PARKVILLE, Mo. — Parkville is trying to find the balance between growing at the right pace and holding onto its small-town charm.

As part of that balancing act, Parkville Mayor Dean Katerndahl said the city could finish the final administrative paperwork as early as next month to allow Village on the Green to move forward.

The project would create more than 230 townhome units on what’s now undeveloped land.

“We’re the second-fastest growing city in the metro area because of all these subdivisions. Now that also presents challenges,” Katerndahl said.

The project was first proposed in September 2021 but delays and disputes pushed the project back to this summer, when the developer started to take the final steps to get the project final approval.

Katerndahl is looking forward to the project starting because it will help diversify the city’s housing stock, which he said often leaves out first-time homebuyers and people looking to downsize.

“We don’t have a lot of this. You might consider these more starter homes or might even be empty-nester homes as people retire,” Katerndahl said. “We don’t have a lot of that housing.”

One big final concern is a proposed emergency gate that would be just for emergency vehicles in a dead-end of a subdivision just south of Village on the Green.

FOX4 spoke with more than a dozen homeowners on the block who all declined to go on camera, but who echoed a similar sentiment: They’d prefer to not have the gate to keep their quiet street quiet.

Some said they support the plan for the gate to only open for emergency vehicles, but the general concern is that the roadway would become a second entrance into the new development.

Katerndahl said that wouldn’t happen, but that final point doesn’t involve the city.

“We have no intention of making this a regular road, but that’s something the developer and the homeowners association are going to have to work out,” Katerndahl said.

FOX4 spoke to the developer over the phone, and he said he won’t be talking about the project until at least next month.

In the meantime, city leaders are finding a way forward between a rapidly growing population, finding places to house them, and preserving the reason they want to move there in the first place.

“How do we keep this the charming community, the small town that everybody likes?” Katerndahl said. “We’re very cognizant of that.”