The Homer City Council will continue to review and hear public testimony on the latest draft of the 2045 Homer Comprehensive Plan.

The council introduced an ordinance on Oct. 13 to adopt the comp plan and recommend its adoption to the Kenai Peninsula Borough. At their last regular meeting on Oct. 27, they held the first official public hearing on Ordinance 25-64 and received numerous comments, both written and provided live during the meeting, from the community.

Council members will meet for an off-cycle work session on Friday, Nov. 7 from 9 a.m. to noon to further discuss the draft comp plan and potential amendments.

The council will conduct a second public hearing at their next regular meeting on Monday, Nov. 10 in order to hear further community comments on the draft plan.

During the Oct. 27 public hearing, multiple community members spoke to certain issues they wished to see the comprehensive plan address more specifically, including housing and short term rentals, environmental protections and preservation of green or open spaces.

Former City of Homer Public Works Director Jan Keiser thanked the council, city staff and contractor Agnew::Beck for their work to date on the comprehensive plan and said that many of the policies represented in the plan “were founded on legitimate public comment.”

Still, she said, she would like to see some of those policies “go even farther, be stronger.”

“If there’s any complaints that I have about the current version of the comprehensive plan, it’s that the version that we are currently looking at is not as strong as the original version we saw back in February,” she said. “I would like to see us be bold and visionary. We’re looking 20 years out. Life is changing quickly … We should establish our vision, our aspirational goals, and do what we can to move towards them.”

Homer resident Landa Bailey asked that the plan include “some really strongly-worded policy and goals” for short-term rentals and affordable housing.

“They go hand in hand,” she said. “Failure to address short-term rentals regulation promotes the arguably de facto conversion of residentially-zoned lots in Homer into commercially-zoned lots when absent owners use their residential property for commercial purposes.”

Regulation of short term rentals within city limits has been an ongoing conversation in Homer for a number of years. The city council previously considered — and, last year, voted down — an ordinance intended to help the city gather data on the short term rental landscape in Homer. The ordinance at the time did not propose a limit on the number of short term rentals allowed within city limits.

A few giving public testimony questioned why the comp plan had changed from a 10-year plan to a 20-year plan.

Karen Murdock resides outside city limits but is a resident of the greater Homer area and has worked and raised her family in Homer. She said that the comprehensive plan will affect the quality of her life and all those who are members of the greater Homer community, and asked the council to adopt the plan as a 10-year plan.

“The world in our community is changing at an accelerated rate, faster than we could have anticipated a few years ago. There have been some major unexpected game changers to the Homer community in the last several decades,” she said. “It does not seem prudent to commit to this plan as a 20-year time frame. A 10-year time frame would provide a more realistic method to assess the progress of the goals outlined in the comprehensive plan and align the goals with the ongoing needs of the community.”

Multiple community members spoke to their desire to preserve open space in Homer.

Jennifer Bernard said she hoped the future land use map included in the comp plan could identify certain areas as “good targets for future purchase, simply for conservation purposes.”

“If we’re looking at the next 20 years with this plan, that’s a really long time, and so many projects could come crowding in (within) that time,” she said. “We might be left with a lot less open space, which would really transform this community in a way that I think would really affect its appeal to so many of us. So why not set some boundaries now?”

Local artist and environmental educator Kim McNett said that the wording in the draft comp plan supports conservation of wildlife habitat greatly, but that she didn’t see a great deal of difference in preserved green space between the current and future zoning maps.

“I don’t think that 20-foot-deep peatland on Kachemak Drive should be zoned for light industrial development,” she said. “It’s not a place where you can responsibly put that type of infrastructure there and not have bad consequences. If this (plan) is visionary … it seems to me that those environmental constraints ought to inform the zoning, and changes and visions to new zoning.”

Economic Development Advisory Commission chair Karin Marks said that there needed to be “a nice middle ground” for Homer to have businesses and bring in tax revenue and also have walkability and green space conservation.

On another track, city resident Rick Foster, who also previously served on the Homer and Kenai Peninsula Borough planning commissions, reiterated concerns he previously shared in August that the current comp plan draft does not adequately acknowledge potable water access as a “limiting factor” to regional growth in the greater Homer area.

“The concern’s not about scarcity of Homer’s water supply, rather it’s about access, specifically how availability of Homer city water has driven population growth outside the city limits, particularly to the east, where well water is often non-potable,” he said. He added that the plan does not currently recognize that city does not track water deliveries, which he said created a “significant blind spot” in understanding and managing regional development.

“A truly comprehensive plan should provide guidance in this area. Because of this omission, Homer’s missing a valuable opportunity to visualize and understand and manage its growth, strategically and sustainably,” he said.

Several community members also urged the council to take their time with reviewing the draft plan before giving their stamp of approval.

In their discussion following the public hearing’s close, council members reviewed some changes in language between the current draft plan and a draft published in February. One instance, as council member Bradley Parsons brought up, occurred in reference to the transportation section, which he said at one point included specific phrases regarding Complete Streets Policies and public parking, and now more simply refers to the 2024 Homer Transportation Plan. City staff confirmed that the transportation plan was originally adopted as a standalone plan but is now a part of and acts as a supplemental component of the comp plan.

Mayor Rachel Lord said that while she heard and understood the public’s comments about the current draft plan compared to the draft published in February, she had “significant problems” with the February plan with regard to vague terminology and establishing goals outside of municipal government bounds.

“There’s different perspectives on what a comprehensive plan (is) — it’s for the community, but if we’re using it for code changes, if we’re using it for planning and zoning and it’s city taxpayer dollars that are paying for it, it is a (required) city document as a first-class municipality,” she said. “We have got to have one of these per the state of Alaska.”

Lord said that she was happy to discuss further concerns about language in the comprehensive plan.

“I am always going to be looking to try to figure out how we can use language in a way that allows the city to move forward and make regulations and make sure that there is underlying policy statements that then can be upheld within Title 21 or in whatever other work we do,” she said.

Find Ordinance 25-64 and supplemental items, as well as the Oct. 27 meeting recording, in full at www.cityofhomer-ak.gov/citycouncil/city-council-regular-meeting-334.

Follow updates to the comprehensive plan rewrite process and find the latest draft at homercompplanupdate.com/.