Residents were invited to a Kenton County meeting at the Erlanger City Building on Wednesday to give feedback on the county’s comprehensive development plan. Statements from residents and public officials at the event suggest a need for expanded public transit networks, at least in the Erlanger and Elsmere area.
“Community mobility is very important to me as access to transportation is greatly needed within our community,” said Elsmere resident and City Council Member Serena Owen, “to help our students get to and from school safely, as well as our workers to access jobs and our seniors.”
The county revises its comprehensive plan every 5 years, and uses it as a template to guide development and public service expansion throughout the county’s 19 cities as well as the unincorporated areas. Kenton County Planning and Development Services, the professionalized staff wing of the Kenton County Planning Commission, had held a similar event at the Kenton County Government Center on Tuesday. They plan to hold another event in Independence on Thursday.
“The County’s Comprehensive Plan is the foundation on which all public and private decisions about development should be made,” said Andy Videkovich, the planning manager at Kenton County Planning and Development Services, in a press release. “The recommendations of this plan will set the tone for development within Kenton County for the next 15 to 20 years, and it is vitally important they reflect our collective vision for the future.”
Videkovich and other staff members from the planning department held public input sessions with residents at various locations throughout the county in the weeks leading up to the event. At the sessions, residents shared their thoughts about development and public services in their communities and what they wanted to see in the future.
One session in Covington’s Eastside neighborhood, for instance, revealed a broad desire for more affordable housing. At Wednesday’s open house, Videkovich told LINK nky that housing was a recurring topic in the input sessions.
Although there was some written feedback at the event that referenced affordable housing, much of the talk at the Erlanger meeting suggested an interest in expanded public transit.
Owen wanted to see broader expansion of transportation networks in Elsmere, at the very least. As an example, she a pilot program the city, county and TANK had done for about six months in 2017, which provided a new bus line in Elsmere. She compared it to a kind of community shuttle. In time, the pilot program even provided free rides for students in the Erlanger-Elsmere Independent Public School District, but the program was sunset due to a lack of funding. Still, she hoped to see expanded transit networks in the county to help populations, such as students and seniors, who may not have access to personal transportation.
The county’s staff had collected input from the outreach sessions and furnished a list of recommendations based on what they’d heard. Other recommendations based on local and national trends were also considered. These recommendations were sorted into broader categories, such as mobility, which were then displayed on placards in the Erlanger council chambers. Attendees could write notes, leave feedback on the different recommendations and place them on the placards for later collection and analysis.
Photos of the categories and their recommendations can be viewed in the slide show below.
Larry Owen, another Elsmere resident and member of the Kenton County Conservation District, mirrored Serena Owen’s concerns about transportation. He added that he wanted to see greater collaboration between different institutions in the county, arguing that everyone needed to be on the same page.
“Transportation is a big issue to me in this county,” Larry Owen said. “I would love to see how the planning commission, how the schools and everything [could] maybe get something going about the transportation for not just the kids but just overall, especially seeing how industrialized Kenton County is becoming.”
The Kenton County Planning Commission will host a similar open house event on Thursday, May 9, from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. at the Independence Senior and Community Center on Jack Woods Parkway. All Kenton County residents are welcome to attend to learn about the comprehensive plan and leave feedback.
Residents who are unable to attend the event can leave feedback by filling out the planning commission’s online survey (also available in Spanish).
Learn more about the comprehensive planning process at the planning commission’s dedicated webpage.