We have a quorum, so we will begin. The first item on the agenda is the utility pull placement that Councilmember Martin put in. And he has an agenda, and I'll let you go ahead and take care of this issue, Mr. Martin. Thank you, Mr. Chair. And also, I'll ask you to be part of the quorum, too, since you make the six. Well, actually, Ms. Crawford made six, so we'll be fine with it. We need to vote. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Last year, the Council looked at a number of items relating to overhead utility lines, and this has become an increasing issue in Lexington. I know Councilmember Feigl put into the Council, and the Council approved rules requiring that distribution lines and new subdivisions be placed underground. And in connection with the Newtown Pike extension, we encouraged the state to put those underground as well because this is an increasing thing in Lexington. And I just thought it would be a good idea to sort of invite some folks down and take a look at the issue, understand what the problems are, and try to start to work toward a community consensus to see whether this is the direction we want to go or whether there are some other options available. I have just some short pictures to put this in context, and we're going to sort of run through some slides. And again, today is just sort of an introduction to this issue and a chance to understand what different viewpoints are and what the different issues are from all the different players that participate in how we provide electricity to our citizens in Lexington. So this is just going to be a number of shots. This is Euclid Avenue. This came up, I guess, a year before last, and it was a fairly large topic of discussion down on Euclid. And one of the issues is not only just the new large poles but also the multiple sets of lines. And so if you see in the pictures, we have both the new large poles but also secondary wood poles that have different lines. And we have folks from KU here today who will help us to sort of understand the thought process behind and the engineering behind the way these are set up. Again, Euclid Avenue looking east. This is Rose Street. This is sort of the poster child for large distribution lines. This is the corner of Euclid Avenue and Rose Street. And this thing is a substantial piece of work. But the one thing is these were required in connection with a new U.K. hospital. And you just can't underestimate the economic impact of the new U.K. hospital. It has a gross payroll larger than the Toyota manufacturing facility. And so they needed new power and redundant power, as KU I think will tell us, for the new hospital. And so this is not just an easy problem to solve. They really, really needed these. This is Woodland Avenue. Woodland Avenue north. And this is Cooper Drive. And these, again, are some of the large poles that come around for the U.K. hospital. And here we have a number of lines that are coming from a buried state up to the surface and up to the tower. This is my world of the world's transmission towers. This is Cooper Drive looking west. This is out in Midland Avenue. This is Lansdowne Drive. And if you look, there's a new pole coming up for Lansdowne. And one of the things I guess I'm looking forward to hearing is whether these are going to be a second set of lines or whether this is going to replace the existing structures. Oh, there we go. This is Winchester Road looking west. And, again, here we have what looks like two different sets of lines. I always like the pictures that are taken out of my counselor's moving car. So we're going to have to encourage him to pull over sometime so that our workers' department doesn't object to this. Very fine pictures, though, Jonathan. And that's it. That's just kind of an introduction to this. To be very honest, this is not prevalent in my district right now. But my concern is that one day I'll wake up and I'll see new concrete pads being placed all the way up Harrisburg Road or down Pasadena Drive. And at that point, it almost becomes too late. And so what I want to do today is try to understand the process so that we know where we as a city fit into the process, when we have the opportunity to make choices, and how we find out about it. The first person I have to speak to us today is Architect Graham Pohl. He and Graham and his brother Clive came to council and complained bitterly, as I joined them as well, about the utility extensions on Newtown Pike. And the thought process there was we had just put utilities on South Limestone underground, and here we were building a new extension, and it was an opportunity to try to continue to help with Lexington. And perhaps Mr. Pohl can help us understand the aesthetics of it in the context of both the beauty of our town, but also as a tourist destination. Welcome. Thank you. I'm Graham Pohl. I live at 239 South Hanover. And I kind of got involved with this accidentally. I did a ‑‑ I took a photograph in, I think, probably several months before the big ice storm, what was it, 2003 when we had that huge ice storm, of the intersection of Woodland and Maxwell. And I doctored it up, took the power lines out of it, and published it, just to demonstrate what it looks like with and without lines. And I have some photos here that are online being put together by an organization called Untie the Sky. And if we could, I'd like to distribute these to the committee members, or at least let them pass them along. What happened is that those photos were published just immediately after the ice storm. And, of course, it got a lot of attention, because everyone realized that if those power lines hadn't been there, they wouldn't have been in the sky, they wouldn't have been without power for seven days after the ice storm. So, at any rate, the Newtown Pike thing kind of got that restarted, and our involvement with that came in part because the entire Newtown Pike development had been sold as one thing and is being built as something entirely different. And it pointed out to us that there's a lack of follow‑through in city government with regard to what we're doing with our roads. We're allowing the state to build highways where we should be building city streets, and the power line issue is just one facet of that. I think it's really important the city get a handle on it, because the city is being cut up by these massive interstate‑like roadways, and it destroys the character of the city. The entire feel of that Newtown Pike extension that's already been built completely eliminates any sense of the topography that was there. The dip that went down to Manchester Street is gone. It's just an absolute dead straight highway through there, and it's really unfortunate because it completely eliminates any sense of what the city could be. It's a tragedy. So the power lines are just one part of that. So I want to concentrate on the power lines for a second, but I think it's really important to recognize that this is one component of a much larger issue that has to do with the city's awareness of our physical bounties and how to protect them, how to be good stewards of what we have in our physical environment. You can see with those photos that I'm sending around where the power lines have been removed from the images to show you the difference between what it looks like with and without, that power lines in the sky are very destructive to the visual environment, and they degrade our sense of our entire community. They dumb down what we expect of our community. So for me, the question is not, you know, one thing that's going to come up in this discussion, I know, will be a discussion of cost-benefit, and to me it's not about cost-benefit. The real question is not how much it costs, but how much, what is the cost of not doing anything about our power lines? So I'm hoping that I don't have to talk about the terrible destruction to the visual environment that's caused by these overhead lines. I think it's really obvious if you just look around and pay attention to it, it's very obvious. I also want to point out that other communities have buried their power lines, so it's quite doable. It's just a question of having the political will to say, yes, we're going to go ahead and we're going to start burying our power lines. And of course it's going to cost something, but what is the cost of not doing it? I think one of the lessons from the Euclid Avenue situation, this is an example of what it looks like on Euclid Avenue. Euclid Avenue could be one of the most remarkable streets in Lexington, but I think it's pretty much been destroyed by the addition of these power lines. I think the scale of these things is so monstrous compared to the scale of that street that there's no way to recover it unless we were to spend the money to bury them at this point. So I think the lesson to be taken from that is that there needs to be some process by which neighborhoods are notified, that council members are notified, and that there's some sort of public reckoning before this kind of work gets done. I know there's been some discussion that something like that happened, but I'm a property owner on Euclid Avenue, and I knew nothing about it until it was a done deal. So there's something wrong with the way the communications are happening. I guess that's really all I have to say. I just wanted to point out that we need to be stewards of our built environment, that the visual effect of these things is terribly, terribly destructive. We grow up with it, so we're not really paying attention to it, but if you really think about what it would look like without them, if you travel to parts of the country and other parts of the world where there are no power lines, it's immediately very striking how much more beautiful those places are. And if we want to have pride in our community and if we want our children to have pride in their community, we need to start a process to get these things underground. And it might take 150 years. I think a point I've made repeatedly through the years is that this might take 150 years. This might be a very, very long-term project, and we have to look at it that way. We have to just start working on it. We have to find a way to start burying conduit and preparing to get them underground. And as I say, it could take three or four generations to get it done, but it's not going to happen if we don't start, and we need a process to get that started. So that's my presentation. I appreciate your attention. I think we have a few questions on the count. Do you mind answering a couple of questions? No, not at all. Ms. Feigl. Not so much a question, but a comment. I share your concern. And, in fact, when I joined the Corridors Commission and we began to look at the design plans for Newtown Pike Extension, I was absolutely taken aback because the utilities were not planned to be buried. And I continue to lament about that publicly and privately, that it was such a shame. And it took an outcry from the public, and I thank you for leading that charge, but it took an outcry from the public to come to this body and insist that we take another look. Now, it did slow the project down, and it added a lot of costs, but it was the right thing to do at the right time. And so I really appreciate everything you did to make that move forward. At the same time, we actually started to look at an underground utility ordinance requiring any kind of new residential development to be underground, and we have been able to get that passed. So that's kind of a step forward. But I do agree that this is going to be a very long-term proposition. Resources are very tight, as you know, but we have to start somewhere. And I do believe that it is going to take a partnership between the public and this body because we have to have the mandate from the public to put city funds behind this. And so I applaud your efforts and I applaud this as a beginning point, and thank you for coming today. Graham, being that tourism is really one of our sort of hallmark industries with the thoroughbred industry and the new bourbon trail and the great things that are coming from that, what is your feeling for how Lexington could look toward other cities and other similarly situated communities to address this? Are you familiar with other places like Austin or Boulder or someplace and how they have addressed this at all? You know, not specifically with regard to power lines, but I think the Downtown Design Guideline Committee is studying that right now. And I anticipate that a power line burial will be a part of the discussion in that committee as well. So hopefully some of this can be addressed within that committee. Thank you so much for coming today. Appreciate you. Mr. Chair, next we have Dan Kaiser who is with LFU CG Engineering, and he is head of right-of-way permitting. And is Dan out here? There you are. Dan, I talked on the phone. I'm sorry I didn't get to say hi to you when we came in, but welcome. And Dan has enormous expertise in this area, and he is going to sort of give us an overview of the various sort of various categories of streets and rights that the city has over streets. And Dan, you and I generally talked about, you know, the I-75 New Circle category, and then we have like the numbered highways like the Nicholsville Road, and then the things that are just solely ours like the smaller streets. Can you kind of walk us through what the city, you know, how the city interacts and what rights we have to say when and how on these things? Welcome. Okay. Thank you. Good morning. I did notice that Councilmember Martin had included a copy of a portion of the ordinance of 17C, which is what we operate under. Right-of-way is one of, I believe, nine enterprise funds in the government. And our purpose is stated in 17C-2, and especially Sections 1, 6, and 7 as it relates to this, which talk about basically benefiting the health and safety of citizens of Lexington as it relates to installations in the right-of-way. We oversee third-party construction. In other words, individuals, and this is not driven by the government, where we would let a contract for construction of a road. Engineering has people who inspect those that are not part of my group. This is for primarily franchisees, i.e. utilities, which is 95% of the folks who come and get permits. The other 5% are general contractors. Of this, there are, as Councilmember Martin mentioned and we discussed yesterday, there are three, I'll say, areas or types of areas that exist, whether they're overseen purely by the state, purely by LFUCG, or jointly by both the state and us. There are two roads in Fayette County which are overseen solely by the state. Those are Circle Road 4, New Circle Road, and I-75-64 as it crosses the county. Jointly, we oversee all numbered routes. That's the easiest way to describe it to you, whether it's U.S. 421, which is Richmond Road, or U.S. 60, which is Winchester Road, or it's County Route 36, as the case may be. And there are various, not just overlap for us in permitting activities for construction, but also on those routes there is coordination between traffic, the installation of signals and how those signals are timed and all of that, maintenance within streets and roads, et cetera. So there are multiple layers of coordination. And then all of the remaining streets and roads which are not numbered are overseen solely by LFUCG. In terms of this issue, once again, I'm going to refer back to the code. I'm not going to read this stuff to you. It's there. I will give you the sections. If you look to Section 17C, well, all of these are 17C, 7B-2, those are the general conditions that we exercise over construction in the right-of-way. If you go to 21-7, those are conditions for a permit denial. In other words, those are the criteria by which we can deny allowing installation. And if you go to both of those, they ultimately refer you to Section 19. And there are ten criteria there. And of the ten, three are probably the most applicable to the situation we have at hand. There's sections or subsections D, E, and F. I will read these. If conflicts with an approved development plan in that geographic area that requires all or certain types of facilities to be located in certain locations, areas, or parts of the right-of-way are located in a high-density utility area. In other words, translation, if it is contrary to the development plan, we can deny installation. It says if it is an above-ground facility other than a utility pole, fire hydrant, or street light that because of its size presents significant public safety concerns or violates guidelines or procedures pertaining to aesthetics that are duly adopted by the council. It's not to my knowledge that with the exception of the very recent underground placement rulings by council, those are the only aesthetics regulations that we have. And the third one is if it fails to take reasonable measures to disguise or cover the facilities required by the government pursuant to guidelines or procedures pertaining to aesthetics that are duly adopted by the council. And I think the last one was placed in there probably in relation to cell towers, which are often disguised as trees and that sort of thing, or incorporated at the peaks of buildings so that they don't stand out as much. Also, the next section, 20, has additional criteria for utility poles. It basically reads the same. The last item that I think is important for consideration is, and I'm backing up to section 18, and that addresses joint planning and notification and uses a tool that is called a master plan. And basically that says that we should be notified on a semi-annual basis of any major capital projects the utilities intend to pursue at least a year in advance. And so knowing that I would be here this morning, piqued my curiosity, I went back and looked at my master plans from 77, excuse me, from 1007 and 1008. And actually I did receive a master plan submission for this. I received it sometime, it was dated March 19, 2008. And, of course, that's about the time we started. So based upon the timeline that you had provided in your document. So in terms of installation of the actual program facilities there in the Euclid Woodland Corridor. That's what I had prepared. I'm certainly open for questions. Can you kind of walk us through the different types of roads that are involved? And, you know, for example, you know, Nicholasville Road, are you familiar with the different road categories in town? And so what would Nicholasville Road be? Nicholasville Road would be one of the numbered routes. I think that's U.S. 27. And it is in a Nicholasville Road hypothetical situation. A utility needs to do work on Nicholasville Road within the right-of-way. They would need to go to the state and get a permit, and they would also come to us to get a permit. So it's a numbered route. It is a numbered route, yes, sir. So what about like Euclid? Now, Euclid would not be, is that a state highway? That gets a little messy. I'm not sure because all of everything comes together right in downtown. And a portion of Euclid may be because I know 27 comes north and then it darts over and then, you know, it's kind of like crisscross there. Well, maybe, I know Kevin Wente is here. One thing I can address is not a numbered route. I'll change your example. That's right. That would be ours to oversee entirely. But just in terms of the loads of the road. Kevin, do you mind kind of helping us with this? Kevin is in our Department of Engineering. Euclid Avenue actually is a state-maintained route. State-maintained. They would have to do both the permit with the state as well as urban county in order to facilitate construction. We have different categories in town. We have, you know, distribution streets and collectors and things like that. What would Euclid be? That would be a major arterial. Major arterial. And what would be like Pasadena Drive? That would be, I guess, Pasadena. This is a question. This is like a game show. I'm sorry. We actually have that coded in the ATLEC, so I'd have to refer to that, either minor or just collector. I'd say Pasadena would refer to collector. So minor, I guess, would a lot of these roads be categorized as major and minor arterials or major and minor collectors? Correct. And at what point, what's below the collector? Just common street. I'll get the ATLEC to, I can pull that up. We've got the whole category there. Okay. Well, maybe we can catch that in the future. Which are major arterial, minor arterial, and then it goes to collector. And then I think after that, we just call them streets, but there's also ratings that are used, say, for snow removal, which goes 1 through 5. Well, Dan, thank you very much. Does anybody else have any questions for Mr. Kaiser? Okay, Ms. Lawless. Ms. Lawless? You were on the request to speak. Sorry, I was a little distracted. A lot going on today. On some of the giant utility polls that were shown, a lot of this is in my district, and I, too, as Mr. Pohl pointed out, we're often the last to know. But much of that was done by the University of Kentucky, and the city has no say in what happens. Can you address that a little bit? One of the things I noticed when all of these photos were flashing up, and, of course, there's a handout that shows all of them, and I didn't count, but probably about half of them were installed outside of the right-of-way in private easements. So once it goes into a private easement, I'm not notified and have no authority in those situations. As a, for instance, one of the, obviously you said it was the poster child, the corner of Woodland and Euclid. That large turning pole, and, you know, not to speak to the engineering too greatly, because that's KU's job, but one of the reasons that pole had to be so large was because it takes unbalanced loads. In other words, most of the poles are being pulled at from both ends. This one's being pulled at two different directions with no counterbalancing loads. So it has to be much larger to be strong enough to support that. But it was also so large that it wouldn't fit within the right-of-way and have sidewalk left. So actually I think it was the University of Kentucky that purchased the easement and set back on a private easement, as well as I know at the other end on Rose and Euclid that that pole sets on University property, the Cooper Drive poles. So many of these are actually outside of the right-of-way. I don't know if that answered your question well or not. But that wasn't the city doing it. It was the University of Kentucky, which we have no, the city has no control over what they do on their property. So I just wanted to make that clear that that was not the city's choice. It was the University of Kentucky's choice. Thank you. Thank you. You referenced reasons for denials and referred back to section 17C19. Under that criteria, does it deal with any of the things that you and I talk about on Commission for Citizens with Disabilities, which is ADA compliance and the ability to pass through sidewalks? It does. That would be a public safety issue, at least in my mind. I mean, that's one of the things that makes my job a little more difficult. Even when it gets as specific as the items that I suggested that you look at, they're still very subjective. And so, you know, you have to exercise best judgment. Once again, I'll use the corner of Woodland and Euclid as an example. I denied the permit for the installation of that turning pole, because they were going to put it in the right way. It would have been located right where two handicap ramps come up to the corner. And there would have been no place for anyone to go. So I've said you're going to have to get an easement here. And that's what they said. And so, yes, it does address those issues on a case-by-case basis as we, I should say, as we oversee the construction of the utilities, the third parties. In other words, if construction goes on on a certain corner, and even if there wasn't a handicap ramp there before, it would still be an issue. We require them to put in a handicap ramp when they leave. But we don't go out looking for areas where one of the issues in Lexington is utility poles, which are placed in sidewalks, which don't leave sufficient width for passage of a wheelchair. You know, what's not in the code is, you know, what's not in the code is a handicap ramp, which is what's been discussed in our Utility Coordinating Committee meetings. And as Mr. Pohl suggested, although I hope it's not 150 years, you know, typical life of this sort of infrastructure is about 30 years. And the unwritten rule is you replace a pole if it was in the middle of the sidewalk. It doesn't go back in the middle of the sidewalk. It goes back in such a fashion that there is clear passage of a handicap ramp. And that's what we want to do, not only for handicapped individuals, but for the populace in general. It is not going to get fixed tomorrow, but if you do it that way, over 30 or 40 years, the life of the infrastructure, your problem is addressed. And it's not an onerous cost or problem for the utilities, because they're addressing this particular issue at the moment anyhow. And, you know, so but by the same token, if we get a call that, you know, the pole is broken or that there is an issue at a certain location, then we will ask the utilities to move that pole or make an adjustment or do whatever is necessary to accommodate that individual and meet that particular need. Okay. Thank you, Dan. Thanks, Chair. Mr. Martin, do you want to continue? Yes, I do. I mean, I'm not entirely convinced that because they can actually put the pole far enough away from the sidewalk to be out of our right-of-way or be out of the way of the sidewalk that there exists a right to string it just wherever they can. So I guess that's just something I want to continue to look at. And I appreciate you coming today. And I understand your comment. And just to illustrate, you know, some of the sophistication of the problem, you were asking about Euclid and the Woodland. And Kevin was kind enough to supplement my memory and say this is a state route. So it's the state's air rights on Euclid. But it would be our air rights on Woodland. So once again. Well, I appreciate it. And you guys are wonderfully managing the ordinances and statutes that we have given you. And this is just an opportunity to kind of look to the future and to see is this the track we want to stay on or is there other alternatives. So I very much appreciate you coming down. Thank you. Next we have Ed Gardner from our Department of Law. And Ed is going to help us sort of understand the Chapter 17C of our ordinances that Mr. Kaiser was referring to. This is sort of the nuts and bolts of it. And this is a long, thick read. And so I think this is just going to be our first introduction to it. And Ed, I really appreciate you coming down to sort of walk us through this. Very welcome. So in about three sentences. I'm going to start with a couple of things. One is to do the things that he's talking about, and that is to have the permitting and have the oversight. And he mentioned the purposes was to govern the placement of facilities within our rights of way and to minimize conflicts between utilities and those kind of things. A couple of things that are important to remember, though, the ordinance provides that compliance with that ordinance doesn't forgive a party that needs a franchise from getting a franchise. And in the same manner, our franchise agreements reflect that having a franchise doesn't mean you don't have to comply with 17C. They are supposed to work together. A couple of things related to that, and specifically in relation to KAU, since that's who we're talking about today with the power line situation, they do have a franchise that was entered into in 2008. It's a three-year franchise. It will expire next year. And as part of that franchise, they are granted a right to use the government rights of way. And to address your air rights question, they are permitted to string wires in our right of way. I mean, it's in their franchise. Now, if there were something in an ordinance that's inconsistent, then they're supposed to comply with that. But as of right now, we don't have anything in the 17C that relates to where the wires go. And Dan is correct that once they move into a private easement situation, then it doesn't, it's not a permitting thing anymore. In other words, the permitting for the actual construction of a pole would be between them and the private entity that they got the easement from. The other thing that should be brought to the committee's attention, I think, in relation to this specific franchise, and it addresses back to the, I guess, what Mr. Pohl said in terms of, you know, they're started with rather the costs that might be involved in moving into something that would ultimately result in more undergrounding of utilities. In the franchise agreement or in the franchise ordinance that then was the basis of an agreement, it provides that to the extent that KU would actually incur costs in connection with its compliance with the government's ordinances, then the government agrees that the company can recover those amounts from its customers by going to the public service commission and getting a tariff that would permit them to do that. So if the government did not put money up front to do it in order to have KU have the ability to do it, then they certainly would have a right to go to the PSC and seek a tariff that would allow them to collect those monies. Beyond that, there's really, unless there are specific questions, I don't know what to add. I mean, you all can read 17C. The thing to remember is it complements the franchise agreement. The franchise agreement is the basic right that the utility company, in this case KU, has to operate within the urban county government rights away, to provide their power service by using our rights away. That's what the franchise agreement is. They pay a fee for that. 17C was intended to complement that, and those documents are intended to complement each other. And like I said, beyond that, without getting into some boring details that I think are beyond the scope of what you may be wanting to talk about, I'd be happy to try to address any questions you may have. Thank you. Thank you, Mark. And thinking through this, it seems to me that there's only a couple really alternatives that we have. And so one of the questions for you is how we might embody those in our ordinances if we chose to do it. And this, again, is just sort of trying to think outside the box and look at, without making choices or judgments on each of the alternatives, are they even possible? Under our ordinances. One alternative, and who knows whether we could even afford it, would just simply be require that all transmission lines be placed underground. Is that something you could actually do in 17C if you wanted to? If you're speaking in terms of our rights away and you're accepting the fact that we would be bearing the costs, yes, you can. In fact, it's already provided in 17C, and I don't think I highlighted it, but there is a specific provision in 17C that says if the government requires utilities that are currently overhead to be undergrounded, they can do that, but they have to bear the cost. And that is what happened on South Limestone. So it's already there. In other words, if the government decided, you know, government wins the lottery or whatever, we have enough money to underground the utilities, then we can require them to do it, but we have to pay them to do it. And that's already codified. Okay. So we have that. So that option's available. It's a cost-benefit analysis on a per-project basis. And so we have, you know, I guess, so we could have put Euclid Avenue underground if we just came up with the $80 million or whatever it would be to run it all the way down. Yeah, that was part of what underlay the, you know, the South Limestone project was the fact that we had to pay them to do it. It wasn't the fact that we could require them to be put underground, but it was part of the project cost. And I obviously have no idea how much it would cost to bury the lines on Euclid Avenue. So what about prohibiting transmission lines on various types of roads? We talked about collectors and arterials. Is that something that is either within 17C or we could put in 17C? I mean, the idea would be to require the company to minimize impact on arterials and corridors and to take another route, either through people's backyards or through across commercial property or something like that. I think there, and I'm going to have to hedge a little bit here, I did speak to an attorney at the Public Service Commission yesterday, and he verified that the from a Public Service Commission perspective, what we legislate in relation to our rights of way, they are really not that concerned with. That they legislate rates and services and they don't consider this being part of service or rates. Therefore, the simple answer would be, yeah, we can write it down. We can put it in there. But as a practical matter, I don't know what the implications of that are. Frankly, you're probably going to have to hear from KU's people. In other words, the simple answer may be, yes, we can write it in there. But it might be something we would never really consider doing if we knew the rest of the story. But I think there would be legal authority at least to put that in ordinance form. But again, you have to remember that KU is going to be able, I believe, to recover any costs that would be related. In other words, if it's ten times more expensive for them to move it in the backyards, that's probably exaggerated. But whatever it is, that's going to go into a rate that somebody is going to pay for. Well, my hope is that in a future meeting of services, if the chair is able to allow some time in a future meeting, that we would perhaps look at some models from other cities and to understand what the costs of those models would be if we tried to look at them in Lexington. And this is just sort of very broad, general conversation about what the possibilities are, without even looking at whether we'd want to do them or what the cost would be. Just trying to understand the world and the world of possibilities. That's really the only three options I can think of. If we leave them as they are, we bury them, or we run them someplace else. The only other legal option would be to, as part of a franchise agreement, have an agreement by the utility as to agree to do things, as opposed to legislating it. But I think that what's in the current franchise is probably going to reflect what is going to be required in any future franchise in terms of that cost recovery. So I don't know that that's, I mean, there's several different legal ways to get where you're talking about, but that would be the other legal way to do it. Go ahead, Mr. Martin. I think we have one, and now we're going to hear from, I think, K.U., if I'm not mistaken. We have David Freibert and Robbie Trimble from the Kentucky Utilities. And Jim, I really appreciate you coming and having everybody talk about you while you're sitting out there. That's fine. The Kentucky Utilities include all the transmission lines we have across the state, and he's the one you want to hear from and ask questions of. But before he begins, I wanted to simply say that we are glad to be here today and be an audience to and part of this discussion, and are pleased to be a participant in any discussions going forward on this. I ran into Mr. Pohl yesterday, and he reminded me that he and I met about three and a half years ago at a discussion on this topic in this building, and we were happy to be there that day. We're happy to be here today, happy to be of any assistance we can be going forward. I do kind of have a slightly different view than Graham does on whether we're making progress. I read forever and ever we would have questions from cities, developers, other organizations about what would it cost to move this, put it underground or whatever, and the discussion would typically stop once we gave them an estimate for what it would cost to do what they wanted. These days, I look at South Limestone and Newtown as indications that the community is kind of voicing its opinions on what's important and what costs we're willing to consider bearing, and we're happy to continue to do that. I'll be around for any questions you have for me, but from a KU standpoint, we're pleased to be here. And Robbie Trimble. And let me just say before Mr. Trimble starts, I appreciate David and Mr. Trimble meeting with me, I guess it was last week, and they sat down with some charts and things like that, something probably we can't show on TV, but this is very high-tech, state-of-the-art. This is the backbone of how we all turn on our lights, and so I really appreciate you taking time then and coming down today. We like to talk about it. Two things before I start, the picture on Lansdowne Drive, that pole is getting replaced. That's where they had that big wreck, and they damaged that pole, so that other pole is coming out. And second order businesses, we know nobody likes transmission, we know that, so it's a tough job. But we try our best. We have a website of how much the federal government controls transmission now, and it's become a big deal in our line of business. We provided you with a brief overview here of how electric is generated, transmitted, and then stepped down into your house. And the transmission grid is an important part of that, and that's from the generating station to all the substations in the state. And I do have a topographical map of the Lexington area with the grid in Lexington. It is protected by FERC confidentiality, but I can show it to you and we can talk about it. I just can't have it on TV. If you all remember in 2003, there was a huge blackout in the northeast part of the country. About 60 million people lost power, some up to four days. Because of that FERC, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission got involved and created about 130 compliance standards. And they range from vegetation control to system protection to generation controls and protection. And within those 130 standards are about 900 subparts, and about 70% of those carry a million dollar a day fine. So we take them very seriously. NERC, the North American Reliability Corporation, is essentially the police arm of FERC. And NERC administers all the compliance standards, administers all the penalties. When you have a violation, they encourage you to self-report if you find one. We've self-reported a few VAR control issues at power plants. They weren't million dollar a day fines, they were relatively small. But they're trying to create a culture of compliance, so we're self-reporting those things. The biggest thing that came out of that, and up here we just have N-1, but they require every transmission owner, and there's four or five in the state, there's Big Rivers, Duke Energy, East Kentucky Power, TVA, and AEP in the eastern part of the state, you have to manage your system so that N is the total number of transmission lines in the state, and the loss of any line cannot adversely affect any of the other lines. In the transmission world, if a transmission line goes out, the power just goes to another line. It's a grid, it's all interconnected. In the distribution world, if a line goes out, your lights go out. Transmission world, that power flows on another line. So if a line goes out, that adjacent power flow cannot overload that line, so we have to keep it under N-1. I talked a little bit about the fines. We can't exceed that rating. That, again, affects N-1, and that's studied and watched 24 hours a day, seven days a week. We have to have contingency plans based on an adverse N-1 condition, and those plans do include load shedding. We don't think we'll ever get to that point, but that's something we have to do based on FERC's requirements. Our reliability coordinator, because of the 03 blackout, TVA is our reliability coordinator. Any transmission line that we have out for maintenance or to do work, that outage has to be approved by TVA. We study it, but TVA has to approve it. And then the system is always also watched by an ITO, and our ITO is SPP, Southwest Power Pool in Little Rock, Arkansas. So we've got two outside entities looking at our system 24-7, and we have to answer to them, and that's important to keep in mind. Some of the lines we have, we have 69KV, 138, 345, and the 500,000. The 500,000 is down in southeast Kentucky, and that's an interconnect with TVA. Lexington is mainly 69KV and 138. There's about 20 miles of 345 in Fayette County on the very western edge of the county. It runs from essentially Keeneland, out west of Keeneland, down to the Brown Power Plant in Mercer County. Of course, we use wood, steel poles, and lattice towers. We have some pictures here, and they range in size from 70 feet on average to where we cross the Ohio River. We have some 430-foot tall lattice towers. Underground, and you all brought that up. We do have a lot of underground transmission in Lexington. We go from Maine and Euclid to just west of Rupp Arena down Vine Street. There's a 69KV underground that feeds two substations. That's how expensive undergrounding gets. We start the estimate at about $4 million a mile, and that's really the cost of the cable. The cable is enormously expensive. I should have brought a sample. It's very big. It's a lot to get out of the UK Med Center. I hate to interrupt you, but you put those numbers up there, the 4 million, 9 million, 18. How does that relate to if you put it above ground? Let me go back. 69 in an urban setting we estimate at about $500,000 a mile. It's about $1 million a mile overhead. Jefferson County has quite a bit of 345 in an urban area. Lexington does not have any of that. A couple of projects that we've done recently in Lexington, in 07 and 08, we reconducted from the Lansdowne substation over to Loudon Avenue substation. We held a public meeting. We met with all the affected neighborhood associations. We had some pushback. We were able to work through all that. But they were not happy. The Med Center, we did meet with the Euclid Avenue Neighborhood Association. That was mainly the outcry against UK. We had to keep our system working. The integrity of the grid is all we're really worried about. All those feed Lexington. So at times we were operating with only two of them energized. We never want to go below two in the UK Med Center because of the load in Lexington. We have one coming up at Polo Club. We've purchased some property and are looking at a substation site on Polo Club Drive, down Man o' War from Winchester Road and into, there's a gas station there. I should have provided an aerial photograph. We've had a few preliminary meetings with Patrick Madden's, he hasn't been there, but his liaison has, about an easement down on his farm down Man o' War. That one, you know, depending on the outcome of these meetings, we may have to get you all involved in them, because that's going to bring to the forefront what you're talking about. In 2013, we're going to need to put a new substation in the Nicholasville Road area near Central Baptist Hospital. Keep in mind, when we buy these substation sites, it's getting very difficult to even purchase a site for a substation in an urban setting. But when we do, we try to locate them right beside an existing transmission line, so we don't have to build a line to a substation. That's our number one goal, is to keep that tap to a minimum. We think that substation will go over by the GE lamp plant, where we already have a line running there, to expand that substation, and that's our initial plan. Some of the process, what we go through, if we know we're going to have to do a big project, even a reconductor on an existing line, we try to notify the city and the state. You know, a lot of highway projects require us to relocate that. We try to notify everybody. We always go to the neighborhood associations and get their buy-in, show them what we're going to do. We provide aerial photographs. We get input. We get input from the commission. And that requires a route study so that it's the least impactful that it can be to the general public. And that study is, that software that's used, it's been specifically created for the state of Kentucky. We use a consultant out of Georgia called Photoscience, but they use some specific software. I think in 05 or 04 we had all the stakeholders in at the Marriott. So what we do is we look at a route and we weigh the environmental impact, the historical impact, the view impact. We weigh all those and try to get the route that is the least impactful to the area. The Kentucky one is specifically tuned to include horse farms, those kind of things. And I can show you an example of that if sometimes you'd like to see it. We always notify the affected property owners and meet with them. We have public meetings, individual meetings. You know, when we were reconducting Lansdowne to Loudoun, we agreed on over on Lakesheds Drive, we agreed to paint a couple of those poles a special color for some of those property owners. We were happy to do that. I went through that kind of quick and that was really kind of transmission 101. Any questions? I know the structures are large on Cooper and Euclid Avenue, but they have an enormous strain on them. Those are engineered to withstand an inch of ice and a 90 mile per hour concurrent wind. So they are big. But they have to hold the potential to hold an enormous amount of weight in adverse conditions. Ms. Henson. Thank you, Chair. And I think developing a plan to go underground would be a good thing. But you talked about the 2003 blackout. Was that due to over usage or? Well, that was due to a couple of things. It was mainly due to vegetation growth in Ohio. And trees took out a line that ran from Dayton to Cleveland. Remember when I said that electricity went to other lines. And they started tripping out. And to protect the turbines at generating stations, the frequency of electricity runs at 60 hertz a second. If it gets down to about 59.4, it can destroy a turbine, about a $30 million piece of equipment. So companies have under frequency relays on their system. So if the load gets too great, frequency drops and they start tripping out. So what happened, they lost a line from Dayton to Cleveland, overloaded two more lines, and they sagged down and hit trees. And then you had three lines out. And then it was just in 14 minutes it was over. And then it started tripping out. And it's really hard to get that back, because generators, generating stations, have to have load to be online. They just can't start up. It's called a black start. It's pretty complex. And they only carry a finite amount of current. So if you lost one, flow would go over and you could possibly overload more. So the same problem could have existed. It just wouldn't have been caused by vegetation. But the trees wouldn't have been a factor if it were underground, correct? I was just trying to compare the cost. It's more costly to go underground. And David and I have had this conversation before, I know. But the maintenance itself should be lower. So if you compare those costs of what it typically costs to run above ground, and the additional cost for running it underground, but then you also have a savings, I would think, on maintenance. There's less, you know, Mother Nature events and traffic accidents. The thing to remember about underground, I know you all have heard this before, the problem is when you have a problem on it, it takes a lot longer to find it and a lot longer to fix it. So that's been your experience with, because we do have some underground utilities, and when they do, they don't go out nearly as often, but when they do, it's harder to pinpoint. Is there things that could be put in place to correct that and make it easier? Well, there's some technology now that allows you to see if the fault is past a certain point. And that's something we could look at. It sort of narrows your search down. Now it's trial and error. Okay. Thank you. Mr. Beard. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. This 2003 blackout that you mentioned, is that the same blackout as the ice storm we had? Ours was in February of 2003, and that blackout was in August of 2003. Okay. So no connection between the two. Right. We saw that blackout on our system, but we didn't lose any power. We saw all the blips. You mentioned some people had been out of power for four days, and I was going to remind somebody, maybe you, David, that not on Jetson Drive, it was eight days. Are there any other utilities that are on your poles, the transmission poles? Well, we allow our distribution company to be on there. We do allow telephone and cable providers to be on there in some instances. And is it in the residential areas, is it universal as far as, for instance, the cable? You know, where I'm coming from is we can solve the electrical problem, but we also have to solve the telephone company problem and the cable problem and not with transmission, not with the high voltage stuff. I'm talking about the more residential and the lower voltage. We can't deny them access to our transmission poles, but we can't force them to pay us costs. You know, we'll model the poles and study them to make sure they'll handle the additional stress of the cable or whatever, and if they need to be replaced, they have to pay for that structure that's large enough to handle it, and then we would let them on. I know, David, that back in 03, I asked you to give me an educated guess as to what it would cost to put all the power in Fayette County down underground, and it was something like triple the national debt or whatever. I don't know, Rob, I don't know if you've seen the newer numbers, Robbie, but at that time, Councilmember, there was a study that had recently been done in North Carolina, being done about that time, and in 2003 dollars, I think it was a four or five billion dollar, billion with a B dollar number for North Carolina underground, their aerial facilities in the state. I don't think Kentucky has done one of those. Well, we provided the number to the commission based on the 2009 ice storm, and the transmission was about statewide was about 40 billion statewide. Forty billion? Yeah, B billion. That's more than the budget of many smaller countries. Thank you. That's all I need. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I know that most of us have no idea how complicated what you all do is, and that when we get in the middle of the night and turn on the switch, we don't understand all of the many, many pieces that go into that. Electricity and distributions is a fact of modern life, and we have many, many things that we balance, and I think that's what we're really talking about is balance. And we talked about that the other day when we met. To me, we have Keeneland and Gratz Park and Chevy Chase and the South Elkhorn and all these beautiful things in Lexington, and it's really about how do we make we're not going to get rid and we're not trying to get rid of our electricity distribution. It's a fundamental to what we do, but it's kind of finding a way to sort of coexist so that it serves us and maybe not us serve it. So we're not criticizing KU at all. I think this is a way to have a dialogue about how we as a community sort of want to move forward and what we really can afford. And it may be that we can afford just what we got, but I think the conversation is very worthwhile. I do, too. And we welcome your input. We'll be glad to come and show you big projects in the Lexington area and show you what, you know, provide you pictures of what it's going to look like. You know, we have another option for poles. Down in Yukon we use galvanized. We can use weathering steel, which a lot of people like. The poles will look rusty. But the problem is in the city, they bleed so bad they just run rust over everything. So we try to stay away from them in urban environments. But they are much more attractive. Well, this is our first day of conversations on it. Thank you so much for coming down, you and David both. Mr. Chair, that's what I have today. Thank you, sir. Thank you. So with this, we'll keep it in committee and have some follow-ups. The next item, and actually it looks like the two items are kind of worked and synced together, are the street repaving list, priority list, and also the snow emergency update. And we'll start with the street repaving list. And I think we have Commissioner Webb here. And we'll let Ms. Lawless, who put this committee to start, and then we'll go from there. Ms. Lawless? On the street paving list, I saw the presentation that was, you know, a little bit different than what I was expecting. And I was wondering, excuse me? Julian? I thought somebody was pointing at me. They're pointing at Julian. Thank you. I saw the presentation. I understand the concept. The problem is I got two different, maybe three different paving lists showing which streets were under 65. And I think some of those streets were not on the paving list I think that was used to make the calculations, like Alumni Drive was somewhere in the neighborhood of $500,000 to $600,000. It was under 65. So my concern is not the concept of the 65 and under, but exactly what streets were in that calculation and show me the numbers, I guess. So that's one issue that I've been trying to figure out. So the result of that was that the entire third district got 1% of the paving money last year, which totaled $17,000 of the 1.7 million for the entire city. And it really wasn't enough to do hardly, I mean, the streets that were on the list cost more than $17,000. So the second part is, I believe, the council, and correct me if I'm wrong, Commissioner Webb, but the council approved that the entire 4 million of MPO funds would be used for street paving, which would be used to make the street paving. Is that what, did I understand that correctly? During the budget process, council approved taking $3 million of the MAP funds for paving. It was already $1.7 million of MAP funds that were in play on your last paving list. Okay. So as a result, now there's no money for, for instance, there's an intersection that's not well lit that is clearly has been identified by traffic as a safety issue on the corner of Pine and Mill, and there's no money for that. It's $3,500 for the stop sign, the flashing stop sign, and there's no money for that for the rest of the year. Is that? Ma'am, the MAP funds that council voted to use for resurfacing, those MAP funds were used for a variety of items. They were used for matching funds for grants that involved transportation. They were used for what you might say call it emergency work that occurs during the year. And basically what that's done is it's, it hasn't completely depleted the MAP funds, but it's still been used for a variety of things. It's taken the majority of the balance. That MAP funding was also programmed in to different LFUCG projects. Budgeting has committed to sit down with engineering and to do a reallocation of the programming based on what we get every year. But the bottom line is it's a very tough budget year. We did not budget in traffic engineering for those types of devices this year. So yes, that is correct. There is no money available right now. The third district has the 17,000 from last year. It would probably be very useful to go through the presentation really quickly. This touches on a number of items in there. You will see we have just completed and put the data together to produce the next paving list. Council had voted that as we do these, that we would divide the monies by the paving list, 65 and under, by percentage of total paving. Percentages change. I don't think too many council districts change positions, but percentages have changed. We can show that up here as we go through the list and take questions afterwards. If you look at this first. And it also touches on some other items that this committee was interested in. Thank you. I'm going to keep this relatively brief to allow the committee to have a chance to answer or ask questions. This is basically a review of two items, one of which obviously the pavement management system and the resulting results from this year's evaluation. And then secondly, an update just on our 2010-2011 snow plan. The presentation you'll find somewhat familiar. This is basically the use of the last presentation that I brought before the committee, just showing updates as to where we are in the process. For road resurfacing, we, through the Division of Engineering, have completed the assessment of all local government maintained roadways, and those evaluations have been inputted into the pavement management system. The one thing that I wanted to note under item two, or step two, the update into the pavement management system is complete, but one thing that we noticed is we had a corruption in past files in the past pavement management system. That basically broke the link between the pavement management database and the GIS. So we're trying to work right now to restore that link. I don't have a timeline, but I'm hoping we're looking at a period of weeks, not looking at months as far as quantifying that time frame. But I'm working in cooperation with the Blue Grass Area Development District to assist me in that process. So hopefully if there are more questions or if you need a follow-up, the one thing that helps in having that link with the GIS is to present this information to you as you see it in just the icon under step three, as opposed to showing everything to you in a tabular format. Showing it to you graphically or geographically makes a lot more sense. It also helps in just the evaluation process to see where distribution of monies have been and so far as resurfacing within your districts. So once we get that established, that will be, I think, a more helpful and convenient way to report this information. The determination of linear footage in the paved areas, we're still working on that. It's still in progress. I was hoping to have that available to you today. Unfortunately I do not, but I will have that complete by this week. This is really the one graphic that I wanted to point out to you. This is the breakdown of those areas that are rated at 65 and less. This is basically the breakdown per council district. Whereas before, if you notice, when we were doing this determination of percentage and then fund allocation based on those percentages, we left the numbers of council districts out. I think you, Council Member Ellinger, wanted to see these numbers and how they distributed. And this is effectively the graphic and then a pie chart that shows that breakdown among council districts. One thing that I want to note that is really significant and really ties to your point, Council Member Wallace, is the fact that when we last presented this information to you, if you notice in the data table, the total of streets, as far as just the linear footage, is almost 700,000 feet of roadway that is less than 65 or 65 and below. The last assessment that we had in numbers that we had to work from was a total of 327,360 feet. So as a result of this full annual review of all city maintained roadways, you can see that over the course of that period of time, since we've had a full assessment of our roadways, there is a tremendous difference in just what we were able to determine. So this is the final allocation of streets and those ratings that we will present to you. So effectively, really it was the item number four that was probably the one item that we wanted to convey to you as far as just showing the assessments and where we are in the process. That's basically the last slide I have until we move on to the snow plan evaluation. So if there's any questions, we'll be happy to answer. I'm sorry, I have pavement management systems and road resurfacing, step one, step two, step three is the last page. There was some modifications that we made to this presentation in the short time that I had to put it together. So this page is actually slightly different than what you might have in your packet, but I'll be happy to give you this information. I'm sorry, I have a page missing. It's not your somehow. Okay. Page 22 should be the page 23 and yours is blank. Ms. Feigl. Thank you, Chair. Kevin, thanks so much for making this presentation, but I have another question. We have as a city had a practice of accepting some private roads into our system, accepting the donation, and some of those are concrete streets. I know you and I have been talking about this for a long time. So as we look through this road resurfacing fund allocation, this is the amount just or these streets below 65 are strictly the asphalt streets. This does not include any allocation at all for those concrete streets that we've accepted. That is correct. And actually this year was a unique year, the one time out of every fourth year that we're evaluating all of the Fayette County streets that we maintain. We also began a new rating system specifically for concrete streets. In addition, we also began a preliminary rating review of roadways and the conditions and whether or not curbs are even present. So we've done a lot in a relatively short amount of time. Probably three months that we've done that. And I appreciate that. I know that I requested that curb inventory, because we have in the 5th District, and I'm sure it's true all over town, we have many curbs that have literally disappeared due to the continued resurfacing without actually, I don't remember the terminology, milling, without milling down the asphalt. Which in my opinion contributes to erosion and sediment going into our storm water system. So I feel like that the curbs are part of our storm drainage system, and I feel like we need to have a better handle on how that's operating. So I appreciate all the time and effort that's gone into that. How many concrete streets do you feel that we have to address by this rating system? Is it a lot of concrete streets we have, or is it just spotty across town? No, it's very minimal as far to quantify that. Just based on if I were to break it down by road name alone, I would say it's less than 50 streets that we have that are concrete that we'll have an evaluation for, an assessment. And is it just ballpark price? Is it more expensive to address those problems than it is an asphalt street? Maintenance of a concrete street will be more expensive, yes. I guess it really is a matter of our determination as to how we choose to resurface it. Whether it's maintained or fixed, repaired in concrete, or if it's elected by the residents that they want to see it resurface in asphalt, then we can determine a price for that. And really to answer that specifically as far as costs and so far as maintenance of a concrete street to that of an asphalt street, I'd really want to defer to Streets and Roads for their input. Thank you. I think you've answered all my questions. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I've been sitting here playing with numbers. These iPhones are great. You've got all types of calculating power. I'm interested in knowing further what percentage of in my district, and I guess it would carry over to everybody's district for that matter, what percentage of the total roads in my district are under 65% or 65 grade? We can provide that. As we said, this data is just available from the complete survey we did this year. We have the total based on the total footage that we're maintaining with the resurfacing fund. But we can very easily provide that to each council member, what percentage of their actual district roads. We'd be happy to do that for you. And right now we have everyone's paving list compiled. What we have to do for each section is to determine what the cost of each section is, an estimated cost, so that you can tell. And we hope to have that done by the end of the week so we can get it out to everybody and get it back. I know that you and I have had this conversation just in the past week concerning the segments and how you handle segments, and contiguous segments are cheaper to pave than an isolated segment somewhere along the line, and how you weigh that and pull the trigger on whether you're going to go ahead and pave the whole street or three of the six segments or whatever, as opposed to the one that is below 65. I think what Council Member Beard is addressing, and individually it's been addressed by several of you that have had paving done already this year, we committed to pave 65 and under street segments. And what that did, we had about $170 million before we deducted out the amount for traffic loops. I think we ended up with about $1.5 million that we started out this spring, and at that time we thought that was our only paving dollars for this fiscal year. And what the 65 and under doing is creating a patchwork of paving. It's really emergency maintenance paving at this point. And seeing what's happening, I think it would be beneficial to everyone if we allowed, whenever your paving list goes out, we can provide you with the paving rating in all the streets in your district and look at what's contiguous to the 65 and under blocks. For instance, we'll have a situation where you have a block that might have been 48, a block that was 70, 69, and then a block that was 53, and what we produced was a block or two blocks with a block in between it or maybe a block at the end of that, where if we would allow a council district, if it's 70 or below and it's contiguous with a 65 or under, to pave that continuously, I believe we would be spending our money well doing that, because it's so close to failure within our system. There's a couple things that I think would make a lot of sense. We have been doing this, once every four years we do our survey completely. Then for the next three years we do a third, a third, and a third resurvey. I do not believe that's using data that's really impactful past that full survey. I think we would be better served to do a complete survey every two years, develop a two-year paving plan based on that, do the little, you know, have a little bit of leniency as far as doing completes or longer sections at a time to get that stuff. As long as it's contiguous with a 65 or under, the potential of getting those pieces that are very close to 65, it's approximately 10% over what our cutoff would be. I think that makes sense. However, I don't know how this committee and the full council would feel about that, since we're dividing this money based on your 65 and under. And that would be a decision that I would look to council to make. If we're going to divide it by where the bad paving is, that we would have these exceptions to the 65 and under whenever we actually produce a paving list. I know that, again, this is part of our discussion, but I'd like the committee to understand what we talked about. Because of this four-year cycle that you mentioned, in all probability, not a certainty, but in all probability, those six or eight streets I had that dropped from 88% down to 53%. And the assumption I initially made was that in one year, good heavens, that can't happen. But you explained that maybe it was really three or four years ago. Some of these streets are as old as three years old. And I hope everyone will look back at the past two winters that we had. We actually endured a winter this past winter that produced below freezing temperatures for over a month. I think it was about a six-week period, which varied, very damaging to roads, particularly when you're continually putting salt on them. And that's the biggest freeze we've had for a number of years now. So you take the ice storm winter and the following winter, which was last year, we put more salt on our roads than historically have ever been put. And I'm not talking about dollars of salt, I'm talking about tons of salt. And scraping those roads really severely damaged our road surfaces. And I believe your constituents, you've been hearing from your constituents about that. But we didn't know actually how bad the problem was until last week whenever we got the data loaded in the system and it could produce a number again. So I believe that it really makes sense that we do this two-year program. We certainly have off-year work that we can do, investigative work that has to do with curbs, sidewalks, a number of other issues there where we can keep, we need to collect data on those also so we can see what our liability is and start building a plan for how we rebuild that infrastructure, how we deal with the concrete streets. There is just a lot of information that we need. And if I could, I would like to share with you, I believe that there's quite a bit more information. I think a very critical piece for us is to determine what the failure rate of our roads are. We have for a number of years produced this, put information into this system, produced a paving list, 65 or under, handed it out, and we can tell you today that our liability here, 65 and under, is 685,000 plus feet. But I think a critical piece for us moving forward on a plan is how many years is it taking for our resurfaced roads to drop back down to 65 and under? Because I can tell you today what you have, but next year there's footage of streets that would be below 65 again. So if we go to the two-year survey plan, we'll add to that number. I'm not sure what amount we'll be able to pave out of that number by now. So that's really a critical piece. Moving forward, can we expect roads that were repaved 10 years ago to fall out, 8 years ago, 15 years ago, that's a critical piece of information, to build a plan to try to get this managed? I know that, again, with my handy dandy here, it's more dramatic to speak in mileage. It's 129.85 miles under 65, and that's I don't know how we'll ever catch up at the rate that we're allocating money to do so. I think the bottom line is no council district has the money to catch up because you're only receiving money based on what's available and by the way, you're not getting money any quicker than anyone else. And I mean, that really speaks to Ms. Lawless's position on this. She had the lowest amount last year. That's council district three. Versus one of the higher ones I know was Doug Martin's council district, but the percentage of bad paving they were allowed to eliminate with the smaller amounts was equal. That is the beauty of this, is that those larger districts don't fall behind, they eliminate the same percentage at the end of the day because it's based on percentage of total bad paving. And you're right, no one is catching up. So that really cuts down on the arguments between the council members, but it doesn't help with the constituents. Yes, I understand that. Okay. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Ms. Henson. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Commissioner. I know you have miles and miles of roads here to work with and it sounds like you're doing a good job trying to get a lot of money. The list that's in our packet, I'm assuming, this is the 2010? Yes. Whether or not your paving was done, has been completed yet, this spring paving, we have, those have been taken out of these numbers. Okay. If they have been paved or if they will be paved with the money we had this spring, those streets have been taken out already. So this is for 2011? This would actually be, we would email you a paving list by the end of the week this week of the 65 and under, which with the new data that is just completed in the pavement management system. This is the complete survey of all the asphalt streets. The concrete streets, we collected that data by hand along with the curb information. We collected that at the same time, but we had to do that by hand because it was not a part of our system. Very important information. We're still working with that information and going back out now and checking how the ratings look and what we expect to see out there and some additional information data work with the curb information. But this is the latest data and this would apply to the $3 million in MAP funds that council voted to make available for resurfacing in this fiscal year. And what we would do, we bid a contract this spring. I've been working with the purchasing department to see if we could piggyback this on that contract so we don't have to bid out another contract. We can just keep moving forward. It has a clause in there that says that the contractor will accept an increase or a decrease in the amount of paving that was in the contract. However, I believe it would be a much more proper process to meet with the contractor, make an agreement and do an amendment to the contract for an additional amount, which we can still do quickly without bidding the contract out. And because I don't think that increase or decrease was, this was about a million, $500,000 contract this spring, and we would be putting in there something like $2.5 million. We have to deduct out a percentage to put back the traffic loops and the other, put the striping back and those items out of that repaving money. So those things can be done when the street is repaved. So it would not make sense to increase the amount of that contract twofold without meeting with them and making an amendment to that contract. It wouldn't require us to bid it out again. So, well, like no streets in the 11th District have been paved from the 2010 budget. And I know I held up Beacon Hill because of the culvert replacement. Yes, ma'am. And I believe that's done. I'll have to double check so you can move forward. So before the asphalt plants close this year, will you be able to get this list completed? We will get the list completed that we started this spring. And hopefully we will have additional streets done on this additional money, but we'll finish that next spring. Okay. And in the last meeting I had asked, because it's like if there are a number of streets, say, even though in one district there's only 7% that are 65 or below, but if that 7% are actually 40 or below, so I'd ask for a list of the streets that are rated 40% or have a 40 rating or below. Can we get that? Yes, I can give it to you by council district on your paving list. I can highlight it in red. I believe Council Member Beard also questions whether we should not wait those streets and provide council districts with more money. We're already breaking by percentage. Those under 65 streets are part of your streets that will produce significant base failures if we don't get those things paved. Again, that would be, we can wait those by .5, if you will. It will change that percentage. But since the districts that have the most bad paving are getting the majority of the, they're getting a larger percentage of the money based on how much bad paving, I would think that those council members would be interested in repairing those streets first. I think you can get so many little things in this that, well, we'll give preference for this, we'll give preference for this, we'll give preference for that, that it makes it hard to keep a very clean, clear break of the money. But if that's what council chooses to do, we'll certainly do that. But I can very easily on your paving list highlight anything that's under, I believe 50 and under is a good thing for you to be taking a real close look at. Highlight it in red. And how do we know what streets or roads in our district are not included in these ratings? Like for Sells Road is probably not included in the 11th and Harrodsburg. Those state roads that are paved by the state are not included in your paving list. So if I know it's a state road. It should not show up. Okay. And then how do we go about getting those paved if they're in poor shape? The state, I'm not sure what the state's process is. I can get with District 7 and see what process they use for selecting those streets. So if there's a problem with a road that I know is a state road, I'll just get with you and we'll see if we can't get it. We can get in touch with District 7 and see where it is on their paving. Okay. Thank you. I would like to also say we'll be trying to get this list out to each of the council members by the end of the week. This week this will be a pick list for the $3 million. The quicker we get that back, the quicker we can get that into queue and get the paving done. I know last time we had these out you heard reference that we received several different paving lists. The first paving list was an error. But the next two were accurate paving lists. We sent them back and didn't get a response. Several months went by. Sam sent another one out. The first one did not have costs on it. We actually put costs on it. What I would encourage everyone to do is to get that paving list back to us as quickly as possible. One of the reasons we want that back quickly is to get whatever we need done on the contract so we can continue paving but also provide your streets to all the underground utilities that we would like them to review and let us know if they have a project on that street before we go out there and pave that and they cut it next year. We want to give them as much notice and actually if we get into this two, if we can build a two-year program, it will be extremely beneficial to providing information to utilities early, earlier than we ever had, so that if they do have a project there, they have the same issue that we do. If you find out the same year we're going to do the paving three months ahead of time, their budgets are already set. Even if they know they have an issue, very hard for them to turn around a project within the length of a paving season. But if we give them a year in advance, they can do a good job of reviewing those, getting back to us and saying we'll do this work next year, then we'll be ready to pave, hold this for a year, and it will be very beneficial to everybody. Nobody likes to see that new paving go down and somebody cut it. Ms. Lawless. The thing that has been difficult for me is the list that, at one point the list I was given with 65 and under had very few streets. I think it was four. Then I got another list and it didn't include several streets, including Alumni Drive, which is huge. And so there was basically the one street that is going to be paved in the third district with FY10 money is Water Street out here, which is basically a service street primarily for LFUCG government. And the other issue, and it's a 65, there are many of the streets or there are some of the streets in the district that are much lower than that. But what do you do with $17,000? You have the option not to pave it. We'll have some additional money coming now. The third district will get, I think it was $80,000 or something. That's not money up there, that's percentage. And I may be incorrect, but I think the last thing I saw was $80,000 for the third district. Again, not in the. Maybe it was 80,000, I don't know. My point is also that the third district is utilized heavily by the entire county. We have U.K., we have downtown, you know, it's so heavily utilized by the constituents and all the other districts. That being said, I'd like to see an accurate list, a total list of those that are 65 and under and how many of those were included in the calculation for, because I was told Alumni Drive wasn't included in the calculation. The list that's coming out will have all that. No, ma'am. Okay. Thank you. The second question I have is, and we talked about this, what would be obviously the $17,000 is not much money, and what would be the process for taking $3,500 out of the paving money, which would be this much paving, to purchase a much needed life safety issue stop sign for $3,500 for my district? Would that be possible? I don't think the neighborhood should have to buy and pay for out of their pockets for a stop sign that, you know, everybody in the city uses because of its location. What I believe is the stop sign issue, I don't have a complete knowledge of what's going on with traffic engineering. We need to engage traffic engineering so that we know what type of studies have done there, what they've recommended. I have. I'm not aware of it. But I think we struggled this year to come up with this dollar amount in resurfacing. And I don't believe I'm at liberty to say you can take X number of dollars out of the resurfacing fund and apply it to other areas. That's council chose to take map money that was already programmed for resurfacing because it was so important. And I believe, in my opinion, it would take council action to use that money for something else, even small amounts of it. That's what I'm asking is what is the process and it would have to come to council? Is that right, Mr. Chair? Read that, please. Thank you. Since there's really not a lot to do with the allocated funds for paving in the third district, I was wondering if what the process would be to maybe allocate $3,500 of that for a flashing stop sign in the corner of Pine and Mill that has for quite a while been a safety issue. U.K. students are back in and there are a lot of wrecks and traffic has said some time ago it was needed. I think we'll need guidance for you all from law to see if we can use that money because I'm not sure if that pot can be spent for that. And I don't know the answer to that. And I don't think you said you knew the answer either. Once council appropriates money for a specific activity, I would think that they would want to have input on what you're using it for. If I understand, Council Member, the money was allocated by this body or by the council for repaving. If the council or a council member wanted to make a proposal to move that money, reallocate it, there would have to be action by the full council to do that. Thank you. That's all I wanted to know. Thank you. Thanks, Commissioner, for talking with us about paving today. My questions are about base failure and the 65% rating. You mentioned 65% earlier in relationship to base failure. Can you talk about what base failure means? Base failure is when every road has a gravel base. It's in newer roads, roads that are built today, that base is put in and lifts and compacted. It's eight to 12 inches thick, depending on the type of road. It could even be thicker than that under some circumstances. Older roads didn't typically have as strong a base as we have today. But what you see is you see the base start to fail and you get, I'm not sure what the technical term is, but it's a little trough or dimple. A lot of times they occur at stop signs or stop lights where there's a lot of weight that that gravel just gives away underneath. And a lot of our older roads had a very thin base. So a 65% on a newer road may be in a better state than a 65% on an older road that has that gravel base. Would that be accurate? If it was made with the Ma'am, I want to be very honest with you. I'm not qualified to stand up here and say an older road, we have people that can go out and look at them. And make a comment. I don't believe on a 65% on one road. First off. The people that know that, do they work under you? Yes, ma'am. Maybe I should just get to what the point is. Councilmember Henson at the last meeting on July 6th a report of the streets that are rated 40 or less and the cost to repave those. And I wasn't taking that that was for her particular district, that that's for a comprehensive list of all the roads that are 40 or less. Because what will happen if you have a 65 on my list, if I have a 65 and going down, I could have some 35s, some 40s, some 45s. The percentage of allocation given that we have available to us, a lot of times you end up having to address some of the 65s so that they don't become 50s or 45s. So unless we find a way to address the 40s and under, or whatever, I'm trying to get to the point where we come up with 65. Because I think we need to, if we have a high percentage, if we can make more of an impact by addressing the 40 or less with the amount of allocations that we have, then maybe that's where we need to go. And the reference to the significance of the 65 percent on an older road versus a newer road, and maybe whoever that expert is needs to come talk with us, would be where are we getting the biggest bang for our buck when we look at all of our 40 and under and 65 and under and compare the year which that road was created. Because I pretty much bet some dollars, if I was a betting person, that most of my 40s and 30s are on the older roads that have that gravel. I think I know, I think I can visualize what you're talking about, about the dimple that comes in the road or the trough that comes in the road. But I can't ever get to where I can address those. Because I have such a low percentage of dollars allocated. But the 65s that will drop, you know, to 60 or 55 next year are on my higher traffic-y roads, that sort of thing. I just don't know, unless we specifically pull those 40 out, I don't know how we're going to be able to ever deal with those. But as a person that can tell us the difference between a 65 on, you know, one of my roads over in Bluegrass Aspendale versus a 65 on one of my roads in one of the historic districts, that's the information that I'm looking for to try to figure out where is my money for my district best spent for safety. As well as we can with making those decisions by providing somebody from Streets and Roads or Engineering. And I have a little bit better feel for what you're getting at. Is a 65 on a neighborhood road as bad as a 65 on a connector? Obviously the connector would probably be the most important of the two roads, they have more traffic, and in some cases your 65 and under roads may not get salted, may not be subject to degradation as quickly through weight that they have to bear. A lot of connector roads, they have transport traffic on them, they have to bear very heavy loads. The ones that are like 50 or less, I notice that there's more potholes. We're having to do a lot more regular maintenance throughout the year on those. So you have to compare those costs as well. No, they're not priority, they're not getting salted or whatever, or even street cleaned probably. And I wouldn't want our street cleaner to go down some of the roads because their equipment would be tore up. Hung up in some of the ditches that are there. But if we can have whoever that expert is to talk to us about the difference between a 65 on a new road over in Equestrian View versus a 65 over in one of my historic districts and look at that so I know when I'm making my decision where to best put that money that has the greatest impact. And unless there's some big massive gift that comes to us for paving, I'm never going to be able to address mine that are on my list. I think I had one that was like a 28. And it's just difficult with the limited amount of money that we have to do that. So that's what I'd like to see is the 40 and under total list. Where the bottom line is and the amount it is that we're trying to address. Because if we always do 65, if a road starts off at 100 today, probably by next season, depending on how much salt we put on it, it could be a 65 already again. So you never know. It's not quite that quick. Absolutely. Well, that's what I'm looking for. So if at the next meeting or within the time from now until the next meeting, if you could provide the total list of 40, what Councilmember Hinson asked for last meeting, the 40 percent rated 40 or less and the total cost to repave those. Next week. We are that close. And I'd like to remind everybody this was a special meeting that we got fairly late notice on. And what we did was put together a pretty simple presentation to bring you up to date with where we are, not to provide all those individual things. But I'm saying we have the committees to be able to have discussions about the information that we need, information we need in order to make changes with our legislation and allocations of our tax dollars. So in no way do I feel like you've fallen short today. But this is just another request, which is what we do as Councilmembers, is to ask information from administration so that we can make the best decisions for our constituents. The total estimated cost of repair, all that 65 and under, we'll send that out in the same email. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Commissioner Webb. I had a couple quick questions. The first is it might be helpful with such a quick turnaround. About what might be best, because we have so many streets that are pretty much rated the same and trying to figure out logistically, like you said, if they're connectors or if they're in the same neighborhood, if that's better for you all. Because when you have one that's rated exactly the same in one neighborhood, instead of sending them over to do another street in another one, if we could get a list of street ratings, what they are, connectors. We can get that easily once we get that link repaired with GIS. But we can put that list in your hands prior to that link being That's fine. I think most of us know anyway the connector streets. If it's our district, we pretty much know that. I think my question was more, there's been one street that keeps making the list and making the list, but I've been trying to find out because it's not a connector street to other streets that are getting paid, but it's in the same area. But the problem is there's development that's getting ready to happen with a shopping center on that street. So my questions are more, does it make sense to pave a road that is heavy construction traffic going through it, but it's a huge, particularly right now with Todd's Road being a mess, it's a huge connector to Man o' War and it's horrible. So do you tear it up or do you pave it when it's possibly going to be torn up with all the construction? Those are the types of questions that if we could possibly get a quick turnaround on, because I know we have to turn these lists in rather quickly and we have some pretty detailed questions about them. And I keep holding off because I can't really get an answer on that. So that's why I was just going to ask if we have questions, if we could get a quick turnaround on them so that we can help justify what we're doing. Because here I have a road that is horrible, I get lots of complaints on it, but yet the shopping center that's about ready to, we hope, we think, that's going to be added on to, you know, I don't want it to get torn up and be a waste of monies that could go to other neighborhoods. We'd be more than happy to discuss with you what you think the timeline of that is. It may be just getting that particular road at the very end of the paving, which would occur next spring into early summer. Okay. So, you know, we could make decisions based on that. That's good to know. And then the other question is where you have the end street, is that the hard end of where it should go? I'm sorry, I didn't understand your question. You start with a street, it begins and it ends for the pavement on this list. You would check off the blocks. Okay, so you would end at a block even though it's not the end of where the street is. The paving list is by block. You would check the blocks on there that you wanted to pave off of your 65 and under list. I'll ask this later, because there's a project that's been paved that it says it ends at a certain block, but it stopped, it didn't stop at that block, it stopped sooner. So I was just curious. But I'll ask that. I'll just email. Thank you. Thank you. Mr. Lane. I just would like to say that normally when I get a list of the roads in my district, I go out and ride those roads and look at them myself. And I try to make a decision like I've had between a collector road versus a cul-de-sac. Even though the cul-de-sac might have a lower percentage rating because it's so low traffic, I would maybe recommend allocating the money to a lesser negative rated roadway. My question is, we've done a lot of work in downtown, like Main Street, Lime Street, and Limestone. Now that does not come out of these funds, so how are those funded and what application would they have to the resurfacing fund allocation that we currently have now? Main and Vine are both state roads. The road we paved, Limestone, was the only one that was considered a city road. And it becomes a state road on either side of those project limits. So absence of the projects that we've done on Main and Vine, those would have been paid by the state. That was a requirement by the state in order to be able to do the projects. They're not reflected up here and would not have been reflected up here. So essentially that would repave a lot of the streets that might be in a district. And they don't need to be resurfaced out of this fund, so that would reduce the allocation. Nicholasville Road does not, is repaved by the state. Versailles Road, repaved by the state. That's all I have. Mr. Martin. Thank you, Chair. Commissioner, you know I've had a lot of conversations. What process would you recommend to sort of re-rate an isolated road that may have been misrated? Occasional roads that just fell through the cracks, just didn't get the right rating, might perhaps be in connection with, be contiguous to other sections of the road that are rated low. Is there a way that we could adopt, you know, every council member could ask for three re-ratings a year or something like that? Just so that we could not abuse it. It would be good for us on a short timeline, like we have right now, to get any kind of re-rating process. We would try to do our best, but for me to lay out a process, I think if we get on this two-year plan, where we produce a paving list that will cover us for two years based on what we plan to spend, then I believe it's possible for us in the meantime to go out and take a look at something. But I think one of the problems that we're having is this four-year rating, then a third, a third, and a third. You go through a couple bad winters, and what you rated three years ago is no longer what that street is. But you base your paving list on last year's, you know, what was 65 and under during the last, the paving rating, which only included a third of the town. Your council district may not have even been rated, because it's a pie-shaped piece. So you think that the two-year cycle will sort of help that a little bit? Yes, I think that becomes much more doable. Well, I know how short-handed you are. So I just, particularly in these really difficult budget times, I just appreciate everybody's hard work. Thank you. Thank you, Chair. Thank you. We'll move on to the third one. But before you do, I just noticed when I was reading through here on council district number six on the last one, page 29, one was rated a 96, and I'm sure that there's probably a typo or something. I saw one rated over 65 that actually. I saw 166. I can see that. But when I see 96, that seems like a pretty good room. I'm not sure what the issue was, whether that was part of a sewer project, whether it was a utility issue. But I can get back to you on that. Well, we can check into that one. And now let's look at the third item. And let's try to be out of here if we can by 1130, because I know people have commitments. Oh, okay. I'm sorry. Kevin, go ahead. No, I'm sorry. Actually, we are. Unless you had any additional information. And we will keep this quick. I just wanted to give a recap. And I think really a lot of this stemmed from you, Council Member James, with respect to snow emergency routes. A collective group of us met back in April over at Streets and Roads. One thing, actually, I want to backtrack to our previous discussion for just one second. I want to give just a notice of thanks to Jim Ray and the staff in engineering that assisted me in getting this information, especially on such a short timeline for this presentation today. Likewise, a lot of thanks to Streets and Roads for their information, especially with regard to this presentation. Collectively, we met back in April, and this was just an internal urban county government meeting to discuss the following that you see there on the left, snow emergency routes, the signage along the snow emergency routes, what I need to do personally to prepare edits to our upcoming snow year or snow plan for the 2010-2011 snow plan. There was some preliminary discussion of how we can make improvements to the website for anyone within the community that has questions with regards to how we're doing it, where we're doing it, those types of issues. As a result of the last snow emergency declaration and all of the lessons that we learned, we have in place now, I'm proud to say with the help of David Lucas and his staff, the reverse call notification of residents that do have a landline along our snow emergency routes. That will, I guess in phases as that becomes a more robust system, that will also incorporate those that have cell phones along those emergency routes. Our staff and the division of police regarding some communication with UK and their message notification system and utilizing that if possible. That's still just a discussionary point. And talking to Brad Frazier regarding our snow emergency route signage, a database has been updated. Every one of the signs that we currently have in place has been GPSed. Any place that there was a gap of greater than 1,000 feet, we placed an additional sign. Signage along one way streets has been placed on both sides of that route. Those to where we found a gap within our database, the signs have been ordered and will be in place, I would say, roughly around November 15th. This is a little, going to be a little, I'm referring to the right-hand column now. In weeks to come, and this is going to be adjusted or have to be adjusted based on the World Equestrian Games. Typically at the end of September, middle to end of September is when we will meet collectively with the likes of the state, Fayette County Public Schools and our internal core group to review the needs that those agencies had and then make the updates or adjustments accordingly. We may have to meet a little later. I'm not sure if I could be prepared to have a meeting within the next two weeks among those groups. But regardless of that, we will have a meeting. We will have the signage in place. We will have our equipment. Trucks will begin being outfitted by the mid-part of October. And if you have any questions, it's basically just a brief review. Ms. James. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Kevin, for the update. We were told that the meeting with Fayette County Public Schools would be in August. So that's the meeting you're talking about is being delayed now? Correct. I was hoping to have something sooner just in preparation or knowing what we were trying to prepare for the World Equestrian Games. But that's been my fault in being able to have that. Okay. So we will need to hear from you after that meeting. The reason that the snow emergency route was set as it was had a lot to do with Fayette County Public Schools and the access to their schools and their streets that needed to be cleared off for that access for their buses and parents bringing children and such. So I'm very interested in that feedback from that meeting. And will police sit in with you on that meeting, too? Because one of the things that we needed an update on had to do with the door knocking versus the issuing of citations and the opportunity for people to move their vehicles or people getting a ticket and getting towed and such. So that, too, will need to be talked about following your meeting. And I really think having that reverse call notification will be excellent. I think it will be helpful to have a reverse call notification. It's just to allow students to park along those routes that were emergency routes. That way we'd have two redundant sources of being able to drive that, hopefully to lessen the amount of vehicles that are cited or towed. Sure. Do you know if Transylvania University has that as well? I do not know. But that would be an area that would also be along the snow emergency route that would need to be notified. And I think that's all that I have. Oh, and I was going to ask with the reverse call notification, can there be some type of trial run of that that happens so that we can get feedback on the number, like the amount of landlines that we actually will be able to reach? I don't know how many people have landlines these days. I can run that past David Lucas to see how we could address that, yes. Okay. And whatever we need to do to start the conversation about the cell phones, to have the cell phone, if someone could, I don't know if they're able to call in and give a number that they, if they don't have a landline? Yeah, that's really an enhanced 911 function. I really don't have the means to address that. I don't see any other questions for Mr. Winty. Thank you all. I want to thank the members for coming in on this special day. We got a lot done and we will meet again in October. And by that time, hopefully, Kevin, we should have the answer to that too, I would think, by the October meeting. We are adjourned. Thank you. Thank you.