# Council Work Session - December 5, 2011 > Auto-transcribed civic record · December 5, 2011 - **Permalink**: https://meetings.lexingtonky.news/meeting/2280 - **Source video**: https://lfucg.granicus.com/player/clip/2280?view_id=14&redirect=true - **Date**: 2011-12-05 - **Last revised**: July 17, 2026 - **Length**: 25,375 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 A Council Work Session was presided over by the Mayor on December 5, 2011. The meeting included 13 agenda items, with the council taking 14 motions and votes throughout the session. Three members of the public provided comments during the meeting. The council approved several significant items, including docket additions, budget amendments, a Transfer of Control Agreement, a Mountain Bike Trail Project, a Bluegrass Family Health RFP, property acquisition, and traffic stop requests. The session also featured informational presentations on public safety staffing and an IT pay study, as well as a report from the Environmental Quality Committee. A Santa Claus Program Announcement was presented for informational purposes. Council Reports were postponed to a later date. ## Attendance **Present:** - Dan Dotterweik - Margaret Ballard - Chris Bartley - Matt - Council Member Lane - Council Member Henson - Council Member Crosby - Council Member Gordon - Council Member Ellinger - Council Member Blues - Council Member Farmer - Council Member Martin - Council Member Stennett - Council Member Beard - Council Member McCord - Commissioner Mason - Chief Jackson - Assistant Chief Jordan - Lyle Hanna - Tim Bailey - Elizabeth - Charlotte - Mr. Martin - Ms. McGee - Joe Venari - Pat - Lieutenant Riley - Mr. Reed - Commissioner Driscoll - Commissioner Graham **Late:** - Council Member Lane - Council Member Crosby **Absent:** None recorded. ## Votes and Decisions All motions during this meeting passed by voice vote. **Docket and Agenda Items** Council placed on the docket a resolution authorizing the Mayor to execute a renewal confirmation with Humana to renew the 2011 contract from January 1, 2012, until the 2012 Humana contract is finalized and approved by Council. Motion by Council Member Henson, seconded by Council Member Ellinger [timestamp: 0:11:26]. The docket was approved on motion by Vice Mayor Gordon, seconded by Council Member Crosby [timestamp: 0:12:29]. The docket was subsequently amended [timestamp: 0:12:59]. **Budget and Financial Matters** Council approved budget amendments reallocating $72,000 from professional services to capital for construction projects. Motion by Council Member Beard, seconded by Council Member Ellinger [timestamp: 0:14:06]. Council approved the transfer of control agreement between Time Warner and Insight Communications under the existing franchise agreement. Motion by Vice Mayor Gordon, seconded by Council Member Ellinger [timestamp: 0:16:14]. An amendment to item H was approved, changing the contribution amount from $12,862 to $17,862 for the mountain bike trail project with the Kentucky Mountain Bike Association. Motion by Council Member Ellinger, seconded by Council Member Blues [timestamp: 0:19:32]. **Property and Services** Council approved the RFP for prescription drug benefits under the new system for Bluegrass Family Health [timestamp: 0:21:10]. Council placed on the docket a resolution authorizing the Mayor to execute a certificate of consideration and accept a deed for property at 401 Blue Sky Parkway, with payment of $250,000 plus closing costs. Motion by Council Member Lane, seconded by Council Member Blues [timestamp: 0:22:46]. **Traffic and Infrastructure** Council directed traffic engineering to place a multiway stop at the intersection of North Eagle Creek Drive and Eagle View Lane. Motion by Council Member Crosby, seconded by Vice Mayor Gordon [timestamp: 0:23:48]. Council directed traffic engineering to place a multiway stop at the intersection of Squires Road and East Hills Drive due to collisions. Motion by Council Member Crosby, seconded by Council Member Lane [timestamp: 0:24:20]. **Additional Motions** Council forwarded the sanitary sewer private property ordinance to Council. Motion by Vice Mayor Gorton, seconded by Council Member Henson [timestamp: 0:28:04]. The NDF list was approved [timestamp: 0:203:16]. Council postponed council reports until after the full council meeting. Motion by Council Member Martin, seconded by Council Member Farmer [timestamp: 0:47:15]. The meeting was adjourned [timestamp: 0:47:46]. ## Budget and Financial Actions The meeting addressed two significant financial matters: **Property Purchase** The body approved a payment of $250,000 for the purchase of property located at 401 Blue Sky Parkway. **Firefighter Retirement Payouts** An appropriation of $1,700,000 was approved to cover payouts to 40 retiring firefighters. ## Public Comment Three members of the public addressed the board during this meeting. **Dan Dotterweik** [timestamp: 0:01:04] spoke regarding the Computer Services Salary Survey. He raised concerns about outdated job descriptions, noting that the study failed to consult with managers and did not adequately account for job scope and organizational size. He urged the board to give more detailed consideration to these factors before implementing any salary adjustments. **Chris Bartley** [timestamp: 1:59:15] addressed Public Safety Staffing and Brownouts. He emphasized the urgency of hiring a new recruit class, characterizing the need for adequate staffing as a life-or-death matter. He stressed the importance of timely emergency response and warned that without sufficient personnel, brownouts could occur. **Tim Bailey** [timestamp: 2:38:28] commented on the IT Compensation Study. He questioned the study's internal equity, pointing out a significant pay disparity in which a network security engineer subordinate was paid substantially more than their supervisor. He also noted that job classifications were not properly aligned with actual responsibilities. ## Contested Items **Public Safety Staffing and Brownouts** Council members engaged in heated discussion regarding anticipated staffing shortages in the fire department. The primary concern centered on 40 firefighter retirements that would create operational brownouts. Multiple council members urged immediate action to address the crisis, including the hiring of a recruit class. However, these calls for swift intervention faced obstacles related to financial constraints and the extended lead time required to train and deploy new firefighters. The discussion reflected significant anxiety among council members about maintaining adequate public safety coverage despite budgetary limitations. **IT Compensation Study and Supplemental Pay** A split vote occurred on the IT compensation study and supplemental pay proposal. While the study's findings indicated that IT department pay was aligned with market rates, Council Member Martin voiced strong criticism of the council's priorities. Martin argued that the focus on compensation for the small IT department represented a distraction from more pressing financial issues. He contended that the council was overlooking larger public safety compensation problems—concerns that directly connected to the firefighter staffing crisis discussed elsewhere in the meeting. Martin's position highlighted a fundamental disagreement about resource allocation and which departmental needs should take precedence during the financial crisis. ## Public Comment During the public comment period, three speakers addressed the board with concerns regarding personnel and compensation matters. Dan Dotterweik raised issues with the computer services salary survey, citing several methodological problems. His concerns included outdated job descriptions that did not reflect current responsibilities, insufficient input from managers in the survey process, and what he characterized as flawed methodology in how the survey was conducted. Chris Bartley provided public comment on public safety staffing matters, though specific details of his remarks were not documented in the available materials. Tim Bailey also offered public comment related to IT compensation, though the specific content of his remarks was not detailed in the summary. The public comment period was informational in nature, with no formal action or decision required as a result of the remarks presented. ## Santa Claus Program Announcement Lieutenant Riley presented the Fire Department's Santa Claus program during this agenda item [timestamp: 06:04]. The presentation focused on the program's fundraising efforts and community outreach activities. **Program Overview** The Santa Claus program raises donations for toys and funds to support the annual toy handout initiative. Lieutenant Riley highlighted the program's role in providing gifts to children in the community during the holiday season. **Corporate Support** A key component of the presentation was the discussion of corporate support for the program. Lieutenant Riley emphasized the partnerships and contributions from local businesses that help sustain the toy donation and distribution efforts. **Planned Events** The Fire Department outlined plans for future program activities, including a breakfast with Santa event. This initiative represents an expansion of community engagement opportunities related to the Santa Claus program. **Outcome** This agenda item was presented as informational in nature, with no formal action or debate recorded. The presentation served to update the body on the Fire Department's holiday charitable activities and community involvement. ## Docket Additions Council Members Lane and Crosby requested to add items to the docket during this agenda item [timestamp: 0:10:54]. Following a brief discussion, the council approved the requested additions to the docket. The council voted to approve the docket and amended it to include the new items proposed by Council Members Lane and Crosby. The outcome of this agenda item was approval. ## Budget Amendments The council discussed and approved a budget amendment to reallocate $72,000 from professional services to capital construction projects. [timestamp: 13:31] **Key Speakers** The discussion involved Council Member Beard, Council Member Ellinger, Mr. Martin, and Ms. McGee. **Proposal and Rationale** The amendment reallocated $72,000 in funding to support active capital construction projects. According to the presentation, the funds were needed to complete projects related to old bond funds that were already in progress. **Outcome** The council approved the budget amendment. ## New Business: Transfer of Control Agreement [timestamp: 00:16:14] The council discussed and approved a transfer of control agreement between Time Warner and Insight Communications. Vice Mayor Gordon, Council Member Ellinger, and Council Member Farmer participated in the discussion. The agreement addressed the change in ownership of the cable service provider and ensured that the new owner would comply with the existing franchise agreement currently in place. The council determined that this transfer of control constituted a non-material change, meaning it did not require substantial modifications to the existing franchise terms or conditions. The council voted to approve the transfer of control agreement. ## New Business: Mountain Bike Trail Project [timestamp: 0:19:32] The council discussed and approved a correction to the city's financial contribution for a mountain bike trail project. The city's contribution was increased from $12,862 to $17,862. **Key Participants** Council Members Ellinger, Blues, and Hancock participated in the discussion of this agenda item. **Project Details** The mountain bike trail project will benefit from volunteer labor and oversight provided by the Kentucky Mountain Bike Association, reducing costs and ensuring specialized expertise in the trail's development and maintenance. **Outcome** The council approved the corrected contribution amount of $17,862 for the mountain bike trail project. ## New Business: Bluegrass Family Health RFP [timestamp: 00:21:10] The council discussed and approved a Request for Proposal (RFP) for prescription drug benefits under a new system. Council Member Ellinger, Joe Venari, and Mr. Mars participated in the discussion. The RFP focused on prescription drug benefits administration, with the council evaluating the proposal based on projected financial outcomes and cost management strategies. The proposal emphasized improved cost control measures that would contribute to overall savings. **Outcome** The council approved the RFP. The approval was based on projected annual savings of $1.5 million, which were attributed to favorable inflation trends and enhanced cost control mechanisms within the new prescription drug benefits system. ## Walk-on: Property Acquisition [timestamp: 22:46] The council approved a resolution to acquire property located at 401 Blue Sky Parkway for $250,000. The resolution authorized the Mayor to execute all necessary documents and accept the deed for the property. Council Member Lane and Council Member Blues participated in the discussion of this agenda item. The council voted to approve the acquisition, which was the stated outcome of the discussion. ## Walk-on: Traffic Stop Requests [timestamp: 0:23:48] The council considered two motions to install multiway stops at intersections in response to traffic volume and collision risks. **Key Speakers** - Council Member Crosby - Vice Mayor Gordon - Council Member Lane **Discussion and Outcome** The council approved both motions unanimously. The motions addressed safety concerns at specific intersections by proposing the installation of multiway stops to manage traffic volume and reduce collision risks in those areas. ## Environmental Quality Committee Report [timestamp: 00:25:25] Council Member Blues reported on the Environmental Quality Committee's recent meeting, covering three main topics. **Construction Management Firm Appointment** The committee addressed the appointment of a construction management firm for the remedial measures plan. Details regarding the specific firm selected or the scope of the remedial work were not provided in the available information. **Sanitary Sewer Private Property Task Force** Council Member Blues reported on the progress of the sanitary sewer private property task force. The specific updates or recommendations from this task force were not detailed in the available information. **Key Plexington Beautiful Commission Annual Report** The committee received the annual report from the Key Plexington Beautiful Commission. The contents and findings of this report were not specified in the available information. **Outcome** This agenda item was presented for informational purposes only, with no formal action or vote required. ## Public Safety Staffing Presentation Commissioner Mason and Chief Jackson presented a detailed report on significant staffing challenges facing the public safety department [timestamp: 0:29:16]. **Key Issues Presented** The presentation focused on the impending retirement of 40 firefighters, which would create a substantial staffing crisis for the department. To address this challenge, leadership presented the SAPA plan, which proposes managing the shortage through rotating out-of-service apparatus—a strategy to maintain service levels despite reduced personnel availability. **Key Speakers** The presentation was led by: - Commissioner Mason - Chief Jackson - Assistant Chief Jordan **Outcome** This agenda item was presented as informational, providing the governing body with details on the staffing situation and the proposed management strategy to address the upcoming retirements and their operational impact. ## IT Pay Study Presentation [timestamp: 2:04:22] Lyle Hanna presented findings from a compensation study of the IT department. The study examined how the department's pay structure compared to industry market standards. **Key Findings** The study concluded that: - Base pay is at 95% of market - Supplemented pay is at 107% of market These figures indicate that the IT department's overall compensation package is well-aligned with industry standards, with base pay slightly below market rates but total compensation exceeding market benchmarks when supplemental benefits are included. **Outcome** This was an informational presentation with no action items or decisions required. ## Council Reports [timestamp: 00:47:15] The council addressed council reports during this agenda item. Council Member Martin and Council Member Farmer participated in the discussion. Rather than proceeding with council reports at that time, the council made a procedural decision to postpone them. The council moved to place the council reports in the announcements portion of the next session instead of addressing them during the current meeting. The outcome of this agenda item was postponement of the council reports to a later time. --- ## Decisions - **Motion** — passed: Motion to place on the docket a resolution authorizing the Mayor to execute a renewal confirmation with Humana to renew the 2011 contract from January 1, 2012, until the 2012 Humana contract is finalized and approved by Council - **Motion** — passed: Motion to approve the docket - **Motion** — passed: Motion to amend the docket - **Motion** — passed: Motion to approve budget amendments, reallocating $72,000 from professional services to capital for construction projects - **Motion** — passed: Motion to approve the transfer of control agreement between Time Warner and Insight Communications, under the existing franchise agreement - **Motion** — passed: Motion to amend the correction on item H, changing the contribution amount from $12,862 to $17,862 for the mountain bike trail project with the Kentucky Mountain Bike Association - **Motion** — passed: Motion to approve the RFP for prescription drug benefits under the new system for Bluegrass Family Health - **Motion** — passed: Motion to place on the docket a resolution authorizing the Mayor to execute a certificate of consideration and accept a deed for property at 401 Blue Sky Parkway, with payment of $250,000 plus closing costs - **Motion** — passed: Motion to direct traffic engineering to place a multiway stop at the intersection of North Eagle Creek Drive and Eagle View Lane - **Motion** — passed: Motion to direct traffic engineering to place a multiway stop at the intersection of Squires Road and East Hills Drive due to collisions - **Motion** — passed: Motion to forward the sanitary sewer private property ordinance to Council - **Motion** — passed: Motion to approve the NDF list - **Motion** — passed: Motion to postpone council reports until after the full council meeting - **Motion** — passed: Motion to adjourn the meeting --- ## Full transcript Music Hello, everyone. Greetings. I'll call the meeting to order. This is a meeting of the work session of the Council. And to start off, public comment for comments on the agenda. Does anyone wish to speak to issues on the agenda? I don't have anybody signed up as an alert. Oh, okay. We do have. All right. I'm sorry. Dan? Mr. Yeah. Excuse me. Mr. Doddowich. Hello. Yes, Dan. My name is Dan Dotterweik. I work in the Computer Services Department here at LFUCG. Normally I wouldn't make a comment before you've had discussion on a topic, but due to the lateness of this being put on the agenda, we just found out about it yesterday, and this being the last council meeting, I wasn't sure if I didn't speak now that I would have another opportunity. As you may have noticed, I did notice the results of the computer services salary survey are included in the packet, at the end of the packet, for today's meeting. While I'm not sure what you plan to do with the results of the study, I would like to make a few comments about the study itself. On page 73, it mentions the methodology that was used by the study. In point one of that methodology, it states that the study was based on a complete review of all information provided by LFUCG, including job descriptions, et cetera. Most of the job descriptions that the HR department has for computer services are over 10 years old. And as we all know, computers haven't changed much in the last 10 years. The second point states that there was coordination with Tammy Walters to confirm the scope of each person's responsibilities, etc. At the beginning of the discussion about doing this survey, we were assured that HR would have no input into the study, and we now find out that the only confirmation about what we actually do was given by HR, who supposedly had no input. I brought this concern to Richard Maloney in early October and was told at that time that the managers of computer services would be consulted to do this. But I've spoken to each of the managers, and none of them were ever contacted to confirm the scope of any of the positions. And about three-quarters of what I do didn't even exist ten years ago when my job description was written. Point three says that the study is based on information on their extensive database of comparable salaries, yet on the page showing their job title matches, less than half are a direct match. Also, while the study compared jobs to those in the industry with similar titles, there was no consideration for the size of the organization. There's a big difference between a job as a network admin for the biology department at UK, which might be one building, and that for the LFUCG, which has been spread out in over 50 buildings across the whole city. To say otherwise would be like saying that your salary as a commissioner should be based on the average salary of a commissioner in the state of Kentucky, because obviously the pay for Commissioner and Wilmore is about the same as it would be for you. So in conclusion, because you both have the same job title, in conclusion, I want to say if it takes this study, if we take it as a general guide, it does show that for the most part LFUCG is close to target salaries in the industry. However, I would hope that before any specific salary adjustments are made up or down, more details of the job than the job title would be considered, such as the actual job duties, the scope of the job responsibilities, and the years of experience of the employees. Thank you for your time. Thank you, Mr. Dutter-Lich. Margaret Ballard. Is Margaret? I'll speak to you. Okay. All right. Next to speak on issues on the agenda, Mr. Chris Bartley. Is Chris here? Oh. He's actually going to be talking, I think, on behalf of the union about the staffing presentation. All right. So you want to do it then? Okay. That's fine. Great. All right. And Matt? Matt has, okay. All right. Okay, we can move on. Before we move to the rezoning and the docket approval, I thought we might give Lieutenant Riley a chance for a quick, responsible commercial message for a real important program. And Council Member Bill Farmer gave me a heads up that you were here and want to give you a chance. Maybe you can get back to light duty. Yes, sir. Yes, sir. We were up against some numbers this year for the turnover of firefighters for donations. And we had a Santa Claus program a few years back. And being in the position I was on light duty, I told him I would take that on because I played Santa before. So we sent out a quick email trying to get it. We got approval. So we got an email out, and Mr. Farmer asked me to come and speak. Basically, the Santa Claus program provides Santa to anybody that's interested in making a donation. We have had from the public families to private corporations show an interest in the past, and also when I make contact with them this year. We do it strictly for donations of toys or cash, and we're going to spend that money for the toy program for the firefighters, which the toy handout is this Saturday the 10th, if anybody is interested in coming and being a part of that. The program will continue, and then we'll just reserve the monetary and the toys for next year. We've got several businesses that have been real supportive of us just today. A company, Big Ass Fans, spent $13,000 with us at Meyers buying toys just this morning. And they're going to take those back and have a little party, and we're going to pick them up Thursday. So that was incredible. so I do one tomorrow night from a company that's going to give me $350 for coming in and sitting and playing Santa and handing their employees their Christmas bonuses so it's pretty well faceted as far as we're available and willing to do anything next year we're going to try to implement a breakfast with Santa and we're still working on the possibility of photos with Santa this year if we can find a good place. And the timing, again, I got started a little late with an idea and getting it approved, but we're definitely going to do that next year so families can have that for Christmas cards. So there's a lot of daycares want Santa, so we're just trying to get the word out that we have a Santa. We're doing it for donations and hope everybody will respond in kind. What's the number? It's through the FOF. The contact number is 859-243-0351, or you can email at www.lfdfof.org to request the Santa. Thank you, Lieutenant Santa. Lieutenant Riley, we appreciate it. Thank you. You did a great job at the announcement. Thanks, Pat. Thank you, sir. Okay. I've been given a message by Hillary that I need to make this announcement on behalf of our council clerk staff. that since we've got the council meeting just after the work session, I'm being asked to encourage any of the council members who wish to make additions to the docket at this time to do so as early in the meeting as we can, for example, motions or NDFs or committee reports that might or motions from committee reports that might emerge. because they're trying to get everything ready. Right, Susan? Is that clear? Yes, yes. Basically, any items that are going to be added to the docket tonight, we're just needing them as quickly as possible so that we can ensure that we have the docket prepared by the time you all get ready to meet at the council meeting. Thanks. All right. All right. Council Member Lane, have you got a walk-on? If we can do that now, that would help. Yes, sir. Mayor, I'm embarrassed to say I picked up the wrong folder, and my aide is bringing down the walk-on for me to read to you, so I will bring that up in just a second. All right. Okay. Council Member Henson. Thank you, Mayor. I have a motion for the docket. I move to place on the docket a resolution authorizing the Mayor to execute a renewal confirmation with Humana to renew the 2011 contract from January 1, 2012, until the 2012 Humana contract is finalized and approved by Council. Second. Thank you. A motion by Council Member Hanson and a second by Council Member Ellinger. Is there any discussion? Hearing none, we can take a vote. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed, no. Motion carries. Thank you. Council Member Crosby. I was just going to ask, I'm in the same boat as Council Member Lane. I have two that I'm waiting for my aide to bring down. Do you just want us to move on? Okay, move on. Yeah, and then come back to it as soon as I get down here. To approve. Motion to approve the docket. I'll be happy to take a motion to it. Move approval of the docket. Thank you, Vice Mayor. Motion by Vice Mayor Gordon to approve the docket, seconded by Council Member Crosby. Is there any discussion? Mayor. you may want to wait before we do this because once you do this it makes our job for our clerk even harder because i'll just hang out over here for a while and we'll uh we'll get it i mean if you don't have the information obviously you can't uh make a motion so otherwise they won't be able to put on until council report and that'll be towards the end of the meeting yeah when they get down here let's get down here we're gonna do it then we can approve it then Yeah. You mean approve the docket then? Yeah. All right. What do you? Why don't we? We can amend it. All right. We've already got the motion now. Let's just go ahead with it, and then we'll go back and amend it. All right. All right. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed, no. Motion carries. Amend the docket. All right. Next on our agenda is summary approval, approval of the summary. Actually, there's none there today. So moving on to Roman numeral number four, budget amendments. Motion by Council Member Beard, second by Council Member Ellinger. Is there any discussion? Yes, sir. Mr. Farmer. On the second journal entry, the 56697, to reallocate remaining bond funds from professional services to capital for construction projects, it's the amount of $72,000. I'm sorry, which one? I didn't hear you. It's the second one on the page. 56697, reallocating bond funds from professional services to capital for construction projects. And my question is, what construction projects? All right. Is there someone here that can address it? Elizabeth and Charlotte, Mr. Martin. Ms. McGee. Thank you. And these are, it's an old bond related to Sanitary Sewers water quality projects. I don't have the information on the specific project itself, but it was a project that was completed, and these funds are now needed to complete another project, and Charlie may have more information. There's just nothing attributable on this page. Yeah, I just found out this was mine as well because it wasn't the typical fund that you see. If you recall, I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, we inherited all these old bond funds, and we've been working to extinguish those and spend those on active projects. That's what this is doing. This is cleaning that up. The active projects in particular for this year were the Crimson King Coldstream in Mr. Myers' district. That was about $1.2 million. And then the Anniston-Wickland one, which is getting ready to launch in April. If I had known it was you, I wouldn't have asked. Thank you. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Martin. All right. Is there any other discussion on the motion? All right. Hearing none, we can take a vote. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed, no. Motion carries. Okay, we can dial back to the walk-ons. Council Member, oh, you're still waiting. All right. Let's just wait. I've got it. Yes, is it? Okay, we're going to have to. Let's do them both at the same time. and that way we can do the amendment more efficiently, perhaps. Under promo number five, next on the agenda is a new business. Moves to approve. Second. It's a motion by Vice Mayor Gordon to approve, second by Council Member Ellinger. Is there any discussion? Yes, Mayor. Council Member Farmer, and I do have a couple of notes here that I've been given. On new business item A, the transfer of control agreement. And as it says, Time Warner is acquiring Insight Communications. As a result, LFUCG franchise agreement with Insight would be impacted. And we, I guess, have retained counsel to assist in reviewing this matter. Counsel approval of the attached transfer of agreement is recommended in Sothis Agreement. would not materially impact the current franchise, which runs out in September 2012. So this will assure that Insight is doing what they're supposed to be doing now and that the new owner is doing what they're supposed to be doing. All you have in front of you for tonight, basically, is the approval of a transfer of control. It will operate under the existing franchise agreement, and it will reserve all the rights we have under that agreement. We haven't yet entered into franchise negotiations for a new franchise yet. Okay. That was kind of the second point. So we will have a different iteration. So this is status quo other than you're going to ultimately have a new owner of your local franchisee right now? Thrilled am I. Thank you. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you. Councilman Ellinger. Thank you, Mayor. Number H, Mr. Hancock. Thank you. I have a note that this is the correction on number H. That I'm not aware of. I just wanted to ask him some questions. Yes, sir. Just could you tell me what the arrangement we have here with the Kentucky Mountain Bike Association and what's going on? In effect, we went to the consulting community and got a bid for about $150,000 to build this mountain bike trail. What Kimba brought to us, and some measure through the mayor's staff at Great Construction, We have entered into agreement with the Mountain Bike Association to voluntarily provide labor for us, and they provided oversight and assistance on redesigning the trail. So we're going to put the trail in place for about $30,000. This is $17,000, not $12,000, as the mayor is about to say. This was a typographical error. We're going to contribute $17,000, which will rent the equipment, and Kimba, the Mountain Bike Association, is going to provide volunteer labor and assistance raking out the trails afterwards. The trail is about four miles long. About two miles has already been put in place. We can't finish because of the weather, but it will be finished in the spring. So, in effect, this saves us a dramatic amount of money, builds in a partner that will take ownership and help us provide events and whatnot on the trail. All for 17,862, not 12,862. So do we have a motion for that one from somebody? Or I'll make that motion if we want to amend it to 17,862. Motion by Council Member Ellinger, second by Council Member Blues. Is there any discussion? I'd like to footnote on this. I didn't know this was going to be on here today, but I'm glad it is. it's one of these things that ought to be one of those things that would be great if we could get front page news on it. It had nothing to do with great construction really except through a relationship. A guy named Jim Johnson is a structural engineer in town. He's built one of these in Tennessee and kept seeing us bidding and getting numbers in at $150,000 and he came to the table and said we can do this for a whole lot less. That's the headline. A whole lot less. and the work is underway. Yes, sir. And it's a very creative solution involving our community in a really creative project. It really is. And we'll have a better product as a result. And a better project as a result. Well, that shows you that you can do more for less. That's a good deal. Okay. Okay, is there any further discussion? That's all I have. I look forward to a ride on it, though. Thank you. Any more discussion? I know you all get one more on item G with Bluegrass Family Health for the, I guess it's the RFP for prescription drug benefits under our new system. And I guess, I mean, my only question is this kind of informational. It's anticipated that the annual cost for providing these services will be $7 million, and I'm just, is that less than it was before? I assume it must be. Mr. Mars, yeah, do you want to help us with that? Because that's a lot of drugs. That's a lot of drugs. Yes, when you factor inflation trend going forward, it's about a million and a half dollars projected less than what you spent. So these will be dispensed at the new wellness center? wellness center? No, no, no. This is just through the PBM. This is just the retail market. So everybody who's on board gets to use this benefit? Everybody. A million and a half? A million and a half savings is a projection. Okay. Thank you. You're welcome. Benji, looks like you've got some help there. Yes, I'm sorry. This is Joe Venari with Bluegrass Family. Yeah, Joe, you've been here before, right? No. No, it's my first time. I've been here, but not to this meeting. Okay, I thought you had, maybe. Then I have more questions. No more questions. All right. Thank you. Do you have a motion? I can't remember. Okay. Is there any further discussion? Okay. Then we can take a vote. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. All opposed, no. Motion carries. Do you have yours? Yes. All right. Okay. Sorry. We can dial back now to the walk-ons. Thank you, Mayor. I move to place on the docket a resolution authorizing the mayor to execute a certificate of consideration and any other documents necessary and to accept a deed for the property located at 401 Blue Sky Parkway and authorizing payment in the amount of $250,000 plus usual and appropriate closing costs. So move. Motion by Council Member Lane, second by Council Member Blues. Is there any discussion? Hearing none. We can take a vote. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed, no. Motion carries. Council Member Crosby. Thank you, Mayor. I have two. The first is I'd like to place on the docket a resolution directing traffic engineering to place a multiway stop at the intersection of North Eagle Creek Drive and Eagle View Lane. This is recommended by traffic engineering due to volume. Second. That's a motion by Councilman Crosby, seconded by Vice Mayor Gordon. Is there any discussion on the motion? Hearing none, we can take a vote. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed, no. Motion carries. And then the second one is a motion for resolution directing traffic engineering to put up a multi-way stop at the intersection of Squires Road and East Hills Drive. This is due to collisions. Second. Motion by Council Member Crosby, seconded by Council Member Lane. Is there any discussion on the motion? Hearing none, we can take a vote. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed, no. Motion carries. Thank you. Yes, ma'am. Thank you. Do we now have a motion to amend? We need that. Is that the motion to amend the document? All right, we just put them on. All right. All right. We can then resume our agenda. Promo number six is continuing business and presentations. First on the agenda is Environmental Quality Committee report by Councilmember Blues. Thank you, Mayor. The Environmental Committee met at 1 p.m. November 22nd with eight of ten committee members present. The committee graciously allowed the mayor to announce at the outset of the meeting his intention to engage in authority on construction management as an in-house project manager for the implementation phase of the remedial measures plan. The individual or firm will focus on cost control and scope management of projects that will ultimately cost taxpayers between $300 and $450 million. The Division of Water Quality Director, Charles Martin, introduced John Steinmetz, senior associate of the environmental engineering firm Hazen & Sawyer, which has been engaged to carry forward the Group 1 phases of the remedial measures plan. Mr. Steinmetz outlined the program management structure, provided a program schedule, discussed proposed project process modifications and design strategies, and reviewed various cost schedule controls and success factors. In addition, he provided committee members with sort of the Bible of the project, the remedial measures, plans, implementation phase binder. It's this pretty large report here full of very helpful maps, and any council member who does not yet have one of these, if you'll just see me and we'll see that you get one, I think it will be helpful at various stages along the way of the project. Mr. Simets' presentation was followed up by a lengthy question-and-answer session with committee members. The second item on the agenda was Councilmember Farmer's report on the work of the Sanitary Sewer Private Property Task Force, which he chaired. It was formed to address the problem of surface and stormwater entering the sanitary sewer system from private properties, often through sump pump connections. Council Member Farmer reviewed a proposed ordinance to authorize water quality employees' access to private properties for the purpose of inspecting and rerouting illegal connections and or resolving infiltration problems. He also outlined an accompanying cost assistance program that would reimburse affected property owners up to $3,500 for any needed corrective work. Following discussion, Vice Mayor Gorton moved to forward the sanitary sewer private property ordinance to Council. Council Member Henson seconded the motion, which was unanimously approved. Council Members, we expect to bring that ordinance to the January 10 work session for discussion and assignment to the January 12 meeting docket. Finally, Patricia Knight, Chair of the Key Plexington Beautiful Commission, presented our third and final agenda item, the Commission's annual report. Ms. Knight discussed the Commission's mission, 2011 projects and activities, and plans for 2012. Following a brief public comment, the meeting adjourned at 3 p.m. Thank you, Mayor. That's my report. Thank you, Council Member Blues. Next on our agenda is a presentation by Commissioner Mason on the public safety staffing related to fire and police. Commissioner Mason. Good afternoon. Thank you. Before I get started, I would like to note that a couple of folks here with fire today are probably making their last appearances before council. George Wolf-Grant and Randy Gillum are retiring with about 25, 26, and 30 years of service. So we appreciate everything they've done for this community, and they're going to be a big loss to the Division of Fire. With that, kind of a segue into why we're here, because as you all are aware that we've kind of talked about throughout the course of the year with upcoming staffing, especially at FIRE, but we also have police and corrections here available for answering questions. We have been working diligently with FIRE over the past six or eight months. You know there was an extensive presentation given back in the summer about their retooling efforts, and we have continued through the fall to develop a reasonable, responsible plan to address a larger-than-expected retirement surge. I've been very involved in this on behalf of the mayor's office, along with all of these executives you see here today. And we feel very strongly that this plan will continue to provide coverage throughout Fayette County without temporarily closing any stations. We've looked at what other cities have done. A number of us went up to Cincinnati about six or eight weeks ago and saw what they have encountered on a daily basis with their fire department and have brought back some of that information with us to integrate into this. It's a very good effort, I think, by this administration to balance in the fiscal constraints in which we reside the public safety of this community. And with that, I'm going to turn it over to Chief Jackson for the formal presentation. Good afternoon, Mayor, Councilmembers. On May 26, on our ballot, May 26, 2011, we presented our retooling of the Lexington Flower Department to you. At that time, we projected 20 retirements. That number has increased to 40. due to a number of factors, one being old age, as he pointed out with just a little humor. But with that, it's also 896 years of experience going out the door for the Lexington Fart Department. Number two being the contract, no raises. Most of these gentlemen, and I say gentlemen because they're all male, we have no females retiring this time, maxed out in pay. and their timing and grading position. The health insurance and the increase in the cost, and some of them that we have already left on disability. Now as we move forward into the presentation, I'd like to establish the protocol for the presentation if I could. If we could hold the questions until slide number five. The initial four slides are just for information purposes only, and most of you know all that information. The second thing is slides 5 through 7 are staffing relevant to the current and the future staffing as of January 2012. When we look at the apparatus, when we go through the slide presentation, when we look at the apparatus, the engine ladders and EC units, they ride with three personnel. So you'll see and then you'll just multiply that. most importantly as in my dealing with the mayor we have to have a plan to how we're going to deal with this issue that we have and so we developed a plan to deal with the issues that the reduction in staffing bring I have the shift commanders and Assistant Chief Jordan who developed a plan that we will utilize in the event that the staffing affects us to the degree that we have to implement it And finally, we will summarize and answer any questions that you may have of the staff. So we'll begin with the overview of our department. As we continue, the 23 stations, 22 engines, 7 ladders, 9 emergency care units, 1 heavy rescue, rescue has materials and five district majors and the ship commander. As we get to the daily staffing this is what we have and I guess I'm an old guy too because I don't have my glasses so I can't see that so that's when I pointed out that we have the 22 engines times 3, 66, the ladders in each unit. This is on our first platoon, Chief of Sales platoon, which has 157 members. And this is how we currently work. And of the long term, just notes that I have for you. Of the long term disabilities, military leaves, like duty, family death, disabilities, military leave, FMLA, those are all added into what we have to deal with on a daily basis, and it fluctuates. And as you point, as we see the magic number, the number of personnel that we need every day to function is 124. And then as we move forward per our contract, we have 21 slots that we have to utilize. So when we get into the next slide, you'll understand more of what we're talking about as we get into January. Is everybody good with this? Now, after 40 retirements, that 157 number goes down to 143 per shift. And that's, as we even out the shifts, that's the number that we'll have on each shift, 143. On an average, with the 40 retirements, that's removing 13 personnel from each shift from the 157 and bringing it down to 143 per shift. Go back to looking at the contractual aspect of it, that contractually we have to let those 24 people off. Not that that happens every day, but it does happen. So we get into what we have in January, the possibility of having to deal with implementing the plan. And if you want to have a presentation on the plan, on the overview of the plan, Chief Jordan and the ship's commanders are here to present that to you. Just to give you an overview, yesterday as we sat down and went over January or 2012, we have what's called days where the personnel have to take off, and we call them what's called blackout days. And those are the days when guys have used, we've used every slot that we possibly could use, and that's 97 days that we have that we're probably going to have to implement the plan. So not that we want to utilize those days, but the situation is there. And those of my staff that really knows me knows that what I want to lay out for you is the truth. The mayor uses the word transparency, and I guess you can't get any more transparent than losing 40 personnel and knowing that at some point we're going to have to implement a plan that's going to, I guess, limit our service to a degree because we don't have the personnel. With that, I'll move on to the summary if we have any questions at the end. In the summary, basically benefit time, as I said, it fluctuates based on the season. We'll have to deal a lot more with these situations as we move into spring, spring break, and the summer months. We may be able to get through the early part of 2012, the January, February, early March phase. But when we get into spring break, times are going to get tough for the Lexington Fire Department. Demand of training. One of the things that we talked about when I initially took this position is that we were going to train them tough. You know, training is the key to keeping our personnel safe. Training is the key to ensuring that we give the community the best service possible. So we continue to train. We have to maintain certain certifications. We have to ensure that we continue to be safe in everything that we do. The on-duty paramedic class, which we implemented to save monies, the on-duty paramedic class contractually has been dictated to us. And not only that, it's one of the things that I, along with the staff, have said that we're going to continue to do because we have to rotate these guys off the EC units. Very important. And I can say that from experience, having ridden a buggy for five years on EC6 in the middle of downtown Lexington, you get tired after five years. A recruit class. Bottom line up front is that we need a recruit class. We need bodies to replace the retirees. And with that, we'll open up the floor for questions. All right. So, Chief, did you say that Chief Jordan was going to present? If you have questions, they'll be able to. in reference to our plan. All right. Vice Mayor Gordon. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you very much, Chief Jackson. Just a couple things. The first thing is I want to thank you for telling us about our two older members here who are retiring frequently. We've got three. We're going to have him stand up because he's probably the oldest one, Brent Frizzell. Oh, where is he? Oh, okay. Well, I just want to thank all three of them. Frequently, council members don't know about retirements until after they've happened, and we don't have an opportunity to thank you for your service because usually you're gone. So I appreciate that you mentioned that today so that I can and all of us can give our thanks for your service. And then I just had one question for now. Do you have any, well, let me back up. Is this number 40 retirements a high number? Yes, yes, ma'am. Or is it a little unusually high? It's unusually high. And like I said, those things that I pointed out earlier, the three aspects or four aspects that I pointed out earlier, played a role in that. And initially, as I talked about on May 26th, the number was 20, and it doubled. Do you have numbers for, say, the last five years of the numbers of retirements? Is it, except for this year, is this an aberration, or are the numbers of retirements different every year? On average, that's why we said 20 was the number. This is extremely high. We usually have between 12 to 15. And that's pretty good history for five years, ten years? Five years. I can go back 20 years on that. We can get you those numbers. But since I've been upstairs, the last five years, it's been between 12 and 15 personnel leaving. So you couldn't have really planned for this? No, not for the extra. We planned for the 20, but for the 40, it was totally different. Okay, well, I'll look forward to hearing about the plan. Thank you. Mr. Stennett. Thank you, Mayor. Chief, thank you for presenting this today. I know when I asked for this presentation, I asked for all three divisions, and we're focusing on fire at this moment. And I think the important thing is, you know, two years ago, council went on break and didn't get this presentation. I think it's important, as you alluded to on the transparency side, to make sure this body is fully aware of our situation as well as the public because we're entering budget time, as you know. And one of the final things on your summary was the recruit class. And those don't come cheap, and they don't come easy, as you know. and I'm not sure what the plan is for the recruit class, and if the commissioner wants to comment on that, is that a priority, are we going to try to put that in next year's budget? Because two years ago as well, we were down to about 510 people at that time, and we did add a recruit class, I believe, of about 35 to bring us back up to that number because we were in a dire strait. We had stations closed and we had overtime issues, and we don't have the overtime issue today yet, Yet, I didn't hear you mention anything about overtime. Are we still not going to have any expected overtime, or are we still operating on a level of uncertainty when it comes to dollars needed to fund that? Well, let me begin with that's my question to you all at this point, sir. We have an opportunity here, which I say is exciting. You know, a lot of people want to add a lot of negative to it, but I think it's exciting because it gives us an opportunity to exercise our right as operational personnel and management. It gives us a chance to come before you with this presentation and say, yeah, we can do it, and we've done it. but it's going to be hard to do unless you give us the recruit class or some overtime funding. And I say that if you don't want the quote-unquote brown out to the stations or what we're trying to call service and personnel adjustments. If you don't want that to occur, then we need a recruit class. Fair enough. And to respond to your question, back to you all, Do you need overtime based on what you presented today? At this point, do we need overtime? Do we need to be thinking about this the last six months? At this point, there's still a lot of moving parts. We continue to meet with finance and the mayor to look at things. We have a very viable plan to move forward without incurring overtime. And that's one of the considerations. I mean, we talk about that, but we have not projected necessarily any specific figures in terms of what it would cost or looking down the road, what kind of time frame on a class. This presentation was to present you with the current status of where we are and go forward from here. I do have police and corrections here. I did not have them do a PowerPoint because of the short deadline to get this one in. In addition, the complexities of dealing with fire personnel in terms of how they're staffing their platoons, I think, warrants much more of a discussion based on a PowerPoint. But they're here available for additional questions after we finish with fire. Because we've got some of them both for the last couple of weeks anyway during our discussions. But under the current plan, beginning January 1, on the projected new magic numbers, is that four companies out of service starting January 1, and which four will be out of service? That's what the plan will illuminate, if you would like Assistant Chief Jordan. But that OOS at the bottom, yes, that's out of service. That would be an estimate on that day, given those numbers. So I assume that will be a rotating, Chief. Would that be a rotating four? or so not just one station will be affected all the time, but every station will have a point of it. Every, the plan that my mindset was is that the entire city would be, and we based it on, like say I've been to Louisville, we took the staff to Cincinnati, and each one of them is planned. None of the city is ever left without any coverage. So that's the plan that I presented to Chief Jordan and the shift commanders. And that's the direction that we're going in. I assume this is a plan for the last six months of the fiscal year? Yes, sir. You'll be able to operate with 485 people? Yes, sir, unless you give us a class or the open time money. Let me ask you, congratulations on our retirees, too, both being here and the rest of them in your department. But are there any plans to promote people to fill those positions? Yes, sir. There are plans to promote into majors, and what will that do to your front line on these numbers? If you promote up to assistant chiefs and more majors and captains, et cetera, does that deplete your front line? No. The front line is going to remain the same. Our majors, we need the leadership. So that's – So it won't affect the promotions at all? We hope not unless you tell us differently. No. You know how to run your department better than I. I'm asking the questions because, again, my main concern is the safety and the coverage levels and making sure that if we do brownout four apparatuses or whatever you call them, it's a rotating four. It's not always the same four. No, it's not the same four. And like I said, if you want to listen to the plan or we want to come and present it to you in your council chambers or something like that, we can do that. Well, thank you. I appreciate the job you're doing and the sacrifices the men and women on the fire department are having to make. To keep it at 485 is a pretty dangerously low level for our city. We haven't seen that number in quite a long time. So I appreciate the work that you all and your leadership team is going to have to do the next six months. And just keep us in tune with what's going on. Hopefully I'll grow my hair back before. Thank you, sir. And before Chief Jordan comes up, well, go ahead. Chief Jackson, you want to introduce Chief. And Matt. As Chief Jackson mentioned, I was directed to put this plan together with the assistance of the shift commanders. The three current shift commanders, Chief Hoskins, Chief Gilliam, and Chief Rizell, as Chief Jackson mentioned, two of the three are retiring. That's going to leave in January Chief Hoskins as the senior shift commander who will assume a lot of the roles and responsibilities of setting the bar, setting the standard on how all three shifts are run. So I want to use him a lot through this presentation, and we'll probably tag team on this. To back up a little bit with Chief Jackson, the staffing, the magic number concept is kind of a mysterious thing. If you look at where our numbers are, we have 22 engines, front-line engines. It takes three personnel to man those. Seven ladders, front-line ladders, three on those. The EC units, nine units. They're, again, three apiece. The math is pretty simple here. Staff positions, that's our district majors, our shift commander. Those are our street-level, everyday supervisors, 24-7. The 210 is kind of our support guy who handles a lot of logistics at Station 1, and he's subject to rotate out to cover front-line apparatus. He's also there covering mobile air truck and some of the special response rigs. Rescue truck, we were carrying that at three people. With the retooling, we reduced it down to two, minimum staffing of two. And then at 220, which is our hazmat coordinator for the city, that was at two prior to retooling and now is at one. So that leaves us 47 units apparatus that we staff every day, 24-7. It takes 124 people to do that. This is the snapshot of after 2012. That's minus the 13 per shift. That leaves us 143 as compared to the 157 of where we are now. So in other words, the shift extras, the extra bodies that allow us to get people off on benefit time to meet the military leave, light duty is 19 on this sheet or was an example of for 2012. The magic number is what we take away, the long-term disability, the things that we have no control over, the guys who are deployed with the military on sick time due to disability or injuries. So those are long-term fixed kind of things. The benefit time, as was mentioned, the contract. The contract is 21 slots for the firefighters, lieutenants, captains, three for the majors. I don't want to say that's the worst-case scenario, but that's nearly at the max. That's our max typical letting off. One thing that is totally in the dark is people that call in or get sick during the shift and have to leave or are unable to come in. This particular example, and it's just an example, on this particular day, we would have four units out of service. Some will be more, some will be less. I think as Chief Jackson alluded to, it's a seasonal thing. spring break week, a lot of people take off, a lot of benefit time is used. Starting spring break, then it picks up again towards the end of May, and we'll run into the end of August versus September. And it's a very fluid thing. We never know how many people will be on light duty. We never know how many people will call in and the benefit use, it varies. So it's a very fluid system. The plan we put together, the SAPA plan, the service and personal adjustment plan, it basically involves I think the commissioner is going to pass a copy of it around. And it says draft on it. We're rolling this out to our entire staff tomorrow in a staff meeting. Timing was a little off on this, but the senior staff has all seen this and has approved it. So there may be a few verbiage change or minor adjustments. But the purpose of this plan was to design a plan that would provide us maximum coverage 24-7 for all of our emergency response units. the shift commanders largely the ones that designed it they're the ones that are responsible for implementing of it at the end of their roll call that they do today for their next shift which is three days they'll have a handle on what their staffing looks like pending call ins and their direction is to notify the senior staff we'll have a handle, we'll have a shotgun a visual of what's going to be next day staffing how many shortages we have and what companies, if any, will be out of service. With that information, we'll look at some of our staff personnel, our support staff, to see if we can plug in to help staff units. This is a practice we've been using some for the last couple of years. There again, it's hit and missed because some of our staff people have obligations that they can't get out of. The plan implementation, there again, will vary day to day. It will fluctuate as to staffing and benefit usage. the plan is to focus on all of our engine companies that's all of the 22 front line engines we've selected the 22 engines just to share the wealth or the hardship on every single address, physical address in the county every council district in the county every fire district in the county will all share in this burden EC units, the ambulances with over 34,000, about 34,000 runs a year and an increase of about 1,000 per year. We didn't feel like we could touch them at all. We need to keep them fully staffed, and I wish I was standing here making an argument for a couple of more ESA units so we don't feel like we can pull them out of the system and still provide the service that we needed to provide. Ladder companies. We've also left our seven ladder companies out of this plan. Here again, I wish I was standing here making an argument for two more ladder companies. We just don't have enough ladder companies to cover the city the way we feel we need to. So we're resorting back to letting the engine companies absorb this hit. The list in front of you is a list up on the board, and I think it's on your second page, of the companies, the order of which they'll rotate. The idea behind this is no company will be out for more than 24 hours at a time. In other words, each of the three shift commands will have an alternating staggering list, so Engine 12 will not be on the same day two days in a row. Yeah, there is some flexibility built in here for needs of the particular district on a particular day. Yeah, there will be some operational issues for us when we have several companies out. One or two, three isn't a big deal. We start getting more than that. Yeah, it does become an issue. Even one is an issue depending on where the emergency comes in. The first on-scene times will definitely increase. We don't have a database on that since we haven't done a lot of this, but we will track that and we'll have a handle on that after the first of the year. We don't project a lot of use of this January, February. Towards the end of March, I think you'll start seeing it kicking in. There are some things on our side, our responses. We've looked at what we send to what responses, what type of emergencies. We've adjusted those slightly. We still need to get the right resources on the scene, particularly if our full alarm is going to be a little slower due to potentially somebody being out of service. Of course, we'll do our best to get companies back in service, clear runs, and things of that nature. Questions or comments from Harold? Questions, issues, additional clarification? We have some council members signed up for some comments or questions. Council Member Henson? Thank you, Mayor. Thank you for the presentation. And I know just from recently going through the Fire Academy speed session, I guess, I was aware that your numbers in personnel and in your units, your engines and your EC units, are not looking good either. I mean, they're aging just like your personnel, right? The apparatus plan is a whole other story. We would love to come back and talk about that. But I do appreciate your service very, very much, your dedication to the city all these years. How do we compare with other cities our size as far as the number of units, the number of stations, and so forth? I think we're in line with most cities our size. One of the things that's different about us, and we went and talked to Cincinnati. We've talked to Louisville. You know, Cincinnati has a higher population. They have more fire units, but they have like 75 or 80 square miles or somewhere in there as compared to our 280. So, you know, every time we compare it to apples to oranges, it's hard to get a good crystal clear comparison. Right, because we're so spread. Right. I think, you know, like I said earlier, we can make arguments for more ESA units. We can make arguments for more ladder companies. But, you know, if there was finances that looked like we could do that, we'd be doing that. So I'm not going to say we're over-resourced, but I'm certainly not going to say we're under-resourced. Okay. So you think probably with the staffing levels that are needed that that is sufficient? Our current response times, I think, are fire response times. The average unit I've seen is just over four minutes. EMS, I think, are our first units on scene just over five minutes. Those are pretty good numbers. NFPA 1710, I think, recommends the first unit on scene in four minutes with the additional full complement in eight minutes, and ALS within eight minutes. So most of the time we're in that range. Could it be better? Absolutely. Would we like it to be better? Absolutely. In these economic times, I think we're doing well. I think your response times are very good. from what I've heard. Also, when you look at your retirees, I know you said you estimate, was it 12 to 15? But this year, or that's normal, is to have 12 to 15? Yeah, I think that's pretty normal. I think they're going to look at those numbers. More than 20 is pretty rare. And I was just curious, if you've looked at the makeup of your personnel, on it's like potential retirees because after 20 years, right, you can retire. So if you were to look at the potential retirees and see what that number would be. I'm not sure what that number is. I know we have gotten very young, so our eligibility is decreasing. I don't anticipate to see 40 next year. Okay. I'm not sure what that number could be, but I think it would be something considerably less. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Council Member Crosby. Thank you, Mayor. When you put down out-of-service rotation, is that a brownout? I mean, are you browning out? That would be a slang term, yes. So that's what we know as a brownout? Yes, it's a brownout. Okay, I guess we use the slang term. So my next question is, are we currently doing any, I'll use the slang term, brownouts right now, as of now. We have had some days where we've had to reduce some of our companies. The hazmat company and the rescue company have taken the largest burden of that. We've used some of our day people as well, which will continue, and we have had a few ladders and engines round out for portions of the day throughout the last couple of months. Four months. All right. Thank you. Thank you, Mayor. What a difference two years makes. I remember Christmas, December 2009, when we all got together here on December 22nd to talk about brownouts. And here we are again, and we're talking about not just for a month or so, but for the rest of the year. earlier it was asked what our retirements were and i and i think vice mayor gorton asked about this and so i basically brought the information that we have and we get this from the administration about the number of retirements and this is our disability chart but also shows the service retirements and then the total retirements for a year so 2010 i had and this is reported from the Police and Fire Pension Board. So we had a total of 41 retirements in 2010, 34 in 2009, 27 in 2008, 15 in 2007, 12 in 2006, 27 in 2005, and 54 in 2004. I think the stated reason for collective bargaining was because of the overwhelming number of retirements. And so So the reason I bring this up is that the level of disability both contributes to the number of people who retire and loss of personnel, and that leaves us short, but it also leaves us short of funds with which to replace the folks who retire. And so while I've tried to get this in committee, we have yet to try to get this fixed. And what I've learned is that we could fix at least this part of the problem with a simple administrative change here in the city. And so I guess I urge the administration to try to find a fix internally for this so that we can keep more folks here working rather than lose good firefighters and good police officers who want to continue to work. And so I don't think this is going to get better. I think it's going to get worse because as the city becomes more and more overwhelmed by our pension and health care payments, we're going to be able to afford less and less. So the question came up about what the number of retirements were, and I'll just leave it to you if you want to make any comments about it. I can't really comment about that history, except I believe that's both. Is that both combined police and fire? It is. Okay. Yes. All right. That's all. Yeah. So with 40 retirements in the fire department, we have a total of 41 last year. So obviously it's going to be huge this year. So obviously we are going to have some heavy lifting to do. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you. Councilman Martin. Can I make one comment on that? Yeah. One of the things that's unusual about our retirement is to have 40 in one month in January. January is usually our high month, but 40 alone, yeah, we do have throughout the year, 40 at one time is a huge number. Mr. Reed, you're coming up to the podium. I wanted to comment just very briefly on the points you raised about the number of disabilities and the need to solve this locally. The disability statute is a state statute that creates a board that is operating locally, and the makeup of the board is such that we are attempting to make those type of changes. as we're working with the pension task force, we do have some recommendations that we're being kicked around. Again, it's not just the administration's willingness or their ability to do it and work directly with the council. It's the disability board. But I think both the fire and the police and the administration recommend that some changes have to occur. It's just getting consensus on what those changes are and how we go about getting them implemented. But we are trying to deal with that issue. And certainly those policies have been around a long time, certainly at the state and locally as well. So that's actually correct. Thank you. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you. Council Member Farmer? Thank you, Mayor. I appreciated the information that you were able to provide there. I think from our emergency response task force meeting we had earlier today, I think this has given us the numbers of people who are retiring. What about the numbers for new classes? I mean, when was the last new recruit class and what's in the pipeline now? Where do we stand in terms of, in recent years, how many have we added and how many are we trying to add now? The last class we had was 2009. They graduated February of 2000. The last class we had was 2010 of 25, and they graduated February of 2011. Do we have anything cooking now then? No, sir. How about in the pipeline? We have a pipeline of candidates. If you gave us a class today, it would probably take us about two and a half, three months to get them to go through the process, the medical, the background checks and everything. We can probably have the class started by March. During the meeting, one of the majors said there's over 100 people on the list that are potentially still qualified to come forward if we stepped up to start that apparatus. And I guess I had one other one. But your grid showed nine emergency care units. Yes, sir. Do we have more apparatus than that that don't have personnel? Yes, sir. We have three standby units at 11. 11 and 21. 11, 1, and 21, yes. So we have the wheels and the ability, but we just don't have the personnel? Yes, sir. All right. I think in that group coming out of public safety and being appointed by the vice mayor, we're trying to find ways to help. This may be new and different, but as we all know, this has more to do about lack of funds than lack of desire. So I appreciate you all trying to stretch around and do as much as you can in the meantime. But it just seems to me that, and I understand that the circumstances alter cases, but not being here two years ago, the whole issue of brownouts seemed to be very controversial and to carry a lot of weight. And I know that sitting in this seat or in these seats, this has been a very long year. and it's been a long year in terms of what employees, both sworn and non-sworn, have had to endure and understand and contend with, and the fact that we solved a budget in probably the toughest time many of us remember. And inside all of that, maybe we've become more attuned to the new reality. But while I'm disappointed that we've arrived at a situation where we will have a brownout situation, I am hopeful that we can resolve it as quickly as possible so that all can remain safe in their homes and safe when they're out. So I appreciate your all's work, but I'm sorry for the situation that we're all in at the same time. Thank you, Chief. Thank you, Mayor. Council Member McCord. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Chief. And, again, thank you for your service for those who are retiring and to all 40-some folks who are retiring. As you said, it's 800-plus years of collective service that's leaving, and that institutional knowledge is certainly going to be missed and hopefully will be transferred. You know, again, nobody wants to be here talking about this, but I sincerely appreciate you bringing this to our attention before we leave and us finding this out. and I appreciate Council Member Stennett asking for this a couple weeks ago. As I'm listening to this, we're talking about 40-some folks retiring, 20-plus more than we thought we had. We talked about we've got folks in the pipeline that take three months. I mean, my simple math is that we've budgeted 44 people for the next six months. Can't we not hire some folks with that, I mean, at least 20 of them for a year? Can we not take that money and put that towards that effort and work to solve this problem? You're going to have to talk with the Commissioner. Sure. I'd be happy to. But, well, again, we've been having discussions about that in terms of looking ahead to try and accomplish that. And when people leave, there's still associated costs for people leaving. And I think that's driving part of this is the large number of people leaving. Well, I know I'm oversimplifying the case, but it would seem like if we've got 44 leaving and we've got them budgeted for the next six months at least, and we were thinking 20, that's 24 positions, I would ask that the administration take a look at that and bring us back how might that work in using that money towards a recruiting class of any size. I mean, anybody at this point, it seems like the phrase was all hands on deck, and every live body that we have takes pressure off of the folks that we do have. So I would just ask to see how we might be able to make that work along with all the other ideas that we've got. Yes, sir, and we have had a meeting referenced to that subject, and I guess we'll continue to do that. So the idea has been placed on the table. Okay, thank you, Chief. I appreciate it. Commissioner Driscoll is quickly approaching the podium. I did want to add that we have been meeting, and there are other issues. The chief or Commissioner Mason mentioned the payouts. They're not insignificant. It's a significant amount of money, payouts for these folks. And we also worked in the budget knowing that staffing would be at a certain level. So remember we budgeted the 97.5%. So all those factors go into it's not we don't have funding for 44 folks just sitting there for the year. But we're working through those variables. As I say, I'll make sure to go on record. I've oversimplified the case. But it would just seem like that there's opportunity there that I would like to see explored and kind of broken out for my benefit, please. Thank you. Okay. Okay. Jane, while you're – I'm sorry, Commissioner Driscoll, you should be more formal. While you're up here – He is fine. Council Member Beard said he'd like to ask a question. Just a quick question, Commissioner. I understand about the payouts, but there is also some savings in salary for the next six months, is there not? Are you talking about a gross amount of payouts versus the loss of the salaries? We're looking at the total personnel that were budgeted, where we are year to date, looking at the payouts, again, for the level of salaries of these individuals' payouts and the time that they have, they're significant. So we're looking at all of those variables. You could replace all those individuals. No, I'm sure. I understand that. And you're going to be bringing up younger folks, I assume, than the ones that are ready to retire. I mean, that's just kind of the way it works, doesn't it? Right. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you. Vice Mayor Gordon. Thank you, Mayor. I'm just thinking about service right now, and in your handout, under the section Maximum Out-of-Service Companies, the shift commander shall limit out-of-service companies to a total of nine companies on days when in-service training is conducted, and seven companies on days without in-service training, and they're all considered to be front-line companies. And I guess my question, and maybe you wouldn't want to answer it or couldn't answer it, but my question has to do with service. So frequently we have more than one fire on a shift, correct? It does happen, yes. Two fires in different parts of town. It does happen, yes. EC runs all over the county. Can you tell me what are your, do you have concerns about a day that might be particularly heavy on runs and what you foresee as the challenges. On those days when staffing is really stretched and then the event of a couple of significant events going on at the same time, a weather event comes through, ice storm or something to that nature, we have the potential to be extremely strapped. I can't sit here and project those days. We do have concerns about that, and we're looking at some other operational issues to help support that. Obviously, the response times, the resources on scene is going to suffer. The potential for suffering at those events is going to suffer at times. So would you be putting, I mean, I guess priorities would then come into play, whatever the greatest priority is would get the service if we're short. We hate to get to that level where we move up apparatus throughout the system, an area that's hit on one side of town. We continually move apparatus across town to fill those gaps and try to minimize the size of those gaps or the area that's unprotected. Okay. I think Chief Hoskins has something he'd like to add. Okay. Thank you. And I'm going to ask my final question and then let you all talk. My final question had to do with these numbers of retirees and how many dollars that represents in terms of salaries that won't be being paid out. So I'll listen. Chief Hoskins. Our projected cost of the 40 retirements is around $1.7 million. You're talking about the payout? $1.7 million? Yes, in the payout. Okay. Yes. And then did you want to add something to the question about service? Yes, when you mentioned the number of out-of-service companies on training days, companies that are in training, though they are out of service while they're at the training center, should the situation arise, we would pull those companies out. So don't get hung up on that number of nine, meaning that those are nine unstaffed companies. And the reason we up that number is because we have to train. We have no choice but to maintain our skills and our certifications. So there are going to be days where we will have more companies while they are out of service at the training center Should the storm come through, should a second fire occur, that's where it becomes an operational issue that we start pulling those folks out, putting them back in the city in a way that we can hopefully cover and minimize the impact of having those people out of service. So are you saying you'd pull them out of their in-service or whatever training they're in and put them on a company and they would go? They go as a company to training, and that way we can pull them out and immediately put them back into the response numbers. All right. Thank you very much. I think as a layperson, if you drive Old Frankfort Pike very often, you can see sometimes on a heavy training day, there may be six or seven fire trucks at the training academy working in the smokehouse and things like that. So at any given time, there is that number of apparatus that are technically out of service, but at a moment's call, they could be pulled out and responding. Okay, thank you very much. Okay, next is Councilmember Chris Ford. Thank you, Vice Mayor, and thank you, Chief and Commissioners, and leadership of the Fire Department. I want to also ask, Vice Mayor, if it's okay, it may be a question appropriate for Commissioner Driscoll as well, while I make a few remarks, if Jane would come forward. I want to start my remarks off by thanking the Chief and his staff. You guys in these tough times have done exactly what we asked you guys to do in regards to stabilizing the department and continuing to have services going. So I'm thankful for that. I'm concerned, however, and thankful for the information that has been mentioned for bringing this information to us before we go on break. But that is exactly my point is that when we adjourn today, we won't return to these chambers for another 30 months. And I'm, excuse me, 30 days. and I'm concerned of what kind of action plan we have going forward and the confidence that you guys need from this council. So I think it's a disservice, and we will be putting our community in jeopardy if we were to face brownouts again. As Council Member Farmer just mentioned, to have equipped firehouses and the buggies and the apparatus needed, To have all the tools but not to have the manpower to carry forth the needed work would not be in the best interest of our government. So let's talk a little bit about what we do and what we need to do to go forward. The math that Council Member McCord mentioned is a brief math. It's at 40 retirees minus 20 retirees budgeted. It gives us 20 surplus, give or take, positions, minus the payouts that are required to those retirees that are going out. Overtime is not the preferred method. But again, my first remarks is that you guys did what we asked you to do in regards to managing and bringing overtime back into an acceptable level. But there are times when overtime is needed, and not just in the fire department, but to carry out business, to keep business going forth. when you're short staff. Is there, Commissioner Driscoll and Chief and Commissioner, will there be, even with the payouts, if we have to resort to overtime funds, will the funds be there in a rough estimate budgetary-wise, do you believe? I think if you look at, I mean, first of all, when we budgeted, this was clearly, we knew that this pattern was going to happen. And we talked about at the level of staffing that there would likely be over the course of the year times when there would be apparatus out of service. So as we went through the budget process, we assumed that. We assumed a certain level of savings from collective bargaining, which we didn't quite reach. We assumed a certain level of retirements. But again, with that come payouts. So when we don't, I don't have a number for you today. I can tell you that we're running, you know, personnel is tight. As we reported at the Budget and Finance Committee, we're actually over budget at this point in time. So again, but those factors, we clearly anticipated some of the staffing issues in the agencies and took some direction during budget. For example, in corrections, you know, included some of those funded vacancies and included a certain level of funding in both police and fire. So we have to reach that level first, which we're not there at this point. So it kind of washes out, so to speak, with the 40 retirees versus the 20 retirees that we budgeted, but the payouts. The payouts kind of leaves us. And, again, I don't have those numbers with me today. I didn't anticipate addressing that. Okay. And thank you, Commissioner. And to Chief Jackson, I guess, and again, from a logistics standpoint and a service level standpoint, I know over time we just got finished talking about the financial implications, but I know over time perhaps it's not ideal in your mind because the fatigue factor and optimal service for the few folks that we have left. but is that an option? Is that a viable option? If we were to make a policy decision to counsel, is that a viable option, the use of overtime to? It would be a viable option. As I said yesterday, we sat and spent two and a half hours discussing the options. The recruit class, like I said, it's almost a year process because we have to go through the background checks, the physicals, then we get them into the recruit class, get them trained, get them to the line. So that entire process will take a year. So like I said, if we started in March with the class, those guys actually go into the recruit class, 20 weeks of training, they would be on the trucks by, 20 weeks would be early July. But then they wouldn't become firefighters until the following March. And then contractually, there's a lot of stuff that goes with that. The overtime option, as far as the monies go, we discussed a number of options that would allow us to put trucks back in service while the paramedic class was in duty. So we discussed those options, and I guess in those options, the opportunity of browning out or us instituting our service plan would be minimized. So could I give you a number today on the actual overtime monies that we would need? No, but you give me two days, and we'll have it to you. Yes, sir. Well, thank you, Chief, and thank you, Commissioner Mayer. I appreciate the time to ask these questions. Just personally speaking, I'm against brownouts, and I think that we should take every step that we possibly can to ensure service, irregardless of I'm not speaking just for my constituents. We're talking about our constituents from county border to border. We want to make sure that our folks are protected, particularly during this holiday period when we'll be away. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Chief. Thank you, sir. Thank you. Let me reiterate a point that through these holidays and into the early part of the year, based on who has requested leave days off, they have a calendar set that looks like we can get through January, February, and either part of March without facing any dramatic out-of-service incidents. So we do have some time to work on some things in addition for that reality. Council Member Myers. Thank you, Mayor. Thanks, Chief Jackson, for coming in today and your presentation. I guess my first question is, what is the minimum class size, recruit class size, that you could bring in that's cost effective to do the class? The minimum class. Or is there one? 12 to 15 would be the minimum. Okay. I'm on the task force that met this morning. Yes, sir. And I could be wrong, so I'd like you to check on this, but I thought I understood them to say that there were at least a list of 30 that have already been through the background checks and all those things, and that if we had the finances to pull a lever, they could start training immediately. There's nothing left for them to do except start the training. Well, I guess the first thing is the list is a little bit stale. That's why we would have to redo the background, because something could have occurred in there. That's why we would have to redo the background checks. Since they were waiting for a job, they might have had to do something in the meantime. They're ineligible now. So when you look at the retirements, I guess what I'm trying to get to is if the minimum class is 12 to 15, and out of that 30 there were 12 to 15 that were ready to go, So does it make sense to try to use some of that 1.7 that we're saving by the salaries being saved? I know there's other funding that has to be done for the retirees, but does it make sense to try to use part of that to get 12 or 15 in so that the brownouts don't begin to take effect? Once again, sir, I mean, if you give us the authority to or the funding to do it, We'll make it happen. I can't answer a policy question based on you. That would have to be at your level. Okay, if you'll look at it instead of a policy question, because that's why I asked it, I apologize for that, and look at it logistically, the 12 or 15, does that get enough people to make, for example, another buggy go? I always use the analogy to my soldiers. It's like putting a Band-Aid on a laceration. A laceration is a long cut. If you put a Band-Aid on it, it's still going to bleed. So, you know, is it going to help? Is it going to stop some of the bleeding? Yes. But is it going to stop it? No. Right. I understand that part. But if you got 15, would you be able to utilize the 15 in a way that maybe would eliminate a brownout? Yes, sir, over time. Over the time period, like I said, we've got to get them the background checks. We'll get them, but it's not going to help us during the spring break. No, it's not going to benefit us at that point. In the summer months when we get them on the line, yeah, it will help us. Okay. Thank you. Mayor, I just have one other question, and that would be then if these brownouts are seemingly going to be in the future, if nothing changes, what is the plan that comes July 1? if we have roundouts now because of the 40 retirements and they're going to increase as we get into spring break and on, what's the plan coming to life? If you're asking me that question, the reason I'm going to say is, if you're asking me that question, I think Chief Jackson just gave a real good segue into an answer. He talked about the soldiers under his command, more than 800 people in Iraq. And what he's done here is give us a plan under very adverse conditions, real adverse conditions. And he is anticipating in this plan certain hypotheticals still. And I think what we're hearing is a command staff that has supported that plan. So if you're asking me that question, I'm going to say, well, that's why we've given this man the job, is to plan during times of adversity and deal with the constraints that we have to deal with. Are you finished? You asked me the question. Okay, you didn't let me finish the question. And the question is not one that he can answer, and that's why I asked you. When you get to July 1 and the new budget season starts, if we haven't hired anybody and if we're in brownouts already, it would seem that they're going to become systemic and continue. So my question to you is, what is your plan to change that? My answer is that at this point that is thorough speculation. We are dealing with conditions and moving parts across this government that require us to address these conditions on a day-to-day basis and anticipating that conditions will not change. We have conditions in this country that are clearly not changing substantially. and that's why it takes the creative energy that we're hearing here that is quite different than it was a year ago. Okay, you still don't answer my question. I answered the question. I said that's speculation for me to answer it at this point in time when the data that we are receiving and dealing with is itself changing daily. Okay, since you don't give me a chance to finish my sentences, if you would, please. What I think I heard was that there's a calendar. When I asked if we hired 12 to 15, would that do anything to change the brownouts? What I heard was, no, when we get into spring break and summer, that's not going to change that. And that there's a calendar in place that when people start to take their vacation and start to take off, then there are going to be brownouts. So when you say that's speculation, I don't think that's what we all heard here. Well, I've answered the question to the satisfaction that I'm going to answer the question. So there's no problem. Are you finished, Council Member Myers? I guess so. No, that's not true at all that you suggested there's no plan. You've been hearing a plan for some time. It would be nice if you would let me finish when you asked me a question. Well, you continue saying that, Council Member. You asked me if I was to finish. All right, I'm trying to. I'm going to start talking about topics. So I guess you've answered the question the best that you're going to answer it. And so unless Mr. Reid has something to add, I guess you're done. Thank you. Mr. Reid, would you like to add something? I don't know. I think basically what we're dealing with here is the ramifications of the budget that we had to put together in July that was pieced together, that we pieced together jointly to avoid layoffs and dramatic effect on individuals. And now we're getting halfway through the fiscal year and things are popping out at the seams because the nature of just the budget business itself, the fact that we exist in very tight financial times right now, that there's no meaningful improvement, it seems like, in revenues. Now, we're going to report back in January as to what the revenue picture looks like and if we're getting an uptick and what adjustments can be made to the budget as a result of those upticks. When you talk about when we get to the budget in July and what's envisioned, I think how we go about preparing the budget and how we go about working together is a joint effort and depends on a lot of factors. It depends on what the revenue situation is. It depends on what other priorities come up. Obviously, it's a high-level priority for this administration to keep the public safety operating at an adequate level. We've done that in extremely difficult financial times. You look at other cities across the country who've made massive layoffs in public safety. You look at some of the things that have been done in Cincinnati. We have worked extremely well between the administration and the council to address these things. Chief Jackson has come up with a plan based upon the budget that you enacted to attempt to deal with the number of retirements that have come up. As conditions change, I think we'll all change by July. The revenues may be better. This is a high priority. I think the discussion can occur then. But the level of safety and what's being done in public safety, I think the chief has done a very, very good job. Does that answer the question? Yeah, my question, again, wasn't to the chief, and the chief has done a very good job. The whole department has, and I admire them for the work they're doing. The question is to us, I think is what you're saying, is what we plan to do in July. And I think it matters, again, I think the answer is based on the revenues, based on the financial picture at the time, and based on what you all want to do at the time. We work together, and we're going to continue to work together, and we take your ideas as well as our own, and the budget is a joint process. So come July, we'll have a proposal. You all have what you want done, and we'll go through the process. Let me ask you this way, because I like your answer and your willingness to have a conversation. Have you guys started planning for the event that things don't change? Yes. Will we get any light of what that plan might look like? I think the vice mayor has discussed some kind of a budget retreat and discussion about where we are and where we're going. We're going to be full participants in that. Yes, sir. We're planning. I think we plan every day. And, you know, I shudder to think where we were with fire if we didn't have Chief Jackson in place and if we didn't have Chief Baston in place in the police department. Okay, so when we get together then for our retreat, if you can maybe have a little bit of an update on how people are. Yeah, and this is a give and take. This is an art, not a science at this point. I mean, when you add in some place in the budget when the revenues are this tight, you're going to have to reduce somewhere else. So we're going to have to have those discussions, and those are extremely unpleasant. And, you know, it's easy to add on. It's real difficult to cut back, and we've avoided those cutbacks to this point, and we may be reaching the point that we can't avoid some of those more major cutbacks and tough decisions, but we're looking at them. We want to discuss them with you and discuss them with you in plenty of time. Excellent. Thank you very much. Vice Mayor Gordon. Thank you, Mayor. Mr. Reid articulated a few of the things that I was going to say, And for me, the important thing for all of us to remember is that until we put new recruits on the units, this problem doesn't get better. And this is not a new thing that we've dealt with. Many of us who've been on the council a long time have dealt with this before. And I appreciate the comments about our difficult budget. We all know we're in the most difficult one we've been in. I think your plan, I'm somewhat not encouraged, but I'm at least a little more calm about the fact that we do have the training, the people in training that we can pull onto a unit. Of course, the difficulty with that is we don't want to be pulling them out of training because they have to keep their training up to date. And so the budget retreat is exactly where I was going to suggest we start these conversations on January 26th and that this would certainly need to be a high priority for us as we move forward. I mean, we heard what Chief Bastin said about our new police recruit and what that will do for us, but it still won't get us back to where we probably need to be. So just I think this whole conversation has elevated the importance of this whole issue, and we'll be working on it together, I trust, and look forward to those discussions when we have our budget retreat. Council Member Henson. Thank you, Mayor. Jane, I just wanted to be clear that what Council Member McCord had asked about, if we could get those numbers, and I appreciate the Vice Mayor's suggesting we'll take this up after the first year at our budget retreat. but if we could get the cost, the 40 that are retiring, what it would have cost if they had stayed the entire year, minus the payout, and just see what those numbers are, if we could have that available to us when we come back in January. And compare that to what's budgeted, which is a key. Yes, compare it because, you know, I mean, I can't emphasize enough that police, fire, corrections, our public safety is critical for our city. And I just feel like if we continue to hold off, hold off, starting another class, it's only going to become more critical. So we really, really need to take a very serious look at it. Thank you. Council Member McCord. Thank you, Mayor. Commissioner, you had mentioned, I guess I'm a little confused, but you had mentioned that there's a game plan for, I'm sorry, Commissioner Mason, that there's a game plan and a calendar set to get us basically to March without any significant brownouts or anything like that. That's correct. Okay, but then I look at the chart on magic number 2012, and it says we're going to round out four. That's an example. That chart is a given-day example. Okay, so I'm totally confused now. Hypothetical, is that right? Yes. Chief, when you made this presentation, it was that, hey, the way I read it at least, was January 2nd, four companies are browned out. There's a few variables and there's a few things that are set. The thing that are set is the 124 people we need to run the shift. Okay. What happens is we schedule people. They have the opportunity to schedule days to use their benefit time. Okay. Typically, people don't want to use their benefit time in January, February, March. But by contract, 21 firefighters through captains, three majors in the battalion chief. So that's where we get that 24 people a day who may be off. Now, where the fluctuation comes in there, and the reason that the commissioner said we probably won't see this, is we have days in January, February, March, we only have two or three people that have scheduled those days. and so that 24 or 27 number you see in there kind of backs down okay and it will allow us to absorb the shortage that we're going to see once everybody retires now also once around april and may once we start seeing spring break and the summer come on those days are much more uh filled with people using benefit time and that's that's when we're going to see it okay and and i gather that but again i guess my confusion was is that i'm you know you're putting up charts and we're trying to absorb what we're seeing, and I see that, and then I see data out of service, 1, 2, 12, and there's a number 4 beside it, but there's no hypothetical written beside that or an asterisk. The potential is always there. I, as a shift commander, cannot predict what day that the firefighters through captains are going to submit leave requests that I have to honor up to 21. If we work Valentine's Day, we may be in trouble Valentine's Day because people may want to take that day off. So that is hypothetically, it fluctuates too much to be able to say it's going to be that way every day. But by contract, we may have up to 24 people on that number. Okay. Well, again, I want to thank Council Member Stennett for asking for this, even if it's the last minute, because it's very helpful to see this and to ask questions because it is very confusing. There are a lot of moving parts. I will agree to that. But my concern is that we've got some syntax issues where we're camping out on words like significant, and it leaves me a little wondering, you know, what am I looking at? How do I process this? And so, again, I appreciate you all helping us log through this a little bit. Council Member Crosby. Thank you, Mayor. You probably can answer this question, Chief. I'm wondering how many EC unit runs are advanced life support per day? Per day? Versus how many are basic life support? All our runs are ALS. Every time the fact that we go out, Chief Griffin can come up here with Chief Griffin now, But every run that we make with an EC unit is an ALS run because we have paramedic level care, no matter if it's a bumped knee or a cardiac arrest. So everyone is classified as advanced life support? Every run we make is ALS. Did you have something to? Chief Jackson is correct. All of our runs are dispatched as ALS, and they get an ALS assessment. Now, whether they are transported ALS is a different story, and that all has to do with the level of treatment that was rendered, whether it was started in IV, administered drugs, that type of thing for billing. ALS and BLS are different for billing, but as far as the dispatch, they're all dispatched as an ALS run. Okay. Does that help any? It does, and the reason why I'm kind of asking some of these questions is, I know I'm not sure if this is by contract or if this is just standards, because I've always been an advocate for the national standards of having three of our, and I'm sorry, I had to take notes as you all were talking about things, that there are nine EC units on duty with three people staffing now. Is that collective bargaining contract, or is that just national standard that we follow? The staffing issue? Yes. That is a collective bargaining issue now. Before, it was just like a gold standard that we had set, but now it's built into the collective bargaining contract. Okay, so we couldn't even look. I was just trying to think of Deering, because I know that even right now the EC units, because there's only nine of them, and they're stressed out because of the amount of runs they're having to make, and they're shorthanded. It doesn't even sound like it's an option, though, because of collective bargaining, to look at other options to increase the number of units so there's not as many runs as temporary. It would still be the same amount of work. But not for one individual unit. It would be spread out with more units. so they would not be as, one buggy wouldn't be as stressed out because of the amount of runs. All right, thank you. Council Member Lane. Thank you, Mayor. Chief, I was a lot more active in the public safety area when I was on the committee that oversees public safety, and I've been a little bit out of the loop. But I do have a couple of observations, and I first wanted to say when you first came in charge of the fire department, We had management issues and we were spending too much money, and you did a great job there. And then now we have non-static or static revenues and no increases in revenues, which has kept our budget sort of flat, and now we have the retirement issue to deal with. But I just felt like I needed to comment. I think you've done a really good job. You've taken a proactive, a positive approach to addressing the issues you've had to deal with. and I think because of your leadership we're a lot better off than we could have been in another circumstance. And I was thinking about this. It's not like we're waging a war to put out fires, to rescue people that are in accidents that are injured and all that. And I think we have to sort of look at that. It's our mission that public safety is our top priority in the government. and maybe we could come up with some innovative ideas that would help us be more efficient and get the job done under the most adverse of conditions. So I'm going to try to come up with a couple of ideas for you, and I will be calling you. I just wanted to say thank you and to your staff for everything that you're doing. I mean, as a citizen and a council member, I truly appreciate all your efforts, and thank you. Thank you, sir. Council Member Stennett. Thank you, Mayor. And, Chief, I want to go back to something you spoke about earlier. You know, even in times of diversity and crisis and, you know, lack of financial funding, there are opportunities. There are silver linings to become more efficient and to run, in the long run, a better operation. And I appreciate, you know, the effort here today to try to do that. And in fairness to the administration, it is difficult to plan ahead and have a crystal ball to know what's going to be the revenue picture coming July 1. That's why I'm glad to hear Mr. Reed when you comment. That's important to work together. I appreciate it, and I hope you mean that, because we spent the last hour and 45 minutes having this discussion. If I wouldn't have asked for it, when would we have heard this discussion? If you want to work together, keep the council in the loop. That's the message today. I think we've all said that. We want to play an active role. We want to hear what the plans are. That's why I asked about corrections. Last week we got a great news conference for police. Keep us in the loop. And as regards to the recruit class, I would hire one post-haste. There is money in the budget. There is a savings not having these 40-something people in our budget the next six months. Now, the catch is we can maybe get through the next six months, but what happens in the next fiscal year? And that's the truth of it. I mean, that's what we've got to figure out. Yeah, we can get them started, but how do you keep them without having the cuts and layoffs? And that's what I hope we can work together on July 26, Commissioner Driscoll, with those numbers. And look at that, because the work for us is not the next six months. It's next fiscal year. And that's going to be the dilemma when the mayor brings the budget in April. It's going to be a tough budget, maybe worse than this past one. And so, you know, I don't want to steal his thunder on the pessimism that may be coming, but it could be worse because we have some big ticket items out there. So let's keep that in mind. I, again, would love to start a class today, but the problem is going to be next fiscal year, and I hope we keep that in the back of our minds. But at the same time, this has to be addressed, and I know brownouts aren't starting day one, and they may be sporadic throughout the first few months, but we've got to get staffing levels back in all three of our public safety areas. I just want to say that throughout, we have not withheld any of this information. We have included it in the link session. At our Saturday morning little mini-retreat several weeks ago that just a few of you were at, we talked about some of this. So this is something we've been working on. I don't want to misconstrue what you intoned there, but we have not withheld any of this information. I did not apply that you withheld it. I'm just saying when would we have had this presentation? When would we have had this discussion? Because it's been a good discussion. It's been very frank and it's been very good for us, for everyone to hear. And these are the type of discussions we need to have. I want to comment on it because I think, you know, Mr. Stenet, you know that you're getting more information from this administration than I think you've seen in a long time. And there's a psychological term for what you're describing. It's called projection. And when we do that, it suggests that the other party in the room is not doing their job. And what I'm saying is we all believe that we're doing our job. We believe that we're working together in a very deliberate way, in a very intentional way, in a very routine way. And so it's important that members of the administration, including myself, when it's suggested that we aren't, we need to say, I'm sorry, we are, and that's what we're going to do. Okay? Thank you, sir. Respond to that? Of course. I'm sure that you will. Well, I'll stay above board and just say that this is the first time we've seen this presentation. This is the first time that this work is underway on a routine basis, and it is being updated, and you asked for it, and we responded with it. But to suggest that we should have the anticipatory knowledge of what you're going to ask for and when you're going to ask for it is a real challenge for anyone who's trying to manage an enterprise. And I think that's what we're saying, and we're saying it as responsibly and as respectfully as we can. And I've asked for it respectfully, but I also ask for it responsibly as a council member just to work together and be kept in the loop. I'm not saying you can go to anything. All I'm simply saying is moving forward. We want to be a part of the solution, and we realize the difficulty of it. But, you know, I'll just leave it at that. In furtherance, on a specific note, I just asked Assistant Chief Wolfbrand about when we really started firming up the 40 number of retirements, and that was post-collective bargaining being signed. So it has been a relatively recent development that the numbers were skewing in this direction. And that changes up until the 9th, I think, they have to pull their papers. So this is something that from October and November, we're looking at this situation, and we're putting this plan together and trying to fine-tune it. So that's how recent it was as to why prior to this you haven't had a presentation. Council Member Beard. I think I want to ask this question, but I'm not sure. Chief? Yes, sir. I'm sorry. You have 30 people in the pipeline right now. Is that correct? Yes, sir. You say that there are background checks and a few things need to be refreshed. Yes, sir. so that you could bring them to their first schooling when. Do you have any idea about when? Like I said, if you were to give us the goal today, it would still be, after we did the background checks, the medical, the physicals, it would be around the 1st of March before we could start a recruit class. That's just a strong guesstimate. Okay, I was hoping that it might be a little earlier than that. My take is, though, that we should, rather than wait until March, until all this happens, and then try to tee this thing up, and it's the middle of April or May before we actually get started, we ought to go ahead and make the decision today to go ahead and get the background checks and that type of thing done. which really doesn't involve you, does it? It's HR that does that, I believe. No, we have to do a conditional offer. You all, as a council, have to approve it, start the funding before we can move forward. I understand, and we can do that tonight. If my colleagues so see, I just want to get it right as close to today as possible to get started. rather than having to wait, and then it takes how many weeks? Plenty to actually get them on the apparatus itself. Right. Well, like I said, sir, I'll move when you say move. Okay. Well, we'll chew on that if we get a break between now and 6 o'clock. But thank you very much. It's a good job as far as I can see that you all do. Thank you. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, sir. Council Member Myers. Thank you, Mayor. Chief, could you just follow up on that 30 and see where they're at? Because the way I understood in that meeting this morning, the background checks aren't stale. And the only thing they were talking about having to do is check to see if those people were still interested in the jobs. So can you check on that? We can check on that. And see? Yes, sir. You know, weather all that. Thank you, sir. All right. Chief. Okay. Chris. Mr. Bartley. This is in the public comment section. Okay. Appreciate you letting me do it here. Some of it's kind of moot, so just bear with me because I wrote this before this meeting. But anyways, thank you, Mayor and Council members, for letting me talk on this issue today. I just want to clear up things. Brownout is an industry accepted term. It is brownouts. It's not SAPA. It's not RAP. It's a brownout. Okay. Today we are discussing the looming brownouts of this apparatus on the Lexington Fire Department. We were last discussing this issue on December 22, 2009, when then-Vice Mayor Gray called a special meeting for after-engine four and other trucks were browned up in mid-December. The story is the same. The facts are the same. This department has been cut to the bone, especially in the last year or so. And now with around 40 people retiring, we will be so short-staffed that trucks will be browned out. They're going to happen. After contract concessions that we agreed to, and after we warned, this local warned the citizens in the city through newspaper articles that staffing must be maintained, and we must hire a class for the health and safety of not only us as firefighters, but as the public. $5 million plus in savings and cuts have been made to this department this year alone through slashing the budget and through the concessions made in the contract. We've been trying to maintain these services, and we have, and the citizens have not seen any effects of this. With these brownouts, they will. That's because the city still has another recruit class planned. Hopefully this changes tonight. Basically, we must be given the training and the tools that includes manpower to do our job. The city has not given us the tools and has set this department up for failure. Just for an example, a story that happened a few days ago. Engine 16, which is the underground station on Man of War, and EC2, which is the EC unit off Richmond Road, Saved a life a few days ago. And if you just take Engine 16 out, your next close and responding units are Engine 7 on Lansdowne and Tate's Creek or Engine 22 at a Veterans Park. That person may be dead and not alive at Central Baptist right now. In our job, seconds matter. It would either be a spread of fire, heart attacks, strokes, anything like that. Medical or fire, we respond to everything. Shootings, loss of blood, seconds matter. Not minutes, not hours. Brownouts will cause a delay in these responses. Cincinnati that they've used examples for has had brownouts for the past year, and there has been a delay in about two minutes in response times. They have 38 engines and lighters and 12 ambulances, as they said earlier, in a 75 square mile radius. We have 29 engines and lighters in a 280 square mile radius. We have a larger area to cover. We will have larger response times. Again, if the brownouts are allowed, response times will increase, and the medical care and the fire suppression will be delayed. The city will be held liable for playing the Russian order with these ideas, and public safety needs to be and remain a priority for this city, even in hard economic times. I ask that you approve a hiring today. Thank you very much, and I appreciate your time. All right. Thank you, Mr. Bartlett. Next on our, is there anything else to? We need to get the NDF list approved so that we can get it on the docket. NDF. Motion to approve and a second on the NDF. Is there any discussion? All right. Hearing none, all in favor of the motion, please indicate by saying aye. Opposed, no. Motion carried. Okay. Next on our agenda is the IT pay issues. And I'm showing that as Mr. Hanna. Lyle? You might. I think a lot of folks already know you, Mr. Hanna. But please introduce yourself. So anyone who doesn't know you. Thank you. I'm Lyle Hanna. I'm the president of the Hanna Resource Group. We're a human resource and finance consulting firm based in Lexington, Kentucky. And we're engaged by the human resource department to do a study of compensation issues in your IT department. And I have some slides. And I don't know who makes those available to me or puts them on, but they were sent last week. So if they're available, I think it would be good to share those with you. They certainly make this go faster. I think I'm bringing pretty good news, so I hope this will raise the spirits and get us reinvigorated. Did I nod when I wanted to go to the next page? Okay. All right. What I'd like to do is give you, the department asked me to give you an overview of our findings and just share that with you to give you an opportunity to make whatever decisions you might want to make. But we were asked to review and evaluate the current base pay and the supplemental pay structure for the IT employees. And so what we did was we conducted a thorough review of the jobs that you have. There are 23 different IT positions. There are quite a few incumbents. Some of those jobs have a single person, but many of them have quite a few people in them. And so we reviewed those, and we determined what the market pay was. And really we were trying to see, do you need the supplement or not? Is the supplement necessary and so forth? So we looked at that. And so why don't we flip to the next page there. And let me tell you a little bit about the methodology. We did collect information from the HR department. So we looked at job descriptions. I'm going to come back to that in just a minute. But we also looked at the organizational demographics, the size, and so forth. We looked at the industry sector. We obviously know that you're part of government, public service, the industry. We look at current pay. We look at what your philosophy is and what your current structure is. And so we coordinate with the HR department on that. Let me add a little bit to the job description. Somebody mentioned earlier that your job descriptions are somewhat out of date. They are about 10 years old. We noticed that immediately. And we said, how do you use these? Because obviously you're hiring for these people all the time, so they have supplemental data. They're going back to managers in that department on a regular basis to say, how have these jobs changed? You can't use a 10-year-old job description to hire somebody right now that you need out of the marketplace. So HR is keeping up on this. That's not to say you probably need to update your job descriptions at some point, but it's a big job to do that. Not everybody keeps those up to date all the time. But there are other ways to keep that information current. And you have to do it when you're hiring people. And you all have, on a regular basis, hired people in your IT department. So the HR department, we felt comfortable and confident that they had good, accurate data to look at. But also, we have another way to check it, and that is that we use a market price system. It's called ERI. That stands for Economic Research Institute. It's the largest database of its kind in the world. It's a consolidation of market data from all kinds of surveys. So years ago I did a study for you all 15 years ago, and we used a lot of Mercer data. But the ERI data has Mercer data and Hay data and Watson and Wyatt data, and they collect data from all government filings. So when government institutions submit reports to the IRS or other things, if there's salary data in there, they collect that data. So the database is really large and solid. In fact, this database is used by the IRS in cases where they're trying to determine whether nonprofit organizations are paying too much to executors or not. It's also used in a lot of court cases now to justify certain salaries or to defend certain salaries. So it is seen as sort of the gold standard for survey compensation data, and there's a lot of government and public sector data in the database. So kind of as an overview, data overview, we looked at government and public sector. But we also, you can slice it. You can get data specifically. So we said, okay, what's the budget for the urban county government? Because we'd like to look at institutions that have jobs that are similar to ours. And that's really important. So we actually used the $480 million budget, which is somewhat generous, you might say, because not all people in IT would work in a department that had a budget like that, certainly. But they're part of an institution that has that kind of budget, so we use that budget across the board. We also take data from all across the country, but it's trended to Lexington. So that means they know what the cost of living here is. They have other ways to regulate salaries here, so they look at data, but they are able to actually hone it down or trend it to the Lexington market. So it's a standard way of doing compensation, and it's used everywhere, and it's a strong way to do it. So we think it provides very solid results. So let's flip then to the results. So here are the results, and this is good news, and that is that if I came to you and said you were so far under market, it was terrible, then you'd say, oh, my gosh, it's kind of another trauma to add to our economic woes. But actually, this first data, let me tell you what we did. First of all, we list down the left-hand side the positions that we were able to find market data on. You had 23 jobs. We were actually able to find market data on 19 of those jobs. We thought that was really good. Some of your jobs are so unique that there isn't a good match in the marketplace. And that's okay. Sometimes you get about 70% or 60%, but a lot of yours matched up well, so that was great. We got data on, by far, the vast majority of your jobs. So the second column is the average current salary. We just put it in sort of increasing order just to make it easy to read down the page, so the lowest salary to the highest salaries read down the page. And then we put the market median data. The median is the 50% point. That means half the organizations pay more than this, half the organizations pay less than this. Now, many organizations have set some kind of compensation philosophy, and they'd say our philosophy in this organization is to pay at X. You haven't really established that at the urban county government. But we worked with our HR department and said, what do you think this should be? We engaged other people actually in that too from some other departments, It's the mayor's department and the law department. And we said, look, we ought to target on the median, the average. It's not the average, but the median. That seems like a reasonable target. So that's what we used. And then the farthest column is what you are as a percent of the median. So overall, if the very bottom of the page you see, 95.44%. If you were 100% of the median, you would be right at the median. You'd be at 100%. So you're at 95% of the median. Now, the standard out there in compensation profession is that if you're between 80% and 120%, you're within the market. That's good, solid HR. You're paying people well. And part of that is because some people are new in the job. You'd expect them to be lower in the market. Some people are more senior in the job or have made better contributions in the job. They would be higher in the market. So if you're between 80% and 120%, you're in good shape. So actually, if you look at these numbers, you can see that your average is 95%. That's really solid. This is without any supplement, okay? Now, I'm sorry that those ones in dark green don't show up very well. At least they show up better on your projector than mine, so that's good. Those are two jobs. The first one is the electronic and computer control specialist, and that job is currently paying at 76% of the market. And the second one is the microcomputer support supervisor, and that one's at 76% of the market. Those are jobs that if we were doing an analysis for you, we'd say you've got to take a look at those jobs because if you're paying them at that level, you are paying them quite a bit below market. You're below that 80% mark, and you're probably going to have a hard time recruiting and retaining those people. So that's something for you to consider. and then if you'll flip to the last page I guess it's the next last page then what we did was we took the back up one should be another table in there yeah, he just about got it and this is the same information now some of the jobs on the last page don't have a supplement so what we did was took the jobs that have a supplement. About 15 different jobs have supplements. There are 14 on this page. There was one, I guess, we couldn't price. But 14 jobs on this page all have a supplement. So what we did was we said the same jobs are listed down the page by title, and we put them in the same sort of increasing value in terms of what their average current pay, average current salary plus the supplement. So the first column of numbers, that is the base salary plus the supplement. And then we compared that to the same median, which makes sense, compared to the same median. And then the last column is what you are as a percent of market. So you would expect it to increase because a supplement means you're adding to the salaries. So actually, you're even stronger there. In fact, if you look at that, on average, the jobs in IT where you're given a supplement, they're paid at 107% of the market. That's a very strong position. In this market, that's a real strong position. And some jobs, the ones that we put in red, are higher. We just mark those because those jobs are paid quite a bit above market. In fact, they fell over the 120% that we use as a standard. So those are the information system specialists, the network supervisor, and the network security engineer. And now I point out that that's not necessarily good or bad. I'd say it's good that you're not way under market. That's always nice, particularly in this market. Some of these jobs are single incumbent jobs. That means there's one person in it. And salaries, you can look at them like this. It's a good thing to know this. But then you have to really make a decision based on who they are, how long they've been in the job, what their performance is, all that kind of stuff. But this gives you a guide. This gives you a professional tool with which you can make some decisions with going forward. So if you flip to the last page, I have a summary. And that basically is that if you look at your IT jobs across the board, with or without a supplement, if you look at those jobs, you'd be paying at 95% of the market. You are paying a supplement to many of those jobs, and with a supplement you're at about 107% of the market. So you have strong pay for your IT folks. Now, that concludes my report. If you all have some questions, I'd be glad to answer those. Looks like some folks have signed up, Council Member Martin, then Council Member Lane, then Council Member Stenet, and Beard. Thank you, Mayor. Thanks, Lyle. Appreciate your presentation and your work on this. Help me understand, again, the parameters of the data. So the survey information is from thousands of organizations. Are these just government and public sector? These are government and public sector. So no private sector. Right. Okay. So when it says includes data, all the data is from government sector. Right. Is that fair? Okay. Right. So and then the utilized 2012 overall budget, $480 million. So that's organizations up to $480 million? Yes. Budget? Is there a bottom of that? you know what it does is it trends their data so it might have some above and some below but that's the target that's the that's the general area and um i don't i wouldn't say there's a bottom so is a is a so you'd have in here community these aren't just kentucky communities either right these are not just kentucky communities this would be across the nation so you'd have communities who might be a small community like harrisburg it could be smaller ones there could be larger ones, but they trend that data to our community. When you say trend, being a lawyer without a finance guy. They're trying to get it as close as they can to the $480 million. So that's probably a better way to say it. I'm not sure I was very clear about that. Okay. All right. So the data, so we're not running the risk that our data pool is maybe involves too small communities or things like that. This would be a good cross-section across the nation of communities that are our size. Okay. All right. Well, I mean, that's what we want, and I appreciate you coming and talking to him about it. I think so. So when you say the average, the averages of that data pool are the communities that have that, yes, that submitted that data. And so we'd be looking at cities like Louisville or Cincinnati or Nashville or places like that. Okay. Appreciate it. Thank you, Mayor. Council Member Lane. My question, welcome. Nice to see you again. My counsel. Thank you, sir. My question is, was any consideration given for the fact some people are merit employees and the pension fund benefits are good and also just the benefit package by itself is good? Would you say the benefits and additional compensation from these other cities would be equivalent to what we have in Fayette County? This data is considered without any consideration of benefits. But I would suspect that the benefits are, you know, we have strong benefits for the urban county government, and there are strong benefits in other governments across the nation. So I'd say they're fairly competitive. Okay. All right, now this is the problem at hand. I'm just looking at the numbers here, but I see one job that we're paying around $79,000 a year, and the market rate is $59,000. Now, somebody's been working for us for eight or ten years and they're making $79,000. How do we go and cut their pay back? How would you handle that? You're the expert on that. Well, all those are handled differently. It depends on the organization and so forth. But the standard practice is through a person's career, if they're demoted, you wonder how did that happen. You've got to go kind of figure that out. And this may be more than one person. I don't know if this is a single incumbent job or not. All right. But, you know, usually those people are just kind of redlined, and no increased salaries are given beyond that, beyond this point. And, you know, if there was an actual demotion at some point, usually adjustment would be made at that time, but it doesn't, you know, I don't know what the situation is. So if you come across this now and that person has been paid at that level for a long time and now we discover that it's less, then you'd say, well, we're paying that job more than it's worth in the marketplace. We could replace that job for considerably less. What is the right way to deal with the community's money? And we need to be the most responsible we possibly can. So that person is probably valuable to us. Maybe we can enhance their job or increase their job in some way to give them more responsibility. I don't know what the situation is. but have them step up to actually contribute to the organization in a way that their value is worth that higher dollar amount. Or maybe you just say that we're not going to be given any more increases for that job. Well, I mean, the other option is we could just say there's no 10% supplemental and go back to ground zero. Absolutely. I didn't know which job you were pointing to exactly, but, yeah, if you're given a supplement, maybe you don't need to be doing the supplement. Well, if our pay with supplements is actually 7.35 percent above the market, maybe we would just make the supplement 2.65 percent supplement to put it in market. Would that be a way to approach it maybe? You might do that. Another option is to just adjust the jobs that need to be adjusted. You have a range of pay already around these jobs. So make sure they're in the right range. Pay them properly. Some of those that are very low, they just need to be bumped up a grade. And the ones that are high, they actually may fall within your structure. And maybe you don't need the supplement. Who would you recommend in our government make this decision? Do you the mayor have to do that? Not my call. Well, you know, if it's a compliment, give it to the council. If it's a complaint, give it to the mayor. That's our motto. Okay. Well, thank you for your input on that. I appreciate it. Thanks. There you go. There you go. Council Member Stinnett. Thank you, Mayor. Mr. Hanna, I just want to ask a couple of data questions. On your charts, the Director of Enterprise Solutions makes the same on both charts. Is that a typo? 103, 547, and then when you add in a supplement, it makes 103, 547. Well, no, it's not really. It looks like an error, but it's not. And so he doesn't get the service here. They can explain that. But it's because that job is very unique. And there's some documents that say it has a supplement. Some documents say it does not have a supplement. So I'll let her explain that one. I think there's an issue on that job. And so we just put it the same because, like he said, there's some documents that show supplements, some that don't. There's some documents that say that that supplement was built into the base at the beginning. But good catch, it does look like a problem. Mr. Don't go away. I've got a question for you two here in a second. But I just want to clarify the data. So does this data have experience in it, Mr. Hanna? Does it take into account if someone's been here 20 years? No, it does not. So some of these pay skills, they could have grown their salaries based on the raises council gives, et cetera. Like I said, some people have more experience than you expect them to be higher in the range. They've been here longer. So your median comparisons have no experience calculated either. The medians are just what the market is, but the market has some people that are highly experienced and some people that are not experienced. So the median, in a way, does include experience. And there's no GIS? You couldn't find any GIS folks? I don't see them on here. There's no comparisons for them? What I have on here was everything that we were able to find good data on. Okay, so I guess our GIS folks are unique to government. Are those some of the ones you were talking about? need. Okay. And Commissioner, what's the recommendation? I saw the title, but I don't see any recommendations. What do we do from here? Is there a plan to go back and look at each one individually? Well, I think at this point, because the study has just come to you all, I don't think we're going to make a recommendation today. I think everybody needs some time to digest it and look at it. And, you know, with Council Break coming up and all that, I think we'll probably readdress it in January, if that sounds okay. Okay. Thank you. Thank you, Mayor. Council Member Beard. Thank you, Mayor. Do you know offhand when the supplemental pay was initiated? I believe it was in 2001. So we're talking about 10 years ago. About 10 years. And we continued to pay supplemental pay for the 10 years to these individuals, and there was no effort made to actually adjust the base pay to some kind of realistic number that the world can see. And it boggles my mind, let's put it that way, that it's ten years. I can understand supplemental pay for some kind of a heavy-duty task for a year, but 10 years doesn't work with me, I'm afraid. Well, you could use this information now to make those adjustments. Well, better late than never, I guess. I'm not aware of any. I just don't see how we can pull a significant chunk of money out of somebody's living budget that they developed over a 10-year period and say, surprise, because they'll either walk on us and we'll be without their talent and experience or they'll go down to an attorney and file bankruptcy, one of the two. And so that, again, is something that we have asked for, the council has asked for, for two and a half years at least is a salary matrix built that we're still kind of flying under the Mercer approach, and there are other approaches now, and we didn't like the Mercer at one point, And so we bent a few wires and skirted it, and it's kind of a mess, as I'm not being in any way. Anyway, thank you for your work, and hopefully we can get this all spurred away. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you, Mayor. House Member Kaye. Thank you, Mayor. And, Lyle, thank you for this work. You're looking for me. I'm right here. I knew your voice. I just couldn't have found you. I was hiding for a minute. I want to go back to Kevin's question about the way in which you look at or think about kind of seniority or tenure within the job description. That's not data. As I understand it, that's not data that you have for this workforce compared to the average. Is that correct? You didn't gather that. That's correct. It's not a standard thing that you'd look at when you're doing a compensation study. You're usually not looking at individuals. You're looking at job classifications. So we looked at job classifications, and job classifications often have multiple people in them. So some are new in the job. Some are senior in the job. In this case, you're right. There's some that just have one person in the job, but that's usually the case, too, with executive-level jobs. Is that data that if it were gathered there would be a national database or a regional database to compare it against? There's no data. The data you compare against is this median data. But maybe this is the point that will help. This median data includes people of all levels of experience. Yes. So in a way, this data has the experience in it. What I didn't compare against is your experience. Right. So it would be possible, for example, for this to be a highly experienced workforce and to have compared to? Quite possible. Quite possible. Or the reverse. You may have all 30-year senior folks, and you would expect then that you would be higher than the average pay. Right? Right. And that's what you have to look at internally. Okay. You have to take this report and look at that. You have to look at these things under a deeper microscope. Okay. The other question, on both charts, it looks like the people at the lower end classifications are all either below the median or well below without the supplement, and that as you get higher on the scale, it tends to go in the other direction. Is that fair reading? That would be my observation also. Okay. And then finally, I think what's also obvious, but within both charts, there are few people who fall either below the 80 percent and few people who fall above the 120 percent. So even with the supplement, when you look at that chart, most people are still right around 100 percent, give or take. That's why I said I'm bringing some pretty good news. Most of your people are right in the market, and that's wonderful right now. Great. Thank you. Thank you, Mayor. Councilman Martin. Thank you, Mayor. Wow, I just have a follow-up question. So what was the purpose for this study? The purpose of this study was to understand where the IT employees are, the classifications are, based on the market, without a supplement and with a supplement. I think they were trying to figure out, do we need the supplement now, given the economic changes and so forth, you know, is this supplement still necessary? And this probably isn't a fair thing for you because you're the consultant here and you're not the policy. But what I didn't hear is, gosh, if we just got our IT compensation in line, the city of Lexington would be on great financial ground. What I do hear is that, well, what you didn't, what was sort of out of your realm, and this is more of a political thing, is that we as a council have basically put 23 employees under the looking glass, whereas we have 1,000 public safety employees who I asked for money to do a study like this. That really is a serious problem. That is a problem that will likely bankrupt Lexington if we don't address it, both the compensation, the pension benefits, and the medical benefits. And so I think it's – I'm kind of disappointed we're sort of picking on this very small department as the problem for Lexington's finances. It's like we're rearranging chairs on the Titanic, Whereas the biggest problem is, in my information, it seems to indicate that we have a serious thing to look at as far as are we comparable on our police and fire pensions, salaries, and benefits. So I guess I'm not disappointed with you, but I'm disappointed with the council. Thank you, Mayor. Vice Mayor Gordon. Thank you, Mayor. Just a quick comment. Thank you very much, Lyle, for your report. and this is more on us that I'm going to comment. When the council passed this ordinance, and I think Mr. Farmer and I are perhaps the only two left who were there, the ordinance says that HR is supposed to review it annually and make a recommendation to council. And that had not been done. and that is the reason that this came up, is that the review and the market study hadn't been done. And, I mean, these numbers that you've brought us argue for us leaving things basically alone. We're in pretty good shape, but I would argue that it's kind of silly and maybe a point for future discussion to keep putting a supplement in, that we should just make it a salary and have the discussion of what that would mean going forward and perhaps consider the ordinance and what we need to do with that ordinance. But anyway, I thank you for your study, and it is more encouraging than perhaps we knew. Thank you. It does reflect that you've kept up with the market. You could be way behind here. And everybody knows this market, the IT market, has grown faster than other markets in general over this past 10 years. So you've managed to keep up with it. That's a good thing. Council Member McCord. Thank you, Mayor. Lyle, again, thank you for this. Council Member Martin, since you're disappointed with the council, let me give you a little frame of reference as to why this came about, is that during the budget season, one of the places that we were looking to cut, because as the Vice Mayor said, the review had not been done in a decade, was where are our IT people? We heard one side saying that we were underpaid and we couldn't keep these folks and we were overpaid, and then you had the supplement issue, and the supplement isn't supposed to go but a year or two or whatever it is. We've been doing it for 10 years, so there was a policy decision there that was up in the air that had not been addressed. And then with supplemental pay, you're not paying benefits and pension and so forth like that. So there was a real reason to take a look at this, not about 24 employees at all. It was about the policy of supplemental pay. So I would contend that it is very good that we've got something back. I would ask Commissioner Graham and the administration to bring back your recommendations as to what do we do with this information. And so, again, it's one of those things where I don't want anybody watching thinking that we're looking at 24 employees and saying, you know, wow, we found something here that's really amiss. No, actually, it's the opposite. It was we've got a policy that has not been addressed in over a decade, and we're actually going against what it's supposed to do. Do we want to keep doing this? I think, Vice Mayor, what your point is, is if these are in range, then let's make it salary and get away from something that maybe we're violating right now. But that's why we did this. That's why we're looking at this. And I agree with you, Council Member Martin, we do have a huge issue on the public safety side. But this was asked for because the Council link and the one that I served on with Council Member Farmer and Council Member Blues ran up against this right during the budget season because of the supplemental pay issues for environmental quality and our water quality folks and Charlie Martin's shop. And so it was something that, again, I'm very appreciative, Lyle, for you taking a look at this for us and would certainly encourage your continued walking with the administration to come with an array of recommendations as we look at this. But thank you. Thank you, Council Member McCord. Council Member Farmer. Thank you, Mayor. I'm just trying to thank you, and we all appreciate your work, and certainly specifically that you're a local proprietor. We appreciate that very much. There was some earlier conversation that maybe you had done this work. using 10-year-old or older job descriptions? Would that have affected any of the outcome of this at all? Well, if we just used the 10-year-old descriptions, that would have been a travesty. Okay. But we didn't do that. There's a piece, I told you some of that, but I'd like to give you the full response, so I appreciate your answering that. In addition to the fact that HR collects information all the time about these jobs because they have to manage them, they have to recruit them, they do performance appraisals on them. You know, there are a lot of ways that HR keeps up on jobs. And we had your chief talent officer helping us with this, okay? But what we also did this. In the EOI database, there are job descriptions. So what we do is we start out with, here's what, we don't just go, we start with a title, but the title is just a starting place. What does that job really do? We get that from HR. Then we go look online and we say, all right, give us a match to that. We get the best description we can offline. And this would be a description that matches the vast majority of these jobs. And we send that back over here. and they take a look and they say, okay, and this would be all brand new stuff. This is stuff people are doing right now. It's not stuff they did 10 years ago. This is stuff that people in the market are doing, you know, IT professionals. And then they say, okay, yeah, but we're doing this other stuff too, da-da-da. So we go back and we try to find things that are even closer match. We try to find the very best match we can. And that's actually a pretty long process. That's the most lengthy part of this whole process is kind of the back and forth on those jobs. So when we finish, we think we've got a darn good match on these jobs, and we ran it by a number of people back here to make sure we had that. Council Member McCord alluded to it, but at the time this came up during budget, we had conversation with folks who tried to make it clear that the job that they had versus the job that they were doing was different because people had laughed and they'd assumed more responsibilities and were doing more. So your analysis takes all of those into account. We think we captured that stuff. Thank you. Thank you very much for your work. Thank you, Mayor. All right. No other council members signed on, so thank you very much. Mr. Hanna. Thank you for the opportunity. Yes, sir. Appreciate that. Thank you. Council Member Myers had suggested that he has been contacted by Mr. Bailey. It's okay, Lyle. Thank you. To speak, Tim. You know the routine, the three minutes, right? Three minutes? The three-minute protocol. Well, after Mr. Hanna's presentation, it might take five seconds. So to give you a little brief information about myself, I've been a civil service employee since 1992. I started in HR. I worked on the original Mercer implementation that was conducted by William M. Mercer. As a result of that, I was trained in the Louisville Area Office in market studies and job classification. And ironically, LaHanna worked for Mercer at that same time, and through that, I got to meet him. I can tell you, you have an excellent consultant, an honest man. So I ask this, Pete, because I think I have a very unique perspective on this. I'm currently the technical manager in enterprise solutions. So I understand market studies because I've been formally trained in how to do them. But I also have a strong IT background because I've been in the IT field for 10 years. Now, a lot of the original issues I have have been addressed. But it's not as simple as comparing external jobs to internal jobs. Once that's done, you have to compare internal jobs to internal jobs. You have to ensure that there's internal equity. And I'm just very quickly going to throw out a few quick examples. Two of the outlying jobs, the network security engineer and the network supervisor. On the PowerPoint presentation, one's at $136,000 and one's at $121,000. The network security engineer, the market medium is $57,000. The network supervisor is $64,000. The network supervisor reports to the network security engineer. So in essence, the study is showing that the subordinate makes more than the supervisor. I know for a fact that a network security engineer for an organization this size would make $100,000 to maybe $115,000. not $57,000 $57,000 is someone who's pulling network cable terminating cables and setting up network accounts I'm going to use another example and I'm going to use myself I'm happy to say I don't have a supplement but I am the technical manager in DES if you look on on this page, market analysis base page. Base pay, I'm sorry. Technical manager for enterprise solutions. My base pay, well, I'm sorry, the median is $75,900. I'm not here to say that I'm underpaid, because I'm not, by any means. I'm very happy with my salary. There's a position in solid waste. Computer Analyst Supervisor, $75,483. Market Median. Looking at the titles, Tech Manager, Computer Analyst Supervisor. They seem comparable. In solid ways, the Computer Analyst Supervisor... Just one second. I want to let the Council know that Mr. Stewart had signed up to give you an additional three minutes. Okay. Well, thank you. So you've got three more minutes. Okay. Well, I don't think I'll need them, but thank you. The computer analyst supervisor supervises one computer analyst. It's isolated. It works in the division of solid waste. It supports the routeware program, which controls the routing of garbage trucks. That's important. I'm not discrediting that. My position, and I'm not here to sing my praises, I manage a technical crew of five people. We support PeopleSoft. We support all of the government's back office functions. We support payroll, AP, purchasing, revenue. I can't even think of it all now. Anything that's HCM or financial related. Not to mention EPM and budgeting and general ledger. My team consists of a DBA, two programmers, a senior programmer, and a systems administrator. The software we support impacts all of government. It touches every division. The solid waste routes garbage trucks. According to the survey, in the external market, we're weighted the same. Maybe we are. I don't know. And, you know, maybe I'm biased because I'm using myself as a comparison. It just doesn't seem right. Now, I'm not questioning Mr. Hannah's methodology. The problem is, is the information he was provided and the information he was given access to to base his analysis on. He's professional. He's very competent. He's an expert. I'm not. It's been ten years since I've done this type of work. But I am very familiar with it. GIS specialists, that's a very common field, and they weren't able to match it. You can go to UK, they have GIS specialists. Most any large municipality has a GIS team. But the most glaring issue is the computer analyst classification. That is such a, again, I was involved in Mercer's. original implementation. And we were embracing the concept of broadbanding, where we were taking multiple jobs, different functions, and consolidating them into one job class. At the time, I thought that was the right thing to do. I was wrong. You know, I didn't know what I didn't know. Now, ten years later, and working in the IT field, that was a mistake. because now in this computer analyst job classification, you have a TSM administrator that handles all the government's backups. Tim, excuse me. Right up here. Here we go. I apologize. Time's expired. So thank you very much. Yes, sir. Okay. Thanks very much. I appreciate the opportunity. Appreciate it. All right. Thank you, sir. Thank you, sir. Yeah. Council Member Lane. Yeah. Could I ask Mr. Bailey a question? Okay. Mr. Bailey. Tim, Mr. Lane would like to ask you a question. I'm just going to hurry up out of here. Thank you. You've got to reprieve for more time. No, I just was curious. First, I appreciate your coming forward and speaking to the issue because this is very complicated. But my question set up is related to this. The question is, how well do you feel like our IT department is doing and the area that you supervise you seem to be on top of our game and operationally, we're doing well. And I'm sorry, Mr. Lane, could you please repeat that? My question is, how well is our IT department operating in the area that you're managing right now? How well is that operating? In terms of enterprise solutions, Equalsoft, I think we're doing well with the staff that we have. Knowing that the systems we support and the staff that we have, I think we do well. Okay. All right. Thank you. Thank you. All right. We are at council reports. Boy. And we are at council meeting. Council may not start at 10 minutes. Yeah. Huh? What's it? I move that we postpone the council reports until after the full council this evening. All right. Is there a motion to that effect? Second. Huh? Motion to put the council reports in. How would you describe the motion, Mr. Martin? Put them after the next meeting that starts in 10 minutes. Okay. During announcements, then, is a suggestion by Council Member Ellinger. So there's a motion by Councilman Martin and a second by Councilman Farmer to place Council reports in the announcements portion of the council meeting. Is there any discussion? All right. We can take a vote then. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed, no. Motion carries. So is there a motion to adjourn? Second. I think we've got everything here. We're just saying. Motion to adjourn. That takes precedent. Second. All in favor, please say aye. Opposed, no. Motion carries. We are adjourned for 10 minutes.