Consultants recommend narrowing Jacksonville UGB study area after hazard, cost screening

Consultants advising the Jacksonville Technical Advisory Committee recommended narrowing the city’s final urban growth boundary (UGB) study area after applying environmental, topographic and infrastructure filters that removed thousands of acres from initial consideration.

Matt Brinkley, the primary presenter, told the TAC the planning team’s analyses identified a need for ‘‘22, give or take, acres of urbanizable, developable urbanizable land’’ to meet the city’s housing and employment goals. He said the housing-capacity work calls for about 5 acres of medium-density residential land and 1.5 acres of high-density residential land, while an economic-opportunity analysis showed a need for roughly 10.4 acres of employment land.

Why it matters: Bringing rural land into a city’s UGB is a multi-step statutory process that must show both demonstrated need and that proposed urban uses are compatible with nearby agricultural and forest activities. The TAC’s narrowing of the study area will guide what Jacksonville proposes to the city council if it asks to initiate a UGB amendment.

Brinkley said the preliminary 0.5-mile buffer around the existing UGB initially included hundreds of tax lots — ‘‘357 lots, 3,556 acres’’ — and an additional set of contiguous exception lands. The team then applied a sequence of constraints. On environmental grounds, consultants flagged landslide susceptibility and used a practical 60% coverage threshold to identify significantly affected parcels; they also removed a small number of floodplain parcels (six tax lots, about 11.3 acres) and 16 tax lots mapped as deer and elk winter range (about 654 acres).

The team also screened for ‘‘impracticable’’ lands under administrative rules. Brinkley said the group read the slope and coverage language conservatively and removed only two tax lots (about 10 acres) on that basis, noting overlap among landslide, steep-slope and habitat constraints.

Autumn Lane was discussed as a case study. Brinkley said that, if urbanized, the area could theoretically support about 85 dwelling units in middle-housing forms (townhomes, duplexes, triplexes and the like), but that existing parcelization and built houses make achieving the needed densities difficult without extensive replanning. He added that extending water, sewer and transportation infrastructure to that area was estimated at roughly $28,000 per unit, which he calculated as about 6% of an assumed $420,000 average townhome sales price — a factor in judging feasibility.

Consultants also identified lands they described as infrastructure-isolated — areas with single access routes or topography that limit service delivery — removing roughly 123 tax lots (approximately 400–546 acres, depending on parcel boundaries) from consideration. After applying the environmental and practicability filters, Brinkley said the team had removed about 2,819 acres from the preliminary study area and was left with approximately 810 acres to examine further.

Raul, another presenter, described the project’s web-based GIS explorer and an alternative-lands analysis that uses statutory ‘‘priority’’ groups and comparison of environmental, economic, social and energy consequences to rank candidate lands. He cautioned against blanket exclusion of large GIS layers (for example, entire landslide-deposit mappings) and recommended evaluating higher-priority lands first and then discounting yield where on-the-ground constraints materially reduce development potential.

On a developer-submitted option, Raul said engineering work for the Stage Pass property showed internal lateral and connection designs that avoid long off-site utility extensions, reducing some of the cost reasons used to argue impracticability for that parcel. ‘‘Our engineers have a developed plan [that] doesn't require us to go bring water down Stage Road or sewer,’’ he said, noting the plan relies on internal laterals and connections adjacent to the property.

TAC members debated the scoring criteria — especially parcel-size preferences (the team favored parcels roughly 10–30 acres), owner readiness to develop and how to weigh proximity to downtown and existing infrastructure. Several members recommended early outreach to property owners in the preliminary study area so owners can state whether they are willing to come into the UGB; others cautioned that earlier, wider outreach increases staff workload and can invite legal challenges that make scoring and defensibility critical.

Next steps: Consultants said they will compile a final report that synthesizes the housing-capacity, economic-opportunity and locational analyses and present broad conclusions to the city council. The TAC discussed scheduling follow-up meetings and public outreach (GIS hub and survey) to solicit owner interest and public comment before council direction.

Attributions: Comments and exact figures in this report are taken from presentations by Matt Brinkley and Raul to the Jacksonville Technical Advisory Committee during the meeting.