The Kearney City Council met on November 12, 2024, at 5:30 p.m. in City Council Chambers. The meeting included a public hearing on a rezoning request for an early head start facility, approval of a 13-item consent agenda, adoption of a mobile vending and carnival code amendment ordinance, and public comment on backyard chickens.
Silence uh and then we'll have our pledge of allegiance on the last okay thank you join us in the pledge of allegiance I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands one nation under God indivisible with liberty and justice for all thank you in accordance with section 841412 of the Nebraska revised statutes a current copy of the open meetings act is available for view as post on the wall of the council chambers. Will you take roll, please? Mayor Claus here Bush Cutter We are absent, Nicola Moore here, and we have no oral communications and no unfinished business, so we'll move right into public hearing one, and it pertains to the application submitted by Meredith Collins for Community Action Partnership of Mid-Nebraska to rezone a portion of the vacant lot located south of 1023 Avenue F, Planning Commission recommended approval. Meredith. Yes, good evening, everybody. I'm excited to be here. Um and do you want me to bring up the PowerPoint or no? Yep, it should be you can scroll through it. Thank you. Uh-huh. So my name's Meredith Collins. I'm the chief executive officer for community action partnership of mid-Nebraska. And my request this evening is to request our vacant property be rezoned from R3 to CO. So just a little bit about our agency. We're a private nonprofit agency. We serve 27 counties in South Central Nebraska, and we provide a myriad of social services ranging from WIC, Head Start, Ride Transportation, Case Management, Homeless Prevention, just to name a few. And this particular request is in regards to our early head start facility. So we would like to construct a new early head start building on this property, and that's why we're requesting the rezoning. And currently our head start program serves 32 children. We have a wait list of 20 kids that would like to be in the program. And we were recently awarded in September a $2.6 million federal grant from the Office of Head Start to build this facility. And I am super excited about it. So with this, we did a feasibility study in 2021. We've been trying to find funding for for several years. So we've completed that. We also did an environmental study on the property, and uh a professional appraisal was done in 2022. So this is the area that we're talking about. You can see our WIC head start building to uh the north there, and the vacant lot is currently R3, and then to the south is our Ride Transportation Building. So just to give you an idea of the zoning, currently our WIC head start building is zoned for CO, RID is C3, and of course, this is currently R3. Uh just visual of the property. This is a vacant lot that we've had for a while that I've really wanted to do something with for quite a long time. So uh to build a facility that's such needed in Carney is very exciting for the agency. I just wanted to give you a visual of some of the plans that were drawn up in the feasibility study of what it would look like. Uh this uh we would like to connect it to our current building. We have a lot of parents that are enrolled in both head start and early head start, and that would make drop off easy as they drop off their kiddos and early head start. They can walk over to the building. Um it would have 26 parking spots with our current uh prospective build, and it would have two infant rooms and two toddler rooms. Uh we'd like to put another outdoor playground um area as well for both the the toddlers and the infants. So with this, the capacity would be up to 48 kids that we could serve, but that I would have to find additional funding uh to serve additional kids and to have additional staff. So that is my request this evening. Can I answer any questions? Council have any questions? No, no, pretty straightforward. Yeah, good. Okay, this is a public hearing. Is there anyone in with in the audience which address public hearing one? Okay, do we have a motion then? I move to close public hearing one and move for the adoption of ordinance number 8701, rezoning a portion of the vacant lot located south of 1023 Avenue F from District R3 Urban Residential Multifamily District, medium density to district CO office district, and that the statutory law requiring reading ordinances on three successive days be suspended. Second. Roll call, please.