The Walk at Boone Got Smaller. Council Votes Tonight.

Boone Town Council votes on the Walk at Boone tonight. Two months after a joint hearing where the Planning Commission recommended denying it, 6-0.

The application council votes on is not the one the commission saw.

Landmark Properties filed a revised plan dated Aug. 24. It reached the public on Sept. 18, when the town posted the packet.

Two buildings came off the east side of the site, the side nearest the University Village neighborhood. In their place, a public green space the plan labels tables, benches, hammocks. Twenty-five fewer surface parking spaces. The project is now 179 apartments holding 618 bedrooms, down from 185 and 642, and the parking ask fell from 591 cars to 567.

Most of them did not disappear. Six units and 24 bedrooms did. The rest went across the creek into Buildings 300 and 400, which is why the request to build four stories now covers five buildings instead of three.

The list of deviations from the town's rulebook reads shorter. Nine, down from ten. Nothing was withdrawn. Two requests, one about bedroom size and one about closet space, got folded into a single line.

Ten of the 179 units stay set aside for people who work for the town, the county, the schools or a local nonprofit, at $1,500, $1,900 and $2,200, rising three percent a year. A household can earn up to 120 percent of Watauga County's median family income and still qualify. The ten-year clock does not start until the last certificate of occupancy. And if one of those units sits empty for ninety days, the owner can rent it to anyone at market rate.

The largest claim in the revision is traffic. Landmark says daily trips are down 18 percent and the evening peak is down 18 percent, and credits the smaller project plus the arrival of AppalCART.

Its engineer's tables separate the two. Cutting 24 bedrooms takes the project from 2,549 daily trips to 2,453, and the evening peak from 199 to 192. The memo calls that 3 percent and 3.5 percent.

The rest is the bus. The memo assumes 15 percent of residents ride it, and the numbers drop to 2,085 and 163. It borrows that 15 percent from two campus transit programs the Federal Transit Administration studied, at the University of Washington and UC Berkeley, and calls it conservative for a site a mile from App State with three stops drawn on it.

Drawn on it. AppalCART director Craig Hughes wrote council on Sept. 1 that the agency would be glad to serve the property once it is built and a contract is signed, and that his team is still working out the route and the timing, if the project moves forward. No contract. No route. No schedule. The 15 percent rides on all three.

Frank Veno, the commission chair, told the Watauga Democrat in July that he could not get past the traffic. The number in front of council tonight is 192 until the bus shows up.

Two of the three driveways are gated now, open to emergency vehicles and AppalCART. Everyone else uses the one nearest 105 Extension. Landmark's own filing says town staff would not support gated access. The gates are in the plan anyway.

It is Item 10.A, the only planning matter on the agenda, with nothing substantial ahead of it. Work session at 5. The meeting gavels in at 6. Council votes twice, once on whether this fits Boone Next and once on the ordinance itself.

The Planning Commission has already said it does not. Its first motion on July 27, also 6-0, found the rezoning inconsistent with Boone Next, citing the plan's goals on reducing auto dependence and on mobility. Council is not bound by that. It makes its own finding tonight, and if it calls the rezoning inconsistent and approves it anyway, the land use map changes to match. The plan bends to the project, not the other way around.

There is no recording of these meetings. We will be in the room.