The ORGAN PLAYS The End The End ORCHESTRA PLAYS The End ¶¶ Thank you. It's 11.03. Go ahead and start. We now have a quorum for today's Social Services and Community Development Committee meeting. I want to start with approval of the minutes. Give you a chance to look over them, and then we'll entertain a motion. I'm moved. Second. Okay, we have a motion and a second for approval of minutes. Is there any discussion? All those in favor, say aye. Aye. That passes unanimously. Okay, the second item on the agenda is determining which elements in each of the current Community Development Block Grant or CDBG public improvement slated projects are eligible for funding through the stormwater quality management fee. And we're going to have a presentation from Mr. Charlie Martin. Thank you, Charlie, for coming in today. It was a great presentation you have for us today. Hopefully this will be helpful as far as the work that you're trying to do here. Susan Bush had asked me to put together some slides just to try to give you some background on the water quality management fee. And it was three points I really wanted to make out of the brief comments that I had. I wanted to give you some background on the existing stormwater priority list, one that's been around for a long time, the consent decree, a commitment to address historic flooding projects, and then talk a little bit about the water quality management fee, the 2009 basis for funding. The stormwater flooding priority list was conceived back in the 90s. It predates my tenure here with urban county government. Darrell Bennett was always kind of the father of this thing to some extent. But what it was is, and it's included in your packet there, it's a formalized process for adding projects to the list. It started with a baseline, but there are additional projects that are developed over the course of the last 20 years or so. And it uses a matrix of 22 different factors that it compiled into an overall severity score. I personally never was a real big fan of this. I felt like it was a little bit awkward and a little bit clunky. And so when we were negotiating the consent decree, it was my suggestion that we have a supplemental environmental project that included reevaluating the methodology of which we used or developed that priority list. I kind of wanted to look at it as an opportunity list as much as anything else, especially in light of all the sanitary sewer capital stuff that's coming down the pike, is that you'd hate to go in and do sanitary work and not touch the stormwater and then turn around and come back and do that. So right now, I did this really quickly in preparing for this presentation, but you have the list that was included, I think, in your packet or at least in your handout, that there are 52 outstanding or uncompleted projects. The current estimate is right around $122 million. So there's a significant amount of obligation that's sitting there on that current priority list. Note, though, that it does still need to be updated. It doesn't necessarily reflect work that we did in 2011. I was gearing up and preparing for our committee that's scheduled for the 31st of this month, and so when asked to participate in this one here, I was having to kind of hustle and didn't have everything quite updated yet. One thing that's important to note, though, is the current list and process excluded commercial properties way back when. And that was a decision that was made back in the 90s. And it's significant now in the fact that in the current water quality management fee, the last time I looked at this, approximately 70% of that fee, the revenue from that fee, comes from commercial properties. And so to exclude commercial properties seems inappropriate in my mind or in my view of things. And so that was another reason to reevaluate or redo our priority list or the methodology to make sure that we were inclusive of commercial properties that were experiencing flooding considering their contribution to the overall fee. So where we are right now is that we're reevaluating that list right now. GRW Engineers is working on that methodology for us. Another component of the Supplemental Environmental Project is that we are committed to spend $30 million on flooding projects by January 3rd of 2021. Essentially, the consent decree says 10 years. And I've got it underlined there is that completing projects, and this is wording from the consent decree, on the priority list. And just for clarity here, this is from out of the consent decree itself, and so on projects on the proposed project list. So we've been focusing on that exclusively as far as how we're leveraging our capital to work on projects that are on the existing priority list as we refurbish or redo the priority list to update it with the new methodology. That kind of segues into the water quality management fee because obviously for a lot of reasons with it we were required to do this water quality management fee one of them being is the consent decree specifically required that we set up a fee basis as you saw from the SEP language that's in your package is that that fee was to include the funding necessary to be able to work on the flooding priority list so this is difficult for you to see given the lighting and the overall size of it, and so I want you to maybe focus on the handout that you have right now. About in the middle of the first box is called Expenses, right up in here. And if you'll notice, it has capital of about $1.45 million in FY11 and projecting out to $1.65 million through FY15. A couple of lines down there, you'll see where it starts referencing where we're bonding, where we're projected to begin bonding for future capital needs. In a nutshell, you can read the numbers there, but you can see that in 2009, when this was prepared by the consultant that worked with us, and this was presented to the full council by the Stormwater Task Force that was chaired by Lyndon Gordon, Vice Mayor, that was in April 6th of 2009, that it contemplated some level of cash and some level of borrowing to fund that $30 million obligation. Now look at Council Member Stenet, because I think he was a member of that committee, but based on my notes and recollection of this, this financial model only set up to spend the first $15 million of that $30 million. There was a lot of concern that to impose this fee at that time, that the fee was going to be too high for folks to be burdened and transitioned into this initially. So, in a nutshell, there is capital that is provided for in the cash flow analysis from 2009. But you can do the math and realize that if we're obligated under the consent decree to spend $30 million in 10 years on flooding projects, there's not a lot left over as far as to be able to do other projects. That's a concern of mine, and I'm sure that's a concern of this committee as well. It just is what it is based on the 2009. Likewise, at the very bottom of it, you will see total estimated annual revenue. It starts out for FY11 at $12.9 million and escalates itself out for the duration of this modeling period of $13.2 million. I will say that this was an ambitious estimate that was prepared by the consultant in 2009. In FY11, when we prepared the FY11 budget, the estimated revenue was $11.5 million, considerably less than $12.9 million. It looks like for FY11, that revenue projection was going to be pretty much on target. We think we're going to be able to make that, but it's substantially less than what the consultant projected back at that time. I think there's a couple of factors involved in that. One of them in particular is that I think they thought that growth was going to go on like it had in the mid-2000s, where we were building, rebuilding things, expanding and things like that, and the economy did a number on us and slowed that growth down considerably. Likewise, I think there's some concern about our ability to be able to collect that revenue even when we bill it. there was a ruling by the Public Service Commission that said that even though this is attached to the water bill, is that you could no longer terminate water service for these type of fees because they were not related to water consumption. I think all of you are well familiar with that. So my point is that this cash flow analysis module was what was presented to the council in April of 2009 based on the best estimates that were available to there, but it was somewhat unrealistic in the aspect of revenue, which is then going to have to cause us to decrease some of those projections that are up there in the expense area, in particular in the capital area. The last sheet that I have here is essentially a different reflection of what we have just been talking about. You see that on the bottom line, the proposed program needs. We have 11.9 up to 12.9, 12.4. It's based on a lot of those revenue projections. You see in here that there are different line items that are associated with different cost modules within the water quality management fee. I only presented this because I just wanted you to see is that basically we didn't contemplate anything other than maintenance capital and priority flooding capital. There are places in here that you could move things around, but the concern would be is that, like with anything, when you move things around, is it going to add up the same way? Items 6 and 7, we just talked about that a little bit, is the billing costs and the bad debt. Those two things are very, very uncertain for me as far as in the path moving forward because we're in the process of selecting vendors right now to change our billing situation. and i have not involved in that selection process but i would suspect is that those numbers are likely to change and hopefully down but there's always the possibility they will go up as well anyway that's really what my contribution of things were i think that bob is going to come up here next and talk a little bit about the um the needs as far as for cdbg projects relative to storm sewers i just wanted to be able to provide you with the background of how we got to the water quality management fee in the first place and what the projections were at the time okay before you go i have a quick question i'm just um is bob are one of you two going to talk about what is eligible is that what bob's going to do no um anything is eligible if it is a storm sewer my point i think was and if i didn't make it i apologize for that is is that if you spend the existing money on anything other than flood projects, you endanger yourself as far as not being able to meet the supplemental environmental project requirement and thus expose us to civil penalties under the consent decree. And my point was is that this fee, it ain't getting the $30 million as it is already. I mean, it only was going to get the first $15 million. My staff has leveraged some of those costs with FEMA grants and things like that to help kind of close that gap. But what I'm trying to say is that the current projected revenues are not going to cover the consent decree obligation. And even though fixing other storm sewers, whether they be in CGBG projects or on South Lime or any other type of initiatives that we take on street or roadway improvements, don't meet the terms of the SEP because they're not on the project priority list. Okay. Before you leave, Mr. Lane, do you have a question for... Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, Mr. Martin, for being here. My question really looked at the cost of service spreadsheet up there. And, you know, my first question, do you have actual fiscal year 11 expenses and income data rather than just a budgeted number? We could get those things, but, you know, I didn't have really a lot of time to prepare for this because it kind of came out of the blue. My other observation is that with regard to where we're spending the money, it seems to me that we should try to put the preponderance of the revenue into actually doing the projects. And even spreading this out over five years, we're looking at $1.2 million a year for incentives. and at some point it seems like the incentives would, do you consider that a way to remediate flooding issues and all that? The incentives came about because the ratepayers were asking for a credit program, and we didn't recommend a credit program because we felt like it was inefficient. But the incentives program came about, and it is specifically called for in the ordinance. So to get rid of the incentives program would require a modification to Section 16. But we spend, last year, if I remember correctly, this is off the top of my head, Council Member Lane, is that we had $1.7 million in requests for $1.2 million in grant money. It is wildly popular as far as here in Fayette County. We've had tremendous participation. The purpose of it is to install water quality improvements that lessen our need to deal with flooding. So I'll give you an example. Ronald McDonald House converted their whole parking lot into a pervious pavement. Rain gardens, things that have allowed some of the ratepayers to essentially reduce their rate and reduce their obligation. I don't disagree with you that we would go through this thing with a fine-tooth comb and see whether or not that we're spending money rationally in each one of these areas and try to devote more money towards the capital, because as I said before, I'm concerned whether we have sufficient capital built into this thing to meet the SEP obligation. I wouldn't start with the incentive one, though. All right. Well, here again, in looking at the cost of capital projects, we're budgeted at $1.25 million in $11, $1.45 million in $12, $950,013, and then going back up to $9.45 million in 2015. I think the point I would make is if you look at how much we're actually spending for capital projects and you compare that to things like public education and outreach, we're budgeted over half a million dollars for that. Incentives at $1.2 million, bad debt at a quarter of a million, and indirect allocation at half a million. It appears to me that our administrative costs are way too high and the amount of money we're putting into capital improvements is way too low. I think it would be worthwhile to reevaluate this preliminary budget that was done, IBS, in 2010, see if you could look at the actual cost in 2011 and try to come up with where we could put more money into projects and less money into administrative costs. Well, okay. I'm open to that. I want to make two points, though, is that this wasn't Charlie Martin's. This was the task force. If Charlie Martin had done this, I probably would have come up with something different as well. So I'm always open to discussing that because that was three years ago as well, and the world's changed a lot. I will also, though, I want to make sure that it goes on the record, is that we're doing more than capital with this, is that we've got our overall stormwater permit and consent decree obligations to inspect this, enforce that, and so there's some costs associated with that. But I don't disagree with you as far as looking at that and trying to find more ways to make our capital go farther. We're about out of money this fiscal year. My folks have really stepped up in getting projects out the door, and that anything we can do that helps that, I'm all for it. That's the other question I might have. Are you spending all cash and you're not bonding anything for this work? That's correct. And see, this model probably will not work very well because if we do the work over 10 years, where we could pay for it over 20, then the revenues that we have from the water quality management fee would be adequate to pay the debt service. I believe this would be a dedicated revenue stream. So the funding of the bonds should not be an issue at all either. If you'll see on the cash flow module, the revenue bond reserve, you saw that in the first couple of years they were building up a debt reserve, which would be required. Since it was a new fund, it had zero reserves, and so obviously not a favorable condition to go to the bond market. But we meet with Commissioner Driscoll's group once a month, and this is something I'm beginning to suggest to them, because it's hard to cash flow projects at a million-plus a year because you hope every one of them comes in at right a million dollars, and they don't. Would you be able to actually pull the incentives of a mini-report on what we actually spent in 2011 and what it looks like for this fiscal year so we can see what the trends look like with actual data rather than budgetary information? I'll do everything I can to bring that together because, as I said before, we're scheduled to present on the Environmental Quality Committee on the 31st. I was really gaining towards that, so I'm glad that we've had this because I'll know to bring that with me. Really what I was trying to accomplish today was to try to demonstrate what the chair asked me is, yeah, anything that's related to storm sewer is eligible for funding under the water quality management fee. What I was trying to point is that we've got a $30 million obligation over the course of 10 years, and the fee was not set up to be able to cover that whole $30 million. And so when we have additional calls to the fund, that presents different challenges. Personally, whatever project we spend the money on is really no concern of mine. My main thing is to make sure that I can total up $30 million 10 years from now so I can check that box relative to the consent decree. Okay, well, you need to look at it from this perspective. If we're generating somewhere around $11 to $12 million a year in revenue over 10 years, that's $120 million. And if we can't put $30 million into capital improvements over that period of time, then our administrative and operational costs are way, way too high, and we need to look at reevaluating how we're handling this. Well, so we can talk about that. We'll talk about that. Okay. Okay. Thank you very much, Charlie. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you, Councilmember. Councilmember Stenet, do you have a question for? Okay. I just want to follow up a couple of points Councilmember Lane had made. Keep in mind that we have an audit coming on the stormwater fee, water quality management fee, after the third year. In February, it will be two years. And also, I'm glad you mentioned it, Charlie. We can't bond anyway until we have two years' worth of revenue data. So this may be a good time. We may need to wait a year until the audit to see what we really need to be spending, you know, on our stormwater projects or education, et cetera. So it may be a little premature to do that analysis today, but I think we're going to have to do it after we get our revenue numbers two years under our belt into February. we're going to have to make a decision going into the next budget anyway as to bonding for stormwater projects. And I think that will free up a lot of the concern, Councilman Lane, that I shared with him about how much is going towards administration versus on the street. And you and I have had that conversation a lot of times, Charlie. So I think we'll get there. I just think we had to get two years of revenue down, and they had to see how much it really costs to run the program. One big thing that we haven't talked about and using these dollars for is maintenance. That's why we're at where we are today, because we haven't been maintaining our system. And a lot of these dollars, my guess, will start having to go towards maintenance. Yeah, there's some of the, under the operating there, there's operating capital. Is that we're budgeted for $250,000 a year for operating capital. That's small repairs. I've got a list that's approaching $400,000 right now. You know, it's amazing how many things you can find when you actually start going out and looking for them, which is the things we've been doing. Does that include clean outs, Charlie, of the gutters and things like that? Yeah, that would include cleaning out catch basins that are full of leaves, gravel, dirt, what have you. We find a lot of storm sewers that are completely just plugged. They're just full of junk. We've got some ugly pictures of things that we have found in different places. Other places where it's just collapsed, it's more of a localized problem where the inlets and a particular intersection are just in such faulty condition. They have a flooding problem, but it's not a capital, traditional, priority list kind of thing. If you just go maintain it, it will work just fine under most circumstances. Since 2007, when the stormwater program came to me, we've gone out and looked for things unlike we have in the past. And so you find more things to do when you find more problems. I will note is that in the stormwater program from when it came to me in 2007, hadn't entered into the consent decree, we had not entered into this fee yet, I have the same number of FTEs in the stormwater program as I did before. The only place where we've added stuff is in the inspections, because as you've heard me say in this room before relative to the consent decree, where we got ourselves in trouble is that we did not inspect, record, or enforce when people were doing things that they weren't supposed to be doing. So we've had a significant uptick in the number of people that are out doing that type of work. Otherwise, on the stormwater engineering stuff, I have the same number of engineers that we had in 2007, just different ones. Eighty percent of the engineering staff I started with in 2007 aren't with us anymore. So we've made a lot of progress, but there's been a lot of changeover in that as well. I'm getting off. Yeah, let me leave you with one thought, though. one thing we probably need to start considering as a group and as a government is street cleaning. We had talked about this extensively during the Stormwater Task Force, but eventually we had in mind to make that part of our water quality management fee program. Right now that fund, as we all know, is running the deficit. We need to make a decision, in my opinion, in the next year. Do we incorporate that as part of the water quality management program, or do we pull it out all together? that we still only do parts of the city because the whole city wants it. So there's a lot of issues we need to look at with that, and we always envision maybe it being part of this maintenance because the more leaves, the more stuff you can keep from going down those gutters, the less maintenance we should have going forward. Right, as you recall, it stayed in until the last minute because that's why it has a line up there devoted to it. But where are we at? I know we had asked for it to be. I know we've changed commissioners a couple times now. I think that's what's happened to it. And it's just kind of said that we need to probably, someone needs to take initiative on the administration side, Mr. Maloney, and see if we get someone working on it because it's time. After two years of revenue under our belt, we'll start seeing how much this fund is really generating. In fact, it can handle that. Thank you, sir. Mr. Chairman, could I just have one question more, please? Sure. Thank you, Councilman Stenet. My question is sort of related to have you gotten any input from the finance department about how much cash on hand you would need to have in order to be able to bond in the future? Because I'm sure there will be some requirement for a certain amount of cash reserves. And so since you have about a year and a few more months to go before we would be eligible to get into bonding, I think we ought to be preparing to meet whatever criteria would be appropriate for that. yeah and and like say council member lane is that we've just really started kicking off our our monthly meetings with them unfortunately that that sanitary sewer thing keeps being the elephant in the room and so it's on my list of the agenda things for them to talk about because i i feel like for us grw one of the things that they've done for us is that they've been assembling the preliminary engineering for the next three million dollars worth of projects what i wanted to get to was us having projects that were ready to go to where then when we borrow the money, we spend it and we move on. The program I inherited, and you probably remember me talking about this before, is that we had borrowed money and put it, set it aside. And so it just sat there for years and years, which is, I don't need to tell you this, that it's not fiscally responsible. So I want to definitely have this bonding discussion with them, and I will bring that up to them as far as are we ready and are we comfortable with that. And I will try to talk more detail to that when I come back on the 31st. And, of course, the other option would be if you could reduce cost and generate $3.5 million in net income for capital improvement, that would be good. We found that we were not spending as much in the area of professional services this year. And in December, we came to you folks, full council, and you approved a $500,000 budget amendment that we moved into capital, which is allowing us to do phase two of Wickland-Aniston. So even on a year-by-year basis, I'm trying to make sure that we're being nimble. We're having projects in the queue, ready to go, and looking for every dollar that we can to be able to get those projects launched. Because like I said, I feel pressured to do $30 million over the course of 10 years. That's more than we've ever done in the stormwater program before. We're on a good path on that. One last comment about bonding and stuff is that this year we had submitted information to KIA for funding requests through the state revolving loan fund money. They're not quite ready for that yet at the KIA. I think they've been focused on water and wastewater for so long is that now cities are bringing stormwater issues to them, and I don't think they're recognizing them as being a funding need. And what I would ask the electorate is that when you talk to elected officials that they think more about that. There's a number of cities, ourselves, Winchester, Frankfurt, that have tremendous stormwater needs, and being able to utilize that low-interest funding level through the Kentucky Infrastructure Authority would, I think, help all of us in a lot of ways. Thank you. That's all I have. Thank you, Council Member Lane. I have just a couple of questions. Mr. Martin, you talked about you're going to update the plan based on new methodology, taking into consideration the commercial properties in the amount that they're contributing to the plan or to the fund and then trying to work their projects into the plan. And that list that you talked about, how concrete is that list in terms of the EPA allowing us to make changes? I think that it's a local priority list. I think they give us tremendous latitude in deciding what the priorities are and what they are not. The methodology is what we have used in the past to arrive at what ones were doing or not. But I don't think they really care so much what the priorities are as long as we have been consistent about how we're applying it. So briefly, at the end of the day, you talk about the $30 million that we're supposed to utilize. What does the consent decree say or what does the EPA expect from us to have accomplished with that $30 million? That we have completed $30 million worth of capital construction on flooding projects that are listed on Fayette County's priority flooding list. Okay, so they want us to spend $30 million fixing flooding problems. That's the basic problem. Yeah, and we're the ones that agreed to that. That's in a supplemental environmental project. We submitted that to them in lieu of paying a fee or a fine to go to Washington. Right, right. Okay. Okay. Thank you. I may have some questions for you later after Mr. Baer speaks. Are there any more questions for Mr. Martin? Okay. Thank you very much. Mr. Baer? Good morning. Good morning. Thank you for coming, sir. Sure. I'm here to talk about, I think specifically, the Meadows North and Arlington project area. get started with this slide showing area, the entire area. This area was first studied in 1997. It was a PEH study that did a storm sewer assessment. There's, I think, 511 acres within this boundary. And the boundary is New Circle Road to the north, Loudoun Avenue to the south, Broadway to the west and roughly Meadow Lane to the east. The original study anticipated that it would require $16 million to upgrade the sewers in this entire area. Over the past 10 years, we've spent $9 million, and we've completed the two areas shown in the yellow shading there. The length of streets within this block is about 12.6 miles. So there's considerable, when you're talking about reconstruction of streets, this is a considerable area. When you say the leaps to the streets in this block, can you, with your pointer, show us, are you talking about that full project area? Yes, sir. We were asked to take a look at within the CDBG projects that we do, what parts of those are attributable to storm sewers. and more generally, I guess, is what would be the elements of the storm sewer system as we see them and as we construct them in these projects. I've listed those there. It's curb inlets in the street, which would include water quality units, kind of a specialized inlet, surface inlets, which could be in yards, any type of stormwater conveyance systems, whether they're a pipe system or an open culvert that just goes under the road or whether it's an open channel or a ditch, manholes, headwalls, basins, passive systems, which we install on some of these projects because there are so many sump pumps and groundwater issues that we try to get those collected and put into the storm sewer system. And then there are natural or what we call structural infiltration systems, such as pervious pavements. Next slide shows specifically Area 5, which is the area that we're working on now. We have completed Areas 2 and 3. Area 5 is composed of subsections A through F. and Area 5A is the one that we are going to be embarking on later this year. This is a table that shows the breakdown of costs for all of Area 5 with the sub-phases A through F. And where those are located, the year in which the construction is anticipated in the lower section has the total, then breaks out the sanitary and the storm portions of those costs, and then what would be left over as the CDBG cost. the percentages of the that stormwater is of the totals on these ranges anywhere from 11 percent to 29 percent can i stop you just for a second sure on that the bottom half of that chart right there where it has sanitary sewer storm sewer or stormwater and cdbg is that a breakdown of what type of job that it is, or is that the actual funding stream for that piece of the job? Right now, the funding that we use is only two-pronged. It's their CDBG and their sanitary sewer. So we've... Yeah, that's one minute. The bottom line is knocked out. The stormwater is paid by CDBG. Okay. Okay. Currently, the stormwater, as you see it broken out on here, is not broken out, but it is rolled into or it's a part of the CDBG expense. So there's just CDBG and there's sanitary sewer. Okay. Also, one thing that may look kind of odd on this list is under subphase A, at the very bottom, there is no CDBG charge. that's assuming that if the CD portion, CDBG portion, were done as stormwater, all 5A is a storm sewer and a sanitary sewer project. It gets the large collector systems in place so that as we go from B through F, we can plug those flows back into that larger system. So 5A is the trunk system for both storm sewers and sanitary sewers. So is it fair to say that that's a flood mitigation project or not? It really is not a structure flooding issue. Once we get in there and start rebuilding it, I'm sure we're going to find lots of ingenuity that people have used over the years in order to prevent nuisance flooding of their yards. but there's no structure of flooding that we know of involved here. Okay. And when we're talking about, on to the next slide, when we're talking about street work, which a large part of CDBG is, it's reconstructing these streets, we probably ought to at least mention the municipal aid program, which is the gas tax money that we get from the state. Annual allocation ranges from about $4.5 to a little over $5 million a year. In FY12, it's $5.2 million is what we've been allocated. And KRS-177 dictates that these funds are to be used for street purposes, which can include paying people that maintain the streets, that design the streets, paying for a right-of-way to build or rebuild streets. But it's specific to the urban service area rather than the rural service area. It can and does go toward paying salaries for employees both in streets and roads and engineering. That range is shown there. The pavement management program is funded out of municipal aid. It's a fairly small expenditure, and it's a good program, in my opinion. Capital projects, this may be mislabeled a little bit as far as streets and roads. What I'm calling capital project for streets and roads is the resurfacing program. Technically, it probably is not capital. It's probably more maintenance, but I guess there are some differing opinions on that. Engineering, we typically get between $1.4 and $2 million a year, and streets and roads, they typically request in the $1 to $2 million range. In years past, whether it's been by bond or by dipping into some of the reserve in the municipal account, there has been more money put into resurfacing. It seems to be one of those things that we have difficulty catching up on. The number seems to keep running right around $20 million worth of need for resurfacing. So there's always a need there for the use of municipal aid funds as well. And that's all I have prepared. Okay. Are there any questions? Council Member Lawless? Thank you, Chair Myers. It seems like, and I don't know if this is happening in other areas, But we're taking one step forward and two steps back in many of the neighborhoods in the 3rd District by allowing entire backyards to be paved as parking lots in R1 and R2 residential areas with no stormwater basin, etc. And that may be something that needs to be referred to another committee, which I can do at the Cal meeting. But it is a very serious, very serious issue. And, I mean, in the last two or three weeks, there have been three such permits allowed. and there's already stormwater and sanitary sewer problems in these areas. Is there any attempt to address those kinds of issues? The municipal aid program, those types of private property development issues would not be eligible for funding under the municipal aid program because you have to attest that you're actually spending the money on public right away. Within the CDBG program, typically it has been seen as an income qualifying program where we're trying to provide an incentive to low and moderate income neighborhoods to make those improvements first to the infrastructure and then carry that over to the private properties. And I think that's what we often see in the CDA. It seems to me that, and this is a fairly new issue, But if Mr. Martin and Acting Commissioner Bush, maybe I can meet with them about, I mean, these are permits that building inspection is giving to these property owners to pave these areas that are already overpaved, et cetera. and it doesn't seem to comply with the ordinance. So maybe I can meet with them and talk to them about what we can do about stopping that. Thank you. Thank you, sir. Thank you, Council Member Lawless. Are there any other questions? I guess if I could kind of preface this Mr. Martin if you could come up the reason I asked to look at this issue was because I made the statement that a lot of cities seem to utilize CDBG to do projects in like for Lexington it would be the city proper as opposed to say this Metals Northland Arlington project rather than just bonding that project and doing it like we do in other parts of the city. This one got pushed under CDBG funding. And I guess I want both of you to stay up because I don't know who would be answering the questions, but I think Mr. Barrett said it was a $16 million project at the beginning. It was estimated to be $16 million. We spent $9 million over 10 years. I guess what I was trying to make the point of before was that if this project had just been bonded in the beginning, and completed i know it's a huge project um one it would have been done in a much shorter period of time and the residents that live in that boundary wouldn't have to deal with this construction over 10 15 years but also i think um mr maloney cio maloney had mentioned in that last meeting that the project went from i think it tripled in cost estimates i think it's what i forgot the numbers that he used 30 million maybe was one of the numbers that he used so i guess What I was trying to look at in this process is, are there projects like this one, and does this fit this category, that if we put it under a different funding stream, one, it would get done much quicker. It would cost less money because of the cost of inflation over time. It would be a lot more efficient for the people who live in this area to have to deal with it for five years instead of 20 years. And then if all that's true, are there elements of this project that could be speeded up if they were moved over to the water quality fee? And so I know that, Mr. Martin, you talked about the $30 million and that you have certain things you might have done. I agree with you that the priority ought to be for abating flooding. And I guess that's one thing I don't know about this whole project. Is there anything in this project, and that's really the eligibility question, where it came from, are there elements of this project that are flooding issues that we're trying to abate, or is it just we're redoing the storm system because it's in disrepair but it's not necessarily a flooding issue? The flooding issues were taken care of early on. They have typically been the properties in the lower part of the watershed, and it's in those areas where we have gone in and created more capacity, more holding tanks, detention bases. so those those are structure flooding is pretty much done within within this project area that that's flooding that we know of so the real value add for us would have been it we've we've that project that part of the project's already done then basically yes there's there were two projects on morgan which is downstream from this that are already done and we also did one in meadows which was related to this. Bob and I try to work together. That's part of one of the things I'm working on with the flooding projects or reprioritizing is that if I see that there are other related folks working in that area, certainly I want to partner with them, whether it's them or UK or the Transportation Cabinet or whoever it is, and that we try to leverage our dollars with theirs to make them go farther. We think we've done that here. Okay, and that was some of the questions that I was going to ask you was back in 2007 when you put this plan together for the consent decree. But I think my question has really been answered. I was going to ask you if there were elements of this that were to abate flooding, if you looked at that when you put the plan together. But there aren't, so that question kind of answers itself. I'm not so sure I really understand that. Well, go ahead. Right now, when you look at this project area, if there are elements of this project that would abate flooding, which is what we want to focus on with the $30 million, my question would have been, when you put together the plan that we talked about, the SEP, were there any discussions about putting this project in there as part of the SEP? But if it doesn't abate flooding, there would be no reason to do that. And so that's why I said the question is kind of answered already. Correct. The $30 million for the priority list, I think this was on the part of the council and the administration at the time, myself and others. You know, the consent decree, there was a large belief is that the reason why we have a consent decree is because of flooding. EPA does not regulate flooding at all. And so there was some concern is that we would have a consent decree that had a huge price tag but no commitment to flooding. And this was the mechanism in which we made some commitment to flooding by agreeing to do $30 million worth of known flooding problems over the course of 10 years. I put some emphasis on known is because this list has evolved over its 20-plus years. And we have found that there are some projects that are on here that aren't viable projects. Something has happened, development, redevelopment, changed the circumstances, which is why I ask GRW to go in and penetrate farther into the list, mature these projects to the point to where if I'm going to go recommend to you all that we're going to borrow money to fix them, that I've got a way to execute that plan in a reasonable time frame, not seven years later on different set of projects. But for these particular areas in the CDBG area, other than the ones that were already done, There aren't any future known priority list projects in that area that I'm aware of. Now, to say that someone might come up and say, hey, I've never had the opportunity to be added to the priority list. I didn't know about it. Thus, they go through the methodology. They score out. If they score high enough on that list, then they're eligible. And I have no magic to which projects we do first or what have you. This is a council-driven priority list. Like I said, my main thing is to be able to tell you all that I took care of that obligation regarding the consent decree, and we can check that offer list, and we're not going to get fined. That's my main focus. Okay. Are there any other questions? Then I have one final question, and I'm not sure. Charles, you might be the person to ask this. If we're looking at Meadows North and Arlington, this project, and we've kind of decided over time, and I know that Council Member McCord kept encouraging a previous council member to look at bonding this project and getting it done, what is the best way to get this project done in a timely fashion? And do either of you know what the cost estimate is now and the projected time for completion? i did a just a rough ballpark on the based on historical costs for street by street construction as we've been doing it we're looking in the neighborhood of 45 million dollars to do the entire area you say 45 45 about 10 of which has been done so and it started out at 16 now it's 45 And is that because of the time, or is that because more has been added to the list, or what's changed that so drastically? A couple things. One, I looked at the 97 report, and the amount of reconstruction they anticipated in that report is nowhere near what we actually have to do in these projects. And the reason that we have to do the level of reconstruction that we do in the projects is because just as our storm sewer systems in this area are in pretty bad shape, as are the sanitaries, so are the private utilities. So as we come in to redo a street, gas wants to upgrade from low pressure to medium pressure. Water wants to get rid of the two-inch line that serves one side of the street and the 6-inch that serves the other and put an 8-inch to serve everybody. So the utility companies get in there ahead of us, and they oftentimes take the better part of a construction season to upgrade their facilities, not just relocate where we have conflicts, but they renew and upgrade facilities. We don't really like the delay, but we see it as a winning situation for the people that live on that street because they get more reliable service. It's better for us because they're not out there tearing up a new street within a few years. So it's a delay that we live with. Also, when we go in and rebuild the sewer and we reinstall laterals for each property, each one of those laterals requires a separate cut of the street. So by the time you cut all the laterals, all the utilities, and our lines in the street, there's no street left. So we have to completely rebuild these streets. And that was not anticipated in that 97 report. Okay. I guess I don't have any more questions. Are there any other questions on this topic? Okay. Yeah. Councilman Wallace? There's a pretty severe problem over in the Elizabeth Street, Dantzler Court area. where when it rains really hard, there's a manhole toward the back of Dantzler Court that blows the top off and literally raw sewage shoots up in the air. which is and you know there's been several Westwood Courts several of those streets where somebody's crawl space has been flooded several times and their furnaces had to be redone and so there's some pretty severe and they're not on the list and I just You don't need to answer that now, but if we could look at that also. Well, I would like to just comment, if I may, please. The Arcadia Park, Barbary Lane, which is number 74, and there are ones that may not necessarily be recognizable names to you. I kind of struggle that with myself sometimes is that we've given them arbitrary names and they're not always recognizable about what the scope of that project is. It's number 74 on that priority list. It's $1.9 million. The overflowing manhole, we're aware of that. The sanitary sewer remedial measures plan essentially calls for rebuilding that sanitary sewer all the way through Boba Link down to Picadome. So that's on the schedule, and we're aware of it. Okay. Ms. Irene Gooding is going to come up and talk to us about an update on the CDBG and home funds and the future funding forecast. Before Irene gets up here, I wanted it. We have a new weather alert system that was installed last Friday, and it is working. And that means that I think there's some severe weather. So that's what that is. Excuse that interruption, please. I thought it was me. As you can see, when I was on the council back in 95, 96, can you hear me now? Back in 95, it was $16 million, and there was a top party. Yes, you can hear.