Mister Markham, who addressed the board during citizen comments, said the team is "still battling, trying to get a final design" for the senior housing site on Route 163 and that recent meetings with the project architect have produced promising iterations.

Markham told the Amherst County Service Authority that portions of the site currently require cuts of 30 to 40 feet and that initial layouts created roughly 300,000 cubic yards of excess earthwork. "That's an expensive, expensive thing," he said, describing the trade‑offs the team is evaluating between retaining walls and hauling soil off‑site.

The developer said the team has added two consultants — one with Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) experience and another with site‑development expertise — to evaluate options, including whether filling a small perennial stream will be necessary and, if so, the stream‑credit costs. "We hired him on to help us through that process because we have...no one will commit to what it may cost," Markham said.

Board members pressed about timing and financing. Speaker 6 asked, "So when will you have a final design?" Markham replied that the latest architect layout, discussed in a meeting before Thanksgiving, reduced cut volumes by combining cut‑and‑fill with targeted retaining walls and that another meeting with Hurt and Profit was expected soon. "I think we'll...we're getting very, very, very close," he said, while also warning that unknown costs have risen since his last report.

Speaker 7 and others raised financing and schedule questions. Markham said his partner is leading financing talks and that the project team understands the relative costs of the various construction components, but emphasized the team's need to avoid taking on unsupportable debt: "We're trying to just, get to a point where we know that we can get this project underway and move it forward."

Next steps: Markham and staff will continue coordination with consultants, pursue bore testing and additional layout work with Hurt and Profit, and return progress updates to the authority. The board did not take formal action on the project at the Dec. 2 meeting.