This is something that the council has been doing every 3 to seven years. Typically we try to do it about every five years. It is a snapshot in time based off this latest one was based off of April 2025. This is when we had aerial imagery flown and that's what the primary driver is of defining what's what we call uh this the land uses and the inventory.

single family residential and particularly single family detached is the main driver of land consumption. And when I talk about land consumption, this is not necessarily thinking about redevelopment, but actually green field development either undeveloped or agricultural land that t tends to be uh used for uh growth in the region.

when we think about that land acreage and compare it to households uh this is a graph showing you land consumption per thousand households in the region. And here again you can see the dramatic drop in how we've been more efficient in our development of land. uh kind of [snorts] putting a a limitation on what we used to coin urban sprawl, which doesn't usually get talked about a whole lot anymore.

Anyone that paid attention to this presentation 5 years ago, a big increase in between 2016 and 2020 was the development of solar arrays or solar farms out in the rural areas and that constituted a lot of that growth in in those areas. This time around it is also constituting some of it. There is also the large um warehouses that we all hear about in the news, but a lot of what we're seeing in the acreage is still the solar arrays.

AI is looking at imagery and it can say, okay, this is showing this color reflectance and we can tell it to call it this or that. But for consistency, you would have so much variation from year to year that we would do it that we would spend a lot of time just trying to fix it or train the machine to do it. So it isn't necessarily as easy as people have thought it would be.

when you align this this sort of land use with transit, uh, you see a lot of benefits, a lot of which uh, align with the council's goals. Um the top there is building ridership... it can help mitigate climate change uh help preserve natural habitat, help advance goals related to equity, um improve safety outcomes, uh support the fiscal sustainability of communities where that development is happening. Uh as well as improve health outcomes.

the council also has unique land use authorities which I think really aligns well with to operating a housing and redevelopment authority and those combined put the the council in a unique position to help support to the region.

Every project goal must be a shared goal with the community and with the development. We shouldn't try to force housing into an area where the community sees economic development.

the council should tailor its role based on local capacity. So support strong cities, partner with those balancing priorities, and take a more hands-on approach where capacity is limited while ensuring consistent and equitable outcomes across the region.

where I come from, we see the light rail system as a complete boondoggle. The Northstar line is pretty much shut down because of low ridership. Green line is 300% over budget, 5 years already behind schedule. Ridership in general is very low.

if the initial investment in that transit was a billion dollars, how is the land use surrounding it able to economically leverage that investment? And that I think is what's missing here. Um and and there's certainly data to support that.

I never want us to lose um sight of the importance of having jobs near transit because one of the key reasons people move around is to go from where they live to where they work.

we've seen about 200 million in additional revenue just along that corridor every single year. And as more development happens that will continue to grow. Now, that's revenue that's going to counties, cities, schools along those areas. A portion of it's going to the state, but it's a pretty substantial amount.