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Special Meeting June 7, 2005 why we aren’t inviting large scale discovery of University City as a place to make businesses and homes simultaneously. We need to talk about Asian shop owners not living in University City. We need to find a way to make it such that people can live and work within minutes from the other. She feels lucky that she has a spouse that works within bike distance from their home. Most of us are not going to drive two to three hours a day from St. Charles to downtown; we are just not going to be living that way in fifty years. She doesn’t think that the idea of ‘do we want the bright and shiny’ versus ‘keeping our neighborhoods intact’ is even being realistic where we already are. She doesn’t know why Richmond Heights decided to do what they did, but they did and its there. She doesn’t think it will be a particularly interesting place to be in ten years. We have an opportunity, in University City, to do something that is not big box. One of the good things about being so conservative about economic development during this big box explosion in the United States is that U. City now has an opportunity to do something that doesn’t look like anything else anyone is doing in the Metro area. Ms. Welsch said that they do talk about that in the report and she hopes that we can get some of that in the Plan. She said that some of it is already in the Plan. Mr. Ollendorff said that the first question of a full time staff person working on economic development is the most controversial issue in the whole report. He would suggest that the Council skip this one until the last. When you think about it, the report is about things that the City should be doing. Then they say that you should have a person doing them. That’s the order Council should tackle these questions – first determine what, we together, should be doing. Then determine last who and how those things will be done. There will be a huge argument on who will be doing it, so he suggests that the Council deals with that question in a month or two, after the list of what we should be doing is determined. To summarize the argument, he would say that this would be the wrong way to carry out economic development. He would like to present the argument that there are better ways to organize economic development than to have one person who is the key person. We can have this discussion later. Second, he doesn’t think that that sentence comes any where near an accurate statement of what ABEP came up with. The statement that Mary Schuman and others came up with at the final meeting at Wei Hong was “not a person, but we should support the city’s development director by giving him the support he needs”. It was debated for a few minutes and some people thought it wasn’t strong enough. They ended up voting on it. The strong, almost overwhelming, consensus was that the statement should convey “get Lehman the support he needs”. We can argue about what they meant or not meant, but we don’t have to now. He can also say that the Plan Commission had a brief discussion of this subject several months ago. The ones that spoke up said that they did not like the idea. I’m not saying these things to get the Council to decide one way or another; I just want to point out that it is really controversial and that he believes it should be handled last, rather than first. Mr. Sharpe said that one of his concerns when discussing economic development is eminent domain. We need to strengthen or do something with it, because he had a Page 7