- Concerns about parking and traffic around the area of the new Commonwealth Center for Biomedical Excellence dominated a public facility review of the land this week.
- The NKY Port Authority, which owns the land, performed a parking study, but some worried it wasn’t thorough enough.
- The Kenton County Planning Commission eventually approved the facility review with some caveats.
Parking and traffic have emerged as a dominant concern around the relocation of Northern Kentucky University’s Chase Law School and the local branch of UK’s College of Medicine to Covington.
These concerns were on full display last week at a meeting of the Kenton County Planning Commission, which was set to vote on a public facility review of the land on East Rivercenter Boulevard, which has been dubbed the “Commonwealth Center for Biomedical Excellence,” where the relocation will occur. Although the commission eventually approved the public facility review, they explicitly acknowledged the gap in knowledge about the project’s effect on parking in their motion.
The land on which the center will sit is owned by the Northern Kentucky Port Authority. The Northern Kentucky Port Authority is a state agency and is, thus, exempt from zoning laws and historical preservation standards. Still, it has to go through a public review process with the Planning Commission to see how well the development plan conforms with comprehensive planning and land use and give the public time to leave comments. School districts must go through the same process…