Meeting Minutes November 2023
Meeting Minutes from the Bemis Park Neighborhood Association meeting for November 14, 2023
Nearly 40 people attended November’s meeting at Augustana Lutheran Church, more than twice the usual amount.
Why the unusually high attendance? The future of Walnut Hill.
Christian Gray director of inCommon, a community development organization with an office at Hamilton and 40th streets, was the main speaker, and spent most of the meeting doing this best to disentangle his group’s Walnut Hill Neighborhood Plan from an amendment put forward by the Planning Board, to amend the city’s Land Use Plan to incorporate ideas from inCommon’s plan.
inCommon’s plan says the group worked with community members beginning in 2021 to provide ideas on what the community would like to see built and the area developed.
The Planning Board reviewed the neighborhood plan and then decided unanimously to incorporate it into Omaha’s Future Land Use Master Plan – a map that dictates no actual zoning rules, but casts a vision for how the city sees Walnut Hill ideally changing in the future.
Ideas being added to the plan include:
Expanding the potential of mixed use residential homes and commercial to include the MUD reservoir site property along 40th Street south of Hamilton Street, in addition to land south of Hamilton west of 42nd Street, and swapping land currently industrial to instead be high density residential 42nd and 45th streets and Lafayette Avenue and Izard Street.
The concern came from residents near the area who hadn’t learned anything about the proposal. At a public meeting with primarily Walnut Hill residents held Dec. 6, Eric Englund, assistant director of Omaha’s planning department, said he was really surprised at the concerns brought by residents, because despite the city sending notices to 700 residents in the Walnut Hill area, until recently no one voiced concerns.
During the December 6 meeting which was also attended by about 30 people, Englund kept reiterating that the zoning map that governs what can be built in the area is not impacted at all by the land use map being discussed, which is part of Omaha’s Land Use Master Plan.
Some residents at the Nov. 14 BPNA meeting didn’t realize there were two plans, and then a lot of the discussion was around how inCommon’s plan differed from the city’s.
One request is from inCommon to have the Walnut Hill Neighborhood Plan by the City Council.
The other request is from the Planning Department to add inCommon’s plan to the Omaha Land Use Master Plan.
The Omaha City Council delayed voting on the plan until Dec. 19 to allow Walnut Hill and Bemis Park residents to further discuss the plans.
Meeting notes submitted by BPNA Secretary Patrick Garmoe
