# Council Social Services and Community Development Committee - March 19, 2013 > Auto-transcribed civic record · March 19, 2013 - **Permalink**: https://meetings.lexingtonky.news/meeting/2921 - **Source video**: https://lfucg.granicus.com/player/clip/2921?view_id=14&redirect=true - **Date**: 2013-03-19 - **Last revised**: July 16, 2026 - **Length**: 19,581 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 Social Services & Community Development Committee met on March 19, 2013, at 11:00 AM, with Ford presiding. The committee addressed four agenda items during the session, approving the committee summary from its January 22, 2013 meeting. Two informational presentations were heard regarding the Bluegrass Workforce Investment Board's development and training initiatives in Fayette County and the FY 14 Partner Agency Review. The committee took two votes during the meeting and heard two public comments. One agenda item—Adult & Tenant Services—was postponed and did not proceed during this session. ## Attendance The following individuals were present at the meeting on March 19, 2013: * Ford * Akers * Ellinger * Kay * Lawless * Stinnett * Scutchfield * Myers * Beard * Lane No absences or late arrivals were recorded. ## Votes and Decisions **Approval of Committee Summary for January 22, 2013** [timestamp: 0:07:39] The committee approved the summary from the January 22, 2013 meeting. Ellinger moved for approval, and Beard seconded the motion. The motion passed by voice vote with no abstentions. **Extension of Presentation Time** [timestamp: 0:22:52] Myers moved to extend Darrell Smith's presentation time by five minutes, and the motion was seconded by Myers. The motion passed by voice vote with no abstentions. ## Budget and Financial Actions The meeting addressed fiscal year 2014 funding allocations for partner agencies through the following action: **Partner Agency Funding Appropriation** Resolution 0073-26 recommended an appropriation of $2,000,000 for fiscal year 2014 partner agency funding. This allocation was presented for consideration as part of the meeting's financial agenda. ## Public Comment Two speakers addressed the council during the public comment period. **Lindy Carnes** [timestamp: 1:49:34], treasurer of the Salvation Army, spoke regarding the organization's funding application and the associated 20-point deduction for a late submission. Carnes emphasized the Salvation Army's critical role in providing shelter and meals to homeless women and children. She requested that the council reconsider the penalty, citing a technical file conversion issue as the reason for the late application. **Jack Birch** [timestamp: 1:52:57], Executive Director of Community Action Council, addressed concerns about the funding process and fairness. Birch defended the integrity of the application and evaluation system, warning against making exceptions for individual applicants as this could undermine the overall process. He urged the council to consider increasing overall funding levels rather than adjusting outcomes for specific organizations. ## Appointments The following appointments were made during this meeting: * **Ford** was appointed to serve as Chair * **Akers** was appointed to serve as Vice Chair ## Contested Items **Interlocal Agreement with Bluegrass Workforce Investment Board** The committee addressed a procedural dispute regarding the absence of a signed interlocal agreement between LFUCG and the Bluegrass Workforce Investment Board. Council members raised concerns about outdated language within the proposed agreement and the lack of performance-based accountability measures. The administration expressed reluctance to sign the agreement, citing perceived risks associated with its terms. In response to these concerns, council members called for a 30-day review period to clarify the legal and policy barriers preventing execution of the agreement. **Funding Allocation for Partner Agencies** A split vote emerged during discussion of funding allocation for partner agencies, centered on the application of a 20-point penalty for late submissions. The penalty's impact on the Salvation Army became a focal point of debate. Some committee members argued that an appeals process should be established to address cases where applications were submitted late, contending this would provide fairness to affected organizations. Other members defended the integrity of the established penalty system, maintaining that consistent enforcement of application deadlines was necessary to maintain the credibility of the funding process. The committee did not reach consensus on whether exceptions or appeals mechanisms should be implemented. ## Approval of Committee Summary for January 22, 2013 [timestamp: 00:07:39] The committee approved the summary of the January 22, 2013 meeting. Council Member Ellinger made a motion to approve the summary, which was seconded by Council Member Beard. The committee then conducted a voice vote, and the summary was approved. ## Bluegrass Workforce Investment Board: Development & Training in Fayette County [timestamp: 0:08:10] Darrell Smith, Chair of the Bluegrass Workforce Investment Board, presented on workforce development initiatives in Fayette County. Smith outlined the Workforce Investment Act and emphasized the board's market-driven, performance-based model for training and development programs. **Key Topics Presented:** - The board's role in workforce development and its partnerships with local businesses - The need for a new interlocal agreement between the Bluegrass Workforce Investment Board and Lexington-Fayette Urban County Government (LFUCG) **Concerns Raised:** Committee members, including Council Member Myers and Council Member Kay, expressed concerns about the lack of a signed agreement between the parties. Additionally, the committee raised questions regarding the impact of funding cuts on the board's ability to deliver workforce development services. Jennifer Compton also participated in the discussion. **Outcome:** The presentation was informational in nature, with no formal action taken during this agenda item. ## FY 14 Partner Agency Review [timestamp: 1:02:41] Commissioner Beth Mills and Craig Benz presented the FY 2014 partner agency funding process to the committee. The presentation outlined a competitive, needs-based review system that incorporates third-party scoring to evaluate funding requests from partner agencies. **Key Discussion Points** The committee raised several concerns about the proposed funding process: - **Late Application Penalty**: Council members questioned the 20-point penalty imposed on applications submitted after the deadline. This penalty was identified as potentially problematic for agencies that might miss submission dates. - **Impact on Specific Agencies**: The Salvation Army was cited as an example of an organization that could be negatively affected by the new review structure and associated penalties. - **Prioritization of Basic Human Needs**: Committee members emphasized the importance of ensuring that funding decisions prioritize basic human needs services when allocating resources to partner agencies. **Speakers and Positions** Council Members Ellinger, Stinnett, and Kay participated in the discussion, raising concerns about the process. CAO Hamilton also contributed to the conversation. The mayor's office, represented in the discussion, indicated a willingness to reconsider aspects of the funding process in response to the committee's concerns. **Outcome** The agenda item was classified as informational, indicating that the presentation was delivered for committee awareness and discussion rather than for a formal vote or immediate decision. The expressed openness from the mayor's office to reconsider the process suggests that feedback from this meeting may inform revisions to the FY 2014 partner agency review procedures. ## Adult & Tenant Services The Adult & Tenant Services presentation, led by Godfrey, was scheduled as agenda item 4 [timestamp: 1:58:48]. However, due to time constraints during the meeting, the presentation was postponed to the next meeting. Despite the postponement, the committee expressed interest in discussing this topic and indicated a desire to hear the presentation at a future date. --- ## Decisions - **Motion** — passed: Approval of the committee summary for January 22, 2013 - **Motion** — passed: Motion to extend Darrell Smith's presentation time by five minutes --- ## Full transcript You made me lose all my charm You know I was raised on a farm Oh, she tells her friends I'm perfect and that I love her cat But you know me better than that Oh, she tells her friends I'm perfect and that I love that cat Oh, but you know me better than that Thank you. Good morning. I'd like to welcome everybody to today's Social Services and Community Development Committee of the Council. Today is March 19th, and I'll call the meeting to order. Before we go through our agenda, committee members, you see we have a fairly lengthy agenda with two topics of interest. What I want to do to allow us to get through the agenda but also to address the issues is for public comment. We have two sign-in sheets in the rear of the room for public comment. One is highlighted for workforce development, and the other one is highlighted for partner agencies. If there are folks that are interested in speaking to public comment on those issues, I'd encourage you to sign in in the back. We will address public comment absent a motion on any issue at the conclusion of the agenda, if that's okay with the committee members. Okay, we'll go ahead and begin. The first item on the agenda is the approval of the committee summary for January 22nd. It was included in your packet, pages 1 and 2. Is there a motion to approve? Move to approve. A motion by Council Member Ellinger, second by Council Member Beard. Is there any discussion? All in favor, signify by saying aye. Aye. Opposed? And the motion carries. The next item on our agenda is the Bluegrass Workforce Investment Board, Development and Training in Fayette County. We would like to welcome Mr. Darrell Smith, who is the chair of the Bluegrass Workforce Investment Board, and he will introduce the respective officials that will give us our presentation. Welcome, Mr. Smith. Again, my name is Darrell Smith, chair of the Bluegrass Workforce Investment Board, and I will be presenting today on behalf of the board. We do have some folks in the audience that I will be introducing to you through the presentation, but if we can get loaded up at this point, I know we want to move as expeditiously as possible today, given your schedule. We may not be who you think we are, and these times may not be the times that you think they are. First of all, I would like to apologize on behalf of the Board because the act that I'm going to speak to today is 15 years old, and there's apparently a great deal of confusion about that act, and as we sit here today, Congress has already passed a bill to supersede the act that we're talking about, and much of our discussion today is going to go back at least 15 years. So I apologize, first of all, but this presentation is entitled Moving Forward Together in Uncertain Times. And first I want to clarify the point that there are a variety of partner agencies that are not city agencies that do work to help Lexington citizens. At the Career Center on Industry Road, there are probably 20 or more staff people that work on behalf of Lexington that are not Lexington Fairview Urban County government's staff, nor are they funded by LFUCG. As we talk today, I want to talk about three topics. First, we're going to explore and look at what the Workforce Investment Act is. And point number one I want to leave you is not a social service program. It is a market-driven program, and that's not something that we created here locally. It's a federal law, and we'll get into that in a minute. We want to talk about some of the results that we've had with that program. and I think it's fair to say that you're going to see in the audience today some of the constituents in Lexington that we serve. And thirdly, we're going to talk about some future possibilities of some things we can work together with LFUCG. We're living in a time of exponential change. If you can make out the photograph of me on top, that's Jim Clifton, president of the Gallup organization, who has a book out that I encourage you to read, The Coming Jobs War. And in it, he speaks of the fact that all over the world, there's this global competition for jobs. Matter of fact, he says $3 billion tell Gallup they want to work. But then if you look at the next slide, the problem is there is a jobs deficit worldwide of 1.8 billion jobs. We're in a war. It's global competition. Between globalization, technology, and the productivity of workers, everything has changed. And if you'll note there, that's a picture of Congressman Brett Guthrie. I was in his office this past week. The picture previous of that was Representative Andy Barr. Both of them voted in favor of legislation called the Skills Act that I'll talk about at the end of the presentation. We are, as I indicated, was passed in 1998. And if you want to turn your time clocks back, William Jefferson Clinton was the president. Newt Gingrich was the speaker of the House. It was a workforce bill that was totally different and radical from many of its predecessors. Most of the previous legislation was geared towards social services. This one came and had some different results and outcomes that had to be met. As a matter of fact, if you read the law, and there's about 418 pages of it, if you Google that, it talks about streamlining services. There were too many agencies doing too much work in the name of workforce. It sought to streamline that. Fast forward to today, even the Democrats are talking about, and the President, streamlining services. Unlike previous acts, this act empowered individuals, which means that money does not flow from a workforce board to a city government. The assistance goes directly to businesses and individuals. This law was different in that it calls for universal access. It's not a poverty program. Any citizen is eligible to participate with it. It has increased accountability measures, and I believe at one of your previous meetings it was shared with you the fact that we met our performance measures as dictated by the Department of Labor and negotiated with the state of Kentucky. It calls for a strong local business-led workforce board, which is radically different than the past when social service agencies, educational institutions took the lead, government took the lead. This bill says the private sector takes the lead. It enables state and local flexibility, so Governor Beshear, we'll talk about some of his programs later, and then it calls for improved youth programs, which means specifically that a youth must obtain literacy and numeracy gains, get a GED or a high school diploma, or the program is not successful. This is the system that we are the strategic stewards of. And right now in the United States and globally, this system is out of kilter. If you look in the middle there, it starts talking about education, preparation, training, and this match. We've been pushing people through a system, but we've forgotten in a capitalistic system, it's demand-driven. And what's happened, if you look, as I'm looking at it, on the right side, where there are businesses and employers, that's the demand side. And the demand right now in the economy, number one, I'll be quite frank with you, there are more job seekers than there are jobs. But the employers out there are telling us there's a tremendous mismatch between what we are producing and what they want. So to help the people on the left get to the right, we have closed the loop and are working in a fashion, in a market-driven fashion that we will talk about today. I want to mention to you that I've already stated, number one, that what we do locally is federally dictated. Congress approved it. It's President Obama's program today. Kentucky has a workforce solutions-based program through the Kentucky Workforce Investment Board, and parenthetically I will tell you that I'm an executive committee member of that board. We are working in the same fashion with a market-driven approach. Governor Beshear has a very pro-business, demand-oriented program. Lexington is working in this region with a similar program that is designed to connect employers with employees. The work of the workforce board is not what you think of a traditional poverty program, a traditional social service program. We are here to impact the growth of the economy. And a key engine in the success of the economy is a qualified workforce. So we are a catalyst for workforce issues, and you'll hear some of those addressed. Our specific strategic plan you are looking at there talks about us engaging board members not to come to meetings in second motions, but to become catalysts back in their communities to effect change. and create a situation where there's a greater qualified pool of laborers. And I will state that as we go through this presentation there's going to be some things, obvious differences between JTPA, which many of you may be familiar with, and this Workforce Act. And right here I want to take my time, and I'm going to be real honest with you. The Act was passed August 7th, 1998. In November of 1998, there was an agreement signed between Lexington-Fayette Urban County Government and all of the 17 counties and the area development district. However, the final rule on the law didn't come out until September 11, 2000. So the wording, the language in that agreement is pointing to a past era in which there was a different thing going on. And to be quite honest with you this morning, I really don't want to talk about it, but there was such a time when there were entitlements and guarantees. We don't live in a time of entitlements and guarantees. The Workforce Investment Act is centered around individual responsibility. It is the federal government investing in a system, but it's performance-based. There are no guarantees. But let me flip that corn over. Lexington in the region has 300,000 citizens. You obtain assistance as an individual or a business by working with the Career Center and the Workforce Board. Lexington hits a triple automatically because no other entity in the region has over 100,000 population. So you have three times as many citizens, probably three times as many businesses. So there's no need for a guarantee. As a matter of fact, the law says there are no guarantees. But we do serve more people from Lexington than we do from any other area, and it's just a simple fact of math. We are, it's different than JTPA, and many of us in this room were trained, and I apologize, it's going to take a little time to do this, but most of the policies governing workforce in the United States came either out of the New Deal or the Great Society. Well, as a reality check, in 1994, I believe, the Republicans took the House of Representatives. So by 1998, when new laws were written, they had a greater private sector flavor to them. And quite simply, Congress does not write bills anymore that give guarantees to anybody. The entitlement days are over. This bill is about opportunity, and there are various avenues for us to work together in that opportunity. and I hold my hands out, but I do want to take my time and say that as a leader and as I've indicated in previous private communications to the council, we hit quite a schism in 2007. What happened was we continued with old language into new times. And when performance came out, Lexington flunked. And we wanted to sign an agreement to hold that we are harmless from that, But the whole function of the bill is about outcomes and performance. When we sit down, and I sat down with Congressman Andy Bond, he looked me in the eye and he asked me if I had any problem with accountability, efficiency, and government. I have no qualms with that. The law today and moving forward is going to hold us all accountable. And as a matter of fact, we're going to have less resources to do more. So we have to work together at a greater strategic level than we have in the past. But that's where we are, and it's created great friction in this community that is racial, that is political. It has to do with power. It has to do with people and organizations. And I feel personally in Providence that God has called and has me situated at such a time. It's time to heal the breach between the WIB and the city of Lexington and between the Area Development District and between the city of Lexington. There are too many resources, there are too many lives at stake for us to continue against each other instead of working together. So I commend Chairman Ford for this invitation, and I commend Councilman Myers for some previous conversations we've had about this arena and the invitation to come today. So I commend you, because it's time to move forward. We have to move forward in these uncertain times. A question has been asked, and I've sat quietly in your meetings, and it's come up. Does anybody work with businesses in Lexington? I'm here to tell you that when Mayor Gray announced the Bingham company coming to Lexington, I was downstairs. But you may not know that it is the workforce board that worked behind the scenes to put together the job prayer that you see that drew 697 attendees. 68% of them are from Fayette County. We're working on your behalf. As a matter of fact, again, to take my time, and I apologize, but there's a whole economic development system that works. And just parenthetically, I am a certified economic developer. I do work for a utility company, and I'm engaged in a lot of discussions privately. And when jobs opportunities come to Kentucky, Governor Beshear has a statewide team that seamlessly works behind the scenes between the state and the locals. So Commerce Lexington communicates a variety of deals, and any time there's a new business or an expansion, there's this team that assembles to meet the needs. In the room today is Mark Manuels, who is secretary to the board of the Bluegrass Workforce Investment Board. He happens to be the vice president for institutional development at Bluegrass Community and Technical College. With him today is his associate, Pam. They do customized training in this town. Every time there's a deal, we're working behind the scenes with people like Jenna Greathouse and Kimberly Rossetti and Bob Quick to make those happen. The next slide. We had a lesson learned with Lexmark. We work every time Lexington citizens are laid off. And we have been working diligently with Lexmark, and one of the lessons learned we have in continuous improvement is the fact that we can't wait to a company that's about to lay off employees to get our strategy together. We are going to start working on a more proactive basis with teams, and you're going to hear us and the governor talk about business resource teams working in communities on a proactive basis to share information so that if there's a company that we can help stay alive, whether that means getting financing, whether it gets help with lean manufacturing, we're going to start doing that kind of thing in Kentucky. But we are very active working with Lexmark employees. I do want to point out occasionally we get what's called national emergency grants. You see Commissioner Mills with us a couple years ago, and I do want to point out the certificate the lady has there is a National Career Readiness Certificate, which is an ACT-based product which measures a person's competency to do a job. We have a variety of tools like that we use behind the scenes to work with individuals. We were able to go back and assist this group with that kind of effort. One of the things that I most want to share with you today in the call to future action, we work a great deal and want to know about companies that are growing. Jennifer Compton and I attended an independent electrical contractors meeting, at which time I gave a talk, and we talked about wanting to partner with businesses. One of the businesses that wanted to partner with us is Amtech. Amtech says we're in a growing mode, but we need to make sure that the people we hire meet through certain hoops. So we got together with them and have developed a boot camp. And in that boot camp, what we do is send them to a variety of different opportunities, at the end of which, Amtac gets to say, huh, I'm going to hire those guys. Every one of them to date has been offered a job that has passed that class. We're looking for more opportunities to partner with businesses in Lexington to do this kind of thing. As a matter of fact, we're doing it in health care. And one of the people who's not here is vice president of Central Baptist Hospital. We do that as well. I'm sorry, Mr. Chairman. Excuse me, Mr. Smith. Your 15 minutes has elapsed, but we want to offer you a little more time. Is there a motion to offer one more time? I'd make a motion that we offer Mr. Smith five more minutes. Okay, there's been a motion. Is there a second? Second by Councilman Myers. All in favor signify by saying aye. Mr. Smith, you'll have five more minutes. Thank you, sir. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I do want to mention that we're working with young people. It's been brought to our attention that young people need to get career-oriented earlier. We organized in Lexington a medical career camp last summer. We plan to do that same camp in Lexington this summer and plan an advanced camp as well. As a matter of fact, I was talking to one of our board members in the back. We're even going to bring some eyeballs and let them see what it's like to operate on eyeballs. They're going out to Rood and Riddle Hospital. They will see surgeries. We are trying to get young people connected to careers at an earlier level. We are working with young people on a disadvantaged level. I spent the day with all these young people in Richmond the other week and had various competitions for them. Two of the groups were from Lexington. Step into a new beat. Will all the folks from Step into a New Beat in the crowd stand? One of the concerns that individuals had in 2007 is, will a workforce board serve people with multiple barriers to employment? This is where the dollars are being invested in Lexington, Kentucky. We start in your prisons. I've been multiple times to your detention center, And we have a values-based program. We're working with Judge Bell, if you see on that slide up there, where we have fatherhood classes, where we're working with the arrearages these men may have with spouses with children. We're getting felonies expunged, and we're taking them all the way from prison to our program on Industry Road. And we also have a housing component to that program currently. So we are diligently working with people with multiple barriers to success. We are getting great feedback from the private sector. We're working in this town with companies like Square D. We're hosting workforce summits. Last year we hosted one for first-time supervisors. We have one slated in Lexington on September the 6th that you will learn more about. We're working with people like Frank Brown who had a checkered past but got his life together and found that he could work with the resources, and we paid him tenure, tuition to go to school. We're working with people like Joanne Lewis who the very day that I was with her taking this picture got a phone call and got a job. We're working with people like Ed West, who is in our reentry program. We're working with people like Don Harris, who says she couldn't have made it to her health care career except for the we're. Behind the scenes, we're working with all of these companies and more in Lexington, but we look for opportunities. The money is not going to flow from us to you like it used to. The money is used to help the economy. It is used to help individuals and it's helped businesses. And we believe in just-in-time solutions. We don't believe in building a bridge to nowhere. So we love it if you have a business that's growing, we can match their needs and help filter some people through a pipeline and efficiently and effectively use federal dollars. We believe in entrepreneurship. Anytime there are more job openings than there are jobs, there need to be more entrepreneurs. We believe in social entrepreneurship and impact investing. And I love what I saw from Commissioner Mills about the mattress recycling. recycling. If you look all across this nation, we need more impact investors that will create pools of money to do things like Recycle Force Indianapolis and Recycle Force Columbus. We need you out, as I'm out, in high schools and put some skin in the game like Kentucky Utilities Company is doing to prepare a pipeline working with minorities and women working with Fayette County Public Schools. We need you out with project-based learning with people like Diane Leverage of the University of Kentucky to bring rigor and relevance to the classroom. We need you with the Bluegrass Higher Education Consortium, where every college president in the region has agreed, and we've already had one workshop where the college institutions and leaders are speaking now with the high schools in the region and the business people working together. And finally, it mentions about Work Ready Communities Program, which will help us in Lexington realize that not enough of our ninth graders are reaching the twelfth grade, and we have to do some radically different things to ensure that that pipeline is open. What can we do together? we can do things like a Just Add One campaign, where we get together and create a campaign and say, what if every business is added one more employee? We can do all of this together by, first of all, understanding that we are is not what JTPA was. It won't be. It's an apple, not an orange. The days of that orange are over. We are playing football now and not baseball, but that football is a mighty file for football. We do have resources currently, but I will tell you, as I conclude, We are under federal sequestration, and we are awaiting guidance to the state and locals to see the impact of federal cuts. And also at the end of this month, there will be debt ceiling talks, which will probably take more resources out. And I've alluded to the fact that there are two competing bills in Congress currently. The Democrat bill talks about streamlining services, greater efficiency, more accountability, business-led boards. The Republican bill says we want two-thirds business-led. We want to take away the requirements of having social service agencies even on the board. That's the reality of where we're dealing today. But we're going to take this football, and you have my personal pledge that my door is open. If I can come to your district with any of these services, we want to help market them more to your constituents. But we're still alive. We never left town. We're here to help. And as we can see by the folks in the room, we are working with people with multiple barriers to employment as well as all the way to the top to the Ph.D. engineer that lost their job at Lexmark. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Smith, for your presentation. Council members, are there questions? Councilman Myers. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you very much for coming in with an excellent presentation. When we spoke before, last time you were here, we talked about one specific company, Sears, and their request to the government for assistance in finding qualified applicants. Have you had a chance to work with them at all? Our workforce group did follow up and was unsuccessful in reaching them, but when we received the e-mail, I believe the e-mail was about six or eight months old when we received it, and the individual did not respond to our calls. But the two things that you and I talked about that day are the exact things we need to talk about. Anytime you have a hot lead where somebody in the community that's a business leader has said, I can't find qualified employees, we need to have an instantaneous contact with the workforce system and work together. The second thing I think you mentioned that day is this whole notion of summer work. Now, we are and did go to Congress, and one of the things we are for is to try to restore monies for summer youth programs. But some years ago, Congress cut that money out, and I agree with what you told me that day. We need to have a greater business input to that so that there are meaningful job opportunities, and perhaps then our Congress people will see that as a more meaty thing than just a giveaway program. And I'm glad that was a great segue into my next question, and that is, can you work with... Don't get too technical. Ms. Compton will have to come and help me, but... Okay. I think you'll be fine. Can you help us work with our summer youth employment program this year? I've started to work on something. I haven't brought this out and made it public yet. But what I'd like to do is see if we can maybe peel off just, say, 50 of those spots and work with an IDA program, work with you guys to also bring some employers on board that are looking for the types of people that you talk about in your presentation. I would love to, and again, I'm cross-pollinated. I'm a member of Commerce Lexington, and I would love Commerce Lexington's chair is Danny Murphy, attorney, University of Kentucky. I think he would love to sit down with us and bring all the leverage of the business community behind this kind of a program, and this kind of approach is the thing that we would love to have between council and workforce and anything that I can do to help in the community. Again, I've been here my whole life, and I know lots of people and would love to participate, and if we can get offline and help get with Danny and Bob Quick, I think we can pull that off. Absolutely, and we can put something together. We've got an IDA program here that could guarantee us 50 to 75 slots. At the end of the summer, the participants could have potentially $5,000 saved in an account towards their higher education. Is this the back-on-track program through the United Way? Yes, sir. We've met several times with Bobby, and we need to figure a way to make that work. Okay. Thank you very much. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you, Councilman Myers. Councilman Sennett. Thank you, Chair. Darrell, thank you for coming back and apology accepted, because I'm glad you were able to actually convey to this committee and to the folks watching exactly what you do, because I think you really hit a home run in what you've shown the council and what the impact is on our community. I've known it, a few other people have known it, but I don't think everyone knew it. So thank you. I appreciate that, you coming forward and doing that. I did have one question. When working with a company like Amtech, you mentioned you got training for those individuals. Do you all do the training in-house, or did you partner with someone else, and they provide the training and you coordinate it back? My right arm is going to come up and explain that program. But in some cases, what we do is she will tell you exactly. When we met with independent electrical contractors, and they indicated a need for individuals to be able to do the basics, be in conduit, re-tape measures. We partnered with Amtech. They actually provide a two-week boot camp program. We paid for the cost of that program. We paid for the pre-screening, the drug test, and selecting the candidates and doing the recruitment for it. At the end of the two weeks, the deal was that they would be available to any electrical contractor that would be interested in hiring them. We are on our fourth class right now, and everyone has been offered a job by Amtech. They have accepted those positions, and Amtech has moved them into an apprenticeship program. So we will continue to do that program in which we fund the training that Amtech is providing until all the electrical contractors have their needs met. So you don't do the actual training in-house? When someone comes to you with a need, you try to find who can train them, pay for the training, and then send it back to that need and see if you can match up a qualified worker? Yes, all of our training that we provide is through Bluegrass Community and Technical College, Spenserian College, Amtech. It has to be customer choice, but it has to be high demand and driven that way. Okay, thank you. Darrell, you talked about a lot of businesses on your sheet are more skilled labor type positions. What about the service industry? Do you partner with anyone currently in the service industry? We do, and I'll give you one specific example. we were asked to come in and BCTC as well with a group of customer contact centers. And to be honest, what those customer contact centers are finding is, and we may as well be honest with us, this. We don't all have the work ethic that our parents and grandparents have. And many employees are not showing up for work on time. They are not showing the proper department in the workplace. So we're currently fleshing through there to see if there's a specific solution we can come up with them. Any employer or employer group that's out there that has a challenge that we can carve down to something specific, if we've got a dime left, we want to use our dollars to help Lexington residents, regional residents, get jobs or keep jobs. So we're very open to that. And I would mention to you, you saw on my opening slide, and I didn't have enough chance to mention it, we are sector-driven. We're focused on manufacturing, information technology, transportation, logistics, and distribution, and health care. And we are having consortia, private sector-led, listening down in those sectors to where there are needs. But at the same time, any business or business association that has a need, we want to listen in on it. And I'll let you in on a little secret. We've already talked to Marilyn Clark, and Marilyn has learned since we have Career Center, if the RUC project is funded and when a contractor is selected, we can run a construction pipeline project through our WIB. Employer tells us what they want. We build and give them what they want. You can go now and see Governor Beshear has a version of this out called Bridges to Opportunity that he just unveiled in Louisville. It's the same thing. Listen to the employer. Use the federal dollar to provide the solution. The worker gets the job. And I would mention, again, to my stepping in the new beef folks, what we're finding is it's slow going. But we're finding more and more employers are accepting the fact that if a person who is coming through a redemption mode goes through some hoops and shows that they're taking responsibility, we have a growing list of private sector employers willing to give them a chance. And we need to champion those employers who are doing it and encourage more in the region to do it. I don't know that we can do it by fiat from behind that desk up there, but as we have relationship and if we can use our tools, they show that they're on the right path it's growing and we think it's going to continue to grow and we're very proud. I cannot tell you how proud I am of the people in this room who have humbled themselves, seen their mistakes and are going through. Let me tell you, I was in the room the other day with Ms. Fogle and I'd hate to be one of her clients because she wanted them specifically there at that time they had to have their documentation together and she is challenging them to be Johnny on the spot. So we're running a first class program and we need to help that grow. Thank you. And two things. One, I do have a lead for you then. So maybe we can work together with a business here who's looking for people that can't get them trained. So we'll work on that. You want to give out your contact information for businesses out there watching so they know who to contact and where? Well, first of all, our website is www.bgwib.com. And electronically from that website, you can find out how to get in touch with us. But I'll let Ms. Compton come back and give you specifics on the phone number that you will have them call. That would be 859-269-8021, and I can be reached at jcompton at bgadd.org. Very good. Thank you all. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Councilman Stenick. Council Member Elliver. Excuse me. Thank you, Chair. I want to follow up with one of the issues that Council Member Myers talked about, the first one about Sears. We understand there was a disconnect there. We see the problem. What have we done to correct that problem? And is there a link between the LFUCG and to you all that they can? There is a tremendous opportunity. Let me address the second part of that first. I think through your public information office, there ought to be a seamless way where you can put information on your website that if an employer is looking to find skilled people or if an individual is looking for help, to link over to our website. And then secondly, I think you guys are going to have to help us. We're today before a social services and community development committee. Typically, we deal with projects through Commerce Lexington and through Kevin Atkins of the mayor's office. We need an official conduit of information as to who is the point person to work with Ms. Compton, and I think that's an outstanding idea so that in the future it's seamless so that we've got a direct contact. So if you guys want to designate somebody from LFUCG that's the official person to work on workforce issues at a staff level, that would be a great thing. That's what I was trying to say. We see the problem now. Let's correct it here. Let's not wait six months when it's already dated. So we'll have to come up with a solution here, but I think it needs to be done and done now. Thank you. Thank you, Council Member Ellinger. Are there any more questions from the committee? Seeing none, I have just one or two questions before we conclude. Mr. Smith, we definitely appreciate you being here. Jennifer Compton, we appreciate you being here and the many folks who have come out, program participants. Darrell, the information that you gave us in regards to the timeline of the transition from DROP training, JTPA, over to WIA in 1998, and then the final rule coming down in 2000, and I think that shows that our last interlocal agreement was signed in 1998, but it predicated heavily towards the former JTPA regulations and things have changed. The question I have for you, the two questions I have for you really pertain to, again, how do we build this formal partnership, accountability and a responsiveness, one to another, urban county government, our constituents, and the Workforce Investment Board, your constituents, joint collective constituents. How do we do that? And then secondly, how do folks connect with you? So let's first start with one. is there currently an executed agreement between urban county government and the Workforce Investment Board? Is one required, et cetera? Currently, 16 of the 17 counties in the region have signed a new interlocal agreement. Lexington is the only government that has not, and the issue has been the issues that I just brought up. The old agreement was an agreement filled with guarantees and entitlements. The new act is an opportunity act. The feds don't write laws anymore that say, just like the UDAG days of the 60s and 50s, where Lexington's the biggest city, so its mayor gets to carve out so much money, no performance. You just get that. There's no more legislation like that. So Lexington officials had a hiccup because the old agreement had lots of guarantees. The new agreement has no guarantees for any constituency. It's an opportunity agreement, and we would love for you as LFUCG to sign and approve that agreement. No agreement. We make no guarantees to Garrett County, Lincoln County, Stanton, South Isa. Nobody gets any guarantees. It's all based on opportunity. But, again, you're 300,000 citizens. It's not that many people. If everybody in Lincoln County used the services, they can't add up to everybody in Fayette County. So we would love for LFUCG to sign the agreement. And as to the second part of your question, I think it links back to something that Councilman Myers just brought up and Councilman Stennett. The way the relationship improves is for us to actively get on the ground and work on things together. And if we can get a project and move forward, and I would like to mention and thank you again publicly because you took the time to go with us to BCTC's campus. One big idea we have over there, well, let me mention two big ideas. One is BCTC, since they now have North Campus, will probably move the Adult Education Center to that campus. That's an opportunity, and it's going to bring resources closer to need. But secondly, they have some buildings over there, and I know the mayor's office has talked about this. We need a business training center on the community technical college campus so that if any business comes to town, they need some funky space where they can move walls around, bring people in, train them on new machinery. That could be the place. So together, we need to help the BCTC Foundation raise some money so that we can create such a center on their campus out in the north end in your district. Okay. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Smith. The only thing that I'll allude to there is the fact that 16 of the 17 counties have signed and FED has not. It basically means that we don't have an agreement. There is a relationship that's there. We are working. But it's paramount for both parties, for our joint constituents, that we hammer out an agreement. And I would ask, and I'm certain that you guys will, the differences and the concerns that have been expressed by urban county government officials, past and present, I would hope that we can work with the ad via the web to reconcile those so we can actually sign on the dotted line and become a formal partner with you. If I could, let me say one other thing. It's a confusing relationship. The ad is our fiscal agent. They signed that agreement, but the WIP makes its own decisions. And I think some people in the past thought that the politicians from the other communities were going to grab the money, take it, and run. No. The WIP makes its own decisions as far as the programs and policies, and they come from the federal government. So anybody who has qualms about the ad and that relationship, be rest assured they must sign the agreement with you, but the web itself controls where the dollars go. Thank you, Mr. Smith. Council Member Myers. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you, Mr. Smith. Quick question. The agreement that the other 16 counties have signed, is it the same across the board? Same across the board, and it's the same agreement that we have brought to Fayette County that has not been signed. There are no guarantees to anybody in the agreement. It is an opportunity, and it just states that we are in your community. And again, I will reinforce there are more people in Lexington, so we have more staff in Lexington. And by the math of it, more services get rendered in Lexington. So we're not trying to pull a fast one on you, but I do understand the concern that the old document was thick and the new document just says we're going to do business in your community. So is the new document based on the regs that came down after the law was changed at the federal level? Yes. And the new document, the new agreement basically says that we will have a presence and that we will service the residents of your county. Even though Fayette County has not signed the interlocal agreement, we have not moved any of our services here. We have continued to try to grow that relationship to get you on board to sign that agreement, which is the same agreement all 17 counties would sign, and it's just saying that together we will work to service the citizens of that county and the businesses of that county. We have continued to do that even though the agreement has not been signed. Okay, thank you. Mr. Smith, one more question. When you look at how you serve our constituents in these 17 counties, not just Fayette County, one of the things that my office found when we did some research is that in Louisville, So your counterpart spends about $4,000, I think, on average per person to get them trained. And here we're spending, I think, on average about $10,000. I think you have to look beneath the numbers, and I think Ms. Compton can. Let me ask my question first. Let me ask my question first. That was just set it up. So I guess I know that it's market-driven, but can you speak to how the decisions are made, what training people go through, and then there's no guarantees. I understand that, but I think you meant by no guarantees that there's no guarantee that a certain amount of money or resources be expended per county. But in terms of the federal government saying they want an outcome-based program, what are the expectations set for the dollar that we spend to train someone in Fayette County, that they get a job as a well-paying job that can help them support them and their families, And then do we follow up to make sure that once they have that job, there's some longevity in that position? Yes. Okay, so the difference between us and our counterpart in Louisville at Kentucky and our works is we spend most of our training funds on on-the-job training contracts, in which we take an individual and they get employed, and we offset the cost of their wages during their training period in which the employer is training them, and we pay from 50% to 90% of their wages, dependent upon the size of the company. For our training, we have a set amount that we'll pay for a two-year program, which is up to $15,000 for a two-year program. So when you look at Bluegrass and you look at Kentuckiana Works, the difference is Kentuckiana Works or Louisville does not provide little to no on-the-job training contracts. And the Bluegrass area puts most of our money or training dollars in making a taxpayer out of that individual on the first day, not sending them to training for a year or two years, but getting in that job, and that is our preferred choice of training. Okay. My time is short. That's why I was. So in that situation where we spend up to that $15,000, Is there a way that you guys set an expectation in terms of what that training is and that there's a viable job at the end of that training? Or can I just come to you, and if I'm eligible to receive funds, I can pull anything out of the sky and say, this is the training I want? No. We have an eligible training provider list, which I believe was provided to you. Anybody that has a federal ID number can apply to be on that list. So you have the dog grooming schools, whatever. Anybody can be on that list. But before we will pay for you to go to training, it has to be a high-demand occupation in which there's a reasonable expectation that you will find employment. As Daryl mentioned, we're driven on these sectors. And if in health care, we listen to what the health care HRs are telling us, and if they're saying that they're looking for a phlebotomist, then that's where we're going to guide you to. Excellent. Okay. My time is just about out. One more question. Sears, we talked about earlier. What sector would that fall under? Our four priority sectors are the ones that we're actively pulling together groups and listening and doing training for. That would be the one that Daryl mentioned in which if there's any other, the electrical group, any other employer that has a need, we want to meet that need. So they're an active employer with an unmet need that we will target. Okay, so can we look at that offline and then see if other employers of the same type as Sears has that same situation that maybe we can do a listening tour for that and add that to our segment. Yes, definitely. And we did reach out to Sears. We did get in contact with them. The need that was presented six months prior to us getting the email was not the current need, but they are aware that we are available if, indeed, they have another need come up. Okay. So, yes. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Chair. Thank you, Council Member Myers. Council Member Akers. Thank you, Chair. So, Darrell, you've mentioned partnerships with for-profit businesses in the community, and I'm just wondering if you have any current or past or future plans to partner with the nonprofits in the community to facilitate job training, job prep, or welfare-to-work programs to either support the work of those nonprofits or to help those that have already been targeted as vulnerable. Even in the case of CDL Drivers was in need of LFUCG, and we were very close to putting together a training class for a group of individuals to run through. And I think we ran into a hitch because they had to have so many years' experience before we could do it. But we can work with anybody that's going to put somebody on the payroll. We can work in those situations. Well, I didn't mean working for the nonprofits. Working with, let's say, the Hope Center to help their clients. I mean, they already have a population of needy individuals. and with barriers. We do need in this community, there are a variety of avenues like that to see, to make sure people are cross-populated into the various segments. And this is one thing the federal government is very concerned about with the current fiscal crisis. There's a lot of groups doing a lot of things, but can we afford them all, and are they seamlessly working together? But, yes, I'm sure, Jennifer, like we've been up to Goodwill before to work with our staff to make sure that they understood the programs. And I'll cite you a specific example. There are clients within the Lexington Housing Authority that are required to do a self-sufficiency component. All of those clients have been introduced to the Career Center and are currently working with a workforce specialist at the Career Center. So we are trying to make those connections, but if you can help us make more, I think it makes great sense that we're working together. And you mentioned the Hope Center. I signed a letter of support today for a mentorship that they're going after in which we will provide assistance with the job searching for those individuals that complete that program. So, yes, we do work with the nonprofits. Thank you. And when we're going to talk here in a little bit about budgets and funding of our nonprofit programs, I just think that the opportunity exists to partner with you all and with the nonprofits to develop innovative programs that have measurable outcomes that show self-sustainability and self-sufficiency over time. And so I just would recommend that and support it. Thank you. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Council Member Akers. Council Member Kay. Thank you, Chair, and thank you for your presentation. I wanted to follow up with a couple questions that have been asked about this agreement. Can you help me understand what LFUCG would be committing to or what it is entailed by their signing this agreement? The partnership that Mr. Ford had mentioned, working together on projects that may come to the city that you would seek her services for. No funding commitment in the agreement, just a partnership. We're not asking for anything from the city of Lexington. We are providing you with the federal resources. The only difference, to be quite honest, is under JTPA the money went a different way. Some of it went to LF, UCG, or others through programs. Now, with freedom of choice, individuals make the choice where they use the money, and businesses make the choice of which training provider to use. So the decision-making is taken away from government and government officials and in the hands of individuals and businesses. So we're not asking for anything from LFUCG other than what we're already doing, which is providing services to your constituents. And more of a partnership. So then help me understand what concerns have been raised by this administration in terms of signing or not signing. I'm not aware of any concerns on the part of the administration, and the only concerns I've heard have been expressed in this committee because the previous agreement guaranteed certain funds off the top to LFUCG, and the specific language I think says we promise to hold you harmless from performance, in which the new law is all about performance, and we can't execute any agreement that's an entitlement-oriented agreement. It's all about opportunity. Well, I'm not sure where that goes. I mean, is there anybody from the administration who is here at the moment who can speak to this issue, who's familiar with it? We'll ask Commissioner Mills to come forward, please. Thank you. I can simply say that when I came on board, we had the WIA agreement from 1998. And it did say WIA in it. It didn't say JTPA. And there was a percentage of funds that were carved out for Fayette County. When we looked at the, we had a new, we had not had a proposal in the interim. We had been living with that contract. And when I came to work, there was an agreement that came through my office that was different. It didn't have a percentage of funds for Fayette County, so I took it to Keith Horne & Law. We looked at it. Some of us went to Frankfurt and talked to the workforce board, and the decision was made by the administration not to sign it at that time. We were told by the web that if 51% of the parties signed it, that we were obliged to the contract. And I can't speak to that. That's a legal question, where we stand with them, but the law department decided not to sign it because of the significant differences in questions between the two agreements. Would it be possible to have that reviewed? It sounds like, I mean, I think what you just said is that whether we sign it or not, we're bound by the... Yes, and I think that's a legal opinion, whether that's true or not. Thank you. Mr. Chair, could we, I'm interested in getting more information from the administration side, and it sounds like there's an opportunity to regularize this relationship that we have not been taking advantage of. And I'm interested in knowing if there are still barriers to signing this agreement and what they are, and if there's other work that needs to be done on this. I don't know if we want to leave this in committee. Yes, sir. I think that would be appropriate. I just wanted to say that the 51% voided the previous agreement. If 51% or more of the county signed, it voided. It didn't hold you all to any new agreement. It just voided the previous agreement. So that was the 51%. And I would also mention that we spent a lot of time on the agreement itself, and I don't know if anybody has gone and looked at the law. The law is online, and it's 418 pages. The final rule will become effective on September 11, 2000, and this is the fundamental agreement. The federal law is the starting place and not the agreement. So I think that's the fundamentals of the difference of agreement, is if you start with the agreement and I'm offering you 22% guarantee with one agreement and I'm guaranteeing you nothing off another agreement, certainly you're going to have questions about that. But I think, as I've explained today, the language in the agreement reflects old ideas that are no longer law. This is the current law, and I will hasten to add that The money is drying up, folks. The federal government is not going to send much more money in the future. And if we can't figure a way to be effective with what we have, all of us are going to be in trouble because our citizens aren't going to get the help they need. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Council Member Kay. Council Member Stenick. Thank you, Chair. I just want to follow up on Council Member Kay. I agree with him on some of the questions they're asking from the administration. I don't want to prolong this issue. I want to figure out what we need to do, CAO, to get this done. And if our administration has hang-ups in the agreement, we need to know and fix them and move on and sign this thing and put it to rest and move forward. We will get back with you in the next meeting of exactly what the situation is and if everything's fine or what we need to change and answer this question. So a 30-day stay and we'll hear it again. Okay. We'll give you 30 days. It will be brief. All right. Thank you. Thank you, Council Member Sinek. Council Member Myers. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I guess I would take a different tactic. I don't know why we'd wait 30 days, because if the federal law has changed and the agreement that the other 16 counties have signed is accordance to the new law rather than the law that was written in 98, then it seems to me we don't have any option. So I would ask that the law department explain to us why they don't want to sign that contract, because if you guys aren't going to change it, and it sounds like you're not going to, The 716 signed the same exact contract. This is the contract before us. We either sign it or we don't. So we don't need 30 days to understand from the administration their intent to either sign or not sign. If they don't want to sign it, then I think it's up to the council to determine what to do next. Thank you, Council Member Myers. And as we conclude the presentation again, we want to thank Jennifer and we want to thank Darrell for coming. Chief Hamilton will work with the administration to provide it. Let me conclude with just this one question. And I think today and the last few months has been a very good starting point for a new relationship that you've alluded to, Mr. Smith. The execution of the interlocal agreement does not preclude this urban county government, the largest unit of government in the 17 counties, from extending further with other cooperatives, other MOUs, and other avenues to express our partnership. If the fact is that the agreement is ironclad and there's no revision for Lexington to be had with the interlocal, we could still define our relationship through other instruments that would be beneficial to Fayette Countians. Is that correct? There's an official relationship through that agreement. But if I think if I hear you correctly, let me explain. There may be, and this is, let me be a private sector leader for a minute. and a leader. We've got to get beyond some stuff. There are some resources that, for example, the Area Development District has with planning and grant writing that because of the string relationship, LFUCG is not taken advantage of. There are some other grants that we may be able to go in partnership with LFUCG on that because there's a string relationship and there's no trust, we don't sit down and say, huh, let's look at this youth build thing far enough out where we can build and build and strengthen it or this other grant or in the case of other communities where they've gotten monies to start recycle forest programs in other communities. There are some avenues like that that would not require an MOU. It just requires a relationship and a willingness to roll up our sleeves and get to work. It doesn't take any agreement to do that. Again, thank you, Mr. Smith. Council Member Myers. Stenet. I'm sorry. Council Member Stenet. I want to make sure I heard you correctly in what you just said. Are you saying the Workforce Investment Board is purposely holding back working with us? No. And offering grant opportunities? No, I'm saying that because of the strained relationship, and let me be very direct, Councilman Myers is the first and only councilman that's come to me with any specific avenues to want to run together with traction on an idea. We are idea-generated people, and we run with people that have ideas. So anybody that has an idea we can run with and execute, we'd love it. Somebody asked me the other day, said, I know the guy that owns the Waffle House franchises. Could you work with him on hiring folks? Certainly. We just need his name and a relationship and a contact, and we're ready to run. It doesn't take an MOU. It just takes an idea, and leaders find a way to move forward. You're looking for communication of these opportunities from our end. Yes, and we have to get it on the right cycle. We can't wait until it's April and say that in May we're going to start this, but we need to start relationships where we discuss ideas. And, yes, we're idea people, and other communities are working with us much closer than the city of Lexington is currently, although I will tell you that we're in the school superintendent's office. We're with every economic development deal in this city. We just want to work closer with whoever's got a deal out there. Obviously, we can't do anything, everything, but there's more that we can do that we aren't doing currently. And some of that is in our annual report that we would love to share with you. Okay. Thank you, Councilman. standing and committee members. Again, thank you, Mr. Smith. There are some skills to be developed and some jobs to be created. We look forward to continuing to work on this issue. Thanks again. The next item on our agenda is fiscal year 2014 partner agency review. I would ask and introduce Commissioner Beth Mills to introduce us to this topic. Commissioner. Good morning. We're here to talk about the partner agency funding. This is for your information only this morning. The information that you will get is the recommendation from my department to the mayor of what to put into his budget. It's a recommendation. This will all move forward during the budgeting process. First thing I would like to say is that the administration has decided to increase funds this year by a quarter of a million dollars. We will have $2 million this year instead of $1.75 million. I think that speaks very well of our city and hope that it's retained due to federal and state cuts on many programs. I want to let you know that this is a competitive process. Even though we had $2 million to give away, we had $3.7 million in request. So there's no way we could fund everybody at the level that they requested. This was a three-step process. I wanted to remind everyone that we spent a year developing these criteria in council. It's in resolution in the Urban County Council, and the role of our department is to have fidelity to those resolutions. We had three steps to this application process. The first one was that the applications were requested and sent to partner agencies with five basic criteria that must be met in order to be acceptance. That was independent for all the agencies. The second step of the process was reviewed by independent third-party reviewers. Our department did not participate in the reviews. We facilitated the reviews, and all agencies got the same chance to have their applications reviewed, both in paper and in presence. The third part of the process was the funding decisions, how to take the $2 million and divide it among the agencies that were ranked by reviewers. This was done by a committee, which Craig Benz will describe to you all in his presentation. No agency could request more than 20% of their total budget from the previous year. 20% total for any programs in their total budget. So our department looked at the intent of this partner agency process two ways, and I'm very proud of the council and urban county government for doing this. I think it gives equal opportunity for funding for large, small, and not formally funded agencies. Everyone had a level playing field. And the other thing that I think this process does, it is not intended to be the majority support for any nonprofit agency. With that, I'll turn it over to Mr. Benn. Thank you, Commissioner. Welcome, Craig. Good afternoon. I'm going to make sure I remember how this works before we do anything else. Apparently I don't. Bear with me for one moment, please. Okay. So this is the second year of implementation of the new partner agency process that was adopted by Council. When we started this process, our goals were to first create a needs-based funding system, second, objectively review applications based on those needs, and finally open the process up to ensure we are receiving applications from agencies best suited to address those needs. So our objectives today, I'm going to be reviewing the process timeline with you briefly again. I'll be going over a summary of the applications we received from agencies for the fiscal year 14 funding cycle. I'll be presenting the scoring and rank order as well as the funding recommendations for all accepted applications. And then finally, we'll be discussing next steps and continual process improvement plans as we move forward. So this is the timeline of events that brought us to today. In August and September of last year, this committee and council, respectively, each approved the fiscal year 14 application, the scoring instrument and rubric, the process, as well as the timeline. We had our mandatory pre-application meeting on October 17th of last year and had 81 attendees representing 61 unique agencies. In September, we advertised the process, of course, and we had an application deadline of 5 p.m. on January 16th, and that application deadline was for an e-mail. We receive everything digitally. It's a paperless process. In February and March of this year, just last month and this month, we had selection advisory committee meetings, and that's the group that actually scores the applications. And then just last Monday, we had a meeting of our partner agency funding workgroup meeting. Now, simply, the partner agency funding workgroup takes that list of scores, doesn't make any changes to it, but they figure out how we're going to allocate the funding that's available based on that scoring. And this is just a snapshot of what we just discussed. The only thing new on here is that the next step or the final step in the process is that we're going to be moving forward with purchase of service agreement and funding awards concurrent with our typical budget approval timeline. This slide just shows the application requirements for this year, and really they're unchanged from last year as well, with the exception of the very first item there. The maximum request this year was for 20% of the previous fiscal year's actual expenditures. So if an agency had spent $100,000 the previous year, they could ask for up to 20% of that and so on. They also still have to be registered with goodgiving.net, with a current agency portrait, and that's again part of the paperless process. All of their background and some of their financials and just general information are out there on goodgiving.net for review by the committee and the public, frankly. They also must be a non-profit with 501c3. They have to attend the pre-application meeting, and they have to submit the completed application, the narrative as well as the financials. There's two files there via email by 5 p.m. on the 16th of January. So this is the results of the process so far this year. We had 55 applications from 36 agencies. 22 of those were existing partner agencies. All of our existing partner agencies did apply this year. And we had 14 new applicant agencies as well. The total funding request was $3.76 million in total. And you can see on the slide that there was a wide variance of requests. It went from less than $2,000 all the way up to $474,000 for a single application. We had a wide diversity of agency types responding to each funding category. The council had adopted the six funding categories that you see on the slide, and every one of those categories was represented in the applications. This slide shows, and it's a little bit tough to read the text there, but it shows a breakdown of the applications by priority need area. And you'll note that a number of the applications, 16 of them actually, responded to more than one need area and are counted for each need area that they responded to. In other words, we had 16 applications that responded to two or more of those need areas. That's why the total adds up to 83 rather than 55. The highest response categories we had this year were positive youth development, which is the orange color, and basic human needs, which is kind of the teal color on the upper left. This is that same information but broke down by funding requests. The categories receiving the largest funding requests were mental health and substance abuse services as well as basic human needs. Both were at over $1 million each. Larger funding requests of more than $150,000 came from Hope Center, requested $1,069,000. That was in the form of six different applications for mental health and substance abuse services, basic human needs, and public health. Salvation Army requested $264,000 for basic human needs and positive youth development, and that was over two applications. Bluegrass Regional MHMR Board applied this year with two applications for $254,270, and those were for mental health and substance abuse services as well as basic human needs. Community Action Council submitted four applications this year for $234,220. And finally, God's Pantry submitted two applications totaling $158,430. so once we received the applications we we forwarded them to our scoring committees six different scoring committees reviewed the applications this year and were responsible for the scoring and the ranking of the applications these again these scoring app committees do not allocate funding they're simply responsible for using a scoring rubric and a scoring sheet that we give them and putting together a final score for each one of the applications that they review The committees were five to six persons each. We had 32 reviewers total this year and included Social Services Advisory Board members, Fayette County School Board representatives, U.K. professors, social service providers in the community, Partners for Youth staff, Goodgiving.net, and other allied agency staff. We also had, you might recall, Junior League really stepped up last year. We had eight Junior League members on our review committee last year, and we had 11 this year, and they had a diverse background as well. We had attorneys and professors and so on from junior leagues, so that was a great help to us. Each committee member signed a non-conflict of interest statement, and they reviewed 9 to 10 applications on a 140-point scale this year. And these committees met on six evenings in February and March at the Lexington Senior Center to hear presentations from the applicants. They pre-scored. They did their reviews before they got to hear the presentations, but the value in those presentations was to provide clarity to any questions that the reviewers might have had, and they can adjust the score by up to 10 points after they receive responses to those questions. So after the funding committee finished their work, we formed a funding work group. I'm sorry, the review committee finished their work. It gets confusing. Then we forwarded it to a funding work group. And the funding work group was formed to recommend funding based on the scoring rank of each application. And we had two council members, two members of the Social Services Advisory Board, and two members of administration that sat on that committee. And again, that meeting was just last Monday. And this is what they came up with. We gave them six different scenarios just to help facilitate discussion. And we were provided by administration with a total budget this year of $2 million, which is up from $1.74 million last year. So I'm pleased to say that we did receive an increase that we worked with. The final snapshot of what the committee did is on the slide at the bottom there. The scoring ranks or the applications that were ranked first through tenth were allocated 85% of the requests. The scores ranked 11 through 20 were allocated 75% of what they requested. And then the committee had decided, there was a lot of discussion on whether you provide less funding to more agencies or more funding to less agencies, frankly, and this is what they decided to do. They tried to provide more agencies with funding. So the agencies that were ranked 21st through 48th received 51%. of the request and that brought us to the two million amount. The applications that were ranked 49th through 55th weren't funded this year. So this is a snapshot of the actual score. You see the first column there is the ranking of the application and these are presented in rank order. The second column is the final score that was provided. The third column is the applicant. The fourth column is the request. what they actually requested in their application. The fifth column is the work group recommendation based on what we had just discussed. So this slide shows the 85% recommendation for the first 10 applicants. You'll notice that some of the names of the applicants are blue shaded on there. All that means is that they weren't partner agencies this year, so that represents agencies that didn't apply last year but did this year. So Community Action Council came in first this year. with the Affordable Energy Initiative. And again, you can see that there's four new programs on there in the top ten. The programs that were ranked 11th through 20th this year received 75%. And again, we have three new programs on there. So I was really pleased to see that happen. And I'm just going to go through these, but if anybody wants me to stop, please let me know. These are the rankings for, this gets into the 51%. funded threshold. And this is, again, this goes all the way from 21st all the way down to 48th. The 48th ranked application was the last one that we were able to fund before we simply ran out of money, quite frankly. And then again, 49th through 55th did not receive funding this year. So the next steps in this process after this presentation today, these These recommendations will move forward for consideration as part of the mayor's budget, and again, they'll move through the typical council budget approval process. And finally, what we did last year after we finished this process, we immediately sent online surveys to review committee members as well as all of the applicant agencies and received some really good feedback that we were able to implement this year. We're going to be finalizing a needs assessment as well. You're all aware of our social services needs assessment. That's going to be wrapping up in August and September of this year, and we're going to be doing some analysis of those funding priority recommendations concurrent with the completion of that this summer, and we'll be bringing that back to you to amend the funding process for next year. And that's my presentation, and I'd be glad to answer any questions you might have. Thank you, Craig, for your presentation and for your hard work. We have several council members that have signed on, but before, I just want a quick commentary. I'm delighted to see that the administration has increased the funding, proposes to increase the funding up to $2 million, an extra quarter of a million dollars is very helpful. I want to thank the council for its leadership. I think it was here just about two years ago that we advocated for creating a transparent and equitable process for these limited funds that we have. And even more so, over the last two years, we've actively participated with the various funding groups and review committees. And now we have the opportunity to ask you guys questions as we explore your findings. So, Council Member Ellinger. Thank you. Chair, I just have a couple questions for you. Today, is this an information or what's our process here? Because it's going to eventually come to us from the mayor for the budget he presents to us, and then the council will have a decision on how we're going to allocate the money. That's a great question. This is, as Commissioner Mills mentioned, this is information only. And as Craig alluded, this is year two of our implementing this process. The only difference between what we're seeing today and what occurred last year is we're getting the information in a more succinct and timely fashion. As I recall last year, the March committee meeting, we had the process, and then we had an interim funding group, and then we had the funding recommendations. But luckily we have the information that's being provided now. Then you are correct that we'll have to go back to the mayor's office, most likely to be incorporated in the budgeting process. And Council Member Ellinger, I see a CAO, Hamilton, wishing to expound. Expound. Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, and fellow committee members. I've had numerous conversations with the mayor about this and the process and the results of the process. And I wanted to convey his opinion on this and what he thinks are the steps forward. And I've sort of written those down so I won't misspeak. and then I'll sort of go into my own words for just a second. The mayor feels that we need to take another look at the process that we're using to decide how to spend these dollars. The basic needs of food and shelter need to be our first concern, and our process must reflect that priority. Although the goal of this relatively new process is fairness, and I know fairness was the intention of everyone involved, in the end, the process needs to address funding for those that need our help the most. The results of this process in place, the results of the process in place, was an enormous cut in funds to provide shelter to women and children who are homeless. There's a lot of finger-pointing as to how this may have happened, but what matters is that we focus on the bottom line, on what's important, helping those who need our help the most. Next year, we'll work with the Council again, as we've done in the past, to refine this process to ensure that we meet the basic human needs of our community. This year, we're going to look at the proposed allocations and at our budget. and decide how to handle this. The best time for me, being the mayor, to make a recommendation is when I announce my budget. And so those were the comments that the mayor would like me to make today. Now, from a personal standpoint, if I can just say one thing, I did this kind of process for 15 years in Community Development Block Grant with the state, and I dealt with a tremendous amount of money. and $50 million on the average. And I had to continue to go through the process of refinement of the process because I never knew what kind of projects it was going to kick out until it was sort of the list was already made. And then the next year I refined it more, and then I refined it more until I finally got to what was the priority. And I just want to say that there was, which I know you all know, there was a tremendous amount of effort put into this and a process to give fairness. And I think now what we need to do is to look back and make sure that we have included fairness, logic, funding of various things, and also some of our most crucial needs. Thank you. Thank you. Well, I hope that didn't take my whole five minutes because I asked you all where the process was, and I haven't even begun my questioning, so I hope. I will ask the clerk if she can reset Council Member Ellinger's time. And thank you, C.A.O. Hamilton. Council Member Ellinger. Thank you. Thank you, Chair. And that actually eliminates a lot of the things that I was going to talk about. And when Commissioner Mills said this is our recommendation to the mayor, that's what this is. but the mayor has already said that he will take in consideration some of the, I think, deficiencies in the recommendations. And what I'd like to do is, I'm not sure who, is it Commissioner Mills or Craig? When we put this in resolution in, and I think it's a good process that obviously needs to be improved upon, was there anything in there about a point reduction? who determined that and and and where is that in where did the the amount come in and who made that decision the point reduction didn't come up at that time what occurred when when the council adopted the resolution was that you adopted the the application which has the all of the rules attached to it if you will and some of those rules say any applications received after the above submittal deadline or not meeting the above requirements will not be considered. In order to be considered, an application must be received by the deadline. Applications containing any omissions of required information will be considered non-responsive and removed from the funding process. Complete applications must be delivered in their original or PDF format by email, not later than 5 o'clock p.m. Wednesday, January 16, 2013. And finally, applications not found to be complete will be considered nonresponsive and removed from the process. So those were the rules I was working with, but we did receive some applications that were late this year. And as a result of that, the administration had made the decision that rather than kicking out those applications, rather than denying them the ability to apply, they would allocate a point reduction instead. And I think that's where we get into the discrepancy on who says when certain times were received. Because I know there's a discrepancy on some applications when they were received. And I think there's part on page four of the LFCC Pargent Agency Funding Information Instruction. Also, it does waive technicalities if there is issues on when that comes in. And if you look at what a 20-point deduction does, if you'd been first in funding, where would that put you if you take 20 points away? That would put you at 42nd. That would take you down to 51%. By taking 20 points away of 140 points, what is that deduction? 14% deduction? But actually it goes from an 85% deduction down to 51%, which is a 34% deduction. So I'm still trying to figure out the deduction part of that because I think it really is punitive on what you've done in the deduction. If you want to take a point or two away when there's a technicality, I can agree with that. I can't agree with a 20-point deduction, which basically just takes funding away. And as the CAO said, we have to look at who we want to fund this with. And if we're not going to take care of the women and children in this, I think this is a flawed system. The maintenance of the point deductions was a decision that the funding work group took a look at, and they chose to leave it as it was. We did give them the option to reduce it. And who made that determination begin with? It came through from administration with our recommendation for point reductions from the motion. Is that a decision from you? Is that a decision for the commissioner? Is that a decision from the administration? I'm trying to figure out where 20 points comes from. The reason we took it forward is we were not going to accept the applications. There were five agencies that were laid, and we were not going to consider them by our rules. And we based that on when a bid is due for purchasing, if it's laid, it's not accepted. When employee applications do at 4.30 and comes in late, it's not accepted. So we went to the administration because we were very concerned about the five agencies that came in late. Thank you, Commissioner. I only have a minute left, so I appreciate that answer. What happens if there's a discrepancy on when you actually think that you thought, and you receive an e-mail saying that it's been sent to you, that it's there, and now who is the person you're supposed to go to then if there's a discrepancy and determining on the 20 points? because it looks like the only one who has a say in that is you, and I don't think that's fair. That's not the case. Well, who makes that determination? Determination was made to accept them with a penalty rather than to not accept them at all. And that was not made solely by me. And then when we went to the funding work group, we gave them the option of changing that penalty points if they desired to do so, and the funding work group decided not to. So it certainly was not my decision solely. I understand there are people here who are going to want to speak when we open it up, because I know they have discrepancy on what they believe they did in good faith, sent you information in the deadline, and if that was the case, then there would be no 20-point deduction. If there's no 20-point deduction, they go from zero funding that they move from zero right now, which would be at number 50, and they would move up to number 14 and receive 75% funding. And I think you have to look at the funding and the zero funding for the women and children. I just think that is just wrong. And I don't know how you could bring this to us in good faith think that that's right. As our commissioner, how could you bring that to us like this? I didn't bring it to you. It was a process that ran through your resolution. There were many eyes on this process. Again, I will say there were five agencies that were late. But according to the process, we were not to accept any of them even for consideration. And we thought the penalty was a compromise. Who do they appeal to, though, if they think that they in good faith sent you that time and were in that time frame? And my time's up and I'll come back. I'll have five minutes. Thank you. Thank you, Gassel, Member Ellinger. I want to remind the committee that the information that's provided in light of Mayor Gray's information that he's afforded through Ms. Hamilton is that the topic is department agency review, and we have some 55 applicants. I understand that there may be some concern in regards to some discrepancies on a few that may have. I just want to keep it on the broad base of the overall process that we've actually called to be employed. Council Member Stinnett. Thank you, Chair. I appreciate the sensitivity of this issue. Going back several years ago, we had over $5 million we gave away to social service agencies in our social service budget. And now it's a shame. I think it's a disgrace that we're down to $2 million. And I appreciate the administration raising it to $2 million, but I'm going to argue at our 1 o'clock meeting we need to have $3 million. We need to have one more in there because we've cut these agencies so much the last three years that it's time we put our money back where people need it the most. And especially if we're going to create an office for homeless and affordable housing, we need to put the money back. Speaking of this process, I don't want to sit here and educate on the difference between an ordinance and a resolution, but we made this process a resolution. And simply being, a resolution is a thought or sentiment from council at that given time. It means it can be changed in the future with a new council, a new body, and we did that on purpose so we could improve the process. Because prior to this two years ago, Dr. Stevens, you're in the audience, you understand how this used to work, probably better than most of us, but it was just the thought of the mayor. Go to the mayor. I need the money. Go put it in the budget. Council rarely, rarely changed it. The first time we did that was in 07. We cut an agency out. The council did that the mayor had funded. And it was a very tough thing to do. Let me tell you, it was very tough to do that. But it was because the agency wasn't performing the way we've asked them to perform. They didn't have financials. It was a much different circumstance. And this year, going through the process that we've set up, to me it's more of a guideline. We've asked the administration to follow this guideline. And as Councilman Ellinger pointed out, there may be discrepancies. We're not under a perfect system. Never will be, probably, given the nature of the volume of applications and the need out there in our community. But I think and I appreciate our CAO reading the statement previously at the beginning because it does clarify a lot. But at the same time, I do not want to undermine this process. We put it in there for good intentions, understanding that there will be opportunity to maybe make improvements going forward. Obviously, the council has the final say when we pass the budget. But I don't want to get into a situation where let's lobby the council, they'll change it for us, and we're back to what we were three years ago, and that's not a good system either. So I thank you all, for those of you in the audience, for respecting the system. I understand there were well-intended consequences to what the administration was trying to do, but also I know there was good consequences and good faith on the submission of applications as well. If you blatantly were past the deadline, you were blatantly past it. But I think there was a clear intention deliberately to get it in on time on behalf of the Salvation Army, and I think that needs to be under fair consideration when we approve the budget. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Councilman Stinnett. Council Member Kay. Thank you, Chair. Some of my remarks will fall off on what Council Member Stinnett just said, but I want to remind people in the audience, people who are watching, perhaps Council Members, that the beginning of this change in how we approach this whole topic had to do with the Council basically saying, we, urban county government, do not want to be in the position of simply funding agencies. We want to encourage agencies to propose new and innovative programs, and we want to look at those, and we want to see which ones we want to fund. we also said we wanted to set up a set of priorities about how we wanted to do that and a process for doing that. So two years ago a process was set up, and last year it was modified, and this year we have a process that's supposed to be reflecting what I consider a policy decision by this council. We're still in the, I think, the process of making changes to that. when you institute a new process, there will be some unintended consequences, which some people consider negative. If so, that may require changing the policy or it may require changing the process. But I would agree with Council Member Stinnett. Today I believe we're looking at some information that provides us a starting point for looking at how these monies should be allocated. I think we need to respect that process as much as possible. I also understand from emails and so on that there are some questions about whether some of the ways in which the process has worked end up with significant negative consequences for specific agencies. And I think that's the Council's responsibility to look at that as well. I do have, in addition, I've got a couple questions about where we are in the process and what the meaning of it is. So this might be probably for Craig. The first question is there's a set of criteria that people work on, a worksheet. Can you tell us a little bit about what the major criteria are? What are people actually looking at, and how do they evaluate a particular application? Sure. What they're looking at, bear with me for a moment. Essentially, the review committee is working with the 140-point scale, and 10 points of that, they looked at the completeness of the application, that they were able to read through it and it made sense and it was clear and everything was answered. Five points of that, or just a little less than 4%, are based on the mission statement. Does the mission statement of the organization tie in with the program that they're proposing? A good chunk of the score is related to the program approach, 60 points or just less than 43%. And that's simply how the program is running. Is it innovative? Is it creative? Can it work? Is it thoroughly thought through and so on? The program measures, the proposed outcomes that they're proposing are another 30 points of that, and that's 21.4% of the final score. And the program measures are simply what they're going to do over the course of the year that they're funded and what those outcomes are going to be and what positive difference are they going to make as a result of the program. 20 points or 14.3% of the score is related to the budget, that the budget numbers work, that they make sense that there's value and cost per client and that sort of thing. And then finally, 15 points or 10.7% of the score is related to diversity of funding. And that's looking at the overall agency and ensuring that if they lose a funding source, they're going to be able to continue forward and that they have a healthy funding stream coming in so that they can continue forward with the programming. So that's the total. Okay. So within the current system, essentially there are categories and there's a point system that's weighted. You get more points for certain kinds of activities and so on. In addition, there's been conversation, and this really speaks to Commissioner Hamilton's presentation and the mayor's view. There's been conversation about taking those five major category areas and prioritizing those as well. Now, I understand that that's tied to the needs assessment that's being now implemented in conjunction with the University of Kentucky. Absolutely. But that the intention at the end of that, my time's up, I'm going to briefly finish. The intention is to take that needs assessment, look at the five categories, and it may be that the ones that the mayor has indicated, food and shelter, are twice as important as other categories, or maybe not. But I think that also comes back to council. We're going to get information about needs. We're going to look at those categories. And if it turns out that we feel certain of those areas are the most important, then they would get more weight in the process. But we have not established that yet, and so they're all treated the same. That's where we are in the process. My time is up. I'll come back. Thank you. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Council Member Kay. Council Member Akers. Okay. I want to, Craig, I want to ask you to come back in there. I want to come back to Council Member Elliger and Council Member Kay if he wishes to speak again. My thought process on this is simply is that we ask for a process, and I want to say that there's been a great deal of work put into it by Craig and Commissioner Mills in our office and in conversation with them is that this is, over the last two years, this has been an almost a year-round process. Right after this time last year, they quickly assembled and regrouped to refine the process to prepare for this year. And even though we have an issue of contentiousness that has arisen, we're just kind of working the kink side. And I want, if I could say, is that in my opinion, I don't think that the commissioner and the department and Craig as a staffer was at liberty to make the subjective decisions that perhaps are being requested now. I think that you guys are almost obligated to a certain extent to be as objective as possible, to uphold the integrity of the process, and in fairness to all applicants, in fairness to all applicants, I believe you guys were required to do that. The policy lies with the council and with the mayor's office, and we have an opportunity to revise that, if so we wish. there's two things I think that has to happen here in this case, in my opinion. I think it would be prudent for the council, again, to uphold the integrity and fairness of the policy that we created. At the same time, I think that we have an opportunity, if not an obligation, to still address the needs in our community that may, as of right now, via the recommendation, are unmet because of the integrity of the process. I think we can do both, but that lies with us as the policymakers and not with the administration. You guys were, we asked you to do what we asked you to do, and now we have to reconcile where we are now. Council Member Beard. Thank you, Chair. Sitting here listening to the discussions, an idea popped into my mind, and that would be a million or a million and a half dollars, whatever it may be, in a discretionary pool that we could allocate to whomever on a needs basis, as opposed to we're going to take 10 points off for you didn't get it in on time and we're going to have so many points off for mission statement and things like that, which they're all nice, but we essentially, for most of the people, know what they do and what their mission is and the depth of that mission. And the allocation that could take place in the LINCS process or it could be a separate group of people that would handle that million, million and a half dollars. I think we have to give enough to get the job done. and it's just external of this process. Thank you. Thank you, Council Member Beard. We have Council Member Kane, Council Member Ellinger, and then if I could commit, I'd like to turn to the three members of the public who've signed in to talk on this issue. Council Member Kay. Thank you, Chair. Craig, I had one more specific question, and then I wanted to make one additional comment. The question, in your presentation, you indicated that the maximum request could be 20% of, but I was not clear, 20% of what? Of a previous program, a specific program or an agency? 20% of what? 20% of the agencies, the overall agencies, prior fiscal year expenditures. So in other words, what did you spend last year? So total budget of the whole agency total expenditures. I was going to use the language budget. And when I spoke with our budgeting staff about that, they they suggested that we use expenditures rather than budget because it reflects reality and what they actually needed to run. I see. So if an agency expended a million dollars in the previous fiscal year, they couldn't ask for more than two hundred thousand. Yes, sir. That's true. OK. And that would be across all of their programs. So in other words, if they ask for five programs funding, the total ask couldn't be more than that, $200,000. And the rationale for instituting that cap? That's, again, for funding diversity. That makes sure that we're funding no more than 20% of an agency so that if they don't get funded by LFUCG in the future or lose one of their other funding streams, that they can continue to exist and be financially stable. Okay, thank you. And then kind of a final comment, if I can. I think the intention here in what Council has been doing is to make this process as fair and equitable and transparent as possible. And I believe, as a couple other people have said, we want to respect the integrity of that process. But we also want to balance that against ways in which that process may create situations that we feel are, in fact, not, for whatever reason, the best outcome that we could hope for. So in my view of these kinds of situations, we are in a position and we should make exceptions, but we should only make them rarely and carefully so that the process itself gets the respect that it deserves. And I hope that in this particular issue, it seems to me, we probably do want to make some adjustments, but we want to be careful about how we do it. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Council Member K. Council Member Oliver. Thank you, Chair. I've been on this council a long time, and I've been involved in this process for a long time. And I think we have moved in the right steps here to try to be, as Councilman McKay said, more fair, more equitable, more transparent, no conflicts of interest. I think that's where we went ahead. But when we did this resolution, I think we have a flaw here where when somebody in good faith believes that they got an application in on time, we should have an appeals process. We should have something that allows that agency then to come, and I guess maybe this is it now, because we are certainly going to change the funding recommendations. But in the past, and I'm glad the CAO came forward, because in the past, usually what came here without just a few little minor corrections, it normally went towards what the mayor presented. And I think this is when you take care of something. You don't wait until after the budget, because it's a lot tougher. You do it on the front end than on the back end. So I think we have to look at the resolution and if there's an appeals process that these agencies can come forward. Because when you're dealing with a 20-point deduction on something that literally takes you from 75% funding to zero, that is not right. And we have to correct that, and we should not allow an individual to be able to make that decision. There should be some way, a process that we affect that, that somebody should be able to come forward and correct that flaw. And I know there's people here who would like to speak, so I'll give them that opportunity. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Council Member Ellinger. I want to call forward the folks that are going to speak. We have three folks that are assigned them to speak. I would ask Lindy Carnes if you could make your way to the podium, and I'm going to ask Council Member Henson if she wanted to make a comment. Council Member Henson. Thank you. Chair, I missed part of the meeting, but I got the gist of a little bit of what's going on. And I did have a question for Commissioner Mills regarding the process, which prior to this process that you and your staff have put in place, which I think is an excellent process compared to what we had in past years. Quite an improvement. But I also think that the needs assessment, I was going to ask about that, and I hope I'm not repeating what someone else has already asked, but would it be possible when we determine the most critical needs for our city, and it's obvious to me that homelessness should be probably that and food our number one priority, if money would be allocated to those agencies and not necessarily have to go through the application process, but then the new agencies and agencies that want funding for smaller programs could apply for a pot of funds? That's certainly not my department's decision. Okay. But we will bring it back to this committee. The needs assessment will come in April. They've talked to stakeholders. It probably won't be finished until August. They're going to pass it off to the Martin School. Once the priorities are set, then it's a council process and a policy process again. It's not mine to institute. Y'all could choose to do different levels of funding. You could ask agencies to get together and apply together for a problem. There's lots of different scenarios, and we can bring some of those to you all, but it's not our decision. I didn't want to discredit what you've done because I think it's great, And I know that you are certainly a social service caregiver, I guess. But I guess I was just thinking along that line or, you know, a certain pot of money that would, you know, our funding is very diverse. And I think that's a good thing, too. But yet we do need to take care of the most critical needs. Now, what's happened this time, in my opinion, the application got there not complete or whatever, but it's not about the Salvation Army or any other agency, but it's about the needs of our citizens and making sure. It's not about the money LFUCG has. It's not about the Salvation Army per se, but it is about the families and the children that stay at the Salvation Army. So thank you, Chair. Thank you, Council Member Henson. I have just enough time to go through public comment and almost done, committee members. Ms. Carnes, welcome. If you can give your name and your address, please, you'll have three minutes. My name is Lindy Carnes, 2400 The Woods Lane, Lexington, Kentucky. I'm the treasurer of the Salvation Army. I want to thank you all today. It has been very gratifying to see this process work in the way that it's working today and the ability for the Salvation Army to get at least the attention, I think, that the services it provides deserves. I want to thank Commissioner Hamilton on behalf of the mayor for her kind remarks. And I want to say the Salvation Army provided 44,000 nights of housing last year to homeless women and children. The Salvation Army served 155,000 meals last year. The city's funding in the past has represented approximately 20% of the shelter's budget. If we do not receive this funding, we will not be able to house approximately 10,000 nights of housing and approximately 30,000 meals. I suggest that these people who are our most vulnerable citizens, who are, you know, we're all sitting here today and we're all getting a little bit hungry, But, you know, we're not carrying two children by the hand, and we are not unable to get ourselves lunch. We are just too busy. So I suggest that this is a service that we all feel is important, and I'm gratified to hear the kind remarks that were made today. I also want to say that we all live in a world of computer glitches where things go wrong. We submitted our application on the deadline. We received an email back from Lexington Fayette Urban County Government that our application was received. A portion of the application did not transmit because of a conversion of an Excel file into a PDF file. We believe that we did submit the application, and we do believe that it was timely. we are a process-based organization. You cannot take care of homeless women and children and not have a strict adherence to process. And we appreciate that this process was put together to protect all organizations. And we do wish to be compliant. And we do feel that we were compliant. I want to say one other thing. One of my mother's favorite expressions was, FAIR happens once a year at the county seat and I am so glad that it happens once a year here as well and probably more often than that thank you so much Thank You Ms. Collins. Tammy Kilder, Tammy Kilder here. Ms. Kilder do you wish to speak? Well, I wasn't expected to speak, so I'm fine. Okay. Thank you for being here. Mr. Jack Birch. Jack, if you'll come forward and give us your name and address, you'll have three minutes. I'm Jack Birch. I'm the Executive Director of Community Action Council. Over the years, sometimes I've sat here, watched you all, and thought, I need to be on that side of the bench. Today I'm absolutely convinced that I don't want to be on that side of the bench. All of the entities who seek urban county government funding have things in this process that we would have done differently. We made recommendations, and I'm sure others did as well, and we had the opportunity to do that. but we were given a process and most organizations were able to comply either because they did things on time or their technical stuff worked I have great sympathy for people who try to convert files to PDF I still haven't learned how to do that but if you start making exceptions to the process and you may very well need to do that because of what happened in this one. It will fall apart. You send a message to everyone that the process is only good until the outcome is what people don't want. If the system's results are something this community doesn't want, and quite frankly, I don't know what we do with all those women and children if we don't house and feed them. It seems to me you've only got one solution. that is not to go after the organizations that complied and who are meeting real community needs, but to find some more money. And I know that's hard, and I know this budget is tough, and I know there are other priorities, and many of you probably have them as well. But I really think you only have that choice. And then maybe the next time you talk about the process, the organizations that are actively engaged in it but have an opportunity to do more than respond to a survey, but could actually sit around the table. I think we can be honest partners in the conversation about the process, and you still don't have to accept our recommendations. Now let me close with a question because I do think you need to work on the process. The funding work group. Now the resolution you pass does not anticipate that a funding work group is going to decide that the top-ranked proposal gets 85% of what it wants. Some people are going to get 75%. Some people are going to get 51%. Last year and now again this year, I have looked at that and I've thought, did anyone ask any of the presenters of any of these projects if their project is still viable at those funding levels? We started to submit our proposals thinking we might only get 51%. We better pad the budget. So I think you've got a lot of other issues, but I would urge you to not send a message to the rest of us. Even if you comply, we may change the rules afterwards. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Birch. Council Member Myers and committee members, we have ten minutes before we die. I'll be really brief. Every time we have these discussions, and it's nice to see Mr. Birch here, and lately we've been agreeing on a lot of things lately. I'm not sure if I slipped and fell or he slipped and fell or hit our heads or what, but it's good to see you here again today. And I agree with what you said. And, you know, two years ago in this committee, we started a process in which we were trying to put together a partnership with University of Kentucky, Martin School, and College of Social Work in a united way. And the gist of that project was simply to increase the size of the pie and to put some analytics around our outcomes so that we could go to other funding sources and increase the size of our pie. This committee shot that down. We're right back in the same place where we were two years ago with Mitch Avers saying that the only solution here, Council Member Sennett said the same thing, to increase the size of the pie. Since I've been on the council, one of the things that I wanted to do was come up with a way that we can determine how much money we're going to put towards partner agencies in this community. And I don't know what the formula would be, if it's a percentage of the general fund budget, if it's, I don't know what it is. But I knew you know this, that in order to get that done, we need the analytics to show that the money that we're spending is going to good use and we're having good outcomes. Without that, people won't support it. So hopefully we can, and I'll tell you, the partnership that we were going to do with United Way and University of Kentucky, those two entities have done that around some other funding sources for the city, not for the city of Lexington, but people who are in the city of Lexington doing services. They've got their analytics. They're able to show results, and they're able to go back and increase the size of the pie in other areas. That's what needs to happen here. Hopefully next year we can bring that back around for round two. But I agree with Council Member Stennett. In our budget process, we just need to put another million dollars into this piece of the pie and go after the things that we need to go after, continue to get outcomes, and continue to increase the size of the pie until we get our community over the hump so that people can be self-sustaining and self-sufficient. Thank you very much. Thank you, Council Member Myers. Committee, I thank everybody in regards to partner agency review. I think we look forward to continuing with our partnership. CAO Hamilton will look forward to working and being in contact with the administration in regards to how we go forward through the budgetary process. I want to thank Social Services again for your hard work, and we want to thank the officials from Salvation Army. Unfortunately, we're here under these circumstances, but we definitely appreciate what you guys do and for allowing you to highlight the issue as we move forward. Committee members, we had one other item on the agenda, which is adult and tenant services, and to Ms. Godfrey, I want to apologize, but we hopefully will roll that presentation to their very valuable programs over to next month. uh you guys see the items in uh committee i i think it's appropriate for us to leave workforce in we had a very good discussion but we have some work there still to go there's no other issues before the committee to give us time to break i would entertain a motion to adjourn it's been a motion and it's been a motion in a second all in favor signify by saying And I, we stand adjourned. We'll see you guys on April 30th for our next committee meeting.