to work with the Department of Social Services and bring to you a proposal that would be in the mutual best interest of everyone in the community, and we hope that we've been able to do that. So thank you for your leadership. Thank you for your leadership, Commissioner, and to the community, as we've talked with a number of different people about how we might be able to address on a long-term basis issues associated with health and human services in Fayette County and Lexington. The greatest impact can only be achieved when organizations align their shared goals. There's a great opportunity to partner with LFUCG, University of Kentucky, and United Way into funding, monitoring, and reporting of investments that are being made in human services programs in Lexington. By working together on a shared process, we can improve the quality of life for all Fayette Countians through strategic human services investments, informed by research, best practices, and responsive to greatest assessed needs. The partnership before you is the product of many conversations, concerns, ideas from the Council, the Commissioners, and others. The process is built on a strong partnership between LFUCG, University of Kentucky, especially the University of Kentucky College of Social Work, University of Kentucky Martin School of Public Policy and Administration, United Way of the Bluegrass, and the partnering agencies. At the University of Kentucky College of Social Work, we have Dean Ike Adams, who's here and will be willing, if asked, to speak to this partnership. He has a long history of providing human services, leadership, and assistance to nonprofits through practicum resources and turning out well-trained human services professionals. With the University of Kentucky Martin School of Public Policy, Dean Bill Hoyt, who is also here and will be willing to answer questions regarding the partnership, has a long history of providing a critical look at community human needs, community conditions through strong research analysis, and turning out consummate professionals that are data-driven with solutions in mind. With the United Way of the Bluegrass, President Bill Farmer, United Way of the Bluegrass has over 90 years of community impact investments in Fayette County. In the past 10 years, we've made nearly $29 million in investments. Over the past 20 years, we've had over 45,000 individual investors from Fayette County. And over the past 20 years, we've had nearly 1,200 corporate partners. Yes, the United Way has a new focus on education, income, and health, but we also continue to focus on critical and essential services. We're providing help for today while reducing the needs for tomorrow. We have a huge network of Fayette County human services agencies. These are highly competent group of human services organizations that are the front lines of problem solving in our community. Regarding the partnership, a number of these efforts already exist with the partners. We partnered with LFUCG and a number of human services agencies. For instance, United Way of the Bluegrass now coordinates CKEY, which provides free tax preparation for low-income workers, with an emphasis on bringing dollars back to our local economy. United Way 211 is a volunteer agency active in disasters, BOAD, and emergency operations center. United Way funds LFUCG programs, including domestic violence prevention and the Health Department Center for Creative Living. United Way, the College of Social Work, and the Martin School partner with LFUCG on the Carver Center Community Assessment. We've had strong collaboration and cross-referral with LexCall 311 and our Emergency 911 and United Ways 211. And quite frankly, the partners have successfully leveraged approximately $1.5 million that could be used specifically in Fayette County in 2010, and that's up from $15,000 in 2009. In front of you, there is a list of agencies that are currently funded with LFUCG and United Way of the Bluegrass. The primary objectives for this partnership, through this work, LFUCG will have more information and will easily be able to report back to the community on programs that are invested and results of those investments. LFUCG and United Way of the Bluegrass funding will be viewed side by side, ensuring well-informed investment decisions. By working together, there will be an increased opportunity to leverage investment decisions with other collaborative opportunities, including grants. I think that's an extremely critical point because, quite frankly, in today's world, two things are happening. A reduction in investments in health and human services or leveraging partnerships to increase the size of the pie. So leveraging is extremely important in today's economy. The partnership provides increased efficiency through the use of electronic grant processing systems. It also will provide regular reports of progress back to LFUCG. Priorities for funding can be based on pressing human needs informed by community-level data, interviews with human services, program participants, and important states, excuse me, stakeholders. Part of the grant input would include employees in key LFUCG departments, such as police, fire, community development, emergency management, social services, code enforcement, and others. We think, quite frankly, that it is absolutely critical to have input from LFUCG employees in the grant-making process. Key roles. LFUCG clearly plays a critical role in this partnership. The Mayor, City Council, and Social Services will provide and establish directions and set priorities for the investments. The Social Services Advisory Council could review the scored applications, make recommendations to the mayor, commissioner, and council members. Who will then make the final decisions? For the U.K. College of Social Work, the college will include a partnership with social work curriculum, as well as identifying work with practicum students to work with the partnership. One of the things I'd like to emphasize is that we will be working with, assuming the board or the council approves this, with the highest level of student, graduate student, on this partnership. The college will provide a community assessment and prioritization data. The college will aid in program development and provide additional community-specific research and reports back to the partners. And finally, the college will provide ongoing program evaluation of the financial and fiscal investments that have been made. That's the College of Social Work. The Martin School will also provide community assessments. The Martin School will provide a review and assessment of the demonstrated and promising practices which are proposed. The school will also provide a quantitative analysis of the effectiveness of each funded program and report this back to LFUCG. And the school will seek to use interns in the aid of public policy research as it relates to the work of the partnership. The role of United Way and human services agencies. United Way will facilitate the process and provide training and technical assistance. assistance, and the local human services agencies will provide and use, excuse me, set priorities, excuse me, local human services agencies will use the priorities set by LFUCG to propose ways to address these issues and provide front-line service delivery. Program sample outcomes and measures. Substance abuse programs focus on financial stability, after-school education programs in the context of runaways, homeless youth, et cetera, and elder nutrition programs. In essence, what we would propose is programs that will provide initial, immediate, and long-term success. So for each of those programs, for every program that LFUCG funds, it is the partnership's goal to provide initial goals, intermediate goals, and long-term goals. I won't spend a lot of time on the process, but in essence the process would work that there would be a needs assessment during the months of July and August, prioritization in September, assemble requests for proposals, on and on and on, until you get to the letter of intent, which would be in December. Full application review in January, which is consistent with, I think, the process now. Expert reviewer and scoring of applications. I think this is an important point that we need to make, that one of the things that we've done with United Way of the Bluegrass, because we have focused on education, income, and health, is that we actually have expert reviewers in those particular particular disciplines who score our applications and provide to and will provide to our Board of Directors the scoring. We'll make recommendations as a partnership to the Social Services Advisory Council, Mayor's recommendations, Council ratification, etc. And I think the most important thing is that you'll notice an ongoing six-month reporting, ongoing a new project and external grant proposals, which will be ongoing. This is an idea of a scoring rubric that we could use that kind of gives you an idea of how the rubric, how we would actually score proposals that you would review. Again, this is just a representative sample of the scoring rubric. but ultimately counsel this committee would review the programs and score them appropriately. Financial considerations. Based on this proposal, there's a $75,000 investment that would be made by LFUCG. That investment would include a full-time employee to manage the partnership, but it also includes the student stipends because one of the things that we want to make sure is that the interns will receive compensation for their work, software and information technology, office space, and supplies. I think it's also important to talk about the full-time employee. That full-time employee will probably spend about half of his or her time working on managing the partnership. The other half of the time will be spent on writing or will be evaluating opportunities for grants for Fayette County and Lexington. That's about a half FTE or a half person working on that. We currently have staff members working on grants for our entire region, which is a nine-county region. But we felt a commitment and an obligation that if we were forging this partnership, that we needed to have an individual who would be dedicated for searching grants specifically for Fayette County and for Lexington. So that's the short proposal to you based on the information that has been provided to us as relates to the partnership. We're available for questions. As I said, we have both deans from the College of Social Work and the Martin School of Public Policy and Administration, and we also have staff members if you have very detailed questions regarding the process. Thank you very much for the presentation. Are there council members who have questions? You can sign on using your granicus. I just wondered, are our budget folks here? My questions are really for, is anybody from budgeting here? Richard's here. Is this a process that the administration and our budgeting folks have seen? No, we have not seen it. You have not seen it. Okay. Well, I'll ask a couple initial questions, and I'm not part of the committee, so thank you for recognizing me to speak. I guess I'm wondering, and I don't know if this question is for you, Mr. Chairman, or who it's for. However, if I understand the presentation correctly, would the LFUCG be paying the $75,200 to who? United Way to administer this? Is that how that works? That is correct. And then the stipends would go to the two schools to go to the students that are participating. So it basically would be an administrative cost to us, correct? That is correct. Okay. And as the process would end, there would be some sort of a recommendation based on all the rankings and the studies. Is that correct as to which partner agencies were recommended? Well, actually, I don't think that we would. We would actually provide the scoring rubric that would give you a list of all of the proposals and what the scores were. And then we would leave it up to LFUCG. Yes, we could make recommendations as to allocations, but the preference would be that LFUCG and council and the mayor would continue to make the decisions. The difference is that you will now have the scoring metrics that you can use. This is not different than our program that we currently have with the United Way of the Bluegrass. Our staff actually works with others to score our proposals. then we present the scores to our board of directors, and our board of directors ultimately makes the final decision. The staff doesn't make the decision. Okay. So I'm kind of, I know this is an oversimplification, but we would be hiring a consultant, correct? I don't think that. No, I don't think so. Consultants will write a report and give you a report at the end of the day. We've got students that are doing program evaluations. They're doing the analytics behind the work that the agencies are doing. They're providing a needs assessment. But we're also, I think we didn't really elaborate much on this part of the partnership, but the United Way is going to leverage, by grant writing, opportunities to find more funding. So, you know, when you hire a consultant, they don't write grants for you. They don't bring funding to the table. They just go out and do a little research and provide your report. Okay, that was probably a bad analogy. this would be administrative cost which would not go directly to a partner agency, correct? The $75,000? That's correct. Okay. Thank you very much. There are two communities in our region that have this relationship, and you have letters from them. The city manager of Owensboro, Kentucky, has sent us a letter in highlighting the assets associated with this program and the vice mayor of Cincinnati. So there are two communities that have launched this program, have used it probably in the last three to four years, and have, quite frankly, great best practices that we can utilize for LFUCG. Councilman Villalas. So the employee would be an employee of the United Way that we would pay or would be an LFUCG employee? As this proposal contemplates, it would be a United Way employee. Okay. Okay. When we first heard from you, and I may have completely missed the boat, but it was my understanding that we were talking about outcome measures. That is correct. And you, in my mind, volunteered to work with this committee and share the work you all have done on outcome measures. That is correct. And I suggested personally that you work with the staff. And it seems we've moved from that to something completely different, that at a time when we are cutting staff and social services, a $75,000 partnership, up the Bluegrass Community Foundation already has goodgiving.net and does many of the same things that you're talking about as far as matching donors with needs, grant writing, et cetera, you said you all wouldn't be writing the grants, so I guess you would be identifying grants? Oh, actually, the person with United Way would be writing the grants for the partnership, which would include LFUCG. So they would be writing grants for the United Way to supplement the $75,000 we would be giving you? No, actually, there are programs that what we call institutional investors, federal and foundation grants. Yes, I'm aware of them. that would lend itself to programs right here within Fayette County and Lexington. What we're proposing is that we would write the grants for those. At this point, unless someone has other information, those grants are not being written today. So we would actually take the lead to write the grants, number one, to search for the grants, write the grants, and then if we were to receive them, we would talk with LSUCG regarding the administration of the grants. So who would administer those grants? That would be up for discussion if we were to receive them. And they wouldn't be specific to an agency? No. What we have found in our grant writing process is that most funders are interested in an initiative or a program. What we have done in the past with our agencies is that when we apply for a grant with the United Way, and I would assume that we would take the same process with LFUCG, is that before we apply for a grant, we actually talk with our partnering agencies to determine, number one, do they want to partner with United Way in this grant. If they do, if the agency chooses to partner, then what we do, we ask the agency, what role would you like to take? We then include that role in our application for the grant. So in essence, there may be grants associated with Health and Human Services that LFUCG currently is not applying for, but this individual would be responsible for seeking the grant out, applying for the grant. And if we were to receive the grant, then there would be a discussion as to how it would be administered. At this point, it would be speculative because some grants require the agency that applied for the grant to manage it. There are others that will allow much more flexibility. So it really depends on the grant. Well, as a former executive director of a private nonprofit, we wrote our own grants and managed those grants. So when we're at a point in our budget where we're cutting two positions, I think it is, in social services, five, and we're cutting partner agencies, this kind of outlay when there are other places in the community that are doing similar programs like the Bluegrass Community Foundation with goodgiving.net and has the opportunity to do the same thing for free. So I'll stop now because my time's up. Council Member Henson. Thank you, Chair. Bill, thanks for coming and doing this presentation. It seems to be very well thought out and a lot of work has gone into it. I do have some questions on page 10. It talks about the outcomes and the number. I was just curious as to how you would determine what an acceptable amount would be. For instance, it says some of these would be easier to measure than others, But let's see. The number demonstrating reduced incidence of behavioral issues in school and restraint from engaging in personal destructive behaviors. Sure. How would you determine if a number is acceptable? Well, in that particular case, what we would do is work with the school district, work with the new superintendent, work with the principals and administrators so that we would not be reporting different sets of numbers than the school district. So what we would do is present to you what Fayette County Public Schools would perceive as being acceptable, and hopefully this body would then feel the same way. Yeah. I guess I've always had a belief that people are different. What's acceptable for one may not be acceptable for another. But I don't know. That would just bother me. And also, aren't there other agencies that are qualified to also provide this service you're proposing? I can't answer that question. What I can tell you is that we're an organization that is an analytics-based organization. that we have focused not only on the issues that we've discussed, but we also are trying to find as much diversified funding as we possibly can. So I think that there are agencies that do a fine job in this community. I think that what the United Way does, because not only are we focused on critical and essential services, but on the underlining and systemic issues that cause problems. I noticed that our board chair, Harry Richard, is here. About three years ago, the United Way board made a decision that not only should the United Way focus on critical and essential services, but address the underlining reasons that cause abject poverty in communities, which is the reason why we're focused on education, income, and health. So we actually have a multi-pronged approach to problem solving in the community versus in many cases agencies may have a single approach. That's not to say they're not doing a great job, but as it relates to the capacity for the United Way to do this kind of work, I think it's clearly demonstrated. And I certainly think that United Way would be one agency that would be qualified to do this work if we chose to do it, but I would have to say that it really should go out for an RFP and allow other agencies to be able to bid on it. So, okay, rather than just opening it up to one agency, But there's no doubt that United Way, from what they've presented, is a very good agency that would be capable. Accountability is important. We don't want to throw dollars out there just into thin air. So accountability is important. I guess I have a question for Commissioner Mills as far as what's being done right now. to assure accountability with our partner agencies? Thank you for the question. Currently, we have a liaison in our department to each of our 16 agencies, and we try to do it based on our staff member that has expertise in that area. For example, your partner agency, Ms. Talbert, is the Salvation Army because she works a lot with people who are homeless. I happen to work with the Hope Center. Terry Farrier works with our domestic violence agencies and so forth. We visit each one of those agencies quarterly, either at a board meeting or a face-to-face visit, and we make a report so that we know what they're doing. Monthly, our agencies submit invoices, and we do payments monthly to them based on the contract of what was awarded. So that's pretty much currently, and they give us a written report of what they've done for those funds. every time. I will mention, by the way, that this is only the social service agencies and there are partner agencies which are not under my purview. Right. Oh, I thought I'd left it on. You had mentioned keeping this in committee. We're not moving it forward, but I would like for the commissioner to come back to the committee and with a proposal of how we could do it in-house and if there would be additional cost. I would like to say that the United Way has been most generous to us, as has the Bluegrass Foundation. There's an administrative officer in my department who has visited both agencies to look at outcomes and measures. And actually, we had two goals in mind. We also want a more accountable process for all our agencies and a fair way to score people. and a fair way for new agencies to apply because it seems that, you know, you get used to applying agencies and they all do good work, so it's really hard to decide. It's not a matter of weeding out people who don't meet outcomes. It's not having enough money to do what we want to do, frankly. Another problem with the agencies, the other thing we were looking at, application processes are huge. Many agencies have a small staff, so if they're spending their time in administrative work, there's less time for services, or they're pulled away from other administrative duties. So if we could look at some of the elements with the permission of the agencies, of course, that are elements of their United Way applications, elements of their Bluegrass Foundation, the goodgiving.net, if we could use pages of those applications, for example, on the Bluegrass Foundation, my aide found out that the 990s are online, the board memberships are online, people wouldn't have to resubmit those. We could also look at applications to United Way. Not all our agencies do apply to United Way. But if you did those two things, your application process would be streamlined. We may still ask for something small. However, if you don't, then you're going to have a bigger application process. The aide in my office has a degree in urban planning. I do know the CAO's office now has a staff member who has done strategic planning extensively. So we probably wouldn't have students with stipends. That's not something we could afford. The software system at United Way is much more complex than what we have. Probably couldn't invest in that kind of infrastructure. But I do think that we can look at a model internally of how we can measure agencies and have them apply to us. I think the group might also want to decide if they want to continue letting all partner agencies apply to certain commissioners if they want to make a separate place for all partner agencies in somebody's department. Mine, somebody else's, I have no ownership there. But it may be that all partner agencies can apply one way, or you may want to do the same process across five commissioners, or six, or however many it is. So I think this group meets again in June, and we could probably have a pretty detailed thing prepared for you by then due to budgeting and all. if it's the committee's pleasure, if we could wait until June, we could probably do a pretty good job of it. Thank you, Beth. If that's okay with the chair, that she brings something back. I was actually going to ask the committee if they would entertain a meeting in May so that we're not meeting every other month. So it's really whatever the committee's pleasure is. That we're going to meet every month? That we would meet in May. And not in June? And meet in June as well. Oh, okay. So that if the committee wants the commissioner to put something together, that she can put that together and bring it back to the May meeting. Do you think would May or June work best for you? Whatever your pleasure is, we'll get it ready for you. Okay. Thank you, Chair. If you could just get me a meeting date. Thank you. Mr. K. Thank you, Chairman. First, I want to thank you, Chair, and Mr. Farmer and United Way for working on this. I think it has a lot of very positive elements. And I think it's important to note, as you did at the beginning, that you're not asking us for a decision today, because I believe one of the things that I have heard from some of the people who have called me is that the partner agencies themselves have not been consulted about this plan, and so they may have some concerns that they've not been able to voice. In addition, I think we all ought to note that it may be difficult for those who receive funding to come and speak out on this issue in this forum because they are then subject to people making decisions about their funding, both LFUCG and United Way. And so we may want to think about a process for getting that input in a way that allows those agencies to speak as freely as possible. What I think is good about this, I think it would be helpful to have a consistent set of data as is proposed, to have a simplified application process. I like the potential for more funding. I think that this may be a good investment. But, again, we have to, I think, be careful. I think we can take these elements and kind of keep talking about them as is proposed, and we may also want to consider, as Council Member Henson has said, alternative proposals. Thank you. Thank you, Council Member Kaye. Council Member Stennett. Thank you, Chair. I'll admit that this idea does intrigue me. Council Member Meyer has been working on this for quite some time, and I understand the benefits that are outlined. I guess I have a couple questions. First for Commissioner Mills, if you look at the partnerships, I guess you came from U.K. recently. Yes, sir, that's correct. So I'm just curious about why do we need to partner with United Way and not directly with the U.K. College of Social Work and the Martin School on our own? Well, that's another option as well. You know, I like the idea of putting an RFP out, and it may be that those colleges would want to present a proposal. Well, there are, that's a good question. There's lots of options. Well, I'm just trying to get my hands around how the four came together. They did a project together, I think is the answer to that. The United Way and LFUCG, we were looking at, it was in cooperation with the Newtown Pike Extension. We're doing a community needs assessment to see what the folks needed in the way of social services. And both the United Way, I mean, both the Martin School and the College of Social Work students did a really good job on that. and we've brought that document forward and looked at it and how we're going to plan for that neighborhood, and I think Unite Away was part of that process. Is that correct? And so that's how the partners kind of got together to my point. So there is a track record of a favorable performance with all four working together that we can look back on. That's one example that I'm aware of, and, of course, I knew there may be others, but that's the one that I knew about. So in a way, this plan sort of has worked in the past on one project. Right. Using all four entities. Good. I guess my next question is from Mr. Farmer. One of the concerns I've got from a lot of agencies that have called me today, of which I am a board member of a few of them, is the fear, I think Councilman Kay was alluding to it, that if we leverage the dollars with United Way that their United Way funding may go down. Because now you see how much they're getting from us, and you may feel like there would be a different direction United Way would take. Are those fears real? Are they something that these agencies need to be concerned about? I don't think that the agencies need to be concerned about them. The funding or the mechanisms that we receive funding through the RFP process assumes that they will be getting funding from some other organizations anyway because we're not funding 100% of the cost. I think that where some of the frustration might be, and we do this ourselves, so I'm not castigating anyone, When we apply for a grant on a project that we really think should be funded, we apply to a number of different funders. We don't know which organization is going to fund it. So what could conceivably happen is that an agency could have a program that it sends to the United Way for funding, also send to LFUCG for funding. And what could occur is that both organizations could decide to fund it. Then the question is, what do you do next? In many cases, what you do is you expand the scope of the work so that you don't actually cut the agency. You actually expand the amount of dollars that they have available because the program merits it. So I think it really depends on the set of circumstances. But I don't think that the United Way board, and again, we have our board chair here, we make recommendations to our board as it relates to funding. We today actually have information through 990s and through public records as to what funding agencies are getting from LFUCG. We don't use that to discriminate, if you will, on our current agencies. So that information is actually available today. So when you go to apply for a grant using our program we set up here, are you going to apply for those grants for every agency or just as one fits that grant, you're going to pencil them in? For the ones that fit that particular grant, yes. So you're going to be looking at grants for everyone as a normal course of your daily business, not just from our partnership? Well, actually, today we look at grants. We have an internal goal to apply for $31 million in grants to bring new dollars into this community, and that's on a regional basis. So we have a pretty aggressive goal today. That's the reason why we would need, if we were to work with LFUCG and would manage applying for grants, we would need to have a part-time person dedicated to LFUCG. So you're asking the question, would we apply for grants for specific agencies? What we would be doing is looking at it from a holistic perspective and saying, where are the financial deficiencies in the community and can we write grants? And if an agency fits within that area, that's how the agency would receive funding. I guess I'm trying to get to the point that if we both fund similar agencies, and you're already doing the grant work now, what are we going to get different for that agency? If you're already applying for those grants for your agencies you already represent that we represent, what's going to be the extra carrot on the stick, or why would we want to take part in it, and if you're already doing it for them? I'm sorry if you can. I'm not quite grasping. Well, if we both say Big Brothers, Big Sisters, I'll pick on them. We both support them. Okay? So I assume you're already applying for any grants to help them. Like you just said, you already look for grants for the agencies you support. Well, I think where the difference is that we're looking for grants that will be available for the community, and if the Big Brothers Big Sisters mission fits within that. So we're not looking for grants specific for Big Brothers Big Sisters. We're looking for grants that fit issues that need to be addressed in the community. And Big Brothers Big Sisters fit that need. But you're already doing that, correct? You do that on a daily basis anyway. But we do it, quite frankly, for a nine-county region, not specifically for Fayette County. And I think where the difference is that there will be more dedicated efforts specific to Fayette County and Lexington. So for the $75,000 fee, we're going to get a dedicated, centralized effort just for our agencies. Yes. That's what I was getting to. Because you said we look at everyone in our group, and I was realizing you do nine-county. So if we're going to give you money to do everybody, I'm not sure that's going to make sense. This would be specific to Fayette County. And the agencies we ask you to look for. Absolutely. Okay. Very good. Thank you, sir. Thank you. I apologize for not understanding. Oh, no problem. Council Member McCord. Thank you, Mr. Chair. You know, I've been on the partner agencies since coming on this council, so for seven years I've been sitting at this table. And I think where we are in the core issue is that, as Council Member Myers said, it's very difficult to know what to fund and when to fund it. And from a commissioner standpoint and from folks who work in this area, you've got a rotating group of council members who have varying degrees of understanding, and there's an educational curve. And so one of the things I think Council Member Myers has been working towards this day for is we need some sort of continuity that no matter who sits in these chairs, they understand what needs to be funded, why, who is performing, who isn't, and how can we help through the budgeting process and so forth. So I want to make sure that you understand how we got to today. That's where it is. And somebody like myself who's not like Council Member Myers, who doesn't come from a social services background, but who serves on many, many committees and so forth, that was a difficult curve, has been a difficult curve to learn. And realizing that one year to the next, there may be a different need in the community. We'd like to say, what's the coming Katrina for a certain area? But I also believe that what you're seeing across the country, federal, state, and local, is that a realization the government cannot do it all. and we've had to because other people have dropped the ball, frankly. Other people in the community have dropped the ball and the government had to step up. And we are at a place, though, where the stark reality is that we cannot do it all. So, again, I think that's another reason why we're here today is looking at this in a little bit different light of who can do this for us. Commissioner, I guess I've got a quick question for you. But from your viewpoint, who inside our operation is aggressively and actively seeking grants for us and for our agencies? Is there anybody that you have that you call upon to do that? We do it in our department. Okay. We're small, but we're mighty. I will let you know that our budget currently is just a little over $6 million, and we have over $2.5 million of grants regularly and $4 million that we've written for community partners. people within our department, other duties as assigned, write grants. All the partner agencies write grants. Larger agencies are fortunate, and they have a grant writer. We have some departments in government that have them. We don't have anyone designated in particular. We've also been fortunate as another community partner will get a grant and realize that we are a person that can help them out. Like Hope 6 was a housing authority grant, but they partnered with our adult and tenant services. That was over a million dollars, and we were able to work with them. So we partner. We have a couple programs at the Family Care Center. The New Chance grant has been funded continuously since 1993. So now it's just grants management. I will say we have a great asset in this government and the Community Development Department. When you write a grant, they will help you do your budget. You don't have to do that. They'll give you stuff like personnel and what the fringe is. They can also find demographics for you, which is very important in writing a grant. But the biggest thing they give you is grants management. They're really on you about getting those reports out on time and making sure that you meet federal compliance. So the writing is difficult. At times we may, if we see a grant we didn't have time to write, I could see us saying could we use some professional services money to get somebody to help us write it. But we've kind of been doing it piecemeal. Yeah, and that's my point. You know, we have so many good folks in this government that are so overwhelmed. with multiple types of duties, wearing every kind of hat there is and piecing it together, and then we go through a budget like we're getting ready to go through, and everybody's going to have to wear another couple hats. And I think what is important to understand is that in the grant writing community, what people fund are leader of leaders. They fund organizations that represent larger groups of people and leveraging dollars, which we've alluded to and we've been successful at in the past. I agree with you that our community development folks are wonderful, but I also have seen firsthand how overwhelmed they are and how sometimes we don't go after money because of how overwhelmed they are. Well, social workers, it's a skill we're trained in, is grant writing. Right. I mean, that's one thing we get as part of our education. So the people that come to us that are professionals have some knowledge about this. One recent example is the Workforce Investment Board has been reaching out to community partners more, and I know a lot of people in this room have also been getting the message, here's There's four grants. Let's get together and talk about them. So I think there's going to be more and more collaboration on grants in our community with three or four partners, and we each do a piece of it. I think it really doesn't matter who gets the money. As long as you don't care who gets the credit, you can get a whole lot done. Well, and that's the point. I think that we've had a sense of ownership, and we've got to do this, or this is our expertise, and it's a new day where it goes exactly to what you're saying. And we don't need to care who gets the benefit or the credit. We need to get these resources in. And my time's up, and I'm going to let you finish talking here. Where I stand on this is that I'm not exactly sure, given this budget, that this may be what we do right this second or not. But I'm a staunch, staunch advocate of letting people who are experts at something do that and let us who are experts in this do what we do. But there is plenty of money out there. The new skill is going to be in acquiring it and managing it. And, again, this budget allows us no sacred cows. We can talk about anything, and that's all today is about, is just talking about anything. So I appreciate your comment. And I would like to close with one caveat. Duplication is not a dirty word. Sometimes it takes three or four people doing the same thing to get the need done. Last Friday we had 35 faculty and staff members from the U.K. go on a health and human services tour. And our department were like talking on the bus, and we stopped at seven of our partner agencies. We went to the Hope Center for Women, which is at capacity, and have as a waiting list of 49. We went right down the road to the Chrysalis House, and I don't know their waiting list, but they have one too. They do a little different things. They both work with families with substance abuse. We could use three more agencies. So that's the one thing. When you look at human services, duplication is not always a bad thing. Sometimes duplication is a necessary thing, and I just wanted people to remember that. Thank you. And I'm going to skip down to Council Member Forrest, since he hasn't spoken yet. Council Member Lawless has already spoken once. And then I'd like to kind of get into it if I could. All right. Thank you. Thank you, Council Member Myers, and thank you, Council Member Lawless, for deferring to my comments. I want to thank Mr. Farmer and his staff from the United Way. I want to thank our guests from the University of Kentucky for coming and providing us the background for this conversation. I guess I'll turn my attention to my fellow council members on the committee being a new council member. Council Member Myers, you provided an overview before we got started. But I kind of want to follow up to what Ms. Lawless said earlier, is that I believe the earlier conversation was on outcomes and performance measures. And we've kind of expanded beyond that. Mr. Myers, what is your evaluation of the current system? As I try to get my hands around this, we're talking about we're in social services committee. Of which many social services, social service agencies are also partner agencies of this government. And I think translating into dollars in a sense, they receive general fund dollars to support some of what they do. They may also receive grant dollars via home block grant ESG. They may also receive United Way dollars. So there's a myriad of things going on there. But to come back to all of that, what's your current evaluation of the system? And to also add to that, our Division of Community Development administers the grant component and also some monitoring of the partner agencies, financially that is. So that's kind of my understanding of kind of where we stand now. What's your evaluation of the current system that has brought forth a discussion of going in a totally different way? Okay. Actually, you. That's a perfect segue into the comments that I wanted to make. If I could ask the commissioner, I would ask two questions to help me answer that. I'll do this however you want me to do it. I don't have to answer any questions right now. I guess I would start by answering your question by saying that the arguments that I think best speak to why this partnership should happen is the $385,000 budget cut we have in partner agencies right now. And a couple of questions I would have around that is, does the commissioner have a plan to write grants to supplement or offset that $385,000 cut? Because that's what this plan does. And so to answer your question in a short way, the issue I have with the process is this. If you look at how agencies get funded right now, the trick they have to jump through, the hoop they have to jump through, is getting in the mayor's proposed budget. Because if they don't get into Mayor's provost's budget, it's a very hard uphill push to get the council to add them into the budget. And the reason is because the way our budgets are, if you add somebody, then you've got to subtract somebody. Okay? I think the underlying unrest that the agencies have right now is, one, you've got this big behemoth in U.K., United Way, and LFCG. Go ahead. George, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to cut you off, but I'm sharing my five-minute time with the committee. So I guess my question is not the proposal. I'm just talking about the current way the system is now in regards to funding of agencies and outcomes and performance measures. Do you have a critique or a criticism of that now? I do, and I'm sure the committee will be glad to give you your five minutes back if I take your time. Okay. Because that's exactly what I was getting to. The way they get funded right now, the process is to know the mayor and get in his or her budget. That's where it all starts because that's what the council gets to respond to. Is that not correct? I don't think that's necessarily the case. And I don't think that's necessarily the case. I think going back to outcomes and performance measures, this is just my spiel. I'm going to keep an open mind as we think about this proposal. I think the United Way and the university can be a great partner to us. Council Member McCord kind of alluded to it earlier, talking about our divisions in government, particularly community development. If we were going to spend $75,000, I would recommend that we invest $75,000 inside government to help our employees who are overburdened. My background is in housing, is in grants, in government, and everybody knows that, but I've often said the easy part is getting the grant. Not all grants do you want. Not all grants will fit. The hard part is administering the grant and complying with the grant. And seeking additional grants does not get us back to what I thought the original point was, which is outcomes and measures. I think we have a current process, and, you know, we're temporary. Everybody around this horseshoe is temporary. We'll serve our terms and folks will go beyond us. But that's why we have an administration. Even the mayor is temporary. But the folks in our social services division, our community development divisions, our grants divisions, they have some continuity, they have some tenure, and they have some understanding of the services provided by some of these agencies out here today that maybe go beyond our understanding, but I think it's imperative for us to understand why that is. In closing, Council Member Myers, I will say that I want us to kind of get back to focusing on the outcomes and measures. I think that one thing that our Division of Community Development does is if folks are funded, they are producing. Now, if we want to see how they're producing and we want them to produce to a higher level, that's okay. But I take great confidence that we have no partner agencies that have or are currently receiving appropriation who are not providing service to the community. That's just my personal opinion. Thank you for your time. Thank you. Can I have five minutes now as a committee? She's already spoke once. Everybody's spoken once except for me. Is that okay with the committee? Okay. Can you start the clock for me for five minutes? To Council Member Forge points, there's a couple questions I was going to ask the commissioner. If you could come up, please. The first one was, how does the mayor utilize the reports that you talked about getting from the agencies throughout the year? And I realize that you just got here, so you only have this one year to go on. But I would ask it as a rhetorical question. And how does the mayor utilize those reports in terms of determining what he or she wants to put into the budget? Since my tenure here, I review all the quarterly reports that come in from the liaisons, which has been short. I've been here one quarter. But then we sit down as a staff. I look at the quarterly reports, and we look at recommendations to the mayor about what to do for funding. And we send the recommendation forward, but it is the mayor and the finance committee's decision of what to do with our recommendations as far as what goes in the budget. I'm not going to answer this. I would simply say to the committee and those listening that the question for me would be how, during that process, the reports that we get from the agencies is utilized. The second question I would have is, do you provide those reports to the council so that when they look at the budget, they have some type of understanding of what these agencies are doing? To my knowledge, they haven't been. Okay. So to answer your question, Councilmember Ford, when you talked about outcomes and funding, that's where I was going with that. The second thing that I would say is that when you talk about outcomes, I think everybody's focused on the United Ways piece in this partnership. But even a much larger role in this partnership is the University of Kentucky and what the students bring to the table. And that's in their program evaluations that they're going to do, the needs assessments that they're going to end up bringing into the conversation. And I'll say briefly, when we talk about – there's a slide in here, page 5. and Mr. Farmer talked about social services, code enforcement, community development, emergency management, police department, others being involved in this process. I talked to one of our community partners that called me today and asked questions about this proposal today, and I said, I've got a clear officer in my district that is phenomenal. And when he comes out to an address to talk to the people who live there about whatever it is that he's called to the scene for, He's taking note of the facility that they live in, and he may recognize a half a dozen code enforcement violations. So when he talks to those folks, he's going to ask them about, have you reported these to your landlord to get them fixed, that kind of thing? What are you doing to get this thing done? And a lot of times I know we all hear as council members that residents are told not to report those things, and there can be, you know, ramifications that are negative to them if they do. Well, what our clear officer does is go back and report those issues to code enforcement so that they're addressed. Another example is we just got a report from emergency services a couple weeks ago that outlined all the EMS calls in our districts by issue, all kinds of different ways that they broke that data down. But what's being done with that data? These U.K. students, as they take all that kind of data into account, all of a sudden we begin to look at as a community that in this demographic group or in this demographic location, We have an enormous amount of service calls for one type of medical situation. So all of a sudden in this conversation of what do we fund in our partner agency budget, we now see that we can either maybe do some education around some type of issue that will help that medical issue go away, or we have to look at coming up with money to address that issue so we can get out there preventatively and address those issues. That's what we're talking about here in this partnership. You're talking about a research institution that's moving towards top 20. We've got two of the most fantastic programs around in the Martin School and the College of Social Work. They bring real live new information on best practices, plus they bring people on the ground doing the work to provide all that information together, which is then what the mayor will use in the administration as he or she puts forth what they want to put in the budget. The council will also get that same information so we can make those same determinations. Councilman McCord, back in partner agencies a couple years ago after Katrina happened, came up with this brilliant idea, and that was let's look at our budgets based on what next year's Katrina might be. What is the big issue that's facing this community that's either already here or is going to be on us quickly, and how do we get out in front of that with respect to partner agency funding? That's what this partnership is about. So I would also ask in a minute that we have the director of the Martin School come up, Dr. Holt, and then Dr. Adams, the dean of the College of Social Work, come forward to speak too, because they're the other part of this partnership that we haven't heard from today. And when we talk about, and there are great questions, why can't we just do this in-house? Well, there's a piece that they bring to the table that we don't have. And my time is up, so I'll stop there and call on Council Member Lawless. Thank you. First of all, I do want to thank Mr. Farmer and the United Way and all the volunteers and donors to the United Way. I've been a big supporter of United Way and an agency that received funds from the United Way. And I do believe in being able to measure what you do. I'm a business person at heart as well as a MSW. So that being said, I guess my heartburn is that we went from you all helping to figure out good ways to measure outcomes, and I was at a dinner a couple of weeks, three weeks later maybe, and somebody's like, oh, you know, this whole big thing I knew nothing of. And I do think that we need to be partnerships and collaboration and grant writing is nothing new and something we've done. When I was at the Rape Crisis Center, we wrote part of the HOPE VI grant. I helped write a grant that funded a program to look at with the dental school on domestic violence and abuse. You know, numerous partnerships with other agencies. And so none of that is new. Again, I do feel like we need to slow down and look at this more clearly, see if that $72,000 could provide a grant writer and administrator within LFUCG and continue the kind of partnership we've had with the Martin School, with the College of Social Work, with the United Way, with the Bluegrass Community Foundation, and to answer more questions and get a clearer picture of what we're really getting into and where the agencies are with that. This is in no way, I'm not saying it's a horrible idea. I'm just saying I felt kind of blindsided by it, and I don't know how it went from one thing to another, and maybe I just somehow missed it. And I agree with Council Member Henson that if we're going to do something like this, that we do a $75,000 project, that maybe an RFP is an appropriate thing to do. I mean, we don't, you know, I'm one of the first ones up here that will holler, is this the sole source provider and why? So I appreciate all your time and all your energy and respect the work that the United Way does, and I do appreciate it. So that being said, I'll let go. Okay, thank you. Council Member Ford. Council Member Ford Ford Ford Thank you, Chairman Myers. Just one other comment, a few more comments I would like to make is that I didn't realize we had $75,000 as a government to invest. I know that we, that's just my opinion. My understanding is that we're facing some tough times. Again, I want to express to Mr. Farmer and to the university officials here how much I do appreciate you guys. It appears I don't want you to think that you guys are kind of on the hot seat or the barrel of bad news, because we know the value that you guys have. For example, I want to thank Mr. Farmer was in my office at my agency a few weeks ago, talking about some ways that we can partner. And the university has been very supportive in being here as well. But to walk in another man's shoes, it gives you an opportunity to give you a different perspective. And so with that, Mr. Myers, I think I heard mention earlier today that the partner agencies in our community were not apprised of this proposal. I guess my question is, if that is the case, why not? And how perhaps can we in the future engage them better into what we want to do? You know, we've had the United Way Talk University again. Absent of the contributions of the partner agencies to this conversation, I don't think it's very wise on our part. So I guess my question is, have they been notified? Were they involved in this proposal? Yes or no, and why or why not? I guess I'd ask the question, I don't really understand your question for one thing, because we have a... Have you notified the partner agencies prior to? Can I finish speaking? I have a floor, sir. I guess the reason I don't understand the question is because we have a democratic process. That's what our committee process is for. In the last meeting we talked about this. Maybe the partnership has developed more than what we were looking at when we first started talking about it, but that's because we've envisioned opportunities to do more when we got together with our partners. So I'm not sure what, and I guess the second part of that is I don't quite understand. Nothing's changing for the partners in a sense, so I'm not quite sure why. I'm not quite sure what your question is about. I guess I'll, and it's not to badger you, Mr. Myers. I'm supportive of you as I am the rest of the council members. We have some partner agencies, some social service agencies that have been around for a while. We have some leaders. I'm 35 years old. We have some leaders of social service and partner agencies in this community that have been at it just about that time, if not longer. That's experience. That's some guidance that I think could contribute wisely to the process. That's just my recommendation as we examine this further. Thank you for allowing me to speak. Thank you. Are there any other questions for committee members? I guess if I could have my second time to speak, I would say that I guess I'm actually kind of perplexed. I wrote down a question, what is the vision? From a lot of people here today, I've heard, you know, we can do this in-house, we can do this and that. I guess my question is then why haven't we been? You know, when we started partner agencies, we looked at what we're not doing to try to figure out how we can do it better. You know, we have a $385,000 budget cut to partner agencies, and agencies are more concerned about this partnership that's trying to be established to bring more non-tax dollars into the community for them to utilize to provide programs and services to our community, and they have more heartburn about that than the heartburn about the $385,000 budget cut that they're addressing right now. So I guess I don't understand why the questions are at us, why are we trying to put together a partnership that will bring more non-tax dollars into this community to address the issues of this community, why we're getting all the grief, instead of asking the budget proposal that you had before you, why did you cut my agency? We were in our budget length this morning, and we talked about an opportunity for a paralegal to be hired in a department of government, and the work that that paralegal would be able to do, they would be able to probably quadruple the money we're going to pay them to do that work. And everybody asked the question, and this came out of a task force, why don't we go ahead and move forward with doing this this year, instead of waiting until whenever we get more money. If you're going to bring in four times more than what that person's salary cost, it seems to me that makes sense. If we're going to spend $75,000 or $72,000 on this partnership, and $10,000 of that goes to college students for their stipends to be able to do the analytical work behind this, and the rest of it goes to an agency that's going to help manage this process and bring in probably millions more into our community and grants, why are we worried about $72,000? So that's what I'm throwing out there. we've got plenty of time to get input from folks. As I said in the beginning, we weren't trying to bring this out of committee with any kind of movement behind it in the first place. So everybody's here. Everybody will be able to watch this on TV. They'll be able to copy the DVD or watch it streaming. They have an opportunity to put input in before we come back next time. But I guess that's my question is we've put together a proposal that we believe will bring millions of dollars into this community to address the needs of this community. And And we've got a $385,000 cut in partner agencies right now, and no one else has put together a proposal to address that. And the commissioner has grant writers, but again, I ask that question rhetorically, do they have a plan to supplement that $385,000 shortfall that's in the current mayor's proposed budget? So that concludes my comments for now. What I'd like to do now with the committee's permission is bring forth the partners from the U.K. to have them speak to what their role will be in this. But before we do that, Vice Mayor Gordon. Just a real quick comment. You made me think of something. In our meeting this morning where we did talk about this, it's a public safety related initiative. We're going to go look for an unpaid intern, someone who can help us, and there are quite a few of them out there and it just occurred to me, why do we not, do you already use some students? LFUCG has taken students over the years. That was my job, so I'm not really aware of that. There needs to be an MSW level supervisor and so I intend to take students in my office. Ms. Danbaugh has students, Senior Center, Partners for Youth. Ms. Lawless took a student. So, yeah, we do take students, and we can get free labor out of them as long as they're learning. And I realize that may not exactly offer us the same thing that this proposal does, but it just occurred to me maybe we also should be doing that. Students are very valuable on both sides. They're valuable to us, and I think we can give them real-world experience, and we do. Okay, thank you, thank you, Mr. Myers. Thank you, and I'd like now for the partners for UK to come up and speak. I do want to make a comment. Having been a social work student and having to do that work for free, I think is a travesty. One of the things I'm actually the one that put in this partnership, that we need to find stipends for these students. I think it's a travesty when students are working their rear ends off to go to school and earn their degree, that we would expect them to come in and work for free to provide a service that is a valuable service to our community. So I'd invite Dr. Adams, do you want to start? Or whichever one. Hi, I'm Bill Hoyt from the Director of the Martin School of Public Policy, and pleased to be here, pleased to have a chance to tell you a little bit about the Martin School and, I guess, what our students can offer. What I want to emphasize, and so I'll put a little subtle pitch into the Martin School while I'm at this, I think, What we do and what's come out, I think, in the proposal, as Bill Farmer's talked about it, is train our students in program evaluation. That's one of our strengths. Public budgeting and finance, we're number four in the country. Our Ph.D. program is in the top five in the country in public administration. And so part of this is one thing that I like to emphasize with the program is we're really good at numbers. We're good at outcome measurement. That's what we take pride in. We take pride in our budgeting. As part of the educational process, of course, like in the College of Social Work, we have an internship. And that's what we're talking about here. These are students with graduate training. So these are not undergraduates. These are students with graduate training that have gone through our courses in program evaluation by the time they would be here in terms of several courses in statistics and in economics. I think that's – they would be prepared to use those tools. And I think that our past experience with these internships has shown that they use them well. And as a matter of fact, on Thursday and Friday, they are going to be presenting, the second-year students will be presenting what we call the capstones, basically a master's thesis. And a lot of those arise from their internships. And it's really quite, well, for a faculty member, I guess, it's really quite a thing to see that because you see them, see what they've done, and you see how valuable it is for the agencies, as well as the students themselves. Of course, we've talked about that. This is a great opportunity for our students and something that they will benefit for. They're looking to work in these kind of agencies in the future, and so this would be a great opportunity. A council person, Hanson, I made a note here, and you said something about, you know, what would be acceptable. I think you had a question. Well, certainly we are not going to be involved in deciding what is acceptable. But one of the things that I think we can do, and was in Bill Farmer's slides there, is what I would envision an intern, one of our students being able to do, is to provide some kind of insights through research and evaluation of what other programs have done, similar programs in other areas. May not give a full answer, I don't think, to what's acceptable. I think that's up to the council, obviously, to decide that kind of thing, but give you some perspective. So that's one of the valuable things. Our students will have, I think, one plus in terms of this is their focus, right? In my experience in talking with agencies at the state level and other cities and stuff is just how, And we've heard it here. Councilperson McCord, I think, said this several times is, you know, just how much capacity do you have? How many hats can you wear? Well, our interns, I think, will provide an opportunity that this is what they're going to be doing, outcome evaluation, research on these things. And I think that will benefit, I would think, both parties, both our students in terms of experience, and I would hope these agencies. So I guess that's all I have. Ike, do you want to? Thank you very much. I really appreciate the opportunity to come and speak to you this afternoon or this evening. I am Ike Adams. relatively new to this wonderful community. And as the dean of the College of Social Work, I'm very pleased to be a partner with this community in any way that we can. It's just a wonderful, wonderful place to live. Commissioner, I'm really proud of her and the work that she has done for both the college and the work she's doing right now. And before coming to the college, when I first got here, I got an opportunity to meet Bill Farmer. I got him here just a little bit before he did. So he brings a wealth of experience to this great community. and since I've been here these two years, I've had an opportunity to begin to meet people in the community. So the college is well positioned, and I'm happy to hear from you and others the credibility that we have as a college and as a university. And I want to continue to provide that through my leadership. So we, Bill and I, serve on the commissioner's advisory board, and we work with the commissioner as well as some of the members of the council. And it's the role of the dean and the dean's college because we do three things, and we try to do three things well within a university. We try to impart great knowledge through our research and our research endeavors, and we want it to be evidence-based. And I think the College of Social Work and the university both do a good job around that. And we also want to provide excellent instructions where we are. And I think the thing that's important today is that we wanted to be involved in the community. We want to be engaged in our communities. And this partnership with United Way and the city and county is an excellent kind of partnership that we seek out with people. So we happily wanted to be partners, not necessarily knowing all of the political ramifications of this. Somebody should have given me a call. But no, we eagerly seek out these kind of partnerships. We're happy to know that we have people with MSWs that are working at United Way, and we think this is a solid sort of way for our students to learn on the one hand and make a contribution to the community on the other. So that's a perfect kind of match that we would eagerly look out for, not only with United Way, and we have those kind of partnerships with others in the community. I beg to differ a little bit with my commissioner here publicly. We do provide this mutually rewarding kind of relationship with other agencies, and we do practicums that are unpaid. But we prefer to have paid practicums. You know, it's just obvious that that's something. And generally speaking, when we have paid practicums, we get the better students. That's just the way it tends to happen because they have to be practical. And so when the councilman, as a former MSW student, he absolutely knows how important it is to have stipends. And I thank you for taking that into consideration in the proposal. I'll entertain any questions that someone may have, but I'm a little nervous with all of these high-powered people around here, and I see sitting in the back and all of that. So this is a great way to be welcomed to the community. Thank you, Dean. Are there any questions that the committee has for either Dr. Hoyt or Dr. Adams? Okay, seeing none, we have circulated a sign-up sheet. We don't normally do this in standing committees, but I think it's a great idea to allow folks that have come from the community to speak. So the first one, we're going to give them three minutes. Actually, we can give them five minutes if you want. Is that okay with the committee? Okay? Okay. Okay. they're going to speak to this proposal. So, no. So let's keep it to three minutes since we do have a second item on the agenda. So we'll start with Mr. Jack Birch. If you could give your name and your address, and then you've got three minutes, sir. Jack Birch, Community Action Council, 710 West High Street, Lexington. I don't want to address the specifics of the proposal today, and let me explain to you why. I've had some informal conversations with Councilman Myers, I've had some informal conversations with Mr. Farmer, and there's a lot of conversation that's gone on in the grapevine, but the actual proposal materials I saw for the first time when I walked into Council Chamber today, and I think it's more appropriate to think through things and do some fact-checking and have some conversations before you stand in a forum like this and offer an evaluation. I would like an opportunity, and I think there are other providers in the community as well, to share with you our perspectives on the whole issue of needs assessments and priorities and outcomes management and outcome measures. There's a lot of work being done in this community by the agencies. What we don't have very well at this point is coordination, but I've had some incredible conversations with the commissioner about that issue, And I think that's a conversation that a lot of us need to have, not just a few of us. And then lastly, a quick public service announcement. The students from the Martin School and the students from the College of Social Work did great work on the Manchester issue. David Christensen, the manager for research and planning at Community Action Council, edited their materials and wrote the recommendations in the final report that went to the commissioner and to Mr. Myers. We were glad to make him available. He's got a master's in social work and has been around for many, many years, and he was able to take some quality work by the students and kind of address it to the policy issues. Thank you. Then we have Mr. Walter May. Could you please state your name and your address, sir? Thank you, Mr. Chairman. My name is Walter May, 167 West Main Street. I'm here with several people who have been partners with this community for decades. I have with me here David Stevens from the Salvation Army Board, Lindy Carnes from Chrysalis House, also Eileen O'Brien from Chrysalis House, Porter Peoples from the Urban League, Janice James from the Hope Center, and I also am with the Hope Center as Director of Special Projects. And, as I say, we have been partners with this government doing work this government has asked us to do for many years. And, Council Member Ford, no, we have not been consulted in this process in the least. Suddenly we're partners who are sort of on the outside looking in in this process. Now, having said that, I want to say that all of us appreciate the work we do with the Irving County government. We appreciate the work that the United Way does. and we've always tried to work together with everyone to accomplish the many good things we try to accomplish with you and as you have asked us to do. For instance, the Hope Center came about because 20 years ago a task force of the urban county government called for it to be created. And ever since then, we have done the work you have asked us to do. If you want to talk about leverage, last year we received $740,000 from the urban county government, 350 of which was for running your detention center recovery program. The rest was for our normal agency. Our total budget is $5 million. So, yes, we leverage what you do for us, and we do that very well right now. I think the process as it has gone has left us with many more questions than answers or opinions, and I think that's come about because we haven't been consulted. And frankly, Mr. Chairman, I think you shouldn't take this up again with the United Way until United Way has come and talked to us and explained everything that they're talking. I think we don't understand. We've been your partners, and suddenly we're on the outside looking in. We don't understand that. We apply for grants ourselves. We do that work. And we are assessed. We are required to be assessed as part of those grants. We're assessed by professionals, not by students. We generally teach students. We're not generally evaluated by them. That said, we have no objection to outcomes measurements. My question would be why not do it in-house? I think the government departments have all the capacity to do that, and this money would be better spent there. Frankly, the money would be better spent with us. The mayor's proposed budget cuts us by $74,000, and you're talking about putting $75,000 into this outside position, we can take that money and deliver services directly to people who badly need it in this time. That's a personal point of view on the front of the Hope Center. To some degree, it seems to me we're fixing something that we haven't identified as broken. It can be improved, certainly, and I think that Commissioner Mills is entirely capable of improving the process. But these are taxpayer dollars. It seems to me that taxpayer efforts should be used to evaluate it. Mr. May. Yes, I understand. I didn't have a PowerPoint. I did make this many notes sitting here for the last hour and 40 minutes. I would request another two minutes. Is that the committee's pleasure? You have two minutes. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. My question also would be is who is evaluating the United Way's ability to do this? Who's scoring them? Maybe they should come back and tell us how they have done over the last five years in raising money. And when they say they can take $75,000, and I think you said turn it into millions, I would like to see an evaluation of them for their ability to do that. And Council Member Lawless, I was going to mention goodgiving.net. I worked on putting that information online. It's a ton of information and took a long time to do it. Believe me. So if you want to know just about anything about the Hope Center, go to goodgiving.net, and you will find out about that. In fact, I think it's a little misleading to say that this doesn't have any power implications. Information is power. The agency controlling the information has a lot of influence. If you're saying that the mayor's information comes to you and you can't fool with it, well, what's the difference between the information coming from the United Way? You still have that same problem. If their information comes in a certain way, you're kind of restricted in your ability to do it differently. I think that's why in-house might well be a better way of going about it. I would ask that this not come back until the agencies have been consulted, until your current partners, the partners who have been working with you all these years, are consulted about it and are given the opportunity to stand up here for as long as the proponents have done to talk about this proposal. I think we've been left out, and we shouldn't have been. We've been doing your work loyally, hard. We're prepared to be measured, but we think that you're fully capable of doing that. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, sir. Next on the list, we have Mary Carnes. If you could please state your name and your address, and you have three minutes, ma'am. I'm sorry, only Sister Hedwig called me Mary. I go by Lindy Carnes, 2400 The Woods Lane, Lexington, Kentucky. I am the treasurer of the Salvation Army. I am the upcoming president of the Chrysalis House. I'm giving full disclosure. I'm on the Community Foundation Board. And I am the prior treasurer of the United Way for the three years prior. And my husband runs a social service agency, Employment Solutions, here in Lexington. So I am not without a dog in the fight. I just want to say I know that the United Way has been very responsive to their own declining revenues in attempts to look for money outside the community, and I applaud them for that. I understand with every agency I am with, it is a challenge to find sufficient funding. I would also say to the Urban County Council that, or this committee, that the agencies, the 14 agencies which you all support, are the best of the best. They are the Hope Center, the Salvation Army, the Chrysalis House, the Nursing Home Ombudsman. These are organizations that have been vetted in this community for a very long time that are currently being vetted by the United Way. They are great agencies. They do great work with little enough in resources. I hope when you consider a proposal for attempting to bring, and collaboration is where it's at. The United Way is absolutely right in that. But I think when you look at this proposal, that you need to look hard at what these agencies are already doing and what the United Way is already doing and what the city can also do. We need all these resources. The city funds the organizations that serve the absolutely most vulnerable in our community. The reason that you fund organizations such as the Salvation Army is because no one in this room could tolerate women and children living in their cars on Main Street. And so we have to be absolutely crystal clear that any resources that get taken away from those organizations will be leveraged, will grow, and that there will be an absolute, complete, and thorough vetting process to get there. The United Way has just embarked in their new direction. They have not yet told agencies what their funding will be for this year. You know, we don't know how their process is working, and we will know shortly. So I think that's part of it. They are on a new path as well. And I applaud them for that path. They are certainly trying to bring dollars into this community. But it's a new path. And these are old agencies that have been doing it for a very long time and doing it well for you. Thank you. Thank you. Is there anybody else who just came in that would like to speak? Okay. Council members, do you have any more comments on this issue? Okay. Mr. Farmer. I'd like to say thank you. I appreciate the opportunity of presenting a proposal to you. This has been an extraordinary opportunity. It has been involving over time. And so if the decision is by LFUCG to have a request for a proposal, I mean, clearly we have developed the template that you can use for that request, and we're very pleased to have done that. I'd like to remember or have you remember that we were asked to be a part of the discussion. And if what we've done so far is to generate more thought, more concern, more discussion about how we move people in this community from crisis to stability to sustainability, then we've done a great job. Certainly I hope that if you do issue an RFP that we will be allowed to participate, but from the United Way of the Bluegrass perspective, transparency and accountability is extremely important, and if it is the will of this organization to request a request for proposal or response to a proposal, we'll be more than willing to participate in the process. So thank you. Thank you very much. Council Member Tennant? I just was going to say the exact same thing. Let us all keep in mind, I think there was a misconception at the beginning, that we're the ones that asked United Way. Yes. They're not coming to us saying, hey, we want to take over your social service administration, et cetera. So we ask them to come here today, and thank you for being our guest and providing us with this information. We certainly appreciate it. It gives us a great foundation to go on and some examples to see how we move forward. So just want to make sure we're all clear on that. And I'll have some wrap-up comments as well, but right now I'd like to bring Harry Richard to the podium. And could you give your name and address? I'm going to the podium. I honestly wouldn't have left when I should have gone blind. One of the reasons I'm bringing him forward is he is the chair of the United Way board. This will be quick. My name's Harry Richard. I'm the board chair of the United Way of the Bluegrass. I wanted to say what Councilman Stenitz said, and I also wanted to say that this would only work, any kind of organization, any kind of arrangement like this will only work when all of these organizations are working together. We don't collaborate enough in this community. We go off and we have all the best intentions, but we do it in a vacuum, and that can't be. What Walter May said is exactly right. Those organizations have been, and LINDY, have been working hard and hard. What the United Way wants to do, having been invited, is to do that in collaboration with all of these agencies so that the collective strength of those agencies makes the biggest difference. And so that's very, very, that's very important for this committee to understand and for this whole community to understand. Thank you. Thank you. And that's the point that I was going to reiterate. And the goal here is to bring more non-tax dollars into our community to provide for the services and program that we need to help the lease of these in this community. So with a $385,000 budget cut to partner agencies, we see this as one of the ways that we can work to make up that deficit. Are there any more comments from anybody on the council or anybody on the committee for this issue? Okay. Seeing none, we'll move forward to our second issue. and that is in our last meeting we talked with the commissioner. She kind of gave an overview. She had just gotten on the ground regarding her division of government, her department of government, what's going on there, and we talked about some of the cuts that have been made in the past and sort of dismantling of social services and that we look forward to this rebuilding process as we move forward for social services. And so the reorg is what we talked about last time. Don't want to get into the budget aspect of this conversation today. They have a link, and that will be addressed in the link. But being that we did talk about their reorg or their restructure, and we've got a loss of five employees, I thought it was appropriate that we have the commissioner come and just talk a little bit about the restructure and how that fits in with the restructure that she has planned. Commissioner? Thank you very much. You all should have copies of two documents in your packet that we sent. One, it was the proposed reorganization by the previous administration, Commissioner Ham. It's not in chart form. It's in list form, but it will kind of give you an idea of her vision for social services. And then this reorganization chart that you have, do you have those documents? Can you put that? Do you have a second one that you can put up on the screen? Put ours up there? Okay, mine's got handwritten notes all over it, but I don't mind. Do you have a – Okay, this one is the reorganization chart, which includes some of the vacancies that were not funded in the current budget, as well as – we have the office in there that's proposed to end services, and it's in there now. But at this point, those were the folks that were laid off. We chose budget cuts by services, not just willy-nilly through the department. We felt like you had to look across the department and feel like, where was the place that we could cut and do the least damage? The former administration proposed having a division of housing and support services. They were going to put children, youth, and families together as a division. And then there was going to be an office of aging and disability support services, The office actually reports to the commissioner, and I don't think that was a big change. It's my proposal to go back to the three divisions that we had previously in prior administrations, the division of adult and tenant services, the division of family services, and the division of youth services. I think if you'll go to another chart, we have individual. This is from the commissioner's office here. The commissioner has a lot of direct reports at this point in time. Boy, it's really sloppy. This is Adult and Tenant Services. Adult and Tenant Services has programs at Black and Williams, the Newtown Pike Project. The one with the initials there is the Rapid Recovery and Rehousing. That has to do with stimulus funds. That's a grant. The Social Services Coordinator was formerly the director of the Cardinal Valley Center. And we changed the Cardinal Valley Center to what is now the Intake Center. financial assistance has been one of the key programs to adult and tenant services. One thing that was done in the previous administration was to do what was called an intake center, and employees were moved over to Cardinal Valley, and that is the office that we've proposed for elimination across our whole department. That office takes phone calls for clients coming in. They have what are called navigators to help people get to social services they need. And they also take emergency financial assistance applications, just like they do at our industry road office. So when we looked at it, we used that word duplication. It is duplication, but I will tell you, you know, duplication is not always a bad thing. But we felt like if we needed to take a budget cut, this was one place where we could still offer those services, maybe just at a lower level. There were some new things proposed over there. We will be still pushing forward with a payee program. We'll just be able to serve fewer people than we did in the past. Newtown Pike, I mean, the Hope Center transition piece, case management, we will not turn away Hope 6 people for case management. It's just that it will be different. One thing that was unusual about that center, there are people from different divisions that reported to that office. They reported to Adult and Tenant Services, but on the payroll, They're in family services. They're in my office. One of the staff is in there, so it's kind of people from different offices that were over there. So that was the one we were intended to cut. If we'll go to some other divisions, I'll try to explain why that happened. In the Division of Family Services, the parent resource centers are high school. High school principal currently is part-time. The early childhood center, that is our daycare center. We serve 115 kids. 103 of those kids are on free and reduced-price lunch. We are one of 17 four-star daycare centers in the state of Kentucky. That means we are the highest quality daycare center, and there are only 17 of them in the state. They do a great job over there. Case management, that's 100% grant funded. That's KTAP grant, funds five social workers, an administrative person, a wraparound employment person, supplies, that whole office. is about, I would think the last grant was about half a million dollars. We don't spend any money on the case management for our mothers over there. Administration are people we need to keep things going at the Family Care Center. We have program coordinators, administrative specialists, staff assistants. The Home Network is also 100% funding, and the more people we hire, the more money we bring in. So they bill Medicaid. They go out and work with mothers in their homes with new babies. All of these programs have staff-children ratios. in order for us to keep what we're keeping. We have lost some people in administration and family services, which makes it difficult to build your child care, you know, to keep things going. Clerical staff is real important in there, and we're managing with who we have, but there's no place to cut in family services because of the staff's kids ratios. We have 30 people in the high school. We have 125 kids out there every day, so we do a real good job out there with what we have. The next division is the proposed new youth services organization. In the transition team report, the one thing that rose to the top was youth services. Part of it is what we lost in urban county government. We've lost a lot of positions. The other part is this community has lost a lot in youth services. Juvenile drug court and family drug court have been stopped by the administrative office of courts. It was a truancy assessment program, which was run by AOC. They also discontinued that grant, and the schools were not able to pick that up. Bluegrass had an early intervention process for substance-abusing teens, and that has been dropped. So there's been a net loss to services for youth in our community pretty large. One of the things that factored into our budget, we wanted to keep our summer youth employment program, and we wanted to keep our Partners for Youth grants at their current funding. And I know I didn't want to get into budget, but some of these decisions has allowed us to do that. We advertise the summer youth job positions the week before spring break. That's just two weeks out. We have 150 positions, and we currently have over 300 applications. So that just shows you the need for youth services. Probation. Our probation officers do not have the ability to take away cases. Anytime a judge sends a kid on probation, we have to serve them. So we need to keep full strength there. Day treatment, this is a hard thing for folks to understand, but our kids have Medicaid, they have disabilities. We can only have 10 to 1 in a classroom with a teacher. If we have a teacher and a paraeducator, we can go to 15. High school kids, they have to be court ordered. All of our high school kids are over there court ordered. Our medical school kids, not necessarily, because they don't get to the court system the way high school kids do. However, Fayette County, they provide us teachers. We provide the social work treatment. They feel like we should really work with middle school kids because that's prevention. So we've got student-staff ratios over there. We've got program mates. CASA goes out and funds raise, gets its own money. They're working on a shoestring. We're meeting monthly now because they're having trouble staying afloat, just like some of our partner agencies are. The community youth and family services that used to just be the Gaines Way project. We've recently entered Woodhill. We work with refugee youth over there and community youth. We have three social workers currently assigned to that. We have one social worker who's working at the Coleman House Project doing substance abuse assessments. So we are at our limit. I mean, I think we will not sacrifice quality. That's very important to us. We're going to continue to look at community partners. we may limit the number of people that we see so that we can continue to do top-shelf work, as frankly is where we are with all of this. A couple of the people that directly report to me now with this Youth Services Division, I think they would more appropriately report to the Youth Services Director. The probation officer, the head of the probation program reports to me now. Better that they'd report to a Director of Youth Services. The CASA Project reports to me. The Partners for Youth person reports to me. Those are all youth services. I think direct reports to a director is really pretty good. I will tell you that yesterday we did final interviews for the new director of view services, and today we did final interviews for the new director of family services. And I can't say enough how much I appreciate the mayor and the council. There has been a hiring freeze on, and particularly Mr. Maloney here. He understands the need. You can't run a program, you can't make decisions without directors in place. Ms. Talbert has done a wonderful job as director of adult services. We've had a person acting over both youth and family services. Look at how many persons they're having to do. They're treading water over there. So I think once we get new directors in place, we'll be ready to move forward, and the community partnerships, we can move towards working towards grants, working with our community partners, because we'll have leadership in place. So that's the way the reorganization will look. Thank you. Are there any questions? being that we're right up against our deadline of we have three seconds left yes okay um i guess if we could just continue this on to our next meeting let me let me ask a question um we talked about having a meeting in may um looking at the calendar tuesdays there's two holidays there well one's election day primary election day so we normally don't have meetings um down here on that tuesday and then the 31st is a holiday, or a holiday before that, so we don't have meetings. So I'm looking at either the 19th or the 12th of May to have our next special meeting. 12th? Does anybody else have anything they want to weigh in on that? Does the 12th work? Members? Let's set it at 3 o'clock so we don't have overtime. Does that work for you, Commissioner? Yes, I can make it work. And I would like to know what you would like for me to bring to that meeting. Would you like a framework for us to do with partner agencies? Do you want more on this topic? We will have had our council links by then. I think if you could circle back on this after you've had your link, on your restructure and how whatever their recommendations are going to do, work for you or don't work for you. And then the second piece, actually the first piece we want to have on the agenda, would be your framework for doing what we're proposing with this partnership in-house, if that's the way you want to look at it. I'll let you determine what you want to put together. Yeah, we can give you some starting points on how we would look at measuring agencies and going to outcomes, and I'm sure it won't be a final document, but I can get together some folks and we can let you all know how we would propose to kind of tighten up that process. Okay, and could you include in there the conversation, you know, I think your assistant went out and looked at their software that they have. Yes, he's my administrative officer, and I can bring him because he has spent quite a bit of time with both the Unite Away and the Bluegrass Foundation who has good giving. And, you know, he has looked at both of them and had a system, and so he can come and let you know what he's learned. Okay, and then can you also add in there, Can you kind of break down this proposal and then see how you would do the same thing this proposal does? Sure. So the grant writing, all that different stuff, program evaluation. Okay. Okay? Okay. Is there anything else from the council? Any motions or move, Jerry? So do. We got a motion and a second? All in favor, say aye. Aye. Thank you. Commissioner Mills, you need this back. Yeah.