# Services Committee - October 6, 2009 > Auto-transcribed civic record · October 6, 2009 - **Permalink**: https://meetings.lexingtonky.news/meeting/1053 - **Source video**: https://lfucg.granicus.com/player/clip/1053?view_id=14&redirect=true - **Date**: 2009-10-06 - **Last revised**: July 17, 2026 - **Length**: 17,781 words > ⚠️ **Auto-generated content.** Audio from the official Granicus video was auto-transcribed with OpenAI's open-source Whisper large-v3-turbo model, run locally by The Lexington Times. Structured facts were extracted with GPT-4o; the narrative summary was written by Anthropic Claude. Verbatim wording may contain errors. See [methodology](https://meetings.lexingtonky.news/about/methodology) or [report a correction](mailto:editor@lexingtonky.news). --- ## Meeting Overview The Services Committee met on October 6, 2009, at 1:00 p.m., with Mr. Chairman presiding. The committee addressed six agenda items during the meeting, including presentations on utility storm response and livestock regulations, as well as several policy matters requiring approval. Four motions were voted on, and the committee heard seven public comments. Of the items brought to a vote, four were approved: regulations on slaughtering livestock presented by Henson, implementation of parking meters in Chevy Chase presented by Feigel, a right-of-way signage liability matter, and an animal cruelty amendment presented by Martin. Two additional items were presented for informational purposes: a report on KU/EON ice storm response by Gorton and a summary of items currently in committee. ## Attendance The following individuals were present at the meeting on October 6, 2009: * Ellinger * Myers * Lawless * Beard * Feigel * Crosbie * McChord * Martin * Henson * Lane No absences or late arrivals were recorded. ## Votes and Decisions **Ordinance 0130-26** [timestamp: 00:35:13] An ordinance prohibiting the slaughter of animals within the urban services boundary in any area visible from a street, sidewalk, or neighboring property, including for personal consumption, was moved by Henson and seconded by Feigel. The motion passed by voice vote. **Chevy Chase Parking Meters** [timestamp: 01:40:46] A request to retain individual parking meters in Chevy Chase with replacement smart card meter heads instead of the current pay-and-display system was moved by Feigel and seconded by Myers. The motion passed by voice vote. **Legislative Amendment Request for Right-of-Way Signage** [timestamp: 01:45:50] A motion to send a resolution to the Frankfort delegation requesting legislative amendment to KRS 512.080 to allow civil fines for unauthorized right-of-way signage instead of criminal penalties was moved by Myers and seconded by Martin. The motion passed by voice vote. **Animal Shade and Shelter Definitions** [timestamp: 01:42:23] A motion to accept and forward to the full council a draft amendment to clarify definitions of adequate shade and shelter for animals based on species was moved by Martin and seconded by Horne. The motion passed by voice vote. ## Public Comment Seven speakers addressed the meeting regarding Chevy Chase parking meters, with comments spanning from 00:43:45 to 01:31:14. **Support for Current System** Ann Kamak, a resident and former neighborhood association president, stated that the new pay-and-display meters are being used effectively, with increased usage and no significant complaints, suggesting the issue may be resolving itself [00:43:45]. **Concerns About Process and Community Engagement** Bill Farmer, Jr. criticized the lack of public input before installing the new meters and accused the Parking Authority of making decisions without community engagement, calling for a more inclusive process [00:45:56]. **Business and Customer Impact** Leanne Parker-Greathouse, a small business owner, expressed concern that the new meters are deterring customers and harming local businesses, calling the current system "horrible" and detrimental to the area [00:48:49]. Howard Pacemull, a store owner, reported daily complaints from elderly customers struggling to use the new meters, especially in bad weather, and emphasized the inconvenience of having to walk back and forth [00:53:42]. Victoria Grafias, property manager for Ashland Plaza, stated that employees now park in safer lots, but customer parking is being lost due to the new meters, resulting in a 50% drop in revenue and business decline [01:29:06]. Jim Gormley argued that the study's revenue data was artificially inflated due to staff directing people to use the new meters, and warned that high parking costs and inconvenience are discouraging new businesses from locating in vacant spaces [01:31:14]. **Traffic and Safety Concerns** Ann Steele reported increased traffic and parking issues in nearby neighborhoods due to congestion at the Chevy Chase intersection, citing a recent serious accident and the need for better pedestrian safety [00:50:55]. ## Contested Items **Chevy Chase Parking Meters** Multiple business owners and residents expressed strong opposition to newly installed pay-and-display parking meters in Chevy Chase. Opponents cited customer loss, inconvenience, and a lack of public input during the implementation process. The community's concerns prompted a motion to revert to individual meters equipped with smart card heads. This item represented a significant point of contention between those advocating for the new meter system and constituents who felt the change negatively impacted local commerce and accessibility. **Authority of the Parking Authority** A procedural dispute emerged regarding the council's legal authority to override decisions made by the Parking Authority, which is appointed by the mayor. Councilmember Lawless questioned whether the council possessed the proper legal basis to direct the authority's actions, raising concerns about the separation of powers and governance structure. This disagreement centered on institutional authority rather than the merits of the parking meter policy itself. **Slaughter of Animals Ordinance** An ordinance regulating the slaughter of animals passed with unanimous support, but the vote masked underlying debate about its implications. Concerns were raised that the ordinance might indirectly target religious practices, with questions about potential constitutional implications. Discussion focused on whether a permitting process should be established specifically for religious rituals involving animal slaughter. Despite the unanimous passage, the ordinance remained contested on grounds of religious freedom and the appropriate regulatory framework for accommodating faith-based practices. ## KU/EON Ice Storm Response - Gorton [timestamp: 00:00:00] EON representatives presented findings from a post-ice storm review to discuss system improvements and response strategies. The presentation was delivered by Greg Thomas, Tom Jesse, and David Barbarie. **Key Topics Presented** The presentation covered three main areas of focus: - **Customer Communication Improvements**: The representatives discussed enhancements made to how the utility communicates with customers during and after storm events. - **Power Line Undergrounding**: EON addressed the feasibility of undergrounding power lines as a long-term infrastructure solution, including cost estimates for this option. - **System Hardening Strategies**: The presentation outlined approaches to strengthen the electrical system, including tree removal programs and upgrades to infrastructure to better withstand severe weather events. **Public Input and Willingness to Pay** The presentation included results from a public survey regarding undergrounding initiatives. The survey findings indicated that the public has limited willingness to pay for undergrounding power lines, which represents a constraint on implementing this particular improvement strategy. **Outcome** This agenda item was informational in nature, with no formal action or decision required. The presentation provided the governing body with an overview of EON's post-ice storm analysis and the range of potential responses being considered to improve system resilience and customer service during future weather events. ## Slaughtering Livestock - Henson Councilmember Henson introduced an ordinance to prohibit the slaughter of animals within the urban services boundary in any area visible from a street, sidewalk, or neighboring property. The prohibition applies to all animal slaughter, including slaughter for personal consumption. [timestamp: 00:29:45] **Key Discussion Points** The committee discussion involved Councilmember Henson, Keith Horn, Feigel, Lawless, and Beard. During deliberation, concerns were raised regarding the ordinance's impact on religious practices. The committee also addressed enforcement considerations related to the proposed restrictions. **Outcome** The ordinance was approved without dissent. ## Chevy Chase Parking Meters - Feigel [timestamp: 00:39:10] The committee discussed concerns regarding new pay-and-display parking meters installed in Chevy Chase. The agenda item addressed customer inconvenience, potential business impact, and the lack of public input during the implementation process. **Key Speakers and Testimony** Multiple speakers participated in the discussion, including Feigel, Gary Means, Ann Kamak, Bill Farmer, Leanne Parker-Greathouse, Ann Steele, Howard Pacemull, Victoria Grafias, and Jim Gormley. Public testimony reflected divided opinions on the new parking meter system, with some speakers expressing support while others voiced opposition to the changes. **Concerns Raised** The discussion highlighted several issues with the new pay-and-display meters: - Customer inconvenience related to the new system - Potential negative impact on local businesses - Lack of community engagement and public input during the implementation phase **Outcome** The committee approved a motion to retain individual meters with smart card heads, rather than proceeding with the pay-and-display system as originally implemented. This decision represented a compromise that addressed concerns raised during the public testimony and committee discussion. ## Right-Of-Way Signage Liability [timestamp: 01:43:31] The committee discussed amendments to KRS 512.080 regarding penalties for unauthorized right-of-way signage. The primary focus was on changing the enforcement mechanism from criminal penalties to civil fines. **Key Speakers and Discussion** Myers and David Barbarie led the discussion on this matter. The committee examined the current statutory framework and identified a need to modify how violations related to unauthorized signage on rights-of-way are penalized. **Proposal** The committee considered amending KRS 512.080 to allow civil fines as an alternative to criminal penalties for unauthorized right-of-way signage violations. This change would provide a more flexible enforcement approach for addressing signage violations. **Action Taken** The committee approved a motion to send a resolution to the Frankfort delegation requesting legislative change. This resolution would formally request that the state legislature consider and enact the proposed amendment to KRS 512.080. **Outcome** The agenda item was approved, and the committee moved forward with requesting the legislative action through the Frankfort delegation. ## Animal Cruelty Amendment - Martin Councilmember Martin moved to accept a draft amendment that would clarify definitions of adequate shade and shelter based on animal species. [timestamp: 01:41:17] The amendment received support from council members, including Horne. No opposition was raised during the discussion. The measure passed without objection. ## Items in Committee The committee reviewed several pending items during this portion of the meeting. The items under consideration included: - Proposed ordinance on animal slaughter - Parking meters - Signage liability - Animal cruelty amendments This was an informational review of the pending matters. No further action was taken beyond discussion of these items at this time. --- ## Decisions - **Ordinance 0130-26** — passed: Adopting an ordinance to prohibit the slaughter of animals within the urban services boundary in any area visible from a street, sidewalk, or neighboring property, including for personal consumption. - **Motion** — passed: Request to retain individual parking meters in Chevy Chase with replacement smart card meter heads instead of the current pay-and-display system. - **Motion** — passed: Motion to send a resolution to the Frankfort delegation requesting legislative amendment to KRS 512.080 to allow civil fines for unauthorized right-of-way signage instead of criminal penalties. - **Motion** — passed: Motion to accept and forward to the full council a draft amendment to clarify definitions of adequate shade and shelter for animals based on species. --- ## Full transcript If you must, but before I have a woman that I can't trust, I'd rather drink better water, sleep in a hole. Love you, baby, won't behave, always bragging about how you got it made. Your kisses are sweet as they mean, before I let you make a fool out of me. I'd rather drink better water, sleep in a hole. I'd rather. Thank you. Thank you. and appreciate it being on your docket. David, if you would just go through. We have a packet that's in front of everybody that they just presented to us, and we'll go from there. I think you have some gentlemen here you are going to help out, so thank you all. I do, and good afternoon, Mr. Chairman, Councilmember Gorton, and committee members. This, what we're about to share with you today, kind of dates back to January and February of this year and to an invitation from Councilmember Gorton to come and present the findings of our post-storm review. As you might imagine, we undertook a system-wide review of our operations and events following this winter's ice storms and found a number of things, and that broad review identified several kind of key components that warranted further study, and you won't be surprised to know that two of those issues were customer communications and what steps are possible for a utility like us or for us to take to minimize the impact of similar future catastrophic weather on our system and on service to our customers. With me today to visit with you are two of the gentlemen that pretty much oversaw both that broader review and the more specific review with an outside consulting firm, our Greg Thomas, our Vice President of Distribution Operations. And with him is Tom Jesse, who is our Director of Asset Management, both of which figured prominently in this program. And I'll leave Mr. Thomas to present some findings to you, and then we will be available to answer any questions you might have. So thank you very much for the chance to visit with you. Thank you. Welcome, Mr. Thomas. Thank you. Oh, I'll try to avoid PowerPoint paralysis moving through this presentation, but good afternoon. I'll say if you want to stop and interrupt me anytime, feel free to do so. I'll try to move quickly and keep everyone's interest level up. We began, of course, with the devastation of the storms. The February storm labeled Kentucky's worst natural disaster. And then to the purpose of the presentation, which is to outline some specific improvements that we have made or making in customer communications, and then really to begin a dialogue, both with the Commission, Public Service Commission, and with the public, on the topics of undergrounding and system hardening. I think it's important to note that at this stage of the game, no specific recommendations have been made to the Commission. We have presented our findings and a report very similar to this presentation that we've made to the commission, and it's under review currently under the, I guess, the total umbrella of the storm investigation across all the utilities in Kentucky. When do you expect some kind of answer from that? Do not have a real defined date, but we're hopeful for the end of the year in terms of a response. On to customer communication. I think all of us know at this stage or in this environment it's just as important to communicate as to actually restore the service. I think we're all aware of that. We're all aware of the channels of communication available to the public. But the real critical question for us is to be able to answer the what about me question. What about my home, my service, my street, when will I be back on? And that's a real challenge for the utility industry as a whole. Very, very difficult to accurately predict what we call estimated restoration times. In 2009, this is a snapshot of where we are today. For the February storm, we were able to provide outage counts and general crew locations on the website. It's kind of a static environment where we were constantly having to do manual updates to the system. Customers can now report an outage online. And some of you may ask, well, if their power is out, how do you report an outage online? What we have noticed and what we have found is that people generally get to a website in some form or fashion, whether it's work, whether it's friends, what have you. but it's a very utilized tool at this point. And we also have about 365, somewhere in that range, active Twitter accounts. We predict that that number will jump dramatically when the first major storm event happens because that will provide general storm updates. And for 2010, we get back to the what about me question. We have a dedicated team of experienced folks that will be focused on nothing but providing estimated restoration times. And what we're beginning with is accuracy to the day. And we've committed to be able to have this in place by the summer storm season of 2010. Hopefully we'll get there sooner, but that's our commitment. As you may be well aware, it's a cultural change for us in terms of rethinking with the organization in terms of the customer and what the customer needs, as well as a rapid restoration running simultaneously. We'll go to interactive, real-time, online outage maps, and that will have a direct connect with our outage management system, provide more accurate and timely updates, and then we're going to explore new ways to reach customers through texting and emailing. We'll probably start out with a one-way communication. The two-way communication is more problematic, more challenging, but we're going to work our way into what customers want and how they want to be communicated with. And, of course, beyond 2010, we're looking at streamlining our communication to and from the field with our mobile technology. Of course, the first phase is to get our estimated restoration time process in place, working, and then to upgrade with our mobile technology. And it will just speed up the updates and timeliness. So now we get into the question of why not just underground all those ugly lines. Then this slide kind of gives you an overall summary. The advantages, without question, you're protected from the elements. But very quickly we come to the cost. If we underground both our complete transmission and distribution system, we're looking at more than $300 a month on the customer's bill. That doesn't count the cost of other utilities. Also, many customers will have to pay for required modifications to their home, their internal wiring, to be able to accept the undergrounding. So it quickly becomes an issue of cost on complete system undergrounding. And this next series of slides is meant to depict that even though your subdivision or your service may be underground, that typically what happens just outside the station or outside the subdivision is you convert quickly from underground to overhead, and then you travel literally for miles sometimes to the substation. This is a Lansdowne substation here. So really to protect from the elements, you're really looking at undergrounding all the distribution, and then you can see in the background the transmission towers. And really, for complete protection, you're looking at all those wires being underground. To further the discussion on undergrounding, we conducted detailed cost estimates across our service territory. Just to pick some example circuits, two in Lexington. I just wanted to show you briefly what the results of that estimate was. But the cost per customer, you can see $10,600 per customer in terms of just undergrounding that one circuit. And then we go to another circuit, downtown Lexington-Lowden, and you're looking at $16,800 per customer. Of course, you have density of customers, miles of line, and then complexity of the undergrounding itself. So there's a lot of considerations in there. but just to give you some scope, scale, and magnitude of the cost. So then quickly we move to, okay, what could be done? What could be done if complete system undergrounding is not, I guess, palatable to the public, to the customers in terms of the cost, what could be done in the area of hardening? And when we think of hardening, we're thinking of really removing the threat of trees in a major event. Whether you remove the trees from, let's say, off right away or hazard trees, or you reinforce the system with bigger poles, stronger poles, larger wire, those kinds of things. So it's really a dual strategy, but you're really eliminating the threat, which is trees. So we brought in an expert in this area, Davies Consulting. He finalized a report in June of this year. It has been filed with the commission. It's under the umbrella of the storm review at this point. And so we're waiting on the commission's reaction to that report. And this is just a further explanation of hardening, whether it be tree removal or stronger system, or the last bullet is smaller clusters of customers. And one strategy would be to install more protective devices on our system, fuses, reclosures, those things that operate to protect, and you isolate the problem to a smaller cluster of customers. And these are just some examples of off-right-of-way trees. There's a lot of focus in the report on removing off-right-of-way trees. Those trees that are outside of our right-of-way pose a threat, either disease, dying, pose a real threat to us during major storm events that really take the trees out. And then in some cases we're going to approach customers for expanded right-of-way. Some customers, we realize that that's probably a stretch in some areas. But our strategy is to remove the threat, which is trees, from our system, whether it be working with customers and homeowners on off-right-of-way tree hazards or in some neighborhoods maybe an expanded right-of-way would work. maybe in the rural areas as well. Excuse me. And then this is just a depiction of stronger wire, stronger poles, et cetera. And this is some of the protective devices that I was talking about. The reclosers and the fuses serve to protect the system from faults and isolate the problem from the source. So you essentially have energized line from the point of the reclosures and fuse back to the source or the substation. So the conclusion of the Davies report, this is just a high-level summary, but undergrounding, of course, expensive. EON U.S. should consider hardening alternatives. we should evaluate and measure the customer's willingness to accept the alternatives as well as their willingness to pay. And then at the appropriate level of funding, our consultant is calling for a pilot program for undergrounding services to the homes, around 500 of those to measure storm reliability and see if there's a cost-benefit to undergrounding services. And then the last two bullets refer to the meat of the program, which is removing the threat of trees either through system reinforcement or through hazard tree removal. And we conducted a statewide survey of our customers in June of this year, and these are the high-level findings. It's not surprising, the first conclusion, because we require that all customers who participate in the survey experience both storms. So virtually everyone said something should be done. And most approve of our hardening alternatives. that we talked about, either on the tree removal side, tree trimming, or on strengthening their lines and poles. And this was a finding that I don't know whether it's surprising or not, but most are willing to pay $1 to $2 a month, somewhere in that range, for hardening. But when it comes to the more expensive undergrounding, most are not willing to pay. You remember the $300 a month, and very quickly when you get to the $40 to $60 a month, people start dropping off in terms of wanting to pay. So that's a quick run-through of our presentation. The report is filed with the commission. We're awaiting their recommendations or discussions around where we go from here with the report. but we felt like we wanted to look at all the areas, complete system undergrounding, because we've had a lot of questions about why not just bury all those lines. And then we looked at some more alternatives that would be possibly more acceptable to our customers. So that's where we are now, just in the stage of inviting public discussion. Thank you, Mr. Thomas. I think we have some questions from Council Members. Ms. Gorton, you're on the list first. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you very much, Mr. Thomas. I wanted to ask you a couple things about the system hardening through tree removal. Are you, well, when you first started, you said remove outside of right-of-way trees. So that presumably would be in people's yards. That's correct. I mean, what we're looking for is the diseased and dying trees that pose a threat. Okay. That was my next question is you're not proposing removing all trees. You're just proposing diseased and dying trees. We have a trained staff of arborists that can quickly identify trees that need to be removed. And let me say up front, we're not talking about not working with our customers. We understand that this is a sensitive area. It's always been one in terms of tree removal. But we think there's some indication, though, that customers are willing to work with us for tree removals. Well, one of the things that, as a city, we're a Tree City USA. Yes. And one of the things that we're looking at with our water quality efforts, including our water quality fee, is to consider neighborhood grants for trees because the trees absorb the water. So I'm guessing then that that would be, we would need to do those in conjunction with you or someone in your shop to be sure that when we do put in trees for water quality, we're not putting them in places where in 10 years we're going to need to take them out. We would very much prefer to work with you on that initiative and to plant trees that will not grow up into the line. And you've worked with cities on this very thing. Yes, cities, neighborhoods. We're open to any of those initiatives. We're trying to get in on the front end of that so we can try to work and manage where it won't be a problem for customers or us down the road. Would you be the contact point for that, or who would? Yeah, either David or myself, either one would be. We can certainly hook you up with our arborists and the right people. Okay, very good. Thank you again for being here. Thank you for the invitation. Mr. Beard? Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Probably a series of questions and one comment. Much of suburban Lexington was developed on pasture land, and all the tree lines followed fence lines. And for some reason, obviously, at the same time that they were developed, You all followed the fence lines also and the tree lines. So you actually built into the trees and knew the trees were there before. They maybe weren't the size they were or they weren't in the condition they were, but you knew they were there and I would assume would know that at some point it was going to be a problem. Well, I guess my response would be that's correct. We are always looking for right-of-way. Excuse me, I've got a slight cold, but we're looking for right-of-way is extremely hard to find, and sometimes we have to take those routes to meet the customer's needs, but you're correct. Is a right-of-way and an easement the same thing, and are they interchangeable? Yeah, we think of it as the same, in terms of terminology. When I was involved with the city in economic development effort before I became a council person, so I lived through both the 03 and the most recent one, what is a circuit and relate that to a substation? I know at least in 03 we ran into situations where we were having stacking problems. A customer may have an outage at three different places, and you may fix one, and he thinks he's home free, and you still have two others that you haven't gotten fixed yet. Okay. Well, if you begin with the generator and then quickly come to the transmission system, then the transmission system feeds into our substations, much like the Lansdowne station, and then we step down the voltage there typically to a 12,000-volt system. And what we define as a circuit is originating from that substation and then traveling to residential homes and subdivisions to your, it ends up at your residential pad mount transformer or overhead transformers. So typically a three-wire circuit that runs from a breaker, we call it, it's a protective device in the station. And that's what we define as a circuit. And the circuit's more vulnerable then than a substation. Do substations get taken down? Very seldom, very seldom. Unless we have a direct lightning strike. Something like that, but not as far as the ice is concerned. And a circuit has the three wires, and so there's a lot of confusion in terms of the question, why is my neighbor on and why am I not, those kind of questions. And that all ties back to the fact there's three wires, and we'll tap one wire to feed this subdivision, one wire to feed this street, those kinds of things. So that's at a high level. When it arrives in transformers, is it at 12,000 volts? Typically it will go 12,000 volts. We do have some 4,000 volts on the high side of the transformers, and then it will step down to the 240, 120, or there's 480-volt services for commercial, those kinds of things. Okay, thank you. Is that right, Tom? Okay. Tom's my expert. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Martin. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. In the interest of time, I thought I might just sort of give a couple of my impressions, and I appreciate you coming today. Thank you. And I appreciate the continuing dialogue between Eon and the city. You know, in everyone's house they have wires and various utility things that are built behind the walls, And the reason folks put them behind the walls is because they don't want to see them, you know, in their house and for other, you know, safety things as well. And I feel the same about our city. We're putting, it seems to me, a lot of our utilities on major thoroughfares because it's easy to do that. It's easier than to try to run them through folks' backyards. And, you know, folks have heard me talk about this before, but I just don't think that we should be running our major power lines and other utilities down major corridors. I think it is something that we will have done to our city for generations to do, and I think that we should make every effort possible to put those in backyards and off major corridors. I don't approve at all of the utilities around the U.K. hospital. I think that was just a terrible thing, and it's going to make that one of the ugliest parts of town for a very, very long time. And I know there's a lot of costs to be considered, but as we make decisions about where our utilities go, I think we should try to put them behind our drywall as much as we can. And that may not necessarily mean burying them, because I understand it is prohibitively costly. But there are other choices that we can make in putting them along corridors that aren't on our major entryways to town and along major corridors in town that will help us keep the ugliness of our technology at bay. I mean, everybody appreciates what you all do. I mean, every time we flip a light switch, every time we charge our cell phone, we appreciate what you all do for us. But just as in our house, I think that we would all like to pretend that we're not really living in 2009 and that someday we really are going to still be outside and see green trees and pretend that we're not surrounded by all this. So I appreciate you coming today. Good point. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. What we want to do is work with the city and find the best route. And, of course, it's always balanced with cost. But we want to work with the city to find those best routes. Ms. Henson. Thank you, Chair. I just wanted to ask, is there or will there ever be a plan to go underground? I mean, is there like a phasing-in process or anything in the works for the utility company? Well, I would say that for residential services to subdivisions and those kinds of electric sources, the majority are already underground. We still have some rural overhead services, but by and large, developers just for the aesthetics will work with us to put it underground. When it comes to transmission, that's a very different and very costly proposition. And so the circuits, the major feeders, the transmission, that's where the majority of the cost to underground is. So I'm not saying we can't do it. Obviously, it's easier to underground new construction than existing. but that's the challenge that we all of us I guess all of us are in it together in terms of the way I see it but that's the challenge. Well I guess you know I'm just thinking about the cost of repair to the overhead, the cost of hardening the system And then, you know, because you're still going to have storms and traffic accidents that cause the need for repair to the utility line. If they're underground, it would seem those costs would be reduced considerably. I know that if it's underground, it's probably going to maybe make it more difficult to locate the problem. But I don't know. I guess I would just like to see a comparison, everything weighed out. And I would really like to see, you know, existing utilities, like I guess limestone is going underground. Just if we could, in the existing neighborhoods, established neighborhoods, if we could have a phasing-in process to go underground, save our trees. and so forth. That's points well made. I think there are some life cycle studies with Edison Electric Institute. It's kind of our utility organization and what we'll try to do is get you a copy of those research reports. They kind of outline all the advantages and disadvantages in life cycle costs of underground versus overhead and I think that's probably what you're referring to. So we'll try to get a report to you. I don't see any other questions. I want to thank you all for coming today. Greg or David, when you get the recommendations or hear back from the PSC, if you all could come back to us and let us know what they said, that would be great. We'll keep this in committee. I think you said the end of the year you should be hearing something from us. We're hopeful. I don't want to commit the commission to anything. I understand. But we're hopeful. Maybe early in the year, then maybe in 2010 you all could come back to us and let them know what the recommendations and what happened, and hopefully we won't be dealing with the ice storm here in the spring. Let's hope. Okay. Thank you so much for coming. Thank you. The second item on the agenda, Ms. Henson put in, and we continued it from last meeting, was the slaughtering of livestock. Ms. Henson. Thank you, Chair. Since the last Services Committee meeting, I met with council staff and the law department, and in your packet there's a copy of an ordinance that I proposed that I felt would not impede upon individuals' rights to know where their food comes from and not put too much of a burden on the enforcement. So if Keith Horn, I guess, if you wanted to come up and... Welcome, Keith, from the Law Department. Could you tell us what the ordinance is here? Yeah, after meeting with Council Member Henson, we discussed what she was hoping to achieve with an ordinance, and that was basically to get the slaughtering that may be occurring out of sight of neighbors. And so I put together this ordinance based on our discussions, first to define slaughter as meaning to kill or butcher an animal for food, and then to say that no one would slaughter an animal within the urban services boundary in any area visible at ground level from a street sidewalk or neighboring property, and then to provide a penalty for violating the ordinance of a fine up to $100. I wasn't exactly sure where you all wanted that penalty or whatnot, so it's always easier to work with something once you have something on paper. Sure. Are there any council members who would like to comment on this? or Ms. Simpson, are you willing to make a motion at this point to move this forward? Ms. Feigl? Your microphone. Thank you. I was just listening to what you said. I really haven't studied this, but did you say that this would prohibit slaughtering of animals for the use of food? Yes, it includes language, including for personal consumption. But the definition of slaughter means to kill or butcher an animal for food. Okay. I guess my concern was wasn't there some discussion about this being a kind of a religious ritual in some religions? I wasn't at your last meeting, and you may have discussed that, and I think that's a very legitimate concern. but since you're not, since this is generally applicable, you're not singling out religion or anything like that, then I think you're okay constitutionally if that's what you're asking. But that's not to say that if you want to build something else into this ordinance that it can't be done. I just need to know where you want to go. I think one of the things that we talked about, because whether it be for slaughtering for consumption or whether it be for religious rituals, it still is probably a little distasteful to the neighborhood. And so I think what we talked about is the possibility of trying to build in a permitting process, that if it was for a religious ritual that perhaps there might be a permitting process just to ensure that it was being done, I guess, discreetly. Was there any discussion with you about that? The only thing we talked about a permit generally, and the feeling I got from Council Member Henson was that you don't want an unnecessary roadblock for someone who may be slaughtering an animal for personal consumption. And depending on what you would hope to achieve with the permit would determine whether or not you actually would want to adopt a permit provision for that type of thing. Okay. Well, actually, I'll just defer to Council Member Henson on this, because I know she spent a lot of time talking with you all in the neighborhood, so I will defer to you. Ms. Lawless? Could you simply add into it consumption or for religious purposes? You have to start being fairly careful when you start specifying religious purposes. I know there's been at least one case where the Supreme Court overturned a local ordinance, not in Kentucky, because it appeared that the intent was to impact religious practices. And so we're trying to avoid any religious implication in this ordinance. Okay. Any other questions for Keith or Peggy here? Ms. Henson, did you want to go ahead and make a motion? I would like to make a motion to adopt this ordinance as written. I did want to comment a couple more comments. Hold on, let's see if we get a second. We have a second. Okay, discussion. Thank you. Thank you. This could be, it doesn't specify in the ordinance, but it would be enforced by, like, if someone, if my neighbor was going to slaughter a hog or whatever, and I didn't particularly want to see it, and I called the police, they would be the enforcer on this, correct? That is correct. Okay. And as far as the religious, I don't think it does, this ordinance does not prohibit any such thing, you know, as a religious whatever from occurring. It's just not within the view of others, correct? Or? This is limited to someone who's slaughtering for eating purposes. Okay. Okay. Thank you. So what you're saying is really not addressing a religious issue. That is correct. So would that be considered vague if somebody called and said that they were slaughtering an animal and they wanted to fine them for $100 and said, but we weren't doing it for public, we're just doing it as a religious, would this then not fall under that? you may be raising the question of if someone gets fined and they go to court and say, well, we weren't doing it for food purposes, we were doing it for religious purpose, and that all comes down to a court finding then, because nothing ever prevents someone from being dishonest in court or otherwise, and so it just becomes a question of fact finding at that point. And I don't know if you've had many complaints about people slaughtering animals for religious purposes in view of their neighbors versus slaughtering them for food purposes in front of their neighbors. Mr. Beard? Just a quick question concerning multiple slaughtering. is there any does anybody have any concern that somebody's going to slaughter five steers in their backyard with the fence around it and that's okay this it wouldn't matter the number now it starts your enforcement wise it starts becoming more question of is this person trying to feed their family or are they running some sort of slaughterhouse Exactly. And there are other provisions that apply to slaughterhouses and are regulated as slaughterhouses. So that's going to raise a whole different kind of fact-finding issues if that's happening. We have no slaughterhouses anymore in Fayette County, but we did have, and we essentially ran them off. I'm using the term also very broadly. Yes. The term slaughterhouse. I didn't know whether this was going to open the door, though, I guess is the question, or could be considered to open the door. Right. This doesn't matter number-wise how many you're slaughtering. If it's, number one, in the urban services boundary, and number two, like we're saying, it's occurring in somebody's backyard. Because if they're doing it as a business, there are other laws and regulations that apply to it. Any other discussion? All those in favor of the motion say aye. All those opposed, that passes. Thank you. The third item on the agenda is the Chevy Chase parking meters. And Ms. Feigel put this in from our last council meeting or a couple council meetings ago. And I'll let you go ahead and begin. Okay. Thank you, Chair. We do have several people here that probably want to speak to this. But just to kind of give some history to this, the new pay and display parking system was installed in Chevy Chase. And many of the merchants in the area felt like that it was really not compatible with the Chevy Chase kind of shopping done in Chevy Chase because it's a very convenience-oriented shopping center. And so we have had a study done, and while the study appears to show that there was an increase in the usage of the pay and display, we still feel like that there is possibly another option. I went online and started just studying parking situations in other cities, and I actually, there's several documents in your packet that I would just refer you to. You don't really have to read all of them specifically with this parking system in mind, But different cities are having to deal with parking issues as well for different reasons. So there really is no one-size-fits-all plan for parking systems. Some of the parking systems in other cities actually have their revenues go toward repairing potholes, and some of them go toward the general fund. So not all parking systems are designed the same. And even the metering systems are very different. Some of the options that are available online that are actually quite intriguing are personal parking meters that you actually leave in the window of your car and you go online to add additional funding for your parking. And then there's another one where you can actually call the parking meter from your cell phone and activate the parking. But that's not what I'm proposing for us to look at today. What I am proposing is if you look in your package, you'll see a page that looks like this. And just with, they're not numbered. Let's see. Yes, it is. Fourteen. Fourteen. Page 14. With this in mind, I just wanted to share with you that there is a new initiative ongoing right now. We've had one meeting talking about the possibility of redesigning Chevy Chase and making it more of a little village area with very pedestrian-friendly streets. The situation we have there now is very pedestrian, unfriendly, very dangerous to cross the road. The islands in the center of the road, as I'm sure you've noticed, are crumbling and just look terrible. So as I began to think about trying to beautify the Chevy Chase area, it became more and more apparent that it needs a lot more than just a few flower pots. And so we do have an ongoing group of individuals comprised of city staff, the MPO, the merchants, and the neighbors in the area. And so we are actually in the process of trying to create a concept for what we are hoping to achieve in Chevy Chase. And with that in mind, I'd like for you to just take a look at this parking meter. We just feel like at this point in time, the vision that we have is probably not consistent with the pay and display meters that are there now. but certainly we could take our meters, the single head meters, and they could be refurbished to allow those meters to use the same parking card, or you could use coins as well. And we felt like that that was probably a better option for the kind of vision that we have for the Chevy Chase area. So with that, we do have some people here that would like to speak to this issue, if that's okay. Certainly. We have, as everybody signed up, we have five people on the list, and we'll go down and start with Ann Kamek on Deshay Road. And if you would, give your name and your address and keep your comments to three minutes, please. And I'll keep the clock, so if I say stop, please try to stop. Oh, okay. My name is Ann Kamak. I live at 231 DeShay Road in Ashland Park. Could you bring the microphone a little closer so we can hear you? Okay. Can you hear me now? Just a little. There we go. Okay. My name is Ann Kamak. I live at 231 DeShay Road. A couple of disclaimers. I shop in Chevy Chase, and I worked very closely with Bill Farmer when he was the 5th District Councilperson, and I was president of the Neighborhood Association. I'm also a neighbor and a good friend of Kenton Ball, who is the chairman of the Parking Authority. He and the members of the authority were charged with fixing the parking problems in Lexington, and they have given countless hours and lots of energy to this problem, as I think you know. their work has resulted in increased revenues from parking meters throughout the city, and I think that's a good thing right now. But specifically, Chevy Chase. No one likes change, and we're all grumpy when our regular routines are disturbed. But when I look at the businesses in Chevy Chase, starting with Starbucks, two upscale restaurants, a florist, a jeweler, an art gallery, John's Running Shop. I don't see a client list that can't figure out how to use a different parking meter. The August survey of the meters, as Councilman Feigl suggested, shows that uses of the new meters are up and uses of the old meters are down. So I would respectfully suggest that perhaps this problem is solving itself. Thank you. The next speaker is Bill Farmer, Jr. Thank you, Mr. Chair, members of the committee, and thank you for putting us on your agenda so quickly and Councilmember Feigel for being helpful to us. And I may just say I might like to address you again after the Parking Authority has spoken. In fact, I would personally like for them to have gone first. But briefly, I would just say this to you. And I want to welcome Ann Kammack back. She has been away for five and a half years. We're happy to have her back at Chevy Chase. I think it's important to understand that you all are our link to the city government. And the parking authority has kind of, they've done things without much public input. And I think that's one of the problems. Because last December when I walked to the end of the alley where I parked my car and I stepped out and almost hit the new parking meter, having known nothing about it, And you all understand from the positions that you serve in now, information is everything. And there was no conversation with the neighborhood, no conversation with the merchants about changing this type of parking situation before it happened. There was a study period that went on after some questions were asked about this. And we had a lot of meetings that really didn't result in anything, at least as far as I'm concerned. And then in the file analysis we had this meter monitoring through the summer, which, you know, it's like anything else. You can train people to do anything you want. If you hang enough signs on enough meters pointing them another direction, they'll either get confused or they'll finally use one meter or the other. But I can't say to you that that study is accurate because, in my estimation, the further we went along, when they weren't getting the result they wanted, they came out and hung more and more signs up. And then in the file analysis, and as you all are, again, well aware, public input and public notice. On page six of your packet, where it talks about what has gone on, third line from the end begins with then notified. I think that speaks to the style of the parking authority. They view parking as inventory. They view us as tax income generators. They don't work with people. They work around people. And they've had a meeting for which I've asked for meeting minutes where they made the decision to pull these meters. I've not yet received the minutes for that meeting. And I suspect when we look at them, we'll find no member of the public, other than the members of the parking authority, were there to make this decision in the final analysis. So I think what we find is the opportunity for you all to lead on the behalf of merchants and customers who are inconvenienced. The point being, customers want to come to Chevy Chase because it is a convenient place to shop and to work. Don't make a decision that only conveniences the parking authority. Parking Authority, make a decision that convinces the taxpayers who have been paying taxes in Chevy Chase for 60 years or more help us in this dire economic time. Thank you, sir. Thank you. The next speaker, Leanne Parker-Greathouse. Leanne Parker-Good afternoon. I'm Leanne Parker-Greathouse, and I own Chevy Barbershop at 442 South Ashland. I came here today because I'm a lifelong resident of Lexington. My dad came to Chevy Chase in 1960 and started cutting hair. There are many businesses in Chevy Chase that have been pillars of this community for a few generations. And Chevy Chase is being compromised right now. And at this point, I'm just begging with you all to please reconsider the new parking meters in Chevy Chase. I'm having to look at it from a small business owner's point of view now, which is different than just an employee's point of view or a customer's point of view. Whoa. It's different. And the simple fact of the matter is the people that come to Chevy Chase and have been coming to Chevy Chase for over 40 years want convenience. And Chevy Chase is not aesthetically pleasing right now, and I commend Councilwoman Fogel for taking the initiative to spearhead something, to try to make it pedestrian friendly. But please, please, this is horrible, what's happened with the painting display meters. I have watched people. They're just not happy. And it's hurting businesses in Chevy Chase. It really is. Thank you. Thank you. The next speaker is Ann Steele. I'm a neighbor in Ashland Park. I live at 233 South Hanover. Pardon? I'm sorry. I was going to say, could you give your address there? I'm sorry. 233 South Hanover. And I attended the meeting with, I believe it was this past week, that Councilman Feigel arranged, along with a number of other neighbors that are very enthusiastic and supportive of planning to make Chevy Chase more pedestrian friendly. Those of us that live in the neighborhood, which was once part of Henry Clay's Farm, are thrilled to have these wonderful shops that we can walk to, family-owned businesses for many years, restaurants, whatnot. It is wonderful, but it is anything but pedestrian friendly. And the other thing I would like to speak to is I have noticed, especially with the implementation of the whatever they're called, we're getting a lot of traffic parking up south Hanover. As I get out and walk, the lowest portion of the street right at high has permit parking only that the owners of those properties have put into place. So you get past Ghent Road, and you'll see a lot of cars parked, oftentimes almost up to the Slash's median. And it's either people that are shopping Chevy Chase or people that work in those shops. And often it's not if I'm just out walking or whatever. It looks like it's a lot of people that are working there that are parking up Hanover. And Hanover has the grass median, of course. It's narrow. It's very winding. It's not been too many weeks ago. We have a continual traffic issue there where Gimp Road runs into Hanover. People run that stop sign, and it happened. I tried to arrange to bring the photo with me. There was a major wreck at that area where a car ran the stop, hit an SUV, and completely flipped it over. So the parking issues also have an impact on our neighborhood. But I predominantly wanted to be supportive of the neighborhood shops because it's wonderful to be able to walk to those. I thank you for your time. Thank you, Ms. Steele. And the next one is Horatio Pacemull. I hope I didn't beat that up too much. 850 East High. It's Howard. Oh, it's Howard. Okay. Hi. I have Worlds Apart at 850 East High Street. And I came to speak. I'm in favor of the parking meters. I think it has controlled, you know, who comes and who goes. What I'm speaking against is the system that we're trying to institute there. I work at my store, and I'm there many, many hours, and every day there are complaints, and especially our elder customers, about trying to figure out how to pay for parking. And there must be two to three complaints a day where people come in and say, What's up with these parking meters? We can't stand it. How come you let the city do it? And so I'm just, from the front lines, telling you all how much criticism I hear on a daily basis. When it first was instituted, I said, okay, it's change, and I was okay with it. But the amount of complaints I hear on a daily basis is something that you all should know about, And I like the option of the meter that you showed where they don't have to go walk half a block, put the money in, walk back to their car. And I've been around on raining days when it's been raining, and people are just, they don't want to go back to their car and keep walking back and forth. and so I just wanted to really, my experience from being a retailer is that it does prevent certain people from stopping in the stores and they have to go back and forth, but I am in favor of the meters. Thank you, Howard. Ms. Feigl, do you want to continue? Just a couple more things I would say. We do have a petition here signed by a large number of people. There are actually three or four pages, and they're in your packet as well. And all of these have agreed that they would like to keep individual parking meters in Chevy Chase for the convenience. Just to address one of the things from Mrs. Steele, a lot of cars do cut through the neighborhoods over there because the congestion in that intersection is very difficult. It stacks way back to Henry Clay, or to Ashland, I'm sorry, many times, and the cars even can't get across Ashland. So that's one of the reasons we're taking a look at that intersection, to try to make it a little bit less congested and hopefully keep cars from passing through the neighborhoods. But at the same time, really what we're talking about is not so much disagreeing disagreeing with the meters where you use a parking card, we do have the option to continue to use the new technology the way the Parking Authority has suggested that we do, but it would still provide individual parking meters at parking spaces. So I think that's really a good alternative, and it would also fit in with what we believe to be the kind of concept that we want in the Chevy Chase neighborhood. And in fact, when I was talking with Mr. Means earlier about this, he even shared with me that they do have some sleeves that go over the post for a parking meter that are actually fluted and look a little more decorative than individual parking meter posts do. So I do think that this is an opportunity for us to look at some options and do some things that are a little more compatible with not only the kinds of businesses that are in the Chevy Chase area that are looking for or where customers are looking for convenience, but also something that's a little more attractive and compatible with the feel of the community. Thank you. I think this time it's probably appropriate to have Gary Means from the Parking Authority come and speak to us about this. Thank you for having me. There's about 20 slides here, and you all have seen a bunch of them, so I'm going to try to quickly go through it and just highlight. I want to really emphasize the fact that we have had a lot of public input. We've spent a lot of time out there, and I really want to make sure that this whole issue doesn't come across as the parking authority against Chevy Chase. We are for Chevy Chase. We've spent a lot of time out there, and we want all those merchants to be successful. So I just wanted to give you a little bit of background. When Mr. Farmer first came to the council, it was back in January, and that's when we were installing them. And then you'll recall we went through the ice storm that was mentioned earlier in February. After I came and spoke to the group, then we met in February with the Chevy Chase merchants, and that's when the suggestion of a small area parking study was made by Mr. Farmer. And then he came to our board meeting in February, and they approved doing a small area study. So then our second meeting with the merchants was in March. And at that time, we started looking at a map that we'd come up with to sort of let's hone in on the boundaries and the goals and the area that we were going to study. And the study basically back then went on during March. And some of the scope of the study was to look at some of the issues, just like Ms. Steele mentioned, where maybe there's a lot of pressure in certain areas and people are parking in places they shouldn't. And as one of the merchants said, when we first began monitoring out there, we realized that a lot of the employees were parking in meters and now they're getting tickets. So a big part of the problem that we found in the first meeting wasn't just the old meter versus the new meter. It was, hey, where do my employees park? And so this just continues on some of the things that we discussed, but obviously the big issue, the third bullet point down, is to analyze the difference between the two types of metering system, which we went into in a separate study. Then we performed the study, and we came back together in April for a third meeting to go over the study. And in the study, we utilized Republic Parking, who is our contractor, their professional company, So they sort of gave us some other ideas to look at when are your peak periods, what's parking like after hours or weekends, or is it mostly busy at lunchtime, those types of things. So as we kept going into the study, we found other things like that that would be appropriate to look at from a whole village, to use that term, might appreciate. You can't see this map really well, but there's a red line that sort of outlines the Chevy Chase area. And in the beginning, we had thought about looking at south Hanover. And so if you can see it, there's a little wing that kind of comes out. If I can use this right here. In that area, out into the South Hanover neighborhood. Right away, the neighborhood asked us, please don't study this. We don't really want the parking out in this area. And so we nixed that idea right off the bat. There is an RPP, a Residential Permit Parking District, set up in the first part of South Hanover. And then what's probably happening now that Ms. Steele mentioned is that because that's being well monitored, Some folks who maybe aren't finding the parking that they want around the Ashland Plaza area are scooting off into the neighborhood, and that could possibly require another study, and maybe the RPP needs to be extended to help monitor that area, and we'd be glad to take that on at their request if the residents want that. But the good news was we identified 752 parking spaces in the Chevy Chase area. I don't think anyone ever really tried to put it all together and find out. And to put this whole perspective into more perspective, there are only 65-metered spaces on street. So in the whole scheme of things in Chevy Chase, the on-street issue is very minuscule compared to how many spaces there are in lots and in the parking garage and some of the areas. This, again, is going to be difficult to look at, but one of the things that we spent a lot of time, because of the quality of the slides, looking into were the different lots that we identified that we felt had a lot of availability, and maybe the owners of those lots could work with us to help find places for the merchants to park. And so listed there are six different locations, the Kroger parking lot, National City Bank lot, Chase lot, the Rite Aid lot behind Shoppers Village Liquors, Chevy Chase Plaza Garage, and the Ashland Plaza lot. And just on that note, Ashland Plaza lot is definitely the most full. That's where the Starbucks is, and so when we did the study, and I'll scroll through some statistics here in a second, but that one was the one that we found had the biggest issue with both employee parking and customer parking. I will not spend a lot of time on all these statistics, but one of the things that we found was that this shows you how many spaces were full of the 700-and-something spaces and how many were empty during the different times of the day. So we found that there were quite a bit of available parking. It may be behind a building or in another parking lot that's a block or so away, but there's a lot of it in that area available. This is the breakdown of each one of the locations. This is the on-street only, so there's 65 spaces. We looked at those and looked at them separately, East High, Ashland, and Euclid separately, and monitored those peak periods and occupancy rates. And then this slide puts it all together, the on-street and the off-street, and it shows how full the occupancy level is. And when we showed this slide, there were several merchants who said, you know, we really should take these statistics and market it. Chevy Chase can say, did you know that at almost any given time during the day, we've got over 300 empty parking spaces? Come shop here. And that's something that I think some of the merchants really jumped on as a positive outcome. Another thing that we did, and again, this goes back to public input. We have not ignored the public. We went out with a survey, and we got 27 surveys back. And in this survey of the merchants out there, we asked several different questions. And some of the statistics were, how many employees do you have? And, again, this is just 27 of the merchants, but there's 160 employees represented in that. And then we asked them things like, you know, how many of them drive or take a bus? We got these statistics together. How many of them park in a designated lot or a public lot? How many of them park on the street? Some of them didn't know exactly where they parked. This is about their customers. When is your peak period, Monday through Friday? during the day is the peak. So this is good information to know how to manage that area. It may come in handy as we continue to look at future developments with Chevy Chase. And by the way, we would love to be at the table and continue to help. And then we found that customers are the really, and we all knew this in professional management of OnStreet, OnStreet is where your customers are typically going to park. And so that then goes back to the meters as far as getting customers to come. We also talked about, okay, we've got all the statistics. What are some of the next steps or what are some of the things that came out? We did find that there were no ADA spaces on street, so we worked with the merchants to identify a location to add a handicapped metered space in the Chevy Chase area. The merchants didn't like the idea of a, this is a second bullet point, of the rates being $1 an hour in certain areas and 50 cents an hour. But the reason why we came up with that, when we first studied the area, before we ever started installing meters or even rolling out the rate increase, we noticed that South Ashland stayed more vacant than the Euclid and the High Street. We felt like the demand in the Euclid area and the High Street tended to have those meters full more often than South Ashland. So that was our reason. But the merchants said, hey, we're Chevy Chase. We want to stick together. We want the rate to be the same. And we understood where they were coming from and went ahead and did that and took it all to $1 an hour in the area at their request. And again, I bolded this, but the big part of the outcome, okay, Gary, thank you for finding all the off-street parking, but part of our issue is the new meter versus the old meter. Another thing that came up, and we still want to look at it, is there an area that we could put a taxi stand out in Chevy Chase? There's a nightclub or two out there that's real busy at night. And then another area that came up was Fritz Alley. It's a city-owned area. I'm working with the city streets and roads department to get some pricing together to be able to maybe add a few spaces back in Fritz Alley. There's a large area in the back there, and we're working with them still to get some pricing on how that could happen. I wanted to just remind everybody some of the reasons that we chose this type of meter, and it is not to try to make it hard on anybody. And the one argument about having to walk back to your car, that's a fact, and there's nothing I can say that changes that. You do have to walk over to the meter and walk back. But again, the Chevy Chase merchants are all talking about walkability. They want someone to go to Farmer's Jewelry and then go get their hair cut on the next block over. So if we're willing to walk a block to the next door, what's 20 feet back to your car? That's kind of our take on it. But we feel these things about it. Obviously, solar power is a great thing for our city to have that green approach. There's a lot of payment flexibility. If we do the only leave the meters like we have them, and we did upgrade them with C.M. Feigl's suggestion, we have already done all of what she was suggesting. This is kind of a sample of what the single meters look like now. You can use a smart car. But the average person that's coming to shop doesn't have a smart card. We hope they'll all get them, but not everybody has one. And so then they're stuck using quarters. So what we felt is great about this is if you're going to go for an hour or two shopping in Chevy Chase, you don't have to have a pocket full of quarters to do it. You can put a dollar bill in. You can put a credit card, debit card, or our smart card that we sell. And you also get a receipt that proves how much time you've paid for. And you can also park in front of Farmer's Jewelry and buy a two-hour ticket and then move to another meter with that same receipt. That receipt's good until it expires, so it gives you a lot more flexibility. If you pay an old-style meter and put two hours in it and then you want to leave, you kind of lose that time. It's stuck on the meter, so we like the receipt. You can take it with you. And to reduce collection costs, think about a block that has 10 meters. The gentleman has to go along, unlock each meter, take the money out, stick it in the canister, go to the next one, and we put one of these on a block and you stop once and take out the money, so it's an efficiency thing. And then something we're pretty excited about is the multilingual. We're going to start working on adding in some different languages, and that will help us as a community be prepared for the World Equestrian Games. Just wanted to highlight, again, the reason. So it wasn't just somebody came into my office and said, hey, Gary, there's this really cool new meter. We want you to buy it. This just sort of analyzes the, since that time, we did the six-month request, our study, to analyze the old meter versus the new meter. So if you can imagine a block where there's 10 meters, this style meter, we left them there and we had installed the new meter. So we're doing a side-by-side comparison for six months. And it did start during the cold weather of March and moved on through the summer. And you can kind of see the overall trend where there was probably people on vacations that overall dropped down a little during the summer. And then we'll see a peak back up in August as people are coming back from vacations and headed to school. Something that Mr. Farmer mentioned about the signs, around May 15th, during this six-month, we added some signs. I'll show you a picture of those signs to help folks know that if you got out of your car and you see this old-style meter setting here, but you don't have quarters, you can go over and use the other one. But we didn't force them. We didn't use the sign that says pay to park over here. And then when we finalized our study, and I'll show you the study results in just a second, on September 9th, that's when our board met. We told Mr. Farmer back when he came to the board that we would extend this study and take it out six months, and we would take it back up in September. Our board meetings are open to the public. They're always a second Wednesday of every month. Anyone can come anytime. And we had let him know when it was going to be. And then we sent out an email to the merchants that we had emails from who had been coming to our meetings to let them know about it. So I can kind of give you all a little more of a perspective. Also, this will, going back to Ms. Steele's comments, you can see the intersection she's talking about there at Ghent. So you kind of get that in the conversation as well. But you can see where there are four. The four meters are in this area, the High Street and the Euclid area. And then you can see South Ashland is where we have proposed just to leave the old style meters there. And there's a few reasons. one of them mainly is these new meters cost about $10,000, and we'd like to put them where there's at least six, eight, ten meters in a row, and there's not a scenario like that on South Ashland. And again, in the beginning, we noticed that South Ashland had a little less business, and so part of our places to find the 50 that we purchased were, you know, we want it to be a busy area, a lot of turnover, and we would like to see eight or ten meters in a row before we put one in. So out of the 50 meters we purchased, four were installed in Chevy Chase. We've got 29 downtown and 17 out in the U.K. area. Again, we're talking about these four. One of the things that Mr. Farmer and I agreed on in the very beginning was that the meter we call number 34 over on the neighborhood side, really if you park there, walking over across the street is something you're going to have to do anyway. So he and the rest of the merchants and us agreed, let's go ahead and take those meter heads out, because that meter wasn't really an issue as far as walking back to your car, because you're going to have to walk across the street to go shopping. So the final slide that I will show you in a minute is really the comparison of the meters on the high street with that new meter, and then the Euclid along there and that new meter, and those 10 there and that new meter. And this next slide is a picture of the signage that we implemented. The smaller sign to your left is what is in most of the downtown area that would say pay to park. So if you got onto your vehicle and you saw the old post, it sends you in the direction of the new meter. In Chevy Chase, we covered up the pay to park with a sticker that says pay and display meter accepts bills, credit cards, and debit cards. And those signs went up in that May time frame. And we felt like while you could get out of the vehicle, you would see this meter sitting there with that sign right underneath it. If you're digging for quarters, that might be, again, a communication to the public as to what their options are. Can you back up to that last line? And I'm going to finish with this one. This is our six-month study. after the meetings and after a request to extend the period and take a look at what's going on on the street. It takes my opinion out, Mr. Farmer's opinion, and others, and it lets the public decide. The red line indicates how much revenue was collected off those streets with the old-style meter. The blue revenue line is the new meters. And you'll see, and we made a point of it, when we installed the signage, and we consider that communicating with the public as well about the program, that's where you notice the big jump. Honestly, if we had started this study out, it's not like we're digging our hills in. We want these meters out there no matter what they think. If the red line would have stayed high and the blue line would have stayed low, we would have tried to find some other place to put these meters. You know, there's some streetscape work going on downtown. There may be some realignment. We might find a place for them. But the public showed us that they are accepting the new meter, and less and less, when they had the option of using the old meter, they didn't. And so when this study was finished after six months, that's public input. And the board saw this, and that was what led them to make the decision to go ahead and remove the rest of the individual meters. And I just want to reiterate that we had a lot of public input. We care about Chevy Chase. We'll still keep working. I'm still working on the Fritz Alley issue. We put a lot of time into this. And so I appreciate your all's time, and that's our results. Thank you, Mr. Means. There's some questions for you, I believe. Mr. Beard? Thank you, Chair. Gary, let me – I hate to try to pick this apart, but I'm going to. If you look at that, you start out in March of 2009 with an aggregate $450, $500 worth of parking revenue, and you end up down here, while there's acceptance, it's only $300 or $400 worth of parking revenue. So what have you done is, in my opinion, is you've driven people somewhere else out of Chevy Chase. That's a conclusion I can come to anyway. That is these three blocks, and it really is about a $50 decrease. We could say it's the summertime. We could say it's the economy. This could be happening everywhere. There could be merchants in town that are saying that their revenue has dropped off as well during the same period. I totally understand and saw that point exactly. But to think about it being in the neighborhood of 450 and then being in the neighborhood of 400 and knowing that there's also parking on South Ashland where if someone didn't like the new meter, they could drive around to South Ashland and park. There's parking on that side too. So this is just three blocks within Chevy Chase, but I understand your point. Well, and also where the reduction is is on the single-space meter side more than on the multi-space meter side increase. Yes. The other thing that seems a little logically flawed to me, you were talking about the number of spaces in some of your earlier slides, and you were including things like Chase Bank and National City Bank. Those aren't in the mix. Those are discrete to those places. You can't go count those parking spaces and then go to Farmer's Jewelers. And that totally is flawed, I'm afraid. Unless you can convince me otherwise. I understand where you're coming from. The average public person can't park. But we went to, I spent time meeting with these people and asked them if they would be able to allocate a certain portion of their lot. It was just in the early study to identify where is parking in Chevy Chase, what might be options. I spoke with Kroger. They felt uncomfortable with it. Chase Bank was uncomfortable. National City was nice enough to donate four spaces. The Gibson Company worked out 25 spaces in the back of the ride aid lot. So I spent a lot of time talking with those folks to find out, of those spaces, which ones truly are available. Well, quite a lot would be because there's only three, four cars in there anyway. A lot of empty spaces. I happen to know a little bit about this area. I grew up in it and have seen the development of it over the years, going back to 1953 when First National Bank built the first branch bank in Lexington, where the Chase Bank is now. You know, I mentioned this to Bill Farmer, and he said he's hearing this more often, and that is pull all the meters out of Chevy Chase and work on a permit type of a process if they have parking available over in the Rite Aid lot and such to put the employees there and let the customers ollie-ollie in free. Thank you. Thank you. Ms. Crosby? Yes, can you tell me if in the Rite Aid lot, is there any indication to any customers who would be shopping more in that kind of core area, the farmer's jewelry, South Ashland type area, is there any indication that there's free parking available in any of these other designated areas where you said people have graciously donated spots? There are areas, I believe, in that lot where you can park and go other places, but most of them, like CM Beard said, is designated to the particular entity. My question is more, is there anything, if I'm driving down from the 7th District and I want to go to World's Park and shop, how would I know that I could go get a free parking spot behind Rite Aid? because if I'm coming in from another area of town, I may not necessarily know. I'm going to see Rite Aid, Shoppers Village, and those shops, and I don't know that I'm necessarily going to know that I can park for free over there and walk. So is there any indication anywhere that there's additional free parking? Not that I'm aware of this. Certainly something we could work with that group on. I'm really hoping that Council Member Feigl will make a motion. I appreciate it. You know how I feel about these because I know Mr. Howard mentioned the elderly woman having to walk back and forth. But as many of you all know, I tromp with a bunch of kids half the time, and I just think these are very inconvenient when you have, whether you're old, young, whatever, if it's raining, any inclement weather, to have to have any type of back-and-forth motion. Many of you all have heard the story where it was snowing, and I had to go with the whole carload of kids on a field trip and couldn't find the meter and got in the middle of a snowball fight and had kids slipping. And they're just so inconvenient. I wish there was an easy answer because I know it's a very good revenue generator. But oftentimes when you go down to the Chevy Chase area too, I find if I go down there, it's often I'm a designation shopper. And if I'm going to have to take an extra step to park or if I have kids or do something, probably in all likelihood I may not necessarily travel to that business. So, and right now I just think with some of the things that we're doing up here, we are killing our small businesses. So I would like to see hopefully something brought forward. I would be totally supportive of it. I know we were not going to be able to do it all over town, and I probably would not support that. But at least if we could start somewhere small and help them out, I would like to see that. Thank you. Thank you. Ms. Feigl? I do plan to make a motion, but do you want to, did Council Member Lawless want to? We have a couple of others if you'd like to let them speak and then we can come back to you for a motion. That'd be fine. Ms. Lawless? Thank you, Mr. Chair. This is, I think, a really difficult issue. I absolutely, and many of you know, Barbershop got the handicap move to the other side of the street, and Mr. Means was very quick to respond on that. And I've heard both sides of this. I've heard merchants say, we had a problem before because our employees would park at the meters and stay all day. And then the customers didn't have any place to park. And, you know, I've heard people say, gee, they're great. I've heard people say, gee, they're ugly. I've heard people say, you know, be on both sides of it. But my, and I certainly, Lord knows, the good news is you all aren't on South Limestone, okay? So you can be really, really happy about that because they take your parking meters in a heartbeat. But my real issue here is we have a parking authority to do just that. We weren't able to weigh in on the airport board. The mayor said, you know, that's not the council's business or the library board. and they are charged with this authority by our government and by our mayor. So how are we going to step in? And they run a tight ship financially, I'll tell you that. So my concern is by what authority does the council have to step in and override the authority that was in place and the board members are appointed by the mayor, how do we do this? And I'd also like to know, is there an appeals process? I know that every time I've called you with a concern, you have responded extremely rapidly, and I appreciate that. And so I hear your all's issues, and I absolutely understand them. I also understand the issues that other merchants have put forth about, you know, customer, you know, parking before these, the individual employees would park there all day, and so their customers couldn't park. So, you know, I think there's legitimacy to both sides, but at the end of the day, what authority do we as a council have to tell the parking authority that's appointed by the mayor that they no longer have authority or to do something differently? Mr. Means, do you want to try and answer that? And we might as well ask. We have a couple of people from the law department here that might be able to weigh in on that too. Just as far as the mayor's involvement, I did want to clarify that. Council established, the parking authority established all of the authority that is given to the parking authority. That was established by council. The mayor does appoint the board members. Our current five board members were appointed by the previous mayor. But I just wanted to clarify that. Now, where we could stand up here and quote, you know, we've got the right to put a meter anywhere we want. We are not going to dig our heels in on every issue. And even in this case where immediately in January there was opposition, Hey, Gary, let's do a study. We did it. We did surveys. We went six months. So we have shown that we work very well with the merchants and with this community, and we always want to be that way. There are things just, you know, you can go out on the Internet and find a lot of things, and Ms. Feigl brought up this in-car meter. We're aware of a lot of the things that are out there. I've looked at those. You have to pay $30 a piece. If we would have rolled this out, how much issues would we have from people saying, you're going to make me pay $30 and then pay to park? You know, there's some bells and whistles out there that don't work. We researched what we did, and we felt like not only just us and our board, but it's being done in other cities, and the professional parking company that works for us also advised us to go in the directions that we went in. So we feel like we're taking the charge that we were given by council and moving forward with it, and again, stopped in our tracks to evaluate it on behalf of the community and still came up with the results that we came up with. I'm just curious, Mr. Farmer, were you on the council when this parking authority was approved by the council? That's entirely possible. I don't believe I was here when the appointments maybe were... The mayor made the appointments. I just wondered if you were on the council with it. I'm just playing with you. I'm sorry. There's need for a parking authority. I just think there's need for public input to the parking authority. Thank you, ma'am. Okay, thank you. Any other questions? Did the law department, did they want to answer any questions about the authority and how it was set up? No. No, you do not. I don't know enough about the ordinances that established the parking authority to give you an answer. I can take that question back with me. Will this be reported out next Tuesday? It will be. I can ask them for someone to get back to you at your next work session when you report out if you would like for me to do that. Now, you can always make a request of any of your boards or authorities in resolution form or just in motion form. So even if you don't have the authority to direct that the authority do something, you can always make that request. But I'll take that question back for the person who works with the parking authority and tell them that you would like to hear from them on Tuesday, unless you change your mind and let us know. Well, at least maybe make them aware of it, and they'd be there at the work session if there are some questions. Thank you. Okay. Yes, Mr. Myers. Do you have a question for the attorney? On this issue? Yes. Okay. Thank you, sir. I guess I have one question, and that is the $10,000 price tag on these meters, how long does it take to recoup that cost? Well, we're going to amortize the cost of them out over three years. The payback happens during that period of time, probably close to the end of the second year they're paid for. But the payments are being made at a 6% rate. Over three years they'll be paid for. There's a little over a $500,000 investment. And, again, we're able to do these types of capital improvements, unlike most organizations, without coming to the council and requesting funds out of the general fund. And that's one of the ultimate goals of the parking authorities, to be able to be self-sufficient, and we're continuing in that direction. Right. The previous meters or the alternative to the $10,000 meter, what did they cost? It's going to be about, per space, about half the cost. So on the average, if I can put a $10,000 meter at 10 spaces, so that's $1,000 a space, these fully set up are in the neighborhood of $500, so it is about half the cost. But then you go back into all the things, the auditing capability and the other customer service that makes us feel it's worth it. So the $10,000 meter is twice as expensive or half? Twice as expensive as the old style. Okay. Thank you. Let me make one more comment about the meters. When we looked at our overall inventory, we felt like approximately 50 of the new meters would cover the areas that we felt made the most sense. So we watched and monitored the different areas of town, and we don't have a plan. That's one thing I did want to clarify from earlier. A lot of people think that this is where it's all going, but there will always be a need for this. There's always a space or two or three that it's just not going to make sense to put one of those in. And so there may be some changes on Main and Vine as the streetscape moves along, but we don't see that inventory of the new meters growing and growing. There's about 850 of these still out there, and that's probably about the way it's going to be. Is there any questions? I think there was a lady that would like to speak before. I think we make a motion. We already had public comment, but we'll give you three minutes if you would give your name and your address. I'm sorry. I got here really, really early, and this sign-up sheet wasn't out there. Okay. My name is Victoria Grafias. I'm the property manager for Ashland Plaza and Saratoga Center. And I just want to address Ms. Lawless on the people who are saying that all the employees were parking in the street and they had no place to park. So now all the employees are parking in the parking lot, which is much safer for the elderly and families. And I cannot police those parking lots all day long because I have another job to do. And so all the safe parking spaces are full of employees. We are constantly working with our tenants, asking them to please, you know, find other places for their employees to park. And so it's an ongoing issue. But all those spaces that are really for customers are being used by employees. And so at least if the employees could use the on-street parking, that's the most dangerous parking. Anybody who parks there, which I have, I mean, people just drive so fast. And if they could park behind the building, it would be so much better. And that graph that Gary had that showed the difference in revenue, it's half, half what it was when the original graph started. And that just gives you an idea of what the income, the sales income for all those merchants has been, because they have lost half of their business because of the parking issues. People are frightened of it. They're afraid of it. And if we could remove those parking meters, it would be such a boost to that area. And I don't stand to gain anything from it except that I talk to my tenants. I know a lot of people who park there who live in the area. And I am committed to my job. I love my job and all the people that I work for. But all my tenants are at an extreme disadvantage because people can go a block or two blocks away and not have any inconvenience and spend their money there. And people are, you know, in Lexington, we're all spoiled. We're not from big cities. We're used to driving around ten times to look for a parking space. We'll just go somewhere that it's easier. And thank you for giving me the time. You're welcome. I think there's one gentleman, and then after that we're going to have to wrap this up because we have two more items in the agenda that we need to get to. If you would give your name and your address, and we'll give you three minutes. Thank you. I appreciate you making a few minutes to hear me. My name is Jim Gormley, and I live at 204 South Hanover Avenue in a house that's been in my family since 1934. I spend a lot of time in Chevy Chase, and I also have dated Ms. Parker Greathouse some, so I'm familiar with what goes on in her business. She has a peculiar problem. She charges $14 for a haircut and has maybe lost a few clients who come out to find $15 parking tickets on their car after getting a $14 haircut. And that's the kind of problem we're talking about for small businesses down there. One thing I'd like to point out to you all about the graph from the study that this gentleman from the parking authority showed you. He had the parking police people down there actually directing people and showing them how to use the new meters and directing them away from the old meters to try to help them make that transition. And part of the result he got there is an artificial result from his employees being down there instructing and showing people how to use those new meters. It doesn't show people's individual preferences. That's my point to you all. I think it's a little bit misleading. The other thing I'd say to you all is that there's about a 40% vacancy rate in Chevy Chase right now. If you all look on that block of Euclid between Tate's Creek Road and South Ashland, There are many vacant businesses there right now, and I think having these parking issues with the higher rates and the new meters does not encourage people to locate in those vacant spaces right now, and I'd ask you all to consider that. I'm not sure that's something that you all are aware of. Thank you. Thank you very much. At this time, Ms. Feigel, I think you want to make a motion. Yes, I do. First, I'd like to thank Gary Means. He did a fantastic job in working with the Neighborhood Association to try and analyze the parking issues there. And some of the issues included a lack of parking spaces, and he was kind enough to go around and talk to all the merchants. So we do certainly applaud Gary's efforts. I think he really does want to do what's right for that particular community. But, you know, we would like to help you save $10,000 on those meters. And so, therefore, I respectfully request, with strong recommendations, to retain the individual parking meters with replacement smart card meter heads to all the meters in Chevy Chase. And that's a motion. We have a motion and a second. Do we have any discussion? Mr. Myers? I have a question. If you were to do what this motion requests of you, the smart card reader, does that allow them to use debit cards, credit cards, all those other things, or just the smart card and cash? And coin. And coin. Coin and smart card. Could you repeat that? In other words, if we responded to the request, we would remove the four meters that are out there, the four pay and display meters, and on each meter post there would be a meter like this that you use coins or you can use a smart card, which you can load up with $20, $30, $40, $100, whatever you want, but no cash, no credit card, no debit card. Okay. Do you have those heads available now? They're already there. Those are the ones that are there? We did this citywide as we prepared for the rate increase. Ms. Lawless? I'm sorry, I'm a little confused. So are you all saying that you want those kind of meters? And you're saying you have those meters? But we want to take them and use them other places. On the three that are left, the three solar-powered meters, two on Euclid, one on high, these are also on those same blocks. There's 29 of them. Our move was remove these 29 because we finished our study, and then we can use these other places in town. There are several twosies and onesies here and there that we need. It would save us about $10,000 to be able to use these somewhere else. Okay. Thank you. I think Mr. Beard walked out. Is there any other discussion on this? Mr. Martin? Mr. Means, I just have one question. If this passes and became actually a policy throughout Lexington, what would that mean to your all's revenues? What would that mean to how parking rules are enforced throughout Lexington? Because obviously we can't give everybody their own flavor of Pepsi. Well, I can't speak on behalf of our commissioners. on our board, but this is a request. The way I'm understanding this is a request to our board. We would take this to our board. They would make a decision based on the input that's been given here on this particular issue. And I think in any other neighborhood in town, it would be the same thing, you know, make the decision based on that. So if they felt like, I would just be speculating, but the point would be look at the operation in that area, look at the outcry from the community, look at what that might do, impact revenue-wise. Because if we did this everywhere, we may be at a place where now we're coming back to council, we need some money because we can't afford to run our operation anymore because we've lost all the revenue income. Is it practical for you to maintain two different systems and sort of give local option choice? We can do that, but what is impractical about it is that you've got a duplication going on there. And if you'll go back to what I was talking about, you get a stop at 10 of these meters to unload the revenue as opposed to one of the others. Well, right now we're stopping at 10 of these plus the one of the other. So it's sort of a duplication of inventory. Well, I just appreciate you coming down today. And my biggest current, I just want to make sure that we don't, well, two things. One is that we really pay attention to our merchants. I lived on Fontaine for a number of years. And so this is my old neighborhood as well. And I'm very, very fond of it. At the same time, we've got limited means. We can't give everybody their own flavor of Pepsi. And we also need to reward sort of the enthusiasm and initiative of our employees. And we don't necessarily want to discourage innovation and discourage risk-taking. And so I appreciate you coming down, and I appreciate you all considering things that would make Lexington better. So thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Mr. Myers, did you want a question? Mr. Beard, you were on here. Mr. Beard. Quick question, Gary. The smart card or embedded value card, whichever way you want to, where do they load that? Where do they get that reloaded? It's loaded at the Lex Park office. It's across from the History Museum on North Upper. And the card has a gold chip on the back of it. and you can get them at $20 increments or you can put whatever you want on the card. And then we have a few usually available over in the Phoenix. So they buy the embedded value as opposed to reload a card that they own and keep? Well, you keep it and then you can reload it. I've already reloaded. You reload that same card. Okay. Do you find that at all an impediment to making that work? I mean, I can't imagine people going in and saying, well, I want $100 worth. Well, there's been a couple, but that is a drawback to this particular technology is that you can't reload it online. A lot of the people that are very tech savvy would appreciate that. You do have to go back down there. But when you've got this lane in your car and you don't have any quarters, it's awful handy. Oh, yeah, it is. Occasional trip to the Lex Park office or put more money on it so you don't have to come back as often. And highly successful for 15 or 20 years in France, for instance. There you go. Thank you. Ms. Lawless, did you have a question? Yes. What I'd like to do is, instead of voting on moving this to the council today, is hear from the law department about what our authority is. Well, my motion really is. Hold on. Let me, I'll roll on that. We've asked them to come to the next Tuesday meeting. So I think at that time, if we do move this forward, and they can at that point let us know if there is an issue with this. Okay. Okay. Is there any other discussion on the motion? The only other thing I would ask, Gary, is in my study online, too, I found that in some instances these cards can be purchased, like a prepaid card can be purchased, like in drugstores, and it might be that we can advance that technology to the point where people can pick them up in a drugstore or any other retail store. If I may, if we go that route, we'd be very open to divvying out. Maybe there's a merchant in Chevy Chase that would want to keep a few on hand. I've actually been approached by Carol Bear at Kennedy's Bookstore to do something like that, so it's definitely an idea that's worth pursuing. I understand Farmer's Jewelry would love to keep a couple on hand. You know, foot traffic is everything. Any other discussion on this motion? All in favor, and would you restate your motion so we're all aware? I move to respectfully request with strong recommendations to retain the individual parking meters with replacement smart card meter heads to all the meters in Chevy Chase. All those in favor say aye. All those opposed, nay. That passes. and I'll read that out on next Tuesday, and also I'll ask the Law Department at that time to come and tell us what kind of authority we have at this point with the parking authority and what this resolution will do. If you would, Mr. Barber, you're ready for the next issue? Thank you all for coming out here. And actually, I've asked, I've tried to, we have number five, the animal cruelty amendment. I actually would like to bump that one up before, if that's okay, because it should be very quick. And I think, Mr. Martin, if you would, take up that one. Thank you, Mr. Chair. In June or early July, the Council passed amendments to the animal cruelty statute, and I voted in favor of those. There are probably some cleanup items to be made with that. Mr. Horne is here very graciously that has put together some clean-up language. The purpose of the language is simply to clarify which facilities are appropriate for dogs and which might be appropriate for other types of animals. And I appreciate the draft that's put together, and I make a motion to accept the draft and to tender it to the full council for consideration for the docket. So moved. We have a motion and a second. Discussion? at this tournament. I think, Mr. Horner, if you would just give us a quick update of what you changed here. The only changes being made are to the definitions of adequate shade and adequate shelter. To specify that part of that definition is just for dogs, and the new language says that based on an animal species, that adequate shade means something different than for dogs, and same thing for adequate shelter. There's just now part of the definition that says for other animals based on their species. And that's the only change being made. And I appreciate Mr. Horne's preparation in this draft. It cannot be very fun to have lots of lawyers on the council looking at your stuff all the time and different council members asking different things of our legal staff. And I really appreciate you bringing this forward and helping us with this. Any discussion? All those in favor say aye. Aye. All those opposed? That passes. Thank you. And now we'll go back to the fourth issue, the right-of-way signage. And now we have another lawyer come to the front, Mr. Barbary. And I think, Mr. Myers, you wanted to discuss this one. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I think in our last conversation when we talked about right-of-way signs, we talked about the fact that right now it's a criminal offense in Fayette County based on KRS, and that is creating a difficulty in us dealing with those who choose to put right-of-way signs out where they're not supposed to be. And so I asked the law department to draft some language that we could send to our Frankfurt delegation to see if they would be so kind to make an amendment to the KRS that would allow us to, rather than affect this enforcement with criminal action, that we could do it civilly. And so I think is this a strategy? The scratching you see is the post-comment version of what it would look like. Normally what we do is we entertain a motion to have a resolution sent to the legislative delegation that generally specifies that you all want a change to a specific law. The last one I can recall, for instance, was ironically enough on animal cruelty, I think, last legislative session. And normally what we will do is we'll send a resolution saying that we want you to amend KRS, in this case it's 512.080, in an appropriate manner that it would allow the Irving County government to assess civil fines. We may or may not choose to include specific language. Normally what happens is someone on the LRC will actually contact us and work through Ned Sheehy, our legislative liaison, in coming up with appropriate language to use. There's nothing that would preclude you all from, in addition to the general resolution, also including an attachment that kind of says it would be substantially similar to the attached, the proposed legislation. So what I would like to do today is to move that we send to the full council a resolution or a motion requesting that a resolution be drafted, that we would then send to our Frankfurt delegation and the other appropriate personnel to touch each one of them, to let them know that our intent is that we change this KRS statute so that we can effect it with a civil fine as well. So whether or not we send an attachment, that doesn't make any difference specifically, but just that we send the resolution by a vote of the council, and hopefully we can get 15 votes to show them that we're serious, and that would go to each one of our Frankfort delegation and the rest of the appropriate people in Frankfort to see if we can't get some action on this in the next session. So moved. We have a motion and a second. Any discussion? Seeing none, all those in favor say aye. Aye. All those opposed? That passes. So the motion you all, I mean, I'm sorry, the resolution you all would like to see for full council consideration is simply what we've done in the past, which would be to express our desire to have them change KRS 512 in the appropriate manner? Or do you want us to include specific suggested language? I really think you're best judgment. Okay. Okay. All right. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you. At this time, entertain a motion to adjourn. So moved. Second. All those in favor? Aye. We are adjourned. Little Nelson Little Nelson The summer wind came blowing in from across the sea. It lingered there, so warm and fair, to walk with me. All summer long we sang a song and then we strolled on the golden sand. Two amigos and the summer wind Like painted kites, those days and nights They went flying by The world was new beneath the bright blue umbrella sky Then softer than that pipe of mine One day it called to you And I lost you, I lost you to the summer wind The autumn winds and the winter winds They have come and they have gone And still those days, those lonely days They go on And guess who sighs His lullaby Through all the nights that never ends Never, never My big girlfriend The summer wind The summer wind The summer wind The summer wind Ooh, you make me live Whatever this world can't give to me It's you, you're all I see Ooh, you make me live now, honey Ooh, you make me live Oh, you're the best friend that I ever had I've been with you such a long time You're my sunshine And I want you to know That my feelings are true I really love you Ooh, you're my best friend Ooh, you make me leave Ooh, I've been born I still come back to you And when I shine You stood by God I'm happy at all. Ooh, you make me live. Whenever this world is cruel to me, I got you to help me forgive. Ooh, you make me live now, honey. Ooh, you make me live. Oh, you're the first one When things turn out bad You know I'll never be lonely I'm my only one And I love the things I really love the things that you do Oh, you're my best friend Oh, you make me live Oh, you're my best friend Oh, you're my best friend Ooh, you make me live Ooh, you're my best friend guitar solo I got the wind busted and the door kicked in From the last time we said never again But this time I'm gonna see you coming Ain't gonna be surprised Yeah, this time I'm gonna know what hit me Right between the eyes Just the one time I won't think it over Before we speak our minds And I know we can make it go this time It's a hard and heavy Lord day and night That's the way we love and that's the way we fight We can't stay together, can't be alone We can go for good, but we don't stay gone And this time I'm gonna see you coming Ain't gonna be surprised Yeah, this time I'm gonna know what it means Right between the eyes For just one time I won't think it over Before we speak our minds I know we can make a good time guitar solo Yeah, this time I'm gonna know what it means Right between the eyes It's the one time I wanna thank it over Before we speak all my hands And I know we can make it go this time Yeah, I know we can make it go this time Yeah, this time Carry on my wayward son There'll be peace when you are done Lay your weary head to rest Don't you cry no more guitar solo Once I rose above the noise and confusion Just to get a glimpse beyond this illusion I was soaring ever higher But I flew too high Though my eyes can see I still was a blind man Though my mind can think I still was a mad man I hear the voices when I'm dreaming I can hear them say Carry on our laywoods, son There'll be peace when you are done Let your weary head to rest Don't you cry no more Masquerading as a man with no reason My charade is the event of the season