# Council Public Safety Committee - May 1, 2012 > Auto-transcribed civic record · May 1, 2012 - **Permalink**: https://meetings.lexingtonky.news/meeting/2497 - **Source video**: https://lfucg.granicus.com/player/clip/2497?view_id=14&redirect=true - **Date**: 2012-05-01 - **Last revised**: July 17, 2026 - **Length**: 15,876 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 Public Safety Committee met on May 1, 2012 at 1:00 p.m., presided over by Diane Lawless. The committee addressed four agenda items, taking three votes and hearing seven public comments during the session. The committee approved two items: the Fire and EMS Task Force Report and the Horses Running at Large Ordinance. Two items were deferred for future consideration: the Chronic Nuisance Ordinance and Items Referred to Committee. ## Attendance The following individuals were present at the meeting on May 1, 2012: * Diane Lawless * Doug Martin * Chuck Ellinger * Chris Ford * Julian Beard * Bill Farmer * Kevin Stinnett * K.C. Crosbie * Jay McChord * Peggy Henson * Jenifer Benningfield No absences or late arrivals were recorded. ## Votes and Decisions Three motions were voted on during this meeting, all of which passed by voice vote. **Fire & EMS Task Force Findings Report** [timestamp: 1:40:41] A motion was made by Bill Farmer and seconded by Julian Beard to report out the Fire & EMS Task Force findings to the full council during a work session instead of at this meeting. The motion passed by voice vote. **Nuisance Properties List** [timestamp: 1:35:17] A motion was made by Jay McChord and seconded by Chuck Ellinger to direct the Commissioner of Public Safety and relevant departments to compile a list of nuisance properties and report it to the committee at its next meeting. The motion passed by voice vote. **Horses Running at Large Ordinance** [timestamp: 1:44:04] A motion was made by Kevin Stinnett and seconded by Doug Martin to adopt the Horses Running at Large Ordinance. The motion passed by voice vote. ## Public Comment During the public comment period on the Chronic Nuisance Ordinance, one speaker provided remarks while six others were present but did not speak. **Craig Harden** [timestamp: 1:47:05] expressed frustration with the slow progress on the Chronic Nuisance Ordinance. He criticized the reliance on volunteer efforts to advance the work and recommended that the government hire a full-time staff member to move the initiative forward more effectively. Harden characterized the current draft as bad legislation and urged that it be withdrawn for revision before proceeding further. The following individuals were present during public comment but did not speak: - Sharon Harris - George Pruitt - Joyce Register - Stephen Marshall - Shelby Arnold - Jamie Gooch ## Contested Items **Chronic Nuisance Ordinance** The committee engaged in a heated discussion regarding the Chronic Nuisance Ordinance. The primary disagreement centered on the fairness and implementation of the ordinance, with particular concern about three key aspects: the adequacy of notice provided to property owners, the opportunity to cure violations before penalties were imposed, and the potential for disproportionate impact on low-income properties. Several committee members expressed concern that the ordinance was overly punitive in its approach. These members argued that the process lacked early notification to property owners, which they viewed as a significant procedural deficiency that could unfairly penalize owners without adequate warning or chance to remedy the issues. Other committee members took a contrasting position, supporting the ordinance as a necessary and appropriate tool to address chronic neighborhood problems. These members viewed the enforcement mechanism as justified given the need to maintain neighborhood quality and address persistent nuisance issues. The debate reflected a fundamental tension between protecting property owners from what some viewed as an unfair or hasty process and providing the municipality with adequate enforcement tools to address ongoing neighborhood concerns. The discussion highlighted concerns about equity, particularly regarding how the ordinance might affect lower-income property owners who might face greater difficulty in quickly addressing violations. ## Chronic Nuisance Ordinance (1-9) The committee discussed a draft ordinance designed to address chronic nuisance properties through a structured enforcement process [timestamp: 00:04:32]. The proposed ordinance would establish a case-by-case enforcement mechanism that includes notice requirements, abatement plans, and civil penalties for properties that persistently create nuisance conditions. **Key Speakers and Discussion** Committee members Keith Gaines, Diane Lawless, Doug Martin, Julian Beard, Jay McChord, Bill Farmer, Kevin Stinnett, and K.C. Crosbie participated in the discussion of this agenda item. **Concerns Raised** Several concerns emerged during the committee's review: - **Fair notice**: Committee members raised questions about whether property owners would receive adequate notice of violations and the enforcement process. - **Opportunity to cure**: There was discussion about whether the ordinance provided sufficient opportunity for property owners to remedy violations before penalties were imposed. - **Impact on low-income properties**: Concerns were expressed about the potential disproportionate effect of the ordinance on low-income residential properties and their owners. **Outcome** The committee did not vote on the ordinance. Instead, members agreed to defer the item and requested that the Commissioner of Public Safety prepare a report on high-impact nuisance properties. This report would presumably provide additional information to inform future consideration of the ordinance. ## Fire and EMS Task Force Report (10-13) The Fire & EMS Task Force presented its findings to the council at approximately [timestamp: 1:40:10]. Key speakers included Bill Farmer, Diane Lawless, Julian Beard, Jay McChord, and Peggy Henson. The task force report addressed several critical areas of fire and emergency medical services operations: **Key Findings Presented:** - Paramedic staffing levels and current capacity - Response time performance and metrics - Recruitment efforts focused on diversity - Preference points for hiring and advancement **Recommendations:** The task force recommended several actions to improve service delivery: - Adding two new emergency care units to the system - Implementing annual paramedic training requirements - Phasing in capital improvements over a specified period **Outcome:** The council approved the report and moved it to the full council work session for further discussion and detailed consideration of the recommendations. ## Horses Running at Large Ordinance (14) [timestamp: 1:43:30] Council Member Kevin Stinnett introduced an ordinance to prohibit horses from running at large in Fayette County. According to Stinnett, no existing law currently addresses this issue in the county. The ordinance establishes penalties for violations of the prohibition on horses running at large. The measure was presented to address a gap in local regulations governing livestock management. Council Member Doug Martin participated in the discussion of this agenda item. The motion to approve the ordinance passed unanimously, indicating full support from the council for establishing this new prohibition and its associated penalties. ## Items Referred to Committee (15) [timestamp: 1:49:54] The committee discussed several items that had been referred to it for consideration. The topics addressed included right-of-way signage, public safety disability claims markers, paramedic training, and community corrections best practices. Key speakers during this discussion included Bill Farmer, Julian Beard, Kevin Stinnett, and K.C. Crosbie. **Outcome** No action was taken on the referred items due to a lack of quorum. The discussion was deferred, meaning the items were not resolved and will require further consideration at a future meeting when a quorum is present. --- ## Decisions - **Motion** — passed: Motion to report out the Fire & EMS Task Force findings to the full council during work session instead of at this meeting - **Motion** — passed: Motion to direct the Commissioner of Public Safety and relevant departments to compile a list of nuisance properties and report it to the committee at its next meeting - **Motion** — passed: Motion to adopt the Horses Running at Large Ordinance --- ## Full transcript Music Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. guitar solo Thank you. A whole dance across the street, and this is the Public Safety Committee. The first item on the agenda is the chronic nuisance ordinance. And I understand we have quite a few people that have signed up to speak. And when I get that list, I'll have a better idea. We'll get it up through a little last week. Okay. We have four agenda items, and we have until 3 o'clock to get through this. So if you are signed up to speak and someone has already made the same point that you're about to make, it would be very helpful if you all would try not to repeat yourselves. You can all hold up your hand saying you agree, and that way we can get through this because it's going to be a lengthy meeting, okay? And we have no choice but to stop at 3 o'clock. Mr. Keith Gaines, I believe, is going to make a presentation on the chronic nuisance ordinance. It doesn't matter. Oh, I thought they had it. We'll put it on the flashback. Okay. I think what they're getting ready to do is put the power... Welcome, Mr. Gaines, and it may be me, and I can't hear very well out of my left ear, so if you'd make sure the mic is a little bit closer and state your name and address. Keith Gaines, and I live at... I've lost my address now. I live on Glenview Drive, and the 1372 Glenview Drive, and I think they're getting ready to put a PowerPoint pulled up here, and that's kind of what the presentation is going to go off of. I'll go on and get started. I think everybody here is already pretty familiar with it, and so I'll try to go through fairly quickly on it. But basically what the chronic nuisance ordinance does is it looks at locations that have had multiple calls for service of a nature that would be of concern from police, fire, nuisance responses multiple times. And this is a growing trend across the nation. And what it does is it helps with safety, welfare concerns, and has negative impacts on quality of life if you have properties that fit this criteria within the neighborhoods where they're located. It also has a burden financially and with manpower on the government agencies that have to respond over and over to these same locations. So what it looks at doing in a nutshell is taking these locations and looking what the problem is and then trying to work with the owner of the property to resolve the issue. And if the property owner is willing to work to help resolve the issue with an abatement plan, there is no fine. What this is geared towards is property owners who either don't care or just don't respond when they've been notified that there is a property that they own that is a continual problem. I've worked with a lot of the people that are in this room. And to be honest, I've got about 16,000 nuisance calls that I had pulled up for a year period. And going through those calls and looking if they met the criteria or not, a lot of what I found was is we fit the same format, or should I say the way other cities that have already enacted this, have found out that there's only a handful of properties that even fit the criteria. And most of them, when you look at the research from other cities that have enacted it, the property owners are willing to work with the city on an abatement plan, and the only ones that ever received a fine are the ones that were really continually not willing to work on an abatement plan or just didn't respond at all. And from my past experience working with the clear unit and working with property owners all over the city, the majority of the properties, and I've looked through them, don't fit that criteria. I've taken a little bit of, well, I'm taking heat from both sides to an extent. And the reason on that is when I was developing or looking at the other chronic nuisance ordinances and laws throughout the United States, They're pretty consistent if you think about, you know, is this best practice? I went considerably higher, if you go and look at all the ones that are out there, with the number of calls that's required to trigger a chronic nuisance property, and it's based on number of units. I think that, like I say, looking through the 16,000 incidences for a year period, there was very little amounts of properties that met that criteria. Basically, the way it would work is you would have complaint, either complaint driven through somebody calling in that maybe they think this property is getting multiple calls to it, or complaint through one of the city agencies. That complaint would need to be investigated. And this is a protection for the property owners because one of the things that we were looking at when we were going through there is that sometimes the complaints that come through could be unfounded or they may have somebody that's just vindictive towards them. So they get investigated and looked at to see what the actual calls were and what the response is by whatever governmental agency that responded, what that response was. And that's where, looking through the 16,000 incidences that I have up here that I've looked through for the previous year, that you find that there's a lot of them. You may have some multiple calls, but when you look at the actual calls themselves, they don't meet the criteria to put it into a chronic nuisance property. And I think that is a big fear that a lot of property owners have is that they're going to be held accountable for calls that really aren't relevant as a chronic nuisance. So that's where when the property gets referred to the Commissioner of Public Safety or a designee, and they look at it and actually investigate that property and the calls that have been there to rule whether it does meet the criteria based on the type of calls and what happened or rule it out. If they rule it out, then it's not a chronic nuisance property and there's no further action. If they investigate and you look and see that you've had multiple arrests, multiple drug convictions for trafficking, multiple other things that would fit the nuisance criteria, then the owner would be notified. There's no fine at that time. The owner would have a chance to respond and come in to meet with whoever the commissioner of public safety would have present, whether it would be every division that would be part of that nuisance, whether it would be code, police, fire, whatever, that would be to look at that property and then work on an abatement plan to figure out what the root cause is and how to stop that from happening again. because a lot of times what we do as a police agency, I can speak on that, is we band-aid things. We go in and we have a property and we go there for one call. We go there for another call. And different officers go at different times. So you may not ever realize that it could be a nuisance property. The property owners don't realize it's a nuisance property because they're not getting any kind of notification on every call. And you get multiple officers going. So somebody would end up making a complaint saying this could possibly be a chronic nuisance property. It gets investigated, call the property owners in if it does meet the criteria, and then you talk about an abatement plan. What do we need to do to stop this cycle? We want to break the cycle. So they come in, we work out, the city would work out an abatement plan, and the option is the owner can refuse to go along with it and can do nothing, and then there would be a fine. They can appeal any decision. If they think that the abatement plan is not fair, that can be appealed to a hearing officer and then ultimately on to district court if they don't feel the hearing officer's judgment is correct either. So there's protection in there for that. But the main thing is there is no fine at this point as long as they're willing to do it. And that's been my experience working with the majority of the property owners. They are willing to help as long as they know what the problem is. That's what this is doing. One, it's notifying properties that there's a problem at your property and we want to help fix it. Or two, you take the property owners who don't care and who aren't interested in helping, and that's the ones that you're going to end up having the fines on. There's a flow chart on there that basically explains the same thing that I just did as a flow chart. It's kind of hard to read up there, and I know the print's small, but it's basically a flow chart of what I just explained. The way it's broken up is non-residential properties, which would be three or more nuisance activities that are documented in citations reports that occur during a 60-day period. And I want to clarify on reports also. A report is not somebody calling in reporting a problem. That's these 16,000 incidences over here. This is where there's been 16,000 separate calls over a year period to properties all over Lexington, Fayette County. These are just calls, not what would be considered reports. A report would be where somebody calls in and says, hey, I've got this problem, this is what's going on. Police respond, or code enforcement, or the fire department, and they actually find something that is an issue. Whatever it is, it would have to be documented. It would be documented on one of our standard reports through the police department or however the fire department would document their runs and what they actually found. What I found was a lot of times when we respond to these, there's really not an issue. We go there and there's no reports done. It's not been an issue. The ones that would be deemed chronic nuisance would have the reports that would be saying, okay, somebody went there, this is what they documented. There was 50, 60, 70 people there. There was a disorder. We saw evidence of drug use. There could be citations that were issued. There could be search warrants that were done, which would document what we found that there was. And that's where somebody would investigate those reports and look at it and see what actually happened. And we're using this because this is not a criminal penalty. Some states, some jurisdictions use criminal penalties for this. I didn't think that that was reasonable in our city to put criminal penalties on property owners for this. This is a civil penalty, just like whether it's with code enforcement. They issue civil penalties. That's what this would be, civil penalty. So it's not based on citations and adjudications on that. It's based on preponderance of evidence. So basically what it is is you're going to see multiple reports where somebody actually physically was there and said, this is what I saw. And then you determine whether or not you think that that was enough for it to be counted as a call for a nuisance activity. If you switch on to the residential properties, it's based on the next slide. It's based on numbers of units. This is where I get heat from the other side because I went considerably higher than the national average. Really the standard on a lot of them is three calls within 60 days or six calls within. It doesn't matter what size property you have. That's it. There are a few cities and jurisdictions that actually did something like this. None of them I could find had this many violations up to the 51 or more units that had 15 violations within 60 days or 18 violations within a 12 month. The exception is firearms and narcotics. And I should say like a firearms violations where somebody's used a firearm, shot a firearm, something like that, or narcotics trafficking, not possession, where it's been noted as firearms are trafficking because I think that's serious enough that we don't need to wait for 18 violations of those two types of crimes to take a look at it. So anyway, I'm getting some heat from the city side because this is way above the national standard of how many calls that it would take to make a property, a chronic nuisance property. Because I've worked with the property owners. I know that the majority of the good property owners are willing to make efforts to help abate these problems. And I'm confident that the ones that aren't willing to work or don't even respond are the only ones that are really going to be fine. And that's what nationally has been found through research. I've got a huge amount of research that I've done over about the last three years that anybody is more than willing to have a look at. and I can show that that's the way it is. So you've got a fine structure, and this is for failure to respond or follow an abatement plan. So what happens is, as a property owner, you get a letter or a notice saying that your property has been designated a possible or designated a chronic nuisance because of the types and amounts of calls. and you don't respond, you're going to be fine because we don't want it to continue. And the next time your fine goes up. Or if, which happened in some cases in other jurisdictions, there's an abatement plan that's set out and then the property owners never follow through with the abatement plan. They say, okay, we'll do it, but then there's no follow through. Well, you're going to get fined. That's just, I mean, what happens if you're not following through. That's the way it is with criminal cases and civil processes where you don't follow through with what you're saying you're going to do. An example. I don't want to, well, there's actually a number on there, but I'm not going to say where it's at. But it's basically a 1,000-square-foot single-family home. If you look at the calls on the next one, and on this, it's really hard to see, but there's some highlighted in red. The red ones are number 4, number 5, number 10, number 11, number 14, number 15, and number 17. This is a single-family residence, obviously, and within a year period, it had 19 calls. That 29 is a misprint. It should be 19, not 29. So 19 calls for this was strictly police to respond to this one property within a year period. Now when you go down and look, I'm going to kind of explain some of this. The first one, narcotics. The important number out there is the 13 because that's a code or disposition that the police gave after they responded. Code 13 means gone on arrival. It means when they got there, somebody called about a narcotics complaint, they got there and they couldn't find anything going on, everybody was gone or whatever. Number two, same one, narcotics. Excuse me, your 15 minutes is up. Would someone like to make a motion to give him an extra five minutes? So moved. Would that be a difference? All right, I'll speed up then. So basically what the important numbers are that you're looking at are the ones, 17s, and if there's any on there which aren't nines or if it's just a seven. Those are codes that we use. The code one, which is number four, if you look at the one, and that's the first one highlighted in red is an arrest. So there was an arrest for a disorder with a weapon. The second one was a call for harassment, and that was looks like less than 30 days after the arrest for distillery with what weapon and there was a report done and it looks like with a out there maybe arrest also then you have down to number 10 11 there were arrests made on May 8th and within another 30-day period for somebody being drunk at that location in those two places. So the ones with the red, if you see a 1 or 17, those are arrests and reports made. So this actually would fit the criteria for chronic nuisance property because there's 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 calls within a year period that would put this over the threshold as a chronic nuisance property. and also down at the bottom 15 16 or 14 15 and 17 probably puts it under the six may put it be close on the 60 day time frame for those three calls there's not a lot of these I mean be willing to show anybody the calls and and looking through there for what it is there's not a lot of them in the city next slide cities and results there's a large number of cities now using a version of I tried to make this one for our city, and that's why the numbers are so high, because I feel like the majority of the people and landlords in this city are willing to work with this if they know there's a problem. And in other cities, there have been effective results for properties that continue to be in violation. Chronic nuisance ordinance reforms. This is in Seattle. It's a motel. The motel was having a lot of issues and problems. It's a lot to read on this, but basically it was number two on the list for their most frequent 911 calls. They did a chronic nuisance ordinance violation on it, and it's no longer in the top five for calls. And these two slides here kind of describe what they did and what happened. If you get on to that slide, it also works in Lexington, which there's another city that had this almost same things that you have an 80% decrease in calls for service on when you have that many calls at a location. They had the same thing, almost like that Aurora Motel. They think it was close to an 80% decrease in calls within a year time frame. So in summary, there's no fines if the property owner responds and works on abatement process. It's a civil process. That's why we're using preponderance of evidence used for determination, not doing criminal penalties. They'll be investigated on a case-by-case basis. This is a protection for the property owners for spite and abuse of the system. They actually have to look and see what the reports were and what the calls were. National best practice model, that's questionable because I have gone so much higher on the number of calls, but as far as other things, it falls right in the national practice of best models. This one is actually not in the ordinance yet. I don't think it made it in there, but I do agree with the second one down, which is an issue with people. Only one nuisance violation from a single occurrence, and that does need to be placed in the ordinance. And same with us. National League cities have limited identified chronic nuisance properties. That's looking at all the national numbers, and I don't think that we're any different. I've got a packet of stuff. I'll pass this out. You can look at it later. What's in that packet is a couple of cities. Madison, Wisconsin. There's some information from Racine. Some innovative programs they actually used with HUD housing, which they got with HUD in Section 8 and actually got together with them to look at the calls for service. And they call that a model program, but we've been doing it for about five years with the CLEAR unit. And we were actually making meetings and actually got it down to a little bit more science where we didn't have to meet with them once a month to go over their properties that we were getting calls from. So the cities that are in there, Seattle, they have about double our population with about a third of our square mileage. And with that, their chronic nuisance properties, you'll see, are very limited. And also with Madison, Wisconsin, it's about our size, about our population. and when you look at what they show for their chronic nuisance properties, they are very limited, and I think that we're not any different. We are not that bad of a city to be a lot more chronic nuisance property infested than these places. So take a look at that, and there's some more information in there. And if you have any questions, be here until you need me. Thank you so much, and thank you and the other members that worked with you for the many hours of research and work you put into this. There will probably be people that will have questions for you. Are there any people, any members of the committee that would like to speak? Okay, because it's not showing up. The public's on here, but I'm sorry, I can't hear you. Yes. Council Member Henson. Thank you, Chair. Keyes, I know that you've put a tremendous amount of work into this. That's very much appreciated. I know you worked on it a great deal when you were a police officer, and even though you retired, you were dedicated and wanted to see it through, and that is so much appreciated. I know that you're a very fair and reasonable person. I think this is a good ordinance. I think it's a lenient ordinance, actually, and I've got many friends out here that I've worked with that own properties that are against this. But I also have friends out here that live in neighborhoods that need a chronic nuisance ordinance to gain attention from property owners that move into our neighborhoods and don't care about our neighborhoods. And I truly, truly believe that everyone deserves a high quality of life. I just can't say enough that it's very fair and it's reasonable. Most of the folks that I know that I work with daily, that if there's a problem with their property and I call them, they take care of it. But it's the property owners that don't care, and we have to protect our neighborhood. So this is a tool that we can use, hopefully, to resolve that. And, you know, I've heard it's going to affect low-income folks. Low-income people deserve a high quality of life. Just because I was low-income, I should not have to live in a neighborhood where there's shots being fired and everything else going on and drug trafficking. I should feel safe in my neighborhood where I live and work. Exactly, and that's what this is designed for. And I know that you feel the same way about this, and I really appreciate what you've done. Thank you so much. Council Member Beard. Thank you, Chair. In situations where you have multiple structures on the same plot of land, but they may be multiple fourplexes or eight units to a building, but maybe there's eight buildings, how do you allocate these numbers here? is that all considered additive or do you take each specific structure and separate it out as to counting making the counts as to the number of activity that we've had part of it would be how the address is listed i think that's the way that that we would go with it just legally that you would look at the address and see how many units is listed at that one particular address The law department could probably respond to that. Keith wrote it is a one-to-four-unit residential property or a five-to-unit residential property. the structure is built on a portion of land i assume you're talking about something like the old pennington place where you had three addresses but you had like 10 buildings is that what you're talking about that and i'm not sure exactly how it's it's it's designated but the uh the property located on codel drive that recently sold right pennington place shuttered for some right there were three addresses three parcels yet there were 10 or 12 buildings yes you could do it one way well there's three addresses so that's three separate parcels okay so you're dealing with three addresses there so you would separate the three addresses out you would i think there's probably what eight or ten units or more than that i can't recall in each building. Maybe there's more 20 units in a building. The way he's got it written is that however many units there are in the parcel would be how you would count it. So if there's 10 buildings with 5 units on each building, that's 50 units on that parcel. Even though the activity may be confined to one building? Confined to one building, yeah. Right. That's how it's written. is confined to the parcel or designated by the street address, not by the building. I see a lot of work has gone into this. I don't see exactly how the implementation of this will be, in my opinion, a nightmare. Thank you, Chair. Okay, Council Member Beard, are you? Council Member Crosby and then Council Member Martin. Thank you, Madam Chair. Council Member Beard, as you know, that property was in my district and was a complete nightmare of a property. I was almost laughing to myself as I was looking at number nine. I think we had A, C, D, E, F, H, I, J, K, L, M, O, P, Q, S, and T out of those. but I'm just saying as council member I found that I was able to work through our current ordinances. It took a long time but once we were able to figure out that we were dealing with three separate parcels and that the city had been treating them as one parcel which was not the property owner's fault it was the city's fault. We were not finding them the correct way. We were not addressing the property the correct way And once we all got on board and kind of the left hand and the right hand within government knew what was going on, and also we worked with the PVA with some different things, and we were able to pretty much get this turned around in short order. So with that being said, I appreciate all the work, and I would have loved to have had something early on, but once we started realizing that we had many ordinances in place and that they were just not being enforced, whether it was because we just didn't have the ability or the manpower to do that. It took a lot of government resources. But, you know, those property owners were out of state, and frankly I don't know if they knew how bad the property had gotten. And, you know, once they started receiving maximum funds and for three different parcels, it became very apparent to them that they had a big problem on their hands. So I guess my comment is that I probably had one of, if not the worst, one of the worst ever properties in Lexington, and we were able to rectify most of the situation. So I'll say that up front. I also have a concern, and I don't know how you all looked at this, with, it's my understanding that, and excuse me, I'm just trying to in my simple way put this, that if an owner, if there's a violation and that they're going to evict somebody, like if somebody has a gun on the premises, they have to somehow give them notice. Like it's state law that they have to give them notice and that the person renting has the ability to rectify the situation and they're supposed to have a certain time to do that, which would mean, say, if it's drugs, no drugs for a certain amount of time. And how does what we're doing, does that interfere with what state statute says, or can anybody answer that? Because it seems to me like if it's like a drug violation and they're told that they have 14 days and they go through the appeal process and that they can have their time to try and rectify the situation, then are we still as a city going to enforce something that's already state law? Does that make sense? Yeah. I'm sorry. I think that there is a partial misconception on that is like focusing on the eviction part of it. There's a lot of other remedies that you can use. That one is just kind of a defense automatically that if you're going to get rid of the person that's causing the problem, then that's a defense. But there's other ways that we can work with that and monitor what's going on. And this is not going to be just one time that something's happened there. I mean, you've got to remember, if you've got one person that's done one thing and they rectify it, that's great. This is for properties who continually keep having problems at one address. And, you know, we go through the same thing. Part of this is a benefit to the property owners because, like you admitted there, that in your place the property owners didn't know how bad it was. This will give them notification that they need to start taking a look at it. And at what point do you notify them? I mean, the first incident? Once they hit the threshold as a chronic nuisance property. But if they're identified then as a chronic nuisance property, I mean, I guess I don't understand, because then they've been already tagged, this property's chronic nuisance. Why would we not be notifying them? I mean, say, I can't remember what the numbers were up there, But if we have one unit that has three incidents, why wouldn't that property owner be notified after two or three that you've got a problem in this apartment? Because we're spending a lot of government resources coming here so that they have the opportunity to rectify the situation versus tagging them as chronic nuisance property and enforcing them to, you know, it's almost too late where they can't even try to rectify. They don't know until it's identified. That's what it's doing is it's notifying them. And we couldn't do it on one or two because, like I say, in a year, 16,000 different incidences to different addresses all over Fayette County. You couldn't notify everybody when they had one or two incidents. It has to build up to realize it's a problem, and that would be for anybody. And then it's not too late once they become a chronic nuisance. It's not terrible to be tagged a chronic nuisance property because we could call it something else. I mean, we could call it an issue property. and then let them know that they have an issue at that property, and that would notify the property owners that there is a problem there. It's a benefit to the property owners that there is a problem on their property, that maybe it's being torn up or being used as a meth lab or something. And because the way the process is now, you're right. You could have one or two or three calls to some place, and the property owner doesn't get notified, so they don't have any idea. You could have 15 calls to a property, And the property owner never knows there's been 15 calls to their property because we don't let them know. This is going to let them know. This is where the city is going to say, we've got a lot of calls coming to this property. Let's work on it. Are they going to have the opportunity to work on it at that point with the people who live there? Or are they going to have to, I mean, because when I look through, like, with the abatement procedure and everything, I mean, is that what they're going to be forced to do when they are tagged a chronic property? I mean, it says that the enforcement is going to be on a case-by-case basis, but I guess it leaves a little gray to me on what, after they're identified, what exactly happens. Well, it explains it in there. It goes to the Commissioner of Public Safety, who will call them in and say, your property has had this many incidences of this type, and this is what we think you need to do. A lot of times it was as simple on some properties as having them put up no trespassing signs so when the police came, we could arrest the people that didn't belong there. That was it. That solved the problem. But the property owners didn't know it was an issue because they never were notified that we had 30, 40 calls to that property for trespassing. So now after a certain amount of calls, they get notified and we look at it and say, okay, what do we need to do to fix this? It's not evictions. That's not the first line of defense. I mean, it clearly states in there that you will look at it and work on an abatement procedure. And as long as they work on it, then there's no fine. Excuse me. Okay. I think Council Member Martin, I believe your time's up. I'll come back for more. Thank you, Chair. We're having a little trouble with being able to. We don't have a clock because we don't have. Is there something you can do? You can go on. Thank you, Chair. Officer Gaines, thank you. You and I had a little sidebar downstairs. I think you were coming here for something else, And I sort of want to follow up on that a little bit. This was several weeks ago, I think. So help me understand, what's the difference between a citation and a report? A citation would be where there's somebody there at a property, whatever, that was cited for a specific charge. A report would be, let's say we go somewhere as a police agency, and we could say that there's 40 or 50 people that's involved in a disorder. And we get there, and everybody runs inside the house. I mean, I don't make this up, but they will run inside a house. They'll lock the doors. We can't kick the door in for that as a police agency. So what we do is we write a report that on this date and time, this officer responded to this address for this issue, And when he got there, he observed 30, 40, 10, 20 people outside in a physical disorder. There were people that appeared to be obviously drinking when they pulled up. They ran inside the house, unable to make contact with them. And after three or four times of that, then that becomes a chronic nuisance because you're responding to that same place. You may never be able to cite somebody personally for it, but under this preponderance of evidence, you go to the same place that many times for something, And there's an issue. I mean, that's just the way I have to look at it. I know I don't have anybody coming to my house that many times. So when is a property owner notified about a citation? About a citation? When it would hit the criteria for chronic nuisance property. After it's been designated, but not before. Correct. Okay. And the same with a report? Yes. Now, it's true that once you're designated a chronic nuisance property, in fact, it's in the ordinance that they're notified that they're subject to penalties, not less than $500 and not more than $4,000. Is that the notice that's given to them? So clearly it's worse to be a chronic nuisance property than not because you're put into a particular class of enforcement in which higher penalties are assessed. Is that correct? Very correct. That's what it's designed to do. Okay. Okay. I'm sorry. So a property owner who wants to either challenge the designation of being a chronic nuisance property can't do it in the steps that lead up to it. They can only do it when they find out they've been labeled a chronic nuisance property. Is that correct? Correct. Because up until they hit a threshold, they would never be notified. Yeah, they're never notified. And so the time that you really want them to be working on it, they don't even know about it or may not even know about it. Correct. The ordinance, excuse me, I guess the citation or the report, it doesn't have to be against the property owner, does it? No. It could be against some unrelated third party. Correct. And so as a result of this ordinance, we are basically going to penalize the property owner for things that happen on or around their property. Is that fair? No. Okay. Help me understand. What we're doing is we're notifying them that it's a problem and asking them to help abate the problem. They're not penalized at all until they refuse to help abate the problem or until they just don't respond because they don't care. But essentially what we're doing is we're going to punish them. And so they have, up until the point where we have assessed them this designation and put them in a class where they're going to get higher penalties, they've not had any opportunity to defend themselves. Is that correct? Well, that is the opportunity. Once you are notified that you're, I mean, we could call it something besides a chronic nuisance property. We could say after this many calls, we will notify a property owner that they have an issue with their property. It's doing the same thing. And if they don't help abate the problem or if they don't respond, then we will fine them. I mean, we're just playing with words here because, I mean, I don't have a problem changing the ordinance to read that way. I think it's more than words because I think that the fundamental tenet of American jurisprudence, of our laws, are fair notice and opportunity to cure. Fair notice is not finding out that somebody has found you guilty of murder or of robbery or something like that. Fair notice is something that's given to you with an opportunity to defend against the charges before the penalty is assessed. And that's what this does. There's no penalty. Thank you, Chair. My time is out. Perhaps I can help explain the procedure a little better. This procedure is exactly the same procedure that's used in code enforcement. When there's a violation, a notice is sent out. The property owner in this case has two choices, or three choices. One, they can appeal the notice. Two, they can come in and have an abatement plan with the commissioner to help clean up the property. Or three, they can ignore it. If they choose number one and appeal the notice, they go in front of a hearing officer over in code enforcement, the same code board hearing officer hears the code enforcement cases, will hear this. If they choose to abate the property or break the nuisance, then it's over. if they ignore the letter that they've been designated to chronic nuisance and that they are not going to help clean it up, then another letter will go out saying you have been found to be a chronic nuisance ordinance, chronic nuisance property. You have not submitted a plan or responded to our notice. And then, again, the property owner has two choices. One, they can appeal the fine to the code board. so they had actually before they get fined they have two chances to appeal may i respond very briefly then i'll with shortly chair the difference is is that in our code enforcement you get a letter saying your grass is too high or you have a broken sidewalk or you have a dismantled car in your front yard what this is is someone that says someone made a noise too loud And by the way, this is the third one, and the first one happened six months ago or three months ago or however it fits underneath the timeline. What this is is that you get a notice that way after the fact that someone had a beer in your front yard, by the way, 45 days ago or something like that, there's no opportunity to defend against the person that wrote that down and said there was a guy in your front yard with a beer. There's no way to defend against that. They don't have notice of it, and suddenly they've been put in to a category in which they're subject to huge fines. So we can discuss it in a little bit, but my time is out. Thank you, Sharon. I'll just respond to that one more time. They have not actually violated the notice so they've hit the threshold of them. Now, in code enforcement, you get a housing citation. It is a citation that you violated the ordinance, and you have a chance to appeal or correct it, and that's the same thing that goes on here. You do not get notice of anything until you have actually violated the law. My time is up. I will come back. Thank you. I will so take the gavel. The chair recognizes Council Member Lawless. Thank you. There are a couple of things. So just for clarification, When there is a citation from whatever division, if it's waste management, fire, police, code enforcement, building inspection, the owner of the property will be notified. Is that correct? No. I can speak to code enforcement. Yes. When there's a citation for a housing violation, the owner of the property is notified whether they live there or not. Right. So would all of these things, would they get a letter with all these things that are included in the chronic nuisance ordinance? In other words, what I'm hearing and what I agree with is that there should be a letter or report or citation, whatever division calls it, that on May 1st, this violation occurred under waste management on your property. Right. The citations have a notice of the date, the time, and the synopsis of the event. And in that, could that citation also include some verbiage that notifies them of the chronic nuisance ordinance? In other words... Oh, you mean for all the code citations and all the... Oh, to put that on different entities? That all those reports or citations or whatever they're called, that that be included on that form. This is to notify you that this may count as a violation under the chronic nuisance ordinance so that they know. because I agree with what Council Member Martin is saying is if they don't know that, then, you know, we need to let them know. So they'll know they need to start taking action immediately. Well, most of these that are listed are criminal events, so it would be a police citation. The only non-police citations on here would be parking violations, which could be issued by Lex Park or the police. And the only other one, well, there would be code violations for junk vehicles. That would be the other division impacted. And then fire code violations, that would be the division of fire would be impacted. So there would be only three other divisions impacted whose citations would count as a chronic nuisance besides police. Aren't there some waste management issues in there? I don't believe I saw that. Oh, any conditions that negatively impact health and sanitation? I'm sorry. Any conditions that negatively impact health and sanitation? Well, that could impact the health department. Okay. So I guess what I'm saying is if that were added to the whatever letter, report, citation that they get from whatever division, that this could so they can start dealing with if it's a problem tenant. The only problem was you couldn't, I don't know if we could force the health department to do that because they're not. Okay, but what I'm talking about is the waste management issues, code enforcement, building inspection. Yes, if you put that in the ordinance, that would be just a little disclaimer sentence on the bottom of their citation. The other issue I have with this, and I'm very much in favor of this chronic nuisance ordinance, the concept, and I think so anyway. But I am concerned that under Section 1261, Number 5H, it talks about domestic violence and sexual assault. and under six, I'm sorry, number six, domestic violence and abuse be included in there as somehow that really frightens me that someone would be afraid to report domestic violence or a sexual assault, if they were afraid that that meant that there was some understanding that they might be evicted. I mean, I don't think that belongs in there. To me, the chronic nuisance that we experience, oh, my time's up. I'm sorry, I'll clock back in. Let me just respond to that quickly. That's just a definition. There's actually a whole paragraph in here based on a Columbia Law Review that specifically says that domestic violence will not count, period. And that's just a definition. Domestic violence will not count. Oh, okay. There's actually a specific paragraph in here that states that. Okay. That's just a definition of domestic violence, so you would know what did not count. Yeah. Council Member Gordon. Thank you, Madam Chair. Oh. I'm going to turn the gabble back over to Council Member Lawless. Thank you, sir. Council Member Gordon. Thank you, Madam Chair. Keith, thank you for your presentation. And some of us up here are not members of this committee, so are not going to be voting or that sort of thing. But I did have a question. And I apologize. I had to step out for a minute. but on Section 12-61, the definitions, did you address on Number 5 how you arrived at the numbers for the different properties? Yes. Do you have a copy of this? Yes. You may have said it when I was out of the way. It's in there. If you look at an example for calls for service to the one specific address, and then it has an example with a lot of calls on it, and they're numbered 1 through 19, and some of them are red and some are black. This is a number of calls within a one-year period, and if you look at the ones in red, those are the ones that would actually count towards a chronic nuisance designation. The ones in black don't count. And the reason being is the number right before the date, you'll see either like a 1, a 17, a 13. A number 1 means there was a citation given. A number 17 means there was a report made. And based on this, there was enough citations and reports made on this one to designate that a chronic nuisance property. So my question, let me give you an example. on 5A, a non-residential property upon which any combination of three or more nuisance activities in a 60-day period, how did you arrive at the three or more during a 60-day period? That's the nationally standard best practice for those numbers. For other cities that have chronic nuisance ordinances? Yes. And then my second question was, how did you, there was some discussion earlier about the term chronic nuisance property. How many of the other cities that have this call it a chronic nuisance? Almost all of them. Okay. So, because I think the term has this. That was my conversation with Mr. Martin. was the fact that you could say once they hit a threshold. You don't have to say it's a chronic nuisance property. Once they hit so many calls, then they would be called in to work on evading the property. And I don't have a problem with changing that. Because what this is doing is there's no violation of law other than the numbers of calls under this ordinance until you hit that threshold. And also with the reports and talking about doing citations and notifying the owner, The difference with the police would be is those citations don't go to the owners, whereas code enforcement and the other ones actually do go to the owners. And you also said there's a large number of cities using a version of this. How many would you say? Nationwide, I would put it in a whole lot. I don't know how many. I mean, is it 50, 200, 300, 500? 500 or more, I would guess. All you have to do is just Google chronic nuisance ordinance, and it will start popping up a list of cities. And it started, if you look at the history of it, probably somewhere early seven, eight years ago, it really started becoming when they started doing it. And it's gained as probably budgets and manpower issues have arose out of multiple calls to single locations. and also blighted properties bringing down the neighborhood areas that they're in. Okay. Thank you very much. I appreciate your work on this. Council Member Kay. Thank you, Chair. I'm also not a member of the committee. I appreciate your giving me the opportunity to ask a question. This is a technical question. It probably is addressed to the law department. In Section 1265, there are four actions on failure to comply. And at the end of the third, it's a very small point, there's an or. And it looks like that indicates that you can only use one or another of those as opposed to being able to use them either in sequence or in combination. Can you clarify that? Thank you, Roland. Or means you can use three or four. So you can't use three and then use four, or you can't use one and two the way it's written? And is that the intent? How did you intend it? No, I think it would be and. It should be an and? Yes. Thank you. Thank you, Chair. Council Member Stennett. Thank you, Chair. Keith, go back to the spot you were talking about when the owner is notified. You're saying after three violations the owner will be notified that this property is a chronic nuisance, right? Within a 60-day, if those violations happen within a 60-day time frame. So why not notify the owner after the first one or second one or carbon copy them on the notice? It seems like it's too late down the road. because then we enter abatement procedures and different things. Well, I think if you're looking at code enforcement and probably solid waste, those citations or notices do go to the property owners. But if you look at the amounts of citations or reports that are done through the police department, like I say, I had 16,000 different incidences that came up, and then you're not just giving the citation to whoever's there at that location and time. you would have to track down a property owner or do something of that nature to try to send them a carbon copy of something of that nature. Once again, this is only targeting very, this would only affect very few properties. I've looked through it. Everybody's more than willing to look through and see what ones it would take, but that's a handful, and that's what's been shown nationwide that I think there's a fear that's not really there. Yeah, but my whole point is we're creating a new ordinance, correct? I agree with what Councilman Crosby was discussing earlier. If we enforce our current ordinances and do them like we're supposed to, we wouldn't be here today, first of all. And we're creating a brand-new ordinance that only a handful of people out of 100,000 households in our city will affect. But it affects everyone, and we're trying to target a handful of people. So that's when I started getting into issues with this type of legislation. So you just said 16,000 notices. We couldn't obviously send every property owner every time someone was cited. Who in LFUCG is going to administer this and track it and track how many each property gets? It's complaint-driven. So if you have a property that somebody, whether it be a police department agency, fire, government agency, thinks that this property, we've been there multiple times, which we have that issue with sometimes with them. So the Division of Police is going to keep the database and track how many times each resident or each property is sited within 60 days? The database is already there for the police, and I'm sure that code enforcement has a database they can pull from. So let's say that property A, somebody comes up and says, hey, I think the police have been there, or the police say, hey, we've been here a lot of times. Well, then the notice, somebody's given notice, so it would be the Commissioner of Public Safety. There's a complaint on it. So then he would look and pull that same report that I did on that specific address and say, okay, here's this address. Here's how many times the police have been there. Code enforcement, have you been there at all? Have you done any enforcement? Anybody else? And those databases are there. And then you look at it, and if they have, then you call the property owners in and say, then we need to work on the abatement. There's not a penalty for it. No, I understand that. but we're missing a very important step. Who is going to monitor that? Who is going to pull the code enforcement database? Who is going to pull the police together and look at each property and know we're to the third point in 60 days? I mean, because it's not happening right now. Our departments are not communicating as well as we probably could be if we all were on the same database. And we've talked about this since I've been on council for 10 years. We've talked about that. But who is going to be the person? I mean, is it going to be the commissioner? Sit there all day long and make sure that the calls? I mean, because someone has to come through this data. Complaint-driven. And that's what I'm saying. I don't think that there's going to be that many complaints. I've talked to the commissioner about it. He's on board with this. I spoke with David Jarvis on my way here. He couldn't be here because he has personal matters. And he is fine with being able to pull any data that's needed to follow through with any of this. Police department, I've spoken with the chief. He's on board with it. So the effect, you're correct. There's a lot of people that the ordinance could affect. But what happens is the process is so slow with the way the process works. And that's the way this is designed to speed up those extremely bad properties and fix them. And that's what's happening nationwide is there's a realization that it's costing the city not only money and resources to continue going to these places, but it's also bringing down the areas that these considerably chronic nuisance properties are in. No, and I agree. We have issues in certain parts of our city, you know, but maybe a dozen that we need to address. So I like the attempt. I just still am not there to the point where we need to, you know, I really want to make sure who's inside LFUCG is going to monitor this and what documentation means in form of a citation or report constitutes a violation of this ordinance. I'm still not comfortable with that language. I still think it can read a lot of ways. I still feel like a neighbor could call on a neighbor just to get back at them. That's what the report is designed to, and the investigation by the Commissioner of Public Safety is designed for that safeguard. to you there's can those um 16 000 calls there may be a property that has 50 calls to that one address it still doesn't meet the threshold because there's never been any enough reports or enough arrests made on that property to hit the threshold and that's what has to be investigated just because you've been sent in in a complaint that's where somebody will pull the reports which would come out of the commissioner's office or his designee to look at the individual reports and see what really happened, which safeguards those complaints that come in that are vindictive or whatever. Maybe the commissioner wants to... I'm sorry. Well, I just want to know who our designee is going to be. If we pass this today, who's going to be our designee on this ordinance? So I'll listen to more questions. Thank you, Council Member. Council Member Martin. Thank you, Chair. Officer, is it likely that low-income properties would receive sort of a higher percentage of designations as chronic nuisance reports or receive more chronic nuisance reports than other types of properties? there may be a i would say there's a probably a smaller percent or a greater percentage for that one of my concerns is that and i agree with council member henson that that everybody has a right to be safe but i'm also concerned that this is going to discourage folks from investing in low-income property and at a time when we've heard and we're hopefully moving toward a solution or at least a partial solution for affordable housing, I'm concerned that this might be pushing in the other direction. Go ahead. So once a property gets designated, a chronic nuisance property, what is supposed to happen? Because you've indicated that that's their notice. That's the notice of the property owner that that's a problem. So what happens at that point? then they would come in and the commissioner of public safety or whoever he designates would sit down and they would look at what the types of calls are, what the reports were, and say this is what the problems are because that's what I did in the clearing unit and that's what we worked so well with property owners doing is say this is what the issue is. Now what do we really need to do to get to the root cause? That's what this is all about, getting to the root cause rather than making multiple responses to the same problem. and look and see what type of abatement procedures would need to be done to fix this. And then it would go on to put those into place. Okay, so let's say there's assault going on. What is the property owner supposed to do about the assault? Well, if it's a continual problem, which is what we really need to look at, if there's one or two assaults, it's not going to hit the chronic nuisance. If there's three assaults within 60 days on your property, then you need to look at the reports and see what the report said. I think that that's where you have the protection with the property owners, where the commissioner will look at it and say, okay, is there a way that the property owner could help with this? Is it the property tenant that's causing these assaults? Is he involved in all three of them? So we're wanting the property owner to basically intervene to stop these crimes. To assist with working on the abatement of having multiple calls to that address. Help me understand, and I apologize, we have a rule about limited time, so I'm going fast, so I apologize. Non-residential properties, is that defined anywhere in here? I think it's defined under that section in there. Well, let me cut to the chase. All right. All non-residential properties are treated the same here. Is that correct? Okay. We'll skip over whether it's defined or not. So if we have a house that's converted to a commercial use, that's a non-residential property, right? Correct. or if we have the entire shopping center on Southland Drive or some portion of that, how does it get designated within? Is it by parcel or by owner? My intent was by address property. By address. That was my intent when I wrote this because you wouldn't want to say that Southland Drive, when you have multiple addresses and one huge thing, it's a separate address. except for owners. So you wouldn't say that that whole... But you could still have a single owner for dozens of addresses. Yes, you could. But that's not going to sweep all those into a single one. No. So if we have Turflin Mall, for example, I don't know how many addresses are on Turflin Mall. You see where I'm going. My concern is about a large property versus various small property. If someone could find that, that would be helpful. So looking at a large low-income or affordable housing apartment development, if it is a single address with unit A, B, C through Z, that's going to be a single address? With unit numbers. With unit numbers. So you have one address, but you may have 30 units within that one address. So that raises the threshold. But there are some, if it's a condominium, they almost might have their own addresses too. Is that right? That's very correct. Or if it's a townhouse community, they might be divided into. So there's some arbitrariness to the use of addresses versus a location or something like that. Yeah, and that's why there's a fluctuation between amounts of calls. If you have one address with multiple units, the calls go up. If you have multiple townhouses that are individually addressed, then it's staying at the lower threshold. Well, again, I appreciate your work on this. I don't feel like it's done yet, at least I'm not there yet. I think there's a lot of different ways to skin the cat. Trying to make things safer and to hold people responsible is a good thing. But I go back to what I said before. I feel like there's not fair notice and opportunity to cure here. and finding out that you're a nuisance property, I think it's too late. I think if we want to affect this earlier, first of all, we've got an ordinance, which I agree if we had the staff to enforce it, we might not be having this conversation. So that's a budget issue, not an ordinance issue, because this is going to create a lot of stuff that will need staff that we might not have to put in. But the other part of that is that the property owner, There needs to be some connection between the property owner and what happens. And holding a property owner liable for an individual they may not know, someone they may have been standing on their front yard who they don't know, or the fact that these folks on Westwood Court or off Elizabeth Street where the students are all partying, well, the one property owner who's not involved who might be gone for the week, they could suddenly find themselves within this. And I think that there needs to be more notice and connection to the occurrence and the property owner. If we're going to cite property owners, by gosh, they should deserve it. Excuse me. Thank you. Council Member Martin, would you take the gavel so I may speak? I will take the gavel. The chair recognizes Council Member Diane Lawless. Thank you, sir. The things that, again, I'm supportive of this concept, the things that I would like to see and what happened during the NCAA is The 3rd District is the core, the center of the city. It has our downtown, it has UK, and it was in newspapers and on news stations across the nation, not because they won the NCAA, but because of nothing less than what were riots. and it was an embarrassment because the core of our city is as much of our brand as our agriculture, farmland, and our equine. And I'm sitting there thinking, if I were watching this, would I want to move my business there? Would I want to send my child to that school? Would I want to be a top researcher and pick UK? That being said, what I would like to see in here is less about the criminal activity, or that can stay, but the issues that brought in many of the people on State Street, and it wasn't just State Street. There were incidents in many of the neighborhoods of vandalism, fires, et cetera, throughout the district that didn't make the State Street riot threshold. and it is situations where the city has not had a coordinated effort that waste management will go to the same properties over and over again. They have to go three times in a year to get, I think, a $15 fine. How much money is that costing us? That same property is having parties and the police are called or just making mayhem through the neighborhood throughout the week. People are afraid to call. Or, you know, if you call on that at 3 o'clock in the morning, you have to wait until the police get there, which may be 5 o'clock in the morning, and then you've got to go to work the next morning. Zoning violations where the landlord themselves, dumping gravel being one of my favorite, zoning violations and building inspection violations, demolition by neglect, and we've done a lot toward that by escalating fines for civil penalties on those properties. and to say that low-income neighborhoods, people are going to be less willing to invest in low-income neighborhoods and decrease affordable housing, that's not true. What happens is they're more willing to invest in them so they can turn them into rental property where they don't have to have any responsibility for what goes on. And a perfect example was there was a rental property in one of my neighborhoods where there were four kids living there, and they were terrorizing the neighbors at all hours. And I called the landlord. The landlord called their parents. And he said, and they had torn up a median, and this landlord redid the median flower garden and put up a new, but he was responsive, and he took care of it. He said, your parents have been notified. If it happens again, then you can look for another place to live. But very few of the landlords let that happen, and it's because all these violations stand alone. There is no communication, and we as a city have kind of turned a blind eye on a lot of it until we came to what happened on State Street and University, but also happens a lot. That was extreme, and it's a miracle somebody didn't get killed. So I would like to see those kinds of violations in there, and there's no reason we can't have a database that enters any of those violations, And I agree 100% that the owner of the property needs to be notified every time that they get a violation or there's a report of noise. I mean, this one group of kids, you know, they'd run in the house and hide by the time the police got there. And so there was no report. But everybody, I mean, five neighbors saw it. But the owner of the property needs to be aware, and that needs to be part of that process with the very first notification, and these are the rules. And they can evict the people that are causing problems, but also the landlords that are causing problems by illegal dumping of gravel, You know, building without permits and ignoring zoning issues as well as code enforcement issues take responsibility for that, too. And everybody deserves a fair, decent quality of life. And that means if you're a long-term resident, renter, adult, whatever, nobody needs to be afraid and be threatened by their neighbors. And I don't care if you make a million dollars or if you're living on welfare. But certainly what has happened in many of the neighborhoods in the third district, and I know in other districts, is the landlords that are not responsible go in to the low-income neighborhoods, and they buy the property and rent it out to people who are irresponsible, and they wash their hands of the whole situation. So in that way, I would like to see these other things added in there, and I agree 100% that every landlord who has a property cited or reported or whatever for any of these things, that that be included in the very first one, not after they've accumulated five or six and now have to deal with it. They can always say, you know, go away. You're no longer welcome to be renting my property if you're going to behave this way, or you can straighten up. So thank you. The Chair returns the gavel to Council Member Lawless. Thank you so much, and I promise not to hit anybody with it, but I get agitated. after riots. Council Member McCord. Thank you, Madam Chair. It's about solving some problems. And at the end of the day, first off, I want to thank you, Keith, for all your hard work and for bringing in this draft to us. And I kind of view it as a draft. It is very difficult to legislate personal responsibility. When people just throw personal responsibility to the wind, it's tough to legislate it. But what's really terrible is when you live a couple houses down from a chronic nuisance situation and you feel kind of helpless as a resident. So I understand where this is coming from, and I appreciate that. Keith, let me ask you a question. How many properties are we talking about in this city that would fall into this category today, roughly? um like the 16 000 incidences that i had there um i've gone through because it's time consuming to go through and sort them out but i've been through about half of them so far and i think i've found two okay so here's what we got we've got we're trying to create a brand new law that has all this stuff attached to it that as council member senate said we don't even know who would monitor it this that and the other but we've spent years worth of work uh we've got we've got these problems. So I don't know if this is just being a lame duck and I don't only have so much time, but let's just create a solution and let's get it done. We can do it right here, basically. Here's what the deal is, is that you've got a handful of chronic offenders. And what I would suggest, Madam Chair, is that on a quarterly basis, that you bring those offenders and put them up on that screen. You put every member of public safety in this room and every property owner and put them in this room. And let's talk about it in front of the entire country, in front of the entire city and say, this is where we're going. Take Council Member Crosby's, what she had said that's so appropriate, let's take the rules that we got and bust their tail. Let's go ahead and take these people out that are doing this thing. We don't need to waste government resources like we're wasting on that one property. But at the end of the day, you have a public safety committee that was created that didn't exist a couple years ago. So that's what we should be doing in this committee is looking out for the public's safety. So what I would be in favor of is let's sum this up in some sort of resolution that's a report out to the full council and say here's how we're going to solve this problem, and we're going to have these folks working with us instead of trying to tweak this, that, and the other. We're going to take the very best work that you've done, and we're going to put people in this room and solve it with the resources that we already have. We don't have to create something new because, again, as I've said before, government can't be all things to all people. But as you so passionately said, Chairwoman, there are some places that really, really are tough and neighbors are frustrated. And if the Public Safety Committee can take that up and you know that you're going to be in front of this entire city, then if that doesn't shake you up, then you need to be fine. Now, I know we've got some rules whether we can throw addresses up and this, that, and the other, but that's the stuff we can work on. At the end of the day, this committee needs to see a quarterly report of those 2 to 12 properties, and we need to throw the full weight of this government behind it every time, every quarter, and be done with it and move on. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you. There's Council Member Crosby and Council Member McCord. I mean, Ford. McCord, Ford, Casey, Chris, anyway. And then if nobody else will try to hear from some of the public's input, because we're getting close to time. Does that suit the committee? That's fine. I'll be brief with some of the comments I was going to make, because Council Member McCord, I think, adequately addressed a few things. Again, I appreciate all of the work that goes into this, and I'm trying to figure out where the happy medium is because I think that on these 5 to 12 whatever properties that we should be calling them to the carpet and doing the maximum things that we can do. So what I have a problem with, I think, is Council Member Martin has talked about, is the notification. Because it seems to me that there aren't that many properties. And it also seems to me that we're going to have some of the same problems that we currently have if we have some sort of nuisance where we're calling the police and it's taking two hours, and by the time they get there, that's not going to change. I mean, that's still going to be a problem because it's a budget issue. We don't have enough people to enforce our ordinances. And that's really what it boils down to. And until this body decides and the public's behind it that we are going to do whatever we can to get adequate staffing with our police and fire to be able to go out and address this, I see this as another thing that we're going to try and pass that has unintended consequences. and that's where I'm just really held up on it. I think, though, that we do need to add some maybe more stringent fines for people who are bad property owners. And I believe if I were a property owner and there were guns shot on my property, like Council Member Henson said, I would want to know that immediately and want to take care of it because long term I think it would affect my overall ability to rent or whatever because people don't want to live somewhere if there's gunfire going on. And so I wouldn't want to know that. So personally, I could rectify that. So I don't know what the happy medium is. Maybe with the commissioner, if there's some threshold we could come to where we could do something that might be a little bit more stringent. I think trying to tie this into what happened with the students, I don't think that's a fair time to bring that in to this. I think that was very isolated. and I also think that some of the well you may nod your head that it's not but we don't win a national championship or go to the final four every single year but we're going to from here on out Coach Cal we do burn couches a lot well and there are again we already have things in place that address that and it gets back to the manpower of being able to enforce what we have on the books and that's why that has to be a priority of this body. So I still have plenty of time where I could talk a whole lot more, but I will just ask that maybe it doesn't appear that we have any type of consensus on this really today, and I would encourage maybe we could get some kind of input from the audience, but also know that we're nowhere near being ready to do anything with this today and try and get some input before we get to that point, And that's what today was about. So I would just mind them that this is clearly nowhere ready to be moving forward. And I know that we want to do something, but maybe there's some kind of compromise that we can come to. Because I appreciate all the work that's been put into this, and I do see value in the fines. But from my perspective, it might be more of a point of notification and then move to where they're identified as chronic, whatever, nuisance property, and then it goes into the procedures. So thank you very much. That's all I have. Thank you, Council Member Crosby. Council Member Ford. Thank you, Councilwoman Lawless. I'll be very brief. I think it is my hope that the council, those in the room, those who are watching, really recognize the need for this ordinance. And, Keith, I appreciate your work. I appreciate everybody that's put a lot into this. This is not just an exercise just to be passing a law to pass a law. Council Member McCord is right, and Council Member Henson mentioned it earlier. Imagine if you lived on a street or you were a neighbor to a chronic nuisance. Imagine if you've been a neighbor or a close nearby resident of a chronic nuisance for a long extended period of time. You feel helpless. You feel that this government has not been responsive to your needs. and everybody in this room wants to be able to provide some relief to our neighbors who feel this way. I appreciate Council Member McCord's comments earlier, and I hope it's possible and I wish it's possible that our legal counsel could endorse that as an option. I think that's an option of us always. We can always call out the bad actors. But my intent is to help this government and its citizens create a culture of being a good neighbor is expected. And particularly in low-income neighborhoods, that's probably more needed than ever. So I don't want to politicize this issue. We don't have time to bring the bad actors down here and put them up on the screen. and this is not being critical of Council Member McCord at all. But we need the assistance of property owners and their residents to help abate chronic nuisance throughout our neighborhoods. And that's what this committee, I hope, recognizes the need to do. It's unfair to our folks who have to put up with this. And I hope that we can find a way to support the legislation presented. I agree that it is perhaps in draft form, but I think a great deal of work is going towards helping getting us on our way. And let's keep that in mind. What if you live next to a chronic nuisance? What would you want this government to do on your behalf? Thank you. Thank you. Council Member McCord. Thank you. Again, in the order of trying to move things forward and producing some progress here today, I want to bring forward a resolution. I want to make a motion for a resolution that what's reported out from this committee is that the motion is that the Commissioner of Public Safety, along with police, fire, code enforcement, pull together whatever list that they deem necessary that falls under whatever definition of nuisance that they like, and to bring that list before this committee at its next meeting to see what can be done about those specific properties in our city. That takes immediate action while we are working out kinks for potentially an ordinance, But at this point in time, that moves us forward and addresses the problem. It also does not cause an additional strain on bureaucracy and so forth like that. So moved. Okay, so we have a motion by Council Member McCord, and would you repeat that motion? Certainly. that the Commissioner of Public Safety, Director of Code Enforcement, Police Fire, any other folks that we are tasking the Public Safety Commissioner to put that group together to create a list of nuisance properties by whatever definition they want to create that list and to bring that list before this committee at its next meeting to see what can be done specifically about those properties. Okay, and we have a second by Councilmember Ellinger. Is there any discussion? Councilmember Ford, I'm sorry. I don't know why I keep calling you Councilmember Cord. Oh, were you going to speak to the motion, Councilmember Henson? Commissioner Clay, did you? Well, I'd like to just ask a couple of questions about some guidance. It seems to me that the resolution is rather arbitrary in terms of placing an awful lot of leeway at the Commissioner level of defining, however I wish, a nuisance, first of all. And secondly, under what authority would we then bring homeowners in? I'm not asking you to bring the homeowners in. I'm asking you just to combine the list so that we can see what the volume of nuisance properties is. And it can be, again, I want to give you some latitude so that we can make this as big as possible. I think where that's coming from, Commissioner, is that he had mentioned he's gone through this list of 16,000 complaints, and there's really two homes. And what we may find is that we're under a dozen, and if that's the case, then I think we can figure out how to address that a little bit better. So I want to give you some latitude. Thank you. Councilmember Ford, did you want to speak to the motion? Okay. Any more discussion? Okay. Thank you, Councilmember Lawless. What does this do for the proposed ordinance that we have standing? I'll support Council Member McCord's call to ask the Commissioner of Public Safety to aid us. But does this allow for the draft ordinance to remain in committee for our consideration? It does. That was my intent for it to stay in here to see, based on that information, if that changes things dramatically or if there's things that can be tweaked. So the draft ordinance stays in committee, and then at the next public safety meeting we would have that brought forward. Okay. Thank you, sir. Thank you, Chair. Okay. Any other discussion on the motion? Okay. All in favor? Aye. Opposed? Okay. That motion passes. And I'm assuming that input from any council members as to things they might want to see on there and how it's administered would be. We have a lot of people here that came to speak, and I think we have a direction on this at this time. We have another item fire an EMS task force report out that shouldn't take the full amount of time. Is it the committee's wish to try to hear from all these people that signed up on the chronic nuisance? or do you want to? I'm sorry, what? I don't know how to say this. There may be people who on that list may not wish to speak since the committee's not taking action today and we're coming back. I don't know for sure, but you might go down the list and then we have an idea of how much public input and just whether or not we should go on with our agenda and let them speak at the end. I certainly think if we have a long list of people, we need to get through our agenda, particularly since the issue is not moving forward. Thank you. Councilmember Farmer. I was just going to suggest that we might want to take up the other two items on our agenda rather quickly because I think we could discharge them. And then if folks want to give us comment up until our 3 o'clock time, I think we'd be very glad to have it. Okay. Thank you. That sounds like a good idea. Is that everybody okay with that on the committee? Okay. Fire EMS Task Force report out by Council Member Farmering. Thank you. And in the spirit of moving along and keeping these people relevant to our process and noting that the Fire and EMS report is something that's very top of mind and something that's very, I think, interesting right now, I would just ask the committee for the opportunity to make this report out to the full council during work session today rather than during this meeting right now so we can move on to the next item on the agenda, so moved. Second. Motion by Council Member Farmer and seconded by Council Member Beard to do the report out at the full council. I certainly support that. Any discussion? I guess will we be able to have the opportunity to ask questions and do we have a full meeting this afternoon with presentations? Because I notice there's recommendations on here. Will you be making motions based on these recommendations? I would just anticipate asking the council to endorse the findings of the EMS task force once the report is made. Because my question would relate to the fact that there's, like they recommend the training, and as many of us know that there's annual training, and I've at least read in the paper, I believe that the mayor has asked for some of these training sessions. I don't know if that's with the paramedics or not. I would be, oh, I guess I would not be very willing to pass the recommendations until I know how they coincide with what we're doing with our overall plan. I agree and I understand, but I'm just, I'm not endorsing the recommendations. I'm just asking that we take this issue up at the work session rather than right now. And my question was, are you going to be making any motions? And I thought you said to accept the report. And in the report are recommendations that, I mean, are we going to have people there who are able to answer those questions during public safety or during our council work session? I would assume the same folks that would be here now would be here then to provide input as we would need. Okay. Okay. So we have a motion and a second on moving this to the committee of the whole work session. All in favor? Aye. Opposed? Okay. That takes us to horses running at large. and Council Member Beard, are you presenting on that? It's Council Member Stenet. No, I'm not. I'm in the category of goats, pigs, miniature horses. Oh, that's right, and miniature pygmy goats. Okay. Council Member Stenet. Yes, ma'am. I can respond to this and make a motion. This is coming from the Animal Care Control Board. We have an issue at times with horses running at large in Fayette County. And currently, under our code of ordinances 4-10.1 or 4-10, there is no ordinance prohibiting that in Fayette County. So basically, we could have horses running at large with no penalty. And this would actually establish a penalty for violations of letting a horse run at large. So it's pretty simply put. But we found out over enforcing the law over the last couple years that there is no ordinance that prohibits that. ironically so this would establish that ordinance so we have a motion by council member stennett and the second by council member Martin is there any discussion one question I'm so sorry I have just one sure technical question So if you're running at large, you're not with an offense. Is that what that means? Right. Thank you. And this is large horses running at large. Let's make that perfect. All in favor? Aye. Opposed? Are we about to blow up? Are we a nuisance property now? Okay, so that passes and will be... Now we will hear from the public who signed up to speak, I think, mostly on the chronic nuisance. Sharon Harris or I think that's what that says Sharon Harris are you here do you wish to speak okay George Pruitt you here want to speak Joyce Register okay Stephen Marshall I'll wait for the next time okay Okay. Shelby Arnold? No. Jamie Gooch? Are you here? I'm sorry. Would you like to speak? No, she wouldn't. Okay, is there anybody that wants to speak? Oh, imagine my surprise. Okay, Mr. Harden. Can I have a full 15 minutes? No, you get three. I do have somebody that yielded their time to me, if that's all right. But what I'd like to do is I'm Craig Harden, 228 Lexington Avenue. I'd like to just take the opportunity to just pass. I wrote my comments down. Is that your home address? No, it's not my home address. It's my office address. Could you state your home? 4737 Inman Drive. I'm sorry, what? 4737 Inman Drive. Okay. Just want to make sure we're to send a Christmas card. I'll watch for that. So if I may, and I think I have enough that will go all the way around and capture Council Member McCord there. So what I would like to say on this issue is, particularly my first paragraph there, is I feel that I need to point out that we've worked on this thing for quite a while. And I'm just going to paraphrase a couple of things here. And we've worked on this particular ordinance for quite some time. and we've tried really hard to be professional and bring this to a point where we could do something with it, and it really feels like pushing a rope here. And I wanted to comment that the process is a little bit broken. I was just going to recommend that Officer Keith Gaines, I mean, I love this guy, he's a terrific volunteer. I've worked with him for many years, and hopefully we've solved a lot of problems in several districts. And I'm just going to say, you know, he's a volunteer, and it's very difficult for us to work with a volunteer. I just want to recommend that you either hire him as a consultant or get somebody, if you're serious about this nuisance ordinance, get somebody that we can work with on a full time that we can sit down and really get something done with it. because at this point we are here to oppose this. I'd like to ask everybody in the room that is here today that opposed this ordinance as written to stand, please. Okay, so I don't know if we can get everybody back next time. It's very difficult to get everybody to take off of work during the day to do this, and I know you all appreciate that. So I just wanted to thank you very much for being here, and I wanted to recognize Officer Gaines that he's a volunteer here and so we are happy to work with the council on this and continue to work on it. At this point, it's our strong feeling that this was just bad legislation and it needs to go away and maybe come back with something a little different and we certainly are committed to try to help the city do that. And I'm speaking on behalf of the Apartment Association. Thank you very much for your time. You're very welcome, and you're a volunteer, too, in this capacity. I will say that for most of the time that Officer Gaines was working on this, he was an employee. But we've got volunteers working with volunteers, it sounds like. Thank you. Okay, now moving on to items on the agenda. And somebody put this in about .03 types. The chronic nuisance is hopefully coming back the next meeting. Right-of-way signage, well, we'll stop. Public safety disability claims marker. Okay. Paramedic training. That's really the EMS report as well. Okay. Like three items. All three of them. Looks like the paramedic training, at least part of it's on the recommendations for later today. Community corrections, best systems of management. This was put into committee by Council Member Myers and Council Member Kay. Okay, do you want it? Do you feel like it's? Okay, and I'll check with. We don't have a quorum. Oh, we don't have a quorum? No, you sure don't. Okie dokie. Well, we will see everybody at 3 for the council work session.