The next public open house to solicit citizen input on the new Warren County Master Plan will take place Dec. 10, county officials confirmed last week.

The event will take place from 4:30 to 7 p.m. and will be similar to one held in the spring, according to Steve Ibendahl with the i5 Group, the county’s consultant on developing the plan.

“It will be an open house format, so we won’t have a formal presentation, we’ll have different stations,” Ibendahl said at the Oct. 13 Warren County Commission meeting, adding that the planning team will also produce a video for the open house.

The i5 Group is still working on the draft plan, with input from the Warren County Master Plan Advisory Committee. Ibendahl presented a map at last week’s meeting to potentially be included in the county’s future land use plan as part of the overall draft master plan, however, as well as a slight variation of this map.

These maps, labeled “Option 1” and “Option 1A,” were very similar, except that in addition to proposed zoning around the county’s existing municipalities and other areas of the county, Option 1A included parts shaded in yellow “recognizing those areas in the county where there’s already clusters of unincorporated large-parcel residential,” Ibendahl said.

In addition to Option 1 and Option 1A, Ibendahl said i5 is still working on an “Option 2” future land use plan to present at the December open house. “I think people will respond better to looking at some different options as opposed to commenting on one,” he said.

Following the open house, there will be an initial public comment period, he added.

“It will be basically two months of that initial review period of the first draft, in December and January, and then based on that feedback, we’ll have what we call Draft Version 2,” Ibendahl said, adding that based on that second draft, i5 will hopefully be able to develop the final plan for adoption by the county.

Commissioner Matt Flake suggested at the Oct. 13 meeting that the Option 2 future land use plan to be presented as part of the draft document in December should include additional areas along Highway T designated for future residential development.

“Highway T is going to have a lot of homes built along it. There’s a lot of farmland there, a lot of ground,” Flake said, adding that much of the land is already owned by developers who are waiting to build homes.

“It’s really close to St. Charles and easy to get to the highway,” Flake said of the Highway T corridor. “And I don’t think all the farmland is going to go residential, but man, if you take an eighth of a mile off of T, that’s a lot of building you could do there.”

Presiding Commissioner Joe Gildehaus said he also expects to see more residential development on the east side of the county. “Eventually, Liberty Village is going to go from T to David Hoekel,” he said.

Gildehaus added that he thinks future commercial development will be focused around certain highway exits, giving Stracks Church Road as an example.

Ibendahl noted, however, that development trends in the greater St. Louis region have been changing in recent years.

“As St. Charles grew over the last 20 or 30 years, the region itself was growing, you know, the multi-county region,” Ibendahl said, adding that in addition to St. Charles, a similar trend of slowing growth can be seen in Wentzville. While there still seems to be a desire to move west within the St. Louis metro area, “the region itself has kind of slowed,” Ibendahl said.

Gildehaus said this was surprising to him, noting that North Point High School in Wentzville, built in 2021, is “huge.”

Flake said, however, that his kids attended St. Charles High School, but with the city’s population now aging, the school has seen a decrease in students since then.

“Their population has really dropped a lot, and they’re thinking about combining schools,” he said.

In Wentzville, Ibendahl said, part of the slowing growth likely has to do with the fact that much of the more easily developable land in the area has already been developed, affecting prices of remaining vacant real estate.

Despite Gildehaus’s questioning of the population trend information that Ibendahl shared, which he said “sort of shocks” him, overall, the commissioners appeared satisfied with the progress being made on developing the master plan.

“I think we’re going down the right direction here,” Gildehaus said.