# Council Work Session - January 24, 2012 > Auto-transcribed civic record · January 24, 2012 - **Permalink**: https://meetings.lexingtonky.news/meeting/2358 - **Source video**: https://lfucg.granicus.com/player/clip/2358?view_id=14&redirect=true - **Date**: 2012-01-24 - **Last revised**: July 17, 2026 - **Length**: 18,231 words > ⚠️ **Auto-generated content.** Audio from the official Granicus video was auto-transcribed with OpenAI's open-source Whisper large-v3-turbo model, run locally by The Lexington Times. Structured facts were extracted with GPT-4o; the narrative summary was written by Anthropic Claude. Verbatim wording may contain errors. See [methodology](https://meetings.lexingtonky.news/about/methodology) or [report a correction](mailto:editor@lexingtonky.news). --- ## Meeting Overview The Urban County Council met on January 24, 2012, under the presiding leadership of Mayor Gray. During the meeting, the Council took 14 motions and votes on various matters and heard 5 public comments. The Council addressed 11 agenda items, including zoning requests, service agreements, budget matters, and informational updates. The Council approved several key items, including Requested Rezonings and Docket Approval, a Resolution Authorizing Services Agreement with On-Site, Rx, Inc., Summary Approval, Budget Amendments, New Business, an NDF Motion, an On-Site Rx Presentation, the Council Report, and the Mayor's Report. The Committee of the Whole presented an Economic Development Update for informational purposes. One item—the Streetlight Presentation—was deferred to a future meeting. ## Attendance **Present:** - Mayor Gray - Vice Mayor Gorton - Council Member Stinnett - Council Member McCord - Council Member Crosby - Council Member Blues - Council Member Kay - Council Member Farmer - Council Member Ellinger - Council Member Lane - Council Member Martin - Council Member Henson - Council Member Beard - Council Member Myers - Council Member Mason - Council Member Gooding - Council Member Hancock - Council Member Hamilton - Council Member Bush - Council Member Moloney **Absent:** - Council Member Lawless **Late:** None reported ## Votes and Decisions All motions brought before the council on January 24, 2012, passed unanimously. **Docket and Administrative Matters** The council approved the docket [timestamp: 00:03:04], moved by CM Stinnett and seconded by CM McChord. The summary of the January 17, 2012, Work Session was approved [timestamp: 00:05:39], moved by CM Beard and seconded by CM Myers. Budget Amendments were approved [timestamp: 00:06:47], moved by CM Farmer and seconded by CM Myers. Journal entry #57575 was tabled until January 31, 2012 [timestamp: 00:09:00], moved by CM Stinnett and seconded by VM Gorton. **Financial and Item Adjustments** An adjustment to item 'B' to read as $126,152.32 was approved [timestamp: 00:15:25], moved by CM Farmer and seconded by CM Lane. The amended new business items were approved [timestamp: 00:11:09], moved by CM Ellinger and seconded by CM Myers. The NDF list was approved [timestamp: 00:24:06], moved by CM Myers and seconded by CM Beard. **Zoning and Services** A motion to place on the docket without a hearing an ordinance changing zones for property located at 474, 497, and 498 Angliana Ave (Trinitas Ventures, LLC) passed [timestamp: 00:04:06]. The ordinance would change 8.10 net (8.29 gross) acres to a High Rise Apartment (R-5) Zone and 2.03 net (2.4 gross) acres from a Wholesale & Warehouse Business (B-4) Zone to a High Rise Apartment (R-5) Zone. This motion was moved by CM Crosbie and seconded by CM Blues. A motion to place on the docket for the January 26, 2012, Council Meeting a resolution authorizing the Mayor to execute a Services Agreement with On-Site, Rx, Inc. to provide pharmacy services at the Dr. Samuel Brown Health Center passed [timestamp: 00:05:06], moved by CM Kay and seconded by VM Gorton. **Committee Referrals and Reports** The Streetlight Presentation was referred to the Budget & Finance Committee [timestamp: 01:05:49], moved by CM Lane and seconded by CM Martin. Activity-based accounting was moved into the Budget and Finance Committee [timestamp: 01:45:59], moved by CM Lane and seconded by CM Martin. A resolution accepting the collective bargaining agreement with Fraternal Order of Police, Town Branch Lodge #83, on behalf of officers and sergeants in the Community Corrections division was placed on the docket [timestamp: 01:57:26], moved by CM Henson and seconded by CM Ellinger. The Mayor's Report was approved [timestamp: 01:12:27], moved by CM Lane and seconded by VM Gorton. The meeting adjourned [timestamp: 02:12:58], moved by VM Gorton and seconded by CM Ellinger. ## Budget and Financial Actions The meeting on January 24, 2012 included authorization for the following financial actions: **Amendments and Repairs** - Authorization to approve necessary repairs to the police helicopter for $126,152.32 (L007-12) **Contracts and Agreements** - Rental Agreement with The Lexington Center Corporation for use of the Opera House for the Kiddie Kapers Program for $126,152.32 (L033-12) - Purchase of Service Agreement with the Lexington Humane Society for animal control services provided by Lexington - Fayette Animal Care and Control and related Lease Agreement for $512,000 (L036-12) - Conditional Offer to lease property located at 913 Georgetown St. to HealthFirst Bluegrass, Inc. for the purpose of operating an outpatient ambulatory health care facility (L052-12) **Grant Awards** - Class A Incentive Grant Award Agreement with Friends of Wolf Run Inc., funded by the Water Quality Management Fee, for $95,000 (L042-12) - Class A Incentive Grant Award Agreement with Andover Estates Homeowners Association, Inc., funded by the Water Quality Management Fee, for $95,000 (L043-12) - Authorization to execute agreements with various nonprofit organizations for participation in the Adopt-A-Spot Roadway Cleanup Program under the Kentucky Pride Grant for FY 2012 for $512,000 (L049-12) ## Public Comment Several council members and officials raised concerns during the public comment period. **Coyote Sighting in Hamburg** CM Stinnett reported a coyote spotted in Hamburg [timestamp: 01:43:51]. Animal Care and Control is planning to trap the animal and relocate it to a safer habitat to prevent harm to both the animal and residents. **Quorum Concern for Rezoning Hearing** VM Gorton raised a concern about the possibility of not having a quorum for the 6:00 PM rezoning hearing [timestamp: 01:47:02]. Several members have conflicts of interest, and VM Gorton noted the risk that the Planning Commission's decision could stand if a quorum is not present. **Redistricting Law Impact** Multiple council members expressed concerns about a recently passed redistricting law that was signed by the governor. CM Kay urged the council to make a public statement opposing the law's impact on Lexington's representation [timestamp: 01:55:20]. CM Martin voiced strong disappointment in the legislature's actions, stating that the redistricting dilutes Lexington's representation and calling for legal action to challenge the decision [timestamp: 01:58:38]. CM Blues clarified that the Urban County Council had no role in the redistricting process [timestamp: 02:04:00]. CM Blues emphasized the council's nonpartisan process as a model for fair redistricting. ## Contested Items **Redistricting Law Impact** Council members engaged in a heated discussion regarding the state legislature's redistricting law. Members expressed strong disappointment and concern about the legislation, with calls for public opposition and potential legal challenges to the law. The debate included discussions on constitutional remedies available to address the redistricting law and emphasized the need for nonpartisan redistricting approaches. **Quorum for Rezoning Hearing** A procedural dispute arose concerning the scheduled 6:00 PM rezoning hearing. Concerns were raised about the possibility of not having a quorum, as several council members were unable to attend. Legal counsel advised that if a quorum could not be established, the Planning Commission's decision would stand without further council action. ## Requested Rezonings / Docket Approval [timestamp: 00:03:04] The Council approved placing a zone change ordinance on the docket without a hearing for property located at 474, 497, and 498 Angliana Ave. The proposed rezoning would change the affected properties from B-4 (commercial) to R-5 (residential) zones. Council members CM Crosbie, CM Blues, CM Stinnett, and CM McChord participated in the discussion of this agenda item. The Council voted to approve both the zone change ordinance placement on the docket and the docket itself. The action was approved without scheduling a public hearing on the rezoning request. ## Resolution Authorizing Services Agreement with On-Site, Rx, Inc. Council approved placing a resolution on the docket for the January 26, 2012, meeting to authorize the Mayor to execute a services agreement with On-Site, Rx, Inc. for pharmacy services at the Dr. Samuel Brown Health Center. [timestamp: 00:05:06] The key speakers on this agenda item were CM Kay and VM Gorton. The council voted to advance this resolution to the full council meeting scheduled for January 26, 2012, where the Mayor would be authorized to finalize the services agreement with On-Site, Rx, Inc. for pharmacy operations at the health center. The outcome of the discussion was approval to place the resolution on the January 26, 2012, docket. ## Approval of Summary The Council considered approval of the summary from the January 17, 2012, Work Session. [timestamp: 00:05:39] Council Members Beard and Myers participated in this agenda item. The summary was presented for the Council's review and approval. The Council approved the summary with no discussion or objections raised. ## Budget Amendments [timestamp: 00:06:47] The council addressed budget amendments during this agenda item. Council Members Farmer and Myers, along with Village Manager Gorton, participated in the discussion. The council approved budget amendments and took action on journal entry #57575. Rather than finalizing the entry immediately, the council voted to table it until January 31, 2012, to allow for further review before final approval. The outcome of this agenda item was approval of the budget amendments, with the journal entry deferred for additional consideration at a later date. ## New Business [timestamp: 00:11:09] The Council reviewed and approved several new business items during this portion of the meeting. Council Members Ellinger, Lane, and Martin participated in the discussion. The items presented for approval included: - Authorizations for rental agreements - Service contracts - Grant awards - Lease agreements One item was amended during the discussion to reflect a revised cost before approval was granted. All new business items were approved by the Council. ## NDF Motion The Council addressed the NDF Motion during this agenda item [timestamp: 00:24:06]. Council Members Myers and Beard were the key speakers on this matter. The Council approved the NDF list without discussion. No motions were brought forward during consideration of this item. **Outcome:** The NDF list was approved. ## Committee of the Whole (COW) Economic Development Update [timestamp: 00:24:36] Chair CM Beard presented an informational update on economic development activities during this agenda item. The presentation covered progress on the Bucks for Brains program and included information regarding the appointment of a new Downtown Development Authority executive. This was a presentation-only item with no motions brought forward. The update served to inform the committee of ongoing economic development initiatives and personnel changes within the relevant authority. ## Streetlight Presentation Budget Director Ryan Barrow presented a detailed analysis of the streetlight fund's deficit, examining the financial challenges and potential solutions. The presentation included cost-saving options and funding alternatives for council consideration. [timestamp: 00:28:00] Susan Bush participated in the discussion of the streetlight fund matters. The council referred the matter to the Budget & Finance Committee for further review rather than taking immediate action, deferring a final decision on how to address the streetlight fund's deficit. ## On-Site Rx Presentation Dan Dobler and Yelmore from On-Site Rx presented a proposal for establishing an on-site pharmacy at the Dr. Samuel Brown Health Center [timestamp: 01:14:15]. The presentation outlined a comprehensive plan addressing cost savings, member benefits, and operational considerations for the facility. The presenters highlighted the financial advantages of implementing an on-site pharmacy, demonstrating how the service would generate cost savings for the organization. They also emphasized the direct benefits to members, including improved access to pharmaceutical services and enhanced convenience through integrated care at the health center. The presentation included operational details necessary for implementation, covering logistics and staffing requirements for the proposed pharmacy service. The Council reviewed the proposal and voted to approve the on-site pharmacy initiative at the Dr. Samuel Brown Health Center. ## Council Report Council members reported on various matters during this agenda item. [timestamp: 01:43:51] **Issues Discussed** Council members addressed several topics: - A coyote sighting in Hamburg - Redistricting concerns - The need for legal action on an unspecified matter - Activity-based accounting procedures **Key Speakers** The following council members participated in the discussion: - CM Stinnett - CM Lane - VM Gorton - CM Kay - CM Henson - CM Martin - CM Beard - CM Blues **Action Taken** The council approved moving the issue of activity-based accounting to the Budget & Finance Committee for further consideration. **Outcome** The agenda item was approved. ## Mayor's Report [timestamp: 01:12:27] The Council considered the Mayor's Report as Agenda Item VIII. CM Lane and VM Gorton were the key speakers on this item. The Council approved the Mayor's Report without discussion. --- ## Decisions - **Motion** — passed: Motion to place on the docket without a hearing an ordinance changing the zone to a High Rise Apartment (R-5) Zone for 8.10 net (8.29 gross) acres, and from a Wholesale & Warehouse Business (B-4) Zone to a High Rise Apartment (R-5) Zone for 2.03 net (2.4 gross) acres, for property located at 474, 497, and 498 Angliana Ave (Trinitas Ventures, LLC) - **Motion** — passed: Motion to place on the docket for the January 26, 2012, Council Meeting a resolution authorizing the Mayor to execute a Services Agreement with On-Site, Rx, Inc. to provide pharmacy services at the Dr. Samuel Brown Health Center - **Motion** — passed: Motion to approve the docket - **Motion** — passed: Motion to approve the summary of 1.17.12 Work Session - **Motion** — passed: Motion to approve Budget Amendments - **Motion** — passed: Motion to table journal entry #57575 until next Tuesday (1.31.12) - **Motion** — passed: Motion to adjust item 'B' to read as $126,152.32 - **Motion** — passed: Motion to approve the amended new business items - **Motion** — passed: Motion to approve the NDF list - **Motion** — passed: Motion to refer the Streetlight Presentation to the Budget & Finance Committee - **Motion** — passed: Motion to place on the docket a resolution accepting the collective bargaining agreement with Fraternal Order of Police, Town Branch Lodge #83, on behalf of officers and sergeants in the division of Community Corrections - **Motion** — passed: Motion to move the issue of activity-based accounting into the Budget and Finance Committee - **Motion** — passed: Motion to approve the Mayor’s Report - **Motion** — passed: Motion to adjourn --- ## Full transcript Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. nicely Thank you, sir. Hello. Hello, everyone, council members. We'll call the meeting to order. please thank you call the meeting to order and this is a meeting of the work session of the council January 24th and first on our agenda is public comment for issues on the agenda I don't have anyone signed up for public comment so So we can move on to item number two, which is rezoning requests and the docket approval. Is there a motion? Motion by Council Member Stinnett and a second by Council Member McCord. Approve the docket. Is there any discussion on the motion? All right. All right. Hearing none, then we can take a vote. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. All opposed, no. Motion carries. Mayor, there is item number 11 under ordinances for first reading. There's a zone change that does need to have a motion to either hold it with or without a public hearing. It's under first reading ordinance. All right. All right. Is there a motion? There's a motion to place on the docket without a public hearing. Motion by Council Member Crosby, second by Council Member Blues. Is there any discussion on the motion? Hearing none, we can take a vote. All in favor, please say aye. All opposed, no. Motion carries. All right, we can move. Is it the approval of the sum? So, Susan, is there anything more? No, sir, that's all. Okay. Council Member Kaye. Thank you, Mayor. At the request of the administration, I move to place on the docket for the January 26, 2012 Council meeting a resolution authorizing the mayor to execute a service agreement with on-site Rx, Inc., to provide pharmacy services at the Dr. Samuel Brown Health Center. So move. Second. Motion by Council Member Kaye, seconded by Vice Mayor Gordon. Is there a discussion? Hearing none, we can take a vote. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed, no. Motion carries. All right. Can we vote on the summary? All right. We didn't get the summary, did we? No. All right. We'll move on to motion to item number three. Is there a motion on approving the summary? Motion? No. Okay. Motion by Council Member Beard, second by Council Member Myers. We'll move to discussion. Council Member Hanson. Mayor, I had a walk-on, but I could do it during Council report. Okay. All right. We'll do it then during Council report. All right. Is there a motion to approve the summary? We have the motion and a second, sorry. All right. Discussion. Is there a further discussion? All in favor of the motion then, please indicate by saying aye. Aye. Opposed? No. Motion carries. Next on our agenda are budget amendments. Are there any questions? Is there a motion? Move for it, Chair. It's a motion by Council Member Ellinger, second by Council Member Myers. Floor is available for discussion. Vice Mayor Gordon. Thank you, Mayor. I just had a question on page 7 about journal entry 57575, which is the economic development loan for the 500s on Maine. And my question was, I mean, we all saw the article in the paper and are somewhat familiar with what's gone on with that project, And I wondered, is this an incentive that we gave and the money is coming back to us? That's all I wondered. Okay. Mr. Barrows is approaching the podium. Thank you, sir. Yes, Mayor. Thank you. This is a budget amendment to put in place funding that was reserved at the end of last year for a defaulted loan that we had security on. I believe more information is coming on Thursday. It's included in our packet to talk at the budget retreat. So it was our loan? Was that an incentive on this project? That transaction was done prior to my being here. I'm sorry. That was one of the projects of the Downtown Housing Fund. That project went bankrupt, and it was our obligation. It was our loan that we were responsible for. So when Ryan mentioned it was before his time, those projects were a part of that Downtown Housing Fund that was established prior to this administration, but it was the 500 East Main project. There were two pieces to that loan, and we paid off. I mean, it was our responsibility, and they came due, and we had to pay off those loans. So can you remind me, I'm a little fuzzy on, is the Downtown Housing Fund an official name? What is that? I will have to get back with you. But, yes, it was formed, and I don't have that information with me. I'm sorry, but I can report back at Budget and Finance if you all would like to do that. I would appreciate it. It's almost half a million dollars, so I would appreciate some more information on that. Sure, and we were planning on addressing this at the budget retreat because we were gathering the specific information for you. Okay, thank you. Council Member Stenet, Council Member Beard. Mayor, it's on the same thing. Myself, I was going to ask. I think based on the Commissioner's comments and Mr. Barrow's comments, so we can have a better understanding, and I believe we're going to talk about it on Thursday, I would ask to table this until next Tuesday, the 31st, and then bring it back before the Council for consideration. Second. All right. So we have a motion and a second to table. With a motion to table, we need to take a vote. All in favor of the motion to table, please indicate by saying aye. Until next Tuesday, indicate by saying aye. Aye. Opposed, no. Motion carries. All right. You still want a question? I'm done. I'll wait until Tuesday to get into it a little bit more deeply. All right. Excuse me, Mayor. Can you tell me what journal entry number that was? 5-7. Sure. 5-7-5-7-5. Okay. Okay. Is there any further discussion? All right. Hearing none, we can take a vote. All in favor, please say aye. All opposed, no. Motion carries. All right. Under new business, there's a motion to approve by Councilman Ellinger, seconded by Councilman Myers. Is there any discussion? Council Member Lane. Thank you, Mayor. I had a question on item C and item F, which would be environmental quality, I believe, or... Commissioner? Okay. I will take C. I'm sorry. You're taking the heat today? No, I'm taking C, not the heat, just C. The first question on item C, I'd just like an explanation of exactly what that software does, et cetera. It is an asset management system for the Division of Water Quality. It allows us to develop work orders and do condition assessments for manholes, pipelines, all of the things that are outside of the fence. Our request here is that the original contract with Acela only allowed for funding for the initial maintenance fee. And so when this year's maintenance fee came due, we realized that we really didn't have authorization from the council for that expenditure, and that's the purpose of this. It's been live since July of last year. That's all for it. And so the $95,000 is an annual fee that would be coming up each year in the future? Okay. All right. Thank you. That answers that. And the question I had on the expenditure of $512,000 for energy efficiency and conservation on the Dunbar Community Center. Do we have any kind of a study that shows that if we spend the half a million dollars, what kind of energy savings are we going to generate from that? Yes, this was part of the ARRA DOE grant we received, and this project was thoroughly vetted. Also, we chose this center as well as another center based on an energy audit to show how much we'd save. And that's part of the grant process as well, just to be able to demonstrate. So when we submitted for the grant, we had to provide all the documentation to get it approved at that time. So it would probably be substantial, like $50,000 or $60,000 a year. I don't have that off the top of my head, but it would be substantial because you can imagine how drafty those old buildings are. And I believe this particular one, the unit was in pretty poor shape and almost inoperable. Okay, very good. Thank you. Thank you, Mayor. Yes, sir. Thank you, Council Member Lane. Commissioner Mason, I have a note that you have a change on item B. Yes, we have a price adjustment on letter B, repairs to the police helicopter. The amount that was estimated did not include some adjustments that the contractor had done. When they got into it, there was a gearbox that was needing to be overhauled, and the prices then moved to $126,152.32. And this is item B, authorization to approve necessary repairs made of the police helicopter. Page 5, item B. Mayor, can I ask a question on that? Yeah. Yes, sir. Do you have this budget in already? Yes. So it's just a matter of the differential? Yes, it's coming out of asset forfeiture monies that can be used for these types of apparatus. Thank you, sir. Yes. You want to make a motion to that effect? Just by way of housekeeping, I believe I'm still logged in at the seat that you're in from the previous meeting, so I can't vote or get on to register my interest in speaking. But for purposes of discussion of item B, I'd like to make a motion to amend it to 106,000. 126,152.32. Second. Thank you. We're working on this, Mr. Farmer. Got it now? All right. There's a motion to make an amendment by Councilman Farmer, seconded by Councilman Lane. Is there any discussion on the amendment? All right. Hearing none, take a vote. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. All opposed, no. Motion carries. Thank you. I think we're back to Mr. Stennett. Thank you, Mayor. I have a question on item D. And I think, Charlie, you're here. This is a piece of property, one where we paid a premium for, to locate a pump station in the Hamburg area on. And this D is a second change order. It represents 22% from the original bid. And I think this poses a lot of questions that I think Councilman Ellinger is looking about our procurement process because all these things go through an RFP process and we have bidders. And I'm just curious about a 22% change order total because this is the second one. How does that affect the other bidders and where does this bid still stand in relation to that? And I understand there may even be a third change order on down the pipe if we don't get some land acquisition. Let me clarify. I think that we're confusing the names of them because we use sometimes these generic names. The Hamburg Farms pump station is an existing pump station located behind the Target shopping center. It's not the one that we just purchased. What this is is we originally intended to eliminate that pump station by taking it gravity to the northeast to that new pump station. And I'll direct you to the top of page 21. It really kind of explains this, is that when we got into it, we realized that the Federal Highway Administration was going to put such restrictions on us in crossing the interstate because the interchange is sitting right there. You've got the off-ramp from southbound, then you've got two interstate lanes, and then on into the property across the interstate. It was going to be approximately a million dollars in construction cost to eliminate that pump station. We made the decision that that was unreasonable. We can upgrade the existing pump station for a lot less than that. So that's what this change order is for, is this is a scope change from the original scope that's saving us a ton of money. We have to keep the pump station, which I love to get rid of pump stations, but not at that kind of construction. But this is still affecting the 2A pump station, according to the wording that we're all looking at? It's part of that project. Okay, I'm just making sure. So we changed the scope of the project a little bit. Yes, absolutely. And this scope change would have occurred for anybody because our original scope was eliminate the pump station by constructing a gravity sewer under ICE 75. As we got into it, 30 feet deep, long bore, very expensive to eliminate that pump station. We said, no, we're not going to do that. We'll instead choose to upgrade the existing station for pennies on the dollar in comparison. Okay. Thank you, sir. Thank you, Mayor. So you actually had more engineering to do in order to save money. Correct. That's the headline of it, right? Yes. Okay. Council Member Hanson? Thank you, Mayor. Yes, sir. I had a... Yes, ma'am. Question on item E. Thank you. All right. Vice Mayor Gordon. My question is also for Commissioner Mason. All right. A couple of questions for you, Clay? Council Member Henson, it's related to the item number E. I know there's no budgetary impact, but I was just curious if this is something new or if this is something we've been doing and I wasn't aware of it. No, it's a new program that will enable people to search the county by crime activity. They can look at geographic locations. They can look at categories of crimes and look up things that are here. It's been a work in progress for a while. A particular question I think Commander Barnard would be able to address. But it's a new program. Yeah, I was just curious and wanting to get more information on it, if possible. Yes, ma'am. It's an analytical tool that we provide there that we work. National Institute of Justice comes in, and they look at that program. They've endorsed it. It's one of the best analytical tools that are out there. It allows anybody and a citizen to go online. And once we get that up and going, you can go online. You can put in a parameter like six months, and you can put in your address. It allows you to analyze what crime is occurring around your house, whether it's shoplifting, whether it's auto theft, burglaries, and allows you to see it and then conduct your own analysis of that information. So it's a very good customer service tool that we hope to use. We've worked with them. Other agencies, I think there's three others in the state that have it, and it's going throughout the United States right now, and it's a proactive analytical tool. for the police department. So will there be some communication with the public to get? Yes, ma'am. Once we get it and it's approved and we use the data agreement, it'll take us a little bit, about 30 days to get it set up. Then we hope to have a press release and bring it and demonstrate it to you all. It'll help, for instance, your council aides when they call and say, I've had so many thefts in our neighborhood association. You can put those parameters. You can pull up every crime that we track in Fayette County for that five-year period and see what time they're occurring. Do your own analysis to say it's occurring at midnight to six in the morning or whatever time period. It'll give you a temporal analysis of it. It's just a really good tool for anybody in the public to use. And instead of us holding that information, we're trying to push that out and have the whole public to have access to it. I request similar information quite often. So I like the sound of this. Yes, ma'am. Thank you very much. Yes, ma'am. Thank you, Commander. And I think Vice Mayor Gorton has a question for Commissioner Mason as well. Just one more question back on the helicopter. Yes, ma'am. Just to clarify, is the entire cost borne by the asset forfeiture money? Okay. And what was the $115,000? What was the specific amount again? $115,000? $126,152.32. Is the total? Yes, ma'am. Okay. Thank you very much. Thank you, mayor. Yes, ma'am. Thank you. All right. Are we ready to vote? No further discussion? All right. Okay. All in favor, then, please indicate by saying aye. Aye. Opposed, no. Motion carries. Okay. We can move on then to the next item on our agenda, which is continuing business and presentations. And is there a motion on the NDF? Motion by Council Member Myers. Second by Council Member Blues. Beard. Who's going to have? Is there any discussion? Okay, hearing none, all in favor, please indicate by saying aye. Aye. Opposed, no. Aye. Motion carries. Next on our agenda is the economic development report. Council Member Beard. Excuse me. Give me just a moment to find it. Okay. I got it. Yeah, there we go. On January 17th at 1.08 p.m., I call the meeting to order. This is the Committee of the Whole Economic Development Committee summary, which you have in front of you. We had Commerce Lexington, Bob Quick, and Jenna Greathouse do a PowerPoint and present with some discussion as we went along about their activities for the past quarter. It seems that they're fairly well on track with their projections anyway, and they have had some successes that we need, sorely need, I will say. There was of interest, Council Member Lane talked about the Bucks for Brains, and the General Greathouse said that the Bucks for Brains is a good program, and some businesses have said that they located an election because of the program. We pick up little grains of information, it seems like, when all this comes out into the daylight. Actually, nothing. We had a pretty full activity as far as the Council was concerned in discussing this whole economic development situation that we sorely need. And the second is, as many of us know, and I'm not sure the public knows, we have a new executive director of the Downtown Development Authority, a gentleman named Jeff Fugate, who we invited to the podium. And he spoke for a few minutes and seems to be, of course, he's just on board and he doesn't quite have his feet under him yet. But he seems to like Lexington. He's moved here, and he likes Lexington, likes what he's seen, and he's very eager to roll his sleeves up, which is exactly what we need. We went about an hour, I don't think. There was actually no other business to be brought in front of the group, so we adjourned. But I'm not sure exactly what time that was. No motions, though? No motions. All right, sir. Okay. Next on our agenda is an update on streetlights, presentation by Mr. Barrow and Susan Bush. Thank you, everyone. I'm going to take this opportunity to give a presentation and actually an update on streetlights. It's the continuation of several presentations and a lot of discovery that's going on on the topic. I think it originally started, if we can think back to April of 2011, going on a year ago, where we broke this fund out for the first time by purpose. and we actually saw some of the financial implications where we traditionally look at the Urban Service Fund in aggregate. It's actually three distinct taxes and three distinct purposes. This is one of those. And then Susan and I also tag team on a presentation in July. Since that time, quite a bit of due diligence coordination with KU, so there was a lot of internal staff time that went into this. I think from a housekeeping standpoint, we have a lot of material to cover. I want to get it all in. I think it fully develops the answers that you would be looking for at this point. But to get it in in 15 minutes, I will try to go through this fairly quickly. So please stop me if you want to touch on specific points. As I said, the first step, and we'll review some of that analysis of FUN by purpose. Again, that full detailed presentation was given last year in April. Then, as all good budgeteers should do, we'll look at the two-pronged cost savings. What can we do on the cost-saving side? And then we'll walk into the funding approaches that we have for your consideration today. And then some administrative policy changes that are also under consideration. this is a recap of the historical urban services the computer seems to be okay the urban service by fund you've seen this graph before this is the streetlight component of the fund whereas we can look over a 10-year span with the two rate rollbacks that you can see encircled there in 2004 and 2005, the fund, the tax component of the Urban Service Fund has only incrementally generated $270,000, whereas the expense side, obviously, that's really dictated by energy costs. The tariff is what we pay. Those have trended substantially apart. We would always want to see the revenue exceed expenditures, But since 2004, this component of the Urban Services Fund has run a deficit in terms of overall revenue to expenditures. The Urban Services Fund we've talked about again, this is a review. The fund itself essentially has a $1.2 million expenditures, exceed revenue, most of which is due to the streetlight component. But if we walk through a review of all those that we talked about in April, the refuse component has a $6,000 cash positive position. However, the $4 million that were required for vehicle replacement were not funded. So if you included that, the refuse component would have a deficit as well. Streetlights had about a $1.7 million. This is the fiscal year 12 budget. And that did not include the $300,000 in capital. So if we talk operation, it's a $1.7 million deficit projected. If we talk with capital, we'll use the number $2 million deficit. And then street cleaning was a lot smaller, but it did have a $125,000 deficit for the fiscal year 12. We walked through this chart as well to move to the cost of service model, which is obviously we're reviewing this for all services across government. When we look at the top components where the percentage increase that would be required to fund operations on a cost-of-service basis, I'd like to draw your attention to the bottom. That includes capital, which is really a more sustainable approach. The refuse, in order to fund that $4 million in vehicle replacement, we would have needed to raise the property tax, urban service component for refuse, essentially 28.5%, the streetlights, 57.1%, and then the street cleaning to that $125,000 gap we would have had to raise at 8.5%. We all know council voted to keep those the same. So what I think is a more important way to look at it is what's the impact on a $150,000 home. So again, if I could draw your attention to the bottom part of that, The 12 budget to move to the cost of the service model would have been essentially a $61.20 impact. A raise in property tax for refuse, street lights would have been only $18, and the street cleaning was essentially $1.20. So transitioning from the review into new material, specifically the cost savings side that we looked at, There's a lot of information that came from discussions with KU traffic engineering. Susan Bush's group worked long and hard on a lot of this. One of the things that was interesting to us was if we talk about cost savings, the removal of any lights that have been in place over five years, essentially there's no cost on the KU side. However, there would be capital costs if there was a base for safety reasons you'd want to move those. If we had some exposed conduit, that would fall the financial responsibility of the city. The rough estimate for the removal of the existing light, again, some are going to be free, some are going to cost some, essentially $197. the new light to put in. So if we talk about switching out entire lights, a new light would be essentially $950. There are several caveats without more strategic guidance in what lights we should or should not look at taking out. There are some that the Department of Transportation would not allow us to do, given some of their design standards, that the standard, the wooden poles, would not be allowed. So the quantity of lights is really unknown for what would qualify for the standard pole versus what would not. We have clearly general concepts. So if we look at what we can do in terms of saving money, it's really four things that we can do. We can remove entire areas of street lights. That's a simple discussion. We could remove selected residential lighting. So if we would go in some logical pattern every other or look in a subdivision and say strategically, obviously this is all for information purposes and it's not advocated, but we could remove various residential lighting or ulterior lighting on thoroughfares that necessarily don't have development around it, pieces of roads, there are no sidewalks and such. Or we could remove a lighting and replace it with a less expensive lighting. So I'd like to walk through those four concepts now. First, let's start with how many lights do we have. We have about 30,000 lights. The quantities and the type of light are listed there. This is information for KU. We also have about 1,200 bluegrass energy that we didn't put on the slide because the bulk of our tariff comes from KU. So 1A, the removal of an entire area. This one is simple because in the urban service, if you have a service, you pay the tax. So we lose money on essentially every light that we have in place. So if we remove lighting from a neighborhood, simple, you would take away the revenue stream. So this would clearly not be recommended. It wouldn't make economic sense if we just removed entire neighborhoods or pieces of the city. The selected approach, again, the hypothetical would be more residential. We would move away from the highly traversed streets into the residential areas. And if we took the approach kind of targeting a cost of service, it would be substantial. We would need 37% of all our streetlights. Remember back to the previous slides, we have about 30,000 streetlights. so we would need to remove about 37% of all the streetlights. There's less expensive lights on the residential neighborhoods on average, so that would only reduce about 33% in the streetlight payments or the streetlight tariffs. As we said, some lights would be free, others would not be. The $2 million there would be capital investments to remove, as I said, some base and some other conduit to make it actually a safer area when the lights are removed. There may be some additional charges. The 15 years is just based on current practices with KU. I think obviously if we remove lights, they would have incentive to expedite that process. Then as we see the tariff increase, and we live in a coal state, so the tariff is going to increase. The environmental surcharge is going to increase. So if we took this, just implemented the removal of light as the tariff increased, to make cost of service work, we would have to remove additional lighting. And then obviously there's concerns associated with that, darker neighborhoods, the perceived or real public safety factor. And then this is a graph. It's a little hard to see there, but essentially traffic engineering took a neighborhood. The red dots represent the lights that would be removed. And this almost looks like an envelope to me would be the remaining lights. So we can see that essentially it would be half of a typical neighborhood in order to save several million dollars that we would need to. This by far is the coolest slide where you can see the actual visual effect of the streetlights in terms of illumination down this residential street. It's really impressive when you need traffic engineering put together. so the moving into the third approach if we took selected arterial lighting this is a visual representation of areas not necessarily large developments that we but it is major thoroughfares so we've moved away from residential removal and in the major thoroughfares where there may or may not be development on the side of the road typically not sidewalks and those kind of things so this would be the remove selected targeted areas as determined by traffic engineering this would be a lot less of what they were comfortable in giving as an option essentially two percent reduction in our overall street lights remember the essentially 30,000 street lights on average they're a little bit more expensive in terms of the tariff so that would actually have a higher impact in cost reduction that would be a lot less costly in terms of capital, what we would have to put up front, and it would be expedited a lot quicker in terms of a three-year implementation. Again, the caveat on the cost savings alone, we would then need to have some type of methodology for future savings to mitigate the increases in tariffs that we essentially know are going to come. Some of the same perceived reduction, perceived a real reduction in public safety, and then Also, some of these we would have to get, obviously, the transportation cabinet to sign off on. Again, that's the visual representation of what 1C would be. Moving into the last possible scenario for consideration would just essentially move to a cheaper light or a less expensive light. The visual representation would be on the left, the box lighting moving to the Cobra Head, which I think is generally the box is more preferred across the city, but the Cobra Head is a lower tariff. So this would be no reduction in streetlights. We're going to a cheaper streetlight. It would have an impact such as 8% in our overall streetlight payment, and the capital cost would be the least of all of them to make this switch over this change. Essentially, this is not necessarily as public safety of a concern, but it is a less appealing light, and there are certain promises that may have been made out there that we wouldn't be able to honor in terms of new streetlight implementation. So the graph that kind of brings it all together, we had the four options. Again, the 1A doesn't make sense to remove entire neighborhoods. You lose the revenue associated with it. The 1B, just the removal of the residential, be it every other or essentially half of the residential streetlight neighborhoods, you can see that would be almost 11,000 streetlights. The cost savings or the tariff reduction would be $1.5 million. and then we would have to invest essentially $2 million to remove those 11,000 streetlights. So that wouldn't even bring the fund to a fully cost of service where revenues exceed or equal expenditures. We would have to do other types of approaches such as removal of arterial lighting. That would be, I think, 600 lights that traffic engineering identified that could be considered. that would lower the streetlight tariff $140,000, and the payback would essentially be about in one year on that particular instance, but it would have a capital cost of $130,000. And then the last one we discussed is the no streetlight removal process, just migrating to a cheaper, again, the box to the cobra head. That would result in an estimated savings of $375,000, and only a $100,000 outlay from the city's standpoint in terms of capital. Now, we've talked through the savings approach. Let's transition into the funding options. We have essentially three kind of main categories of funding options to talk about today. We can increase the urban service property tax rate. That was one of the things that we discussed in the Avalorum discussions we had for fiscal year two budget setting. So it would be fiscal year 2013 cost of service model. Essentially, all the property tax for streetlights would need to be increased. We could create a streetlight fee. That could go on Bill's bill or the new sewer bill that we're going to have to implement sometime in this calendar year. Or it could be a general fund appropriation. and the general fund doesn't have those limitations that the urban services fund has. So it could be a direct appropriation, or we could raise and appropriate the franchise fee. That has some logical ties into utilities. So just to recap what we talked about, the property tax approach, increasing the property tax, if we draw your attention to the bottom, essentially that's 57%. These are fiscal year 12 numbers. We haven't done the fiscal year 11 without, we haven't got the property tax, new property tax information. But fiscal year 12 numbers would be a 57%. Essentially, you would assume that number would have to be increased in 11 due to the tariff increase. So option two, replace it with a streetlight fee. You could go for all or the piece that were short. So the top $6 million would essentially be the entire appropriation for the streetlight tariff through a fee structure. The collection rate would be substantially less. We have a better collection for property taxes than we do a fee. There would be additional cost of implementation, obviously setting up the additional line item for billing and collections and those kind of things. And then we would have a cost shift. If you have a fee, right now this is property tax base, so the higher property taxes bear the higher burden of streetlights. If you move to a fee structure, you would assume that the cost would shift slightly from the commercial and industrial more to the burden of the residential living in the city. Or we could just fund the gap or what we're short in the streetlight piece, and that's essentially the $2 million, again, this year with future increases due to tariff increases. Same issues, the collection rates would be substantially less. Then we would have cost of implementation. Essentially, we'd have two funding mechanisms with this approach in the streetlights, and it would have, to a lesser extent, a similar kind of effect on more burden placed on the residential. The third approach would be a direct line appropriation. Obviously, we're going to talk more about it on Thursday. We've talked about it a lot in this room. We have a structurally imbalanced long-term due to a lot of issues such as pension and capital backlog, just to name two of the biggest. And then also those fundings now have to compete with other public safety needs. social services, parks, and general government would essentially be in competition or be in evaluation with other needs that we have across government with a direct appropriation. Or the second component, franchise fees are currently a general fund revenue, but we could deviate from that structure that we've put in place, and we could raise and appropriate that franchise fee. So essentially we'd have to raise the franchise fee now a half percent to go towards that. We would need to think again long term because we understand the tariff increase, especially the environmental component of the streetlight tariff, is going to increase as projected drastically over the foreseeable future. Transitioning away from the funding options, again, we've talked over cost savings, talked over funding options. There are some administrative policy changes that we would like to talk over as well. Well, we're considering, Susan and some others are looking through future streetlights limited to the most economical rate. Obviously, if we would have made the decision 10 years ago and gone with the Cobra Head versus the box structure, the streetlight tariff would be a lot lower. But obviously, there are aesthetic concerns as well. The cost of streetlight installations in the new development, Obviously, currently we lose money on all our streetlights. So through an ordinance change, we could make that the responsibility to the developer. So obviously, if the developer wants a more expensive light, then maybe some of that cost burden can be borne by them. And then another consideration that obviously we've talked about is that moratorium that is on streetlight installation due to this funding issue. And then longer term, if we do have a strategic decision that funds this, there are some ways that we can look at mitigating the future tariff increase. It's not going to solve it. It's not going to have a large impact until we figure out the cost side or the funding side. But essentially the streetlight tariff is interesting to me. I didn't know this. The streetlight tariff is mostly composed of the capital piece. So we're renting the capital, and to a small extent, it's generated by the electricity cost. So that purchasing of them could make some economic sense, again, over the long term. And then, you know, if we do decide to do that, need a business case and a lot of planning, we would have to iron out several things with our providers, you know, that they would have a new tariff. They currently don't have a tariff in place just for providing maintenance. So kind of in my wrapping it up slide, really it's more of a decision on the lower cost. We can take out lights. We can go to a less expensive light. Or we increase the property tax, the fees, or the other sources through appropriations from the general fund is essentially what we would like you to consider. All right. Questions now, Ryan? Yes, ma'am. All right, sir. Okay. Floor is available for questions from the council members. All right. Thank you. Vice Mayor Gordon. Thank you, Mayor. Just a couple questions to start out with. Do you know or is there anybody from traffic engineering here who could answer what our standard is for spacing and whether that follows a national standard? Yes, they're here. Jim Woods is here. I bet he knows. Our standard spacing is roughly about 180 feet for subdivision lighting, 180 to 200 feet spacing. Under this proposal, it would go to about 600 feet, and then you would also light the intersections. And does that follow any kind of national standard? I know you have a lot of standards you are supposed to follow. Currently we do. Or is that our standard? Well, we follow the national guideline standards, International Luminating Society standards, and that's what we follow now when we do all of our lighting design. The Kentucky Department of Highways follows the same thing. So when we design lights on arterial routes, the state has to approve those, and those have to meet the national guidelines. Okay. But if we go with these others, they wouldn't meet them. Okay. They can take anything out. All right. Thank you. And then on page 41, Ryan, you talked about removal of streetlights that had been in service longer than four years, et cetera. Is there currently a mechanism in our process where a street can request that their streetlights be removed? I haven't heard that there is, but it seems like I remember that we don't let streets do that. But there might be some streets that if we had that in the process, they would request it. We've never actually had any requests for removal. Usually we just happen to put them in. It's rare that we would ever. Sometimes they want them relocated, depending on the location of them, but we've rarely ever gotten any of them. Okay, so rarely means once, maybe, or never? I can't recall ever getting a call where someone said to take one out. Okay. But we've had several where they wanted them to move across the street or on someone else's property. Okay. Thank you very much. And then just one other question right now, Ryan. On your expenditures and revenues, do you know offhand over the years what's happened with the indirect cost allocation? Yes. We're currently, accounting is currently reevaluating that. the indirect rates have stayed the same for several years. The indirect component, I don't know if I have that with me, but the indirect component that would be attributable to streetlights, again, I would reference that April presentation that we gave that showed the pro forma for streetlights. The fund is essentially on streetlights is inbounds $2 million. And if I recall, the indirect component that would hit streetlights is maybe $600,000. Please don't quote me on that. So even if we removed entirely the indirect component that would be attributable streetlights, the fund would still be imbalanced over $1 million, or the component of the fund would still be imbalanced over $1 million. And who did you say is evaluating that? I think you said the county. Accounting. Oh, accounting. Yes. Okay, thank you. Would you mind to get me, do you have a graph, and it maybe is in the April presentation or some kind of a chart showing indirect cost allocation in the last, say, five to seven years' worth, how that has gone. Yes, just to clarify, are you looking, indirect essentially takes it to a fund, and as we talked about in April, we made assumptions to kind of prorate it based on allocations to the components of the urban service. So would you like to just see by fund or by? By fund. Okay. Yes. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. Council Member Stenet. Thank you, Mayor. Ryan, I think you kind of glanced over a point that I think we all need to be aware of. Is one, on the capital cost of installation of streetlights, we've never issued a revenue bond or any type of bond. We've always paid it from cash flow, which, as you said, should have probably been going towards the maintenance and upkeep of them once they're installed. That's correct, right? We've never issued a revenue bond to install streetlights? No, we've not. Yeah, and so that may be something we want to look at going forward as well because this does obviously produce some type of cash flow. Right now, obviously not positive. The other thing that you mentioned is have developers borrow some of the cost. Well, we already do that. We do that, and we did it in Hamburg. And the experience with that, some of you have also had this experience, is where the developer pays to install a better light, and then the neighborhood finds out that that light is five times the cost. they're paying on the property tax, so they want that light uninstalled. So we've done that before in Fayette County. So I'm not sure we ever want to get to that point because we're already doing that. So developers are paying some of that cost to install them. It's just the maintenance cost, the neighborhood can't afford the better lights. And then the wooden poles, I'm not sure everyone in this community want to go back to wooden poles. I'm not sure that's an option either. But the last option I think is the most viable, and the solution we all need to be focusing on today. I know Commissioner Graham and I and Commissioner Driscoll met, is talk about the landfill fund. The landfill fee is on our water bill right now, and obviously that's getting ready to make a transition away from the water company to our own billing method. But that fee that it's generating is generating a surplus each year, and that fee needs to be rolled back and the streetlight fee needs to come on. Now, obviously that would be tax neutral to anyone paying the landfill fee. But the people not paying it obviously would see it increase. We already have, what, 117,000 households paying the landfill fee. Is that right? Approximately in that ballpark, 120,000. That's what we're talking about now in the billing. So that would be an option I would go back and look at. But when we were looking at that at our last meeting, the Department of Law came back and said you can't have two separate funding sources for the same program. Is that not correct, Commissioner? Did I understand that right? Oh, I see David. There he is. At the time, you would say we can't have a property tax and a fee. I think the concern with streetlights on this would be that you're going to have to justify the difference on why you have one. On the landfill, one is easy to do because it's really paying for a separate service, and it's actually being billed not necessarily even to the same clientele that the garbage tax goes to. On streetlights, you'd be able to have to articulate what service is not being paid out of the existing tax. That's the legal complication on trying to do it. It would be much cleaner if you were going to go to a fee to go to a straight fee and not have an ad valorem tax at all. By having an ad valorem tax, you have a legal complication in trying to bootstrap a fee on top of a tax where you don't have some extra service that's suddenly out there that's being paid for as a result of this fee instead of the tax. So the fee couldn't keep the property tax to pay for maintenance and ongoing expenses and have the fee pay for capital? Well, the fee, you may be able to do a model like that going forward, yes, where you have a separate thing to pay for a component of it. Yeah, but we'd have to talk about which component of it you wanted to pay out of the fee, and we'd have to be comfortable that that was okay. But that probably, of the different ways you could lay it out, that probably would be the cleanest way. But the idea would be the only people paying those fees would be the people having the issue with a fee is, just like a tax, you have to actually be getting the service. So anybody paying that fee is going to have to see the benefit of paying it. So if you did the capital that way, I think the idea would be they would pay it for a limited period of time until the cost of putting those in capitalization-wise was exhausted, and then they wouldn't pay it anymore. So that may be difficult to – I think in a lot of places what you do on the capital stuff, and I'd have to go back and look and see if this is an option in Kentucky or not for this type of project, is you would pay a special extra tax for the capital component until the capital part's paid off, and then you wouldn't pay it anymore. Like for some of the sewer stuff, an option would be, if I'm going to benefit especially from a public project, as a homeowner in that neighborhood, I pay an additional ad valorem tax of X amount for the next 10 years once that capital project is paid for, I don't pay that extra tax. But the complications are only the people that are benefiting are supposed to be the ones paying for this stuff. So for every type of fee or tax or anything else you talk about, you have to keep that in mind. Yeah, I would say, first of all, the financial case is there. Obviously, we're running a $1.7 million deficit. But the benefit argument, everyone drives on every road in Fed County, and we all want to be able to see when you go down whatever road, whether it be in my neighborhood or on New Circle, I mean, who's paying for New Circle Lights? I mean, the whole community is paying for them. So I think that there's some definitely issues we can work through on a couple of those. But Ryan, did you all look at when you said the streetlight fee as to if we got rid of the tax, what that fee would be, a dollar amount? No, we did not. Okay. I wouldn't calculate because, again, you would have to look at the existing urban service numbers, direction and then we can run those analysis for you. I was trying to get to the point if you cut the landfill fee in half and put the other half towards streetlights would that be sufficient to run the whole program? Or again, as Mr. Barber said would it only be a piece it could fund and how we define what piece that is? If we could do that that's the most tax neutral thing we could do and faster fix. I'll end by saying that Council Member Blues and I have some neighborhoods that were promised streetlights, promised a certain type of streetlights, and obviously our goal was to get those installed as soon as possible. So whatever we can do as a body to move that forward, I know other people have them in other districts. I think that should be our goal in the next six months or less before this budget cycle begins because they've been waiting well over a couple of them going on two years. Just to clarify, we talked about two options, an entire fee to fund streetlights in entirety or to fund the gap. So what are both? See, both. I mean, I think both needs to be on the table. Thank you. Thank you, Mayor. Yes, sir. Thank you, Mr. Stenet. Council Member Lane, then Council Member Blues. Thank you, Mayor. Could you put sheet number five, which is your Streetlights cash flow study? Okay. You'll notice that the revenue received in 2003 is greater than the revenue we received in 2011 because there were two rollbacks of the Streetlight tax rate in 2004 and 2005. The concern that I have is if we switch from a tax to a fee, the taxes are tax deductible for the property owner, whereas the fee is just an out-of-pocket expense. And so I think it's better to leave it on the tax as opposed to a fee situation. Plus, only the people that are receiving the lights would be paying the tax. My question is, could you look at what the rates were in 2003, and maybe what we should do is just raise it back to what it originally was and see what it would do to the gap in our revenue. Yes, we have the data historically what the rate's been. The one caveat I would point out, I can't remember off the top of my head, but we would be subject to the property tax rules, 4% above, subject to recall, those kind of considerations. But we can look back and see what would the rates in 2003 generate in terms of revenue today, if you'd like. All right. But I believe that the property owners that are paying for the streetlights want them. I can't see spreading them out to 600 feet apart because some of the housing will have minimal lighting and some will have the same amount. And I don't see going from a tax to a fee unless, you know, we did it for everybody. I guess we could do that, but because of the tax deduction that you receive, I think that would be a negative. And so I think that's the way we need to take a look at it. The other question I had, can you tell me how many homes have streetlights? You may have said that number, but I just wanted to check on that. I mean, how many, like the entire neighborhoods? Well, yeah, in other words, how many houses are being taxed for street light service in Fayette County? Because everybody doesn't have street lights, I don't think. Bill's saying he'll get that number for you. Essentially, it's the majority of the urban service area has street lights. The other question I would have, could you also show what the average cost per home is for Streetlights if you took the revenue divided by the number of homes that have the services so we could sort of see what the average person would pay? Now, that's not going to be really valid because it's going to be based on tax rate. I'm just trying to – you can't base it on $150,000 because some homes are worth $100,000 and some are worth $400,000. So it's going to depend on the value of your home, what the tax would be. But I'm just trying to get an idea of what the rate is and then what the differential. That was our shortfall. In other words, on the average home, how much more do we need to collect to break even on the fee? To fund the capital components on streetlights, the average existing tax bill on a $150,000 home would be $31.50. To move to the cost of service to fund that gap, that $2 million gap, that would go to $41.50. It's essentially an $18 increase on a $150,000 home. Right, but my point is if your home is worth $450,000, then the streetlight increase would be $94.50 a year. So that is not really a good way to, I mean, it's not an apples-to-apples kind of analysis. I was trying to get an average for all houses just to see what the rate was on that. I guess those are the only points that I had. You know, I think that this is a pretty complex issue. I think I'd like at this time to make a motion that we refer this into the Budget and Finance Committee because that is, you know, most of the people are in Budget and Finance Committee, and that would allow us to take a little more time to analyze this. Would you want to have this recommendation come out and be effective the fiscal year 13, so it would be in the budget at that time? Is that the approach, or are you looking for a more immediate fix? I mean, that would always be nice, but I think this is a policy decision, so whenever the council decides. Okay. All right. Well, I do have a motion. Does anybody like to second that? Okay. The motion by Council Member Lane was a second by Council Member Martin. Okay. Second by Council Member Martin to refer to the issue to budget and finance. Is there any discussion on the motion at this time? All right. Do we take a vote? All in favor, please indicate by saying aye. Aye. Opposed, no. Motion carries. All right, sir. And now we have Vice Mayor Gordon and then Council Member Stennett. Thank you, Mayor. Ryan, just a couple quick questions. Council Member Stennett brought up the landfill fund, and I know that's not what we're actually discussing, But when this comes up in budget and finance, it would be important for us all to understand what is planned for the landfill fund and whether we have obligations to do any kind of work at Haley Pike or if Raven Run. I can't remember if Raven Run is already capped and finished, that sort of thing, if you would, please, since it was brought up. And then the other thing is, so is the administration going to make a recommendation? I believe that they are prepared to do that. So will you be doing that at Budget and Finance when we discuss this issue? Somebody will be able to bring that forward. Okay. All right. Thank you. Susan was prepared to speak to it, but I think that's basically what you were going to say, wasn't it? but it's always better from your voice. The question was, what would be the administration's approach based on the recommendations going forward, timing of that, and so forth? Well, clearly we have more work to do. And I know the mayor wants an opportunity to vet and discuss this with several council members, as well as we haven't had any discussions with developers or anybody like that as well. But looking very hard at some of the cost control measures that we can employ going forward. I don't think anybody is too excited about turning off streetlights at this point. That's not a preferred way to go. And look how we can control costs going forward. And then I think this would be a good topic for discussion during the upcoming and ongoing franchise agreements to put that on the table. Okay. Thank you. Thanks, Susan. All right. Council Member Blues. Thank you, Mayor. I'm intrigued by Council Member Stendard's proposal. so I'm glad we're going to see this matter put into budget and finance, and I hope that we can come to a workable resolution to this problem in the short term and meet our commitments to the neighborhoods, to the streets and residents that we have made. Longer term, I think it might be very useful to look at the whole lighting issue or subject to see. Earlier on in the presentation, Ryan talked briefly about the perceived or the actual safety factor. Well, what really is the safety value of streetlights at what distance? What is the difference that they actually do make in terms of security? What is the environmental impact of lighting? how in the long term might we move toward a system that might still provide safety based on what evidence and studies we have and be environmentally meaningful. So I'm hoping that at some point, and I'm not calling for this in the immediate future, that we could have a presentation perhaps from environmental quality and or traffic engineering, maybe a joint presentation possibly at the Environmental Quality Committee to talk about the streetlight matter in that context. And if Susan, either you or Mr. Woods wanted to comment on that now, that would be fine. But I would like to follow that thread going forward at some point. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Council Member Billis. Just as a footnote to that, I had a conversation a little bit earlier with Commander Barnard, who was here earlier. I don't know if he's still here now, but, yeah, he is here, who has done a lot of work with Derek Paulson, professor at Eastern Public Safety. Safety by design. Safety by design is exactly what Mark was suggesting that would align, you know, those issues that you're describing would align themselves with these questions. So very worthwhile. Thank you. And I'll talk to those folks and see what might be possible here. Thank you. Council Member Stenet. Thank you, Mayor. I just want to also say, Ryan, thank you again for doing that presentation. I appreciate it. And, Commissioner Bush, thank you for getting the information in. The landfill information, Ryan, they already have in environmental quality. I didn't want you to have to do double work. But the bradstone had already compiled a lot of it. So just trying to make sure you didn't do double work. And also, to Councilman Elaine's point on timing, there's two major deadlines we probably want to keep in the back of our minds. One is we're currently doing an RFP for the change in billing services. If any new fee, we may want to think about that opportunity, which as of right now, it's April 1, but it could be later on this year, depending on the outcome of our discussion. So that's one deadline. The second one would be any property tax changes would be in August. So we don't want to let this issue draw too far out before we miss opportunities and make any other changes to it. So I just wanted to point those two dates out, keeping it back in mind. Thank you, Mayor. Yes, sir. Councilman Lane. I'd also like to say thank you for the work on this presentation. I don't think people sometimes, when they see your overhead, realize how much time was involved. And so I just wanted to acknowledge that and thank Mr. Stennett for his comments. about the timing issue. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Lane. Brian is acknowledging it there as well. Excuse me. All right. If there are no further questions or comments, then regarding the streetlight update, we can move on then to the next item on the presentation, which is the presentation regarding the on-site pharmacy. Melissa, do you want to introduce our guests, please? Or if you had a different plan. All right. We have Yelmore and Dan Dobler here with on-site. I hate talking into microphones. We've got Yell Moore and Dan Dobler here to talk about OnsiteRx. They were the vendor that was selected to run the Onsite Pharmacy. And they have a presentation, and they'll answer any questions. So I'll give it over to them. Thank you. Thanks, Melissa. Well, it's Dan? It is. All right, Dan. By the way, you can have that podium, and we'll go up if it helps you any. There's a button down there. Where is it? It's a button. No, actually it's a podium. Okay. Ah. It's really magical. While that's maneuvering itself, I was just going to say, Melissa Luker, Melissa got a nice note from the marathon folks praising, I know you don't like me doing this, and I promise I won't ever do it again, But she got a nice note from the Marathon people praising her management of the project and saying that it's the best project management they've seen from a city. You haven't even seen it, have you, in a project like this. There's been a lot of turbulence in it, but a well-managed project is a tribute. And this is another part of it, so we're pleased to have you guys with us today. Thank you. Thank you. Can everybody hear me okay with the microphone? My name is Dan Dobler. We're from OnsiteRx. Both Yale and myself are co-owners of this venture. And as we prepared to speak to you this afternoon, it was important that we put ourselves kind of in your shoes as stewards of the urban county government's resources as to what you might expect from an on-site pharmacy and what questions you may have. I think the first and probably most important one is if you think about the on-site pharmacy, our value proposition or our proposal to you all was that it will save money, it will reduce your prescription drug costs while simultaneously being an enhanced benefit for your members at a lower cost. I think it's important probably just at a superficial level to understand exactly how that works because if you're skeptical at all like me, it would cause you to raise an eyebrow. There are obviously some benefits to having your prescription drugs dispensed on campus, as it were. Benefits to having a pharmacist on board. Benefits to having this integrated with the clinic that you all have in place now. Obviously, with anything of this nature, there are practical considerations. And, of course, as a business partner, you probably want to know what assurances we are willing and able to give your organization. So that's kind of the overview of what my comments will be directed towards. First question is, how does an on-site pharmacy save money for you all? What I have up here is just a simple schematic of what the prescription drug supply chain looks like in the United States for commercial purchasers such as yourself right now. Pharmaceutical manufacturers obviously design, manufacture, and market these drugs. They do not distribute them to the market. they go through the wholesalers. There's a markup there. That's what those green arrows indicate. The wholesalers, of course, largely involved in logistics. There's a markup there before they get to the actual retail pharmacies. Now, they're dispensed there, but the payment cycle goes through prescription benefit managers, or PBMs. These are the folks you all contracted with at the beginning of this year, and they are responsible for organizing pharmacies into networks. And then at the bottom there is plan sponsor, and that, of course, is in this case LFUCG. You all are responsible for paying the bills for your employees and their prescription drugs. That's what's left from the copay. What we're proposing here, and as you can see in the supply chain, by the time it gets down to you folks who foot the bill, there's a number of little bumps or marginal increases to the cost of drugs. What we're proposing is that you all have the purchasing leverage or the purchasing power in everyday prescriptions here to open your own facility, your own pharmacy, and purchase direct from the wholesaler. Obviously, that requires some expertise. That requires some legal adherence to state and federal guidelines, clinical expertise. That's where our organization comes in and will help manage that process. But this is really kind of the simple overview of how it works. you're shortening the supply chain by two very important steps in terms of the cost addition here, averaging about $20 per prescription and savings. The question comes up, well, why would we want to get into the pharmacy business? I guess the answer, quite plain and simply, is last year you spent between $8 and $9 million on prescription drugs. So the answer almost back to that is, in fact, you may not realize it, but you already are in the pharmacy business. There are two, I can categorize these, I guess, these bullet points into two major things. One, there's the cost benefit of it. And two, there's an opportunity here to more effectively deliver pharmacy services to your members. Just getting into, I guess, a philosophical point of view here, we can talk about health care costs and how to decrease them all day long, and certainly we feel our solution is something that addresses that. But at some point we have to get to the member's health itself, and placing a pharmacist and health care professional on site offers an opportunity to address members' health concerns much more directly and have an impact in that regard. So if you look at it, you're really taking the two-pronged approach to making what you're doing already more efficient. That is, how do we do it less expensive and how do we do it more efficiently? Next remaining slides will kind of address some of those things specifically. This one obviously deals with price. These are some example comparisons done from a retrospective claim study that came from your actual members over the previous four quarters to this review, which I believe was third quarter, 2010 to third quarter, through the second quarter, excuse me, 2011. Simvastatin, it's a relatively inexpensive generic drug. However, your organization is being charged $55.50. The cost to that through OnSiteRx is $1.14. So the annual savings there, $652. That would be split between the plan and the member. You can look down and see the other drugs there, some of which you may recognize in name. The Copaxone injection is not a very common prescription drug, but it is used to treat multiple sclerosis. It's what's called a specialty drug. Those are drugs that will also be available through this pharmacy. It is a full-service pharmacy. so these are just some examples I think that may resonate with some folks as to what the cost may be and how this actually works to cut out some of the expenses that are built into the system right now. Looking at another savings projection, this is an example of a peer of yours, also a city government, and 5,600 members, employees, and dependents used their pharmacy. This is obviously a more mature pharmacy. It's been open for about two years, two, three years now. And in 2011, you can see the top blue line there is what they would have spent, and the orange line there is what they actually spent. Forgive me for not using projected here. This isn't a projection. It's because we have the claims data and we get the claims data, we can actually tell what the costs would have been had those prescriptions been used in the remainder of the network, the other pharmacies, versus what the costs were in the pharmacy for that employer. And that discrepancy there, that difference between the blue and the orange line, as we carry that out through the year, is $2.4 million savings. Now we get into a little bit of the discussion of what some of the benefits might be in terms of non-financial gains. You've obviously got a health care professional that is on the campus or on board there at the facility. Member education is a very important piece of changing behavior. Everything from compliance and making sure patients such as diabetics are taking their medicines properly and correctly. There's obviously clinical evidence that demonstrates that such activities like that can greatly reduce health care expenditures and keep these people, these patients who are sick, healthy much longer. Wellness and promotional things. Pharmacists serve as a great resource, a very trusted resource, in providing education to these members. If you look at any survey of the most trusted professionals, pharmacists are consistently at the top. There's an opportunity for your organization to take advantage of workers' comp. The drug billing that is mandated through workers' compensation prescription claims has even more drug inflation than what I showed in the earlier slide. That was specific to prescription benefits, but the workers' compensation opportunity is quite substantial as well. And then there's obviously an opportunity for over-the-counter medications. In addressing, I guess, the chronically ill population, and if you look at your costs, 80% of them are going to be driven by what, in the medical profession, are called these frequent flyers of people who are the most sick and have the most disease states. Those folks, the one thing they have in common is they all take prescription drugs. or should be. And so this pharmacy is a very natural and a very logical place to start providing them a portal into a health care system that you all are well on your way to providing already with the marathon clinic that's in place. One of the concerns that may come up is if we go ahead and finance this, will our members actually utilize it and will they come to use it? to the extent that we need to recoup the money on it. If we look at this utilization graph right here, it just shows the milestones. This is an actual client within the first 24 months, and this is very typical of what we see for our customers. In fact, we have yet to have somebody who does not achieve these milestones, and we have placed contractual language in the agreement that shows that we will guarantee utilization that meets or exceeds the 50% mark there. This next slide is, again, a peer of yours, city government, who has a mature pharmacy. This is obviously past their 24-month maturation point. The utilization is still increasing slightly but has stabilized. And essentially, I guess the important thing to understand here is this is the group that I showed you before saved $2.4 million in 2011. In the fourth quarter alone, in fact, there was savings of $700,000. The next few slides are just some examples of survey responses. There are actual survey responses every year, as is in this agreement, as is in every agreement we have with our clients. We conduct a survey of the members. What do you think of your experience? Are you comfortable that your information will remain confidential? How are the hours serving you? Parking, every aspect of the service that's provided we ask them about. And these are some of the comments we just received from our most recent survey. Everything from, it's changed my life, saved over $1,000 a year. That's a very common description that we get. And these aren't just from people on the HSA plan. These are people who take, like I said, we talked about frequent flyers. There are people out there taking 10, 12 more medicines every month. And if we can start to reduce their co-pays, get them compliant, this can really have a very large financial impact as well as an impact on their well-being. Some more comments here, again, from actual surveys. You'll see the one in there, the middle, referencing the staff. It is important that we put staff in here that have customer service as a primary concern and is paramount to the success of this facility. Some practical considerations. These, as you can imagine, have been the basis of our discussions with the selection committee up to this point. Obviously, the location is pretty well set. Timeline, it appears there is a great desire and excitement to get this up and running. Staffing I spoke about is very important, the hours of operation. All of these things are maybe perhaps beyond the scope of this meeting right here, but they are things that we have been gaining clearer understanding of each day and have implemented to the best level possible into the agreement we have in place and on the table for Thursday. Assurances from our organization. One of the, I guess the primary concern would be if your organization builds this facility, will the members really come? The savings are going to be dependent upon the utilization, and we have put language in our agreement to guarantee that your utilization will be at certain milestones within certain points, so that that is in fact the case. Will it be open on time? Yes, that's another guarantee. will the savings outpace expenses again this is we are contractually bound to do that and will the people be happy with it again the surveys are a function of what we do every year and we guarantee a certain level of responses within those surveys so with these i guess i'll conclude my presentation but open it up to questions. Okay, thanks, Mr. Dobler. The floor is available to council members for questions or comments. Council Member Beard, then Vice Mayor Gordon. Thank you, Mayor. A couple of questions. I'm the senior pill taker in the group here. You mentioned Nexium there. Nexium has gone generic recently. How do you all manage that situation in relationship to I've got to have Nexium? I won't go generic as far as the patient is concerned. Nexium, in fact, is in a class of drugs. I'm sorry, Nexium. I'm sorry, Lipitor. So Nexium, I've got a question about Nexium. Sure. But go ahead with the Lipitor. I'm sorry, can you restate your question then as a particular question? Well, just from the numbers here, it doesn't look like there's a lot of savings for Lipitor. But if you demonstrated the generic for Lipitor, which is a mouthful, wouldn't there be the availability of more savings? Who makes that decision? I assume who writes the prescriptions, and that would be somebody within the sphere of your operation out there. Yeah, absolutely. You bring up the point Lipitor has recently gone generic. Right. The generic name of that drug is atorvastatin. Now, in the United States with generics, they are under what's called a 180-day exclusivity. So the price of that drug has not actually dropped much more than 5%. I noticed that just quite recently. Right. But very soon, within the May timeframe, that is going to happen, though. I would actually point you up to the example of Simvastatin, which is another drug up there in that category. Let's just say it drops to that level. Again, one of the benefits you have of having your own pharmacist on staff here is they're going to be – they don't have to worry about 100 other insurance plans. They don't have to worry about what other kind of prior authorization coverages they have. They will be specifically trained and locked into what's going on with your organization. So that provides them an opportunity to say, hey, this is a drug that's generically available, and yes, certainly you make a good point. There is $20 worth of savings there. And this chart, again, the data we had, there was no generic atorvastatin available or generic lipitor available. But you can imagine whatever the savings would be when it goes down to $20, $10, $2, the pharmacist will be directing those folks to that lowest cost alternative. Okay, and then the other example is the Nexium and the Omeprazole. Absolutely. That's one of our favorite ones, and these are things that I want to point out are not contemplated in our savings projections, but you can imagine the opportunity here. Nexium and, as the council member pointed out, Omeprazole are within the same class of drugs. these are proton pump inhibitors, to heal or eliminate the symptoms of gastroesophageal reflux disease, heartburn. If you can take a person who's on Nexium for $170 a month and move them over to something like Omeprazole at $240 per month, I believe the co-pays we're recommending here would more than cover that. There is no planned cost. versus something like Nexium where the member may pay $30, $40, $50. There's still a burden of over $100 on the plan to pick that up. So, yeah, the impact is quite profound. And, again, I mentioned some of the member education. These are things that we have our staff do often in lunch and learn settings, even outside of the pharmacy to kind of go out and get with your folks, your employees, to educate them of these opportunities. You know, hey, diet is important in heartburn, but also if you happen to be on Nexium, there are other savings opportunities. There are less expensive drugs that are available. You haven't lived until you sat through a four-hour zone meeting, which we have one this evening, I think. Maybe not four hours, but we do have a zoning meeting this evening. I believe that's all. I just wanted to kind of see where you all were on these because of your selections here. I just thought they were kind of interesting. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Council Member Beard. Vice Mayor Gordon. Thank you, Mayor. I have just a few questions. On your slide, page 79, about practical considerations, have you determined yet what the hours will be? We have not officially determined them. There have been some discussions to have them loosely match what the medical center's hours or the health center's hours are with Marathon Health. And what are those? I wanted to thank Melissa for sending us the contract. I know it says 44 hours per week and no more, or we pay more money. So that's a lot of people are used to a regular pharmacy that's open until 9 o'clock at night. We're working with them still on the hours and working with our consultants. They've looked at other pharmacies, retail pharmacies, and then some smaller locally owned pharmacy hours. We are still working on that. I talked with our counterpart in Chattanooga, Madeline Green, who came up and presented. Because I was looking at the hours, and I was like, okay, I need to know. And Chattanooga's hours actually aren't open every hour that their health center is. and she said that's been fine. So that's been thrown into the mix because we have 48 hours with Marathon, and then the contract, we would have to pay more over 44 hours with on-site. So that's been taken into consideration. The health center hours are 8 to 5, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Tuesday, Thursday, 8 to 7, and then Saturday, 8 to noon. So we're going to work as best we can to match the hours to make it as convenient as possible for employees, but we're still working with them on that. So there would be some weekend time. How about holidays when urban county government is closed but most businesses are open? We have not discussed holidays with OnSite. I know that with Marathon, they go by the same holiday schedule that we have, so when we're closed, they're closed. Okay. The reason I'm asking these questions is I think if our employees are off on a holiday, it would be a good time for them. Many of them run around and do errands and things like that. So I guess will you be updating us on the hours? Yes, I will. And then a couple more contract questions. And again, I do thank you for sending that, Melissa. In the contract, one of the sections is use of private health information, referred to as PHI. One of the items, and I apologize, do you have the contract with you? I do. Okay, it's page 4 at the top, 1.12. Access to the private health information will be limited to those employees performing plan administration functions. Who will that be? Those would be folks in the administration, like human resources. Have we identified who will have access to the private health information within government? Will it be by name? These would typically be the same people who have access to your prescription benefit information as you currently contract with your PBM right now. Okay. Janet, could you come up to the podium on it? Thank you. Commissioner Graham. I think Mary Lyle is currently the employee that administers our pharmacy program with the outside, So she would probably be the one to do it. She's our registered nurse. That sounds good to me. And then another question. On page 7, financials and accounting. I'm not sure if we were actually supposed to get this version, but there's a paragraph 3.03 that says in parentheses, we do not understand this sentence, and I didn't understand it either. Would you mind to explain that last sentence about total days of therapy at on-site pharmacy divided by total days supplied? Certainly. This is one of the performance guarantees that we were speaking of in terms of guaranteeing a percentage of utilization. And what this does is it's a measure of the total days of therapy dispensed to the members at the on-site pharmacy versus the total days of therapy dispensed to members in your entire prescription benefit plan, so it includes other pharmacies that they may go to. So this is the most accurate way that we can get a measure of what percentage utilization is being driven there. Okay. And then just quickly, finally, a lot of pharmacies will do a vacation override, so you can get prescription filled even though it's not time according to your insurance. So will you do that so you can get forward medicines if you're going out of town? Right. That's actually a function of the prescription benefit, and, of course, our pharmacists would facilitate those kind of things as well. Okay. And I guess you're less expensive than mail order. A lot of our folks use mail order. Is that correct? That is correct. Okay. Thank you very much. Thank you. And your members will be able to get a 90-day supply at the employee pharmacy also, like mail order. Council Member Lane. Nice presentation. I just had two questions for you. I don't see the page number, but it was the one that said yielded $2.4 million in savings. I like the word savings particularly. I think it's page five in the series. I know the slide quite well you're speaking of. I'd like to bring it up. Yeah. Okay. All right. The question I had is the $2.4 million, that's a combined savings for both our employees and the urban county government because actually we're saving that much, but our employees are getting a chunk of that savings too, right? That is their co-pay or the actual cost you have to pay for it? Correct. Okay. All right. I just want to clarify that one. And the other question, do you only handle prescription drugs, or are there any over-the-counter things you sell to? Yes, there will be over-the-counter drugs available at this as well. We have durable medical equipment. This is an agreement with the nation's premier wholesaler. But this will be just like a full-service farm. There will be no greeting cards or anything like that. Okay. And then can you actually order off of a website? Do you have a website, too? We are working on that functionality. We don't presently have it, but we are working on some functionality for electronic ordering through smartphone devices and so on. All right. Thank you very much. Good luck on your project. Thank you. Councilor Beard. I get a second chance now at this. But unlike CVS and Rite Aid and Walgreens, who are on corners with lights and main thoroughfares and things of that sort, you all are somewhat hidden. You don't really need to disclose what steps you've taken to harden your, especially the controlled substance part. but have you taken the fact that you are somewhat tucked away somewhere that you might be a good target for some folks? Absolutely. There are obviously state and federal guidelines that we have to follow to secure, like you said, control substances. Our organization will be responsible for an electronic security system. From what I understand, some of the building that was put in place in anticipation of this has already been put into State Pharmacy Code to ensure that it is a secure facility. Thank you. That's all I needed, Mayor. Thank you very much. Thank you, Council Member Beard. I don't show anybody else on the monitor for questions. Thank you all very much. Thank you. Thanks for joining us. Council Member Stanton? Oh, we're ready. Council reports. All right. Already? Good. Just had a couple items. One, as many of you know, if you've been following the news, in the Hamburg area, there's been a coyote spotted. Granted, this coyote is native to that land, and obviously he was probably there first before most of the homes. But there has been some concern from the neighbors, and I appreciate Commissioner Mason's response in his department as well as our animal care and control. And just so everyone watching will know, while it has not endangered anyone or attacked anyone, our animal care and control folks are going to go out tonight and trap it and hopefully find him a safer home, the habitat, and remove him from harm as well as the neighbors. So I didn't want anyone. We're getting a lot of calls. I just want to make sure everyone understands what we're trying to do. And it is considered a nuisance animal by the state. Obviously, with nuisance animals, you can dispose of them as a property owner, but we choose not to allow people to do that in Fayette County, grant the safety. So thank you, Commissioner Mason, for your office's work on this and our animal care and control folks, and hopefully the situation will be resolved in a few days. Just want to make sure everyone has a pet, even though your dogs are supposed to be on a leash. Make sure, because we had this situation in Bourbon County where dogs were let off the leash, and they were caught in a trap. The trap doesn't differentiate between animals, so just make sure you keep your animals close to your home. over the next few days if you live in an area. And last but not least, Mayor, can we get an update on the parking garage that's attached to this building? I know we've had a couple engineering opinions. I think we have asked for a third. I don't know. If you can give us an update. We're getting a lot of questions since we're tearing down the one behind us. It's going pretty fast. Yes, sir. But if we could see what we're going to do with this garage. I know it's been closed for four years, and maybe it's time to figure out how to either open it or do something different. So thank you if we can have that soon. Thanks. We'll sure do it. Council Member Lane? Thank you, Mayor. I'd like to move the issue of activity-based accounting into the Budget and Finance Committee. I've spoken with the chair of the committee, and it feels like we can move that in probably for our next meeting. I'll make a motion to move it into committee at this time. Motion. Second. Motion by Council Member Lane. Second by Council Member Martin. Regarding activity-based accounting, is there any discussion on the motion? All right. Hearing none, we'll take a vote. All in favor, please indicate by saying aye. Aye. Opposed, no. Motion carries. Vice Mayor Gordon. Thank you, Mayor. Just one item, Councilmembers. We have our zone change hearing at 6 o'clock, and it's my understanding that law has agreed that we can limit this to three hours or less if we get done before that, so we will not go past 9 o'clock. and I'm thinking, Mayor, that we'll need to find out if we're going to have a quorum. I know a few council members have emailed that they cannot be here. If we could take a count. And Councilman Farmer said he would be able to be back for the rezoning hearing. So everyone who can make it, can you just show of hands who plan to make the rezoning hearing tonight? Who are coming. Who plan to attend, just hold your hand up. I'll tell you what. Can. Who are coming. Who are coming. Are you coming? Hold your hand up if you are coming. So you're not coming, Kevin. Who's not coming? Well, we have five here plus Councilmember Lawless and Councilmember Farmer, which is seven. Mayor, in examining the packet provided to us from the planning department, I discovered I have a conflict of interest. My wife is a consultant for the Hearing and Speaks Center, and I unfortunately have to recuse myself from that. So I apologize to my fellow council members, but I think that's what law tells me I have to do. Council Member Blues? No, you will be here. Okay. Mayor, I gave notice that I have a conflict. I cannot be here. It looks like we have seven. So not enough. All right. Mayor, if we could ask, we still have to show up, correct? And we have, is it 30 minutes? I think our law department is conferring in the back. Mayor, if the law department could also let me know whether I need to stay and recuse on the record at the beginning of the hearing, that would be helpful as well for the purpose of the record. Okay. I think they heard the question. You may have a couple of problems. First, and recognize planning is not my forte, but I'm being told that tomorrow may be your deadline to take action on this in terms of the amount of time you have to schedule a hearing. So you may want to select an alternative date if you have that option. and we're checking with Rochelle to see now, because if you don't have a quorum at 6, it's going to be difficult for you to select a date because you can't take action without a quorum. So, Mayor, if I might. Thank you. So are you suggesting that right now we can take action to set an alternate date, which we may not need? I would suggest that you set it in the terms of if you don't have a quorum tonight for the hearing, you are selecting the alternative date of now. We need to confirm this time frame you have because, as you know, you have a limited time to act on zone changes. And if you're up against the wall on your time limit, then you're going to lose the ability to take action. Mayor, just a legal question. To override the approval of the Zoning Commission or Planning Commission, we need eight votes to override that? That is correct, but you have to have 10 to have a quorum to have a meeting. Okay. Yes. Yes. So if you don't have the, so what is the outcome if the time has expired and there is no meeting? I think the action of the Planning Commission carries. Prevail? Yes. Okay. Vice Mayor Gordon. Just one more thing. There are a couple of council members who were here earlier who did not email me that they wouldn't be here, and I wonder if their aides are watching, if they could contact them, because that might give us our quorum. You could take a brief recess if you need to do some counting in terms of now, but that's obviously up to you all. Chris Ford told me he was coming back. Chris said he will be back. Okay, he's one. So that makes eight. So we need two more. This does say you have to take action by January 25th, which is tomorrow. There's five of us. Julian's not coming. Julian's not going to be here. So we have eight. Casey would be nine, but I don't know. They're not yet. They're coming. Yeah. And it looks like the Planning Commission had granted conditional approval of whatever this is. As soon as they end this time, we can schedule another meeting. But it's tomorrow. Yeah, exactly. Right. Right. Right. We're losing. Thank you. All right, we're going to finish our meeting then. Okay, Council Member Kaye, Council Report. Thank you, Mayor. I'm going to speak to an issue that some constituents have expressed some concern about to me. I've not had an opportunity to talk with many of the people on Council about whether it's appropriate to take Council action in terms of a resolution, but this has to do with the recent redistricting that has affected many of the citizens in Fayette County. And so at the very least, I want to express my own concern about the redistricting law that the legislature passed and the governor signed into law this week and its impact on the citizens of Lexington. And going forward, I would urge the governor and the legislature to institute a redistricting process that ensures that districts are drawn fairly, representatively, and in a nonpartisan way. Many people have expressed to me their concern that by their action, the legislature and the governor, by signing that law, disenfranchise a significant proportion of Lexington's community, and I feel it is appropriate, at the very least, to make a public statement about that. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you. Council Member Kaye. Council Member Henson. Thank you, Mayor. I have a suggestion for Council Member Stenet. I think he should call Turtle Man for his coyote. Do you know who Turtle Man is? But anyway, I do have a motion. I don't like to see them get hurt, And he does capture and return them to wildlife. Who? He is from Kentucky. Okay. Central Kentucky. All right. Seriously. I moved to place on the docket for Thursday, January 26, a resolution accepting the collective bargaining agreement with Fraternal Order of Police, Town Branch Lodge No. 83 on behalf of the officers and sergeants in the Division of Community Corrections. Second. A motion by Council Member Hanson, second by Council Member Ellinger. Is there any discussion on the motion? All right. Hearing none, we can take a vote. All in favor, please indicate by saying aye. Aye. Opposed, no. Motion carries. And then I had an announcement that tomorrow at 2 o'clock will be the, as the mayor said in his State of the Emerged Government address, the grand opening for Parkside development will be at 2 o'clock, 1060 Cross Keys Road. and Colony 4 Neighborhood Association will meet at the Beaumont Branch Library at 630. And thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Council Member Hanson. Council Member Martin. Thank you, Mayor. I had a delightful time Sunday meeting with the Harrods Hill Neighborhood Association. I appreciate Council Member Steve Kaye joining me, and we had a nice time updating the folks there about what's going on down here at City Hall. I appreciate Harry Clark, the president over there, having us down. And strangely enough, they said everything's going great. So I like that. On a more serious note, I just wanted to voice my complete disappointment that the state legislature, both houses, have taken upon themselves to dilute and to limit the representation of Lexington, Kentucky, and the state legislature. I think that it's a disappointment. The amount of political bickering that took place is unacceptable in public office. I thought both houses behaved inappropriately, and the loss of our senator from Lexington is inappropriate. And I'm very disappointed. And I thought that the governor should have vetoed both bills. And I understand the complexities and the limitations under which he operates. But this is not good government. This is not how we should be operating. And we should do better. And Lexington has come out on the bad end of this. We have less representation now than we did before in Frankfurt. And that should be of concern to all Lexington citizens. And so I'm disappointed, and I wish that we take steps so that this kind of thing doesn't happen again. This is the Hatfield and McCoys. and we can't get good things done for the citizens if we're fighting among ourselves. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Council Member Martin. Council Member Beard. I guess it's my turn to weigh in on the same subject. Council Member Kay had given us two versions of a statement that I assume we might make, and I want to let him know that version number one is tougher than version number two, so let's do version number one would be my vote. Second question, is this change effective July 1st like other laws? They're functioning now even in the middle of the... Okay, that's even, in addition to being worse, it's ridiculous. I understand they had an emergency provision attached to the bill and that it took effect upon passage. And upon signing by the governor. Good heavens. Can we not file suit? Janet just heard the dirty word there. Maybe she could help us. Commissioner Graham. There has to be, there's always some way. I mean, if they put people in murder, ax murderers in jail and let them stay there for 14 years, in good heavens, you ought to be able to do something. I've not researched that. But I think if you, I mean, I would have to look at the law on that. But, I mean, our Constitution provides for relief from actions in open courts. So I think, you know, I think the question would be whether the General Assembly has some legislative immunity and some broad discretion in the areas of redistricting and what would be considered political actions in some ways. So I've not researched that to know whether that would be an actionable case or not. We'd have to look at that. Well, our new senator has to drive 204 miles to get here, he told me today. So I'm sure that's not a lot of fun for him either. Yeah, I mean, and whether this body would be the proper body to bring suit would be another question. Whether, you know, there's a legal analysis that you always have to do on standing, you know, who has standing to bring suit, and whether it would be this body or whether it would be a disgruntled constituent or someone clearly affected by the redistricting claim. I'm sure they can find disgruntled citizens that were out on the street here over the weekend, but part of our job is to protect our constituents also, I think. Of course, that doesn't necessarily mean anything in Frankfurt, does it? I mean, we could certainly look at the threshold issue of, you know, can a body like this bring suit and provide some guidance on that if you'd like. Okay. Well, if you don't mind digging into it a little bit or putting somebody on that job, I'd appreciate it. Yeah, be glad to. Thank you, Mayor. Yes, sir. Councilor Blues. Thank you, Mayor. But on the same issue, I know that council members received many emails from outraged citizens in Lexington throughout the county on the action that was taken in the legislature. Some of our citizens thought that the Urban County Council was responsible for this travesty. And I think it is important for everybody to understand that the General Assembly is responsible for redistricting itself, that we had nothing to do with it. But on the other hand, I think that without boasting or bragging, we can hold ourselves up as a model of how redistricting should be done. And it was done on the council level this summer by a citizens committee who brought forward a proposal after several meetings to the council. I think we as a body made some small and inconsequential changes in it and passed it. And I think that is a consequence of the fact that in a bitterly partisan time, where governments at state and national levels are absolutely paralyzed by mindless and vicious partisanship, We are nonpartisan, and while we all have different views and will argue various sides of subjects and may be divided on one issue, we may be reformed and united on another. And I think that what we have here is an example of how government can work, that democracies can function when men and women of goodwill get together to work on behalf of the citizens and the welfare of the city. I do hope, Council Member Kaye, that you will bring forward a resolution on this so that we can express our disdain and our objection to the General Assembly's action. And perhaps at our next work session this can be done. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Council Member Blues. Vice Mayor Gordon. Thank you, Mayor. Dr. Blues, you have articulated beautifully exactly some of the things that I was going to say, and in particular, I think that Fayette County did have a process which, at the end of it, came to the council with a recommendation that only required one small change. If you recall, there was one precinct that the council changed. And I think that, Mayor, today at your State of the Merged Government, you said that as of now we have, I guess, officially gone over 300,000 people. And that bothered me very much that 300,000 people in our Commonwealth of Kentucky would suddenly be left with a person representing all of us who lives so far away. That is not a comment on that person. I met him today, and he seems like a fine person. It has nothing to do with that. But I think it's fairly disrespectful to Fayette Countians when something like that happens. So I think that our state legislature would be well served by the discussion which is going on. And I think Representative Bill Farmer is putting a bill out to establish an independent group of people to do this next time. And I think that is really the way to go. So thank you. Thank you, Vice Mayor. Council Member Martin. Thank you, Mayor. I just want to make a follow-up comment. I appreciate my colleagues' words on this as well. I just think that we should not go quietly into the night. That whatever legal resources we have, that we should bring to bear until a judge tells us, no, you have to go home. And I think that we should explore this and we should make our voices very loud that this is unacceptable for the people of Fayette County. and regardless of whether we're successful in the end I think it is a worthwhile endeavor to loudly oppose and object to what has been done because we have suffered, we are less after what has been done we have less representation in Frankfurt and let's face it, we're paying a lot of the bills over there and to have, be treated with this level of disrespect and have our representatives, whether you agree with them or not, whether you voted for them or not, they are our representatives, and now we don't have them. And that is unacceptable. And whoever sits in the seats in Lexington, but also in other places in Kentucky, they are elected, and while they serve, they deserve our respect. And so I hope that the administration will pursue this with all vigor. I support Mr. Kaye's drafts that he brought us. I appreciate his leadership in bringing that forward. But we just should not go quietly into the night. We should use our resources to oppose this. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Council Member Martin. Council Member Beard? Just a quick adjustment to your comments, Council Member Martin. Why stop with just one judge? They've got two other sets of judges. I think we should take it as far as we can take it. And that's certainly what I meant, was until our remedies are certainly taken up and until we come to a final stopping point, I think we should pursue this. This is completely unacceptable. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you. A lot of discouragement, a lot of disappointment associated with this, and it's all been expressed really well. Councilman Beard, did you back up again? Okay. All right. Oh, Keith is back. I don't think you have many options. Your deadline's tomorrow. I don't think you have time to call a special meeting. So if you can't get a quorum tonight, the action of the Planning Commission is going to be carrying through. All right, Vice Mayor. And can you confirm that those of us who are able to attend do need to show up at 6 o'clock? And do we have a 30-minute window that we are required to wait to see if we have a quorum? We don't have any window of time. You do have, and I don't have your rules in front of me, but any time you have a meeting, there's a period of time during which you can try to get members present, but there's no requirement that you wait any specific amount of time. Susan thinks that they usually do 20 minutes. But Susan Lamb thinks you usually wait 20 minutes. Okay, thank you very much. I'm supposed to chair it, so we'll wait 20 minutes. Thank you, Vice Mayor. All right. Okay. Thanks so much, Keith. Thanks, Rochelle. All right. Anybody else? Any other council reports? Am I missing? Nope. All right. There's a mayor's report. Move approval. Second. There's a motion and a second to approve. Is there any discussion? He made the motion. He made it early. Yeah. Yep. Yep. All right. Is there any discussion? Hearing none, take a vote. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed, no. Motion carries. Thank you very much. I don't have anybody signed up for public comment. No, Mr. Mundy? Okay. Thank you, sir. All right, then. Then I'll ask for a motion to adjourn. To adjourn. It's a motion by Vice Mayor Gorton to adjourn. seconded by Council Member Ellinger. Without discussion, please indicate in favor by saying aye. Aye. Well, I struggle. All opposed, no. Motion carries. We are adjourned. So, yes, the Council will re-