersection of Hamburg Avenue and County Road 50. You might remember that we worked with the county to kind of modernize that section a couple years ago, but we did identify that with that, we still have an intersection issue. And the change here is that the county is trying to advance this to a 2025 construction versus 2026. So all things are in line to be able to maintain that schedule. They're kind of working through preliminary designs, but it was initially programmed for '26 and as of this afternoon, I think 2025 is reasonable. One of our objectives is to improve safety along our corridor as well, and part of that is to construct a freight rail car storage facility, which would thereby move the storage of rail cars north of County Road, east or west of that I would say, to south of 70 is kind of the goal there. And that project is programmed for 2026. We do have some outside funds that we've secured, so working through that process and with the rail companies as well. Also with growth is the 179th Street extension. You might remember the Brookshire plat, also the Pheasant Run; this kind of connects these two, and it's a highway bridge that spans the North Creek. We are quite a ways through design on this one, but this is scheduled for construction in 2026. And long term, this will be a future extension of County Highway 9. Holyoke Avenue, north of City Hall, south of the water tower, is programmed for 2027 modernization, providing curb and gutter, making storm sewer improvements—you'll see on the bottom slide there would be a pedestrian underpass there as well—and then also making intersection improvements to address some safety concerns that we have as well. In 2027, we'd move back to the County highway system and we would work on modernizing that section of Dodd Boulevard between County Road 50 and 210th Street. Too big to fit on one screen, and moving that project down a little bit further south, we'd subsequently program the following year in 2028 to do the same thing and modernize Dodd Boulevard between County Road 70 and 210th Street as well. And the last one—we just had a public open house recently—but we continue to make progress on an interchange design for Interstate 35 and County Road 50. This project has been talked about for a long time. We worked on the initial improvements in the early 2000s, and traffic conditions and safety needs are kind of advancing this project as well. This project is not fully financially secured yet; we're still working on that. We have a number of partnerships that we're trying to work through. But the plan is to get everything in place so that we could start construction in 2028. And this would be improvements basically between Klamath Trail and Jubilee on the system, and then it would be basically between County 60 and just north of the interchange on 35. So stay tuned, there'll be a lot of news on that one and a lot of opportunities for public participation. Moving on to our Park and Recreation component of the CIP: we have a couple of cool projects that we wanted to highlight here. One is the North Creek Greenway and East Community Park. This is an extension of an existing system that goes from the Minnesota Zoo all the way down to Farmington. We just have a few gaps here that we need to improve and kind of right-size to County standards. And with that, we would implement Phase Two of East Community Park and construct a trailhead, and that's scheduled for 2025 and 2026. Then on the west side of town, we have the Lake Marion Greenway and Ritter Farm trailhead. There's segments of this that are constructed, but this one has a few more gaps. So we've kind of broken that into two different phases. The ones that you'll see here are programmed for construction in 2026. Basically, it would be constructing a trailhead at Ritter Farm Park and working our way southeast along the lake into downtown and making a connection to Holyoke Avenue. This here provides a little bit of a schematic and cross-section what that might look like. And here you'll see downtown where we want to provide some connectivity with this project. We'd put a trailhead in the green area there, perhaps look at a cul-de-sac to improve some traffic movements there, reconstruct that parking lot that you see kind of in the middle of the screen, and then make a connection just north of the Lakeville Area Arts Center. With that, we also have a number of new developments that you've approved recently, and so we have programmed neighborhood parks. These are just four of them that are programmed in the next several years: Voyager, Spyglass, Ritter Meadows, and Grand Prairie State Park. Moving on to utilities: again, similar to the roadway, we have our existing system of 300 miles with sanitary sewer and water main that we need to maintain so that we can provide our residents and business communities with stable, dependable sewer and water. And then with the anticipated growth comes additional infrastructure needs. So we are proposing... [pauses] that did not get updated, sorry about that, I'll have to ad-lib. Lift Station 26 provides us additional capacity to serve folks on the north side of town that is directly tied to construction that's northwest of Interstate 35. So we'll have that; that's actually currently under design and is programmed to be operational next year. Dakota Heights water tower: again, for our water supply and our water storage system, we want to maximize that life cycle there. And so to preserve the coating and to minimize future costs, we have to repaint that every so many years, and Dakota Heights is scheduled for 2026. Again, on that theme of new development is the construction of Wells 24 and 25. It's programmed for 2028, but it's subject to land development and anticipated growth as well. If we see a little bit slower rate, we might be able to push those out, or in some cases, we may have to accelerate. We're just about ready finishing our most recent well off on 190th Street just east of Dodd. Facilities: we have a couple exciting projects too. The first center is well into the design; that's proposed for construction in 2025. It's located at the old Public Works site just east of Hamburg, north of County Road 70. That would be a regional facility to provide our emergency service personnel, our fire and our police, the ability to train. One of the challenges for those folks is to find the opportunities to train, and a lot of times having to go off-site. Here we'd be able to bring that right into town and enhance the opportunities for our staff to have modern technology and modern training opportunities as well. And that's programmed to begin construction in 2025, might go into 2026. With that, again, that theme of a growing community: our Central Maintenance Facility and then also our Water Treatment Facility on the subsequent slide here. As we start to grow, we have additional needs for equipment, and so with that you'll see we have programmed in 2027 expansion to the existing facility off of Cedar, as well as our Water Treatment Facility. And then we have Environmental Resources. We have a number of projects here. This one here is a water quality project that's programmed for kind of the central-east side of town by Greenridge Park, if you're familiar with that area. We have an opportunity to provide some additional water quality, potentially some rate control at Greenridge Park, and that's a partnership with our Vermillion River Watershed. Sorry, you see the slide trying to show us some examples of where we've successfully done some work in the past, and we'll put this on our website too as well so that this can be shared with the public. Annually, again preserving our existing assets, we do a Lake Management Program where we do lake studies. We take a look at the fish, the habitat, the vegetation to make sure that they're sustainable and maintaining a high level of quality for recreation and also aesthetics. We also have quite a bit of public land. In addition to our parks, we have city outlots that house existing structures like our well sites. We also have outlots where we have prairie preservations and woodlands like Ritter Farm Park and also The Preserve at Lakeville. With that comes maintenance. We do a couple of things with this program: we try to reduce the amount of invasive species and therefore allow our existing species like Oaks and Maples to thrive. Also, we want to have native flowers and native vegetation as well. So we have a program to address the invasive species and weeds, and we do a number of different management techniques to do that. And that applies to our shorelines, our rain gardens, or wetlands as well. Water conservation is a theme. It's been a pretty dry summer here until towards the end, but certainly we have ebbs and flows with the weather; we'll have dry summers and wet summers. But with that, we want to really have an approach to water conservation. So we do look at our systems and our city property to make sure that we're using good technology and minimizing our water use. And then lastly, our forestry assets as well. We work to maintain that, kind of similar to what we talked about, addressing things like Emerald Ash Borer and Oak Wilt as well. So we want to try to be proactive in maintaining those assets. And then lastly is the general equipment and technology acquisition and replacement again to make sure we're maintaining our efficiencies to operate as a city. And there's a map, and what I just wanted to highlight there is you can see it's really spread out. We have needs throughout the entire city, and we really work hard to make sure that it's a balance and to make sure that everything is addressed as well. So there's a little bit of something everywhere is kind of the takeaway for that. Tonight, this is not a public hearing, but the request of the Planning Commission is to review our Capital Improvement Plan and make sure it is compliant with our Comprehensive Plan Amendment. With that, we would ask for written findings so that we can bring that to the City Council for their approval. And with that, I will stand for any questions. [15:55] **Vice Chair**: Thank you very much, Mr. Johnson. And do we have any questions? [15:55] **Commissioner Swanson**: Madam Chair, just more of a statement: I will not be participating in any vote on this issue due to my employment with the State of Minnesota and the Minnesota Department of Transportation. We're a partner in that project at County Road 50 and I-35. So normally I'd have other comments on the CIP this year; I will not. Thank you. [16:42] **Vice Chair**: Thanks very much. Um, [to another Commissioner] Madam Vice Chair... um, sure. [16:42] **Commissioner Zimmer**: Mr. Johnson, the question I had: the plan is very detailed as you revise it each year. Do you have a process where you look at what happened with the actual cost and the actual budget and whether it trues up as each year goes by? [16:42] **Zach Johnson**: Yeah, what I'd like to say is this isn't a budget. So it provides the framework for the project costs and what we call a Capital Improvement Plan level of estimate. So a lot of these projects haven't even been designed. Other than identifying a need, we haven't done any surveying, any records research, or things of that nature. So we do have an estimate, but absolutely, as we work through the process—a lot of these processes take three years—you start with preliminary engineering, you work into final engineering, sometimes there's right-of-way acquisition, and then you have construction. And throughout that entire process, we do take a look at costs, both projects that are in the works and then that allows us to take good quantities and costs and take that into consideration. So the CIP does have a connection, a nexus with our budget, absolutely. But I just want to point out that the estimates, the numbers you see, are a lot of times without the benefit of the engineering. Some that are further along are a little tighter, but it's a conceptual cost estimate, if that makes sense. [17:29] **Commissioner Zimmer**: It does, thank you. [17:29] **Vice Chair**: Yeah, any further questions? Mr. Johnson, you've asked us for a motion? [18:16] **Zach Johnson**: Yes, please. Accepting the CIP—that the CIP in its form is compliant with the Comprehensive Plan Amendment. [18:16] **Vice Chair**: Yes, please. Great. Anyone want to make the motion? [18:16] **Commissioner Travis**: I make a motion that we, the Planning Commission, find it in compliance with what's necessary from the City Comprehensive Plan Amendment. [18:16] **Commissioner Zimmer**: Second. [18:16] **Vice Chair**: Okay. Um, Secretary Morrow, please take a roll. [18:16] **Secretary Morrow**: Zac? **Commissioner Zac**: Aye. **Secretary Morrow**: Travis? **Commissioner Travis**: Aye. **Secretary Morrow**: Tinsley? **Commissioner Tinsley**: Aye. **Secretary Morrow**: Zimmer? **Commissioner Zimmer**: Aye. **Secretary Morrow**: Mike? **Commissioner Mike**: Aye. **Secretary Morrow**: Swanson? **Commissioner Swanson**: Abstain. [18:16] **Vice Chair**: Thank you very much. All right, appreciate it, and we'll have that prepared for you. All right, thank you very, very much. The next item on the agenda is a public hearing for the Cedar Hills North Comprehensive Plan and Zoning Map Amendments. We do have Mr. Steve Troskey here with Lennar to present. And I'll invite him up, and anyone that is interested in coming up to speak with us, please sign up at the back of the room and we'll make sure you get an opportunity to address the group. And welcome, Mr. Troskey, please go ahead. [19:03] **Steve Troskey**: Oh, good evening. Steve Troskey with Lennar. It's great to be here. It's great for Lennar to be back in the City of Lakeville. We've had great success here as you know; you've probably seen my associates here a number of times over the years. So we're back with the first of what will be several requests, and tonight we are seeking a Comprehensive Plan Amendment and a rezoning for a community that we are calling Cedar Hills North. It's on Cedar Avenue and 200th, directly across the street from our Cedar Hills community—go out there, it's under construction right now, beautiful homes, there's model homes open if you're so inclined. So we are planning Cedar Hills North to have approximately 88 single-family homes and 144 townhomes. We really want folks—customers have told us that they want more options in Lakeville. People want to be here; they want to move here. You've done great things, and so we want to provide a number of options for folks to move into Lakeville. So I know Chris Jensen has a lot more technical details with the presentation she'll give, but I'm happy to answer any questions you may have. [20:35] **Vice Chair**: Right, I think we'll probably call you back up for questions. Thank you, Mr. Troskey. And I'll ask Miss Jensen to come forward. [20:35] **Chris Jensen**: Thank you. Good evening, Commissioners. [20:35] **Commissioners**: Evening. [20:35] **Chris Jensen**: All right, as we've said, this is a public hearing for a Comprehensive Plan Amendment and Zoning Map Amendment for Cedar Hills North. As Mr. Troskey said, it is adjacent to Cedar Avenue, so it's east of Cedar, north of 200th, and west of our city boundary with Farmington, directly north of Lennar's existing Cedar Hills development. As he said, it's 88 single-family lots and 144 attached townhome lots. I will note that this public hearing is strictly for the Comp Plan Amendment and the rezoning. We will see the preliminary plat at a meeting in the near future, probably the second meeting of October, but we're just advancing this as we've done similarly with Lord of Life at our last meeting, where we had that in advance of the preliminary plat. Having said that, I did include what we've got so far for the preliminary plat just so you can kind of see how the property is proposed to lay out because that's going to play into these amendments. So this street here is essentially dividing the parcel; it's an extension of an existing street within Cedar Hills—it's called Galifray Way. And so the single-family is typically on the east side of that except for this portion over here that's proposed south of the creek. The remainder of the site, generally on the west portion and north of the creek, is the attached townhomes. This is subject to change—we are still working with it—but I wouldn't expect any major changes at this point. Moving on, we've got the two land-use designations up there. On the left, the MHDR, which is Medium-High Density Residential—that's the area shown in orange. That area then has a correlating zoning of RM3, which is a medium-density residential district. On the east half of the site, we have the LMDR, which is Low-Medium Density Residential, and its corresponding zoning district is RST2. The Medium-High district allows for the attached townhomes; it does not allow for single-family. And the RST2 district on the east half allows for single-family, detached townhomes, and twin homes; it does not allow for the attached townhomes of four or more units in the building. As you see, this slide is about the Comp Plan Amendment. I'll try and guide you through it here. So this area in light orange here is—there's no change proposed for that. This line represents this essential same line, which is how we divided it on the map when we were doing the Comprehensive Plan. We did not know how this property would be laid out—keep in mind we were doing this plan five, six, seven years ago—so we just split it down the middle. So this is the dividing line. So this area in light orange remains as is. This portion in here is currently guided Low-Medium Density Residential; that's proposed to change to the Medium-High. The spine street through here, the Galifray, becomes kind of the new divider through the site. This area over here, these single-family are currently guided the Medium-High; that area would change actually to Low-Density Residential, not Low-Medium. And then the remainder of this area over here would change from Low-Medium to Low-Density Residential. That's because the density as proposed doesn't quite meet the requirements for that Low-Medium, and so we need to drop it down to that Low-Density Residential. Staff has spoken with our sector rep from Met Council, so they're fully aware that we are proposing these changes and have kind of given us a preliminary approval on that. To be... the zoning has to be consistent with the land-use designation. So again, this portion—I lost my mouse here—this is the area that's RM3; it will stay. This portion in this area will change from RST2 to RM3. Again, this area down over here will change from RM3 to RST2. The rest of this site does not need to be rezoned; we can remain at that RST2 zoning. So it's just these kind of two areas that are involved in the rezoning. So that's the summary of what I've got for you. I know it's a little confusing, but hopefully the different maps helped lay that out for you. Staff is supportive of this request. If approved by the City Council, the request will be submitted to the Met Council and they must approve the Comp Plan Amendment before it can actually be put into place. This is a public hearing. If you have any questions, I will stand for those. Thank you. [25:58] **Vice Chair**: Excellent. As we said, this is a public hearing, and is there anyone that would like to address the group? Seeing no one come forward, I'd be willing to take a motion to close the public hearing. [25:58] **Commissioner Mike**: Motion to close the public hearing. [25:58] **Vice Chair**: Any discussion? All those in favor signify by saying Aye. [25:58] **Commissioners**: Aye. [25:58] **Vice Chair**: Opposed? The public hearing is now closed. Planning Commissioners, do you have any questions for Mr. Troskey or Miss Jensen? Go ahead, Commissioner Mike. [26:43] **Commissioner Mike**: Miss Jensen, quick question on the ghost plat: is that going to stay consistent with the land around it? [26:43] **Chris Jensen**: The ghost plat is something that we just ask developers to put there more to look at: can the necessary street connections be made? Any inclusion of a ghost plat adjacent to a preliminary is not considered a part of that approval; it's just showing how the property potentially could be developed. Yes, the commercial—or excuse me, the comprehensive designation—this area north of the Low-Medium Density is currently Low-Medium, and then the area to the north of the Medium-High is actually a Corridor Mixed-Use. Keep in mind our Comprehensive Plan was 2017 to 2019. The County has identified 195th Street as a potential future stop for the Red Line, and so as a part of our Comprehensive Plan, we were required to have a certain higher-density development set for around that 195th Street location. So that area above the Medium-High Density Residential is just kind of the fringe of that Corridor Mixed-Use that higher-density area we were required to have. We have been discussing with Met Council and Dakota County potential changes and, you know, what's the feasibility of the Red Line as we move in to get closer to starting our Comprehensive Planning process again. [28:15] **Commissioner Mike**: Okay. Um, yes, I would say it is consistent. Looking more at the at the white carve-out of this development... [28:15] **Chris Jensen**: Oh, I'm sorry, are you talking about this one? I just want to make sure that was... sorry, that's all good. On the other side too, there—that is an existing... there is a single-family home on that parcel, so that parcel is not included with this plat. Again, the ghost plat is just showing how it potentially could be developed if that property were to ever be sold. [29:00] **Commissioner Mike**: Is the zoning consistent with what's new? [29:00] **Chris Jensen**: Yeah, okay. Yes, they were not part of the Comp Plan Amendment because they're obviously not part of the plat, right? Um, it may be that they would need to do a Comp Plan Amendment, not a rezoning, at the time if that property were to redevelop in the future. [29:00] **Vice Chair**: Madam Vice Chair, please. Go ahead, Commissioner Travis. [29:46] **Commissioner Travis**: So, Miss Jensen, as I look at these changes within Cedar Hills North, do they necessitate any changes on the border around Cedar Hills North as we've made changes inside? Do the immediate bordering areas stay the same? [29:46] **Chris Jensen**: Correct. Yeah, if... I mean, the areas to the north and to the west are not yet developed. So if at those times those develop, if there are considerations for amendments based on what's being proposed there, that would be addressed at that time and we would look at the existing developed areas around that as a part of that review. [30:33] **Commissioner Travis**: Thank you. [30:33] **Vice Chair**: Commissioner Swanson. [30:33] **Commissioner Swanson**: Thank you, Madam Chair. Um, as I'm looking at this, this kind of reflects the reality of trying to actually develop the land. You know, we start with these nice rectangles of 40 acres approximately, and they look like nice shapes and they make the map look nice and pretty when we put the Comp Plan together, but there's always obstacles in the way. And so as I recall on this one, you've got a fairly large natural gas pipeline that runs to the west side of the site. We've also got a drainage way that runs kind of through the central portion of the site as well that kind of dictates where the roads go, how this all lays out along with all the stormwater management requirements and everything else that comes into play here. So I appreciate having kind of a draft of what this plat may look like in front of us; that really helps me formulate and see why we're creating the shapes that we are and trying to balance this out. So this is one of those things that happens as we actually get to the level of trying to actually develop the land. So I see this as being a reasonable request to put things into a developable state. [31:19] **Vice Chair**: Thank you. I would like to say kudos, Miss Jensen, for your use of color layovers in order to lay that piece out and explain it in such an easy... [31:19] **Chris Jensen**: A lot of playing around in [Laughter] Adobe. [31:19] **Vice Chair**: Do we have any other questions? Looks like we're ready for a motion. [31:19] **Commissioner Zimmer**: Madam Chair, Commissioner move to recommend approval of the Cedar Hills North Comprehensive Plan Amendment and Zoning Map Amendment and approval of the findings of fact dated September 19th, 2024. [32:06] **Commissioner Travis**: Second. [32:06] **Vice Chair**: Thank you very much. Secretary Morrow, take the role please. [32:06] **Secretary Morrow**: Zac? **Commissioner Zac**: Aye. **Secretary Morrow**: Travis? **Commissioner Travis**: Aye. **Secretary Morrow**: Zimmer? **Commissioner Zimmer**: Aye. **Secretary Morrow**: Mike? **Commissioner Mike**: Aye. **Secretary Morrow**: Swanson? **Commissioner Swanson**: Aye. [32:06] **Vice Chair**: Excellent, thank you so much for your presentation, Mr. Troskey. And Miss Jensen, when will this come before City Council, please? [32:06] **Chris Jensen**: At their October 7th meeting. [32:06] **Vice Chair**: October 7th, okay excellent. Do we have any staff notices for tonight? [32:52] **Chris Jensen**: Just what was included with the memo that was with the agenda. [32:52] **Vice Chair**: Okay, I don't think there's anything else before us. Motion, or we are adjourned. [32:52] [Music]