Trip 3 recap

Consultants from Verdunity met with both community members and City Staff to review a series of scenarios that modeled the fiscal ramifications of differing development patterns over two days in May.

A pair of public events were scheduled midday at the Kyle Public Works building and in the evening at City Hall to show citizens how decisions their leaders would be making in the coming years, in an attempt to account for expected growth, affects each of them personally. These community members provided consultants with the tradeoffs they were willing to make to put the city in a sounder financial standing. Most residents felt that diversifying the housing stock and building in a more efficient pattern was a worthwhile choice as long as development provided other high-quality amenities to the public, such as improved public spaces and walkability, and was spread thoroughly across the entire city.

Consultants from Verdunity also worked with representatives from Engineering and Public Works to ensure that plans for the future use of developed land were in line with infrastructure and other resource constraints.

The trip wrapped with a presentation to a joint session of the City Council and the Planning & Zoning Commission to present the growth scenarios and help identify improvements and revisions to the Scenarios to create a finalized fiscal projection for inclusion in the Comprehensive Plan document. Council and Commission Members identified specific elements that were important to communicate to the public in the Plan, including the way that new development interacts with existing spaces and what constitutes the type of small-scale business that are conducive to neighborhoods.