The ¶¶ Amen. ¶¶ ¶¶ Thank you. I think we settled in at 1 o'clock. Welcome to the people on GTV that are watching. A fairly slim agenda today. we had been asked by the administration if Kevin could break a rule and come make a quick presentation to us on his activity and what he sees going forward and what he's going to be shepherding, I suppose. So, Kevin Atkins, if you'd like to come to the mic, I'd appreciate it. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you for the opportunity to come today. Just a couple of things I thought might be beneficial to come up and see, talk about where we are on the plan to move forward with some of our economic development efforts for Lexington. So, if you want to go to the next slide. A couple of the main targets that I've been working on in the last month and a half since I got started was to take a look and confirm the current conditions of our economic development efforts here in Lexington. This is not a look at any targeted anybody, but to see where our weaknesses, but more so how can we accentuate our strengths as we move forward? Where can we put the best possible efforts into moving our programs forward? The second is to confirm the conditions of the planning initiatives in organizations like our planning department, DDA, DLC, Historic Preservation, and PDR. Again, the effort to put our strengths to their best uses. As we look at our economic development tactical initiatives, the look is toward the long-term possibilities for our manufacturing land use, such as Bluegrass Station. After I accepted this position, I found out that we had less than 20 acres currently available in our industrial park off of Georgetown Road. As the chairman and Councilman Stenet learned last week in an economic development briefing also. So Bluegrass Station does provide us an opportunity with the golf course, the former golf course property in play. There's currently 771 acres at Bluegrass Station. 211 of those are considered to be recreation, and half of that 211 is the former golf course facility that the council voted not to reopen this year. So we're working with General Collins on his master plan on how to move Bluegrass Station forward and provide him with the space he needs to provide additional jobs for the community. So we need to develop a long-term plan so that if a business expresses an interest in locating in our community, that we have property available to show them. Also looking at a development strategy to better target our relationship with the university. How do we retain the entrepreneurs that come out of programs such as Aztec at UK? And hopefully to, you know, locate places like Coldstream. But another emphasis that we've talked with the Commerce Lexington folks about is how do we lure some of our homegrown talent back home that may have gone off and started their businesses elsewhere? Is there a way that we can bring them back home? And then how do we interact better with our university leadership, both the deans and the overall administration leadership, in identifying those folks before they move to other communities? And how do we accentuate? Dr. Karf has done a great job of developing the health care facilities. They're some of the best in the country. How do we continue to build on the development that he's put in place? One of the new initiatives is developing a stronger relationship between Louisville, northern Kentucky, and ourselves. I looked up the statistics, and 38% of the growth in Kentucky over the last 10-year period has been in five counties, Fayette, Jefferson, Boone, Kenton, and Campbell. These five counties, according to the 2009 census estimates, represent 32% of the state's population. So this positions our region to be an economic driver with companies we already have in the region, our quality transportation, our two research universities, transportation infrastructure. You can go north, south, east, and west easily from here, and obviously we have the three airports in the communities. The next initiative is taking a look at our planning process. As everybody in this room knows, we're getting ready to start the comprehensive plan process. We're trying to develop the roadmap forward in that by talking with stakeholders and talking with planning staff on how we can move this plan forward in a way where the debate is beneficial for the entire community. We want to be able to come up with a plan that provides adequate growth space for Lexington while protecting the signature industries like the horse industry and our farmland. So as you can imagine, infill will be a topic of the debate. And the PDR program, I had the opportunity to go out about a week ago and tour the areas where the PDR program is in place. One of the people I got to meet was Sean Millard at his family's farm, who they were the first PDR recipients in Fayette County. And they started an arena, riding stables, the whole thing. And to show you how planning, economic development come together, They've almost doubled their employment on the farm during that period of time. And we're getting ready to look at some new initiatives, such as what we're going to call the Arena, the Arts, and Entertainment District. It's the whole look at the Civic Center complex and the community around that complex, such as how do we tie the Distillery District into the Civic Center District. we want to bring connectivity to the downtown area. We've met with the Bluegrass Community and Technical College administration on how we can better develop the new town Pike campus that they're currently under construction on. We've talked with the WEBS about their plans for the center point block. I talked with Councilman Ford last week about the East End project. So as you can see, we have a lot going on, a lot to look forward to, and many challenges that lie ahead. And I look forward to working with each of you as we move these projects ahead. Thank you, Kevin. Are there any questions? Kevin Spinnett. Thank you, Chair. Kevin, thank you for coming today. We appreciate this update and look forward to a new process and getting some of these initiatives on the table. Well, for the viewing public, can you give them your titles so they can start putting a face with a name? Yes, sir. I'm the mayor's chief development officer. Development officer. Good. I'm glad you mentioned the comp plan because one of the bullet points I was going to ask you to add to your last page was looking at the ED zone within the comp plan. And I don't know if we can do it internally or maybe externally. Look at the analysis because this council wisely several years ago as well as the planning commission included that as part of the comp plan. And that was, I think, 10 years ago at least. Let's look at it today, and has it done what we intended to do within the comp plan? Is the ED zone, are those areas still developed? Are they still raw land? And are they doing what we really asked them to do? Because there is an opportunity, as you mentioned, during the comp plan to reevaluate the need for such large areas to be ED zone versus another use, like a mixed use or something. So I don't know if we can do that in-house, but if you could, you know, we can work behind the scenes and figure out a way to approach that. But there has to be a way to measure if that's really done what we've set out to do with that in Fayette County, and is there a better opportunity somewhere else. Okay. We'd like to. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Kevin. Council Member Blues? Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, Kevin, for this preview. You mentioned the five-county region. It's going to be vital, and I only caught one county. I'm sorry. Could you? I sure can. Fayette, Jefferson, Boone, Kinton, and Campbell. Thank you. And Boone, Kinton, and Campbell because the three counties basically operate together up there. Okay, Council Member Farmer. You're not, you were up here a second ago. Glad to have you. Council Member Crosby. Thank you. Did you mention that the TIF projects were under your purview as Chief Development Officer? They will be. They would be. Do you think you might be able to give us, you don't have to do it today, but just an email or some kind of update on where we stand on all the TIF projects and where they are within the state? I don't think we've gotten anything on this here recently and just kind of know where we stand and if there's more opportunities for TIFs or if you might be identifying any for us. And then my other question is regarding since the mayor's training center closed in 2007, will your office also be looking at those who are unemployed or underemployed and ways to try and assist them through your office, or will those fall somewhere else? We haven't specifically talked about that. Okay. I think it goes back to the whole bringing jobs to the community. Okay. Thank you. Any other questions? I've got one for you, Kevin. Council Member Crosby mentioned TIFFs, and we kind of had a flurry of TIFFs all at one time, the Turfland Mall, the Distillery District, and the Show Prop. And I'd love to know exactly where we are and what the anticipation is on the processes going forward on those three tips, if at all possible. Thank you. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you, Kevin. Oh, Mr. Chairman. Oh, I'm sorry. I wrote your name down, but I forgot to turn around and look for it again. Go ahead, Council Member Lane. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I have a couple of quick questions for you. How do you see our relationship, Fayette County, with, say, the 17-county Bluegrass region, as far as economic development effort goes? Can you sort of touch on that a little bit? You know, my former position, I had an opportunity to be in those counties quite a bit. I think we have to have a cooperative relationship with those. What benefits one ultimately benefits as the destination center ultimately benefits Lexington. So I think that's what the mayor is trying to achieve. not only the triangle, if you will, initiative doesn't take away from what would essentially be the bluegrass ad region. I think it just adds something to it. So I think the relationship is good. Okay. And then the other question I had was I'm sure you've had meetings with Commerce Lexington. How do you see your role in working with Commerce Lexington? Have you got a handle on that yet? I think the role is to interface with all the partners in the Bluegrass Alliance, whether it be the university, Commerce Lexington, or some of the other partners like the utilities and those folks. So I see my role as being the point person within the mayor's office, working with those entities on a daily basis to provide the economic development function. That sounds good. And do you envision that if, say, a company wants to come in and develop property here in town and they have some issues with getting necessary government approvals to move forward, do you see yourself working with them also? Would you be a point person to help them in that regard? Yes, sir. All good. Well, welcome aboard. Thank you. I think you started off very well, and we're happy to have you here. Thank you, Council. Thank you, Kevin. Anything more? Oh, pardon me. Excuse me. Thank you, Mr. Chair Gray. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. It's awful good to be up here. I just want to take a minute or two. I think from a couple of things. One is saying that the presentation that I believe you all are going to hear from the representatives of IBM is in scanning through those documents, it's really in informing data and information. I think my sense is that it's another piece of data puzzle that we're putting together today in what amounts to a reset of an economy. What Professor Trotsky told us last week in the last Monday in the budget meeting was information that's very relevant. And as you, as a newly formed committee, set your agenda and purpose, I'm looking forward with Kevin, with others like Commerce Lexington who are involved, In our efforts, I'm looking forward to reimagining entirely what it is we're doing today in economic development. I had a chance last week to be with Greg Fisher, the new mayor of Louisville, with some folks from the Brookings Institute. To be honest with you, I wasn't looking that forward to that meeting at first. But sitting with these people and hearing them, what they said was not unlike what we saw in the data that we got last week. Lexington, like other cities in America, has had the benefit of being able to have sustainable, sustained industries and long-sustained models like a university. But what these folks were saying who are traveling in other countries is that we're just not competing globally. We are not exporting adequately. We are not thinking adequately beyond the city limits, beyond our borders. And I'm the first one to admit, even having been in the economic development business all my life, I'm proud of it, that I do not know everything that's going on today. We do not know what's going on, even in our own back door. However, we are not adequately prepared for the storms that are hitting us, and we've got to do better. Now, I'm just up here to tell you that we're going to work as hard as we can. Sometimes the issues are going to be contentious. Sometimes the bar that we raise is going to be higher than is comfortable, but I just don't see any way around it. My own experience, I suspect, like many of you, is that when you're in times of adversity and struggle, you probably test yourself more during those times, and you find answers that you might not otherwise find. And the only reason I'm saying this is because I think we have to put context to what we're doing. We're talking strategically about linking the dots, taking advantage of the assets, the attributes that we have as a city, and digging into those attributes and those assets, and really, really then understanding them, connecting those assets, whether it's the university, whether it's the city, whether it's our history, whether it's the people who migrate in and out of here with assets and with wealth that we would like to link into because we have a vision of what our city might be and how it might be better. Those are all the strategic economic development issues that we've got to work on hard, and I'm telling you, we won't have the answers every day, even as we appear before you. But I know that you all want to help us get those answers, So I thank you very much for asking us and asking Kevin to be with you here today. Thank you all very much. Thank you, Mayor. I guess we're ready to move on with our agenda. Council Member Gorton. Thank you, Mr. Chair. This next item, IBM Smarter Cities Project, I first want to thank Council Member Crosby, who brought this to the attention of the mayor and myself. And we were able to meet with these folks, and so that is how this has come to the Council. And there are three folks here from IBM, and I believe we met with all three of you. David Saharchik, Senior Managing Consultant, Ashley Sider, Client Representative, and David Edwards, who's an associate partner for Smarter Cities Campaign. And so we welcome you, and they have a very interesting presentation that I hope we can consider where this fits into our economic development. We have one addition, Mark Nicolay from IBM also. I'm sorry. Sorry, Mark. I looked right at you. Anybody go right ahead. Thank you. Thank you. We really appreciate the opportunity to come and share this with you all. First of all, just up front, what we're sharing with you today is work that was an investment by IBM. So this wasn't work that was paid for by the city of Lexington. It's work that we've invested in based upon our interest in understanding and better understanding cities, how they operate, and how they function. So what we wanted to share with you today is the results of a couple of assessments that IBM has done and that we have looked into to help us gain an understanding for city-city operations and hopefully to inform you all some information about your city and how your city compares to other cities around the U.S. The first study that we're going to talk about is the Smarter Cities assessment. If we do have time, and I realize that we do have a limited amount of time, we will share with you the results of an IBM operational efficiency benchmarking study that was conducted by my colleague David Edwards and his folks. So our focus will be first on the Smarter Cities assessment. So just to frame some context, IBM has been focused on a strategy related to Smarter Planet for a couple of years now. And one of the core components of Smarter Planet is Smarter Government. and answering and helping governments answer a question of how can you become more efficient and improve your outcomes of your government based upon improving the intelligence to inform better decisions. So as a part of this, we've established a Smarter Government campaign, which is focused on how we can help governments around the world, state and local governments, as well as federal governments, in helping to improve the outcomes of government. And we do that through our point of view of how we can do that is through first instrumentation, the massive amounts of data that's being collected by individuals, by various that already exist in various databases across the government, as well as data that's owned by secondary parties. Secondarily, once that data, given the opportunities between the connectivity between systems and the citizens that can also provide this data, when you add on top of that the layer of intelligence, just having data doesn't necessarily do anything for you. And we see a number of cities that have tons and tons of data, but they're not able to leverage that data to actually make informed decisions. So bringing together these three components, we believe, can really help drive efficiency, and we work with clients both in the public sector and the private sector. Okay. So in Smarter Government, we're looking at and we have a number of different areas where we're working with clients across a number of different areas to help improve the operations, to improve efficiency, and ultimately to improve outcomes. And UL is the Economic Development Committee. My focus is, and my focus apart from Smarter Cities, is also on site selection and economic development. So the things that we're going to be talking about with Smarter Cities, water, energy, communications, quality of life, these are all critical attraction components that are going to drive growth and industry growth and attraction. So there's a very strong context to you all as the Economic Development Committee. So two of the different areas that we look at, one is Smarter Cities Assessment, and the second is Operational Benchmarking. So, helping to do an initial diagnostic of a city to understand where there are opportunities for improvement. And we're going to talk first about the Smarter Cities Assessment. Okay. So, our Smarter Cities Assessment looks at seven different core systems in a city, which are, which when you look across the city around the world, all of these are pretty much going to be the same. Basic infrastructure services, including water, energy, communication, and transportation. On top of that, you have two different user systems, the businesses that do business and operate within the city, and the citizens that live in the city and utilize the services. And then on top of that sits a layer of city services, so all of the various services that the city is responsible for delivering both to the business and the citizen community. So we look at a number of different factors, about 250 indicators of what we look at in our assessment, to help provide an initial snapshot and understanding of how well is a city performing across these various areas. So the output of the assessment is able to show how well is your city doing compared to other cities. So you don't really know if you're doing really well unless you compare yourself to other areas. So we've developed this approach based upon how we do corporate site selection. We look at a number of different factors, and we benchmark different cities. When investors look at Lexington, they are looking at you compared to other alternatives. It's a business decision. So the competitive assessment and the assessment that we do is a benchmarking analysis of comparing cities against one another. And what you're able to see at the end of the assessment is looking at the, if you look at the spider chart on the top, you're able to see how an individual city compares to, one, the best practice. So the best practice of those cities in that benchmark group, and then the average. So in this example that you can see here, City 4 performs above average and near the best practice in a number of different areas. However, when you look at the transport system, they're well below average, which helps to provide an informative basis for where is there potentially an opportunity to improve your operations. Again, the assessment results need to be balanced with the priorities of the city and the vision and the objectives of the city as well. So when we've been sharing results with different cities, obviously your economic development strategy and a strategic plan for your city is really going to drive the focus areas of what's relatively most important to you as a city in achieving the aspirational vision that you have. So that needs to come into play as well. So last year we looked at and we did a study within IBM. We did one in North America, and we also did one in Europe, and we're conducting another one in Asia right now. And we took a benchmark, a group of cities, to do an initial analysis and assessment to understand what are some of the systemic issues. and Lexington was one of the cities that we selected for this study, and that's why I wanted to share the results with you all. We are not sharing the results of the names of the other cities with the cities as we talked to it. So when we go through this assessment, go through the results, you'll be able to see that Lexington is City P. Obviously, from an economic development perspective, you know how cities will use data against other cities. So that's the reason why we are keeping it anonymous and not sharing that information with other cities. But what we are providing you is some information regarding the general profile. So the population size, geographic size, to understand the population density issues, and then also the regions where these different cities are. So there's two different cohorts that you can see. The south region is where Lexington falls out in this cohort group. And then from a population size, Lexington is, I think, the second smallest city that was considered in this study, in this peer group. So when we look at the results, understanding that of the cities that were included here, many of them and most of them were much larger than Lexington. So take into consideration that if we were to do this study and compare Lexington to another group of cities, the results would probably be very different. We actually have just completed another benchmarking assessment for another city, and they asked us to include Lexington because they were very interested in Lexington potentially as a competitor. Lexington actually did very well in that. So taking into consideration that the results of this are considered and comparative to the benchmark group. So in the study that we looked at, and I apologize, the top, the subject line says that there's 21 cities. There was actually 19 cities. You can see that Lexington in this benchmark group performed at the bottom and was the weakest performing city looking at, and this is looking at the aggregate score across all of these different areas, city services, water, energy, transport, communication, business, and people. You can see all the way to the left is the best practice. And with the best practices, that is the best performing score of all of the different cities that were included in the assessment. So this is an overview of some of the major strengths and weaknesses that we saw as a result of the study. And there was two areas that the city performed above average and actually performed very well, water and transportation. One of the things that we've seen by looking at cities, small to mid-sized cities in the U.S., is that small to mid-sized cities normally perform better than larger cities in transport and water, due largely to the fact that they don't have the congestion issues. that the larger cities have, and also due largely to the fact, from a water perspective, that they haven't had to deal with a lot of the growth and expansion that a lot of larger cities had, and also dealing with aging infrastructure. The other areas in the assessment, though, the city performed below the average of the benchmark group, and we can certainly talk about, I want to be sensitive of time. We only have a couple of more minutes. But overall, I think the takeaway is that there is a lot of opportunities for the city of Lexington to improve in a number of these different areas. And all of these different areas, and this study should be taken in the context of an external view of the city, just like a site selector will take an external view of the city. So this is how you are viewed externally by third parties. So do we want to try to move forward into the next piece? Five minutes. Okay. We could spend hours talking about the detailed results of this. So I think I may propose that we use the rest of the time for questions. Excuse me. Why don't we go to questions right now and then see if that jogs anything that you might want to say in response? I was going to ask if they could just go to some of the, kind of the meat, more of the meat and potatoes of the study in the different areas and talk about the rankings a little bit for us, because I think that's, towards the back, yeah, I think we were clear on the methodology and all that, but if we could maybe talk about where we fell in the different areas. Is that part of this? Sure. I can talk through some of the major high points and some of the major points in each one of the different areas, if that would help, man. So in the people system, what we're looking at in the people system is a lot of those things that relate to quality of life. So we're looking at health care, education, public safety, housing outcomes. Some of the major findings that related to Lexington was that it was a below average number of police officers per capita from an investment perspective. However, when we looked at public safety outcomes, the outcomes were actually better than average when we looked at the other cities. We did see that there was limited investments in smarter public safety solutions that a lot of other larger cities have invested in, but given the outcomes and the public safety outcomes in the city, that's not really a surprise. When we looked at housing availability, overall it was well in terms of affordability, but when we looked at per capita number of public housing vouchers and public housing units was actually below average from the other cities that we looked at. And also it was above average in the number of families that were below the poverty level when we looked at the average and the national average. It was well below average in investments that were made in information technology investments in education, and that's also looking at the state level comparatively. And a lot of these things, when you look at a lot of the investments will be made at the state level, and a lot of times cities are a product of their environment, unfortunately. Other cities will benefit from investments that are made in other states, like California and Massachusetts, where substantial investments are made at the state level and cities benefit from that. So that does come into play in the assessment. School performance and graduation rates are right around the average, and actually better than many of the other cities that we looked at from graduation rates and overall school performance. In terms of business, above average real estate availability, which was a strong point for the city, it was below average of the number of the key indicators that we look at for industry attraction. Again, this was not an industry-specific focus study. We were looking broadly at a number of different factors in terms of business attraction, so we weren't looking specifically at different labor types because we had to look generically across a number of different industries. But in terms of labor force availability, access to ports, customer proximity, market size, patent trademark generation, it was below average to a lot of the other cities that we looked at. There's also limited information for online city services for businesses in terms of licensing and permitting compared to other cities. From a communications perspective, the city actually, its upload and download fees and overall performance of communications infrastructure was relatively decent. The broadband levels were actually assessed as below average. However, we are not, the data that supports that that we're leveraging from that is broadband.gov. We're not wholly convinced of the accuracy of that data. from what we've seen in talking to other cities. The city, we did give credit to the city for its investments that it's made in broadband, apart from the private investments. And the public Wi-Fi coverage for the city was decent, but when we looked at it comparatively to other cities, especially larger cities, it was below average. From a transportation perspective, as I mentioned before, the city is doing very well in that area because you really don't have to deal with a lot of the congestion issues of larger cities. Again, if we were to do this benchmarking analysis with smaller cities, you may find that and we'll probably find that Lexington would be higher and actually rank lower. But again, it's relative to the benchmarking group, and I know that there is public sentiment about the traffic congestion issues in Lexington. In terms of public transportation was another area that we looked at. The city has a relatively less advanced public transportation system than most of the other cities that we looked at. Obviously, it's limited to bus. It does not have the extensive rail systems that a lot of other cities do. When we looked at the system, but the public transportation system actually does well in overall system efficiency. So looking at cost and service efficiency actually performs very well in the benchmark group. The city, though, in the public transport system ranked well below average in terms of public transit usage and usage by the population, especially for commuters. The public transit rates were actually very low comparatively when we looked at other cities. With that said, the amount of operating revenue that's covered from fare revenue is much lower than most of the other cities that we looked at. I believe it was 13 percent, was the recovery rate of operating revenues from public transport from operating fares. From an energy perspective, at the state level, a majority of the energy level, the energy is largely driven by regional issues. So from a sourcing perspective, coal being a primary source of energy for the city did impact its score. A number of other cities, however, have made a significant and make significant investments in terms of renewable energy and sourcing renewable energy and incentivizing both residents as well as businesses in adopting renewable energy sources. So there's a number of other cities that actually have taken proactive steps to address some of the circumstances that they're faced with from a regional perspective of where their energy comes from. From a water perspective, the city did very well. One of the areas for Lexington and a lot of the other cities that have performed well in water is that while we looked at the city, compared to other U.S. cities, it does very well. When we compare it to a larger benchmark group, including European cities, it actually does well below average. And we've compared the results of our U.S. study to our European study and found that the U.S. is the leading consumer of water, per capita consumer of water, with the rates 340% higher than Germany on a per capita basis. So while the city is actually doing well from a water consumption perspective, there are significant opportunities for improving water consumption, regardless of how well you're doing compared to other U.S. cities. Even compared to Canadian cities, Lexington will not perform as well. And from a city services perspective, one of the major things that we saw was that from the degree of services that are available to citizens online, it's not as great as it is in other cities, in other larger cities. The 311 services do provide a channel for citizens to interact with the city. but the degree of interaction in terms of the extensiveness of those services that are available to citizens is not as great as a lot of other cities. So that's a summary of some of the major points as it relates to Lexington in this study. Councilman Gordon. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you very much for being here today for all of you. And on page 14, you've got your list of cities and the city cohorts and the population and geographic area. And I understand completely why you can't say what these cities are. I'm presuming you might use this information in the business. But would it be fair to say when I look at the list, there's really only one other city, and it's City M, I believe, that has the same population, is in the south, and has a similar geographic size to ours. So would it be fair to say that's, if we were looking at a city that might potentially be similar to ours, is that a fair comparison or not? I think that's probably a relatively fair comparison, City M. And, you know, the reason why we didn't want to share this information is we did want to have open dialogue with cities. And we do understand how cities use information against one another. So it's as much for your protection as it is for anybody else. But I think, yes, ma'am. Are there any merged governments in here, are you allowed to say, other than ours? There are not. Okay. I was just curious. And there's a mixture of cities here with Strongmare. So there are some Strongmare cities in here, and there are others that are not. Okay. And can you talk a little bit about public safety smart technology? Is that like the mobile data terminals in the cruisers? And what are some of the examples that you asked about? Well, it includes a number of different things. It includes, and again, going back to kind of our point of view of instrumentation, so being able to collect data from a number of different sources, that also includes collecting information from citizens and allowing citizens to report information, to report crimes, to report graffiti, for example, all the way through the interconnection of how data is actually used and shared between agencies and also the degree of instrumentation that's used for public security cameras, for example. Also looking at the advanced use of analytics for crime prediction. There's a number of cities that actually have advanced crime prediction analytics tools that they use. There's also online services that are provided to residents in terms of residential crime maps that are updated on a regular basis to show residents where are different types of crimes taking place. So those are a few examples of some of the things that we consider from a public safety perspective. On the water, I was just curious in the list, is there a mix in this list of cities that have public water companies and private? It's a mix. It's a mix. Do you know what that mix is, or is it half and half? I would probably say probably about half and half. Okay. Okay. The management really and the governance over water really hadn't, we didn't see any strong correlation there between the management and the outcomes. When we're looking at water, we're looking at a number of different things. We're looking at access to water. We're looking at consumption of water. We're looking at the quality of water and how it's being managed. So we're looking at a number of different types of factors. So not just purely consumption. We're looking at a number. We're also looking at drinking water and wastewater. Okay. And then just on a final note, I noticed under the business the second bullet of City P, which is our city, one of the things you mentioned was the high administrative burden, and that's one of the things I'm very interested in because we've heard from many of our small businesses that we need to fix that because we require so much administratively to start a business before they've even made money. And I'm presuming that would be one of the things that you looked at. Is that correct? Yes. How hard it is to start up a business? Yes. And one of the other things we saw, too, from a permitting perspective, that it wasn't intuitive if it exists of how individuals and small businesses interact with the city to obtain those necessary business permits and other things in order to start. Okay. Well, thank you very much. I appreciate that you all put Lexington in your study. Thank you. Council Member Stenet? All right. Go right ahead. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you again for coming in and including Lexington into your survey. I have a few questions. One, when you look at the criteria that you looked at, and our council has heard a lot in the last few years about the creative class and about the things that the creative class is looking for in terms of locating to a job or when they graduate, whether or not they stay in the community or leave and go someplace else. Can you talk just for a second about where those things play in here? They're interspersed, and let me – when we look at cities from a site selector perspective, one of the standout things will be quality of life. In quality of life, we will look at the different types of recreational services that are available in cities. We'll look at the cultural amenities. We'll look at schools. So there's a number of things that relate to quality of life that we consider from a site selector perspective. We don't specifically break quality of life out when we're looking at smarter cities. We're looking more from a systems view. But in terms of those things that relate directly to quality of life and talent attraction, it's education, public safety, transportation, especially when you're talking about the creative class. Access to public transportation is one of the driving criteria that individuals are looking for. There was actually a recent study that was done that was looking at what attracts teleworkers. And teleworkers is actually an increasing population with increased numbers in teleworkers who have the option to live wherever they want because their work flexibility provides them that. And looking at what are the different things that they're looking for. Apart from quality of life in the schools and cost of living, and public transportation was one of those different areas. So in here, the things that we're looking at is related to the citizens, so education, health care, as well as transportation, are going to be extremely important. The creative class, too, is also going to be interested in energy. Sure. You know, that's the source of renewable sources of energy, alternative sources of energy for cars and vehicles. One of the other things that we looked at in the study was the degree of infrastructure support for transportation, and there was only three alternative fueling stations within 25-mile radius of Lexington. That was the lowest of any city that we found, and those were primarily biodiesel. There's a number of other cities that have a much larger infrastructure of electric vehicle fueling stations, biodiesel, hydrogen, and other sources to provide the citizens with the ability to actually start using some of these next-generation vehicles. So that was something else that we looked at, which really did not exist in Lexington. Okay. Vice Mayor Gordon already talked a little bit about the business on slide 9. So I'll skip over that one. If we can go to page 16 and 17. I don't think you went through those yet. So you may be – No, that was actually the second study that we conducted, which we haven't – that was the operational efficiency and benchmarking study, which we did not go through. Are you going to go through that today? I don't want to jump the gun. That would be on the council's. It was our understanding of the time. Do you have anything else on the agenda? No, we're – we're set. Let's go ahead if the rest of the committee feels like they would like to. And let's go ahead and flesh this out and everybody's here. Okay. So then I'll hold my questions until after they're done with this part of the presentation. Thank you. Okay. Thank you, Mr. Chair. My name is David Edwards. I'm from IBM's public sector consulting practice from Atlanta. and I've spent the last eight years as the senior policy advisor to the mayor of Atlanta. I just joined IBM about ten months ago. And the genesis of this study, which we're about to share with you, it was the work that we had done in Atlanta when I was working for the mayor there. We did a benchmarking study very similar to the one I'm going to show you at a much smaller scale. And we used it as a means to evaluate the city of Atlanta at the time. This is back in 2002. for when we joined the city in 2002, we didn't have any real effective way of collecting operational data in the city. We had no idea where we stood versus our peers. So we did a benchmarking study very similar to the one you're going to see. And when I joined IBM last year, we decided that it might be helpful for the cities if we were to repeat that study on a much larger scale and present it to folks, to mayors and city councils around the country just to help them as they go through their efforts to deal with their budget deficit, et cetera. So what I'm going to present to you is the results of this study of 100 cities that we did. And I'm going to go through it fairly quickly so that we don't waste too much of your time. But the sort of basic approach to this study is that we used public information, and Lexington was included in the study of 100 cities, and we looked at their spending and their employment data, and what we were trying to evaluate is how many resources do these cities require to deliver core municipal services. And those services include police, fire, parks, public works, planning and zoning, and then all of your support services like your attorney's office, HR, finance, et cetera. And then we basically just took all that data, did it on a per capita basis. We normalized it for cost of living differences. We normalized it for crime rates. So we tried to take out some of the factors that might affect spending and employment decisions across cities, and we just ranked them from 1 to 100. And so let me just take you through the findings of this study quickly, and then we can get some Q&A if you're interested. If you flip to the next slide, well, I should flip to the next slide. This is the rankings as they came out. So the way to read this chart is the upper left-hand side is the city that spends and employs the fewest number of people to deliver those core municipal services. And this is not in your deck if you're flipping through looking for your deck. We're not publishing this particular chart for the same reasons that David mentioned. We really don't want to embarrass folks about where they stand in these rankings. so we're just going to flash this in front of you. But just to give you a sense of where you stand, Laredo, Texas spends the least and employs the fewest people to deliver core municipal services. Yonkers, New York, at the bottom right, spends and employs the most. You are in the fourth quintile, ranked, I think that makes you 77th or 78th. There's two major findings overall from the study. One is cities spend and employ a wide variety of resources to provide services. The amount of money that cities dedicate to these services varies tremendously. So the way to read this chart is, on average, cities spend about $705 per resident to deliver those core services I mentioned earlier, police, fire, planning, et cetera. But some cities spend over $1,100 per resident, Some cities spend less than $400. So that's a very large variation across this sample set. Why is that? Well, we wanted to test why that was. So we tried to theorize as to what could be driving these differences in spending. And so we tested and we ran regressions on several factors, including population. We thought perhaps larger cities should be more efficient because there might be some scale economies that operate in delivery of services. That did not appear to be the case. There's no correlation between population and what we call efficiency. Perhaps geographic size wouldn't matter. We thought perhaps the larger the city had to cover, the less dense it was, the more expensive it would be to provide things like fire services, et cetera. That did not prove to be a factor in this variation. Labor conditions. Obviously, folks always point to the fact that they have collective bargaining agreements that cause their cost to go up. The data does not show that in the sample. There are cities in our sample who spend very little who have collective bargaining, and there are cities who spend a lot who don't have collective bargaining. So that was not a factor. Per capita income, we thought perhaps wealthier cities would choose to spend more on city services, and therefore they would have higher spending. That did not prove to be a factor. So this is interesting to find a curious result, really, because we thought there would be something you could attach the spending differences to. What we did conclude, however, is that what really matters is that those factors could be important, but they're being masked by something larger. And what we think that is is management decisions. We think that what ultimately drives how much a city spends to deliver those services are choices that managers, that bodies like you, make in what level of service you're going to provide and how you provide it. So even though most cities are chartered to provide a set level of services, you have quite a bit of flexibility to decide the level and quality of those services. And it's those decisions that make a significant difference in costs. There's also a wide variety of ways of delivering services, methods of delivering services, how much labor do you use, do you use technology. Dave mentioned earlier the use of e-government services. And how you source service, how much do you outsource, how much do you insource. All of those have important impacts on costs. So it's those decisions we've concluded makes the biggest difference. And this is borne out in one area of the study that I want to mention, And that is we did test the degree to which strong mayor forms of government comparative city manager forms of government. In our sample, there are 54 strong mayor forms of government and 46 city manager forms of government. And as you know, the reason we have city manager forms of government in this country presumably is because the thinking is that if you took political and other factors out of day-to-day administrative decision-making, that you would be able to use resources less, more effectively. In fact, that's what the study showed, that city manager reform of governments are about 10 percent more, spend about 10 percent less than strong mayor forms of government on a per capita basis. This is a strong mayor form of government, by the way, in case you were wondering. All right. The per capita crime numbers we used as a way of understanding these strategic decisions that people make. So the amount of money we spend on police services in the country on a local basis varies significantly. And so one of the things we want to look at is why can some cities spend less on police and others spend more regardless of the impact on crime? If you look at, in fact, if you map spending on police services and crime rates across really any sample set, if you look at our 100 cities, the more you spend on police, the more crime you have. That's consistent with research that's gone back 30 years. The more you spend on police, the higher crime you have. That is because spending on police is primarily driven by crime. Cities with high crime dedicate more resources because they really spend most of their time responding to crime. Police spending is largely a reactive spend. So if you look at crime rates and spending in cities across the country, the higher crime you have, the more you spend on police. That's consistent with research that's gone back 30 or 40 years. But if you flip that the other way around, the question we have, well, what if you take the cities that spend higher than average on crime but have lower than average crime rates, which is what on this chart shows these green dots are. Those are the cities that have lower than average crime but they spend higher than average on crime, so they spend more on police. And the thought experiment we said is, well, if you just took those cities and reduce their spending to the average on police, that that alone would balance their budgets. So let me restate that. If the cities that spend more than average on crime and yet have lower than average crime rates, and you simply move their spending down to the average, that alone would collectively solve their collective budget deficit. So that's the opportunity size we're talking about. In one department alone, you can actually reduce spending to that degree, which is obviously a significant point. Now, Lexington is up in the upper left-hand corner, although it's barely in that corner. So what that means is that you spend a little more than average on crime, but you have significantly less than average crime rate. So that puts you in that corner, but you're not, you know, you alone aren't going to solve your budget deficits on police spending reductions alone. But just to give you a sense of how you could use this data to kind of compare yourself to your peers and to understand that the fact is there are lots of cities out there that spend a lot less than you that have lower crime and have higher crime. And so trying to put yourself into that context, we think, is a useful exercise. This is how your spending compares to the peer set and your employment to the peer set. So on average, as I said, $705 is spent. You spend about $923 per capita for these core services. On average, cities employ about 653 city employees per 100,000 population. Lexington employees about 738. So if you look at the bar chart, you're on the right-hand side. You are in the fourth quintile. So how do you use this data? One way of using it is to give you direction. And what this is, you know, benchmarking is a very blunt instrument. So it's really just to help stimulate thinking and provide direction. It's not going to provide you any immediate answers. But if you look at sort of where you sit in this kind of matrix, if you look at the chart in front of you, if you're up in the upper left-hand corner, for example, that means that you employ a lot of people, but you don't spend that much money. That is an indication to us that that's a city that should be looking for ways to automate business processes because you probably have a lot of lower-paid employees doing manual tasks. And in fact, when Atlanta did this study eight years ago, that's where we were. We were in the upper left-hand corner. And that helped direct us towards improving the use of technology to automate our business processes and eliminate clerical-level types of jobs in the city. If you're in the bottom right-hand corner, that means you have higher than average spending and lower than average employment. That suggests you have a lot of high-paid employees. Your employee base might be high. Your labor cost might be high, and therefore you might be looking for outsourcing opportunities where you might find cheaper labor outside of government service. Lexington in this chart falls on the upper right-hand side, which is where you probably have a mix of both those kinds of issues going on. You may want to look at both those types of areas and opportunities. So what does this mean for Lexington? Now, this is a tricky chart, so I'm going to spend just a couple minutes just to explain it so you understand what we're saying here. So as we said earlier, 78th on our list, that your relative ranking is a consequence, as I said earlier, of two different things. One of strategic choices you make and operational choices you make. You might make strategic decisions to have more parks than other cities do. You might have strategic decisions to provide a broader set of recreational services. You might have strategic decisions that says we need more police officers for one reason or another. Those are not efficiency issues. Those are strategic choices you make. That will drive your relative position. However, there's also operational choices you might make. How do you leverage technology? What kind of mix of capital and labor do you deploy? How do you source things? those are also contributors to your relative position in this ranking. If we were to move you from – this is strictly a thought experiment, but it's intended to give you some direction. If we were to move you from 78th in the ranking to 20th, to the bottom of the first quintile, so if you were to move from 78th to 20th, what would that mean in terms of the amount of resources you would be spending? What that means is that you would actually be spending about $140 million less than you currently do. So to get you from 78th to 20th in this ranking, you would have to reduce your spending by $140 million. And the way that that spending would be reduced is in how this bubble chart shows you by department. So the intention here is to show by department where you relatively sit versus your peers in spending. So as you can see, the biggest bubbles are on the right-hand side, which is police and fire. So if you were to look at your entire city, the areas where you are most farther from best practices than in any other department is your police and fire. You spend more in police and fire versus your peers, relatively speaking, than your other departments. So it's really your police and fire is where we would say that's a place that you should be looking very hard at. As I said, there may be some very good reasons why you spend that way you spend in police and fire. There might be decisions that you wouldn't want to change. But it's worth understanding those decisions because they are clearly different decisions that other cities are making. There also may be operational issues that you might go on cover as well. And in my experience, you'll find both. But that does not mean that we're not suggesting that you have $140 million worth of efficiencies that you can pull out of city government. That's not at all what we're suggesting. We're simply saying that this is the space that if I was running a form program for you, that's where I'd be exploring first in these areas. because this is where you are relatively speaking hives. Parks is next on that list. The rest of them cluster fairly close to the middle. In fact, your planning department already sits in the top 20. So that's why they're on the bottom left-hand corner of that chart. That means your planning group, your planning department, already is spending less than the top 20, or sort of alone is in the top 20 of the spending. The closer you are to the middle of this chart, the closer you are to sort of the 20th position in the chart. Does that all make sense? I know that's a confusing chart, but I just wanted to make sure you used it. This is usually a study that I spend an hour and a half with folks on, so I really apologize for how abbreviated this was, but I just usefully wanted to give you a sense of what this work was. The intention here, as you said, is to help cities focus their efficiency efforts. We're all facing huge budget challenges these days. Those challenges are structural. They're not going to go away with a recovering economy. IBM's point of view is that cities really rethink their business models, and one step in doing that, as we think, is to really evaluate the efficiency of your operations through using these kinds of tools so that you can focus your efforts and make sure that you're not simply doing a lot of cross-the-board cutting and doing things that aren't necessarily as strategic as they might otherwise be. And with that, I will turn it over for any questions you might have. Any further questions? I've got a whole list here of folks, Ed Lane being the first. Thank you for your report today. I did have a couple of questions, and I'll just direct them to you, and if you don't know the answer, maybe somebody else will. The first question I had for the area surveyed, were you dealing with Metro County, the MSA, our regional trade area, the different cities. Are you talking about the first or the second study? You're talking about the first or the second study? Well, I was thinking about the first data, yes, sir. The first study actually we used different levels of data depending upon what we were looking at because of the availability of data. Some was available at the metro area, the MSA level, other times it was available at the city level city level or the county level, depending upon the different data that we're looking at. So we were leveraging, again, publicly available data sources, and those would vary widely depending upon the area of measurement that we were looking at. Sometimes the Census Bureau will have things by the county, sometimes we'll have it by the city, sometimes we'll have it by the MSA. So for example, in the recent information on the crime data, that would be based on a city or a county or a county or whatever. You can get that city best. Actually, we actually got that data updated from the sheriff's department when we did the smartest city assessment. Okay. What department? Sheriff's department. Is that what you said? Sheriff's department. Okay. Okay. One other question I had is on educational levels. I didn't see that addressed. And I ask that because we have one of the best educated populations in Kentucky, and we are way above national average. And because educational levels are a real component of, you know, the workforce and the knowledge economy we're dealing in competing globally, I think we would rank very high in that area. But I did notice that in there. Is that something you do look at, too? Well, we were looking at, for the Smarter Cities assessment, it's going to be different than when we would look at doing an economic assessment. Because when we do an economic assessment, we're looking targeted at specific industries. So we're going to be looking for various types of labor categories and different skill sets. So we were looking at this much more broadly. So instead of looking across multiple labor categories and levels of educational attainment, that wasn't one of the areas of measurement that we were focused on in this study. We were looking at performance of school, performance of schools, but not looking at educational attainment of the population itself. Okay. Okay. So a follow-up on educational levels. How about per household, per capita income levels? Do those have any value in your analysis at all? We looked at median income as one of the factors that we consider in terms of educational outcomes. We're looking at poverty levels. We looked at educational, the education, the performance levels of the school, graduation rates, and then we also looked at median income adjusted for cost of living. All right. Another question is on the energy cost. Kentucky has one of the lowest energy costs in the country because we are a coal-based energy source. And that, obviously, if you have really low energy costs, sort of disincentives you to have alternative energy sources. Do you see that as a bias a little bit on the report? or do you think we should be assessing alternative energy, even though we do have low-cost utilities already? Cost did not impact the evaluation in energy. We were not letting cost be an overriding factor. Obviously, coal-based source energy and electricity is going to be a lot less than other sources, at least at this time, and in many regions, unless you have access to hydro or wind in prevalence. So that was not a factor that we considered. Cost did not drive the assessment. Okay. All right. I think your partner, this is his question coming up. On the, when you were looking at crime data, did you also look at things like unemployment rate or per capita income when studying that? because if you have a high unemployment sentencing, sometimes the crime rate goes up, or if you have low income, crime rate sometimes goes up there too. Did you just really look at the number of instances? We looked at Part 1 crime rates, so the Uniform Crime Report that the FBI uses for the city. We used that, and we simply used that as a means in our study to understand spending patterns. So the presumption being, and this is borne out by the data, that the more crime you have, the more police officers you need. And we didn't want to punish cities in the rankings for the fact that they had to deal with higher crime. So we controlled for crime in the rankings. I've just got two more questions, so I guess you'll be happy to hear that. But I was curious. I think this is very meaningful information, and I believe that government on all levels would be interested in benchmarking the performance of a local government or state government with other similar entities around the country. And my question is, is this a new public service for IBM, or is this actually a business you've created and you're going to provide this service for a fee to government? Could you touch on that? Well, part of it, and I think Dave touched on this a little bit at the beginning of his presentation, so IBM has started this Smarter Cities program where we are trying to help local governments improve their efficiency and effectiveness. Part of the way we do that is we do some thought leadership. We invest in research like this so we can develop a point of view about how those cities can improve their efficiency and effectiveness. So this is a study that we did on our dime as a way basically to communicate to our potential clients that, you know, we have an invested interest in helping you improve. We have some insights we think we can bring to the table, and we'd obviously love to sell you consulting services at the end of the day. Well, if we were to say to use your service, will we have the ability to consult Watson in making those decisions at the council level here? If you put it in the form of an answer, yes, you can consult Watson. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. Councilman Myers. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you for going through this second study with us. And a couple of my questions Council Member Lane just asked already, but looking at slides 16 and 17 were the two that stood out at me when I was prudent before you went to the presentation, I guess if I skip 16 and just go to 17 and then go back to really the question that Council Member Lane asked, what do you do with this information once you have it, now that you have this? I assume part of this is because you're looking to locate facilities in different places and you're looking for the best opportunity for you guys. No, no, no. I'm sorry. That's not at all what we're trying to do. Okay. So we have a services business, consulting business, where we are selling our services to cities, states, or federal government to help them improve their efficiency and effectiveness. So as a city of Lexington or as other cities are putting together their plans to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their services, we've got a broad set of services that IBM provides as a consulting firm. And the point of this work is just to point out to cities a couple of things. One is we've done some thinking about your situation, and this is data that I think helps you to help direct your efforts. And B, we have a set of services that we can come in and help you with, whether some of them are technology-based, some aren't technology-based. We can do organizational redesign. We do business process improvement. So there is a whole set of services that we think we can help cities, that we can deliver to cities to help them improve the efficiencies and effectiveness of their business and help improve their business. So if we wanted to look at page 16, and we're up there in the right-hand corner where it says we design operating model, then we can engage you in helping us do that. Yes, exactly. And then the next slide, when we look at how we could save some of that, the opportunity to save some of that $139 million, we could also engage your services to help us figure out how to do that as well. Right. So one of the things that we do, what we typically do with the city after looking at this kind of data is that we would say to them, look, we think you need to do a diagnostic in particular departments. Police, fire, and parks are the obvious places in Lexington to start. And we have a tool set that we go in relatively inexpensively. So the first step is to go in and just take a look at those departments. And let's see if we can understand what's driving your differences in these spending patterns. Let's see whether these are strategic decisions you're making. Let's see whether these are operational issues that are – and it may – in our experience, it's a mix of both. And we can say to you, you know, you guys are choosing to provide recreation programs and aquatic centers to every citizen in your city. I'm just making this up. Every citizen in your city, did you know that lots of cities or most cities don't do that? Most cities concentrate those kinds of services in certain areas. And so we're not saying that that's incorrect for you to do that, but that that has a cost implication. It costs you to do something like that, and you just need to understand that. We also might uncover the fact that you're not using e-government to pay in your finance department as extensively as you might. And if you were to do that, you would actually spend less in your finance department. So it would be a diagnostic that would be intended to kind of root out and identify what the sources and the drivers of this cost difference, these differences are. Okay. And I was going to say e-commerce would probably be one to add in there because we can probably collect more and do it for less money. You know, there may be opportunities there, but there's dozens and dozens of areas that you could do. So is there anybody else operating in your space that does this same type work? I don't think there's – let me put it this way. I joined IBM last May, I guess. So I left the city of Atlanta. I wanted to go into local government consulting. I wanted to consult the local government. And I interviewed with just about every large consulting firm out there. And I could not find one that was as serious about local government as IBM or was making the level of investments that IBM was making. I mean, this is an indication that this is something we did on our dime. Sure. There's no other company out there that I know is making these kind of investments. But that's, of course, a biased point of view, so I'll let you. I'm sorry, I mean, cut you off. No, no, go ahead. In terms of timeline and process, what would be the next step for a municipality that wanted to engage your services to do so? Our next step would be to come in and do a diagnostic, and we could do a diagnostic on 10 departments. We could do it on three departments. You could do it on as many as you want. And depending on how many you want those to do, it would obviously drive the sort of cost of that. But that's something we could do in a matter of a few weeks. It's not a terribly extensive or expensive effort, but it would help. Again, it would be the next step on the ladder that you're creating to do a sort of a redesign of your government or you're going to call it a turnaround plan, whatever it is. Most cities have got to figure out how to make their revenues match their cost, their expensive. I mean, we're all in the same game now, cities. And so, you know, building that plan of action, that medium and long-term plan to get a business model that's fiscally sustainable, and that's what we're trying to help cities do, and this is just one step in that process. Do you have any kind of – I guess what I'd like to do is see this committee and the council move in the direction of at least engaging in that first piece. Do you have any kind of ballpark of what it might be in terms of cost? I know it depends on how many different divisions we would do, but say you've done the study now. You identified three, I think, if we put e-commerce in there and made it four. Are those the top four that you would go after if you were us? I've only been in a short period of time, but I've already learned that it's not a good idea to throw out numbers to political, legislative bodies. So I will defer the answer to that, but we would be very pleased to come and have that conversation with you in a different setting. And really what we need to do is, in seriousness, there's a couple things we need to understand better. How much information do you have? Because so much of what we're going to be doing is assessing the information you've got about yourselves. And some cities have a lot, and some cities have hardly any. So we've got to spend a lot of time digging out the data and information. That's obviously going to be more resource intensive. So part of it, we need to do a little due diligence before we start throwing out numbers. But my point would be this is not huge, expensive consulting work. Certainly this first step is not. Okay. So, and I'm almost done. The last few questions then. Could you put together a one-pager or a two-pager that would kind of outline the steps that the local government would go through to get to the end? Sure. I'd be happy to do that. And then I guess I would move that this committee vote to recommend to the full council that we engage you in that first part of the process. We'd love to be loved. So I guess I make that in the form of a motion. I realize that we don't know what the cost is going to be, and that's got to be a part of it. We have a motion on the floor. We have a motion. Do we have a second? A second. You know, it may be premature to make that decision sitting right here right now. Councilmember I mean I realize we don't have I think we need to peel the onion back a little bit more I know a little bit about dealing with IBM I promise you Well okay let me ask this I realize we don't have a cost so we have no idea what we're talking about but I want to get the process started so I guess if you put that one or two pager together that would help but maybe if you could put some numbers around those five categories if you will We'd be happy to do that Thank you very much Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you. Council Member Crosby? Thank you, Chair. I have a few questions, but I also have a suggestion to Ms. Huffman, Sheila, who's from Urban, Texas. She was brought on by the mayor to look into some of these performance measure areas, and it might be beneficial for you all also to talk to her and kind of look at it, because there may be some areas that we're very strong in or that she's doing this in currently and where you may see, based on the study that you've done, where we might be lacking and there might be a logical fit there rather than just, you know, blindfolding and looking at all these targets, trying to figure out where we need help. Because clearly when the study was done, we had a different administration. Now we've got a new administration, and they've come in and tried to make some of this a priority. But it still doesn't mean we don't lack in a lot of areas with these types of measurements. The other question I have is, did you all look at relationships that we have with outside agencies when it comes to, for example, like Commerce Lexington? We have a partnership with them when we look at our economic development ventures. Did you all look at, I guess I would be looking more at the first part of the study, did you all look at that relationship and the effectiveness of that relationship? I'm just curious. Well, one of the things that we look at in the business dimension, and it's not a quantitative, it's more qualitative, looking at support to business, and that included looking at economic development organizations. And the model for Commerce Lexington is very similar to a lot of other cities, where there is a private economic development organization that augments and supports the city's economic development organization. Obviously that model is in place because it provides flexibility for that organization to do a lot of things that otherwise the city wouldn't be able to. So the model for Commerce Lexington is very similar to what a number of other cities have, either at the city level, the MSA level, or even the regional level. So we did look at how effective that, well, not how effective the organization was, but generally the support and responsiveness. And that was also informed by a lot of the work that we do from a site selection perspective in interacting with these organizations. So looking at the effect, we did not specifically look at the effectiveness of the investments that are made by the city into the economic development organization and the results in terms of investment and direct investment that has resulted from that. That we did not look at, but we did look at it from an external perspective of how much support does that organization provide to external organizations. So, for example, like if you all have a part of what you do is you help consult companies on where they're going to relocate or where they may locate. And so when you're talking about site selection, that's how you looked at the relationship or what the services they provide was from a site selection and business support measurement? Right. I mean, there are some cities, smaller cities even the size of Lexington, that it's nearly impossible to find the information that you need in order to figure out if you wanted to invest in that region to get the quality information that you need. So, I mean, we see very good models and we see very bad models. And Commerce Lexington's model was, I think, on par with the cities that we looked at. Did you say on par? I'm sorry. It was on par. I would say on par. We didn't do a detailed analysis from a customer service perspective or responsiveness perspective of Commerce Lexington versus the other regional or city economic development organizations as a part of the study. And would you say it's probably, you mentioned that other cities did have this relationship. Excuse me? Leading. Yeah, or would you say that like 50-50 again, that there's this type of relationship with external agencies, with cities, like we have set up, or would you say that it's done more in how? I'm just trying to get a feel for what you see since you've looked at 100 different cities of different sizes. What type of relationships? I couldn't put a number on an allocation of the number of cities that leverage a private organization to augment their economic development efforts. I would say that the practice is fairly common. And if not the city having an organization itself, the city relying upon a regional organization that may do it. So there may not specifically be one set up for a city. They may rely upon a regional body that does it. For example, Columbia, South Carolina is a regional economic development organization that supports that central Midlands district. So it doesn't necessarily have its own that it's funding, but there is a regional partnership that receives its funding both from the public sector and the private sector. So I couldn't give you an exact percentage of how many cities in the U.S. leverage that model of public-private economic development organizations versus those that have just the city run. I was just interested in the cities you all looked at, not every city. I would say in the cities that we looked at, almost all of them have, there exists at least some form of a private economic development organization, either at the city, MSA, or regional level, that provides site support services and investment promotion services. Okay, thank you. And then the slide that's up, can you tell me where you got these numbers from? Are you using general fund dollars? These are general fund dollars out of your most recently enacted budget as of October of last year. And then when you looked at some of the different, for example, like, say, public works and transportation, did you take into consideration the dedicated fees that we have, particularly around transportation? Like we have a dedicated fee with LexTrain, and we rank very high in transportation, So I was just wondering how those fees may have. So in each of these departmental areas, we had to narrow it down to sort of like and like services. In public works, this is almost exclusively streets and sidewalks and lighting. This is not mass transit. It's not bus services because not every city is in those businesses. We had to focus it on the sort of core, it's really streets and bridges and that transportation. Okay, well, I appreciate you all coming today, and thank you so much. Part of the reason why we like to get information like this is, well, one, it was free. You all did this study, and I think what many of us read or found out over the course of the past few weeks is that sometimes we pay for things and don't necessarily get the best quality. So we appreciate the fact that you all have done this and that you included Lexington as a city. I'm not sure how we got included, but we appreciate it. And that this is just another tool in our grand scheme of when we're coming up with our plans. I believe that we can look at some of these different areas and just take into consideration where we may have ranked high, low, and what kind of changes we may want to make and whether that's sticking with what we do or something different. I don't know now, but at least we have one more tool to look at as we go through our process. So I appreciate you all coming, and thank you, and I'll stop. I don't know if anybody else can. Anybody else have a question? I got several. I get to go last, I guess. There are a few things that just don't quite match up in my mind as it relates to, for instance, It's the transportation and congestion and where that fits and influences the carbon footprint. The carbon footprint that we use for our energy is 35 miles away from here. It isn't here. And if we have a positive transportation system and congestion, you would think that we'd have a lower carbon footprint. We didn't do a carbon footprint diagnostic of the city of Lexington. In the transport area, we were looking at the investments that are made in the public, in the transportation infrastructure. We were looking at the assessments regarding the roads and the quality of roads, extensiveness of the infrastructure, looking at the quality of public transportation and also the degree of adoption and use of public transportation, looking at the energy intensity of the transport infrastructure. But we were not looking at specifically the emissions from vehicles as it relates to a carbon footprint for the city. That was not something that we did. I mean, that in itself is a – Well, but it influences air quality, theoretically, anyway. The air quality data that we were getting was from external sources. We did not do a carbon diagnostic and footprint of the city of Lexington. Certainly we didn't do it to directly correlate the carbon footprint from transportation emissions. But if you look at the results of the assessment, though, it does inform that the degree of adoption and use of public transportation in Lexington is well below the other cities that we looked at. The percentage of individuals that use public transportation as a means of commuting was the lowest of the cities that we looked at. But the cost of public transportation was very reasonable. We looked at the energy intensity of the public transport infrastructure. There was, I think, limited use of biodiesel as a percentage of the overall fleet, as opposed to some of the other cities that use alternative fuels as a vehicle for their fleets for public transport. So those are the types of things that we looked at in that regard. Okay. Mr. Edwards, you mentioned aquatic centers. Would you have any information about cities running golf courses? To the extent that golf courses were separately budgeted in people's budgets, we took them out. So if your golf course, I think it is separately. I think in your budget there's a golf, as I recall, there's a separate line item for your golf courses. Oh, yeah, it's a line item, but it's within the general fund budget. But we would have taken that out of the study because that was not part of it. So when we went to these departments, as I was mentioning, in public works, we actually went to layer down to make sure that we weren't penalizing cities. One city that runs a golf program does, we didn't want to, you get away from apples to apples if you do that. So I don't think golf was in here. And while we're probably not unique in this, this hidden population, many cities, especially in the south, have illegal alien population, which is estimated to be 40,000 people in Fayette County. And you can't get your arms around it. But that's one reason why we have a large police force. That's a good bit. Yeah. Well, I appreciate it. Thank you very much, and we'll probably focus at some point and see if there's a second step for us. Great. Thank you very much for having us. Very good. Thank you. Back to on page 57, items referred to the committee. Of course, I don't think there are a whole bunch of those, but... I'm not even sure. Should be on the back. Motion to adjourn. Second. All in favor? Aye. Adjourned. We are adjourned. I'm not sure what you're doing