In a unanimous vote after a public hearing Tuesday evening, the Urban County Council approved a zoning change for The Summit, a proposed 50-acre mixed-use development at the corner of Man o’ War Boulevard and Nicholasville Road.
Earlier in the summer the Planning Commission also voted unanimously to approve the zoning change which would allow the proposed development, known as The Summit.
The project is being developed by Bayer Properties on the former Fritz Farm property and will be a 1 million-square-feet mixture of upscale retail and residential units.
Opponents to The Summit project say the development will put even more traffic on Lexington’s busiest road and is not in keeping with the South Nicholasville Road Small Area Plan, a community planning tool adopted in 2009 that “considers the needs of existing residents, the desires of property owners, and issues important to the community ... (intended) to guide public improvements and steer private investment in order to protect neighborhoods and achieve the goals for sustainable new development.”
Attorney Hank Graddy, who represents Don’t Overload Nicholasville Road with More Traffic, an informal association of nearby neighbors, says his clients feel that The Summit is in contrast with the area plan’s traffic recommendations.
“We read the plan to emphasize the need to address traffic problems along Nicholasville Road as one of its overarching purposes and to make sure the development that occurs on Nicholasville Road does not aggravate the traffic more than it has to,” Graddy said. “Our concern is that the proposal that’s now being considered, we believe, will make the traffic significantly worse. It’s already pretty bad.”
Graddy pointed to a recommended traffic feature in the small area plan, a single point urban interchange (such as the New Circle Road and Winchester Road intersection), which would be jeopardized if The Summit development were to proceed because less space would be available.
“We argued that it was very important not to put development along the Fritz Farm in a way that would foreclose installing that improvement in the transportation plan,” he said.
Bill Lear, an attorney representing Bayer Properties, argued that The Summit’s makeup of residential and commercial space was in keeping with other tenets of the small area plan recommending the property be mixed-use.
Lear said he has worked with the Fritz family since the early ‘90s regarding their property’s development. Previous attempts to develop the land failed, Lear said, because the proposals were strictly commercial.
“In all the previous efforts to rezone the property, the comprehensive plan called for it to be exclusively residential, and the requests that were made were almost for exclusively retail, so the council turned them down because they did not agree with the comprehensive plan,” he said.
Later, after the small area plan was adopted, Lear said the document recommended a mixed-use facility on the land.
“As a result of that process, the land use for the Fritz Farm was designated mixed-use, calling for a mix of residential and commercial space, and this proposed development complies with that. In what was submitted, there are actually more square feet of residential feet proposed than commercial space. So that’s the difference this time around – it’s in full agreement with the comprehensive plan.”