All right.

Can everyone hear me?

Testing testing.

All right, welcome to planning commission.

On this lovely rainy day on April 2nd, 2026.

All the meeting to order.

And who's driving today?

Is it I don't know.

We'll uh we'll move into item two.

We'll move into item two, and I'm not sure who's presenting to us.

Okay.

Yeah, we have the special alarm.

Some of our kind of required against the guys are awesome.

Hey, uh find fragment and the options.

I didn't want it to I agree.

So I could tell.

Yeah, they're gonna present to us and let us know the uh you guys want to introduce yourself and then you can uh yeah uh we are the BYU group.

I'm Grace Gibson, um and I'm Kezia Tripp.

I'm a civil engineering master student.

Marcus Fisher.

And I'm Aaron Christensen, also a civil engineering master student.

So this is just um did you wanna okay great.

This is just a little overview of what we've been working on.

We've been working to model future growth using different land uses.

We're wanting to estimate build-out capacity under different development patterns and how those different development patterns might change fiscal impact, so how the revenue and expenditures are gonna fluctuate as those development patterns change, and then just be able to put this all into a report that we're writing, and we'll have to Mike in a couple of weeks.

So if you're interested in that, he can probably pass that along.

And it's just gonna help identify trade-offs in different batter development patterns and how that can inform planning decisions.

Um yeah.

And then this is just a brief community overview to kind of help you gauge where we're coming from that's been informing our decision making process, um, knowing that Lehigh is growing so fast and that this growth trajectory trajectory is expected to continue going into 2050, which is the year where we are kind of gauging our scenarios at.

Um yeah.

Um and then for our model assumptions, we are using a program called Community Viz, which is just an add-on into ArcGIS.

And that's what we've been using, and so these are kind of the assumptions that we've been putting into our model.

Okay.

Um so as far as land uses go, we did decide to consolidate some of the different land use types of the general plan.

Um we focused mostly on commercial, residential, and then um open spaces because they have different revenue and expenditures based on each of the land use types.

Um then we also decided to separate the commercial and then the retail commercial because of sales tax.

Uh as far as residential land uses go, we've just there's five that are on the general plan, but we decided to break them into three different categories so that it could be more understandable.

High medium and low density residential.

Um as you can see on this little chart, the high density has 12 units per acre, the medium density has five units per acre, and then low density has two units per acre.

Um as the density decreases the land or the square foot per unit increases and the value per unit also increases.

Um so then with mixed use and transit-oriented development, we chose different um splits for land uses.

So in mixed use, 75% residential and 25% retail, and within uh transit oriented developments, 50% residential, 25% commercial, 20% retail, and 5% open space or parks.

Yeah, and most of our assumptions were gathered from either a little bit of research that we've done or from what we've seen kind of in Lehigh about to be typical.

Um and then our kind of next list of assumptions, which is also not exhaustive of all the assumptions that we've made, those will all be in the report.

I'm sure we can provide you with a list if you're interested.

Um so we've got like our property tax using the portion of the property tax rate that um kind of comes to is not uh comes to like Lehigh city level as opposed to the state level, and then the sales tax count a lot of these were calculated using the fiscal 2026 fiscal year budget and then divided by whatever units that we had access to.

So for sales tax, the total amount of anticipated revenue for 2026 from sales tax divided by the numbers square feet of um retail buildings currently that are currently in use, and then for expenditures, once again using that budget and the expenses related to police and fire divided by an assumed kind of 30,000 existing housing units in Lehigh and a road cost per lane mile that was provided by the city, as well as a parks cost that was calculated from the budget divided by the assumed kind of 268 acres of parks that presumably exist currently in Lehigh, utility cost that was used by totaling the linear foot or linear feet of the culinary irrigation, sewer and storm utilities on GIS and dividing that from the budget once again, and then public facilities being kind of a flat rate of things like the library and other facilities that we assumed would be kind of collective.

And then a couple of formulas that we used in our model, um, which are mostly just taking what we so we started for the most part with parcels and the general plan um GIS map, which gives us stuff in acres, and so just moving that kind of into dollars, a couple of those ideas, for example, with our property revenues kind of from property taxes, acres to then square feet, which is 43560 is that conversion, and then the floor area ratio to identify how much of that is the building times the valuation sort of parameter of like 200 per square foot, um, and then times the property tax and then proportionate whether it's retail or commercial, and then times 14% to represent what Lehigh gets total out of the property tax.

So these are some of our preliminary results.

We have been learning how to use this software.

So a lot of this isn't 100% accurate yet.

We've been getting a lot closer.

Our first results were like crazy numbers that we're like that can't be right.

But as we can see from our base scenario versus our build-out scenario, um, obviously when things are built out, there's gonna be more commercial retail to get more um revenue.

But within our totaling to revenue minus expenditures, we've been comparing it to the 2026 budget, and we've gotten down to 2 million, almost 3 million.

Um net profit, I guess, which obviously that should net zero, but that shows that our model is in the right direction, and so it is able to compare what we have modeled from our base scenario to our build-out.

Um, and it is worth noting that our build out is full build out.

So with our residential assumption of 12 housing units per acre, all of the housing that is zoned as high density residential is 12 units per acre.

And so that is a consideration that these assumptions are it is fully built out.

Um great, and then these are the three main points we're going to be working on in our final report, but just kind of a overview of what we're going to be looking at and analyzing is the projected long-term fiscal sustainability of this full build-out scenario.