It is five o'clock, and I'll call the City Planning Commission meeting to order and roll call, please.

Here Schaefer.

Here.

Ron Spielman.

Dave Whartonweiler.

Here.

Jesse Duff.

Here.

Lewis Armstrong.

Ron Markham.

Okay, we have a quorum, so we'll go ahead.

Correction of minutes from August 12th, 262026.

Sounds like none so they'll stand approved as presented.

Okay, business.

Let's drop down to C three planned unit development conceptual discussion botanical garden on 13th Avenue.

Hello.

I had to test.

Hi everybody.

My name's Melissa Birch.

I am the president of the board of directors for the Monroe Botanical Garden, and I just wanted to acknowledge that Peter is here and Peter Kind, who is our has been serving as our attorney.

And Kathy Hauk and Angela Jellini are here also on the board.

So there's a group of us.

So let me just take you through why we have come to you.

So we are requesting a planned use development because there are some specific site considerations, which we'll go through in the presentation.

And I think you may have had the slides in advance, but I'll take you through them and then but please ask questions as we go along because usually that's faster to get everybody's through the questions that way.

And then I want to just take you through some of the key concepts of the garden itself.

So you kind of familiarize yourself with what we're hoping to accomplish with it and why we think it's important to have a botanical garden in Monroe.

And then we'll get through to those details which you all want to talk about, which is some of those site considerations.

First of all, the site.

And I mentioned our board of directors, or at least some members of our board of directors.

This is the most one of the most amazing parts of this project so far is that we have been able to gather a really talented board of directors, and together we're working on building out the vision and execution plan for this particular project.

We have partners who we've been turning to.

So we have two design team partners.

The first one is Psyche Design.

They're an architectural award-winning architectural firm based out of Madison.

Probably the most common or the most likely site that you're familiar with that they've worked on is Old Brick Gardens in Madison.

They've been doing that for many many years.

Psyche's been around for quite a while, and they worked with them for I think at least 25 years of time, probably 30, I think.

And then our soche design is our landscape architect partner and our architect partner for the building is Studio GWA.

I'm pretty sure you're familiar with Aaron Halverson.

He's probably been here a few times talking to you, and Quentin Cammer have been on that team.

So together, and you're familiar with the work that they've done, including the Eugene Hotel, but they're those two design firms are working with us to build out this experience that you're that we're introducing you to today.

We began early in the year with a community meeting.

So the goal for the community meeting was to do some gauging of interests of the community as to whether they felt like this would be a place that we should or something we should continue to strive for.

And we had overwhelming attendance, much more than we were expecting, and got a lot of wonderful feedback from the folks that joined that discussion.

And we took the input from them during that session, and we've used that to inform a lot of the decisions that we've been making throughout the design process.

Just a quick note we're gonna be in the Cheese Day Parade.

We have a float in the Cheese Day Parade.

We have another community outreach event in October, and then we're beginning our fundraising efforts in starting relatively soon, but definitely by November.

The concept.

So there's three key features of the garden or areas, I guess you could think of.

The first is really our outdoor garden.

Those are where we have you know the things that you think of when you think of a botanic garden trees and plants and trails and things and benches and things that people can use when they're on the site.

We also have a vision of incorporating greenhouses for for uh year-round enjoyment of the community of the space, as well as an education center and educational classes for our community members.

The branding and ensure that the messaging and marketing that we have is really intended to be a welcoming environment for everybody in the community.

And one of the most helpful slides for you because it really gives you a sense of how we intend to use the space.

So I'm not gonna run through this whole slide, but I wanted to just give you a sense for the the components of how we intend to use it.

So unstructured garden visitation, those are just folks that pop by lunchtime, evening time, stop by and take a look at how things are looking.

We want to offer educational classes to six to eight times per year, probably.

Those would be for children and adults and all sorts of educational classes related to plants and and things like that.