# Council General Government Committee - November 15, 2011 > Auto-transcribed civic record · November 15, 2011 - **Permalink**: https://meetings.lexingtonky.news/meeting/2251 - **Source video**: https://lfucg.granicus.com/player/clip/2251?view_id=14&redirect=true - **Date**: 2011-11-15 - **Last revised**: July 17, 2026 - **Length**: 17,509 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 General Government Committee met on November 15, 2011, at 10:00 a.m., with Ed Lane presiding. The committee addressed four agenda items during the session, hearing 12 public comments and taking 1 motion to a vote. Two items—the Parks Acquisition Fund and Items in Committee—were deferred for future consideration, while two informational presentations on the Golf Management Plan and Aquatics Management Plan were received by the committee. ## Attendance The following individuals were present at the meeting on November 15, 2011: - Ed Lane - Jay McChord - Linda Gorton - Steve Kay - Chris Ford - Tom Blues - Julian Beard - K. C. Crosbie - George Myers - Doug Martin - Jerry Hancock - Lee Meyer - Jill Bertelson - Todd Johnson - Brian Rogers - Richard Maloney - Mike No absences or late arrivals were recorded. ## Votes and Decisions **Motion to Adopt Closure Plan for Kearney Hills Golf Course** A motion was made by Doug Martin and seconded by George Myers to adopt a closure plan for Kearney Hills golf course at the end of calendar year 2011. [timestamp: 1:56:45] The motion was decided by voice vote and was **tabled**. ## Budget and Financial Actions The meeting included two significant financial actions related to aquatic facilities: **Pool Demolition and Abatement** The body approved a purchase of $40,000 for demolition and abatement of Constitution and Berry Hill pools. **Aquatic Center Capital Improvements** An appropriation of $1.33 million was approved for capital improvements to aquatic centers. These improvements include splash pads, climbing walls, shade structures, and concession upgrades. ## Public Comment **Parks Acquisition Fund** Todd Johnson expressed concern that the Parks Acquisition Fund was established exclusively for parkland acquisition and should not be diverted to capital improvements on existing parks, citing a 1995 resolution clarifying its purpose. [timestamp: 0:14:55] Council Member Stennett questioned the continued collection of fees into the fund, arguing that the city already has sufficient parkland and that funds should instead support capital improvements on existing parks. [timestamp: 0:16:00] Council Member Blues agreed with Stennett that acquiring more land is premature without first improving existing parks and suggested combining the fund with other revenue sources for better use. [timestamp: 0:18:09] Vice Mayor Gordon advocated for a bifurcated approach: maintaining the fund for future land acquisition while addressing current capital needs through other means. [timestamp: 0:19:56] Council Member McCord challenged the Home Builders Association to support broader community funding for parks, noting that the fund was used to balance the budget and that parks are underfunded. [timestamp: 0:22:44] Council Member Kay suggested that the fund should be used to develop existing parkland rather than acquiring new land, especially since many current parks remain underutilized. [timestamp: 0:24:59] **Aquatics Management Plan** Council Member Myers supported closing Constitution and Berry Hill pools and using the savings to reinvest in those parks for alternative uses like skate parks or ball fields. [timestamp: 0:52:21] Council Member McCord emphasized the need for modern marketing and policy change to make pools and golf self-sustaining, citing demographic shifts and outdated policies. [timestamp: 1:06:35] Council Member Beard asked whether the number of citizens using pools could be measured, noting that current data only tracks attendance, not individual usage. [timestamp: 1:18:49] Council Member Kay requested that seasonal maintenance and coordinator salaries be included in the cost analysis to better understand total operating expenses. [timestamp: 1:22:15] **Golf Management Plan** Council Member Myers asked the Parks Board to survey lap swimmers and consider the potential for a dedicated lap pool at Berry Hill before closing it. [timestamp: 1:23:18] Council Member Beard questioned the validity of the financial data, noting that some costs are not accurately allocated to individual courses in PeopleSoft. [timestamp: 1:58:24] ## Contested Items The November 15, 2011 meeting included three significant areas of disagreement among council members. **Parks Acquisition Fund Use** Council members were divided on whether to amend the Parks Acquisition Fund's restrictions to allow capital improvements on existing parks. Some members argued for reinvestment in current infrastructure, while others insisted on preserving the fund's original purpose. The vote was split, reflecting fundamental disagreement about how the fund should be deployed. **Aquatics Pool Closures** A heated discussion erupted over the proposed closure of Constitution and Berry Hill pools. Council members debated the community impact of closing these facilities, explored potential alternative uses for the properties, and questioned the fairness of using savings from closures to fund improvements at other parks. The intensity of this discussion reflected deep concerns about how the closures would affect residents and the broader parks system. **Golf Course Management** Council members disagreed on whether to close Kearney Hills golf course. Those advocating for immediate closure pointed to significant financial losses as justification. Others argued for continued operation and requested additional time for further study before making a final decision. This split vote indicated unresolved questions about the course's financial viability and future prospects. ## Parks Acquisition Fund Jerry Hancock presented on the Parks Acquisition Fund, which currently holds $1.44 million. The fund was established in 1983 to support parkland acquisition efforts [timestamp: 0:07:10]. The discussion centered on whether to amend ordinances to allow the fund to be used for capital improvements on existing parks, rather than exclusively for acquiring new parkland. Council members debated the merits and implications of this potential change. **Key Positions:** Todd Johnson, representing the Home Builders Association, opposed any amendment to the fund's original purpose, arguing that the ordinance should remain focused on parkland acquisition as originally intended. Council members expressed differing views on the fund's future direction. Some argued that the city has acquired sufficient parkland and suggested that collected fees should be redirected toward maintenance and improvements of existing parks rather than continued acquisition. Others raised questions about whether the city should continue collecting fees for the fund given current parkland holdings. **Speakers:** The discussion involved Council Members Stennett, Blues, McCord, and Kay, as well as Vice Mayor Gordon, in addition to the presentations from Hancock and Johnson. **Outcome:** The matter was deferred, with no immediate decision made regarding potential ordinance amendments or changes to the fund's use and collection policies. ## Golf Management Plan [timestamp: 1:27:03] Lee Meyer presented the Parks Advisory Board's recommendations for golf management to address operational and financial challenges. The presentation focused on three primary strategies: adjusting fees to improve revenue, reducing operational costs, and exploring long-term repurposing options for golf courses. **Key Recommendations** The Parks Advisory Board emphasized golf's role as a public service while advocating for pricing flexibility to remain competitive in the market. The board recommended fee adjustments as a mechanism to improve financial performance without compromising public access to the facilities. **Concerns Raised** Participants, including Jerry Hancock and Mike, raised concerns about the financial losses currently experienced by the golf operations. The discussion highlighted the need for policy changes to allow greater operational freedom in managing the courses. The board stressed that without adjustments to current practices and fee structures, the financial sustainability of the golf program would remain at risk. **Outcome** This agenda item was presented for informational purposes. The presentation provided the Parks Advisory Board's analysis and recommendations regarding golf management strategies, including revenue enhancement through fee adjustments, cost reduction measures, and consideration of alternative long-term uses for the courses. The discussion underscored the tension between maintaining golf as an accessible public service and achieving financial viability through operational and pricing adjustments. ## Aquatics Management Plan Jill Bertelson presented the Parks Advisory Board's aquatics management plan during this agenda item [timestamp: 0:28:51]. The presentation focused on recommendations for restructuring the city's pool operations to improve efficiency and service quality. **Key Recommendation** The plan recommended closing Constitution and Berry Hill pools, citing low attendance and high operating costs as the primary reasons for these closures. **Proposed Reinvestment Strategy** Rather than simply eliminating services, the plan proposed reinvesting the savings from closing the two underperforming pools into the remaining four aquatic centers. The proposed improvements included adding splash pads, climbing walls, and shade structures to enhance the facilities and user experience. **Public Feedback** Public input on the proposal was positive, with attendees showing strong support for closing the underperforming pools and redirecting those funds toward improvements at the remaining facilities. **Key Speakers** In addition to Jill Bertelson's presentation, Jerry Hancock and Brian Rogers participated in the discussion. **Outcome** This agenda item was presented as informational, providing the board and public with details about the aquatics management plan and community response to the proposed changes. ## Items in Committee [timestamp: 00:57:21] The committee discussed the need for policy changes to modernize marketing, improve data tracking, and allow greater operational flexibility for parks and golf operations. **Key Participants** Vice Mayor Gordon, Council Member McCord, Council Member Myers, and Richard Maloney participated in this discussion. **Main Points** Council members emphasized the importance of using modern technology for outreach and called for a review of outdated policies that hinder innovation and revenue generation. The discussion centered on updating existing policies to better align with contemporary marketing practices and operational needs. **Outcome** This item was deferred. --- ## Decisions - **Motion** — tabled: Motion to adopt a closure plan for Kearney Hills golf course at the end of calendar year 2011 --- ## Full transcript Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. ¶¶ Thank you. The End ¶¶ I'm Chairman Ed Lane, and we're starting the General Government Committee for November 15th at 10 a.m. I ask all the council members to please take your seats. Thank you. Okay, we have a quorum, so our meeting is in order. And the first item on the agenda is the approval of the summary for the meeting on October 11, 2011. Okay, is there any discussion? All in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Okay, thank you. All right, the second item on the meeting is a discussion of the Parks Acquisition Fund. and the Director of Parks and Recreation, Jerry Hancock, will give us a report on that. Good morning, Council Members. I'm Jerry Hancock, Director of Parks and Recreation here in Lexington. You have asked for a report of the Parks Acquisition Fund, which I believe you have received in your packet previous to today, so I'll go through this in summary fashion for you. The Parks Acquisition Fund was initiated in 1983 by resolution, and it changed a set of ordinances establishing certain additional fees to building permit fees that the city issues for new construction. It varies from $100 for an apartment in an apartment complex to $180 per home that's built in the city and a variety of other smaller fees from $0.08 to $0.25 per 100 square feet of commercial property. It was revisited in 1985 to clarify the uses to which this fund could be put. It has been defined and studied and opined by the law department that the funds can only be used for acquisition of park land or the development of new parks facilities at the time that new park land is developed. And this became effective in 1995. I think that was a little quick. Parks believes that the council may want to take a look at this set of ordinances to see if there's an opportunity to amend the restrictions to allow for capital improvements on existing park land. A couple of options exist to do that. We either repeal 178.95 and amend 447.83 to apply to both existing parks and new parks for improvements or modify 178.95 for a specific period of time. This was done in 2004, which allowed $150,000 to be used for the operation of the city's swimming pools for that summer in a previous type budget experience. And when that was done, and at times since then, consultation with the Lexington Home Builders Association has taken place. I'm told in this law opinion, which I think you all just got a copy of this morning, that the builders didn't like the fee, but they didn't oppose to that use as long as the fund was used to buy parkland or enhance new developments. That is, in the creation of the fund, they didn't exactly fall in love with it, but they felt that it would enhance their developments. but they may oppose it for general operations or maintenance, which we're not recommending. What we are suggesting is that we consider capital improvements, the building of new facilities on existing parkland from this fund. There is no requirement, as far as I or the law department can tell, that would compel us to go to the Lexington Home Builders Association, but historically we have done that. The funds have been used just for the purchase of property or those services ancillary to the purchase of property, like EPA Phase 1s or appraisals or boundary surveys and that kind of thing. Here are a number of recent purchases of property that have been accomplished through the funds generated by building fees. The fund has $1.44 million in it today. In 2006, it was about $1.4 million. A total of about $1.3 million was used by the Crawford property adjacent to Raven Run. And as you can see in FY08, 2009, 2010, and 2011, somewhere between a half a million dollars or $90,000, depending on the building cycle that year, have contributed to this fund since 2006. So the fund currently has $1.44 million in it. We have a number of projects that we're thinking about that might be good uses for this fund to either allow for public access to parks or expanding existing parks. But the current lack of development funds hinders us in thinking through a complete project. little value in buying new land if you can't develop it or connect it. So the money sits there. We have a number of uses to which it might be put. Modifying the ordinances to allow for capital construction on existing parks would probably help us develop and improve our parks in addition to just buying brand new land. This is a list you obviously can't read that shows all of the properties. It's in your packet, and I apologize for the poor quality of that, but that shows all of the properties we have purchased since 1995 when we bought in McConnell Springs. So that, then, is my summary of the Parks Acquisition Fund, and at this time I'd like to engage any questions that you may have about this. Do any council members have questions now? Go ahead. Please, thank you. Thank you, Jerry. One of the things, in the last couple of budget years, we've come back to this and looked at this as an opportunity, and I know Todd Johnson's here from the Home Builders Association. I know Todd and I have had conversation at great length about opportunities with this fund to recognize what they've done. And, Todd, I don't know if you'd like to speak at all from your all standpoint as to how you feel, you know, and what you see going forward and what the mood of the home builders is with this fund since it is your all's fund. Please, if you don't mind, I'd love to hear what you all have to say. Thank you, Council Member McCoy. I appreciate being recognized to give comment. We've been here before talking about this fund on a number of occasions. The last time, I believe, was in 2004 when then under the Mayor Isaac administration, Parks and Recs came to us about the $150,000 wanting to know if we would allow the funds to be used for keeping, I think it was two pools open. I believe our funding would go to, at that time, to fund staff for the pools. and I believe Kentucky American Water donated the water to fill the pools at that time. In agreement with Mayor Isaac at that point, and I believe the council agreed as well, that they would not come back to that fund for anything other than its determined purpose. And that's our understanding. To clarify a little bit, I believe it was members of the Home Builders Association back in the 80s that came to urban county government to champion establishing this fund for parkland acquisition. and it was clear under my understanding of what happened at that time. Of course, I wasn't here at that time, but the intent was for it to always be used for parkland acquisition. In 1995, under Pam Miller's term as mayor, there was a resolution clarifying Resolution 447-83 to provide that the funds generated by additional building permit fees are not to be used for improvements to parks but shall be used exclusively for the acquisition of land for parks. And this became effective and clarified on July 1, 1995. That is certainly our position that we feel that that fund was established and should be remained, and under the guise of that being established for parkland acquisition, we feel strongly that those fees were collected for that intent and purpose only, and to use them in any other way would be a misappropriation of those funds under which they were collected. So that's all I have right now. If anybody has any questions, or I can comment later. Thank you, Todd. Do we have a follow-up question? All right, we'll go with Mr. Stennett first. Well, I just want to ask you, and I don't want to put you on the spot, but do you feel we still need to collect for this fund? I mean, granted, Ivan heard us in the process of even attempting to acquire any more parkland. So are we still needed to charge to continue to put money into this fund? My question would be, does the community have all the parkland that it needs and wants from here to for? And if that's the case, then let's stop charging the fee, create a different fee or tax or user fee or whatever to fund improvements to the already existing parks, perhaps. It would not be borne by one industry. That's what I was getting to. I don't hear us screaming for more parkland. I don't hear us in the need of additional properties to acquire or even having the funding to develop those properties. So at this point, our biggest needs are the capital maintenance as well as improvements to several areas in our city in our current park. So I think that's something. Jerry, do you want to elaborate on that? Well, if I might, two things. One, it might be a little bit short-sighted today to say that we don't need any more park land. And two, the money that was collected that sits in the fund today was collected for that purpose. No, I understand that. And obviously that money would still be utilized for future acquisitions. But why keep putting money into a fund when really the monies should be borne by the whole community and we really have bigger pressing needs than acquiring more land at this time because our most recent purchases, we still haven't done anything in those two. Liberty and Broward Hill just now was able to come on board with archery. So we still have a lot of opportunity in our current lands, and I would just really question why we keep adding money to it when we could be adding that money somewhere else. Thank you, Chair. Okay, I believe Mr. Blues was next. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. My concerns have been pretty much stated by Councilmember Stennett, and that is that we would be, I think, making some mistakes if we try to acquire more parkland before we can make necessary improvements on current parkland. My question would be, is it really the best use of the park acquisition fund, which has accumulated substantial dollars, to let it sit? And I think that is a worthy conversation with the Home Builders Association. Could that money, for example, and I'm not necessarily advocating this, be combined with other revenue sources to make the kinds of improvements that our parks need? So I think that conversation needs to go forward because there may be better uses of that money than to hold it in abeyance for who knows how long before we can purchase more parkland. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Okay. Vice Mayor Gordon. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Well, Todd, thank you for speaking to the homebuilders' perspective. And the first thing I'd like to say is that page 8 is fairly stunning. The list of land acquisition from the fund, and I appreciate very much that urban county government has been able to use those funds to purchase all these properties. I don't remember seeing a list like this, so that's pretty impressive, and I thank you and thank the home builders. I think there are actually two different conversations we need to have, and different council members have spoken to this. I believe that Mr. Johnson's comment that it might be short-sighted to end this is on point because I believe this was begun because we wanted to be able to plan for parks in our future development. and we all know that when we, and we will be doing future development, even though we're in a down time right now with building and construction, we know that the future will hold development and we have to have a plan and a way to fund parks in new development. So I think that's one discussion. And also added to that would be what does our master plan say for needs of having parks. The other discussion is how do we fund our current needs for maintenance, all those things that we know we don't have for parks. So I would like us, when we're discussing this, to have kind of a bifurcated discussion and not be short-sighted in our future acquisition of land for any future development that might occur. Over the years, the school system has had the same conversation about we have future development, but no land for schools. And so there's been planning on the school side for that. So I just would hope that we will split this kind of into two pieces and recognize that we don't necessarily need to acquire land now, but we might in the future. And we don't know that yet with all the facts in. So thank you. Thank you, Vice Mayor. Mr. McCord. Thank you. I just wanted to come back real quick. I think, Vice Mayor, you kind of articulated it well. But over the last two budget cycles, this has come up. And, again, Todd, we had this conversation two years ago about I don't think folks do appreciate what the home builders have done. I don't think they have any clue who started this fund, why it's there. I don't think you guys have gotten the appreciation that you deserve, so first, thank you for doing it. But secondly, I would ask and challenge you to go back to the board and say that where the city is right now is we have a lot of land. We have $50 million in deferred maintenance and capital improvements, and the real need is in developing this and getting folks using this stuff. I think the home builders could benefit tremendously and tell their story better if we have an opportunity to utilize these funds in that direction. If we choose not to, that's fine as well. But I do think, as Councilmember Stenet said, that we need to find a way that the whole community adds to this type of a fund that can develop and acquire property, build on that property. But again, if we go back, council, to this budget, this administration balanced its budget on using this fund. And so now here we are. We're talking about this fund, and we find out, no, we can't use it for this. We can't use it for that. And so I want that not to be lost, that we sat down, and as a council, we had to – there was a certain portion of this, and we kept asking, have you talked to the home builders? Do we have a letter? And finally, we got that. So I appreciate everybody bringing their information today because a lot of times we don't sit in an educated place. And I think that what I would like to see happen from this day forward is, one, a very heartfelt conversation with you guys on how we can tell your story better, use those resources for our community. But secondarily, how does the whole community support parks because they are woefully underfunded and in a very tough spot as we go through this recession, especially with public safety needs and so forth. Parks is the one that always ends up eating it, and that's the unfortunate part of this. Thank you, Chairman. Thank you, Mr. McCord and Council Member Kay. Thank you, Chair. I just want to kind of add my sentiment in the same vein. It seems to me that the underlying intention of instituting that fee was to make more parks and parkland available to our citizens. It does not do any good to acquire more land if we can't. We're not using the land we have. I'm particularly familiar with Cardinal Run North, a large piece of property outside New Circle Road, as big as Shillitoe Park. It's never been developed in any way. it seems to me that the citizens would benefit from having government have the ability to develop some of that parkland and make it available more than they would benefit from additional acquisition of land that would just sit there. So I would be in favor of further discussion about this issue and, if at all possible, modifying the way in which those funds are now allocated. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Council Member Kaye. I wanted to sort of say a few words about this issue myself. I think that the council has got to look at the money put in this fund on a long-range outlook and not find a short-term fix. We will never know when a particular property may become available or matching funds may be available. And I think of one instance just in my district where the Raven Run Nature Sanctuary, a farm became available next to it, I believe it was 500 or 600 acres. and we were able to get a matching grant from state government to match with some money from this fund in order to acquire that property. And it's a passive park area, so we just have the land in inventory and it is protected for the long term. But there could be other opportunities at other parks that we have where land adjacent may become available and we have the money available to acquire that land. And I say this because I think it's a bad practice to take a long-term investment strategy to build parks for our community and to go in and take that money out and use it for maintenance operations or even adding new buildings or upgrades to the existing park because that's not really what it was designated for. So I concur with the vice mayor that I think we need to look at this as two separate entities, and I would like to see the funds continue to be held in the park acquisition fund until such time as we saw a good investment to make with that money. And I think even though times are tough now, these times will not be tough at all the time, and our economy will rebound. I think with changes that are being made in the government by our council and our mayor, we're going to be running more efficiently, and hopefully we'll have some positive cash flows coming up. We'll have more money to make investments to make improvements to parks in the future. Thank you. Anybody else wish to comment? Is there anyone else in the public that would like to comment? Okay, then I think we will go to the next item, and this is the golf management plan. And Lee Meyer, who is a representative on the Parks Advisory Board, is going to speak to that. Do you want to do an introduction or comment on that? i would and i'd especially like to do it at 11 o'clock when lee is going to join us instead i thought we might present the aquatic plan okay jill berthelson a long-time member of the parks advisory board representing the 10th district is here to make this presentation um so i'd like to turn it over to jill uh dr meyer is sitting at a doctoral dissertation committee meeting right now he'll be here at 11. so this is This meeting may be over mile 11. Let's start at 10. Well, I would doubt it, but with any luck, it will be before noon. Let me introduce Jill Burleson. She works for the state of Kentucky. Jill, if you'll tell us where you work in Frankfurt and how long you've been on the advisory board, and I'll give you this clicker, and that is forward and that is back. It's that simple. All right. If you'd like to use this, you may. Don't shine it in eyes. I have to answer. Good morning. My name is Jill Berthelsen. I work for the State Division of Water. I'm an environmental engineer. Okay. Oh, that's kind of dark. All right. I'm going to do the presentation on the aquatics management plan. Let's see. Forward. Where do I face it? Aha. Here we go. Okay. All right. The aquatic facilities in the county have seen major changes in 17 years. In 1994, we had an aquatics master plan, which recommended closing small neighborhood pools. And in that time, Dixie, Duncan, Garden Springs, Marlboro, and Valley pools were closed and removed. It also recommended one Lexington Aquatic Center. Instead, LSUCG rebuilt three of the existing pools so that Castlewood, Woodland, and Southland pools became aquatic centers. Slides, baby pools, zero-depth entries, larger decks, and concessionaries were added to these pools. The Tate's Creek Pool was renovated into an aquatic center in 2002. Douglas Pool was renovated in 2005, which leaves us now with four aquatic centers, which would be Castlewood, Woodland, Southland, and Tate's Creek, four Olympic pools, which are Berry Hill, Constitution, Douglas, and Shillitoe, and one neighborhood pool, which is Picadone. So during this time, the aquatics world has become more complex. In 2009, there was the Pool and Spa Safety Act. It required the city to spend $100,000 in pool anti-entrapment drain covers. The new ADA man lifts that need to be installed next year will cost $70,000. The new model aquatic health code is coming. There are evolving regulations on spray pads, and there's increasing concern by the public about sun protection. The setting for aquatics in central Kentucky has also changed. The surrounding communities have built a number of aquatics facilities. Georgetown built the Pavilion, which is an indoor facility, and then also recently opened an outdoor facility. Nicklesville opened an Aquatic Center in 2002. Richmond opened Paradise Co., which has two slides, a spray pad, a lot of shade. And there were two YMCAs that were opened with aquatics facilities, including Beaumont and North Lexington on Loudoun Avenue. Also, though, the YWCA pool did close in this time. The result is that Lexington is no longer the leading aquatic provider in the area. The city lost 20,000 patrons when the Nicholas School pool opened. The facilities have also become pretty dated relative to the other communities. This chart shows the attendance and cash flow and the cost effectiveness for all the pools. You see the four aquatic centers are at the top. They are generally about breaking even. And then these smaller pools there at the bottom, where's that light thing? The total shows that per person we have about 50 cents net cash flow negative. So Lexington's public swimming program has about a 50% cost ratio. This is in line with the fees and charges policy that says that for youth sports, we want to recover 50% to 70% of direct costs. For adult sports, we try to go 70% to 100% of direct costs. The community regularly requests new aquatic programming. Right now, the city has traditional programming, which covers a lot of groups. There are swim lessons provided. There are 27 different classes and five pools that provide services to 1,200 kids. There are senior aerobics at Piccadone where they have 1,700 people come to that. They have wet and wild Wednesdays. They had eight of those this year in June and July. There are also birthday parties and pool rentals. Some of the special things that were done with the pools this year, the Mayor's Initiative on Youth had over 3,600 people come to four free Monday admission days. There was Better Bites, which was a healthy menu program at Woodland and Southland, both very successful. They partnered with the Tweens Coalition. They'll be doing that more in 2012. And there were seven heat advisory days in 2011 when the heat index goes over 105. On those days, the prices of the pools are reduced to $2 for adults and $1 for children. There's other programming that's in the planning stages still. There's special needs aquatics programs and adult learn to swim programs, swim teams, aquatic exercise programs, aqua therapy, lifeguard training, and water safety programs. At its core though, the facilities still lack a feel for the new and exciting. The facilities are 15 or more years old, they're a little dated, they don't have contemporary slides, they don't have enough shade, they don't have the spray features that are found at a number of the other locations. The water slides in lazy rivers and spray features are now a part of the normal aquatics facilities elsewhere. We also don't have any indoor year-round swimming. The good news is there are a lot of options for reinventing the existing pools. We can add slides, we can add climbing walls and other interactive features. We can provide age-focused experiences. We can have experience that focuses on thrill-seeking teens versus more expansive baby pools. We can provide senior swim versus lap land swimmers. We can put spray pads combined with the pools or put them as standalone items. We can add more complete food and beverage offerings. Sunshade is increasingly important to our citizens and we would like to create an in-town aquatic destination experience. So the Parks Board is recommending closing some of the pools to reduce the budget load. We recommend closing Berry Hill and Constitution based on amenities, attendance, and scissor rating are all low at these two pools. They are also very close proximity to Castlewood and Tates Creek Aquatic Centers. Fewer pools and better features may help change our fiscal model. We're currently at a subsidy model. We have older facilities, a limited experience. That's pretty much where we are now. We like to be at a break-even model where we expect the users to pay for the direct operating costs, but we'll need newer facilities without direct competition. A positive cash flow model where they will spend more money for a completely different aquatic experience is pretty much a water park, a water theme park, excuse me. So this slide, where do I look at the thing? I have to look here, right? So here it shows the four aquatic centers, Castlewood, Woodland, Southland, and Tate's Creek. You can show that Constitution and Berry Hill are well within the three-mile boundary that is part of the comprehensive master plan, which says that it's reasonable for a citizen to travel three miles to get to a pool. So the Parks Department sent out a survey to over 10,000 Parks customers for input. They had 1,739 respondents. 63% of those respondents said that they used the public pools. 75% of the respondents said that the pools are an excellent or a very good value. The majority of the respondents agree with the same criteria that Parks Board is using for closing pools and ranking the closing factors from first to sixth the most important. Majority, excuse me, backwards. Wrong hand. Majority of people, no, I went the wrong way again, didn't I? There it is. The majority said a first or second or second or third should use lowest attendance or close together pools as a criteria. And most people ranked limited amenities or keep all open and close something else as fairly low. But everyone is divided on what to do once the pools are closed. We've split about half and half for those who wanted to close the pool and leave it until it's replaced with something else or close it and just reopen it if the economy improves. improve. So Parks is recommending a two-part pool improvement solution. The same survey, the citizens said we should keep the money where it replaces a lost amenity. A third said keep the money in parks, not the general fund. Another third said keep the money in the park where the pool was closed. And 17% said we'll take the money and improve features at the other pools with that savings. So what we looked at doing was demoing the pools and bathhouses. We have estimates at $40,000 for each pool to do that. The operating cost for both of these pools in 2011 was $50,000. Utilities were estimated at $20,000. So if we dedicate those same funds for three years, we would net $130,000 for improvements we could use elsewhere. We'd like to engage the neighbors in the replacement selection. Some of the ideas that have been discussed are a skate park at Berry Hill, or ball fields at Constitution Park. We could possibly raise swim lessons, swim teams, or season pass rates and dedicate that to these improvements also. Fewer pools create advantages. We have reduced operating expenses. We can drive attendance and revenue to the remaining pools. A good percentage of people will travel to another pool to have an aquatic experience. Mothers with small children, however, may not want to travel so much, so So splash plaids, fresh playgrounds in their local areas would help minimize that inconvenience. There may be some citizen interest in paying for these upgrades. The emission and season passes are below the neighbor's prices, but the look and feel of our pools is dated, so increasing those fees right now is not recommended. We could increase lessons and have a 20-visit pass rate. That might generate some new revenue because those are also below neighbor's cost. There may be interest and improvement surcharge. They asked on this survey, would you pay an extra $1 per visit or $10 per pool pass if the funds were dedicated to improving pool and aquatic centers? Three-fourths of the people said yes, and one-fourth said no. So the short-term, two- to three-year plan for the Lexington Aquatics. We would like to upgrade the core of the existing four aquatic centers. We'd like to add some new features, some more programming, create day-long interest for kids, adults, and seniors. We'd like to add some more food options, add some more color, just to attract and retain the interest in the pool. We would like to specialize with some lessons and feature capabilities for youth or adult swims after work. We'd like to add some lap swims at Shillitoe. Piccadome is used for seniors. Set aside some hours for seniors or lap swimmers, and also allow the swim teams to use the pool first thing in the morning. Spray pads. They are very popular. They don't have any standing water. They cost less to operate. A waste-to-drain spray pad runs about $115 per square foot. There's no holding tank. There's no recirculation of water. You can hold about 25 kids per 1,000 square foot. A 2,000-square-foot pad would cost about $250,000. If we wanted to use recirculation, that equipment would add about another $200,000. There's lower water use by the low-flow nozzles. We can also restrict the spray pad use or the features of it at certain times. We can have sequencing, which would only have about 40% of it on at any given time. There are three of these spray pads being built in Louisville right now, which we estimate we could have $8,000 a year in operating savings. Some of the areas that have built spray pads include Cincinnati, Dayton, Louisville, and Paducah. This is an example of the spray pad in the city of Dayton. There's a lot of features on here. They've got spray out here. They've got some good shade. They've got a play area over here, more spray features, a lot of space and a lot of features. This is something much simpler, much less expensive. Obviously, the kids are having a very good time. Other features that would increase attendance, we could add some climbing walls at Woodland and Douglas. The climbing walls will attract older teens, both boys and girls. They're actually portable. We can move them from pool to pool. A new baby pool or splash pad at Shilatow would be good. The current facility is small. It's inadequate. Castlewood and Shilatow would both benefit from better concession facilities. It would help attract longer visits. And we also need to investigate the pool at Picadome. Can we reduce the depth of it, make it more of a senior kid's pool? We also need to upgrade the restrooms at Picadome. So this is an example of one of the climbing walls. The kids can climb up the wall, fall back in the water. and obviously these kids are very excited about this. And you can see on the back of the pool here, there's holes in the pool and this can be picked up and moved. So these are ideal for attracting teenagers. Teenagers are hard to please. They will go where it is that they find the things they like to do. Shade structures. These shade structures cost, this is at Douglas Park, I believe. This one costs $10,000. and this is at Southland Pool, this one costs $17,000. So the near-term plan that we've developed would cost about $1.3 million in improvements. The suggestions that we would like to do would be at Castlewood, we'd like to update the concessions, add some shade. At Douglas Pool, we'd like to put a splash pad outside the pool area and add a climbing wall. Picadome, we'd like to study reducing the deep end and also redoing the restrooms. At Southland, we'd like to put in a new slide, update the shade, and add some more deck area. At Silto, we'd like to add a splash pad, enlarge the baby pool, and add some shade. Tate's Creek Pool is pretty much in good shape. We'd like to enhance the spray features a bit. At Woodland Pool, we'd like to add a new slide, a climbing wall, and put in a lap pool, a line of the lap pool. At Northeastern Park, in order to leave the swimming in the fountain at Thoroughbred Park, we'd like to add a splash pad there. We also need to add ADA lifts to the pool. So in total, some of these, you know, you can see are a little more expensive than others, but in total we come up to $1.33 million. In the longer term, the community really wants a multi-generational indoor community center with capability for swim meets, therapy, recreational water areas, fitness, track, etc. The Parks Department would like to work with the Senior Citizen Center and other health facility partnerships on this kind of facility. The citizens ranked this kind of facility very high in the Master Plan needs assessment. An indoor aquatic center was ranked number 5 out of 28, and a new Senior Citizen Center was ranked number 7 out of 28. The Master Plan recommended two recreation centers of about 25,000 to 30,000 square feet, which would cost about $8 million each. That would require a lot of collaboration with social services and parks to accommodate everyone's needs. So the Parks Advisory Board recommends that the Urban County Council adopt this plan and seek the financial resources to implement it. Thank you, Jill. Could you turn the lights up, please? Thank you. Council Member McCord, you're the lead-off questioner here. I'm doing this because Council Member Stenet has no screen, so it's actually for him just to get him recognized. I can't log in. You won't look over here. Okay. Oh, you're all right. Well, just give me a high sign then. Okay. Council Member Stenet, please. Thank you, Chair. Ms. Bertelsen, thank you so much for presenting this to us today. We appreciate the thought and effort that went behind it. This is something that I think many of us were looking for almost a year ago before we start planning the budget. It's helpful to have what ideas in the community are out there before we start planning our budget. So this will give us a lot of things to consider. Just going back a few slides, One of the things I saw in order to make our pools better that wasn't in here, and maybe you all did talk about, was marketing. One of the travesties, the Constitution pool in my district is we don't market it well. We don't tell people the pool is this way off the main artery. People, a lot of times, that move into the community don't know they're there and right down the street. So marketing has to be a big part of this. Even the pavilion in Georgetown marketed here in Lexington TV markets to get people there. I know a lot of people from Lexington drive there. So did you all discuss marketing and a plan to really get people through these pools if we're going to keep them open? Marketing all of our parks facilities has been a big discussion on our parks board meetings. I have a number of members of the parks board advisory members are here, and they can attest that, yeah, we discuss this a lot. Ways to market, ways to, you know, the fund guide is issued every year, and the pools are advertised in there. we've been talking about trying to have a better presence on Facebook just doing commercials maybe on GTV for some of the parks facilities marketing has been a big topic of discussion I think in terms of marketing I would really focus though separating out pools and separating out golf there are unique marketing patterns to both of those rather than tie them in with all of parks marketing because I think those two funds or those two programs should have their own funds and should be enterprise funds. They should be striving to break even, collecting enough revenue, the match expenses basically is the long-term goal of both of them, and we've really got to hone in that marketing. But getting away from that for a second, going back to some of the feedback we got from the public and looking at the cost center effectiveness, one thing that stuck out is we recommendation was to close Constitution and Berry Hill, But what did you all talk about Picadome? Why would we keep that one open and close the other two? Because Picadome has the second worst loss ratio. Picadome, you know, I think there were some major improvements for senior citizens, and I'm a firm believer that we need more aquatics for seniors, but any of those should be tied in with a new senior citizen center because they can offer the programming, and people are naturally going to go to the senior citizen center anyway. So that conversation before we upgrade Picadome should be tied into a new senior citizen center somewhere here in Lexington. Did you all talk anything at length about Picadome? And before we get into the golf discussion, I mean, that's a whole area that's underutilized, both in golf and in pools. So maybe Jerry can answer that. I'm just curious why we keep pointing at the Constitution and Picadome or Barry Hill when Picadome, to me, is losing money and there's better uses for that area. Good question, Councilman. Pickett Dome has been used almost exclusively the last four years by senior aerobics groups who overwhelmingly ask for a facility where the general public will not be allowed while they're exercising. Many of these seniors are very sensitive about their body shape. They don't like to be seen exercising around teenagers. We tried to attract this group to Berry Hill a couple years ago, put in a new entrance form, and all that, and they simply felt uncomfortable being around teenagers. The Piccadone pool is our smallest. It's not used by the general public except some children in the immediate community. So it seems an opportunity to provide a specialized senior aerobic facility or middle-aged aerobic facility. It's small. It has parking. So that's the idea there, not because of the attendance, but because it has perhaps an alternative specialized use. And that's similar to what the use for Meadowbrook is. But I guess I'm just looking at more long-term. Why invest capital into that pool? I obviously need some upgrades to it, rather than partnering with our senior citizen folks and looking at time, that programming in with our new senior citizen center. I'd be happy to put a picket on that list if money were available and a consensus in the community was available to spend the requisite dollars to build a multi-generational facility. I'd be happy to do that. Yeah, because I applaud our seniors who do utilize it. I think you're going to see a tremendous amount of other seniors as we all start aging. That's the biggest part of our population in the next 10 years are going to have that need. So we need to be thinking a lot longer than two years out on a senior citizen's amenities, and a pool of that type of recreation would be of value to many people. So I'd want to look at that conversation with our new senior citizen center, and before we'd spend a lot of extra money upgrading Picadome. I know it'll be good in the next couple years, but I think the conversation needs to really grow on that amenity. So I'm glad you are thinking that way as well because it sort of ties into the gulf at Piccadome as well. Is that something we want to still continue to do? Do we want to create more recreation activity at that area? So I know those are other conversations, but it all fits together. But in the interim, the seniors need a place to go, and they're really adverse to going to a general population pool. Sure, and I can definitely appreciate that. Now, given Constitution and Berry Hill, the recommendations there, are you proceeding with getting bids for demolition and then also alternative costs that should we demolish and take those pools out, what we can immediately put in there and what those costs would be. Where are we at on that track just so people are watching and can understand? Good question. Pending the outcome of this conversation, we're ready to go forward. There are a lot of very specific questions. You brought up a very good one, which is the possibility of the reuse of the bathhouse at Constitution with an alternative recreational amenity. I don't want to drag contractors through and ask six different questions. They get tired of that. in addition to which I can't very well ask for bids without having money in an appropriate place to actually pay for the product should we choose to buy it. So pending the outcome of this conversation, I'm ready to go forward to nail those costs down much more specifically. We were glad to hear that the original wild-ass guess of $75,000 at Demo the Pool turned out after two years of hard times in the community to be more like a $40,000 effort. So perhaps this is a good time for us to buy some contracting services. But I'll do it as soon as you give me the word that we want to go forward and get specific details. Is that $40,000 for both pools? We took them to Constitution because we thought that would be the more difficult given the space constraints. The pools are exactly alike. The land is a little different, but I'm confident the second one would be closer to $40,000 than $75,000. Okay, very good. Thank you. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Mr. Stenet. Council Member Myers. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Jerry, Mr. Hancock, can you stay up for just a second? Did you just say the second one is going to be $40,000 to $70,000, $40,000 to $75,000 on abating the pool? The two pools are exactly like. They're identical. Chester pools, same plans. I suspect that demoing both will be closer to the latest estimate we got of $40,000 than an estimate we got two years ago of $75,000. Okay, gotcha. Okay. Thank you for the presentation, and whoever wants to answer can answer, and I want to thank my dad for serving on that park advisory board. He's done an awesome job with the 8th District for several years now, and I appreciate that. When you go back to the survey, and I guess I will say that the 8th District, The citizens around Berry Hill, I think, are resigned to the fact that the pool is probably going to close. And earlier this year in the budget cycle, we had the conversation that if we were to do that, we've got to immediately abate the pool. And the council voted, maybe even unanimously, to put $75,000 in the budget to do that. It was vetoed by the mayor. Now your estimates drop down somewhere around $40,000. I guess the first thing I wanted to do is get on record that we've already had our first meeting, first neighborhood or community meeting that was advertised and everything, to begin that discussion of a skate park to replace the pool. I want to go back and say that we need the $40,000 or whatever it's going to cost to abate the pool if we're going to close it, and we need that immediately so that we don't have the eyesore there and the vanillism magnet and all the other things that come with that and the safety hazard. So if you consider that the pool is probably going to close, I would go to slide 13. And as part of the survey, citizens said keep the money where it replaces the lost amenity. 35% said keep the money in parks. Can you put 13 up on the screen for me, please? 30% said keep the money in the park where the pool was closed and 17% say improve features at other pools with savings now originally when you wanted to close these two pools it's always been because of our budget so on one hand it looks like that was the issue for closing these pools but at the same time we're talking about taking that money and moving it elsewhere to make improvements in other pools right down below the second bullet point there. So I guess my question is going to be, if you demo the pools, bathhouses, now the estimate is at $40,000 each. Operating for both in 2011 was $50,000. Utilities was another $20,000. And if you dedicate for three years, it nets $130,000 for improvements elsewhere. If we're closing these pools because of our budget, then why are we taking the net savings and just putting it elsewhere? You don't necessarily have to use it elsewhere. The last slide says we'd like $1.3 million to bring our pool assets up to snuff. I'm not suggesting that the remainder go elsewhere. It might go toward a ball field or toward a skate park there. That's your decision. The needs in pools is far greater than the modest savings here. And please keep in mind the $70,000 a year for closing those two pools, that's for a three-month season. Two months of FY12, June and July, have already occurred. Sure. So I'm not suggesting that the savings stay on those two sites. That's a choice I'd like you to make. Okay, well, then I would lobby for that. If we did this and we took for the first three years and we put that money back into those parks, because part of the concern about closing this pool, particularly if you don't do anything with it, is that's the front door to this neighborhood, this community. And if you take away the pool, as I've said before, the tennis courts are in disrepair. The playground, unfortunately we put $60,000, $65,000 into the playground when I first got in the office, but we put it in a hole back there. if we could take that money and put that net back into that pool, into that park for three years move the playground up, maybe fix those tennis courts maybe redo the basketball court and then put some money towards that skate park now you've brought real value to this community rather than just closing in a minute in the community so I'm in favor, I'm with you on closing the pool we need to do something different than what we're doing and we need to find monies to improve the amenities of the other pools and try to be more competitive with, you know, Nicholsville has their splash pool, and, of course, Georgetown has its facility. We need to move in that direction, particularly being Lexington, and I'm agreeing with that. But my vote would be that we look at that net savings for the first three years and put that back into those two parks. And then once we do that, then we take that net savings and move it towards other pools or however you want to do that. So I appreciate your work here. That's going to be my recommendation. And, in fact, if you're looking for a motion, Chair, at the end of this discussion, that will be my motion. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Myers. Vice Mayor Gordon. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I had two things. I know that our CAO, Mr. Maloney, is here, and there's been some discussion in this meeting. of a pool in the new Senior Citizen Center, which we all think is coming soon. But I'm wondering if you could tell us how soon you think are we in any discussions. I know we were in discussions about a Senior Citizen Center, whether we can anticipate anything within the year. And I don't mean to put you on the spot at all. I just think we need to have a realistic sense of whether we're very close at all to a new senior citizen center since this has been brought up in the discussion. We're not close, but we are still working with some folks on looking at other sites and opportunities with the site we have here. So we are continuing to work on those two sites. But nothing over the near horizon. Okay. I appreciate that just for purposes of thinking about that. And then I wanted to address the marketing, which Jill brought up in her presentation. We have had many conversations in the parks boards about marketing, and my sense is that we are perhaps held back by old policies. You know, people are on Facebook, they're on Twitter, they're on, you know, we get all the coupons, Groupon, you know, Pete's deals. Everyone is doing this. And so my recommendation would be that we ask our government, our administration, to look at bringing us into the 21st century in terms of our abilities to market so that a division like parks could go ahead and do some real marketing. I know the Parks Guide is good, but there are so many people in our community who never would look at that. And we need new modern technology on our side to do our marketing. We have a lot of great things in our parks, and many people don't even know about them. And so to that point, I think our parks have been somewhat hamstrung, and we need to be looking at modern marketing and how we might accomplish that for our parks, for everything in the parks, everything from aquatics to golf to everything. And so I guess I would ask our CAO what the status is, Mr. Maloney, for upgrading our marketing efforts. Richard, can you give us some sort of – I had heard in a Parks Board meeting that you were working on upgrading our abilities to market through Facebook and Twitter and those sorts of things. I think it's held back by a division like parks, which needs heavy-duty marketing. And that's what's going to be, I mean, recommendation from also when the golf comes up, how we're going to expand our Facebook. We're working with IT. We're working with GT3 and all those to try to get this out as quickly as possible. So there is a lot of marketing being looked at now as we speak to advertise our parks. Okay, so we'll have it again under golf. Thank you. Okay, Councilmember Kay. Thank you, Chair. Chair, a couple questions, if I can. The slide on page 5 has got the revenue, expense, et cetera. Yes, sir. We had this conversation the last time I remember. there was a question about the programs that the city sponsors where either the city pays from one account into another for children who come to the pool or children who come to the pool who don't pay because they're in a program. Are those figures included in here, or is there a way to separate those out so that we can get a better sense of what's real revenue and what's not? Let me explain what attendance and revenue is to see if that answers your questions. Attendance is everybody that walks through the door. Revenue is all of the revenue that we receive either in single-day admissions or through season passes. We offer the community and have for a decade an opportunity to get 50% off in scholarships for season passes if citizens, families will bring us evidence of free and reduced lunch or KTAP or other state assistance programs that they receive. We take that as prime facie evidence that there's a need. So students can get or families can get season pool passes that they use to come every day. I cannot tell you of the 176,000 people that came last year how many of those people are in a subsidized program. I can't do that. Okay, I'm sorry. My understanding was that in addition to that, there were some programs that bring children to the pools. Yes, there are many, many, many, many daycares that bring children to the pools, and they pay full attendance. They pay admission. So there are for-profit groups that bring children to the pools. They're counted in the attendance. They don't get a group rate. Okay, so I still, again, I still maybe either have a false memory or a misremembering. My understanding was that there were some LFUCG programs that bring children to the pools. Is that not true? Yes, yes, and that gets at the question of Barry Hill and Constitution, of Constitution primarily. Constitution, about half of their attendance is from our ESP program, which is a park-sponsored extended school program. We would easily take all of those children to Castlewood. Perhaps you're remembering that much of the attendance at Constitution is from our ESP program. So is there a way to separate those figures out so that we could see essentially? I asked Brian Rogers to step up here. He's been running the SP since its inception. Perhaps you can estimate, Brian, what that percentage would be. Well, that camp at Northern that goes to Constitution averages about 75 to 100 kids a week. And over the course of an eight-week period, 800 of those, I would say about 800 a week would go to Constitution pool. if I had to guesstimate right now, I can get better numbers for you. But there's no record that we could look at that says in any particular pool what part of that total attendance was actually from the ESP program? Well, no, not currently. And it's not just ESP either. The community center camps are allowed to go to all the different pools. All of Park's camps attend the different pools. tennis and swim camp. Okay, and right now those numbers are simply rolled into attendance. That's correct. And they are not generating additional revenue for the pools, but they're providing a service. Is that correct? That's correct, unless you want to attach concession revenue that those kids make, which would be minimal. That's correct. But, yeah, they're paying for the camp, obviously. So the revenue goes into parks revenue, but not necessarily that pool that they may use several times or many times. Okay. So going forward, that's information that I think would be useful to have as we make decisions about how the pools are being used and how the pools are being paid for, if that's possible. Thank you. Thank you, Chair. Mr. McCord. Thank you, Chair. Are you calling in for Council Member Stendon again? No, this one's actually for me. Thanks. Okay. Thank you. We can turn the lights back up too, please. A couple things. Just as a guiding statement from this conversation today is pools and golf need to make enough money to pay for themselves. I mean, at the end of the day, both of these things, however it works out, we need to do everything in our power to make sure that pools and golf fund themselves. And pools are off by 82,000, golf's off by about a million. So we've got a lot of work to do on one of those. But as Council Member Stenet said, those two things offer immediate revenue. And if you market those things and you do a good job of telling people where they are and what's going on and the things that we have to offer, we've got an opportunity to increase revenue for those two things immediately. But I want to, you know, a lot of times we bring our other hat into this chamber, the things that we do on the outside. and I'm just going to ask you to humor me for a second and let me bring my other hat in here and share what demographic information is coming our way. Because we've sat here and I've heard we've talked about seniors and kids and what we're going to do for them, but I don't, Vice Mayor Gordon, I think you said it very profoundly, we need absolute policy change. But we need policy change from an educated standpoint of what we're looking at demographically. This is what the world looks like right now. and 66. That is a shrinking demographic every single day. You lose over 1,000 World War II vets every single day. But that group is who we're sitting here talking about having folks at Picadon and the 10 folks who don't like the way they look, so they're going to exercise over here. That group is a shrinking demographic. What you have coming on the tail of that is 77 million baby boomers. The top end of baby boom is at 65 right now. 77 million. It's called the silver tsunami. It's coming. And everything that they touch has changed since they were born. And so our senior center needs to be looking at what is it going to be doing for the next 20 or 40 years as this group moves through, because they do not do the same things as this other group does. Gen X is 40 million. Smallest generation of Americans, yet it makes up a third of the workplace. This generation postponed getting married and having children until later. This is my generation. And basically, this is the group that has now had kids late in life. Gen Y, there's 67 million of these folks, second largest generation Americans. They didn't wait to have kids. So what you have is you have 100 million people having children right now. And it's a mini baby boom. So the median age of Lexington is 36, with or without UK factored into the equation. So the point of this is is that when we start talking about policy change and we start talking about seniors and kids, you're thinking about, like you said, Vice Mayor, a 20th century model. You're not thinking 21st century or even 22nd century. And so I hear us talking about a senior center and an indoor swimming facility, and yet we've got policies. We can't even take really corporate donation in a massive way. We can't name it something. And I'll use this example because it's the most crude and crass, But if big-ass fans came in here today and said, I'm going to give you $40 million, and I want you to name all your parks big-ass parks, exactly, would we take it? Oh, I don't know. I just don't know about that. So the bottom line to it is that we need to have a discussion policy-wise as to what we're going to do and not do. And Berry Hill is a great example. You know, for the last two, three years, we've thrown up Constitution and Berry Hill and said we've got to close them because of attendance. And then, you know, you look at Picadome and that doesn't quite jive. At the end of the day, we need to reimagine these parks completely. Picadome needs to be completely reimagined. Pool, golf course, the whole bit. It is a foregone conclusion that that place is not operating at maximum efficiency for this community. And it could be so much more. So much more. But I'll take Berry Hill, for example. Berry Hill, Council Member Myers has been approached by the skate community to put in a skate park. Okay, that's great. We're thinking we've got to tear the pool out to do that. You don't have to do that. Do you realize all the people that lit all of us up at the end of the pool year that said there's not enough lap swimming and UK closed it and what are we going to do? All my friends that are triathletes and so forth that were doing races, here sits a lap pool that people will pay us to use. If it's underutilized, why in the world can't we just have more lanes marked and just charge them? The schools will pay you, and those athletes will pay you to do it. You've got this rock wall thing. I appreciate you saying that. I went out to Philip Goll and Son the other day. They have an extreme interest in providing climbing opportunities. This is one I didn't even think about. But what if we ask them to support all of these types of things? Now we're not talking about just tax money and how are we going to rob Peter to pay Paul to get this stuff done. But at the end of the day, the vice mayor said it probably as succinctly as anything. We are not in this century at all. We are operating under poor policy. We are hamstrung by our own policy. We can't even turn it loose. We can't turn this parks advisory board loose like it should be, and we can't mark it the way we should because we are totally handcuffed. So I would be in total support of absolutely changing everything as it relates to parks because parks by far and away is our best calling card. It's the one thing that is positive in this community. So much of this government is negative. So much is you don't see it until something bad happens. Parks is the one positive place. And we should be doing everything in our power to support these folks and build this world-class facility. The problem is that we're 50 million in the hole. So at the end of this, I would look forward to whatever we can do, Vice Mayor, to move that policy discussion forward very fast. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. McCord. I'd like to ask a couple of questions. Mr. Hancock. I blew it up. One of the issues that came up during our budget deliberations for the current fiscal year was that there was not a plan for the closing of any of the pools that were proposed to be closed by the Mayor. And, you know, I'm a little bit concerned because of the way I interpreted what you said is you don't have a budget established to close the pools for the next fiscal year budget will be coming up in January. I think we're going to close pools that in order to accomplish it and have a good plan, we need to have a budget for that. So are you planning to have the numbers for us on that, say, in early January? Yes, sir. If you'll give me some direction as a group that you find this interesting but lacking the executable numbers to do that, We'll look at our budgets to see if we can not do some things and see if we can scrape up some money. There will be some savings if we don't operate those two pools in May and June. Yes, if you'll give us direction, we will try and find the money and identify what our shortfall is. Perhaps Councilman McCord and Myers can help us identify sources. All right. Okay, I'd also like to coincidentally look at the exhibits up on the slides. Maybe we can dim the lights just a little bit here. And, you know, while we were in the meeting, I looked at some of the numbers. I've reviewed them a little bit earlier prior to the meeting. But it looks like that if you look at the four top parks listed there, they are generating 86 percent of the traffic. This is the number of users. In other words, there's only about 25,000 users in the bottom five and all. There's about 150,000 in the top five. Also, if you look at the revenue and the net cash flow, the top four facilities actually are break-even on expenses and revenues, whereas the bottom five, which represent only 14 percent of our traffic, are losing quite a bit of money. So what I think would be an interesting exercise is if you could come back with a financial model showing what would happen if we concentrated on the parks that have the big traffic with regard to generating more traffic there. And, for example, you look at the five lower volume locations. Look at Douglas, for example. It has 2,400 attendants and only 2,100 in revenue, so the average revenue there is probably about 80 or 90 cents per attendee. and that also reflects, I'm sure, that we're subsidizing and helping some of the visitors to that park. As part of our plan, maybe we could come up with a way that we could have some type of busing and underwriting and we could maybe bring people from one area to another to utilize our parks so we could increase the operating capacity of the larger parks. Then we could invest more money there, do higher upgrades on those parks. At the same time, I think George Meyer's idea is excellent. The money that we're saving by closing some of these other parks, maybe the plan would be the money saved for the first two or three years would go back as a reinvestment in those parks to upgrade them for alternate use. And that was a couple of other questions that I wanted to ask, but maybe we could turn the lights back up now that we've looked at that chart. Do we already have, for any pools that are proposed to be closed, do we have an alternative use plan for that facility or for causing the pool? The communities in both of those locations have something of a consensus. I don't believe we've done specific survey work or had public meetings with them. But in the case of Constitution, there is a large feeling that an additional baseball field is needed. We have girls, fast-pitch softball, playing three games a night over there because there are no fields to provide for them. In the case of Berry Hill, Councilman Myers has done a good job coming, interviewing, questioning, and he has concluded at this point that a skate park is of a high desire, high probability of success that people would attend there at Berry Hill. So we have tentative conclusions on both of those pools, alternative recreational amenities. All right. Now you're going to be coming back for a special meeting on December 1st. Do you think you could work on this a little bit and bring that information back to the meeting on the 1st? Just sort of ballpark numbers of what might happen if we close some pools and move some of the attendees from one pool to another location, look at the revenue estimates of what would affect our bottom line and then some estimate of, you know, even if it's a ballpark number, to renovate any pools that are closed. We'd be happy to put some effort in that. That's just a couple weeks away, but we're happy to make that effort to try and use some data that's out there that might suggest how many people might transfer from Pool X to Pool Y. The issue of busing from Douglas has a series of issues associated with it, but we're happy to take a stab at all that. I'm not necessarily saying move from one pool specifically to another. I just pointed out that, Douglas, obviously you had, it was a question about subsidies, and you can look at the, for example, Constitution is probably about $1.75 per person. Berry Hill is about $2.50. Douglas is about $0.75. Shillitoe, it looks like it's about $2.50. Picadome is $2.20. and you compare that, the overall average for all users is $3.40. So it would appear that we're getting more like $4 from the top four locations. That's probably related that we're selling, I guess, food revenue in there also. I think the bottom line is that those four aquatic centers are newer. They have more amenities, more features. They're bigger. They're sexier. They have zero depth entries. They're just more fun. They're simply newer, and that's where kids want to go. They want to go where their friends go, and they tend to go where there's more excitement. And our other pools below the box don't have slides, don't have shade. They're not nearly as interesting. Okay. Well, that's what I think we're looking at. We'd just like to see a business plan of maybe what might be possible. All right. I think that's all the questions I have. I believe Julian Beard, Council Member Beard, you have a question, sir. Thank you, Chair. Jerry, there's a little bit of disconnect, not only for me and all of us up here, but maybe for the public in general. 176,000 attendants, but how many citizens actually use the pools? Does citizen A go every day? Does he go every other day? Do you have any way to measure that at all? And if you did have a way, would it not be a valuable piece of information to have? Yes, it would. We don't have connectivity at our pools, and so we haven't conceived of a way to have unique admission identification. We can't identify Mrs. Smith each time she comes. We only know that she came today and paid a dollar, and she'd come tomorrow and pay another dollar. The survey that we did of 10,500 people told us how many times the respondents told us they came. But that's a group of 10,500 people in the community that already are participants in parks. They've signed up for something. They've bought a pass. They've done something. There are that or more numbers of people who aren't in our database, and so we couldn't respond to them. We don't have a unique admission technology in place. We can guesstimate. I'd hate to stand here and throw that number out, but I don't know what that number is. We have the same problem with golf, maybe even worse. And we do have some techniques to be able to come closer, I guess, because we have people sign in. Well, the golf courses have connectivity. Some of it's dial-up, but we're much closer there than we are at our swimming pools for cost reasons. I mean, those pools are only open 10 weeks of the year, and there's nine of them. We have not invested in a portable technology that would uniquely identify each. I was figuring 80 days, roughly, because you leave some of the aquatic centers open later than you do the others. and did a little quick math, and it's 4,400 individuals using 176,000 admissions, you know, if they were going every other day. And I'm sure you have a lot of that, especially at the aquatic centers. The same people are coming back. Absolutely. Yes. and probably in all of them, though. I would guess that Picadome, you know, it's a discrete number of folks that are coming to use that pool for a specialized purpose, and nobody else uses it for the most part, anyway. But to be able to zero in on how many of our citizens we're touching, we're touching some of our citizens 40 times during the summer, and we're touching 96% of our citizens, not at all. There are lots of other pool opportunities in the community. There are private clubs, there are neighborhoods that have pools, and there are surrounding communities that have pools. And there are some people that haven't been in a pool in two years. Yes. Yes, sir, you're right. Thank you. Thank you, Chair. Council Member Kay. Thank you, Chair. One more question about that same chart. I failed to notice it in the first go-around, but now I see the asterisk at the bottom, that the expenses of the seasonal maintenance workers and pool coordinator salaries are not included in that chart. It would be useful if you can provide those figures overall. It may be separate. or if you can allocate those in a reasonable way across the pools, that would be even more helpful. But simply the raw numbers would be helpful so that we can get a better estimate of what the total cost of running those pools is. Thank you. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Council Member. Council Member Myers. I'm sorry, Mr. Myers. I skipped over there a minute ago. That's okay. Thank you, Mr. Chair. You know, Council Member McCord brought up the issue of lap pools. and so that brings an interesting point to the conversation. When you looked at your survey, were there any questions about lap pool? We asked people if they would prefer to set aside a pool for lap swimming or if that was their primary pool interest and the data was not overwhelming one way or another. It's a relatively small percentage, but those people are vigorous and repeat users relative to the number of recreational pool users. Is that in the survey anywhere, in the PowerPoint? No. Okay. Well, let me ask you to do this. Berry Hill is an Olympic-sized swimming pool, correct? No, it's 25 meters. 25 meters? Yeah. What is Olympic size, 50? 50. Okay. We have Olympics at Tate's Creek and Shiltoe only. Okay. Is $25 long enough for lap swimmers? Absolutely. And then it's, what, about eight lanes? I think that's right. Am I reading this chart right that says Barry Hill lost $16,705? Yes, sir. We took in $9,000, and our expenses were $26,000. Okay. I would ask that the Park Advisory Board go back and see if it can figure out a way to survey people who would use a lap pool rather than just an overall survey and then have a small number of those respondents favor lap pools. As Councilman McCord said, there's triathlons. My wife did one a couple years ago. There's all kinds of people that if you get to the right organizations, you could probably get some pretty good information from them. Before we close that pool, let's look at the opportunity of having a lap pool. And the second thing I would say is, Mr. Meyer. Is that right? Could you come up just for a second? You're the chair of the advisory board, right? Correct. And I think I remember serving with you on the University Senate Council when I was at UK. You did, right. Yes. So welcome today. I had a specific question for you. The vice mayor is a member of your board. Right. She talked earlier about being hamstrung by policy, and really not only this committee but the body of the council is the policymaking arm of the government. Could you, as a chair, send us a memo with a list of policy change recommendations that specifically get at the things that the board, the things that are inhibiting the board from doing all they'd like to do? Yeah, we've really been focusing on pools, and in a few minutes we'll talk about golf, and we've thought about those policy changes relative to those two enterprises. So I think we're prepared to do that right now. And I'd want to go back to the board to get a little bit more deliberation, to think a little bit more broadly. But I think that's a great suggestion. Okay, and definitely if you could start with these two, pools and golf. Because if it's policy, we can just change the policy. Excellent. Okay. So how soon can we look forward to that? We don't meet until January again. Okay. So sometime early in the year. Does that fit your schedule? Whenever you can do it. And what we might want to do is, when we talk about golf, we have a specific recommendation there that you could act on immediately or at least deliberate on. I mean, the committee is deliberating and take it to the full council if you'd like, but we can talk about that in a few minutes. Okay. Good. Thank you. Thank you, Chair. Okay. Thank you. Does anyone else want to add a comment on the aquatics program? If not, I suppose we're now moving over to golf management and Lee Meyer. You're back on the hot seat now. So welcome again. Thank you. That's probably Jerry calling me to see if I'm here. Say, where's the equipment here? There we go. Well, thank you for inviting me to be here on behalf of the Parks Board. I'll start by introducing myself. I'm Lee Meyer, and I know many of you on the board, and I was already introduced. I've been chair of the Parks Board for a couple years now. And what I want to do, and I'm also an economist, professor of agricultural economics at the University of Kentucky. And so, Mr. Ford, you know, I look at things from an economist's perspective many times. And so feel free to ask those questions. I think I've asked of the Parks Board some of the same questions that you do, and we'll present you some data. One of the things, and I laugh because I am the least likely person to be here talking about golf. I play golf about once every six years in a departmental scramble. I have been on the golf courses. But I also think that that's a good reason for me to be here, not because I think I've taken a dispassionate view of this role of parks. So what I decided to do is really start, Mr. Lane, with the recommendations first. And then I'm going to give you some background on the policy. We'll get into some of the details. We can spend as much time on that as you find valuable, or we can move on and talk about some of those policy changes that we recommended. One of the things that, what the Parks Board has done is really taken a deliberative perspective on the golf enterprise. Over the past couple of years, we've recognized that there's some issues going on, that this is important. And so we started out by really looking at the role of golf in our community. So what we wanted to do is, so we looked at this and we said, Gulf is really like the other elements of the Parks Department's portfolio. It's important to offer. It's different in some ways. It's a land-intensive operation or land extensive. It's intensive with regard to resources. The greens fees are much higher than any other fees that we charge. and what we decided after we looked at that is that golf really is important for this community. It serves a lot of people in this community. It's an expectation for the community. And so from the perspective of citizens, we decided the parks were deliberated on and acted and said we think that golf is a public service that should be provided to all citizens and gets to Fayette County at a reasonable price. And so that was the perspective. But at the same time, we have to be judicious and responsible in how we do that. And I'll talk more about that. Mr. Myers mentioned about the policies, and one of those policy changes, which I'll justify in a few minutes, is the ability to be more flexible in price setting. And that's hindered and actually caused some of the problems that I'll describe in a few more minutes. So what we decided to do from a more operational perspective is to, based on this belief of the role of golf in this community, what we wanted to do is to be effective in how we implement that. So one of the elements is to be able to adjust fees to meet market conditions. Market conditions have changed dramatically in the past two to three years. The competition has changed. As someone said, no one is charging past retail prices for golf anymore except Parks Department. And so that's led to some financial consequences and some much higher losses than we have otherwise had expected. And then the part in terms of being responsible management is how do we cut our costs down. So what we'd like to do is to look at a way where we can adjust fees to generate greater revenue and at the same time be aggressive in terms of reducing our costs so that we can return to a break-even. The goal is not to be profitable but to be in a break-even situation. So continue to be more efficient. One thing that has popped up, and we ask others about this, and I'll tell you how we did that in a moment, but the idea was can we privatize? Could we just contract our golf courses out to somebody else to manage them, and would that be more efficient? And after talking to managers of golf courses and other municipalities comparable to ours, we find out that really that has not worked. There's been by no means is that a general trend. There's some problems with that. if someone does that in the short run, what sometimes happens is there's an exploitation of those resources. So to maintain a golf course is a long-term investment in terms of maintenance, fertilization, weed control, and all those kind of things. You can run a golf course for a short while without doing that, but then it's going to deteriorate. So only if there would be long-term benefits and the Parks Department, by being part of the public, captures those and the people who have experimented with privatization have not found that to be beneficial. Our long-term plan, and this is probably one of the things that you'll be asking and want to talk more about, is to really take an assessment of what our golf resources are and see if we need, in the long run, do we really need this many? And if not, how could we move it into some other productive use for the community? So, you know, we are, I mean, that's the hard question. No one wants to ask those open, closed questions. questions, but that's on our portfolio to dig in over the next year and to look at that very carefully. And then our goal on a shorter-term fiscal basis is total cost recovery. So here's some of the background. Golfers probably know something about this. Other golfers might not. we have a reputation for having good golf opportunities in Fayette County we have a diversity of types of courses and while I said before that I'm not a golfer I have lots of friends who are and so over the last few months I've asked them what do you think about this or what's your perspective on this and it's all consistent with the discussion we're having this morning they're offered at competitive rates and affordable rates. While we haven't done any surveys on this, anecdotally, I've had several say, well, raise the green fees a couple bucks, but keep providing that service for me. And we'll talk more about how you do that. When we talk about pricing flexibility, what we want to do is have the ability to differentiate prices for different clientele groups. and golf certainly contributes broadly to this community. Well, one other thing on that, too. I mentioned I'm an economist, and we don't have time to dig into this, but I asked a colleague about the economic impact of golf, and there have been lots and lots of studies all over the place that we'll start going through those and look at what the economic value of golf is to the community. But when I just did a brief overview of those, there are financial benefits to communities that come from golf, and that's another reason why it's justified under Parks' portfolio, not just because of the direct benefits to our citizens, but it provides a broader base even to those non-participants. Here's our five golf courses, Meadowbrook, Lakeside, Tate's Creek, Picadone, and then Kearney Hills. Kearney Hills is the premier course, hosts some very high-quality tournaments. Picadome is the most recently purchased golf course. One of the cost issues there is the debt, the repayment on the bond to buy that, and you might want to discuss more of those details with Jerry. It was also by acquiring that golf course, there were multiple issues for its acquisition. partly because of the land use and the quality of the land there and floodplain and issues like that as well. I mentioned about the economic benefits of the community. There are, if you go through and look at how golf fits in, it's not just the private courses that people play on. They come here, they come, they extend stays because of golf course, So people will come to go to U.K. football games or Keeneland, and they'll add golf at some of our courses as well as the private courses to extend the time while they're here. And obviously that's good for our reputation and good for our bottom line as well. We've hosted different championships, and as I said before, we know anecdotally about some of the benefits, But when you look at the in-plan studies more broadly, they generally support that there are substantial financial benefits for communities from golf. I'm not going to go through all this. You can read this. Like a lot of other activities, golf brings different benefits in many different ways. Some of the opportunities we have are that public golf offers that's unique, is kind of programs that youth can participate in, senior citizens can participate in. We have flexibility to have tournaments and events, and that's all the value of having these public courses available. To extend this, most people think, when you talk about parks, they think of the big green spaces we have, Shiltoe, Masterson, parks like that. But the golf courses also contribute to that green space in the community. And the way we do that is very important. They are, Mr. K., potentially chemical intensive. The Parks Board has been moving away from that, adopting sustainable practices, and is documenting that path. So I think we've done it. I won't take credit for that. I'll give credit to the Parks Board and its leadership, or not the Parks Board, the Parks staff and its leadership, for recognizing those issues and being proactive in terms of doing that. When we look at the water issues and the EPA agreement, that ties into this too. Having these green spaces available is a very positive thing for our community. Now, what brought all this issue to the table? Why am I here? Why did we spend two years, the parks for time, looking at this? Well, as everybody knows, the economy changed dramatically. We had a strong belief that the demand for golf was on an upward trend and it was going to continue that way. We expanded golf opportunities privately throughout the community. So we had that going on, and then the economy crashed, and that had dramatic impacts on golf. It is more expensive than some other activities, and the difficulty with the economy hurts some groups more than the others. And so what happened is that nationally the number of players decreased. At the same time, more courses were being developed, and so as an economist and any reasonable citizen can see that you have a crash of increasing supply and decreasing demand, and that's not good for prices. So here's what's, if you look at this chart here, you can see, and this illustrates a couple things, what happened with both revenue and what happened with rounds played. So if you follow my description there, since over the last 11 years, you can see that there's been a downward trend in the green line of rounds played. And revenue has basically stayed flat. So it's stayed flat through most of that time. And then when I was talking about the last couple of years, revenue started going down. And when I show you the whole balance sheet, you'll see how that showed up. So here shows our revenue. As I mentioned, it was fairly flat through 2009, and then the last couple of years, we crashed. Expenses stayed pretty flat. And the expense part of it is very important because golf is a high fixed-cost enterprise. If you look at it from a business perspective, as an economist, the marginal cost of providing more golf is virtually zero. You can bring the revenue, the cost is not going to change. If the number of rounds played on a course is 200 during this time period and it goes up to 220, we've got 20 more units of revenue and virtually no more cost. And that shows up here. So we had the net revenue there has been back and forth. 2007 was negative, but then we actually were positive in 2009. So we have a history here of having a balanced return to Gulf. And so I don't want to – I'm not showing a picture here where if you go back five and ten years, that there's been this downward trend, and we really have to dramatically change things. It's a short-term turnaround, and we think that while we need to keep maintaining those – keeping that cost structure as low as possible, generating some more revenue can bring us back to break evens where we want to be. Here's, and I'm not going to, I won't spend any time on this, or very little time on this. Here's the impacts on, or the balance sheet for the different courses. What you should focus on here is rounds played. So we had a total of about 89,000 rounds played this past year. Yes. Yeah, that's why I'll skip over it. It would be all right if I asked a question at this time. Because in reviewing these numbers, it appears that for each round of golf that we're currently having on our golf courses, that we lose about $13.50 per round. And, you know, one of the concerns that I've had is that there was discussion about trying to promote lower pricing or more promotional pricing, but we're actually competing with private golf operators in the area, too. So then it comes government, you know, funded and subsidized versus private ownership. And being an economist, maybe you could speak to that a little bit. Okay. I was really, Mr. Ryan, I did the same thing you did. I looked right to what the cost, basically subsidy per round was. And I took, it was about $10 because I looked at the PL with admin there rather than that debt part because there's some issues going on there. But regardless, that's higher than it should be. There's lots and lots of services where there's park services that are provided by others out there. There's swimming. There's the Y that provides swimming opportunities. There's our partnerships. There's with Little League and soccer and all those franchises. And so there's this really broad continuum of the kind of activities that we provide in this community. And that can be provided other ways. If you go on over in the Reynolds Road area, the big basketball thing there, you know, and it has its own, has indoor soccer and those kind of activities. So we recognize that there are private sector roles here, but the Parks Board feels very strongly that golf is an appropriate service for the parks and that there should be a balance between the private sector and the public sector here. So that's been how our deliberation has gone in that area. Well, in the face that the number of rounds at play have been declining in the golf industry and we still have capacity, do you think there would be any possibility of maybe closing one of the golf courses and adapting it to another use, like soccer, for example? There's a huge demand for soccer. Has that been a discussion you've had? Yes, that's been a discussion point. What we feel to, we're faced with strong financial issues right now, and repurposing a golf course is expensive. And so the best financial path in the short run is to try to get more rounds played on our courses. And hopefully that would expand the whole golf enterprise and the whole community. and then take another look at perhaps repurposing a golf course. So coming back to the council with a plan, and I mentioned in the beginning, the potential for Picadome. Is that something that needs to be repurposed? If so, what would it look like is a different type of park facility, and what would it cost to get us there? but that would actually be more expensive in the short run than just trying to continue to get more rounds played there. Okay, very fine. Just a technical note, my system is out here, so I'm going to pass over the management of this meeting to the vice mayor. Sorry about that. Well, now, is your vice chair here? No, he's not. Okay. All right. Well, hello. Next, then, we do have a couple more council members who have questions. Council Member Beard. Thank you, Vice Mayor. Well, first, I guess, there needs to be a minus sign by the $1,195,104. We've got them everywhere else, and they have to foot out. We're down, what, 78,000, 80,000 rounds? Right. Which is 50% of what it was, roughly. Set. Let's see. Did we have rounds? Yes, that's generally true. Okay. Jerry says that's true. Pardon me? Jerry says that is true, the year reduction in number of rounds played. Is it at all possible to be able to ratchet up over some extended period of time to even get back where we were when, in fact, golf nationwide is plummeting? You have to talk to some experts about that. Mike says that there are some who feel like golf has bottomed out and that might even be increasing a little bit. I don't think we can make any decisions based on that until we see something change in terms of number of rounds played. But we do feel that if parks has the opportunity to do some discounting, that will not only bring golfers. It's not just a zero-sum game of bringing golfers from other courses. It's to get people to play more golf. And so we think that prices and current price structure has discouraged golfers who are advocates of the parks courses. And so by discounting that, that we'll be able to get increased rounds that way. Now, I have no idea what level we get back to, but with our costs not changing, that seems like a reasonable strategy to reduce the subsidy that we have right now. Well, it may be a wish, but I don't know whether it's a valid one. You know, there are two golf courses in Fayette County that have gone bankrupt already. One of which was, I guess, somewhat comparable to Kearney Hills as far as its quality. And the Champions is out, so to speak. I guess it's still operating, but operating with a new owner or operator. I just don't, I guess I don't see why we're in competition with the private sector when they are taxpayers and we ourselves aren't. Now, I'm not saying we do away with golf, but I think we have to, my personal opinion is that we have to pare it down somewhat as to the number of courses. And that's, you know, everybody's got opinions, and that's mine, but I'm not by myself. I think the position of the Parks Board is that the most reasonable fiscal strategy, strategy is to do some discounting, go into next year, and then see where we are after that. And that because any strategy to try to make a radical change is actually going to be more expensive in the short run than the long run. Well, we've been talking about doing something about golf now for, to my starting knowledge, three or four years. And now we're going to start to do something about golf, I guess. And then we're going to have to wait and see if that works. it's a drain on our budget to say the least. And I think that we don't need this many golf courses. And as I say, I'm not by myself. Thank you. Thank you, Chair. I'm happy to report my system is up and running now. And the first thing I'd like to mention is that several of the council members will be going to a meeting that starts at noon, and that's about eight minutes from now. We will not have a quorum at that point. So I would like, there are a couple of people that wanted to make a comment. I'd like for you to limit your time to two minutes, please. Thank you. I'm sorry, Council Member Martin, you're on. Okay. Thank you, Chair. I appreciate you coming to talk to us about this today. I have no doubt of the importance of golf to economic development in Lexington. As Council Member Beard indicated, though, the question is who provides that service to the public. Clearly, we've experienced a consolidation of the golf market, both nationwide but also in Kentucky and in Lexington. And unless we have some numbers that the overall size of the golf market is going to rebound in the near future, we have too many golf courses chasing too few golfers. And so at that point, our efforts to increase the number of golfers at our courses by discounting, which we as a government can do because we can operate at a loss and private business can't. So to the extent that we are able to undercut the market because of taxpayer subsidies, we are going to essentially put private companies out of business because we're going to take their golfers from them. And so do we have any information that indicates that the size of the golf market in Lexington is going to rebound? Mike, do you want to address that? Sure. Yeah. Hello. Studies have shown that there's this thing called the 2020 outlook, and that is by the year 2020, they foresee golf rebounding to even bigger numbers. It's part of the Tiger Woods phenomena that the youth that Tiger Woods got into the game will be leaving college, joining the workforce, and begin playing golf. It's also important to remember that 80% of all golfers play public golf, and that public golf courses is what feeds the country clubs. That's what creates golfers for them. I'm getting the stop signal from the chair, and I appreciate that. My concern, though, is if we have to wait until 2020, we're going to be the only person left standing, the only provider of golf left standing. And so I'm going to make a motion that the committee recommended to the full council adopt a closure plan for Kearney. And so at the end of this calendar year, gentlemen. And so I'm making a motion that the committee adopt to the full council a plan for the closure of Kearney at the end of calendar year 2011. So move. Anybody willing to second? Do we have a second on that? I'll second it for discussion. I'll second it for discussion. Okay, we have a motion and a second. Mr. Blues. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Are we not going to continue this discussion on December 1st? Yes. Yes, we are. On December 1st, we're going to have a master plan update for the Parks Department, and this subject will be discussed in more detail at the time. And this presentation hasn't really been concluded yet. I see several more pages here that Professor Meyer has. And also, we're going to be without a quorum in about three or four minutes. So that's just the beginning of my reasons for not supporting this motion. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. All right. Okay, Mr. Myers. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I seconded it just so we could have a discussion. I guess one of the questions that I have are how real are these numbers on this slide right here, and where did you guys get the numbers from? Because one of the things that some of us have been looking at in terms of enterprising golf and trying to figure out the true expenses of each course is that there are a lot of costs associated with golf that are in sort of the golf general fund. There's some expenses that are itemized in PeopleSoft by course, but there are other expenses that are not. And there are questions as to which employees are really being assigned to which golf courses as to whether or not these numbers are truly accurate. The numbers that you see here are accurate per golf course, although PeopleSoft may not reflect what you see. This information is 100% correct. Can we get the background spreadsheets that itemize things out that aren't able to be shown in PeopleSoft? Yes. And it's also one of the things that we are working toward correcting, the way the budgeting process is and the way expenses are budgeted to each golf course, including personnel. Yeah, and that would be one of the motions that I would make whenever this conversation is to that point, is that we mandate that parks itemize each one of these golf course expenses so we know exactly what's being attributed to each course. And that's something that we have wanted to do for a long time. Now, there are some things like utilities, when you have like Tates Creek Golf Course with the pool, and that's tough to designate as far as expenses of personnel and things. we want that to be designated to each course. Okay, so are you guys already in the process of doing that? Yes, we are. What needs to happen for you to be able to complete that? Part of the issue is the way the accounting has been set up. Actually, when the creation of PeopleSoft began, all of golf was lumped into...