RUMOR: The Town Center Plan means the City will "take" people's property in the town center to build high-rises.

FACTS: No, not at all. We’ve had a Town Center Plan for decades, by the way, as well as a Comprehensive Plan. Plans help direct the future by determining what property owners can and can’t do on their property. The idea is to avoid conflicting uses next to each other and give the entire city a general direction it’s going.

Recent updates to the Town Center Plan give property owners within that area slightly different options than they had before if they are interested in developing their land. In some locations, that does include allowing a slightly taller building, a change made at the request of numerous existing property owners as well as the general public who provided feedback for over a year on these rewrites. The updated Town Center Plan does not, in any way, supersede private property rights.

On a related note, the City owns the block where the Red Apple was located. We only own this land because it was originally intended in the 1990s to build a larger City Hall there. Instead, we expanded our existing building in the early 2000s, making the Red Apple site no longer necessary. After recently acquiring the last two parcels, we are finally marketing the property for redevelopment but that’s in an effort to get ourselves out of the land-development business, not further into it.