The Lafayette City Council met in workshop on April 22, 2025, at 5:30 p.m. to receive presentations on the 701 Pocket Park project, the water supply and project update, and the 2025 work plan update, followed by council new ideas. The meeting was informational; no formal motions or votes were taken.
All right. Well, we can go ahead and get started here. Um go ahead and open up the uh City Council workshop for April twenty second, twenty twenty-five. We have a few items on a few items to address tonight, uh, including the uh seven oh one pocket park project, a water supply uh update, as well as an update on our work plan for the year of twenty twenty-five. And then we'll end off the council meeting uh with any new ideas that counselors may want to bring up during that time. Um but uh we can go ahead and just get started with the first item tonight. Uh, this is the Seven O One Pocket Park Project Introduction. Uh, we do have our director of our economic development director here, Bridget Keating. And are you going to get us started? Yeah. Great. All right. Well, there's Councillor Samson. We can go ahead and get started. Thank you. Great. Thank you, Mayor and Council. And I'm also joined here with Dennis Warrington, the Parks and Open Space Manager. And so we're really excited to be here tonight to kick off the 701 Pocket Park Project. So setting the table for the presentation this evening, I'm gonna we're gonna do a joint presentation between the two of us. So we're we'll start off with an overview of the property and then dive into the strategic outcoming guiding principles, talk about the project approach and schedule, look through the communications and outreach strategy, talk about some next steps and open it up to questions and discussion. So for the property overview, uh we wanted to zoom out first about where this is located within Old Town. So the 701 Pocket Park project is located on the corner of Kim Bark and South Public Road. Um you can see here that north of or north of Emma, you we have a lot of beloved uh city assets such as the Festival Plaza and the Collective, but south of Emma, we kind of see a gap of some of those activated um community facilities or amenities. And so we're really excited about this project for filling that um gap that we see on public and really helping bring people from South Boulder Road up to baseline. The other thing I wanted to highlight with this map is there's a blue dashed line right next to the pocket park location. Laura is funding streetscape improvements along the 700 and 800 block, and so there'll be new landscaping and public art and make it feel similar to the treatments that you see uh north of Pub or north of Emma. And so we're really excited about both these two projects really providing an activation for the uh an investment in the South Public Road and really seeing this as a catalytic project to bring more people throughout Old Town and state for longer periods of time. The other thing that I want to highlight as far as um the project context is where this is located within Old Town. So in thinking about Lafayette's overall demographics, about 19% of our residents identify us as Hispanic or Latino, and then when you zoom into the Old Town area, about a five-minute quarter mile buffer from the old Old Town area, it jumps up to about 30%. And so we just want to be cognizant of um who is in Old Town and who may be using the park. And then we also wanted to highlight that 6% of Lafayette's um housing stock is manufactured homes, and that's all within walking distance of uh this new pocket park area. So I'm gonna turn it over to Dennis to talk about how this relates with some of our uh green spaces within uh the project area. All right, good evening, council. Uh so what we've got here, the green dot of the middle is where uh 701 Pocket Park is, and what this is showing is a what would be a 10-minute walk in any direction uh from that location. The Trust for Public Lands does advocate for there to be green space for residents in any community to be able to walk to. Um, what this is highlighting here, you can see from that location, you can get up to Romero Park in about 10 minutes to John Borough Park. Um, East Simpson is just outside of that. You can't get to get to the Nature Kids uh Discovery Zone at Sancho's, and then just touch the corner of Lamont Dose Park. So this will be uh we we believe a really uh big asset for East Old Town and that area to have a green space to go to. Um see next slide. So uh this flexible green space and uh how we are coming to get uh 701 South Public. Uh it was purchased by Laura in 2019. Uh it's a small lot, it's 6,283 square feet, which if you're familiar with Spruce Park at the corner of Centaur Village and Caria. Uh it's gonna be just a little bit smaller than that one. Um the city manager last year approached Laura about uh purchasing and developing this into an into a green space. They uh later on in the summer entered into an agreement uh for this to become a green space, and uh demolition for the building that is currently on the site is slated for uh spring, perhaps early summer uh this year, and uh we are waiting on some utility disconnects to happen, and as soon as that is done uh and approved through Excel, then hopefully that will happen. Great. So then we're gonna move on to some strategic outcomes and guiding principles about how this project will achieve some of the things that we're hoping through our comp plan and also our downtown plan. So we're familiar with the comprehensive uh plan wheel, and through that we have goals for a strong economy, environmental stewardship, community character, and connected community.