Music This is my favorite. Thank you. public comment for issues on the agenda. And Mr. Mundy says there is none. And the second item is the docket approval, which we do have a docket. Any requested rezonings? And then we should have four walk-ons. Oh, we have one person who would like to. Okay. There is one person who is here to speak, and is this the person who wants to speak? What's the name? Todd? Yes. It might be better to wait until the presentation. Okay, until after the Code for America. Would that be all right? That would be great. Okay, very good. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Mundy. Now, our docket for Thursday. Do I have any motion? I'll need a motion to approve. Second. Well, okay. Who made that motion? Council Member Beard moved to approve and Council Member Ellinger seconded. Now, there are a few walk-ons and other proposals, so if you'll please log in, Council Members. Council Member Farmer. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you. Hello. You're welcome. Vice Mayor, I move to place on the docket for the June 6, 2013 Council meeting a resolution amending Resolution No. 255-213 as part of the NDFs to substitute Lake Edge Condominium Association, Inc. for Dallavelle Management, Inc. as a recipient of funding. So move. Second factor. And I'll explain this if you all like. This is trying to put some bicycle racks up on Lake Park, and we need to convey these to a nonprofit rather than a for-profit, and that's the change that is made with this amendment. Thank you. You're welcome. We had a second, I believe, by Council Member Lane. So are there any questions about the motion? All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Anyone opposed? All righty. Council Member Myers. Thank you, Madam Vice Chair. I move to place on the docket for the June 6, 2013 Council meeting a resolution authorizing and approving the purchase of the following insurances. Excess aviation liability from Old Republic Insurance Company for $4,581. Excess liability general, automobile, and public officials from the Munich RE for $561,396. Excess property insurance from Alliant PIP for $317,403.78. Excess workers' compensation from New York Marine and General Insurance Company in amount of $326,989. and self-insured auto non-fault bond from International Fidelity Insurance Company for $2,500 at a total not to exceed $1,212,869.78 and authorizing the mayor to execute all necessary documents to accomplish the same. So moved. Second. Motion by Mr. Myers. second by Mr. Ellinger to place on the docket the excess liability issues. Is there any discussion? Seeing none, all those in favor, please say aye. Anyone opposed? That motion passes. Council Member Ellinger. Thank you, Vice Mayor. I move to place on the docket for the June 6, 2013 Council meeting under first reading of resolutions, a resolution to purchase a cooling unit from climate condition company, a source provider. So moved. Second. I have a motion by Mr. Ellinger, seconded by Council Member Myers. Are there any questions, comments about the motion? All those in favor say aye. Aye. Anyone opposed? All right. Council Member Kay, did you have a walk-on to the docket? I have a budget amendment. Okay. We'll wait just a minute. Uh-huh. We'll wait just a minute for the budget amendments. Are there any other walk-ons or motions? We do have an issue. Mr. Farmer, did you have an issue? Thank you for that open-ended opportunity there. Well, not just any issue. This will take a few minutes, no. Is this about the docket? I'm going to try to make a motion to set a zone change time, potentially, for the Kroger hearing, which we won't do that later. Can we do that later since it's not on the docket technically? Absolutely. Thank you. And then I'd like to turn over the chair to Mr. Ellinger because I have an issue for the docket. Certainly. Vice Mayor? Thank you. I move to place on the docket a resolution expressing the urban county government's opposition to the rate increase requested by Kentucky American Water Company in Public Service Commission rate case number 2012-00520 and directing the clerk to notify the Public Service Commission. We have a motion and a second. We have a second by Council Member Henson. Do we have any discussion? Seeing none, all those in favor say aye. All those opposed, that passes. And, Vice Mayor, I will pass the gavel back. All right. Thank you very much. Are there any other issues regarding the docket? I see none. So there's a motion on the floor to approve the docket as amended. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. All those opposed, same. That motion passes. Now, approval of the summary. Do I hear a motion? Council Member Clark moved and Council Member Massadi seconded to approve the summary of May 28th work session. Any discussion? Corrections? All those in favor say aye. Anyone opposed? That motion passes. And excuse me one moment. We have a technical issue. Thank you. Now, is everybody, are we all squared away? Okay, very good, thank you. All right, now, Mr. Farmer, this might be an appropriate time before we go to new business to discuss the zone change that you wanted to bring up. Recently, the Council's had a hard time setting zone change hearings. Mostly that's had to do with, Council Member Lawless is correct, with people not coming, but we've had a timing issue in relation to when the Planning Commission acts and the fact that we need to act within 90 days of that period, And we've had a couple of instances where either over the winter break or during the summer recess, we've had either time run out or had short time. As it relates to the Kroger zone change, I just mentioned it last week to the council just to make them aware that we need to take action on that either immediately before we go on break or as soon as we come back. And while the staff hasn't brought the minutes forward and we don't actually have the case review in front of us, we know that we have the need to act on behalf of the constituency and I believe set a hearing date and time and see if we can get enough votes, enough people to be here to have the hearing. There's been an interesting amount of email this morning back and forth about when and how we can do this. And just for purposes of beginning the discussion and hopefully finding a happy medium, I would just make a motion to have the so-called Kroger Zone Change hearing on July 2 at 7 p.m., which would be after our regular council meeting. Listening to the meeting earlier, I noted the vice mayor talking about things that were a while back, and we don't want to say they're old, but they're a while back. It used to be the rhythm of the council to have a zone change at 8 o'clock after a 7 o'clock meeting start. And so this is not something that we haven't done before. We just haven't done recently. And if there is a second for this motion, we can have discussion on it and amend it accordingly. But I would like to have the idea in the public that we're working to have this hearing as quickly as possible, as opportunely as possible for everyone involved. So, again, the motion would be to have the zone change on July 2nd at 7 p.m. here in Chambers. Second. So that would follow our 6 p.m. council meeting. Yes, ma'am. Okay. There's been a motion by Councilmember Farmer and a second by Councilmember Ellinger to schedule a potential zone change for July 2 at 7 p.m. And I think, on a look at our council clerk, we would simply roll into that when the meeting's finished, if the meeting's finished at 7.30. We can't roll into it before 7, but we could roll into it at 7.30. If we're finished at 8, we'd roll into it at 8 whenever the council meeting's over. That is correct. Okay. Just to clarify what that would mean. And I was simply going to ask if there are council members who would not be able to stay. I know that the mayor of our sister city is being welcomed that night. which I don't know if that's a conflict for very many people. Council Member Kay? So I'm looking at my calendar, and that's something, either my calendar's wrong or your date is wrong. July 2nd is a Thursday? It's a Tuesday. It's a Tuesday, and we have a work session and a council meeting. I'll say, just not on my calendar. Okay. Thank you. Any other questions? Yes, Council Member Akers. I guess my only concern would be how late my... We can't ever really predict, but according to some folks who were at the planning commission, I think theirs last two hours, Mr. Sully? About two and a half, I think. Two and a half. Thank you, Vice Mayor. Five. We think it was closer to three and a half hours. Okay. I think this is a pretty contentious issue, and that's my only hesitation, is that I think it could last 11 and 12, and I don't know. So I just, that's why I voted for the June 27th date. Thank you. And that is an issue. So any other comments? Council Member Lawless. The other issue is that we have to set an exact time, and we're not going to have a good idea. Well, what I just was saying to the clerk is I believe if we were to set it at 7 o'clock, we can't have it before then, but we can have it after that if we're still in a meeting. Is that correct? Okay. That is correct. That has been a standard practice with any meeting. when you advertise it, if there's some other reason that it can't start until five or ten minutes later, it's okay, or even an hour later. Okay, I just want to double-check that because I don't want any tomfoolery. Any other comments? I am going to make my own comment. If it potentially can go three and a half hours, I am going to reflect what Council Member Akers said in that I would like for us to look at a date when we don't have to start so late. Some of us have to be up, sorry, this is personal, very early the next morning in a job. And so I'll probably be voting against this date. Thank you. Council Member Henson. Thank you, Vice Mayor. And I would point out we need to think about the citizens that might want to come and speak. and I'm sure most of them have jobs and would need to early, but we could cut this off at a certain time and recess and come back. Is that possible? Do you mean come back a second day? Yeah. That's probably not preferable. I think we're looking for a date when we can start and end and have one continuous meeting. Okay. But I don't really think it's real convenient or fair to a lot of people, so thank you. Council Member Kay. There has been a lot of back-and-forth email traffic about a possible date, and I would, if we can, I don't know if we can do it now, but I would prefer to find another date if possible. If that's not possible, then I would vote in favor of this motion. But it seems to me if we have any option at all, we ought to identify it and see if we can't set it up. If I might respond to that, we've identified Thursday, June 27th. There's no council meeting that Thursday, so it could start late afternoon. we've identified July the 8th, which is a Monday. We've also identified August the 19th, which is a Monday. Any of those we could start earlier in the day. You've identified those as possible dates, but not as dates when we know we'd have 10 council members. No, I don't know anything about the quorum. So that's what I'm saying. If none of those work and this other date would work, I would be in favor of it. But if any one of those other dates worked, then I don't know if we can find that out now. I think we can. Although we do have a motion on the floor. So to the July 2nd, Council Member Lawless. Okay. Okay. All right. Is there any other comment about the motion for the July 2nd date at 7 o'clock after the motion? Yes, Vice Mayor, is it not appropriate to do a little bit of investigation relevant to this motion? I don't know whether I want to vote for or against it until we've done some polling about other dates, or is that not appropriate? Well, it's a very specific motion about July 2nd. second I think we can either vote it up or down and then if we vote it down we'll look for another date thank you and if we vote it up then we'll see who will be here I mean I think the discussion is kind of leading to that don't you so councilmember Clark right I'd suggest that we we vote this this motion down and then poll the council and then if none of the other dates work, then we will make another motion for July the 2nd. Sounds good to me. Okay, seeing no one else who has a comment, all those in favor of the July 2nd at 7 p.m. For the zone change hearing, please say aye and log in. All those opposed, there are three ayes and the rest are opposed. So let me just take a poll here. We have, how about if we talk about, yes, Council Member Lawless. I've been looking at this very carefully, and I have some other options to throw out for people to think about, if that's okay. Okay. Dates and times, please. We get back on, I think it's doubtful from what I understand from planning that June 27th would have the time to get the documents and get it approved or advertised, et cetera. Mr. Sully. Thank you, Vice Mayor. Yeah, that's 23 days from today, and with the notices not having been mailed yet, that's very, very tight. Okay. They would have to go out tomorrow, and we would have to hope there were no problems at all. Okay. Noticed. So we're looking at July or August, basically. Okay. Correct. And because July 8th and the 9th is our last council meeting, and we have a council meeting that night, We go on break, and many people are gone on July 8th because that's the long 4th of July weekend. I was looking at August. We come back on the 13th, and we could do it on the 13th after the work session. The 20th, we could do it after the work session, or any days, 14th, 15th. And we have a council meeting, so that probably wouldn't work. But the 14th evening, Monday the 19th, and then the 20th is just a 3 o'clock work session. So that's pushing it pretty tight, but it seems like the most likely to work. Okay. Thank you for those dates. Council members, August 13th is a Tuesday, so we would set the hearing probably at 5 o'clock so that we could have several hours. You mentioned the 14th. That's a Wednesday. Right. There are just no meetings. Okay. Part of the dilemma, I think, for going on a, and this is just my opinion, it can be shot down easily. Part of the problem with going on a date that we never do is lots of people work another job. Oh, I agree. And the 13th, I mean, that one that lasted until after midnight, I was so brain dead, I didn't know which end was up that time. So if we could try to stick maybe to Mondays, Tuesdays, or Thursdays, which are traditional days, would that suit people? So we've got Tuesday the 13th after work session. We've got Monday the 19th. That could be at 3 or 4 o'clock. And we've got, this will make everybody nervous, the 20th. we would have to be finished by midnight. Is that correct? Is the deadline the 21st? So if we went past midnight, it would be okay. Okay, so Council Member Ellinger would like to express an opinion. Thank you, Vice Mayor. Just listening to those dates that are thrown out, I'm going to make a motion that we have it on August 13th at 6 o'clock. Second. Okay. Okay, Tuesday, August 13th at 6 o'clock p.m. is the motion. And Council Member Myers, I believe, seconded it. I did. I'm sorry, Council Member Lawless seconded it. Okay, how many people could be here after the work session? Is there anyone who cannot be here after the work session? So we have one maybe on August 13th. We're on break. Okay. All right. Is there discussion about August 13th? I'll look at the clerk. Council, do we want to set it at 5 o'clock or 6 o'clock? The motion was 6. The motion was 6. Is that your? Yeah, I mean, I'll. Okay. All right. Any more discussion? Council Member Lane. I'm sorry, Council Member. I'd just like to mention that we have a general government committee meeting starting at 11 a.m., public safety at 1, work session at 3, and then if we go into the zoning meeting, and that goes for three or four hours, we'll have a 12- or 13-hour day here in the council. That's pretty abusive, and I can blow our overtime budget. I think we've abused ourselves like that for years. I apologize. Council Member Stennett was on the list to speak. Thank you, Vice Mayor. I'm just trying to go back to, I know Council Member Aker has just asked, but what's wrong with July 1st or 2nd? 2nd, you have the same problem. If we're going to do 12 hours, let's get it done. Or what about July 8th, July 11th? Nothing to say we can't come on that Thursday, July 11th, and get it done before we go on break. The difficulty. It doesn't matter. We're on a break when we go on break. So we can still schedule July 11th or 8th or 1st or 2nd. So I think we need to revisit July and make sure no one can be there those days before we jump into August. Because making them wait until August while we're on break is not a good policy. The difficulty with July the 2nd in particular was that our council meeting, you know, we have a council meeting that night. And so the concern was that it would go until midnight. Well, but we had the same problem on the 13th of August. We still come in here at 11 a.m. We'll be here until midnight anyway. Well, no, it's not the same as the 13th. It's a work session. The timing is not the same. Well, but the second, we don't start down here until 1. So we have a two-hour difference is my point. Okay. Councilmember Akers. I guess we have to vote on Councilmember Ellinger's motion before I can make a motion for an alternate date. Yes. Yes, unless you want to amend it. I would like to make a motion to amend it and that we schedule it for Monday, July 8th at 5 p.m. So moved. Okay, I hear a second from Mr. Farmer. The motion is to schedule July 8th at 5 p.m., and Mr. Farmer seconded. And is there discussion? I would just like it on the record I will not be here, but I think that's just one. We'll have 14 others, correct? Wait a minute. Okay, let's see who can be here before we do this motion. How many people can be here July the 8th at 5 o'clock? Can? Can? Yes. will be here. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, eight. We have ten, which is our minimum. So Council Member Myers, Ellinger, and Gorton Hansen cannot be here. And we don't know about Council Member Ford. Yes, Council Member Kay. I think we already understand it's not good policy to schedule if we think maybe we'll have 10 people here. We might get another person, but if we can find a date when 13 or 14 or 15 people plan to be here, we're going to be in much better shape. Any other comment on the motion? This is actually the amendment to the motion. All right, all those in favor of the amendment to hold this July the 8th at 5 o'clock, please say and log in aye. Anybody opposed? No. Okay. We need a couple more. Has anyone not voted? we have one person who didn't vote. So that motion fails. So the motion on the floor then is to hold the hearing at 6 p.m. on the 13th. Was that your original motion, Council Member Lawless? No, it was Chuck. Or Chuck, I'm sorry, Council Member Allinger. Okay. On the 13th, since we're talking about a long day, I will amend my motion to make it at 5 o'clock instead of 6, if that would be helpful to the Council. Do I have a second? I'll make that motion. Who, Council Member Massadi, seconded it? So the motion is to amend and hold this hearing at 5 o'clock on August 13th. Is there any discussion? Council Member Myers. Thank you, Vice Mayor. This is going to throw a lot into the mix. But, you know, we've canceled the general government meeting for July, right? I wonder if we can look at whether or not we need a general government looking at our docket for August or maybe move that or maybe just take public safety and move public safety from 1 to 9. And then we've got to move work. Never mind. Still got a work session there. I was thinking that how do we get the meetings all to start earlier and then we can start this earlier than 5 because it is the day before school starts. But work session is still there and we have to move everything. So never mind. Thank you. Okay. Any other comment about the motion to amend? Seeing none, if you are in favor of amending the motion to August 13th at 5 p.m. for the zone change hearing, please say aye. Aye. Anyone opposed? All right. That motion passes. So the motion on the floor is to hold the zone change hearing on August 13th at 5 o'clock p.m. Is there any discussion? And how many people will be able to stay? If you can be there, please raise your hand. Out of work session. We have 11, with potentially Council Member Ford would be 12. Okay. All right. Any other discussion? All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Anyone opposed? All righty. I believe we have a date, August 13th at 5 o'clock p.m. for the Kroger Zone change. Is there anything else on that issue? and did everybody vote sorry we need about four more votes please okay so that passes ten to four well no we had okay council members that was simply the vote council member Stenet if you cannot be here on August 13th, please raise your hand high after the work session. Council Member Lane and who else? Council Member Stennett. So just two. That gives us, yeah, that potentially gives us 13 if Council Member Ford can be here. All right. Thank you very much. Okay. Okay. Now, let's move on to budget amendments. Do I hear a motion? Move approval. Council Member Lawless? Was this back on the zone change? Okay, can you hold that thought a moment? We have a motion and a second to approve budget amendments. Is there any discussion? Council Member Kay. Thank you. I make a motion to amend the list of budget amendments on pages 7 through 9 of the work session. Packet to add two budget amendments. BA 5054 provides $224,000 for needed commissary goods and supplies for community corrections offset by previously budgeted revenues for commissary sales within the prisoner account fund. and secondly, BA 5055 provides $30,000 for overtime for facilities and fleet services by decreasing their repair budget within the general fund. These funds will help work through the backlog of pending repair requests that have not been completed due to vacancies. It is necessary to walk on these budget amendments to get two readings during fiscal year 2013. So move. Do I? Council Member Henson seconded. Are there any questions? All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Anyone opposed? All right. That motion passes. Is there anything else about budget amendments? Questions? Motions? I see none. Let's see. Council Member Kay, are you still on for budget amendments? No. Okay, and Council Member Lawless, you're on to go back to the previous issue, or do you have a budget amendment question? I had a budget amendment question. Journal number BA5040, the Mayor's Office Family Services General Fund, $2,752 to transfer funds to cover the cost of design and printing of the Homeless Commission report by Bullhorn. Was that written by Bullhorn? Maybe Ms. Raybold has the answer. Welcome. Thank you. No, it was not written by Bullhorn, but it was formatted by them in a professional way, and they designed the cover. Have you seen a copy of it yet? I don't know that I've seen a $2,752 cover. Well, it's not $2,752 just for bullhorn. $752 of it is for printing from Lynn Imaging, and the other $2,000 is for the time it took to format the very comprehensive report. Okay, thank you. I was just curious. Thank you. Are there other budget amendment questions? Seeing none, all those in favor of approval as amended say aye. Aye. Anyone opposed? All right. Now, Councilman Belalas, did you want to go back to the previous issue, the zone change, with a comment? I just want to make sure that when people say that they can be here, that they understand that unless you're half dead or something, that that's a commitment to be here and stay for the full time, and it can be lengthy. So if there are any, because it was close enough, there's some, Chris, Council Member Ford didn't hear, so we don't know his availability, and I think there were three that couldn't be. two that couldn't be? Council Member Lane and Council Member Stennett. Okay. So if there are any maybes, maybe nots, speak now or forever hold your Kroger. Thank you. Vice Mayor, I had sort of mumbled under my breath, and Council Member Lawless heard me, so that's why she's voicing this concern, that because it is the first day of school the next day and because I do have a child that will be starting middle school, I was a little bit hesitant whether or not I could stay the entire time, if it goes until 11 or 12 o'clock. So that being said, I will do my best to be here and stay as late as I can, but that's what the discussion was about. I also heard the comment at this end. Yeah, this wasn't directed at Council Member Akers. I saw other people kind of going, it's the first day of school. So anyway, I just wanted, that's kind of where we got in trouble one time where everybody but one said they could be here and then nobody was able to come. So thank you. Council Member Lane. I was just going to say that we know we have an extremely good division of planning. We have a great planning commission. and this zone modification was approved with 9-0, and I don't know that there's any chance we're going to overrule it. Well, we can't talk about that right now, I don't think. Here's the issue that I wanted to make. Why would we bring issues before council when we don't have to do that unless there's some huge issue to be resolved? I don't see there's a lot of issues here. I haven't even seen the report, but when the Division of Planning, the Planning Commission, it's a 9-0 vote. I don't recall ever overruling a vote like that, any zoning hearing that we've had here before. So I'm just saying, is it necessary to bring it before the council? It's my understanding that a zone change hearing was going to be requested by a council member and neighbors. So I think Mr. Farmer was trying to be proactive and look forward for a date is the reason. So if that helps. Okay. Now, we're down to new business. Do I hear a motion? I heard a motion from Mr. Farmer and a second from Mr. Kay. Are there questions about new business? Council Member Massadi. Thank you, Vice Mayor. I have a couple of questions on Item D in reference to the electronic access system. Is this a brand new system or is this just a repair? Item D. Yes. Thank you. The current access system that we have is outdated. It's probably in excess of 18 years old to a point where the manufacturer has not been making this system for the past four or five years. We were having a continued problem with system failure and trying to get the parts and doing repairs. So we did an analysis of what's out there right now and what was a long-term commitment on the manufacturer's part on providing service in parts. So we advertised, and Burdine, that's also a local company, got the project. One of the main issues we had, and we still do with the current system, is a proprietary system, which means once you got with this manufacturer, you can't go with anyone else, provide services or parts. Versus the one that we are purchasing, you can have the parts ordered, installed, and serviced by more than two or three different contractors. Thank you. Makes sense. Council Member Stenet. Thank you. I have a question on item I. Okay. This is on the City Employees Pension Fund. Yes, sir. Yeah, I think for the public watching it as well, I know some of it's written in here, but give us an overview of how many people are still drawing from this fund and why the decision was made to go from a 3% cost of living to a 5% when our own pension systems, the state pension system, has frozen all COLAs due to the nature of those funds. I know this is overfunded, this fund. It has a lot of money in it, 158% overfunded, so that's a good thing. But tell me what the decision was going from 3 to 5. I believe the vote was 3 to 2. Yes, that is correct. In the memo, I stated that there were five members present at the meeting on April 30th, and the vote was 3 to 2 to prove an increase from 3 to 5%. There are currently 88 members, 31 retirees, and 57 beneficiaries that are receiving a stipend. The last increase, well, when they got a 3%, it was in 1981, and they have obviously managed their pension very well. It is a closed pension, and the average salary of the retirees and beneficiaries is $1,442. I don't know if that's relevant or not at this point of discussion. I have some statistics here. There are three members that are retirees that receive a monthly salary between $3,000 and $4,500, and there are 16 members that receive a salary of between $2,000 and $2,999. There are 36 members that receive a monthly salary of between $1,000 and $1,999, and there are 33 members that receive a salary of $337 to $999. That's the monthly salary. That's gross. The retirees brought it forward to, there are three members of the retirees that are on the board that are voting members, and they brought it forward to the board for the review. There were two actuarials done. One actuarial was done back in March of 2012, and they checked to see if a 3%, 5%, and 7% could be managed within the fund, and all three were doable. And as reported, the 5%, it would be 158% funded for the next 15 years. And then the second actuarial that was completed was based on a tier structure, and that got a lot more complicated. And so it was discussed over the course of four board meetings, and this was the result of it. And I don't know if that is helpful or not. The last employee that retired was last year, so there's no longer any current employees? The last employee was closed out in 2010, I believe. So it's been three now. Yes. Uh-huh. And this was a permanent change, so this is not one time. This is for the rest of the pension's life, 5 percent correct? That is what the vote was of the motion within the board meeting. Yes, sir. Okay. Very good. Thank you, Susan. Thank you. Thanks, Mayor. Thank you. Councilmember Massadi. Sorry, Vice Mayor, I had another one. I just didn't get to the page quick enough. This is on the 911. This is item H, I believe. I don't know if someone can answer. I have a question in reference to the computer system. Commissioner Mason. Thank you, Commissioner. I know in the past they used to have to take the system every couple of weeks offline in order for maintenance. Will this replace this process? That's a technical question. I think Director Lucas said he was going to be watching this and come down to address questions. that's a technical question that I don't know the answer to. I would hope so. In this day and age that we'd have to do a two-hour downtime for maintenance, I was just hoping that this would take place, take that place, and that's what my concern was. Okay. If you could find that out for me, that'd be great. Thank you. Council Member Lane. Going back to item number I regarding the increase in the rate of the pension benefit from 3% to 5% cost of living, the thought that I have here, I haven't personally seen an actuarial report or any kind of written recommendation on the impact financially, and I feel that this is how some of the pension funds we have around the state have gotten a little bit out of hand in that there's not enough evaluation before the vote is made on something like this. Based on what I know about the plan, I have a tendency to agree that it probably has the funding available to make the increase, but I think that as a policy of counsel, we shouldn't approve any increases in pension without more documentation about the long-term financial impact on that particular fund. so I would like to request that a report come before Council before we make a final vote on this and if we don't get a final report by then that we don't table until we do receive the report I'm not making this as a form of a motion unless you'd like for me to but I think we could just request that information to come before Council that's my comment thank you Councilmember Henson Thank you, Vice Mayor. As a member of the City Employee Pension Fund Board, I just wanted to speak up and say that I understand Council Member Lane's concern, but this is a closed pension. No one else will go in this pension system. And there is a report that we could send you that was done to show that it could sustain the amount. It actually could probably do more than this because they have done exceptionally well with their money and the investments. And the board also I'd like to mention would welcome other council members to sit on this board. So we've asked several times, but since Tom Blues has stepped aside, I'm the only one. But I do, I think this was studied completely and we can get you that information. Thank you. So, Council Member Henson, will you send that to all Council members? Yes. Yes. Okay. Thank you. And are there other questions about new business? Council Member Ellinger. Thank you. Can I follow up with that, Council Member Henson, just to make sure? Because going from 3% to 5% is a big increase, and I think everybody would like to have that. But to try to understand the whole situation, they have 158% funding on it. So is there going to be any additional increase that cost is going to come from the taxpayers now, or is that coming from the fund itself? No, it's strictly interest. There's no contribution from the city anymore. It's strictly invested. Right. It is closed, and everything is self-contained is the best way I can describe it. But just if you don't mind, I can tell you that I have the actuarial in my hand, and a 5%, as reported, is 158% funded, and a 7% is even 137% funded. So just to give you some idea, 3%, if they maintain what it is currently, it's 180% funded. And that goes for 15 years, is it? Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Thank you. Okay. Are there other questions about new business? Seeing none, all those in... Oh, Council Member... I thought David Lucas comes, so can he answer that question, please? Thank you. Welcome. I'm not as fast as I used to be getting down here. Could you repeat the question, please? I remember in the past, and I think they still do it, they take the computers in the 911 center offline for two hours every couple of weeks for maintenance, And I'm wondering if this new contract is going to replace that so they don't have to do that. Actually, they do not take the 911 system down. They take down the computer-aided dispatch and other things that are unique to the Division of Police. The 911 system is completely separate from all that, so we still receive 911 calls and can process them during that downtime. It's just they don't have the computer-aided dispatch. So this is completely separate from that. And actually, we will be addressing CAD systems in our next fiscal year when we're looking to consolidate the two systems at police and fire. So what you're saying, though, even though they're separate systems, you still do have that time period in the other system that you take down two hours every couple of weeks for maintenance? Unfortunately, yes. Okay, so this won't replace that, won't help that at all? That's correct. Do we have plans to take care of that in the future? Yes, we do. That's in the next fiscal year budget to replace those. and we've been working to get a stopgap measure in the meantime. All right. Thank you. Any other questions about new business? Okay. If not, all those in favor say aye. Aye. Anyone opposed? All right. New business items are approved. And council members, I have been notified that Councilmember Ford can be here August 13th the zone change hearing, so we'll have 13, the magic number. Now, moving on with continuing business, do I hear a motion about neighborhood development funds? Second. Council Member Scutchfield moved and Council Member Ellinger seconded approval of neighborhood development funds. Are there any questions? All those in favor say aye. Aye. Anybody opposed? All right. Thank you very much. Now, on to the real interesting stuff. We have a presentation today by Pastor Ron Edmondson and his Leadership Lexington Group on the Vision Lex Pedestrian Wayfinding. And you'll find this on pages 30 to 40 in your packet. Welcome. Thank you so much, Vice Mayor and Council. Thank you. My name is Ron Edmondson, and I want to just raise your hand if you're with our group. This is a project group of Leadership Lexington, and my wife and I just moved here about a year ago, and we love this city. And I have spoken to some of you before and told you, and I feel the need to say it tonight, just sitting there listening to you coordinate schedules, how much we appreciate your service. I served as vice mayor and city council in the city I came from and had many midnight meetings, and the public does not understand the input, the dedication that you have. This is sometimes a thankless job, and I appreciate it. But much of the success that happens in this community is a result of what happens in this room, and I keep shortening my talk because I don't want to take much more of your time. But when we came here, for example, we didn't know where all the local restaurants were, and we wanted to find them out. And so until we found this little nice handy restaurant book, I hope you have one. Guys, you need to pick one of these up at the Visitor's Bureau. There's over 100 local restaurants in here. We're at about 50, my wife and I, right now. But we needed some direction when we got here. We also quickly began to discover downtown and bought season tickets to your opera. But it wasn't until we were here a few months before we knew that you had that downtown. We believe one missing element in our downtown is a wayfinding system, very similar to what you've already invested in with the equestrian games when they came here. This would be an extension of that, and we've come up with a pilot program that we think will help that get started. I'm told, for example, that Rupp Arena alone sees about 900,000 visitors a year. You can imagine the millions of people that cross through our downtown at any given time. One thing we are noticing in this project and become very conscious of is that visitors don't know all that exists downtown now. And we've taken some impressive steps. You've taken some impressive steps to invest in downtown, some bold steps. How do we keep people in downtown longer? How do we help them discover all that we have to offer? and how do we spur even more investment downtown, which provides even more jobs downtown, which improves the revenue for all of us. Just as the mall uses a wayfinding system to help people make sure they don't miss anything in the mall, our city needs this for our downtown area. We believe this is an investment in downtown that will have immediate results as people stay downtown longer and discover all we have to offer. And I would just ask you to think about what you love about downtown. And if you invited a visitor to come to the city, would you want them to miss that element? We've discovered along this process that most great cities like Lexington already have this in place. It's hard to find an example of a vibrant downtown that doesn't have this in some form. Honestly, we are a little bit behind the eight ball on this one, in this one area. Knoxville is investing over a million dollars in their system just downtown. Obviously, they see the value. And personally, I believe we have more to offer downtown than Knoxville has. Let's let our people know what we have. Also, because these signs are in our schema today as our group, everywhere we go, in the cities we travel, in fact, in Omaha, some of our people just got back from there, people are using these. They're taking advantage of them. You'll hardly ever find one that somebody's not standing there looking to find their way. We need this. And you can ask, when do we need this? Well, we need it as soon as we want it to start taking effect and be a value for our downtown. If we believe in downtown, if we want to see it thrive, and if we truly want to be a premier downtown, eventually we're going to need a wayfinding system. We're just a citizens group. We hope our efforts can help spur this project further. But in every situation that we found, if it's done in a city and done well, a body like this has had to help it move forward. So we're asking your support to move this project forward. We're going to open up for any questions that you have. I will show you. This is a little bit heavy, and it hasn't been sized yet. We just put it in here for the first time. But we are trying to stick with the theme that's already being used around town. And so these are basically the way the signs are designed. If you have any questions, if it's detail-oriented, I'm probably going to refer to some of them on my team. But we would love to have your support in this project moving forward. Any questions? Thank you so much, Pastor Edmondson. We do have some questions, so you might want to stay at the podium. We'll give you the third degree like we do our internal folks. Council Member Lawless. First of all, thank you for your enthusiasm and loving Lexington. And where are you from originally? Clarksville, Tennessee. Oh, okay. It's interesting that I'm a big proponent of the wayfinding signs and actually was aware of that project getting started before 2004, 2002. In fact, at home, I was cleaning some stuff out, and I had two great big boards with the proposed wayfinding signs dated, I believe, in 2002, 2004. And I started to bring them to the office today, but I didn't have time to grab them. So they were also supposed to be part of the streetscape that the previous administration put in place, and those both some larger wayfinding signs and these wayfinding signs. But since the benches aren't on South Lyme yet either, I can see. But I'm extremely supportive. I think they are very important. And I met with Mr. Shea about it some time ago. And so bravo, and I'm real excited. and anything I can do to help, I'm more than happy to do so. I will say that some of the work that was done earlier was invaluable to us because the people we worked with, absolutely, we have used all of that information. So the good thing was when we came to the table, we didn't have to invent anything. It was there. We just had to pull it together. Yeah, well, I'm glad it was useful. Thank you. I might ask Chris Edwards if he could put page 35 up on the... Do you have a copy of the presentation? I do not. Okay. I think it would be helpful for the public to be able to see what we're talking about. And I think Mr. Farmer is going to get that. And then in the meantime, we have Council Member Beard. Thank you, Vice Mayor. Again, thank you all for coming. and it's always nice to have somebody that kind of pokes a little bit and helps get things done. One of our issues downtown, and you may not be aware of this, is one-way and two-way streets. Yes. And we would probably have wayfinding signs up now if we ever resolved that problem one way or the other. obviously there's no sense of putting a wayfinding sign over covering a lane that is going in the same direction that is the only thing i think that would be a showstopper as far as i'm concerned one way or the other is we've got we've got to solve that as well well we we we have talked about that and considered and going forward that would become an issue for what we're proposing we're really walking, we're using it for walking traffic at this point, which really would not be affected. Am I speaking correctly to that? Would not be affected by this. We're really looking at people who are already downtown. They're standing there, but they just don't know where other things are. And hopefully by the time this project continued, some of those answers would be given as far as one-way streets and that sort of thing. You know, we're relatively close to making it. There's a study going on right now about the one-way, two-way issue. And however that falls, we'll dictate. And I would think we're going to see traffic vehicular one-way. And that's where the background information came in very handy, so that what we were doing would not be dictated by it was before walking traffic. Again, thank you. Thank you. You're almost a neighbor to me. I live on the other side of Tate's Creek. Okay, okay. I live close to the church, too. Yep. Again, thank you. I can't keep track of Bill Farmer better that way. You're welcome. Councilmember Myers. Thank you, Vice Mayor. Thank you, Pastor and group, for coming in. It's an excellent project. I just have two quick questions. One is the funding. If I'm a restaurant or a business that gets listed on these, Do I pay to have my... No. Somebody want to speak directly to that? Renee? Because if you're on the highway and you have those signs that come off and it says this restaurant here and this gas station here, I think they pay for that. Yes. And I have to disclose I am not part of the official group doing this. I'm just kind of one of their consultants. But the box in the top left corner is from downtown Louisville, and what they do is they list every first floor business regardless, and there's no pay-in to that. It's just every business on the first floor. There is a signage committee that Kevin Wente is on that's been appointed by the council, I guess, or the mayor. and ultimately we think it would be up to that group of what the policy would be, but we've discussed internally that it would be first floor businesses and possibly larger, you know, rep arenas two blocks ahead type of things, but you can't obviously list every business within a high rise. So we were kind of looking at Louisville. They've had this in place for many years and it's been very successful. So does Lidl just absorb the cost of the signs of the city? It's actually handled through their downtown management district. And as many of you who I've met with before, this is something that the management district, if it's created here, would continue to finance. Okay. Thank you. The second thing I would say is on the Omaha trip, I walked by a building. I'm not sure if it was their chamber or not. but they actually had, I think they had some of these, but they also had like a touchscreen computer that was in the window that you could touch the window even when the business was closed, and it showed all the restaurants and showed you how to get to them and all those things, and it gave a little story about that particular restaurant or that venue. So that's something else that might be interesting to do. I think ultimately we would love to have a digital kiosk, even outdoors. or we did at one point have a little pilot program indoors, I believe, and I may misspeak on this, but I don't think our current sign ordinance allows digital signs outdoors even for that purpose, which is something that at some point we would love to see changed. But, yeah, I agree with you. I think the digital is very helpful. Okay, and I look forward to someone putting that into committee. And one of our hopes is that this spurs discussion. Sure. We need more. Absolutely. Thank you very much. Thank you, Vice Mayor. You're welcome. Council Member Kay. Thank you, Vice Mayor. I had a couple of questions. The first one is about the actual budget request. Are you requesting money from Council for this initial project, or is this money coming from somewhere else? It's not clear from the letter you sent to Kevin and what the status is. Our department did make a request for $100,000 towards maintenance of both existing wayfinding, and then a portion of that would go to the pedestrian wayfinding as well, was our thought. Yes, sir. That's in the present mayor's budget, proposed mayor's budget? Yes, that's correct. And what portion of that $100,000 is for this new project? We actually haven't weighed that at this point in time. We were looking to see what Leadership Lexington was able to foster as far as monies raised to start this program. And then I did pledge that we would make that offer to the mayor's office when we decided to propose our budget this year. And through our Links Committee, that $100,000 was moved forward for approval. Okay, so the $100,000 that's in the mayor's proposal budget would cover existing signage issues and some portion, if needed, to the pedestrian wayfinding correct. Yes, sir. Okay. Thank you. And the second question really is about the maintenance. It's a small thing, but it says in the letter to Mr. Wente, the Downtown Development Authority would do the maintenance. It should say Downtown Mexican Corporation. So that's just a typo. I've not seen that, but what we've discussed, because as you know, in order to use the image of the blue horse, you have to have an agreement with the Convention of Visitors Bureau. And I've been talking with Jim Browder about the Downtown Lexington Corporation signing into that agreement. So if a sign is damaged in a car accident or it's vandalized with graffiti, how long it would take to replace that. Also, just keeping them fresh if a new business opens, replacing the insert and making sure that they're accurate. And so that would be an agreement between the Convention of Visitors Bureau and the DLC. So the DLC would ultimately have responsible. I think you all are trying to do eight signs. They're trying to put eight signs out initially to see what the public's interest is. And we've committed to keeping up those signs. And they're also looking at putting those on Kentucky utility poles, which there is a charge. I don't know if Lori's in here, but Lori Houlihan has looked into what the cost is. And, you know, through the money that they've initially raised, we would hopefully be able to pay that out of that. It's not a large fee, but we understand it's a fee and we don't want it to be a burden on the government. We are hoping to not have any burden to you for the ongoing maintenance and keeping it up. Okay. Thank you. I think it's a terrific project. I've been in other cities where the wayfinding is a whole lot better than ours, and I think you're right. We are a little bit behind the curve. I hope that this pilot project works well. I commend you for all the work you've done on it so far, and hopefully we can kind of continue it on. Thank you. Thank you, Vice Mayor. You're welcome. We have several more questions. Councilmember Stinnett. Thank you, Vice Mayor. Renee, back on the maintenance, I was going to ask about it. What is the ongoing maintenance cost? Have you all projected that out? Well, I mean, it really depends. I don't know if you're talking about one being completely damaged or if you're just talking about cleaning the glass or changing out the insert. I mean, they're doing a fantastic job of fundraising, and we feel like with those eight initial points that it won't be such that we can't afford to take care of it. Obviously, our hope for the future maintenance is that we create a management district here in Lexington, and then they would become part of that program, and that you would see them on every corner. So to change one name, give me an idea of what the cost, do we know what the cost would be? Oh, the cost to change a name. I mean, it's very... A sign company goes out, changes it? It's a piece of, it's an insert that you have printed. It's very inexpensive. Okay. I mean, it is something that could literally, I mean, you obviously wouldn't want to do it every single time that a business changed like that week, but you could print them up. Yeah, you could pass it around. Then the sign itself. Okay, I see. It's paper, basically, or hard stock. Okay, I was thinking it was hard plastic. No, no, no. It's not nearly as labor-intensive as the large signs that are up now. This is something that's easily. Makes a lot more sense. And then talk about the rationale behind just allowing first-floor businesses. I mean, why wouldn't we open up and have a business pay to be on there? Because I know a lot would to be recognized to go where downtown, where they're at, move around. Well, I mean, some of it is just logistics. What if everyone in the financial center wanted to be on there? Well, we've got to figure it out. Well, and that's why, you know, I don't like to reinvent the wheel. I always look at what other cities do, and that's a very common practice. Okay, that's why I was asked. It's just other cities are looking at just first-floor businesses. Very common, and that is to be fair, that it is first floor businesses. I know other cities also allow only so many proposed, and whoever wants to be on there pays it, just like the interstates. And it's competitive. Yeah, and it could potentially be, you know, I hate to say this out loud, but if the management district wasn't created, there's obviously got to be something that is looked at as to how it's paid in the future. and we would look at that at that time, but our hope is that we don't have to make that determination. I would just hate to leave a business out since we're doing it for free. I'd hate to leave them off that list and have to worry about those types of issues coming about. And I think that's why we would have a policy in place, and again, we've already looked at some of those policies from other cities. Obviously, this city could choose to do something different. No, great idea. Yeah, I'm glad it's finally coming forward and moving forward, and thank you for everyone here for working on it. It's long overdue. Thank you. Thank you, Vice Mayor. You're welcome. Council Member Lawless. Council Member Scutchfield hadn't spoken yet, if you want to let her. Council Member Scutchfield. Thank you, Vice Mayor. Thank you, Council Member Lawless. One of the questions I had, when I go anywhere that I don't know the lay of the land, And even in Lexington when I'm looking for something, one of the things that I fall back on is my app on my phone around me, Scout. There's several different ones out there. I am always hesitant to spend money, especially when I think a lot of people have the accessibility with their smartphones, and it's going to be a lot less of a cost. Have you all looked into having one specific to Lexington? I believe that the Convention and Visitors Bureau is working on a Lexington app, or at least they have considered that in the past. But, I mean, we haven't specifically looked at that. We've just looked at it. Well, we did look at that, and there are some apps out there that are pretty good, and we can use those. The problem is when you walk out of the rub, how do you know to find that app? where do you, you're going to leave before you download an app and, you know, we'd have to have a sign to tell them to look up the app. And we did consider that even placing, you know, something on there to tell them to send them to an app. But you still have to have a sign to let them know how to find that information. You're welcome. Can you put the QR code on there? We talked about that. The question was, what do we point them to at this point? And we didn't really want to feel like we were to make that decision not caring for it. And now, Council Member Lawless. That was, Council Member Scutchfield, that was an excellent segue for what I was going to say. The Lexington Convention Visitors Bureau does have an app called Big Lex. It has a blue horse on it. It's extremely useful. There's also Take It Artside, which is an app that the University of Kentucky College of Art, yeah, there's Big Lex, called Take It Artside that has, it's really neat. It tells you what's going on, where different sculptures or museums are. and I would encourage everybody to, as soon as possible, go to the parking authority's new website for their new app that's going to be awesome. But you're right, people don't know the app's there unless they know the app's there, so getting that word out. This is a wonderful app. The Big Lex app is fabulous, so thank you. Does any other council member have a comment? Council member Beard. Yeah, thank you again. Was this just a sample or is this a live board that you're ready to put up? It is a sample. Is there modification? Well, that's the actual structure and size that we are proposing. that's pretty much exactly what downtown Louisville uses. We've shown this to the Department of Transportation to get there okay because they are state roads. The insert obviously needs to be sized a little more appropriately, but yes, that's what it would look like. This comes from a banker, so you understand why I say this. you've got the only bank that has ever been closed in Lexington on there, and you skipped about four or five others. Well, but I mean, that's the content. I understand. I just kind of was a chuckle over here. But that is the actual material, but not content. It's very attractive and sturdy, and I've got no problem with it whatsoever. Okay. Did that complete your questions? Okay. Council Member Akers. Thank you, Vice Mayor. I do believe Central Bank is still there, though, Julian, or Council Member Beard. I see what he's talking about, but it was still open when we finished. My question, Renee or Ron, why are the different colors? Is it just to mix it up so it's easier to read, or are certain colors, do they mean certain things? and yes jay morris bistro is also yes hello my name is teddy hibbard uh at the time i just seen other examples where things such as atms um bus pickup locations and parking were highlighted and so that was just a proposal at this point that maybe it would help people filter through more quickly through the content i agree I think that you need some differentiation, but I noticed the bank was still white, but the ATM was yellow. So I thought maybe it was financial services in yellow, but I was just curious. So I think that mixing up the color is a good idea, though. Thank you. Any other questions, Council Members? I see none. Thank you so much, Ron. And Leadership Lexington, thank you so much for being here. Many of the council members are graduates of Leadership Lexington. We appreciate your work on behalf of the city. Thank you. Thanks, Renee. Okay, we will move right along to our other presentation, Code for America. And I think Jamie Emmons, the chief of staff for the mayor, and Derek Paulson, our commissioner of planning, are going to make this presentation. and then we have our public comment speaker afterward. Thank you. Welcome. Well, just to begin, I have rearranged the presentation slightly so we have passed new copies out. The substance remains the same, but I think it will flow a little better. What I'd like to do briefly is introduce, of course you know Commissioner Paulson, but on the screen above us we have Luke from Code for America. Is Bob still with us? Bob is on his way back. Okay, this is Luke Norris. Luke, can you hear us? Yep. How are you? Doing great. Welcome, Luke. Thank you. Thank you for having me. So Luke's been on the phone listening to the council meeting for the past hour, so I'm sure he's enjoyed this conversation. All right. Before I get started, Luke, just hang out and we'll jump back and forth, but I just wanted to add some context before I jump into the presentation. So just a little history, brief history, about where we're at today. In the mayor's office, we created a goal that, in my view, brought us to today's opportunity, and that goal was to engage and build relationships with the private foundation community to help Lexington to do more than our current budget allows. and the purpose of that goal is to elevate Lexington's stature and brand so that we can attract business and investment. So beginning a year ago, we engaged this goal by entering the Bloomberg Philanthropies Mayor's Challenge. As you've heard, we finished in the top 20 out of 300 applicants, and that caught the attention of many, including other private foundations. So as a result of that networking event, Mayor Gray was invited to the Knight Foundation to review their News Challenge grant proposals. And he was the only elected official in the room of a dozen or so business and community leaders and executives, which turned out to be a very valuable experience. So we've also been recently introduced to the Ford Foundation and the Case Foundation, each with unique interest in supporting municipal efforts to increase innovation, transparency, and citizen engagement. This Code for America Fellowship will help us continue this momentum while providing tangible benefits through deliverables for the council members, citizens, and the city, which Commissioner Paulson will describe in greater detail in just a moment. So there's no question that we're now in the game and we must continue this momentum. Lexington has been selected as a finalist of the 50 cities that applied for Code for America this year, and the final requirement is to acquire the funding. So that's why we're asking Council to make this investment. So with that, I'd like to just summarize today's presentation briefly. Chris? It's not moving. Okay, just briefly, an overview of the presentation. The challenge, which we all know, is that governments are expected to do more with less. We have a new opportunity here to engage technology, which will find innovative ways to do our jobs better, faster, and smarter. The solution that we have come to the table with is this neighborhood information management system, which we introduced several ideas to the Code for America group, and this is the one that popped out at them that they thought they could help the most with. Now, you know, there's some flexibility built in here so that if we do engage this fellowship, The fellows will be here in January to brainstorm and try to figure out how they can best help Lexington through the NIMS project. And, of course, the means is this partnership with Code for America. Just briefly, let me read this quote, which I thought was interesting. Technology is oftentimes the easy part. Most of it's already here. It's available now. What will direct the way forward are strong visionary leaders, those who want to step out, innovate, and use these technologies will make cities better equipped to handle the rapid pace of urbanization. That's Michael Palacci from IBM that made that statement. Christian, go to the next slide. So what I'd like to do now is briefly introduce Code for America with a two-minute video. Thank you. Code for America is not just the creation of a bunch of apps. It's connecting our citizens with our city. It's about inserting a model of working, thinking, innovating into a culture that's bound by a lot of rules. I mean, it's kind of a culture virus for innovation in government. It is something that really cities need a lot, which is to bring in talented individuals that can come in and think about how technology and civil service can kind of cross. The fellows don't know that what they're doing is impossible, so they continue to deliver. When you bring in somebody or a group of fellows from Code for America, I would actually put them on the hardest problem you've got. We were specifically asked from the beginning to work around the issue of blight. Blight sucks in many ways. There's a huge quality of life issue. Blight is just one of those things where if you can take down that house next door to Ms. Rita or take down this house next door to Ms. Jackson, they're going to love you to death for it. They already were really mobilized and they understood the process. So we kind of like waded through different data sets in City Hall and tried to kind of bring together all the information that would tell a clear story about what's happening with that property or that property. We absolutely benefited from their talents and being able to solve an intractable problem for us. The projects that they developed are transforming thousands of Detroiters' lives right now. and so this has been one of the most incredible experiences in my professional career. You absolutely have to take that step because if you don't take that step, then you're going to be the same place you are right now. Okay, so Code for America is a nonprofit dedicated to helping cities. I think the video did a pretty nice job of explaining that. They've been described as a peace corps for geeks, where folks take a year or so off from their work and come and do a little bit of public service to help cities. Go to the next side, Chris. Luke, are you there? Can you hear us? Can we bring Luke up? Luke, would you like to talk a little bit about how the Code for America Fellowship program works? Sure. Thanks for the opportunity, Jamie. So the Code for America Fellowship is a year-long project that starts in January of each year where our fellows are deployed to San Francisco. They spend the entire month of January in intensive training and education around principles of lean startup, data-driven methodologies, exploring tactics on how to engage local stakeholders and individuals in the community. In February, they actually go and spend the entire month in residency in their respective community. And during that month, it's typically common for them to meet with somewhere between 100 and 150 citizens and stakeholder groups. So individuals like most of you and your aides, individuals from neighborhood groups or associations, other individuals from both the private and nonprofit sectors, helping really discover and explore where unique opportunities lie and where problems may exist. that they can start to define technological solutions for. They then, after February, go back to San Francisco where they work with their peers, the other fellows from the other eight to ten cities, and over the next six to eight weeks start to define and develop a minimum viable product that they bring back in late March or early April back to your city to show what's possible when you leverage technology and engage citizens in the process. As they get your buy-in and feedback, they further iterate on that application and over the next eight months further refine and ultimately develop an application that they will then transition back to your city, to a private sector company, or to volunteer corps that they will help ignite while they're on the ground and working collaboratively with your council, your mayor, and your community. Great. Thank you. I think we have Bob there. Bob Softman, is that correct? Bob, would you like to add anything? Yep, that's correct. Would you like to add anything, Bob? I can just barely hear you. No problems. Okay. Luke, maybe you could help just for a moment more. I know some of the council members are interested in sort of the types of fellows that may come to Lexington. Can you give us a little background on the types of people you look for when you're looking through your applications? Yeah, absolutely. So last year, or this current year that we're in, we hired around 34 fellows. The average age of those fellows is 31 years old. They were selected from a pool of over 600 individuals who applied for the fellowship around the United States. They are individuals that have left careers in the private sector with companies like Google, Oracle, et cetera, or careers in urban planning or architecture. A lot of them have backgrounds in design and technology development and have a passion for giving a year of service to local governments to work hand-in-hand with individuals like you and your staffs to help governments better innovate. So we intend and suspect that next year those same credentials will likely exist in the pool of candidates that we'll select as our 2014 fellows. And as Luke had mentioned, we get about 600, 700, 800 applications a year for a finite number of positions. Those applications do come from a wide variety of backgrounds and skill sets. And so when we talk with the cities about the specific areas that they want to work in, we look at the right mix of developers, front-end and back-end developers, designers and urbanists. So while we typically have teams of three working in each of the cities, the cities actually have the benefit of the full cohort of fellows because they each bring a slightly different skill set to the table that's often needed to make a complete application. Great. Thank you. So now I'd like to transition over to Commissioner Paulson who could dig into this NIMS project just a little bit more so that the council understands that. All right, I'm going to talk more about what we're going to be doing or what we hope the Code for America folks are going to help us do, which is, as Jamie alluded to earlier, is this NIMS project, Neighborhood Information Management System. What we've got here is kind of their standard deliverable, what we get from Code for America. And kind of cut to the chase, it's a web application, kind of the Web 2.0, and it revolves around a specific problem that we identify. This is created for us, custom developed for us, around this key problem. The thing that we're working on is NIMS is about data integration. Lots of data from different places. A couple weeks ago, maybe a month, we were invited to go up to New York City and see, Jamie and I, to see their data analytics program. We stole, not really, they borrowed this sheet off the side of their wall. They let us keep it. But it kind of gives you an idea of what New York City has developed over the years. This is about well over a million dollar investment just to get it started, and I think their investment now has grown significantly. But the idea behind this is you're integrating lots of different data that's within your city right now for problem solving. Some of the things that they have worked on are focused on efficiencies with fire inspections. Got a lot of buildings trying to figure out which ones should they analyze first, which ones should they hit that are most important, that are most likely to burn. Going through the data, they created kind of a formula using some of the algorithms, but a lot of it was really driven by the data and being able to get that data together. That's really where we're going to try to go with NIMS as well. and the deliverable or what we see the real benefit from this are a couple things one it will allow us internally to work much better to be able to see data across different types of data code enforcement building inspections zoning enforcement police fire all these different types of data coming together so we know better what's going on in neighborhoods and we can analyze that for our own internal processes how do we work together better how do we deal with true neighborhood issues that are not just code or police or zoning or LexCol, but all together? Do we see trends that are across neighborhoods and across time periods that we can really tackle? Commissioner. Yes, ma'am. You know we have a 15-minute limit. And I will speed you through this. And your 15 minutes is over, so, Council Members, do you think you, does five minutes extra get it? I can be done with this slide and one more in about a minute. So, Council Member Lawless, did I hear you make a motion to add five minutes? And Council Member Myers seconds. All those in favor say aye. Aye. Anybody opposed? All right, thank you. One of the other things, and I think this is one of the big keys, is the transparency. It will provide a dashboard to the public, making it so this data that we often hear about, how do we get access to it, how do we see these issues, how do we know about what's going on, they'll be able to see this information. They'll be able to access it. And again, make it much easier for council members to know what's going on in your neighborhoods and your districts quickly, easily, rather than trying to call around numerous different divisions. And we've given kind of a simple, again, very simple example here in talking to a couple council aides and a couple council members about what's a typical issue that comes up. Citizen member calls about a building permit. Someone's building something in my neighborhood. I don't know if it's valid. There's a fence. I think it's too high. I think they're building without a permit. They call Council Aide. Council Aide calls building inspection to see do they have a permit. Building inspection looks around, finds yes, they do. Contacts Council Aide's office back. Council Aide contacts the citizens again. And this could take, I'll let you fill in the blank as to how long it may have taken in the past. You can insert a different example here as well. Code enforcement complaint. Lex call. Are things happening? How do we know what's going on across this? From what we will get through NIMS is a much quicker process. Citizen calls Council Member's office. Council A looks up on NIMS. You have access to it right there. And much quicker. Or Citizen just goes straight to the public-facing NIMS software and can figure out for themselves. They can see things. Much like the blight status that was developed in New Orleans, but on a much broader scale. Covering much more data, covering much more issues going on. And I'll pass it back to Jamie. I'll be quick. Just to close it out, I would like to just show you one example of a Code for America product from New Orleans. Chris, we have that video. And then we'll keep Luke and Bob on the phone for questions afterwards. In New Orleans, if a citizen wants to know what's happening with an abandoned property in their area, they currently have two choices. Either spend hours on the phone with multiple city departments or wade through numerous dense and confusing websites to try to track down the information they need. Both options are frustrating, time-consuming, and often create more confusion and work for all parties involved. To solve this problem, Code for America teamed up with the City of New Orleans to create Blight Status, a simple and publicly accessible website that provides quick and easy answers to residents' questions about the City's efforts to reduce blight in their neighborhoods. Here's how it works. to receive automatic alerts via email or text message the moment a property status changes. With Blight Status, citizens, city staff, and local organizations are better equipped with the information they need to focus on what really matters, working together to shape their communities. Blight Status is an open-source project by Code for America. Try it for yourself at BlightStatus.com. If you have any questions or would like to see Blight Status in your city, please get in touch. NewOrleans at CodeForAmerica.org. Okay. Looks like we have Bob online here. Just to conclude, I would say that it looks like for the past three years, Code for America has had about 20 partner cities. They're going to do another 10 or so this year. We could perhaps be in that pool of 10. We think this is a smart investment for Lexington to make. It will complement, I believe, this investment we're making in our chief information officer, who will be here hopefully in the next few months, Sally. And we'll get some good guidance from our CIO as we move forward if we become a Code for America fellow. So with that, we'll open it up for questions. Thank you very much, Jamie and Commissioner. Council members, log in with your questions. Council Member Kay. Thank you, Vice Mayor. Just to start off with a big question. Why is Code for America the answer to the need for the NIMS as opposed to some other way of getting this done? Well, I'll be glad to let Derek help on this, but I would say that there are other options, certainly. Are they cheaper? We're not sure, but I'm not sure that it's all about the money because there's a lot of value in a Code for America fellowship outside just the investment and the problem that you're trying to tackle. You have the Code for America network of the fellows that are in place this year, as well as the family of fellows that have been working with Code for America the past three years, as well as the partner cities. Mayor Gray was down at the Knight Foundation News Challenge. As they were going through applications, people were pointing out, well, that's a Code for America city. There must be something special going on there. So, Derek, would you like to add anything to that? I think from a technological standpoint, within what we've tried to do so far, we've kind of reached our max. I think the benefits we would get, as Jamie laid them out, from a technological standpoint, we'd get a lot of other benefits as well. The people that are involved in this, as were laid out by the Code for America folks, are top-notch. Not to say that we don't have top-notch here, but I think there's a lot of other benefits they would bring from experience in other cities, from seeing what they've done there and how we can build off that in an open source way. I think what we're not going to get, we could do the typical process, put out an RP, and try to go with a standard software system that we would be locked into, such as a PeopleSoft. But with this, I think we'd really get something much more customizable, much more driven based on what our real need is. And again, with it being open source, it doesn't really lock us into some of the problems we've had in the past with our own locally developed, internally developed software. And is it fair to say that the expectation is that within the year of the Code for America fellowship, the system would be fully operational and robust, or how far can we get? I think we'd probably talk with the folks from Code for America about what their experiences are, but that is our impression of it, is that yes, within a year we'd be there. And I think one of the things that has made the NIMS project particularly exciting to the Code for America folks is that our data, we control all of our data within the city as opposed to some other locations. Again, the New York diagram that I showed you, them to pull all that data together took a whole lot longer than it would take here. So I think that is one thing that would lend itself to being able to really get this up and running within that one-year process. But I think the Code for America folks could talk a little bit more about the timeline. Hey, Bob, would you mind speaking just to the length at which we developed the application in the nine-month development phase? Sure, sure. So we've built about 150 applications over the past three years, built and deployed them. And so we've gotten reasonably effective in understanding what's feasible and possible through the course of the 11-month fellowship program, which actually includes roughly eight and a half months of development. And so as Luke had mentioned, February is mostly the time for data gathering and understanding where the opportunities are. The early part of March is really scoping out specific applications, and they do that very much in collaboration with you all, with Lexington. And then they start development. And what they do, our process is iterative in that we build every six weeks an application or an aspect of an application, test it, and then build another six-week cycle incremental functionality. And so instead of sort of gathering requirements, spending seven months developing, we actually iterate individual sections or parts of an application in that process. And so it allows us to pretty tightly control the development process. And we do this in part because we have hypotheses about what we think is going to work. We don't want to presuppose, though, that we have all the answers. And so by breaking applications into chunks and testing each of the specific iterations, we're pretty much on track to deliver something at the end of the fellowship that we know works and is doable in that time frame. And like I said, we've had now a fair amount of experience doing this, and we're pretty confident in our ability to manage projects in the time frame of the fellowship. Great. Thank you for that answer, and thank you for bringing this forward. I've been interested in ways to make government more transparent for a long time, certainly since I've been on council. I've been interested in the work that the administration has already done in moving us in that direction. I think it's been encouraging. This seems to me a really fine opportunity to get the best minds in the country focused on the system that would really work for us. So I'm hoping that we can make this go forward. Thank you. Thank you, Vice Mayor. You're welcome. Council Member Lawless. Thank you. I'm very enthusiastic about this. I've talked to Commissioner Paulson and many others for a long time. The frustration I've had as a council member trying to find out, you know, residents will call and say they're building something on such and so. do they have a permit and I have to call to find out if there's a permit or Andrea calls to find out you know so we go back and forth and then we wait for a call etc and I know that you were working on something and we were talking about buying software for code enforcement that would bring them into the loop and I'm wondering you know this sounds like it would be somewhat of a catch-all, and would we consider postponing some of those purchases and implementing of other software waiting for this that would integrate everything so that you're not, so we're not, I mean, part of PeopleSoft and some of the issues we've had with our software is they don't talk to each other. Sometimes they don't talk to themselves, but they don't talk to each other. So would this be something that we would wait so we would have a more integrated system that could talk to each other and talk to us? Well, that's certainly a question for probably Derek and Chad Cottle, but I would say that from what I understand about Code for America, Their focus is on process improvement backed up by technology to create a more user-friendly system. So I would think that we would probably try to improve these processes and do the data at the same time. I mean, I would just hate to spend money on something that then they are going to come in with something much better. Right. And currently there's nothing budgeted for code enforcement in terms of software. but I think even if we were to one of the issues we have right now, our code enforcement software, we have one currently. It was developed in-house. It is kind of past its life. This would be something I think the way we view this and I think the way Code for America would develop it is that it would talk to a lot of different pieces of software. That's kind of the goal of this already. We're going to be trying to integrate various different types of different databases into one. And with that, it will have that open connection ability. So even if we find that we need something more substantive for code enforcement or other divisions, that this would still be able to hook into this in a different way. Again, I think with NIMS, what we're really looking at is it's the ability to bring all those pieces of data together. Those disparate databases that we currently have and that we may purchase in the future would still be able to be integrated in this. I think that's one of the things that we would really want to see from Code for America, is that they would write the software with the ability to, the architecture would be able to still bridge those gaps and bring all that data into that one place. That's a typical issue for a lot of different agencies is that siloed experience, and I think we want to avoid that. But I think these are kind of mutually exclusive. I don't think if we go forward with a code enforcement database, it really is kind of a separate issue from NIMS at this point, and that NIMS is really about bringing all that data together in one place, not only internally but externally for the public as well, which I just don't see if, again, upgrading the database for code enforcement while important is going to be different than this. Okay. I mean, and I think it is no exaggeration and probably an understatement that I have an average of five to ten calls on code enforcement, building inspection, zoning issues, streets and roads, signs missing every week. And I mean, you know, because of the older neighborhoods, et cetera. So I would be very excited about this. Thank you. Thank you. Council Member Stenet. Thank you, Vice Mayor. Derek, who owns the data after this gets set up? Do we own it internally? We own the data, even with this. This is just an application. So what this would do. Who owns the application? It's actually open source. So we wouldn't own the application? We would not own the application. It would be what the way, and they could probably talk more about this, I'm sure, Tom, and then you can, what it would do is it would be open source in the fact that others could download it and make it work. They would then have to deal with the back-end systems that will be set up for us by Code for America. And do we pay anyone after we get it set up? Do we pay any maintenance costs to anyone else? No, and one of the benefits of it being open source is that it would make it easier for us to maintain it ourselves. Because it's not proprietary software like we have currently, those types of maintenance should be much easier to handle than if we were to, again, go out to Software Vendor X and have them write us a custom piece of software that they would own the code. We've done that, other agencies have done that, other cities. This being that it's open source, should be much easier to maintain over the long run. So Accela would still be a valuable tool? Absolutely. You know, Accela is, again, Accela is going to be great for internal things. It will help us in some ways, but it doesn't have the same kind of functionality that we're discussing. And, again, it's also further down the road. I think one of the things at this point, Accela, we've got it for division of water quality. we're budgeting it for planning and for building inspection, it would assist in kind of a one-stop shop or online permitting process, but that's really not what NIMS is about. Online permitting is really something we need to move forward with and will be able to be handled by Acela, but these kinds of things, the NIMS functions of being able to bring different pieces of data, we will not be able to get all the different databases in Acela in the same way that we could NIMS. And, again, it's just going to be able to query those things and put them in a format that is usable for citizens, for council members, and others, whereas the SELO is, again, a little bit different. And in each department, and this is where some of our issues lies, that department will be responsible for putting the information into the system. And that's where we've had some trouble with people's soft implementations and other things. So who's going to train them, and is there a cost in training everyone to utilize after it's set up? Because $360,000 doesn't seem like a lot of money to get something like this off the ground. Well, and what it does is it builds off the databases we have now. So really what it does is it takes those databases. What it's going to do is aggregate those different databases and bring it into one system. So it's really not, they're not going to get new databases. Any system is as good as, you know, it's just as good as the information that's put in it. Those are some things we have to deal with internally. And one of the things that we will work on while Code for America is doing this, we're going to be working on internally how we use this information. Again, one of the main purposes for this is for us internally to use this data differently, to be able to analyze code enforcement, building inspection, permit issues, and crime data together and to be able to respond to that in a different way. I think that's one of those things that we're not capable of doing right now that this will really help us to be able to do. And LexCol, would this take the place of LexCol or would this be integrated into LexCol or vice versa? I think what we're seeing is we would integrate it in. LexCol and the existing databases we have would integrate in. But as we upgrade LexCol, it would still, again, with the open source nature of it, it would be able to integrate in to NIMS. And after the $360,000 initial investment, 50% from us, what's the other investment to get this going, keep it going, et cetera? Long term? Yes. Yeah, I think it's the same as any other software development. But probably, you know, I guess we'll have to figure out what the costs are. But I think, again, because it's open source in nature, Chad can probably speak a little bit about that. But with the open source nature of it, it should not be as cost-intensive as other proprietary pieces of software. Well, that's all relative. I'm just trying to get a ballpark number because some are $10,000 a year maintenance costs. Some are six figures. So I'm trying to understand what we can expect to have to budget after this. If we could have Luke take a stab at that question, And I think they've had some experience in other places. Bob, you'd probably be the best to reference ongoing maintenance. Yeah. Could you just – I'm having a little bit of a difficult time here. Could you just repeat the conversation? What are the ongoing maintenance costs after we get the initial application set up? How much will it cost in the long term each year to keep it going? It's a great question. It's a little bit hard to answer in the absence of understanding the specifics of the application. I can give you as an example the light status application that you saw the brief video of. And this is an application that, as the video and the conversation was around, integrating a variety of databases. Not an insignificant build, but one that the fellows were able to do in roughly four months of development. they contracted with the city of New Orleans to maintain the application and the annual maintenance costs were under $25,000 for that application. That didn't include enhancements to the application so as I think you all were describing the blight status application is a really good platform for example integrating crime data over blighted properties to understand how vacant properties and crime relate for as an example and so in that case there may be incremental development costs associated with the application but by and large the development costs and the maintenance costs for these applications are significantly less than the traditional alternatives just because the cost of technology has dropped so dramatically it is open source as was described. And so there are opportunities based on what gets built for the city to maintain it themselves, for third parties to maintain the applications. In fact, it's interesting that in 2012, out of the eight cities we worked with, three of the teams developed applications that were so interesting to other cities that they created civic startups around them, Light Status being one of them. And they can offer the product itself, the application itself, and maintenance around it at significantly less than the traditional alternatives. In fact, frankly, the biggest problem we have in doing that has nothing to do with the technology. It has to do with sort of getting these contracts through procurement, right, a process issue. In some cases, the smaller applications that get built get maintained by the community. Because the applications are built in open source languages, the community can actually maintain and enhance applications. We have several examples where that's been really effective. We also are working with another organization who is taking a lot of the fellow applications and deciding to pull them in and maintain them themselves. Bottom line is it's really hard to, with any degree of specificity, peg exactly what maintenance and enhancement costs are going to be. It's very application-specific. But in the end, it is generally far less than sort of the traditional alternatives, based on the technology being used, the fact that it's open source, the fact that a lot of people can participate in this maintenance. Very good. Thank you. And I guess, Jamie, do you want to answer, do we have the expertise in-house to maintain this system? We're comfortable with that level. We know open source, et cetera. Because I know we had this conversation. It haunts us that we're on council in 2006 when we were told we are going to a new financial platform and we didn't have the expertise in-house to do it at the time we were told we did. So I just want to make sure we do your comfortable chat with everything that's going on. Yeah, absolutely, Councilman. And you've asked a valid question, and I think I can see the questions are actually really coming at this from a traditional IT perspective, asking these questions about how much does it cost and how much does it cost to maintain it. The industry average to maintain software is about 22%. I would estimate that these costs would be extremely lower than that, maybe high watermark 10%. And one of the things that's not being talked about, the beauty of the Code for America model is this idea of using crowdsourcing, of using, you know, it's open source. We can use local talent and local community to help us actually maintain it. But the actual costs will rise if you start to do enhancements. I think he mentioned that during his response to your question. But maintaining it, if it's in the cloud, basically all you're paying for is compute time and actually access time for people to get on and hit the website. Those costs are really, really low. One of the cloud applications that we run right now costs us about $14 a month. If that kind of gives you some perspective, I would assume that something with the scope of NIMS would have considerably a higher cost than that, but nothing like what we traditionally pay for for IT programs. But, again, the benefit is being that it's open source. The community can support it. CFA, we actually have what's called a CFA brigade, which is a local CFA group here in town, a lot of what's termed as hacktivists, grassroots people who are actually interested in helping the community and helping the government explore and, you know, create some nice technological solutions for problems. So we've got that going for us as well, if that helps. Very good. Thank you. Thank you, Vice Mayor. You're welcome. Council Member Clark. Thank you, Vice Mayor. As usual, Council Member Stendent has asked my question. He's not listening to me, but all right. But that was exactly my question. Can we maintain this in an appropriate way and cost-effectively? And first, I'd like to thank Bob and Luke for taking part in this. I think it's been valuable to have you as part of our discussion. I have probably spent more time looking into Cost for America than most because I was very interested in just the general gist of it. The more I looked into it, the more impressed I became. I would also suspect, in spite of Jamie's thought of me, we could find something less expensive. We could also find something very much more expensive than what it's costing us for this. This seems like an incredible bargain for what we're going to get out of it. And I'm just amazed at what the potential is for this. One of the things that I like about it is one of the comments that was made on the presentation, and we don't think we got to it, but talked about putting Lexington on the national stage as a city interested in innovation. and I think that's really important for us as a council. It's something that we ought to be always looking at because I think that pays off in the long run. And we talk about developing Lexington and what it means to this state and what it means to us as a council. These are the kinds of things that can really put us on the map in addition to all the other wonderful things that's happening to us. So I certainly want to say thank you for those folks who know this program. I also was fortunate to have somebody close to me that works in New York City who I talked to about the project in New York and how it was being used, and I was encouraged by the comments that I heard. So anyway, thanks, and I would certainly support this in whatever way is necessary. Thank you, Vice Mayor. You're welcome. Councilmember Akers. Thank you. I also want to congratulate you all. I'm excited about this project. I know that a lot of work has gone into it. I think that $180,000 investment on behalf of the city is a great use of our monies, and especially to improve the efficiency of our government and to open it up to citizens to be more transparent. As I've talked many times, I've said over and over how much I love data, and numbers and research, and it's hard to argue with the numbers. It's hard to argue data. And in my research for food trucks, actually, I was provided a list of metrics from New York City and how they measure every department and division in the city, and I can't explain exactly how excited I was to find it. But when you're able to measure the effectiveness of every single program and every division and every phone call that's logged, you're able to then increase that efficiency to have accountability within government to the citizens and just overall improve policy decisions, even down to policy. So I think that it's a no-brainer. I think that if we want to be a more effective and efficient and transparent government, then this is certainly a step in that direction. And in your packet, I noticed a statement that specifically says that Code for America is for forward-thinking cities. I like to think that Lexington is one of those cities, and I hope that my colleagues on council will agree with me and support this investment as well. Thank you, Vice Mayor. You're welcome. Council Member Ellinger. Thank you, Vice Mayor. I think it was said at some point it's not really about the money, but I think sometimes it does have to do about the money, too. And I guess I'd like to know, you have this in your bond package. Could you explain to me, if it's so important and it's something that the administration thinks that we should do, why we aren't not paying cash, and how can you explain how it can be bonded? Because I really have a hard time with the bonding aspect of this. Well, I tried to avoid that question. I wanted to get the merits of the proposal on the table and see if you guys wanted to pursue it or not and then figure out which way to go. I think that's part of it. We have to pay for it. I understand. It's $180,000, but it's really $360,000. And I think that needs to be explained, too, where the other $180,000 comes from. Right. Well, we have a couple channels that we think we can raise the money from. We're not asking the city for the other $180,000. But to leverage private money, the city's commitment is a very serious commitment to have to take these folks and say, you know, we're serious about this proposal. So I think those two channels would be national foundations and local regional corporations and philanthropic folks out in the community. 180 is a large number to raise, but we think we can do it. And I'll let Bill talk to you about the bonding versus cash issue. And if we tell them that we're going to do it and we have to make that commitment, when? and if we don't get the money, you're going to come back for a change order for the money then? Right. That last piece of the question again. Well, you said that we're going to go ask foundations, we're going to go get a partnership, and if that money doesn't come through, the $180,000, we make a commitment for $360,000. Somebody has to pay for that then, don't they? We can't tell them that we're going to do it and then not spend $360,000, can we? We have to have $360 raised by August 15th. I believe that's the right date, Luke. You can correct me if I'm wrong. Correct. So if the city commits $180 and we don't have the other $180 raised by August 15th, the money will stay in our budget and not be spent. I guess all the things I'm hearing, it's such a great deal. Why would we not go ahead and put the mayor put this in out of cash if it's going to have? Well, I believe that's a Code for America policy position. Is it not, Luke, that you would like to have partnerships at the local level? Yeah, thank you for the opportunity, Jamie. So the model of splitting the $360,000 investment 50-50 really is simply that. It's a model that we have found to be a best practice in the over 20 cities that we've worked with in the past three years. Certainly there's flexibility in the way that we work with cities to invest in those projects. Fundamentally, though, we do believe that it's important to ask for the community to represent its commitment to the project, both financially but also in showing their commitment in coming to events and engaging with the fellows and with the individuals and local governments. so we typically see that more specifically driven by a financial investment. However, if the city was steadfast in exploring funding the project directly, we would be certainly welcome to having those conversations in part because of the amount of collaboration that we've seen in the past with Lexington and its constituents and certainly with Jamie, Shea, and the individuals that we've worked with in their leadership, I think we have firm commitment that they would bring the community and certainly all of you would help bring your community to the table to create a really incredible application. And I would just echo Luke's thoughts. We've had different funding ratios through the last couple of years based on the cities that plead to pay, based on community interest. So this is sort of a principle as opposed to a hard, fast rule. The value for us is in this notion of community-government collaboration. And we have actually participated with the cities in helping raise third-party funds. And so this is something that we can also do collaboratively. Lexington is a night city. Knight is a major founder of ours and also very interested in what we do in Lexington. So I think there's those avenues. But I would offer up Vote for America's assistance in securing third-party funding, and particularly as a night city, I think there's some really good opportunities there. So by saying that, are you going to go out then and call on local or national businesses to help raise money for us for this project? Is that what you say you do? Yeah, that's a great question. So my role is the National Director of Business Development. So I work hand-in-hand with our city partners, both as they go through the application process and also through the funding process. So we are absolutely willing to be a stakeholder in that. We know that oftentimes you locally have the connections and relationships. We certainly see our role as coming in talking about the opportunities for Lexington, why Lexington was selected as a finalist, our confidence in your leadership team, etc. So we are happy to both drive and also take a passive role in those conversations. We actually here in Kansas City, I've played an active role in helping raise close to $100,000 for the local Kansas City $180,000 community match. So we are glad to play that role and certainly happy to help champion Lexington being selected for the program. I see my time is up, but I have just one follow-up here. Did I hear on August 15th, was that kind of a deadline that you gave? So if we put this in the budget for $180, then we have six weeks to get the additional $180. And what happens if we don't get the additional $180 from the private? Do you come back to the council and ask to amend the budget and make a budget request to us? That's a tricky question. I'm not sure. You know, they have a deadline for a reason. Luke, could you possibly hit on that for just a moment so we can better understand why August 15th is important? Sure, absolutely. So we hire our fellows for the 2014 project in September. So at this point, all of our finalists are finalists for one of our 10 spots in the fellowship project. We make a decision in late August based on the funding for each of those projects who we will enroll into the program. Certainly our intent is to work collaboratively, as we've mentioned, to get the project fully funded. To the extent that that project was not fully funded with private donations or individual contributions from nationwide foundations, we would aim to have a pretty transparent conversation about what that gap is and how likely it is that we would be able to fill that gap over the next six 12 weeks i think you know to the point that we mutually feel confident about that we likely would move forward with having lexington as a selected member of the 2014 class additionally should you know jamie and the mayor's office feel that it's appropriate to go back to council for additional investment, we would yield to them on that decision. I would just follow up to that and say I would like to have a conversation with the mayor and some folks before I commit to doing either of those things. It's just that that question had not been answered for me yet. And can you, I know Bill O'Mara came forward in response to the question about bonding. Can you answer that? But Council Member Ellinger asked, why bond this? Why not pay it in cash? Well, our reasoning when we were preparing the budget was this was a bondable project because we're putting up 50%. If you look at the timeline, two months are the fact-finding and creation. That's not bondable, but that comes out of the donated $180,000. The actual code development is developing the ongoing product that is bondable, and we saw it like the Acela project, and so we felt that it met the criteria for bondable software. Thursday, all of this is under discussion, and next Tuesday with Council. If Council chooses to recommend using cash rather than bond, that's okay too. The drop-dead date is before we sell the bond, so we would know whether this is an ongoing project before the bond was sold, September, October. So we felt all the timing worked well in recommending that this would be part of our bonding project. So that was our reason. I guess just to follow up on that then, so you're saying the first two months would probably not be bondable because that's going to be doing research, and then when you're using the application, so? You're developing the application. And that's part of our 50%, $180,000. So that meets all the criteria. It's over $25,000. It has a useful life. So that it meets all the criteria, just like the Acela project, which is another portion of our bond package. So we felt that it met all the tests for a bondable and a capitalizable project. Okay. Thank you. Council Member Beard. Thank you, Vice Mayor. I'm not sure. I guess Jamie. How long has this been on the front burner or back burner or any kind of burner? Well, I originally heard about Code for America about this time last year, and I got interested in it at a Conference of Mayors event. But the application that we submitted was, what, February or March? It's been just a couple months. Okay, well, it's a couple of months ahead of when I found out about it, because I found out about it in this book right here. And then, of course, we're going to go on break, and we get back two days before the drop-dead date. I don't know whether that influences anything that's going on or not. I don't really have any problem with the project, per se. It's just there's some pieces of it that don't hang together exactly like I might want it to. You might want it to. No, I think it would be a busy six weeks if we do engage Code for America, and that's just basically fundraising at that point. Everything will begin roughly January, February of next year. Is this people that, local people that we would? No, they're not local. They're not local. Okay, because we don't want to bother the local group because they're the ones that are going to buy or rejuvenate rubberina, and they're going to have to come out. I'm sorry, I was confused. Yeah, that's another issue. Lighten up. Thank you. Council Member Kay. Thank you, Vice Mayor. So of the total $360,000, can you give us, I know you don't have the fine detail, but roughly how is that money spent in the year? How much of that is support for the fellow, and what else is that spent on? I hate to keep going back to Luke, but I think he's best to answer this question for you. Sure, yeah, happy to do so. So the city's investment, the city $180,000, covers the direct expenses for the fellows. So each of our fellows receive a $35,000 a year stipend. We also obviously cover for benefits, taxes, et cetera. The remainder portion of the $180,000 helps cover for travel for the fellows, both during their residency as well as some team-building costs. So out of that $180,000, $158,000 of that covers the direct expenses for the salary, benefits, and taxes for the fellows. And the remaining $180,000? Sure. So the remainder is provided for overhead and programmatic support for Code for America. So basically helping fund our ability to maintain the program, to provide all of the training and resources to the fellows. So that $180,000 is comprised of both salary support for key program staff, such as Bob and his team who are kind of the administrative operational overhead for the program, training, and then infrastructure costs, which covers basically our collaborative working space for the fellows throughout the year, technology access, et cetera. Great. That's very helpful. Thank you. Thank you, Vice Mayor. You're welcome. Council Member Ellinger, can he jump in front of you? Council Member Massotti? Surely. Thank you. I guess this kind of goes against what I thought I heard from Bill O'Meara, because Bill O'Meara did not give me that kind of explanation about the bondable part of that. It sounded like two months of it was going to be part of salary, and then the rest of it was going to be, and this now looks like this is salary, benefits, overhead, training, and infrastructure. And it did not sound like that really fell within a bondable kind of. I don't see it that way at all. So let me explain how I was approaching this. We're engaging an organization to develop a product, a definable, usable product at the end of the project. Whether that's a consultant at $200 an hour or Code for America, if you look at 280 hours times three, we get three people, for a year, that's something like, I don't know, $50 an hour. If we went and did an RFP, we'd be paying $200 an hour or more for a consultant. So if you look at the per hour cost of the developed product, it's a pretty good deal. But what we're paying for is a product. When we hire a consultant at $200 an hour, that dollar amount is paying for all expenses for that consultant to develop a product, whether it's their overhead, their personal salary, their expenses to develop, to have resources to develop the code. So we're not getting into how that $360,000 is spent within Code for America. We're getting into 12 months, three people, product at the end, deliverable. That's the way I looked at it. Now, GASB says that if you are doing an assessment, that's not a capitalizable expense, but the actual development of the product is. So that's where I came up with the first two months is your assessment. The last two months is your development of your deliverable. That's the logic. Maybe it would be helpful if you can give us examples of where we have bonded people's work in the past. implementation of PeopleSoft. That was all consultants. That was configuring of the product. We developed a custom program for code enforcement, for community corrections, and for building inspection. And there was a product that was used afterwards. Ten years later, we're still using that product in all three locations. I don't know if it's 10 years for code and for building inspection, but it is for community development. I mean for the corrections center. Okay. Does that help? Well, I just thought it might be helpful to see what we've bonded in the past that included people's work, as opposed to a hard product that we buy, a fire engine or something. Sure. Councilmember? The Acela project that was developed for waste management would be another example and part of this year's product to come up with the CAP support. Councilmember Massadi. Thank you, Vice Mayor. I don't know who can answer this, but there was a reference made to that we're going to be hiring a chief information officer soon. I mean, do you have an idea? Is this six weeks, two months, six months? When is this supposed to be? Well, it's not funded yet, so we have to wait until July 1st. And that's what my concern is, is if we don't have someone that is in that position, and we've got several different databases already that are in process, I'd hate to have it not be functional. You know what I'm saying? We don't have someone who's in charge of this program, and we've got a database over here, and we've got a database over here, one over there. And I think the program has a lot of merit and done some study myself about it, and I know they're doing it in Louisville in the criminal justice segment. But my concern is just being able to collaborate, collaborative effort here. And without a CIO, I'm just wondering how is that going to be done? Right. Well, we have to put the leadership team together, but I do think it would be a nice compliment to the chief information officer once they're in place. And, Sally, I think our timing on that is going to be as soon as we can hire after July 1st, right? Do we have an idea when? I mean, when we're looking at that? We have just circulating right now the job description because I felt like that we could go on and place this advertisement. And if the council decides not to fund that position, that's fine. But I was trying to get this position in just immediately, early, you know, midsummer, right after it's close to I'm aiming for August the 1st. It just seems like it would make sense if you had someone in that position with all these different databases and we're trying to do all this information, you know, collaboration and so forth, that we had someone to make sure that could manage it and manage the program if it goes on further. That was my concern. But I can assure you that we're moving very quickly on this. And I assume we will get some good candidates. I mean, I'm sort of just saying. I would hope so. Yes. Thank you. Are there any other questions? Council Member Ellinger. Is it my understanding that it doesn't actually start the program until January, so it's a calendar year 2014 program. Is that not correct? That is correct. So we have six months, basically, if we hire August 1st. Is there any way that you could do it in two fiscal years then? Do you have to have the money all up? Because it's actually going over fiscal year 14 and 15 is what's happening, if it's going to be calendar year. It is spread over two years. I don't know whether or not they would allow us to pay over two years. Bob, is that something you can comment on? I know they were looking for a commitment by August 15th. Good question, though. We're actually pretty flexible in the way in which we look at the funds. This is not an unusual circumstance where cities would like to straddle fiscal years. We typically look for payment for 2014 in November of 2013 in February and then I think in June. But we can have you talk with our chief financial officer. This is not an unusual conversation, and she can give a variety of options for sure. Thank you. Bill might want to add to that just briefly. This is actually funding an actual project rather than an ongoing expense. So just like a bonded project, whether you're building roads or constructing something, you have to have the approval for the entire project. Then you have the funding go in place, and then you have the spend down. So that's why we proposed this as a project. It was capitalizable, and to have the funding and the commitment to Code for America so they could hire or give the stipends to the three people. We wouldn't want to have them make the commitment to three people and six months in not have the additional funding to complete the project. So you could not split the project, do the data, do the first part with 90,000 city money, 90,000 donated, then second fiscal year, 90,000 bonded, 90,000 donated. Is that what you're saying? Well, that's not the way I understand. And identify two different? My understanding of their model and what their commitment was, was the 360 commitment was August 15th so that they could make their selections in September, have the people hired. They start to work in January. They work throughout that calendar year. That spreads across our fiscal year of July 1 of next year. But like all capital projects, we do not close the fund at the end of June 30. It's ongoing unless there's no application. So I've been known to ask to sweep unused bond funds if the project is over or not having any activity to reassess and use for current projects. Yes, I think we're going to be looking at that. Other council members? I'd just like to ask one question, Jamie or Bill, Commissioner. Can you have for us, when we have our meeting on Thursday, a projected annual cost going forward, other than this cost? You said there would be some cost, so that council members can have some idea of what we're talking about in terms of long-term financial commitment. Is there a way to get some of that in front of us? Well, I think based on, we'll circle back with Code for America. Based on their comments today, I think a 10% would probably be a budget number that we could talk about. And that would be cash out of every budget? It would be an operating expense. An operating expense. Okay. Councilman Ellinger. Thank you. I'm going to give you a softball question here, Jamie. But one of the things you haven't touched on that I think is a benefit to this program is about being alumni. Can you kind of touch on what happens after that and how we become part of the alumni of the Code for America? Well, my understanding is there are fellows, three of each or so, that have spent some time in each city, and they continue to collaborate and work on problems amongst each other. Of course, you're building connections with other mayors and other councils as time goes on. So, again, I'll go back to Bob and see if he has anything to add, but that's the basic understanding that I have. Yeah, I would add a couple of things. I think it's appropriate to think about this sort of Code for America engagement as being a long-term engagement. So our vested interest, frankly, the mission that we're all about is really to help cities be in a position to use technology more effectively. And clearly there are a lot of characteristics, a lot of components to creating those conditions, right? And so the applications are clearly one of them. And the applications are, frankly, what Code for America, I think, is best known for. And so building applications that address important issues is front and center to what we do. But it's applications as a means to an end that is equally as important to us. So, for example, the conversation earlier was, are we going to have the internal skills in order to maintain the application that gets built? Part of what our fellows do, engage in skill set training for IT folks, for example, not only to help support the application that we build collaboratively, but to support all of those applications that come next based on similar sort of 21st century technologies. We talk about processes, right? And so in order for an application to be sustained, the government has to be in a position to be able to contract for the maintenance of these applications if they're going to do it through third parties. And so we look towards procurement. You guys have been really sort of leading edge around the whole open data movement, open data legislation, open data, creating an open data portal. Our fellows help further your open data efforts by helping to encourage the opening up of data sets within your government. We have, as mentioned earlier, a small and growing brigade in Lexington. So this is an effort to catalyze the local civic-minded, mostly technologists, but not exclusively technologists, group to work more collaboratively with the city of Lexington as a way to scale community engagement. In order for us to sort of maintain the connection to each of the cities we work with, we created a program called the Peer Network. We currently have 40 cities in the peer network, and it really is a combination of an educational forum, a forum for discussing best practices, and actually a forum for engaging in activities that cities have an interest in working with other cities on. And so Lexington would be a part of the peer network. That is an ongoing forum for these kinds of activities. And it was talked about a little bit earlier, not the least of which, participating in Code for America, allows all of the cities to sort of be together in trying to move forward innovation in government and these specific activities. And so we really value both the network and the national sort of platform that we operate in. And so if you talk with other 2012 or 2011 cities and soon to be 2013 cities, they'll talk about the value that being a part of this network on an ongoing basis has meant to them. So I encourage you, as you think about engaging in Coach for America in 2014, you think about the applications because they are front and center to what we're doing, but think about a lot of these ancillary activities that we do together around skill sets, around addressing key processes within the city, around engaging the civic tech community, around becoming a part of a national group of like-minded cities, has also the benefits of participating in Code for America. And that is sort of the value beyond simply the developing of applications that I think our organization represents and is kind of front and center to how we do our work. Bob, you've provided a great segue. We have some of our local network in the audience, I think, who want to speak. Jamie, I don't see any more council member questions. Thank you for your presentation. Commissioner, thank you. Bob, we appreciate you being with us, and also Luke, who may have had to go. So thank you very much. And we'll hear from our local. Yeah, thank you for being here. Yes. We have three folks who'd like to speak on the issue. And first is Todd Willey, and then Ronald Southard, and then Nick Such. And you'll have three minutes if you'll give your name and address, please. My name is Todd Wiley. I live in Lexington, 467 Lamont Drive, 40503. Thank you, Vice Mayor, for allowing me the opportunity to speak. I'm here to voice my support for this. My support comes as someone who is not a native Lexingtonian, but is happy to call Lexington my home. One of the reasons that's the case is because Lexington is a very open and empowering city. I came here, and right away I was able to lead the initiatives that I wanted to live, whether it was starting a nonprofit, finding a great job, starting a family. This is where I am fully invested in. At the same time, I am a technologist. I have a background including NASA Ames Research Center and startups in San Francisco that were successfully acquired by larger companies. The entire time I was doing those things, I was living right here in Lexington where I wanted to build my family and my business. As a CEO of a software startup, it's very important that we set the right attitude and tone and culture for our city. I need to hire people. This is what I want to do with my life. And doing that requires that we make Lexington be known as a place that openness and innovation are priorities. And I think the small price that is attached to this is a very, it's a bargain. It's a steal for what we're getting. The NIMS system itself is genius. It's going to be great. It's going to promote the openness that we need to have. The Code for America Fellowship as a separate investment is also a great thing for our city to proceed with. I can't speak to the benefits of bonds and funding, But I thought that I would share my opinions on the things that I had valid opinions on. So thank you for your time, Vice Mayor. Thank you very much. Okay. We'll go to Ronald Southerd and Nick. Such. Welcome. Thank you. My name is Chase Southerd. I live at 869 Overview Drive, 40514. and as much like my friend Todd who was not a native Lexingtonian but came here in 1996 to go to school and ultimately stayed and started a business worked with other local startups and started a family but a part of that too is Lexington is a really special place and I'm going to take those skills and those things that I'm trying to foster in myself and be able to give back to the city And so in 2009, I heard a talk from people from the Sunlight Foundation who said to do exactly that, to give back to your community in that way. And so in 2010, we came together and formed Open Lixington and is now part of the Code for America network through their brigade program. and so in the last three years it's been fantastic to be able to work with people like Chad and Derek and Jamie and other people to investigate those things and work together and come together and this last weekend we had the National Day of Civic Hacking and we had an event here held at the Plantry and it was joined by a number of people throughout the community, non-profits, technologists and people to try and do those things and leverage those from those pieces of data that we've already done and the work that we've already done so far. And so to be a part of the next step, the next big step of going into this full-blown Co-For-America program, I think would very much take Lexington to that next level and certainly does through the council's decision might show the level of commitment to openness and transparency and innovation. And I stand here and share my support with you to do that. Thank you. Thank you very much. Nick? Welcome back. You've been here before. Yeah, is this desk new? I like this. My name is Nick Such, 400 Transylvania Park. My friends Chase and Todd have really said all I think that needs to be said. Just wanted to reiterate this amazing opportunity that we have. For those of you who read a recent piece in The New Yorker about the technology industry and some of the ways that it's maybe stayed away from public service, I think this is a tremendous opportunity and maybe something that we have some unique assets here in Lexington and how engaged our small but growing technology community already is in making Lexington a better place. So I think this is an incredible opportunity for that reason. And just wanted to echo what Todd had mentioned about this as an economic development opportunity. For startups who are considering moving to Lexington or staying in Lexington over other places they could go, this really says a lot to have this commitment to technology and entrepreneurialism within our government. And I think that's something, you know, we will see the rewards of that over many years to come. So I urge you to support this, and thank you for offering us the time to be here today. Thank you. Thank you. All right. Council will move on to council reports. If you have one, please sign in. Councilmember Kay. Thank you, Vice Mayor. I want to use my time for council reports to basically follow up on this whole conversation. I was privileged to spend a little bit of time with the Civic Hacking Group on Saturday and Sunday this past weekend, and I can tell you that it was inspiring. These are, I think I can say, young people for the most part, not all, but mostly young people who are really committed to this community and to taking the skills that they have and applying them basically across the board to civic projects, to government projects, wherever they see the need. And so a part of what I see is the future of Lexington. And not to put too fine a point on it, but for all of the men in the room, start working on your beards. thank you vice mayor what would you suggest for the women do the best you can is there any other council member who has council report council member farmer i'll be brief vice mayor i noticed from a press release from the city that there's been an injury accident on Richmond Road at Todd's Road. It's closed one line in each direction, so I know there's a lot of rush hour traffic problems right now out that way. And then I was just going to ask Commissioner Paulson had been here to give us an update about the Taste Creek Road sidewalk project and its bidding process, which has bogged down and become a little too circular for opportunity. Sorry to bring you back in, sir. just a thumbnail of our rebidding opportunity for Tess Creek Road. Sidewalk, if you would, please. Yes. Pull up the best I can. We have about a, it was one week ago, the bids closed on the 24th. We had two bidders that accepted our bid and actually submitted bids, Bluegrass Contracting and Free Contracting, both of which were considerably higher than we expected. So at that time, we then decided to go through and try to figure out why that was the case. We interviewed both contractors that submitted a bid as well as those who did not submit a bid to try to figure out a little bit better what is it that was causing this very large discrepancy in terms of what our estimate was and what the bids were that were returning. We basically focused on a couple key issues, one of which was the time that they felt they had to actually do the work. The bid, there was confusion about the amount of time during the day. They felt they were only allowed to work between 9 and 3, and that with that there was going to be a lot of extra added expense of the takedown and putting things back up every day between those times. And again, just would extend the amount of time to do the project as well. And with the liquidated damages, they were very concerned about how much money they would have to spend in order to get the project done, only being allowed to work for six hours a day. The reality is that they're allowed to work for more than six hours a day. And so what we've done is we've gone back and we have made some changes to the proposal that will extend those hours. That will be that on the inbound lanes, you'll be able to set up a temporary blockage between 9, after 9 in the morning. On the outbound lanes, you'll be able to start up early in the morning, and you'll have to be done or at least get off the road between that kind of outbound traffic time around 3.30 to about 5.30. But we're also exploring the possibility of being able to do closed lanes on the weekends where there are not football games to give them more time to work as well. The one thing we're waiting for is kind of final approval from the Office of Local Programs. We're also extending the time that you can complete the project. That was a bit of a concern from the liquidated damages standpoint. and exploring some other things related to landscaping. There were some landscape costs that they were concerned about. But in terms of how we came up with our bid, just quickly, the unit price contract that we put in was $36 per square yard for Tate's Creek. Leastown Road, Citation Boulevard, sidewalks that were just approved in April this month came in at $36.55. So it was very consistent. Clay's Mill was at $31, again, very close. Our construction unit price is a little bit low. Actually, we were below the state's unit price. What came back was on the order of a double. It was $74 in the case of one contractor and over $50 in the other. And again, those costs were largely related to that concern over the time. Our next step that we are moving forward with is to, again, if we get to go ahead from the Office of Local Programs, which we are getting the indication that we will, we will rebid it on Friday. We are going to have a pre-bid meeting in which all contractors are allowed to come ask questions. We will respond to those and put out an addendum before the bid needs to be submitted. We hope to be able to get a response back before Council goes on break. Wonderful. That's how long it's after. Thank you for that in-depth scoping of that, but we want to get on. Thank you, Vice Mayor. You're welcome, Council Member Clark. Thank you, Vice Mayor. This is a complete, this is a 180-degree turn from our previous very serious conversation. But I would like to just mention to the council and to the city and to those folks who are watching that the state baseball tournament is being held as we speak. And I think people don't realize what an economic advantage that is for us. It's like the state basketball tournament. A whole lot of people come to Lexington to see these teams play. And so I'd just like to mention that, and certainly not in my district, but certainly in my scope of interest. And so in the future, I think we need to be very cautious about supporting this because I think there are other places that would love to have this. And I think we owe a debt to Alan Stein, who has been very instrumental in bringing that to Lexington and increasing the number of teams and obviously the number of patrons to the ballpark. Thank you, Vice Mayor. You're welcome. Council Member Myers. Thank you, Vice Mayor. And Council Member Clark, that's a great segue into my council report, because in talking about Lexington becoming a destination city or a city of destination, those sports activities is something that's really key. And so Chris is going to set up a video. Don't start yet, though. And so my council report is going to be a video today. And just to kind of lead into it, the skate park that we're trying to build is very dear to me, and there's a whole lot of reasons why. And Spencer Lee, my council aide sitting in the front row here, and I have been talking for a while about the skate park and what it means and what it can do and everything. And so he put this video together for us today to just kind of talk about what the skate park means, I think, for not only me, but our city. Thank you, Chris. I am a native Kentuckian and love Kentucky dearly. But one of the things that really scares me about our Commonwealth is that we have the highest rate of pediatric obesity on some scales in the country. I think Frankfurt is catching on to the fact that health issues in Kentucky are affecting the state budgets in a very dramatic way. And the money we're spending on health care is pulling money away from our schools and our colleges and our universities. And the doctors are telling me that they're seeing diseases, heart failure, liver problems, joint problems, that they see in 50, 60, 70-year-olds, in teenagers because of this obesity epidemic. They walk to school, they don't have physical education to the extent that they used to, and they're watching more television. Thank you. You know, there were a lot of people here and as you can see there's a lot of people here right now too and it's just a really good sense of community and as soon as I got here it was just right away I knew that I could skate here all the time. I'm from a really small town and where we lived we didn't have a skate park. We had nowhere to go and they're actually trying to outlaw it right now and I moved I moved up here because my mom pretty much gave me the choice to move wherever we wanted to. And I like this park a lot, so I was like, you know, let's move to Lexington. This changed a lot of kids' lives. I mean, you can understand, like, some kids, you know, you let them down the wrong path, so to speak. But I mean, with skating, like, that's an outlet. So a lot of people come out to the park and enjoy themselves. I was a little younger when the park actually opened, So I missed the whole initial fundraising and organizing and all that. But because people before us had put in hard work and got this park here, it really opened up a whole lot of opportunities for me. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And you saw the credits for the rest of the people, too. Thank you. Thank you very much. Council Member Lawless. Well, I have a video of my grandson who's three but had not turned three when this video was taken of him on his, what do they call them, slider bikes at a skate park in Eugene. And, of course, he's precious, but I don't guess I can get it up there. And I want to say, oddly enough, it's a small, small world, one of my children's very best friends who I've known for years and years, many years ago, left Lexington, and he's become part of a design-build skate park group that specializes in those and has spent several months in Israel designing and building skate parks. So kudos. I'm all about it. And I won't mention my other son that had the skateboard accident and was in for two years and seven surgeries, but it was a fluke accident. So I'm excited about this, and I've said for a long time on the issue of childhood obesity, I think there are a lot of reasons that kids don't go out and play anymore. One of them is a fear that they're going to be abducted or they're going to be abused or somehow taken advantage of. And I think we have, as a culture, we've grown away from people used to get a job where their family was. Now people get a job and they do not have extended families. And so nobody's there to watch them and they stay inside. And I think it would be a wonderful project to take 20 obese children who are on K-CHIP or Medicaid and buy them video games where you have to pedal the bike and give them to half and the other half and see what happens at the end of the year. That's been my little thing. But I would love to work with you on getting a Kaboom grant for this because we are now a Kaboom Play City, which has been on my map. And I also want to announce that the Ellsford Neighborhood Association is having their meeting at 7 p.m. this evening at the corner of where High, Maxwell, and Kentucky come together. And I forget the name of churches because I forget the names of things, but it's the Maxwell something-something church. So great church, very supportive. So kudos, and I like that, and maybe I can get him to help me put together a video of something really cool. Thanks. Any other council reports? I'll just say that one other good activity that way is Council Member Scutchfield and I started off the roller girls bout Saturday night. And if you've never been to see the roller girls, it's a very interesting activity how these attorneys, insurance agents, CPAs, morph into roller girls for their Saturday night bouts. So I encourage you to go. Did you have one more? Just one more thing. As most of you all know and many others know, my mother, who will be 93 in September, lived alone in Owensboro, had just bought a new car, suddenly went blind about three or so weeks ago. and we're in the process of moving her to Lexington. And so a lot of people have expressed their thoughts and kindness and offered assistance, and I really do appreciate it. And, you know, getting old is not for weenies. So thank you all for your patience and understanding. It's been a very trying time and very heartbreaking. Thank you. Thank you. Do I hear a motion for the mayor's report? Yes, President. Second. All right. Any discussion? All those in favor say aye. Aye. Anyone opposed? That motion passes. Now, is there anyone here who wishes to do no public comment? All right. I have a motion and a second to adjourn. All those in favor say aye. Anybody opposed? We are adjourned. Thank you. Thank you.