LEXINGTON, Ky. — The text amendment that is supposed to turn the 2024 Urban Growth Master Plan’s recommendations into enforceable zoning rules for Lexington’s 2,800-acre expansion area appeared on the city’s Accela portal dated Aug. 31, three months after the date by which planning staff had told the Planning Commission it hoped to have the amendment heard, and nearly five months after the early-April filing staff projected. The record (PLN-ZOTA-26-00011) carries one sentence of description and no attachments: no draft text, no notification letter, no hearing date.
It was a light week on the portal. The Lexington Times pulled every Planning Division record updated between Aug. 29 and Sept. 6 from the city’s Accela Citizen Access portal — 12 records, 17 new attachments — and set aside the zoning-compliance permits and a shared-mobility license. That left six cases: the growth-area amendment; a four-story nursing-home building at Sayre Christian Village whose plan sheet reprints a 2010 zoning condition barring pole lighting on part of the site, while the lighting sheet filed with it shows seven heads on 20-foot poles; new letters in the Pasadena Drive drive-through case, whose lawyer told a commission committee Sept. 3 that “we screwed up”; a two-bedroom duplex on a 26-foot-wide Brucetown lot that sold for $7,500 in May; a landlord’s short-term rental near Kirklevington Park; and a homeowner’s garage apartment on North Hanover Avenue.
The growth-area rulebook, months behind staff’s own schedule…