Խ මුල් ස්වභාඩි ක්ලින් කිරීම හොඳින් ක්ලින් ඇත. අපි ස්තූතියි කරන්න. අපි දොතිම් කරන්න. අපි කරන්නම්බියෝව ප්‍රවතින් ප්‍රවතින් ප්‍රවතින් H and I. Someone could come forward. I'll ask Commissioner Coe to, it's going to be Mr. Allen instead. Hi Mr. Allen. Hello. Let me see here. A question on this was just, were the funds for this already budgeted? For the flu shots? Yes. Yes, Council Member. Okay. So this is not additional funding. This is just authorization to go ahead with it. That is correct. Wonderful. Thank you very much. You're welcome. And another question on letter I. Thank you, Mr. Baird. My question on this was there a schedule along with this resolution? Were there funds attached with this? So will we be getting a credit or I don't know what the appropriate language would be. I'd like to ask Bob Stark whether to address the funding if he would. Okay. Thank you. The funding for that project was bond funds, and the users on this particular project decided that they did not need it. So why spend the money if we don't need to? Absolutely. Absolutely. So what happens, I'm new at dealing with the bond issues, but what happens with that bond issuance? I'm going to have to yield to finance. Okay. Thank you. Those funds were approved as bond funds in 2008. You have a reimbursement resolution coming to you soon so that we can start spending that money, but essentially that project just dies and we won't ever sell ponds on it. Now, it will be in the reimbursement resolution just because we included all the projects, but the money will never be bonded. Okay. So we don't have the bond funds yet. We never will. Okay. Okay? Thank you. That's all I have, Mayor. Thank you. Any other questions about the items of new business? If not, let's proceed to vote electronically if you could. The motion carries. Brings us now to the Services Committee update. Council Member Ellinger. Thank you, Mayor. On page 55 through 57, you can find the summary. We had a couple of motions. A motion by Council Member Cord to request a multi-way stop at Brunel Drive and Northside Drive. Second by Council Member Evans is passed without dissent. I so move forward. Second. Any discussion? Those in favor, please vote electronically. Aye. Those opposed, vote nay electronically. Motion carries. Thank you. The next item on the agenda was the Par 3 Golf Course. And Jerry Hancock, the Director of the Parks and Rec, gave us a very informative power presentation on not only Meadowbrook but also the other golf courses. There was a couple of motions. A motion by Council Member Beard. I don't think we need to vote on these, but these were just brought out of there. To have Administration School Board to present to the Council what happened to the $750,000 agreement. That was seconded by Mr. Myers. Along with that, there was another motion by Mr. DeCamp to appoint a Par 3 Golf Course subcommittee. And that was seconded by Mr. Beard. And that was passed without dissent. That has been formed, and I believe that they actually met yesterday. Mr. Beard is the chair along with Mr. Blevins and Dr. Blues. And that is what transpired in the service committee on September 11th. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you very much. Any questions for Council Member Ellinger? All right. We'll move on to the presentation on the Policeman and Firefighters Retirement Fund. And I'll call to the podium now Tom Cavanaugh, who is one of the actuaries for the fund. Thank you, Mr. Mayor, Council Members. It's a pleasure to be here this afternoon. Our understanding is that you would like some background in terms of the contribution requirements for the Police and Fire Fund. I'd like to ask you to bear with me for a few moments. I'd like to give you some background on the need for and, in fact, the benefit of funding these programs in advance, as we're talking about. And then my colleague, Todd Green, will run through the results of the valuation quickly for you, and we'll be happy to answer any questions that you may have. Where I'd like to start is, and I believe you have hard copies of all of this, so in front of you. There really are three overriding pension plan policies that are involved with any pension plan that we deal with, a benefit policy, an investment policy, and a funding policy. The benefit policy answers the question of how much, when, and to whom are benefits paid. And the statute that you have on the books that describes the benefits that the policemen and firemen receive is, in fact, your written benefit policy. The investment policy talks about the asset classes to invest in and in what proportion, and the Board of Trustees deals with that on an ongoing basis. The issue before us this afternoon, what I was asked to come and talk to you about, is the funding policy for the plan, which is how much and when to contribute to the program. And I want to give you a little bit of background on that as we go along. Keep in mind that these three policies are interwoven, if you will. They're all interrelated. If you change one, you really need to look at the other two and see about the impact on that. But that's beyond the scope of what we'd like to talk about this afternoon. If we talk about the funding policy, I'd like to briefly talk about the cash flow characteristics of a pension plan and the need for actuarial valuations. Starting with a very basic retirement funding equation, C plus I equal B plus E. The other way of looking at this, dollars in equals dollars out. There's no way around this formula. There's no way to hide from this formula. The contributions plus the investment income must equal the benefits paid plus the expenses out of the fund. If we look at this, break it down a little bit, the B, of course, depends on the plan provisions, in other words, the statutes, and the experience of your fund, how the policemen and firemen work their lifetimes, when they retire, how long they live, that kind of issue. The C depends in the short term on the actuarial assumptions that we make in terms of trying to estimate the value of those benefits that will be paid in the future. And what we call the actuarial cost method, which is nothing more than a budgeting method to budget for the liability for the benefits promised to members that you haven't already paid for through the assets that you've accumulated. But in the long term, the important thing is that the contributions depend on I, B, and E. When you look at this formula, I think we can see that for a given benefit structure, given expense level, the more investment income you have, the less contributions are required in order to finance a benefit. And, in fact, for a typical public sector pension plan, 75 cents to 80 cents of every dollar that's paid to a retiree comes from investment income, not from contributions. Thus, the need for and really the benefit of advanced funding and building up an asset pool so that you generate that investment income, so that the cost to the plan sponsor is as low as it possibly could be. In fact, we would argue from a pure actuarial standpoint that you should write a check for the entire amount of the liability that you don't already have in the bank, in your asset pool, because that will generate the most investment income over time and, therefore, cost the least over time to the plan sponsor. Of course, that number is much too large. You don't want to write that kind of check in one fell swoop. process and calculate a contribution to be made on an annual basis that we hope is fairly level from year to year as a percentage of payroll that will budget for that additional contribution. But, in fact, the more investment income you can earn, the lower the cost is to the system. I want to look at this in a slightly different way. There really are two fundamentally different ways to finance benefits. If we look at the Social Security system, the Old Age Survivor Disability Income Program, it's really an owe-as-you-go or a pay-as-you-go system. The current generation is paying benefits for the prior generation. There's no assets being built up. It's simply the taxing power of the federal government collects FICA taxes. Those tax dollars are used to pay current benefits for people who are in receipt. For most public systems and for, hopefully, the police and fire system here, it's more a save-as-you-go basis. The current generation saves money for their own retirement, either through member contributions, which we certainly have for the police and fire fund, but also, in essence, for foregone wages in the form of contributions by the employer to the retirement system. And the prior generation did the same. One other way to look at this is the following. If we had a benefit plan that we just started out, at the very beginning, we've got no retirees whatsoever, brand new program, but we grant everybody past service credit. So month one, month two, we have some folks who have been working with the county, say, long enough that they are eligible for retirement benefit. They decide to retire. They start to collect the benefit. As we go on and we have the retiree pool growing, as a percentage of the active member payroll, those benefits that we're going to pay continue to grow, and we get this kind of pattern. If you go for a very long period of time and the active membership stays stable and the benefit structure stays stable, eventually, you get the cash benefits as a percentage of active member payroll, leveling out as a percentage. One of the goals, of course, of advanced funding is to get a level contribution from year to year. So for budget purposes, you don't see big swings from year to year in the contribution required. You might say, well, eventually, we're going to get to this level contribution line, so why don't we just do, in essence, pay-as-you-go contributions. We'll just put in enough money to meet the benefits that we have for the coming year, no more, no less. There will be no asset pool. There will be no investment income whatsoever. Well, the reason you don't want to do that is you want to get level contributions that are lower than that. And what will happen then is over time, the investment income will make up the difference between the employee and employer contributions and the cash benefits that you need, and we'll be in a situation where the investment income is financing the majority of the benefits that you have to pay out. If you look at this curve, when we look over at the left-hand side of it, at the start point, you're putting in more dollars than you need to pay out. You're building up an asset pool because, obviously, more dollars going in than are coming out. Even after the line crosses, you're still putting more dollars in. Your asset pool is still growing somewhat because the difference is not as large as the investment income that you're earning. But when you finally get out to the end there, the asset pool is growing at the right level that it matches the difference in what you need. And that's the whole purpose, the whole point of advanced funding in the system. What we have is a situation where we're developing contributions using one of the acceptable funding methods from the Governmental Accounting Standards Board, the Entry H-Normal funding method. It generates, among other things, something we call an accrued liability, which is a reflection of the value of the benefits that have been earned by the members from employment to the date of the valuation, and we match that against the assets of the system. The difference generates what's called an unfunded accrued liability. It's a significant number from the standpoint of part of the budgeting process and part of the amount that you have to pay for. It is not an underfunded situation unless in situations like, unfortunately, yours over the last few years, the contributions are not being made at the level deemed necessary by the actuary. And so you are underfunding. You're falling behind every year in terms of making that up. If you were to look at that unfunded accrued liability more as a mortgage on your house, it would be the same concept. You have a mortgage. You're expected to make a monthly payment to the bank to pay off that mortgage. If you skip a payment or you pay half a monthly payment, that difference gets added to the principal that you owe, and the principal continues to grow, and you're going to have to make bigger payments later on. So the longer you go without making the contributions necessary, the bigger the requirement is going to be when we get a couple of years down the road. But even beyond that, it's a benefit for you to make that contribution because those dollars go to work for you and they generate that additional investment income, which helps to hold down the cost over the long term. It's the same thing as the Social Security system. We're pushing a lot of our expense for Social Security benefits off to future generations because we're only doing it on a pay-as-you-go basis. You certainly could do that here. You would have problems with your accounting standards because you would be generating a liability that goes on your balance sheet for not making the contributions that are necessary. But there's no Federal law that requires you to advance fund the system. There certainly is a legal requirement in the statute that you make contributions. In accordance with the statute, that's a legal issue that I'm not going to get into since I'm on the actuarial side, not the legal side of this. But you've got a legal obligation to make benefit payments, and the statute calls for some legal – legally calls for some contributions that should be made and really are to the benefit of the system and to the benefit of you as the employer to make those contributions. We have some slides in here on the Governmental Accounting Standards Board requirements. I'm not going to take your time going through them because I think that I just wanted to provide some technical information with regard to what is necessary for you as a planned sponsor in terms of what you have to show. But you do have to report every year in your financial statements the required contribution is calculated by the actuary and how you are doing historically against those required contributions. To the extent you do not make the required contribution, the difference generates what's called a net pension obligation. That becomes a liability that goes on your balance sheet, and it stays on your balance sheet until it's – until it's paid off. And every year that you don't make the required contribution, you add to that and eventually that number could get large enough that it would impact your – your bond ratings, your financial condition, and make it more expensive for you to borrow in the market. So all of these reasons kind of add to why you really need to stay on top of the funding and provide the right kind of dollars. Another thing to just keep in mind with regard to this is this is not like buying paperclips or buying supplies for – for any of your divisions. You are actually funding these dollars. You're putting them aside. They're earning money for you and helping to hold down the cost in the future. In addition, to the extent that you have members that are staying within your jurisdiction after they retire, the dollars that you pay to them and benefits turns out to provide economic return to you in terms of the spending that those retirees do while they're – they're within your district. So you're generating some tax dollars just because you've got folks living within your district receiving those dollars out of the system. So it is a – it is a return. Economic studies would be something beyond our expertise, but I will tell you that one major statewide system did a study and showed that for every dollar of employer contribution to the system, the state earned $7 to $8 of economic activity as a result of that – that $1 of payment. So there is a significant return to the entity economically by making those – those contributions. What I'd like to do is, as I said, I'm going to flip through these. I'd like to have Todd come up and just go through briefly the June 30, 2006, valuation results for you so you've got that as a basis, and then we'd be happy to answer any questions that you might have. Hi. Good afternoon. As Tom mentioned, I'm going to go over the actual results of the June 30, 2006, valuation, which is going to be – Tom – what Tom did was more of an overview. This is going to be more a detail of your plan, of the police and fire plan. In order to do the valuation, we have to collect census data from you, and based on the 2006 results, you had 1,065 members that were active, currently working, and you had 825 members that were retired or in receipt of a pension. The – this slide shows the payroll. The payroll plan is a pay-based plan, so the active people – the active members had a total payroll of $57.2 million. The members that were in receipt of a pension were – had total pensions in receipt of about $27.5 million as of July 1, 2006. These are notes that were changed. The July 1, 2006 valuation was the very first valuation that we did as a firm, so when we took it over, we just made a couple of changes in the valuation process. The first was we changed the asset method to a smooth market value. This is a – essentially an actuarial tool, so to speak, that allows the allocation of gains and losses on your asset values over a five-year period. On a market value, you have to realize all your gains and losses over the assumed 8% all at once. So in situations where you have a large negative return, you have to take that all at one time. It can cause your contribution rate to go up. And then the next year, it can be offset by a large return. That can cause your contribution rate to go back down. So what the – basically, the asset method is just a tool to stabilize the required contribution so that over time, it stays level, or if it goes up, it trends up or trends down. It's not a – it doesn't jump back and forth. Another thing is the minimum monthly benefit was increased to $1,250 a month, and we've also recognized some cost-of-living increases that were granted to retirees. The next – the next graph shows the asset value, and this is a comparison between the market and the actuarial value. We assume an 8% rate of return on your market value. You actually had a 7.2% rate of return from – over the year. So your actuarial value, you can see, is not going to – we're going to smooth out the 0.8% that you didn't get. We're going to smooth that out over a five-year period. So that's what this graph depicts. The next page shows the present value of the liabilities that your plan had as of the date. The plan had a total liability of $724 million. That means if you had $724 million in the bank, your plan would be completely funded and you wouldn't have to pay anything in it. This pie just breaks it out into the different types of benefits that your plan offers. You know, $465 million of it is due to age and service retirements. Eight – roughly $9 million is due to just people who terminate and who are due a vested pension. $223 million is due to disability benefits, and $27 million is due to survivor benefits. And one thing, it's important to realize that these liabilities are also – are made up of current people who are in receipt of these benefits, but also your active members that are working now, they have the potential to receive these benefits in the future. The next slide is just a – is just another slice of this total pie again. You can see $325 million of your liability is basically due to your active workforce, because at some point in the future, they're going to retire and they will receive benefits. $235 million is due to your current service retirements. $141 million is due to your current disabled retirees. And $23 million is due to survivors. Now, the next slide is how we look at your $724 million from an actuarial perspective. Our goal is to provide you with a contribution rate that is going to fund this over on a level – based on a level percentage of pay until everybody has gone through the system. And you'll see the graph there. You had a total liability of $724 million. You had an – you had an asset value of $373 million. So our goal on this graph is to ultimately get your – the blue piece of this pie to cover the entire graph. The yellow portion is due to what your – the 11% of pay that current workers deposit into the – or pay as part of being a member of the plan. They're going to – the total – they're going to put in $48.8 million over their working lifetime. The next portion is going to be the employer normal cost. And this is what – that's the red piece there. And basically that represents the liability for all the active members as they work. There's a value to each year of service that they accrue to the pension. There's a cost to it. So the present value of all those benefits are the – is $80 million. And then the green piece is the – what represents the unfunded liability. If your plan was completely funded right now, the blue portion would cover the assets that you have, and it would also cover the unfunded liability. But since it doesn't, we have to come up with a way to make basically a make-up contribution to amortize this $221 million very similar to the way you'd make a mortgage payment, the same methodology as Tom had mentioned before. So if you turn the next page, the next graph here shows that the required contribution for the employer is 46.75% of salary. And you can see the employer normal cost is 18.6%, and that translates back to the red portion of the graph. And then the unfunded piece or the make-up contribution for the service earned by members now that wasn't totally paid for is 28.69%. And that's what we call your unfunded liability contribution. So when you add those two together, you get a total required contribution from the employer of 46.75%. So it's also important to just to point out that if your plan was completely funded, that you would still have to put in 18% of pay. So if you had no unfunded liability, the plan still cost 18% of pay. The next chart is just, it shows the funding percentage and basically this is the ratio of your accrued liability to your assets. You can see your plan is 63% funded. If you had no unfunded liability, that would be 100% funded. So that's it as far as the results of the valuation. If we have any questions, we'll be glad to take those now. Let me say a word or two before we get into a discussion. When I think about the big issues that are confronting urban county government, this one is always on the short list. And I'm talking about it's one of the three or four most significant issues that are confronting us right now. We talk about it weekly in our staff meetings. I think about it daily. And we have been looking for some creative solution to address this. I am not entirely there just yet, but I'm about to reach the conclusion there are no creative solutions to this. There's only the one very boring, very expensive solution, and that is to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and pay what we owe here. Right now, we are, well, as of the 1st of January, we'll be contributing at the level of 27%. If you go back a slide or two there, you may remember that roughly 47% was the magic number we needed to be contributing. So we got a 20% shortfall. Roughly, each percent is $500,000 or $600,000. So in very rough terms, you're probably talking about a number that's in excess of $10 million that we need to be adding to what we are doing right now in order to begin to reverse this trend. What you see on the chart up there right now just won't work. It just won't work. And so what we have got to do is to get back to the point where we're not only reversing that trend, but we're getting to that 100% level because every year, every year we're below 100%, that problem gets worse. And the difficulty here, I appreciate, is the fact this is a very complex, very boring, it's an issue that, you know, really comes home to roost 20 years down the pike when none of us in all likelihood are going to be here. But it is something that is going to come back and haunt our predecessors and haunt our kids and our grandkids because we have no choice but to fulfill this contractual obligation. So that is why when back earlier in the year we were talking about what to do with the surplus, if any, we were proposing that we put as much of that as we possibly could towards the police and firefighters pension fund. And that's why next year's budget is going to be a very difficult one because we've got, in effect, a $10 million new dollars that are going to have to be devoted to this before we start doing salary increases, before we start expanding parks, before we start doing any other new programs that we all want to do. Is that a fair summary? Yes, sir, it is. Okay. So having said that, let me throw the floor open for questions, and I hope you have a lot because this is important for us to all get our arms around it. I have Council Member Stephens on the list. On your next to last chart, you indicate that we need to contribute 46.75 percent of payroll, current payroll for the police and firefighters pension fund. Correct? Yes, sir. It's just above $50 million. The payroll is just above $50 million. I thought I saw the payroll was a little higher than the previous one, but whatever. How long will we have to contribute that much to reach appropriate level? These calculations are made expecting that that number would be contributed for in order to eliminate the unfunded liability, you'd be making that contribution for 23 years. Twenty-three years. This is not a one-year or a two-year differential here. I understand that. I was just trying to get the idea. And after 23 years, the fund would be, if the actuarial projections are correct. If the actuarial projections were correct, yes, sir. That would be 100 percent funded. It would be 100 percent funded. And at that point in time, you'd go from the 46 percent of payroll to the 18 percent of payroll contribution because your unfunded would be financed at that point. I see. So is it necessary to fund 100 percent? It's necessary to make progress on that. I think as Mayor Newberry pointed out in the last slide, the direction you're going in on the funded ratio is not the direction you want to go. You've got to be moving in the other direction, and the only way to do that is to make the contributions at the level that is being developed currently at the 46 percent of payroll level. Well, is there any magic to 23 years? Would 30 years or 20 years be better? What's the idea of the 23 years? The 23 years comes from the way your statute is currently written and the way we calculate the contribution rate towards the unfunded. The technical part I don't think is of all that much interest to you, but the maximum period that you can use by a Governmental Accounting Standards Board basis is 30 years. If you were 30 instead of 23, instead of 46 percent of payroll, you'd be about 42 percent of payroll. We're still talking about a significant difference between where you're at now and where you would need to be. I understand that. I'm just questioning about the time involved because 40 you said 42 percent? 42 percent if you had if you used a 30-year basis. And you're assuming also that none of the provisions of benefits would be changed? That assumes that none are improved, yes, sir. None are what? Improved. They're not made any better. I don't, again, we're not lawyers, but from our experience with other entities, there's almost always been a consideration by the courts that there's a contractual relationship once a benefit is in statute that you can't change the benefits for current members. You can make changes perhaps for new members, but you can't change the benefits for current members. Therefore, to finance the benefits you've got now, you can't reduce those benefits for those members. Well, for example, there are certain policies we have for determination of disability and disability retirement. Yes, sir. And so those could be changed for those people who will be in the future, but not for those who are now receiving benefits. That is likely correct. Again, we're not lawyers. I wouldn't want to give you a legal opinion here. But as far as the way you interpret the disability statute, yes, that could be. These are assumptions you use to base your actual argument. Yes, sir. If it turned out that based on any changes that were made, there were fewer disabilities granted in the future, that would reduce the incidence of disability and that would lower that liability somewhat. Okay. I think that's all the questions I have for now, Mayor. Let me try to clarify one point that you made. Let's say we got to 90 percent of the required contribution. If I understand correctly, though, our unfunded liability would continue to increase if we only got to 90 percent. Yes, sir. There's a difference here between a percentage of the contribution, 90 percent of the contribution we calculated, the 46 percent, and what I thought Mr. Stevens was asking, which was more of, well, we're at 64 percent funding, what if, you know, what's the right? Do we have to be 100 percent funded, or can we be 90 percent funded? That's two different issues there. But I just ---- Explain that to me again. Okay. We are currently putting 27 percent of the police and firefighter payroll into the pension fund. According to these numbers, if we want to be fully funded at the end of 23 years, we'd have to put in 47 percent, roughly. If we only put in, let's say, 43 percent, our unfunded liability would continue to grow. Well, I thought he answered my question. Well, if you put in 43 percent, it would be 42 percent, and that would ----  If you did that for 30 years, then yes, because, again, if you're at 47 percent at 23 years, you go down to 18 percent of payroll. So if you're at 43 percent for 30 years, for an additional 7 years, then you drop to 18 percent at that point. So that the extra 7 years at the 43 percent level makes up for the fact that you're doing 43 instead of 47 for the first 23 years, if you ---- He uses the analogy of the mortgage, and it's the same on car payments, I think. If you have a longer period of time that you're paying for your car, you pay maybe in the long run more, but you also pay less each payment period. That's exactly what we're talking about. And, of course, our general fund is ---- would take less. If it was 30 years, then ---- But our 23 percent, our 23-year time frame is a matter of statute, as I understand it. Yes, sir, it is. Oh, how can ---- but I want to ask you before you do it in 30 years. Well, okay. We've got to deal with different issues here. Your statute says, and I'll get into the detail and stop me if you ---- the statute says that the contribution for the unfunded accrued liability will be equal to regular interest on the unfunded. Right now, that's 8 percent. If you take 8 percent of the $220 million unfunded, you get a contribution in dollar amount when compared to the number that we have. If we use a common method for financing the unfunded accrued liability as a level percent of payroll, and we use that 28 percent and assume that the payroll is going to grow at 3 percent a year, that will pay off the unfunded over 23 years. We're getting a little complicated here because of the way your statute works. It gets a little difficult to get really apples and apples. We stay with the statute as it is, and all our ---- you make the 46 percent contribution, and everything else works the way we expect it to. The next year, your unfunded is still going to be $220 million. You're still going to have to make 8 percent, according to the statute, 8 percent of that $220 million, the same dollar amount that you had. However, the payroll is going to likely be a bit higher than it was If we look at the payroll, it's not going to be 28 percent of payroll, it's going to be 27 percent of payroll or 26 percent of payroll. And so we would get a situation if we follow statute without doing anything else, the unfunded is going to stay at $220 million. It's never going to move, but it's at the contribution rate as a percentage of payroll is going to get somewhat less every year because the payroll itself grows. If we can get the contribution locked in at 46, 47 percent of payroll, and we stay that for 23 years, then at the end of that 23-year period of time, we're estimating that you'll have no unfunded at all. There's two different directions that we're going here. It seems that this is a very pervasive problem with many different institutions. There are ---- Funded liabilities, I mean. Yes, sir. It's a very ---- You are not ---- I certainly support that we need to make our contractual obligations, but I'm just not sure that's the best way to do that. I welcome your input on that. I just know that as it stands right now, Fayette Circuit Court, subject to an appeal, has said that we haven't been doing it right and we need to cough up $20 million. So this is a real right now kind of dilemma for us. I understand that. I appreciate very much your remarks. Thank you. And I've been wrestling with this pretty aggressively, and it is very complex. So don't feel like any question you're asking today is not a good one. I really want you to try to develop as much of an understanding as you can, and don't hesitate to ask questions. Council Member Stennett. Thank you, Mayor. I can tell you, first off, I do look forward to your budget next year, and some of the sacrifices we will probably have to make. It really does put a bigger emphasis on economic development in our community, so there is a greater need for that, of course. Just a couple of general questions to start off with. One, are the health insurance benefits that we're paying out, are they in this fund, or are they a separate fund? They're separate, sir. Okay, so they're outside of this. And you mentioned you used the percentage of 3% to project a payroll increase. Yes, sir. Well, I think in reality, I think we all know on council, it's more closer to 5% right now through contractual obligations. So what does that do to your math on our unfunded liability? Well, if we were to make that kind of assumption over this long period of time, you would have a lower contribution requirement as a percentage of payroll. I can't tell you exactly what it would be right now. I would caution, though, that, you know, we actuaries are curmudgeons when it comes to this stuff, and, you know, we're looking at a much different time horizon than virtually everybody else because we're looking at benefits that are going to be paid 30, 40, 50 years from now. So we're trying to project out over a much longer period of time. And the recent experience is certainly a guide for us, but not necessarily a lock-in. That's what we should use for the longer period. Well, can you do that for us and project it at 5% and tell us what the math comes out to on the back end? We certainly can. What I would have to say to you is that if we were to make the assumption that long term, the total payroll is going to grow at 5%, then we would have to adjust our individual salary increase assumptions that we're currently using, probably increasing those which would increase the liability that we're getting. So there's a tradeoff here between those two, and I'm not sure how much change you're going to get in that number, but we could certainly do that. Okay, very good. And then we talked a little bit earlier about the investment performance. What was our prior investment performance? I understand we've changed some of it, moved it around a little bit, maybe a little more aggressive. We're on the liability side of the balance sheet, not the asset side. Anybody, Scott, you got any input on what they've been doing on assets in terms of – we're not the investment consultants for the funds. Well, I think you mentioned earlier in the presentation that you're looking at an 8% growth on our investments. Yes, sir. Okay. That's our long term assumption at 8%. And do we have the – how much return we've been getting year to year? Yes, sir. Do we have the history of that as well? I don't have that here, but I can get it for you. Okay, very good. And then I guess, Mayor, this may be a question for you. What are we looking at in terms of – for all the new people we're bringing on? I mean, if you look at this year's budget, there's about 100 new public safety employees coming on board. What are we looking at now to move forward? I mean, are we going to continue this plan? Are we going to freeze it for the new people and look at a new one? Because a lot of companies I'm working with are doing that. We all read about Boeing just did that. What are we looking at? That's one of the issues we've been wrestling with pretty aggressively, and we don't have it wrestled to the ground just yet. Part of the difficulty here is the fact that we're in a fairly specific competitive marketplace. Unlike a situation where perhaps you're hiring people who work in an office, we're trying to compete against all the other law enforcement agencies, state police, other city and county agencies in Kentucky. And so, to a degree, the competitive nature of the marketplace precludes us from being able to go out and say, well, guys, you're going to get a 401K just like everybody else in the employment world these days is getting. Typically, police officers and firefighters have always had attractive retirement benefits, and that's been one of the words that has attracted people to those lines of work for decades. And that is the market in which we're operating. However, our benefit package is richer, if you will, than, say, the state retirement fund for police officers is. And so one of the options is to try to find a way to move from our current benefit package to one that's more in keeping with what the state has, and we're exploring some ways to do that. All right, very good. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you. Yes, sir. Council Member Lane. Thank you, Mayor. I have just a few questions regarding the pension fund. These questions are going to be sort of simplistic, but I thought for the people watching on TV, maybe it would be helpful to them to put it into perspective. Could you just state the exact amount of the unfunded accrued liability over the next 23 years the fund currently had? And I guess that was as of June 30 of 2006, which was 14 months ago. Yes, sir, I can. And just I'd like to reiterate what the Mayor said before. You know, most normal people find all this stuff boring and too complicated to worry about. It's weird people like us that get excited about it. So I understand the issue. As of the evaluation July 1, 2006, the exact amount of the unfunded accrued liability was $221,490,170. Okay. And that would be the amount that we're short over the 23-year period that that was studied on. Is that a 23-year period? The 23-year period would be the period of time that you would need to pay that off if you were to contribute at the 46.75% of payroll for that entire period of time. The way to look at the unfunded accrued liability as a number itself is that that really represents, in a sense, contributions that should have been made that were not made, not necessarily that you as a plan sponsor didn't make them, but, for example, the assumption had been made in a number of years in the past that the cost of living adjustment was going to be 2% a year. So in a year when the cost of living adjustment was different than 2%, you all of a sudden had this additional liability for that additional cost of living adjustment, and no contribution had obviously been made because it had not been anticipated. So that adds to this accrued liability, adds to the unfunded accrued liability. So it really represents the amount of benefits accrued to the date of the evaluation that have not already been financed. Okay. Now there's, in addition to the long-term accrued liability, there's a current portion of the unfunded liability that technically is a liability on our balance sheet. About how much money would that be? That, I think you're referring to what we call the net pension obligation, which is the amount that you have not contributed at the required contribution. Scott, do you have any idea what that number is? Because I don't. I don't remember. We'd have to get that for you. Okay. Well, I can answer that. I think it's approximately $20 million. Okay. Now, the reason I'm bringing that up is that if we don't have that $20 million invested right now, that means we're not going to get our 8% earnings on that money, which would be $1.6 million. So that's another reason that being underfunded is a problem, because when you don't have the money invested, you're not going to make any earnings on it. And so that compounds your problem over time. Absolutely. By not making the required contribution, you not only have a fund that's short by that amount of money, but now you've got a fund that doesn't have that money to invest, and you're short by the investment on that money. Okay. The other question I have is, what are the solutions to this? Other than putting more money in and making a higher contribution, could the Irving County government, for example, buy a bond for $100 million or $200 million and pay the fund up and then pay the bond down over a 20- or 30-year period? Is that a practical approach at all? It's an approach that has been looked at, has been used in certain circumstances. They're called pension obligation bonds. You issue them. They are considered a tax arbitrage, and therefore they're taxable bonds. They're not tax-exempt bonds. So you have to pay a somewhat higher interest rate on those bonds. It's really, in essence, an issue that finance has to decide whether it makes sense, because, yes, you're giving the money to the fund and thereby reducing the unfunded accrued liability and reducing the required contribution to the fund, but now you've got a bond obligation that you have to refinance. So you've got to pay that off. So you've got to weigh the two. In some respects, you should look at it that you're replacing a what I would call more of a soft liability with a hard liability. The soft liability is the unfunded accrued liability that we calculate because it's based on a lot of assumptions. They change from year to year a bit, so we can see some movement in those. Once you go to a bond, that's a bond. You've got to pay that off. You're obligated to that. And so it's really a matter of whether or not the combination of the interest payments on the bond plus the principal repayment on the bond plus your reduced contribution to the fund compared to the contribution to the fund absent the bond and whether that makes some sense. And it's you're betting to an extent by putting more dollars in, you get more leverage in the fund. You've got more dollars at work and you have a short-term loss in the market, then you're going to have more issues involved. Well, you obviously work with other cities around the country and other people have pension funds. What would be the best thing in your judgment for us to do in this particular case? Contribute 46.75 percent payroll. To me, that is the best thing that you could do. It's needed, but as I said earlier, it really is to your advantage to do that for the long term. I know that's not an easy answer, but for the long term, that is probably the best approach for you to take. I'm not saying that you shouldn't be looking at the issue of Mr. Stenna, maybe, the issue of the benefit structure we have, is that what we want to continue going forward for new employees? That's a policy issue. It's certainly beyond any comment I would make. But as far as the promise you've made to date for the members you've got today, the best way for you to get there, I think, is to figure out as quickly as you can how to get to that required contribution. Because the longer you are under that number, the bigger it's going to get, and it's just not going to go away. It's just going to get worse. All right. Does the State law of Kentucky require local governments to pay the interest on the unfunded portion of the pension fund? Do you know offhand? I don't know offhand. I know that the statute that you are under requires the calculation be made on that basis. I personally would prefer that you didn't have that requirement and that we could calculate a contribution at using a 30-year amortization period, for example. But right now, we're bound by the statute. Right. And then the only option that we have for future is we would have to put a new fund in, a new retirement fund for all new employees, and we could then work this plan through to its conclusion. Is that the only choice because you can't change the benefits that are currently in the plan? Yes, sir. That is my personal belief. It's not a legal opinion. There is some work. As I'm sure you're aware, there's a Blue Ribbon Commission here in the Commonwealth looking at the State's plans, and that particular question is one that they are addressing as we speak. They have legal work on that to see whether or not there is a contractual obligation to make the benefit payments. So I think you might piggyback off whatever is concluded there in terms of what your expectations are under your statute. And then, of course, we're at 14 months in arrears right now in our calculations, so we may have wrapped another $20 million or something in the last 14 months. Do you have any idea approximately what the monthly depths it would be if you run that calculation? Will we know each month how much we're going in the hole? No, I haven't. But I mean, the number that the mayor mentioned, the $10 million, if you look at it, and then roughly about $1 million a month, you're in the hole for the contribution. See, I find this very concerning, as does the mayor, because the amount of our future liability is almost equivalent to one year of our general fund. That's quite a bit of money that we owe in the future. Yes, sir. That's my questions. Thank you, Mayor, for your time. Good questions. Thank you. Council Member Beard. Thank you, Mayor. On your slide number 26, present value of future benefits by benefit. Yes, sir. Almost 31 percent is in the disability category. Yes, sir. For other municipalities, police and fire pension, is that normal? Is that high? Is that low, that percentage? I would say for other police and fire municipalities, that's probably normal to a little high. At the state level, that would be considered high, if we looked at a statewide fund. But municipalities, it's a little bit closer to a normal amount. I mean, I've got clients where the disability retirement liability is a lot bigger percentage-wise than that. Okay. And second question, I don't know whether this is a question for you or not. Does our plan allow for a lump sum payout on retirement? No. It does not? No, sir. Is there any benefit to making that available? From the plan's perspective, I would argue no. And the reason for that is, again, C plus I equals B plus E. The longer those dollars sit in the fund, the more investment income the fund can earn. On a, what we call a present value basis, you can calculate that so that the amount that the member takes out is equivalent to that. But it would depend on how the lump sum was determined. But at that stage. That's a terminology I learned some time ago. And I don't know what a PBGC calculation of based on some external index of bond rates or something of that sort. Well, you can do the calculation. We're not subject to PBGC or any of the laws that deal with private sector plans. So, in a sense, we are free, if you will, to do whatever you wanted to in terms of developing the assumptions that were to be used to calculate a lump sum, if you wanted to provide that. Okay, thank you. Council Member James. Thank you, Mayor. I just had a couple of questions. You've worked with many localities. And I'm wondering how many of those are 100% funded? Percentage, I would say probably 100% funded. I would think not more than about 10% or so. Okay. So about 10% or 100% funded? 100%. Would you agree with that? Fairly few that we have some state clients that are there or very close to that. But the vast majority of public pension plans, particularly right now, have an unfunded accrued liability. And the main reason that they have that is the market situation, the early part of this decade, was such that there were significant losses that were generated in the markets. And those losses are still there and will take a number of years to make up. So when you've made suggestions to those that the best choice is to be 100% funded, do they usually come up with a plan to stair step to get there? Or do you even have that conversation, maybe you're not even part of that follow-up conversation? Well, the conversation we have with them, if they're at whatever level they're at, our conversation generally starts the same way we had the conversation this afternoon, and that is the contribution rate calculated is this. And if you contribute that over a period of time, you would get to 100% funding. We don't necessarily say, let me back up. From an actuary's perspective, the more money you give me, the happier I am. Okay? I said this earlier that the cheapest way to finance this is to write a check for the entire amount and just put it in the bank. Right. That's the cheapest way, but I'm not expecting anybody to write a check for $220 million. So it's a matter of how do we budget for that. From an actuarial perspective, we'd love to see it at some point at 100% funding. Absolutely. Now, as you get to 100% funding, there are, we can't deny, there are other issues that come up. There are other political issues that come up. There are other benefit issues that come up. There are other labor issues that come up. Because now you're getting, use your example, you're going to be going from 47% of payroll to 18% of payroll. That's 30% of payroll you were paying and now you're not. Well, you're going to end up in a conversation over what happens with that 30% of payroll, I guarantee you, if you get to the 100% funding. So I'm not saying it's necessary that you ultimately get to 100%. I think you ought to have a goal of moving in that direction. But whether or not you want to get to 100% is a policy issue for you and for the board that oversees the pension plan. Okay. And you may know that we are on a hiring freeze right now. Hiring freeze and attrition and things like that, does that play a part in the charts that you have? So where we've discussed it, we look at either a 3% or 5% payroll increase, salary increase. We kind of are looking at a lack of increasing in the actual payroll because of a hiring freeze and possible large number of employees leaving due to retirement. How does that affect our numbers? Let me inject here. The hiring freeze doesn't apply to sworn personnel and public safety. Sorry, my bad. What about the retirement and the attrition? Is that factored? Yes. We look ahead and factor that in? Yes, ma'am. We make assumptions with regard to the active members as to when they're going to retire. Okay. So that's all been factored in. Okay. And the investment income, you mentioned that. Did you say an 8%? 8%. I'm sorry. 8% a year. Is that pretty much a fixed or is that variable? Is there things that we can do with investments to increase our investment income? There are certainly issues that should be reviewed, and I believe the Board of Trustees for the fund does, in fact, review the investments on an ongoing basis and makes those decisions about how to allocate the assets. Certainly, the more aggressive you are in your asset allocation, over the long term, perhaps, the better return you might expect because equity investments tend to return over long periods of time more than fixed income investments do. But you're also then opening yourself up to short-term, more short-term fluctuation, which then finds its way into the contribution rate. And so now you're trading off potentially a higher long-term return for short-term more fluctuation in the contribution rate that we calculate. So now we're getting into the budgeting issues of, well, I'm saying 46.75% of payroll, but next year it might be 42 or it might be 47 or 48 or 49, depending on how the investments do. The more aggressive you get with the investments, the wider that differential could be. This is all part of the tradeoff you need to make. So do you, from what you know about the panel and the board that makes those decisions, do they look at the unfunded amount and make choices as far as their investment based on that unfunded amount? So will they say, well, we'll take a high-risk investment to attempt for short-term, to attempt to increase our investment income? They don't, and they shouldn't, look at the unfunded accrued liability by itself. But what they should look at, and what I believe they do look at, is the anticipated benefit payment stream for the membership. What are the cash requirements over the longer period of time?  And how do I in essence generate that cash that's not coming in from contributions? And what kind of investment structure do I need to meet that? Just to give you a simple example, right now I'm almost certain that your benefit payments exceed your contributions. So you need investment income right now to make up the difference in the two. Well, that has a liquidity impact on your investments. You need to have the cash available. And so that has an impact on how you do the asset allocation. So all of that needs to be taken into account when you develop the asset allocation. It's after the asset allocation is set that we come in and say, based on that asset allocation, we think that over the long term that will generate an 8% return or whatever assumption we're going to use. Okay. Thank you for your patience with my questions. That's quite all right. Thank you, Mayor. Council Member McCord. Thank you, Mayor. A couple of the questions have been answered, and I just want to make sure I heard it correctly, that out of the municipalities that are 100% funded, your guess is roughly about 10% of municipalities are at that 100% level. Yes, sir. I wouldn't expect more than that. Okay. And then does 100%, if you're there, does that just remove a potential lawsuit? Is that basically the deal? I mean, is that? No, I'm not sure I understand where the lawsuit would come in. I mean, it's just. . . So the benefit of being 100%, outside of the fact that you are meeting your contractual obligation, is what? If you're at 100%, your required contribution going forward then is a lot less than it would otherwise be. So from a budgetary standpoint, you're better. Okay. As it relates to the budget, I think that what would be beneficial for us going forward is, could you just put together a very simple chart that shows what we put in in real dollars, not necessarily percentages and things, but in real dollars going back, let's say, the last 10 years into this, and what do we need to be putting in in real dollars as we go forward? Certainly. Those two numbers would really help some of us that don't get as excited about actuarial stuff as you do. And understand why. Yeah. I appreciate your effort to sort through this, and, you know, I agree that this is one of the big three of the issues we've got to sort through. So thank you for helping us. Yes, sir. Council Member Maloney. I know that's a bad question to ask, but taxes here, I know that. . . Our goal, the mayor may want to ask you is, we need to come up with $10 million additional on top of what you're putting in for 23 years. Is that the way I understand it? And has anybody looked at the tax set-up that we have from payroll to property taxes or anything that has been studied in any of you all's recommendations to see all the option of revenue coming into this? I mean, $10 million, I mean, I told you all a long time ago that I thought we might want to do a public safety tax, maybe cut the payroll tax back and have a property tax and payroll tax and somehow even it out where. . . And I don't know if anybody, if you have anybody look at that and put this in with public safety tax because with the collective bargains and all that's going to be going on for the next three, four years every year, we have to continue to increase the funding, not only this, but anything that comes out of collective bargains. And our goal is to hire another 150 police officers. We're at 50 this year, and then the next three years we want to catch up to 150. But I just can't see the way this general fund is going right now with the way our tax is with all this keep going backwards. And I hate to use this word taxes, but I don't see any other sources out there that I've seen where anybody's coming, unless you win the lottery, you could have won a couple weeks ago. $350 million, that would have helped you out there, but I don't see that happening. Let me try to address that. We haven't fully identified the best approach just yet. I mean, some of it may be just a matter of, you know, pulling our belt up a notch or two and trying to find an additional $10 million from existing sources. Some of it may be a commitment that to the degree we find some windfall money along the way, that we'll devote that to the pension fund liabilities. But once we figure out how best to proceed, then, you know, we'll try to take a look at what funding mechanisms might be most appropriate to pay for it. My goal would be to do it without having to tinker with the existing tax structure much, but there may be an alternative way of structuring our taxes to make it more feasible to get this obligation knocked out. Because I, realistically, I mean, I don't see the economy, not just here in Fayette County, but all over the United States, if we can tell that we're going through some tough times. Especially Greenspan got on 60 Minutes the other day and said, be prepared for some rough roads ahead. And I see public safety is one of our top, everyone on this council said public safety when they ran for office was one of their top of the list. And to keep it up the way we're going right now, I don't see us making $10 million surplus anytime soon, with the way the economy has gone in the last year, that I really think that we're going to have to knuckle down and probably have to go back to the drawing board and look at a tax structure to see if we can come up with additional $10 million on top of some other projects that we want to do. And I know that we all want to do parks. We want to make sure that we make the worth of all the equestrian coming here. I know that's going to be an issue that we don't have a lot of funding to go in there, especially with the budget going to be tight next year. And you've got two years from there to 2010. Maybe we need to put a committee together and start looking at all the different tax proponents. Because I really don't, I'm not trying to be, I'm just hearing from what the national, from the nation, it's going to be tough in the next three, four years. And I just feel like I just hate to keep getting behind, behind, behind. That's the problem right there. We're just getting further and further behind. And Council Member Lane hit the nail on the head. That $221 million number is low, I'll guarantee you, because we haven't been at that 47% level for the last 14 months. So it's gotten worse. No, everybody hates that word, taxes. But I just, I'm telling you, we need to look at options. If we're going to continue to serve what most of the councils stand for, public safety, and make this one of the safest cities, we're going to have to balance it out some way. We're going to have to tell people this is what we got elected. And make no mistake, this is a public safety issue. That's exactly where it falls. Thank you. Council Member Glovitz. Thank you, Mayor. I want to agree with Council Member McCord that some historical data is needed here. And the reason why is we may be giving the false impression that the government has been making its mortgage payments, either at all or on time or partially. That's somewhat true, but reality is a little bit murkier than that. So historical data that I would like to see is the unfunded liability. Because I believe if you look back five to seven years, you'll see rapid growth where it was a smaller number, and then all of a sudden it really went fast. And the reason it went fast is the same reason that the other 90% of municipalities are in the same condition we are. And that is big market losses over the last few years. But there's two others that are more within our control that also contributed to our local problem. And these are the ones that I want to encourage the administration to help us stop the bleeding. And the first one is changes to the plan itself. When we make seemingly minor changes that sound really good in terms of treating our firefighters and police officers well, they can have dramatic impacts from an actuarial point of view. I believe some of those have occurred over the last five to seven years, and we'll see that if you can present us with the data. We can somewhat control those, but somewhat we can't. A lot of it comes from the state legislature. So Mr. Sheehy is going to be earning his pay this year. And can I speak to that issue just briefly? Please do. Last year, and it was in January of this year, there was a proposal introduced to provide widows with a continuation of their health insurance benefits. Now, I'm here to tell you it is not a very popular thing to be doing in Frankfurt to be lobbying against some exceptionally nice folks who, when their retired spouse passed away, found themselves without health insurance benefits. But we're in a deep hole, and we need to quit digging. And you make a great point. Well, I agree 100%. The hole keeps getting deeper for the reasons Council Member Lane points out, that we're losing the income opportunity on the money. But I wanted to also point out it's the plan side as well. We can't afford to keep giving more and more benefits. We're going to have to look at this problem slightly differently. So I wanted to make that point. The other thing that we can do to stop the bleeding I think is also on the disability side. Mr. Beard was trying to tease this out with his question. I'll be a little bit more blunt and say we have sort of a liberal definition sometimes, or appear to, of disability in this city, and that's causing 31% of the problem, or up to 31% of the problem. I do not want to come across as being hard-lined on someone who's been hurt on the job. That's not my point. But anybody that's been in the town for the last five years has seen at least enough to make you raise your eyebrows in wonder. So I would look to the commission to review its rules at least on disability assignments, and we'll see if we can do better there. So I just wanted to point out to the public this isn't that the government's not making its obligations, that there are a number of factors that are involved here, and all of them are adding up to a very large problem. Thank you, Mayor. Anyone else? All right. Thank you, Mr. Cavanaugh. I appreciate the time you've taken to be here today, and we'll appreciate the one or two follow-up items as well. And thanks to the council for your questions. Thank you very much. The next item on the agenda is a visioning, update on the visioning process. I talked with Mr. Boland about that, and he said a couple more weeks would probably be a more opportune time to do that. So the good news is we don't have that item on the agenda today. The bad news is it will probably come back and take up a little time in a couple of weeks, but we're going to postpone that one today. That brings us down to the council report. And if you wish to give a report, please indicate electronically. Council Member James. Thank you, Mayor. I would like to announce that the Meadows Loudon Neighborhood Association is having their monthly meeting at the Grace Baptist Church tonight at 7. Please come out. Of course, we just heard in committee today about the Loudon Avenue updates. If you want to hear more information about what's going on on Loudon Avenue and the surrounding area, check that out at 7 tonight. Also, William Wells Brown Neighborhood Association will meet on Thursday at 6.30. They meet at the Brenda Cowan Center on Chestnut Street. For more information, feel free to call my office at 258-3216. That's a new neighborhood association around the Bluegrass-Aspendale area. Someone else will probably go into more detail about this, but the Bike Summit will be on Friday. You can register online at www.lfucg.com and look for the link for the Bike Summit. I also want to thank the North Limestone Neighborhood Association. You may have seen some articles in Nugget and in the Herald-Leader about limestone. Those neighbors are really doing a good job of cleaning up that area in many ways, in more ways than one. They've been meeting every other Saturday and choosing an area to clean. And they cleaned limestone, actually, their last meeting. So I appreciate the neighbors there in the North Limestone area for doing their part. I've also been requested to put into services committee the topic of smoking ban on hospital premises. So I've moved to put into services committee the issue of smoking ban on hospital premises. They would like to go into the December meeting, if that's possible. Do I hear a second? Thank you. Any discussion? All in favor, please vote aye electronically. All opposed, vote nay. Thank you. All right. Great. The motion appears to carry. Council Member James. That's all that I have for now, Mayor. Thank you very much. Council Member Maloney. Thank you, Mayor. I've got a few things. First of all, yes, Sunday I had a lot of phone calls on a block party in Cardinal Valley off Delmont, I mean, Davenport, and a lot of complaints came from, like, three neighborhoods over about loud music. And I've already talked to Commissioner Bennett on it. And I'd like to get a little bit more educated on block permits, because a lot of people are confused on how that works. So I would like to put it into the service committee to discuss the block permits, on how, what can be used on that, because the loud music can, and I think they've already got a few things in on the fireworks. So I'd like to put it all in the block. So moved. Thank you. I've got a motion and a second to refer to the services committee the matter of block party permits. Any discussion? Those in favor, then please vote aye electronically. Those opposed, vote no electronically. Motion carries. Council Member Lerner. Thank you. The other thing, I know that Tuesday you were going to bring an update on the town branch overspill from the, well, there's another one that I've been kind of following, too. And if you could give me an update on that one. I think it's on Manchester Street, and it's about, there's about 5,000 gallons supposed to be, I mean, every minute. Or they don't know, last I heard, they didn't know where it was coming from. And I would like an update on that, too, to see if they found that sewage that had gone into the creek. And it's down there by Manchester, and it does go into town branch. And last I heard, they're having a hard time finding it. And what also I'd like to do is when you see those kind of problems, we get informed, the public out there, especially those who live on the creek or around by the creek, to give them a report to be sure that no animals or anything goes around, that we have some kind of information to get out to them, to let them know that there is a problem. We have a leak. We don't know where it's coming. We're trying to find it. If we find it, keep an update on that, if somebody can give us a report on that. I'm going to speak to the town branch bill in just a few minutes, briefly. Mr. Martin and several others are negotiating with the EPA today, so they're unable to be here, but we'll try to get some feedback for you on the Manchester Street issue next week and address specifically the notification issues. Mr. Green, if you'd put that on the agenda for next work session and follow up with Mr. Martin about that. And then last but not least, the favorite one is the Bitches Dog Ordinance. And I know Mr. Stennett is working on some dog issues, and I don't think he doesn't have, he told me and I understand that he's plate full and they're not really quite hitting on the dog bitches issue. What concerns me is, in my district, the other day, and we've had complaints on these pet bulldogs that have been getting loose, and it's about three or four times. Well, the other day we had a gentleman walking down the street with his dog, a pet bull, the same one, got loose, undercut the guy, grabbed the dog by his head and dragged it across the street. And three to four neighbors ended up getting, pounding on the dog and all that. The problem I found out, we're trying to make that a vicious dog, but from what the ordinance says, the only way it can be a vicious dog is if it bites a human being. And to me, I would like to put this back in the service community. I know I'm trying to, but I really think that we ought to look into this vicious dog a little bit more. If the dogs are loose and attack another animal that's not on their property, I really think they should be considered a vicious dog. If they jump into somebody else's yard and damage or kill another dog, which I've already had two in my district this year, where two animals have been killed where dogs have, where the pet bulls have jumped over the fence and killed the dogs. And, but the problem is you couldn't give them a vicious dog because they have not bitten any human beings. So, I'd like to look at that law in the, in the service committee that we may want to review the vicious dog. So moved. Second. I have a motion and a second. Any discussion? Council Member Kustinit. Just a point of clarification. For the dog task force, we were charged from a resolution from council to look at four issues, and the vicious dog is not something that we were charged to look at. In fairness to the other four major issues we're looking at, I believe and continue to believe still that the vicious dog is a whole separate issue and one that warrants its own discussion, whether it be in the task force or committee. But from a council standpoint, we were just charged to look at the four issues that we're currently exploring, and we'll be reporting out hopefully sometime here in October on those issues. Thank you, Mayor. Any further discussion? All those in favor of referring the vicious dog item to the services committee, please indicate by voting aye electronically. Those opposed, vote nay electronically. Motion carries. Council Member Maloney. That's it. Thank you. Council Member McCord. Thank you, Mayor. I wanted to first say what a great day Saturday was for Xolotl Park. We had the dedication, official dedication of the Toyota Miracle League and the BB&T building at the Miracle League. And I just want to say thank you to the Rotary Club, to Toyota, to BB&T, to all of the corporate sponsors that have put together almost a million dollars worth of investment into Xolotl Park and into this great amenity that is really a regional and a national draw. As you know, the Miracle League is for physically and mentally challenged folks now of all ages. We've started an adult league, and it is only the 17th of its kind in the country, and it is a great example of public-private partnership. So I want to say thank you and really appreciate Kevin Weaver and all of his diligence in getting that moved so quickly over the course of a couple of years. Secondly, I want to say congratulations to the University of Kentucky and the win on Saturday, and what a great day it was. Unfortunately, we saw kind of the aftermath and see that we do, as a government, have a number of obligations now to look at, from policing to trash pickup to, you know, how we're going to handle some of these type of activities. And the good news is that we probably will have many, many more of these things with the team that we have. The bad news is that I don't think citizens necessarily like the aftermath, and so we probably need to take a long, hard look at that and how we can better be prepared for something that happened like on Saturday night. Thirdly, I'd like to invite everybody to the downtown tour this Sunday at the Urban Lifestyle Tour. This is a really, really great opportunity to showcase all the things that are going on in downtown, from residential to commercial to retail. And if you haven't noticed, our downtown is exploding, and developments are starting to happen. Three years ago, you would walk through a dark parking lot, and they would talk about what was coming. Now you're starting to see units appear, and it's just an exciting time, and I'd encourage all citizens of Fayette County and surrounding counties to come and tour that throughout Sunday. Two more items. One is I want to say my congratulations and warmest wishes to Lay Carr, one of our longtime employees who is retiring next week. Lay has been with us for a long time and has been a very integral part of the engineering department, and we will sorely miss him. And my best wishes to him in his retirement. And lastly, Mayor, I think last week I had asked you about the confusion that some of the constituents that I serve had with the Neighborhood Summit that you're hosting on October 6th, and then I guess another flyer they got in the mail from the Neighborhood Council about a separate summit, and they weren't quite sure what the difference was and so forth. And I think last week I had asked if we could have the Neighborhood Council come and just explain to us kind of who they are and what they are and so forth. There seems to be a lot of confusion, and I had pulled from their website a couple of things, and, you know, we looked at this yesterday, and it's interesting because their website has last year's council members listed, so it's not updated information. There's a statement in here that they represent 130 separate neighborhoods, and as I said earlier, I've got neighborhoods that don't believe that they're represented by them, but they say that they represent it. So if we could, I know that, Artie, you've had some trouble in getting them to respond to your calls and your e-mails, and I think it's very imperative that they come here and chat with us, especially since in the news that they have been very actively involved in the EPA lawsuit and wanting to be at the table, and I think this is something that probably needs to just be cleared up and can be done very, very quickly. So anything that you can do would be helpful, Mayor. I appreciate that. That is my report. Thank you. Thank you very much. Council Member Gordon. Thank you, Mayor. The first thing I wanted to say is that the dog swim on September 9th set an all-time record, 830 dogs swam in Woodland Pool, and it is now cleaned and finished and ready for next year for people, but that is one activity that the dog owners in Fayette County absolutely love, and the money it makes, which was about $10,000, all gets put back into our park system, and so it's a really good public-private partnership. And then the other thing I wanted to do is show just a few photos. Some of you know that recently we had a delegation who went to Deauville, France. This is the 50th anniversary of our Sister Cities partnership with Deauville. We partnered with them in 1957, long before some of our council members were born, and we partner with them for many reasons, and this delegation went from Lexington to France to celebrate, and the French delegation will come here in November to have a celebration in Lexington. And there were some significant activities which occurred, and this picture shows Mayor Jim Newberry with Mayor Philippe Auger, who is the mayor of Deauville. They actually dedicated and named a room in their convention hall for Lexington. It is now the Lexington Room, and they did that in celebration of our partnership. And then we'll look at the next photo, and there are not very many, but they also dedicated a dahlia, a flower, to the Lexington-Deauville partnership because of their feeling of the importance of our partnership. And this was taken at the ceremony where both our mayor and the Deauville mayor participated and spoke. You gave many speeches while you were there, and it was really a wonderful day, and this dahlia is beautiful, and it is named in honor of Lexington, Kentucky, and Deauville. And then the next photo, there was a joint signing of the partnering document, and if you'll put the next photo on, not only were our mayors on the trip, but this was so important to the sister cities of Deauville that mayors of their sister cities came. They had the mayor of their sister city from Germany, the sister city from Ireland, who is also our sister city, Kildare, and the mayor is in the red dress, Mary Glennon from Ireland, Kildare. And then their mayor partner from the city of Cowes in the Isle of Wight. All of their sister cities mayors came to help celebrate our partnership with Deauville, and then Mayor Newberry and Mayor Auger led the signing of the document to reinforce our partnership. And then they also have a wonderful plaza in Deauville. This is after the signing, all the mayors, and in the back are some of Deauville's council members. We don't have quite the flashy bling that they have, but it was a really wonderful occasion. And the woman in the front in the white slacks is the former mayor of Deauville, and she is now the head of the region, Calvados, and is highly respected. And so then I think I have just two more. This is a little dark, but in the city of Deauville there is a very large roundabout, which, you know, we have one roundabout, Traffic Circle in Lexington. Of course, Deauville has many, many roundabouts. This one is dedicated to their sister cities. They actually have a flag from each sister city. This pole, if you'll go back out again, has the Lexington flag flying, and it's next to the flag of the United States of America. And they do the same with every one of their sister cities. And then the final one, which I really wanted to show more for the sign at the bottom of the flagpole, is they say just how far it is to get to Lexington. And it was a wonderful time for Lexington and its delegation to celebrate our partnership with Deauville. We have had students who have done student exchanges. We've had economic development exchanges where business folks came here to work, and we sent business folks to Deauville. And it was a grand occasion. And, Mayor, I just thought you represented us well. And it really is exciting to think of November and some of these same folks, including Mayor Mary Glennon from Ireland and some of the mayors from our sister cities who will come here to celebrate the 50 years. So just a little glimpse. Thank you. Let me make a couple of comments. I started my part of the trip by going to the American Cemetery at Normandy and laying a wreath there in memory of those members of our armed forces who gave their lives. There are 9,387 Americans buried at that cemetery. And it was quite a moving moment to have the opportunity to honor their memory. I will tell you that I have had the good fortune to go to France previously and have experienced less than hospitable greetings in Paris. But the attitude that all of the folks in Normandy have about Americans is starkly different. And our guests in Deauville could not have been any more hospitable. And I'm looking forward to having the large group return in November. But there's already been a group from Normandy that was here yesterday to talk about developing some research relationships with the University of Kentucky and to also try to develop some economic relationships based on the horse industry. So while we were in Deauville, I had an opportunity to visit with some of those folks there and they've already been back here. So we're trying to develop a little business along the way too. Anything further? Thank you. Council Member Brutus. Thank you, Mayor. Several items. On Saturday, September 22nd, there will be two events related to the Roots & Heritage Festival. First of all, at 2 o'clock in the afternoon, the Step Show will take place at Commonwealth Stadium. For information, you can call 425-2025. And then the Lynx Walkathon and Body and Soul Fast Health Fair will take place on that day. The registration is 8 o'clock in the morning at the North Lexington Family YMCA on West Loudoun Avenue near Newtown Pike. For information regarding the walkathon, call 258-7266. For information related to the health fair, the number is 288-2332. Some second district neighborhood events. Tonight, the Meadowthorpe Neighborhood Association will meet at 7 p.m. in the newly renovated Meadowthorpe Community Center. On Thursday, September 20th, the McConnell's Place Neighborhood Association will meet at 7 o'clock at the Bracktown Baptist Church. Now, the topic for the evening is specific in one subject. It's the care of the principal greenway in the neighborhood. So residents whose houses border on the greenway between McConnell's Place and Long Branch Lane will be particularly interested in this meeting. And again, that's 7 o'clock Thursday night at Bracktown Baptist Church. The Radcliffe-Morrowboro Neighborhood Association will hold a Meet Your Neighbor picnic and fun day at Morrowboro Park on Saturday, also on September 22nd. Events will start at 9 in the morning, go through the day until 4 p.m. There will be hot dogs, hamburgers, lemonade. There will be various games for the kids and face painting. There will be a dollar sale table to raise money for furnishings for the new park shelter and a raffle for a color television set which has been donated by St. John Baptist Church. So hope to see folks from the neighborhood out that day. It's going to be fun and raise some money for the new community center. Thank you, Mayor. That's my report. Thank you very much. Council Member Stevens. Thank you, Mayor. There's been a long history of Kentucky and France through the years. And those of us here in Fayette County recognize that. And we were very pleased when our boys demolished King Louis Town, or Louisville as it's known nowadays, on Saturday night in the most exciting football game I think I've ever seen. I do have some more serious business in that the Carter's Committee is very pleased that we now have two grants going, one for Versailles Road and one for Newtown Pike, Main Street out. From the Transportation Enhancement portion of the Transportation Cabinet, we'll be engaging the citizens and the property owners who live along those two roads as these plans are implemented, primarily vegetation, signage, and some fencing and other permanent structures. There's not enough money in these two grants to do much in the way of public art, but we have applied to the legacy program of the Knight Foundation to perhaps put some public art on the corner of Versailles Road and New Circle Road, and also we'd like to put up a large signature piece at the corner of I-75, I-64, and the off-ramp on Newtown Pike. That would be a place that's a little knoll that we own, the city, Coldstream Park, and we could put a signature piece there, perhaps a little smaller than the Arches of St. Louis, but something to really indicate to people going by that they're passing one of the better communities in the United States. We do have a problem that was evident and has been evident for several months with hazardous street trees. One street tree in particular that was featured in a newspaper today, I think, and the law department has prepared an ordinance that would allow the forestry portion of streets, roads, and forestry to, if a tree is declared hazardous in the right-of-way, to go take the tree down and then bill the property owner, and if the property owner doesn't see fit to do so, pay it, then put a lien on the property. They can't do that now, and they have no authority to take the tree down if it's deemed hazardous. So I would move that we refer this item to the Intergovernmental Committee for discussion at its next meeting and perhaps a presentation to the Council following that if everyone agrees. Second. The motion is to refer it to the Services Committee. I think I said Intergovernmental. I'm sorry. If I said Services, my tongue was tied. No, you said Intergovernmental. I'm just sort of getting in the habit of referring everything to the Services Committee yesterday. Yes. Congratulations. The motion is to refer the street tree issue to the Intergovernmental Committee. Any discussion? Council Member James. I just have one question, Dr. Stephens. Would this be appropriate for our tree board as well? Is this an issue that tree board should deal with more so than Intergovernmental? They have discussed this and are supporting this ordinance already. Wonderful. Thank you. No, we're both together on that. Any further discussion? If we could reset the voting machines, I'd like for the Council to vote electronically on the motion to refer to the Intergovernmental Committee. I'm pounding, but I'm getting nothing. Those in favor, how about voting aye or opposed? Aye. No. The motion carries unanimously. Thank you. All right. Council Member Ellinger. Thank you, Mayor. The conversation we've had the last month, we talked about the Sunday expanded liquor sales, and I think it raised a lot of issues that alcohol causes on the community and on the government. Both sides talked about the problems that occur with the sales of alcohol from police protection, social services, corrections, Hope Center. And we've all been touched directly or indirectly by alcohol-related issues. Therefore, as we all have done today, put into the Services Committee, I make a motion that we put into the Service Committee the issue of alcohol and how the government is affected by it and what we can do for education awareness and the government services that are affected by it. Second. Heard the motion and the second. Any discussion? Those in favor, please vote aye orally. Aye. Opposed, no. Motion carries. Thank you, Mayor. Council Member Stennett. Thank you, Mayor. I want to remind everyone tonight at 6 p.m. we had a previously scheduled dog committee task force, and we are scheduled to meet. This is our last meeting, actually, before public hearing and input. So, it is a critical meeting. So, I will not be at the zone change as I previously announced a few weeks ago when you scheduled for tonight. Also, I want to make everyone aware of the public hearing Thursday night, this upcoming Thursday night, in regards to our search for a new police chief. It will be here in this chamber from 6 to 8 p.m. on Thursday night. The 20th of September. So, if you have an input, either as a citizen, council member, whoever, we welcome your opportunity to hear from you Thursday night here in the council chambers in regards to the new police chief. And also, I want to give also my thanks to Lay Carr and his work he's done here for our government and also put out there for the administration that whatever we can do to replace that individual as soon as possible, because we have several, several road projects that we discussed in planning committee earlier today, but whatever we can do to expedite the hiring of his replacement, I know everyone here on council would support. So, if we can do that in a timely manner, that would be great. And then, last but not least, I want to announce the Eastman Parkway neighborhood meeting, which will be next Tuesday night at 6.30 p.m. there at Christ Center Church. We will have people from our stormwater division there to make a presentation in regards to the Fort Suttner-Gale Drive creek bed area. That's all, Mayor. Thank you. Thank you. Council Member Blevins. Thank you, Mayor. I'd like to move approval of the Neighborhood Development Fund List, please. I have a motion to second. Any discussion? Those in favor, please vote aye. All aye. Opposed, no. Thank you, Mayor. That's all I have. Motion carries unanimously. Thank you very much. Council Member DeCant. Thank you, Mayor. I think last week many of us saw an article that was in the Herald-Leader on the Lyric Theater. I think it caught a lot of people's eyes, especially the $6 million that was quoted in that article. A citizen came before us last Thursday night, Joe Graves, who spoke about this and brought forth, I think, some very stimulating questions concerning this project. My first thought was to put this in committee, but on further thought, I think it might be appropriate, Mayor, if we get a detailed update on the Lyric Theater project before the Council is whole, and I think as soon as possible, if you can arrange that. All right. Mr. Green, if you'd ask Mr. Boland to come. He's been working with the Lyric Theater group, and we'll see if we can do that next work session. Thank you. Council Member Crosby. Thank you, Mayor. I just have one quick announcement. This Saturday, September 22nd, the Explorium will be holding their annual museum go-round. It's a great activity for the kids, so I would encourage everybody to come out. They have lots of kids who display their art, and it's just a lot of fun. That's all. Thank you. Thank you very much. Any further Council Member wish to speak? All right. While there's no written report in the Mayor's Report Department, I did want to touch basically about three or four items real quickly. First, we're getting ready to have an appeal of a decision from the Planning Commission, and I have once again gone over the rules governing these hearings. I think they're antiquated. I think they take too much time, and I'm going to be coming to you with a proposal from the Law Department soon to shorten this whole process because my distinct experience has been that lawyers have a way of filling the amount of time allotted, and if you give them less time, they still get the job done in the same amount of time. I've been in that boat myself, so I don't want to shortchange people, but I want to be respectful of everybody's time here as well and give everybody a fair hearing in a little less time. Second, I just wanted to mention the Bike Summit is coming up this Friday at UK at the Student Center. We start at 8 o'clock, and if you all can attend, we'd love to have you. If you know anyone who might be interested, please feel free to invite them. And then I'd like for Mary Ann Blodgett to come to the podium. Mary Ann has been working to put together the Neighborhood Summit that is coming up on October 6, and I wanted her to give you just a little bit of an overview about what's on the agenda so you might be aware of that. Yes, we're going to host a Neighborhood Summit targeted for neighborhood leaders in Lexington and really anyone who's interested in how government works and perhaps would like to start a neighborhood organization. I'm working very closely with one of the council aides, so it's a joint effort, the mayor and council office. I hope all of you that can come on that Saturday morning will come. It will be a great opportunity to meet and greet your neighborhood leaders. We're also going to have a resource fair where neighbors can come and learn a little bit more about government, how it works, and there will be a nice opportunity for exchange of information and ideas. We're also going to have some breakout sessions. I tried to follow some of the suggestions that you all have made and also looked at some of the LexCALL reports as to what kinds of things people are calling about, and we put together breakout sessions on public safety, parks planning and play, environmental issues, how to start a neighborhood organization, and also how to kind of navigate through government. It's hard sometimes for people to know where to start when they have an issue, and we're going to try to talk to them a little bit about that. So it will be a great opportunity, again, for you to meet some of your neighbors in your different neighborhoods, an opportunity for us to get their ideas, for us to capture information from them, and move forward hopefully not just once a year but regularly through the year, inviting them down to talk more seriously about some of the topics that interest them in a kind of comfortable setting. We'd like to invite anyone listening out there today to please mark your calendars for Saturday, October the 6th, from 8 to 1 o'clock here at the Government Center. We're going to use our own facilities to offer this summit. Thank you very much. Let me talk about the town branch situation just briefly. I don't want to get into an awful lot of detail today because we're still in the process of trying to identify exactly all of the problems that arose and what some of the solutions are. But let me tell you what I have learned so far and perhaps give you a little more detail lately. I think there were three core problems. First was we have a system that is too fragile. I'll get into that in just a moment. We have a real problem with what I consider to be totally unsatisfactory reporting at the town branch treatment plant. And the third problem is we fail to rebound once a problem occurred in an appropriate fashion. Let me elaborate just a little bit. I said we had a very fragile system. Part of the fragility stems from the fact that there was one power source at town branch. We knew about that. We were in the process of correcting it. You may recall that in August we brought a measure before you to incur the expense necessary to have an additional power source. So we were working on that already. Unfortunately, as you all know, we didn't get that project completed rapidly enough to avoid this particular issue. Unfortunately, the proposal we brought to you does not provide for a secondary power source until the construction is completed probably in April. So we've got a period of time here where we're still going to continue to have one power source, and I want us to look at ways to shore up that problem. Fortunately, it hasn't been an issue that has plagued us in the past. This is a longstanding arrangement with one power source there, but I don't want to have another issue if there's any way that we can avoid it without spending an outrageous amount of money. The problem was caused by a bird that triggered a lightning arrester. Now, I can't tell you all the gory details about that, but the short of it is a bird got into the wiring. It short-circuited the wiring, blew a bunch of fuses, and I'll get into all of that. But the fact that we can have something that simple happen and upset the entire apple cart at the treatment plant is not satisfactory. We've got to find a way to address that through screening or some other mechanism. The thing that distresses me most about all of this is we went from 6.45 p.m. on a Friday night until roughly 9.30 on a Saturday morning before anyone was contacted outside of the town branch facility itself. I cannot explain that. It is totally unsatisfactory. Charlie Martin has taken some remedial steps already to make sure that everybody understands that's not the way to deal with a situation like this, and we'll be getting into that in greater detail with the staff there. I, at this stage, am at a loss to explain to you how 3 million gallons of raw sewage can be released off the premises there and no phone calls be made for 15 hours. That's just not anywhere close to being appropriate. After all of that happened, we encountered several problems. There was a slow response by our initial efforts to utilize our own employees to address the problem. We then had communications problems with KU getting them there. We also had a problem with some of the folks from KU left thinking the problem was fixed when, in fact, it wasn't fixed, and that precipitated another delay while we got them to come back. There is an issue, a technical issue that I don't fully grasp the details for yet, but we thought we had the electrical system arranged in such a fashion that the fuses would blow either on our end or KU's end, but not on both ends at the same time, and both ends blew at the same time. So that further exacerbated the amount of time at which the release continued. And then, finally, I haven't yet gotten to the bottom of what we can do when everything else fails to avoid the discharge. So we are beginning to at least identify the problems. We have not yet identified all of the solutions. As those solutions are identified, we'll come back to you with some proposals about what the fix should be. But it was the only silver lining here is we may be able to identify some steps we can take in the context of our sanitary sewer system as well as in other parts of urban county government to make sure that we have harder facilities, that we are clear on our reporting obligations, and that we're able to rebound more quickly. I'll be glad to answer any questions that you might have now, or when Mr. Martin is back in town, I hope we'll be able to give you a more detailed presentation later. Council Member Beard. Are there sensors or alarms of any sort that go off and tell somebody that this is happening? They did, and they didn't call. Okay. The people on site heard the alarms, and they did go off as they should have, but they just didn't involve anyone other than the maintenance crews. I'm sorry. I'm sorry, too. Yeah. Thank you. Council Member Gloven. Thank you, Mayor. I just wanted to add one more to your list. I would view this as an environmental disaster, and one of the phone calls that should have been made was not only to the State Department of Water Quality or whatever just for reporting purposes, but we should have invoked our own disaster planning mechanism. It was not a good thing that this happened, but I guess it was as gentle a reminder that we need to be prepared for something like this in a major way. So, in that sense, it was a good reminder. If this was an overturned chlorine car from a railroad or something, we would have had deaths, not just dead fish, human deaths, so we can't afford that. Let's use this as a very good reminder to get our disaster act in order as well. Council Member Lane. Thank you, Mayor. I was extremely disappointed at the failure of the Sanitary Serve team and the way this was handled, and I would ask that you might consider bringing in somebody that's an expert in Sanitary Serve systems and have an outside party just do an evaluation of our management practices and whether our system is up to par or not, because that's just catastrophic when something like that happens. Thank you. Council Member Loney. Thank you, Mayor. The concerns I have is can a bird do it again? Do they have anything there to keep the birds from going in there and doing that kind of damage? That's a question I have, and I don't have an answer yet. But, you know, one of the thoughts across my mind as I was looking at some of the preliminary information is, can we spend five bucks and put some screening around this? Mayor. Pardon me? What did they say on that? Did they say anything about it? I haven't been able to get all my questions answered yet, which is why I'm just giving you some preliminary information today and hopefully a more detailed presentation later. Okay. Well, that brings back to the point that Mr. Blevins brought up, and I'm concerned about the deal on Manchester. That seems like it's a lot of waste being discharged, and maybe I misunderstood it, but I think somebody told me it was on television, but that it's 5,000 gallons a minute, discharged sewers coming into this creek. And I just, and it just concerns me. That goes back, should the public somehow know what's going on? I don't know. Maybe that 5,000 may not be a lot. I'm not an expert on that, but I still think the public and everyone should have some idea, especially those down the creek, of anything, animals, or any kind of, especially kids that are going down there to fish or something that they're not getting themselves in any trouble. Sure. Part of the issue on August 31st stemmed from the fact that the stream flow was so low because of the dry weather we've been having. But that's why you have folks from the State who get involved and make some assessment about the severity of the problem and what notifications are appropriate. And we just did not do an adequate job at all of getting that word out. Okay. Thank you. All right. That's the last item I have. Do we have any public comment on any issue that's not on the agenda? Mr. Barnett. Thank you. For those of you who don't know me, my name is Jack Barnett. I'm president of the Civil Service Employees Association. I tried to make it down earlier, but due to the time change and taking care of city business, I didn't make it. I wanted to complain about abolishing civil service positions. But if we don't need them, that's okay. But if we start filling them with temporary full-time positions, then I'll be back. The other thing I wanted to talk about that's not an issue on here, in the past administration, I'd ask for a training program be developed for all the council people, appointed people like commissioners and directors, for training on the civil service comprehensive plan, so you all would know what we're talking about when we have issues. And at the time, Milton DeHoney, I think, had instructed human resources to prepare a plan. And then he left, so, you know, it kind of got dropped by the wayside. But I'd like to request that that plan be put into effect for training, just so you all don't have to rubber stamp anything that goes with civil service. You will be able to communicate with us, you know, basically on problems that we have. And if you all would agree to that, maybe we can get it put together. Thank you. Council Member Ellinger, I think. Thank you, Mayor. I was wondering if possibly we could do that in a workshop kind of set up, and we try to do those kind of things in education, of course. That would be great. If we could set up a workshop that you could present to us, that would be very helpful. Because it's really a complicated plan, and it takes a long, long time to figure it out. But if you had good training on it, you would catch on real fast, and you would be able to understand the problems that we have when we come to you. Jack, did you all have some sort of a written summary of the program? No. I think HR. I don't know if they finished putting the plan together, the training plan, but they had started on it at that time. We'll follow up. Thank you, sir. Thank you. Anything further? All right. Council Member McCord. Thank you, Mayor. I move that we go into closed session pursuant to KRS 61.8101C for the purpose of discussing proposed litigation. So moved. Thank you. Any discussion? Those in favor, please vote aye. Opposed, no. The motion carries unanimously. If we could ask everyone to step out for just a few moments. This should not take more than ten minutes.