The Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Welcome, everyone. It's two minutes after 11. We do have a quorum, and this is a special meeting of the Environmental Quality Committee. We do have a full agenda, and we also have a couple of members of the public who wish to address the committee, and we'll have that public comment and conversation following the regular agenda. The first item is the waste management presentation. And so, Mr. Feast, if you're ready to roll on that. Okay. The floor is yours. I'll go through this PowerPoint slide presentation pretty quickly and leave room for questions if we need to. And we've got a little demonstration of some of the new technology that we're using at Waste Management that we'll have at the end as well. Submission statement. I think all of you have received this information here. We employ an integrated waste management system here in Lexington. What that means is that instead of just sending all of our waste to a landfill or an incinerator, we use a lot of different tools to manage waste. Recycling, composting, landfilling, things like that. Certainly education is a huge component of what we do. To educate residents on the importance of recycling properly, to prevent litter and illegal dumping, those are key components of what an integrated waste management system is all about. We also use a zero-waste vision, which means that recycling and composting can take front and center, that landfilling will ultimately be a marginal activity, that we try to find the highest and best use of all components of our waste stream. And also that we look to find ways to collect and process items in a way that reduces our carbon footprint, whether that means driving our trucks fewer miles or that means using different fueling systems. Let me give you a little background in terms of our scope in waste management. 87,000 Herbys, 63,000 Rosies, 53,000 Lennies, once per week collection. What's not shown here is our dumpster collection. There's about 3,600 dumpsters provided to businesses and multifamilies. That's twice per week for those dumpsters. So on a typical week, depending on seasons, have about 180,000 to 200,000 service points that have to be taken care of. Last year, we hauled and sent to our transfer station on Old Frankfort Pike about 139,000 tons of landfill-bound waste. This is handled by Republic Industries. and this is all paid for out of the property taxes where we actually pick the material up and once it goes from the transfer station to the landfill, that's still all paid by the property tax. The only part that's paid by the user fees is the disposal into the landfill once it gets to one of the Central Kentucky landfills. And so that comes out of the Herbie fee. What we typically know is the $4.50 fee that goes to each household on a per month basis, and the user fee that businesses that have our service also use. Our recycling facility, our MRF, is located on Thompson Road. About 24,000 tons was processed last fiscal year. This year we're on the line to do in excess of $2 million in revenue from the sale of the commodities that we send through there. Yard waste composting is done at our Haley Pike facility. About 21,000 tons were processed in 2010. Parks and Recreation also sent about 1,300 tons out there. That material is composted by Red River Ranch, a private operation, into mulch. But we give a lot of that mulch back to residents. Eight weekends per year we give mulch away free. These past two weekends we gave away 26 tractor trailer loads of mulch to almost 800 residents. So it's a very popular program. We're also trying to expand the scope of what we're doing in terms of organics composting. Not just yard waste anymore, but we're looking at food waste and compostable paper, basically anything that will rot. We have done some workshops that teach people about food waste composting and how to make sure that operation goes smoothly. We are also doing a pilot project in the Clay's Mill Road area involving 400 homes. And basically they can put in their lineys more or less anything that will rot. We're evaluating the levels of involvement there, and we're also at the landfill or at the compost facility evaluating the decomposition rates. Our e-waste facility is on Versilles Road. It's open six days per week now. We take everything from microwaves to cell phones, CPUs and TVs and fluorescent bulbs and rechargeable batteries. Once again, a very popular program. construction demolition debris that basically means a lot of inert material it's about 21% of our overall waste volume that we're sending to the landfill we have a CD landfill at Haley Pike that is nearing the end of its life it has only about 14-15 months of space left and so we're forced to make a decision in the next few months about whether to open up a new cell And we're also investigating ways of recovering CD items, such as concrete, wood waste, asphalt shingles, metals. All those things are very recoverable, and we're definitely investigating ways to do that. Let me move ahead just a minute here. I mentioned that CD waste is about 21% of what we throw in the landfill. And these are the items that are going into the transfer station. This was done by an outside firm a couple of years ago, and this was the first time we'd really ever done a full-scale waste composition study. And it shows how everything is kind of spread out there. We're still not recovering 24% of what's going into the landfill. This paper, a huge chunk, 23% is organics, basically the food waste, some yard waste that we're still not actually getting, and some paper towels, things like that. So most of the items in this pie chart are recoverable through composting or recycling or some form of waste diversion. I'll go through these slides here. This just shows you the Urban Services Fund and split it in three separate systems. street cleaning, which is provided by streets and roads and forestry, refuse collection or waste management, which is provided by waste management, and street lights, which is handled by traffic engineering. The 14.3 cents in refuse collection represents a tax rate. Just to give you an example, a home that's assessed at $100,000 in assessed value would have $143 in taxes. This is the breakout of fiscal year 2012 in terms of what the revenue estimates are going to be, how much we're bringing in. Same for the landfill. Once again, this landfill fund, the money's come here through the $4.50 fee that each household that has a Herbie sees, Each business that has a Herbie or a dumpster also pays into this fund, and this fund goes to bury the waste into landfills, and also we have monies from this fund that have been set aside to close the Haley Pike landfill that has not been officially closed yet, but we're nearing the point where we need to actually do that. This just gives you some breakdown of how the support divisions within government are funded. out of the Urban Service Fund. And so there's a number of agencies that are at least in part get their operating funds out of this fund. This looks specifically at waste management. I know the material recovery facility there is showing here. That's a couple of years ago. I think, Brad, is that fiscal year? FY10. That was the year when we were installing a lot of processing equipment. That is down considerably now. It's less than half of that now in terms of what we've requested for FY12. This is the same thing for the landfill fund. Once again, the large number there, the waste management, that's the fund that's going to pay Republic Industries to dispose of waste. we've been asked to come up with a cost of service estimate the cost of collection for the carts for dumping a Herbie, dumping a Rosie or a Lenny we've tried to go more toward automation throughout our service areas and here it is 51 cents is on an automated truck we have a three man truck with a rear loader it's 90 cents per Herbie, Rosie or Lenny cart dumped and with the dumpsters it's $338 per dumpster. Now what this is is a representative sample of the cost of, in terms of personnel operating the capital cost of the truck, but this does not include a lot of the administrative overhead cost and certainly a lot of the ancillary services that we offer to our residents. And this is a snapshot in time. As we move forward in our zero-waste vision and move materials from the landfill-bound waste stream to recycling and yard waste, the cost of collecting those streams are going to change. They may be relatively the same in aggregate, but the individual cost of those streams are actually going to change. We are doing a lot of new things at Waste. As I mentioned, all of the 180,000 to 200,000 service points that we offer each week, we've been pretty much doing on paper and 2A radios. And it's really, in order to move forward and to become more efficient and to have better customer service, We knew we needed to change some things. So we've gone through a computerized rerouting system that has already yielded some good results. We rerouted our commercial routes in the fall, knocked a couple of trucks off that area. And then just a month ago, we rerouted all of our residential areas. And so we're just beginning to settle in. It's a much larger operation, and so we're still adjusting some things in terms of what the model said and what's actually needed to provide the kind of service that we want to provide. We're also going through some changes in terms of our customer service database. We have a brand-new customer service database. For years, we have used PVA, which was not always accurate for our purposes. We didn't know always exactly who we had in our service area and who we didn't. But this new customer service database called LexPro will do a variety of things for us. First of all, it will communicate much better with LexCall so that they will be integrated into what they all know what we know and vice versa. And we'll also be able to, I think, have a lot better understanding if we're missing some addresses out there that are not paying for it. We've already found some cases like that. We have a new GPS system in our trucks, and one of the things that we're hoping to do, and this is an evolving process, but lower the response time for our ancillary services. All the things that we've talked about with cart delivery and repair, bulky item collection that we provide every week, used appliances, tires, all of those things that we provide, we need a better way of communicating to specific trucks that those services need to be provided. We don't want them to have to run the entire route when they would only have to go to a point-to-point routing system. And so we're still working through some of those challenges. Let me go back, and I mentioned the ancillary services that we provided, and I'll just go back through those. I just mentioned the bulky items. The environmental education that we do, I guess the bulk of what we do is our partnership through Bluegrass Pride, working with a variety of schools, actually all schools in Fayette County, as well as apartment communities and businesses. This is critical to what we do. The paper shred days are now, thanks to Esther Mobley, who's back here, have been implemented on a monthly basis. Just last month we had over 1,000 cars. Last November. We had 1,000 cars come through for paper shred day. And so now through a partnership with a private company, we're going to offer this free of charge to residents to be able to come in. A lot of folks want their paper shredded for security reasons. So we're doing a variety of different events here at Cache for Kansas, something we've done for a number of years here over the past five or six years. Here are just an example of some of the other programs that we've gotten involved with that we've been doing also for years at Animal Collection, Inner City Alley Cleanup. We've just started the Keep America Beautiful Commission, which is now I think a year old, something like that, that's really handled through environmental policy. At this time I'll introduce Rich Miller, who is our project manager on really introducing all of the technologies that we've been involved with here, the rerouting of 320 collection day areas. And I don't want to embarrass Rich, but he's been a dramatic help for us in terms of going above and beyond what anyone would expect from our project manager. Rich is going to show us basically what we do with what a unit looks like in one of our trucks and how we look at the addresses, how an individual driver will be able to actually count the addresses. Rich, you want to go ahead and take off? Thanks, Steve. What we're showing up on the screen here, what we wanted to share with you is what the driver actually sees when they get into the truck and they start their route. Prior to this, their responsibility is to do a pre-trip safety inspection of their truck. We hold this route basically as a hostage until they've completed a pre-trip and safety inspection, and then we load them with a route. Once they have the route, this is a touch-sensitive screen, as you can see. What I can do is I can scroll up and down. It does start at the very beginning of their route. It shows them the address, customer name, and then the type of container that needs to be picked up. When they're at that address, when they press done, what it does is it marks that particular line line with a green checkmark. Or if they need to skip that particular address, they press skip, and it defaults to that container is not out. One of the things this allows us to do is this data is immediately sent back to our customer service desk so that if we get a phone call from a citizen who says, hey, you forgot to pick up my container today, we can say, no, we were there at 7.15 a.m. this morning and we skipped it because it wasn't out. The other thing we can do is we can go into a navigate mode, and this is somewhat similar to a Garmin. All these little black dots, and let me kind of expand on this. All the little black dots here are the stops. So while this looks somewhat simple on the screen, what this particular route has got on it is close to 900 to 1,000 stops on their route. And you can see the little flashing yellow star there. That is the next stop. So again, I can zoom in a little bit on this. And this is what the drivers do. It's very interesting, the personalities of the drivers, as to whether they prefer to use a straight list of the customer or the map. And I don't know if it means they're left-brained or right-brained, but a lot of them prefer to use the mapping function. So as they go through and they hit done, that black dot will turn to a green dot. Or if they hit skip, skip, skip, you can see the red dots. And again, all of this information is transmitted back to our customer service desk. We can see which locations were serviced and which locations were skipped. Let me go back to the customer screen. Some of the other functions across the bottom here is if they need to jump to a particular, a different part of their route. And again, we spent a good six months at the beginning of the project trying to optimize as best as we could each of these routes. And that's to take into account the amount of time in a neighborhood, the amount of weight per truck. We're trying to redistribute the weight on each one of these routes. That's how we were able to reduce the total number of trucks that cover the city. But things do happen. They can't always follow this sequence exactly as it's laid out. there might be a car that's broken down, there might be a fire, there might be other reasons that street is blocked. So they may need to jump. If they jump, they can go to the top of the route, middle of the route, bottom route, or locate. And what the locate function does is allow them to geocode where they're at. So if they've got a particular part of the route that they know they need to service next, they can drive there first, hit the jump locate, and that will geocode where they're at, and will pick up on that part of the route and move forward. They can also jump to next up, and frequently what we're finding is if a driver is going in and out of their route, they can't remember exactly where they've been. If they jump next up, it will go to the first customer that they have missed. So there's no excuse for missing a route or missing a stop. It will always take them to the last stop where they were located. If they know the address, they can jump to the address. If they know the sequence number, they can go to the sequence number. So if I say zero, it will jump directly to that customer location. Across the bottom, they can add extras, and a lot of the drivers were very interested in keying in extras. If they stop along the way and there's bulky items or there's extra bags set out, they're worried about not getting credit for the additional time and the additional weight that they've had to pick up. So in this case, on that customer, I can say extras. Say I've got extra bundles or I've got a customer container. I've got two of those. I can save it. Now I get credit for the extra material that I've picked up at that address. If I have a complicated skip, for some reason I skip that address, and it's because they've got illegal material. And again, as Steve said, we do a lot of transmission over two-way radios. This is now information that the driver can key in directly. I've got illegal material. I save it. It's now been reported on that customer that I've got illegal material. So when they call in and say, hey, you skipped my container, I say, yeah, we skipped it because you had illegal material in it. They can add additional comments. And I don't want to spend too much time on all of this. We do have timers for them. And the timers are to allow for unforeseen things. If they have a flat tire or if they go to the landfill, they start the timer. And it's basically all it is. Very simple, very basic. They could take a break. They could take lunch. Whatever it is, we account for that additional time where they're at. They might be out at the landfill. They stop the timer. And then we've recorded it. So that's kind of a highlight, very high-level review of what the drivers actually see. I think the training for the drivers took some time. We have had some challenges, but I think basically they've all got the hang of it. There was some resistance to technology, but, again, I think they've all embraced it and we're moving forward. And I'll be glad to entertain any questions if there are any later on. Just a couple more slides here. Going back. Too far. Just some of the deficiencies that we're hoping to garner here over the next few months. As you know, a couple of years ago we purchased property adjacent to our base of operations on Old Frankford Pike, 30 acres to locate a new MRF, and we are going through the design phase on that facility right now, and we are preparing later this summer to come back to you to report on what the status is on that in terms of moving forward with Phase B of the design phase. and so we're excited about that. Everything is looking positive. One of the other projects that you may see coming on in the near future is we're looking to try to get the Herbys and Roses off the downtown streets and to kind of streamline that system. And we're looking at some cart corrals to centralize the cart collection and looking at the purchase of some electric vehicles to at least collect some of the waste from the downtown area. So right now we collect waste six nights a week in the downtown area, or I mean actually 11 times every week. And so we're hoping to kind of streamline this operation at the same time, hopefully make Lexington, the downtown area, look a little more free of Herbys and Roses. Some of our upcoming events, we've got a home composting workshop again tonight. Is that right, Esther? Esther is our education person here. She has done a marvelous job on really ramping up a lot of our education activities. Great American cleanup that we're involved with, of course, every time this year, Kentucky River Clean Sweep, and the EcoArts display. And this is an example of some of the EcoArts that was made from glass out of our recycling facility from Lexington traditional magnet students. That's all I have. If you want to ask any questions, we'd be glad to try to entertain. Steve, thank you very much. Committee members, if you have questions for Mr. Peace or Mr. Miller, hit your request to speak button, and Vice Mayor Gorton, you're first in line. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you very much, Steve. And my first question is for Richard. On your new software, where you mentioned the documentation of illegal materials. Does that go into a database that tracks that over time? For example, if a home has multiple illegal material incidents, or is it just a one-time? We keep a history. So what we're building now, we're only three weeks into it with the regular residential pickups. But I have every day, time, comment of every route will be maintained in history. And the customer service people can pull that up so we can see if there's a repeat offender. And so when the illegal materials are documented, is there also some, we used to do the tagging of the Herbie or something. Does that still go on so that the homeowner or renter knows? Yes, we still tag. We still tag the containers for education to the customer. They've still got a problem, but we're recording it internally so we can see it. Basically, this is eliminate a lot of the paperwork where the driver has to do the tag. They write it down. They turn it in. It goes into a file. So we've got it all electronically now. It looks terrific. I can see you're happy. You like this. I think that's really good that we are gathering data that way and that our drivers can, you know, be more efficient. So that looks really good. Thank you. Steve, I had a few questions. You mentioned a shredding day. Can you remind me what citizens who shred at their home on a regular basis do with their bags of shredding? because I know you don't want it dumped into the Rosie and they set out a bag. Right. Well, the best thing to do is just put it into a plastic bag, I think that's what we've – in a clear plastic bag so that when it comes to the MRF, when it's dumped into the Rosie and dumped into our truck, all to the MRF, the folks that are on the line can see the clear plastic – they can see the shredded paper through the plastic bag, They'll pull it off and separate that because if you just send loose material in there, it drops through all the processing systems and will wind up being a landfill. So the clear bag actually goes in the rosy? Clear bag in the rosy. Aha. Okay. Very good. Now, about the urban service funds, you mentioned the revenues, but there's nothing in here about fund balances. Does anybody have fund balances for us? I don't at this point. Can we get that? We'll certainly work on it. Because I think that should be available. Would you? We'll get that for you. Okay. And then with the, and can you make that individualized per fund, the fund balances per fund, not all lumped together? Certainly. Okay. And then I wanted to ask about the indirect cost. Over the many years, we've always discussed indirect cost, and it is someplace in here. You had some indirect costs, and I wanted to know what sort of it used to be. We used a formula to figure that out, and what is the current formula? and method that's being used to fund indirect costs. That's probably a question we'll have to ask for Commissioner of Finance. I'm not quite certain on that. Page 20 has the... Steve's correct. That cost is calculated through Jane Driscoll's group, and we, of course, have pointed out that we're not completely sure, you know, whether that's appropriate, not appropriate, And so Jane has committed to reviewing that calculation. Right now it amounts to about 25 percent in the Waste Urban Services Fund. And this is how it's allocated, and it's been allocated based on a formula over the years, but that formula hasn't been updated in a while. So she's very aware and is committed to breaking that out and doing a more thorough analysis to see if the number is accurate today. So, Commissioner, are you saying that 25 percent of urban services funds goes to indirect cost? Did I understand that? I believe that is correct, but I'm not able to break that out for you at this point. And what we did do, though, was show you basically in dollars where those charges go. Okay. So budgeting needs, we need to ask budgeting? Yes, and I know they're aware of our question. That question's been asked, and they've definitely committed to reviewing that whole situation, reviewing the calculations and the percentages and updating them to reflect current costs. Okay. Because in the past, I'm just trying to understand this, page 20, you have a very significant, over a million dollar cost, for example, that's charged to risk management, insurance, and law. But those are things that would also have gotten indirect cost allocations. So what is that line, the $1.078 for risk management insurance and law? I believe that that is based on our injury rate and some of the workers' claims that have to be addressed each year, and that varies year to year. I think Steve did mention and kind of went through it quickly, but our injury rates in the Division of Waste Management are relatively high. I think we're second in city government, injury rate and accidents. And so something that we definitely are focusing on now is to reduce that injury rate. So that's why you may have noticed that Rich emphasized you're held hostage until you do a safety check on the trucks. But we're also working very hard on automation. I think the fact that we're going to fewer manual labor positions and automating is going to help us in that area. but that particular number is reflective of the total number of injuries and accidents that we've had in that waste division. That number changes, and it's on top of the ongoing personnel. Okay. So, for example, government communications, that is direct cost for things that urban services funds request, as opposed to indirect cost that, you know, GTV3 might be doing or something like that? That's my understanding. Those are requests that we, for example, programming or filming or different sorts of events that we ask them to cover, that kind of thing. But I'm not completely sure on the details of that. I know this is what the charge was, and we've certainly been through a lot of this in the budget discussions, and hopefully we can flush some of this out in the LINCS committees. We start our LINCS committee tomorrow. Okay. But, oh, thank you. I didn't realize that line includes LexCol as well, so I apologize. I didn't know that. I forgot. Is that an indirect cost, LexCol? Or do you actually send money in your budget to LexCol? LexCol allocates its charges based on the total number of calls that it gets. So it's a very data-based charge. So, okay. Sorry. So if LexCol, out of 100 calls, typically the majority of the calls to LexCol have to do with the Division of Waste Management. So the lion's share of LexCol funding actually comes from Urban Services Fund. Okay. So that's not considered in direct costs. You're actually allocating money to LexCol in your budget. Based on the total number of calls and the percentages. So they do actually break that out, and they charge. I know we get water quality also gets charges. but their charges are much lower than waste because the majority do come in that way. And we're hoping in the future, as Rich pointed out, you know, some of what we're dealing with there are citizens who believe they set their waste out on time and drivers who say that it's not out on time. So a lot of those calls coming in are trying to straighten out some of those situations. But as we get more and more efficient with how we pick up and manage our waste, hopefully the total number of calls into LexCall for complaints particularly will drop. That cost ought to go down. So budgeting can then tell us, it would seem to me then that you shouldn't be charged indirect cost for LexCall, for example, but they could tell us that. Yes. Okay. And I know they're looking at it. Okay. I had one last question, and that is if we're going to, and I've asked this before, I'm like a broken record. If, in fact, we're going to get to zero waste, what are we doing with our private haulers who don't take and offer all the services that we offer? How can we ever expect to get there? Well, probably a variety of opinions could answer that question. I think there are a number of things we've discussed in the past all the way from coming up with a process to require that by ordinance that that be offered. A lot of our private haulers do offer different services, recycling, and people pay fees for different types of services that they want in their own home, where we have a tendency to come at it more from a bundling philosophy. we have a cost, and then we bundle in all the services like everything from mattress pickup to mulch. So those things wind up getting bundled into the cost of service for us. So it's a matter of deciding what do we want to require as a part of being a waste hauler or a business in this county, and putting that into ordinance would be my guess. You could do some competitive bidding. There's a lot of different ways to do it. And then, you know, we have, although I firmly believe, and our surveys indicate, the majority of folks in Fayette County do heavily support recycling, there are people who don't. And so, you know, we've never required our citizens to recycle. That's still a personal choice. But as we're starting to see our revenue streams increase and we're investing in recycling systems, it helps all of us to get more and more volume. We can now handle three times the volume of recycled materials that we could handle a year ago. So we are much better positioned to take more recycling. So if we require recycling, then we would require service providers to recycle. But all of those things would have to be, in my opinion, vetted with a lot of public input. You know, what do people want here? And then what can we come up with that would maximize our systems as a city and also provide services to those folks that are outside the urban services area. Thank you very much, and thank you ahead of time for sending the fund balances. Okay, got it. Thank you, Vice Mayor. Council Member Martin. Thank you, Chair. Mr. Feese, I've got a couple questions. Did you – I didn't see much information about commercial operations, and I know that we were interested in looking at that. Do you have any more information on commercial operations? I guess I'm talking about, you know, what the budget is for commercial operations, how the fees are set up, and sort of how the service is structured. Well, all of the services, all the collection services are, once again, paid for through property taxes. when a business has a dumpster for instance the user fee that they pay is based on the size of dumpster that they have. 8 cubic yard is $48 and it goes down to 6 and 4 cubic yards so they pay that fee just like residences do but we've been providing that service for a number of years so it's fairly straightforward businesses are required to rent their own dumpsters by ordinance. That's not something that we offer, but we do provide the service. So what's the property tax that businesses pay? It's the same rate that all properties pay, 0.143 or $143. I'd like to see how much that adds up to on different types of properties. Okay. And I'd also like to see how that adds up for various residential properties, because being a property tax, if you have a very expensive property, you're paying a lot more than folks who have less expensive properties for roughly the same service. Is that accurate? Yes. I mean, like Cheryl mentioned, all of these services are kind of bundled in, and whether we're talking about specifically dumping the dumpster or providing a variety of the other services to keep the city clean, those are all kind of incorporated in that same property tax. And so, yes, you're paying more. When you're paying at the property tax, you're paying for more than just that individual service point. So one of the questions I have is what's the fairest way for us to charge and to collect revenues for the service? And I don't have any information to be able to know what the difference between an average house cost and a different type of property. With commercial properties, there's a wide disparity. Obviously, if you have a mall, it's a different cost than if you had a small little office like mine. So if you could put that information together, I'm very interested in seeing what that looks like. The other thing is residential folks can opt out of this service. Is that correct? I'm not an attorney. That's probably a question for law. My understanding is it's – Well, you have private haulers, don't you? We have private haulers, but we've had folks opt into the service for a number of years, but to my knowledge, we've never had anyone to opt out. So, I mean, I understood that folks can get together a petition inside that they're going to go private. Is that not true? That's never been done before. It's never been done before. Not to my knowledge. Well, I have to quit telling my neighborhoods that they could get a petition. That's what we, yeah, I thought that's what we were told. So you don't have a form for opting out of the collection. But not everybody has it. That's correct. We service about probably 86% to 90% of the residential homes in the city service area. What about commercial? Probably a higher percentage of that. We're probably in the low 90s in terms of the businesses that we serve. Okay. So I'm also interested in the opting in and opting out because my concern is that there's just a wide disparity because it's a property tax rather than a fee for what the services actually are. And I think what I'm hearing from constituents is that they'd rather have a fee because then they know what they're getting and that it's more comparable to the actual service they're receiving rather than something that's based on the value of the property or something like that. And commercial properties, particularly there's a lot of disparity that may not reflect the level of their service. And so I think that's something I'd like to explore. Thank you, Chair. Thank you. Council Member Henson. Thank you, Chair. Steve, I want to thank you for doing the presentation, and I appreciate the efficiencies that you've put in place over the years. I think you're making some big strides for improvement. But I had a question about the items disposal that goes to the landfills. Have you been recording a reduction of weight? And like I know you said 139,000 tons or whatever, but since we started the recycling program? Yes, there has been a drop. And part of it's due to the economic realities that we have here. When people are buying and spending less and buying fewer products, they throw away less. We had about 40,000, or I think it's 25,000 to 30,000 reduction from the previous year when I said the 190,000 tons that we hauled. That was a drop of probably 25,000 tons or something like that. I don't have that number right off the top of my head, but there was a reduction. The good news is that our recycling tonnages that we collected pretty was actually ticked up just a bit, I think. And so we were more than holding our own in a time when less was being generated. Okay. I get, you know, that was my question. Is the recycling a huge benefit to our landfill as far as a reduction in the waste that goes there? We definitely are. And also, when you pick up bulk items off the streets, is that recycled? No, not at this point. Not at this point, but it's something we certainly want to look at. And a lot of the items that we pick up are construction demolition items that could be recovered, and that's why we are very seriously looking at a construction demolition system that would capture those items. I know in certain areas of my district I see a lot of tires and TVs, and I know that all that could be recycled. So currently it is not. If you bring a TV to our e-waste facility, certainly that's recycled. We have a facility that we work with in Georgetown that is a state-of-the-art facility that recovers all these e-waste items and breaks them down to their individual components. But we have not been able to capture some of the televisions and some of the e-waste that are sitting on the curb at this point. Okay. And bear with me. Okay, the electronic recycling, what are the hours? It's six days a week, is it? Right now I believe it's 8 to 5, forgive me, and it's 8 to 5 Monday through Friday. It's 8 to 4. Okay. 8 to noon, Monday. Okay, thank you. Steve, could you repeat those hours on mic so that the audience might hear these? Monday, Tuesdays, and Saturdays, 8 to noon. Wednesday, Thursday, Fridays, noon to 4. Okay. Thank you. Another question I have is if someone, a business has the dumpsters, how often are they picked up? Twice per week. Same as any business that has a Herbie. That's correct. And they can ask for additional service that we'll offer for a fee. Right. And I know you talked about cleaning up the downtown area of roll carts. I would like to see that expanded to be major corridors into the city because there's Herbies. A lot of times if businesses have Herbies and they have multiple Herbies, and I see it as an eyesore coming into our community. And let me see if I have anything else. I think that's it. But thank you so much, and I do appreciate the work that you've been doing. And I know I was screaming and yelling about a lot of things in my district that need to be corrected, and you've done a real good job to address those, and I appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you, Councilmember Henson. Mr. Lane. Thank you, Mr. Blues. Got a couple more questions for you. And thanks for coming down to visit with us this morning. I'm sure this is a lot of fun. That's fine. All right, the first question I had, do you receive like a monthly financial statement showing the operating expenses for solid waste, what you've expended and what your budgets are and how much in line with the budget you are? Yes. All right, are you able to provide a copy of that report to the committee? I don't have it with me today, but I can certainly provide a copy of that. Well, we had, there were reports in the packet for the sanitary sewers and the storm sewers with balance sheets and all that in there. I don't know if your accounting is different from theirs because of your source of revenue, but I think that would be very helpful. The other thing that I'd be very interested in, when you did your estimate of cost to pick up one dumpster, Do you have worksheets on that and a little more detailed information? I like to review those numbers and see how those were calculated. So I'm requesting for myself. If any other member wants it, that would be fine. The other question I had is, in the past we've had some under time issues, and how is that going for us right now? There's no problem with that at this point. And our challenge right now is getting folks done on a tight basis. As Rich can tell you, we're having struggles to get them in from everybody done at 4 or 5 o'clock in the evening once they start at 6 in the morning. So your routing has worked out very well. You've got them working full schedule. Yeah, full schedule and a little more. And I would say, Ed, and all of you, I just want to compliment our staff, Kevin Bennett, and all of the folks out there who have worked so hard and put in so many hours on getting this and really handling all this new system because it's not easy. It's something that they've been doing for a long time, and we're asking them to do a lot of different things, and they provided the service very well. Well, that's very good because that was a big issue a few years back when I was early on the council and where people were able to run their route and get done a few hours, and then they got paid under time because they got a guaranteed minimum daily pay or whatever. Now, what about overtime issues? Are we okay on overtime too? Yes, we are. Overtime is a dirty word with our budgets being as tight as they are. The other question, have you had any issues with training with your new computers, your GPS system and all that? Do you have to go through an extensive training with your drivers? Rich has been working very hard on that. I know he's done quite a bit of training. It's an interesting dynamic with a lot of the drivers. We tried the initial training with a group of about 12 or so, and we found out in a group of 12 they interact negatively. We get a lot of negative interaction. But we sit down with groups of two or three or four and they're like little puppy dogs. It's not a problem. So we broke it down into smaller groups, worked with them hands-on with the screen, then walked in and out of the truck. For the most part, the training after about maybe two or three hours, two or three sessions, they understand how to work it. I think we've only had a literacy issue with maybe two or three drivers. And then once they memorize the pattern and the color scheme of how to hit done and skip, they work fine. And on the under time, it's very interesting. We do have the GPS tracking. Some of the information we can gather and look at is how long they've been idle, more than five minutes. So if they've been sitting somewhere more than 20 minutes, I usually call them out. And they call me eagle eye. Okay, very good. I think that's probably most of my questions today. Thank you very much. I would like to see those reports, and as soon as you could send them, I'd be happy to look at them. Thank you. Thank you, Council Member Lane. Council Member Stinnett. Thank you, Chair. You didn't think I was going to skip, did you, Steve? I didn't know. Well, since you incorporated what I asked for in the budget and finance that wasn't prepared a month ago, not by you all, but wasn't on our agenda, you kind of infused two presentations, So I appreciate the timeliness of getting some of those numbers in there. I guess the first question, I'm going to go back to what Councilman Martin asked about, and that was can people opt out of our service? Now, understand, I'm not a fan of that. I don't think they should be able to unless it's an extreme circumstance. But I think the council needs to be clear on exactly how we're monitoring and regulating that because, one, we submit to the state, and correct me if I'm wrong, a five-year plan of solid waste, our operation. So we submit to the state, Councilman Martin. And in that plan, it says we will not let people opt out of our service. Now, having said that, this council also says a tax district. We have several of them, as you know. And we said a tax district can change it for a particular residence or a street or whatever. You have that purview, too. But also, we need to understand that following our policy and the plan we submit to the state would be in our best interest as a group to follow that policy. And that policy does say we will not let people opt out of our service. So I just want to make sure you're clear on that, and we can talk offline about that. Second thing is on your presentation, I didn't see a key number in there for whatever reason. I'm not sure if you have it with you, but what are our total expenditures for solid waste only? I think our budget is $25 million. We spend every dollar we take in. We don't have any excess. That's what I'm looking for. I see a list of things. Obviously, I can sit here and add it up. I just want to be clear on what our total expenditures are for the solid waste piece. I don't think this reflected what the actual revenue – I mean, I have the revenue number, which is $25 million last year, projected $26 million this year. I'm looking for what our real expenditures were, and I guess I can add up pages. Our – this year, because our revenues were pretty flat, And as a result of the 10% decrease that we had in our tax rate last year, our expenses and revenues were very close. That's not the case usually. It's not been the case in the past. But this year it has been the case. So they were close to $25 million? Yes, because we had initially requested a number of capital projects that we cut out of the budget. We also eliminated 31 vacant positions. Okay. So, you know, we did do a lot of cuts in order to come in line with our revenues this year. So I know two years ago in the budget it was proposed to cut at 10%, and then this year we're supposed to cut another 10%. We're not pursuing that, I assume, at this point. Not to my knowledge. Good. So I want to go back to your cost per service, per Herbie. This is just the Herbie. It's not the Lenny, the Rosie, the Grubby, the Lily. It's just the Herbie, right? Okay. If it's $0.90 at a worst-case scenario, we have 100,000 households, we pick them up once a week, 52 weeks a year, that's only $5 million. Where's the other $20 million? Where is that being spent? That's what I'm trying to get my hands around. Or what does that $0.90 equal? What does that represent, that $0.90 per Herbie? Because when we did that calculation in 2006, I can tell you it was almost $4 a Herbie. Either we calculated it wrong in the end or we're not figuring in something in that $0.90 that we did back then. Something doesn't. Let me get back to what we did. We calculated the cost of just going and picking up that Herbie, okay, just the Herbie. But it's not the waste stream. It's not the landfill-bound waste stream, which includes bulky items, mattresses. It's not the overhead cost that's included in that $0.90. And so it's just the cost of picking up that. Which is what, labor, the labor cost, the vehicle fuel. Operational cost, vehicle fuel, the capital cost, and the indirect cost, too. I think, Brad. Is there not a way to, because we need to include Lexi call costs for service, the landfill costs. I mean, there's a lot of other costs I think we used to include in there that would really give us an indication, because going back to what Councilman Martin mentioned, if we ever want to go for a pay-as-you-toss service or something like that, you know, we would really need to know what the true cost is for the whole operation per Herbie to really get to that point, or Lenny or Rosie or whatever it may be. And in certain items, it's really the cost of the waste stream because any of those waste streams are not necessarily contained in those carts because it's all landfill-bound waste or it's all the recycling stream or all the yard waste, and there's often a lot outside of those carts that we pick up. Other cities don't necessarily do that. Sometimes they just say, well, we're only going to pick up that cart if it's not out there. You know, Louisville does bulky item collection twice per week, or I'm sorry, twice per year, where we do it weekly. And so that cost, and incorporated with that cost also are education efforts to reduce illegal dumping, litter prevention, things like that. So that's all those indirect costs that, while whether you consider that part of the cost of service or not, is an important factor in how you come up with that number. Well, if I take $25 million as our true cost for the whole operation, it's about $5 a Herbie when you get down to it. And so it's a much different, you know, to realize that kind of number is a much different. And that's what I'm trying to help you all because I really want to understand our true costs so the public understands, you know, it's not just $0.90. There's other things that go into that to pick that one Herbie up. Did you want to say something, Commissioner, I assume? Yeah. We struggled to answer your question. I think one time you even said it's a simple enough question, but it turned out to not be a simple one to answer because it depends on what you want to consider. And I know that, you know, I kind of go back to when we developed the water quality management fee under Vice Mayor Gordon's direction. One of the first things you have to do is decide what is the service we're going to provide. You know, are we going to continue to do composting? Are we going to? Because a lot of cities don't do any of these things. They just pick up the garbage. And that's pretty basic. And that's the most basic service we can offer. But we do a whole lot more than just pick up the garbage in this city, and we've bundled all that. So some of my dilemma is not at all that we don't want to answer the question, but what do we want to, as a community, include in the scope of work? I don't know, you know, do we want to pick up mattresses? Do we want to pick up appliances? Do we want to offer electronic recycling? What about household hazardous waste? Those are things that have proven to be very, very popular in this community, but they cost. Every single one of them costs. And if we don't want to offer that, we will reduce our cost. But then again, it adds costs not only maybe in quality of life, but also the dumps that we have to clean up. If you're going to charge people to recycle, many, many, many people will choose not to. They'll dump it. So we've got all those things, and it's not as easy a question to answer. And we really did think about it all the way from taking the $25 million and splitting it and saying $5 a Herbie to, well, what would it really cost to drive a truck this many miles with this many people on it, which is the other end of the spectrum. And then I think what I would like to see is maybe an approach in answering that question would be to have the same kind of group interaction that we had with the water quality fee, where the first thing we discussed was what service do we provide with this fee? and then decide. Because I think any of those things, we can pick that apart and figure it out, but I don't know what you want to include in the service. That's, I guess, my fundamental question. Well, I just want to include at this point what we're currently doing. And then I guess long-term would be to answer your question would be do we want to continue doing those things and provide a luxury service or do we want to provide a basic service? So I appreciate those comments. I do want to ask one final question. Is the cost to pick up a Herbie the same as a Lenny, as a Rosie, or are they all three totally different costs? Roughly. The cost of picking up the Rosie and Herbie are the same. As long as we're picking up by an automated service, and it's one of the challenges we have. We've converted almost all of our recycling and composting operations to an automated service. Just one person on the recycling truck. Typically it's two people on a yard waste truck. Landfill-bound waste varies between one person. and, of course, we also have the other services in terms of bulky items that we have to send out right now as well. So, but the cart, as long as it's automated, is roughly the same. But non-automated, it's not okay. But not in the entire waste stream of dealing with the bulky items and things like that. Well, thank you for the presentation, and thank you to all the men and women out there that do the work on a daily basis. You know, Council Vice Mayor Gordon and I were challenged the other day to provide more police and fire cars and fire trucks and things like that that we already do often, but I want to challenge everyone to ride the back of a garbage truck for a day with these men and women. You mentioned underpaid, under time. Councilman Lane, you can't spend the least amount of time on the back of a truck. It's a difficult job, and I value the job they do every day because you can't have our city without them. So thank you. Thank you, Mr. Stinnett. I'm going to call on Councilmember Farmer next, if you don't mind, since he hasn't had an opportunity to speak yet. Thank you, Chairman. And really just one question and a comment, but I'll agree with what Kevin has just said. You all do a great job out there, and I appreciate coming out one morning to speak to your guys. Absolutely. They enjoyed that. Before they headed out. It's nice to drive around town and have the people in the trucks honk at you. Most of them wave. Some of them just signal. So your page 20 has gotten the most comments and questions, and I'm just at the very bottom of it. I know it's probably in the budget document, but I didn't bring that stack of things in with me just now. What is the traffic engineering function for $4.5 million? I know it's something I'm probably overlooking in my mind, but I just wondered. Street lights. It is street lights. I figured it was going to be something just that simple, but I just want to make sure that's a lot of street lights. Yes, sir. Keeps from going. Thank you very much. Council Member Martin. Mr. Feese had a question for you, a follow-up. You know, we've had some continuing problems with pickup in the sort of part of Beaumont, and I was looking at your automated system where they click that off. How is it possible to miss streets with the automated system? How does that happen? Well, it could be that they're not showing up on our map. We've got some instances where the new mapping system, I just got a call today. Over the first three weeks of this new system, we're having a few streets that pop up, and boom, there's one of those streets that's not on the map. That could be the situation. We are also reorganizing some of the things we're doing out there in terms of people's job roles, and so we've got our central dispatch system going before. We've never had it in the past, but we're also looking at having people placed to be able to monitor all this information flowing in. We've got kind of a fire hose of information coming in that we have to try to make sure that we're monitoring. And so we're in the process of putting people in place to monitor all these routes. So that's the other thing. Rich, you have anything you want to add? So the two issues that have come up most frequently are the missed streets, which we've got one particular street where if it happens again, I think they're going to succeed from the union or something. And then leaking trucks was the other one, a lot of leaking trucks around. And we've talked about that. There should be less of a problem with that. Now, of course, this is the wettest April on record. Some of the trucks that we've got are new, and they don't compact quite as much. A lot of the problems we had was grass. When we pick up grass, we encourage folks to leave grass-cuttings on their yard as much as possible. This was like paint. It's sort of out on, and you can see the trail behind where the truck went, that kind of stuff. Yeah, I appreciate it. We also encourage people to bulk their paint before they put it in the Herbie. Once it gets into the truck and the truck compacts it, it's not watertight. It's going to come out, and that's the enforcement thing. Thank you, Chair. Thank you. Council Member Lane. Yeah, I've just got one short more question for you here. On the acquisition of new equipment, do you have any plan for this fiscal year, or is it in the budget for next fiscal year? My understanding there are no plans for capital purchases for trucks this fiscal year, this next fiscal year. So this is for the year ending June 30th, 11th, or? No, FY12. FY12. All right, and then have you bonded any equipment? Are you still basically paying cash for equipment? What's yours? Last year we did bond equipment, and we still have a couple pieces of equipment that we're going to be taking in this fiscal year. Okay. All right. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Steve. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Miller. I think that this has been an interesting and helpful presentation and question-answer session. What we've got here, I think, are beginning to formulate our number of agenda items for this committee. So, colleagues, you've created some work for us because I think we will want to address the compulsory recycling issue. If we have over two-thirds of the public who support compulsory recycling, I think that that's something we really want to look at. We want to consider the private handler issue and the services that are offered there. the issues that Council Member Lane, Martin, and Stinnett raised, the relationship between the costs of service and the services that we provide, the scope of work, I think that is the definition that we probably want to address as well. So we do have a number of agenda items for future meetings. So thank you very much for that discussion. Next, Director Martin and his report on consent decree issues. Charlie, I hope we've allowed you sufficient time to work through this, and I think there will be some questions and responses. Okay. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Ready? Okay. Thank you. The reason I'm here primarily is this is a follow-up to a presentation that I gave you in January of this year. It had to do with where we were with sanitary sewer assessment work and particularly the remedial measures plans. If you'll recall, I talked a lot about remedial measures plans and what those are. Those are going to be the plans that get sent to EPA that commits Lexington to what we're going to fix, when we're going to fix it, specifically a schedule, and approximately how much we're going to invest in our sanitary sewer system to make sanitary sewer overflows go away. And so a big part of that was that the consent decree required us to go out and do public participation allow for public comment on the development of those plans, which is basically what I'm here today is to report to you back on as far as what we found on the public involvement. The agenda for today is really summarize that public involvement, the input received, discuss the impacts of illicit connections that are on private property, essentially stormwater or groundwater that gets into the sanitary sewer system improperly, Provide some initial cost estimates for the required improvements under different design storms. And address critical issues that need decisions. The first remedial measures plan is due to EPA in October of this year, five months away. And time is of the essence. Decisions that need to be made need to be made early because if we make them late and our consultants do a lot of work headed down the wrong path, they'll probably be able to fix it, but it'll cost us more money to develop those plans if we don't make the decisions up front. In particular, I wanted to emphasize two things today was this issue about private property. Based on some of our assessments, we found some interesting characteristics associated with private property. And also the magnitude of rainfall events used in the designs. I mean, that's really where the rubber hits the road is that we can talk about making overflows go away, but under what conditions? Unfortunately, we had another significant rain event last Tuesday. And as I was sitting back here going back over this, I made a note to myself as I'm probably working on something for constituents of yours, for about half of you that are on this committee. And so you're very, very aware that there are private property issues, not only on the giving end, but also on the receiving end. You know, we can focus on the remedial measures plan on the fact that EPA made us do it. Or we can focus on water quality in streams. To me, I think the harsh reminder of last week is it's about public health, protecting public health, and protecting private property. You know, we have some folks that are in the audience today that are particularly interested in how this thing unfolds because they're in that last category. Unfortunately, we meet these folks in the most unfortunate circumstances, and you do, I know, as well as far as dealing with constituent services. So I invited them to come and hear what we had to talk about so they would understand, hopefully, the magnitude of the problem, but also that we could work towards solutions that caused where we would not have to meet on those unfortunate circumstances in the future. In the recent public involvement, we've been out on the roadshow. I belong to a little Bible study group on Monday nights, and when I showed up yesterday, They talked about my celebrity because they've heard me on the radio, seen me on TV and all this. And so we've been with you folks, and we've met with the legislative aides, your staff in particular, so they would have a better understanding of what was about to transpire and be able to field questions from constituents. We had three separate individual stakeholder group meetings, Commerce Lexington, the Home Builders Association, and Fayette County Public Schools, recognizing it as having significant impacts in the Commerce Lexington. That included representatives from the U.K. and the Lexington Bluegrass Area Realtors. The media in GTV3, we've also met with representatives of the Fayette County Neighborhood Council, not only individually, but also they attended one or more of the four public meetings, which some of you were in attendance as well. The primary concerns of the residents, this is kind of what my takeaway from these meetings were, is that the portion of wet weather problems that can be attributed to private property is a concern. I share this concern as well, and I think this is nationally, you'll find this in other communities, that if you fix the public system and don't deal with the private property sources of clear water getting into the system, you probably won't fix the problem. I read an article a few weeks ago where Milwaukee is going back again now, and they're actually dealing with private property in a much harsher manner as far as forcing improper connections, because all the tunnels and all the millions and billions of dollars that they've spent on their system, they still have overflows that occur, and so they still have a problem. And so residents were concerned about that as far as that, well, you know, everybody needs to pay for it if we're all part of the problem, but who's more part of the problem than the others? And so that last part of it was a lot of things that we took away from that, is the people who are putting more into the system, they ought to be the ones paying for it, not me because I'm not putting anything in the system. The problem with this is you don't know who's putting what into the system. There's really no way to really know that without intensive door-to-door investigations, And we're not set up for that, not only legally, but also administratively as a division. You know, the prevailing humor thing that goes on in my division, you knock on somebody's door and you tell them you're from the government and you're here to help, is usually not a good way to get in the door. But also, too, is that people want to see that the SSO is eliminated, but they are concerned about those costs. And we'll talk a little bit about costs here in a minute. I wanted to use an example of a particular area that we've studied the system extensively. We just sent the Sanitary Sewer Assessment Group 1 report to EPA last week. It was due last week. $6 million worth of investment. And so we have a huge, huge amount of data that was not at our disposal in 2008. And so I wanted to choose one particular area, but not for any particular reason other than it typifies what we found throughout the area. Just to orient you here is that here is Richmond Road, and here is the reservoir. Fontaine, as it comes into Richmond Road, this is the particular area that we're focused on here. This is what we call the Prather Road Trunk. This next map, kind of busy, and I made it as unbusy as possible, but essentially what we have done is this, is that we've got a flow meter location that's right there, and everything within the purple line drains sanitary sewer-wise to that location. And so we were measuring flow that comes out of that particular neighborhood. Why, you ask? Well, because it was of interest. Right downstream from that is the wood subdivision, where we have chronic recurring problems as far as wet weather overflows. And so we wanted to try to hone in on what are the potential sources of that. You've got one major sanitary sewer that goes up there, and it breaks out into the neighborhood into smaller ones. One thing that's not shown on here is the storm sewers, because we're still in the process of mapping storm sewers. But I can generally tell you they're not very robust here. This is the top of the hill. This is an older neighborhood. It's fairly typical where you don't have a lot of storm sewers. All right, we have that flow meter there. So, okay, well, what did it tell us? What it told us is that right here on the x-axis, this is time in days. And on the y-axis, this is the amount of water that comes into the system based on gallons per minute. You can tell when it rains. Right here, we're baselining about 200 gallons a minute coming into the system. rain event in March 27th of 28th, we peak out at 1,120 gallons per minute. The rain goes away and it falls off, not to the predetermined levels, but it still falls off. But you can tell when it rains again. The ground is saturated, and every time that you have a little bit of rain, that thing keeps bumping up and down as far as the flow until finally in this area here, it finally basically returns back to normal. boom, rains again. This is very typical of what we see in numerous locations. Right now we have a list of 14 neighborhoods where we have similar results, some worse than others, that we are in the process of trying to develop into future neighborhood projects. But again, it gets into this issue about whether or not that we're just dealing with the public system or the private system. One of those areas, Ms. Gordon, is in the Zandale area. Now, we know we don't have the overflows that we had before on Zandale Drive because we replaced that sewer, but we also did neighborhood rehabilitation on the public system. The flow meter wouldn't tell you that we did very much there, that probably the bigger pipe had more of an impact than any of the rehab that we did out in the neighborhoods itself, because we still, it's one of those 14 projects that we would identify as a fast-track project. Likewise, in the Idle Hour area, we did $750,000 worth of public system rehab back in 2004 in Wood Hill Idle Hour. It was a bond project from 2001. It still shows that we've got a significant amount to water. Now, that's not to say that there's not other public property issues that have gone on there, But the likelihood is that we've got a significant private property issue that we haven't dealt with in the past, and it's going to be my recommendation that we consider different ways to be able to deal with that. But as I said earlier, the local conditions were not unique. I see other cities, other colleagues, they have the same thing that goes on with that. And when I say public, I mean, you know, stuff that's out in the street or that's out in the easement. What's a little bit more dicey is what's private. The individual pipe that comes to your house and connects to the sewer out in the street or in your backyard, that's considered to be privately owned. And if you've got a downspout or a sump pump in your basement that's connected to that, that's also a private source of clear water. None of those things need to be treated. We pay to collect, convey, and treat that on a regular basis at a fairly extensive amount. And then also you've got some fairly large private collection systems. Most all of the University of Kentucky campus, that's a private system, that we don't operate or maintain any of the pipes that are on campus. Likewise, Fayette Mall and some of the other larger apartment complexes are considered to be private systems. But how these things interact with one another, some of you may have seen this slide before, is that you've got the public system out here in the street, and you've got a broken manhole or cracked pipe or what have you, and those are problems that we can control and we can fix. I'll have a slide later that talks about what we've been doing up to this point. But then you get into the private lateral. If that lateral is all broken because of tree roots or something else, or the clean-out, which is a maintenance access point, if the cap of it's broken off and all the yard surface water is draining into it, that's a problem. roof drains. This slide doesn't even show the sump pump. So it's a collaborative thing. Water will seek its point. And it will find to get in there anywhere you can. And if you go back to the earlier slide where we used that particular neighborhood as an example, we have a large number of older neighborhoods in Lexington that weren't really built with much of a storm sewer system. They have basements. I neglected to mention on that slide, most Most of the houses in that locale have basements. So if you're in a basement and you don't have a drainage solution, you only have one pipe to connect to, the likelihood of it being the sanitary sewer is pretty good. I just got some examples of some of the things that we've found and corrected over the last couple of years. You've got one that both of their downspouts are connecting. This guy here is particularly ingenious. This is the downspout, and it comes in and ties in directly to the clean-out that's for his sanitary sewer system. So he didn't mess around. I mean, he just sent it right in there. Here, this is disturbing in the sense that you see the white puffs of smoke here. This is a private service lateral to this house. I think three years ago, the government did a community block development grant project where we replaced the storm sewers, the Sanchez sewers, rebuilt the street, all the public infrastructure, new public infrastructure, but yet you've got houses out here that the lateral leaks like a sieve every time we get a high saturation level because we haven't dealt with it in the past. A couple of other examples here. this is the guy standing here looking at, there is a, here's the garage right here where my pointer is. There is a driveway drain right there. It works very effectively in being able to keep water out of that gentleman's garage. Unfortunately, that smoke tells me that that driveway drain is connected to the sanitary sewer system, not to a storm sewer system. So everything that sheet flows off his driveway ends up in the sanitary sewer. Combine that with some of the other sources we've talked about already, and pretty soon you have a manhole that's overflowing in somebody's yard, or worse still, a backup in somebody's basement. Same thing here. This is a loading dock, so probably even worse than the first picture. But driveway drains are a significant problem that we have found in the past. And recognize that we've been doing this for the last couple years, that we've really only scratched the surface on the amount of system that we've been able to explore, roughly about 20% of the system. This could be an ongoing thing that we could do for a long, long time. A gentleman, a former colleague of mine who used to run the Montgomery, Alabama system, he talked about a project where they had gone in and replaced all the clean-out caps in one neighborhood, and their flow meter gave them great results. They had solved the problem. A year and a half later, the flow meter showed that all the flow had come back. Why? Because that particular neighborhood was a low area, and as soon as they put all the caps on there, everybody started having residential flooding. So the residents went out there and took the caps back off so they didn't have flooding problems anymore. So when we talk about developing a solution to deal with private property, I think that one of the things that I mentioned in the public meetings is we've got to give strong consideration to giving people a solution to their drainage problem. because any of us would take that step as if we've got a drainage problem in our basement. If we have to take matters in our own hands, we will do so to protect our property. I want to talk a little bit about some of the stuff we've been doing because I know that that would be a concern. Shardy, you're up here talking about all the doom and gloom and all these problems, but we've done 430 sump pump redirects since 2008. We've been going at it very, very aggressively. Likewise of those smoke defects that you saw earlier, I didn't put this on the slide, but we have had about 710 private property defects revealed by smoke testing that we've already corrected, either through sending folks letters, asking them to participate, in some cases using public dollars to help them accomplish that, and in other cases using enforcement. On the public system, we've spent about $5.2 million in a variety of locations, and one that we're focused on right now is out in the Wolf Run 2 area, essentially Beaumont Middle School, the Lexington School area, that flow meter showed big problems. We had history with problems there, and so we've been out working on repairing sewers out in that location for about three months now. One thing that's interesting, the project manager who is handling that, I asked him what his biggest problem is, and he says it's all the flow that's in the sewers when nobody's home. Sump pumps, a lot of basements in that area. I mean, because one thing that has happened as far as this wet weather has really drawn a real spotlight on some of the problems that folks are having as far as reoccurring overflows. But also for us, when we're out here in nobody's home and the pipe is running half full, that's a pretty significant indicator to us that there's other things going on than just the public system. One of the things that I would suggest or recommend, and I know that this is probably not going to go over well with folks because we always get tired of the task forces or subcommittees, but basically what I'm asking you to consider is that we focus more on how to deal with the private property aspect. And there's just two suggestions here about an expanded system dealing with sump pumps. We've approached this in the past. Other cities have a mandatory sump pump redirection program. I don't necessarily would be recommending that to you based on what my earlier comments were, is that if we don't give people an alternative, then we solve one problem and create a whole different set of problems. For example, in Mr. Blues' district, I went to check on one of the ones we worked on last year. that thing travels all the way down the street, around the corner, all the way down to Forbes Road before it finds a storm sewer. In the wintertime, it's probably a sheet of ice. And so we don't want to create one problem while we solve a different one. Okay, we've talked enough about private property. I want to get to the other part of what we got from the residents. They want SSOs or sanitary sewer overflows eliminated, but they were concerned about the costs. We've got some cost information that's in your packet that you've, I'm sure, already peaked at already. I want to make sure that I emphasize these are current estimates based on very general concepts, not detailed engineering, not geotech, not right-of-way or property acquisition or anything else, just general. By general, we've tried to choose what is the most straightforward conservative approach as possible. And that conservative approach means that, one, no INI removal, no inflow and infiltration removal. And the second one is make the system big enough, the pipes big enough, to convey all the water under a particular design storm to the bottom of the drainage area and then store it until the rain event goes away. So it's very simple and straightforward instead of having a mix and match because that would have made it difficult to come up with a cost estimate. Now, I will say is that from the practicality associated with no I&I removal, I think that's conservative. We're going to continue to chase the water in the public system for certain. Hopefully that we're going to be able to have more flexibility in dealing with the private system. But that's going to happen anyway. The costs were developed around a two-year, five-year, or ten-year storm. And you see how much rain that is over a 24-hour period. Putting that in context, I think that last Tuesday's event was right around a five-year storm. The rate impacts are based on financing capital improvements for 20 years at 3%, spread over 106,000 customers. I think, Councilman Martin, you had mentioned in the previous discussion about the equity as far as how people pay for things. This is something that was a lot of discussion in these public meetings, but our recommendation moving forward is that it almost has to be spread across the board, potentially as a surcharge type of scenario, and I think this is what Louisville is doing, is that currently your sewer rates are based on your water consumption, with the theory is that what you consume from the water company then in turn gets returned to the sanitary sewer system. Rainwater has no relationship whatsoever to water consumption. But again, since we can't clearly identify who the bigger contributors are versus who are not when we get into private property, about the only way that probably the most equitable way to do it is just spread it out amongst everyone and have everyone pay their fair share. Clearly that will be the council's ultimate decision on how we're going to do that. But this is what we used to be able to determine our cost estimate. This is a slide that's just for Wolf Run drainage area, and it represents different storm events. A one-year storm, a two-year storm, a five, and a ten. What's most interesting about this is the blue is the amount of rain, and you can see that the slope of how that goes up is pretty steady. The green is the cost, and you can see that it grows much faster as you get into a larger storm event than the rainfall amount does. And for Wolf Run, that similar thing plays out when you project that across all seven of the drainage areas that we have. Again, two-year storm, 3.2 inches, 3.8 inches, 4.3. and you see these things growing, the cost's a lot greater. Because right here is where the rubber hits the road is that little graph right there. And I'm going to stop here for a second because I'm sure that this is, it was sobering, sobering for me. Based on our projected analysis is that for a two-year storm, roughly 3.2 inches of rain over a 24-hour period, The estimated cost to repair our sanitary sewer system under that general concept is $540 million. Based on the 106,000 customers over 20 years at 3%, the rate impact would be approximately $28.25. That's an increase over what we are right now. So that's $28.25 more. You can see what it looks like for the five-year storm and the ten-year storm is that the dollar amounts go up significantly. Charlie, not to interrupt, but the rate impacts, are you talking about annual or per month? Monthly. Monthly rate. Sorry, thank you for pointing that out. That is the potential monthly rate increase based on financing under that scenario we talked about. recognize that these again these are general concepts and general type of solutions I am optimistic that we can continue to aggressively go after the water getting the water out of the system simply rather than this scenario is just make it bigger and forget about trying to get the water out we can see how make it bigger is going to be very very expensive I have been in this business for nearly 30 years at some level or another, and it still becomes my thing is that we've got to get the water out of the system that doesn't belong in the system, because not only do you pay for a tremendous amount of infrastructure that you only use occasionally, but also you really never, ever deal with the problem. And instead of putting a Band-Aid on it, it's about a more robust solution. But I know that's a sobering thing, and it was for me as well. The two-year storm is most likely the smallest that EPA will consider. The consent decree is mute. It says to use good engineering judgment. There is a two-year storm discussion related to capacity assurance program as far as future service connections. That's the only way it talks about that. The selection of a two-year storm obviously will result in the lowest cost and the lowest rate increases. But the selection of a larger storm would have higher costs but less SSOs on residential and less regulatory fines. The consent decree talks about is that after you have implemented a capital project to eliminate sanitary sewer overflows, subsequent overflows that you have, you will pay a fine based on VITE. So for in this case is that, you know, if you build for a two-year storm, our projections is during a five-year storm, you would still have 13 reoccurring SSOs that occur in the system. And in 53, if you have a 10-year storm. So saying that different is that we had 3.2 inches of rain after we fixed the system, we should be okay. We go to 3.8, we would project there would be 13 places that would overflow. If we had a 10-year storm, which is the 4.3 inches of rain, you would likely have 53 overflows. Now, back to the fine situation is that if we put this into the reference of where we're at right now, if we do nothing, that we're looking at fines in the ranges of half a million to $2.4 million a year annually. because we average 480 sanitary sewer overflows a year. So all of this, we've talked about this for the last three or four years. Those of you who have been on council for quite a while, we've known going into this thing that it was going to be a difficult and hard road to hoe. And we're at that point now to where we've got to start making some decisions regarding where we are with submitting our remedial measures plans, that we've got to consider the design storm and consider the capital costs and the rate increases or rate impacts that we're going to have. Also, the environmental protection aspect of it. Again, drawing the line under these property impacts, the exposure of public health or risk of public health and private property damage. I know there's some folks in the audience that want to talk a little bit about that. I think that hopefully the committee will give them the opportunity to talk about that here in a few minutes. But also economic development. I mean, we don't want to end ourselves up on a moratorium. I think that would be the last place that we'd want to be as far as from a long-term plan. So this last bullet, I guess, is where we're going to draw the line because we need to move forward. is that unless otherwise directed by the council, we're going to proceed with a remedial measures plan that's based on a two-year storm. Personally, I think that it's a conservative approach because that design is for no I&I removal, no inflow and infiltration removal. And I've stood here and told you that I am a firm believer that we've got to get the water out of the system. If we build the pipes to handle a two-year storm, I mean, you know, a two-year storm, that 3.2 inches of rain, but at the same time go get the water out of the system, I think that that investment will actually increase our return. It will get closer to a four- or five-year storm without having to build all the pipes and all the storage tanks that are relative to that. I mean, if you look at it from the standpoint of a storage tank, a storage tank that sits on a football field, It's one foot for every million gallons. No, I'm sorry, three feet for every million gallons of storage. If you do the math, 2.8 feet. At West Hickman, which is the most expensive of what you saw up there, which is roughly 40% of the costs, under the General Solutions, 34 million gallon storage tank would have to be built at West Hickman to handle a two-year storm. That is 97 feet high. Essentially, that's filling the lower section of Commonwealth Stadium. It is tremendous amount of water. And so getting the water out of the system, again, as I said, is paramount, I think, to our long-term success. I apologize for being the bearer of bad news today. Unfortunately, like I said, we've known this is coming. And again, I think that in summary here is that what keeps me right about this is that I live here. I'm not looking forward to paying more for sewer rates any more than anybody else is. But I keep coming back to this, well, EPA made me do it, or what's for in-stream water quality. You know, like I said, last week was sobering because, you know, myself, you, our staff, we have to go and meet people in bad circumstances. And if anything, we owe it to our neighbors to make sure that we don't have sewage in their basement. That, to me, then makes it a little bit more worthwhile and more palatable if I, along with everyone else, are going to have to swallow the cost associated with an improved sewer system. So with that, I have questions. Charlie, thank you. You shouldn't have to apologize for delivering the kind of news you just did. I think, as you've said before, we're all in this together, and we're all going to have to face up to the obligation to give the best protection that we can provide. Council Member Martin. Thank you, Chair. Charlie, thanks again for coming today and sort of giving this sobering news. and as charlie has mentioned i have two constituents here and i know we all have constituents who are faced with this uh you know i've got some some sections of my district that have just chronic reoccurring sewer backups and flooding and and i know we all do um and one of the things that i want to sort of uh balloon i want to float and let folks think about is you know we have a grant program to take care of a sort of remediation but it's for things like rain gardens and things like that, trying to reduce the amount of impervious pavement. But I might suggest that at least another use of the money or I don't know whether it's a better use of the money, but we have so many folks who have direct impacts and that are going to continue to have regular direct impacts until we are able to solve this enormous problem. And I think I'd like my fellow council members to consider setting up a grant program where we can help sort of alleviate some of the more difficult situations that some of our constituents have. And I guess I'm talking about either a grinder pump, having the city work with them to install a grinder pump, or have the city work with them to disconnect their basement drains and restroom facilities. because this is just going to be a continuing problem. It's a health hazard because you have sewage backing up into folks' basements. They have to move out and get the sewage out and then have it sanitized. But you also have loss of property, as you mentioned, by having, in these cases, bedrooms and businesses and things like that get completely wiped out time and time again. And so I'd ask to maybe consider that type of use for funds. I mean, I love rain gardens. I think they're a great thing. But when you have sewage in your basement, I think that's a real immediate type of thing. Charlie, I guess one question for you is that the enormity, you're talking about funds in addition to the $4.32 that's currently being charged. No. Now, the $4.32 has to do with the stormwater program, which is where the grant program you just mentioned at. What we're talking about is the sanitary sewer user fee, which has been in place since the early to mid-80s. It's been in place for quite some time, and it is based on your water consumption. So it's your sewage disposal fee, Fund 4002. We had a rate increase in 2009 and 2010. It was in response to the consent decree. We've done two things for the public out there. Before I came on council, you had the sewer fee. And then since I came on council, we adopted the stormwater mitigation fee. So the numbers you're talking about, though, are over top in addition to those amounts. Is that correct? Unfortunately, yes. Did we not anticipate the amount? Well, yes and no. When we entered into the consent decree, I mean, what they told us to do is go assess your system because you don't understand it well enough to be able to give us early action projects. We did give them some, South Elkhorn, which is one of the reasons why we did it early action. But they wanted us to assess the situation. Likewise, something I should have mentioned when that slide is on here, is that when we talk about that type of investment, that's not instantaneous. That's a gradual increase in rates because it's all predicated on how you stage your debt service and your borrowing as you fix the system. So it's not going to be an instantaneous rate increase. So when we considered that in this last rate increase, we didn't want to raise the rates to the ceiling and then not be able to spend the money because we were too busy assessing it rather than building it. Does that make sense? Yeah, but you're talking about going back to the well, so to speak, for a rather significant tax increase to pay for this two inches of rain or five inches of rain. Or two-year storm or five-year storm. Louisville has gone on record that they are promising their customers a 3% to 5% increase for the foreseeable future. That was in the Courier Journal for the foreseeable future every year. I said every city that, you know, Nashville, northern Kentucky, Louisville, we're all in this, and that we've gotten these consent decrees, and they have enormous, enormous costs to them. And I'm like you a little bit. I'm worried about it because in the context of where we were in 06 and 07, the world's changed a lot since then. Well, when we were going through the stormwater, we were looking at, well, I guess $300 million for that. So I guess this is another $700 million, $800 million. You know, northern Kentucky, the three counties up there, I think that their last projection, of course they have a whole different set of problems because they're a river city and they have combined sewers, but their number was something like $3.2 billion. Thank you, Chair. I have two constituents here, and I hope there might be some time after Charlie's presentation to hear from them because they're sort of relevant to this conversation. Thank you, Chair. Council Member Stannett. Thank you, Chair. Charlie, explain to us how does this correlate with the stormwater approach of the 25-year storm? I know we made a rationale to only fix up to a 25-year storm on the stormwater side, but isn't it correct that if we start fixing some of those stormwater problems, maybe this number is not as big as it's being presented today? Oh, I believe that's true. is that if we dealt with improved storm sewer systems in areas where have had substandard ones in the past and were able to, and I hate to use the word force, but strongly encourage people to redirect their sump pump away from the sanitary sewer system and put it in that storm sewer system, I think that we would see a marked decrease in it. I was in Mr. Farmer's district last week on a call for somebody that he had set up, and I was driving down the street, it was Wednesday, no, it was Tuesday night, the day of the rain, and I saw three sump pumps that were discharging out into the curb line. They had very nicely done that. But I'm noting to myself is nearly every house on that street has a basement. I wonder where the rest of them are going. If we were going to put a storm sewer on that street, one of the things that we would want to have is the ability to, maybe with some financial assistance or otherwise, but get them in the storm sewer and get them out of the sanitary. I've got to believe that what we would spend on private property, even using public money, would be considerably less over the long haul from what we'd spend on bigger pipes, seven miles all the way to West Hickman. So, yes, I agree with you that there is a correlation between the storm and sanitary solutions. As far as a corollary between the 25-year storm, which we use as the benchmark for stormwater versus what we're talking about here on sanitary sewers, I would be afraid to see the numbers we talk about for a 25-year storm regarding sanitary sewers. I think that the stormwater stuff, if we've got carrying capacity for a 25-year storm, that's going to handle the majority of the sump pumps that we're looking at redirecting. You know, when the storm happens, you see the flow meters, the response sometimes is a little bit delayed, especially if you've got sump pumps, because the ground has to get pretty saturated in order for those things to be impacted. In the late summertime, we'll have an inch and a half or two inches of rain in one afternoon. It all runs off. It all ends up in the creek. And you can look at our records and show, you know, bump stations don't overflow. Nothing happens. These saturated conditions like we've had this spring with repeated over-and-over rain, it's chaos is when those things happen. So we don't have a way to measure it yet. For instance, every dollar we spend on stormwater, we save 10 cents on the sewer side? No, sir, not yet. We don't have a correlation there? Okay. I'll be thinking about that one tonight. I haven't really thought about it from that angle. One other thing. We put a cost of living increase in the sanitary sewer fee a couple years ago, a built-in one. So you're saying that percentage is nowhere near enough to cover some of these additional costs each year? No, I don't think so. Well, first of all, the last time I talked to the revenue folks is that because of the changes in our economic outlook in the United States, that's been pretty much nonexistent to start with. It was tied to the Consumer Price Index, which hasn't been particularly robust since we put it in place. Likewise, I know that it was optimistic on everybody's part that we wouldn't have to revisit this rate increase situation again in the near term. and hopefully it's something we'll be talking about in our links meeting on Thursday as far as what type of existing debt service coverage that we still have. But I think that to avoid getting away from another rate increase is going to be, unfortunately, wishful thinking. It's a question of when. Very good. Thank you, Chair. Thank you. Council Member Henson. Thank you, Chair. Charlie, are there areas in Lexington that are worse than others? As I mentioned before, is that I've got a list of 14 neighborhoods that our flow meters indicate to us that it would be a productive endeavor to go work in those neighborhoods and replace and repair sanitary sewers. One of the things that we're working on right now is trying to make sure that we incorporate the LexCall information into those areas as well, because I want to make sure that we're focused on the private property problems and not just completely reliant on the flow meter itself. But that's about $6 million worth of work if we started that right now. and that with aggressive work on hiring engineers and contractors, if we were able to accelerate our selection processes and all that, I could get all that work on the street by this year. There's no shortage of things to do out there, and in particular, yeah, there are certain neighborhoods that we know have chronic issues. We also, in the consent decree, it lists 111 reoccurring sanitary sewer overflows that we've been tracking since I came in here in 1999, and they predate me. So, you know, because I'd asked this question before, is would going with a two-year storm across the board, would that, I mean, is that putting a Band-Aid on it, or are we planning for future developments? Two-year storm, in absence of an aggressive INI or inflow and infiltration removal program, is skating pretty tight because you may have circumstances because the soon-to-come capacity assurance program says that we have to certify that there is capacity in the system for a two-year, 24-hour storm. So that's where that number comes from. We also believe that's the smallest storm that EPA would accept. And some of the folks I've met with about the Capacity Assurance Program, you can connect to a system even if we can't certify it, but you have to go and work in that system and fix things in order to be able to get your connection. And it's not a one-to-one thing. Let me give you a scenario. is that if someone wanted to build something in your district in the Deauville Drive area and stuff, is that they'd have to go downstream and fix three times as much as what they wanted to connect to the system. So if you want 100 gallons a minute, you've got to go fix 300 gallons a minute of stuff downstream. The beauty of that is, one, is you don't completely shut down your economic engine, but also you can use your economic engine to help pay to fix your system. So there's some advantages to that, and that has worked fairly well in Knoxville and in Birmingham and other communities that are further along than us. So it's not preventing folks from developing? They're still doing this? Well, if they can meet those certain conditions. But back to your question is, is the two-year, 24-hour, I'm trying to resist using my own personal judgment here because I'm trying to represent the division and all that. And what I have learned is that typically the council wants to see what the low-cost option is, the lowest and best bidder. And I'm giving you the lowest and best bidder that I think would fly from a regulatory standpoint. I'm not certain. EPA may reject it. But I wanted to make sure that you knew what the additional costs were and the impacts on monthly rates if you choose a higher level of insurance. You know, one of the other council members asked me, not on this committee, asked me, Charlie, what do you expect to get out of these community meetings? And it's like, I guess, knowledge and information that they would know this. But unfortunately, and I'm going to apologize again, Dr. Blues, is that you guys have got a tough decision here. I mean, you as a council, and I understand that. I live here. I'm a citizen. I'm paying a stormwater fee. I'm looking at higher sanitary sewer fees. I'm paying $4 a gallon. I'm in this with everybody else, and fortunately I'm also the owner of the solution. And I do, you know, all of us live every day for the day that when it rains we're not cringing, that we're not going to hear from those folks who've had reoccurring problems because it's never good. It is just not good. So if the council wanted to go to a larger storm event and said at the same time, design around that, but look at ways that you can keep those costs arrested as much as you can, because we're trying to project 11 to 13 years out in the front. We may get five years into this and find more, I guess, the smoking gun and other things that cause those numbers to drop down a whole lot more than what we thought we were going to do. The whole consent decree, the biggest problem is they want huge commitments from you in a very short time, and it's like going down a blind alley. Like I said, if you talk to other folks in other communities, they tell you the same thing. It's daunting in that part of it. Thank you, Charlie. We promise not to shoot the messenger. Thank you so much. No, we need the messenger with us all the way here. Charlie, we acknowledge that we have a decision to make as a committee and also as a council. What's your timeline here? Well, as I said before, we're moving ahead with that two-year, 24-hour storm. In the next 30 days, next 45 days, I don't think there's any reason why they can't continue down that process. You know, the further, the deeper they get into it and we have to pull them back, the likelihood that from an engineering fee standpoint it will cost us more money. So, you know, the sooner those decisions are made, the better off I think we will all be. I want to be able to come back in August, and I think this is an expectation, is, all right, Charlie, tell me what the real plan is. What's going to get fixed first? What's going to get fixed second? What's going to get fixed third? Because that's the other thing. if you're going to commit to that kind of financial obligation for this community, then you're going to want to know, what am I getting out of it? What am I buying for this? But I would say is that if I could have some type of acknowledgement that whether or not we're headed down the right path in the next 30 days would be very, very helpful. And I know that is a short time frame, but I will remind all of us that when I was here in January, I said April, and now it's April, so I'm moving the line for you a little bit, because I know you've got another daunting task in dealing with a fiscal year 12 budget, so I know you've got your hands full. This committee meets next on May 3rd, and I'm hoping that we can work toward making a recommendation to council on that day. that would keep us within your 30 days. That would work very well. Thank you. That would work well. We shall indeed try to do it. Council Member Martin. Just a quick question. Charlie, I know there's a movement in the city to increase in redevelopment so that we become more compact and less spread out. How is that going to affect our water and sewer capacity? And my question, the question is, in this calculation, do we have to build in extra capacity for the future? Because if we go with a two-year and we find out in ten years we've run out of it because we're becoming more dense, is that going to make us have to redo it all over again? If I remember correctly, I'm going to turn around you for this acknowledgement. Our two-year 24-hour storm is based on a 2035 planning horizon? Yes, it is. So we've tried to introduce the planning horizon of 2035 full development in each one of those drainage areas to make sure that we were targeting a two-year storm for the future. And like I said, that's not to say is that zone changes and other things, higher density, any time we change zoning things and increase the amount of people, thus creating an increase in the amount of sewage, that that won't change, but we've tried to address that. So you're talking about a 25-year life cycle before we have to upgrade it again? that's full development is that if you tear something down, you get the credit to reduce it and replace it. An example, we've done that over in the U.K. already, even without the cap, is that when they built the parking garage, they tore down a whole bunch of houses, and we subtracted that sewage flow that would have been in the system, and now it's kind of a credit for U.K. as they build on the hospital and stuff. So in the infill and redevelopment, the increase is the net difference between what was there versus what's going in. And if we're planning for a two-year, 24-hour storm based on full development 2035, we can always move that if you want to, but I think we've got it covered. Okay. Thank you, Chair. Thank you. Our next – thank you, Charlie. I appreciate this effort and for your adding to this committee's agenda. The next item on today's agenda is the Coldstream Crimson King stormwater recommendation. Daryl, do you or Ben want to speak to that? I can. I was going to, if you've got technical questions or specific questions, Ben and Daryl are here to answer them. The purpose of this enclosure in here is that to follow through with the recommendations of the old water resources oversight committee is that we were going to be more transparent about how we went about making stormwater recommendations, in particularly what involves buying houses. We've posted this information on our website, let the citizens know that it's there for their review, and if they wish to question it, we've had a public meeting. This is kind of that last step, is that now we're coming to the council and essentially announcing that our recommendation, and we believe all the citizens are on board with us as well, is that we purchase houses. I'm not really excited about purchasing houses because it's more grass to cut, but we believe it's the best and most cost-effective solution. Like I said, Ben can answer whatever technical questions you may have. Okay, thank you. Committee members, I think that Ben Krebs' letter has been pretty complete on this, And the key point is that all of the residents are on board for this purchase and demolition program. And secondly, that this is the most cost-effective course of action to alleviate the floodplain problems here. So are there any questions for Ben on this or a recommendation to water quality on going forward? My sense of the committee's silence here is that this is the most feasible and reasonable and well-vetted course of action, and I think we see no reason why it shouldn't go forward with it. Am I correct, committee members? Thank you, Chair. You added this to the committee docket today and the information in there based on input to make a decision on this issue? I'm not... I don't think we need a motion on it. I think we can go forward I would go forward without that. I really wanted to see if there were any objections primarily. Thank you, sir. Thank you. Committee members, we do have financials for information purposes, and I'm hoping in our May meeting that we will be able to provide a more complete report along the lines that Council Member Lane has suggested for us. So what I would like to do, unless there are questions about financials today, is to move forward with public comment. I know that Council Member Martin has two constituents here who wish to speak. We appreciate their patience. Council Member Martin, would you like to just take 30 seconds to introduce them? Thank you, Dr. Bluse. I have two residents in the Garden Springs area who are here. And, John, do you want to speak first or John Collins? They live in the Garden Springs area. And this has been an area that has really received just a chronic sewer backup issue. And, John, we dealt last year after the Derby flood rains, and the city was able to extend a grant to John to help clean up his house and to recover some of the costs of his loss, computer equipment, things like that, and we're sort of back here again. But, John, you want to kind of tell us what's going on? Okay, yeah. My name is John Collins. I'm sorry. I was just going to say, Mr. Collins, if you, for the record, could give us your name and your address and if you could do it in three minutes, that would be good. All right, I'll do it quick. My name is John Collins. My address is 858 Astor Road. I'll just tell you real quick, we've had three floods since my wife has lived in this house. The first flood I wasn't there for, the sewage water came from the drain. It got the carpet down there soaked. She took the carpet up herself, threw it away, and I guess got all that in her mouth and face and got really, really ill. So they capped the drain, and then I moved there from Kansas City. And since the drain was capped, it all came out of the toilet, which made an incredible mess of just raw sewage and destroyed everything I owned. Insurance wouldn't cover anything, and I didn't know what to do. So that was bad. And then this time, the drain was not capped again, so it just came right up out of the drain, and this house just fills up with 8 inches of water. No matter what we do, the level it wants to hit is 8 inches. So this time I had a pump. So for over 12 hours, we pumped sewage water from my basement into my backyard all day. And it stayed around four inches. It never went down until whatever is going on there is over. It's either eight inches or just pump it forever. So I don't know what the health risks are. I was taking computer books and all my stuff upstairs, putting sewage water all over my kitchen, my table, everything. I don't know. I can't get any health answers. And I don't know what to do. I would love to move, but I'm stuck there. So I just need help. That's all I got. Thank you. Thank you. The next folks we have is actually Mr. Collins, next-door neighbor Todd Eads. And, again, Todd, we communicated last year in the Derby rains, and he's also experiencing a problem again. And these houses are sort of the bottom of a big watershed over in Garden Springs. And so they have a lot of folks, I think, who are uphill from them who have rainwater infiltrating the sewer system. Todd. Hi, Todd Eads, 854 Astor Road, Garden Springs. I just kind of wanted to expound on what Mr. Martin had brought up earlier regarding some type of assistance, whether it be assistance with the installation of grinder pumps, rejector pumps, possibly maybe a different type of backflow preventer. The city has, on many of our houses in the neighborhood, installed backflow preventers, but they don't seem to be very effective. And I was talking to the other Mr. Martin about this earlier, and maybe a more robust type backflow preventer would help. And one of the big things from talking with the neighbors that would be very helpful is, and I've also been communicating with Mr. Martin about this, is some type of notification. So when the pump station begins to overflow or reach its capacity, that we are somehow notified of this so we can get our, I guess, flood measures in place, which for me involves getting out two or three different pumps, sealing off my drains, taking things from downstairs to upstairs just in case all that doesn't work. because the problem with pumps is if the electricity ever goes out, it's not going to do you any good. So I know the neighbor on the other side of me, he wasn't home last Tuesday morning, and he was telling me if he would have known this was coming, he could have went home and capped his drains off and stuck a pump in his toilet and wouldn't have maybe gotten flooded, but unfortunately he did. So basically understand that it's a huge problem that's going to take years to fix, but anything that could be done in the interim would be greatly appreciated. Thank you. And if I might add, Mr. Chair, the fellow who lives on the other side is a member of our police department, I believe. And so obviously he's someone who we care about. But I think that if we can find some way to sort of address some of these sort of critical ongoing problems at the neighbor level while we address the larger problem about taking the water out of the system and upsizing the size of the pipes, because obviously we have symptoms and individual residents are certainly experiencing hardship as a result of the overall problems, and particularly the folks who happen to live at the bottom of the hill. So thank you, Chair. Thank you, and thank you, gentlemen, for, you know, for putting what really has to be a human face on this, you know, on this problem. and it's, you've experienced it, almost all of us have constituents who have faced it, and it speaks to the urgency of making the kinds of decisions that are going to be helpful in the short term and to resolve the problem in the long term. We have a couple of minutes. Charlie, I didn't know if you wanted to respond to those comments. Two thoughts. One is that Todd had mentioned the notification system. Rod and I are working on that right now. I think that's doable. as I told Todd in an email I'm almost, I guess I hope we don't get into a Chicken Little situation to where the thing's buzzing at him all the time and nothing happens and then we kind of lose the edge on that. I don't remember what the number was off the top of my head but the pump station that would be tied to is Wolf Run Pump Station and I think in the course of an eight year time frame we had like 300 or 400 overflows there and that's not how many we had where they live at. And so, you know, there's got to be a better way to do it. And anything that allows them to protect their property, we're going to do everything we can to do that. Now, the second part of that is the grinder pump. And I understand where they're headed with the grinder pump. This is my concern, is that any time you install a grinder pump or raise a manhole or change what is the hydraulic grade line of that sewer is that you then make someone else susceptible who doesn't have the same protection. We find this all the time with the backflow preventers. You put one backflow preventer in and the neighbors talk at the fence on a sunny day and the next thing you know they all want backflow preventers because if the low basement is protected, then they realize, gee, I'm next door. I better get one too. And it kind of mothballs on itself. And so, you know, I'm sure that Mr. Collins and I will be talking about this again extensively, and I certainly want to do something so he and I don't have to talk to each other on such terrible circumstances and look and see whether or not that's a solution. But I think that we also got to make sure that we're not just simply moving it to somebody else who hasn't had a past problem because that will be your next telephone call. And that, you know, I'm more about, like I said, getting the water out of the system. The grinder pumps, the backflow preventers, all of those things have been just really trying to treat the symptoms instead of trying to treat the disease. Thank you, sir. We've got to get after the disease. Looking around the horseshoe, I see that there are only a couple of us left standing or sitting. Council Member K., although you're not a member of the committee, did you want to make any comments? Okay. Thank you. If we've lost a quorum, have we lost a quorum? Yes, we've lost our quorum. So I can't – I think it would be appropriate – what I wanted to do is make a motion that the council create a task force or a committee, and maybe the chair could do that from this committee, but to come up with recommendations for addressing some individual – like a residential program in terms of either a grant program or guidelines that we can recommend on an ongoing basis. One of my things, following up with what Charlie said about not wanting to send the water down to the next guy, what we don't want to do is get in a situation where we're using folks' basements for storage capacity for the overflow. And so I think what we want to do at all costs is to keep it out of everybody's basement. And I realize that with these two individuals and many more in that area, we certainly want to get the water out of the basement and not use their basement for storage capacity. So thank you, Chair. Thank you, and I think we'll have to take up that issue at the May 3rd meeting, which we will. All right. Thank you. Since we don't have a quorum, I guess I can all by myself declare our meeting adjourned. And thank you all for being here today. I'm sorry. Good night. Thank you. I'm gonna break the spell she's got on you You're gonna wake up to fine I'm your desire, my intentions are true Hey, babe, I know it's time You're gonna see what you mean to me So open up your eyes and see it easy I can love you better than that I know how to make it together All I'm asking is for one little chance Baby, I can love you, baby I can love you better Oh, yeah I could love you better than that I know how to make you forget her All I'm asking is for one little chance Baby, I can love you, baby, I can love you I can love you better than that I know how to make you together All I'm asking is for one little chance Baby, I can love you, baby, I can love you better Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh I know how to make you forget her All I'm asking is for one little chance Baby, I can love you, baby, I can love you I can love you better than that I can love you better I can love you better than that Baby, I can love you, baby, I can love you better Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to get through this thing called life. Electric word life, it means forever and that's a mighty long time. But I'm here to tell you, there's something else. The Afterworld. A world of never ending happiness. You can always see the sun. Day. Or night. So when you call up that shrink in Beverly Hills, you know the one. Doctor, everything will be alright. Instead of asking how much real time is left, asking how much of your mind, baby. Cause in this life, things are much harder than the afterworld. This life. You're on your own. And if the elevator tries to break you down, I'm crazy. Punch your airflow. Don't lie. Where's your living here? Take a look around. At least you got friends I call my own lady For a friendly world She's picked up on Jocs on the floor That's all I heard I'm gonna let the elevator Break us down Oh no, let's go Let's go crazy Let's get nuts Just look for the work For the man I deal in Without saving trouble Let's go I'm excited, don't know why Maybe it's cause, all gonna die When we do, what's it all for? Dancing now, fucking me, come knocking on your door Tell me, baby, gonna let the elevator break us down No, let's go, let's go crazy, baby Let's get this Look for a purple man until they put us in control Let's go, baby Come on, baby Let's get this Yeah Bring this Let's go crazy I'm gonna let the other bit break us down Oh no, let's go We are crazy Let's go crazy Let's go Let's go Let's go! Let's see everything will feel alright Make everything go wrong Beelze and beelze and I'm back in the hill I'm just gonna He's coming He's coming He's coming The End Take me away! It had to be you It had to be you. I wandered around and finally found somebody who could make me be true. Could make me be blue. Or even be glad just to be sad. Thinking of you. Some others I've seen Might never be mean Might never be cross Or try to be boss But they wouldn't do For nobody else Gave me a thrill With all your faults I love you still It had to be you Wonderful you It had to be you Some others I've seen Might never be me Might never make cross Try to be boss They wouldn't do For nobody else Gave me a tell Whether you're boss I love you still Baby, it had to be you Wonderful view Had to be you