Thank you.

Hello, and welcome to the March fifth, twenty twenty-four town council and planning commission joint study session.

My name is Justin Brooks.

I'm the mayor and um the presiding officer over this study session.

I'm joined here with the planning commission chair, Mr.

Tim Burns.

Who is named Kelly Riskel because I said her the Zoom thing, but she's really Sarah Normella.

Oh, is Sarah going to do it?

I'm sorry.

So uh I'm Sarah Normella, planning and development director, and I uh thank the town council and the planning commission for uh spending time with us tonight, our our team, which includes Kelly Driscoll, our planning manager and Josh Campbell, our senior planner.

And uh we're going to be walking through some draft scenarios with all of you tonight is not uh to to talk about oh, we have these polished scenarios for you to consider and choose from.

It's more of an opportunity for you all to weigh in on the direction in which we're headed with these scenarios.

Our full expectation is to refine the scenarios that you're seeing today and to enhance some of the information around them.

So, and we may end up with another scenario that you that might come up from conversation tonight.

So I wanted to lay the ground for that with the expectation that we do want to have a dialogue and um we want to hear from you with respect to the kinds of things that the community you think that the community might be thinking or wanting to know is part of the information around these scenarios.

And um yeah, that this is definitely a conversation and our next step is refinement and getting into um uh a much broader outreach with the community.

So with that, I'm going to hand it off to Kelly Driscoll.

Thanks, Sarah.

And yes, thank you all for taking time tonight to to be with us.

Um what we're gonna go over is um the project timeline where we're at um and where we're headed.

Um some key findings from two of our consultants um on the economic market analysis and our land use fiscal analysis.

We'll take a little break and do a little interactive activity.

Um I emailed you around 6.15 a link.

Um let me know if you did not get that.

Um, and then um we will go into our draft scenarios.

Um, wrapping up with next steps, and we'll we'll have time for um questions and discussion moves as well.

So um most of you remember the the project started in late um 22.

Um, and um we kind of um pivoted uh in that analysis phase as we um terminated our contract with our um our main consultant and moved the work in-house.

Uh we are now in this third phase, the the visioning phase there, which is probably you know our largest in terms of effort and um timeframe.

And throughout all of these um different phases, we've had periods of community engagement.

Um, like Sarah said, um, we wanted to get your feedback as well as we're um we're meeting with the the PAC and the TAC on these scenarios before we go out um to the public in our what we're calling our final phase of engagement for the plan.

Um so we are still on track to um have the draft plan, adoption hearings, all of that um in um summer this year.

So um oh my goodness, sorry, skipped ahead there.

Um moving on to the key findings.

Our economic market analysis consultant um is EPS.

And on the screen here, you see um the map of Erie in green, and then the uh the red boundary around it is what they've defined as our secondary market area, which is a 15-minute um drive time outside of Erie's boundaries.

And some of the information they provided is really some some snapshots on um the commercial uh activity that we see within Erie.

So for retail, um, since 2010, Erie has managed to capture 92% of that secondary market area's new retail development square footage, which is fantastic.

Um our average rent is around $25 a square foot, and our vacancy is is pretty low at um two and a half percent, which is way below our secondary market area at um 6.1.

Um, and this just goes into a little bit more detail as far as um comparison from 2010 to 2023 in that square footage and shows the annual growth rate for the town of Erie as well as the secondary market area.

And we did have them look at our existing mixed use centers, so our downtown area and town center, so we could get an idea of um how those are performing in context.

And then the table on the other side shows the uh rent changes for those areas.

And the office market since 2010, we've captured almost 85%.

And our vacancy rate is really low at 1.6%.

We just don't, we don't have a lot of office in town.

Downtown Erie vacancy is a little bit higher at 3%, but that's still well below our the secondary market area that's almost at 10% vacancy.

As far as industrial, we've only captured about 55% of the market area since 2010.

And this might be due to the fact that our um our average rent is a little bit higher than the secondary market area.

Again, our vacancy rates are really low.

We just don't have a whole lot of industrial available in the town, and what what we do have doesn't stay vacant for very long.

So there's a lot of potential there.

So as of last year, um we have almost 5,000 jobs in town, and our top five industries make up over half of our total employers.

Those are kind of outlined in that black box on the on the left side there.

Um important things about um employment are almost every single industry has increased in the last decade, which translated to uh 7.3% uh growth each year.

Um the most category, the categories that added the most jobs were professional, scientific and technical services, administration and waste management, as well as accommodation and food services.

And um EPS is predict that um from 2023 to 2050 that our employment will continue to grow at a 4.3% annual growth rate.

Um, as far as wages, the average wage in Erie is uh 75,210.

Wages have continued to increase um over the last decade at uh about 5% annually.

And you can see on this graph, those ones that tend to be in the the much higher categories are those um primary employment jobs and technical fields.

Um moving on to the land use fiscal analysis.