Emporia City Commissioners held a public discussion regarding the city’s recently released development agreement standards to close out its regular meeting slate Wednesday afternoon.
The discussion focused on questions submitted through the city’s online portal in relation to the guidelines, with City Manager Trey Cocking noting the majority of said questions focused largely on matters covered in other city policies, namely environmental matters. City Mayor Becky Smith stated that, between the DIO, the city’s large volume water and wastewater policies and others, the city has covered many of the major concerns that have been addressed in recent months.
That said, she noted there are undoubtedly areas the city may not have yet considered and, with that in mind, she says the recently announced standards are subject to change should anyone come forward with said suggestions.
As for the standards themselves, Emporia City Manager Trey Cocking noted Wednesday that the document is strictly the city’s “non-negotiable list” that all developers or end users would have to adhere to should they move forward with a development agreement, if or when an end user is identified. What is not, however, according to Cocking is the city attempting to move the process forward.
Smith also stated this was the city’s way of “drawing a line in the sand” for any developers that come forward now or in the future.
This was one of many items addressed by Cocking during Wednesday’s slate of meetings where, during the action session, he directly responded to comments from the public earlier in the morning, all of which centered on the data center debate. Among the comments were demands from residents to the city to release documents sought in a recent Kansas Open Records Act request filed by Emporia Neighbors United.
According to Neighbors United, they had submitted the request earlier this year seeking access to emails and documents in an effort to find evidence of potential corruption or coercion among city leadership as it relates to the data center. Neighbors United co-founder Edgar Esparza on KVOE’s recent issues forum claimed the city had quoted them one price for the documents before sending them a different price tag last month.
Cocking responded, saying the original estimate of just over $1,400 was just that, an estimate based on the request as it was first submitted.
He told KVOE News once the exact scope of the work required to provide said documents, in addition to the number of documents themselves, became clear, the price tag had to rise.
According to Cocking, the total calculated the time needed to coordinate searches among city officials and employees, retrieve and organize the records, review the records for information that can be released and prepare the records for production. The standards may not be usable, however, depending on the results of the November 3rd general election with two petition questions seeking to ban high-impact data centers and battery energy storage systems in front of voters.
Smith says if voters vote to approve the 10-year moratorium on data centers and BES the standards will likely be shelved, noting this may be a talking point again for a future commission.
In other business, Wednesday, commissioners also reviewed a recently updated housing study and discussed its meeting schedule for the month of December. During the commission’s action meeting, commissioners approved several items, including an application for a moderate income housing grant that, if approved, would support a local housing development project on property owned by the Emporia Land Bank.
According to Jeff Lynch of the Emporia Land Bank, plans are to utilize the $400,000 grant, should it be awarded, to fund the construction of three residential units, with the initial amount funding construction of the first two homes and proceeds from the sale of said homes to fund construction of the third.
It is worth noting the city has funded the construction of new homes in the past, from 2017-20, with a prior MIH grant as well as 24 apartment units with a current MIH grant awarded in 2022.
Separate items included the approval of new handrail installation in White Auditorium, an amendment to Article 17 of the Emporia Municipal Code regulating use of residential and portable generators.
The Emporia City Commission will reconvene Wednesday, November 4th, inside the Municipal Courtroom at White Auditorium.
