# Council Committee of the Whole Work Session - August 29, 2011 > Auto-transcribed civic record · August 29, 2011 - **Permalink**: https://meetings.lexingtonky.news/meeting/2146 - **Source video**: https://lfucg.granicus.com/player/clip/2146?view_id=14&redirect=true - **Date**: 2011-08-29 - **Last revised**: August 29, 2011 - **Length**: 24,971 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 Urban County Council met on August 23, 2011, in the Council Chambers on the 2nd Floor of the Government Center, with the Vice Mayor presiding. The meeting included three agenda items and two public comments from members of the public on issues before the council. During the session, the council took three votes and heard informational presentations during a Committee of the Whole Work Session. The council approved a proposal for a bike lane on Maxwell Street. Overall, the meeting addressed both procedural matters and a specific infrastructure project. ## Attendance The following council members were present at the meeting on August 29, 2011: * Council Member Farmer * Council Member Henson * Council Member Stinnett * Council Member Beard * Council Member Lawless * Council Member Lane * Council Member Martin * Council Member McCord * Council Member Kay * Council Member Ellinger * Council Member Blues * Council Member Ford No council members were absent or late. ## Votes and Decisions **Motion to Place Three-Way Stop at Londonderry and Dunkirk** [timestamp: 00:09:15] Council Member Henson moved to place a three-way stop at Londonderry and Dunkirk, seconded by Council Member McCord. The motion passed by voice vote. **Motion to Refer Parking Removal Process to Parking Authority** [timestamp: 01:03:25] Council Member Lawless moved to refer the issue of the process for removing parking to the parking authority, seconded by Council Member Ellinger. The motion passed by roll call vote with 7 ayes and 6 nays. **Motion to Remove Bicycle Lane Striping and Replace with Parking Spaces** [timestamp: 01:16:27] Council Member Farmer moved to remove the bicycle lane striping between Woodland and Kentucky and replace it with parking spaces, seconded by Council Member Beard. The motion passed by voice vote. Council Member Lawless and Council Member Kay voted against the motion. ## Budget and Financial Actions The meeting addressed two significant financial items: **Web-Streaming and Voting System Contract** Resolution BS 296-11 authorized a monthly support and maintenance contract with Granicus, Inc. for $33,520. This contract covers ongoing support for web-streaming services and the Council Chamber voting system. **Housing and Urban Development Grant Application** Resolution BS 300-11 approved a grant application to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in the amount of $500,000. The grant would fund planning consultation services for the North Lexington Gateway Plan. ## Public Comment Two speakers addressed the council during public comment, both raising concerns about a proposed bike lane on Maxwell Street. **Richard Sexton** [timestamp: 0:43:33] expressed concern about the removal of parking spaces that would result from the bike lane project. He emphasized the importance of parking availability for local businesses in the area. **Nick Nicholson** [timestamp: 0:47:26] spoke against the bike lane proposal, arguing that the petition supporting the project was not representative of the affected businesses on Maxwell Street. ## Appointments The meeting included discussion regarding the Planning Commission, though specific details about the appointment action and the individual involved were not documented in the available records. ## Contested Items **Bike Lane on Maxwell Street** A proposal to install a bike lane on Maxwell Street generated significant community opposition. The project would have required the removal of parking spaces to accommodate the new bike lane, which prompted local business owners to voice concerns about the impact on their operations and customer access. The disagreement centered on balancing bicycle infrastructure improvements with the parking needs of businesses and their patrons. Local business owners argued against the removal of parking spaces, leading to a heated discussion during the meeting. Following the contentious debate, the decision was made to remove the bike lane striping from Maxwell Street, effectively abandoning the original proposal in response to the community opposition. ## Public Comment - Issues on Agenda [timestamp: 00:00] The council opened the floor for public comments on issues listed on the agenda. No public comments were made at this time. ## Committee of the Whole Work Session During this work session, the council reviewed the docket for the upcoming council meeting. The discussion focused on first readings of ordinances and resolutions that were scheduled for consideration. This session was informational in nature, providing council members with an opportunity to examine the agenda items in advance of the formal meeting. [timestamp: 00:00:37] ## Bike Lane on Maxwell Street The council discussed a contentious proposal regarding a bike lane on Maxwell Street, which would have required the removal of parking spaces. The discussion took place approximately 43 minutes and 33 seconds into the meeting. Council Members Lawless, Beard, and Martin participated in the debate. The agenda item involved public comments on the bike lane proposal, indicating that community members had concerns or perspectives to share on the project. The council considered a motion to remove the bike lane striping from Maxwell Street. This motion reflected opposition to the original bike lane proposal, suggesting that concerns about parking space loss outweighed support for the cycling infrastructure. The council approved the motion to remove the bike lane striping, effectively rejecting the bike lane on Maxwell Street. --- ## Decisions - **Motion** — passed (0-0): Motion to place a three-way stop at Londonderry and Dunkirk - **Motion** — passed (7-6): Motion to refer the issue of the process for removing parking to the parking authority - **Motion** — passed (0-2): Motion to remove the bicycle lane striping between Woodland and Kentucky and replace it with parking spaces --- ## Full transcript And the first item on the agenda is public comment regarding issues on the agenda. Is there anyone who wishes to make a public comment about issues on the agenda? If not, there's no approval of a summary. So we'll go ahead and start right through and review our docket for Thursday night. And first is first reading of ordinances 18 through 23. Is there any question, referral to a committee, removal, any motion at all? Does anyone need information, council members? Okie doke. We'll move right along. On page two, we have first reading of resolutions. And this is pages 2 and 3, and I'll ask if there are any referrals to committee or motions. Mr. Farmer. Mine is a question about number 26, the resolution authorizing some civil service changes as well as some promotions in the Division of Police. Is anyone from HR or public safety? Commissioner is here. There's a question, Commissioner. About number 26, Mr. Farmer, do you want to restate your question? Commissioner, I realize I have not had a conversation with you about this. I'm just wondering, there are several promotions in the Division of Police, and I just wondered what effect these promotions would have on the number of people on the street versus inside the House in administration. If there's none, that's fine. I'm just wondering. Welcome, Mr. Bossie. Ultimately, the moving officers up in rank does reduce the number of patrolmen. So for each rank above patrolman, you'll lose an officer off the street. So this would have some of that effect then, it strikes me. Are none of these patrolmen moving up? I didn't really. No, well, there will be one patrolman moving up the sergeant, and then the others are moving up lieutenant. So we'll have one less person on the street is what I'm getting. Well, actually, some of these are retirements where officers have left, like Lieutenant Bottoms. So in order to replace that position, you would promote a sergeant, which would leave an opening for that sergeant position, which means a patrolman would move up, which ultimately does mean that a patrolman would be one less patrolman. Yes. I'm good. Thank you, gentlemen. Are there any other questions or motions regarding first reading of resolutions? Councilmember Henson. I want to question that further, Chief Botts. Yes, ma'am. I guess I'm concerned because there are so many of the special units that have been decreased in size or done away with. And although I know that it's good to be promoted and we shouldn't take that opportunity away from someone, But it does concern me when you've got five here that are being promoted up, and so that's five less officers on the streets. Now, come November or whatever, if you have more retirements, it just concerns me that we're going to lose more of these special units. Right. It's actually a double-edged sword because, as you know, a lot of the liability in the city runs with the decisions that the patrolman makes on a daily basis. Every one of those patrolmen is supervised by someone above that grade. And so we rely very heavily on our sergeants. And I think a lot of you were present at the sergeants' hearing several months ago that the liability associated with the decisions that they make falls oftentimes on the supervisor who's either there or not. So to have openings in the supervisory position and the management position adds to our liability and decisions that our people make on the street. Plus, most of these bodies are going back to the patrol function. I mean, they are going to be responding. They will be taking calls because I think that's the biggest concern is that we don't have enough officers for the service calls. Correct. Especially right now with being 60 below our strength where we were a year ago, we are seeing it's becoming more difficult to answer calls. And that's why we've moved those bodies out of the non-enforcement positions into the enforcement positions because our most important function is the answering of service calls. Okay. Thank you. Are there other questions or any motions about first reading of resolutions? All right, we'll move on to page four, second reading of ordinances. Are there any motions, or does anyone need further information, or is there any referral to committee? I guess my clarification would be on number 17, which is from the council office. And I'll ask Ms. Jeanette Williams, does that include the change to 10 a.m. meetings? Yes? Okay. Just for Council's information. All right. If no other questions, we'll move to page 6, second reading of resolutions. Are there questions, motions to remove or refer, or is there a need for more information? Seeing none, we'll move right along. And, Council Members, on pages 11 through 13, you have budget amendments, and this would be the time for any questions or comments about budget amendments. Council Member Stennett. Thank you, Vice Mayor. I've got a question on the very first one, 54-535. These are funds to look at the evaluation of our own parking garage here at the government center. And those of you who have been on council a while know we've looked at that numerous times. I'm just curious about is this our annual checkup? Does anyone want to answer this question? John Sheed, do you know the answer to that? Do you want to have a repeat of the question? That would be wonderful. Is this an annual checkup that we're going to start doing every year on this garage since we don't use two of the floors? Or is this a first-time checkup in three years since we condemned it and closed it? No. The primary intent for the study is to identify any of the issues associated with having a 10-year life cycle on the garage. They just completed the analysis. We expect a report within the next couple of weeks, primarily identifying specifically what needs to be done in terms of deficiencies for putting the entire garage back in service. And we don't already have that plan because I thought the council, we were given a plan in 08 or 09, if I recall, on what it would take to reopen it. Pretty much since then, obviously, we've done regular inspections with it. We just want to make sure we go back through the punch list, making sure that, you know, nothing has, you know, none of those items have expanded into other areas, any kind of additional costs and so forth. This way we have a very good understanding of the extent of the work that's going to require based on a 10-year plan rather than a replacement. And who will this pay? Will this pay a third-party engineer? Yes. Do we know who that is yet? It's THP out of Cincinnati, Ohio. Okay, the same one that did the garage behind us recently? Okay. Thank you, sir. Sure. Is there any other question on budget amendments? Thank you very much. We will move on to item five. Council members, first of all, do you have any motions to refer items to the docket? Council Member Henson. Thank you, Vice Mayor. I don't have a, I have a motion to place on the docket a three-way stop at London Terry and Dunkirk. So moved. And you all have copies of it. We have a motion by Council Member Henson, second by Council Member McCord, to place the three-way stop at Londonderry and Dunkirk. And this is an agreement with the Traffic Engineering Studies. Is there any discussion? If not, all those in favor say aye. Aye. Anyone opposed? All right, that motion passes. Is there any other council member who has a motion to refer? If not, and council members, I will bring the special environmental committee of the whole motion during committee reports. We have NDF list, neighborhood development funds on page 25. This is for informational purposes only. And then we'll move into presentations. And, Council Members, I need to first ask before we go on, I had an email sent to you yesterday. The first presentation on the Maxwell Street bike lanes, we did not receive any information on that. and so within the 72-hour window prior to this meeting. So what is your pleasure? Do you want to go on and hear the presentation, or do you want or do you not? Second. Thank you. Council Member Stenet moved and Ellinger seconded to go ahead and hear the Maxwell Street bike lane presentation. I'll call on Commissioner Taylor and Mr. Keith Lovin. for that. Oh, excuse me, we need to vote on the motion. All those in favor of hearing the presentation say aye. Anyone opposed? That motion passes. Okay. Actually, what we had planned to do today, I guess maybe it's the connotation of the word presentation, But we had researched what had happened as far as that situation on Maxwell was concerned. If you'll recall, we had some folks that came in about the bike lane that was there that was actually put in as an error to begin with. And Keith has been the project manager for that Maxwell Street project. And we went back and researched the history. And now we want to give you an update of where we are and then the point we're at where we would really like direction from the council on which way you'd like to go with this. Thank you. The Maxwell Street Bike Lane and Sidewalk Project was a bike and pedestrian improvement project that was federally funded. And we also got funds from UK and the Neighborhood Association. We got about $10,000 from the Neighborhood Association and about $11,000 from UK. So we went about, and the project limits were from Rose Street to Woodland Avenue. We conducted a number of meetings in 2007, 2008, and 2009. And during those meetings, we looked at extending the bike lane. We wanted to go from, we realized that we could take the bike lane all the way to South Limestone with no capital improvement, but we could do it with just shifting the parking from the south side of Maxwell to the north side. And then we also looked at extending the bike lane from Woodland to Kentucky Avenue to take us all the way to Woodland Park. We felt like that made for a good project. So that's what we put in the plans, and that's what we got approved by Frankfort. After we had it in the plans, then because we were going to be removing parking from the south side of Maxwell between Kentucky and Woodland, the neighborhood representatives voluntarily went to the business owners to ask if they had any objections. We found out that they did have objections, so the plans were already approved, but we were going to tell the contractor, or we did tell the contractor at the pre-construction meeting that we were going to remove the bike lane between Woodland and Kentucky Avenue. The problem came, the striping crew at the end of the project went in and striped the bike lane. So that was the error. What happened after that, then there is not a specific policy from traffic engineering to remove parking to add a bike lane. They do have a petition process in the Neighborhood Management Traffic Program that says if you want to remove parking on any street, if you get a petition signed by 65% of the business owners or property owners and or residents, then they would go along with removing parking. So I conveyed that information to the neighborhood representatives because they were very interested in keeping the bike lane all the way from South Limestone to Kentucky Avenue. So they came to me with a petition that had 85% of the business owners and property owners to keep the bike lane between Woodland and Kentucky Avenue. And so then we had that presentation last week. And so right now it's a standstill. We've suspended all plans to do anything. We're sort of looking at the council for direction on what to do. I would like to say that the bike lane is in our bike and pedestrian master plan to add bike lanes, but it does not discuss the removal of parking or anything like that. Council members, do you have comments, questions? And Mr. Lovin, is this that was just passed out from you? No, I've got maps showing the number of parking spaces to be removed, And I've also got copies of both petitions, the petitions that were presented by the Neighborhood Association and the petitions that was done by the business owners. And I can pass that out if you want that. Okay. We have a few council members who have comments and questions. And we also have four members of the public who wish to speak up on this. So, Council Member Lawless. Thank you, Vice Mayor. One thing I'd like to add to this history here is that Fire Chief, the Fire Chief Hendricks, had informed me that they were going to remove the parking on that side of the south side of Maxwell Well, between Woodland and Kentucky. Kentucky, thank you. Because, and they have removed parking from one side of several streets in the third district because they're too narrow and emergency vehicles can't get through. so we were kind of going on that information and in fact right before Chief Hendricks left he asked me again when are they putting in that bike lane because we were waiting for them to do that before we removed the parking when the lane went in early I called the fire department and Commissioner Mason said they didn't have a problem with it. They could reroute. Today, and I'll pass this out, this just came to me today serendipitously, are all the accidents from 2008 through 2013 2010. And you can see how many of them on East Maxwell are side swipes or angles. And people often get their cars side-swiped. Bigger cars are parking there. It's a very narrow street. So I'm going to pass these out to you. They're hot off the press. when the original plan for the Maxwell Street project was done, it was traffic engineering, I believe, that assessed that Maxwell, that corridor, was too narrow for parking on both sides of the street and parking was removed. But because at that time the project was not going beyond woodland, they didn't assess that one little piece. So I just want to clarify that it wasn't just, oh, oops, here, we'll do it, that there was a history. And I met with the property owners a year ago and mentioned to them that the fire department, and when the fire department says it's a safety issue, it's a safety issue. So I just want to clarify that this wasn't just some rogue bike lane go in. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Councilmember Blues. And our time clock isn't exactly on, but I'll try to keep track of your five minutes. Thank you, Vice Mayor. I was just going to ask about the number of parking places that are at stake, but if we're going to get that information later, that's fine. I've got drawings and it shows that nine spaces would be removed. Nine spaces. Thank you. Council Member Stemmett. Thank you, Vice Mayor. I guess is anyone here from the Fire Department that can back up that recommendation from a year ago? Because, I mean, this road obviously has been this way for decades here in Lexington without an issue that I know of, unless there was another issue that wasn't made. Where are we going to look at other streets in downtown and make the same recommendations, or are we just doing this one block? I don't mean to put you on the spot, but it was... Thank you. My involvement in this is pretty limited, but in trying to backtrack and determine, the fire department had no real position on this other than the parking spaces adjacent to their firehouse there on Woodland. We're really not in play because the fire trucks can't come out and make that turn anyway. It's too sharp of a turn, so they end up going a full block around to get on in towards Chevy Chase. So there really wasn't a fire department position on it. So if they were to go back as parking spaces, there would be no issues with the fire department? No. Okay, thank you. Council Member Kay. Thank you, Vice Mayor. Keith, a couple questions. On the petition process, in the procedure, is there a stipulation of the geographic area that is included in the folks who will be asked about the petition? Yes. Actually, there's three conditions for the petition process. the request can be submitted to the Division of Traffic Engineering through any Urban County Council member or via the Urban County Government the applicants will be required to submit a petition signed by 65% of the residents in the petition area which would be from Woodland to Kentucky in this case and the petition area is defined by the staff and so those are the three conditions Okay. And as I understand it, you now have a petition from 85% of the property owners or residents or both? It's actually a mixture. Some property owners and some business owners. Okay. My understanding is you now have a petition from 85% of those? Yes, and that was in the packet. Okay. If the road had not been striped in error and you had now received these petitions, would you proceed with the striping process? The neighborhood representatives were very interested in continuing with that buy claim. So if it was not in the project, they could have come to us and said, you know, we still want to extend the buy claim. We want to remove the parking. And the process would have been the same. So there wasn't any parking spaces. There was no stripes at all on that section. All we did was just added a stripe. The parking was sort of free will in that location. Okay, but I guess what I'm asking is if, contrary to fact, there had not been a striping in error and people came to you with the petition as they have come, would you now proceed with a striping of that area for a bike lane? Yes. It's following traffic engineering's policy. So we would find the funds, you know, we would have overwhelming majority supporting it. I think for me part of the confusion has been we got two petitions and they want opposite things. And so the process, as far as I can see it for bikes, as Keith mentioned to you, has some fluidity to it in that it does specify the petition signed by 65% of the residents in the petition area. but then the petition area is defined by the staff and must include, at a minimum, residents on the blocks of the street. So if you take the basic blocks of that street, we have two petitions with people who have signed them, and both of them live in the block or work in the block or they're within a block. So it's kind of confusing as to what is the petition area and what is not the petition area. I think that's part of the confusion here. we don't have a clear process for bike lanes. I think, as Keith said, that if we had not striped the lane and then someone had come forward with a petition, it would have followed the process that we would have added the lane. But you can see you can get in a do loop here. We have the opportunity for both sides to have an opinion, and depending on what we define as the boundary, that can say who's the majority or who's not the majority. Okay, so now I'm confused again. Did I make it worse? I'm sorry. It's confusing, but I couldn't answer it last week for that reason. The present procedure allows staff to make a determination of what the geographic boundary area is. Is that correct? Yes. It defines a minimum, but then it allows the staff to define the boundary. Had that determination been made by staff as to what the geographic area is? The traffic engineering did define what the dimensions were, and they said it was the property owner addresses on that petition was what traffic engineering designated as the petition area. They felt like if we had over 65 percent of the people on that list, then it would be a valid petition. Okay, and you now have a petition with 65 percent of the people on that list. Correct. Thank you. Thank you. Mr. Farmer. Mr. Farmer. Vice Mayor, I'm interested in, I know we have people here from this area. Are they going to come after we've had our commentary? Is that it? That's what I was thinking. There are two more council members following you, and then we'll hear from the folks who signed up. And then we can reload again, talk some more. We can reload again. That's right. So there was never any, the number 85 was not a percent, but the number of people who signed a petition. I don't believe there was a petition. No, the 85 from last week was a mistake. It should have been 85%, not 85 people. But I thought it was 65, according to the testimony of just now. Minimum of 65%. I guess I have time to read it while we're talking. Thank you. Councilmember McCord. Thank you, Vice Mayor. Keith, what are the plans for the rest of High Street? If we were to go through and do High Street again, what is in our plan, or is it in the plan? How does that work? On High Street, because we have put the bike lane in on Maxwell, now we're looking at High Street to do the other couplet, and the street width is there for us to stripe a bike lane. We don't have to remove parking from Woodland down to – we feel like we can get a bike lane all the way down to South Limestone. So that's our next step is to continue striping more bike lanes. And then going the other way, towards Woodland Park, what's the plan? We would go through the same process. We would go through the petition process because of the business owner's interest. Again, I think it's kind of indicative of, unfortunately, what we heard before break during the budget cycle is that, you know, we're kind of stuck here and we're being put in kind of a reactionary mode because we don't have a plan or a process. or, you know, and it's we were kind of caught in a bureaucratic swirl. And, you know, I think the thing that is interesting to me is, is that, like you say, if we had done this and then you had gotten the petition right now that was valid to say, you know, hey, we want a bike lane, then we'd have to go back in and stripe it. So from the parking standpoint, I remember when we striped Euclid in front of Memorial Coliseum and we had a lot of the same back blow as to losing spaces there and the damage that would do. And sometimes those things, you know, work out in a different way than maybe perceived. But, you know, it kind of puts us in a strange spot here because we've got, like you say, Commissioner, two competing sides that are somewhat meeting the process. And here we sit where somebody is going to be upset by the decision we're going to ultimately have to make. Thank you, Vice Mayor. You're welcome. Council Member Beard. Thank you, Vice Mayor. The stretch from Kentucky to Ashland Avenue, I mean, that needs to be bike-laned also, does it not? I mean, if those eight spaces are so valuable, then we need to get rid of all those cars on High Street all the way down. In fact, why not go ahead and go past Ashland Avenue and go all the way down to Fontaine and Euclid Avenue. And I'm sure that my colleague Bill Farmer would just love that. But is there any limit at all to what we're doing for bicycles? because if anybody would like to wake up and find out, it's like 1,000 to 1 automobiles to bicycles. I don't see bicycles up and down and up and down at all. I see one bicyclist, then I might not see another one for three days. And we're sitting here jeopardizing businesses in this area for eight parking spaces. which in itself is important to them. It doesn't sound like a big deal to me, but it's important to them. And it's just a bunch of ado about nothing as far as I'm concerned. Thank you. Council Member Martin. Thank you, Vice Mayor. Keith, thanks, and I appreciate you presenting the information to us. I guess I have an understanding and sensitivity to what these business owners are saying, and I support bikes. I really am happy with our trying to make us more mobile and use cars less. This older part of Lexington, I think, is, you know, where you have businesses. They say walkability is one of the most important things to make a neighborhood great. And if folks don't have the ability to come in and park on the street, you know, I think that we're going to, first of all, hurt these businesses, but also sort of hurt the nature of this very unique part of our community, which I think is kind of great the way it is in a lot of ways. So I don't know about other fellow council members, but I sort of feel that, you know, as a bicyclist myself, that, you know, there are some places where I just got to either go on the sidewalk or go around. And so, you know, if we were to take away the cars from along, you know, Woodland Park there, for example, Folks wouldn't be able to come down and enjoy Woodland Park, and they wouldn't be able to come and go as easily as they do now. We'd either have to create new parking there or something like that. So, you know, I always say good government is about balance, and I think this is kind of where we're trying to balance the benefits we get by sort of making it safer for bicyclists and encouraging this more active lifestyle, but also understanding that there's not that many other places where folks can park to go to these businesses. And if they can't park there, they're going to go someplace else, and those businesses may not survive. And particularly in this kind of economy, I think we want to do as much as we can to sort of help these folks. So I appreciate what you guys are doing with bike lanes and with things like that. And I just think this might be one of those circumstances where, you know, It's too great a sacrifice to ask of these business owners to take this on-street parking away from. Thank you, Vice Mayor. You're welcome. Mr. Lane. You're next. Well, I'm in the commercial real estate area, and I can tell you that investors in real estate who buy property to either occupy or lease or folks who are tenants in real estate, One of their major due diligence areas is the adequate parking. And so the fact that these many businesses are located here and they've all evaluated the location and decided they could go there based on the amount of parking that's available, and now that we're taking some of that parking back, I think that's not a good judgment on behalf of our city, our constituents, and the merchants who work in that area. So I would be opposed to the take back. Having said that, I strongly support bike and hike trails and all that, and I think we should have as many as possible. But I don't think it's fair to existing businesses to come in and take away the parking that they've been relying on for decades. Thank you. You're welcome. Council Member Lawless. Thank you. I'd also like to add that some of these business owners contacted me and said, we want the parking gone. But also some of these that signed this one petition are on Kentucky Avenue. and there is the possibility because it is wide enough to do, and we've talked about this before, we talked about it a year ago, diagonal parking on one section of park would be much closer to decoratifs than many of these places and provide, supplement the parking that they might be losing. The other option is to put in parking meters because one of the problems seems to be even shop owners park right in front of their shop and stay there all day, but also students that come and park there. And if we had parking meters around there, that might also alleviate some of the problems. So I think there might be ways that we can have our cake and eat it too, especially adding more parking there on Park Avenue, or Kentucky, I'm sorry, which would service many of the businesses that are in that area and would be no more of a walk than there is now. And the other issue that has been a big safety issue is that people overpark. They park beyond the yellow lines, and that creates what, you know, creates a safety issue vision at that intersection you can't see around them. So we need a solution, and nobody is more pro-small business and local business than I am. But I also think we need to figure out a way that everybody can win, and I believe we can do that. And this is not new, and this being striped early did not initiate the petition. There was an article in the paper over a year ago about expanding the project and putting it on from woodland to park. So that was in the newspaper over a year ago. Thank you. Council Member Blues. Thank you, Vice Mayor. I can certainly agree that there are perhaps several possible solutions to this problem that would resolve it to a large extent, but none have been offered. and instead it would seem that we're on the verge of perhaps exacerbating it by simply removing eight parking spaces with no plan put forward for, let's say, replacing them or for coming up with some other creative solution. So it does seem to me that unless it can be demonstrated that there's some overwhelming reason to deprive these important business owners who have been there a long time of the parking in front of their establishments, that while it might be a partial solution, we restore the parking, and perhaps when an actual plan has been brought forward to create a win for everybody, that could be another discussion. Thank you, Vice Mayor. I have a question about the process. Did you want to comment, Commissioner? Because the way things had been set up when the question came up last week, that Keith had already instructed the contractor to remove the stripe and put the parking back. That's what had been planned. And then what caused this question, I guess, is the fact that we have a petition, and then last week we had other people with another petition, and the plan was to remove the strike because it was put there in error. I mean, that's basically what happened. It should not have been put there in the first place, so we were going to remove it and put the parking back. Now that we've had this and recognized that the process is somewhat unclear, just as Keith said, we received a petition that seems to meet the requirements of our process as it exists today, but we can already tell that's going to be something that's going to be a problem between two different groups of people. And we can come back with a proposal for an improved process, But at this point, we have a process that says, frankly, both petitions could be considered valid, depending on where you draw the residency line. So at this point, our plan was to take the line back out and put the parking back in, just because that was an error to start with, and that seemed the proper path to take. Thank you for that clarification. I do have a couple of process questions, but I'll defer to Mr. Farmer first. Okay. Okay. My question, if in fact you were planning to stripe further on down High Street, would you be having public meetings and disseminating information and gathering public input? What portion of High Street are you talking about? Well, I think I heard you say that in the future you would be looking at striping more bike lanes. The section between Woodland and Rose Street, there is no on-street parking. We have in the past gone in and just added the bike lane because there's been no impact on parking, so we felt comfortable doing that. If there is parking involved, we would look at the process and get the petitions. Okay. And in a case, going back to what Council Member Kay was asking, if you receive, if everything is normal, and of course we're never sure what that is, right? and there hadn't been a mistaken striping, and you received a petition from the proper number of people to add a bike lane. Would you not have any kind of public input to that, or would you just go ahead based on what is the process after you get that petition? I can't think of a time where we have done this process. The places where we've added bike lanes, we haven't had a conflict with parking. I would look at, you know, we look to traffic engineering to help guide us on the appropriate way to do that, and this is what they gave me. If we wanted to take it to South Ashland, obviously there's on-street parking, so we would go through the public meeting process to get input and to explain our plan. And so would you not get input from the owners of property on that very block? Yes, yes. So there would be another step to the process. Yes, yes. And that's sort of what we did. We did it back backwards, but that's the process we did. We got the property owners and residents to request it. I mean, that's what they did. They requested the bike lane. They requested the parking to be removed to add the bike lane on that block. After the fact? Yes. Okay. Thank you. Now, Council Members, shall we hear from, we have five members of the public who wish to speak to this. And if you all will just come up when I call your name, and you'll need to give your name and address, and you'll have three minutes to speak. And first is Richard Sexton. A guy on the property at 509, 511, and 513 East Maxwell Street, I bought it 21 years ago. And when I bought it, I knew there was no off-street parking, so I knew there'd be on-street parking. And there it was. It's been that way for 80 years, okay, so why would it be different? Now, I've got an eight-unit building there. I've got four businesses and four apartments up there, okay? Now, if you take away, incidentally, I keep hearing the figure eight. If you're going to measure and allow for about a 16- or 17-foot car, which is smaller cars from now, it's more like 11 instead of 8, okay, that we're going to be losing, okay? Now, just before we got here, and we see this all the time, and I think this is important. At 2.30, all the parents from Maxwell School come to pick up their kids. And there was 10 cars parked in this place where this white line is now. Okay? They didn't care about whether that line's there or not. They won't come and pick up their kids. Now, this only lasts for about 30 minutes, and then they're gone. But tomorrow morning, about 7.30, it'll be like bees are swarming again, you know, to pick up their kids. Nothing wrong with that. Now, during the day, there's small periods of time when there may not be many cars there, but they come. I've got, like I say, four businesses there. I've got one called Hair Raisers, and there's a boutique there. And on the High Street side, this building's got an approach on High Street too, okay? And I've got the Black Market over there, which has got two of those entries, okay? And High Street is always hard to find a parking spot, okay? If you take these away from Maxwell Street, where are these people going to park, try to come in and spend some money with us? You know? I want to be able to pay my property taxes and the mortgage. It was important to me 21 years ago when I bought this building. Why isn't it important today? It ought to be. Mike Cortney, the same way, owns the Blackstone Bookstore. Rob Ramsey, who owns the three-story building there on the corner. I bought that. I had that 35 years ago. And I looked for parking there, and I wouldn't have went in debt for that. Now, Rob Ramsey owns it. I sold it to him three years ago, and he's concerned about parking. On-street parking is the only thing we've got going for us. But now there's another perspective, too, here that I think is important. I've talked to several people, and they said, well, just pretend that bike lane is there. I wouldn't take a chance of riding down that direction with that high-speed traffic to my back. And that back lane is narrow. It's not like those down on Euclid Avenue. You've got super ones down there, which I don't see many people using them. But anyway, maybe I'm there at the wrong time. But anyway, I guess my three minutes is about up. But anyway, from the safety standpoint of people, kids, bicyclists getting hit, and or the economic side of it, which was, like I say, it was important then. Why isn't it important now? Thank you, Mr. Saxon. Thank you. Michael Courtney. Okay, you're going to give your three minutes to Mr. Nicholson. and then after Mr. Nicholson will be Dan Courtney. You're giving him your time also? I'm selfish. Okay, so Mr. Nicholson, you'll have... I certainly will not use nine minutes. I will be very brief, in fact. We've talked about this to death, but for the record, my name is Nick Nicholson. I'm at 300 West Vine Street with Stalking and Ogden. here is basically who I am representing. If it will come up, hopefully. The shaded portions of this are the Neighborhood Association. These are the businesses that are basically at these parking places really serve. And there is a copy on the packet I handed out, and I do apologize. That did not get the 72 hours. I just received that today, in fact. These are the property owners, the properties, the businesses that are directly affected. You will also notice that we have a fair amount of signatures. We gave you a petition last week that had, I believe it was 23 signatures. We have went back around this past week and updated that. We made sure everyone who had originally signed had signed again and basically even added more names. I do not know how in the world 85% of apparently the residents and property owners could constitute 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14 spaces. Apparently, this is the petition that was presented in opposition, basically, to increase the bike space. There are 14 spots on this. There is one property owner on here, and he only represents a company and does not even own the entire company. There are a mix of tenants. There's a mix of property owners, and then there is a mix of a business owner on here. This does not represent 85% of the affected people. It certainly doesn't even represent 65%. If you look on this petition, that looks like a lot of names. There are only five names on that petition. They are just signed multiple times. And Melanie Williams, I believe, is a tenant. James Witt is a property owner that the building, in fact, faces East High Street. It does not, in fact, face the Maxwell property that we are talking about. The back of the building is the only thing that is actually touching the affected area. There is only one business owner on there, and that is Mr. Feinberg, I believe, and he leases spots in the church parking lot that is right next door. And you will also notice the reverend's name is on there as well. He represents the church that has a very large parking lot that, in fact, leases out spaces to Mr. Feinberg. It is not representative of what the people in this area feel and that are affected. The various petitions that we have presented to you represent an overwhelming majority of the impacted businesses and people that need these parking and want these parking spots. I do not want to waste your time. I simply want to say that this was, it's very clear now, it was done as a mistake. It was analyzed for years. Apparently there were several meetings, and it was decided against this block. This is a commercial block. This is not a residential block. The rest of Maxwell Street that has the bike lanes on there, we're not fighting them. It is a very drastically different neighborhood. We think the bike lanes are great there. They can help get people to our businesses. However, those are residential areas. And the residential area, it ends at Woodland and it goes down to Euclid and it goes up to Central. These are residential properties at this point. That is where the bike traffic should be with regards to the safety and also taking into respect the need for parking for these places. Again, I really don't want to waste much more of your time. You heard from a cyclist last week that he thought it would be crazy to go down this little spot. The fire truck can't even turn down there, so we can't use the argument that it is too narrow to get the emergency vehicles there. We agree with Maxwell that that is a very big thoroughfare that needs to be protected, and it was analyzed, and bike lanes were determined to be appropriate there. It was determined to not be appropriate at this small block. This is a small block we're here talking about. We're not asking for a mass removal. We just want a small removal that goes back in accordance with the plan. And as we, I think, was demonstrated, the process is unfamiliar with regards to this petition process, with regards to how to stripe a bike lane, because this is a very new process that Lexington's going through, focusing on the bike-friendly nature. And the process, whatever it was, it was not followed this time. We would be happy to sit down with anyone from engineering, with anyone from planning, with anyone from public works if they would like to discuss the impact that it would have on this block. There's a reason why it wasn't in the plans, and there's a reason why it shouldn't be in the plans. And I think the numbers of tenants, business owners, and property owners on our petitions are very indicative, as opposed to the five people that signed the other one. That is all I really have. Okay, thank you, Mr. Nicholson. Mr. Ramsey? Did you bring us dinner? No, but I just want to thank you for the opportunity to see my government at work here. This is really amazing. Will you state your name and address, please? My name is Rob Ramsey. I own Ramsey's Diners, Missy's Pie Shop, and also the building that the bike shop is in on the corner of Maxwell and Woodland. I'm here to state that to me the 11 spaces are very important to our neighborhood and all of the businesses in the neighborhood. To give you value of what a parking space is worth, I lease 10 spaces from my beloved landlord at High Street, and I pay $875 a month for those 10 spaces. It's kind of a blackmail situation, but that's how critical parking is to us. I give my parking lot up for the students to pick up their kids at school in the morning and in the afternoons, and I think it's critical to some of those kids not having to walk further than they should have to walk. Those 8-11 spaces are extremely critical to our neighborhood and our business. I'm to the point where when we hire an employee, we ask them, do you have a car, do you have a ride, do you have someone that can drop you off? There's no place to park in this neighborhood. I employ about 60 people and they all are expected to get transportation during the daytime that does involve parking an automobile. Other than that, Ms. Lawless said that there are some alternatives, that there's an opportunity for everybody to win. My opinion is the bikers have already won. We gave up half of Maxwell. We want just the 11 spots that were planned to be part of our commercial parking. Mr. Lane talked about being in commercial real estate. I think he'd tell you that, he'd agree with me, that if you have to walk more than 500 yards, it's not adequate parking. So why don't we take the petitions and see who signed within 500 yards of those parking spaces. I think the people that want to see that remain parking would be in the vast majority of the people that signed the two petitions. Ms. Lawless spoke of over-parking on Kentucky Avenue. Well, duh, yeah, there's over parking in that whole neighborhood because there is no parking. So 11 spaces, it's worth $87.50 space to me per month. And I'm here to ask you all to let some of the other tenants or the other business have some parking because I've got it all. Anybody who's coming to shop in our neighborhood right now, those 11 spaces and the meter spaces on the street are the only place they can park. So between employees, our other customers, there is no parking right now to keep other businesses viable outside of the parking that we share and that I give up of mine. Thank you. Thank you very much. Commissioner, can I ask you a question, please? Is it, I think Council needs to know, based on what you said, what the situation actually is now. Is it still the case that the striping has, you've requested that the striping be removed? Yes. There is a purchase order. We have a contractor. I don't have a date for it to be removed, but it should be within the next two weeks. But once we received the other petition, we wanted to make sure that that was appropriate action. So without, I'm just trying to think ahead here about action. If the council takes no action, the striping will be removed. Is that correct? Yes. Okay. Council Members, is there any other comment or question? Council Member Farmer. So if the bicycle lane striping is removed, what is it replaced with? It will go back to parking. That's the most excellent answer. Thank you very much. Council Member Lawless. I think we clearly are in a situation where we didn't have a process that was clear and fair to anybody. And so I'd like to make a motion to move this issue into public works. Would that be the appropriate committee to study not this particular block, but to study a process so we don't get into this in the future? Can you be specific about which exact process? A process for removing parking. Okay, the motion is to move the issue of the process for removing parking into public works. Is there a second? Council Member Ellinger seconds. Is there any discussion? Council Member, now, Council Member Kaye, do you want to discuss the motion? Okay. If you want to discuss the motion, please log in. Council Member Blues? Thank you, Vice Mayor. I'm wondering whether this might be something appropriate for the parking authority to take up. I see lots of shaking heads. And I did speak to them. I have spoken with them about the parking meters because a couple of the owners said that they thought that might be a solution. Do you want your motion to remain or do you, is there an amendment to the motion to refer it to the parking authority? I'll offer that as an amendment. to move this to the parking authority and ask them to take a look at it. And to report back to the council. Does the seconder, the seconder agrees. So the motion is to, are you amending the first motion or are you replacing it? Well, I believe I'm amending it to say that the matter be referred to the parking authority to be discussed and reported back to the council. And I accept that amendment. Okay. Now, discussion, Council Member Beard. Your Vice Mayor, this is exclusive of the eight places that we've been talking about all afternoon. This is for the future. We aren't throwing those into the pot and keeping these merchants without adequate parking. Council Member Lawless, is that your intention for future? Yeah, for the future. I mean, we need a process. Obviously, we don't have one that people feel is adequate and fair. Okay. Okay, thank you. All right. Does anyone else wish to speak to the motion? Council Member Martin? Yeah, I guess I'm not sure I understand the motion. What I understand that happened here was that a contractor painted stripes on the street by accident. And so I don't know if this represents the lack of bureaucracy, a lack of enough meetings, a lack of public hearings. I think this is a contractor that made a mistake by striping the road. And so I'm not going to support this at this time. I think they're doing a fine job, and I think that we shouldn't allow them to do it. Thank you. Council Member Lane. My thought is I thought we have Lex Park for, I believe that's in their prerogative, to manage the parking in the city. and I don't know the need to put in one of our committees. I think we should refer to Lex Park and let them give us an opinion on it. And if they feel like they need an ordinance to upgrade their management of the parking, we could pass one. Does anyone else wish to speak to the motion to amend the original motion to ask Lex Park, the parking authority, to look at the process for removing parking and report back to the council? Seeing no one, all those in favor of amending the motion, please say aye. Aye. Anyone opposed? Will you log in, please, Council Members? We should have 12 voting folks here. Two more. Are there a couple more of you who want to register your vote? I'd be glad to, if I don't have a screen to do it. Okay. So if you don't mind to tell us out loud how you'd like your vote to register. I'll vote, yes. Okay, so the vote is 9 to 3 to amend the motion, and that motion passes. So the motion on the floor then is to send the issue of a process for removing parking to the parking authority, Lex Park, and to report back to Council. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Anyone opposed? Okay, we have three, I think three nays. Council Member Beard, Council Member Farmer, and Council Member... Yes. Do you want to discuss it? I apologize. I broke the process. Is there discussion on the motion? If ain't broke, don't fix it. Thank you. Okay. Now, do you have discussion on the motion? Not yet. Okay. All right. All those in favor, please say aye. All those opposed. Okay, if you'll register your vote, please. I can't get to my screen to vote. It's a no. So that's a tie vote, which means the motion fails. Well, his Oh, okay, you were able to register your vote Or somebody did Excuse me, I'm sorry It passes 7 to 6 So that motion passes that issue It will go to the parking authority And they'll report back to us It's just majority This is to refer it It'll be referred to Thursday night And it'll come It'll be reported out Only for another month, Mr. Lane. Okay. Thank you very much, and we appreciate your presentation. Council Member Kaye still has a question or a comment. I have both, because I still have a confusion, unfortunately. Excuse me. My understanding now from what I've heard is that absent any action by the council, the striping will be removed. That is correct. And then what I heard from Keith is that he has in his possession a valid petition from 65% of the people in the affected area, which would allow him to go forward with re-striping for a bike lane. That's my understanding. I just want to be clear if I know what the present status is. So remove the mistake, and then after the mistake is removed, honor the petitions and put the stripe back in. If I've got it wrong, I need to have someone speak to this. My opinion is we need to clarify, as you heard from some of the other folks that had comments, what is the area that is allowed to sign the petition. That's the part that I personally, in an engineering world, you have a very clear boundary. This is a very loose boundary. And so the stripe, as it went in originally, was a mistake. It wasn't vetted through the process the way that it should have been. So I had directed them to remove the stripe and put the parking back. When we got this petition, the question was, what is the valid residence of the petition area, and what does that mean? And there's a lot of disagreement about what that means. And that needs to definitely be examined. And if there is a petition that comes back that is valid, that meets that definition, in the future any street could be subject to this, not just this particular block, but any street. But that's the part that, frankly, I'm having a problem with, is deciding what is the valid petition area. Okay. My concern is that I think there's two things going on here. I've heard the concerns of the property owners, and I think they may be valid. And they're probably not the only property owners who would have these concerns. I think there's a fair amount of support on council to honor those concerns. I think that's a policy question. And we've referred that question to the parking authority. But in addition, there is this specific issue that's before the council. And my concern is if people have proceeded according to what they saw as the existing regulation, policies, and procedures, that that not be overridden. And I think we're going to have to go back and take a look at that. There are a number, and I'm fairly new to the public works side of the House, but there are a number of processes that do allow for flexibility in decision-making, and this is one of many. We are in the process of trying to do a better job of documenting our processes and making them clearer so that it is clearer for people to know what to do and how to do it. In this case, when I read this, not being an attorney, I think I could interpret this several different ways, and that's part of the problem I'm having with this. But the error is to be corrected, and that's what we're planning to do unless we got direction from the council. And we definitely need to go back and take a look at the process, clarify that, and do a better job, because theoretically this could happen on any block on any street. People could bring a petition and decide that they want a change, and they have that right, but it's still not clear to me which one is the predominant opinion, because it depends on where you draw the boundary. Okay. So we definitely need to improve this process and clarify it. I totally agree and would welcome any comments. Well, I have a suggestion in this particular case. It seems to me that while there is a possibility that the prevailing facts may determine that striping is appropriate, that we not have the striping removed until that question is resolved. I think there's a question of fact. Who's qualified to sign the petition? That's the question of fact. And once you determine that, do you have the right percentage of signers to qualify to get that stripe for a bike lane or not? Until that question is answered, I believe it would be inappropriate to use government resources to remove striping that might be replaced. And that's kind of where I don't know how you want to respond to that, but that's kind of the way I see it. Thank you, Vice Mayor. Councilmember Farmer. All right. With respect to this petition, which is, I don't know, this says 11 of 13 and therefore it's 85 percent. As I read this with respect to some of the comments that Mr. Nicholson made, I don't see any retailers here. I don't see anybody who goes to work every day, pays their taxes, supports people in the neighborhood, and has employees who also pay taxes. And I think if there is something here that needs to be clarified, I'm really ready to clarify it by way of a motion because I think if we want to make sure the process is right later, let's do that later. Right now I think we need to help the people who make the wheels turn in Lexington by way of merchandise, merchandise, being a retailer, doing something. So I would make a motion to specifically remove the bicycling striping on Maxwell between Woodland and Kentucky and replace it with the parking pattern striping that was there before. So moved. We have a motion by Mr. Farmer and a second by Council Member Beard to direct the public works folks to remove the bicycle striping between Woodland and Kentucky? Any discussion? And we already have people who wanted to speak before the motion, so just raise your hand if you want to speak to the motion. Mr. Martin. Vice Mayor, I think as a matter of, I guess, protocol, there was a motion already on the floor that was tabled until today. Is that correct from last Tuesday? My motion was to put the striping back. And so that motion back on the table, back off the table? The motion came to us through the present. I mean, the presentation brought the issue back to us. No. I made a motion last Tuesday and it was tabled until this Tuesday. Isn't that correct? So until we heard the presentation. So I guess my motion has to be voted on, I guess. Before we do. I don't know. It doesn't matter because it's the same motion. It is the same motion, yes. But just for future reference, I think if you take it, once it comes back, it's still alive until you vote it down. Okay. I think you technically need to untable it. I mean, I appreciate your bringing this up. It was untabled until today. Yes. It comes off the table automatically. So it's back again, correct? Mr. Farmer, you made a motion. to direct that the bicycle striping be removed and replaced with parking striping, parking places, and Mr. Beard seconded it. Okay, did you have any further comments? Thank you for bringing that up. Mr. Lane. Yeah, with all due respect to Council Member Kay, I feel that it's not a good precedent that we can have people sign petitions to deal with parking spaces that are already existing. And, I mean, your point may be well made, however, that we need to say that that's not the case, because if we're going to have petitions to decide how we run the government, where we put parking spaces, you know, maybe where we have parks, et cetera, I think that we could lose a lot of control over the future direction of our community. And I don't think it's fair to be able to have a petition to take away an established parking space that's been there for decades, that people have made an investment based on the availability of that parking. So I will be supporting the ordinance to just verify that that parking space is still valid. Thank you. Thank you. Council Member Beard, you're next. Are you on to speak to the motion or not? Well, it's allied to the motion. It needs to be to the motion, please. You can have a chance to speak later if it's to something different. Okay. Council Member Lane, you just spoke to the motion. Who else? Will you raise your hands if you want to speak to the motion? Council Member Kay. It feels a little bit like ping pong, but with all due respect, Council Member Lane, my understanding is that there are many provisions right now in government that require a petition process for changes on street signage, on off-street parking, on – thank you. I can't recite the list, but I believe that's the case, that we have right now in policies and procedures any number of issues that if a neighborhood wants to make a change, they bring forward a set of petitions. And if they get the right number, then they get to make that change. Is that correct? So this is not a unique situation. That's number one. The second point, and I feel like I'm beating a slightly dead horse, but it seems to me unfair to apply any action retroactively. We have a set of procedures on the books, whether they are fuzzy or inappropriate or don't work well. That may all be true, and then our job is to change those. but it seems inappropriate to me to apply them after the fact when citizens have come forward with what they think is a valid petition. Thank you, Vice Mayor. You're welcome. Is there anyone else who wishes to speak to the motion? Okay. The motion on the floor is to direct Public Works to remove the bicycle lane striping between Woodland and Kentucky Avenue and replace it with parking spaces, parking space striping. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Anyone opposed? No. So there are two nays, I believe. Would the nays, Council Member Lawless and Council Member Kaye? Okay. So that motion passes. Thank you. Now, we're going to go back to our list of people who want to speak. and I believe Council Member Beard is at the top of the list. I just wanted to make a comment concerning petitions. Petitions are for guidance. We make the law here And 65% sounds overwhelming, but there's obviously some questions about the area surveyed and do they have all the information we have to make a decision or does it just happen to be that they just went ahead and signed the thing anyway so they could get back to the TV set? We are not commanded by the public. That's the way Switzerland works. We're not commanded by the public through the petition process or, for that matter, the email process. Good Lord, if that was the case, we'd be running the city by email. I shudder to think of the thought of that. Thank you, Vice Mayor. You're welcome. I have a question of the commissioner. I'd like, it's really a request. I don't, I would question whether this is a valid petition, and you probably have a copy. This says, we the undersigned as residents, and then there's one person who's listed as the residents at four different addresses, and then there's another person who's listed at a residence of two different addresses, a third at two different addresses, and I would like for you to run this past law, if you don't mind, because I suspect this is not a valid petition, because it says, we the undersigned residents. Unless you can live in four different places, I guess you could live in four different places if you want. Well, I think that has, we'll check that. If you don't mind to check it with law. And also what's a resident versus a business, and what I think has been done in the past is if you're the property owner. Yes. Thank you. I appreciate your checking that. Mr. Lane? I'm happy to advise, Vice Mayor, that was an old request. Okay. I don't see anyone else who wishes to speak to this issue, so I think we're done with this one. Thank you very much for being here. And the next presentation is Community Corrections, and this will be given by Commissioner Mason and Interim Director of Corrections, Ray Sabatini. Welcome. Thank you. We're just going to turn this over to Ray, let him present some of the updates on what's gone on with the community corrections during the time that he's been over there as interim. Glenn Brown is also here, who's been very involved with the transition. And I'll turn it over to Ray. I'm sure glad I run in jail instead of a bike ride or something like that. Welcome. Now, you'll have 15 minutes total. I hope you remember the rules, don't you? Well, not really, but we can do that. That's not a problem. Thank you for allowing us to share this time with you. We want to give you just an update. It's been about three weeks that we've been working at the jail together. So I want to show you kind of our first phase, which is basically an organizational stage, working with community corrections, and give you a little update. I'd ask some questions. So if I can figure out how to work this. That wasn't it. Chris Edwards might be able to help. He's behind you. There was only four buttons, and I picked a wrong one. Okay. You can push it there. I'll tell you when to hit it. We're all in great shape. And if you'll start as 15 minutes. I locked it up. That's good. Sorry about that. Start as 15 minutes over. It's been the story of my life. There we go. It's moving again. It's moving again. Okay, just a little overview. One of the things that everybody talked about was the issue of transparency and some transparency and kind of reestablishing some credibility back with the community as it relates to the Division of Community Corrections, and we certainly want to do that. We're going to talk about a little realignment of the organizational structure that we've created. We want to talk about the reduction of the inmate population, which I think is very, very important, because once we reduce the population, we have two choices. We can spend less money or we can try to generate more revenue. But that's a decision for this government. We will provide you with the information you need to adequately address that issue. We want to talk about enhancing inmate programs to reduce the length of stay. House Bill 463 put on the table a variety of mechanisms to allow the jail stay to be shortened if persons participate in programming, which means that if we can put some programs in place that are actually paid for out of not the government funds but out of inmate revenue, then we have an opportunity to reduce the length of stay of people that are staying in custody. And in doing so, we save money. And in saving money, then we have, again, the option to determine whether we want to move in that direction or whether we want to move in the direction of trying to temporarily utilize beds to increase revenues. Those are our choices. Okay. Ta-da, did it. Transparency. In Louisville, we have just installed, and I say we, it was a business partner of mine just installed it. I don't have any financial interest in it, but he's a business partner. an IP camera in the booking area of the Jefferson County facility. That was installed because Jefferson was having some similar issues with use of force, and they were trying to figure out a way of being able to have kind of an oversight and allow people to examine what goes on in the booking area where most of the activity takes place in a jail. And it's an opportunity to be able to see what's called an Internet protocol camera, an IP camera that allows for 29 frames per second, which is basically full motion. And for somebody from the outside to monitor either from the desktop or from a mobile device, that booking area 24-7, 365, with the appropriate permissions as to who this government decides, decides wants to monitor that particular camera. This is just a little view of it, and it's a fisheye, but the software allows it to be flattened out, and then you can zoom in on any area of it, but it allows both audio and video, and it records full time in that area. This is the entire Jefferson County booking area, very large, but it looks like it's small. I don't know why I clicked off there, but if I had my Mac out here, it wouldn't have done that. But it's a PC, so that's what happened. But that's a camera that allows the image to be viewed by a member of government, a member of attention community at any time, and even if there was a desire on the government, and if we looked at the law relating to that to be able to view it on a website from the Urban County government website. In other words, we can view it depending on how you want to do that. So it gives us an opportunity for transparency. It allows the government and members of the community potentially to be able to view what goes on in jail booking at any time and for us to be able to record it at the same time and then store that for future purposes. This is the organizational restructuring. The old structure of the detention center was kind of from the top down with a director, a couple of assistant-type directors, and then there were division directors underneath that or subdivisions underneath it. What kind of occurred is that the director, everything went to the director's office, and everything was pushed from the bottom, from the top down to the bottom. And we want to reverse that. What we want to do is allow the flattening of this structure so that each of the bureau managers are enabled to manage their particular area of the facility and that we then empower the sergeants, the lieutenants, and the captains to bring things forward in order to operate the facility in conjunction with the managers from those five bureaus. And then the job of the director is to monitor those so that we make sure that what is intended to occur at the detention center is occurring at the detention center. It becomes a monitoring process on the part of the director. So it allows kind of a push from the bottom to the top of things so that we can adequately manage the resources that we have. We'll have questions after unless you want to run through this and ask questions in the interim, but I'll go ahead and go through it. This didn't come out too well, but the population management. One of the things, three weeks ago, it was actually the Friday before I started, we had mistakenly released somebody from custody at the jail that was a person that had a similar last name but was mistakenly released from custody. And we have two people in that case in court processing that are trying to manage the entire process of every court case that comes forward. They have to make a determination as to who gets out at what time, what bonds are appropriate, when the serve time is done. And now with House Bill 463, you have a calculation of a new bond credit, a new bail credit, a new fine credit, and a work credit. That court process scenario has to be beefed up. The reason the mistake was made is they were overwhelmed with responsibilities that they just could not fulfill. In fact, the day that that mistake was made, there was only one person in court processing trying to do all that. The first week that 463 was passed, there were 3,900 telephone calls about the bond credit issue under the new House Bill 463. that they had to field and deal with as well. So we have a lot of activity going on in that area, and that area has to work properly not only to determine when people get out, but to properly utilize the mechanisms available in House Bill 463 that allow us to reduce the number of days that a person is in custody, whether it's for bond credit, bail credit, fine credit, or work credit, because at this point we can start saving money by making sure people get out of jail in a timely fashion. And if we have expenses associated with work credits, those monies come from inmate funding as opposed to taxpayer funding. So funding inmate programs, education programs, we'd like to see KETs fast forward in every one of the housing units at the jail. Adult basic education, reading skills, language skills, substance abuse treatment programs. We have some in place right now. We'd like to expand those. We even want to be talking about a dog rescue program that takes place in Gwinnett County, Georgia, where they work with the Humane Society to take dogs that are really going to be euthanized because they're kind of difficult dogs. And they place them in the jail setting with the inmates and set up a housing unit for them. And then they train those dogs, and they allow them to basically be saved from being destroyed. And the program's a great program. If you have time sometime, I'll show you about a three-minute, four-minute clip that explains the program. Or if you go onto YouTube under Gwinnett County Rescue Program, Dog Rescue, you can look at it. It's a phenomenal program, and it allows inmates and dogs to have a second chance. And the same as the other programs, for every 30 days, we can engage an inmate in a program. The new law allows us 10 days of good time. So we can have a tremendous impact by implementing programs to reduce the number of days that a person is in custody. So I think it's a win-win for everybody. Okay? The way to do this is that we have negotiated a contract for the phone revenues, and this year that contract is going to increase by 16% because it's been there a while, and now the phone equipment is paid for, so they increase the revenue by 16%. If we capture those funds to run the inmate programmings, programming so it will have no cost to us as a taxpayer. And from that, we can do almost like a prepaid inmate benefit where now you're looking at bonding some almost 1,000 mattresses to the tune of almost $100,000. Well, if we put this in place and we use the phone revenues to do it, we can buy 80 new mattresses mattresses per month, two computers for the housing units, implement a broadband wireless network connectivity, not through the urban county government's division of computer services, but from inside or some other provider that will basically, because we're paying for it with inmate funds, be able to use the wireless network around the jail. And from that, then we can enhance both the KET programs and even do telemedicine and telemental health with those units once we have that broadband around the housing units. You know, one of the things we talk about is how many people we send from the hospital, in fact one today, that we send from the jail to the hospital, which is a cost of the transport, a cost of security, a cost of maybe a couple jail employees that have to escort the person, and then about $2,500 every time you hit the emergency room. If we have telemedicine in the housing units and we have telemedicine from the medical area to U.K. emergency, and if we develop a relationship, a better relationship with U.K., we might be able to do the telemedicine programs from the housing units or the medical area of the jail with the emergency room and prevent some transports and some costs. So, you know, all of it ties together. It's like creating an electronic infrastructure for the future of this government at the jail. Because the fewer people we have to transport, whether it's green relating to the car's transport or the security issues of the staff having to transport somebody to the hospital, the more we can electronically connect, the more money we're going to save in providing services at less cost to government. It's the only way jails are going to survive in the country. We can't run jails the way we've been used to running jails. So I think this is a great opportunity by grabbing an extended revenue that will cost the taxpayers nothing, but utilizing that to develop programs so for every 30 days a person is complying in a program, they get 10 days off their sentence. And last but not least is just kind of jail facts, which will give you an idea of what happens when we save one day of an inmate in custody. It costs us right now $71.49 this past year to have one inmate one day in custody. Of that, $51.41 is for staffing expenses. Health care, which is medical, mental health, and dental, is about $10.17 per day per inmate. The food cost, the food, labor, and supplies, and profit for our private provider, $3.73 per day for all three meals. the entire operating budget of the jail, the full maintenance, security electronics, all of that which are security electronics are being upgraded as we speak, the maintenance of that, the utilities, the uniform, the bedding, the laundry, the paper, the cleaning supplies, officer training, uniforms, equipment, vehicles, travel, and everything is only $6.18 of that $71. So this government is operating in a fiscally sound manner as it relates to in-custody inmates. Now, what I want to give you as a perspective is how much it costs to put one person in jail for what we call an average length of stay. Because right now, the average length of stay for anybody that gets arrested in this county is 18 days. So if you multiply one arrestee times 18 days, it costs us about $1,200 for every person we book into the detention center. And for every new officer that may make 75 arrests a year, the cost, additional cost in running the jail is close to $100,000. So that's why it's important to have programs to get people out quickly and to have programs under 463 that encourage citation instead of arrest, because more people that we can cite that are not violent offenders, the less money it's going to cost us to operate that jail. So that just gives you kind of a snapshot of what we're looking at in putting the new organization together. We've just begun. and there are many, many deficiencies there that need to be resolved. You know, we basically are down 100 staff. You know, what organization in police and fire can go down 100 positions and function properly? Okay? We have many captains, many lieutenants that once those people retired, they were defunded. What organization in public safety could withstand that and still have an organizational structure that can perform what needs to be performed to run a good organization or good jail? So we have some challenges, but if we reduce the cost, I think that we can work quite well with the funding that we currently have on the books to increase some of the staffing and provide the care services that we need in order to run constitutionally. I think we can do it within the existing budget. I know we can. But there are things that we're going to be coming forward to you with to ask you to help us to make some changes so that we can move forward. So, again, this is just the beginning, phase one. Next thing we're probably going to look at is privatizing our division that deals with the facility maintenance of the facility. And maybe privatizing that. We think we can add some cost savings to that, as well as free up some officers that are now sworn officers that are involved in that, that we can put back into the housing units that are so underfunded at this point and take individuals in the maintenance area that were $10, $12 an hour employees instead of sworn officers that are now there at a greater expense. So there may be some cost shifting that we can do by privatizing some things. We would still need the head of maintenance to monitor that contract. That's where we're getting hurt right now is when we eliminated our assistant directors, we don't have the people we need to monitor contracts. And if you can't monitor a contract, the contractors are very sophisticated, and they can do just subtle things to save their money at our expense. And we've seen some of that in our last two or three years that have occurred. So we need to maintain the ties to the top people to monitor the contracts, But I think we can take a look at on the second phase of privatizing some of the programs that basically we can do with non-sworn, non-hazardous staff, and then take those folks, put them back in the housing units where they belong. Thank you very much, Mr. Sabatini. We have several questions. First is Council Member Stenet. Thank you, Vice Mayor, and thank you all for coming today, Commissioner, Mr. Sabatini, Mr. Brown, for presenting to us. I'd ask for this presentation, one, because with the change in the director at the jail, while council was on break, there were some questions that several of us had about the direction and where we were going to go in the next year, if not six months. I guess let me address some of the things you asked or mentioned in the slide. First of all, the dog rescue program, would that be in conjunction with our local Humane Society? Yes, that's the way it works in Gwinnett County. In fact, there's a person that runs that for the jail that's an assistant director in Gwinnett. Gwinnett's an even larger facility that we have, beautiful facility. They would be willing to come down and help us implement that program. Incredible program from a community standpoint. Very good. It'll kind of help the problems we've had in the relationship with the community. And we do good things at the jail. Just that at this point we've had some bad luck and some bad things happen, and we need to repair that, this would be an opportunity to do that. The security software that we're supposed to upgrade, where are we at in that process? It started this morning. Okay. Very good. The phone revenue account that you listed in one of your slides, are there restrictions on what we can use that money for? Because I know when we were balancing our budget a couple years ago, there were certain things we weren't allowed to spend that money on. Is that correct? Not true. Those are general fund monies that you can utilize any way you want. The statute allows those to be put in the general fund, but when you defunded it or you took it away from the jail, what you did is took a million dollars a year that we were using for that $6 per inmate. Correct. Sucked it right out of the jail, which now has put us in a real bind on the things that we used to do with those funds. And I'll ask the commissioner this in a minute, so I assume we don't need that anymore for general fund. And I'll let you answer that, because I know we've used that money, as you just alluded to, to balance the budget in the last couple of years. On the 16, it's not the full amount. Right. We're getting a 16% increase. That's all we're really. Yeah. They're just going to take the increase to do what. That 16% can do what was on this slide. But the rest will still come back here. Okay. Now, there may be a little more, but the fact of the matter is we are kind of budgeting that increase to provide the programming. And who is tracking that increase in the appropriate percentages? It hasn't gotten to us yet. It will be coming this month. But who will be tracking in LFUCG? It will be part of the audit process for the government to track. Okay. And then you mentioned some changes in the hierarchy. I know the council had some lengthy discussions before we went on break back in July about a new stipend and some changes in the hierarchy. Are those changes still in effect today? The 29th is when the flattening of the structure will take place, which is next week. Okay. And so there were no changes made from what we passed as a council back on July 12th and changing one position to collective bargaining. And are you familiar with? The ordinance, I believe, allowed for the process to take place. There was a change at that point, and we've actually reverted back to the flattening of the structure instead of having it at the assistant directors, two assistant directors and the director. At this point, Glenn Brown is temporarily assigned part-time to the jail, and I'm the director, and it's more important to have five bureau managers at this point. There will be a point at which you hire a new director of the jail, and they may want to look at it differently. But at this point, I'd like to have five people at the table to help us do the things that we need to do because we have a lot to do. Okay, so the stipends were reversed that we passed back in July. No, I don't think they were reversed. They've not been totally changed. We're reviewing that with Ryan and HR and law this week. Because we had a lot of discussion, if you notice, on that 30-day. I'm trying to figure out why would the administration bring us a plan and then go back and change it a month later. So I'm trying to figure out where we're at on those. Where we're at on that right now is we want to even it out to where, since everybody is increasing responsibility. Yeah, that makes sense. We're evening that. Mr. Kamer and Ms. Dabney will not be, quote, bureau directors. They will be bureau managers. Since that stipend was approved, we want to meet with HR and budgeting or finance this week to find out how we can do that to increase for all five because of their responsibilities changes. Okay. So is Mr. 17 reporting to you and you're reporting to Mr. Mason, or how's the hierarchy with you all? I'm trying to keep him from, in other words, I tell him no for the administration. But anyway, no. We work and then we report to Mr. Mason. We've been involved with Jeff. Okay. So it's not a decision that he makes randomly that we go with. I'm basically, I'm assigned to help him, but there's yeses and nos. Sure. And there have been more no's than there have been yes's. And my last question, and can we hear from the administration as to your time frames for hiring a permanent director? I know Mr. Sabatini committed to two years, but I'm not sure. No, he didn't. I'm just kidding. I'm kidding. Just what the time frame is from your administration, because we have several key directors throughout government that haven't been filled, and this is one of them. I'm just curious about what our time frame is we're looking at. Thank you, Vice Mayor. We don't have a definitive time frame. We've had some discussions with some of the mayor's staff about looking at how we're going to go about that, but it's still relatively preliminary. Well, when are we going to start? I mean, are we going to do a national search? Are we just waiting another month or two? Mr. Reed may help us out on this. Welcome. Hello. Hello. This is a four-man tag team. Yes, yes. You've got a couple of things in play here as to when we attempt to hire a successor. Ray committed to six months to a year in that time frame, and we jockeyed around on that. That may be news to him. One big thing that's a factor in this is that you all have asked to study the concept of moving the jail to under the sheriff's purview, or at least portions of the jail, or the entire jail. Now, we're not going to go on and hire a director to run the jail. Am I wrong on that? Yes. Well, the motion was changed to reflect that the council wanted to look at what was the very best. One of the options. Well, that's not in the motion. The sheriff. It. It's my understanding. It will be discussed in committee, and I guess they'll talk about what the options are. I think if we took any permanent action in the near term to hire a permanent jailer, I think that would somewhat run counter to the type of study that you all want to undertake and look at the options, whether it's the sheriff or not, whether it's a partial movement or not, of certain activities to the sheriff. I didn't think we wanted those precluded. I think we will have a search. I think we're in the process of interviewing people that might become jailer in the future, but I think that time frame will be in the six months to a year look as we go forward. I would just caution against waiting on counsel to make a decision as best practices to run the jail because there's so many items that have been in practice for three years, so I wouldn't want to wait three years. I appreciate that, but I would argue that we, having Ray Sabatini and Glenn in this critical period running the jail, I think we have what I consider best practices, and we have people in control of the jail making the changes that need to be made and overseeing it, and the administration has a great deal of confidence and how we're dealing with this issue right now. Okay, thank you. Council Member Beard. Thank you, Vice Mayor. This is how he called you, Ray. I'll call you, Ray. I've known you a whole lot longer than he is. Let's dial back to the dog program. Yes. Are there multiple dogs that are put in the... Yeah, they actually take one housing unit and they work with the Humane Society to select the dogs that are most appropriate. And then the jail, through proper classification, selects the appropriate inmates to work as trainers with the dogs, and they kind of graduate them out so that they can be adopted. It's a great program. So there is no, I mean, the dog knows what its mission is. He just doesn't go in and start eating somebody or anything. No, no, no. No, where you work with the Humane Society to take a look at those that can be rescued. That's an interesting thing. People are using dogs for a lot of things that, you know, cancer people and epileptics and things of that sort that dogs can do that we never even guessed 10 years ago would be the case. Thank you again, Director. Thank you. Actually, Council Member Beard, the Federal Medical Center out Leastown Road has had this sort of program for many years, and it's been very successfully run. They take dogs from our Humane Society, and the inmates each are dedicated to training a dog, and then the dogs are adopted out. So I'm not familiar with the Georgia program, but I know we have a good program right here that is also a good model. All right. Council Member Lawless. Yeah, I have several comments and questions. At this point, the Public Safety Committee is supposed to be, and it should be on the agenda for September 20th, which is the next Public Safety Committee meeting, looking at best practices. And I guess it seems like you're moving these forward without council input. But are these recommendations that you're making, you're putting into place? Well, there needs to be some things put in place because the facility at this point is quite deficient in the way it's being managed and resourced. and we don't want to be in a position of delaying something that could result in a serious harm to somebody or litigation or both. Well, that's apparently already happening. That's what we're working at right now. We're not working on structure of how this place is going to look two years from now. We're talking about looking at the medical care right now. You've had some medical deaths, okay? We've had some overdose issues. We have some issues of brittle diabetics that we've had claims that they're not being dealt with. Those are things that you don't want, I don't think you want to put in your committee. Those are things that at this point we need to be dealing with so that we can rectify the resources necessary and the way we're dealing with managing those particular issues. No, I certainly agree. Those are the things we're dealing with at this point. When you talked about the increasing the cost for inmate phone calls. It's not increasing the cost. The cost remains the same. We will be getting a larger portion of the funds that are generated. In other words, when the company that we contract with paid out that contract and they no longer owe for the equipment, they were willing to increase our percentage of the revenues to the jail. It has nothing to do with the cost to an inmate. So the inmate will not be charged any more than they already are? No. In your organizational chart, it refers to majors, and I think somebody else touched on that, that we did away with majors and the stipends, et cetera. Do we have majors again? We have captains. We have captains. Go ahead. You want to answer that? The major comes with the title for a bureau manager. It's a title. They're still, quote, a captain on paper. But they move up to the management position, which gives them the title of major for the position. So are they civil service or are they? They are civil service and they are appointed at the direction of the director. So they're in the civil service rather than collective bargaining. What do you mean? No. Collective bargaining as a captain, yes. But they still stay in it. The position gives them the title. Okay. Does it give them civil service? No, they're collective bargaining. Okay. Okay. And who reviews any kind of grievance or any kind of disciplinary action? How is that process being dealt with at this point? Currently, if an officer files a grievance, it will go to the captain over the area that they belong to. The captain will answer if the union disagrees with the answer given. It would then go to the director. The director can answer, then send it down to a designee with a step two answer. Step two, if they're not satisfied, the union's not satisfied with the answer, then it comes downtown. And I think Ms. Jarvis handles them at this point. And so who also hands out disciplinary actions? Discipline is recommended from the command levels. If a sergeant has a problem with something that the officer has done, the sergeant will send the paperwork through his command, chain of command. The captain will forward it on to the bureau manager at that level. The bureau manager reviews it, and they forward it to the director for review. The director then has a chance to sign off on it, can upgrade it, reduce it, whatever the director decides he wants to do. One of the things that we discussed this morning was that that needs to move down to the sergeant level so that we have the lower level staff having the responsibility of dealing with the employees that they work with the best. and that we try to informally deal with things before we start a monument or a structure of hierarchy that papers us to death and does nothing but create ill will amongst the few troops that we have left. We have to have a spirit of cooperation. We have to build some civility into this process. We have had the most destructive time between the lawsuit and dividing this staff, and this staff needs to come back together if it's going to function as an entity that you'll be proud of. So we talked this morning about going back and training line staff and sergeants to know what their responsibilities are and then to be good decision makers, and if then they can't agree to something, then it can be moved forward. But the process as it exists now basically goes from a complaint to the director. That is not the way to run an organization. We don't need supervisors if that's the way it's going to work. It needs to be trained at the bottom and allow the people that run this facility on a day-to-day basis to make good decisions. And then, if it isn't satisfactory, it can be challenged upwards. But at this point, it's been going from the very bottom to the very top, and that's not a way to run a business as far as I'm concerned. And one more. Do I have time? You're actually out of time. Do you want to sign up for a second shot and let the two who haven't spoken? Sure. Okay. Thank you very much. Thanks, Mr. Kammer. Council Member Henson? Thank you, Vice Mayor. Thank you for being here, and thank you for agreeing to take on this task temporarily. Temporarily is the... Temporarily. Yes. I'm glad that you brought up several things that are a great concern to me. One concern has always been the turnover at the detention center, and I've voiced this to everyone, Ron Bishop and the current commanders. So it sounds like you are putting things in place to reduce that turnover rate. Absolutely. And it comes with training the people that need to be the first-line supervisors. We've not had the resources to train people. They haven't been trained properly. They're not confident in making decisions, so they pass everything to the top. That's not the way an organization should run. That felt like. My opinion. Sorry. They need more of a team effort. Yes. And the prevention of deaths, and I've been told that, you know, we have a low death rate at the detention center. Well, we do. Very low. But in my opinion. If you can't defend the negative outcome by making sure that you have done things properly and according to law, the federal constitution, everything else, then even one death that isn't justified is far too many. But when you look at the number of negative outcomes that we've had in this facility, I would challenge any government in the United States to say that in 20 years They've only had one suicide in their 1,000-bed facility. This organization has done a tremendous job in providing care to the jail. The issue is that being that we've spent the last three or four years dealing with the litigation instead of running a jail, we've gotten to the point where we're not managing contracts properly, and I think that some of our contracts are a little out of line, and we need to bring them back in line so that we make sure, first of all, we want to prevent deaths. But if we should have a death, the key is then to be basically defensible. And to be defensible, you have to have a mapping of things that need to take place in order to prevent a harm. And it's that mapping that we've gotten away from. That's what this new organization is to put back in place is that portion of accountability. that says A, B, C, and D need to be completed so that we can prevent the death. And if it does occur, just like we have people that overdose and they tell us that they've never taken any additional drugs, we can be defensible because we can say we asked the police, we asked the inmate themselves, we have an alert system that electronically notifies us if it happened in the past, and then we observe this individual. And as soon as we observe the distress, we take the person to the hospital. But it might be too late at that point. So I really want to say that you should be proud of the low number of in-custody deaths that we've had and the fact that most of them have been defensible. So that's what we're working on. Well, I just know it's a great concern of mine. Absolutely. And I know that they play games, the inmates, they'll fake illness and so forth. But the staff, the medical staff, have to be trained to identify if someone is sweating or pale. That's hard to fake. So I can't stress that enough. Oh, I understand. Before, when I was working for the Kentucky Association of Counties, we developed a poster for every jail in the state based upon symptoms of distress that a line officer would have to be trained in. So if they saw those symptoms, they would immediately contact the medical staff. That's the tag team and the handshake that we're talking about that has kind of loosened and we need to tighten it up. Thank you for doing that. And one last thing is I met with the commissioner and Ron Bishop and some of the other staff about the electronic monitoring. And I thought that was a true cost saving to them. Absolutely. It needs to be expanded, but we need the buy-in from our judges, and hopefully if we can create this criminal justice commission that empowers the judges to examine the way we're doing business and how much it costs to arrest a person and to adjudicate them, and 18 days in jail, if that can be moved from 18 down to 11, we can save millions of dollars. And by putting people on electronic monitoring, we're saving that, but we want to make sure that the ones we put in on to proper classification are those that are of the lowest risk. Right. Thank you, sir. You're welcome. Council Member Lane. Thank you, Vice Mayor. Thank you, Director Sabatini, for coming in today. I wanted to just get a few bits of statistical information about the jail. What is our current maximum occupancy in the jail? What are we rated at? We have about 1,200 beds, but I think there are probably 1,000 people in there today, maybe a few less. So we've been cutting down on the population. The population is about as low as it's been in quite a while. But we hope to do better because at this point we're not implementing 463, and we have people in there, if we had them in programs, they'd already be out of here, maybe as many as 10%. Think about that cost savings. Well, as the jail director, how are your staff able to get people out sooner? Is it working with the judges and getting them out? Well, I think we need to put kind of a criminal justice commission back together so that the judges are at the table with the government so that we fully understand when I put up this jail facts, everybody sees what it costs to put somebody in custody. And then if they decide they want to put 100 new police officers out there, or 25 new police officers, there is a recognition that there's a cost to that. So if you put 25 here, you have to spend money over here or you're going to have a train wreck. One of the other areas that we need to spend more money was in the maintenance of the facility because I think when a couple of the studies came through, we said some deferred maintenance, and the rationale obviously was our budget has been very tight. So do you have something focused on deferred maintenance? Well, we're going to – it's not deferred. We've actually put one person back on on a full-time basis. We're doing the best we can to maintain it, but we really need to look at if privatization would be of benefit to us. And if it isn't, then we're going to have to increase the staff that we used to have in maintenance to try to up the preventive maintenance schedule. because you have to remember it's not like one of your buildings that operate 8 or 10 hours a day. A jail operates three shifts a day, so the life cycle costing of a jail is three times what it is for a business that operates 8 or 10 hours a day. So this jail is really, from your perspective, 33 years old. All right. Well, the other question I had in looking at your jail facts, You were indicating that the cost per inmate day was $71.49. That's correct. I have been tracking this for a while, and actually my estimate is $89.40. And what I've done is I've gone back and gotten the audited financial statement for 2009 and taken the actual operating expenses, added our debt service on that. Debt service is not included in that, so you're probably correct. And then dividing it. Good job. I divided that by the, like, 1,150 inmates, which would have brought the average down. But as you bring down the enrollment. Right. Inverse relationship. It sort of saves the money here, and it averages that a little higher maybe. Okay, well, good luck. Good luck. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you. But, you know, it's that type of fiscal management that you need to bring from folks like yourselves to the table to look and examine these issues, because I don't think many people understand what it costs to keep one person in jail for a day, and then 18 days as the average length of stay, and then 75 new arrests in a year that comes to $100,000 of additional jail costs. Yes, it's a very onerous cost. My last question that I'm going to bail out here is I was fairly actively involved with the management change at the jail that occurred recently during our budget period. And my primary concern is I didn't want some of the top management there to be hurt financially. Some of them were civil servants. They went into the union and they gave up their civil service rights. They reduced their civil service pay. they were supposed to receive a stipend for additional duties and all that. So I'm hoping that, I don't know what the status on that is, but I would, probably one thing I'd really like to see a little report on is, you know, what is the status on the compensation for the top management of the jail and make sure they're being adequately treated. Right. Thank you. And everybody appreciates that, but it's also the low end, and we need to worry about those folks as well. Right. And I think that we'll be able to give you some better figures as to the equity issues because right now we really have not only depleted the resources from the standpoint of the number of officers, but some of the things that have been taken away as it relates to the food and things like that are really very unfair in the situation. We need to take a look at some things. We need to heal some wounds. Right. Well, thank you very much for your time. and I was sincere when I said good luck, but I think luck is when preparation and opportunity meet, and I think there's plenty of opportunity, and I think you're highly prepared. Thank you. I wonder if Ms. Williams would add Mr. McCord after Ms. Lawless. Mr. McCord's monitor isn't working. Next is Council Member Stinnett. Thank you, Vice Mayor. I ran out of time earlier, so I just want to come back to some of the points we were talking about. I'm glad to hear you say food service because I tried to get the council to add that back into this year's budget, and they voted no on that. But I'm glad you hear that because that is a big piece of this morale puzzle. Oh, absolutely. And that's what I'm curious to hear about what your first impressions were about the morale when you came back because I mentioned last week when I asked for this presentation that I've been getting letters and phone calls, handwritten letters, e-mails about situations of intimidation, of people being made promises that weren't kept, transfers being made, not just in the last, I'm not talking about the last 30 days only, but since I've been on council. What is the current status of the morale? Because believe me, this council is watching this time. I think it's very poor at this point. I mean, we are working people mandatory overtime. We've had lieutenants and captain vacancies have been vacant for a long time, so sergeants are having to step up into those positions. So we're kind of broken at this point. And once we get the organization running like we want it to from the top part, then we'll be able to better evaluate the resources that we truly need. And then we're going to come back to you and say, you know, this is the revenue that we may have increased here, but we need to help out the morale of the staff. We've got an officer dining room that's nonfunctional at this point. You know, we have inmates eating candy over here, but staff at the tower over here not being able to eat their snack at the officer's station. Those are demoralizing things, and it came about as a result of litigation. We just need to make sure that we don't go back and violate the premises of the wage and hour litigation. But I think there's some reason to move forward on trying to make it a little more civil in the way we deal with our employees, because otherwise we're not going to be able to hire people to work in the jail if, in fact, we don't treat people a little better. And right now, and it wasn't just people not wanting to get along. It was a litigation that drove people against each other. And that's over now. Now we need to move forward. So in the last 30 days, what have you all looked at to start increasing morale? What's some of the first things you've done? Well, one of the things that we're looking at is trying to amend, the amend once we talk with the law department so that we're not running into the labor litigation issue, trying to increase some of the things, benefits that officers have at their workstation and some things of that nature. The officer, the ODR, the fact that they can't even get a meal that the inmates are eating, and we've taken that away from them, not that it's good food, but we've taken that away, and yet we have a short period of time to have a meal and it's impossible to go from the bowels of the jail to McDonald's and back in a half hour. Those are all stressors that eat on the staff and that's why we have this high turnover rate. And anybody that's been in business knows it's the turnover rate that kills you because we spend a lot of money training people initially and if they leave after a couple months, that's wasted money. So it doesn't do anybody any good. Those are the things that once we get this in place, we'd like to bring back to the law department, to the government, and say these are the things that we want to do in order to make this a more civil organization, fair to the employees. Well, and that's what we're looking for because, obviously, we have some excellent citizens out there working in our jobs. Absolutely. And they take a lot of pride in their work. Most of them do. Absolutely. You're always going to have some people that cause issues, but I'm sure you all have ways to handle that as well. One last question. Electronic monitoring, you and I spoke briefly before the meeting about this issue, but one of the things I've heard the jail has been trying the last year is to get those inmates on work release on the weekends instead of housing them all weekend, get them electronic monitoring at home. Is there anything, what can council do to help you? Where are we at in that process? Well, again, if once we implement the Criminal Justice Commission, if we do implement it, then those judges will be at the table. They're the ones that make those decisions on a day-to-day basis. So is the judges holding up the electronic monitor on the weekends? I'm holding it up. It's just a matter of this point that they have to be confident that the program is going to work. They have to be confident that the people that we select through the classification process are of a low enough risk level that we can be confident that if they reoffend, it's not because we should have known that they shouldn't be on the program. It's because they've been rogue in their behaviors. So if classification is good and can truly identify the lowest risk offenders, then I think the judges and the prosecutors would have more confidence in putting these people in the program. We had it at one time when we had to lower the population at the old jail from 800 back to 500. Even Ray Larson, who doesn't give any inmate a break, was at our table with us saying, if you classify people properly, then these are the folks that I will not oppose if you put them on. He didn't say in favor of, but he wouldn't oppose if they were put on electronic monitoring. And I think Raymond would be just as happy to do that with the judges if we can assure them that the classification of these offenders is proper. Very good. Well, again, as Councilman relates, I don't want to use the same words, good luck, but thank you for your candid response. This isn't what I want to hear. Please keep us involved in the process as well. It's been very difficult. Let me tell you something. These first three weeks have been, in fact, the most restful time I've had is the hour and a half that you all were talking about the bicycle. That's the quietest time I've had in the last month. I appreciated it. I was happy back there. Thank you, sir. Me too. Councilmember McCord. Thank you, Vice Mayor. I think, Director, you're finding that this council really wants to do the right thing and wants to understand all the facts. And, you know, certainly for my seven years being on council, the jail has been something that has been of great concern. I spent a lot of time there. And the morale of those employees is a very tough, tough thing. It's a tough place to work. And they, you know, sometimes police and fire are a lot more sexy to advocate for politically. You're right. And it's tough. And one of the things that I certainly have tried for seven years to do is to advocate for the jail and to understand. That's great. And we appreciate that because that's a return thing. I mean, we want to have the best jail that we possibly could have. We don't want to spend a fortune, but we sure want to do the things so that we can employ employees and make sure that they stay there and they get trained properly and they make good decisions, and then all of us are in better shape. Well, and I think that, you know, the questions that we're asking and will continue to ask reflect that we have a great deal of concern about the employees that are going to work there. I mean, you're in an interim role. Our goal is to find the best way to run that going forward, and these are the folks that have made that career decision to be there. And so at least for this council member, that's where I'm coming from. I think that one of the things as we go and we're trying to find out more information, you know, the issue of this commission, I know it was in the sheriff's audit report and so forth. I had questions about, you know, how that was laid out, and the sheriff automatically kind of putting themselves at the head of that table as the chairman, and, oh, that's just kind of how that worked. I'm not real sure about that one. But I would say that we need to do everything we can to put the confidence in those judges, or those judges having confidence in us, I should say, for those inmates, reducing that cost, whether we form a commission or not. So anything that we can do, I want to certainly work with you directly on that. Thank you. I appreciate that. You know, you'd been out there, you were out there before I came on council. I was probably out there before you were born. Might very well be. But you and Mr. Brown have certainly had institutional experience there, and now you're back in this interim role. Mr. Reid mentioned that the administration has a lot of confidence in you all, and again, I appreciate you coming down and talking to us. Mr. Brown, I guess this question is for you. You had mentioned that kind of the way the structure flows is you're the link between the administration and Mr. Sabatini, and you've kind of given him more no's than yes's. Can you give me some specific no's that he's recommended these things and the administration said, no, that's not something we're going to go there? Can you give us a flavor for what those might look like? Part of it is what. If you could talk into the mic, Mr. Brown. Thank you so much. Part of it is what Council Member Stenet was talking about as far as some of the things that we've done. One of the things as far as that we had discussed and put out to staff was the opportunity for maybe coming back and allowing them to have. I think you don't have to crane. Allowing them. Too close to me. All right. And allowing them to have breaks. That didn't work. To have breaks back at the station. Wanted to implement it. Discussed. Can't do that yet. We need to confer with law. to even consider anything to flatline the management criteria. We need to look at that. We need to discuss that first. So you came in right after he left, but if those that know him know he is pretty much set on doing how he wants to do it. And as I tell him, I am the administration's representation to be a part of coming to a conclusion, but making sure it best benefits us as well as the staff that are at the jail. Thank you. I have a tendency to move too quickly sometimes because I know what needs to be done. Another example is the camera, the Internet Web portal. The idea on that is being vetted through law. We've had discussions. They're doing legal research and see how tight we need to restrict the viewership of that portal. So there's a lot of things that are on a daily basis back and forth with the administration and the corrections. I wear them out between 10 and 12 at midnight with e-mails every night. And one other point about Commonwealth Attorney Larson has even moved further in support of electronic monitoring. He's not just not going to oppose. He is supportive of the idea given the appropriate classification. Thank you, Vice Mayor. You're welcome. Council Member Lawless. Thank you, Vice Mayor. Can you tell me a little bit about other jails in the state and what their phone contracts look like? I think our inmates pay $3 a minute. I haven't been up on that. The only thing I knew, there was not an increase. I can look into that. Okay. Give you a report if you like. that I know is that we've gone from like 52% or 53%, which is pretty commonplace across the country. And because the equipment is paid for, they've increased at 16% more. Okay. Because I am interested in that. I understand. The other thing is, have you all considered or have you done an anonymous survey with your rank-and-file employees, like a survey monkey that they can do online? We discussed that the first two days that we were in talks at the jail of doing exactly that, and one has already been done, but I think it can be simplified, and just like with the Internet survey that takes place, one question at a time, one response at a time, and then follow up with once it's submitted some immediate feedback as to how people feel about things. I think it's an excellent tool. Good. Thank you. And the other thing is when during the transition team, public safety transition team, there were some pretty alarming things that came out about the CAP program and how it is being worked. And I'm all for the electronic monitoring. I think it's a great tool. The fellow that was let out to go to the doctor, if he'd had an ankle bracelet on, he might have come back. But how are you all dealing with that? I haven't addressed that at this point. Okay. Thank you. Does anyone else have questions? All right. Thank you very much, Mr. Sabatini, Mr. Brown, Mr. Reed, Commissioner Mason. And all the folks that do all the work. And all the support. Yes. Thank you all very much. Thank you. Okay. We'll move right along to committee reports. And, Council Members, I wanted to give the report from today's committee of the whole special environmental meeting that was held at 11 o'clock. And this basically was the one issue of the sanitary sewer consent decree implementation of the 10-year financial model for the remedial measures capital improvement plan. and there was one request by Mr. Lane and then a motion to move to Thursday night. The request which Council Member Lane asked is of law, and I'm just going to say it here out loud so we can all hear it. His request was for law to look into whether inspectors could legally go into homes to look at illegal sump pump connections, And so we'll look forward to that answer. And basically, Mr. Martin from Division of Water Quality and Mr. Barrow from Division of Budgeting gave this report, and the administration recommended that the council adopt or support their wish to have a two-year design storm as the basis for the sanitary sewer remedial measures plans. And so the council, through a motion, supported the administration's recommendation. And so this all basically was heard in an earlier form at the June meeting, Councilmember Blues, the June environmental quality meeting. And so the motion going forward is to, I move to forward to the Council via the docket for the August 25th Council meeting a resolution supporting the administration's two-year design storm for sanitary sewer consent decree remedial measures for their capital improvement plan. And there's a second by Councilmember Farmer. Is there any discussion on the motion? Councilmember Farmer. Thank you, Vice Mayor, for raising that motion and couching it absolutely correctly, because I think we're all working very hard here to make the best decisions in the City of Lexington. And what we did pass today was the administration's recommendation for us. It's what the administration decided would be the best course of action for us, and the council has been courageous enough to step forward and take that action. I would like to think we are working in partnership, but when I view some of the postings online or some of the press releases from the mayor's office, I'm absolutely not sure. However, on this motion, I am very much in favor. Very good. Is there any other discussion on the motion? If not, all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. And if you'll log in, it'll help our recorder there. Is anyone opposed? Do I hear any opposition? Okay. We need a few more. Will yours work? Okay, she's logged your vote. Has everybody voted? Council Member Lane? Did you vote? Thank you very much. That motion passes 13-0, so that will come as a motion Thursday night to put on the docket. Thank you. Now, Council reports. Council Member Ellinger. Thank you, Vice Mayor. I just want to let my colleagues know that the committee met today for the Council Administrator, And we have planned a meeting on the 19th of September between 9 and 3 to go through the applicants. And I would recommend everybody come in to listen to the six people that we will be requesting to come to be interviewed. So it will be starting at 9 o'clock on the 19th for the council administrator, potential people who might take that position. Thank you. Thanks, ma'am. And Council Member Stennett has a question about that. I just want to ask a question. The meeting was scheduled last Thursday. I had another meeting. I couldn't be there today. But did you all discuss during this personnel meeting, do we need a council administrator at all? While we're still interviewing people, why wouldn't we be better off to serve with another admin person and save money? Can we talk about that? I mean, because I know the Vice Mayor has a lot on her plate now running the office, but just curious, was there a discussion about why we even need one? This would be the first time that I've heard of this, so if that's something that the Council wants to bring up, that's more willing to bring a motion, I'm sure, but at this point that has not been brought forward, so we are moving forward as the Committee was requesting to do. Okay. Thank you. Thank you, Council Member Ellinger. Councilmember Lawless. Yes, I just have a few announcements. This evening from 5 to 9, the International Association of Women Police, IAWP, are hosting an international street party at the Fifth Third Bank Pavilion at Cheapside Park. It will be a night of excitement and will feature food, drink, music, and fun. Mother Jane will be performing for conference attendees and the public. The admission is very affordable. It's free. So come take part in this. They have women police personnel from all over the world here, and so it's a great opportunity. The Chevy Chase Business Owners Association is hosting a block party on Saturday the 27th from 4 to 7. Music, food, entertainment, kids activities, contests will all be a part of this. I've been to it several times, and it is a great deal of funds, so it's come on down. and I believe Council Member Farmer, who owns a business in the Chevy Chase, and as a member of the Chevy Chase Business Owners Association, will be there having fun, too, and selling jewelry. On September 2nd, from 5 to 9, Lexington will host the Lexington Festival of Ales. That's not like illnesses, but A-L-E-S. Beer, I think it kind of means. At Cheapside Park at the Fifth Third Pavilion, representatives from dozens of American and international breweries and micro-brews will be set up for beer tasting, and the Polyzar Band will perform throughout the festival. Tickets are $25 and available at several Lexington businesses. Or you can go to Lexington Fest of Ales. That's LexingtonFest, O-F-A-L-E-S, .com for all the details or email my office and we can give it to you. And also want to remind people that the farmer's market is still going fast and strong. The Woodland Park, thank you to everybody that made that happen. The Woodland Park Arts and Crafts Festival, it was extremely well attended. And Mother Nature was very kind not to have the thunderstorm until at the very end of the second day, at which time trees were blown over in my district and et cetera. So thank you very much and have a good weekend. No. Have a good weekend and a good week. Council Member Farmer, you were. Someone was in front of me. Okay, Council Member Martin. My list has been kind of changing. So, okay, good. Council Member Martin. Thank you, Vice Mayor. In May and June, during the budget discussions, I asked Commissioner Clay Mason for some information relating to, first of all, what public resources were being spent on the public, basically the Citizens Police Academy and the Citizens Fire Academy, given that we were taking officers off the street because we were short of public safety officers, I think it was a fair question, because as we allocate our resources, whether we're allocating resources to basically public relations campaign, I think is important. Richard, I'm going to need you on this, actually. Since that time, I've sent a number of e-mails to Commissioner Mason. I sent e-mails to Mr. Reed in June. Richard, you and I talked about this last week. I sent you an e-mail about it last Tuesday. So the first issue is what city funds are being spent in terms of personnel and other funds on both the Citizens Police Academy but also the Citizens Fire Academy. The second thing I had requested from Commissioner Mason and made numerous e-mail requests since that time is whether our non-collective bargaining police and fire officers were given raises this year. And given that public safety is 55 percent of our budget, I think this is an appropriate question to ask. And so, Richard, I guess I'd like some word from the administration about when, first of all, whether public safety has any obligation or duty to provide information to council members and why it takes three or four months to get information on these two issues. Did you hear the question? No. Okay. Yeah, it's a calculation that they've got to go back and see how much time. Can you speak into the microphone, Commissioner? Calculation spent in looking at how much time and how many sessions and how many people were involved. I got the last email today from police to get you that information. Well, your answer in May was that you didn't think there was any. I said it was minimal. Okay. Well, I think three or four months is outrageous. I'm sorry it is. And this is something that was a budget issue, that we were going through the budget. I have been extremely patient in sending emails and trying not to make a stink out of this. But the fact that I'm not getting responses is unacceptable. And the fact that I had a question about whether our senior staff in the public safety department are receiving raises this year, raises when we're taking officers off the street because we don't have enough funds to keep folks fully staffed. We took some of the special clear units off. Who received raises? That's my question to you. Did the police chief receive raises? Did any of the officers, did senior staff receive raises? What I'm asking about is non-collective bargaining. I understand that collective bargaining is a different process, and that is in process. But my question is that did non-collective bargaining senior staff, I mean basically the senior staff, did they receive raises this year? And I think that's a reasonable question. And I shouldn't have to make a stink in the middle of a council meeting to get a response from you about that. The Citizens' Academies, between the two, $6,000. That includes employee time. Yeah. Yeah. Well, the time they're going to be working anyway. But what we get back... No, but the time they're going to be out on the street doing their job for the citizens and not conducting a public relations campaign. The question is how much resources... Because see, that's employee hours that we're using for that. I guess we have a philosophical difference on what a public servant can and should do. to educate the community about what they do is sometimes very important. For instance, a return on investment of having hundreds of people volunteer hundreds of hours over the course of a year for events like the Noble Conference. There were probably thousands of hours of volunteer time by graduates of the Citizens Police Academy. Well, we can't get to the policy discussion if you don't provide the information. And I think this is a reasonable question. But the question also about did we give raises this year? I mean, can you answer that? I don't know. You don't know? No, I don't see that. You don't know if people in your department got raises? The line item of the budget of whether or not the police chief received a raise, I don't particularly know that specific detail. I'll find out. But I don't have that particular detail off the top of my head. I'm sorry, this is just outrageous that I should have to go through this kind of thing. I mean, I've been patient. I mean, but we've sent four, five, six emails on this. And so, you know, I think when can we expect to get this information? Well, I just want to follow up. Last week you gave me some information. He is getting that to me, as I told you, I will get that to you. And then he just got most of the information today on the other two questions. We have sent those out. They're doing research on those. We will have it. I apologize if it came to this situation. We will be able to take care of it. If it comes again, please come to me, and I'll be glad to help you out on it. Thank you, Vice Mayor. Council Member Ford. Thank you, Vice Mayor. Just have a couple of comments I would like to share with the council and also the constituents watching. Since we've come back from break, we've had a lot of discussion in regards to items of community interest, and it kind of leads me to talk about public input. Today's discussion in regards to the bike lanes on Maxwell and last week the address changes on Richmond Ave. What my observation is that in our community we often have some competing interests, and I guess our role in this is how do we examine the impacts that governmental policy has on our residents, in regards to their homes, their businesses, their public safety, their transportation and recreation. And oftentimes government works, but what we've seen in the last few days is just sometimes there's some gray areas where there's a lack of existing policy or process, but that's where we come in. And I think we've done a great job to have an attentive ear to the comments that have been presented to us. but for me it shows that public input is really needed in these cases and as it does in many cases it gives the council and me particularly some good and accurate information that I may not have had before and I think at the end of the day it helps us make some fair and deliberate decisions as best we can by a majority vote so I am appreciative of the comments that we've had and I'm appreciative that we've been able to take a listen in and to provide some clarity. Particularly in the bike lanes, I think that the biggest thing that we did was we gave some guidance to our government officials, Commissioner Taylor and Keith Lovin, both of which were dealing with those competing and lack of policies. But to that end, public comment for an issue that I'm working on and very much interested in is the Charles Young Center Task Force. We are continuing our work. Quick announcement is that the last community forum that's scheduled will be Wednesday, September 7th at 530. That is the Wednesday following the Labor Day holiday. And we're asking all interested citizens to come out and participate in this process. If you cannot come out, we have a centralized email account, charlesyoungcenteratlexingtonky.gov. And I look forward personally to studying each of the comments and presenting this information in the report that's going to come back to council, hopefully in October. Moving on, some exciting news in the district is last week, last Monday, I believe it was, August 15th, I attended the groundbreaking for the Bluegrass Community and Technical College Newtown Campus. A lot of our colleagues and dignitaries were there. Governor Beshear, Mayor Gray, Council Member Blues joined me on the platform, and Vice Mayor Gray and Council Member Kay were there, as well as a lot of state legislatures. I think there were 17, including our delegation. But it's a very exciting time and a big development for North Lexington. And as I mentioned then, we have an opportunity to help that project succeed. Two government issues that come to mind in my district are our study of the two-way streets, one-way streets and how they may be converted to two-way, particularly in that area's 3rd and 4th Street, bordering Newtown and Jefferson. And then also we want to keep on our radar the Legacy Trail, which has come yet to the Northside Y, but we're still working with engineering to hopefully connect it to the Coolovan Rail Trail, which will border the campus and go from there. I want to conclude my report with just giving a couple of shout-outs and some acknowledgements of our staff here at Urban County Government. Another initiative that I've worked real closely on is the Commission on Youth Development and Public Safety. Glad to report we had a very successful youth town hall meeting on Tuesday, August 9th, right before the school kids went back to school. We have a lot of community support, 50 members strong with that task force. But I want to thank the government officials, particularly social services, police, and Parks and Recreation for all that they have done with the task force and other activities this summer. And then my last remark is public safety related as well. During the break that we had this summer, if you guys recall, ironically, there were about two weekends or so that we had major rainstorms, and they always seem to be on Friday evenings, ironically or so, maybe a week's gap in between there. But that caused major traffic impacts on North Lexington. West New Circle Road, Russell Cave, North Broadway, Newtown Pike, and even out to the interstate. And fire and emergency services did an outstanding job. So appreciation to Chief Jackson and police and the rest of the public safety responders. Thank you, Vice Mayor. That's my report. Thank you. Council Member Farmer. Thank you, Vice Mayor. I did want to follow up on some of the comments of Council Member Lawless. The Chevy Chase Business Owners Association is having a street fair on Euclid Avenue on Saturday. The street will close around between 2 and 3 o'clock in the afternoon. There will be a lot of local retailers, local vendors with special things out there. There will be a couple of bands playing, and actually the street will remain closed through until about 10 o'clock. Really, actually, we have to end the fair at 10, and the street has to reopen at 11 p.m. So I know that one band called the Tall Boys will be playing, and there will be specials at many of the local merchants and retailers down there. Thank you again for the shout-out, Ms. Lawless. Going back to our earlier action today and something I've already commented on, as Beverly Fortune posted online after our earlier meeting, which, you know, we acted, I think, within the realm of what's the least expensive fix for our sewer problems that was presented to us, what's the most effective thing for us to do with the taxpayer dollars in terms of what rates will change over the next 20 years. Yet the headline in the posting says, Council Panel OKs Plan That Would Raise Sewer Rates 137% by 2025. You know, I just think that's so unfair to us in the leadership position we have taken here today based on direction from the administration. I would have made this decision the same way if the administration had recommended against it, because I think if we're going to meet the timetable as set forward by the EPA, we need to be in a position to make sure that the work gets done. What further troubles me, though, is that shortly after that, And Susan Straub then releases a press release saying that Mayor Gray challenges the price tag in the sewer fix where he tells the council that he is challenging the price tag. You know, I like to play politics as well as anybody in this room. I also like to make good decisions on behalf of taxpayers. And if the mayor is trying to say through this press release that he doesn't want us to pass this fee, I think that that should be reflected in this verbiage and not something that I think is alternative. Let's ask him. What I said this morning was a message to our own people. Okay. That message was we get an estimate. We just don't accept that estimate on the face, on the surface. We examine it. We challenge. We question. We maybe change the engineering solutions. That's what we need to do. I agree. And I said, I am sure that the council also feels the same way. And so I feel like that today. Thank you, sir. I appreciate that. Well, and I know sometimes when we present people's resolution, they don't like the resolution. But I just, you know, we raise taxes today, in essence, if you get right down to it. We have not, that action has not been taken. I just, it's a leak. What we are doing is, in my view, what is responsible, and that is to make every effort to get the best deal we can for the taxpayers, for our citizens, and to achieve the outcomes that we need in terms of fixing the problems that we've got, like in your district, the storm sewers. If we just go down the path of a $540 million sanitary fix and we only spend $30 million on storm, guess what? Lots of folks in your district not going to be too happy. Going to get the job. I suspect. Right. So that's part of what this effort should represent. Thank you, sir. I just want to go with you on the path, Mayor. That's all. I appreciate it. Thank you, sir. You bet. Thank you, Vice Mayor. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Mr. Farmer. Does anyone else have a council report? These meetings get interesting just when we don't expect it. I have two brief items. First, Council Members, just to remind you that Thursday, August 25th, we have two confirmation hearings for nominated planning commissioners, one at 4.30 and one at 5 o'clock. And they'll be in the fifth floor conference room. And then I just very briefly wanted to say something quickly about the International Association of Women Police Officers who are in town. Sunday at the opening ceremony, the opera house was packed with women police officers from all over the world. And the most inspirational talk, I think, was given by the Afghan woman police officer. She was offered a scholarship in order to bring her here to Lexington for the conference. And she is one of 1,000 policewomen in Afghanistan out of 120,000 police officers. She became a policewoman with the disapproval of her family, and she finally was able to convince them that she could do some good for her country. And it was very inspirational to see this young woman. and I think she's 28, and she's here right now in Lexington, talk about what it took for her to become a policewoman in Afghanistan and the hurdles that she overcame. So it was really wonderful, and I thank our public safety folks for bringing these conferences here. I think that it's really good for Lexington, It's good for the folks who come to Lexington and see the way, you know, we are here. So with that, is there any public comment on issues not on the agenda? Do we have a closed session? No. I don't know that we do. Okay. We have a motion to adjourn. Do I hear a second? I second. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Anybody opposed? We are adjourned. Thank you to all.