# Council Planning & Public Works Committee - October 4, 2011 > Auto-transcribed civic record · October 4, 2011 - **Permalink**: https://meetings.lexingtonky.news/meeting/2196 - **Source video**: https://lfucg.granicus.com/player/clip/2196?view_id=14&redirect=true - **Date**: 2011-10-04 - **Last revised**: July 17, 2026 - **Length**: 20,957 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 Planning & Public Works Committee met on October 4, 2011, at 1:00 p.m., with Farmer presiding as Chair. The committee addressed seven agenda items during the meeting, taking three votes and hearing six public comments. Of the items considered, one was approved—Sidewalk Specifications & Regulations—while four items were deferred to a future meeting: the Re Paving Program, Renegotiate & Expand Paving Warranties, Sustaining Salting Services in coordination with Fayette County Public Schools, and Items Referred to Committee. Two additional items were presented for informational purposes: updates on the Todds Road Widening Phase 2 project and the Oliver Lewis Way project. ## Attendance The following individuals were present at the meeting on October 4, 2011: * Farmer * Ellinger * Gorton * Kay * Ford * Blues * Lawless * Beard * Martin * Henson No absences or late arrivals were recorded. ## Votes and Decisions The meeting included three motions that were voted on and passed. **Motion to suspend rules to allow Council Members Lawless and Martin to speak a third time** [timestamp: 01:25:01] Council Member Farmer moved to suspend the rules to permit Council Members Lawless and Martin to speak a third time. Council Member Gorton seconded the motion. The motion passed by voice vote with no abstentions. **Motion to adopt sidewalk specifications and regulations draft ordinance** [timestamp: 01:54:27] Council Member Lawless moved to adopt the sidewalk specifications and regulations draft ordinance. The motion passed by voice vote with no abstentions. **Motion to adjourn meeting** [timestamp: 02:17:06] Council Member Ford moved to adjourn the meeting. The motion passed by voice vote with no abstentions. ## Budget and Financial Actions The meeting addressed three appropriations for municipal services and infrastructure: * **Salt Budget Allocation**: $1,000,000 was appropriated for salt inventory to support the 2011-12 snow season. * **Leaf Collection**: A budget amendment of $132,000 was approved for leaf collection operations. * **Paving Program**: $6,400,000 was allocated for the paving program in fiscal year 2012. ## Public Comment Council members raised concerns about the city's paving allocation system and road maintenance priorities, along with a proposal regarding urban farming regulations. **Road Paving and Equity** Council Member Beard addressed the poor condition of Rose Street and Martin Luther King Boulevard, attributing deterioration to inadequate base materials. Beard called for reevaluation of the paving process and base repair protocols [timestamp: 00:29:54]. Council Member Lawless expressed concern that roads with high condition ratings (70s–100s) remain in poor condition and questioned the fairness of the current allocation system based on a 65-point threshold. Lawless argued that traffic volume and community impact should be considered in paving decisions [timestamp: 00:55:59]. Council Member Ford advocated for reverting to an equitable split of paving funds across districts, contending that the current formula based on 65-point ratings fails to ensure fairness despite growing infrastructure needs [timestamp: 01:10:02]. Council Member Blues suggested creating a system to prioritize major arterial roads and acknowledged the need for long-term planning, noting that some roads like Sir Barton and Fortune Drive will never be fully repaired under current funding levels [timestamp: 01:16:33]. **Paving Specifications Review** Council Member Martin requested a deeper review of paving specifications, particularly regarding base failure repairs and contractor discretion in the repaving program. Martin moved to keep the repaving program in committee for further study [timestamp: 01:26:06]. **Urban Farming Regulations** Council Member Kay raised interest in expanding urban farming opportunities within the city, including regulations for keeping chickens and goats. Kay proposed a draft ordinance to update animal ownership rules within the urban service boundary [timestamp: 02:10:06]. ## Contested Items The October 4, 2011 meeting included three significant areas of disagreement among council members. **Equity in Paving Fund Allocation** Council Members Ford and Lawless challenged the current formula for allocating paving funds, which was based on 65 pavement ratings. They argued that this formula failed to ensure fairness in how resources were distributed across the municipality. Other council members defended the existing method as superior to an alternative approach of even distribution. This disagreement resulted in a split vote among the council. **Paving Specifications and Contractor Discretion** A heated discussion arose regarding paving specifications and contractor performance. Council Member Martin accused the contractor of cutting corners on the work and failing to address base failures in the pavement. This dispute centered on whether the contractor was meeting the terms of the contract and maintaining appropriate standards of accountability for the work being performed. **Sidewalk Enforcement and Code Language** Council Member Kaye raised procedural concerns about sidewalk enforcement practices. Specifically, Kaye identified a lack of clear policy governing when civil penalties should be applied for code violations. Kaye called for greater transparency in the enforcement process and advocated for clearer guidelines to ensure consistent discretion in how penalties are determined and applied. ## Re Paving Program The committee discussed the current paving program, which uses a pavement rating threshold of 65 as the basis for determining road maintenance priorities. [timestamp: 00:04:00] **Program Structure** The allocation of paving resources is based on the percentage of roads in each area that fall below the 65 pavement rating threshold. **Key Concerns Raised** Council Members Wente, Williams, Martin, Lawless, Beard, and Ford participated in the discussion and expressed several concerns about the program: - **Equity issues**: Members raised questions about whether the current allocation method fairly distributes paving resources across different areas. - **Road condition discrepancies**: There were concerns about inconsistencies in how road conditions were being assessed and rated. - **Base failures**: The committee discussed problems related to base failures in the road infrastructure. **Council Response** Multiple council members expressed frustration with the existing system and called for reforms to address the identified problems. **Outcome** The discussion on the Re Paving Program was deferred, indicating that the matter was not resolved during this meeting and will be taken up at a future date. ## Renegotiate & Expand Paving Warranties [timestamp: 01:06:37] The committee discussed the feasibility of extending paving warranties beyond the current one-year period. Key participants in this discussion included Wente, Billings, Walker, Martin, and Ford. During the discussion, experts identified significant challenges to expanding warranty coverage. The primary obstacles centered on real-world conditions that fall outside ideal construction scenarios, including: * Overloading of paved surfaces * Utility trenches affecting pavement integrity * Poor construction practices These factors were noted as complications that would need to be addressed in any warranty expansion effort, as they can compromise pavement performance regardless of initial construction quality. The committee explored the concept but ultimately determined that further study was necessary before proceeding with any renegotiation or expansion of paving warranties. The outcome was deferred, allowing time for additional analysis of the feasibility and potential terms of extended warranty coverage. ## Sustaining Salting Services: Work with Fayette County Public Schools [timestamp: 01:32:03] The committee discussed potential reimbursement for snow removal services provided to Fayette County Public Schools that extended beyond the official snow plan, and explored options for partnering with the school district on snow removal and cost-sharing arrangements. Key speakers in this discussion included Wente, Gorton, and Ford. The committee examined the feasibility and financial implications of working with Fayette County Public Schools to sustain salting services while establishing a cost-sharing framework that would fairly distribute expenses between the county and the school district. The discussion centered on identifying mechanisms to either reimburse the county for snow services already provided to schools or to formalize an ongoing partnership that would clarify responsibilities and funding for future snow removal operations at school facilities and properties. **Outcome:** The committee deferred this agenda item, indicating that further analysis, information gathering, or discussion would be needed before reaching a decision on how to proceed with the school district partnership and reimbursement arrangement. ## Sidewalk Specifications & Regulations The committee reviewed draft regulations governing sidewalk violations and enforcement procedures [timestamp: 01:41:00]. The proposed ordinance made three key changes to existing policy: **Proposed Changes** - Tied sidewalk violations to public safety hazards, clarifying when enforcement action is warranted - Reduced civil penalties from $1,000 to $500 per violation - Clarified enforcement procedures for city staff and property owners **Committee Discussion** Key speakers in the discussion included Jarvis, Barbary, Lawless, Gorton, Kaye, and Beard. The committee examined the draft regulations and considered the implications of the penalty reduction and safety-based enforcement framework. **Outcome** The committee approved the draft regulations for forwarding to the full council for further consideration and potential adoption. ## Todds Road Widening Phase 2 Update [timestamp: 01:56:45] Barrett provided a brief update on the Todds Road Widening Phase 2 project. The presentation focused on the status of pending state agreement for design and right-of-way acquisition funds necessary to advance the project. No action was taken on this agenda item. The update was informational in nature, intended to keep the body apprised of project developments and funding status. ## Oliver Lewis Way Project Update Barrett provided a status update on the Oliver Lewis Way project [timestamp: 01:56:45]. The presentation was informational in nature, with no new developments reported at this time. No actions were required as a result of this update. ## Items Referred to Committee [timestamp: 02:06:55] The committee discussed a draft ordinance on animal ownership, with particular focus on urban farming provisions and the inclusion of chickens and goats within city limits. **Key Discussion Points** The speakers—Kay, Beard, Horn, and Gorton—raised concerns about the lack of legal clarity in the proposed ordinance. The committee identified a need for expert review before proceeding with the measure. **Concerns Raised** The primary concern centered on ensuring that the ordinance would receive thorough expert analysis. The committee determined that the Animal Care and Control Advisory Board should review the draft to provide specialized guidance on the animal ownership provisions, particularly as they relate to urban farming practices. **Outcome** The item was deferred, indicating that further review and expert consultation will be required before the committee takes additional action on the animal ownership ordinance. --- ## Decisions - **Motion** — passed: Motion to suspend rules to allow Council Members Lawless and Martin to speak a third time - **Motion** — passed: Motion to adopt sidewalk specifications and regulations draft ordinance - **Motion** — passed: Motion to adjourn meeting --- ## Full transcript This is the end of the game. I'm not sure if you're a fan of the game. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I'm sorry. Thank you. guitar solo Let me welcome you to the October 4th meeting of Planning and Public Works. we have several items on our agenda and more than one of them should generate a fair amount of commentary so thank you first up is our quote-unquote our repaving program which was placed in committee by councilmember Martin and I think that who's going to start on that commissioner will you thank you ma'am hi everybody we have a number of issues to address today and the first one The next one that we're going to talk about this afternoon is our paving program. Of course, Council Member Martin's name is listed since he's the one that actually asked us to make the presentation, but we've had a lot of questions from a lot of different people across Council, and our citizens have asked a lot of questions about how the paving program works, what kind of warranties do we have, and those kinds of issues. So what we wanted to try to do today is address as many questions as possible possible and then find out what other questions people may have that we need to research. So we're going to give you an overview. Kevin has done the work to pull together the information for us. And we've also asked some folks to join us today. Mr. Billings is from ATS, our asphalt contractor for most of the road work that we do. And Dwight Walters is a member of the Asphalt Institute and is an expert in roads and asphalt and that kind of thing. So we brought technical experts. And, of course, we have Sam Williams, who is our director for Streets and Roads, and Sam operates and runs our daily program to manage pavement replenishment and asphalt in the county, so for the roads that we maintain. We also, today in our presentation, we have a couple of slides in there that are not about paving, and we can address those whenever you'd like. But we've had a number of questions from people regarding our preparation for snow plan, believe it or not, snow plan 2011-12, and also some timely information regarding leaf collection. So we just like to make sure that you get a chance to look at those slides if you have any questions and mention those a little later in the presentation perhaps, if that's better. Yes, ma'am. Okay, with that, I'll turn it over to Kevin. He's our expert. Mr. Wente, how are you, sir? I'm well, thank you. Welcome. Thank you for your work on this. Absolutely. We have a lot of information to go through in a relatively limited amount of time, so I will run through some of these numbers and talking points. As you see, we're going to discuss the pavement management system initially and then the discussion items on road warranties as we currently have those issued through our contracts. I wanted to touch a little bit on our latest meeting for the upcoming snow season in our snow plan updates, and then finally a brief mention of our efforts towards leaf collection. This year was the first year we announced we were going to begin a new process of reviewing or rating our road surfaces. This is just basically a step-by-step guideline as to how we proceed with that process whereby we hire interns to assess our roads. They're trained for a period of a week to two weeks in the field. They go out and assess each roadway that Lexington is responsible for maintaining. We bring that information back on a daily basis and load it back up into our database. And from that information, we're able to determine the rated systems and provide lists to you of roadways that are 65 or rated as 65 and less that we feel would be warranted for resurfacing for the current fiscal year. This year, this is the numbers of how we, I'll come back to that in just a second. This year we did, from the guideline, you can see the red line, and really we divided the county into an east-west dividing line, and everything you see arrowed to the east is what we assess for this fiscal year, or this calendar year, excuse me. The process began back in May, and we wrapped up everything east of what you see of Tate's Creek, running all the way up to Newtown Pike, wrap that up in August of this summer. This is the breakdown of the numbers for what we have budgeted or allocated for resurfacing this year. The council allocated $6.4 million towards resurfacing of everything in the urban service area. Roughly $950,000 allocated through the county road aid program. So 14% from my calculation of the current assessed roadways we have are under 65 or less in their rating. And to resurface all of that 14% would require roughly $29 million based on our current numbers. These resurfacing figures are based upon a resurfacing of 1 1⁄2 inches in depth, and that would roughly equate to $35 per foot. Now, with the money that's allocated through that $6.4 million, we have certain maintenance aspects that we take out of that percentages-wise. It's 2% for traffic loop replacement, 4% for our crack seal operation, 5% for asphalt rejuvenation, and then 6% for manhole adjustment. The crack seal operation occurs every five years on roads after they have been resurfaced. So after the five-year period from that road being resurfaced, we'll evaluate it for crack seal. and then three years for asphalt rejuvenation. And then below there you see the allocation of funds that we have for this particular calendar year. As we discussed, one of the big topics of conversation for today was that of road warranties, which is why we brought Dwight and Brian in for a discussion of that. Our current contract specifies that we will warranty our resurfaced roads for one year, All resurfacing specifications are outlined within our contract, which I do believe I have a copy of, if anyone in particular is interested in reviewing the specifications. I had a meeting last Tuesday with James Ballinger and folks with the District 7 office, and they had an interesting, we had a very interesting conversation whereby the state basically does not warranty their roadways. They approach their method of road construction from the standpoint of just making sure that they have technical inspectors on site to make sure that the roads are being constructed to specifications. And they have various tools and whatnot to make sure, and maybe Brian or Dwight can help elaborate on those tests. we do offer our specifications through our engineering guidelines as to how we want our roads to be constructed and we do have inspectors on site that are state trained in order to make sure that those roads are constructed to specification in jefferson county this when we were having our discussion with the state they mentioned that at one point in time as far as road warranties were concerned jefferson county did an experiment where they received the lowest bid or they were basically setting their contracts out for the lowest bid and the best warranty on those roads as they were constructed. But they ran into a number of problems with that for a variety of reasons, which we can get into in further discussion. But proactive inspection, basically from their perspective, limits the need for road warranties and then their use of highly trained inspectors for monitoring of the construction. One point that I wanted to note is that resurfacing is a maintenance function and not a capital construction project. So I want to make sure that we clarify or make certain that we clarify that difference between a maintenance aspect to that of what is a newly constructed road. But if we were to look towards extended warranties for constructing of these roads and the longevity that would ensue, that would come at a premium cost. I'm sorry? Repeat that. My final point was if we were to look towards extended warranties for capital construction, we would be looking at higher costs for that construction in order to have that warranty available. Just moving on quickly to our snow plan. We met last Friday with members of Fayette County Public Schools, a number of agencies internally. UK was present. The state did not have a representative, but they basically have everything covered from their end. We did some reassignment of areas, which that's still a work in progress as far as the divvying of responsibilities between the division of streets and roads and that of water quality. The map, as you see it now, preliminary shows how we're going to offset those two divisions for the responsibilities when we have an active precipitation event. Snow emergency routes were updated last year for the snow plan. and we did a thorough assessment of our signage among those emergency routes. Signage was replaced. We did, I think, around $6,000 of updates to that program. We worked with Enhance 911 for a reverse call notification system for anyone that lives along a snow emergency route that has a landline. If there is a snow declaration or snow emergency declaration made, they will be notified by their landline, and so they can move their cars off the streets to allow us to facilitate the removal of the snow. In addition, there is the LEAN program that is sponsored through Enhance 911, where any individual can actually get online and key in their cell phone number. So if there is a declaration of a snow emergency, they would be notified through their cell phone of that declaration and can be made aware of that. This is helpful for our supervisors, both with water quality and with streets and roads, and so I thought it would be helpful just to make note of that. We did make a number of edits to our snow route maps, so it's been probably the most comprehensive re-evaluation of that program in many years. We're going to start outfitting our trucks mid-part of this month. Thanks to the council, we were allocated a million dollars in our salt budget. As you recall, last year we had $800,000 budgeted or allocated, and we went over that by roughly $200,000 because of the length of the season last year. Prior to the start of this season, we'd like to see or would expect to have roughly 8,000 tons of salt on the ground to prepare. And one thing I wanted to note, which was the primary point of this discussion, I think initially when we were making the agenda, The preliminary discussions with the Fayette County Public Schools was actually very successful. We're going to have further discussions with this, but I did make a request for a possible reimbursement for any roads that are requested outside of the areas that we have mapped within our snow plan to address. We've also had some preliminary internal discussions of a reimbursement cost if we are called out by, say, a particular utility company. If there's a water main break and we have to be on site to treat that, we would offer that at a fee-based rate, which we're still in the discussion of a one-time rate of being there on site, costs for staff, materials, and equipment. And that would be for a two-hour period and then a fee maybe every hour thereafter that we could be reimbursed for that activity and material costs. So that is being discussed now. and then finally some points on leaf collection we are required by ordinance to have a one time pass through the urban service area the budget amendment that we created for this year basically amounts to $132,000 last year we had budgeted for leaf collection actually more than $445,000 But because of the early onset of the snow, we did not actually allocate or spend all of the funds that were allocated for leaf collection. But within the time frame that we were able to collect, we collected 900 tons of leaf material. Our leaf collection efforts will begin November 28th, and we will have newsletters sent to homes to alert them of this activity. And then we would like to see a push for our citizens to use the facilities that we have in place with our lennies, the free bags, perhaps mulching and composting for further leaf collection, as opposed to an active leaf collection routine on an annual basis, just because of our means to try to find ways to cut back in expending funds or the difficulty that we're having in finding funds for certain activities. So I've thrown a lot of information at you, and I will be happy to offer the floor for any questions. That was beyond a broad brush. That was like a whole paint bomb. All right. I just want to kind of go back to the top of our agenda, which item one was the repaving program. And I have several council members lined up. Just at the beginning of this, I would like to just stick with questions at first about repaving program and then renegotiating and expanding paving warranties after that. Even though he talked about several things, I would like to try to stick to our agenda a little bit. But first up, I have Council Member Lawless. Thank you, Chair. One of the things that I'm having difficulty with is, and I'm not sure if it's because some of it may be due to old ratings, some of it may be due to the extremely harsh winter we had and asphalt failures, but there are several areas in my district that are rated quite high that are in very bad shape. And one example would be the area from about Woodland Park to South Ashland on High Street, which is rated 90s and above. And there's one place that almost looks like a machine dug it out. So, I mean, it's clearly under 65. Right. And I have a very small amount of paving allotted to the 3rd District. And it's the gateway for the city. Everybody comes through the 3rd District, and the neighborhoods in the district are often used as cut-throughs. So the first is I'm perplexed as to what to pay because the ratings aren't helpful for the most part. And secondly, not at this meeting or at this time, but I would like to see us look at how those funds are calculated because I think traffic should also be in there. If you have a street that has several hundred cars going through it as opposed to a street that has very few, that might be a consideration. So those are my comments, and I was wondering if you had any insight as to how I deal with all these sections that are rated over 65 but are in terrible shape. That I would have to go back and revisit per each individual section. We actually rate our streets on an intersection-by-intersection basis. So those segments per intersection are how we put it or code it into our system. One thing that I'm working towards is gearing that operation to a full GIS type of operation. So our crews can get out there. They would have a GPS unit attached or appended to their computer. They would know exactly where they were. If they weren't familiar with Lexington, the computer would effectively offer that. Once they're on a particular segment, that would be highlighted, and then they would do their assessment. It's a subjective mechanism, but at least it gives us something to base the road conditions on. From there, we would tie that back into our main system. I could provide that to you in a graphic format instead of a tabular format as you see it on an annual basis. And then from there, that's where we like to offer those lists of what we've assessed at being 65 and less and provide you with the input as to what you feel is the most necessary given your district, volume of traffic, number of complaints, what have you. But we want that open dialogue so that we can formulate how we're going to attack the resurfacing program for that year. I think we've had a very, very good cruise. There might be, again, issues where, and two, one thing I will say, prior to this year's budget, I gave you an assessment that wasn't complete because we had just begun in May. So it may be that the data that you were working off of what did not accurately reflect the segments, especially I travel that section of High Street all the time, and it does need base repairs. But we can go back and adjust that accordingly so that we're applying the funds in the right locations. Hopefully that will help in so far as answering those questions. But I think the most important part of that is the accurate assessment and then a graphic means of being able to show or highlight for you, as well as to your constituents, where we want to attack this and allocate the money. From that, I can also append when we last resurfaced, and we can get an idea of how long our roads are requiring resurfacing, and kind of track that longevity from the point we last resurfaced. So there's a number of things we're working towards, but I think we're in good shape. Well, and I think that I've got two seconds. I'm not the only one. I mean, Council Member Beard, for instance, lands down drive. Everybody uses it to get to Fayette Mall or away from Fayette Mall. So I think as you're calculating the percentage, the usage of the road is also an important thing that we look at. That's an excellent point. I think usage also applies to percentage of rating, of where that states. For example, we were having this discussion yesterday, Sir Barton Way, And I'm going to let Dwight and Brian discuss this in greater detail. But when that road was initially constructed, it was constructed with a certain longevity or time frame in mind, we'd say 15 to 20 years. Well, volumes of traffic that have increased over the years because of all the development that had occurred, that amount of traffic that we initially estimated to be on that road within that 15, 20-year time span, has really occurred within a five-year time span. So we're already seeing Sir Barton requiring base failure repairs and resurfacing. So that ties back into the road warranty mechanism because there's so many variables that play into that with respect to traffic volume, with respect to the course of how severe our winters have been and how that impacts our roadways. And when we're in the point in time that we're actually assessing that, given the time of year that we're going to be doing the ratings on that road. So it's a constant juggling act with things that we may not necessarily be prepared for in that regard. So thank you. Did he get to what you were after in your question? Thank you. Council Member Beard. Thank you. Kevin, per this chart, I'm just curious about the allocation of dollars. where you have three councils that were allocated exactly the same amount, $709,000, another three, $322,000, another three, $451,000. on what basis do you have the parity to have the same dollars for three different councils? When we've done the assessment on a given year, we take those figures, and I do a calculation of everything that is rated of 65 or less. That's been the base standard that we've used. and I think last year we discussed whether we want to change that percentage of where we have that cutoff as far as what is ultimately necessity or ultimate need for resurfacing. I'll take those streets, I'll separate them out of the entire database, and I'll do the calculation of total length of those roads. From there, we're able to assess that percentage breakdown on a full county, or well, it's really on a full urban service area basis, And then that's where that breakdown comes. I'll actually separate that out per council district and see where those greater percentages of roads requiring resurfacing are allocated. And from those percentages, that's what we were using to base the full number that you've allocated in numbers or in monies for resurfacing and break that into those percentages per council district of roads that we wanted to attack. Whereas in years past, what would happen was with, say, for example, the $6.4 million, we would just allocate an even number across all council districts. With that, we were finding that we weren't necessarily hitting all the roads that needed resurfacing. There were some that were in fine shape, but because all the other roads were perhaps taken care of in the resurfacing efforts, roads that may not necessarily have needed it were being resurfaced again. So this way we felt would be the best allocation of those funds. I guess still, Kevin, District 5, 6, and 7, $709,438.80. Now, there's no way humanly possible for three districts to have exactly the same needs and requirements. It just doesn't make any sense to me. It does look odd, but actually based on the numbers, and I'll be happy to show you the calculations, that's where the percentage breaks were as far as on a per council basis. It actually did come out to be just that fashion or worked out in that way. So we just felt that we'd allocate those numbers or that money and, you know, where that even break was. And then there's further three other districts at $709,438.80, and another three at $451,461.05. Now, I can't possibly think that there are nine districts that have this parity with their partner, I assume partner, because it's kind of scattered through the amounts. Are you using the calculation based on the percentage and then applying the percentage to the dollars? That's correct. Without putting a decimal point and two or three more? Well, it is a rounded figure based on those numbers, yes. Okay. Okay. Well, that may be the answer. It's just kind of strange looking that they've been all. And it does look a little odd, but it is a rounded figure per percentage wise, yes, sir. The second question really isn't in my district, but I drive it so often that it looks like it's almost major construction requirements as opposed to paving. But Rose Street, from High Street to Maxwell, the car is just like this. It's in such bad shape. And then again down near Euclid Avenue, the same thing. What do we do? I mean, it's a situation where you just have to close the road or at least close one lane and take it down to the earth and start building the whole underpinnings back up again because it has been a problem and it will continue to be a problem because it gets a pretty good amount of traffic. I'll leave Sam to address that too. Mr. Williams, welcome. Mr. Beard, I know your exact concerns there on Rose Street. As a matter of fact, our crews have done some work looking at the base issues there. Not only Rose Street there from high down toward UK campus, But we have a similar situation with Martin Luther King in behind the Good Samaritan Hospital. And what we found on those streets, and Councilman Farmer has been with me. We're paving some in his area. we have different construction techniques that have been used over the years in construction of streets here in Lexington. And what we find on areas like Rose Street and Martin Luther King is that there's very little road materials used in construction of those. and for instance of course Chinaway out there we were working on today milling down we had some areas of obvious failure and we have the milling machine cutting the base cutting the surface down milling down about two and a half to three inches and we're finding number two stone and choke with like DGA and there's some evidence of clays that are working their way up into this base. And we've seen the same thing on Rose Street and over on Martin Luther King. And what we've got to do on those, Mr. Beard, is go in, and I've talked with our contractor, and basically cut out that bad material. And one thing, Kevin had any slide there, there's basically four components of a pavement. You have, if you look at those on the left there, and I don't have a pointer, but the very bottom of that pavement is the soil that you're constructing the roadbed on. And you try to get that compacted, and so it has a bearing level that will support what you're building above it. Basically like you're cutting down to put a foundation for your house. Your second level as you go up is the granular base, which we refer to as a dense graded aggregate, which is a stone that compacts itself fairly well. That's the DGA area. Point up to that one. Point to that one. Okay. I'll have to get up this way. And then I would just say, I've got one other one. This page, if you would walk back to the microphone. No, the microphone will walk to you. Okay, I've got the microphone. If I can work both hands, I'll be good. Yeah. Okay, this is the DGA layer. It's basically a crushed stone that when it's dense graded, it fills in all the voids when you compact it. It's very strong, but it's very susceptible to moisture that allows it to degrade. Above that is a bituminous base, and basically it's a fairly well-graded stone that has a bituminous binder, like an asphalt binder. And that's generally what we see that fails that causes the problem with the surface cracking and stuff. And then the final layer is what we're really talking about with our maintenance paving. It's about an inch and a half of surface that basically acts as the, if you will, the shingles on your house. It keeps the water from penetrating the pavement and causing the other components to fail. but again the uh the lower level is the uh is the soil the the base uh sub subgrade this part is uh uh the dense graded aggregate the third level is the uh asphalt binder asphalt base and then the top level, the level that we see when we drive down the road is the surface. That graph or that slide isn't in our presentation. I think it answers a lot of questions for people about how what you do works. So I appreciate your walking us through that. Council Member Beard, you're good? Yes. Thank you. Thank you, sir. Next, Council Member Martin. Thank you, Chair. So I'm one who put this into committee, and I guess my motion was to look at the specifications and the program in general. And so we didn't really hear about the specifications. So I'm going to ask Mr. Billings to come up, since he's out there laying it down. And let's kind of talk about what we're doing. Welcome. Thank you. Good afternoon. You and I had a conversation out at the Diamond. Is that right? Yes, it's good to see you again. Well, the Diamond looks awful good. It's ATS, is that right? Yes, and I heard on the radio this morning they're advertising that all three lanes are open. I drove them this morning. It gets better and better every day. It was refreshing. We're excited to get out of Beaumont in less than five lights. So repaving, the first thing you do is they grind it. Yes, we refer to that as milling. So the milling takes place, and I understand we have not been doing a full milling lately. We've been milling to the curb. That is correct. We call it a curb cut. You leave the full thickness of the pavement at the center of the roadway, and you just cut enough at the curb to be able to either tie into the curb or, if the curb has been overlaid in the past with asphalt, to remove that and then re-overlay the curb. Okay. And so what happens? So that's the prep work, is that right? Mm-hmm. That's correct. And what about base failures? We will follow the direction of the inspector on site, which is under the direction of Sam. Williams. And if he instructs us to remove additional base failures, such as we're doing on Chinaway today, our crews will do that at that time. Am I correct that the fixing of base failures is part of the specifications of the contract? It is included. And the way our contract works is we get paid by the amount of work that we do each day. We weigh in the millings that are removed by the ton. And so if you want to add additional tonnage of millings to a road to remove a base figure, it's just basically paid by those units. And same with the asphalt. When we put the asphalt back down, we are paid by the units of asphalt we place, which is by the ton. Okay. And so, I don't know, are you familiar with the paving list for different districts, or are you guys just... This is the list from 2010. I don't know if you You can make that bigger, Chris, but perhaps not. But this was a – that's kind of hard to read. I apologize. But that's all right. That's a little harder to read than I thought. But I guess what percentage of base failures would you find in doing a district? Like, I'm District 10, so I'm out in Clay's Mill and in Garden Springs and in Beaumont and Harrods Hill and over in the Southland area. It's very difficult for me to give you an opinion of that. When these are added to the list, our superintendent will look at each one of those roads. I don't personally inspect them. that's something that we go and we measure the streets make sure that the tines for resurfacing that's set up is correct and if it's different we'll work with sam or his people to adjust those tines so you don't we don't fix all base failures then no and we don't we don't as ats we don't review it and recommend to you all what to do to our inspectors what to do it's more or less we go out a day before with them they'll look at the road lay out the limits of where we're supposed to mill and pave and review it at that time. But you agree that your contract requires you to fix the base failures? At your people's direction. Is that what it says? Yes. Okay, we'll take a look at that. And so the base failures are or aren't fixed. What happens if you mill, I guess, if you repave over a base failure? A number of things. I will say I do a lot of, let me back up one second. I worked for the Harbor Department for about 10 years in construction, and I've been working in the private industry for about six years. And I look at a tremendous amount of parking lots as well as city streets as well as state roads in the course of my duties for our company. My general rule when I go to look at a parking lot, and I know streets aren't exactly parking lots, if the base failure is bad enough that you can pick it up with your hand, that the asphalt is loose, you need to replace it. And if it's cracked but it's still in pretty good shape, you can probably pave over it. And that's just a layman's way of looking at asphalt, I guess. Well, I'm going to have to log out because my time for this is up. But I just want to say that one of the issues we're here is that I went with Sam Williams and looked at every one of my roads in 2010. As I understand, none of the base failures in any of my roads got fixed last year or this year. and what I want to understand is who's authorizing you all to not follow our specifications. So I will come back in a minute. Thank you, Chair. Very good. Thank you. Can I, in general, just discuss that? We will be glad to do as much work as the city wants us to. If base failures are something that you all, as a council member, as council decides that you want us to do, We have no problems with that. But, again, it's paid by the amount of work that we do. The contract that we have received from you all basically outlines the amount of milling of surface and replacement of surface. And when it comes to the point that it is a base failure removal, that is totally of the discretion of Sam Williams and the folks that work for him, and we'll be glad to do that for him. Council Member, did you want to follow up right now since he made a comment? Yeah, I do, because the Urban County Council passes contracts, and when you guys are hired, we have approved the contract under which you're hired. Neither you nor an employee for the city have the authority to vary from that contract. And what I understand has been going on is that you guys have been cutting corners, and drastically, and putting down cheap paving jobs, and that we're going to have to go back and fix in five years. And so we're going to explore that a little bit today. I'll be glad to address all those issues, and I will say this. I disagree 100% with that statement. Very good. Thank you, gentlemen. Appreciate that. Next is Council Member Stenet. Thank you, Chair. Thank you. Kevin, I want to follow up on this year's money since we focused on that list quite a bit. Where are we at on the paving for this year? Have you received all the Council Members' lists, and are we moving forward? We are moving forward. There are a couple districts that we're still absent of having the list intact. Okay, so most of the council has turned in the list? Yes, the majority of the council has submitted their list. Yes, sir. And we're currently working on those, and we'll hopefully get to it before the winter and after us. If I'm not mistaken, we're currently working in District 5, and I believe that following that we were going to be moving towards your district. Yeah, I'm not asking for my own. I'm just curious about it. Has everyone? Right. We're probably getting to the microphone. Yes, thank you. Just take it with you to see when you go. I think we're working five as we speak. We've had some good weather this week. We've had some rain the last couple weeks that have slowed us down. But I think we'll be looking at your district next and District 2 thereafter. So I've talked today with Chris's aide and looking at getting their list finalized. So we're probably a third to half along the plan as far as what we've given ATS to do. We've probably got a third of it in place. Okay, so any district that's missing needs to get it in as soon as possible? and probably will be carried over to after the winter season when we start back in the spring. I think what we've got booked right now is probably going to take us through November, 1st of December. In the comments that were made earlier, have you noticed since you've been director of any shortcuts or anything of the such out there on our repaving jobs, or are we dealing with harsh winters the last two years, or what have you noticed? I think just one thing that I've observed there, Mr. Stennett, is we're seeing, and I think, of course, the experts here are with us, and the life of a standard design pavement is probably 12 to 15 years. And we're seeing, here we are, 2011 year. You know, let's look back to 1998, 97, 96. You know, Lexington was experiencing a lot of growth during that period, particularly in your district and also in Mr. Martin's district down in Beaumont area and that. And I think what we're seeing are those areas are becoming mature, you know, in terms of their pavement life is probably getting at the point that it requires the maintenance level that we're doing now. And I think that's probably what we're seeing generally more than anything. And the other thing that we're seeing, Mr. Stanton, is I think we have progressed as a city over the years in our requirements for new development. I know, and I don't know the exact years things have been changed, but I understand talking with the engineering folks, we have upgraded our requirements for pavement thicknesses. We're talking about the DGA, the asphalt base, and the surface. At one time, that combination was probably down to about 8 or 9 inches. Today, it's over 12 inches in a collector-type street. So those things have been improved. I think we're probably seeing some of the things that were constructed under lesser specifications coming up and causing issues today. Well, you are very diplomatic in your response. I think there's some blame to go all the way around because if you look back, you brought up Sir Barton earlier. And there's no reason why that road should be in the shape it's in. But when it was built in 1998, if you pull the plans, it wasn't designed to last much longer than 10 years at this current volume. And here we are in 2011, and exactly what was going to happen if we reached these volumes, we just didn't predict it. Same issue with Fortune Drive. It was just repaved two years ago, and it's failing now. And I think it was somebody else, not just the paving company, has to be held accountable. And it's who's designing these roads, whether or not they were designed as collectors or major artillery, is an issue that we need to explore in government because we're not keeping up with the design either. That's exactly where I think what we're seeing, Mr. Stanton, is that the Hamburg area has been very successful. I mean, you go out as far as a commercial development, and a lot of those streets were just basically for residential traffic. And the other things that we see, too, is the first couple of years during development, you have a tremendous amount of loading on the streets. You know, that's when the concrete trucks come and deliver the concrete to build the sidewalks, to build the foundations for the new housing and all that. And that road is subjected to a lot of weight. And basically, and I'm looking back 30-plus years ago when I studied pavement design in college, but there's two factors. It's the amount of volume of traffic and the weight of that traffic on the pavement, and that's really what you're dealing with. Well, I appreciate you saying that, but I think we all need to look at it differently going forward, I think from a design point, engineering point in-house, to what we're requiring our contractors to do, because I think working on a different level from what we have been in the past and analyzing those volumes, and Fortune, for instance, has semi-tractors every day going down through there, and it was never designed for that. That's correct. And that's part of the issue. So I thank you for addressing it and helping it, and you were very, again, diplomatic in your answer. But there's a lot of blame to go around. One thing I would like to add there that we have incorporated since I've been out in the streets and roads, we do not do a full meal. We do a partial mill. We're trying to retain as much of that strength that we have in place in building upon that, and that's something that I feel is going to help us in the long run. But do you take a core sample before you make that decision rather than go all the way down to the original base? Because sometimes it may be better off to go down to the original and do it all over if the volumes have changed and the weights. Are we not doing that every time? Well, if we have problems, we are looking at it. We did some on Pasadena for engineering the other day. We did that, of course, out on Fortune. It's the type of thing you've got to realize that basically the cost is how much it is per inch. Sure. And if you're looking at resurfacing, that's X. And if you're looking at milling out four inches of base and putting four inches of base in it, that's five times X as far as the cost for that. But what's the longevity difference, and how much does it save us on down the road? I mean, my point is, is it worth the savings? There has to be some cost benefit in there. There is a tradeoff there, and that's something that we need to consider as we go forward. Very good. Thank you. Yes, sir. Good. Thank you. I studied pavement design in college, too, but I think it was a night class. And now Council Member Ford. Thank you, Chair. The question I have is in regards to the slide that's posted now that talks about the paving allocation for fiscal year 2012. And I would ask Kevin, I guess, if you could help us here. It was mentioned earlier in this discussion. As I look at this slide, and as we all know, the need far outweighs the resource. It says there's $29 million needed right now to address all the roads that are under 65 rating. But this fiscal year, we only have about $6.5 million. So my question is our policy in regards to the equitable distribution or allocation of paving. And Council Member Beard mentioned the split amongst the various districts, And you also alluded to the fact that in the past there was an even split amongst the 12 districts. Talk to me about why that was changed and why that perhaps shouldn't be our policy today. We were seeing that roads that weren't necessarily at that mark of 65 and less, they would have been at a 65 and up within, say, any given council district, if we had the same amount or allocated amount per council district, was not being applied to roads that necessarily were warranted. based on our assessment. And it may have been for a sense of connectivity. You know, if we had a series of roadway down, we'll use, for the sake of keeping things standard, let's use Tate's Creek Road. If we saw from Alumni down to Lansdowne was of a value that was 65 or less, we'll say it was a rate of 50. And then from Lansdowne to New Circle Road was a value of, say, 75. For the sake of connectivity, it may have been that that allocation of funds, that chunk of money would have taken that entire span, and instead of stopping at Lansdowne, had continued all the way to New Circle Road, even though it may not have been warranted. And seeing that, we were not keeping up with this pace as far as what we saw as a growing percentage of roads based on past winners we've had over the course of the last three years some of the worst winters that we've experienced in years past because of the number of months or weeks, I should say, that we were under freezing, strictly under 32 degrees, which just wreaks havoc on our roadways. So we were having a growing percentage of our roadways that were of a ranking that was requiring resurfacing. We were seeing a growing number of base failures just in this past winter alone. So two years ago, we decided rather than allocate the same number, we would look on a per council district basis within the urban service area all roads that were rated 65 and less, get a calculation of all those roads, and then what the percentage was within each individual council district of that percentage. So, for example, within your district, we would look at what the total percentage is, and based on the number of roads that you had within your district of 65 and less, what that equated to in the all-around percentage, and that number would be what we would allocate insofar as funds to that district because it may not have been as great as that of, say, Council District. I think in this instance we saw that Council District 10 actually had the greatest majority of roads that had a rating of 65 and less. So that's where that fund allocation started. So we could distribute that money to tackle those streets that were of greatest need as opposed to just one set amount to the discretion of what you wanted and then work cooperatively to see that we got those done. Thank you, Kevin, for that explanation. That helps give me a little background. It doesn't quite necessarily satisfy from the perspective that I see in regards to need. Again, the need is going to always far outweigh the resource that we have available. And I'm concerned about equity. We all have roads in our district. We all have the same amount of folks in our district that rely on roads to navigate around this county. Talk to me about the 65 rating, if I have enough time left. Yes, sir. In regards to how it's a road that has a 75 rating, how did the 65 rating incorporate into our policy and decision-making as an administration and as a government? There's a certain amount of time after a road that we have seen over the course of time that we've been involved in this process. We were seeing that once a road hits 65% or 65% value within our pavement rating scale, beyond that the rate of degradation to that road increases, especially if we have severe winters as we've seen over the course of the last three years. So we just commonly have used 65 as that break point to where anything above that is not an immediate need, but below that is something we feel is something that you need to focus on within your district, and that's why we want to offer that dialogue with you, if that helps to answer the question. It gives me a start. I appreciate it, Kevin. Thank you for your response. Thank you. Unless there are other new speakers on these first two topics, we'll circle back to first Councilmember Diane Lawless. Thank you, Chair. I withdrew and put my name back on when I saw there were people that had not spoken. Councilmember Beard brought up Rose Street, and that's a perfect example. There's one section between Funkhauser and Washington that's 58, and East Maxwell and College View that's 68. The rest of them are 80s, 90s, and 100 in the area he was talking about on Rose Street. The Martin Luther King area he was talking about behind Samaritan is rated 81, and that's where I'm having difficulty. Now, the first year I was on council was the first year that they did not do it 112, 112, 112. And Commissioner Webb, Public Works was under Commissioner Webb, and Mr. Williams, and I received a list of about four streets that were under 65, and the third district was allocated $17,000 for the entire district for that year, with 1% of the $1.7 million. Then another list kind of showed up that had all these other streets on it, and then that was taken away. And then last year I think I got 2% or a little over 2%, which I kept to roll into this year because there wasn't enough to do it. So, again, it's the major, two major employers of the city are in the third district, Alumni Drive. I'm getting calls from people that aren't in the district saying, you know, it's the hub of the city. And I have so many streets that are rated, you know, way above 65, even to 100, that are in really bad shape. And, Mr. Wente, I really appreciate how you've really tried to wrap your arms around this, and you have responded quickly to me and even ridden your bicycle over some of the streets I've called you about that had a 90 rating. and you feel like you're going down a country road in Model T. And, you know, Commissioner Taylor, this is your first year being in charge of public works, so I want to make that clear. But the frustration level for me and the third district and the needs of the third, We talk about quality of life and economic development and drawing good businesses to our area and our downtown in the U.K., et cetera. And the streets are in horrible condition. And, again, I think traffic patterns need to be counted into that. It is where everybody comes through the city and gets out of the city. So that being said, I'll get off my soapbox. But that's why I'm so perplexed with my list, is that the streets that Council Member Beard brought up are rated in the high 70s, 80s, 90s, and 100. And what do I do with this? So thank you. I guess, as you pointed out, I am no road expert. I know that it's a new area for me. I'm a mechanical engineer, so civil. I'm dealing with a lot of civil engineering lingo like everybody else. But I think my observation from the side has been when that system shifted, it was with good intention. And I think it was to try to address in each district the priorities for each district based on first the rating, but more importantly you have the right to override that rating because we make mistakes. We are using subjective measures, but we'll try to do the best we can. And in your case, perhaps there has been an error. So without looking at it, I don't know. But I think the other thing to remember is I think at the time we did that, it was a new way to do it. The council agreed to try that. But if we're not happy with how it's turning out now, you certainly have the right to suggest change. So what we want to do, there are many ways you can slice and dice the funding that we have. We never have enough to do everything. And I think as a holistic community, there are probably certain projects that we all agree are important for all of us, no matter what district they're in. And maybe there's a happy medium where each district gets a certain amount of money, and we have a pool in the center that we all choose from. Or there's any number of ways you can do this. So I guess what I want you to understand is if you have other thoughts about how we should do that, we're certainly very open. And I consider this a system that we can always improve. So I'm happy to take any suggestions you have to make it better. Yes, ma'am. Just real quickly, also because there are so many older neighborhoods, the streets have been so overpaved in many of them that there is virtually no curb. and where there are stormwater drainage, they're overpaved, which is also a water quality issue that is really severe, and that comes from not milling down far enough and overpaving. And that's part of the water quality problem that we're having in the flooding and sanitary sewers, which in the 3rd District there are many areas that the sanitary sewer goes into the stormwater. It's all the same. So thank you so much. Thank you. Council Member Martin. Thank you, Chair. I have to say I think the folks in the 10th District think that they're every bit as important as the folks in other districts as well. We started with 17.5% of money because we have the worst roads in Lexington. And so, you know, I would not want to see us change to a situation where we're never going to catch up. So maybe, Mr. Wente, maybe I can maybe ask you a few quick questions, and we can sort of cut to the chase. Do we apply a tack coat before we put down paving? I will have to defer to Brian and Sam to answer that. I'm seeing a head shake. so we do do it all the time or is it times we don't do it or brian come on up if you would sorry i was trying to give you a break brian tack coat the purpose of tack coat is to bond a older layer of asphalt to a newer any new time anytime we pave over old asphalt we place tack if we're paving base like on harrisburg road and we come right back over to the next day with surface there is no need for a tack coat but i'm looking at lion drive or something like that? Anytime that we mill, it's important to tack and then surface. And what thickness are we laying down? Most of the streets are figured on an inch and a quarter to an inch and a half of material. But again, the specs seem to say that they're an inch and a half. Because the situation I saw is I went over and watched the actual paving being done on line drive, and there was no way that was an inch and a half. An inch and a half is state standards. That's what's going out on harrisburg road in it an inch and a quarter for surface i see there's no way they're putting an inch that that thickness on on line drive and so one of the things i i think and you and i talked about this briefly is i mean i'd like to go back and and and have a independent consultant come in and take some core samples because you know i don't want to have to come back and redo this in five years and i don't think it's prudent for the city to to lay down thin paving because i i've got pictures from uh from from constituents of of milling next to the curve where it's like a half an inch and uh and i'm assuming they don't put an inch and a half over top of a half inch milling uh let me i asked our people about that when after you and i spoke on herdsburg road there are situations that i discussed earlier when the curb has already been overlaid with asphalt like Ms. Lawless pointed out. It's already been covered. We'll remove it to the curb, and then it's the discretion of our inspector to say the curb is in bad condition. We can't expose this. It's a hazard, and they instruct us to cover that back up. This was Palomar Boulevard. That would be the only situation where I know that we would have not milled down the full thickness at the curb. And let me say this, discussing thin patements. We are paid by the amount of asphalt that we bring you all. It is not in our best interest to give you thin pavements. It's in our best interest to give you more than an inch and a half. And that's what I want you all to understand. Well, if I'm going to interrupt you, I had a situation over on Lane Allen. It was near the intersection of Alexandria and Lane Allen. The pavement there flaked up. And we've all seen it in other places as well. And so I'm trying to figure out, well, what happened there that allow pavement that was less than a couple years old to flake up like paint and i don't know in that specific situation since you and i spoke i have not had time to look at that to see but um we and it's the same with our milling it's not in our best interest to give you less product it's our best interest as a as a as a person under contract with you all to give you more thickness and more product so we're there's no way that we're trying to short you with the amount of tons. And all the material that is delivered to the city is, you all provided a ticket to verify that you received that much material. Well, what, I guess, I understand the administration got together. Has the administration discussed warranties, new warranties with you? Yes, we have. Sam and I have spoke. Cheryl and Kevin had a meeting yesterday and we discussed some with pavement warranties. And that was one of the reasons I asked Dwight to come. Dwight is a retired highway employee that now works for the Asphalt Institute. He sees this on a nationwide basis, not just Kentucky, but he looks at things. And if you all don't mind, I'll do a little bit of talking about pavement warranties. I don't want you all getting the expertise from ATS construction, what you need to do with a pavement warranty. It really needs to be coming from a separate entity. But I will say this. In a perfect world, pavement warranties are a great idea. In a perfect world. Mr. Stinnett, this guy's already brought up Sir Barton Way. In a perfect world, that road was designed for maybe 5% heavy loading. And when I say heavy loading, every yard of topsoil that was stripped off of every parking lot and every building out there was hauled over Sir Barton Way one way or the other. And that's never weighed. You don't know how much those trucks weigh. So right on top of the concrete trucks, the delivery trucks, that road has endured probably 100 times the loading already that it was intended to endure from a design standpoint or whatever you want to call it. And Dwight's analogy is you can make one trip with an overloaded truck, and that's compared to 6,300 trips with a passenger car. So in a perfect world, that road should never have been subjected to the kind of loading that is seen. But we don't live in a perfect world. So there is at least 20 or 30 percent of the pavements that we resurface every year for you all that are over either concrete that is crumbled or cobblestones. You know, the old roads in Lexington at one time downtown were cobblestones, and we end up having to mill off an inch of asphalt over those and pave right back over them. You know, that doesn't fit into anything of what Sam described as the dense grade, the base. It's, you know, there's a lot of non-perfect world situations out there that we're paving over. And the last one that I want to mention, I don't want to take up too much time, is how often do you see us pave a road and within a year there's a utility trench right down the middle of it. And as soon as that trench is made, the pavement that goes back in there is usually put in with substandard equipment. It's usually a small roller or it's done with concrete and it leaves joints to where the water is able to go down in there. So there are a lot of non-perfect world situations out there when you start trying to apply a longer warranty than a year, a 5 or 10 or 15 or whatever year warranty, that becomes very difficult to try to administer a warranty program. It's what you'd call the disclaimers if you buy a product off the shelf. You get all these disclaimers. This will avoid the warranty. That will avoid the warranty if you get in the situation of looking at a long-term payment warranty. But if you all don't mind, if you all want to hear some further discussion on that, Dwight Walker of the Asphalt Institute can address the council. Do you all? Do you have another question? Let's get one from Council Member Ford, then we'll do it to Dwight. Is it for me? No, sir. Okay. And thank you, Chairman Farmer, for the opportunity to speak again to this issue. We've had a lot of discussion about it. Can we restore the lights? Because I want to confer with you guys as the committee. I'm still having difficulty with the equity of funding in regards to the 65 rating being a threshold. And if I don't know, Chairman, or if anybody on council want to speak to the issue of the decision that council made a few years ago to go towards that. And let me share my concern in regards to the 65 rating. Again, I think that it's, per my understanding, it's non-restrictive, meaning that the 65 rating is used as a base for allocating funds to the areas of greatest need. However, there is no restriction placed upon us to actually select projects that have 65 rating. That's right. So it's non-restrictive in that regard. And then also I think it, I know it's an attempt by the administration, but I think this attempt lacks a comprehension of strategy, meaning the need will always outweigh the resource. True. And so just to allocate funds based upon a rating, on face value it may demonstrate an attempt to address the greatest need, but I don't necessarily think it equitably does so for a lot of the things that are stated. So I would recommend that we go back to, in fiscal year 13, equitable split of funding across the 12 council districts. That's my opinion. Again, I wanted to open this up for conversation just briefly, if possible, amongst the committee. Well, from a historical perspective, which I think Linda and I, or the Vice Mayor and I bring to the conversation, 65 has been the standard with which this government has dealt for at least 15 years or more more. I think the use of a formula is something that was instituted, I guess, just two years ago. Wouldn't that be correct? so it may be and the notes I've taken during this discussion kind of do hinge around on what is the genesis of the formula, has it been codified how will it take into account the redistricting when does the paving season end and begin do we want to have some sort of standard deviation because we go from if you look at that list it was from 5% to 13% and do we want to place in there some sort of arterial override where we take some of the funds off to the side just to pave arterials, and it comes out of everybody's bottom line. Because if I'm correct from Council Member Martin's comments, so last year did you get 17.5% of the funds? That's what I took from your comments. The first year it was allocated, the 10th District was allocated 17.5% of the funds. It was a much smaller amount than we have this year. Understood. But then this year I think it was something like 12.5% or 13%, something like that, yeah. I would just say to you, I think there's more conversation we can have about this issue. We may not resolve it today, but I think we can work on it between now and next time. And I didn't really recognize a motion from you in that it was a commentary. And I'm not ready to jump back there just yet, but I'm looking like your commentary goes towards some equity. And it is hard to merchandise when you're the 5% guy sitting next to the 13% guy. How come that happened that way? Exactly, Mr. Chairman, particularly with the fact that the 13% guy may not actually have to spend his 13% on roads that are under 65. Well, you're going to a nuance of how these things work, and I appreciate that. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to cut you off. And that's not a good or a bad thing. I'm not saying that because the beauty of district representation is that we as elected officials, irregardless of what the rating of the road says, it gives us an opportunity to share with the administration our perspective of the needs of that road per our constituents. So I don't. No, I think you're on a good track. And Council, gosh, we've filled up here. Council Member Gorton, Vice Mayor Gorton. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I just had a couple of thoughts about this. I think there is room for discussion about maybe some adjusting of the way it's done. I will say it might be helpful for this committee to look at the, you'll remember Kevin and Sam perhaps, the study that was done on the number of roads that were below 65% rating before we changed the formula. We should have that data. And it seems to me what I remember that was happening for years and years was that when the money was allocated evenly across the board and districts, then many roads that were failing never got resurfaced. And that was the whole idea behind changing the formula was to get the failing roads up countywide. and it might be helpful to look at that data before we made the changeover and then to have the further conversation about what we might be able to do differently. I would not be supportive of a straight across-the-board even allocation to districts. I think that doesn't quite solve the problem, but there might be something that would work there. We can keep it committee and work on it because that's what I see coming from this discussion. So could you, Kevin, I don't know if you have that data from the previous study. What would that have been, three or four years ago? It would have been, I believe, three years ago, and I should have everything as we presented it in the PowerPoint presentation. To look at the numbers before the new formula. Correct. Okay, thank you. Sure. I was going to take Council Member Blues next and come back to Council Member Stenet. Okay, I'm going to take Council Member Stenet. Well, thank you, Dr. Blues. I would just add to what the vice mayor spoke about. You know, we had the same question posed to Council three years ago. We made the decision at that time to change the way we've always done things and try to get all the roads up to par. One big problem with that, though, the new system that I see that we probably do need to address, and you alluded to it, Council Member Farmer, is, for instance, Sir Barton. If I wanted to repay that this year, I'd need about $1.2 million. I'll never get that much money to repay that. So what do you do? So I think maybe shaving off the top some big auteur routes, major routes that we can pick off each year, one in each district or something, would help. But I think there's going to be some weighting on the big projects. Fortune drive. I mean, I'm never going to get enough money again to do fortune. That was done out of a bond years ago. So that's one issue we need to address. But the equality issue, I've seen it, but I've been both ways. Council Member Ford, I understand both ways on how it works. But I also know there were council members, and I remember the joke on council in 06, a couple years on council then, that I'm paving roads that don't need to be paved just because I got the money. And that shouldn't be either. We shouldn't be paving 80 and 90 roads, percentile roads, just because you got money. So that's why we try to reach this balance. And I do think there will be some minor tweaking on those major roads, because we'll never get enough money each to do one. We'll keep in committee work on it. Thank you, sir. Dr. Blues. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Kevin, you're now evaluating the roads every other year, or half the roads every year. Correct. And previously it was how often? In previous years, we would work on a third base. We had a third of the county done, and then on our fourth year, we would evaluate the full county. So there would be a time prior to that full county evaluation where you would be working off of numbers that could be effectively four years old. So by moving to a rating system that occurs, basically we'll have a full county assessment every other year. Those numbers will stay more up to par with a colder or more severe winter that we've had over the course of the last three years and stay hopefully at pace with that degradation of the roadway and stay up to pace with the ratings to evaluate and pass on to you. And I think that's an important point, too, because if we keep the ratings up to date, they're going to be more up to date and more reliable in that sense. to the point about equity. I think there are a number of factors there that need to be balanced. I have authorized resurfacing of roads that have been above 65 because they've been in bad shape and they needed to work. I've also authorized paving of roads that are above 65 because I want a section of the road paved that's below it. And I know that the stretch of the road at 70 is going to drop soon, and it's cheaper to do it now when all the equipment's there than to bring it back for another patch another year. Another factor is that some districts have more roads than other districts. So if you've got a larger geographic area, then you're going to have more responsibility in that regard. And, of course, then the factor of the traffic burden on those roads needs to be brought in. So to me, going back to the system of equal funds for each district is completely inequitable. And I think we have to work on our current system to improve it. I appreciate the fact that we're rating the streets on a tighter cycle. That really is helpful. We do have more work to do on this. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Did you say inevitable or inequitable? Inequitable. Thank you. There was a cue in there, Mr. Chairman. Yes, sir. Noted. Council Member Beard. Yes, I'm in the inevitable group. This is not a question, actually. It's more like a statement or a prediction. We have long ago passed the tipping point on keeping our roads where they need to be. We can't catch up. It just can't happen. There's not enough money available that I can see on the horizon for us to get to a point where we could then maintain as we go along. I think that just isn't going to happen. We're going to be always playing from behind. And you lose ball games when you play from behind. Thank you. Thank you, sir, for those words of wisdom at the end there. All right. Vice Mayor Gorton, have you spoken once or twice? Just once. Okay, go ahead. And so I just had a quick comment. And so then council members are acutely aware of the fact that redistricting is happening. and that there will be new maps drawn by the end of this month. And so the thinking is, and I don't know if you had been thinking about this, but I'm wondering if you'll be doing a reassessment based on the redistricting after the winter and during next year because some of the resurfaced roads and some of the failing roads will go to different districts. It just adds a little layer of complication that I think is worth thinking about ahead of time. And it absolutely would be entered into that new calculation. One thing that would be nice is when we're actually able to implement a new GIS-based system, we'll be able to track this series of degradation over periods of time from when a road was resurfaced to when it needs to have a new resurface layer. and then that will in turn tie into a best managed process or system to where we can, I think, better assess these roads and get a feel if we need to readjust that level of 65 and less. It's just for years past, that's just been the level to which we felt that breaking point. Once you got to 65, you were going to see it turning into a 50 and a 45 on a faster scale than if we started at that break point of, say, a 70 or a 75. So having this in a full-fledged GIS system, number one, I'll be able to provide maps to you so you can graphically see where you might have a road that it doesn't equate to a 65, but for the sake of what Council Member Blues was saying, it just makes sense to go ahead and wipe out that entire segment in one fell swoop. So I guess to convert my statement into a question then, Will you have, by next summer or by the time you ask council members to look at the appropriations again, the new redistricted council boundaries with the new roads in them so there won't be a lag for a few years? I would have that information, yes. Once the boundaries are provided to me in the JAS format, then we can run those numbers against that new boundary. Yes, that would be correct. So before asking from the budget, you will have those changes. I would make those adjustments. Very good. Thank you. Sure. I believe we're down to a couple of council members that both have spoken twice. So there is a parliamentarian here, but that is a council rule, is it? Now, can the chair decide to do differently? If you want to say, okay. Then I'll ask for a motion if we want to let these two have another, a third go at the well then. I'll move. Second. Okay. Well, that makes you a great parliamentarian today. All right. We have a motion and a second to suspend the rules and let a couple of council members speak a third time. Any discussion? All those in favor? Opposed, like, sign. Council Member Lawless. Just very quickly, I do support the thought of taking care of our worst roads first. Where it becomes an issue for me is I have so many miles of roads that are rated 70s, 80s, 90s, and 100 that are clearly in horrible shape. So if my roads were accurately rated, and again, some of this may be leftover, some of it may be the harsh winter, but these roads are in terrible shape and they have very high ratings. So that's my issue with it. Thank you. Thank you. Council Member Martin. Thank you. Just very briefly. I would like to leave this in committee, and particularly I would like the administration to bring us really more information about the specifications, because that's what my motion was to talk about the nitty-gritty about how these are being done, and talking about base failures, and you are correct, it is at the city's election to tell you when to do its base failures. So I appreciate you pointing that out. So we've got that issue about when are we doing base failures and when not. crack seals and isn't is the thing i've rarely seen crack seal in 10th district since i've even been on council and uh and the commissioner i've talked briefly you know like i have lion drive and then what happens is the seams of these pavings start to open up and if you don't put crack seal in them they just continue to open up and then suddenly instead of having a crack seal job we've got a whole paving job those kinds of things are going to save us money they're going to lengthen the life of the road, I don't think that we have a rational system for addressing the degradation life of a road in Fayette County. And I would like to try to explore that so that we can better address this enormous cost that we face in trying to take care of these. So I would like to keep this in council and continue to look at the road specification and repayment. I have a question there, because in the packet today are the bid and the specs. What other information would you desire? Well, it's a long chew, as they say, and it would be nice. In past years, before you came back on council, we were given sort of an overview of what different types of road work is required. For example, there are many types of road reconstruction and road preservation devices and type of mechanisms that can be done to preserve a road. And we're not talking about any of that. So my concern is that I don't believe that we're adequately addressing the preservation of our roads in order to lengthen their life. Crack seals is an obvious example because I may have had two or three streets crack sealed in the 10th district since I've been on council. All right. You're giving me clarity here, and I'll come to you just in a moment, Council Member Ford. So what I'm hearing from the committee is we'll keep the repaving program issue in committee, and we'll kind of work on what that formula is because I've heard three or four different takes on how that formula is or can work, And I think we can look at it between now and our next meeting and come back with either some more information or some recommendations. And then on the second item, renegotiating and expanding paving warranties, what I hear is that we need to look at other opportunities other than just repaving, things to do in terms of maintenance before repaving or pavement failure takes place. Is that it or close? Yeah, and a lot of it is connection with the base failures. fixing base failures is a part of the repaving process or the different kinds of things. You can lay cloth over the seams to prevent the paving when it's put back on from cracking as well because as the seam underneath cracks, the crack will extend to the new paving on top. And so one method is to actually put cloth over those seams. So there's a number of things we can do. Very good, sir. And Council Member Ford. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I would like to help you as our chairman in the committee and the administration bring clarity to this issue. I would like to make a motion with the understanding that we're going to keep this in committee. But my motion would be to request the administration to prepare, present us proposals, options, that would help us achieve a more equitable allocation of paving funds, but to also ensure that we're addressing the greatest needs at our very next meeting. And so I make that in the form of a motion. As we work through it this month, I'll try to make sure that that happens because I don't hear a second for your motion. Thank you very much. I would, unless there's something you have to add that's very specific or that Dwight is on your mind at heart, we're done with these two for today. We've spent an hour and a half on this, and it's a great time. It's time well spent. Okay. What I wanted to mention was something that we had discussed yesterday in our look through the specs and that sort of thing is perhaps using an independent person like Mr. Walter to go through the specs for us and maybe suggest opportunities to modernize them, update them, improve them. But we're using packages that I think we've had in place for a while. So we thought we might try to bring in some expertise on that particular. I think that sounds excellent. To try to prepare for next week or next meeting, excuse me. Well, we'll be talking about the warranties and the formula next time out. If you all had the time to use some expertise like that, I think that helps us all. So I think it's an excellent suggestion. Thank you very much. Having concluded that, I would like to move on then to the third item, sustaining SALT services. And Mr. Wente, you made kind of an opening remark about this in your presentation. Why don't you come back and give us a little bit more conversation there, please, sir. We met last Friday with the various agencies that I mentioned before. And after that meeting was over, I had a sidebar conversation with the representative from Fayette County Schools, stating that our intent, based upon last year, our shortfall of $200,000, and our need based upon our shortcomings with our budget, that we're going to have to find some means to be reimbursed for the materials, time, and equipment that we're applying towards, probably more so towards the requests that are being offered or asked of us through Fayette County Public Schools. That was a very positive conversation. There didn't seem to be any heartburn as a result of that. And then the next phase from there is to probably organize a meeting with the commissioner and the higher-ups with the officials with Fayette County Public Schools. Another option that we thought we would offer for them is if they wanted to bring on their own contractors to tackle those streets that are not under our purview per the snow plan, and it was something that they would consider as well. So with that, we've had a very good discussion initially, and we'll move forward. When do you anticipate having another follow-up? I would like to have something organized by this week as far as a timeline to continue on with that discussion while everything is still fresh. Well, unless there are questions from Councilmembers, I would like for you to have at least one more meeting with them between now and our next meeting. Oh, absolutely. Most definitely. I'll have something to report and follow up on at that point in time. It's a really good opportunity for us to do some partnering with them and a great opportunity for them to work with us on getting kids to school on days when they might not otherwise be there. And that was their sentiment that was reflected as well in the course of that conversation. Very good. So I felt it was very positive. In the meantime, we have a question from Vice Mayor Gordon. I just thank you, Mr. Chair. I have just a quick request. Would you mind to send me and perhaps the committee members the streets above and beyond what we plow and salt, the streets that have been requested in past years, maybe a two- or three-year look by Fayette County Public Schools? If I understood you correctly in the beginning, you said that they occasionally request streets that aren't in our snow plant. Correct. So is that possible to just give us an idea of how many they're requesting? I can look through to see if some of those requests came through. Let's call, and I apologize, Vice Mayor, a number of times where those requests come through, I just write them down by hand and then turn that list over to streets and roads to see if they can address that. So we can have a database that chooses. Let's see what I can have if I can find historical information for that cause. Okay. Okay, thank you. Thank you. Yes, ma'am. As Kevin said, we do have historical information in our office, in Streets and Roads office, in Lex Call, so it's a bit scattered. But we'll gather that up. And then I guess some of the other issues in my first winter here, and you may recall the first week I came back, there were three snows. So I was inundated. But we had a lot of calls from Fayette County schools, not just to plow but then to go back. We had to go back several times because kids were getting in in school and out of school. And so we've talked about those issues with them, too. I think they would like to have more service, and we would like to be able to ask them to partner with us on the cost, and I think we can work out a good partnership. Thank you. Thank you. Anyone else on this issue? We will keep that in committee and have more information on that next time. brings us to item number four, page 49 of our packet, sidewalk specifications and regulations. I'm sorry, Mr. Chair, I thought there was one other related issue which you haven't talked about at all. I thought you were going to give us a chance to talk about that. I'm sorry, go ahead. Just briefly, a question about leaf collection, which was on the end of that slide. You did have that on his original. Go ahead. It's not really part of our committee work, but it was part of the presentation. Please proceed. Let's not get in there. Very brief question. Given the difficulty that was created last year by early snow and the failure to use all of the leaf collection money and get all the leaves collected, I wonder why leaf collection is not scheduled to begin before November 28th. I guess it seems late to me. I wanted to make sure. I'm not sure I completely heard what Kevin said, but last year we had $527,000 budgeted for leaves. We spent $440,000, and that was partly because the snow did catch us and we were not able to completely collect all of the leaves. And I'm not a leaf expert, but I do know Parks has been our leaf expert for many years. They had a meeting, and they felt like we would maximize our ability to collect the most leaves if we waited until late November. It's probably a guess. you know again hopefully i think that from their experience over the past many years of collecting and saying correct me if i'm in but what i heard them say is over the last several years if they go out too early there's just not enough leaves on the ground and people typically have not addressed them so they're trying to pick what they think is the optimum window for when we can pick them up. And that was what they guessed. So I think that's a date that was picked as opposed to maybe necessarily a science reason for it. Thank you. Thank you, Chair. You're welcome, sir. But just as a follow-up, isn't there usually a time when you make a presentation of the full council about the leaf collection staging and strategy? Normally, Parks has done that. I have the information from their past couple of years presentations. This is one of those where we've reorganized. Leaves has always been managed by parks, but it's always been paid for since at least 10 years by Urban Services Fund. And the Urban Services Fund is authorized to pay for one leaf collection annually, but for some reason for the last 10 years we've been doing it twice a year. I can't explain that to you because it wasn't something I have any history on. But this year we're doing it once. Urban Services is paying for it. We originally thought we could handle a lot of this in streets and roads, but in looking at the equipment and the people and the logistics of gearing up for snow, we would have to hire people anyway, so parks stepped up and said they would take it over another year for us while we transitioned because we didn't want to try to transition and have an awkward pickup and waste money. With as much change as you're talking about and that we're all aware of, I think it would benefit the entire council as well as the community to have an updated presentation at one of our upcoming work sessions. And how it works. How it's changed and how it will work. Okay. Some of the new opportunities, because what we've done in the past isn't necessarily what we're going to do this year. Right. I think we need to educate folks to some of the differences and some of the new opportunities presented to them to, you know, load those leaves up and take them somewhere special. Well, we are going to do some things. You're right. We can do that this year. We will. We're planning to have a staging area in town as opposed to Haley Pike so people can bring leaves in town. We do offer, and I think we are the only city in the universe that offers free leaf bags. Those bags, we spend almost $300,000 a year on those bags, and they hold 30 gallons volume-wise of leaves. The lennies, we have almost 60,000 residents in Lexington that use lennies now, and they hold about 95 gallons of leaves. So we have options to handle leaves that we did not have 10 years ago. And we can certainly give you an update on that and encourage people to use those options. It's less expensive for us to get them that way. There's plenty of story to be told there. We'll look forward to that presentation. For now, though, Council Member Blues. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I think the idea to have a presentation to Council is excellent. I'd be particularly interested in doing the environmental impact of going to the one collection, because I know that leaves are a problem for our stormwater system. And it also looks like you are thinking about phasing out of the leaf collection business, perhaps. And I think it's well worth exploring, although it will cause some problems and it will involve new kinds of responsibilities for many of our citizens. especially in the big tree areas. So I think we should hear more about this. It would be a great idea. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, sir. And thank you, Council Member Cade, for bringing that up for us very much. I appreciate it. So then now we're on to number four, sidewalk specs and regulations, which we have David Jarvis and David Barbary. How are you, gentlemen? Welcome. Good afternoon. Thank you. Some of you all recalled it. I think Council Member Feigel put this in committee a while back, and our recommendation was to wait until we had regulations before you adopted any kind of ordinance change on this. And what you have in front of you, I hope, is pretty self-explanatory, but on pages 49 through 51 of your packet, we have the draft ordinance, which will be familiar to some of you all because it has not changed since the version that was presented in committee about 10 months ago. And then with that, we have some proposed regulations. So if you all are comfortable with those after you review them, the recommendation would be to go ahead and have those adopted by the full council. So you had promulgated the code but had not done the regulation. That's correct. So the new stuff for you all would be on page 51 of the packet. And these are short and sweet, but we've moved essentially from kind of a vague standard on some of the corrections to sidewalks to tying them to public safety hazards and then including what those regulations would be, and you all would adopt those. I guess I had thought that this, at least from the underscoring and crossing out in the ordinance itself, this was kind of to make things a little less stringent. Well, yes, right now, and David can help me out on this, Right now it's possible to get dinged on a sidewalk with a penalty for something that might be less than a public safety hazard with respect to a sidewalk. I think the driving force in the ordinance change was to clarify that and tie the violations to actually public safety hazards with respect to the sidewalks. There was also a recommendation at that time to decrease the maximum fee from $1,000 a panel to $500 a panel. Thank you. And then we legally thought we should have some regulations adopted that kind of clarified what those safety standards would look like, and that's what's on page 51. So we have, for instance, things that would be likely to result in an injury or harm to the person or property, i.e. a tripping hazard, a crack with one-half inch or greater of horizontal displacement, a vertical displacement of three-quarters of an inch or greater, a slope of greater than one inch to 12 inches, a hole or pop-out that's one inch or greater in diameter, et cetera, et cetera. So the intent was to go ahead and adopt regulations that are tied to safety issues with the sidewalks and to give people that wanted to know what they're looking at when they're being sited an idea of how bad the sidewalk is before they're going to come out and site it. I appreciate that. Mr. Jarvis, anything you wish to add at all? Just previously, we always used the recommendations that were for new construction, And we realize that what we enforce is real more public safety versus new construction of sidewalks. And we think we're more reasonable with the regulations we've adopted. And, again, with the civil penalties, I think that $500 for one citation issued every 30 days is enough to make anyone move forward. I appreciate that. First up, I have Council Member Lawless. My question, first of all, Council Member Feigl and I, I think, brought this up because in the older neighborhoods where the sidewalks have pitting or whatever and then held to a standard, it isn't a safety issue, but held to a standard of a new construction sidewalk. But it says meeting the criteria set forth in Section 17147. That's a strikethrough. Is that just gone 17147 because I don't see it? I think the current issue on that was there really aren't any spelled out in there anymore. Okay, so that section is just not. What happened was you had a gap in changes, and it used to be you had the engineering standards directly referenced in Section 147, and at some point in time that got lopped out during another change. Okay, thank you. This is excellent. Thank you very much for your work on this. Thank you, ma'am. Now Vice Mayor Gordon. Thank you, Mr. Chair. One comment and one question. I like the fact that you lowered the civil penalty to 500. I think 1,000 was extremely punitive. And I wanted to ask on page 51, and I guess maybe David Jarvis would know, are these basically the same standards that the inspectors use without them being official? Basically, yes. Absolutely. And more geared towards public safety. So they weren't really changed in terms of what they'd been using, it's just it wasn't official? Very slight. Okay. Right. Thank you. Thank you, ma'am. Councilmember Kaye. Thank you, Chair. I think the changes are moving in the right direction. I actually have questions that have to do with the part of the ordinance that have not been changed, if that's okay. Yes, sir. While we're working on this ordinance, on the first page, the ordinance states that right in the middle of the paragraph, the middle of the paragraph, to repair or replace the same at his own expense, quote, within a reasonable period of time, as stated in such notice. How is the question of what is a reasonable amount of time determined? I'll defer to David on the practice. I think they've gone with at least, I think they initially issue a notice of violation prior to issuing it. and I think those are always a minimum of 30 days. 60 days on a sidewalk, and then what we do is we can issue a final letter at 90, so it gives a three-month time period. Again, if we're in the middle of winter, we know that. We have to take that. I think that's why that reasonable amount of time frame was included in the language to give some leeway to the property owner. Again, if it's in the middle of spring or summer, we're going to hold them pretty close to that 90-day time frame. But again, if there's four inches of snow on the ground, it's going to be tough to pour concrete. Okay, that helps me. I'm still, I guess I'm not clear. If I get a notice, if I'm a property owner and I get a notice, within that notice, does it state a specific amount of time? Absolutely, 60 days. Okay. And at the end of that 60 days, you get a final letter, and at the end of that 30 days, being a total of 90, we can issue civil penalty. So then my follow-up question would be, if that's the case, why do we not have that in the ordinance instead of using the language of a reasonable amount of time? Again, I think it would fall under weather. I mean, if we have 60 days in there and we're in the middle of February, I think we're going to be held to a standard where we're not enforcing the ordinance as written. And I think we need to have that leeway dealing with this type of issues in the middle of winter. Okay, and if that's true, how do you determine when leeway is appropriate and when it's not? Do you have some standards or policies? Just weather. No, we just take the weather into consideration. And is that a decision that you make? Usually the inspector. Okay. In the Section 2, same kind of question. It says that right near the second, third, last sentence, notice provided there may be assessed a civil penalty. How is it determined whether that is actually assessed or not? Well, the language of maybe, if the property is in violation and an amount of time has passed, then we can impose a civil penalty. I think you've not discussed this before about may and shall. Right. We have. Right. I think under the civil penalty code, may is the word that's used versus shall under criminal code. And so is the answer that the language in this section simply reflects what the state code mandates, and there's no option to have a different language in here? I think, you know, as a counsel, you could change the language in anything you want to say, but I think that's normally typically under a civil penalty phase. I think there's never been a comfort level with demanding that in all instances a civil penalty would be issued at some point in time because there may be some circumstantial differences. I think as a matter of practice, that's what they do after providing the notices. I think everybody gets one at some point in time. But if you put it in here, it's a discretion issue. They're not going to have any discretion other than to issue a fine, probably, arguably, regardless of potential circumstances. They have some cases where it may take the person all of the 90 days to start the repairs. And normally they might be issuing the civil penalty, but if they go out there and find out the person took until day 91 to start the work, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense under those circumstances to go in and issue it. The discussion I've had with your office is once they do issue it, they're not exercising any discretion in what the amounts are because those are set pursuant to actual tables and what you all have said in the ordinances. But they have always, I think in all of the code enforcement stuff, You all, in adopting the ordinances, have always reserved discretion to them about whether or not they need to issue the penalty or not. I understand that, and my time is running out. I'll just state my concern, and that is that there is no procedure or policy for determining when that discretion is applied. And what that means is that the average homeowner has no idea how much latitude they have, but the people who own a lot of property understand full well and take advantage of it. And this is an issue I'd like to see addressed at greater length. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, sir. Next is Council Member Beard. Thank you, Chair. Yes, sir. David? I've got some votes. Which one? Jarvis. Thank you. Once upon a time, we had a pool of money each year. that we generally ran out of to repair sidewalks. Correct. On a 50-50 basis with the homeowner or whatever. And generally that was like the 4th of July we were out of money. Right. Do we have that pot of money this year? No. That money was not budgeted at all. It wasn't budgeted at all? No. Well, that's nice because I told a bunch of people at the Lansdowne picnic that we had this pot of money. No, there is nothing. Councilmember David, I think there's still some money in adult. No. No? Not in 12? Not in 12, okay. Oh, well. I'm sorry that it was not, you know, and this would be about the time, I guess, that we would run out of money. Maybe you can use some repaving dollars. Well, we could do that. There's lots of things we could do. We could print money like the federal government does. I really have nothing else to say. Yes, sir. Thank you very much. Thank you, sir. Council Member Lawless. I have a quick question, I hope. So you said these were very similar to our current standards. Right, right. We still use the same language of spalling and vertical displacement, horizontal displacement. But they're not as strict. They're not as strict, that's right. And, for instance, a sidewalk in an older area that was ported in 1920 that gets little pits in it that isn't, that no longer would be sited as it has been previously. Right, that's right. Okay. Before the old specs, I mean, it had to meet the criteria for a new sidewalk. Right. If it had a crack, a 16th of an inch crack in it. Right. It was a violation. So I think this is great, and we certainly can tweak it if it's not working. So I'd like to make a motion that we adopt this and forward it to the full council. Yes, ma'am. Go ahead. A motion in a second. and I have Council Member, pardon me, Vice Mayor Gorton. Actually, mine's on a different, it's not about the motion. Very good. Are there then question or discussion points about the motion itself? Seeing none, all those in favor signify by saying aye. Aye. Opposed like sign. Well done. Thank you. Vice Mayor. Mine was simply to follow up on your and Paul's and Mr. Beard's conversation. So just to be clear, there's no money for low-income matches. Is that what you were saying? Right. There is none. And did some of that money get housed in social services, or was it all housed with you? I believe it was housed in our budget and then allocated by social services. Okay. So there's $0 for low-income match. That's right. And do you remember how much we had last fiscal year for low-income match? I don't think there was any earmark just for low income. I think it came out of the same pot of money. And typically we didn't have a problem with low income reimbursement. Okay. So we went from $75,000 to $60,000 to $30,000 to zero. So when you say you didn't have a problem, you mean you had enough money to do those matches. That's right. I think just in the future we need to look for some money to have matches for the low-income sidewalks because traditionally we have been able to use that money to help the lower-income folks. So maybe during our next... What if I'm going to get part of the report out? Yes. Do it to the full council? Yes, thank you. Yes, ma'am. And along those lines, I think even a dollar amount of $25,000 a year, I mean, you know, not a large amount of money would go a long way with assisting those folks. $25K. Got it. Very good. Thank you both. Anyone else on that issue? Then Todd's Road widening. I'm sorry, we did vote on it. Yeah, we had 8-0 vote to pass the motion. It came up and said 8-0. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Unless there's something else. Okay, next up is the Todd's Road Widening Phase 2 update. And I guess, Mr. Barrett, you're here for that, as well as Oliver Lewis Way project update. Welcome. Thank you. I think everyone should have received kind of a stat sheet on both these projects. They're included on pages 53 and 54. We really don't have anything to add to this. We have an agreement pending with the state that would make available these additional design funds so that we can get the design changes made that we need to get made to get on with the right-of-way phase. And that agreement that we're waiting for also includes the funding for the right-of-way acquisition for what we're calling both Sections 2A and 2B. Excellent report. Next. Now. Welcome. Thank you very much. Hopefully I'll be just as quick. The Newtown Pike Extension Project, hopefully everybody had a chance to review the insert that was in your packet. I wasn't going to read it or go over it, but if there are any questions, I'd be happy to address them. It was short but succinct. Are there any questions? Yes. I just want to congratulate everyone who worked on the Newtown Pike extension. It has received national attention and it is something that is really a thing of pride for our folks and for the state folks and everybody who worked on that. It's just a terrific project. Congratulations. If I could add to that a little bit, But the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet did enter that project into a national, basically the AASHTO, American Association of State Highway Engineers. And it won the Southeastern Region as best project, not necessarily for being completed under budget, but for being completed on time. It's up for a national award. And if everybody would like, I'll send you the link so you can go and vote on it. Thank you. Washington State has this beat by, I think, 30,000 votes. Where can listeners dial in to vote? They can find it on the web. How would they find it? How would they Google it? I'll send a link to every council member. Very good. Thank you, Bob. Oh, I'm not exactly sure what the website is off the top of my head. Thank you. Anything else there? Council Member Kaye. Thank you, Chair. I want to add my also positive thoughts about this entire project. I've followed it for a very long time, and it really is a terrific, I think, asset to the city. And it's a good example of what can be done when people work extensively over time with the federal government, state government, local government. I had one little question, and what struck me is this noise wall, which people have known they've needed for 10 years. Why is it still being negotiated? The noise wall itself was put in the environmental impact statement. We are going to build it. The unknown was exactly where we were going to build it. We are putting it on a railroad right away, which is property that we have to negotiate and purchase from the Norfolk Southern Railroad. They have been very hard to deal with. As a matter of fact, we designed it once. They wanted us to move it. We had very little choice. We said, yes, we'll move it, and we went back to renegotiate purchasing property again. Hopefully, we're going to have a resolve to that. We've done everything that they've asked. We moved the wall 35 feet. We've given them everything. So hopefully that will be resolved within the next two or three months. Great. Thank you. Yes, sir. Thank you, Chair. Yes, sir. Council Member Beard. I just wanted to add that it is nice to see a start on that project, and I know that it's got a lot yet to do. I've told this story to several people. I might as well do it again. Everybody gets bored with it. But when I was taking my driver's test in 1954, the state policeman that was with me, because we went down Main Street. It was two-way, by the way, at that point. And he pointed out that I think at that time it was a Georgetown Road extension. and he pointed out that they were going to take that all the way over to South Broadway. I think most anybody can do the math on how many years ago that was, but that was a long time ago that that was in the middle and we finally got there. And I also appreciate you've been a trooper right in the middle of all this, Andrew, and kudos to you, too, for being the driver. Well, I've had a lot of help. The state has been a tremendous asset, and it's really been a learning experience for me, too, as well. Fine. Thank you. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, sir. Council Member Blues. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I think that this is one of those projects that it probably is good that it didn't get constructed in a more timely manner, because I think that it could have really torn up the city when it was proposed as more or less a freeway. And as an at-grade road, it has much less impact than that. Also, the environmental justice aspect of it is extraordinarily important. It's not only a road project, but it is a large-scale social engineering project. the neighborhood revitalization project. Andrew has been involved in both the engineering and in the Davis Bottoms neighborhood projects. It's a Herculean task for him. And I would call attention to one small thing. It's not a small thing. The Community Land Trust has now appointed an executive director, and that really moves the neighborhood project forward. and the Land Trust Board is having a retreat on Tuesday all day to do some specific planning for the months and years ahead. So thank you, Andrew, for all your work on this. It really is a magnificent road and social project for the city. Thank you for the follow-up to the update. We have one more council member, and then there's one item that is not on the agenda that's kind of a walk-on I want to try to take at least a first swing at. We are in overtime today, though, but we don't have a meeting at 3 o'clock. Council member Ford. Thank you, Chairman Farmer. Andrew, again, I agree with everybody. Great job that you guys are doing. Speak very briefly to this project in the context of Davis Bottom. Do we still have folks living in temporary homes? and if so, for how long will they continue before they have permanent housing? Yes, sir. We still do have residents. There are 18 pre-manufactured homes. The first 14 were moved in, I want to say, in January of 2009. It is anticipated that they will be there until the construction of New Derody Street or whatever that street's name is, my best estimate, as I look forward today, I would say three years. Three years from this point, they will still be in temporary housing? Three years from this point, hopefully they will be moving into the new houses. So I'd say yes. At the end of three years from this point, they'll be making the move. That's what we're hoping. Very good. But I'll, again, congratulate the government for the job that you've done on the road project. Councilman Blues talked about the great improvements that are going to happen with the community land trust. Let's deem the project a true success when we make sure that those folks that live down at Davis Bottom have the adequate permanent housing that they have perhaps long been overdue. Look forward to your work and partnership on that, Andrew. Thanks. Thank you. I would hope that for our viewers at home that the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials website has been put up so that they could vote on behalf of the Newtown Pike extension. Thank you very much, Mr. Grunwald. I appreciate it. Council members, a little bit of discretion, if you would. And there's an item that was placed in committee last Tuesday that has to do with the keeping of or what you can keep other than humans inside the urban service boundary. And I think this was kind of a conversation that was between Councilmembers Kay and Beard. And we have a draft ordinance that has been placed before us and dated yesterday. and behind it is a follow-up letter or email trail between Councilmember Kay's aide and Rick Curtis in the Department of Public Safety. So I was going to ask for your all's thoughts on how to deal with this today, if there is indeed a haste or a taste to do so. Councilmember Beard. I think, as you all may remember, when I brought this up last week, there is a horse being housed in the backyard of a home on Tahoma Drive. And it's a full-grown horse. The horse has escaped twice and had to be collared and brought back. That's really not the place for a horse for several reasons. It's not the place for a horse. One is the carrying of the horse of itself is in an exercise room form. We've run into a blip, however, because there is a state law concerning how horses are handled and treated. We have a strange law on the books right now that, if you'll help me, Council Member Blues, what is it we can keep and what is it that we can't keep at this point in the present board? The only prohibited animals are pigs, hogs, and goats. Beyond that, there you go. You can have any kind of animal you want, although there are, as I understand it, Council Member Lawless explained to me earlier today, there are state statutes which prohibit certain exotic animals. I don't know how that they are. Lions, tigers, boa constrictors. Giraffes. Giraffes. I guess I think they'd be. I'm looking forward to taking more committee time on this, I think, than we can present for it today. I just don't think we're actually, Chair, I don't think that we're really ready at this point. We need law to take a look at this in more depth to see exactly what we can and can't do. Although Wilmore just passed a horse ordinance. because Glasgow and Bowling Green have horse ordinances, so maybe they just don't have law departments. Well said, sir. Council Member Kay. Yes, just for further clarification, the reason that I and my office became interested in this is because some constituents are interested in expanding the opportunities for urban farming, which would include, as people may know, a lot more people are keeping chickens nowadays than they used to. And there are certain kinds of goats which can be kept, people believe, within the city limits, within the urban service boundary without causing any difficulty for their neighbors, and it would allow people to expand their urban farming. So when the issue of the horse came up, and I realized there was going to be some discussion about this, I thought it would be a nice way to kind of meld the two things. So while I have no objection to limits on other animals, I also have an interest in expanding the option for those that are interested in urban farming. And goats was the main thing that we had inquired about and was incorporated in this draft ordinance. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, sir. Mr. Horn. Briefly. Yes, sir. What we in the law department try to do is when you request an ordinance, as Council Member Kay did, is give you what you want. I would not have sent this draft out if I didn't think it was legal. Now, having said that, I did see the e-mail chain between Rick Curtis and Council Member Kay's aide. Yes, sir. My recommendation would be that perhaps you shunt this to the Animal Care and Control Advisory Board to look at it and then send it back here after they've taken a look at it. I'm okay with that. The chief is here, and he's shaking his head he's okay with that. And I think that we need more expertise than we can bring to bear on it today anyway. The Sutherland's High Height Neighborhood Association isn't going to be very happy about it, however. Well, I don't doubt that. I don't doubt that at all. But we don't have legislation placed before us, I think, that we can actually take action on today. I understand. I'm just kind of sensitizing Mr. Curtis and Mr. Bowling to the fact that they need to happen post-haste as opposed to... Just so you know, I've seen some other comments, And they don't necessarily relate to what the original intent of the ordinance was, but there may be other questions about what we're including, what we're not including, and those types of things that perhaps animal care and control can help address in terms of a recommendation. This needs a different vetting than we can give it here at this point in time. I appreciate that. I was going to go to the Vice Mayor first and then come back to Mr. Curtis. I was just going to agree with that. But some of us haven't seen the e-mail chain, and I think to rush it through without being sure that everything is attended to, I would favor sending it to Animal Care and Control to get their vetting and to come back. Thank you. Count, do you want to stay on? No. I was just going to. It seems to me that the only thing in question would be chickens and goats. Could we move this forward without horses, mules, asses, and calves? Well, if you make a motion to get a second, you can. Personally, I'm not comfortable. Okay. Well, then I'll withdraw. We brought it up, I think, on behalf of the district council member, which Council Member Ford made really good comments earlier about how district people serve. We're trying to show that this neighborhood that we're very interested in, in the problem that they have with the horse in their neighborhood. But I think we also have other policy questions that come from opening this barn door to this whole group of issues. So I think we need to take at least another month's time. Hopefully you all have time to meet in that capacity. Do you have something to say on that, sir? As the chair of that committee, I've already made all the committee members aware of this draft so that they can start to get their thoughts together. We should be able to have something very, very soon. Plus the fact for Councilman Beard certification, that horse owner has been cited for care and control on that horse because he's not caring for it properly at all. That's what the good chief informed me of today. I would imagine not. I mean, obviously, a 60-foot wide lot in and of itself doesn't get the exercise they would need. I don't think anybody, including myself and on the committee, and I think the chief would agree with it as well, that we don't think that it's proper. But unfortunately, there's no law that prohibits it. But the horse may have to be removed because he's not able to carry it. Well, I mean, that's a whole different story. A whole different story. But in all probability, that should be. It never should have come to pass. Right. I agree. I would just say to you, I'm sorry. We will meet again on November the 1st. If you guys stay in contact with Mr. Schoeniger about your office progress, make sure we have the information in our packet. I will. We will see you November 1st. That'll work. But one other thing, Rick. If, in fact, they need to move the horse for their own purposes in making that determination, they don't need to wait, as far as I'm concerned, to do so until we go through this whole process. Oh, no. It's actually in the court system now, and that may very well be a contingency of the ruling that it has to be moved regardless because he can't care for it properly. Right. Okay. Thank you. Which still leaves us with the urban farming aspect that was brought up as part of the issue, so I'm aware of all that. I was going to forego the opportunity to review the issues in committee since we're in overtime and just ask if there's anything. I have a motion to adjourn. I'm sorry. Yes, sir. If I could, one comment before we adjourn. On the vote to approve the sidewalk amendment, I voted in favor. Okay. Despite the fact that I have serious concerns about the language that controls it and many other parts of the code enforcement ordinance, and they have to do with the latitude and the way in which it is now exercised within code enforcement, I believe that would be an issue that I'd like to bring back at some point. It's a larger question of the way in which the penalties, fines, notices, et cetera, for code enforcement are presently being used. I think you're phrasing it very well, and we look forward to bringing that in. And I just want to be clear. I voted in favor because I didn't want to hold up the sidewalk ordinance on those grounds, but I think that there's a larger issue to be addressed. Thank you, Chair. I appreciate it very much. We have a motion to adjourn in a second. All in favor? Opposed, like sign. Thank you. This is a very good meeting. BAM!