# Council Work Session - January 22, 2013 > Auto-transcribed civic record · January 22, 2013 - **Permalink**: https://meetings.lexingtonky.news/meeting/2843 - **Source video**: https://lfucg.granicus.com/player/clip/2843?view_id=14&redirect=true - **Date**: 2013-01-22 - **Last revised**: July 16, 2026 - **Length**: 17,877 words > ⚠️ **Auto-generated content.** Audio from the official Granicus video was auto-transcribed with OpenAI's open-source Whisper large-v3-turbo model, run locally by The Lexington Times. Structured facts were extracted with GPT-4o; the narrative summary was written by Anthropic Claude. Verbatim wording may contain errors. See [methodology](https://meetings.lexingtonky.news/about/methodology) or [report a correction](mailto:editor@lexingtonky.news). --- ## Meeting Overview The Urban County Council met on January 22, 2013, at 3:05 p.m. in the Council Chamber on the 2nd Floor of the Government Center, with Mayor Jim Gray presiding. The council addressed nine agenda items during the session, including public comment periods, rezoning requests, budget matters, and various reports. The body took 16 votes and heard 3 public comments from members of the public. Among the items approved were requested rezonings, a summary approval, new business, council reports, and the mayor's report. The meeting also included informational presentations on budget amendments and continuing business matters. ## Attendance The following individuals were present at the meeting on January 22, 2013: * Jim Gray * Linda Gorton * Chuck Ellinger * Chris Ford * Diane Lawless * Julian Beard * Bill Farmer * Kevin Stinnett * Jennifer Scutchfield * Jennifer Mossotti * Harry Clarke * Peggy Henson * Ronald Akers * Michael Kaye * David Myers * John Clark No absences or late arrivals were recorded. ## Votes and Decisions All motions brought before the Council on January 22, 2013 passed unanimously. **Special Council Meeting for Police Disciplinary Hearing** [timestamp: 0:00:00] Motion by Gorton, seconded by Henson, to schedule a special Council Meeting on February 4th, 2013 at 3:00pm for a police disciplinary hearing. Passed unanimously. **Docket Approval** [timestamp: 0:00:00] Motion by Beard, seconded by Ellinger, to approve the docket. Passed unanimously. **Public Hearing on Neighborhood Design Character Overlay** [timestamp: 0:00:00] Motion by Henson, seconded by Ellinger, to schedule a Public Hearing on an Ordinance creating a Neighborhood Design Character Overlay (ND-1) zone for 52.68 net acres. Passed unanimously. **Amendment to Special Meeting Schedule** [timestamp: 0:00:00] Motion by Henson, seconded by Farmer, to amend the motion to schedule a special Council Meeting to hold a Public Hearing on Ordinance 2 for March 5th, 2013. Passed unanimously. **Docket Approval (Second)** [timestamp: 0:00:00] Motion by Beard, seconded by Gorton, to approve the docket. Passed unanimously. **Speed Limit Resolution for Bellefonte Drive** [timestamp: 0:00:00] Motion by Beard, seconded by Gorton, to add to the docket for the January 17th, 2013 Council Meeting a resolution authorizing and directing the Division of Traffic Engineering to lower the speed limit on Bellefonte Drive. Passed unanimously. **Summary Approval** [timestamp: 0:00:00] Motion by Farmer, seconded by Gorton, to approve the summary. Passed unanimously. **Budget Amendments** [timestamp: 0:00:00] Motion by Gorton, seconded by Myers, to approve the budget amendments. Passed unanimously. **New Business Approval** [timestamp: 0:00:00] Motion by Gorton, seconded by Henson, to approve all new business except item K. Passed unanimously. **Item K Approval** [timestamp: 0:00:00] Motion by Stinnett, seconded by Myers, to approve item K. Passed unanimously. **Code of Ordinances Amendment** [timestamp: 0:00:00] Motion by Lawless, seconded by Scutchfield, to place on the docket for the January 17th, 2013 Council Meeting an Ordinance amending sections 14-85(a) thru 14-95 of the Code of Ordinances. Passed unanimously. **Confirmation Hearing Schedule** [timestamp: 0:00:00] Motion by Gorton, seconded by Ellinger, to schedule a Confirmation Hearing for January 31st, 2013 at 4:30pm. Passed unanimously. **Mayor's Report Approval** [timestamp: 0:00:00] Motion by Stinnett, seconded by Ellinger, to approve the Mayor's Report. Passed unanimously. **Ethics Commission Nominee Approval** [timestamp: 0:00:00] Motion by Gorton, seconded by Stinnett, to approve the nominee for the Ethics Commission pending the Confirmation Hearing. Passed unanimously. **Commissioner Approval** [timestamp: 1:36:26] Motion by Gorton, seconded by Beard, to approve Richard Maloney as Commissioner of Environmental Quality and Public Works. Passed unanimously. **Adjournment** [timestamp: 1:47:52] Motion by Gorton, seconded by Farmer, to adjourn. Passed unanimously. ## Budget and Financial Actions The meeting included authorization for the following financial and contractual actions: **Contracts and Agreements** - **L1177-12**: Approval of an agreement with KD Analytical Consulting, Inc. to participate in the Kentucky Business Investment Program. - **L1258-12**: Authorization to execute the Kentucky Revenue Cabinet Exchange of Information Agreement with the Kentucky Revenue Cabinet. - **L0043-13**: Authorization to execute agreements with twenty-two (22) engineering firms for Category #2 of RFP #33-2012 covering Dig and Replace Pipeline Projects. - **L0045-13**: Authorization to execute a Release of Easement releasing a portion of a utility easement on property located at 3600 Winthrop Drive. - **L0063-13**: Authorization to execute a Partial Release of Storm Sewer Easement on property located at 1146 Monarch Street. **Purchases and Change Orders** - **L1266-12**: Authorization to execute a Purchase Order with Machinex Technologies Inc. for custom sorting screens for the Materials Recycling Facility in the amount of $31,188. - **L0064-13**: Authorization to execute Change Order No. 2 with Claunch Construction, LLC for the Meadows/Northland/Arlington Public Improvements Project, Phase 3D, in the amount of $26,439.86. **Grants** - **L0047-13**: Authorization to submit an application and accept a $10,000 award from the Commonwealth of Kentucky Office of Highway Safety for participation in the Click It or Ticket Safety Belt Enforcement Mobilization for FY 2013. ## Public Comment Three speakers addressed the meeting on January 22, 2013. **New Business Item A** Chris Croom introduced KD Analytical Consulting, Inc., a small company seeking to participate in the Kentucky Business Investment Program. [timestamp: 0:01:04] Croom indicated the company is expanding into the first responders market. Jonathan Turpinning followed with remarks on the same topic, reiterating KD Analytical's mission to support first responders with chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear equipment consulting and repair services. [timestamp: 0:01:04] **Pension System and Disability Retirements** Tommy Puckett raised concerns about the high number of disability retirements in police and fire departments. [timestamp: 1:28:31] Puckett cited 102 retirements occurring in less than 13 months and called for reform of the city's disability ordinance in response to this trend. ## Appointments Richard Maloney was appointed as Commissioner of Environmental Quality and Public Works. ## Contested Items **Pension System and Disability Retirements** Tommy Puckett raised concerns about the high number of disability retirements occurring in the city's police and fire departments. He cited specific data showing 102 disability retirements in less than 13 months, which he characterized as problematic and warranting reform. Puckett called for changes to the city's disability ordinance, indicating that the current system may be enabling or encouraging a level of disability retirements he considered excessive. This discussion became heated, reflecting significant disagreement about the appropriate policies governing how disability retirements are processed and approved in these departments. The contested item centered on whether the existing disability retirement framework was functioning as intended and whether reforms were necessary to address the volume of such retirements occurring within the police and fire services. ## Public Comment – Issues on Agenda [timestamp: 00:01:04] The council opened the floor for public comment on items listed on the agenda. Two visitors from KD Analytical presented during this period: **Presenters:** - Chris Croom - Jonathan Turpinning **Presentation:** Chris Croom and Jonathan Turpinning from KD Analytical presented on New Business Item A. **Outcome:** This agenda item was informational in nature, allowing the public to address the council on matters under consideration. ## Requested Rezonings/Docket Approval [timestamp: 02:44] During this agenda item, the council addressed the docket approval process. No docket approval was required at this meeting, as no council meeting had been scheduled for that week. Despite the absence of a formal docket requirement, the council proceeded to approve the docket and related motions. The item was approved by the council. ## Approval of Summary The Council considered approval of the summary of the work session agenda. Ellinger presented this item to the Council [timestamp: 00:02:44]. The Council approved the summary without discussion. **Outcome:** Approved ## Budget Amendments No budget amendments were presented during this agenda item. The council proceeded directly to new business without discussion of proposed budget modifications. ## New Business [timestamp: 00:03:16] The council addressed several new business items during this portion of the meeting. Key speakers on these matters included Martin, Scutchfield, Lane, and Farmer. The new business items presented for consideration encompassed: - Contracts with engineering firms - Purchase orders - Agreements for utility easements - Safety programs The council approved all new business items that were brought before them. The outcome of this agenda item was unanimous approval. ## Continuing Business/ Presentations [timestamp: 0:23:09] During this agenda item, the Council reviewed the Public Safety Committee summary and received a presentation from Director Rodney Ballard of the Division of Community Corrections. Director Ballard presented information on improvements across several operational areas within the Division of Community Corrections, including: * Staffing improvements * Morale enhancements * Revenue increases * Operational efficiency gains The presentation was informational in nature, with Henson and Ballard serving as the key speakers during this portion of the meeting. No specific concerns or debate points were documented from this agenda item. ## Council Reports [timestamp: 1:34:05] Council members provided reports on appointments, work groups, and legislative initiatives during this agenda item. **Key Speakers and Topics** The following council members participated in the reports: Gorton, Stinnett, Ford, and Myers. **Appointments** The council confirmed Richard Maloney as Commissioner of Environmental Quality and Public Works. **Outcome** The council reports were approved. ## Mayor's Report Council approved the Mayor's Report during this agenda item. The discussion involved key speakers Stinnett and Gorton. In addition to the Mayor's Report itself, Council also addressed a nominee for the Ethics Commission. The nominee was approved pending confirmation. The outcome of this agenda item was approval. ## Public Comment – Items Not on the Agenda [timestamp: 1:28:31] During this portion of the meeting, the council received public comments on matters not included on the formal agenda. Tommy Puckett addressed the council with remarks focused on pension reform and disability retirements. Puckett raised concerns about the high number of retirements occurring within the municipality and emphasized the need for ordinance reform to address this issue. His comments highlighted the financial and administrative implications of the current retirement practices and suggested that changes to existing ordinances would be necessary to manage the situation more effectively. The council received these comments in an informational capacity, with no formal action or decision made during this public comment period. --- ## Decisions - **Motion** — passed: Motion to schedule a special Council Meeting on February 4th, 2013 at 3:00pm for a police disciplinary hearing - **Motion** — passed: Motion to approve the docket - **Motion** — passed: Motion to schedule a Public Hearing on an Ordinance creating a Neighborhood Design Character Overlay (ND-1) zone for 52.68 net acres - **Motion** — passed: Motion to amend the motion to schedule a special Council Meeting to hold a Public Hearing on Ordinance 2 for March 5th, 2013 - **Motion** — passed: Motion to approve the docket - **Motion** — passed: Motion to add to the docket for the January 17th, 2013 Council Meeting, a resolution authorizing and directing the Division of Traffic Engineering to lower the speed limit on Bellefonte Drive - **Motion** — passed: Motion to approve the summary - **Motion** — passed: Motion to approve the budget amendments - **Motion** — passed: Motion to approve all new business except item K - **Motion** — passed: Motion to approve item K - **Motion** — passed: Motion to place on the docket for the January 17th, 2013 Council Meeting, an Ordinance amending sections 14-85(a) thru 14-95 of the Code of Ordinances - **Motion** — passed: Motion to schedule a Confirmation Hearing for January 31st, 2013 at 4:30pm - **Motion** — passed: Motion to approve the Mayor’s Report - **Motion** — passed: Motion to approve the nominee for the Ethics Commission pending the Confirmation Hearing - **Motion** — passed: Motion to adjourn - **Motion** — passed: Motion to approve Richard Maloney as Commissioner of Environmental Quality and Public Works --- ## Full transcript Greetings and greetings. I will call the meeting of the work session together. Call the meeting together. Thank you all for joining us. First on our agenda is public comment for issues on our agenda today. I'll open the floor for comment for issues on the agenda. I believe that we do have some visitors here, Chris Croom and Jonathan Turpinning from KD Analytical. And they are here in connection with New Business Item A on the agenda and would like to say a few words. If that's a surprise, then that's good? All right. Welcome. I'm just right up here to the podium. First of all, thank you for having us. Thank you to the Cabinet for Economic Development for assisting us in this project. We are a small company. We consult to DOD Homeland Security, and we're expanding into the first responders market of firefighters and police departments. Mainly what we do is we consult to these folks, we support them, and we repair instrumentation for chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear-type equipment. And we're looking at expanding out of Bluegrass Station. All right. Chris? Jonathan. Jonathan, okay. I just met you guys, so I got confused. Well, thanks very much for joining us today. Thank you. Yes, sir. All right. Next on our agenda, any requests for rezoning or docket approval? There is no council meeting this week, so no docket approval is needed. We can move on to summary approval. Is there a motion? Council Member Ellinger. Motion by Council Member Ellinger. Second by Council Member Beard. Is there any discussion on the motion? Hearing none, then we can take a vote. All in favor, please say aye. Opposed, no. Motion carries. Next on our agenda, budget amendments. There are no budget amendments. And it allows us to move on to new business. Is there a motion? Move approval. Second. Motion by Vice Mayor Gordon, seconded by Council Member Ellinger to approve new business. Is there any discussion on the motion? Council Member Lane. Yes, sir. I have a question on item D. Which item? I'm sorry. Item D. D. D. All right. Charlie Martin. Mr. Martin is coming to the podium. That was D, correct? D. Yes, since I had a phone call last week, I want to make sure I'm answering the right one this time. That's good. That's good. Well, good afternoon to you, Mr. Martin. I just wanted to get an update on this. Is this to qualify these engineering firms to bid on work coming up, or will this be qualifying them to do the work on some kind of price, some kind of time and materials contract or something? What kind of range are we going to have with these firms? This qualifies them to be eligible for capital projects now moving forward in this particular category, this being the dig and replace of existing pipelines. What will happen is they'll be ranked, similar to what's in the memo that's in the packet. And then when a project comes up, the top three ranked are then to submit price proposals for the project in question. We'll evaluate those. The lowest priced one will be the one that gets recommended to be awarded that project. And then the next two stay on the list, and the whole thing repeats itself over and over again. We have approximately 54 dig and replace projects in the remedial measures plan itself. So there's a substantial amount of work, obviously, coming forward, and this saves you all from having to sit on these selection committees over and over and over again. Okay, when we award the contracts, will we know what the three bids were? Will you provide it to Council for a review? We can provide those, yes, if you would like. The remedial measures team, my internal team, recognized that they're going to have to be demonstrating to council, to committees, et cetera, how much we're paying for all of these projects, for design services, easements, construction, the whole lot, because we've presented to you a schedule and an anticipated cost of the remedial measures plan. We're going to show you how that's going, good or bad. So, yes, you will get to see those. Okay, and the engineering firm that's sort of managing the whole project, are they involved in the selection also, or are they sitting on that committee and they review the pricing on that? No, they were not eligible to compete, and they were not part of the selection. Purchasing the mayor's office, myself, we looked for a council representative. Unfortunately, we weren't able to find one, probably because we were trying to do these all over the holidays. It was an interesting holiday for me to read proposal after proposal after proposal. Okay. Thank you, Mr. Martin. Okay. Thank you, Ms. Laine. I think Council Member Farmer and Vice Mayor Gordon have a comment or a question related to the same item. So Vice Mayor Gordon. Thank you, Mayor. Thanks, Charlie. I did have questions on item D, as in dig. So once an engineering firm has had a project and then they drop off? They go to the bottom of the list. They go to the bottom of the list. So did you say, I apologize if you said it and I missed it, how many years worth of these 54 dig and replace, how long do you anticipate that taking? That's spread over the 11 to 13 years. If I remember correctly, this thing is structured, is that we go three years in, and then we'll recalibrate. We have the option to rebid or to extend with the existing list. We used this approach. There were eight firms on the pre-qualified list that we had previously, and we were able to rotate through that, I believe, almost two times in the course of two years because we're projecting these 54 projects, but there are other projects that end up coming up for us. And this kind of allows us to accelerate the project by getting it started quicker. So if this is over the course of the 11 years, it's conceivable that some of these engineering firms may have significant changes that might change whether they were prequalified, correct? if it's seven years down the road. So what do you have built in? The scope requires them to notify us of any changes in personnel, and we will then evaluate that to determine whether or not they still meet the criteria as far as being pre-qualified. Okay, that makes sense. I appreciate it, and this is terrific. I really applaud you. There are six different categories, and you may not be necessarily aware that you've already approved three of those categories as well. There weren't as many firms on the list because there's not necessarily as much of a body of work. I will say this is that what we've found so far and the ones that we have awarded have been considerably less than what the engineer's original estimate was. It's a highly competitive environment out here, and maintaining that competitive part of this, even though they're pre-qualified, is so far working well. Okay, thank you. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Vice Mayor. Council Member Scutchfield, unless your question is related this way. Council Member. What's the next thing about the state? All right, we'll come right back to that then. Council Member Farmer. Council Member Farmer. Thank you both. So this is a follow-on to what we did two summers ago where we picked eight and they rotated through. Right, yeah. That has now gone by the wayside because it was really for this similar category, but it was really kind of a test for purchasing and finance and other folks to get comfortable with that we could do this pre-qualification approach. Louisville Water Company, MSD, many large utilities have been using this same process for a long time. We've just been launching it here recently. But, yes, this will replace what I call the Elite Eight that you were part of the selection for. In this case, we have categories that are for storage tanks, for dig and replace of pipelines, for stormwater flooding projects, for neighborhood rehabilitation projects such as Acton Park that you're familiar with, small pump stations, and large pump stations. Small and large pump stations are still to come your way. How did you get to a total of 22? Anything special to get to that? No. Actually, it's a committee, so majority rules. I personally would have been more comfortable with fewer than 22, but it's manageable. There's just enough of a body of work. We spent a lot of time talking about how you don't want to put somebody on the list, and you're number 21, but you never, ever get any work out of it. That's really kind of misleading. But we felt like it was important that we make sure that we take all the people that are qualified rather than trying to label somebody who's disqualified when they're not, when they are and did in fact meet the criteria. So we ended up with 22 firms. So is the way that that chart appears in the packet, is that the rank order of them? Yes, that is the intention, is that they are ranked based on the least amount of work with urban county government within the last 12 months of which this was done to the most amount. So if you've already got a lot of work with us already, you're going to be at the bottom of the list. If there's a tie, which there are a lot of ties for zero work, is that then it's based on your score that you got from the committee. And the scoring, as you see in the memo on page 10 in your packet, there was a lot of emphasis on the qualifications of the project manager and a lot of emphasis on office, the locality of the office. So I think you might find is that many of the folks that are at the very top of this list, they are some of the smaller firms that are located here in Lexington that have not gotten work with us in the past, which I'm excited about the opportunity to give them the opportunity to show us what they can do. It's just a fact that we have a lot of work to give, and we have a limited time frame in which to do it. So there are some new names, some people that we really haven't done business with. I would say since the time I've been here, the top nine, I have never had a contractual relationship with in the past. Talked to a couple of them, and I've told them, I said, this is a real opportunity for you to show us what you can do. It's a double-edged sword, though, because sometimes you can show us what you can't do, and that may be the last chance you ever get. Which is just to my last question. I mean, some of these people may not prove out. So in the same way the vice mayor is asking about when people do good or when they change, when they don't perform, you kind of? Yes, they will get booted from the list, yes. One of the things that I had put in here, as you'll see in the scoring ranks on page 10 of your packet, was I required them to have a risk management plan as far as in their proposals, because I wanted to evaluate that very thing, is that if you're a small operation, what is your plan to replace a key individual or a couple of key individuals? The beauty of the dig and replace stuff is, as I was describing to someone this morning, it's not as complex as pump stations and treatment plants and storage tanks and things like this. You're building a house, this is more of the sidewalk and the driveway, not necessarily the structure. So that's been the reason why you probably see a larger number of firms on this than you will see moving forward on the pump stations because if you're naming an electrical engineer and you don't have a sub, that's a huge part of a pump station, 50% of the cost. So we're going to be a lot tighter about how we evaluate that. Bottom line is that they have to perform. We have deadlines. It will be in their contracts that they pay any fines that we incur because of lateness due to EPA. We recover those costs. We haven't had that happen yet, but that is in every design contract and construction contract, stipulated penalties. I enjoyed helping you before. I'm sorry I wasn't able to do so during the fourth quarter, but thank you. Thank you, Mayor and Council Member Scutchfield. Thank you, Council Member Farmer. Council Member Scutchfield. And this is item C. Just because it is such a large amount, I see that it is budgeted, but could you provide us with some, I guess, information on what exactly the six-finger discs are? I don't think there's anybody here from Waste Management. So I'm Todd Slayton from Central Purchasing, but my understanding is it's custom machinery. There's only one manufacturer of the device and that's who's going to make the screens for us. He may know more about that. Okay. I apologize. Director Feast is under the weather today, so I gave him a call. These are individual rubber discs that are used in sorting the materials, and this is basically just routine wear and maintenance costs associated with it. As Todd mentioned before, MachineX is the sole proprietor, so it's basically just routine parts that go into the screening to replace those that are worn. These are six discs, and each screen, I think, comprises of 60 to 70 discs, so this is just a replacement cost for those. Thank you, Council Member Scotchfield. Just parenthetically, I'll say I appreciate the question related to an issue like that since it is a sole source, and in being aware of those issues, we've all come over time to understand the importance of it. Council Member Sadi. Thank you, Mayor. Council Member Farmer had asked a couple of the questions to Mr. Martin already that I think are sufficient answers. Thank you. Thank you, Council Member Sadi. All right. Council Member Lane. Yeah, Mr. Martin, can I get one follow-up question? Just out of curiosity, because you have multiple persons working doing different components of the sanitary sewer system, how do we work on warranties? Because if there's more than one person working on it, something fails somewhere, how do you handle that? And I presume we're getting some warranty on the quality of the workmanship. Jeff, how? These are the design contracts, and so the warranty is really in their insurance and stuff as far as making sure they have professional liability insurance and those type of things like that. In the time that I've been in this business, that hasn't been as much of an issue as it is in the construction end of it. In the construction end of it, we can write basically whatever warranty we want into it. you typically will see a one-year warranty, and for a pipeline, we would go out and inspect it with our closed-circuit television cameras. Any warranty you put into it, though, you're going to pay for it in the back end. If you ask for an extended warranty, just like buying a television set, you pay for it. But right now, professional liability, along with quality control checks of the design work that is done by these outside consultants, along with then in the construction level, it would be the standard one-year warranty unless we have a desire or reason to have a greater one. Okay, and who do we use for the outside consultant to review the design work that we get? Well, for example, even our own team, you know, is that we've, you know, the folks that are on my team, they, you know, probably totaled several hundred years in experience. Hazen and Sawyer will play some role in some quality control aspect of it. And then for the pipelines, every one of them at 30%, they have to go to Stantec. Stantec is the capacity assurance program team. What they do is they take that design, analyze it, run it through the model to make sure that it will convey the peak flow that we're targeting. Because if it doesn't, then it goes back to the design engineer to fix that. Otherwise, then we know it's a solid design as far as conveying peak flow, and we're good to go. So, you know, like I said, in this particular one, it's probably less risk associated with it. It's pipes and manholes. It's not highly complex, as I was saying before. Dealing with the property owners and dealing with the alignment and all the easements and the lawn restoration is probably as challenging as the pipeline itself. But, you know, there's a lot of eyes that are on this. I can't say that every plan is going to be 100% reviewed. But lastly, and I just thought of another thing as I was talking, the Division of Water has to review and approve all facilities' construction plans. All right, and this brings up another question tied in with this. With regard to the construction, do you envision you'll have 10 or 15 companies that will be qualified to do the construction, actually install the plans, or will you use a lesser number of companies, and will you have the same kind of bidding process for that? You know, Council Member Lane, I haven't gotten that far yet. This is six months behind where I wanted it to be, to be quite honest with you. I wanted to do this last summer. I'm going to figure once I get through these six pre-qualified categories, and then we'll kind of look and see from there. I have a little bit more concern about pre-qualifying construction companies. I'm still, I guess I'm old school a little bit about having competitive bidding straight up the standard way. It seems to work pretty well. And so part of me says if it works, don't fix it. You know, since with professional contracts, the CAO policy is to always form this work group to review these things. It added six to eight weeks to the time frame. And if we're supposed to be banging projects out all the time, it seemed like a logical place for me to go. and try to attack the schedule. On the competitive bidding thing, you don't have that same kind of thing. There's not trying to get everybody's schedule mixed together to review a bunch of proposals. It's here it is, your bids are in this day, you open them, there's a low bidder, and if they're qualified and that bid's sound, you move on. So I'm not inclined to do that right now, but clearly we will look at it as we went forward. If we felt like it had not only a savings of time but a savings in money, then I'd bring it forward. Okay, so you're more or less saying that one contractor would do a big chunk of the work and not have it broken up into components of work based on what you're saying right now. Let me phrase that differently because I'm not so sure that's exactly what I said. Of these 54 design projects that I just talked about, dig and replace, each one of those will be competitively bid. You may have 54 different contractors that get those, or you may have one that gets all 54. Depends on how good a contractor he is and how much capacity he has. But that's how we've done this all along in this government. We do competitive bidding for construction-oriented type of stuff. The connectivity of things, if there's a concern that one project will not mesh with the next one, is we're starting at the bottom of the hill and basically laying a pipeline up. They have an elevation that they have to meet at the far upstream manhole. The next design engineer is designing off of that elevation, and that contractor is building to it. So I would never let different contractors work on a pump station because it's such an integral thing. A pipeline is like different people paving the road. One guy can pave the first two miles, and somebody else can pave the next three miles, and it works fine. Okay. Thank you very much. Thank you, Council Member Lane. All right. If there being no further questions or comments regarding new business, we can take a vote on the motion. All in favor of the motion, please indicate by saying aye. Aye. Opposed, no. Motion carries. All right, next on our agenda is continuing business and presentations. First, NDFs. Is there a motion on NDFs? Move approval. Second. Motion, Vice Mayor Gorton on the NDF, seconded by Council Member Kaye. Is there any discussion on the motion? Hearing none, then we can take a vote. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed, no. Motion carries. Next on the agenda is the Public Safety Committee summary, which will be presented by Council Member Henson. Council Member Henson. Yes, ma'am. The agenda for the Public Safety Committee that was held on January 15th was very short, and it was to elect a chair. There was a motion by Council Member Stinnett to nominate myself, Council Member Henson, as committee chair. There were no other nominations, so a motion by Council Member Ellinger to elect me to that position, and seconded by CM Beard, the motion passed. And then I asked Council Member Stennett to serve as the vice chair, which he accepted, and a motion to adjourn. Thank you. Thank you. Council Member Henson. All right, next on our agenda is a presentation by Community Corrections. Commissioner Mason will introduce the presentation. Commissioner Mason. Thank you. Once again, I'm here for a major presentation by one of our significant divisions here in terms of size. And I think you've got the material in front of you. This is a very positive presentation. There have been some extremely outstanding accomplishments thus far in community corrections. We felt like that looking back two years ago, the transition report, as I referenced last week about fire, the transition report was equally scathing about some of the things that were going on in community corrections. And we pursued a course to bring in a professional corrections administrator. And I think we've done ourselves a great service in finding Director Ballard and recruiting him away from state government. Not all the problems are solved. You can't solve everything in a short amount of time, but we've gone a great way towards alleviating many of the problems and taking steps towards resolution of the ones that still remain. And I think that clearly the corner is turned. He uses a different phrase that's on your last slide that I'll let him go ahead and take as he gets through the presentation. But I'm extremely excited about what I've seen going on out there in the last seven or eight months. So I'll turn it over to Director Rodney Ballard. Thank you. Director Ballard, welcome. Welcome. Good afternoon. Mayor, it's good to be here and good to be in front of council, and welcome to our new council members. To those new council members, I'm pretty new to. I came here in March. So we're going to get to learn how this works together because I'm still learning. I brought part of my team with me today because it's my first opportunity to meet council in 13. I wanted to introduce to my team. To the rear of me is Major T.R. Gibbs, Major Mike Korb, Major E.D. Dabney, and Major Nolan Hill. And I have one major that couldn't be with us today because of a prior commitment. But let me tell you something about, compare me to Coach Calipari. I have the dream and I have the vision, but the players score the points. The men and women behind me and the men and women at home watching us on TV for the Division of Community Corrections are the ones that truly deserve the credit. They're carrying the ball across the goal. I'm their cheerleader. So I thank each and every one of you for your hard work. It helps if you turn it on. When I first met the mayor, one of the things he wanted me to do was put a strategic plan together. And you know the old saying, if you're lost, any road will do? Well, we're not lost. We created a map. And our map was our strategic plan. Where were we going to go in the Division of Community Corrections, and how were we going to get there? So we began working on our map. Okay. I'll give you a snapshot from back on March 15th, which was my first day here in our community. We were 58 correctional officers short. Morale was suffering. Our staff were working three to four shifts over time a week. For those who don't familiarize with our work schedules, we work eight hours. So they come to work at 8 o'clock in the morning, get off at 4 o'clock, and then have to work until midnight, drive home, get up, and do that again four and five days in a row. They were physically fatigued, burned out. In fact, we were giving discipline for people not wanting to come to work. I didn't blame them. They were just physically exhausted. You can look at our snapshot there for the March of 2012. Our overtime for that period was $181,000. I took some snapshots out of PeopleSource to give you a little idea where we were at and where we're going. You can, excuse me, wrong button. If you look there, I took back before I came here on March 11th and you can look at what your overtime was. And almost a year to that date, you can see we were up $71,570 in overtime. I took another snapshot several months later, and you can see we were starting to turn the corner from 11 to 12. Overtime was down $40,700, and again in October, down another $24,000. So staff were working hard, hiring people, and streamlining the hiring process to get us fully staffed. Looking at the months, you can look at highlighted in yellow for you the largest amount of overtime, 2010. To the least in August, $176,000. By my math, that's roughly $133,000 difference. And you can see as we're continuing on, we're continuing to go down. I'll put in a little different chart for you to look at. You can see how our overtime has went from here, and it's somewhat leveled off. What drives my overtime is that when one person calls in sick, somebody has to work. When I send one person to training, somebody has to work overtime because we don't have enough staff to cover their shifts without paying overtime. But we're addressing it and working on those as we speak. Good news, we're fully staffed. They tell me prior to many years in the past we've had trouble keeping staff. I can tell you we're doing a great job. I wish Mr. Cameron was here so I could give him his credit. I think the last time we hired we had 300 people go on to our website and apply for our jobs here. so we are now hiring the best of the best here at the division. I think another little barometer there for you to look at, we've hired seven officers who've been reinstated. They've talked to their co-workers. They said, you know, things are changing. We're not working five days a week, 16 hours a day. Things are on the uptick, and they've come back and said, the grass isn't greener on the other side. Can I come back? And we've taken them back. One of the other issues when I first met counsel and the mayor was the officer's dining room. If you know where the jail's at on Old Frankfort Pike, There's not many places close. If you've been to the belly of the beast, you know you can't get out of there very quickly. You can't carry your keys in your pocket, can we, George? We've got to wait for somebody else to open the door for us. So it takes a while to get out. So we instituted the ODR. I went to my friends with Aramark and said, what can you do for us? We opened the ODR up at no expense to the taxpayers. Our staff are paying minimum prices. It needs some fine-tuning, and we're going to work on that in our next RFP. The hours of operation needs to be worked on the menu. but we've got it open, we've got it cleaned up, it's decorated, you saw my Christmas pictures at least it's a place for the officers to get away from the housing units and get away from the inmates and come relax we had a big celebration, it was a big deal because they'd been there for years and they'd done away with it for many different reasons one of the things I tell my staff, I cannot focus on mistakes of the past but solutions for the future so the mayor joined us and the commissioner in reopening our dining hall Catastrophic fun As your former Deputy Commissioner with the Department of Corrections Much like our heads here My budget was directed by the Governor's budget And many times throughout our budget cycle Our money would be cut Well at the Department of Corrections we had a rule We continued to file catastrophic claims Even though we were broken, had no money When I came here I continued to encourage our staff To continue filing the claims Even though the state told us they didn't have any money In FY11 FY12 and to date in FY13 You can see we've collected 312,000 from catastrophic. Catastrophic, in essence, is an inmate goes to the hospital here in Fayette County, stays, is admitted. The bill costs more than $1,000. We're submitting those bids back to the Department of Corrections, and they're paying the bills. So the staff did a great job in keeping up with turning the forms in for a long time with no kudos. And this year, as you can see, their work paid off. Early on, the commissioner and I met with the U.S. Marshals trying to increase revenue, and we looked at a couple of things, housing more federal inmates. It only makes sense to us that we've become the largest housers of federal inmates because of our location to the U.S. courthouse here in Lexington. So you can look at some quick numbers. For FY12, our average daily population was 80, and you can see there the revenue we brought in, 1.6 million. And for FY13, we're averaging 93, and that date, the amount you see there today, is from November the 12th, and that's what revenue we've brought in so far. So not only are we focusing at the division to reduce the expenses, but also increasing our revenue. New council, you can talk to the old council, and they'll tell you that when we went to institute a fee increase, it was not pleasant. We had people lined up speaking against us. Thanks for your foresight. You voted the fees in. And I'll have some more slides to tell you. But that's one of our kiosk machines to help capturing bad debt from inmates. Just a quick snapshot. Since just October of this year, you can see where the same period in 2011, this is what we took in the door, and this is 2012. So we've increased our fees by about $13,000 and some change. Here's really the good news. I reached out to Vice Mayor Gordon's staff and was hoping Corey Dunn could be here today because we do listen to the division. And one of the complaints we heard, as you council members will remember, the cost of the over-the-counter medication, clothing, was too high. I had a contract with a company, so you just can't void the contract and start over. So I went back to my vendor and said, I need you to do me a favor. Figure out a way that we can lower our costs for those items, and at the same time, you don't lose money, because if they lose money, We've got to renegotiate the contract. Well, you can look real close. We made some significant changes. Look at the deal from $4.95 to $3.17. Some serious reductions. What we were able to do, if you'll go to the increase side, by increasing those, I'll call them non-essentials, by $0.04, the vendor broke even. So the vendor was happy, we were happy, and I hope Coy Dunn's happy. The other thing I forgot to put up here, he complained about, the group, if you remember, uniforms. As of today, we bought a little over 1,100 brand new uniforms, replacing those that are worn out and need to be replaced. Class Ds. It's been many, many, many years since this institution housed Class D inmates to help generate revenue and provide a workforce. I currently have a kitchen and staff with approximately 50 inmates, and we're working to fill those with Class D inmates. Doing the simple math, the 3143 you see is what the state reimburses us a day. And we currently have a housing unit that we're going to hopefully have 80 inmates in. Realistically, I'd like to tell you I'd like to keep it 100% full every 365 days. That's a really tough goal to do. So our goal is going to be try to keep it at 75%. And if we're successful over a 365-day period, that is new revenue we will have generated with the Class D program. Now, the Class Ds aren't just going to come here and sit and do nothing. One of the things that we're going to do at this division is focus on reentry. And this is one of the pieces that we're going to do. To work in our kitchen, you're going to have to complete these two programs. The next time you're at one of our fast food restaurants, if you look where they hang their liquor license, they'll have a serve-safe restaurant. That means all their employees have taken the same test that our inmates are going to be taking. We're hoping when they complete these three courses, I'm going to buy them a chef coat out of their commissary money. They're going to be able to work and wear their chef coat. And when they leave, take the chef coat with them. Because we're hoping when they apply for those jobs in the restaurants, they'll be one leg up on people on the outside because they've been trained and they can skip that process. The reader coordinator, this is my dream person. The qualifications that are going to be online are less. But we're going to focus on somebody that has these kind of skills. We're looking at education, social work, not corrections. Not that our folks didn't do a great job, but we're going to focus on trying to fix the problem. We have to do that through education and through our social work folks. The other thing we're going to focus on is risk and needs. It's clear that it doesn't do you any good to take a regular screwdriver to take the wall plate off if what you really needed was a Phillips head screwdriver. We're going to try to drill down and see what the inmate really needs. If he's bipolar and he can't concentrate, it doesn't do me any good to put him in a GED class because he can't focus, he can't listen. So we've got to deal with both of those issues at the same time. The other thing we're going to do is we're going to hear a lot about evidence-based programs. These are programs that are nationally recognized of reducing recidivism. They're not feel-good programs. A lot of us have feel-good programs. They make us feel good, but are they evidence-based? Do they work? Can it be repeated someplace else and get some results? Well, Mayor, after listening to the speech today, this was perfect. For years, we've all invited Sheriff Taylor and Barney into our house, and we've all laughed at Otis the Town drunk. But today, Otis the Town Drunk is not only a problem in our community, in our commonwealth, but across the nation. In front of the LRC, I had the opportunity to testify one time, and I said, if you had a sober alcoholic in jail for 90 days, what do you have on the 91st day? A sober alcoholic, because he'll be intoxicated before the sun goes down, because we didn't do anything to fix the way he thinks. You wouldn't put a cancer patient in the hospital and think they would fix themselves. For years we have housed addiction people in jails and prisons and somehow thought they would fix themselves. So we're going to focus on treatment for these folks. Another initiative, as I travel around with my former job, I'm into conferences. We looked at energy-saving initiatives. We've met with folks, and we'll just give you a snapshot of our facility. You can see we're a 470,000-square-foot building, about 1.3 million in utilities. We've got some preliminary numbers with an investment of $2.7 million in energy improvements. It will take approximately 12 years to pay it off. It will save us about $204,000 a year in energy. We are in the very early discussion stages. I've met with the commissioner and many other commissioners of government, and we're going to hope to move forward on this initiative. Electronic medical records, big deal. When I came here in March, my first second day on the job, Corizon folks came in and asked, what can we do for you? And I said, electronic medical records. Just like when you go to your doctor's office, we have the state-of-the-art equipment. In fact, we went live just the 16th of this month to improve our record-keeping. We were the first large jail in the Commonwealth to have such a record-keeping system. Some of the things it does, it makes our appointments for us. It orders medication for us. I no longer have to try to read doctor's handwritings. So you can appreciate that. It's easier to read. Some of our new pieces of equipment, you can see that's a MedCard that's used to pass around medication with a laptop. And they call that a Cal. That's what the doctor types in two ways, providing medical care and talking to the patient. When the MedCard is out on the floor, it's all electronically scored and kept track of and make sure that we gave the medication to the correct inmate. We've also taken an initiative to give back to our community. We started out with Special Olympics, and it just turned out to be a big hit. Several of our employees have family members that are special needs, and the divisions just embraced it to the point that we sold enough T-shirts this year that our name and logo will go on the back of the 2013 T-shirts that will be sold around the Commonwealth. So we were pretty excited about that. They didn't quit there. We had the big brown truck pull here in Lexington. The Division of Correction came in first for the co-ed division, pulling that tractor-trailer behind them. This is why we do it. It's for the kids. But when I was getting some kids there, I noticed this one and then realized this one. So we've embarked on getting back to our community, which is a big deal. We haven't forgot our vets. We're working very closely with our VA folks, trying to make sure we capture them in our jail management system so they know they're there, so that we're notifying them that they're in our custody and these folks can get their benefits to them. Sometimes the vets don't go to them seeking help. We're bringing those folks back to our institution, trying to encourage them to come over to VA hospital and get what's offered to them for serving their country. Our health initiative. When I came here, I realized we have a huge building, so we put it into a walking track. If you've ever been to the division, there's a visitor's hallway you go down. So we put a walking track in, nothing fancy, but you can see it's got some distances there that gives the folks a little idea where they're walking. I don't want to fool you and think it's so busy at lunchtime it looks there's traffic, but we do have a few people using it. I'm one of them that needs to start using it for many reasons. Forging relations with our police department. Some of you may know I'm a retired Kentucky State trooper, so dealing with police and fire is just normal. But building a relationship with Chief Ronnie Baston has been wonderful. One day I was down in the intake center, and one of the buggies come in, the transport vehicles, and I said, that thing needs a bath. So we got with our inmates. We called them in. We bought the supplies. We armored all the tires. Everything was waxed. We detailed the vehicle out. And it was funny, when I was putting it together, you can look here real close. It was a hot summer day, and you can see everybody hiding under the shade in that wheel. So we were able to help the chief out by cleaning up his vehicle. Plus, it helps reduce their costs because he was paying a company to detail these vehicles out, and they didn't do the job we did. So we're looking forward to that. The other thing we were able to do, first time this year, was the police chief called me. I came on the job March 15th, and a couple weeks later we had the NCAA finals here, and he wants me to set up a temporary booking. And now they've had six months to plan for this NCAA game. He's given me eight hours. So when he called me, I said, hey, Chief, I'm really going to have to think about this. Hung the phone up and told my staff, I don't care what it takes, we're going to do it, get it done. So I was able to call the Chief back. So we've been able to set up special bookings. The one on the right happened to be at a U.K. ball game. So we're working with our police out in the communities. Try to do what we do best and put police back on the streets. A triage station. I was relatively surprised when I came here of our booking numbers, and we're booking people in one at a time. Could you imagine going to Kroger's, and there was only one cash register working on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving or the Tuesday before they said eight inches of snow is going to fall on Wednesday? You can imagine what that's like. So we're looking to expand that. To give you a little idea of what our booking numbers look like, you can see all the declining. You can see we're still around 22,000 a year. The top picture up on the left-hand corner is our current station, the one, and then you can see on the right we've added a second booking station to try to speed up the process. I've told Chief Baston I'm doing it for two reasons. One, I want to get his policeman back out of the facility as quickly as possible, back out on the street to speed up the process. the fire chief got to hook up with Keith it's been a great opportunity we've helped in their promotional process they've toured our facility to familiarize them with the building which is exciting but what probably is not on a slide is that I'm here before you today with confidence that if I called the commissioner the police chief or the fire chief it would be what do you need I'm on the way and they're going to come help me So the relationship we have with police and fire is wonderful. Pretty simple. Working together towards a common goal is our key to success. We're a team player, and that's our theme. We're going to continue to do that. I'd be glad to take any questions. Thank you, Director. Okay. Well, I'm sorry. You want to do that? Yes. I've got to close. Since I've met the mayor, I've always left him and told him the glass is half full at the Division of Community Corrections. It's a good place to work with a great bunch of people. I couldn't do what I do every day without the men and women at the Division. So thank you. The terminal is lighting up as I stand here. Before I do call on council members for comments and questions, I do want to take the privilege of the chair for just a minute to thank you, Director. I think your work here really does illustrate that leadership matters. From the beginning, you said you wanted to address mission and purpose, provide purpose for people, and create a culture where people were inspired to come to work and to do the work of public service, to do the job of public safety. And I want to recognize Commissioner Mason, also returning commissioner now, hopefully soon, confirmed, Jeff Reed, who participated in your recruiting, and thank them. You've developed priorities and you have tracked and managed, and there's a lot to be said for that. So thank you very much. I appreciate, too, the way that you have said there is always opportunity for improvement. Yes, sir. Council Member Stennett. Thank you, Mayor. I'm still looking at that glass half full. What's in there? Colored water. Okay, good answer. To be politically correct. Well, thank you for bringing us this presentation. You know, it's always good to hear the positive aspects of what's working in our community corrections. For so long we heard so much negative when we had a discussion in this room about community corrections. So today's a good first step. So thank you, and thank you to the men and women on your staff and those as you recognize watching today or actually performing the duty while we're here. There's a lot of positive things to be proud of, and I appreciate your leadership on all those. A couple follow-ups. On the commissary or the officer's dining room, before, I know we funded it around $80,000, $90,000 a year. They didn't pay, but now it doesn't cost us anything, but they're paying to buy the meals. Have we looked at going back to the old method and maybe as a benefit to keep good people out there paying for their meal? Well, not totally. We're drafting a new RFP for our food service because they've been with us seven years. A couple of things we've got to look at is the hours of operations. I think our staff knows the day of government paying for our meals totally free or gone. So I think we're okay with paying a small amount, as you saw, those prices. So we're really going to work on the better hours. I'll give you an example. We're serving lunch at 530. They come to work at 4. They get to their housing units. They do their jobs. They can do the head counts, get the routine out of the way. They're not ready to go eat yet. They want to eat. It would be like going to work at 8 o'clock in the morning and going to eat lunch at 10. It doesn't work that way. So we're going to work with our vendor to see what they will charge us to change those hours and make it more conducive. The vendor is agreeing that volume goes up to increase that menu, and we need to. So we're willing to pay our fair share. Okay, good. So when you came here on one of your first slides, you said morale was low. Tell me where morale is today. with your rank and file? I'm excited. I'm glad to be here. I think what they needed, and I think I told the mayor and some of you privately, I still stick by what I said the first day I came here, what they needed was a cheerleader. I still stick by that. They went through some rough times. You can't keep telling children you're bad, you're bad, you're bad all the time, and after a while they believe they're bad. So they needed some encouragement. So with some change in philosophy, some new leadership, some new direction, they have embraced it. They're moving forward. I am challenging them each and every day. They will tell you that when I ask the question, if they say that's how we've always done it, the hair on the back of my neck stands up, I want new and innovative ways. And they're doing that. And they're getting to be managers again, too. I'm putting that responsibility back down on them to come up with the new ideas. I tell my staff, I don't have all the good ideas, but I know one when I hear one. So we're encouraging the ranking fellow and all of it to come up. I think the community's support you're seeing us in the community is an indication their morale is up. I think you're seeing people reapplying for the jobs that they once had, they gave up, is a good signal. Are we complacent and we're aware we should be? No, there's always room for improvement. We're always going to be striving to do even better. So, in your last, Commissioner, do you want to? If I could, you ask about the employee morale. I've got an e-mail folder in my computer that probably has 25 or 30 notes from employees out there thanking him, thanking the staff, thanking me for various changes that have gone on just in the last six or seven months. And those are folks who have taken the time to sit down and type out a thank you e-mail for some little things, gestures. but some dramatically significant things such as how often he's down walking floors. Good. So, Director Ballard, you're on my last minute, and I can chime back in here in a minute if I need to, but tell us what this council can do to help you and what your challenges are that we can help you with going forward while you're here. Number one, come out and visit me. Come out and see what the men and women do. One of the things that is bad about my industry, Our job is to keep the bad guys in. Unfortunately, we keep the good people out because of the nature of our business. You need to come see what we do because they do a great job each and every day. And as you alluded, sir, we are public safety. Because when you read those terrible stories in the newspaper, these crimes are being committed, we live with them. We don't go home. We stay with them 24 hours a day and take care of their needs, even though they've created some terrible crimes in our communities. What's number two? You know, I've got to tell you the budget. I thought you guys did a great budget last year. You support us. Like anything, we're working on our new budgets next year. I have some innovative ideas I'd like to bounce off of you, and we'll work through it. But we're a team. The days of government just giving us endless streams of money are over. We know that. My staff knows that. And we're going to work on those things to be more efficient in our own operations. But I think number one, all in all, is just coming out and meeting the staff and see what they do each and every day. You don't see me at the Fourth of July parades. I don't have any fancy vehicles that make all kinds of noise. I don't get to go to the parks and visit with people at the soccer field because our business is inside those closed four walls. So taking time and coming and seeing us, I've talked to the mayor's staff about having meetings at our place. In fact, the commissioner has the next commissioner meeting scheduled out in my conference room so that they can come and kill two birds with one stone so we can show them what we do. Very good. Thank you, sir. Thank you. Vice Mayor Gordon. Thank you, Mayor. Director Ballard, thank you very much for your presentation. And I'd just like to ditto what you said about coming out to visit because you invited council members out, I think it was this fall, to a day when we could actually eat with staff in the dining hall, which I did. And I got an earful of good things as they moved in and out of different shifts. and I was able to talk with staff members, the morale is incredibly better than it was two years ago. When I served on the transition team, which Mayor Gray put together, the public safety team, those of us who sat with the rank and file heard negative after negative after negative. And it's my opinion, having talked with a lot of them now, that lots of those things have changed. And there's been a lot of good go on out there. And we can see some of it in your report. So I don't have a question. I just congratulate you and your staff who have worked really hard on this and encourage council members, if you haven't been out there to eat or to take a tour or whatever, it is a great way to find out what goes on out there. So thank you. Thank you. Council Member Akers. Hello. Hi. First, I also want to commend you on all of the improvements, the decreased overtime and increased staffing levels. I have friends who work there, specifically Major Hill there is my next-door neighbor. and a couple other friends of mine. So I did hear about the overtime and all of the shifts that people had to work. So I'm glad to hear that those are reduced now. And I want to commend your staff on the diligence in billing for medical services and those recouped monies that were in your presentation. And then I also attended your commissary presentation, request for increased fees several months ago. And so I'm glad to see that the necessary needs have been decreased costs and those that aren't as necessary have gone up. So I'm really glad. And lastly, I guess on commendations are the treatment for addiction, and I look forward to hearing more about those types of programs. As someone who works in the field of social work, I know that our jails and criminal systems are obviously overburdened by those who battle addiction, and so we need a larger approach or scope to serving them. I do have a couple questions on the PowerPoint. If we accept the federal inmates that you mentioned, will that dislocate any of our local inmates, or is that just to subsidize the numbers that we have currently? No. When I came here, we currently had empty beds. Today our population was a little higher than normal, 1,222 inmates. We've been running around 1,140, so I have empty beds. So what I couldn't do constitutionally is deliberately overcrowd the facility by paying customers. So we're taking advantage of the fact that our bed count's down and trying to fill those with paying customers for right now. And on the overtime slide, where you highlighted the 210 and 76, can you talk a little bit about why there was such a fluctuation between May and June and then July and August, the jumps there or decreases? One of the things that probably we had hired a cadet class and they had not graduated yet, so we're still having folks coming and going. Anytime you hire a new director, there are some folks that want to get on board with the new ideas, and there's some that says it's time to move on. We had a little bit of both. So without looking at it, my guess is they came in, I believe, March 28th. Does anybody remember what day it was? Remember the March class? It had to be close around the 1st April, so the class of 45 had not graduated yet. That's one thing that probably is drawing that up. August, I would guess at 1, we hadn't started picking up with our training incentive really high yet, so we weren't training, so overtime was basically vacation, and we might even have had a second class graduate by that August date. So it adjusted that. I understand. And last one, I see that your booking numbers have decreased gradually year to year. Do you know why that is or any thoughts on are we just arresting fewer, I guess? Are we, I don't know. No, I think our police department is doing an outstanding job. In fact, I attended the luncheon today, violent crimes down 27% in our community, which is huge. So I don't know what's causing those numbers. There's been some law changes with House Bill 463, but even with that, I don't think that's what's drawing the numbers down. Well, it's good to see regardless. Yes. Thank you. Thank you, Council Member Akers. Council Member Henson. Thank you, Mayor. I think we're just becoming better citizens. Yes, but I know that some of the laws have changed to where it's no longer an arrestable offense, right? Because that could have a small amount to do with the decrease. I think if you look across the country, arrests are down in many communities, and I don't know that any one thing particularly. It could be something as simple as not looking at the census, are we getting older? Yeah. You know, our criminal justice experts say the older we get, we're less likely to do crimes. You know, there's so many variables to control for. I don't know how you'd actually drill down to figure out what the direct cause is. That makes sense. Thank you for the improvements that you've made. It's good to see things moving, it seems like, in the right direction. And I know that the detention center currently partners with CompCare, and then the Hope Center program is out there. So do you anticipate partnering with any other agencies, or is that something this new position might look into? Well, that's what we're hoping to do with our reentry coordinator. One, instead of coming back to you and asking for money, I hope to get the new reentry coordinator to start looking at some grants. And based on those grants, help increase our funding for the Hope Center and other treatment program. The other thing he's going to do that we've never done in our community is the aftercare. We just can't push him out the door and expect him to find the services on their own. And we've been doing that historically, not across the nation like that. And we're all learning. We learned with the DOC when the Pew came in. There were a lot of things we were doing wrong. So we've had to change the way we think. So with this reentry coordinator, he will be coordinating with those outpatient treatment centers, with the homeless shelters, with all the different sectors to try to make a transition from jails to streets. In fact, there are federal grants called from the Bureau of Justice, jails to streets. And when I get my reentry coordinator on, we start capturing some of these numbers, we hope to apply for some of those grants to help pay for those programs both inside and outside. I really appreciate those programs because I really think the numbers, the percentage is high among inmates with either drug and alcohol abuse or mental health. Wouldn't you agree? Yes, ma'am. And one last question. The reinstatements, like if an officer is sworn and they leave the detention center and then decide things are looking better, what requirements are there? They don't have to go back through the academy. What do they need to do? Well, one of the rules are they have to come back within one year after leaving. We usually hook them back up with an FTO officer, a field training officer, let them work for a couple weeks so they feel comfortable again, and then training addresses any issues they might have. So we don't turn them back loose until they feel comfortable. So would that take a slot? If you have a certain number ready to graduate, they would have to wait and make sure there's an opening, correct? Yes, ma'am. That's one of the deals we have with Jan Driscoll in streamlining our hiring process is that I have a cap, and I can only have X number of employees. So if we had full staff and somebody was reapplying for reinstatement, I'd have to wait until somebody quit to actually hire them. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Council Member Henson. Director Ballard, you've got lots of comments still coming. Council Member Lawless, then Kay, then Myers, then back to Stennett. Thank you, Mayor. Certainly sounds like your presentation, you've instituted a lot of new things, but I do have several questions, and one is who is our food vendor? Currently Aramark. Aramark. And don't they do, is that a national company? Yes, ma'am, it is. Have you considered a local vendor? We're drafting an RFP. The current contract allowed for original was original for five years with two one-year extensions, so our seven years is up. we're working with Todd Slate and his group to draft a new RFP that will go out on the streets and then they'll be able to be bid on by anybody. I think that would be an excellent move. I also have, I know that there have been some issues with them in other places. So, you know, having a local vendor keeps money in Fayette County. So the other question I have is, do you all ever do employee satisfaction surveys that are anonymous that don't go to their commanders or majors, lieutenants, captains? Not yet. But that's something that I've talked about. Other agencies have done it, job satisfaction later on doing it. We're not too far from doing something like that because we've implemented a lot of programs. There's been enough change. If you'd have done it the first day I came here, I think we're all pretty aware of what they'd have said. Well, it would have been a good baseline measure. It could have been. So as time goes on, yes, those are something we could definitely consider doing. Because, I mean, you know, I'm not agreeing or disagreeing that morale is higher, but I think it's helpful in government and in business and in social services wherever that we have something we can measure rather than anecdotal. And I think that that's important and it gives you feedback. And I would encourage, I mean, it's not, you don't have to buy some big fancy program or, you know, et cetera. You can use, there are several we have licenses for that. So I would be interested in seeing that, and I think it would be helpful to you too, and you'd have a baseline. Like I say, if you had done it when you first came, that would have been great because you would have had a baseline. And I have a couple more questions, but I'm going to reserve those for possibly a closed session. So thank you very much. I've been to the facility, and I'll be back, and I always try to go to visit rather than as a guest. So thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Council Member Kaye. Thank you, Mayor, and thank you, Mr. Ballard, for this report. It's really encouraging. I applaud you for all the good work you've done. I do have one question that has to do still with turnover. I've noticed if you look at the last, I don't know, six, eight, ten mayor's reports, there's still significant numbers of people resigning, and I'm curious if you track the rate of turnover and if you have some plans for reducing that, You anticipate, and I know turnover is expensive, training and so on and so on. So I'm curious about data for that and what your thoughts are about the turnover rate. We're currently capturing those because we, too, know the significance of those. Let me tell you one of the things we are doing, we implement it. In the past, we only hired when there was an academy, and we would wait, and we would lose some applicants. You know, let's just pick January 1st. We say we're going to hire. Class doesn't start to March. We call them up in early March. they've already found jobs so we'd lose them. We're now hiring those people and bringing them into the facility immediately. What they're doing, they're not having day-to-day contact with inmates but something as simple as going through the mail, filing, answering telephones, delivering stuff throughout the institution, learning where to go. And what's happened to us, we've had a couple people quit because you know what they didn't like? Being locked inside that jail. So those aren't failures, those are success stories because they realized this wasn't quite what they thought it was going to be. No matter how much we teach them, no matter how much I can try to educate them and prepare them for coming into a jail, working with intoxicated people day in, day out, I can't. So they find themselves in an environment that they don't just feel comfortable with. Sometimes it's not what they thought it was going to be, even though we took them on tours, even though they've been to the academy, it isn't what they liked. We've lost several. We lost one at the fire department. We're going to lose some to the police department this next time. We've lost people. I sent Commissioner Mason a report. We had one young man, his wife got transferred back to Bowling Green, so he went back to Bowling Green. So we have a whole host of options to try to leave. But obviously, yes, we're very concerned about the turnover, and we track it. So if I can follow up, is there a level of turnover that you think, given those conditions, is acceptable? and are you willing to share that information so that we can kind of get feedback on it? I don't know if I have a number out of my head. Obviously my goal is to get it as small as possible. I think if the best thing to look at what it was the last three or four years, probably in the 35% to 40% turnover rate down to the 25%. So I think we've made some headway in reducing it. We'll just have to continue to look at it and just do our best. They leave us for pay raises. They go to work someplace else making more money. But obviously we're very in tune. That's why we start bringing them in early, trying to let them see who we are before they go to the academy, because we have a lot of money invested in them. Okay. So just one last comment, just to clarify why I'm asking the question. When I see the numbers in the report, I want to know if they're significant or not. So if I see five, six, seven resignations and I know that's typical, it's kind of where we're at, then I won't pay any attention. Otherwise, I've got to wonder and then I want to know if I want to ask the question and so on and so on. I think five or six over a course is not unusual because the other factor I forgot to tell you, some of those folks got terminated. I fired them. They didn't come to work, or the violation of the rules and regulations were so bad, they left me no alternative. So in that last month, I can think of two that were terminated, bringing contraband into the facility and giving it to inmates. Another two that I know got transferred were their spouses. So if there were six, four of them I can address real easy. So maybe what I can do is if, I don't know if I can send it out publicly, But privately, I think if you called me, I could probably go through the list and tell you why this one left, why this one left. I'm not kidding. Great. Thank you very much. Thank you, Mayor. Let me tag on just as a footnote because the director and I and the commissioner, we've had some of the same conversations. And I think what, in my translation of what Council Member Kaye is saying is in a constructive way for sure, and I know that's the way you interpreted it, Rodney. And it might be helpful if there are some national norms that might be benchmarks, something like that. I think what Council Member Kaye is saying, and I know for those of us who have been on the Council even longer and look to the past, these questions were almost routinely asked. And we considered those to be symptoms, those numbers to be symptoms. And my translation of what Council Member Kaye is saying is that we see evidence of good things occurring today, positive trends, and we don't want to be discouraged by any numbers that might suggest something that's not symptomatic of a problem. So you've just illustrated with the experiences with those incidents and the facts behind those numbers, which is very helpful. And so maybe it is thinking through how to share that data with the council in a way that's appropriate. I think that would answer a lot of your questions. Because Mr. Mason gets an email and he's got footnotes, you know, moved on to another job where he changed careers, terminated, transferred with his spouse. So I'll get with Mr. Mason and see if there's some way we can communicate with you. To make that feeling feel a little better when you see six, you too can say, well, four of the six, you understood. Right. All right. Thank you. Council Member Myers. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Director Bowen, for coming in today. On that note, I'll just ask a couple follow-up questions. When we see our report, I think they're listed as resignations. So if a person separates for whatever reason, is it listed as a resignation? Or if you terminate them, is it listed different in that report? I've always saw it as resignation. HR codes are different, but I've always seen the same thing. It always says resignation. Okay. I think, you know, when you look at the work that they do there, it's a tough job, obviously. And I think you're right that some people get in there and realize they're not the right fit for it. And also it might be that the economy, some people took a job because they needed a job during the economy, and maybe some things have changed, and now they've done something different. But I think one of the things that we can look at is the fact that you've had five people that came back that have talked to their colleagues that are still there and learned enough from them that the changes are such that they want to come back and work there again. So I think that's very positive. As you know, we went on the tour. I spent about half a day there, I think. Time went by fast. I learned a tremendous amount. There's a great crew working there. And, you know, I just looked at your PowerPoint presentation, and one of the things that I took from you when I was out there and your team is that you're sort of an innovator, and you attack problems. You just don't go to work and deal today and the day's over and you go home. You listen to people. You learn from people as a student, you know, what's going on here, what could be changed, what could be different. It was interesting. When I was there, he was looking at coding the uniforms that the inmates wear, different colors, so that they can immediately identify different situations. And on his table, we had, you know, like five or six different companies of uniforms, and they'd washed them, you know, 150 times to see which ones faded and just, you know, he's a student. at what he does. And I think you're a teacher and a leader, too. And that was evident from talking to the people as we went on the tour. And I was very impressed and continue to be. And just how you looked at listening to what the council members said with respect to the cost of certain items that are sort of necessities. And you went back to the vendor knowing that you had a contract and said, how can we work something out here so that the deodorant is cheaper but the honey bun that is the worst thing in the world to eat anyway is more expensive. But if you look at that, the deodorant is significantly less expensive, and the honey bun didn't go out that much. So you work things out, and that's what you've done with the lunchroom as well. You work that out so that without spending more money. And so I think the mayor made a great hire, a great choice in this. You've got a great staff, and you're a leader and an innovator and a teacher and a student and a listener, and I appreciate all of it. So thank you very much. Thank you, Council Member Myers. Council Member Beard. Thank you, Mayor. I'm trying to go back to when we last discussed this in the fifth floor conference room. You came and visited us maybe six months ago or so. Approximately. I'm curious about the telephone charges that the inmates, and I was that day also, How are we doing on that? Is it still a pretty hefty number? For revenue? Yes. Yes, the revenue, I think, last time I saw the revenue was up, I want to say $800,000, not up $800,000, but about $800,000 a year for telephone revenue. We're getting about 72% commission on all calls. That's amazing. You can call England right now for four cents a minute. I don't understand why it is so high. It's like we've got them between a rock and a hard place, and we're going to squeeze them. Well, let me address that just for a second. You have to understand who I'm housing. If I gave inmates free telephone access and free Internet access, they'd be running con games from inside the institution. Just like some of you might have saw the article last week in the paper, the number of inmates that are filing IRS returns using deceased people's names and getting the money mailed back to the prison to put in their commissary account. So the phone calls have to be collected. A couple other reasons, we have victims out there. The last thing you want is have a daughter in a domestic violence situation and the perpetrator calling her at night saying, please drop the charges. So that person has the opportunity to say, this is a collect call from the Fayette County Detention Center, and they can disconnect it. So there are some costs that are associated with them because of where they're at. You just couldn't give them free limited dialing because they would abuse it. What happens to that $800,000? It goes back to the general fund here. It goes back to the general fund? Yes, sir. Okay. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you, Council Member Beard. Council Member Clark hasn't spoken yet, and then we'll come back to Council Member Stenet. Council Member Clark? I'm interested to know what would you see as a glass completely full? A detention center with no inmates in it. That would be a true success. Unfortunately, that's unrealistic. I don't know if any of us are perfect. I guess the phrase, the glass is half full, meaning that we're optimistic that we're going to continue to move forward, be innovative both with our expenditures and our revenue, and we are public safety in protecting those from themselves even. Let me ask you one quick question. I noticed your overtime is coming down considerably. Now that you're fully staffed, is that going to continue to come down because of that, or is it going to stay pretty level at this point? we're fully staffed per budget. Do I have enough people to run the facility and reduce the overtime? No. I did a staffing analysis shortly after I came there. By my numbers, I'm still 37 people short. So that line is going to be there. Every time I take somebody, a line staff, and put him in a training class, I've got to pay somebody overtime to take his place. When somebody doesn't call in sick, I've got to take somebody to take his place. And the list goes on, funerals, FMLA, those things. So I don't have that luxury of having enough staff on duty so that there's no overtime. So we can say that probably unless the authorized amount was greater, that overtime is going to stay pretty consistent? I hope so, yes, sir. But definitely not return to the numbers that we saw early in the year. Yes, right. Yes, sir. Good. Thank you very much. But this is a good report, and I see good leadership here. Thank you, Council Member Clark. Council Member Stennett, then Council Member Kay. Thank you, Mayor. Let's go back to you've answered the staffing question. Do you have a class going right now? Starts Monday, January 28th. And how long is your training? Ten weeks in the class. Six weeks in the class. Four weeks with an FTO officer. Good. And how many will be in that class? 14 or 15. Okay, so small enough to work hands-on. Good. Well, and that's the only openings I have. You know, I had come down, I had 14 openings, so I was able to fill it with 14. The number sometimes fluctuates, but we'll fill it. And to get more authorized strength, is that a conversation you're having with the commissioner, and he may want to address it? Well, it's part of the budget process, and we've been, the commissioner and I and our staff, we've been meeting for the last month and a half working on budgets. Okay, good. And we hope one of the things you're going to see different in my budget this year is I'm going to actually show you where the manpower is allocated. So you saw the extra triage space that was in the intake center. One of the things I've talked to Chief Bastin about is I want to put on an additional booking station in the peak hours. And he's currently running those numbers for me. And it's going to be 7 p.m., 3 a.m., or 8 p.m. to 4 a.m. But I currently don't have the staff to staff it. So that would take three new people to open that up in the peak hours to get the police in and out quicker. So I'm going to show you that in the budget so you'll be able to look at that and understand why those three people are needed. Okay. And then on your revenues, Councilman Beard talked about that you're collecting the fees. You're returning all those to the general fund? Absolutely. Anything we collect here, I don't write any checks. The only checking account we control is the commissary. All the money that comes in from the state for any revenue from any vendor all gets turned back into it. And what about the restitution fund? What's the future of that hold? We had a meeting last week. We have a restitution fund that has about $283,000 in it. The funds go back prior to 1998. We met with Jana Graham. We met with the county attorney's office. We're looking. I think the consensus is that they're trying to figure out where that money goes and who it belongs to. So we've drawn it to their attention. And one of the things, my goal is to get it out from underneath my roof and get it someplace else. And one of the things we've been talking about, just like with fire and police, we're looking at positions by position to see does this position necessitate a sworn officer and trying to identify some ways to put civilians into a few positions that the sworn officers can then be available for filling the lines and that way it will cut down on some of the overtime costs. Good. I guess, Commissioner, you're looking at maintenance too and about those positions. Yes. Are we still using part-time maintenance and some full-time, a combo? A little bit of both. It's getting harder to find part-time folks. So we're going out to bid on some maintenance stuff, and we've got working with Todd Slate and his group, we've got three options for them to bid on. And the reason we did three options is because it gives you three options on what you want to fund, because we realize we're not going to get everything we asked for. So we've asked for three different levels. One example would be outsourcing everything above the roof line. So we're breaking that down so we can try to get a handle on it. In 2000, when you opened up your new facility, you had 11 full-time maintenance people. Today, you have four. Yeah, not sustainable at that level. No. And the other thing I try to educate when I get an opportunity to talk to you, jails grow old at three times the normal rate. Just think of your normal office building. It's basically eight or ten hours a day. The jail is 24 hours a day. So in our industry, we would say our jail is 36 years old, not 12. It's because it taxes all our core. Sewer, water, your water lines, those things are starting to have issues with. A good example, our kitchen equipment. The kitchen equipment we're going to ask to replace in this budget was purchased in 2000 at a 10-year life expectancy. Last but not least, where are we at on the adult probation positions? Are we going to try to make those civil services this year? We are. We've worked. E.D. Dabney has taken that mission on. As easy as it sounds, it's much more complicated. So, unfortunately, we're going to do one at a time. But our goal is eventually just keep doing one at a time. How soon? Oh, I'd be afraid to give you a deadline. But it's on the burner. We've been talking about it for years on this council. We have majors working with HR. HR is working with us. but there's certain criteria in civil service you've got to follow, and we're just working our way through it. Very good. Thank you, sir, for your updates. Council Member K. Thank you, Mayor. I wanted to follow up on the question of the overtime and the staffing level. And the question is, have you done an analysis of what it would take? well, I'm going to back up and say it may be that that's the most efficient thing to do, which is to have overtime because it's flexible and so on and so on. It may be that if you bring down the number, if you raise the number of staff, you bring down the level of overtime sufficiently to justify it. Have you done that kind of an analysis of where the break-even point might be with staffing versus overtime? Not totally that way. What we did look at, though, is we went back and did a relief factor. We figured out every employee's number of sick days, off days, suspension days, everything, and it came up with a relief factor of 1.87. So for every person, for every human being I got at a post, for one shift it takes 1.87 people. Take that 24 hours a day, it's almost six people. So we've looked at that. Yes, there is a break-off point where, you know, when you pay benefits and where that is, and we're not there yet. And to be honest with you, I haven't drilled it down. I've just finally got it down to where I can manage it. So obviously the next step that you're talking about is what is that break-even part? Right. And does it make sense just fiscally to add three people if it brings down the overtime enough to pay their salaries? Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Councilman McKay. Councilman Henson. Thank you, Mayor. Real quickly, Rodney, do you have a strategic plan to maintain that staffing level now that it's where it needs to be? You know, because I know we were seeing, council was seeing turnover out there like a revolving door, which has slowed down. But will you have them in the hopper ready to release? you might have not even noticed, you're already voting on people to potentially hire. We send you this big, long list. It might have 50 people, 60 people on it telling you we'd like to hire them, and you're giving us approval. And then when somebody quits, we're able to go to that list because you've already approved us, take that person off the list and put them to work. So we've cut that down drastically. Thank you. Thanks. All right. All right. Director? No one else has signed up. You performed strongly. Thank you, sir, I would say. We appreciate, I suspect I can speak for members of the Council. We often see a lot of good presentations, and I think we all believe that we've seen one today. Thank you, sir. Thank you. Yes, sir. All right. Next on our agenda, council reports. If council members will sign up, please, for council reports, and I will recognize you. Council Member Farmer. Thank you, Mayor. Since I will not be here this evening, I may be the only one with the report today. First, I want to congratulate you on the deal that was reported out last Friday to do with the pensions, and then your performance today at lunch. You made us sound less like Mayberry and more like Mount Pilot. I wasn't standing up for any particular reason except to go to say thank you to Director Ballard. I agree. One of my constituents is here that has played a role as a retired police officer for 25 years as a patrolman. Longer than that, maybe, Mr. Bucket. Was it 35? 35, thank you, sir. And he and I had a conversation at the end of the presentation last Friday, And as I arrived today, he had some information to pass along. I was going to ask him to come to the microphone if you have a moment. Pass that along if you would, sir. For those of you that don't know me, I'm Tommy Puckett. I was a police officer here for over 35 years, retired four years ago. And I have been on the pension board starting my 20th year. and I'm also the president of the Retired Fire Police and Widows Association, which is the only organization that represents the police and fire retirees. During our discussions that we had last week over the changes in the pension and everything, one of the things that has been, if anybody knows me, has bothered me, and we've all read it in the paper and everything, was our disabilities. Why are they so exceptionally high and so forth? And I even tried to address that issue, and basically it came coming back that it is a city ordinance and you're the only ones that can change it. And what really has brought it to a head is in the last four months, as being on the pension board, I have had to, the board has had to grant two pensions in which the individual had a 1% whole body impairment. And I'm sorry, that just doesn't go down well. In most cases, especially the younger people that are leaving, the ones under 20 years of age, I would tell you that probably 50% of them would love to stay if they at all possibly could do so. Obviously, I think that would help the pension system. Basically, the longer they stay in and pay in, the less we pay out and so forth. Another thing that came to mind over the weekend, I was just playing on my computer looking at some numbers over the pension and everything, and something that was very alarming to me. Since 1990 until December 31st of last year, we have had 786 people retire. If you look at that, the average is less than 33% or 33 people per year that's retiring. Since January 1st of 2012, we had 82 people retire. That's the highest. There's not even any other year that's close to that. Since the first of the year, we've already had 20 more retire. That's 102 in less than 13 months, and we have seven pending disabilities. that is alarming to me not only as a pension board rep, but as a citizen of this community. I mean, that is roughly 10% of the police and fire. And, you know, it was very alarming to me, and I think that's something that you all need to be made aware of and maybe address. Again, we need to do something about the disabilities. I feel sorry for Mr. Farmer because he had to walk with me all the way back from the Commerce Building. And it's something that the board wants to do something about, but we're getting blamed for it when it isn't our fault. You need to address it. It's an ordinance. There's a fix there. Most of the pension systems in the United States go with the AMA, American Disability Act. And, in fact, I'm surprised somebody hasn't filed a suit over that because they would win. You have to make some reasonable concessions to these people. So, thank you. All right. Any questions? Others may have. You have basically told me with more facts or with more specificity what we spoke about. last Friday, and I would just, things are in a state of flux at this time, and I'm appreciative of the leadership that we have already had in these areas, and I would like to make a commitment to work on this more specifically maybe after we've been successful with the unions first and with the legislature second, because I think we need to finish what we've started, but I think he points up something that a lot of us, especially not taking anything away from the large people in the district capacity, you people just say, why do we do this? Why is it this way? And we can't solve all the problems at one time, but I felt it was an especially good moment to have him come and speak to that today because we've made great strides, Mayor, and you have led in those, but there's more to be done, and I don't want to turn my back on an opportunity for us to lead in another area. In the spirit of what Director Ballard said earlier, continuous improvement. Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Puckett. Thank you. Vice Mayor Gordon. Thank you, Mayor. A few items. First of all, I want to thank Council Member Stennett, who has agreed to continue on as the Council's parliamentarian. That's a two-year stint, and I appreciate that. And then I have sent out a memo this afternoon appointing a mobile food truck work group based on our conversation with the mobile food truck folks. And Council Members Stinnett, Akers, Farmer, Clark, and Lawless will be the voting members on that work group, and Council Member Akers has agreed to chair it. And we already have a lot of research which will be available for your group, and we have several stakeholders who will be non-voting members. and so that group will get going soon. And then, Council Members, many of you saw the back-and-forth emails about us doing a resolution in support of industrial hemp. And two things on that. I want to thank our law folks for quickly getting me a draft resolution on that. And I've circulated it to council members this afternoon for you to take a look at that draft. And I'll also circulate it to other folks like Farm Bureau, police, several entities to get feedback. The thing about this resolution is it's on a fast track because the legislature meets in February only. and so my legislative aide is trying to find out when this issue will come up, if they can tell us, so that we can be timely in our resolution. And if any of you would like to go with me on Friday, I'm going to Frankfurt to meet with the Agriculture Commissioner, and I would be happy to have a group of us if you're interested. it. Then finally, the council met this morning and had a confirmation hearing for Richard Maloney as our Commissioner of Environmental Quality and Public Works and did vote unanimously, the group that met this morning, to move him forward as commissioner. And so, Mayor, with I would like to go ahead. Law has helped on this and said that if we can just go ahead and make it clear that we want him, they'll see that it gets on the docket. So I'd like to bring forward the motion to approve Richard Maloney as Commissioner of Environmental Quality and Public Works for Law to work their magic with the docket. Motion by Vice Mayor Gordon, second by Council Member Beard. Is there any discussion on the motion? All right. Hearing none, then we can take a vote. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed, no. Motion carries. Thank you very much. That completes my report. Thank you. Council Member Stenning. Thank you, Mayor and Vice Mayor. Thank you for reminding everyone about the parliamentarian. And I will add a little tidbit to that. Council can speak twice, five minutes apiece during council meetings, which includes zone changes tonight. So whoever's chairing that, which I'm not sure if the mayor will be here, but the vice mayor, just keep that. I know our last zone changed. Some of the people got a little long-winded, but council rules are five minutes unless it's changed at that meeting by council votes. So just keep that in mind as well, and you can speak twice. A couple things. Mayor, thank you for your address today. I thought you did a great job painting a picture of what we've been able to accomplish both from a government standpoint and a private standpoint. I think it is a good example of the private and public partnerships we're going to have to have going forward, especially as it relates to the old courthouse. I know a lot of us have had some good ideas on what we can and should do in that courthouse, but we look forward to that discussion this year. But I appreciate you pointing out everything that has been able to be accomplished going forward. I thought we've got a good foundation to build on, but we've got a lot of work ahead of us. So thank you for that. And also, this is the first time we've met since we've had a consensus reach in the pension. Thank you to everyone who's worked tirelessly over the last five years, both behind the scenes and at the table, to get something done. It was a big effort and a big undertaking for Lexington to finally get to a point where we have a plan in place. Mayor, can you give us a time frame? I know I've been asked this a lot today, even after you spoke today, what our time frame is in terms of the next steps and when it will eventually get to the state level for consideration? Do we have that time frame? Scott Shapiro or Jamie are not in the room, and I would expect that they will be able to address that. Okay, so if we can kind of give Council an update. I don't want to be premature about saying the exact steps, but the expectation is that it will not be tardy. Understand. So if you can get us an update as soon as you are, figure out the next time frame with the unions voting, when they'll vote, that sort of thing. And then last but not least on the pension, I assume we're not going to do the pension bonds in this current budget cycle that we put in the budget? The negotiations do impact if the negotiations are successful and the legislation is successful, but we're not able to say at this point in time that there's any changes or that any funds should be adjusted in the budget. No, I wouldn't go in there. I'm just saying on the bond itself, I know last year we did it in May. We'll wait until it goes through it. I think we better see where we are. We'll see where we end up. That's fair enough. And then the last thing I had today was, Commissioner Hamilton, you and I spoke earlier about the parking lot behind this building. With the closure of next door, I think we've created kind of a problem on parking back here. And you said you told me some information I think would be helpful for my colleagues to know about when the arms are going up and what we're going to do to kind of patrol it a little better. I think there's an issue with crowding back there, and some public may be using that lot more than we think. Thank you. Yes, Council Member Stenet mentioned that to me earlier today. We have, Gary Means has given us now the arm that was over at the annex garage, so we have that. I had approved, I think about 10 days ago, the contract to do all the electrical work to insert that arm. I have a meeting tomorrow morning to find out the exact time and date for that. so that we can control this parking better. If we cannot control this, if it's going to be a couple weeks before that gets in, then we will make other provisions to control this parking back there. And thank you for bringing it up to me. Thank you for addressing it. Thank you, Mayor. Sir, thank you. Council Member Stenney. Council Member Ford. Thank you, Mayor. I want to echo some of the sentiments in regards to the negotiations in regards to our pensions. I think over time it will prove monumental for this government. I know that just like it's not done just yet, but we definitely hope that we can get the legislation down in Frankfort and hopefully that our delegation in Fayette County will be supportive and will carry that through the General Assembly for us. So I do echo that. I want to turn my attention, Mayor, to some budgetary matters, And I just want to talk a little bit about fund balance for the fiscal year 2012. I know that we're in the midst of fiscal year 13, budgeting for fiscal year 14, probably will start here soon. But I know that, and I say that in the context that I know that there's been a lot of transition in the ranks of your financial team with Jane and Ryan going down to Frankfurt. I just wanted to know if we could perhaps get an update here pretty soon in regards to the fiscal year 12, I think, proposed fund balance. I know that Jane mentioned that to us right before the end of the calendar year last year. I just kind of wanted to see if perhaps the Council could get an update on that and what some plans and options are. How about we talk to Interim Commissioner O'Meara, and we'll get back with you on that. Okay. That would be great, Mayor. Appreciate it. Thank you. There's a meeting of budget and finance, what, next week? I think it's probably scheduled then. Some conversation associated with it will be scheduled then, too. Can expect it. Council Member Myers. Thank you, Mayor. I just wanted if the Commissioner of Law could come up for just a second. Commissioner Graham. That just spoke on the disability issue and said that that's an issue that we could address here at the local level. Could you look into that and see? And then if maybe Council Member Farmer would, maybe if he could enlighten us a little bit more about what his constituent had in mind. I'm not sure if he was saying that he wants us to change that law. I couldn't understand what. So, oh, he's still here. Okay, I didn't know. I thought he left. Okay. So can you look into what we can do? And then if he had a recommendation for what he'd like to see as a change, that would be helpful as well. I'll be happy to address the legal aspects of that. But I would point out that I think there's an operational element that goes along with that, the Chief Bastin probably would be the best one. So I think you'd almost need to hear from both of us to get the full picture on that. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Council Member Myers. All right. Council Member Stennett. I just want to add one thing before the zone change. I know myself, I am recused tonight just so I don't get counted in the headcount as well as Council Member Farmer, so you'll be too short. Thanks, Mayor. Thank you, Mayor. And while we're on that subject. The point of order has been offered that need to explain why the recusal. Council Member Myers, I think that's appropriate. Council Member, we'll go in alphabetical order, Council Member Farmer. This is about my recusal this evening? The Department of Law has instructed me that since I have a piece of property in the subject area's boundary, I'm not able to sit in on the deliberations or be part of the audience for those deliberations and consideration. So I will be leaving you all to your pizza, and I will be going to the Kenwick Community Center for their Neighborhood Association meeting. Council Member Stennett? In myself, I have an immediate family member who lives on the street and owns property. Therefore, I've been asked not to participate in those deliberations as well. So keep the five-minute rule tonight, and you'll be out of here before game time. Thank you. Not necessarily. I will, and let me speak to the same question. I will not be chairing the meeting tonight. My predecessor as mayor, I don't know about previous mayors, but Mayor Newberry did not chair any of the rezonings, and I acquired a sense for how to do that during the four years as vice mayor. And I've continued. I actually, frankly, would welcome this hearing. I have a family commitment that has been set, scheduled for months now. I've also, however, been advised by the Law Department. I have not one, but two family members who live on the street affected, my brother and a nephew. But I will say that for 26 years I have lived happily in the first historic overlay district in our city. It is the only place I have ever lived in our city. And I said I have lived there happily with the blessings, the benefits, and the burdens occasionally. So, does anyone else have anything to say tonight regarding that issue? All right, then we can move to public comment for issues not on the agenda. Floor is available for issues. All right, Mr. Mundy, thank you so much. No one has signed up for issues. Speak for issues not on the agenda. If there is no further business, I will ask for a motion to adjourn. So move. Motion to adjourn by Vice Mayor Gordon. Second by Council Member Kay. Unless there is an objection, the Chair will declare the meeting adjourned. Thank you. I'm killing you.