# Council Environmental Quality Committee - May 3, 2011 > Auto-transcribed civic record · May 3, 2011 - **Permalink**: https://meetings.lexingtonky.news/meeting/1997 - **Source video**: https://lfucg.granicus.com/player/clip/1997?view_id=14&redirect=true - **Date**: 2011-05-03 - **Last revised**: July 17, 2026 - **Length**: 20,946 words > ⚠️ **Auto-generated content.** Audio from the official Granicus video was auto-transcribed with OpenAI's open-source Whisper large-v3-turbo model, run locally by The Lexington Times. Structured facts were extracted with GPT-4o; the narrative summary was written by Anthropic Claude. Verbatim wording may contain errors. See [methodology](https://meetings.lexingtonky.news/about/methodology) or [report a correction](mailto:editor@lexingtonky.news). --- ## Meeting Overview The Environmental Quality Committee met on May 3, 2011, at 3:00 p.m. at Lexington-Fayette Urban County Government, with Chairman Blues presiding. The committee addressed five agenda items during the meeting, including constituent comments, environmental remediation planning, property authority issues, and grant program considerations. The committee took three votes and heard one public comment from constituent Ed Kusche. Two items—the Remedial Measures Plan regarding $SO Baseline Recommendations and the discussion of Private Property Issues concerning Responsibilities & Authority—were deferred for further consideration. The committee approved the Acute Problem Grant Program and voted to schedule a special meeting for June 2011. ## Attendance **Present:** Blues, Stinnett, Gorton, Farmer, Martin, Henson, Lane **Absent:** Kaye **Late:** None ## Votes and Decisions The meeting included three motions, all of which passed by voice vote with no dissenting votes. **Pilot Grant Program for Sewer Backups** [timestamp: 02:06:45] A motion by Martin, seconded by Gorton, to recommend establishing a $100,000 pilot grant program in the 2012 budget to address chronic sewer backups in homes passed unanimously. All seven members voted in favor: Blues, Stinnett, Gorton, Farmer, Martin, Henson, and Lane. The Environmental Department and Legal Department will develop eligibility criteria for the program, with funding to come from the Sanitary Sewer Fund. **Special Meeting on SSO Baseline Recommendations** [timestamp: 02:07:23] A motion by Lane, seconded by Blues, to schedule a special meeting on June 21, 2011, at 11:00 AM to make a recommendation on SSO baseline recommendations passed unanimously with all seven members voting in favor. An amendment was added to the motion to include an opportunity to place other items on the agenda for that meeting. **Work Group on Private Property Access Policies** [timestamp: 01:25:36] A motion by Farmer, seconded by Blues, to form a work group to recommend policies on private property access to reduce inflow and infiltration into the sanitary sewer system passed unanimously with all seven members voting in favor. Vice Mayor Gorton will lead the task, which will include expertise from the Planning Committee and the consulting team. ## Budget and Financial Actions The meeting included approval of a pilot grant program totaling $100,000 to address chronic sewer backups in homes. This grant program is intended to provide financial assistance to homeowners in need of sewer backup mitigation. ## Public Comment [timestamp: 00:00:00] Ed Kusche, representing Hillcrest Cemetery, addressed the council regarding the water quality management fee. He expressed concern that the $3,000 annual fee places an unfair and unsustainable burden on small businesses. Kusche urged the council to explore alternative funding sources for water quality management and to enforce the fee more equitably across all affected entities. ## Contested Items The May 3, 2011 meeting featured two significant areas of disagreement among council members regarding sewer infrastructure and financing. **Equity in Sewer Fee Burden** Council members engaged in a heated discussion about whether all residents, including rural property owners, should bear the cost of sewer improvements. The debate centered on fairness concerns, particularly regarding the impact on low-income and small business taxpayers. Members disagreed about the appropriate distribution of costs across different segments of the community and whether rural residents should contribute equally to improvements that may not directly serve their properties. **Funding Mechanism for Large-Scale Sewer Projects** A second point of contention involved how to finance a $500–$800 million sewer project. Council members were split on whether to implement flat-rate fees or usage-based charges. Proponents of different approaches raised concerns about equity and affordability, with particular worry about the ability of residents to absorb increased costs under either funding model. The split vote indicated that council members could not reach consensus on which mechanism would be most fair and sustainable for the community. ## Constituent Comments: Ed Kusche Ed Kusche, representing Hillcrest Cemetery, addressed the meeting to express opposition to the water quality management fee [timestamp: 00:00:00]. **Key Concerns Raised** Kusche highlighted the disproportionate impact of the proposed water quality management fee on small businesses. He argued that the fee structure created an inequitable burden for smaller operations compared to larger entities. **Requests and Recommendations** Kusche called for two primary actions: - Equitable enforcement of the water quality management fee across all affected parties - Consideration of alternative funding mechanisms that would distribute costs more fairly **Outcome** This agenda item was informational in nature, with no formal action taken during the meeting. ## Remedial Measures Plan - $SO Baseline Recommendations [timestamp: 00:05:34] Charlie presented a draft remedial measures plan outlining cost estimates for addressing sanitary sewer overflows (SSOs) based on different storm event scenarios. The presentation included projections for two-, five-, and ten-year storm events. **Key Discussion Points** The discussion centered on several critical aspects of the plan: - **Cost Breakdowns**: Participants reviewed detailed cost estimates associated with each storm event scenario to understand the financial scope of remedial measures. - **Financing Options**: The group explored various financing mechanisms and approaches to fund the proposed remedial measures. - **Inflow and Infiltration**: Speakers emphasized the importance of addressing inflow and infiltration from private property as a strategy to reduce long-term expenses. This focus reflected recognition that reducing water entering the system from private sources could decrease overall remedial costs. **Speakers Involved** The agenda item involved input from multiple participants: Charlie (presenter), Martin, Lane, Farmer, and Gorton. **Outcome** The matter was deferred, indicating that the group did not reach a final decision or approval on the remedial measures plan at this meeting. Further discussion or additional information was needed before proceeding. ## Private Property Issues - Responsibilities & Authority [timestamp: 01:10:34] The committee discussed challenges related to accessing private property to address illicit connections and inflow/infiltration issues. **Key Discussion Points** The primary focus was on the difficulties the committee faces in gaining access to private properties to identify and remediate unauthorized connections to the sewer system and water infiltration problems. These issues can significantly impact system performance and water quality. **Work Group Formation** In response to these challenges, the committee formed a work group tasked with developing recommendations for improved access and enforcement policies. The work group's mandate includes examining potential policy mechanisms to facilitate property inspections and remediation efforts. **Potential Policy Approaches** One approach under consideration is the implementation of mandatory inspections during property transfers. This would create a mechanism to ensure properties are evaluated for illicit connections and infiltration issues at key transition points in property ownership. **Speakers** The discussion involved multiple committee members, including Charlie, Farmer, Lane, Martin, and Gorton. **Outcome** The agenda item was deferred, indicating that further work by the newly formed work group is needed before the committee takes final action on recommendations regarding private property access and enforcement policies. ## Acute Problem Grant Program The committee discussed the establishment of a pilot grant program designed to address chronic sewer backup issues affecting homeowners. [timestamp: 01:38:44] **Program Overview** The proposed program would allocate $100,000 to provide financial assistance to homeowners experiencing chronic sewer backups. Eligible solutions under the program would include infrastructure improvements such as grinder pumps or basement capping. **Key Participants** The discussion involved committee members Martin, Gorton, Lane, and Henson. **Development Process** The committee determined that specific program criteria would be developed collaboratively by the Environmental and Legal Departments. This approach ensured that both environmental standards and legal requirements would be incorporated into the program's framework before implementation. **Outcome** The Acute Problem Grant Program was approved by the committee. ## June 2011 Special Meeting The committee approved scheduling a special meeting for June 21, 2011, at 11:00 AM [timestamp: 02:07:23]. The purpose of this meeting is to finalize recommendations on the SSO baseline plan and prepare a report for the full council. Key speakers on this agenda item included Lane and Blues. The committee voted to approve the special meeting date and time as proposed. --- ## Decisions - **Motion** — passed: Recommendation to establish a $100,000 pilot grant program in the 2012 budget to address chronic sewer backups in homes - **Motion** — passed: Motion to schedule a special meeting on June 21, 2011, at 11:00 AM to make a recommendation on SSO baseline recommendations - **Motion** — passed: Motion to form a work group to recommend policies on private property access to reduce inflow and infiltration into the sanitary sewer system --- ## Full transcript taxes and raising old ones like all the preceding mayors have done. Everyone wants more services and fewer taxes. We at Hillcrest are not everyone. We are not a big or rich company. Our profits are meager. We would gladly take a cut in services to pay for fewer taxes. Kudos to Mayor Graves' proposal for cutbacks. We have to make painful cutbacks because of the continually increasing taxes and fees of the LFUCG. Before the water quality management fee to repair storm drain systems began last year, the cemetery already paid more than a fair share and a grand fortune of a multitude of taxes and fees to the LFUCG. The water quality management fee has added $3,000 a year to that huge burden. The water quality management fee is too high for our small company to bear and is unfair in many ways, which I have documented and willing to discuss. We are not against clean water, but we do resent paying this astronomical fee for many reasons, including unfair exemptions given to others and unfair application and enforcement of the code and lack of accountability of the LFUCG. The Director of Code Enforcement and his sidewalk supervisor voluntarily agreed to have repaired promptly a dangerous-to-public-safety broken sidewalk storm drain system issue in front of our property nearly two years ago, and nothing has been done. Citizens have 90 days with limited extensions from the LFUCG to make such repairs or else. We always comply with the LFUCG without refusal. The LFUCG makes unkempt promises and is exempt from what citizens must do. The water quality management fee treats our cemetery like a parking lot in a polluter, which it is not, and gives exemptions to others that are. The ratio of green space to impervious surface, which allows rain to naturally percolate into the soil, is unfairly not even considered as we feel it should be. Yes, sometimes I let the LFUCG agitate me. However, I stand here before this committee angry at no one but myself for standing idly by and not using the opportunity such as this to voice my opinion while this unfair fee, which is crippling our company, was concocted. I was also unimpressed with a recent experience with the Division of Water Quality. However, Director Martin's presentation at the last meeting was most impressive and informative and shows the urgency of these sanitary sewer issues. Therefore, the remedial measures plans is very important to all of us. However, we at Hillcrest are afraid that the remedial measures plans mean another huge and unfair LFUCG tax-slash-fee increase, like the water quality management fee, which threatens the survival of our small business. Thus, I am here to humbly beg for mercy from the LFUCG for our company as more taxes and fees are planned for us to pay. Please, Council, find your funding elsewhere and place your new taxes and fees on someone else besides our small company. We can take no more. Perhaps tax those who are not paying a fair share of the water quality management fee. Suggestions for funding the remedial measures plans. The LFUCG could enforce and apply the water quality management fee fairly. I contend that some businesses are not charged enough according to the code. Make cutbacks like we have to do because of LFUCG taxes, as Mayor Gray proposed. The mission of the Stormwater Management System Ordinance is to minimize discharge of pollutants into the streams and to reduce runoff from the rain. However, some of the biggest culprits got the biggest breaks on this fee. Tax the railroads that are unfairly exempt and pay nothing to the fee regardless of their income. and even though they have buildings, roads, parking lots, and tracks are built entirely on impervious surface and they contribute greatly to polluted runoff. Tax the farms of Fayette County, each of which pays only $4.32 a month to the water quality management fee regardless of their income, even though they have buildings, roads, driveways, parking lots, all impervious surfaces, and they use industrial amounts of commercial pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers, and continually produce mountains of manure that line the fields, soak in the rain today, and pollute Fayette County streams, tax the homeowners, enforce the illegal connection ordinances, and the LFECG will have fewer SSOs and other related problems, perhaps obligate plumbers to report illegal connections in homes and businesses. According to the information provided by Director Martin at the last meeting and LiveLexingtonGreen.com, the homeowners are some of the biggest complainers and also some of the biggest culprits in the problems with the sewer system with their illegal sump pumps and drains and pollution with yard chemicals and waste. Yet they pay a mere $4.32 a month while our small business suffers and painfully pays $3,000 extra per year just for sewer repair that, in my opinion, is not being done sufficiently. Thank you for the time and consideration on these important matters. Thank you very much. Thank you, Mr. Cushing. Committee members, the next item on our agenda is the remedial measures plan and the SSO baseline recommendations. Charlie, if you want to provide context for this, that would be helpful. I did not prepare a different presentation today. Instead, I brought back the presentation that we had from last week. And this is the slide that was the eye-catcher, I think, for everybody. You know, what we were talking about was it's time for us to submit the first of three remedial measures plans as required by the consent decree to EPA and Division of Water for their ultimate in review and approval. What that plan will do is provide the list of projects, the schedule of those projects, and the cost associated with those projects to fix the sanitary sewer system up to a certain level. And the levels that we talked about a couple of weeks ago had to do with this two-year storm, which is about 3.2 inches of rain over a 24-hour period. You see the cost for that, and this is not just for group one, which is the report we're getting ready to send, but this is our current estimate for the entire system, groups one, two, and three. We're projecting way out ahead here because groups two and three, the sanitary sewer assessment that needs to be done in order to develop the remedial measure plan is still ongoing for those two groups. But we feel like we've got a pretty good amount of information to be able to make a reasonable estimate. And we felt like one of the things we heard from the public meetings that we held in March was that citizens wanted to know, how much is this going to cost me a month? And that last column, the column on your right, is what our projection is as far as increases in sanitary sewer fees on a monthly basis for each one of these different scenarios. It's a two-year storm, five-year storm, or ten-year storm. The costs go up because the amount of water that's getting into the system during those particular rainfall events goes up exponentially. I had my notes here just to give you some April statistics. This past month of April I don't think is representative of a two-year storm. I don't think it's necessarily even representative of a five-year storm. We've had continual rain for what seems like forever, but 30 days, 12-plus inches of rain in central Kentucky. But the April statistics is that Town Branch Treatment Plant, average day flow, average is 20 million gallons a day. In April, we averaged 38.5 million a day, with a peak of 90 million gallons coming in on the 12th of February. West Hickman, same average, right around 20 million gallons a day, rated for 33. So on an average day, we've got plenty of capacity. But in April, we averaged almost 41 million gallons a day and peaked out at 93.5. We had 22 pump stations in the month of April, 22 incidents. They were some of the same pump stations because of all the continual rain, but 22 incidents where a pump station overflowed for at least 24 hours or more continuously. One particular one that is nestled into a fairly small, older neighborhood, which is typically where we seem like we have our problems, it overflowed for 140 hours totally for this month. Lex call, we had 240 calls that were related to flooding, sanctuary sewers, those type of things. That doesn't count the calls that came directly to me or came directly to Cheryl's office or your respective offices or to the mayor's office. And so we've been pretty busy. That doesn't even begin to talk about the 100-plus manhole overflows that are listed in the consent decree. I mean, we've had so many overflowing manholes, and most of you know this. I've talked to you or your council aides about these. I mean, it's been an overwhelming thing. And so the only silver lining I think that this May or this April event has taught us is that it's kind of drawn the big red line under that we've got some serious sanitary sewer collection and conveyance issues. There's a lot of water getting in the system. We talked a little bit a couple of weeks ago about how we believe that a large contribution of it is coming from private property. We recognize there's public system stuff that needs to be fixed as well, and that's what this represents is what we believe is going to be the public system cost based on whatever storm event that we decide to choose to design around. The caveat is that this assumes we're not going to get any water out of the system. no inflow and infiltration or I&I removal. As I said a couple of weeks ago, I feel like that's a conservative estimate because my recommendation to you is that we're going to aggressively go after I&I. So whatever storm event that we choose, we continue to go aggressively after I&I on both public and private property. We'll design for a storm and end up with better level of protection than what we had otherwise because we did that. That's the thumbnail version. I kind of thought maybe I might be here to answer questions as much as to reiterate what we talked about a couple of weeks ago. But just to kind of wrap that up is that the first remedial measures plan is due to EPA October of this year. Our consultants, they really need some direction right now as far as what type of storm event LFCCG is going to recommend in that plan so they can start developing those projects, the specific projects and the specific costs associated with those because those have to be in the plan when they go to EPA. Thank you, Charlie. I'm assuming here that really the two issues are linked, that the selection of a two-year storm level or a 5 or a 10, should relate to a program to deal with our SSOs? Yes, they are all related to SSO removal, and they are all related to not only dealing with the public infrastructure, but also the private infrastructure. because, as I said before, is that all three of those rows, the cost associated with those assumes no I&I removal. If you choose a two-year storm and you go after I&I, depending on your degree of success and how aggressive and committed you are, you may find yourself building the pipe for a two-year storm, but you got rid of so much water, now you're carrying a five-year storm. Or likewise, if you choose a five and you aggressively go after an I&I, you're going to get more bang for your buck. I mean, clearly building the pipe to handle the storm and not trying to get rid of any of the water is going to be the most expensive thing that you're going to deal with because you're going to have to keep dealing with it over and over again. Reducing the amount of water is getting in the system. One gentleman at one of the meetings said this very aptly. He said that Lexington, you guys don't have a sewer capacity problem. You've got too much water in the system. As I said a few minutes ago, the average day flow at Town Branch is about 20 million gallons a day. It is rated for 30. West Hickman is rated for 33.8, and the average there is 20. So 365 days out of a year, 364, we're good. Or I guess it would be 700 and whatever many days. But it's that every day, every two years is when the wheels fall off. But to build the system to handle something that happens every two years and five years, we're going to have to do that, I think, because EPA is essentially, that's pretty much what they've indicated in the consent decree. My recommendation, though, is whatever it is, the one we choose, is that we go after the INI as much as we can because by the time we get to the end of this plan, we may actually save ourselves a lot of money. And since I live here, I'm pretty interested in that as well. Thank you for that. So really as we move forward with this discussion, we're really sort of combining agenda items two and three because how to get access to private property to work on SSO problems is going to be crucial to this discussion. Also, with reference to Agenda Item 5, my intention was to propose later in the meeting and following this discussion of both our storm level impact and private property access was to propose a meeting in late June, June 21st, on which this committee could make its recommendation to the full council. And if we do that, Charlie, does that leave us? I believe so. Does that provide you with adequate time to? I believe so. As I said a couple of weeks ago, is that what I had directed our consultants to do is to continue to work on the two-year storm. And what I said was that unless we're directed otherwise, we will work towards that two-year storm solution. Anything that they do right now that moves to a higher storm in the very near term, the sooner we can find that information out, the better. But for them to recalibrate and move to a higher level storm is probably pretty manageable, especially if we do it in that time frame of June. And moving backwards is going to be a lot harder than moving forwards, and that's another reason why we, in order to keep them working and making progress, we chose that two-year storm. Thank you for that. And with that, let's open the discussion. We have three committee members at this point who want to ask questions. Paul, if you'd set the five-minute clock, I sure would appreciate it. Councilmember Martin. Thank you, Chair. Charlie, thanks for coming in. and has always talking to us about this very, very large project. One of the questions I have is, I mean, can you put that back up actually? Is we're, thanks. The, you know, these are, the estimated costs are very large. It's like we're being asked to buy a big car, but we don't know what type of car it is. So I guess my question is, what makes up these costs? How were these estimates arrived at, and what are the various parts that came together to reach a number that's $540 million? In a very basic standpoint is what we looked at is that, you know, the drainage system is like a tree. You know, the bottom of the hill is the trunk or the roots of the tree, and it branches its way out. What they've done is they've constructed a hydraulic model and input rain events based on flow monitoring and rain gauges that we've had in place for the last couple years. And they simulate a storm through that, and every place that it starts coming out of manholes or coming out of pump stations, that tells you we've got a size problem. So then they start adjusting the sizes, making a 16-inch pipe now an 18, 20, until it's big enough to keep that amount of water in. So it's all based on simulated models. Once they arrive at a pipe size or a pump station size, then they run it through. We've got national firms that are working on this, and they've done this type of work in Knoxville, in Louisville. They've done it all through the south and east. So they use some cost curves that they've developed from the other work that went on in other communities, that how much does it cost to replace pipe sizes in urban areas? And so they use kind of a rule of thumb of so many dollars per linear foot to replace from X to Y. To try to help folks at home understand this, we're talking about digging up the street and taking out a sewer pipe and replacing it with a larger sewer pipe. Correct. And so, and that is, as you said, a sort of a network of web, like a tree trunk, where bigger pipes go to smaller pipes go to smaller pipes. and eventually the homeowners' houses. Which are the leaves, yes. And so I guess this project is about replacing the size of those pipes. So is there any other sort of parts of this project? I mean, are we talking about anything like connecting to the sewage treatment plant or are we talking about replacing sewage treatment plant with its money? I just want to know what makes this up. Yeah, where we're at right now, there will be some sewer plant improvements because one of the things I want to make sure that we get to is that we've got a firm capacity at the treatment plant that is a reliable and firm capacity for the design frame that we're talking about. The last thing we want to do is spend a bunch of money, if it's something less than that, and then find out the treatment plant's falling apart and we can't handle the flow because there's going to be the expectations that as we move forward, hopefully in a more healthy and robust economy, is that we're going to be able to add connections to this and help us be able to pay the bill. Also, too, what we're talking about right now is a generalized solution. I think I mentioned this in the meeting last time, is that on a general solution for the West Hickman sewer shed, you're talking about sending over 100 million gallons of water on a given day, on a rainy day, to West Hickman. You will swamp West Hickman. It cannot handle that. So clearly improvements at West Hickman, either to be able to treat that peak flow or, at the very minimum, make sure it's reliable as it stands right now in building offline storage tanks, which essentially are surge tanks that you store the water in until the storm goes away, and then you slowly meter it back out into the system. That way you've got a smooth treatment process instead of one that is like this. Because in treatment, you can't go in those wildest swings. Well, I kind of feel like we're on let's make a deal because we've got box A and box B and box C, and we're going to be buying what's behind those boxes, but we don't really know what's made up. And if you could provide us some information, some breakdowns about the various sort of things that – We can provide it by the next meeting, if not before, distribute to the committee members that shows all the different pipe sizes and what they need to be upgraded to. If you'll remember in one of the earlier meetings, I showed you a map that showed green lines with a bunch of orange and red. I mean, essentially those represented all the pipelines that needed to be replaced. We have, pardon me, just if you will, the storage tank one is the one that's a little bit dicey, and I'll be honest with you right now. We've played with different scenarios of different storage tanks out in the system. We'll respectfully ask, and this is something I need advice from the law department, because we certainly don't want to encourage speculation on the part of folks if we're looking at storage tanks in particular locations. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Mr. Martin. Mr. Lane. Thank you, Mr. Blues. Oh, you're ducking. No, I was getting myself in a drink. Good afternoon, Mr. Martin. I'm relatively new on the Environmental Quality Committee, and I have some a little behind the curve, so could I just ask a couple of questions about the chart up there? The proposed expenditures, I'll just put a quick point. pencil to it, but we're looking somewhere between, say, $30 to $56 million a year in fees to do whatever it is we're going to do up there. So is this to just upgrade the sanitary sewer system, to upgrade the storm drain system, to do both of them, to upgrade our treatment plant? Where is that money going to go? I don't know the big picture there. Wastewater treatment, sewer. Right up here, the numbers. Yes, I know. I'm telling you. Wastewater treatment, wastewater collection, and wastewater conveyance, pipes, manholes, pump stations, all the way to the treatment plant. No storm sewers involved here whatsoever. In the consent decree, one of the fundamental components of the consent decree is that LFUCG, you're breaking the law by discharging wastewater into streams without a permit, because it was coming out of manholes, it's coming out of pump stations. And they said you need to develop a remedial measures plan for your sanitary sewer system so you're not breaking the law anymore. And so this is all about what comes from toilets, sinks, and that into the pipe, into the manhole, to the pump station, to the treatment plant. And so all the costs that you see reflected up here are based on our engineers' estimates to upgrade the public system that's necessary to send it to the treatment plant and get it out of the treatment plant into the creek in compliance with our permits. Okay, so these are fees for the sanitary sewer system? Yes, sir. So now if you're not attached to the sanitary sewer system, then you wouldn't have to pay the fee. Is that correct? That is correct. Okay. All right, now the other question I have is the reason that our sanitary sewer system is being overloaded is because when we have heavy rainfall, the water is going into the sanitary sewer system instead of going into the storm sewer system, and then that's running into our, and overloading our treatment plants, is that? Yes. So would it not be, rather than trying to build up the sanitary sewer system to accommodate the infiltration of storm water, would it not be better to try to upgrade our storm system and not have to upsize our sanitary sewer system that much? Once it's in the ground, you can't hardly get it into the storm sewer system. Water is going to seek its natural course. In most cities, and particularly in Lexington, you know we're sitting in a rock trench. When all those sewers were put in years ago, because they're 10 or 12 feet deep, they're essentially in rock. And as that groundwater comes down into the ground, it's going to find that trench, and it's going to follow that pipe and find any place where there's a leaking joint, a hole in it, into the manhole, and what have you. I agree with you is that in some cases stormwater improvements would have a marked improvement on the sanitary sewer system performance, in particularly the context of the private property stuff that we talked a little bit about last week and a little bit this week, is that some of the older neighborhoods where we have the most problems really don't have a storm sewer system really to speak of. For whatever reason, back in the day, they were built kind of that way. And so if you have a basement or a sub-area and you've got a foundation drain that goes around it, it doesn't really have any other way to get around it as far as a positive release other than that sanitary sewer system. And I think over the years that people, out of necessity, recognizing they want to have a dry basement, they want to have extra floor space, they've hooked up pumps or they've hooked up things, and it gets into the sanitary sewer system either directly or indirectly. And you're on to something, and I'm a believer of that as well. If you look at most of our system, so many of our problems are at the top of the hill, not at the bottom of the hill, at the top of the hill. And that tells me is that they've got a groundwater problem up there, and they don't have any storm sewers at which to be able to deal with it. I think you're on to something there. And that as we move forward with this plan is that, you know, we're not just going to try to build stuff for the sake of building it. The plan, in my mind, will be what we submit to EPA and they will approve. But we're going to meet with them on a regular basis because if we're finding that certain actions that we're doing are not paying off to the end result, we're going to ask to modify that plan. And like I said, I think you're right about that, Mr. Lane, is that their storm sewers are part of the solution here. Well, as you know, I represent the 12th District, and that's comprised of about 70 percent of the land area in Fayette County. A lot of that is farmland, and it uses natural drainage for storm. And they do not have sanitary sewers because they're on 40-acre lots out there now. Most all the people that are outside the urban service boundary, with a few exceptions, this is not an issue for them. Right. I understand that. But on the other hand, you know, we're charging everybody right now a storm water fee. And so when, you know, people that live in the 12th District, that live in the farm area, you know, I have to explain to them that everybody's paying because collectively we're trying to improve the quality of water everywhere in the county, including the water that's being discharged over land in the rural areas. On the other side of the coin, many of the neighborhoods that I represent that are inside the urban service area, like Heartland, Heartland Gardens, Tanbark, Greenbrier, places like that, they do have sanitary sewers. They have good storm sewers too. They have good detention areas. and just driving around during all the rain we've had, I haven't found any flooding in my districts anywhere. Also, I can't remember the date of this, but this was maybe a year or so back. We had a huge rain. It was a record-breaking rain in one day, and we had a lot of flooding. And I think there were 500 or 600 flood calls into 311. I think we had 10 of them or maybe 12 in the 12th district for 70 percent of the land area. So the newer subdivisions in the rural areas are not having these problems. My thought that the way to approach the storm drainage issues that are more in the central part of the city would be, we do the engineering work and identify where the problems are, and then we set up like a storm drainage district, and then we come up with a plan to improve the storm drainage, which eliminate illegal tap-ins and sump pumps going into the sanitary sewer system, and then come up with a plan for that area. And it might be based on some kind of drainage patterns for, you know, the drains basin for that particular community. And then what would happen is that that neighborhood, maybe with some co-op money from the city, would then enter into a bond to make those improvements in our neighborhood, and each property owner would pay a share of that cost. Now, the reason I'm saying that is fair because many of the people who are buying brand-new lots and brand-new subdivisions are paying $40,000, $50,000, $60,000 for a lot that has all of the modern design for storm drainage in it, and to go back and make them pay an additional fee to fix up another neighborhood that doesn't have the modern drainage system in it doesn't seem to be equitable to those people. At the same time, the neighborhood that gets the improvements in a storm drainage district, they would eliminate flooding in their basement, back up in their toilets and things like that. And essentially that would bring up the value of the property in their neighborhood because they've eliminated a very negative issue that would affect property values in that neighborhood. And if it was bonded by their county government, paid out over 20 years, it would be a reasonable cost for each property owner. and I think they get a substantial payback on their investment in improving the drainage and the storm system and sanitary system in their neighborhood. So I wish we could look at that a little bit because I think if you go back and you try to ask everybody to pay a higher fee to improve it for some neighborhoods that are older, I mean, it could be over in Chevy Chase, some of the nicest homes, most expensive neighborhood, and we're going to be subsidizing, putting in better storm drainage and better sanitary sewers there when they were in one of the higher-priced neighborhoods. So I think we have to look at an equity and parity issue here when we talk about raising the fees because I don't think we're going to get very broad-based support on that. I didn't mean to talk so long, but I'll just give you a little bit of feedback because I'm getting calls from constituents about these issues. Well, I appreciate that feedback, and I know that you're not really necessarily looking for a response from me because you're sharing that with your colleagues as far as a perspective. I can tell you this. I live in your district, so I hear the same thing on my street when people who know who I work for. So that has been discussed, at least on Kennesaw Village Drive. So I have heard of special assessment districts. I kind of peeked over my shoulder while you were talking. I don't think Ed Gardner is here today because that would be more of a question for the law department because my experience with that was in Ohio and not necessarily in Kentucky, and I don't know whether Kentucky statute allows for that, but it certainly was something that would be on the table. Thank you very much, and maybe with as many people calling, you need to get hazardous duty pay. Thank you, Mr. Lane. Council Member Stinnett? Thank you, Chair. Paul, if you could, I think it would be helpful if we could see the clock on the monitor. Ready, set, go. Oh, here we are. Yeah. You know, just to add a couple comments on what Councilman Relain mentioned, And, you know, before I got on council, I probably would agree with something like that. But having been on council now seven years and served on the stormwater task force and other stormwater initiatives, this is not just a single area problem because we all eat at restaurants. We all go to facilities that flush toilets, that drain sewage, that have stormwater. We want to be able to drive on the roads. We don't want to erode the flood. So this is a community issue. It's not just an isolated one part of the city issue. everyone is affected in some way. It would be like me saying I shouldn't pay the school tax because I don't have kids. I mean, we all benefit from it. So, you know, I'm not sure how much homework we should put into that. You know, it's worth an effort to look at it, but we did look at that on the stormwater fee. But we all benefit from cleaner water, better sewage treatment facilities, because all the facilities in the urban core do use them, and people do visit them and come to downtown. So I just wanted to add a couple of two cents worth on that. On the correlation between stormwater and sewers, I asked last meeting, what is that correlation and how can we measure it? Because I do think Councilman Lane, excuse me, Ed. Yeah, not Mr. Ed. But I do think he's right. He's going somewhere. There is a direct correlation. There has to be a way we can measure as we improve the stormwater side of the house, how much savings do we realize on the sewer side of the house? Have you gone down that path, brainstormed how we can do it? You know, we've looked into it. I have not found anything clarity yet from other folks about that as far as other folks that have studied it. You know, kind of what I was suggesting earlier is we, you know, one thing I want to need to point out about that slide, and I'll get back to your question, is that that's not an instantaneous raise. That is what we're looking at at the end of the 11 to 13 years, because clearly we're going to borrow money and strategically schedule our borrowing and such that we're not going to just raise the rates and borrow $500 million all in one day. But to get back to your question then is that as we do these projects and as we do private property stuff, part of the things that we're required to do is post-flow monitoring and be able to evaluate whether or not the money we're investing is actually paying off. I looked into trying to find some people that had done studies on the private property part of it to try to make some kind of correlation that you can spend 50 cents on the dollar by chasing the private property stuff and putting it into an appropriate storm drain rather than treating groundwater. I haven't found anybody that has done something to that detail. But we will pursue that because, again, I live here too, and so anything that we can do that would reduce those costs and still meet the objective to where the phones aren't ringing off the hook about sewage in their basement or water in their backyard or, worse yet, sewage in their house. I'm all for it. And I think you're absolutely, both of you are absolutely right. We need to get a handle on that. Well, again, whatever model we use here is not going to be static. It's going to change over time, and we may redo it all in five years thinking we're saving a lot more money than we thought. So as we work down that path, be glad to share any insight and help on getting that correlation measured down. The other thing is on your model here, this assumes paying cash for all the dollars, right, based on the fact that this is no bond money. Can we put the slide back up? What this assumed was essentially how much it was going to get to in the end. If you borrowed that over 20 years at 3% and split it out as a flat rate among 106,000 service connections, You know, with our finance folks, typically I would look to them for some assistance in this kind of stuff. But, you know, since they've been kind of drinking from the fire hose like you all have been regarding the FY12 budget, we try to at least do a baseline here to give people some figures. There's creative ways to be able to finance this as far as being able to stack it or to stagger it. But we will continue to pursue whatever grant money through KIA or what have you, low-interest loans. We have one right now we're waiting on for Wolf Run that I think is a 2% loan. Any opportunity that we can that we'd be able to reduce the amount of money we have to spend. So the 28th and 42th, whatever, 37th are bond payments, basically. Yes, basically. And how many series of bonds did you assume? Except we didn't break it. We just tried to give somebody a flavor about what the question was in one of the meetings was, is that for me to make a decision between a two-year and a five-year and a ten-year storm, ballpark, what are you talking about? If it's $3 more a month, maybe I'm not as worried about $3 more a month as I am $30. So this was trying to give some representative scale between buying a little bit of insurance versus buying more insurance or more insurance. Very primitive, certainly not in your realm as far as doing the financing. I would just add another asterisk on here then, too, and put that 11 to 13 years down the road is what this represents, because that's an important piece that's missing off this slide. If we can make sure that's represented when people look at that, this is not next year. This is the end. Yes, this is the end. Assuming that that estimate is correct, at the end of 11 years, that was how much your bill would be of increase. 11 years it was on this? It was 11 to 13 years. Okay. Thank you. Thank you, Chair. Council Member Martin. Thank you, Chair. I just had a few follow-ups. I guess sort of continuing where we left off, I guess what I'm interested in is something like an executive summary, something that has estimates of various components of the project that add up to $540 million or $718 million so that we can sort of figure out what we're buying. And I guess those estimates, I'm assuming that the two-year is measured by millions of gallons of capacity in various types of things. Let me see what we can do, Councilman Martin. I know that we still have to develop the remedial measures plan. That's why we're trying to get a sense of where council wanted us to go because we didn't want to have to backtrack. When we develop that plan, you guys are going to see that executive. You're going to see the projects, the order that they're in, how much the estimated costs are, and you're obviously going to be able to weigh in, tweak those things and all that. We'll get you to you early as we can. But, Charlie, I'm looking at a slide that has $718 million. That just doesn't pull out of thin air. I mean, it's not $717, it's not $719. And so I think your consultants should be able to give us the various components that make up the 718. We can do that. What I was trying to say, though, is we will do that, and we will do that post-haste, because obviously you're right. We didn't pull that number out of the sky. What I was pointing out was is that when we do the detail plan, you will see that in more and more detail as we prepare the plan to send to EPA. I was trying to just be clear that we will not send a plan to EPA that you all don't get to see first, because this is a huge commitment. Right. But as we're being asked to decide between a two- and a five- and a ten-year plan, you know, I just need more information about what the difference between those are, other than they're categorized. I mean, it's just such a loose label, a two-year. I mean, exactly what is the two-year. And so we just need, at least I need more information about what makes up each of these numbers so that we can sort of make a more informed decision about the direction we want to go. My concern is that we're at a juncture like we were, like the city was years ago when we put in Man of War. And so many folks have criticized Man of War that it lacks sufficient capacity for current traffic patterns. And so what we have to decide is what is going to be sufficient for the future. And so part of that is sort of understanding what we're buying and what is going to sort of make up these three distinct projects that are going to have three distinct capacities. As far as the information we have to date, as far as collecting that, you shall have it. We'll give it to you as executively as we can, given the degree of complexity. We're not engineers, at least not. One comment on something that you made there regarding future connections. The consent decree is mute on how we're having, what size of storm we rebuild our system for remedial measures. It says best engineering judgment. That's why we're up here talking about multitude of storms. In the capacity assurance program, which is a subset of the consent decree, It says that we have to certify that there is available capacity on a two-year storm in order to allow new service connections. So that does have some relationship here, and thus where we were talking about building the system to the two-year storm and getting INI or inflow infiltration out of the system because we don't want to build the system and then turn around and tell somebody you can't connect to it. We're very cognizant of that. And we also had the sort of slow loss of capacity due to deterioration over time. I mean, cracks, the system cracks, you get more water in, or you get cave-ins or sediment in the system or things like that. Somebody who set a power pole in the middle of our pipe a few months ago. Yeah. The last question I had is, I mean, what are the penalties and what are our alternatives? I saw there's a slide in the handouts that we're looking at, I guess, is it thousands of dollars per discharge or per hour of discharge? It's based on volume. Based on our average, our estimates right now, if we were in a fine-paying mode right now, we would average somewhere between a half a million and 2.5 million a year in civil penalties for overflow volume. If we reduce, if there's a slide, it's the third to the last one, so it's on page five. It's the fourth slide. And I wish that was available to folks. Go ahead and bring it. It's the next slide. Just click to the next one. There you go. Selection of a larger storm would have a higher cost, but would have a less SSO impact, less regulatory fines. But the number you indicated, though, between, was it half a million and 2.5? That's current. Current. The point of that being is we're going to be paying for this anyway. So if we don't fix this, we're going to be paying out fees, and that's not going to help us fix it, because we're still going to have to fix it at the end of the day. And so that, I think, for the public to understand is that it's coming, and we would rather spend this money fixing it rather than paying fines. I agree. Yes, sir. The one thing I just want to bring up, if I may, that came up during the meetings as well, a couple people brought this up, and it's kind of hard to get your arms around it, is that question about paying to pollute. I mean, we build the system. We're never going to build the system to handle Hurricane Katrina or some type of monumental event, and so we're going to be paying fines. But at what point in time do the fines spread out over several years get to be less painful than $500 million or $800 million over an 11- to 13-year period? There were a lot of people that brought that up as far as their concern. They were cognizant of the fact that it in some cases may be cheaper to pay the fine than it is to fix the system. Council Member Farmer. Thank you, Chairman. We're in a really tough time with this issue right now because we're being asked to make hundreds of millions of dollars worth of decisions when, you know, today we're having people who are having flooding in their basements, in their backyards. And, you know, I was confronted this week with a constituent who had written a letter to me about a problem in his backyard dated 2004. And his problem in 2004 was 15 years old. And, you know, we're going to talk about, what is it, acute problem grant program later on. But right now you're trying to coach not just the citizenry but the council into the fact that despite a stormwater fee that started a year ago January, there's just not going to be enough capital around to make the required fixes that the EPA is going to place upon us. And the definitions that you've given us in that first slide of a two, a five, or a ten-year situation are things that we're going to have to dissect individually to see what the best answer is, but they're all going to be more expensive than what they are now. And when we were sitting here in our last meeting, I was skeptical of the two-year answer, just for the public process involved of what's going to be the best situation. However, if you couple a two-year answer, if the EPA will approve that, I mean, our approval at this council is a beginning point. It's what the EPA tells us we have to do in the final analysis. And if we present them with something that is a lower cost to our constituents first, I think many of us would be agreeable to that. However, there is the conversation to be had that by going to a higher standard, we solve more problems. And that's where we're in. We're in this problem-solving situation. So I appreciate that we can have this conversation now and make a proper decision. But I would say we're all in this together more than ever before. And everybody who flushes a toilet is going to pay. I know that there are many constituents in the 5th District who have paid decades' worth of taxes and have had overflows of all different sorts in nature. And they would not turn to neighbors in the 12th District who had been built onto the system between them and the sanitary sewer plant and say, hey, because you all were built between us and the plant, we now want you to pay more because you're causing a problem in my neighborhood. The underlying value of this is this is a city that is in crisis as it relates to stormwater and sanitary sewers, and we're going to have to address it as a group and in unity, because if we don't do it for ourselves, the EPA will make us do it, and we have to get this job done. Thank you, sir. Thank you. Council Member Farmer, Vice Mayor Gorton. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I wanted to weigh in on three things, one of which was what Mr. Farmer just addressed, and that is that I would not favor some system of fee that didn't include everyone, because everyone, whether they live in the rural area or the urban area, expects to be able to go to every venue in Fayette County and use the sewer system. And I would suspect that people in the rural area do go out to dinner, for example, and expect to use the facilities where they go to dinner. So I liked Council Member Stennett's analogy. It would be like asking the people who have children to pay for the school system. And so I would never favor parsing out the cost of these improvements, which are mandated by the EPA, to certain segments of our community. Secondly, Charlie, I wanted to ask if I did hear you say that this would just be a flat across the board divided among 106,000, I think you said, rate payers. Did you consider doing it like we do the current sanitary sewer fee? In other words, based on water usage, you pay a certain increased percentage, or is that too difficult to figure out for this? We didn't because I don't really have the ability to do that. As I said before, is that we really need the Department of Finance's assistance. They've got the technical know-how more so than I do. And with them dealing with the budget stuff, I didn't have the heart to pester them about it. I can say this, though, is that I think I said this a couple weeks ago, and you may have been called away. The difficulty with trying to apply it the way we have right now is that it's based on water consumption. And water consumption starts breaking down when you start talking about rainwater getting in there because that didn't come through your meter. And so when it gets into an equity standpoint, I've struggled with this equity thing myself, but given what I thought I knew at the time is that the easiest way to illustrate it in a slide was break it out between 106,000 existing service connections that currently pay a sanitary sewer fee spread evenly. Well, that makes sense. I mean, and then the current sanitary sewer fee would stay the same as it is based on water usage. Yes. See, several of the folks who came to the public meetings were very concerned about, all right, if I've got to swallow hard and accept that you're going to raise my rate to fix this problem, when are you going to drop it back down? And that there seemed to be this concern is that if you're going to have a special project, to rehabilitate the system. Don't bury it in as a regular rate. Make it a special assessment. And I understand that that's what Louisville has done as far as dealing with their problems as well, is that their stuff shows up as a special assessment. But in this case, there's no sunset built in, correct? Well, you know, like I said, all I'm doing is really kind of putting the straw man out here. You know, as engineers, we can go through all the technical stuff, and I can give Councilman Martin all the pipe size and all the this and that, but when it comes down to how we're going to pay for that, that's why we're in front of this body and we'll be in front of the council, is that obviously you folks have a huge stake in this and that us, along with the finance folks and the other folks in urban accounting government collectively, are going to figure out how we're going to do this. We signed on to the consent decree essentially saying that we would do it, and that in itself was a broad leap back in 2008 when we did that, is that you were committing to do a lot of things and not really knowing where you're headed. And that's where we've been for the last, I've been personally for the last three years. So the way this is crafted, though, it would, over 11 to 13 years, it would rise to that chart that you have and then would stay flat? Until the debt service was paid off. I would assume that if you staggered your debt, it kind of goes back into Councilman's tenants. You'd have to look at that as there might be ways that you could level that off because you retire some debt as you go along or you restructure and all that. There's a lot of different ways to do it. Okay. All right. Thank you. Thank you, Vice Mayor. Council Member Lane. Council Member Lane is deferring to Council Member Henson because she hasn't had a chance to speak yet. Thank you, sir. Charlie, I know that we have a decision to make, correct? Yes. We have got to decide which of the year storm plan, whatever, either a two-year storm, five-year storm, or a 10-year. And I know that, you know, so I'm having a difficult time trying to decide which one is sufficient. 3.2 inches is a two-year storm in a 24-hour period. And I guess that doesn't seem sufficient to me. But, you know, and we've had this conversation before, and I think you and I have, that to maybe help us decide if, because you're talking about a tremendous cost to repair our storm sewers and our sanitary sewers. so if we're going to go in and correct something I don't want to just put a band-aid on it but I want to correct it properly so can you think of any way that would help us decide I mean there's really not a lot of difference in the two and five year storm you're talking about a half inch rain more and I think from a perceptive standpoint you don't know. It's indiscernible. What I had said all along is that you've got folks who've got some serious sanitary sewer problems, but the broader majority of folks we have, they all get a bill, and they're going to have a bigger problem with the bill they're getting than the sewer problem they're getting. And that's going to be where your decision is tough. I don't disagree with you at all. I mean, would it be of any help to know what the benchmark is for other cities? I kind of know on the top of my head, but I could put some more detail for that. I think Louisville is talking about a five-year storm. But there's other things that you can do, and I keep coming back to this private property thing, is that to where you can make the situation better than it was before. You know, is that to me, I'm as interested in water quality as anybody is, but at the same time I'm a pragmatic person, is that the law was written back in the 70s and it evolved through the 80s to where you were not allowed to have unpermitted discharges to the waters of the U.S. The problem is, is that when we built this system back in the industrial age and moving forward, it wasn't built that way. So now we're trying to go back and rebuild a sanitary sewer system, whether it be here or northern Kentucky or Louisville, Nashville, or any place else to fit a law that was really developed 70 and 80 years later. That's tough, and that's expensive. And in my mind is that we can do what we can afford to do without bankrupting a community. And otherwise, if we're still going to have overflows and extreme events, if we can build the system such as that it minimizes the impact and exposure to the public, that's probably the best that we're going to do. And I think it's what my other colleagues and other communities have done as well. To help you probably put this into some perspective, we'll go and look to see what Louisville and northern Kentucky and Knoxville and some of our other benchmark communities have, because many of them are much further down the road. Off the top of my head, most of them are at that two-year storm. Some have gone as far as a five, but I'm not aware of any that have gone past five. That would be helpful. And, you know, I know I've mentioned to you the concern I have about the Beacon Hill, Normandy Drive area. Every time we have a large rain, they've got sewage coming out into the street. And if I knew this would correct it for them, because that's the biggest problem I have in my district, then my answer to that would be is it would correct it where it doesn't happen all the time. Right. Also, with evaluating the model and how we build the system, that if the system is going to have an upset because we have an extreme event like we had right now, what I'd be directing my folks is don't put it in the street. put it someplace where it minimizes the impact. If it's going to happen, because again, like I said, as hard as this is for me to say this, because I'm in the water quality business, but reality is you can't control Mother Nature. We can make it this big and it's going to rain this much. You're never really ever going to get there. So if you just accept the fact that you're never going to get there, how do you build the system such as that it is not a continual inconvenience for like the gentleman Mr. Farmer mentioned earlier, who I visit with on Friday? He says he's been dealing with this 20 years, and his last comment to me is, I hope I live long enough to see you fix it. You know, that's what we owe our customers as much as anything else is to not inconvenience them or risk them for property damage. I think that would be a worthy goal. But as far as the Normandy thing, I think we can get it out of the street where it is not a reoccurring problem. And then I guess, you know, I really appreciate the plan that you have and how hard I know that you guys have worked on this. I just didn't want to get another, you know, which I probably, I don't know if I'll be here or not, but 25, 30 years from now and we're having to redo it. We know we haven't even paid for this, and we're having to go in with different measures or whatever. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Council Member Lee. Thank you, Mr. Blues. Can you give me approximately the amount of revenue we're currently collecting for sanitary and storm service now in Fayette County? Off the top of my head, that should be in your budget packet, and you can check me on this, but I think on sanitary sewers it's about $45 million, and on the water quality management fee of the stormwater it's about $11 million, $11.5 million. So that's about $55 million, so I'll round it off to the nearest $5 million. And then the fee that you were proposing earlier, if we went up there, It would be somewhere between $35 to $55 million. That would be in addition to the costs we're currently incurring. So we'd be in the $100 million range, somewhere in there. All right. There are two questions I have that sort of relate to this. One is what are we doing to be prepared to be able to do the bonding to, you know, pay for this? Do we have somebody on your staff that is, you know, working with some bonding company to go up to plan, like we need to have a certain amount of cash in the accounts because they're required to have a certain amount of cash, and then there's a debt equity ratio thing, too, to, in other words, determine what the bonding capacity for the sanitary sewer and storm sewer programs are? Do we have something like that in works right now that you have a handle on what we can do? Yes. Yes and no. If you'll recall, when we embarked on this, when we signed the consent decree, we put together essentially a four-year plan to get us to this point, because we didn't understand our system well enough to really know how much it was going to cost. And so Bill O'Mara kind of led the charge with that and some of the former commissioners, in that we have that as far as bonding for projects that are currently in the queue. Two of them that we still haven't launched yet was Wolf Run and the other one out off of Winchester Road out in your district, the Polo Club one. So we're set up to do those early action projects. We're not set up to do these because we haven't had those preliminary discussions because now we're arriving at how much we're going to spend and when we're going to spend it. So that will have to go on simultaneous with that. We've done it for the first four years that have gotten us to this point. I did notice, and you probably did this as well, is in the budget packet, I was particularly interested in some of the debt service we have already and where we are with that. When will we retire that debt, and does it become available for future bond issuances and stuff? Again, like I said, we haven't been really focusing on the finance folks, just because I know they've been pretty overwhelmed with trying to get a budget together for you all. What percentage of the work that you've been doing the last 24 months have you paid in cash? What percentage have you bonded? I'd have to go back and look at that and see. But we could get that information. To me, that would be a very valuable report if we could look at the revenue end, and you've got operating expenses and capital expenses, what percentage were paid in cash, what percentage were bonded, and what the long-term bonding is. I know you all are working on the analysis I asked for, looked at long-term revenue and operating expenses and capital expenses and debt service and all that, which probably would incorporate this. But that would be the first question. But I would hope that we're retaining as much, you know, a lot of cash, so we have a minimum cash amount that would improve the quality of our bond rating because we have cash on hand. The other question I have, and, you know, I've discussed this with you all before, but, you know, I'm concerned about the management of all of this construction. Because if we're looking at $55 million a year right now in revenues, and we go up to another $45 million, that's $100 million a year. In over a 20-year period, that's a couple of billion dollars. That's a lot of construction that would have to be implemented. And, you know, my concern is, you know, are we on top of our game? And, you know, I've been your advocates. I'm not picking on you guys. I think that personally we need to have an outside construction management company and an owner's manager and, you know, somebody to macro overview all of the engineering and maybe get somebody who's been in another project like this in another major city who is really an expert in that area because I think this is a huge job. And, you know, as you said, we've inherited a mess because we've got some really old sewer lines. We've got some really good ones out there, but they're all sort of mishmashed together and, you know, trying to come up with an overall plan. So I've been an advocate of that, and I would, you know, I would like to have some kind of a little maybe report back to our committee about what your plans are in that area. It doesn't look like in the next 30, 45 days or something. It's not like you've got to do it right away. I know you're already doing some work on this. I know we've approved some construction management people on staff, I guess, for short-term employees. But I don't have the big picture of what all you have in mind. If I could comment on that, is that we had a similar discussion with the mayor and his staff yesterday afternoon, Cheryl and myself. Because I have the same reservations you do, is that when we start building stuff on steroids, I think I said in one of my earlier presentations is that, unfortunately, in our world, it takes almost three months to get an RFP out. And we will never make it if we go at that pace. We've been working with the purchasing folks to try to shorten that time frame, accelerate that time frame. We have Hazen and Sawyer, CDM engineers, and Stantec as our remedial measures consultants. So we are using a lot of outsourced type of stuff, but I'd be happy to report to you on this because I'll take all the advice I can get. Because you're right, this is the biggest project I'll ever be involved in, and it is a quite daunting and overwhelming task. And so we can't afford to miss it. So it goes back in, I think, what Councilman Martin said is that, you know, not only we pay fines for overflows, but if we miss deadlines, we pay fines for those too. And I don't want to be up here explaining to you folks why we miss deadlines on getting projects underway and completed in accordance with the schedule. I just have one follow-up question regarding the fees. How would you plan to do the fees for someone who's like a commercial business versus a residential? Would they be multiples of that some way? My slide, when Nick said it, I did a very baseline just to try to give people a flavor, very simplistic, is if we had to borrow this much money and pay 3% interest on it over that duration, I'd have spread it evenly out among every customer. Because, again, water usage doesn't relate to how much they're putting into the system. So you may have a big parking lot, big store, what have you. I may have the Fayette Mall, but incrementally they're not contributing any extra stormwater than my house is. We don't know that kind of information right now. And it will be a long time before we know that. And so just for analysis's sake, we did it as a flat rate. It doesn't matter how big you are. It's just based on the number of service accounts we have. Well, you know, down in the 1800s we used to have paid toilets in downtown Lexington. Maybe we need to put those back in. So thank you. Okay. Thank you, Mr. Lane. Committee members, unless there are further questions on the baseline recommendations. One thing I wanted to go back to, I was trying to keep up and take notes. I know my colleagues back here, something that Vice Mayor Gorton had mentioned earlier, and I wanted to make sure it was clear on that, because sometimes we go back and forth between the water quality management fee, which is based on impervious area and is applied outside the urban service area and inside it, The sanitary sewer fund is based on your water consumption. It appears on your water bill based on that consumption. And if you're in a rural area and you don't have public sewers, you don't pay for that. There's only a few loan exceptions outside the rural area, and that's in the Blue Sky area, if they're in the rural activity center. Keeneland, the airport, the horse park, and Spindletop are publicly connected, so they get a sewer bill from us. Otherwise, if you live on a 40-acre farm, even if you have Kentucky American Water, if you don't have city sewer, you don't pay this directly, recognizing, though, when they come to town and they go to the restaurant or they go to the movies, we're all going to pay indirectly as that cost gets passed along. But I wanted to make sure that was clear. What I said earlier on is that this impacts the rural people differently than it does the urban service area folks, because it's a question about whether you have sanitary sewer service or not. Council Member Lane. Yeah. I was just going to say that that is true, and I understand that. I think the source of complaints that I've received are from people who are paying for the storm water quality fee because it goes to every person in the county regardless of where they even have any storm drainage or anything. And I have said when people call up, and I strongly support that, that everybody needs to kick in because the enhancements for the entire community, everybody will benefit from that. But with regard to going up to, you know, $40 a month or something, that would bother me a little bit for the rural area. But if you say those people would not be included, then that would be very good. They're not paying a sewer bill. And it was something that Ms. Gorton said, not that you said. I just wanted to make sure that the folks who are watching at home were clear, because she had talked about equity as far as everybody paying it. The key to that equity, I think what you were saying is that as long as you are a customer, and in the sanitary sewer thing of it, you actually physically had to be connected to the system to be considered a customer. Thank you, Council members. If there are no further questions on the baseline recommendations issue, If we could move to the third agenda item, that's the property issues. And if you would allow me to ask a question of Charlie to start off. What is the extent of access that you think that we should properly be aiming for? That's a difficult one to answer. I made the suggestion at the last meeting is that there was a previous discussion about at the point of transfer of a property that you do home inspections. And it seems for us appropriate, and we know that other communities do that, that they, in fact, require that inspection themselves. Winchester, they have mandatory inspections. They send you a very nice letter, and if you don't reply, then they send you a not-so-nice letter the second time, and the third time they shut your water off until you let them come in and inspect. I'm not recommending anything at that at this particular point. When a house goes up for sale, that seems like a logical time to be able to make improvements, Because otherwise, are we allowing the transfer of a property that has what is, according to the ordinance, an illegal connection and allowing that to be passed along to a future homeowner? Here's where the rub is, and this is where it gets back into the drainage and the stormwater issues and stuff, is that I've been to so many people's houses like you have as well, is that if people have water in their basement, respect the fact that they want to do everything they can to keep their basement dry. We would all do the same thing. And the real secret is to be able to do that, encourage the disconnection, but give people an alternative to put the water someplace else. Because if they just put it out in the yard, the likelihood of them having a different problem or it flowing into their neighbor's yard, and now you're getting two calls instead of one call, that happens all the time. We've had ones in some districts where it runs constantly and it creates a huge ice problem. I think that in order to have a successful private property redirect program, if you've got people who have area drains or sump pumps, is we've got to look very closely at the storm sewer system and include that as part of the fix. But you've got to make everybody who's connected improperly to the system connect to it, or otherwise it doesn't become cost effective. You know, if I've got to put in $100,000 worth of pipe to take off one house and the other five elect not to reply to our letter, that's not cost effective. We're not going to do that. And we've had that in several areas. We go out, and I won't pick on any streets here, but I know one street that we've had two people who have voluntarily had their sump pumps reconnected. The other eight have ignored us because they don't have to, but the person at the bottom of the hill has water in their basement every time we have a serious rain. You know, why would they reply, I guess, on a voluntary basis? As far as they're concerned, they don't have a problem. And if we disconnect it, they may very well have the problem. There's that fear factor. When we put in back trap valves, you can see what happens. As soon as somebody gets a back trap valve, the neighbors talk on the next nice day out at the fence, and everybody else wants one too because there's that fear factor. So this way I don't want to, if something changes, I've got to react to it. So I think that our, I'm talking here without the benefit of an attorney and what my suggestion was earlier, and I know some of you don't like, you know, work groups and task force and all that, but I really do think that we need to hone down to what type of ordinance changes need to take place in order to us allow us to be more effectively deal with private property under the premise is that we're trying to save ourselves money, shave money off that $500 or $800 million because I think that there's an opportunity. I use sump pumps for an example. Our average cost on a sump pump redirection is roughly about $1,400 per redirect. If I went out here in Main Street and dug up the sewer that was leaking around the joint, that cost me $5,000 or $6,000, including pavement and everything else. I'm going to get rid of this much water versus this much water by making that pump go away. Intuitively, it tells me that my bang for the buck or the cost effectiveness is to go get rid of those direct connects as opposed to chasing every drop of water. So I don't have an answer for you other than my suggestion is that we form a very focused group that is working on ordinance changes that are necessary in order to accomplish the objective. How we accomplish that objective, I would like to welcome some other folks into it because I've got my ideas, but I'm sure folks have got other great ideas. In the packet, there was a group that was chaired by Don Blevins back, I think, in 07 or 08 that tried to flesh out a lot of these things. And I think that revisiting this in the context of where we are today would be very beneficial for all. If I understand what you're saying, it does seem to me that we would need something a bit more comprehensive than access and intervention when property changes. Yes, I think so, too. My personal recommendation, having been to enough of these folks' houses, and I know some of you have been involved in this as well, is I think the last thing that we want to set ourselves up for is fixing one problem and creating a new one. You know, somebody I work with very closely tells me this all the time. Begin with the end in mind. And that, you know, to solve the sanitary sewer problem and then create an icing problem where someone gets hurt or, worse, still killed, bad move. creating a different flooding problem where neighbors are at odds with one another because someone's sump pump who runs most of the time is now running into their basement, bad move. My recommendation is we think this through, especially in the context of installing or upgrading storm sewers in neighborhoods, especially if we're going to go in there and fix the sanitary at the same time, a more comprehensive fix. the missing link, comprehensive fix, I can do anything I want to in the right of way as long as I have enough funding and I follow the appropriate permitting processes. But once I get to that sidewalk, all bets are off and I can't do anything. And if that's part of the problem and also part of the solution, what I'm encouraging the council is to help us try to figure out how to get there. And just one further question. If we move forward on that front, we're thinking here of our committee meeting next month to make a recommendation to full council on baseline. Yes. Do we need at the same time a recommendation on private property access, or can that... That's a marathon. That's not a spread. I think we're going to have to evolve that over time. Well, that's what concerned me. I don't think we can make it that quickly. But we do have to assume that we're moving purposefully in that direction. Yes, because I think that that's our best bet, our best plan moving forward, to make those numbers that we saw in that first slide be less than they are today here in 2011. I think it's our best bet to get where we want to be as efficiently and fiscally responsibly as possible. Thank you. Council Member Farmer. Thank you, Chair. At our first couple of planning committee meetings, I thought that we had taken action on something to help us get access to private property or to begin that process. Am I incorrect or is there you still need a different type of methodology? You're going to have to remind me what it was because either it did stick or I'm at a loss here. Maybe we need to talk about that. Maybe I'm missing something. Right now what we have is that we have the Sump Pump Redirection Program, which is voluntary. We target letters to neighborhoods where we're doing rehabilitation. Right now we're working out in the Beaumont Middle School area. I saw the most recent report. I think we had 18 redirects last month, and about maybe a fourth of them were in that neighborhood. So we focus that, but it's all voluntary. My project manager will tell you one of his biggest challenges out there has been is there's so much water in the system that it's hard for him to fix it because of all this rain that we've had. So that tells me while we're fixing stuff, there's still private property coming in. We don't have the ability to go door to door. That being said, I think that's one of those neighborhoods built in the late 50s, early 60s, post-war building boom, top of the hill, not a lot of storm sewers out there. And so people have done that out of necessity. That's the way the houses were built. So there are other things that we do right now. We've been out doing smoke testing and things like that where we get, say, that the clean-out cap is missing from your house or the roof drains are connected to the sanitary sewer system. We have sent those people letters essentially telling them you've got to disconnect, and some of them we've actually done enforcement work on. It's really been limited to what I call Group 1, which is Wolf Run, East Hickman, and West Hickman, But we've identified 815 of those, and to date I think we've successfully disconnected nearly 700 of them. Now, again, that's slugging it out, you know, door to door, and that's not even getting inside the house. That's only the stuff that we're seeing outside the house. Well, maybe I want to spend more time to make sure we have a coalesced approach to this, because that is the key thing right now is to make sure we have the access to help folks understand that, you know, your basement will be a two-sump pump basement from here on out. It will be one for gray water or something, another one for just water that runs across the floor or comes in through a gutter or a basement or a foundation drain, and it's going to have to go out to the street. And then beyond that, we're going to have to make the policy about what happens when it gets to the street, especially if there's not enough infrastructure or the right kind of infrastructure there. So, you know, I think there's so many cars on this train, it's just tough to grab onto. But this policymaking part is going to be vitally important to the success of whatever efforts we undertake, whether or without the EPA's input. You know, and you're right, if it were easy, we would have all done it a long time ago. Other cities still struggle with this, is that Milwaukee, They're now going after private property more so than they did before. After millions upon billions of dollars on relief sewers and tunnels and all this other kind of stuff, they're still not there. It goes back to my earlier comment, the challenges associated with trying to rebuild systems that were built, you know, from the 1920s on through the 1970s and 80s and try to reapply them to laws and regulations that were written 50 and 60 years after you built them. That's challenging. It houses that well, too. Mr. Chair, I just think that, especially with the vice mayor here, too, I think we might want to consider some sort of a working group between this and planning to help policy be formulated and passed by the council as quickly as possible. And I would volunteer my services to that end. Thank you, sir. Council Member Farmer, do you want to make a motion that I form such a work group? I guess do I have that authority or is that for the Vice Mayor to do? If it's a subcommittee of this committee, you can. That would bring planning expertise to it because there are several members from both committees who could work on it. But I think this is, as much as the first conversation was about how much, this question is about how to. And we need to have a group that can cross both planning and environmental quality areas because we need to get all the expertise we can into the situation for policymaking reasons. So I would so move then, if that's a proper motion. move to ask the vice mayor to form the work group? Absolutely. Let's get the vice mayor involved. If I might. And then the specific task is to recommend policies relating to private property and sewers? Is that your basic? I think that's probably the simplest way I would know to put it, unless there's anything No, I think that's fine. is recommend policies aimed towards reducing the amount of private property groundwater into the sanitary sewer system. I mean, it's all about trying to reclaim capacity in the sanitary sewer system so we don't have to build mega storage tanks and mega treatment plants and pay $2 or $3 a gallon to treat groundwater that's not required to be treated. We're paying for it in so many different ways. We've got big capital numbers, but we're not even talking about the operational numbers that we're dealing with at the treatment plants and the pump stations right now because we're pumping and treating stuff that we don't need to be pumping and treating. It sounded like the simplified version that you proposed, Vice Mayor, would work. Sorry about that. Do I hear a second? Thank you. It's been moved and seconded that we ask the Vice Mayor to form a work group to recommend policies related to providing government access to private properties so as to keep stormwater infiltration, inflow out of the sanitary sewer system. I was just going to make a point is that, you know, Councilman Farmer has suggested planning and other people as far as contributing. Part of our consulting team, they've got a lot of expertise in this and we'll be providing their expertise in this as well. I think they can provide a lot of guidance, again, about other communities that have dealt with this over the years. Lessons learned. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Committee members, if you want to join Council Member Farmer as a volunteer on this group, please see the Vice Mayor as soon as possible. Or call her at any time, day or night, or email her to volunteer. Council Member Lane. I didn't duck that time. I was just curious. We've hired some engineering companies, and they're running cameras through all of our sanitary sewer lines. Are they able to, when they do that study, identify every tap that's going into the line? We have done large percentages. because we haven't done every line. But, yes, we know where the tap locations are. Yes. Okay. But even though you know where all the taps are, some may be illegal and some may be legally tapped. But if somebody's dumping into a sanitary sewer line, they could go through a regular, I guess, orifice into the line, and you really wouldn't know that it was illegally discharging into the sewer system. That's correct. Most of them are that way. They come through their approved connection, but they're connected somewhere up on that private property. They're intertwined. When we do the smoke testing, we're blowing smoke into our system and seeing where it comes out. That's how we're able to track down the roof leaders or yard drains and things like that, because it comes back out. But once it gets inside the house, especially on a pumping situation, you can't see that. Well, the reason I was asking that question is maybe as part of our new private property issues where we have illegal taps, maybe we could come up with an ordinance that says that, you know, if engineering tests indicate there's an illegal tap into the sanitary service system, they would have to pay a tap-on fee and a monthly fee for that service until it was remediated, which would then have the financial incentive for somebody to come out and take care of it. That, to me, might be the strongest motivator to get some of these illegal discharges into the sanitary service system, which are causing our problems eliminated. Do you think that if an ordinance was drafted like that, that you'd be able to document adequately the illegal taps when you do the smoke tests and things like that? No, because I think we're doing that already. It's a manpower issue for me is that we've actually sent eight of these to enforcement, and we're using our existing ordinances for that. The difference is the sump pumps and the other more sinister stuff that's inside that we can't figure out. Downspout is fairly a low cost to be able to get rid of that, and most people have been pretty cooperative. They didn't know it was tied in that way in the first place. I showed you some pictures last time where the guy, like he tied his downspout into his sanitary sewer correctly. We got him disconnected. Most people just don't realize that's not okay to do. It's those sump pumps. You know, your average pump, if it averaged 20 gallons a minute and you've got 10 houses on there, you've used up nearly all the sanitary sewer capacity before you flushed the toilet. There's the ones that we're having the biggest problems with. Otherwise, the outside stuff, for me right now, it's more of a manpower issue than anything else. I've lost some people. They've moved around. When we were going out this hard, as I said, we had 800 of them we had identified. 700 of them, through letter writing and contact and encouragement, we've been able to get people to disconnect. Only 8 out of 800 did we actually have to send to enforcement. I think that, again, being able to enter private property and inspect the internal parts of it is if we were willing to, as we are right now, pay for the redirect, plus give them some place to put the water where they're made whole. I think a lot of people, if they realize that it's cheaper for me to do that than to face a $40 sewer bill 10 years down the road, I would. And that's really the issue for us is being able to get in there and try to identify just how bad the problem is and be able to put a dollar figure to it. Is it cheaper to fix the source or make the pipes bigger? That's really what we're asking for right now. Yeah, well, I think there's a basic issue that a man's or a woman's home is their castle. Sure. And so, you know, it's intrusive to go in someone's home and do inspections. But at the same time, you know, if they're violating our ordinance and basically cheating, you know, the sanitary service system by discharging in there illegally, that's, I guess, it's hard to balance those two issues out there. Every other city has balanced that as well because you're right. It's like you knock on the door and say you're hired here from the government, and that's not a good entryway in anybody's house. You know, that's why I had suggested initially is that if you dealt with it, the property transfer part of it is that, you know, you've got somebody coming and somebody going, and maybe it's a little bit easier to be able to deal with. Well, as that saying goes, the scariest words to be heard is from the government I'm here to help you. Exactly, yes. But have you got any successful program that's been done for that in any other city that you've been able to find? Well, like I said, I think that all of them have been able to make some progress in that area. But, you know, to any of them to say that it's all a big, fat success, statistically EPA says nearly 50 percent of the extraneous water that gets into a system comes from private property. And I think realistically you're never going to get it all, but you try to get some type of percentage of it that works out with your cost. And so success is relative, I think, in different people's perspective. The most recent ones I've talked to is that they always go into it with glowing expectations, and they maybe don't call it a success because it's not as easy as what they hoped it would be. Thank you, Mr. Martin. Thank you, Mr. Lane. Council Member Martin. Thank you, Chair. So, Charlie, the private property disconnections where we have water getting into the sanitary sewer system, What portion of that large project is contained in the $500 million to $8 million? I'll have to get into that and find out how much of it is. I don't believe any of it is in there right now. You don't think any of it is? No, because remember what I said, and I'll have to huddle with my folks, but that $500 million to $800 million is assuming no INI removal. So we put that up there as the worst-case scenario, is that if we go in and are able to figure out ways to reduce the amount of inflow and infiltration, I think that number will lower. That's the expectation. And I guess that's where I have some heartburn, because clearly our biggest problem is water infiltration into the sanitary sewer, and yet the big project doesn't really address that. So we clearly have to move, and obviously we've got a task force to do something, but to move forward on getting these disconnected, because that's really the main source of the problem. Is that? Right. And I don't disagree with you. But remember, in the plan, we're not committing to a $500 bill. We're committing to a two-year storm or a five-year storm or a 10-year storm. That's what we're going to design for and say we're not going to have overflows during those storm events, is that what we try to give you is the worst-case cost scenario so you could have some idea of how bad is bad, but you allow us with appropriate ordinances and policies to support us to go in and get rid of some of that water, and we deliver a $500 million project for $380 million, then we're all heroes, I guess, for as long as you can be at a $380 million. But if we go with a two-year storm proposal that says we're going to get rid of 25% of the private property INI, but we can't get in those people's houses, we're going to miss the target. We're going to end up with a plan submitted that we couldn't deliver. because right now I don't have the ability to go after 25 percent of the private property I&I. And we're going to have a certain number of the population that won't be able to afford it. You'll have indigents and folks of low income who basically can't afford the $1,500 or $2,000 to do the disconnection. You see, we're already paying for that. This year's budget request in the mayor's budget is a half a million dollars a year, and we spend about that much every year. You know, I think that since that's already kind of built into the program, continuing that is, you know, it's just continuing to be aggressive about it. One thing I'd like to do is have it more focused and on a mandatory level is that when we're working in a particular neighborhood and we're out here fixing all the public system, that every house that has a subfloor or basement crawl space, that we're able to evaluate that and disconnect it from their sanitary sewer lateral and get it someplace in there to where we're not treating it because we'll get a double whammy for the amount of water that's reduced coming from that neighborhood. Are we paying for the Beaumont disconnections or are the private homeowners paying for that? So we're paying for that. Yes, sir. And that's sort of a pilot project. It's been going on since 1998. We have, as a government, we've paid for nearly 1,400 sump pump redirects since I think 1997 maybe. Let's look at Ms. Gordon or Mr. Farmer because they've been around as long as I have. I think this started out as a pilot project in Mr. Stennett's district when Al Mitchell was in his seat. That tells you how far back it goes. And I must have misunderstood you in a previous conversation. So this is just going to be, you're in Beaumont near the Beaumont Middle School, and so this is just the next phase of trying to do disconnects. Yeah, what we try to do is that if we target an area where we're going in and fixing the neighborhood sanitary sewers, we try to layer on top of that sending voluntary letters to people asking them to redirect their sump pumps on our expense. Because the reason we went into that neighborhood is because our flow meter showed that it spiked like crazy when it rains. When we're done with the redirects that are voluntary, when we're done with the sanitary repairs, I want to come back in and see how much we've reduced that spike, because that will tell me how much gallons I'm getting out per dollar and something for me to be able to establish future benchmarks on. Thanks for coming in today. Okay. Big project. Sorry to keep talking in engineers. I know I keep wandering off here. It's a lot of money, so we've got to kick the tires. It's very complex, too. It's a lot of money and very complex. Which is, frankly, one reason I'm concerned about having everything combined into one department. That's another discussion. Thank you, Chair. Absent further discussion on the private property issues, our next agenda item is the acute problem grant program. I don't know if that's a proposal, but it is a question on, I think, Council Member Martin that you wanted to bring forward, and perhaps you wish to speak to that now. Well, this came up at the last meeting, and I didn't realize I was going to be the presentation on this, so I will do my best to fulfill the agenda item with something that's appropriate. But we have a lot of facets, as folks may be watching, to our sanitary sewer problems and our storm sewer problems. While we undertake these extremely large projects and gear up to hundreds of millions of dollars in expenditures, we have homeowners who are currently getting sewage in their basement every time we have a big rain. And so my thought was to take a sort of multifaceted approach where while we undertake this large project, we try to do some small remedial measures to take care of some folks who are particularly hard hit by this. And so we address it sort of at the local level as well. And I know Charlie and your department have been just terrific on working with folks at the local level, individual homeowners and their neighbors, and some of the problems like that. And so the question is, how can we put together a grant program, I guess, through the Sanitary Sewer Fund? Is that correct? and what do you need from us in order to try to do that? And I'd be happy to make a motion if that's where the group is headed with that. But the idea is that we would either work with homeowners to do some pumps or to cap lines off or things like that. If you'll allow me, I'll couch a little bit of what your intro is as far as what the issue is. You know, over the years, the Division of Sanitary Sewers and now Water Quality, we've installed what are known as back trap valves or they're one-way valves on people's sewer laterals. In some cases, they've proven to be fairly effective. In other cases, maybe not as effective. One of the problems with them is that there's no notation is that if Councilman Martin sells his house to Councilman Lane and doesn't tell him there's a back trap valve there, is that if the sewer is surcharged and that valve closes and he's upstairs taking a shower, he doesn't even know it. So in some cases, he may flood himself in his basement because it can't leave his house. And so those things have been problematic in that sense, is that just over the years that they aren't being well maintained because it was the property owner's responsibility or they just didn't work well or the people didn't know they were there. You know, up until recently, I kind of had been resistant to this, but I'm coming more along the lines of your thinking is that we've got to do something. It's going to be a marathon in fixing this system, and we've got to take steps to provide a level of protection for folks who have reoccurring problems. One of the things that's been on the table is a grinder pump. You can use pumps and install them in people's basements and essentially be able to separate their plumbing in many cases. You know, your upstairs plumbing comes in and it sometimes ties into a separate stack than from where your downstairs is. And if you could put the downstairs on a pumping system and let the upstairs go by gravity, now you've got protection from a backup in your basement because the water is not going to back up through that pump. And because the upstairs is higher than the street level and higher than the manhole that's out in front of your house, that if there was a gargantuan rainstorm, it's going to come out of that manhole before it comes out and you're upstairs because water seeks its highest elevation. The only concern that I have about it, with the exception of financing, we'll talk about that in a second, is moving the problem, is that you're going to spend money and you're not getting rid of any water out of the system. You're just essentially putting a plug in that dike. And, you know, the little Dutch boy, you know, you end up doing this thing. And that would be the only concern that I have about that, is moving the problem to an unknown or unwitting neighbor. Now, that being said, I think that within certain cases we can look at these things and try to do it intelligently. It goes back to what I said before about moving things. If we're going to move it, let's at least move it to someplace that's inconspicuous and minimizes the exposure to public health in the interim. Doing basements makes it a little more challenging than it is doing people's yards. We're looking at using bolt-down lids in certain locations to try to protect people's yards or their property. But long story short, I'm certainly open to this, more so than I was a year ago, because I got really caught up in the worried about moving it and forgot about the current problem we have, which is the person who's having the problem right now, and that there's no budget for it right now, And that we would have, if the council, if the committee and ultimately the council, through the course of the FY12 budget, elected to put money in there to start a pilot program, we would do that. And I hear your concerns about moving the problem down sort of further on. I guess my thoughts about that are is there's not really an engineering difference between a grinder pump and just simply capping the basement off. and my concern is because folks get six inches to a foot or whatever of sewage in their basements we can't allow sort of homeowners basements to become storage facilities for taking capacity out of the system. I think in fairness we either have to cap them off so that they take their bathroom facilities out of their basement so that their floor drains and their sinks and their toilets that are below the sewer manhole. So that's where the problem is because it flows downhill. And so there's not really an engineering difference between capping those off and taking those out of the system so it doesn't back up or having a grinder pump and mechanically moving out of that. And the capping might be even, I don't know, might be less of a, at least you take away contributions to the system, but I guess arguably people aren't flushing their toilets downstairs during flood events. You've probably heard this too. I mean, obviously, you know, it's hard to ask somebody you can't use part of your house anymore. That's kind of a tough sell. It goes back to hiding from the government, I'm here to help you, and you can't use your downstairs anymore. you've convinced me of that it goes back to what I said before I think over the decades that people who've had problems have taken matters in their own hands and cumulatively it has gotten us where we are today you and I talked a little bit a couple weeks ago in the back as we left here and you kind of convinced me this is another one of those steps as to where urban county government because of this consent decree we're going to have to get out in the lead in dealing with folks' drainage problems and give them real solutions. If we can get to the end of this, it's going to cost us a whole bunch of money, but if we can get to the point where people don't have water or sewage in their basement every time it rains, we may end up being viewed as heroes as well because it is a reoccurring problem. So I guess just to say that I'm willing to do whatever it is that you folks would like to do, So my main problem is going to be right now is I don't have a funding mechanism in my current budget to do this, if that's what the will of the committee is. So how much would we need? What are we talking about? Depends on how many that are out there, but based on the estimates that we had back in, I think it was 2002, we had a pilot study done. Then it was roughly between $8,000 to $10,000 per house for a grinder pump. And every house is unique. And those are 10-year-old numbers. So put some inflation on there, and it's probably 10 to 12 now. So it depends. 10 to 12,000 per house. And so if you did 10 houses, it's $100,000, $120,000. So you're looking at a million dollars for 100 houses? I can't imagine we have 100 houses. I would be surprised. One of the things I would be concerned about, it goes back to my comment about the back trap valve, as soon as you get one guy who gets it or one resident, then the other five are lining up because they're like, wait a minute now, you know, is that if this person has it, well, what about me, what about me, what about me? And so you could see that it could start growing exponentially. But I'm looking for something right now here is that recognizing that not everyone, unfortunately, I wish they would use LexCol, but they don't. But I was looking in here that we had a flooded basements. I know that on our cleanup list from the 12th, we had about 25 homes that were calling us, asking us to report to their house or our contractor to perform sanitation method, including some of the ones that were in your district. So that gives you kind of a, I don't think it's 100. I would be shocked if it was 100. It would be unfortunate and scary if it were 100. So I guess that's going to be part of the budget. Vice Mayor, I might sort of tee this up to you for a second. Is it appropriate to – I don't know what kind of motion I can actually make at this point that's going to affect the 2012 budget. So – May I comment, Mr. Chair, Dr. Chair? Yes, Vice Mayor Gordon. Well, it would seem to me that any motion from this committee could be entered into the Committee of the Whole for Budget discussions, is how that would, or to go to a link. So how much money do you need? My inclination would be to start out with a, you know, we start a lot of these things as pilot projects. You know, because the question is, it's not going to launch right away because who does it? You know, one of the things that people I've been talking to already, encouraging them to hire their own contractor and us ask as a third party, that might accelerate things more. I would start out with no more than $100,000 as seed money to do this, and we'll adjust depending on what the participation is. I particularly don't think that you'll go through all that, but I've been surprised before, so I'll be surprised again, but I think that $100,000 is a very safe amount. If that's the will of the group, I'm hoping that out of $43 million worth of revenue that we'd be able to deal with that. I guess at this time I'd like to make, if it's appropriate, Chair, make a motion that the committee recommend to the full council the establishment of a grant program in the 2012 budget with a funding amount of $100,000 to be developed using criteria developed by law and the environmental department. So moved. Council Member Blues, before you get a second, if you could recognize Council Member Kaye. Right now you don't have a quorum without Council Member Kaye. We have five members. Do I hear a second? Do I hear a second? I need a second. Yes, do I hear a second, please? So it's been moved and seconded. Council Member Martin, you want to speak to this motion? I think we've covered it. I think it's a pilot grant program to start with a fairly modest $100,000 would probably address maybe 10 homes. homes and what I'd like to see is that some criteria be established that there's a history of chronic flooding and chronic sewer backups in order to apply for this. And so if the Council decides to establish it for the 2012, that we could have criteria so that there's just not a big run on this money and it's used for really the worst cases and folks who have really serious chronic problems with their sewer backups. Council Member Gorton. Thank you, Dr. Bluse. Have you already met with your link? Yes, we have. Two weeks ago? Yes. So this could not come to the link. I guess I'm thinking about our budget process that we have in place, and we do have a place where Council will bring recommendations. So are you thinking this would go to that point where we discuss recommendations from council in terms of budget? I'm just thinking of where this could go to make it most effective since the link's already met. Well, there's obviously opportunities for the council to individual council members, but I would hope also this committee to certainly voice our recommendations to the full council. And so I'm open to suggestions as to a particular meeting you might have in mind. But at this point, I think we're trying to find out whether this committee desires to pursue that, because if we don't prove it in this committee, then obviously we don't have to worry about the logistics of it. Right. Well, what I'm thinking is the deadline for items, proposed items for the budget is May 27th. That's for individuals. You know, you said the link is met, but they haven't reported out yet. I think the easiest thing to do is when that link reports out, that it be mentioned or recommended that, assuming this committee wants to go forward with that, that you mention that it gets brought up then, or if not brought up then, at the 27th? Well, in the past we've had five or six council members sort of pile on to put in a recommendation, which this could be from our committee. I mean, it doesn't have to be an individual council member who makes the proposal. and are all the LINCS members on this committee? So then technically it can't be a LINC recommendation. The LINC hasn't heard this. So I'm just thinking about the process, and it seems to me this could go forward if we approve it to be a council member recommendation, and there are how many council members who will vote on it? We would all be the council members to propose it, those who vote for it. So it gets on the list. Sure, and I'm fine with that. I don't know if we have to be that technical, but I'm happy to be. But I think there are, I think, a sufficient number of council members here to do that. And also, I remember when we set up our new committee structure, the idea was that our links were going to be tied to the committees. This was originally supposed to be the link for these issues. And so, you know, and I certainly think it's appropriate for, and certainly in the spirit of our new structure, that this committee be allowed to make a recommendation for the budget that leases is considered by the council. Council Member Lee? Yeah, I think that another possibility, too, would be that Mr. Martin could talk to the Links Committee and say that, you know, we referred this as a possible idea for budgeting, and you could discuss that with them individually maybe. And then the other aspect that could be referred into the Budget and Finance Committee, which will be a committee of the whole, we review the budgets anyway, that this idea came up after the next meeting had been held. But that wasn't really my comment. My thought is I like this idea, but I would like if we were able to fund this and implement it, that it would be sort of like a test, and then we would maybe do five or ten homes or whatever. But then after it's been done, we would go back and actually meet with the property owner and get an assessment of how effective this has been so that we can determine whether this was a good investment for the Irvin County government to make to cure this acute problem, or maybe it didn't really fix the problem. Or have you already done enough of these that you feel like this works and there's no question about it? No, sir, we haven't, and I'm with you 100% on that, because we don't want to keep doing it. You know, one of the things that I've struggled with in thinking about this over the last couple weeks is that, you know, one of the areas that I would be particularly focused on is that we're going to have a schedule to make all these repairs. If you're further out on the schedule, maybe you get more points because you don't want to go in and invest a bunch of money on one you're getting ready to fix and solve the problem, but ones that are going to have to wait a couple of years, this is their relief until you get to me. But, yes, we're going to have to constantly reevaluate, and I agree with you 100%. We will do that. Yeah, and another possibility that we might look at is not paying 100% of it, maybe having a match grant so that we could get more bang for the buck, at the same time helping the property owner eliminate a problem in their home. I think our limited research has found that Cincinnati, Louisville, other communities are already doing this. As I said, we won't reinvent the wheel. We'll look and try to take the best and brightest from their program, run that through law, and then report back to the committee as far as what direction we're headed. Thank you. Council Member Gorton. Just quickly, with the motion, if the motion passes, Council Member Blues, would you bring it to the, in terms of the process when Council Members bring forward motions? Would that work for you and for the committee? Yes, if the motion passes. Okay. Thank you. I do have some questions. We're talking about putting or recommending the funding of a program. Do we have a sufficient structure for it? That is, do we have preliminary criteria? Is this feasible as a test project? We have a solutions manual that was produced back in 2002, and we actually piloted this. There weren't many takers back at that time frame, and I'd have to really go back through the report to figure out why there wasn't very many takers. I think we had targeted four homes throughout the urban service area, and I think that one of them actually took us up on it. The idea of having a sewage pump in your basement, I think in a lot of cases, wasn't attractive. But that's not the only option here. There are other options because each people's basements, the plumbing configuration is unique to certain styles of homes. So anyway, I think there's a framework in place that that 2002 study would have to be updated to kind of bring it a little bit more current. From a manpower standpoint, again, that's really a function of level of interest. And it's one of the reasons why I suggested a conservative dollar figure, because I think I would be able to absorb that within my existing manpower. And as Councilman Lane suggested, that we evaluate to see did we really accomplish what we intended to, and then we could go from there. So I think we could be able to launch this fairly quickly. It's a matter of developing the criteria of who is and who isn't. That's probably the most difficult part is trying to determine who's the most deserving. Usually the folks who are asking are always the ones who are most deserving. Thank you. Council Member Gordon? I do still. Okay. Council Member Henson. I wanted to ask that you repeat the motion. And then I think I have another. Should I try? And I don't have it written down. But the motion is to establish, I guess to recommend to the full council a grant program for the 2012 budget to be initially funded with $100,000 from the sewer fund. and that the grant program would be based on criteria and procedures to be established and created and developed by the Environmental Department and the Legal Department in terms of whether we do it a match or something like that. But essentially it's to recommend a $100,000 trial program for 2012 for addressing chronic sewer backup issues so that we can take care of some of the symptoms of some of the worst problems that we have while we look at the larger picture and the larger projects. That was much longer than my original motion, but I think that was it. Okay. I just wanted to make sure, one, that it came out of the sanitary sewer. and this I assume would be based upon like for lower income individuals, folks on a fixed income could apply for this grant money? I think it certainly could, and I think that's perhaps an issue we want to sort of work through because I have a number of areas, I know Dr. Blues has a number of areas that have chronic sewer backups, And the thought is that the city would try to get in there and help those folks, you know, because $12,000 is a lot of money for folks in certain levels of income. And so I think in many of the older neighborhoods typically have sort of smaller houses and things. But I don't have any sort of solid criteria for what income level would be involved. Thank you. I think as I understand it, we'd be, if the motion passes, we'd be asking the council to approve this funding and entrusting the Division of Water Quality to work out some preliminary criteria for this trial or experimental program. Council Member Gorton. Thank you. Now, it just occurred to me, we're talking about the Sanitary Sewer Fund. Correct. So our discussions, if I recall, on the recommendations are about the general fund, correct? Correct. So are you talking, is your motion actually, you're asking for basically a budget amendment of some kind within the sanitary sewer fund because you're not asking for general fund money to be put into the sanitary sewer fund, correct? That's correct. That's correct. So now I'm a little bit wondering about this. I understood it is to be a council request for an appropriation from Fund 4002 to be added to the FY12 budget. Okay, and so would that not require, you're going to have to find it from some other line item, correct? Within the sanitary sewer fund. Yes. So, okay. It goes back into, I think, Councilman Lane's request to us about, you know, based on revenue coming in, you know, how much cash we're spending, how much credit. And we've got to look and see where in there, what our fund balances are, what our debt service coverage ratios are, all that kind of stuff. And is there $100,000 in there to fund a pilot program moving forward, or do we need to reduce some other operating accounts or other accounts to make that happen, assuming that that is indeed appropriated in the FY12 budget? Okay. Personally, I think that that's probably manageable. I mean, what we're talking about already is, you know, I wouldn't want to recommend reducing any of the money that we have allocated right now to getting water out of the system. Because that's still job number one in my mind. It goes back to our earlier slides. But I think if we probably looked at the sewer fund, we could find someplace in here to be able to get this started. I look at it now almost as for the amount of time, effort, and money that we have spent with these folks dealing with this problem, it may end up paying it for itself. Because I'm paying a contractor to go out there and sanitize their basement. But I'm going out there, you're going out there. I mean, we end up investing a lot of time and effort into this, and I'm convinced that there is some benefit in doing this. Okay, so you'd be looking. If this passes, you'd be looking for the money in the sanitary sewer fund. Yes. Thank you. Is there further discussion of the motion? Seeing none, all in favor of the motion, please say aye. Aye. All opposed? And the motion passes. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Mr. Martin. If you'll hold off that move to adjourn for just 30 seconds, Vice Mayor, I would appreciate a motion from one of the committee members before we adjourn to schedule a special meeting of the Environmental Quality Committee for 11 a.m. on Tuesday, June 21, to take up the matter of SSO baseline recommendations specifically for this committee to, at that meeting, make a move forward a recommendation to the full council on the on our SSO recommendation I move the same it's been moved by at least two committee members do I hear a second thank you very much councilmember Lane I'd like to make an amendment and any other items you wish to place on the agenda for that meeting, that would be permissible. I will be happy to do that depending on whatever time constraints you might be facing that day. All in favor of that motion, please say aye. All opposed? And that motion carries. Mr. Chair, just to go on the record, I guess I'll say this for Cheryl's benefit. I've been pegged for jury duty in June, so hopefully she won't have to cover this. I just wanted to let you know that. I think we can handle that. I think, Council Member Lane, that that amendment was a friendly amendment, and it was so understood by the seconder of the motion. Is there a motion to adjourn? So moved. All in favor? Aye. And we are adjourned. Thank you. you