# Urban County Council Work Session on 04/24/2012 3:00 PM - PACKET - April 24, 2012 > Auto-transcribed civic record · April 24, 2012 - **Permalink**: https://meetings.lexingtonky.news/meeting/2486 - **Source video**: https://lfucg.granicus.com/player/clip/2486?view_id=14&redirect=true - **Date**: 2012-04-24 - **Last revised**: July 17, 2026 - **Length**: 23,740 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 Lexington Fayette Urban County Government held a meeting on April 24, 2012, at 3:00 p.m. in the Council Chamber on the 2nd Floor of the Government Center. Mayor Jim Gray presided over the session, which included 14 motions and votes on various matters before the body. The council approved five substantive agenda items: Requested Rezonings/Docket Approval, Approval of Summary, Budget Amendments, New Business, and the NDF List. In addition to these votes, the meeting included five informational items: a COW Economic Development Committee Update, The Parks of Floyds Fork Presentation, a Council Report, Public Comments on Issues Not on Agenda, and the Mayor's Report. Two members of the public provided comments during the meeting. ## Attendance The following individuals were present at the meeting on April 24, 2012: **Mayor and Council Members:** - Mayor Jim Gray - Vice Mayor Gordon - Council Member Blues - Council Member Ellinger - Council Member Farmer - Council Member Beard - Council Member Lawless - Council Member Henson - Council Member Stinnett - Council Member Kay - Council Member Crosby - Council Member Martin - Council Member Lane - Council Member Myers - Council Member Ford **Other Officials and Staff:** - Commissioner Sally Hamilton - Commissioner Mason - Chief Jackson - Dan Jones - Bill Juckett - Derek Paulson - Jordan - Hoskins - Griffin - Littrell No members were recorded as absent or late. ## Votes and Decisions The council conducted fourteen votes during this meeting, all of which passed by voice vote. **Ordinance Placement** Council Member Bleu moved to place Ordinance 11 on the docket without a public hearing, seconded by Council Member Ellinger [timestamp: 00:09:20]. The motion passed. Council Member Lawless moved to place Ordinance 12 on the docket without a public hearing, seconded by Vice Mayor Gordon [timestamp: 00:09:52]. The motion passed. **Budget and Committee Approvals** Council Member Farmer moved to approve an Environmental Quality Committee meeting at a cost not to exceed $241,000, seconded by Council Member Beard [timestamp: 00:10:29]. The motion passed. Council Member Ellinger moved to approve budget amendments, seconded by Council Member Myers [timestamp: 00:12:34]. The motion passed. **Docket and Work Session Approvals** Vice Mayor Gordon moved to approve the entire docket, seconded by Council Member Ellinger [timestamp: 00:10:59]. The motion passed. Council Member Beard moved to approve the summary for Work Session 410, seconded by Vice Mayor Gordon [timestamp: 00:12:00]. The motion passed. Vice Mayor Gordon moved to approve the summary for Work Session 17th, seconded by Council Member Farmer [timestamp: 00:12:34]. The motion passed. **Agenda Modifications** Council Member Beard moved to remove item O (Lexington Children's Theatre grant) from the agenda, seconded by Vice Mayor Gordon [timestamp: 00:14:20]. The motion passed. Council Member Ellinger moved to approve new business items, seconded by Council Member Ellinger [timestamp: 00:25:35]. The motion passed. Council Member Ellinger moved to approve the NDF list, seconded by Council Member Blues [timestamp: 00:26:08]. The motion passed. **Business District and Presentation** Council Member Lawless moved to place the pedestrian-oriented business district on the docket for first reading, seconded by Council Member Blues [timestamp: 00:32:32]. The motion passed. Council Member Lane moved to extend time for presentation by Dan Jones and Bill Juckett beyond 15 minutes, seconded by Vice Mayor Gordon [timestamp: 00:36:46]. The motion passed. **Golf Subsidy Referral** Council Member McCord moved to refer the public golf subsidy issue to the General Government Committee, seconded by Council Member Blues [timestamp: 00:32:05]. The motion passed. Council Member Myers moved to amend the previous motion to bring the golf issue to a work session instead, seconded by Council Member Lane [timestamp: 00:46:27]. The motion passed. ## Budget and Financial Actions The meeting approved multiple budget amendments and financial authorizations: **Budget Amendments** Seven journal entries adjusted departmental funds: - Journal 59680: $120.38 to correct account detail for the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant - Journal 59681: $3,276.26 for Economic Development Loan legal fees related to the 500's on Main development project - Journal 59682-83: $2,918.84 to repay Park Maintenance overtime expended during park facility rentals - Journal 59686: $3,000.00 to cover landfill user fees by decreasing emergency financial assistance funds and creating a transfer to the Landfill Fund - Journal 59687-88: $3,000.00 to cover landfill user fees through a General Fund transfer - Journal 59690-91: $250.00 to recognize a donation from Sharon Donohue for CERT backpacks for the next training class - Journal 59694: $17,012.00 to transfer lapsed graphics personnel funds to the operating account for the graphics program **Lease Agreements** The meeting authorized lease agreements with multiple organizations for space in city facilities: - North Central Area Health Education Center (L354-12): $3,849.00 for space at Black & Williams Neighborhood Center - Nursing Home Ombudsman Agency of the Bluegrass (L357-12): $3,386.00 for space at Senior Citizens Center - Faith in Action: Elder Outreach (L358-12): $2,089.70 for space at Senior Citizens Center - Meals on Wheels of Lexington, Inc. (L360-12): $893.67 for space at Senior Citizens Center - Blue Grass Community Action Partnership (L362-12 and L364-12): No cost for space at Senior Citizens Center and Black & Williams Neighborhood Center - Legal Aid of the Bluegrass (L366-12): $22,672.02 for space at Black & Williams Neighborhood Center **Grants and Donations** The meeting approved several grant-related actions: - Sharon Donohue donation (L399-12): $250.00 for CERT backpacks - Community Development Block Grant (L403-12): $252,000.00 from U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development - Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant (L413-12): $252,727.00 from U.S. Department of Justice for FY 2013 - Project Safe Neighborhood Grant (L415-12): $24,000.00 for agreements with Commonwealth Attorneys - Lexington Children's Theatre (L418-12): $11,000.00 from Department of Environmental Quality and Public Works to support the play "Heap It On" **Contracts** The meeting authorized contracts with Bullhorn, LLC (L421-12) for graphic design services and approved an amendment to add McGee Springs Farm Inc. (L426-12) as a mowing contractor. ## Public Comment Two speakers addressed the meeting during the public comment period. **Ken Cohen – Metal Theft and Scrap Ordinance** [timestamp: 00:03:42] Ken Cohen of Baker Iron and Metal presented an alternative proposal regarding the metal theft and scrap ordinance. He suggested that his company place a police officer on its scale to monitor transactions, which he argued would eliminate the need for a scrap ordinance. Cohen offered to pay for the officer and recommended that the Lexington ordinance be put on hold until the state ordinance takes effect. **Wendy Schaus – Bluegrass Community Action Partnership** [timestamp: 00:08:48] Wendy Schaus, representing Bluegrass Community Action Partnership, stated that after reviewing the meeting packet, no comment was needed. ## Appointments The following individuals were appointed to the Task Force on Capacity Assurance Program: * Council Member Blues * Council Member Ellinger * Council Member Kay * Council Member Farmer * Council Member Stinnett * Vice Mayor Gordon * Derek Paulson ## Contested Items **Public Golf Subsidy Policy** A motion to refer the public golf subsidy issue to the General Government Committee passed, though not without significant debate. The primary disagreement centered on the procedural approach to addressing the issue: council members disputed whether the matter should be handled in a work session or through the regular budget process. Council members raised concerns about the implications of singling out one program for this type of discussion, questioning whether doing so set a problematic precedent. There was also disagreement about the timing of the discussion, with some members expressing concerns that the current moment was not appropriate for this review. Despite these procedural and substantive disagreements, the motion to refer the matter to the General Government Committee ultimately passed. ## Requested Rezonings/Docket Approval [timestamp: 00:09:20] Council members addressed requested rezonings and docket approval during this agenda item. Council Member Bleu, Council Member Ellinger, Council Member Lawless, and Vice Mayor Gordon participated in the discussion. The council moved to place Ordinance 11 and Ordinance 12 on the docket without public hearings. Following this action, the entire docket was brought forward for a vote. The docket was approved unanimously by the council. ## Approval of Summary Two motions were made during this agenda item to approve summaries for Work Sessions 410 and 17th. Council Member Beard, Vice Mayor Gordon, and Council Member Farmer participated in this item. Both motions to approve the summaries were approved without discussion. [timestamp: 00:12:00] The outcome of this agenda item was approval. ## Budget Amendments A motion to approve budget amendments was presented during the meeting [timestamp: 00:12:34]. Council Member Ellinger and Council Member Myers were the key speakers on this agenda item. The amendments included adjustments to multiple funds for various purposes: - Legal fees - Park maintenance - Landfill fees - CERT backpacks The motion was approved without discussion. No concerns were raised during the consideration of these amendments. ## New Business During the New Business section of the meeting, the council discussed and approved a series of lease agreements for social service agencies operating in county facilities. [timestamp: 00:13:10] **Key Participants** The discussion involved Council Members Beard, Farmer, Lane, Myers, Kay, and Crosby, as well as Commissioner Sally Hamilton. **Topics Discussed** The council addressed lease agreements for social service agencies, with particular focus on transparency, fair market value assessments, and the rationale behind proposed rent adjustments. The discussion examined how these lease terms were determined and their alignment with fair market practices. **Outcome** The council approved the lease agreements as presented. Additionally, the council approved a motion to remove item O (Lexington Children's Theatre grant) from the agenda. ## NDF List A motion to approve the NDF list was presented during the meeting. Council Member Ellinger and Council Member Blues were the key speakers on this agenda item. [timestamp: 00:26:08] The motion was approved without discussion. No concerns were raised or debated regarding the NDF list during this portion of the meeting. ## COW Economic Development Committee Update Council Member Beard presented a report on the Economic Development Committee's activities [timestamp: 00:26:44]. The presentation covered several key initiatives and proposals. **Topics Covered** The report included updates on job creation efforts and the committee's work with minority business accelerator programs. Additionally, Council Member Beard discussed a proposed transfer of a parking garage to the Lexington Parking Authority. **Key Speakers** Council Member Beard led the presentation, with Commissioner Sally Hamilton also participating in the discussion. **Outcome** This agenda item was informational in nature, providing the council with an update on the Economic Development Committee's ongoing work and initiatives. ## The Parks of Floyds Fork Presentation Dan Jones and Bill Juckett from Louisville presented on the Parklands of Floyd's Fork project [timestamp: 00:35:11]. The presentation detailed the project's vision, funding mechanisms, land acquisition strategy, and public-private partnership model. The presentation was extended beyond its originally scheduled 15 minutes with unanimous approval from the body, indicating significant interest in the project details. Mayor Jim Gray participated in the discussion alongside the primary presenters. The outcome of this agenda item was informational, with no formal action or vote required. The presentation served to inform the body about the Parklands of Floyd's Fork initiative and its implementation approach. ## Council Report Council members provided updates on various initiatives and ongoing projects during this agenda item. **Speakers and Updates** Council Member Henson, Council Member McCord, Council Member Hanson, Vice Mayor Gordon, Council Member Martin, and Council Member Lawless each contributed to the discussion, sharing information about activities and programs within their areas of responsibility. **Topics Covered** The council addressed several key initiatives: * Stream cleanups * The Disability Expo * Golf policy * EPA consent decree task force activities **Outcome** This agenda item was informational in nature, with council members sharing updates rather than taking formal action or making decisions. The discussion allowed the council to keep the public and fellow members informed about ongoing work across multiple city initiatives and programs. [timestamp: 00:24:05] ## Public Comments - Issues Not on Agenda [timestamp: 00:03:42] Two members of the public provided comments on matters not listed on the meeting agenda. **Ken Cohen** addressed the body regarding scrap metal theft. **Wendy Schaus** spoke about the Bluegrass Community Action Partnership. The outcome of this agenda item was informational in nature, with no formal action taken. ## Mayor's Report [timestamp: 00:18:27] Commissioner Mason and Chief Jackson provided an update on fire department staffing and the SAPA plan during this informational agenda item. The discussion focused on two primary topics: current fire department staffing levels and the implementation of the SAPA plan. Chief Jackson and Commissioner Mason outlined how the SAPA plan would affect department operations, specifically addressing the impact of brownouts on fire department response times and service delivery. Key speakers included Commissioner Mason, Chief Jackson, and Mayor Jim Gray, who participated in the discussion of these operational matters. The outcome of this agenda item was informational in nature, with no formal action taken. The presentation served to update the council on staffing considerations and the planned operational changes associated with the SAPA initiative. --- ## Decisions - **Motion** — passed: Motion to place Ordinance 11 on the docket without a public hearing - **Motion** — passed: Motion to place Ordinance 12 on the docket without a public hearing - **Motion** — passed: Motion to approve Environmental Quality Committee meeting at a cost not to exceed $241,000 - **Motion** — passed: Motion to approve the entire docket - **Motion** — passed: Motion to approve summary for Work Session 410 - **Motion** — passed: Motion to approve summary for Work Session 17th - **Motion** — passed: Motion to approve budget amendments - **Motion** — passed: Motion to remove item O (Lexington Children's Theatre grant) from the agenda - **Motion** — passed: Motion to approve new business items - **Motion** — passed: Motion to approve NDF list - **Motion** — passed: Motion to place pedestrian-oriented business district on the docket for first reading - **Motion** — passed: Motion to extend time for presentation by Dan Jones and Bill Juckett beyond 15 minutes - **Motion** — passed: Motion to refer public golf subsidy issue to General Government Committee - **Motion** — passed: Motion to amend the previous motion to bring the golf issue to a work session --- ## Full transcript Music Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Welcome, everyone. This is a meeting of the work session of the council, and I'll call the meeting to order. Thank you all for being here with us. First on our agenda is public comment for issues on the agenda. I have three who have signed up for issues, to speak to issues on the agenda, Greg Dixon and Ken Cullison and Wendy Shouse. And so, Mr. Dixon, if you'll come forward. Mr. Cole, all right. Mr. Cole, I routinely say that I have the unpopular role sometimes of being the timekeeper, and we have a rule of three minutes for comments. Please, sir, if you'll identify yourself and address. Thank you. Thank you very much, sir. It's a pleasure to be in front of you. My name is Ken Cohen. I'm the owner of Baker Iron and Metal. We're based out of Middletown, Ohio. We have 26 locations across southern Ohio, southern Indiana, central Kentucky, and Tennessee. And the scrap ordinance that's on the books today to be considered on Thursday has been something that we've been discussing internally for a while now. And we understand that the issue is metal theft, and we understand that parts of the legislation are talking about licensing and tag and hold, and we understand the importance of oversight and enforcement as far as the rules and regulations are for metal theft. Our company is a stand-up company, and in evaluating the legislation that currently is being considered by this fine body, we thought the easiest way to address the metal theft situation is go right to the heart of it. So what we're proposing, as opposed to the enactment of the ordinance, is that Baker Iron and Metal steps up and we put a police officer on our scale. The police officer will be paid for, whether it's part-time or full-time or off-duty or retired, we will pay completely for the expenses and the salary of the police officer. Every transaction that comes across our scale will be monitored and approved by a policeman from Lexington, Fayette County. That way there won't be any necessity for a license. There won't be any necessity to tag and hold the material. As the person comes across the scale, his ID will be presented. The policeman will verify the ID, check it out on the no-buy list. He'll be able to watch the material that comes across the scale to determine whether the transaction is legitimate or not. And we think that this is the way that we solve the metal theft problem in Lexington, not by arguing about pros and cons of the ordinance, but going right to the heart of the problem and solving it by letting a policeman actually monitor each transaction at our business. What we'd like to see happen is a short period of time to get organized. we think we can be ready to operate by June 1st. And then what we'd like to do is to leave the Lexington Ordinance in abeyance for the time being, let the state ordinance kick in. It will kick in in July. And then continue to monitor on a regular basis what's happening through the police department and through the transactions that occur at our location. So we think this is the proactive way to solve the metal theft problem in Lexington. And as I said, we want to be part of the solution, not part of the problem. So we were proposing to put this on our back and to carry it ourselves and to help solve the problem. Thank you, Mr. Cohen. If I might just say one more thing. The overhead that you're seeing on the screens, this is an example of a community that passed a law that required licenses and tag and hold. And the first thing that happened was that advertisements started appearing in the Cincinnati paper, this was Cincinnati, appearing in the Cincinnati paper, announcing the companies that were outside the jurisdiction and advertising that we'll take the scrap outside of Cincinnati and we'll sell it to somebody that doesn't require a license. So I think this is real appropriate when you talk about licensing. The three scrapyards that are in Lexington are all on board. We've made contact with Wise and with Stuffs. and they're agreeing to move ahead with the process also. So 100% of the transactions in Lexington will be monitored by a policeman and we don't have to worry about issues where recycling goes away in Lexington and all of a sudden appears outside the county and the city. All right. All right. I have Mr. Dixon, you don't wish to speak? No, I don't. All right. All right. Okay. Mr. Dixon reminded me, I think I said it earlier, But we propose kind of a six-month time frame to kind of watch this and see how it works, meeting monthly with the powers to be to monitor how this progresses and then deal with it accordingly at the end of six months. All right. Thank you very much. Next on our agenda is or next signed up to speak is Wendy Schaus. Wendy? Mayor Gray and members of the council, I'm here to represent Bluegrass Community Action Partnership, and after looking at the packet, we do not need to make a comment. Thank you. Pardon? We do not need to make a comment after looking at the packet. All right. Thank you. All right. Thank you very much. All right. We can now move on through our agenda. Next on the agenda, Roman numeral 2, rezoning and docket approval. Council Member Blues has a motion. Thank you, Mayor. regarding ordinance number 11 for first reading. I move to place number 11 on the docket without a public hearing. It's a motion by Council Member Bleu, a 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 say aye. Aye. Opposed, no. Motion carries. Council Member Lawless This is regarding ordinance number 12 I would like to place it on the docket without a public hearing Motion by Council Member Lawless second by Vice Mayor Gordon Is there any discussion on the motion? Hearing none we can take a vote All in favor please say aye Opposed no Motion carries Thank you, Mayor. of environmental quality at a cost not to exceed $241,000. So moved. Motion by Council Member Farmer. Is there a second? Second. Second by Council Member Beard. Is there any discussion on the motion? All right. Hearing none, we can take a vote. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed, no. The motion carries. Thank you. Seeing no other motions, is there a motion for the entire docket? Move approval. Second. Motion by Vice Mayor Gordon. Second by Council Member Ellinger. Is there any discussion? All right. Hearing none, we can take a vote. All in favor, please say aye. Opposed, no. Motion carries. All right. Next on our agenda is approval of the summary. Is there a motion? No approval. Motion. There is work session 410 and the 17th. Right. Summary of work sessions. All right. We can get taken separately. Is there a motion by Council Member Beard for work session on the 10th? Summary. Is there a second? Second. Second by Vice Mayor Gordon. Is there any discussion? Hearing none, we can take a vote. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed, no. Motion carries. There's a motion on the 17th. Move approval. Motion by Vice Mayor Gordon to approve summary for the 17th work session. Is there a second? Second. Second. Second by Council Member Farmer. All right. Is there any discussion? Hearing none, we can take a vote. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed, no. Motion carries. Next on our agenda, budget amendments. Motion to approve by Council Member Ellinger, second by Council Member Myers. Is there any discussion on the motion? Hearing none, we can take a vote. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed, no. Motion carries. Next on our agenda is the number five, new business. If someone wishes to speak, Council Member Beard. Thank you, Mayor. On item O, at the request of the administration, I guess I need a motion, actually, on this to remove item O. Second. Okay. Council Member Beard, would you offer that motion again? Would you offer that motion or just describe it again, please, sir? Well, the description is that Lexington Children's Theater has another source of funding, an eco-art grant, and they're eligible to apply for. And so they've opted to go that direction as opposed to our direction. So the motion would be to remove item O? Remove O from. All right. All right. And you offered that as a motion. Do business, yes. All right. Was there a second? Second. Second by Vice Mayor Gordon. Is there any discussion on this item? Hearing none, we can take a vote. All in favor, please say aye. Opposed, no. Motion carries. All right. Council Member Henson. Thank you, Mayor. I have a question about item Q from Parks and Rec, I guess. So this is approving, I'm assuming, a contractor for our green spaces. Maybe. Never mind. I'll bring it up during council report. All righty. Council Member Stenet, did you want to speak to this, to the new business? Yes, sir. All right. Item P, this is a proposal RFP for the graphics design work for all LFUCG departments. I was curious, a copy of the contract was not put in here. How long is this contract for? Can somebody answer that from the administration? Scott is not here. Can we? Oh, he is here. Yeah, he is. All right. Scott, can you come up? Yes, sir. Thank you very much. Hi. I believe the contract is for one year. So we're going to rebid it every year? That is the plan. Okay. I didn't know if you made more sense. It's not for a specific dollar amount. Right, because each budget will, you know, it's a unit price contract, right? Right, right. Okay. Can we get a copy of that, what that price contract is when you get a second after the meeting? It's fine. Sure. So it's an annual contract? It is. Okay. Thank you. All right. Thanks. Council Member Farmer. Mayor, if no one else is offered, I wanted to make a motion to approve new business, and then I had an item for discussion. I'm sorry. I was motioning to approve new business, and then I have an item for discussion. All right. So there's a motion to approve new business. Is there a second? Second by Council Member Ellinger? Yeah. So now discussion. I just wanted to ask about the first three or four new business items, because they take a little bit of a different form than I have seen in terms of this lease agreement overview, which I'm appreciative of, but I just wanted to know a little bit of the background on how this information. I'm just interested in the way these are done. All right. I will ask. Be careful. Commissioner Hamilton is coming to the podium. These look very informational, certainly. This is our first example. We have seven of these of our facility usage policy. Okay. And this was passed. This was the one that was passed in November of last year. And so the way we did these, we're bringing seven to you, and there will be a lot more to come, but we wanted you to see these first seven and see how you like the summary and how it was presented. What we have here are seven social service agencies. Yes, ma'am. And we asked Beth Mills to be the sponsor of these. And let me say right now, she did this the way it was supposed to be done. She met with all of these social service agencies along with John Sheet and our people, and we all explained what the purpose was of the ordinance. And then they filled out the forms and submitted them to Beth. And Beth then, based on the type of services, their financial capability, went down and recommended what they should be paying. And this form shows you what the fair market value is, what the utilities are, and then what we recommended for them. And there's a small justification at the end. And what I thought was so amazing about this was the seven leases that we're putting in today for your approval, their existing annual rental was $7,735. And this new rate comes up to their proposed increase is $25,000. And what we propose to do is set this money aside so that we can then repair and maintain the space that these people are in. I appreciate the physical policy there, and I appreciate the information on each one of these. And I guess we'll get used to this formulation and how it works, but certainly it adds a lot of transparency to some things that sometimes we couldn't put the numbers down because we did not really have them. So I'm appreciative of that very much. And I think that my understanding is what this would do for you is to let you see what we're spending on these buildings and what people are paying, and not to penalize anybody, but to use our judgment when they can afford things and when they can't. Thank you, ma'am. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you. Council Member Farmer. Council Member Lane? Thank you, Mayor. I just wanted to say that this ordinance came through our committee, and I worked on this. And Council Member Kelly made some recommendations. And I think that the commissioner and her department have done an excellent job in implementing this program. And I think it's a very valuable tool for the council because we can see how much space is being used, what it's valued at, what part of it is pro bono, and what part of it is being compensated, so that each council member knows how much support we're giving to each of these entities. So I just want to thank you all for your efforts in getting that moving forward, and you, Commissioner Mills, too. Thank you. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Mr. Lane. Council Member Myers. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Commissioner, for doing this work. I have a question for John Sheed. Jump sheet on, let me see here, F. Do we have all the space worked out? F would be. Oh, that's the meals. The spaces that are all identified in every one of these leases have been verified through our office as well as reviewed by the current tenants we also had the opportunity to discuss with them if there any need for expanding or reducing the footprint which both of them have happened during the process so that pretty much reflects the area that they are currently occupying okay thank you very much sure thank you mayor thank you sir don't have anybody Council Member Kay. Thank you, Mayor. I just want to add my thoughts about this as well, since it's an issue that I was concerned with and was happy to see move forward. I think this is a step in exactly the right direction. What it provides us with is information that we can use in coordination with the grant applications that we get from the social service agencies so we know really to what level we are subsidizing them. My understanding is that in previous years, this is information that was difficult, if not impossible, to come by. So I appreciate the work that went into getting it to us. I think the challenge to the council is to use this information now and to make some judgments about the agencies that are tenants in the urban county government buildings. So thank you, Mayor. Thank you, sir. Council Member Crosby. Are we back to the list on where we can ask on other items? we're still on the motion for we're on well I have a question about another item on new business oh ok well we're still on the motion to accept new business so that's alright so I can ask my question my question was if you were only taking comments on that one item my question is on well now I've lost an H parks with the agreement? I'll ask why you're coming up. First, thank you for extending this agreement to softball. I know that they have been begging for field space, but my question is, will they have a similar agreement where they maintain the fields or have some kind of responsibility along with utilizing the fields? Are you talking about girls' fast pitch at Constitution? I'm talking about item H, which is Is it an agreement with youth softball leagues? I'm not sure what the question is. Most, if not all, of our leagues provide maintenance in terms of mowing and dragging the fields and lining. That is my question. Will they be providing that, or are they going to be playing on fields where another league is already providing those services? They'll be playing on fields assigned to them, and they'll have the responsibility for maintaining those fields. Thank you. Thank you. Do you know when that's going to go up? Within a week, I'm told. Thank you very much. All right. Thanks very much. Now we have a motion. We have a second. I don't see any further indication of comments, so we're ready to vote. All in favor, please say aye. Excuse me, Mayor. Could you state the motion again? The motion was to approve new business. Right. The motion is to approve new business. All right. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed, no. Motion carries. Motion to approve. All right. I have a motion to approve new business by Council Member Ellinger. to approve, sorry about that, to approve the NDF and a second by Council Member Blues. Is there any discussion? Hearing none, we can take a vote. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed, no. Motion carries. Next on our agenda is the Committee of the Whole Economic Development Committee update by Council Member Beard. Thank you, Mayor. The Economic Development Committee of the Whole met on April 10th. started out with the quarterly report by Commerce Lexington concerning their activities as far as economic development is concerned. They indicated 874 jobs were created. A little bit behind their goal, but they feel like they can make that up in the last quarter. um jenna greathouse who actually made the the presentation um also mentioned their venture club entrepreneurial efforts and invited uh council members to join commerce lexington any key employer visits which uh might be a good idea if we had the budget to budget to do so but uh But anyway, Tyrone Tyree, the vice president for community and minority business, discussed the minority business accelerator efforts. Pamela Trotner, executive director of Business and Education Network, discussed continuing workforce development issues. Council Member Kaye asked about job creation data. He asked about average wage data and distribution of wages, and he also asked about the wages paid by Triton Container. I do not know whether that has been forwarded to Council Member Kaye yet or not. And if not, I'll make a telephone call if you wish. Other main business at that time was pedestrian-oriented business district. Council Member Lawless introduced Chris King, who explained exactly what we were talking about, about all street parking in certain areas. and a motion was made and passed 8-4 to forward that to the docket. Commissioner Sally Hamilton discussed the proposed parking garage, moving the parking garages from LFUCG control to the Lexington Parking Authority control. And there is some fairly significant savings. Without going into all the detail about the dollars and cents, it's significant and will allow them to upgrade and fix, especially the annex garage that most everybody has some problems or concerns about. But all the garages need help at one time or another, and this is a method to be able to do this. Council Member Blues brought up the subject of employee parking and the cost for employee, rates for employee parking, if any. and to my knowledge that has not been totally resolved at this point. And beyond that, Gary Means will come back with a full-blown presentation when we can fit him in and talk further about rates for parking, both the employee and others. Meeting was adjourned at 2.55 p.m., a full hour and 55 minutes of meeting. And as I remember, we transitioned right into another one. And that is my report. All right, sir. Thank you. You're quite welcome. Council Member Lawless. Council Member Beard, did you want to make a motion on the pedestrian? We passed it to put a place on the docket. Do you need to make a motion on the pedestrian-oriented business district on page 34? We made a motion to put it on the docket at the time, and it was voted on at that point. Okay, I didn't know if we needed to make another motion. Well, yes, you would need to make another motion at this point, being the one who... Okay. Well... You want me to make the motion? Well, if you would, yeah. Okay. I'd like to make a motion to place on the docket for Thursday night for first reading the pedestrian-oriented business district, as it was proposed by Mr. King and passed out of committee 8 to 4. Is there a second? There's a motion. There's a second. We have a motion, and I have a second by Council Member Blues. Is there any discussion on the motion? Hearing none, we can take Council Member Blues. Just for clarification, I think in the course of that discussion, And Council Member Farmer recommended that the district be expanded so as to potentially cover any area in the city. If I'm not mistaken, did you not, sir? Council Member Farmer. That's correct. That was part of our conversation at the time. in sitting here with Council Member Lawless. She spent some time, I guess, with Chris King from our Division of Planning who explained to her that trying to permit it in all the zones wasn't something that, I guess, the way that this legislation is tailored that it would permit. And I guess where I got to my comfortable spot was the idea that once this is passed, if we wanted to amend it in some way to include other areas, other pedestrian-friendly areas, we could find a way to make the amendment rather than stop this legislation from moving forward at this time. So your recommendation is that we go forward with? Yes, sir, it is. And then subsequently might take it up with reference to wider areas of the city? Yes, sir. I think that's a great way to do it. Okay, thank you. Thank you. All right, any further discussion on the motion? Okay. Hearing none, then we can take a vote. All in favor, please say aye. Opposed, no. Motion carries. All right. Thank you. Next on our agenda is a special presentation. We have visitors from Louisville, Dan Jones and Bill Juckett. And to introduce them, I'll say that it's hard to get on these guys' schedules. And the encouragement of Council Member Lane, especially who has, in one of his publications, had a really wonderful story about the park system in Louisville. and Council Member Lane encouraged this presentation and Dan and Bill are both willing to join us today and then are going to have a presentation later this afternoon at the Carnegie Center for others who may be interested. But by way of introduction, Dan Jones is the Chief Executive Officer of 21st Century Parks, which is a private nonprofit managing Louisville's new parks system. and he's joined by Bill Juckett, who is chairman of the board of the trustees of Louisville's Olmstead Park Conservancy. The 21st Century Parks say that they are relearning what Frederick Law Olmstead already knew, which is all about history. And we've invited Dan here today and Bill to tell us about Louisville's plan to create what has been described as the finest urban edge in the country. I also want to recognize Sally Hamilton, because as soon as Sally took the job on as Commissioner of General Services, which of course includes parks, she's been talking about this remarkable project that you all have created in Louisville to inspiringly lead into the 21st century and beyond, Dan, and also to preserve the history of what was created more than 100 years ago. Out of respect for you all coming to town, I'd like to entertain a motion that we don't restrict this presentation to our normal 15 minutes and we give enough time for a good give and take among the council. So moved. Second. The motion by Council Member Lane, seconded by Vice Mayor Gordon. Is there any discussion on the motion? All right. Hearing none, we'll take a vote. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed, no. Motion carries. Dan, thank you very much. Okay. Well, thank you, Mayor, and thanks to the council for having me today. I am Dan Jones, the CEO of 21st Century Parks, and Bill Juckett, who is also one of our board members in addition to his role at the Olmstead Parks. I'm from Citizen of Louisville and a Cardinal fan, so I came down here today with a little bit of trepidation. But when the cards lose, then I'm a Cats fan, so I'm very happy. But I have given you a lot of information. There is an edited version of the PowerPoint I have. And I'm going to go, I appreciate the relaxing on time, but I will try to go through pretty quickly through my PowerPoint and kind of highlight the key points of this project so that you all can, you know, if you have time for any questions or anything at the end. But basically our organization is called 21st Century Parks, and the project is called the Parklands of Floyd's Fork. So I'm just going to flash through some slides to show you what it looks like. Behind you is a picture of Floyd's Fork. It's a very typical Kentucky stream. What's unique about it is that it's 20 minutes from downtown in Kentucky's largest urban area. So remember that you're about a half mile from the Gene Snodder here, 20 minutes from downtown, and it's quite a remarkable natural setting. We have a tremendous amount of wildlife, incredible waterfalls, incredible fossils. So a wonderful natural history. There's also a wonderful cultural history out there. You know, Kentucky has been an agricultural state for a long time, and part of this project is to preserve and integrate into the park some of that landscape. Last but not least, we are on what I call the suburban frontier. So Louisville, like Lexington, has a lot of growth at the edge, and one of the goals of this project is to interact with that growth in ways that support quality of life, support economic development within the city. while preserving some of these important lands. There's a very simple philosophy here that you all will understand as public servants, and that is that to us, parks are infrastructure. And pictured here is Central Park in New York laid out by Frederick Law Olmsted in the 1850s. And at the top of the slide, which would be the south side of Central Park, is 59th Street. And when Olmstead laid Central Park out, Manhattan was 30 blocks to the south. And so it was very much his intention to put in city-shaping green infrastructure that would make New York not only a great city, but one of the most livable great cities in the world. And if you've been in Central Park, you'll know that it worked. It's 843 acres. Last year they had 37 million visitors. So it's really Manhattan would not be livable without Central Park. So that's in the 1850s. In the 1890s, Olmstead comes to Louisville when we're about the size of that white blob in the center and lays out Shawnee, Yerquois, and Cherokee Park, well beyond the edge of the city. And then that larger egg represents that the city grew around them. And so what we're doing in this project is very simple. We're doing that again. And so what you see in green along the edge, labeled the parklands, are the approximately 3,700 acres of land that we have acquired for this project. And then the larger transparent egg reflects our belief and really our observation, because it's already happened, that the city is going to grow around these areas. And so that basic idea of preserving land, turning it into public parkland ahead of development is the guiding principle of this project. It worked incredibly well 150 years ago in New York, 100 years ago in Louisville, and we want to do that again here. It is one of the largest new metropolitan parks projects in the country, so Louisville is kind of batting above its average here. So that's a little bit of the vision and the scope. 21st Century Parks is a nonprofit. We're a private entity, but we have many partners. The Metro Louisville is a partner, a land trust called Future Fund founded by Steve Henry, some of you may know, and many, many other partners. You can't do these projects without partners and partnerships. At the same time, our organization is responsible for getting it done. So we've raised the money. We've purchased the bulk of the land. We have designed and managed the construction process. And probably most unusually, we will also maintain these parks. Central Park in New York has been managed by a nonprofit partner to the city for approximately the last 30 years, and they have been very effective at bringing that park kind of out of the dumps that it was in back in the late 1970s, early 80s, when New York was in trouble. So we wanted to bring that model here. We think this is not just important for Louisville. We think it's a model for other cities, and I guess that's part of the reason why I'm here. but as obvious as it may sound that every fast-growing city in the country or the world should be preserving land ahead of development to build public parks, in most places it doesn't happen. The 21st century is going to be an urban century. The United States, it's predicted that over the next 40 years, we'll add 100 million people to our population, about 90% of which will be added to urban areas. So places like India and China are adding cities by the millions almost every year. So, again, this is something that is kind of bringing up an old idea that our country did very well 150, 100 years ago when we were urbanizing, but that still needs to be applied in areas of urbanization. In terms of the status, it's a $113 million capital project. We have raised over $111 million to date. It took us about 70 separate real estate transactions over seven years to put together that 3,700 acres. and, most importantly, to connect it. So along a 15-mile corridor cutting north to south through eastern Jefferson County, per that slide you saw a moment ago, we have assembled through these 70 parcels a continuous stretch of new parkland. And all of those acres are or will be preserved in perpetuity for public use and access. So there are protections placed on all of these so my evil successor, the mayor's evil successor, or can't come along in 10 years or 50 years and overturn the investments that we and the city and others have made in these new parks. So that's kind of the money side and the land side. In terms of the timing, we incorporated in 2004, finished our master plan in 2008, opened phase one of the project, which was a playground and spray ground last year, and then also broke ground on the first of four parks. The big news in all this is that $113 million capital project, 3,700 acres, four new parks, will be built and open to the public by the end of 2015. And we're on schedule. We're completing Phase 2 late this year. We're going to break ground on Phase 3 in about a month and a half, and Phase 4 next year, which will carry us all the way down to the southern edge of the project. So if you go back to the Big 6 nationally, this is the only one that's essentially 100 percent funded and will be built and open to the public within four years. So that's context. A little bit about the design of the parks. First of all, it's a system, and I'm going to show you a map here in a minute that demonstrates that. It's four parks. We link them with park drives so people can get into and use these parks with bike paths, with hiking trails, mountain biking trails, equestrian trails, and most unusually, 20 minutes from downtown, in a top 50 metro area, a paddling trail. So there's a very wide range of amenities in this project. The four parks are each named for a tributary of Floyd's Fork, so you'll kind of see the park highlighted on the left. The very top of the screen would be Valhalla Golf Course, where that pond is shown, for those of you who are familiar with that. It's off Shelbyville Road in eastern Jefferson County. We're coming down. The big band of gray in the middle is I-64. heading out towards Frankfurt and Lexington. So Beckley Creek Park, Popelik Park. We have a piece of really connecting infrastructure. We get the bike path through along this corridor that we call the Strand, and then Turkey Run Park and Broad Run Park. So the point here is that this is not a single new park. This is an integrated system, integrated in terms of its recreational planning, its design. We're adopted into Cornerstone 2020, which is Louisville's long-term growth plan. and so it is systemic, systematic in all of its elements of design. A little bit deeper dive on a couple of the parks just to give you the flavor of what we're designing in them. Beckley Creek is the northernmost one. It's up by Shelbyville Road, which is a very fast-growing part of the city. It's the most what I call people-centric, urban, formal, and it centers on our great lawn, which we call the Egg Lawn, which is a 23-acre lawn kind of in the middle of that egg that you see just on the other side of I-64. And that lawn is designed, you know, on a typical afternoon, people could put down a blanket, they could have a picnic, they could throw a frisbee, a pickup soccer game. You know, people could set up their nets and their goals and their cones and play pickup games. But we could also host a festival there or a Louisville Orchestra concert. So it's designed for a very wide range of uses. It's surrounded by a walking path. Next to it is what we call the Creekside Center, which has a community center building, an education building. I'm going to flash some pictures of those in a second. And then across the creek to the south is a promenade where we can host art fairs and farmer's markets. And then at the very far southern end is a sports complex. So hopefully you get the sense in this project of uses that range from playgrounds and ball fields through trails, through lots of quiet walks in the woods, and the ability to host all kinds of different events, indoors, outdoors, and so on. This is the walking path. This is an aerial. You can see the egg. This is actually taken about six weeks ago. So the new sections of the park drive, the bridges and so on, are actually under construction. And this will begin to open late this year. This is our community center building, which is really an earned income opportunity for the project. We can host up to 300 people in a large room. So we can host community meetings, but we can also host weddings and corporate outings and so on. It's right along the creek. As you see there, this is our education building. We have a major educational initiative in this project designed to get kids and families outdoors in partnership with the Jefferson County public school system. This is the framing of those buildings. This is also about six weeks ago. They're actually substantially further along than this. This is one of our park bridges for the park drive. And again, under construction. These will begin to open late this year. Playground and sprayground, which is open. This was taken last summer. We were the busiest public water facility in the city of Louisville last year. So that's Beckley Creek Park, one example of the design. Jump down to the south, which is a more rural part of the county, a different kind of park. It's basically 1,100 acres. It's very large. The recreational programming is not the traditional playgrounds and ball fields. This is the heart of our hiking trails and our mountain biking trails and our equestrian trails. We might do a zip line or a ropes course. And then the design of the park, the architecture here, we use the old rural buildings of Kentucky. So in this picture, only the kind of modern building on the left is new. That's our bathroom and trailhead building. All the rest of the buildings are adapted reuse of old buildings. So the tobacco barn becomes a picnic pavilion. The silo, we're going to recap and put a stairwell in. So it's a place you could stop on the bike path, climb up, and get a great view of the surrounding countryside. The lawn in the middle, again, could be used for, this shows a farmer's market, but it could be a concert series. So, again, a very wide range of uses. This is the oldest house in the property, built in about 1820 on land originally deeded to Squire Boone. The picture on the left is how we got it. The picture on the right is we had a funder who gave us money to restore the exterior, and we actually just got a second grant from them yesterday to restore the interior. So there's a lot of restoration in this project, both natural and cultural. We have a canopy bridge. It's up in the treetops, ADA accessible. It's about a five-minute walk down from the Silo Center I showed you a moment ago. So again, a totally different kind of recreation. This is the paddling trail. and now just to kind of sum it up why is all this important? well first and foremost it's public space and one of the things that is very important when you think about the preservation of space particularly along fast growing edges is that there is a significant difference between land preserved for open space and land preserved for parks those two things don't always mean the same thing and both are important. This is a project about creating public space that is available to everyone regardless of who they are. Lots of recreational benefits in this project, which I've already touched on. This is the bike path, which we're going to build about 19 miles of the 100-mile loop around the city as part of this project, and 2.1 miles of that will open later this year, which is what you see here. We have lots of environmental benefits. We do a tremendous amount of planting. In February, we planted over 30,000 trees, which was the largest tree planting in Jefferson County in at least 30 years, and this is two of our crew members at work out there. We do a lot of cleanup of invasive species, kind of restoration of natural habitat, and that's what's shown in this slide. We actually are censusing all of the deer. We put ten cameras out at night, and this obviously is a deer that's a little bit puzzled by what's going on. But we're going to work on a significant wildlife management plan. There are lots of economic benefits. Some of you may have worked with Paul Coombs, who's a professor at UofL. But at the end of the day, this is a quality of life project. And when Louisville or Lexington or whoever is out trying to compete for business, compete for jobs and bringing people here, these are the kind of things that make a difference. I was in Washington on Friday. I presented this to a staff member of one of our representatives up there who didn't know anything about it, and at the end of the conversation, she said, you know, I want to move to Louisville. So it really is, we see it as a game changer for the city. Kentucky has terrible health statistics, so we're working on a partnership with the YMCA, with Jefferson County Public Schools, about how these amenities are programmed. and then last but not least through the PNC Education Center and a grant from the GE Foundation we're working on a partnership with the Jefferson County Public Schools so at the end of the day it's a legacy gift it's one of the few things that by intent and design will be here in 150 years so that at sort of warp speed is trying to simplify a very big and very complicated project But I'm open to questions, comments, concerns, and I thank you again for having me. Thanks, Dan. Just as a footnote for questions or comments from Council members, I will say that many thanks to your family, to your father, to the Humana Foundation over the years for the contributions that you all have made outside the city limits of Louisville. In fact, right here in Lexington, especially to Transylvania and University of Kentucky and other civic initiatives that we've had in Lexington. And a big tribute to the leadership in Louisville, really, and the vision and the inspired vision and the support that's been given. I think a piece of that might be worthwhile for you to share with us at the appropriate time. but we do have several council members who have teed up to offer comments, beginning with Councilman McCord. Thank you, Mayor, and thank you very much. You were our gracious host about four to five years ago when a small group of us that were envisioning the Legacy Trail came, and you took us by foot, by van, and would have been by canoe if we had time down Floyd's Fork. And we got to see all of this firsthand and spend time with you to know some of the mechanics, which was very, very instrumental in us building the Legacy Trail. So first I wanted to thank you personally for your ability to kind of make things simple and answer a lot of questions from people who didn't quite understand what we were doing at the time. You know, what's funny is that I've screamed from the rooftops that we need to re-envision and to create vision and cast vision for our parks. This is what vision looks like. This is what you do when you have vision that transforms things, and I applaud everything that you're doing. I want to point out to council members and folks in our audience, this is a $113 million project. They raised $111 million to do that. This is a private entity that's working with government, writing grants and working with Senator McConnell and others to make this happen. But it was the easy thing to do when we sit up here is go, well, that's Louisville. Ah, you know, they've got this, that, and the other. I was very intrigued at the challenges that you all have faced and how you have kind of attacked those challenges. But I want to challenge us in this room and say this is Lexington, and we have some amazing opportunities that we are absolutely not seeing, but today provides an opportunity to see them. You have a rural landscape, but the way that we have written our laws does not allow you to go out into it. And so we basically put it behind fences and said, you know, that's great. Just come look at it and zoom by in a car. And what we found with Legacy Trail is it's an amazing preservation tool. And when you put trails out that direction, Commissioner Paulson, we have a PDR program that's preserving acreage, but we have a hard edge that we have an opportunity to create a PDR program for trails that allows us to buy easements, green easements, so that if development ever does go past the hard edge right now, you've preserved that rural landscape in a transportation system. It doesn't matter. We can't put trails on it right now. We can do that tomorrow. We can start to offer that tomorrow. These folks assembled, was it 77 landowners that you had to? About 70. 70, okay. We have a gentleman in our community, Mr. R.J. Corman, one landowner that owns miles and miles and miles of railroads. It goes from back of Rupp Arena, something very near and dear to your heart, Mayor, all the way into Woodford County. That's one landowner with 20-some miles of availability that if you put the right thing together, cast the right vision, and make it appealing, we can do some unbelievable things. But here's the last point I want to make. two last points one is we have dozens of city parks all within a very small amount of of space that you can actually coordinate inside new circle road with just a series of sidewalks and signs this friday uh dan moni's class is reimagining parks and they're going to roll out what they see as parks and it would be very simple to just look at what sidewalks need to be created to connect those parks. And the city cannot do it all. It's not the city's responsibility or government. And I think that's the takeaway here is that the private side can do things with excellence that the public side can't quite do or do as well. And government has to start to realize that it can't do it all, that we need to work with folks that have imagination and vision and resources, and let's utilize this amazing landscape that we have. So again, thank you for coming and thank you for helping us at the time we needed it. Yeah, well, just a couple of responsive comments, since that's obviously focusing down on Lexington and what you all are trying to do. I mentioned Steve Henry and Future Fund. He began his land acquisition process in the early 1990s. So five of the original parcels were actually acquired over 20 years ago. So to the point about it, and I've given this presentation all over the country, and the point is it doesn't have to be 4,000 acres and $113 million. It can be 50 acres and $2 million. There's a basic benefit to parks wherever you build them, whether it's in the core or on the fast-growing edge, that I think is critical in a city, and I think that's one of the things that the rest of the world is going to learn to their detriment because in many of these places they are growing so fast that they're not setting land aside. But, you know, places like Lexington and Louisville, we have our fast-growing edges, and if you get that land and you protect it, you've got it. If you don't and it goes to development, it's almost impossible to get it back. I showed on that slide of the sixth a project called the Beltline, which is down in Atlanta. And Atlanta, as we all know, boomed, you know, horizontally at a very rapid pace. about eight to ten years ago they said, oh my gosh, we blew it. And so they have gone back and designed, sort of retrofitted a design for a series of parks, a system like ours called the Beltline. It's about a third the size of our project. It's about 1,200 to 1,400 acres. Its price tag is currently over $400 million, and it goes up so it's about four times the price. And frankly, it may or may not happen because of the difficulties. You all know how difficult development is. In our family, we say land use is a contact sport. And to go back in and try to retrofit at that point is really difficult. So I do second the idea, even if you don't have the money, if you have partners and people who can preserve that land, make agreements. A number of our acquisitions were life estates where people still live on the land. We pay them money now, they live on it, and then we get it when they pass away, but we've protected it. So if you do that, a lot of the other work can follow. Thank you, sir. Council Member Beard. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you for this. This is amazing to tell you the truth as far as I'm concerned. I noticed that you had naming rights for PNC on one feature. I was trying to dig through here and find it. I couldn't find it. And then also another marker was the distillery bend. Is the distillery bend also a naming type of thing? Distillery bend is not a naming, but we do offer naming rights. As you noticed, it was the PNC Achievement Center, which is our education building, which was actually done after that brochure that you hold. But we do offer, at certain levels, above a half-million-dollar contribution, the ability to have a naming right. We did, however, not choose to sell the naming rights on the parks themselves. And so our decision was at the highest level to use tributary names. If you know Louisville's parks, Olmstead used Native American tribal names to show system. We wanted the park names themselves to carry a very distinctive idea of system, and so we chose at that level not to sell the naming rights, which we could have sold for quite a lot of money, but we did choose at the next level down the amenities in the parks for certain gift levels and above. You know, you could get carried away with yourself on that naming rights situation. You can indeed. And have a three-ring circus by the time you're through. but it's fine to see the PNC step to the plate anyway. I agree. I mean, there's a fine line there. We restrict corporate logos and that kind of thing, but at some point we are a private entity that's part of our fundraising. Sure. I understand. Thank you so much. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you. Council Member Kay. Thank you, Mayor, and thank you for coming, and I want to also thank the Mayor and the Commissioner for inviting you. I think this is a great presentation and really very inspiring. We have in Lexington a very different kind of a situation, but I think a lot of what you've brought us today is applicable. The main thing I take away from it is if you create a compelling vision, you can get people to invest. People are willing to pay for something that they can see will really make a difference in the community. I also appreciate your distinction between open space and public space. We have done a good job, I think, of preserving our open space. And I'm a fan and a supporter of the PDR program and of our urban service boundary, but I don't think we've done as well with our parks. We have an opportunity to do that. We have to think about it differently. We have a different set of circumstances here. But this is the kind of thing we need to be bringing into our community. When I see that, above all else, what I see is creating a community that is incredibly appealing for a broad range of its citizenry, where people say, I want to live there. That's a community I want to be a part of. So I think that opportunity is here for us. I hope we move forward on it and take advantage of it. I would add just a couple other comments. You mentioned the Beltline in Atlanta, Central Park in New York City. There's also the High Line in New York City. a repurposing of an old elevated railroad track that is one of the new great amenities in New York City. That was not terribly expensive in the grand scheme of things, but someone had a great idea, and they moved forward, they put it out, they got funding for it. I think we have the opportunity to do the same thing, and I thank you for sharing with us. Thank you, Mayor. Great comments. A couple of responses. My comment on open space is not a criticism of open space initiatives. I'm a big fan. But they are different, and I think one of the reasons that we've been able to raise the money that we have is because of the word park. The word park has a very positive resonance with almost all people. There are certain cases where it can have, particularly places that live close to parks that have not been well-mained in terms of safety and security and so on. But there is a difference, and I think it's important to note that, and they're both important. And I kind of glossed over this, but in one of my slides there was reference to an award we received two years ago called the Placemaker Award. And that is a national award given by the woman who founded the Central Parks Conservancy, Betsy Rogers, who's kind of my guru in all of this. And she gives two awards. One is the Placemaker Award, and the second is the Place Keeper Award, which is for a fix-up, a restoration project. And they give it at the Loeb Boathouse in Central Park. So two years ago, we went up there with about 30 of our board members and donors, and we come into this meeting with about 500 very well-heeled New Yorkers, and the Placekeeper Award was going to the High Line. So when we got there, the New Yorkers, and the High Line is probably the most famous new park in the world. It's a remarkable thing. It's completely reinvented a whole section of Manhattan. But they were a little skeptical about Louisville and the High Line, but they got it. And we're quite proud, and the reason that we received that award gets back to that point about setting aside land ahead of development. That was something that Olmstead advocated when he built Central Park. He designed park systems all over the country. Only Louisville, Boston, Buffalo, and Rochester built to completion his plan. and the reason Betsy Rogers gave us that award was to recognize the importance of setting aside that land ahead of development to build park systems not only in the United States but worldwide because of this phenomenon of urbanization and the fact that Louisville is really one of the few places in the world that's actually doing it. I didn't elaborate on the details of the other projects, but most of them are redevelopments of a large chunk of land like an old Department of Defense base. They're wonderful projects, but they're sort of different in their not tied into the organic growth of the city in the way that ours hopes to be. Councilmember Henson. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you for being here. And I was just curious, are you familiar with Lexington, and have you identified or looked at any possible areas? I know we have many watersheds, waterways that run through our city that I think would make for a beautiful area. and I'm thinking of some that are right in the middle of our city that is unkept, that has not been opened up, and it's quite a few acres. Yeah, I think I'm generally familiar with Lexington. I have not looked at it from a park planning perspective, but one of the things, if you go back to Olmstead's original plan in Louisville, Cherokee Park essentially follows the flood plan of Beargrass Creek. Shawnee Park is in the floodplain of the Ohio River, and Iroquois Park is up on the knobs to the south, which are sort of soft, shaly soils. That is, he took lands that really weren't that economically valuable or developable and turned them into these gems that then shaped the growth of the city. Central Park was actually a kind of derelict, swampy area of the city in New York, and Olmsted actually, his philosophy was a little bit different than ours. He moved stuff around quite a bit in a way that we probably would not be comfortable doing today. But the key is space. I mean, if you can find it with good design, you can integrate almost anything into a park. And the second is to do the inventory. My guess is that the Parks Department here has probably done some of that work. Our goal in this project is 4,000 acres, which was based on an inventory that Louisville and the county government at that time, and that was pre-merger, did that showed in the eastern and southern parts of the county, we lagged about 4,200 acres on it using one of these per capita park acreage measures. So we set 4,000 as a goal. We didn't know if we'd ever get there. We're at 3,700, and I think we will. But that sort of basic inventory, that focus is where it begins. Having a private partner is helpful, not in any negative reflection upon the city or the government, but people will write a check to a private entity that they won't write to the government because they already wrote their tax check, and that's just sort of the nature of that. And it sometimes enables us to look beyond sort of a single administration's vision and so on. So we worked very closely with Jerry Abramson when he was the mayor, but now we work very closely with Greg Fisher. And so each side of the partnership brings its strengths, and that's very important. But, you know, an inventory of those places that you've observed and others that others have observed is a great place to start. Thank you. Thank you. Council Member Martin. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you for presenting this to us. And I used to work in Louisville, and I think I've seen parts of this. You know, private efforts to connect people with nature have been opposed by environmentalists here in Lexington recently and their friends on the council. I guess perhaps if Lexington approaches this from a park standpoint rather than relying on private interests to put this together, perhaps we might have more success. Over the past weekend, I was in Mammoth Cave, and I heard you say zip lines, and they have zip lines down in Mammoth Cave. But here in Lexington, we treat zip lines like Kings Island. They're amusement park rides. And so we have prohibited zip lines in Fayette County, and so we couldn't do that kind of thing here. So I guess I think we have a long way to go before we can embrace just a truly incredible vision like this, where people can get out in nature and not sort of just sort of fence it off to keep away from. A couple of responses to that. I think you have put your finger on a very important issue in sort of park development and management on a national level. We had those kinds of conversations, and we have public money in this project as well as private, so we held a lot of public meetings. And I always say that there's the people side of this project and the nature side of this project. And, you know, we place the fulcrum of that balance or that spectrum towards certain areas that are very people-centric, certain areas that are very nature-centric. And we were quite transparent about where we put that fulcrum. I can tell you there's some people on the people side that thought we should have put a lot more people stuff in it. There's some people on the nature side. But we felt, given the public input we had from a very wide range of sources, from environmental to developer, recreational programs, that we placed it at a good spot. But I think your point is well taken. It is really important to articulate that. And there is, speaking as an environmentalist myself, but one who believes very strongly in the growth and vibrancy of our city, you can't wall nature off to people. You need to find places that you can bring them out to. There may be certain places that are so sensitive that you have to do that. It gets back to a good plan again, a good inventory. And we ultimately, through I think good planning, dealt with most of those issues. The zip line is really an illustration of what we call adventure programming. There's all kinds of things. There's pump tracks, which is sort of a BMX track for mountain bikers. There's our canopy bridge. Some of those will get built. Some won't get built. Some might get built in 10 or 20 years. So there's a whole host of those different kinds of things. And, you know, at some point we may say zip lines liability-wise, we don't want to be in that business. But I think what we tried to do was to look at some things that didn't exist in other parks. We'll have playgrounds and ball fields, the traditional infrastructure, but also bringing things within a 20-minute drive of anywhere in Louisville that maybe people couldn't get, like a mountain bike trail or a paddling trail or a zip line or something. I like your idea about varying what is appropriate for a particular area. My favorite word in government is balance, and looking for the right balance at the right place for nature but also for people. One of the things we did, just to not drill too far down, but as we began to assemble the land, I actually hired a young man to go out and work on what I initially called the 100 Special Places Project, which that's everything from an old barn to a rare plant. And we did that every time we'd buy a property. We would inventory that. So as we began to move into master planning, we knew where everything was, and there were certain areas that we wanted to take people to. There were certain areas maybe we wanted to keep quiet. And by doing that inventory in advance, we now have 400 places that are GPS, they're described, they're thematically organized. That's now flowed into our education plan. That's sort of the basic document as we try to marry up with the science standards of the public schools and the other schools in Louisville and surrounding counties. We have this incredible knowledge, but it was also very important in the master plan to be able to find that balance. And if you have that knowledge, you can do it. Thank you. Thank you, Mayor. Thanks so much, Dan. Thanks, Bill, for joining us today. I was going to ask one quick question. Give us Cliff's notes on the planning process that you all went through, Dan. And somebody, this may be apocryphal, I don't know, but did I hear correctly? Did you go back to school? Did you go back and get a master's? Is that true? I did. Yeah, that's true. That's not apocryphal. Tell that story. Okay, so a couple of things. First of all, before we wrap up, I just want to thank you all for inviting me and also giving me the amount of time. I've given these presentations in Louisville, and I know how busy you are and how many different issues you deal with. So I do appreciate the fact that you have both had me here and given me so much time. In terms of the way this thing started, Bill Juckett and Bridget Sullivan, who was our Metro Parks Director, I don't know if we ever figured out if it was 2001 or 2002, but they were doing a strategic planning plan for the Olmstead Parks, and they went around and interviewed a bunch of people, and they had a meeting with my dad and I, at which they asked a bunch of questions that I don't remember, but one question was, what should our generation do that would have the same impact as the Olmstead Parks? So I walked out of that meeting. I didn't think about it immediately, but in the next month or two months or three months, I began to think about it, and I decided, you know, it's pretty simple. We should do exactly what they did again, get out ahead of the development curve, get enough land to build not a single park but an integrated park system. So I hired a planner to go out and, first of all, kind of look around the city, say, if we did this, where could we do it? But there really was only one section, the Floyd's Fork section, where there was enough land. It matched the city's master plan. So we routed it. We always had an A route, a B route, and a C route because I worked in the real estate business. I understood the complexities of acquisition and getting held up by so. And then we went out and started raising money. We met with the mayor, kind of built the partnership with the city, then with Steve Henry and Future Fund. By that time, I realized we either had to hire somebody or I had to quit my old job. and I enjoyed this more than my day job. So I did quit my job. I went back to the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies for two years and got a master's degree, kind of focused on everything from park planning to urban forestry to people and nature issues. And I always say that it was a career change, a sabbatical, and a midlife crisis all rolled into one. My wife and four kids went with me. And then in 2006 I came back and I ran the project full-time since then. The biggest challenge in this, to be honest, we have federal funds. Senator McConnell got us $38 million, which builds the roads, the bike path, the infrastructure. For this, we really couldn't have integrated the system without that. So we had to go through the NEPA process, the cultural resource process, and it was a very, very complicated process. I will say that I think it's probably the single hardest thing I've ever done in my life, but we won approval about 18 months ago. We broke ground almost immediately after that, and then we continued to go back on future phases. That required tons of public meetings, which was great. We reached out across the city into surrounding counties, into southern Indiana, and said, what do people want in this park from the people side, from the nature side? We got a list. We still have our planners typed all that stuff up, Everything from polo to we heard lots of talk about the horse facilities in Lexington, by the way, the wonderful sort of event spaces and so on that exist down here. And then we filtered that in a variety of different ways. Thank you. Thank you again, Mary. Thanks so much. Thank you all for visiting with us and being here with us. Appreciate it. Good. I'll see you again shortly. Oh, I think maybe one more comment or question here from Council Member Lane. I'll make this very short, but first, thanks for coming over. You made a great presentation today, and I think it enlightened our community to some ideas that we could use in Lexington. The only other question I had, and you can make this sort of short, but you had to have a working relationship with the city of Louisville and some of the other cities over there. And could you sort of define or explain a little bit about how that worked and how you got together to make this go forward? Yes. So in terms of our relationship with the city, there were basically three issues. The first was the broad partnership. That is just both of us agreeing that we wanted to work together to do this. And for those of you who knew or worked with Jerry Abramson, he was always kind of an embracer of new ideas. And that really didn't take very long, to be honest. The next two issues were a little more challenging. The first was I mentioned that all of the land in this project is or will be protected in perpetuity for public access, public use and access. It turns out that most city-owned parks nationwide have no protection. And the city owned three properties in the corridor, Future Fund owned five. We had to go back to the city. One of those three city properties was purchased with Kentucky Heritage Land Conservation Funds, the butterfly license plate, so it did have protection on it. The other two did not, and initially we asked 21st Century Parks to hold an easement on those properties that would be tied to the master plan and public access. That generated some friction, actually, the idea that a private entity would hold that easement, And so we rewrote those as a deed restriction in favor of the public. So same conditions, but anybody, including us 100 years from now, could file a cause of action if the city attempted to go in and bulldoze a building or a bike path or something. And remember, we bought most of the connecting land on this with private money, and our pledge to our donors is you're giving to something that's going to be here in 100 years or 150 years. So that actually surprised us, that we thought that would be obvious. Everybody would be happy about public protection. It turned out both on sort of the council side, and there were some concerns, and on the public side. So we try to be transparent in all these things. We sort of took the conversation back out to our critics, and we worked out a solution that everybody was happy with. The third issue was maintenance. And one of the things, comments, we got a lot of public meetings. We don't take care of the parks we have. How can we afford to take care of new parks? What we said is that we will raise all of the money to pay for the long-term maintenance in this project. We have established a separate endowment in which we've raised about $10 million to date, which is not part of that 111 that we've raised. And we have a sort of nonprofit fundraising plan and earned income plan, so we have a long-term plan for how to do that. But we also had to negotiate that with the city in a way that the council felt that, on those city-owned properties, they had accountability and transparency. And it was a great negotiation. It worked out really well. It's a five-year contract. At the end of every five years, if both sides are happy, it automatically renews. It's modeled on Central Park. Every ten years they come back and fight a very bloody battle over the negotiation of that. At the same time, if the city has an issue or we have an issue, Both sides have the ability to either get out or have leverage to get that issue fixed. So, again, it was a process of sort of give and take and negotiation. But the one thing I will say is that like any public-private partnership, we occasionally have our ups and downs, but it is a very strong, very vibrant partnership. The director of Metro Parks sits on our boards. Mary Lou Northern, who is one of the mayor's senior advisors, those are both ex-officio seats on our boards. So the city, they have a permanent presence there, and the relationship is a very strong one. Well, thank you again. Okay, thank you. Come back often and frequently. Sure, I'm happy. And if you all ever would like to come take a tour, we'd be happy to host you, your staff, your team, anyone. We love to do it. We do it all the time. We're not supposed to do a lot of clapping, but thank you all very much. In fact, I was going to say that you said you've been around the city council. You understand it's got a lot of different issues to work on, Dan. So I was going to say now you can allow us to get back to sausage making, and you all can go ahead and leave us. So thanks very much. All right. Next on our agenda is council reports. Before we start council reports, I was just going to say that I've invited Chief Jackson, Commissioner Mason, to share with us kind of an update on our fire division issues that we've been reading some about. And I'll ask them to do that during the mayor's report after the council reports. All right. So I have signed up council reports beginning with Council Member Henson. Thank you, Mayor. I wanted to announce, I think everybody from Parks and Rec left except for South. Tim, on Saturday, we have organized a stream clean for Valley Park. And along with that will be some educational components with Bluegrass Pride. It begins at 1 o'clock and lasts until 5. Those that volunteer to clean the stream will receive food and drinks after you're finished cleaning. But in addition to that, there is a cleanup on Sunday with Preston Cave Springs. But that brings me to my point with Tim. A lot of times when we do these stream cleans, we also do some restoration of the creek banks. And I know that there were some incidents where the contractors that mow along the creeks have mowed down some of the plantings. And Tim, so I just wanted to ask you, what are you doing to educate the contractors? We can't mow to the edge of the creeks. We put the plantings out, take out honeysuckle and replace it with more native, environmental-friendly plants. And then the contractor comes in and mows it down. So can you tell me that that won't happen again? I'd love to be able to tell you that. I think specifically the incident you're referring to happened at Dogwood Trace just recently. And actually we had in place carcinite no-mow signs, and those had disappeared. And so, but at the same time, the plantings were obvious. They should not have been mowed down. One of the contractor's employees actually did that. We communicate with our mowing contractors the no-mow areas that we have, and that was an unfortunate situation, and we're working to resolve that and make it right. Okay. And I do appreciate, because I know that you guys have lots and lots of right-of-ways to maintain. And I'm sure, you know, and it seems like we that number gets greater every day or maybe not every day, but quite often with the demolitions and water quality and so forth. But I just want to emphasize the importance of, you know, because I know we've got many, many neighborhoods working very, very hard to restore the creeks and improve the water quality. And I can understand when that hard work goes into that and then it's just gone. No, we absolutely support Creek Bank stabilization and no-mo zones, and we appreciate your support and all the council's support in that effort as well. And I appreciate your support in the stream clean coming up on Saturday. Absolutely. Thank you. Thank you. And I have another announcement. On Thursday morning is the Disability Expo, where we begin at 8.30 with an employer seminar educating an untapped resource of hiring individuals with disabilities to employers. That will last an hour and a half, so at 10 o'clock the Expo begins where there are many, many agencies, companies, so forth, that will provide their display, their services for individuals with disabilities. We will have a LexTran bus on site inside at the Expo, along with wheels van and the new taxi cabs. So I would encourage all the council members, if you're available between 10 and 4 on Thursday at some time, to come out and visit. And that is the end of my report, Mayor. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Council Member Hanson. Council Member McCord. Thank you, Mayor. Just very quickly, last week I had made mention about my intentions as it relates to golf and looking at what we're spending and identifying some policy. And I just want to go back and really very quickly re-couch what we're doing and what we're not doing. And then I'll have a motion to come out of this. But the council was asked, and first off, the council and this council member have supported public golf. We voted for every budget. We've supported it. So the issue of not supporting public golf is moot. We have it because we support it. But on June of 2010, our parks director came and presented and said that parks loses only $11,000. We know that's more like a million dollars. Also in that presentation, it was mentioned that the council has given no policy direction. So what we want to do at the end of this is to come away with some policy direction for the 2013 budget. That's what we're talking about here as it relates to expenditures of golf. We need to give direction because there is none right now. And so Commissioner Hamilton and I have been working on this. And at stake, what we have here is we're taking in a certain amount of golf revenues. and we're spending about a million more than that. And so we need to come up with a number as to what that subsidy is, but more importantly than the number, we need to come up with a rationale as to how we derive that number. And I can throw a number out based upon something I feel, or Council Member Kay can throw out a different number. What I've passed around to you is a resolution that has a blank on it where that number should go. And the question is, how do we get to that number most effectively? Commissioner Hamilton has sat down and really appreciate your efforts in looking at this in a lot of different ways, coming at a lot of different numbers for us to look at. And if a council member here or eight council members decided that $1.2 million is the right subsidy, which is what we had done last year, you can make a motion based on that. I don't think so, especially given the climate that we're in. And so where we are right now, folks, is that we've basically said to meet budget, we're okay with browning out fire stations, but we're not going to brown out golf courses. Any day, any way, we've got to keep golf courses open, but to meet budget, it's okay to brown out fire stations. And that's kind of what has this council member very concerned. And as I say, when Parks asks for a policy from council, I think we need to deliver it. Now, the best way to do that is up to debate. This is what my motion is going to be for today, though. As the co-chairman of the General Government Committee, along with Council Member Lane, I would like to put this issue into that committee for Commissioner Hamilton to bring the information she has, the committee to look at it and work in conjunction with the links to derive the rationale and the number, and for this council to adopt that number before we go on break. So my motion is to put the issue of public golf, what the subsidy is, and the rationale behind that subsidy into General Government Committee. So moved. Second. That's a motion by Council Member McCord, second by Council Member Blues. Is there any discussion on the motion, Council Member Lane? Could you clarify your motion a little bit more specifically because are you referring to putting it into the General Government Committee or are you talking about General Services Committee? No, the General Government Committee, our committee, which is the standing committee, but also that we would derive a number and a rationale for that number before we pass the budget. Before we pass the budget. That's what's going to come out of that committee. Okay. The reason I was asking is that the links committee that handles the golf is really a general services link, because that's been split in half, and so I won't be working on the links, but it would be covered by our general committee. So it's a little bit of a gray area between the two. Mr. Cady, would you like to comment on that? Thank you. Okay. Council Member Beard, then Council Member McCord. Council Member McCord, I think this is great what you're doing, but I would like a little guidance. Are you talking about putting a number in there today and signing it? No, sir. No, I wanted to pass that. That is what the resolution should look like when it comes out of. I'm ready to put a number in there. I understand. But I think more importantly, there may be 15 different numbers. What we really need is a rationale behind the number. Why did we derive at that number? What we have right now is nothing, nothing. It's just carte blanche. And two years ago when we asked what that was, it's $11,000. Oh, we found out, no, that's really $1.2 million. But we don't really have council guidance. Well, let's give council guidance. Let's work on a number and a rationale. And again, if that number is incorrect, every single year they can come before council and say, or in the links process, no, we need more, and we can deal with that, or that council can deal with it. But this way we at least come out with a rationale and a number. It would be a good exercise to actually, and maybe not put our names on it, go ahead and put a number in there so we get some feel for for uh what it could be anywhere from again from one i would welcome that in the committee sure to uh zero and uh and see what the sense of things are so that the the committee itself would have something to just at least a starting point so i'm going to put my number in there and give it back to you and you can do what you will thank you council thank you council member kate thank you mayor um i appreciate the intent of the resolution you know there's a butt coming right i intend and uh i have no objection would have no objection to having the committee review again the whole issue of the way in which golf fits into the larger budget but as i said uh at the last session i do object to ad hoc budgeting I don't think we should be separating out any single issue the link will have the opportunity to look at the way in which golf fits into the overall parks budget the council will have the opportunity to look at the way in which the overall parks budget fits into the larger budget and I don't think we ought to short circuit that process we have a we have a process in place for making these decisions and I would not want to separate out one particular area either in parks or anyplace else, to arbitrarily say here's a number and you have to live with it regardless of what the budget process says. So I would be amenable to the proposal if it were modified some, but as it stands, asking for a specific number, I would vote no. Thank you, Mayor. Council Member Henson? Thank you, Mayor. And I will certainly agree to put this in committee, but it was my understanding that we had a plan in place for golf and that there was a presentation made to Council about this plan. Am I mistaken? and I don't... May I clarify? Sure. That proposal or what you saw was a result of my asking parks to show us what it would look like to be zero, to be what Council Member Beard was suggesting where they live within their own means. What we got was not that at all. We got a business plan that showed them cutting about $460,000 worth of expenses out of a $1.2 million subsidy. That means we would still be subsidizing, in that situation, golf to the tune of $700,000. So we didn't get what I asked for, but working with what we did get, what we're trying to do is get to a place where we have some understanding of what golf is going to spend, and they've got some direction from this body. Thank you, Councilman. I will support your motion. I don't see any reason that it shouldn't be looked at, But, you know, I just have a fear of every year Meadowbrook comes up, and I'm a strong advocate for our senior populations that use that golf course. And I just do not want that to happen. And I know that it loses money. But is the benefit, you know, I don't see our legacy trails making us money. But, yes, there are expenses involved as far as maintenance. But I won't argue, and thank you, Council Member McCord. All right, thank you, Council Member Hanson. Vice Mayor Gordon. Thank you, Mayor. I had a lot of the same thoughts of Council Member Kay in that we're right in the middle of our budget process, so I'm not sure that I think this should be in a budget link as opposed to in a standing committee. Is there a reason that you didn't put it in a link? Yes, because that's only three people. and the bottom line to it is that we need something to vote on. We need some direction, and if you have three people reporting that out at the end of May, that's 12 other people who haven't seen it. Well, what details did we see, that type of thing. At least the committee has the opportunity for more people to see it. It's televised. We can put the numbers out there. council members can make an educated decision instead of just getting back. I know, Council Member Kay, you would do a fine job of reporting out, but there is a breakdown when the links report out, where a lot of council members have concern over how do we derive that. This is at least a lot more open process. And so to clarify, the motion is not to put the issue of golfing committee. It is to put the issue of capping the subsidy specifically. Correct. Okay. Well, I cannot support the motion because I think we are in the middle of budgeting, and this is truly a budget issue. And so it is coming piecemeal by itself. And to take it out of context with the new business plan, which Council Member Henson, I think, was referring to, we have got to see those numbers. We said that as a council we would come back in a year and see after they have had an opportunity to set the rates and to adjust them when they have cancellations. I think we're cutting off something that the council already voted to do. So I appreciate your effort. The other thing is that we're not looking at any other item. We subsidized lots of items in our government, lots of services and programs to our community. And this one's been handpicked. So I think if we could take the whole thing in context and look at golf, I would certainly be willing to do that. I think that this motion by itself of capping the subsidy is really more appropriate in budgeting and in the context of all of parks. Thank you. Does anyone else wish to speak to the motion? Council Member Lane? Thank you. I have strongly advocated trying to operate within a budget and knowing what that budget is. And I think part of our problem in the past has been our accounting system could be a little bit tighter and we could really know what our costs of operations are more precisely. but having said that I think that we need to make a careful deliberation on where to go forward on this and I have not seen the latest report but I've been told that our promotion for the golf courses has been good and this may be weather related or maybe due to the promotion but we are running ahead of last year's revenues my concern about bringing it before either links or the general government committee is that the entire council will not be involved in this issue in making a decision, and I would much prefer to have the commissioner and staff come before the full council and give us a presentation in a future work session. And I think we could get the information out and we could all review that. So those are just a few of the thoughts that I'm having. So that would be my preference. And I would like to say that I want to do what's best for the taxpayers of Fayette County. If that means we keep the courses open because that's beneficial to them, that would be one option. Or if it means we need to close one or two to make the operations more efficient and reduce some of our overhead expense because we have overcapacity, that would be the other option. But until I got all the information, it would be hard for me to make a definitive decision today about what to do or even in just a committee environment. Thank you. Thank you, Council Member Lane. Council Member Myers, then Council Member Lawless and Kay. Thank you, Mayor. I guess my position on this is that I see this as the same thing as where we were really the last eight years on pools. Every year we talk about closing a couple of the pools. I think it started out four pools at one point, then it dropped down to two. and every other year it seems like we're talking about golf courses and where we close one or two golf courses. And so I like this motion because what it's doing is saying that we need to come to a head on this and we need to make a decision on what type of subsidy we're going to provide. We heard from parks that we were subsidizing swimming out of a tune of about $70,000 a year, give or take a few thousand dollars, and that was more than they thought we should subsidize swimming. And if we're subsidizing golf to a tune of a million or if they make these reductions that they talked about, and even if the revenue goes up, say we're subsidizing it at half a million dollars, we need to make a decision on where we want to be with that subsidy. And if you look at the historically, like I said, for the last eight years we've been talking about closing swimming pools, opening swimming pools. Last year this time, we determined first they were going to close, and then we came back at the end of the budget cycle and determined they were going to be open. And I think a couple of council members said we need to deal with this in the off season so that we don't have to keep doing this in the middle of budgeting moving forward. And I think that's where Councilman McCord is trying to take us now with golf, is to look at this issue, determine where it is we want to be with respect to a subsidy, and then make a policy decision based on that. And so that moving forward, we don't, because every other year we've talked about closing Meadowbrook or a different golf course, this will give us a policy decision based on economics. And I think that just like the vision for parks with swimming was, and one of the things I asked for was an aquatics plan. And they have a vision for spending that savings that we're going to accrue by closing these two pools. And I think that we can get to that point if we determine what the subsidy is going to be for golf, and then we cut it off at that point. Moving forward, whatever money is saved, parks can then come up with a plan for utilizing that money. And that can be our indoor aquatic center. That can be more trails. It can be a whole host of things. It could be maintenance for some of the things that have been deferred. But I think that this puts us ahead of the game by making us come up with a policy decision, which is, again, what Parks asked for, was policy direction from this council. So I'm going to support this motion. Now, whether it's moved to the full council so that everybody has an opportunity here at the same time, that would maybe make it more efficient if we're trying to get it done before this budget cycle is over. Maybe that's an amendment we make to the motion is to bring that back to a work session rather than to put it into a committee. So actually, I'll go ahead and make that amendment. I move to amend the motion to bring this issue to a work session at the earliest convenience to the administration being able to put together the numbers it needs to put together and then scheduling. So moved. Okay. There's a motion to amend by Council Member Myers, second by Council Member Lane. Is there any discussion on the motion to amend? Is the motion to amend clear? I bet everybody. All right. Hearing no questions. Is there no discussion? We can take a vote. There is a question. Council Member Ford. Thank you, Mayor. I share the same concerns that Council Member Kay and Vice Mayor Gordon have expressed. Just to cut straight to the point, I'm concerned that we're singling out one recreational program out of all the many offerings that we have. and I'm concerned about us wasting and burning a lot of calories. From where I sit, we have much bigger fish to fry as a local government, budgetarily, and service delivery otherwise. So if it's a budget issue that is a concern of my colleague, Council Member McCord, let's address it in the link process, in the regular budgetary process. But I can't support singling it out, and I also can't support the council dedicating limited time that we have this time of year to dedicate this to a work session item. So I'll be voting against the amendment. Thank you, Mayor. Council Member Ford, Council Member Lawless, then Council Member Kay. I won't support it either. We have a link process, and if you feel the link process is flawed because there are only three members, I mean, we're talking about three members in every link looking at every aspect of government. And Parks and Recreation did bring to us a plan for bringing up revenues, sending out, you know, discounts, et cetera, and until we can, I think, a presentation on that is great, but, you know, if we're going to single out one thing out of our entire budget because only three people are on the link, then maybe the link process is the problem, not particularly golf. So for that reason, I will not support this. Thank you. All right. We're now speaking on the, I'm sorry, we had an amendment on the floor, and we need to vote on that. All in favor of the amendment, please indicate by saying aye. Aye. Opposed, no. Motion carries for the amendment. All right. We're back to the discussion on the motion. Yes. There were a couple of nays on that. Yeah, who wants to register the no's on the amendment, right? Thanks. Council Member Ford and Council Member Lawless, did you get it? Okay, thanks, Jeanette. All right. Okay, we're back to the discussion now on the motion, the original motion. Council Member Lawless, you've spoken. So Council Member Kay. Thank you, Mayor. Just a couple of comments. First, there's been some reference to the unreliability of information that we've had in the past. I've sworn not to say I'm the new guy, but here we go. I was not around prior to the budget process last year. In that process, I was not happy with the information we got in my link on parks and recreation in particular. I did not think it served us well in making the decisions we had to make, and I was concerned that we change the process. I have been favorably impressed with what we have had in the last few months. I believe that we are now getting information that's reliable, that I can match up with other information, and that if we're not totally in a position to have all the information we need, we're really close. We also asked the commissioner and the Parks and Recreation to come to us with a plan for golf and the parks generally, they did that. They did not respond to the specific question that Council Member McCord asked, and I recognize that. But what they did come with was what I consider a good move forward in helping us think about the ways in which we want to allocate the money that we have for parks and recreation in particular. I want to let that process go forward. if in its wisdom this council would like to have a specific part of the budget process focused solely on golf i'm not opposed to that what i am opposed to is asking that that meeting come up with a single figure that then is the cap on golf i think that's an inappropriate way to do budget work so i'm still opposed to the proposal as amended, but if someone wants to bring, if it goes forward, if it passes, then that's where we are. If it does not pass and someone is interested in a special meeting just to deal with the golf issue in the budget and people want that information, it seems to me that's a reasonable way to proceed. Thank you, Mayor. Mayor. Thank you. Is anybody else? Council Member Blues? And Councilman McCord? Mayor, this question, just for clarification, if this motion is approved, then are we obligated in the discussions in the General Government Committee to come up with a number that would represent a sort of a subsidy cap, or are we involved in simply discussing whether to assign such a number, whether to set a subsidy limit? You can do whatever you want. If there's a motion that's made, you can vote that up or down and come forward. If it's just discussion, it's just discussion. Is that a question? Well, I just want to make sure what the, if the issue is put into committee. Work session. It got amended. Work session. then are we obliged to, you know, come up with a number and you're saying no? If there's a motion and there's enough votes, then yeah. Yeah, gotcha. Thank you. Vice Mayor, where are you going to speak? You were next. Council Member McCord. I mean, I'll defer to the Vice Mayor. No, you were next. You said, yep. A couple things real quick just to respond. And I hope this goes through in this fashion because, again, the council link is three people. It's not a flawed process. It's the best way for us to attack the budget. But those meetings are not televised. Therefore, you don't have seven council members live, and you don't have council members with the availability to go back and watch, much less the public that can sit there and watch and find out the numbers that our commissioners come up with, how we're building a rationale. So that's why it put it into committee. Secondly, the committee reports out sooner than the link does in the process of the calendar, so that's why those decisions are there. Again, I would point out that budgets drive priorities, and 3% of the population of this city golf. We keep those golf courses open 365, basically, regardless of weather. And we've heard from the business plan as to why that doesn't save you any money to do it any differently. And, folks, whether you like it or not, in last year's budget, what we said was we prefer to brown out fire stations versus golf courses. That's the budgetary decisions we made because we did not brown out golf courses, yet we browned out fire stations. And last week you had two separate instances on Wednesday and Thursday where that situation cost us, cost taxpayers. And so when we talk about the good of the taxpayer, I think it is something to sit and look at. We pull out pieces all the time and look at them separately. The Charles Young Center was pulled out separately. We served on that committee, Council Member Kay. So, I mean, it's one of those things where we do this a lot. We're the council. We can do this. It's within our purview. If there's not enough votes, that's fine. That's just where this council member is trying to get us to is to create a policy where there is a rationale and a subsidy number. Thank you. Vice Mayor Gordon. Thank you, Mayor. I just had a clarification from Council Member Myers. Your amendment passed to put this into work session. So since the work session does not have the same two-hour window for discussion that committees do, how do you envision this working in work session? Would it just simply come up as a discussion and then we spend the necessary time on it? Council Member Myers. Thank you, Mayor. I think just like today in the meeting, the Mayor asked that we suspend the rules for giving a 15-minute presentation for a presentation that we all thought was valuable enough that we ought to listen to in its full entirety. and again I think that this is an issue that continues to come up each year budget wise every other year to be closed one specific golf course etc etc so I think that whatever time the commissioner and her folks need to present we allow them to do so and then we have a discussion so I think it's an important enough issue I think the dollar amount that we're talking about is important enough that we hear it out So, Commissioner, would you be bringing, do you know what you would be bringing? Would you be bringing the new business plan numbers? Would you be bringing other subsidies to give context to this? Or how would that look from your perspective? In preparation for our link and then in conversations with Council Member McCord, what I've been doing is I sort of would present three things. I've looked at the number of rounds that have been played this year to try to show you some trends, and those rounds have increased, and I think you'll see a multitude of reasons of why they've increased. I've also looked at an estimate of how I think we'll finish this year in golf, and I think you need to see, I mean, this issue needs to have that as a part of it. Then I've looked back at what does the 13 budget look like? What is the operating subsidy? And then you remember all the time you all ask, you say, be sure you're counting everything, not just what you want to count. So I've looked at the operating subsidy. I've looked at the administrative cost. I've counted in the debt service for golf carts, for the bond issue. and to come up with a total. And I think I can go through that with you pretty quickly. Those numbers are pretty clear. I guess what I want just is what I would like, excuse me, what I would like is if we end up putting a number, a subsidy number, I'm going to need direction of the cause and effect of that. The subsidy number, if you leave me with the subsidy number of, and I'm not saying pro or no, but if you leave me with the subsidy number of $400,000, I need you to give me direction of how to do that. Because Meadowbrook, you won't have to worry about it. It's just losing $1,000. So, you know, that's sort of, and Council Member McCord and I talked about that today, the setting of all this in a context. Thank you. Thank you for that. I did vote to change this and to amend it. I'm not going to support the motion because of the reasons I stated earlier, that I think it needs to be through the actual budget process and that we not handpick one program in government. But with that said, if the motion passes, I will look forward to your presentation. Yeah, and I'm going to call on Councilman Rebeard, But my experience from the council, this is an unusual issue to bring into a work session. So I think we need to think about, is there going to be a 30-minute limit on it or three hours? So, Council Member Beard. Thank you. I was glad to hear about Meadowbrook, Commissioner, because it's been the poor dog that gets kicked around for many, many years. And when we start complaining about the money that we've lost or whatever, it gets offered up as, well, we'll close Meadowbrook. and even in its worst days it only lost 50,000 or something of that sort. So it was kind of ludicrous and everybody kind of settled back and said, well, we've done our part. Well, no, not necessarily. The classic case of kicking the can down the road, a term which the mayor uses on occasion. this has been going on for to my knowledge 10 years and yes we do discuss singular issues as opposed to the budget as a whole the budget as a whole is made up of a whole bunch of single issues and this is the one that keeps rising to the top If we could get a three-year plan where we could move and transition from one type of situation to a better type of situation, it doesn't have to be like a cut-it-off-tomorrow-night approach, but a real, solid movement in the right direction. I think most of the council would accept that, and I think also probably the public would accept it too. I mean, the facts are is that golf all over the country is not doing well. We may be doing well because we had a wonderful, wonderful February and March when we really thought it was April and May, and we lowered rates. Now, which or was it a combination of things that caused it to look better than it did last year? But does that necessarily mean that it's going to continue to? Closing a golf course is not the easiest thing on earth to do. Everybody's got their pets. but the number of golfers and we have these nice rates now which are also being utilized by people from other counties. It isn't just our citizenry. And that in and of itself is something that we probably could look at also. Anyway, I'm glad to see that we're making some kind of grit our teeth and get after it. And, you know, again, as far as I'm concerned, it doesn't have to come to a hard stop before we pass the budget. I would like to see a good start. Anyway, thank you. Thank you, Mayor. All right, sir. Council Member Crosby is asked to speak, and then Ford, and then Lane, and then Martin. Mayor, you can take my name off. I've already spoken to the issue or anything. Council Member Crosby and then Ford and then Council Member Martin. Thank you, Mayor. Well, I am one of the three members who are on this budget link and also one of 15 up here, so I guess either way I'm a winner. I'm going to hear about golf. So with that being said, I'm really not sure how I'm going to vote on this motion, but I have a question for the chair of our link. Are we hearing from Parks and Rec this Thursday? Do you know? Yes, we are. Is this something that you would consider that we could very specifically and directly ask them about during our budget link meeting this Thursday? Would they be prepared to address it? I'm seeing the commissioner nod yes, and I'm also assuming that this is a part of what they are preparing for us as a part of the overall process. So, yes, Thursday, 9 to 12, you're all invited. Well, and I would just say, and I think Council Member McCord brings up some good points regarding the fact there's only so much money, and I don't necessarily think it's just golf. It is with a lot of the programs and a lot of things we do. We have to decide what our priorities are and how we're going to spend our money, and clearly this is the opportunity to do that. I'm not so opposed to hearing this as a group because we have heard it year after year after year, But I also believe with the timing, with us hearing it Thursday morning and our budget length, it also gives us the opportunity possibly to report to you all back as a group maybe Thursday night on what we learned. And if we decide that we need a special presentation in front of this body, then we could make that motion Thursday night. So just throwing that out there. Thank you. Council Member Ford? Thank you, Mayor. The motion on the floor, as I understand, is for this issue to go to a work session. And I still contend that that may not be the very best, may not be needed at this point. I say that not to try to restrict us from discussing this issue. What I would be interested in, Mr. Myers, to your motion, we've heard from the administration. We've heard from the Parks Advisory Board, which I represent the council on, along with Vice Mayor Gordon. So we know that there's a business plan that's at work. But from what I hear from my colleague, Mr. McCord, is for us to take some action now, to continue deliberation now. They're not opposed to that. One thing that separates this and makes this different from Charles Young, for example, is that we had community input all along the process. and I know again the Parks Advisory Board has helped our Division of Parks, has helped General Services come up with this business plan. If we're going to dedicate time to this issue, I think it will behoove us to have a public hearing on this. I think a public hearing on this issue would be much better than just having another presentation at work session because it allows us the input from folks that use this service to hear how important public golf would be. I could support something like that because I think it would add value to the process. I don't know how Mr. McCord feels about that or you as your original motion, Mr. Myers, but for us to belabor this in a work session when it's a budgetary matter that the link are, you know, we can solve as a budgetary matter. Jay is right. Budgets are about priorities. We're elected to set priorities based upon what is expressed to us by our constituency. Somewhere along the way, we can schedule it now or we can schedule it later. That perhaps is the better exercise than us just plugging an arbitrary number into a slot and passing a resolution. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you. Thank you, Councilman Ford. And Council Member Martin. Thank you, Mayor. I'm going to support this motion because I suspect that the presentation will be shorter than our debate on the presentation. So I think we'll get through to it. But I think that this also illustrates a weakness in our link system. And so in some ways I am receptive to Vice Mayor Gordon and Council Member Kay. You know, it's about the big picture. And, for example, all our spending on partner agencies for social and community services from 2002 to 2012 has only increased by $200,000 in a 10-year period. All of it. arts, culture, and education has actually decreased over the 10-year period by $40,000. So at some point, and I'm happy to talk about golf, but at some point we need to look at the big picture from a historical standpoint about how are we spending our money. Because over a long period of time, we are making judgments about priority about how we spend money. And that's a bigger picture thing that we are losing in the link process. In the link process, we're looking at a very narrow slice this year versus last year in this very narrow group of categories. But what we don't look at is do we need to spend money on this but not that? And so hopefully, Vice Mayor, we can have an opportunity to stand back and look at the bigger picture, maybe from a historical standpoint. Maybe Connie can help us with that. over the last 10 years, where have budgets gone and where have they not gone? And I think that is a worthwhile thing. So I'm going to support it because I think it will be shorter than what I just said. So thank you, Vice Mayor. Thank you, Mayor. All right. Does anyone else? Councilman Myers. Thank you, Mayor. And I would ask, I know the Commissioner said that she's going to need some direction on where to go if we give her a number. But I think just like with aquatics, we got a recommendation from the administration because it was not citizen-driven that we close the swimming pools. It was driven by, and not just this administration, I guess I should say it was driven by parks and rec year after year after year. So I think one of the things that would be helpful to me as a council member in this meeting is if you will present some scenarios and maybe to the best that you can in such short notice, a recommendation to us that if we go from a subsidy of $100,000 to $300,000, then this is what we could do, et cetera, et cetera. However you want to kind of mince that out. Thank you. All right. We're ready to vote on the motion now. All right. Everybody, all in favor of the motion, please indicate by saying aye. Opposed, no. No. All right. Sure hands. Well, we can use the electronic. Motion. The motion carries. All right. Back to our agenda. Somebody didn't find that. Oh, Bill Farmer. Bill Farmer. All right. Back to our agenda. We are on Council Reports at Councilmember Blues. Thank you, Mayor. I have two announcements. First of all, the McConnell's Trace Homeowners Association will hold its semi-annual meeting at 7 p.m. Thursday, April 26, two days hence, at First Baptist Church Bracktown in the community room. The future item of that meeting will be a second district candidate forum, and the three candidates for council in the second district are expected to be there. This is an excellent opportunity for the members and residents of the neighborhood to keep the candidates, hear what they have to say, and be better prepared to make a judgment on primary election day a few weeks hence. Second item, most of you remember Sarah Brown, former council aide, now a Bracktown resident. She has organized a Town Branch Creek cleanup. That's scheduled for 8 to 12 on Saturday morning, April 28th. Folks who would join that cleanup to help restore some measure of beauty and serenity to the creek along the town branch trail should park at 3254 Bracktown Road and walk around the corner to enter the creek from Bradley Lane. Trash bags, gloves will be provided. If you've got water boots, you should bring them because otherwise you're likely to get your feet wet. This is an important civic event. I hope there will be good participation. If you need further information on the town branch cleanup, again, that's scheduled for this Saturday, the 28th, 8 o'clock till noon. Contact Sarah Brown at 608-8152. That's 608-8152. She'll be able to answer all your questions. Thank you, Mayor. That's my report. Thank you, Council Member Blues. Council Member Crosby. Thank you, Mayor. I just want to announce that this Thursday night at the Opera House, the Black Jacket Symphony will be playing. They are a symphony that covers classic rock, and so they will be covering Pink Floyd this Thursday night. And it's my understanding that they might have a little surprise at the end that includes members of the community. So I would encourage everybody to come out. They're out of Alabama, and it's sure to be a great time. Thank you so much, Mayor. Thank you, Council Member Crosby. Vice Mayor Gordon. Thank you, Mayor. Just one item. The EPA consent decree mandates that we, as a city, have a capacity assurance program. and you may recall that a motion was made a short while ago to ask me to form a task force to work through some of the detail of putting into place this capacity assurance program, which, as you recall, has to do with sanitary sewers and adding on development to those sewers and how to deal with all that. So I have appointed the task force, and it includes Councilmember Blues, who will chair it, Councilmember Ellinger, Councilmember Kay, Councilmember Farmer, Councilmember Stinnett, and myself, as well as Commissioner Derek Paulson. And those are the official members of the task force. Our Division of Water Quality is inviting a large number of stakeholders, as guided by the EPA consent decree, to take part in the discussions and the planning for our future programs. So that task force will get up and running in May. Thank you. Council Member Martin. Thank you, Mayor. The Pasadena Neighborhood Association has rescheduled their garage sale, their neighborhood-wide garage sale, for this weekend, April 27th and April 28th. Folks who are participating will have balloons tied to their mailboxes. Also, the Pasadena Neighborhood Association is having their annual meeting on Monday, April 30th at 6 p.m. at the Broadway Baptist Church on Harrisburg Road. and the doors will be open at 6 p.m. to socialize and to have a few vittles. And several elected officials and candidates have been invited to attend and I think representatives from the Lexington Fire Department will be on hand to talk about their fire services as well. Folks, we appreciate you all coming out as well. So please come out to the Broadway Baptist Church for the Pasadena Neighborhood Association Monday at 6 p.m. Thanks, Mayor. Thanks, Council Member Martin. Council Member Lawless. Thank you. I just want to remind everybody that Thursday Night Live starts this week, and the Farmer's Market downtown at Cheapside Park is open, and the Colt Trolley has expanded route, extending to Chevy Chase and downtown, both in the morning for the Farmer's Market and in the evenings. so you can go to LexTrend's website to get the times and where it stops, and I hope everybody has a good time. Come on out. Third District's hopping. Thank you, Council Member Lawless. Okay. Don't have anybody else signed up for a council report, so we can move on to the mayor's report. I mentioned earlier that I had invited Commissioner Mason and Chief Jackson, along with some of the command staff at the Fire Division, to join us for an update on the staffing issues. And so I'll ask them to ask Commissioner Mason first and maybe introduce for context, and then Chief Jackson. Thank you, Mayor, Council. I'm going to be brief. I think that probably everybody was aware of the media coverage of last week, a couple of incidents, and we wanted to give you all an update. I think Council Member Crosby had asked a week or so ago about this as well in terms of the SAPA plan. And, you know, a couple of highlights that I'll hit. We haven't closed any stations here in Lexington. Some communities have done that. The rolling brownouts is an industry standard reaction to budgetary drawbacks. So we feel like we're right in line. We have a lot of information that could be provided. But one of the things that I wanted to bring up went back to the transition plan. One of the first documents I got when I arrived here and looked at it again this week. And for the fire transition team overview, the first thing listed was overtime costs. The first bullet on the list was overtime costs. The second bullet listed was no funding for paramedic classes. And we've tried very hard to address those in also a way that continues to provide services here, the services that Chief Jackson will talk about now. Thank you. Okay. Thanks. Just for purposes, just a little housekeeping here on timekeeping, I may have to leave in just a few minutes. I'm supposed to introduce Dan Jones over at the Carnegie Center. And if you guys want to, if the chief want to sit down, I think it would be okay if you all, I know you're always prepared. We appreciate that. All right. All right. Chief. Good evening. You might want to introduce your colleagues, too. I know I was planning to do that myself. Go ahead. Thanks, Chief. Good evening. With me, I brought Assistant Chief Jordan, who's our Assistant Chief of Suppression, Battalion Chief Hoskins, who's our senior shift commander, Assistant Chief Griffin, who's our Assistant Chief of Administration, and Major Littrell, who works in our fire prevention area. What I want to do is briefly give you an overview of how we came about the plan and then discuss with you the recent issues that occurred last week. And then if you have any particular questions in reference to the specifics of how we go about our process, then we'll bring up Chief Jordan and Chief Hoskins. So Chief Jordan has a copy of the plan that we'll give to you. And as stated, the basis of the plan is this, is that when we were provided the guidance for the economic situation that we were in, I went to the staff and stated that what I wanted to create was the best opportunity to service the citizens of this community with the staffing that we had currently. And then we created the service and personnel adjustment process. And in this process, the shift commanders are given the leeway to provide an opening and direction for the service with the units that were available on that day. As the commissioner pointed out, the standard across the country is brown out stations. and what I said, the direction that I gave is that we would brown out companies. In some instances, we brown out in our single station houses, we actually brown out the station for that period, whether it's a 24-hour period or a period that is designated by the shift commander, maybe from four hours to 16 hours, depending upon the paramedic class. When we look at the operational and the tactical function that provides or causes, we have the issue. From the beginning, we said that there will be an impact based upon the number of personnel that we have. If we look at the numbers, which we printed up, we started in January with the brownout only producing 68 hours. We moved forward to February. It's 371. We get into March. It was 703 hours. And to give you a number of companies that we did, it was 41. And then in April, it's 835 hours. So as we stated, as the vacation season entered, we would have a serious impact on the service that we would be able to provide to the community. And that's how we go about introducing the program. and it's managed based on, like I said, the shift commanders coming in three days prior to and then sending out the list of the browned-out companies, and then we move forward from there. The impact with our operational process has to do with the fact that we have an on-duty paramedic program. along with a number of other functions that we continue to maintain throughout the day. And we, at this point, have managed up until the recent events, which was something that wasn't placed or a calculated event. It occurred. So I go back to my history as an operational and a tactician in the military where we take very seriously what it is that we do in a combat operation. And we do the same here. We're all a part of this community. And when I look at the process, I base it on my personal ingrainment in this community. I think about my grandparents. I think about the effect that it's going to have on your families and our families. And so when we are setting as an executive staff trying to create what is best for the community, that is what we base it on. We base it first on our own protection, each firefighter who I have to look at and determine what direction we're going in as a division. and secondly, the citizens of this community, then thirdly, the property that we're bound by our profession to protect, and then to minimize that risk. Those are the four things that I look at. And so as a staff, this plan that we presented to protect the city utilizes each member and each aspect, each piece of apparatus to protect the community. We've never browned out or never will brown out an emergency care unit. we have continued to focus on providing that aspect EMS we have a plan which we've already started to implement where we are visiting all the neighborhood associations that are willing to have us I started with a council member Ford a couple of weeks ago where we explained the process with Engine 8 and how we build what we refer to as redundancy, but how we build in that we'll never brown out a station in a district. I'll give you an example of Engine 8. Engine 8 may be browned out as a company, but EC3 is still there. So Station 8 remains open. And then within that district, we have Engine 19, Engine 10, and Engine 4 that respond to that area. So you still have the service. What that causes, the impact of it, is that it increases some of the response times. And like I say, in the instance of last Wednesday and Thursday, we had an increased response time. And so as we move forward, we re-looked at the plan yesterday, and what we did when we initially established this plan, we had a threshold of nine companies that we would utilize for training and browning out, and we discussed the effects of that. We reduced that from nine companies to four to six companies. So that has a significant impact on the number of companies that remain on the street. So one of the most important things for us is that we created a plan that has some flexibility built in it. And the flexibility allows us to provide even more protection to the city based on the numbers that we have. So one of the things that we continue to do is to continue to re-look at our processes and to create better opportunities to provide support to our citizens. Like I said, number one is we protect ourselves. Number two is to protect the citizens and the community of Lexington. Number three is to ensure that all property is afforded the best public safety or fire service that it can, and then to minimize the risk that goes along with that. Thanks, Chief. You had mentioned to me when we were talking the other day about just being in Buffalo. I think that might be something worthwhile sharing in terms of you were with just the context for that. Yes, sir. In reference to cities that follow the process, talk to personnel from Los Angeles, talk to a guy from Richmond, Indiana yesterday along with visiting Cincinnati. but going into Buffalo, like I said, the focus for us was not to close any fire stations. I was in Buffalo last week in an assessment center, and they've reduced their personnel from 900 to 700 personnel, and they chose to close fire stations. And it had a significant effect on the city in and of itself. We in the Lexington Fire Department want to remain parts of the community. We want to be ingrained in everything that this city is. And so our focus was not to close fire stations, but to choose a different route, and that was to brown out companies. And so when we look at the direction that we want to go in, we want to go in the direction of providing the best possible service without closing fire stations. All right, sir. Thanks very much. Appreciate the update. Do you wish to introduce anybody else for any comments? I think if we're not, I said we would do this as a quick update. I thought it was appropriate to be responsive to the questions that might have arisen, and I appreciate you all being here today. I know that the council has a lot of other, you've got some interviews this afternoon. Do you want to have some questions or comments by the council to the chief? Council member Crosby? Okay. Chief, I'm sorry. Did you say that you were going from nine out of rotation down to four? Did I hear that correctly? Yeah, the threshold of companies that we had established in our initial plan was nine companies for training or training process, training that we go through or the brownouts. So now, based on our plan, we want to reduce that threshold from seven to nine initially to four to six companies. And is this a result of what happened last week? It's a combination. Initially, our plan was to reevaluate after six months our SAPA process, the brownout process. And with the recent event, we moved it up to four months. Yes, ma'am. Okay, because I had an incident, too, in fact, in front of Station 21. I took a picture of it, in fact, because there was a car accident right in front of the station. And, you know, the sign was out that this station was not open for service, but there just happened to be one of the, I guess, the EC unit was in rotation, so they were able to help, I'm guessing, because there were some firemen actually there. So I just found it curious that all of a sudden we start having incidents and we can revise the plan. I guess I don't know why we just didn't start with the lower number and it had to take an incident to get us maybe to that point. But I think what you're saying is you were going to reevaluate in six months, and we're at that point. We were going to reevaluate anyway. And like I said, some of that's just timing. Yes, ma'am. Thank you. Yes, ma'am. Thank you, Council Member Crosby. Anybody else? I don't mean to truncate the conversation. You all are here, so welcome the comments from Council Members. I do need to escape so I can make this introduction. And Council Member Martin and Vice Mayor Gordon is going to take over. Thank you, ma'am. Thank you, Mayor. Chief, thanks for coming today. Yes. The report in the paper, and I was trying to pull it up here while we were talking, was that the response to Sheridan Drive was delayed due to the brownout. Can you comment specifically on that? Can you restate the question again? The report in the paper about the fire on Sheridan Drive indicate that there was a fire department's position that the Brown out of the Southland Drive station caused the fire to be worse because of the delayed response time. Yes. Do you know how much longer the response time was delayed? Well, just to give you an example, like I said, that particular day, Engine 6 was responding, was a part of a Code 500, which is they were assisting an EC unit in transporting another patient to the hospital. Engine 11 had gotten, had. I'm sorry, I can't hear you, Chief. Engine 11, which would have been the next in company, was transferred to EC11, which they were making an EMS run. The next closest company was Engine 20 in that response area. So Engine 20 was the first in company. So, yes, it affected it. Well, my question is that whenever I see a response, a couple years ago I was at some constituent's house, and she started having a heart problem. And we called 911, and two companies came. Because I understand we have a policy that we send the closest responder, and then we send the regular responder. And so we have two companies out. Is that correct? Yes. Yes. But, well, you have to understand that is dependent upon the incident. A cardiac arrest, a chest pain, then the first responding company is usually an engine company, followed by an EC unit. That's the natural response for them. Do they stay for the duration of the, both companies stay for the duration of the call? Until the transfer of carry, yes. Okay, so, but typically one company is needed for that, is that correct? I mean, you need three, for a heart attack, you would need three paramedics and a buggy, is that correct? You need, like I said, it depends upon the call. Our response is you get an engine company for cardiac arrest and an EC unit. Well, I thought the comments in the paper were a little abrupt, considering that we have stations that get closed for training all the time. That's correct, don't we? We close stations for training. No, we don't close the station. They just go on what we call a 10-5 basis to train. But they're further away than they would otherwise be. Right, right. And they are gone for these double runs on certain types of calls. So, you know, I've asked for some information. I guess we'll continue on this because the report in the paper was that, you know, that the kitchen was destroyed because of this delayed response time. And I don't know what the basis of that was. So I guess we'll look into that more. Do you all have statistics on run times? Yes. Okay. I guess the point that I'm getting to is that I think we spread our personnel out for a lot of different things. And it's always treated as a sacred cow that we can't look at how we allocate our personnel, at least from where I sit. And I don't know why we send two teams out on runs because it would basically double, you know, it requires more personnel to do that. Well, but the standard of care that we've established. Well, I understand that, but we have to afford it. We have to pay for it. And that's the problem is we don't have enough money to hire. Life is not worth that. If we have a cardiac arrest that occurs in the city of Lexington, we're going to send the standard that we've established, which is a first-end company, which may be an engine company, followed by an ALS unit, which is an EC unit. And the standard of care for the citizens of Lexington, you cannot put a dollar amount on that. So, I mean, we have the statistics. We can prove to you what we do and how we do it and how we maintain. But we cannot allow a dollar amount to cause us to reduce the amount of care that we provide to the citizens. Chief, you and I are going to disagree on this because seeing six people stand around for one heart attack does not improve the standard of care. I am one of those guys that is one of those six people, and it takes sometimes six people to handle it. And when I talk about this, I talk about it from the standpoint of I made, and it's not a personal thing, it's what we do. I made a code on my grandfather years ago, and it took six people to handle that situation. So we're talking about, we can't be conflicting on this matter because we are here to support and provide support for the citizens of this community. It's not about a dollar, it's about the level of care that we provide. Well, Chief, if we had unlimited resources, I would agree with you because I would not want nothing better than unlimited great care for our citizens. But we have reached the end of the unlimited resources. We have to better allocate our resources because we're not going to be able to continue to expand your all's budget. You all have to use your personnel better and more efficient than you have in the past. And because of that, we will better be able to keep fire stations open, which is what this is all about. Thank you, Chief. Thank you, Vice Mayor. Any other Council members have questions or comments? Thank you very much. We really appreciate your being here. Okay, now we have a couple more items of business. Is there anyone who wishes to make public comment on issues not on the agenda? No? Mundy says no. Thank you. Move adjourned. Now, we have the mayor's report. Is there any discussion on the mayor's report? Vice Mayor? I have to recuse from the vote on the Explorium of Lexington, but I do vote in favor of the rest of them. Thank you. Okay. Thank you very much. Any other comments on the mayor's report? All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Anyone opposed? and as soon as we get our motion to adjourn we'll take a 10 minute break and then we'll start our citizen advocate interviews so do I hear a motion to adjourn? All those in favor say aye. Anybody opposed? Okay, we are adjourned. We'll see you in 10 minutes, council members. There was some blue and shallow times