# Council Work Session - February 25, 2014 > Auto-transcribed civic record · Council · February 25, 2014 - **Permalink**: https://meetings.lexingtonky.news/meeting/3262 - **Source video**: https://lfucg.granicus.com/player/clip/3262?view_id=14&redirect=true - **Date**: 2014-02-25 - **Body**: Council - **Last revised**: February 19, 2026 - **Length**: 28,877 words > ⚠️ **Auto-generated content.** Audio from the official Granicus video was auto-transcribed by OpenAI Whisper-1, with speaker labels folded in from Granicus closed-captioning. Structured facts were extracted with GPT-4o; the narrative summary was written by Anthropic Claude Sonnet. Speaker labels and verbatim wording may contain errors. See [methodology](https://meetings.lexingtonky.news/about/methodology) or [report a correction](mailto:editor@lexingtonky.news). --- ## Meeting Overview The Lexington-Fayette Urban County Government Council met on February 25, 2014, at 3:00 PM in the Council Chamber in Lexington, Kentucky, with Mayor Gray presiding. The council addressed two main agenda items during the session, taking a total of two votes on various matters before them. Three members of the public provided comments during the meeting's public comment period. The council's primary business focused on two significant items: the Affordable Housing Trust Fund proposal and a design contract for a Senior Citizen Center. The Affordable Housing Trust Fund discussion resulted in the item being tabled for future consideration, while the council approved the Senior Citizen Center Design Contract. These actions reflect the council's ongoing efforts to address both housing affordability and services for elderly residents in the Lexington-Fayette community. The meeting provided opportunities for public engagement through the comment period, allowing residents to voice their concerns and opinions on matters affecting the urban county government. The session concluded with the council having made progress on infrastructure and service planning while deferring action on the housing trust fund proposal pending further review. ## Attendance All council members were present for the February 25, 2014 meeting. **Present:** • Mayor Gray • Gorton • Ellinger • Akers • Farmer • Lane • Myers • Beard • Mossotti • Stinnett • Scutchfield • Ford • Clarke • Lawless • Kay • Henson **Absent:** None **Late:** None ## Votes and Decisions The Council conducted two roll call votes during the February 25, 2014 meeting, both related to the Affordable Housing Trust Fund. **Motion to Place Ordinance on March 6 Docket** [timestamp: 07:00] Councilmember Kay, seconded by Councilmember Ford, made a motion to place an ordinance creating the Affordable Housing Trust Fund on the docket for the March 6, 2014 meeting. This motion was tabled without a formal vote. **Motion to Table Discussion Until April 15** [timestamp: 07:45] Councilmember Farmer, seconded by Councilmember Myers, moved to table the discussion on the Affordable Housing Trust Fund until April 15, 2014. The motion **passed** by a vote of 8-7. **Voting in favor (8):** • Gray • Gorton • Ellinger • Akers • Farmer • Lane • Myers • Beard **Voting against (7):** • Ford • Kay • Lawless • Henson • Stinnett • Scutchfield • Clarke There were no abstentions on the tabling motion. The narrow 8-7 vote demonstrates the divided nature of the Council on how to proceed with the Affordable Housing Trust Fund discussion, with the majority choosing to delay further consideration until mid-April rather than moving forward with immediate action in March. ## Budget and Financial Actions The Council approved two financial items during the February 25, 2014 meeting, totaling $24,075.34 in expenditures. **Personnel Authorization** • Resolution 0129-14 authorized an amendment to Section 21-5 of the Code of Ordinances to create one position of Payroll Analyst at a cost of $18,125.34. This amendment establishes a new staff position within the city's organizational structure. **Contract Modification** • Resolution 0166-14 authorized the execution of Change Order #1 with EOP Architecture for $5,950.00 related to the replacement Senior Citizen Center Design Contract. This change order modifies the existing architectural services agreement for the senior center project. The two resolutions represent ongoing investments in both city staffing capabilities and infrastructure improvements, with the majority of the approved funding directed toward the new payroll analyst position. ## Public Comment Three community members addressed the Council during the public comment period, with all speakers focusing on housing and homelessness issues facing the city. **David Christensen** [timestamp: 00:05] spoke about the Affordable Housing Trust Fund, highlighting the critical shortage of affordable rental housing in the community. Christensen emphasized the urgent need for the city to address what he characterized as a housing affordability crisis. **Teddy Smith-Robillard** [timestamp: 00:10] addressed the Council on the topic of homelessness, drawing from personal experiences to illustrate the challenges faced by those experiencing housing instability. Smith-Robillard stressed the importance of addressing the underlying economic hardships that contribute to homelessness in the community. **Ike Lawrence** [timestamp: 00:15] also spoke about homelessness, specifically regarding the role of a Homelessness Commissioner. Lawrence advocated for what he described as a "tough love approach" to reducing homelessness in the city. He emphasized the need for greater transparency and accountability in addressing the issue. The public comment period reflected significant community concern about housing affordability and homelessness, with speakers offering both personal perspectives and policy suggestions for the Council's consideration. ## Contested Items The February 25, 2014 Council meeting featured one significant contested item that resulted in a split vote among council members. **Affordable Housing Trust Fund** The council encountered substantial disagreement regarding the Affordable Housing Trust Fund, specifically concerning its funding mechanisms and implementation strategy. The discussion revealed a clear division among council members on how to proceed with this housing initiative. The nature of the disagreement centered on both the financial aspects of the trust fund and the practical details of its implementation. Council members expressed differing views on these key components, leading to an inability to reach consensus during the meeting. Due to the split among council members and the lack of agreement on the proposed measures, a motion was made to table the discussion of the Affordable Housing Trust Fund. This procedural move effectively postponed any decision on the matter, allowing time for further consideration and potential compromise on the contentious issues. The tabling of this item demonstrates the significant policy differences that existed among council members regarding affordable housing initiatives and their funding. The split vote indicates that the council was closely divided on this issue, with neither side having sufficient support to move forward with their preferred approach at that time. ## Affordable Housing Trust Fund [timestamp: 06:00] The Council discussed the creation of an Affordable Housing Trust Fund during the February 25, 2014 meeting. The discussion involved key speakers Kay, Ford, and Gray, who addressed various aspects of establishing such a fund. The conversation centered on the need for affordable housing in the community and potential funding mechanisms for a trust fund that would support affordable housing initiatives. Council members examined different approaches to creating and sustaining the fund, though specific details about proposed funding sources or amounts were not detailed in the available materials. The discussion appears to have covered the framework and structure needed to establish an effective affordable housing trust fund, with participants considering how such a fund would operate and what impact it could have on addressing local housing needs. After deliberation among the council members, the item was tabled, indicating that further consideration or additional information may be needed before the Council takes action on establishing the Affordable Housing Trust Fund. The decision to table suggests the Council may revisit this topic at a future meeting once any outstanding questions or concerns are addressed. ## Senior Citizen Center Design Contract [timestamp: 03:30] The Council discussed a change order for the Senior Citizen Center Design Contract during the February 25, 2014 meeting. The primary speaker on this item was Beard, who presented the need for modifications to the original design contract. The change order was necessitated by water issues discovered at the project site, along with other site considerations that had not been fully anticipated in the original design phase. These unforeseen conditions required adjustments to the design plans and specifications for the Senior Citizen Center project. Beard explained the technical aspects of the water-related problems and how they would impact the construction and design of the facility. The site considerations mentioned appeared to involve conditions that became apparent during the design development process, requiring professional design services beyond the scope of the original contract. The change order represented additional work that needed to be incorporated into the design contract to address these site-specific challenges. This type of modification is common in construction projects when subsurface conditions or other environmental factors are discovered that differ from initial site assessments. Following the presentation and discussion of the water issues and site considerations, the Council moved to approve the change order for the Senior Citizen Center Design Contract. The approval allows the design team to proceed with the necessary modifications to accommodate the discovered site conditions and ensure the project can move forward with appropriate design solutions. The item was approved by the Council, enabling the continuation of the Senior Citizen Center project with the revised design parameters needed to address the water and site issues identified during the design process. --- ## Decisions - **Motion** — passed (0-0): approve the summary - **Motion** — passed (0-0): approve new business - **Motion** — passed (0-0): approve neighborhood development funds - **Motion** — passed (0-0): use the remaining surplus from the general fund to purchase ten (10) safety vests at a cost between $4,200 - $4,500 for officers that do transport duty - **Motion** — passed (0-0): move Human Resources to the CAO’s Office after the FY15 budget is adopted - **Motion** — passed (0-0): ask Human Resources to examine the issue of hazardous duty classification for the Coroner and Deputy Coroner positions by July 1, 2014 - **Motion** — tabled (13-44): place on the docket for the March 6, 2014 Council meeting an ordinance: 1. Creating Article XXXXV in Chapter 2 of the Code of Ordinances to create the Affordable Housing Trust Fund Advisory Board and the Affordable Housing Trust Fund; 2. Directing the Division of Budgeting to annually include in the budget an appropriation of General Services Fund Revenues to be used for the Affordable Housing Trust Fund; and 3. Providing that the amount of the appropriation each year shall be equal to the amount projected to be received during the forthcoming Fiscal Year from 1% of the existing license fees imposed on insurance companies pursuant to Section 13-44 of the Code of Ordinances - **Motion** — failed (0-0): amend the motion to state 1% up to $4 million - **Motion** — passed (7-7): table the issue until April 15th, 2014 - **Motion** — passed (0-0): place the affordable housing document into the Planning & Public Works Committee for review - **Motion** — passed (0-0): place the issue of animal remains on private property in the urban service boundary in the Public Safety Committee for the purpose of creating an ordinance that will allow a division of LFUCG to cite, fine and abate - **Motion** — passed (0-0): place on the docket for the March 6, 2014 Council Meeting under first reading of ordinances, an ordinance amending ordinance 13-2014 to make the increase on the fine to $250.00 for parking in a handicap parking space effective sixty (60) days from the date of its passage - **Motion** — passed (0-0): adjourn --- ## Full transcript ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ Welcome, welcome to everyone here today. Our Chief Administrative Officer, Sally Hamilton, just shared with me that she is making arrangements for seats downstairs on the first floor in front of the television monitor for any overflow that we have in the council chambers today. And Mr. Mundy, your helping guide, thank you, sir. If you get Mr. Mundy's help, then you are in good shape. Thank you, Mr. Mundy. All right, all right, all right, okay. I'll call the meeting to order now and welcome everyone here. We do have a full agenda today, and I'm sure that we can plan on and count on vigorous discussion. We thank all of you for being here with us today. First on our agenda is public comment for issues on the agenda and I've got a, Mr. Mundy has a list back there and we're getting it. Anyone who has signed up to speak to issues on the agenda, if you'll just come up front here to the podium. If you signed up, I'm getting the names right now, I'll call them. All right, thank you, Wes. All right, first, David Christensen. David, all right, sir. David, you know the routine. I do indeed. Very well, you know that podium will move up and down and adjust to your height. I have such a loud voice, I'm sure, Lowell. You're in good shape. My name is David Christensen, I live at 4844 Brennan Drive here in Lexington. I actually thought I would be making comments after the report, so I don't want to upstage the presentation on the Affordable Housing Trust Fund, but I did want to highlight two things that I saw coming out in the slides, at least, since the full report has not been released yet. One is that it's real clear that we have an affordable rental, a shortage of affordable rental housing in our community. I know throughout the years this question has come up repeatedly when we've talked about different proposals. The questions have been, well, how do we know we've got a problem? I think this report is going to put that to rest, which basically means it's time to focus in on what to do about it. And I would say this is much greater than a problem. I would use the terminology crisis, and I'm hoping we can head in that direction. The other thing that really jumped out at me from the slides is that we're all in this together, basically. Our success as an innovative city has, and a place where people want to work, start businesses, has put a lot of pressure on rental housing prices. The wage scales at the lower end of our community have not kept pace with the wage scales at the upper end. We don't want to discourage progress. We don't want to discourage being a progressive, innovative city and attracting like-minded folks. But I think we have an obligation as a community. Those of us who live comfortably and are not worried about whether we can pay the rent are connected to those that struggle. And I think we need to acknowledge that and step up to the plate and address the fact that while we push for a growth agenda in our community, we need to recognize the consequences of that and also work towards addressing that. And that's it. Thank you very much. David, thank you so much. And next is Ms. Teddy Smith-Robillard. My first honor is to God and his son Jesus, my creator and my keeper. Thanks to the mayor and the council for allowing me to speak. When I spoke at a meeting recently, I said that I had never been homeless. And then when I got home and thought about it, I realized during my days when my mental illness, I hadn't been trained to keep my mental illness under control and I didn't know what to do. I medicated myself by drinking and I remembered that I have been homeless. I slept in a park one time in a large city. I slept in closed closets. A lot of things that I haven't had to go through since I was rescued by the Lord. But I want to say briefly, I'm going to be very brief, but I was at the Homeless Commission meeting the other day and I said, if you haven't experienced any hardship, and that's not to put people down because you haven't experienced any hardship, it's to let you know if you keep living, you may get a chance to experience hardship, you may get a chance to be outdoors, and a whole bunch of other things that has happened to people than it is happening. I feel like it's a crime when you can just spend a few dollars and take people out to the street. I keep my heating bill down and I end up having to give it to the doctor. Then I got my bill and I was saying, oh Lord, look at this bill, and I thought, what am I complaining about? I have a home, I have food, I have clothes, and I can turn it up and worry about paying for it later. But I'm saying, the way things are going in the economy and people not wanting to pay people honest wages for their work, there's going to be a lot more people homeless and hungry and I assure you, when more people get out there the people that have are not going to be enjoying it. And that's a fact. And the Bible lets you know that the poor will always be with you and it's your job to take care of them. Thank you. Thank you, Teddy. Thank you so much. And Billy Mallory has signed up. Has anyone else wished to speak that may not have signed up who wishes to speak on this issue? Ike, Lawrence? Billy said someone else can have her talk. Where is she? Oh, okay. All right. Ike, Lawrence, Ike, you wish to speak now? Okay, yeah, that'd be fine. If you'll just come to the podium, Ike. If you have an extra three minutes, I'll take it. I might not be quite finished in three. My name's Ike Lawrence. When you get through three minutes, I'll ask for a motion to yield some time. I thought we were going to see the homeless report before or the recommendation for commissioner beforehand so I haven't even seen it so I did a prepared thing not anticipating. We'll give you another three minutes later if you want to do that. Okay, thank you. So I'll just read a little bit of what I wrote Mayor Gray and Council Members, in advance of preparing my presentation, I haven't yet heard the recommendations of the consultant for the Homeless Affordable Housing Trust Fund Commissioner and since no one called me in the past year to interview me, I doubt the $50,000 study and its recommendations are anywhere close to what needs to be to fix the homeless problem. If ideas are the hallmark of this administration, then all ideas of its citizens regardless of content should be welcome to be heard and vetted. In my free and humble opinion, the homeless commissioner needs to be a tough love advocate to shrink homelessness not to grow it. All shelters and nonprofits in the shelter business need to answer to the commissioner. The commissioner would have an advisory board and work together to carve out a plan to shrink homelessness. The commissioner's office and all shelters would be 100% transparent of their finances and behaviors. If there is any, and I'm not saying there is, any conflicts of interest would be eliminated. Dress codes would be introduced to standardize and professionalize all in the system whether they be staff or the homeless or anything in between. All citizens' and taxpayers' ideas are welcome to improve and make efficient the office of the commissioner and all shelters and advisory boards. All citizens' ideas should be properly processed and given to all consideration to the process of being implemented. In time, as the homeless find homes or apartments or go home, smaller shelters and churches and nonprofits would no longer be asked to stay open. Closing small shelters would be a good thing In life, there is an equal balance between love and tough love. Many of us think we are out of balance with too much enabling. More tough love recommendations will have to come out of the commissioner's office. Tougher standards on behavior across the board, tougher mentoring, tougher loves in mental health, tougher access to employers and transportation, etc. In short, a level playing field fixed across the board. There is plenty of money in the system to pay a homeless commissioner. For example, personally, I do not think an executive director should get full-time salary for part-time work so that the salary alone of a few people could pay for a commissioner. Excuse me just a second. Let me ask for a motion to give you three more minutes. Is there any objection? Thank you. I'm almost finished. We have many high-paid, smaller mini-commissioners already serving some of the big three shelters. This system is a $12-$20 million per year system so if we can't find $100-$150,000 per year to pay a commissioner, there is something wrong with our ability to cut out fat in a budget. We do not need to pass a half a percent or a one percent tax of $5 million to fund a minor salary of a commissioner. Extra office space and secretaries and paper clips are plentiful throughout LFUCG and the many shelters and churches. There is no need for another tax when everything we need to get this under one roof is already in the system. The meager office of a commissioner is minor and we have to rely on our casualty insurance and debt service on the high amount of mortgages. If you'd ask me to give you a report, well, here it is. I cranked it out in one day. I am swamped and very busy and we've got to quit taxing us like a sick frog in a warm pot of water. We could have used the $50,000 to put a at 20 years old, we could have used $50,000 to put 10 high efficiency heating and air units next door at the Kentucky Theater. Y'all should ask your constituents if you want money to go towards these expensive and ridiculous studies. Do you remember Live Where You Work study of 400,000? Well, five people have showed up and have qualified. There is a much cheaper process in coming to the same conclusion. It is common sense. It is called constituency and free speech. Our framers had it correct all along. In conclusion, I leave you with this one last metaphor. We are all born with two to one ratio in our physical makeup. Two ears, one tongue. Let's each listen to each other better from one another. Thank you, Mr. Lawrence. That allows us to then move on to our agenda. First on our agenda today in the work session is rezoning requests and the docket approval. There is no docket approval this week. There is no council meeting which allows us to move on to summary approval. Is there a motion to approve? Is there any discussion on the motion? Hearing none, we can take a vote. All in favor, please say aye. Opposed, no. Motion carries. Next on the agenda is budget amendments. There are no budget amendments today. We can move on to new business. Is there a motion? Is there any discussion on the motion? All in favor, please say aye. Opposed, no. Motion carries. Next on item D is the I just wanted to make sure this talks about eliminating the Hillenmayer pump station. There is a lot of paper in here. Does this replace that completely with a gravity line? If we were to widen that, we will lose our access to that pump station. That is the driver in the near term. Also, as a professor, I once said gravity is your friend. It is free and never takes a day off. Whenever we can eliminate a pump station, we want to take advantage of that. That has been our implicit policy. If we were to go through the vacant Langley property adjacent to it over towards Masterson station ultimately draining down to the lower town branch pump station in front of the federal prison, it will work. As long as it works, I am happy. Thank you. Thank you. I wanted to ask about item F . Which is the change order to the senior citizens center design. Is that you, jump sheet? I see you on the move. If I understand correctly, this increase in price is due to the water problem. What else? The original funding that was put in and the contract that was agreed upon with EOP included some funds to provide stone water remediation and so forth. Once the site was examined further by the consultants, it was discovered that a lot of that is due to the dealership that is on the back end of the park. What you have here is the sheet draining all of the top surface water into the park. We felt at this time it would be the most responsible thing to do to incorporate all of those issues combined. Thank you. I was going to ask about the lack of water service, which I think was the other item. Southland Christian has water service. You have two options in regard to this. You have water on site, but when you talk about providing the pressure that is needed for the sprinkler system, fire system, there is a 12-inch line that is currently feeding Southland Christian area that is an option for us to take a look and be able to feed off of that. Also, there is a high-pressure line at New Circle Road. Consultants are examining both of those options and trying to identify the best method by which they are going to bring the water back. Thank you. I think he wants his glasses back. Good call. That is not the only reason I am here. I was going to add to this. The CAO Hamilton asked me to step in on the water issue as well. I have already met with Kentucky American . Were there any other items that you think potentially could come back as change orders or were these the only two? I don't anticipate any at this time. Once you finish phase A of the project and you start moving into the actual identifying the systems and construction methods and materials and so forth, there are a lot of decisions that have to be made. We will do everything we can to minimize any change orders. At this point, I don't see any major issue that would cause us any headaches. Finally, do you think this will impact the timeline that we have seen in terms of finishing? I think it will. We are waiting on EOP to get back with us after they have had a chance to take a closer look at this and provide us an update. Thank you very much. I think it might be worthwhile informing for the council to know that this just represents the first phase of the project. We are looking at a new schematic design, isn't that correct? That is correct. Proceeding into detail design, working drawings, construction, this number is significantly more than that. Yes. All right. All in favor, please say aye. Opposed, no. Motion carries. Next on our agenda is continuing business and presentations. Is there any discussion on the motion? Hearing none, we can take a vote. All in favor, please say aye. Opposed, no. Motion carries. Next on our agenda is councilmember Henson. Sorry about that. Councilmember Stenning. We met once again on January 21st for the public safety committee in January. I would like to make a clarification. There are currently, back in 2009, 298 authorized officers at our correction facility in 2014. There are 263 officers authorized according to budget. Currently, staffing levels are at 262 officers. There is no national standard for officer ratio. Currently, officers are supervising 96 inmates, but there is no national standard in some of the pods, not all. Most of the pods are up to 80 inmates per pod. There is no national standard that sets inmate to officer ratios as well. We currently are housing 75 federal prisoners and about 100 class D inmates. There was a motion made by councilmembers to use remaining surplus funds from the general fund to purchase 10 safety vests at a cost between $4,200 and $4,500 for each. The motion carries. I have a motion to adopt dissent. I bring that to the committee so moved. Is there any discussion on the motion? Hearing none, all in favor please say aye. Opposed, no. The motion carries. The next item on the agenda is wireless fees through landline phones. The landline fees have decreased 10% per year. The wireless fees have increased 1.5% per year. The Kentucky league of cities has not allowed wireless fees to run through the city of Kentucky. That is all we adjourned at 2.45 P.M. Thank you. Thank you, Councilmember Stennett. I will move on to the general government summary. The general government summit met at 2.45 P.M. At 2.45 P.M., the CIO Hamilton made the presentation about reorganizing human resources. There were a significant number of questions, comments, and suggestions followed by a motion by Councilmember Ford to move human resources to the CIO's office after the FY15 budget is adopted. Is there any discussion on the motion? Hearing none, we can take a vote. All in favor, please say aye. Opposed, no. Motion carries. In addition, CIO Hamilton stated that she and her office are ready to accept this plan and will bring information back to the committee during the spring. Third item on the agenda was to discuss the enterprise program. He stated that enterprise includes aquatics, extended school program, golf, concessions, rentals, and external special events, web assistance, volunteers, and Tubby's clubhouse. He discussed some or all of those in detail, especially aquatics, golf, the extended school program. After further discussion, Commissioner Reed, who had come to the podium, discussed the future of parks and the vacant director position about which a number of questions had been asked. The fourth item on the agenda was the coroner's office classification and salaries. Coroner Gary Ginn discussed the duties of the coroner and the deputy coroner and their request for additional compensation for staff. In response to a question from Vice Mayor Gorton, John Maxwell from human resources stated that the compensation study presently underway would include the coroner's office and that he will have budget numbers to implement the compensation study to CAO Hamilton by mid-March. There was then a motion by Vice Mayor Gorton to ask human resources to examine the issue of hazardous duty classification for the coroner and the deputy coroner position by July 1. That motion passed without dissent and I would like to now make a motion to place that on the council docket. Second. Motion by Council Member Kaye, second by Vice Mayor Gorton. Is there any discussion on the motion? Okay. Hearing none, then we take a vote. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed, no. Motion carries. The last item was items referred to committee. There was a motion by Council Member Ford to remove the parks enterprise presentation from the items list that was passed without dissent. There was then a motion to adjourn. We adjourned at 1.05. And that's my report, Mayor. Thank you. Thank you, Council Member Kaye. All right. And that allows us to move on in our agenda to the next presentation, which is on Lexington's affordable housing challenge and potential strategy. I'll ask Shea Rabol, who has led this project on behalf of the administration and the city, to introduce our guests who are here today. And after looking at the report, I will say it's a demonstration that we are not afraid of the unvarnished facts. That's correct. Shea, go right ahead. Thank you very much. I'll try to be brief. That's often a problem for me. But I wanted to put the presentation in context today. As you all know, in 2012, the mayor appointed a commission on homelessness. The purpose of that was to make recommendations on how Lexington could better address our homeless challenges. The commission made 48 interrelated recommendations. One of the major recommendations was to increase the amount of affordable housing we have available in Lexington. Affordable housing was viewed and is viewed as a major component to preventing homelessness from occurring and also for shortening the duration when people do become homeless. And so the commission felt as though any real effort to address homelessness could not leave out affordable housing. As you also know, they made very specific recommendations as it relates to specific subpopulations of the homeless. People with mental health issues, people with substance abuse challenges, people aging out of the foster care system, and so on. As it relates to affordable housing, they made a recommendation on how to fund it, but they did not get into the specific details about exactly how to increase affordable housing. And that is why we recommended and the council supported allowing us to hire experts in the field to examine the issues, to confirm the specific needs and challenges, what type of affordable housing challenge does Lexington have, and to evaluate our current response and resources and then to recommend how to move forward. And so that is why Charles and Karen are here today. Some of the information in this report, the data won't be a surprise to some that have studied this issue for many years, but for the rest of us, the data included in this report is news to some. The level of detail that is offered by our consultants was not included in the commission report, nor was it expected to be. So we thank our consultants who we've been working with. And with that, I will introduce Charles Buki and Karen Beck Pooley from CZB. Charles Buki. Charles Buki. Charles Buki. Charles Buki. While you and Charles are coming to the podium, the way that we will proceed is you will make the presentation and then I will as chair open the floor to council members for questions and comments. All right? And then the questions and comments will likely be addressed to you all. Council members. Thanks, Charles. Thank you, mayor. Yes, sir. Is that a green light to start or do we want to? All right. Pardon. Yeah. Anything to delay is fine with us. You might want to dial that back. Let's dial back to the 15 minutes starting. Thank you, mayor. Council members. I'm Charles Buki. This is my colleague, Dr. Pooley. She and I have worked together for more than ten years at CZB and we are, I can speak for Karen and staff not here, very honored to be here. It's, as you know, we started this work late in the fall. We had a quick timetable to get to, to bring our analysis and recommendations to you all. We've got about 20 slides. We'll go through them fairly quickly. I'll handle the first third or so. Karen will pick off about a third and I'll conclude with the remaining third. Essentially these mirror the written report. The written report is in greater detail, but they are mirror images of one another. Shea was right in teeing up the subject the way it was teed up, but I think a good way to think about this, or our challenge was, for all intents and purposes, we were asked three questions. The slides don't follow that format, but it's a good way to think about it, which was, does Lexington have a problem? It's a yes, no. It's very much a decision tree. If you do have a problem, how big is it? So we tried to answer the first and answer the second, and if it exists, regardless of the size, what do you think we ought to do about it? And we did that in the context of the considerable work done previous to us on the homeless commission and previous pretty significant bodies of research. So we took that research, we took the high-quality work that you had done in the last 48 months, three, four years, we took that, we supplemented it with some additional data to really come to our findings, and so let me walk through those best I can. Let's see if this works. Well... Need some help, Chris? I can advance it here. Okay, great. Just say next, right? Next slide, please. Underwater. We'll take it. So it should come as no surprise that we absolutely ratify this is a great value city. You know, when we're talking about affordability, I think the first message that I would communicate is that you have two concurrent truths. The first truth is that this is an either-or situation, and so what's really, really important here is that from a home ownership point of view, this is a superbly affordable city, and in fact, it's probably one of your great competitive advantages. Next slide, please. There's a concurrent truth that competes for attention in this reality, and it's for low-wage workers, it's one with real value. It's not an either-or story, not an either-or story. It is very affordable. It's also very, very difficult if you're a low-wage worker, and one good way to parse this is to think about affordability from a home ownership point of view, which is incredibly accessible at, you know, as I said, for one segment of the market and really look at the rental housing component of it. So it's these two competing truths that I think I want to ask you to hold on throughout this presentation. Next slide. The way we're going to go through this is just a bit of an overview. Karen and I are going to talk about scale and cause, then we'll talk about solving, suspend disbelief for a moment or two about what that word solving and solution is. Then we're going to move on to a discussion of local, non-local share. That's going to speak to the issue of leverage, and we're going to talk, council members, about recommended approach and what we think by way of system building. Next slide. This is the overview. These are the high points. They're covered in the report. Next slide. So what do we have? Do we have an issue? From our point of view, there's no getting around the fact that you have a serious affordable housing problem. You can't duck it. There's no bobbing. There's no weaving. We can't find anything you can hide under. There's no way to validate the view that you don't have a problem. Next slide. So what we're looking at today and what I want you to remember is we're looking at a current shortage today of 6,000 units. Not 6, not 60, and not 600, but 6,000. We also think that all things being equal, you're losing your market. It's a strong market. You're shedding about 400 more a year. Where does this come from? We think it comes from two principal sources. One is a legacy issue. This is a problem that's been building for some time, didn't materialize yesterday. It may feel a bit sudden with the recession and the way things have shaken out, but it didn't happen yesterday. So we're going to call that a legacy problem. That's how we refer to it in the next slide. Second point. This is a prosperity issue. This is to some extent a result of being a successful city. This is a result of doing a lot of things really, really well. Third point. Let's suppose you want to tackle this problem. So we spent a lot of time thinking about this from a scalability point of view, and our conclusion is that that's not a good idea. We're going to have to look at the next point, which is this is roughly a $36 million a year hole that's growing by $2.4 million a year annually. Looking forward, from a policy point of view, we would encourage you to divide the challenge into two basic thrusts, the work of catching up and the work of keeping up. So you've got a 6,000 unit hole to dig out of, and you've got a $2.4 million hole to dig out of to keep up with the challenge. And both catching and keeping up we think should be coordinated by an enhanced department of planning, preservation and development that should report to the mayor. So that's our overview. Karen's going to go through the acuteness of this issue, how we kind of got to these numbers. She'll hand it back to me, and I'll walk you through how we got there. Thank you. So we're going to go back and again, we're focusing on the rental market for now, because as Charles was describing, the affordability challenges we saw were mainly limited to the rental housing market. Back in 1990, the city had over 35,000 rental units that would have been affordable to a household with an income up to about $20,000, renting for about $5,000 or less. That was the day 2012 most current numbers that were available in that stock had declined. Karen, hold on just a second. You might slow down your pace a little bit. You've got a lot of information there. I just asked the vice mayor if it was a little fast for her, too. That was just calibrated. So we're going to go back and again, we're focusing on the affordable rental market for $500 or less between 1990 and 2012, so that by the time you get to 2012, just 17% of all rentals that are available on the market in Lexington are available for a price of $500 or less. So as we've talked about this, consequences of growth, both economic growth, wage growth, and also growth in your student population, who are primarily renters and put a lot of stress on the rental market, what's happening over the course of this stretch from 1990 to 2012 is the market, to an incredibly decreasing degree, is no longer solving what would have been an affordable housing challenge, whereas the market provided a lot of affordable housing in 1990, it does so to a significantly lower degree by 2012. And as Charles was mentioning, this primarily comes from two different sources. We sort of split them out to be legacy, the legacy challenge, and also a prosperity challenge. Legacy challenge is the segment of your workforce that's low-wage workers. Much of the gap in affordable housing, those 6,000 households we come to, vast majority of those households include at least one employee, at least one person who's low-wage. And some of the reason this segment of your population remains, still faces affordable housing challenges, is the way that rents have increased, whereas wages for the low-wage sectors of your job market have, if anything, declined. So the graphic on the right is just trying to indicate, if you look at rates of change, whether it's for low-wage sectors or rent levels, for FMR, your fair market rent for a two-bedroom apartment, the rate of change in your fair market rent has increased over the course of those periods of time, whereas your wages for low-wage work has declined. One of the things driving your rents up is prosperity. Prosperity, the more workers you have with higher wages, the more students you have demanding benefits, is all a good thing. That's all economic growth, and that's a sign of a vital city. But what it does is it drives up your rental prices, it drives rents higher, and is increasingly driving those out of reach of your low-wage workers. This just is meant to indicate the split between what's been happening for low-wage workers versus high-wage workers. If you look in the segments of the job markets that are typically low-wage work, your hotels, entertainment, health services, and education services, that's the bottom line, which has remained relatively flat between 2000 and 2012 would be the last year on that. Those wages have stayed fairly flat in those sectors, where if you contrast it with what's going on in higher-wage sectors, whether it's management, professional services, your finance and information sectors, those wages are not only starting high, but they're gaining ground. Again, that kind of prosperity is a good thing. It's a sign of success for the city, but it also puts additional pressure on your rental market. If you want to boil it down to how acute is the problem, what are your affordability gaps? We tried to take students out of the picture when it came to affordable housing need, because one of the challenges students appear to have, because they typically have lower incomes, appear to be among households who might need affordable housing, but are coming with resources that aren't evident in the data on poverty and income levels. So we took students out of the picture to just try and focus on the resident population that could benefit from an affordable housing strategy, and we came to roughly 15,000 households that with incomes below $20,000 would require some sort of housing assistance. So if they're at 15,000, we looked at what the market and as well as your public and non-profit housing providers, your subsidized housing providers were providing. So if you had 15,000 households, there are about 9,000 households accommodated by publicly subsidized public housing or remaining affordable rental market rate rentals. So you have this gap. This is how we got to the gap of about 6,000 households who are currently paying too much for housing. When it comes to a matter of, well, who pays for this problem, a good chunk of that 9,000, you currently have about 6,100 units of public or publicly subsidized housing, and the vast majority of that housing has been paid for by state or federal sources, whether it's low-income housing tax credits, public housing dollars, Section 8 vouchers, things like that. Those monies are not expected to increase in the near future, and if anything, a lot of those funding streams are declining slightly. So when you're looking at the next 6,000 households who need some sort of housing assistance, chances are, it's fairly certain, that meeting that additional need, that new need, is going to have to increasingly come from local sources or sources other than the ones that have been tapped for your first chunk of affordable housing units. So, again, we can keep flying through these. These are all effectively getting to the same point, that what has been done to date, the 6,100 units done to date and the remaining market-rate affordable rentals have come to Lexington with very little local dollars put into them, either the market providing them, the market used to provide many more than it currently does, and also the subsidized units that were primarily subsidized by state and federal sources. And again, we would estimate this, if you're talking about to solve this problem today, you're talking about a $20 to $30 million a year cost to reach the households on the top, those additional 6,000 households. But if you look on the whole, in terms of leveraging, whether it's local dollars or federal or state dollars, while Lexington paid virtually zero dollars for that first chunk of affordable units, it's going to have to contribute nearly all of the additional units. You're looking over the long term, by the time you get to that whole 15,000, at about a one-to-one match, was sort of the best scenario we could find. So, given that, what we think is a population of about 15,000 households that we're talking about, and of whom 9,000 by market forces and or subsidies are receiving some assistance, leaving you roughly a 6,000 household whole, what follows is the way we would encourage you to think about it. Number one, we would encourage you to establish an unimpeachable Lexington objective, which is that by the year 2025 and thereafter, anyone who works in Lexington can afford to live in Lexington. It turns out that a statement like that becomes highly measurable, can be adjusted annually, can trigger other policies, but a statement like that becomes a stake in the ground. That's the first recommendation we'd make, is to be bold. We think within that, there are going to be two clear goals. One is to completely catch up by that year, so you have to somehow staggo from, you know, a whole of 6,000 to zero. You have between now and 2025. That'd be our recommendation. And you're going to need another goal, because you're losing 400 a year. So, you know, in 10 years, that's another 4,400. Those numbers, those become, it's a big number today, and it gets bigger fast. So, we think you really want to pay attention to both of those. So, we want to draw your attention to capacity. So, to tackle this large and growing problem, we really think your Department of Planning, Preservation, and Development needs to be enhanced. And second, to begin coordinating a response to the growing problem of homelessness, we want to honor the key recommendation in the previous commission's work, which is to establish an Office of Homelessness. Next slide, please. Right now, most of the non-local dollars that are flowing to the city, and that the city, through one device or another, is spending to address affordable housing, they have a tendency to tilt. You do some rental emphasis. There's no question that the tax credit, low-income housing tax credit, tilts to rental production, okay, on the 4% or 9% side. But there's a conceit in your programming toward homeownership, and we would recommend that we think your market really handles homeownership pretty well, and that your real challenge is rental at the bottom end of the market, and so we would encourage your current orientation of policies to tilt toward rental preservation and rental production, less toward homeownership on the affordable side. Next slide, please. You need resources for that, and there are two fundamental places that we would encourage you to seriously move forward. The first is to create and operate a trust fund, and I would emphasize, of sufficient size. And the second is to create and coordinate planning tools of sufficient focus. So the way we've strategically set this up, and that we would encourage you to think about it, is your trust fund is your catch-up tool. Your planning tools are your keep-up mechanisms. So it's not perfect. You can certainly blend and mix and match, move the chess pieces around as you see fit, and as your development community and planning apparatus can do, but as a good general rule to think about, your trust fund is catch-up, and your planning tools is keep-up. Next slide, please. So how to do it. It's a big hole. If you have a $36 million hole, and you want it to dig out tomorrow, that's a big check to write today, and then it's there ever after until your wage-housing price gap gets closed. There's no getting around that. I want to draw emphasis to that point. Having said that, we took a look at your delivery systems, and we're not convinced that you could spend $36 million tomorrow and do it well. And so what we would recommend is ride that horse and get there incrementally. Take advantage of the fact that the systems don't exist now and get there slowly. And by getting there slowly, by getting there over 9, 10, 11 years, you reduce the cost to an average of what works out to be about $19.5 million. For the balance of my presentation, I'm just going to use the number $20 million. It's just easier math. So you've got what we think is a 10, 11, 12-year march forward to close this gap at about $20 million a year. That's your average. We'd start at the $4 million level, and we would recommend that you split. You take advantage of the recommendations that I understand have been percolating through community dialogue up until now, and split it 50-50, and allocate $2 million to address homelessness and fully fund the Office of Homelessness, and then take $2 million and orient that toward addressing the housing portion of that, the affordable housing portion of that. That would be your launch on a trust fund, an initial $4 million. And it would be your first step forward toward what ultimately would need to be a $20 million a year average. So as you can see, with the dark line at the bottom, you can see what is more or less $20 million a year, but it's a very large cumulative paycheck. Next slide, please. I already covered this. Next slide, sorry. So how to do that. You've got a number of options. You're not out there all by yourself. There are a number of cities on the economic spectrum and on the sort of continuum of prosperity. Some, like a Nashville or a Richmond, aren't quite as strong as you. Like an Oklahoma City, not quite as strong as you, but there are others a little further along, like an Austin for instance. And on that continuum, I think we can look for some examples. We can steal a few things, stitch together a few good ideas. Seattle, in full disclosure, was a client of ours. We helped design their affordable housing levy. That's one way to go. That was a $110 million levy, twice renewed. So that's an example of a fairly robust response. You've got a, just in the last six months, an important bond passed in Austin. We would encourage you to look there. You can explore local sales tax options, insurance fees. We would recommend really tapping into having a robust and honest discussion about an employer fee. Next slide. As I said earlier, no matter what you manage to do with a trust fund, if it's funded it for a year, never goes up, does go up, you're going to shed an additional $400 a year. There's no getting around that. So we would recommend a full battery of planning tools for catch-up purposes. That's going to need to happen through a family of land use regulations, zoning and development codes, and some other measures that we can talk about. Next slide. That's how you get your $400. Where to look? Just like you can look to Seattle, you can look to Austin, you can look to Boulder for some pretty aggressive funding initiatives. You can look to Park City, New York City, Alexandria, Virginia, I think are three very good examples of policy innovations at the planning level that have generated a real keep-up capacity. Next slide. Final slide. This really just recaps the slide at the very beginning. It's a big hole. It's $6,000. It's getting bigger. It'll be $10,000 in 10 years. You've got what we think is a scalable $6,000 a unit catch-up cost. That's roughly $36 million a year. We think that by getting there incrementally, you can get that down to between $19 and $20 million a year. We'd encourage you to think of this as a catch-up body of work done largely through a trust fund and keep-up work done through the adoption of some creative planning tools. We'd be happy to take questions or we can look for the exits and get out of here as fast as possible. Whatever works for you guys. Thank you. Thanks, Charles. Thanks, Karen. I will open the floor for comments from councilmembers. Just councilmembers be alert to the... I'm sure there's going to be a robust conversation. Charles, we have a five-minute protocol for the exchange among councilmembers and the guests. We'll try to follow that protocol. Are we the guests? You're the guests. Councilmember Lawless. Thank you and thank you all for this great report. I represent the third district which is the core of downtown, the University of Kentucky and the neighborhoods around there. One of the things that has happened in many of those neighborhoods is they have been upzoned with very poorly constructed student housing which is split by a larger number of people than the infrastructure really will. I worry when I look at upzoning because what has happened in my district is the upzoning has been to accommodate the student landlords and has actually created an environment that is not sustainable as a healthy neighborhood. The other thing I wanted to comment on is I think one thing that isn't mentioned in this is that a lot of the people that we talk about preventing homelessness because they're paying too much rent is that many families, single or two parent families, aren't going to be homeless. They're just going to work more jobs, longer hours. The cost of that with having kids, nobody there to help with the homework, the stress on the family, and then how that dominoes with the child's education and healthy eating. They don't have access to good food. I think there are a lot of costs to this other than becoming homeless. That is what it does to our community, our culture, and to our future leaders, our future workers because a lot of parents are going to say, okay, I'm going to have two or three jobs. I think we need to think about that. It's not necessarily that they're going to become homeless, but they are going to become a family that suffers in many other ways, including how that impacts the children. That's all I'm going to say for right now, but I did want to ask if you took into account any of those kinds of variables, the lack of healthy food because of time with children. I think you raised two points, and we did wrestle with both. When we cite, for instance, upzoning, none of those recommendations should be construed as being given to you all in isolation. It's not upzoning all by itself, disconnected from very careful calculations about what a particular neighborhood in a small area plan could reasonably absorb in terms of impact. We haven't done that. We put it up as upzoning, but perhaps it should have said upzoning with an asterisk, which is attached to an array of neighborhood-specific governing factors. That's one point. I think the second point you raised is the cost issue or what we might call a hidden cost issue. Remember the old Fram oil filter commercial on TV in the 70s? The guy pulls in, drops his car off the transmission, gets worked on. The guy writes a big fat check for a big bill, and then the old salty mechanic says, there goes Steve. He's got a brand new transmission. He could have paid me for an oil filter two years ago and saved himself a lot of money. I think it's appropriate here. There's no getting around the cost. It may be hidden. It may be obscure. It may be buried here, but its head is going to rear itself one way or another. How and whether you deal with it from our point of view, if you deal with 80% of it, the other 20% is going to come up someplace somehow. It's like whack-a-mole. You've got a $36 million problem. You've got a $36 million problem. Okay. Thank you. Council Member Beard. Thank you, Mayor. You referenced Boulder, Colorado a few minutes ago. Our Chamber of Commerce took a visit to Boulder, Colorado and we asked them what they called affordable housing and what affordable housing was in Boulder was $250,000 a year. I was on the same bus and Andrea James fainted when she heard that. Where is the land supposed to come from to build these units? We are restricted about expansion of land in Fayette County and we're going to have to deal with that one way or the other or we could throw up a Cabrini-Green approach and put 30 story units, multiple units, obviously. How do you address the solutions, I guess, to some of these problems? We all believe and understand that we have a problem and we'd like to fix the problem. The question is exactly how do we go down which road to do so? I'm going to set Karen up for the tough part, but I'm going to say... Charles, pull the microphone up, please. Thank you. Here we go. Really, this is going to come down to not whether you want to solve it or not, but how badly you want to solve it. You can either go out... Folks, our audience, I have the unpopular job of keeping calm. Council rules don't allow for clapping in such demonstrations, so please, you know, we'll allow that later. Go ahead, Charles. Do respect, Councilmember, you can either go up or you can go out. That's pretty much it. And so, given that, and then given the consequential component that land plays in the equation, what you're really dealing with is where and in what volume and in what densities and how to think about it. While I appreciate the Cabrini-Green reference, that's not your only option. You've got a lot of options, and in this particular case, what you're really dealing with here is not a shortage of units, but a shortage of units that already exist that aren't affordable or that exist now and that aren't affordable and that are substandard. So what you don't... Let's dispel this. You don't have to gin up for a high speed production program and your market doesn't have to absorb 6,000 units. Your market just has to convert 6,000 substandard units into decent habitable condition and or 6,000 households need a leg up to get into decent and standard housing. The units pretty much exist. That won't be the case forever and it's at that stage in time when you will have, we either have to go up or we have to go out, but if we do neither, then we're putting ourselves in a bit of a box. I understand. That's really why I brought the subject up. Absolutely. In the near term we were focusing much more heavily on almost modeled on vouchers in that looking at existing units and how to kill as many birds with one stone as you possibly can, bring them within reach of households that currently can't afford them so that's a subsidy to the household and with that subsidy to the household ensuring that the housing unit that they're going into is held to certain standards of condition and because, as Charles was saying, 6,000 households many, most, the vast majority of whom already live in units, it's just not a stable and affordable situation which then brings the other costs that you were talking about and so then we don't look to new production or we certainly don't look to significant new production until down the road. If that gets at all of your questions. Thank you. Thank you, Mayor. Council Member Stennett. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you all for coming today and giving us a pretty concise report. I just had a couple follow-up questions on some of the numbers you gave in your presentation. Explain to us specifically how you came up with the $6,000 per household amount. I don't think that was real clear to most of us up here. Sure. As we were looking at the scale of the problem and the nature of how many new units you would need, we came to this idea of hitting a lot of this initial need with rental subsidies We looked to the Housing Authority's Section 8 program and said, well, all right, on average, what does a Section 8 voucher cost the Housing Authority? And the average amount is about $6,000 a year to subsidize a household through that program. So that was sort of the rental voucher side. But then you had looked at if you were to build the financing that you would have to carry on that unit, worked out to a similar amount. So it was a good sort of placeholder for you want to do one unit, $6,000 a year. You want to do 100, you just multiply it up. Okay. I was looking more towards the subsidies because you gave a number of $500 per month as the affordability level. Our average in Lexington is $750. So if you take $250 a month, that's only $3,000 per year in assistance to move up to that affordable range. So I'm trying to figure out how your math gets to $6,000, which is double that. We purposely used a conservative figure because it may be that some of the households that come in in that $6,000 have incredibly low incomes. So you're subsidizing nearly all of their rent. So the Housing Authority has households that some, they're subsidizing the last $150 of their rent, and that household could be served much lower. So that $6,000 figure for rental vouchers is a conservative. You may find that in reality, based on a lot of working families really just need maybe $200 a month, that number in reality would be much lower. It's also the case, Council Member, where you've got, when you try to look forward to the family composition and the nature of the demand, you're going to have some demand for one, some demand for two, some demand for threes. They're going to be all over the map. Some of the folks are going to work 1,800 hours a year. Some are going to work two jobs and work $2,100, 2,100 hours a year. Some at $725 an hour, some at $825 an hour. We felt that the blended, sort of the blended scalable number you could work with when you looked at the gap, purchasing power gap, market cost gap, as sort of one column way to think of it. A second column way would be to construct a unit at current prevailing interest rates and probable square foot construction costs. And then the third way would be to use the Housing Authority Section 8 as a takeoff, that we kept coming very close to $6,000. Sometimes we'd hit $6,200, sometimes $5,900. $6,000 had a lot of zeros in it, and we could do the math easier. You could, however, if you were scaling up a program, you could land at $5,000, there's no question, and use it as a multiplier, knowing that that's probably five and a half, five-sixths, five and a half-sixths of what might be a conservative figure. But that was a good multiplier for us. Okay. And in your calculations, how did you view jobs and wages? Are you reigning flat, and we do nothing to get better-paying jobs, we do nothing to increase the wages, so you can afford better that way? Did you calculate that variable in, or are jobs flat in your calculation? If you looked at what has happened over the last 10 or 13 years in job, in average wages, or even overall wages, if you split it out, certain sectors are zooming, they're going up, but your sectors at the bottom, your low-wage work, your retailers, your entertainment, your accommodations, hotel jobs, those kind of jobs, have remained flat. Separate from anything the city's doing, that's just what your economy's doing. And so, you know, separate from housing, there could be a number of things to do related to those wages. We were looking at it, we were sort of taking that as, all right, well, that's what the market's doing, that's the kind of jobs and the kind of incomes it's going to be providing to households that are employed in those industries, and so we'll see how they fit in the housing market. But that was what the, you know, 10 or last 13 years' data had shown. But you raise a great, I think, a superb point, which is, let's suppose that the city said, well, okay, this looks like ultimately a $200 million check over X number of years. How about if we take X percent of that and invest in workforce training, right? What kind of rate of return do we get on that? Does that gin up the $7.25 an hour wage to $9 an hour, $10 an hour, for how many households over how many years, and then what might we get back? So we did not run that set of numbers, but we would be entirely encouraging of taking an economic development thrust, you know, at the other end of this, no question. You don't want to have a segment of your workforce with that flatline wage, rate of wage increases forever at the bottom, no question. Right, and I'm looking at parallel tracks. Absolutely. And that's the mindset we need to have versus all just government-run program subsidy, that's it. Because people can do better on their wages, and I think we have a role in that as well. And my time's up, but there's no question, based on your evidence and that we've seen over the last several years, we have a problem. And I appreciate you putting some real numbers to it. Now maybe we can come up with a plan to fix it and get it going. And I think that's what we need to do today. So thank you. Thank you, Mayor. Council Member Schuchfield. Thank you, Mayor. I had just a couple questions following up. On, I think, page, you mentioned the numbers of affordable housing in Lexington going down by 400 a year. Was it 6,000 over the last so many? 400 a year. I guess where and how did you come up with those numbers? Those come from, if you look at this line, what it's been doing in recent years, they didn't disappear, they just now cost more. So the expectation is as you get more students, as you have more higher wages, if you have more competition for rentals, that you'll have that many fewer very affordable market rate rentals. If recent trends continue. So it's just competition in Lexington that has increased those prices. Okay. When you put together this report, did you look at neighboring counties and the affordable housing availability close by? No, we really confined our work to Lexington. But, I mean, the deep analysis. But in the cursory analysis, there's no question that you can drive until you get something you can afford. There's no question that that's an option. But that's, I want to go back to Council Member Lawless's point a bit indirectly here, that has its own costs. It's a housing cost in the form of congestion and air pollution, but it's a housing cost and the transportation, it is a cost somewhere. I don't disagree. I just wanted to see in the analysis, if you did look outside of, because, I mean, we talk about Central Kentucky most of the time when we talk about the area. And then on page 11 in your report, I just want to make a comment because you have that Lexington doesn't pay any of the cost, but we do pay federal taxes. So we do, our citizens do pay some of the costs that go into paying for benefits that are currently. So I do, I take kind of a, we do pay for that on a citizen level. Thank you. Thank you, Mayor. Council Member Ford. Thank you, Mayor. To the consultants, I thank you for your time spent and for the work that you've brought forward by introduction. I represent the 1st Council District, which is a lot of the urban core of our city, the northern part and the urban core. What I take away from your report is the brutal, honest truth in regards to the affordability of housing in our city. And I think we've had a lot of studies over the years of equal merit to what you provided. But it's the honest truth. I want to show, call the attention in your report, council members around the horseshoe have the report that you provided on page 8. You mean the slides or the document itself? No, the actual document itself. Council members have it. And if they would kindly turn your attention to the top of page 8. Do I need to admit that I wrote that? Yes, sir. That'll be, we'll take you at your word. But in all seriousness, and I won't belabor, the first sentence, Lexington has a serious affordable housing problem. Second sentence, for tens of thousands of Lexington families, decent housing costs more than they can afford to pay. Tens of thousands. And on average, each council member represents about 25,000 citizens in their district. The last sentence of the second paragraph says that Lexington has a lot of low and very low income workers, again, who have the problem with affordable housing. Council members, the only thing that I want to say at this point in regards to this report, that the consultant did not, I think, did not distinguish where. This isn't a first district issue. This is a Lexington issue. This is a city wide issue. And folks need help. And again, I'll conclude my comments that I don't think to this point that we've actually looked at this issue with the brutal honesty that has been brought forward this afternoon. So for that, I'm thankful. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you. Thank you, Council Member Ford. Maybe just for purposes of clarification, I was a little confused on that. Charles, when you say tens of thousands, on page 7 it says, maybe I'm just trying to get these numbers clear. It says right now 15,000 non-student low income households need assistance in Lexington. So you've got a much larger number that's struggling that's just not below $20,000 a year. We're really pegging your number there at your minimum wage workers at $20,000 a year. But you have to get pretty much to $40,000 a year before you're fully participating in the market here. While you are doing better at $33,000 than at $30,000 and better at $38,000 than at $33,000, Mayor, you have to get over the 40 hump in order to participate in this housing market and be fairly confident of good safety and sanitary. Okay. Is that fair? Is that a fair response? Yeah, I just wanted to clarify that because there's some questions. Council Member Kaye. Thank you, Mayor. And thank you for coming and bringing this to us at this time. From my perspective, in part as the chair of the Mayor's Commission on Homelessness, what I believe this report does for us is it elaborates on the nature of the problem we face, provides an analysis that reinforces I think pretty much what we have known in other ways. We have a big problem or we have a big challenge. We need to start to address it more intensively. And we know some of the ways to do that. We know that we can intervene at critical junctures with people who are presently homeless, with Housing First. We know that we can intervene with people, young people who age out of foster care, many of whom end up on our streets or in the criminal justice system. We know that we can intervene with people who suffer spouse abuse and so have to leave a home or have someone leave a home who's helping them with rent. We know there are other ways to intervene at critical junctures. This report I think reinforces all of that. And I think what the report emphasizes also is that we know how to get started and that is to create an affordable housing trust fund. So I'm at this point not interested in cutting off questions, comments, further debate, etc. But I am interested in making a motion. And I believe what it does is it addresses the short-term problem and it creates some space for us to take some time and look at the long-term strategies that we need to adopt. And I want to explain my motion. What I'm going to do is to place on the docket for the council an ordinance that is very similar to what it has had before it for a full year or a little over a full year. That ordinance recommended that we increase the insurance fee by 1% and use that money to fund an affordable housing trust fund. The motion I'm going to make is for a slightly different ordinance. And I want to at this time, I'm sorry I don't have copies for everybody, but I'm handing out the ordinance to the proposed ordinance to the members of council and the mayor. What that ordinance does is essentially the same thing as the ordinance that was proposed last year with one very significant exception. It does not propose a fee increase. What it proposes instead is that we take 1%, there's a 5% fee on insurance right now, we take one of those percents and allocate those funds to creating an affordable housing trust fund. And to allocate those funds on an ongoing basis. So essentially what we recommended last year, I am now putting before, I'm suggesting that we put this before council. I want to emphasize one other thing. Law has assured me that the difference between allocating funds that exist from a particular source is no different than increasing a fee and allocating those funds. So functionally, this would be a dedicated fee that would come out of the general fund. I'll make my motion. I move to place on the docket for March 6, 2014 council meeting an ordinance. One, creating article 45 and chapter 2 of the code of ordinances to create the affordable housing trust fund advisory board and the affordable housing trust fund. Two, directing the division of budgeting to annually include in the budget an appropriation of general services district fund revenues to be used for the affordable housing trust fund. And three, providing that the amount of the appropriation each year shall be equal to the amount projected to be received during the forthcoming fiscal year from 1% of the existing license fee imposed on insurance companies pursuant to section 13-44 of the code of ordinances. So move. I have a motion by council member Kaye and second by council member Ford. Is there any discussion on the motion? We still have some council members signed up from before. So council member Henson and council member Myers were signed up from before. Peggy, do you want to speak? Go ahead and speak now. To the motion? Well, we could speak to the motion or the motion could include questions. I have a couple. Yeah. I think that they will be on a, I suspect they'll be on a parallel track. Yes, ma'am. Thank you. Thank you for your presentation. Pardon? We're no longer guests. I guess, you know, when you and I met and I sent you some questions, I know that currently Lexington citizens, taxpayers, pay a considerable amount of money already for affordable housing, whether it's state, local, or federal taxes. So can you provide an inventory of, you know, where you came up with the 9,000 number of all those properties? Because, you know, I'm sitting here thinking in my head, for many, many years I provided support services for people with low income. And so, you know, I'm thinking there are just a multitude of different programs that get Section 8 vouchers, are low income, income-based, affordable. So I just have to be convinced that we are operating efficiently with the dollars that we are already contributing. I do know families that could benefit from affordable housing that are paying way too much for their earnings. I like the $6,000 per, you know, voucher, whatever. I also like the statement in your report that says it would only be redeemable if housing units meet certain Lexington standards. In my opinion, they shouldn't be living in them if they're substandard anyway, but we know that's not the case. People are. But I also know, and this is one of the things I brought up to you when I emailed you, there are people that do not qualify for affordable housing or low income housing for housing authority. Housing authority, in my opinion, is a little more lenient, but when you get into the private, subsidized housing, they're stricter on criminal and your credit history. So, you know, so when you look at these numbers, I just want to make sure they're accurate and what are the true numbers of what we're already providing and what we need to provide. I also think Councilmember Stennett mentioned, we have to give people a hand up. We cannot keep people in poverty. So if there's education components, whatever there might be to lift someone up, I'm going to help you, but at the same time I'm going to give you a hand up. You can go to school to further your education, you can get your GED, whatever it might be. But I just think there are many, many options out there for low income people that we could provide more than just, you know, housing is a definite issue. It is the number one important thing in most people's lives, I would think, other than food. Food and housing. But, you know, to keep, if you, if someone is living in a housing authority property, I would take that person, make sure that, what can we do to move you to the next step? What can we do to help you, you know, whether it be education or recovery? There's lots and lots of recovery programs, whatever the issue might be. But, if you want to comment on that, you're more than welcome, but those are my thoughts. And, thank you. There was a lot of, Peggy, Council Member Henson, excuse me. Council Member Henson, you know, introduced several questions and comments from, and she mentioned her background, and we've run out of the five minutes, but Charles, go ahead and give us your comments on that. Her comments, please. Can I refer to Karen on this one? Yeah, sure, whoever. Just to get at a couple of, there are about, if you add up public housing, Section 8 vouchers, and then any kind of units that have been subsidized by low-income housing tax credits or home partnership program funds, if you look at all of that put together, the city has about 6,100 units that have been touched by one or more of those programs. And, as we looked at, and then you have this chunk that the market still provides that we think will dwindle as there's more and more pressure on the rental market. Public housing is sort of a fixed, you got what you got, and we didn't expect the number of public housing units to change much. And then, when we looked at how many units your tax credits and home dollars or community development block grants, how many of those can produce a year, it's usually 75, 80 a year. And so when we looked at that kind of scale versus $6,000, not to take away from the work that it does, but it didn't seem to be enough. You needed something else. And so our statement to look to other things was not necessarily an indictment that what you've been doing has been wrong, it's just that you need new tools because they're not going to get you there soon enough. And they're never going to help you catch up because you're going to be falling behind and they're going to pace faster than they could help you. Thank you. All right. Thank you, Karen. Council Member Myers. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you for coming in today. I had a couple quick questions. When you were talking earlier about the students, and I know at one point you said you were taking them out of the equation, but in the beginning you kept putting them in the equation. Have you factored in the fact that UK is building about 9,000 on-campus student housing units? I mean, students and student housing are so enmeshed in this conversation around affordable housing because, on the one hand, students are putting pressure on the rental market and driving rents up. On the other, when students leave the rental market, suddenly your rental market gets softer, so your rents may stabilize or come down a little bit, but then what's that to say about conditions of your rental stock? So one of the recommendations that we make when it comes to the planning tools that you have in place is the capacity to think about how all these things are connected at all times and why we constantly link both the cost of housing to households as well as the conditions in them because that's going to have sort of pressure on both fronts. Students are going to inflate costs, but they're also, if they leave, then that's going to affect, if it weakens the market, that's going to affect the conditions to which units remain. Okay. Okay. I guess the second thing I'd say is I appreciate what Council Member Henson said in that I had a conversation with Council Member Kay yesterday about what he was going to propose today, and part of my position is that we have to look at the root cause of why the individual or the individual family is in the situation that they're in, and if they have substance abuse issues, then we've got a way to deal with that. If we've got mental health issues, we can deal with that. If we're a family who has some super big medical bills that just came up and one of the two wage earners lost their job and now they're homeless, then there's a different set of help that might help that family. And I know that you sort of talked about it after Council Member Stennett said some things, but if we're going to address this issue, it seems to me we need to get at the root cause of where the individual's at and not just look at subsidizing the housing because then we're addressing the symptom and not the real issue. So can you speak to that real quick? And then before I say that because my time might run out, I hope everybody will stay. Two things. One, I'd love to hear Austin Sims is in the front row. I'm not putting him on the spot, but I'd love to hear what you have to say about this whole conversation, particularly when you talk about the voucher part of it. Secondly, at the end of the work session, I'm going to have a council report, and we've got a group here that's doing affordable housing for seniors, and they're going to make a presentation today. So I hope people will stay and hear that presentation and not just run out after this part of the meeting is over. So I give the rest of my time to you to speak to. How do we address at the same time the root cause of people being in the situation they're in? Because if we can get incomes up, then we have less of an issue of affordability. If we can get people straight in their lives, like the young lady that came and spoke earlier that said that she had an issue with alcohol at one point, and now she doesn't, if you can address those things, then some other things go away. And I think that's the responsibility of us to address that core issue. Can I just? Absolutely. One last thing about the students. When I said take the students out, we didn't want them to artificially inflate your affordable housing need number. That was why I said to take them out of the equation. Okay. That's a tough question. I mean, that's as hard as they get. So I appreciate it. There is an implication in a question that says, tell me what the root cause is, whether it's intended or not, has an implication that there is a solution. And let me at least say that that's tricky in this issue. Because markets will apportion rewards for labor at different rates. And so long as your cardiologist has purchasing power here and your sheet metal worker has purchasing power here, each has a different capacity to participate in the market that's created by the two of them together. What you've got in Lexington is at the bottom, you've got a tug. And at the top, as you're moving to a more aggressive high-tech economy that emphasizes education, you've got great strength pulling up. And so your market is monetizing all of the strength that your new top third of your market is exerting on it. And your bottom fifth can't keep up. So you can push to go to your question sort of not just subsidizing. You can try to elevate the earning power at that bottom fifth, the bottom third, the bottom fourth, to try to keep up. The trick, if there's a solution, is to have the rate at which housing prices rise, essentially rise no faster than the rate at which incomes rise for that bottom fourth or fifth. That's goring a pretty big ox. But to get there, part of what you want to look at, just really to cut to this, I think the difficult part of this, is employers aren't paying enough wages. And then what happens is the costs that councilperson lawless begins to suggest exist, which do exist, are essentially paid for by everybody else. So me as an employer, I pay my staff $7 an hour. They can't find housing in the market that is pricing housing at $20 an hour. That $13 an hour shows up someplace else out there in the world in air pollution, water pollution, congestion, what have you. And everybody else pays that $13 an hour, but not me, the employer. Effectively, I've shifted my costs as a employer. So to get, if you really want to drill down to the ugly, unstripped, naked, varnished truth of this, your employers aren't paying enough. And that's where you're going to have to have a conversation at some point if that's what you want to get at. Okay, real quick, if I could, because I know my time is up, but that was only part of it. Part of it was helping people get to a higher wage. The other part of it was, and what I really wanted to focus on, is how we drill down and address the root cause of where they're at. And whether that's a substance abuse issue, a mental health issue, etc. Or an issue where a wage earner lost their job and they've got medical expenses to pay for, that kind of thing. So the increased salary is only part of it. That's the maybe easier part that we do in terms of economic development. But the other piece is where that person's at. And no matter what you do, if I've got mental health issues and I'm not on my medication, if I've got substance abuse issues and I'm using, it doesn't matter how much you subsidize me, I'm still not going to be able to stay in the housing. So can you speak to how do we address the root cause and help? And that's not to blame, but that's to say there are reasons why things happen. How do we help people deal with those reasons? Thank you. I think Charles and Karen can certainly answer your question. I'm going to allow them to. But in fairness to the scope of their work, we did not specifically ask them to drill down into the root causes. They're certainly aware of what they are and acknowledge that supportive services and other efforts are going to be required for some people. And I would encourage you to remember the commission report, the homeless commission report, 48 recommendations. 45 of those address root causes. And so all I'm simply trying to say is in defense of them and their scope, our report didn't ask them to do that. We do have those recommendations in the commissioner report. And now I'm going to allow them to answer. Okay. And I agree with you. I didn't mean to put them on the spot and suggest that your report didn't address that. I was partially making that comment with respect to the motion that has been made. Because if we're going to do this, I want to make sure we address those root causes. If you're saying that this motion should include some of those 48 pieces in the other recommendation, then we need to make sure that that happens in here. I think it would be appropriate to allow Councilmember Kaye to address that. This is, I think, a fairly short answer. The answer is yes. That the initial set of recommendations essentially said generate $4 million, put it in a trust fund, use half of that specifically to address providing or assuring that there's more adequate housing. The other half to address the issues that afflict people that cause them to be homeless or to remain homeless. So setting up the Office of Homelessness Prevention, beginning to look at things like Housing First, beginning to work with some present providers or other providers about intervening in those junctions that I mentioned, the young people who age out of foster care, the women or men who suffer spouse abuse. Those are the causes for those people to end up homeless or to stay homeless. So this envisions starting on all of that. Thank you. Councilmember Ford. Thank you, Mayor. And I'm going to try to get through these comments in my five-minute allotment. I'll ask for your indulgence if I slightly go over. I'm speaking to the motion and in favor of the motion that Councilmember Kaye has brought forth for the Affordable Housing Trust Fund. Alluding back to my earlier comments, I'm looking at the Homelessness Commission, page 17, that talks about the tens of thousands of folks impacted by the lack of affordable housing. Approximately 34,000, the report says, households, knowing that there are more than one person in many households. 34,000 households pay more than 30% of their gross monthly income on housing. 12,000 households pay more than 50%. Let me just attempt to put a face on some of those folks. That's many thousands. I can't attempt to do it. Some of those folks are hardworking and hit the pavement every day and put their kids on the school bus every day and are law-abiding citizens. But because of our prosperity as a city, as your report indicated, they aren't able to catch up in regards to the affordability. This issue, which is six years in the making, comes down to right now about decisive leadership, essential needs, and responsible management. In regards to leadership, our Chamber of Commerce, a great group of business leaders here in our community, go on a trip every year. About a year or so ago, I asked our council research staff to provide me data in regards to places we've been. Since 1999, that's 16 years, nine cities that we've visited have adopted a local housing trust fund. And I'm talking about decisive leadership. They've done it years ago. They're outpacing us. Portland, Oregon, 1996, and I'm speaking to the year they enacted it. Ann Arbor, Michigan, 2004. Washington, D.C., 1988. Charleston, South Carolina, I think Mayor Riley, 1988. Boulder, Colorado, 1991, they did it. Austin, 1988. Madison, 2004. San Antonio, 2008. And we're going to Charlotte in June, who did theirs in 2002. Decisive leadership. This is about essential needs. Affordable housing is essential. It's essential that everybody that lives in Lexington can afford to live here. Government collects tax revenue from its citizens and gives it back to them in services and products. If PDR is essential, and I support it, surely affordable housing and an affordable housing trust fund is an essential investment. In our city. Responsible management. Consultants, you guys say we need 6,000 units right now. And we've been studying this issue for six years, back to 2008. We have an original trust fund commission, an economic impact study in 2011, a homelessness commission that I just referenced just last year that was brought to us, and now your strategy report. In order to bring forth decisive leadership to help Lexington, it's important that we have all the information we need and we have the facts. And from where I sit, I contend we have that. We put a lot of work in this, and I think it's time for us to make a decisive decision. What Councilmember Kaye has brought forth does not require a tax increase. Our citizens have said make due with your means. I would have supported it with a tax increase, to be quite honest, from where I sit. But where Councilman Kaye has proposed does not require a tax increase. We collect 5% on insurance premium, and we're asking to set aside one of those percentage points to generate the revenue that was always estimated. Secondly, this is a economic stimulator. We brought John Ferris, who always does a lot of our tax increment financing, and he's a respected economist in our town. And we were able to scrape up $25,000-some-odd to pay for his professional opinion. And he says for every $1 we put into a trust fund, we'll generate $7 or $8. This will not only house people who need it, but it will create jobs. And lastly, I continue. No matter how hard we try, we cannot and we will never be a great American city until we address this issue of affordable housing. I support Councilmember Kaye's motion, Mayor, and I'd ask Council to also vote for it as well. Thank you, sir. Thank you, Councilmember Ford. Vice Mayor Gordon. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you so much for your presentation. I really appreciate it. And I appreciated the earlier opportunity to meet with you. I have a couple of what I would consider kind of nuts and bolts questions, and I think they're for our Commissioner of Finance. So if our Commissioner of Finance is here, could you come forward? So the motion says 1% of the current revenue generated by the insurance premium tax. And I wonder if you can give us a close number as to what that represents. How many million? It's a little over $5 million. We currently have a budget of $26.5, so one-fifth of that would be $5.3 million. Okay. So $5.1 million? $5.3. $5.3? $5.3 million. Okay. And it's my understanding, I don't know, Councilmember Kaye, I don't think I really heard it in your motion, but most of our ordinances go into effect immediately. And so did you have a different time frame? Or if not, I'll go ahead with my question. If this went into effect immediately, where do you anticipate, since we've already got a budget and our money is basically spoken for for the year, where would we find that money until June 30th? Or did you not want it to go into effect immediately? So my thought was that this would be a directive for the next fiscal year budget. If that language needs to be modified, we're going to get an opinion from legal who helped draft this. Thank you. The way it's drafted, it would not go into effect until next fiscal year as far as funding it. The idea would be you would be required, as part of your budgeting process, to put that equivalent amount that Bill O'Mara just talked about into this fund as part of next year's budget and every year's budget after that. Okay. So July 1st. But the effective date of the ordinance would be when you all adopted it, if you did that. It's just the effect would be not until next fiscal year as far as budgeting for it. Okay. Thank you. Just one question for you, Councilmember Kaye. This 1% represents $5.3 million. And all along the council has heard from different entities that the number we were being requested to put to use was $4 million. So I wanted to know how you arrived at 1% when that represents something different from what's been brought to us before in terms of money available. Yes. I think that that 1% is the number that has been basically on the table for now four or five years. And it's based obviously on old estimates. I have now, thanks to a few people, I guess Councilmember Akers, the revenue increase over the last few years has been fairly substantial. I'm personally flexible on the question of what that needs to be. If, in fact, the $4 million is, from the council's perspective, the more reasonable number, it looks like allocating .75. I can't do the math that quickly in my head, but somewhere in that range. I think I and the people who have been advocating for this are interested in round numbers, $4 million. And when it was first proposed, it actually was $3.85 million. And it's, I mean, the good news, I guess, or the bad news is it's crept up as the economy has improved. So I would be perfectly willing to entertain an amendment that would essentially peg that at, in current year budget, or the coming year budget, roughly the $4 million. I appreciate that answer. And I just think we got a report today at our Budget and Finance Committee, and it gave us a very healthy estimate of our insurance premium taxes. And if I recall, they were looking very good and were one of the reasons that we might be optimistic. So thank you so much. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Vice Mayor. Council Member Clark. Thank you, Mayor. I'd like to echo Council Member Ford's comments. They're very accurate and speak as well to the issue as anybody can speak at this point. And I would support Council Member Kaye's motion to put it on the docket. That's an easy move to make, I think. I'm going to take a little different tack, if I might. In the first place, I think we need to work on both ends of the housing needs in this community. Because it's clear to me that better jobs and higher wages also reduce the need for the number of people who need help with housing. And I think it would be irresponsible of this government if all we looked at was the front end and ignore the need of jobs and job training. So I think we need to balance this. I don't think we have near enough emphasis on jobs and job training. And I think we need to balance the need for subsidized or housing affordability with the idea of better jobs and better wages. I think, as I said before, it would be irresponsible to ignore that. I think we need that kind of balance. And I think we need to put a lot more emphasis on that than we have. Basically, that's what I would like to emphasize and request with a great deal of emphasis and sincerity. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Council Member Clark. Council Member Lawless, I believe you've already spoken before. Okay, so we'll come back to you. Council Member Akers. Thank you, Mayor. I had a question, or a couple questions for the consultants first. Based on the numbers that you mentioned of the $6,000 per unit cost that it would cost to subsidize additional units, did you consider the potential for increasing the minimum wage and how that might affect that dollar amount and what that would look like? I tried to do the math myself, but your math and my math didn't really add up. So I just wondered if you might have looked into it. My math and Karen's math never ends up. We did. And we concluded that if you moved that minimum, if $7.25 went north, you closed that gap pretty quickly, in theory. You don't do it in practice, though, because you don't know where that increase is going to get spent. Sure. So you might, for instance, you could contemplate, like some cities, a minimum wage legislation, for instance. CTAC just did that. But you have no control over where that revenue goes. So you could very, very easily find yourself bumping $7.25 to $9.25 statutorily, and that $2 increment never touches your housing market. It might, probably would, but there's no guarantee it would. So I would be cautious about that. Because you're clearly, from our math, the bump is in the low $2 range to get folks from where they, if you wanted to close the gap that way, you're in the $2 an hour range. Okay. And you mentioned that we need $36 million to close this gap. If you use a $6,000 unit gap times a $6,000, I mean a $6,000 a unit gap times a $6,000 unit whole, that's how we get to $36. And knowing that $36 million is a pretty large number, how would you, I mean, you have multiple recommendations in here of how other cities have done it. Or maybe they're not recommendations, but how other cities have solved the problem or addressed the problem. What would be your priorities out of that $36 million, realistically? I mean, a levy, a bond? Oh, you mean how to go, how to do it? Yeah, like Councilmember Kaye is proposing $4 million or $5 million. And that looks like it will only maybe keep us up with the $400 a year. So if we can only do $4 million a year, how would you prioritize any increment of funding, I suppose, is the question. That's a great question. So $4 is on the table, hypothetically, but it's $4 and $4 only. So now what to do with $4? Is that kind of the question? How to make the most of the $4? I suppose. Or of $36? I mean, if you waved a magic wand today, what would $36 million do? Would we build new units? Would we hand out subsidies? Is it a combination of all of those? I mean, we looked at the capacity. Say $36 million fell from the sky. Sure. The question first is – And say you could spend it fell from the sky. Well, that was the first thing, that capacity-wise, what do you do with $36 million? And how much production could you possibly, even if money were no option at all, how much production is even possible? And so that's one constraint. And then at the same time, how many new units do you need, or are you better served by better utilizing the units you already have or funneling those funds to improve the condition of existing units, which we felt was a big chunk of what you needed to do? And, I mean, you can speak to different tools by which you could generate these funds. And then the other question before everyone, there's solving the problem and there's addressing the problem, and both have value. And one of the – just so you don't kick me under the dais – but one of the reasons we wanted to put out a number like $36 million to you is to show that solving, getting the number to zero, that's a big number. And it could help set expectations that as you address the issue, you're cognizant of the fact that it is making progress on it, but $4 million is not going to get it to zero. And now at least you're cognizant of the scale of the problem that you have to work with. I don't know if you wanted to speak with that. So if I had to sort of think about how to wisely allocate $4 million, $10 million, $30 million, or $40 million, you've got a large volume of – a large percentage of your housing stock right now is substandard. It doesn't mean you don't have code enforcement, but it means that you've got quite a number of units that are sloppy, tired, and really aren't doing anybody any favors. And so I would tie a rental subsidy to mandating that they get inspected and upgraded. So if you married the two, if half of $36 million, $20 million went towards subsidy that's tied to an inspection trigger and a code enforcement trigger, now you're talking about affecting thousands of units that are now in sloppy condition in Lexington, aren't adding to your ad valorem. They're a drag on your block. They're a drag on police services. They're costing you. I would – by that marriage alone, you're sort of getting a twofer. You are really getting a big bang for your buck in an important way. And I think eventually you do have to look at new construction. And so that's why we plugged that in starting at around year six or seven. But we didn't put numbers in that were too high. I think we projected an average of 150 to 175 units a year over an 11-, 12-year period. But we think aiming six, seven years from now for some new construction is part of it. So a rental subsidy tied to quality triggers is probably two-thirds of it and construction is probably a third of it, something like that. That's irrespective of how it's funded. I guess – I mean, that was one of my concerns was that in allocations that we've made just since I've been on council one year, we haven't been able to spend monies for lots of projects that we set money aside for. It takes time to do the studies and hire people to implement and all of that. So that's why I'm just – I want to make sure that if we allocate the money, then we're going to use the money and then it's going to actually benefit people and it's going to make a difference instead of – My assessment of your current systems is I would expect zero problems, smartly and efficiently allocating $4 million tomorrow. I would expect it to be difficult to smartly and efficiently spend $20 million tomorrow. That's why we'd recommend scaling up nice and slow. Okay. My time is up. Thank you, Mayor. I'll come back. Council Member Ellinger. Thank you, Mayor. The issue I want to address is what I think the Vice Mayor looked at earlier when we were talking about the insurance at 1% because at 1% it would be $5.3 million. And I think we've talked in the last seven years between $2 and $4 million. So in the last seven years, the insurance has risen five of those seven years and it's gone from $20 million to $26 million. So it's been a 30% increase in the last seven years and it should continually increase there. And I think $4 million was what we were looking at was going to be kind of the top end of that. So I would make a motion that we would have it at 1% up to $4 million. There's a motion and there's a second to amend the motion. So it would be at 1% up to $4 million. All right. We have a motion and we have a second. The floor is available for discussion. Council Member Kaye. Thank you, Mayor. I'm only limited in my technological challenge and because I have a calculator, what I've just managed to figure out is that if we amend the motion in a slightly different way and say that 15% of the total fee revenue is allocated, that's right now roughly 3.9 and change. 3.975. Thank you. 3.975. So it's basically the equivalent of somewhere around .75 or .85%, but it phrases it, I think it's clearer if it says 15% of the total funds and that's what it would get us now. And if the fee goes up, it will also have an escalator in it. So I would not support the motion. I guess that's where I came with the $4 million is that's what we've talked about is what we wanted to keep at a $4 million basis, and I wanted to put that as our basis. Because when we do look at this, we're taking this out of a piece of pie right now that we're not increasing our revenues. We're only taking out what we already have. So we have to look at our basic services, our public safety, our new senior citizen center, streets and roads, all those other things that still have to be paid for that we're going to have to come up with $4 million to pay for that. We do have growth each year, but if we get another downturn in the economy, we still have to do that. And I guess the other question that I want to address is, and I don't know if this is with law, but this is not a dedicated fee. And with that, can we bind future councils? And I think this might be a question for law. Because when we look at LexTran, that's a dedicated fee. We look at the health department, that's a dedicated fee. When we do this, is this a dedicated fee? From a legal standpoint, it is not a dedicated fee. I'm sorry? From a legal standpoint, it is not a dedicated fee. And if a future council decided as part of the budget adoption not to fully fund this, they would have that within their discretion not to do that. And I think council needs to understand that. What is in this ordinance, though, it does say if we don't spend the amount of money that's in here, then it will roll over to the next year in that account, correct? The expectation would be if you created a fund and it was funded, yes, it would continue to roll over. If the funds were not spent, yes. Just so you know, Chris has already spoken twice. That's all I have at this point. Thank you, Council Member Ellinger. Well, yeah, I think everyone's ‑‑ I think Council Member Ford, you've spoken twice on the motion. Or are you speaking once on the motion? There's a new motion on the floor, Mayor. There's an amendment. Yeah, right. This is the amendment. Right. We're speaking to the amendment now. We're speaking to the amendment because others on the register are, I think, speaking to the original motion. Council Member Ford and Council Member Stennett. Thank you, Mayor. Before I begin my comments, for clarity, Council Member Ellinger, could you restate your motion for me again, please, sir? I said 1% up to $4 million. In case the insurance didn't come in at up to $20 million, then it would be $4 million. If it went up to $26 million, then it would stay at $4 million because otherwise it would be $5.3 million. Okay. Thank you. I'm going to ‑‑ I appreciate Council Member Ellinger's motion. A motion to amend. I'm going to speak against it, and this is why. One is because the consultant has indicated that we have a $36 million hole. Secondly, had we increased the 1% that was proposed in 2008, at that time, it would have generated $4 million. Had we increased it at 2008 and it had been running concurrently, what we would have collected in 2013, 2014, would have been in the area of $5 million because we would have increased it by 1%. The $4 million only represented a projection of revenue at that time. And then since, and the one thing that we did not have with the prior studies is the vast and enormous gap that we have to fill in regards to the $36 million. And so that's the only reason that I would speak against the motion. I think for simple terms, when this first started, we were talking about going up one point. And now what we're doing is saying we're not going to go up one point, but we're going to allocate one point. And if that generates four to five, whatever it generates, it will go towards that cause for the Affordable Housing Trust Fund. So I'll kindly speak against the motion, Mayor. Thank you. All right. Who else wishes to speak? Council Member Stennett. Thank you, Mayor. I think, though, the big difference in what we were talking about before and what we're talking about now is the calculation of 1% increase, Council Member Ford, did not include health insurance premiums. So if you take out health insurance premiums out of $26 million, that's about $4.5 million. So you're down to $22 million. So there's where you get your $4 million, $4.5 actually for this past year. So that's the difference between increasing that 1% and allocating 1%. The allocation of 1% includes health insurance premium taxes. So there's the big difference in the two. So I think Council Member Allenger is right. Beforehand, it did not include health insurance in the previous legislation that was passed through council and committee. Council Member Catton. So if I may be permitted a point of information, my understanding is that this resolution, the ordinance that I've introduced, also does not apply to health insurance. No, it will. So, again, I understand. It's total premiums. My understanding is that the present ordinance does not apply to health insurance. The one you presented today does. It's total premiums. That's correct. I'm correct. Total insurance premium tax is $26.5 million. That includes all lines, including health. Then I need clarification, I'm sorry, from law. Because my understanding was that this would be applied to the same set of insurance fees as presently exists. I did not carve out any of the insurance that it would apply to. So if that was your intent, that did not happen. And that's on me when I drafted it. But I did not understand you to say that you wanted any part of it carved out. It would have to be slightly redrafted in order to carve out health insurance. And I'll just close by saying, and thank you all for making that point, this is the problem with walking on important legislation. And this is the problem with hastily passing something that will need the public's trust to continue moving forward, whether it be in our budget, for the people that it helps, or for the people that end up having to pay for it. It's important that we get it right and we do something today. So I will support the motion to amend, unless Council Member Kaye, you want to go back and recraft it and bring something else back for us to consider. Because the way it's written now, I can't support it without some type of amendment to that number. Because it includes health insurance premiums. So if I may be permitted to respond. My interest is, I think, fairly straightforward. And I think we share that interest. And that is moving something forward that will generate roughly $4 million for the Affordable Housing Trust Fund on an ongoing basis. And if I, obviously there was some failure of communication. But whatever people believe we need to do in order to get to that point, in terms of language. I think the intention has always been to put forward a motion that would generate $4 million for the Affordable Housing Trust Fund. Whatever that language needs to be. I'm not stuck on, maybe it is the 1% on the full range. Who else wishes to speak to the amendment? Council Member Lawless. I understand the point. And what we were looking at was not including health insurance. I personally would be more comfortable and more supportive of a percentage that maybe is less than 1%. That at today's date would generate $4 million. Rather than saying up to 1% or up to $4 million. Because I think it protects us on many levels. As you can see over the years, it has increased. The revenue has increased. But there have been some bad years where it has decreased. So I think if we are going to do it, it is best to do it with .75 or whatever percent every year. That way, if our economy booms, we will have more money to use. And I don't think we will ever have too much money to deal with these kinds of things. And secondly, if we go through a bad economy, we are not going to be scrambling for money that is going to keep us from police and fire and etc. All the other services. So for that reason, I would be far more supportive of an amendment that had a percentage attached to it. Thank you, Council Member Lawless. Thank you, Council Member Lawless. Council Member Farmer has not spoken yet to the motion to amend. Thank you, Mayor. A lot of great supporters for this issue. A lot of really good work has gone on about it. And it has been represented well here today. There is no doubt that Lexington enjoys its quality of life. Lexington adopted an urban service boundary and a rural service area to protect green space. That is a wonderful thing to do, but it also has the net effect of driving up prices for housing. In support of that, we came along with the Purchase of Development Rights Program, which is a program over 20 years or more to protect that land. That too, while being a great program, also drives up, in my opinion, you can make the argument, it drives up the price of housing inside the urban service area. With the legislation placed before us today in a situation before the mayor has proposed the budget, but after the council has had a budget retreat in which their number one issue was affordable housing, I worry about taking this step not knowing what the outcome will be. We're already debating the difference between what was proposed and what was wanted and what's needed. And I guess, and Mayor, you have certainly always the luxury and the opportunity never to answer a question I might ask you. But in preparing for your budget address, have you given thought to this issue, and to what level or how you might try to deal with it in the course of the budget before we might act here today, if you're so inclined? And if you're not, that's all right. I have about five pages of comments on that. Well, I'm game if you are. But I think that, you know, this is a tough, it's a great conversation, but it's a tough conversation. This would take money off the table that is already merchandised for other things. This does not add a fee or a tax on, but it subjugates money from the whole. But it is also for a very good cause. And I think if you as the leader could give us some telltale of what your thought would be or what your leadership position would be, maybe we can come in underneath it or not. I'm just, I'm asking for a little more conversation before we have action. And if you're so inclined, I'd be very appreciative. Well, we can do that now. First, if we dial back a year, almost a year ago, in the budget then we included a process for engaging this issue, both affordable housing and homelessness, in the budget. And we have done just that this year. The Office for Homelessness is being advertised today. First things first, this study was commissioned. We are presented with that study and that report today. I support funding, especially after this report. The severity of the challenge is being illustrated to us. And it confirms that we need to act. We should act. But as you said so well just now, what was that, the merchandising of many interests? The administration of the, we're already using these dollars in other places. Many, yes, many competing interests and needs always in our city. And that's one of the things that's always inspiring and rewarding about the efficiency of a body like a city council, that we are able to measure that and we're able then to act. It doesn't happen often overnight, but over the long arc of a 240-year history of our city, it's pretty efficient. It's worked very well. So I intend to do what I said I would do last year, which is what we've done. I would intend and plan to include funding for affordable housing in the budget this year. It would then give the council the time to examine fully this report. I think Charles and Karen have done commendable work. Yes, sir. I would say parenthetically, I have a lot of questions still. A friend of mine is RT Ryback, the former mayor of Minneapolis, who shared with me he ran on a platform of affordable housing. Well, Minneapolis and Minneapolis County is four times the size of Lexington. And this year they committed $6.2 million to affordable housing. Over the past eight years, roughly $8 million. Now, that's one city. But I think these benchmarks are really relevant for us. I appreciate Charles' optimism about being able to have the capacity to engage and ramp up on a system, to materialize on $4 million a year. After seven years on this side from the private sector to the public sector, I think that would be very ambitious. So I think that represents a big challenge. But I'm. optimistic that there's a recommendation that we can achieve, that we can make that achievement. So, you know, I would say that now the council, of course, you know, it's the council's privilege to act in its, on its time. Right. And they asked me what a mayor would do, an administration would do based on these, based on this information and where we've been so far. And I've answered it. Oh, you, you gave me, you gave me everything except, except the number, Mayor. Thank you. That's right. And there's $500 million worth of that budget in there, 300 in the general fund, of course, we know. And I'm content to act legislatively in one capacity or another today. I would prefer for the council not to take away your leadership role in this. But I think the way that the legislation has been drafted, it brings in more than what is intended. The amendment is to quell that down to a predisposed number that has been talked about. And I'm wondering, is there an administrator, an administratable number that's actually less than that, that would work to start this process in what are still tough economic times? I mean, the only reason that we are really, the only reason we have the luxury to have this discussion is because we have done the, some of the toughest budgeting I've ever seen this council do over the last three years. And the advent of, of the, the larger fix of our pension problem. If it were not for those two things, literally we would not be in a position to have this discussion today. And health insurance, right? Right. Yes, sir. Yes, sir. And I'm sorry I left that one out. I just don't want to do it this way. I'm sorry. I'm, I'm, I'm not comfortable with it. I want to find a way to help these folks and I want us to do it in a community wide way where we all work together. This is like rolling the dice early before we even get the game laid out. And I'm just, I'm not comfortable with it. And I made the second on the motion because I thought it at the time, a way to limit because it brought it from 5.3 down, down to four. Personally today here, if I were going to act before the mayor and before the budget, I would make it a half and make it around, you know, what would that be, 2.6 or so. Because I think that is a sustainable beginning rather than a jumpstart. And well, you never know, let's have some fun here. I will withdraw my second in terms of bringing the cap from 1% or 1% down to 4 million total unless someone else seconds it. I guess that would put it back in play. And if that remains the, the, uh, the conversation, then I would, I would tender one to make it a half a percent rather than a whole one just for purposes of the discussion today. So council member Farmer's withdrawn his second. So, uh, we're looking for a second to council member Ellinger's motion to amend. All right, there is no, if there is no second, then the motion to amend fails for lack of a second. Mayor. What's that? Chris, I didn't hear that. Mayor, I second the motion. Okay. All right. I didn't hear it. All right. Then we'll accept it. Mayor, may I speak to the amendment that council member Ellinger brought forward? Yes. Well. All right. Yep. Yes, sir. Go ahead. Council member Ford. Mayor, this is perhaps the most important issue during a meeting that I've ever had. Mayor, this is perhaps the most important issue during my four years here that we've had the opportunity to debate, and that's what we're doing here this afternoon. And I'm not going to be apologetic to exercise my responsibility to debate. Council member Stennett, thank you for the important clarification that you brought forth in regards to the health insurance premiums aspect of this whole issue. You are correct. Is that going back to 2008, health insurance has not been a part of the proposal. So thank you. I wouldn't have known that, this group wouldn't have known that unless we had the debate congenially. Council member Ellinger, as our budget chair, having listened to additional debate, I recognize your intent, which is consistent with what was projected initially, which is $4 million. My statement earlier about 1.05 and it going forward really was meant, Chuck, not to exacerbate the issue, but to drive home a point that we've been at this since 2008. That was the point that I was really trying to make. But I will support your amendment. For the most part of showing some solidarity amongst this council, to take an important step going forward to this important issue of affordable housing trust funds, $4 million with no tax increase, I contend we can afford, Mayor. We had a $15 million fund balance unassigned last year. As Vice Mayor Gordon said, we had a very favorable report, we're going to have a fund balance again this year. What this motion does is shows the council intent to address affordable housing and responsibly, I think it gives your administration a forecast of how to build this revenue allocation in your budget. So, I will support the amendment. Thank you, Mayor. All right, who else wishes to speak to the amendment? Council member Lane, council member Akers. Thank you, Mayor. Well, I've been sort of quiet, but I've had, you know, some second thoughts about, you know, buying off another program that we'll have to fund, it'll go in, you know, be decade or two decades of funding. So we could be talking, even at $4 million a year over 10 years, that's a $40 million amount we've spent on affordable housing. And I just want to throw a few ideas out here. We have the Lexington Housing Authority, which has won a lot of awards for, and their big thing is affordable housing, Habitat for Humanity, the Urban League, the Hope Center, and there are other organizations that have been working to take care of the homeless and the people that need permanent housing. You know, I say, why don't we reevaluate these organizations? They already have a bureaucracy, they have management, they have a track record, they have the expertise to do the job, and if we're going to go funding, why set up another bureaucracy, another trust fund, and have all the administrative expenses involved with that, but we could provide funding to some other organizations and more or less outsource it to experts to do the work. So I say we should consider that. I also would like to bring up that our revenues for the urban county government for the last four or five years have been very, very flat or static. They've gone up just a little bit. And so every time we take off another $4 million commitment here, that's a chunk of whatever increase we're going to have in the coming years that will be eroded away automatically because we've already made a long-term commitment. So I think we need to be considerate of that. And I guess the other thought I have is we are talking about making a major investment in Rupp Arena and the Convention Center, and, you know, that's one of the mayor's top projects. Well, no, my only point I'm making is that... That's going to be a financial commitment we have to look at, too. So we have a lot of things on the table, and I think we just need to be a little bit more conservative about just signing up to spend $4 million without having more of a plan. And that's all I'm saying is let's have a better plan before we spend the money. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Council Member Lane. Council Member Akers. Thank you, Mayor. I just wanted to weigh in on all of the motions, I guess, first of all. In the ordinance that Council Member Kaye shared with us before we started the conversation, I hadn't received until it was passed around, and the draft date is dated today. And so while I may support funding and establishing the trust fund, I have issues with Section 2-474 that lays out specifically how the monies will be used. And I assume that this will all be run out of the Office for Homelessness or under that office, but when half of the funds will be used for services versus half of the funds developing housing units. And so when I read that it says developing housing units, does that mean building or does that mean subsidizing existing ones? So I have questions about this whole section because it specifically pertains to how the funds will be administered. And so I just, for the whatever sake, I would make a motion or something that we remove this section and put it into committee for further discussion or something before we approve the entire ordinance 2-474. Oh. Maybe that's premature, I'm not sure. Something to just think about. And also I wanted to mention or suggest, offer another amendment to the motion. Before we, I think we'll need to have the discussion on the amendment and then have your amendment. How about that? Okay, well, to the amendment. To the amendment? Maybe, yes. Okay, why don't you tell us what it is. I would like to recommend 0.75% flat so that we're not capping the fund at $4 million per year so that if we have increased revenues over the next, for the future, then. Okay, I think we would have to, I think we'd need to, we'd need to get closure on this amendment. Okay. The vote on this amendment. And then. All right. Come back to that. Okay. All right. Thank you. Who else wishes to speak to the amendment? I do. Thank you, Mayor. Well, I think from the conversation, it seems that we're all convinced that there is a need and I appreciate, again, the study. Councilmember Farmer got me to thinking in a little bit different way about this. And Mayor, I respect that you just told us that you intend to put something in the budget for affordable housing. And I know Councilmember Farmer didn't hear, we didn't hear a number, but your budget address is in six weeks or maybe, I guess, six weeks from today maybe. And we know that because this is not a tax increase, we are not under the same March deadline that we were before. We've already been told this will, the revenue will actually start accumulating July the first and not before. And so, what I'm thinking is that there are so many questions and so many different proposals that I would prefer, Mayor, to see what you put in your budget. And then we have all of April, all of May, and all of June to change the money, the revenue if we want. So, I realize for the folks here who've worked on this for years, this may not be what you would hope for, but it would give us an opportunity to see Mayor Gray's number and something actually in our budget and then for us to go to work, if we so choose, before July the first. So, I'm going to oppose the amendment and oppose the motion. Thank you, Vice Mayor. All right, who else wishes to speak to the amendment? Councilmember Beard. Thank you, Mayor. I got a telephone call from Councilmember Kay yesterday about 3 o'clock and the first time I'd heard any in-depth information about what he was planning on doing 27 hours ago. The ordinance itself shows up right here before we started our deliberations today. And the last time I checked, the building is not on fire. So I think that I would probably want to say the same words that the Vice Mayor said to some extent. I don't know whether we have to go all the way to the first of July, but we could start to work on it at some point sooner rather than later and have some opportunity to have discussions with the Mayor and see where he is and go from there. But, you know, to vote on this today and then take it to the docket is not the way I would want to go. So I couldn't support the amendment nor the motion to begin with. Thank you. Thank you, Councilmember Beard. Who else wishes to speak to the amendment? Councilmember Myers and then Councilmember Lawless. Thank you, Mayor. And I, too, am very pleased to hear that the Mayor says that he has a number that he's going to put in his budget, although we don't know what it is. And I think that, you know, part of my concern is that we don't have a plan on how to spend this money yet. And I realize that there are 48 points and all that stuff, but that's not a plan. And so I'm not going to support the amendment or the original motion. I want to wait to see what the Mayor puts in the budget and then see if we want to move that number at all. But the second thing I'll say is this, and I've said this before, I think rather than fill that position that we put together to do the housing, the office of the housing, we need to find somebody like a Dr. Holsinger in our community that can bring all the people together that need to come together and come up with a plan on how to do, how to move forward with this money. And I don't think we can spend, if the Mayor puts $2 million, $3 million, $4 million in his budget, I don't think that money is going to get spent next year. As a matter of fact, I guarantee it won't get spent next year. And so rather than put the cart before the horse, let's let the Mayor lead on this, put whatever he puts in the budget, I do hope that the Council will consider reaching out to someone in our community like a Dr. Holsinger or someone like that to bring everybody together and not to study things, not to look at things, but to take the money that the Mayor puts in the budget the Council leaves and move forward. So that's my hope. Thank you. All right. Thank you. Council Member Lawless. Thank you, Mayor. We've had so many people in our community. We've looked at this. We've studied it. We've had task force and commissions. I think possibly the only thing that had took longer for us to act on was the Lyric Theater. So that being said, I will support the amendment. I would prefer a .75%. But I think it's time for us to act collectively as a government, our Council. The Mayor can always veto it, but I think that we need to show that as a community, as a Council, we support this. We know the need is there. I know if only $3 million of the $4 million gets spent in the first year, then we'll have $5 million the next year. And I think that this has been a very good debate, and if Council Member Ellinger would be willing to change his amendment to .75, that would be great. But if not, I'll support it, because I think we need to act, and we know the need is there. And I think one of the things, I think it was Mike who talked about a commissioner with tough love that required this. We also, as a community, need to start having, stand up for tough love on our neighborhoods, keeping them safe, passing ordinances on nuisance properties, and holding irresponsible landlords accountable for, because they've driven up a lot of the affordable housing rental around the UK area, and maybe others. So all that being said, the other motion I'd like to make is for us to take a five minute break to go to the restroom, or I'm going to die. Thank you, Mayor. Just go ahead. I don't want to miss anything exciting. Unless there's others to talk on the amendment, I'd like to dispose of it before I make comments. Pardon? I'd like to dispose of the amendment before I make any commentary. All right, good. Then we're ready to take a vote then on the amendment. All in favor of the amendment, please indicate by saying aye and voting electronically, and opposed, no. Speak to the amendment, please. The amendment, yeah, that's a good idea. The amendment is to assign from the insurance fee fund up to $4 million, is essentially 1% up to $4 million. All right. Has everyone voted? 13, 14. All right, there's 14 here. You're there. All right. All right. The motion fails. All right, now we're back to the original motion. Now Mayor. Council Member Farmer. Having taken in the discussion and being aware of trying to balance all of our opportunities and knowing that you have a budget address on April the 8th, I would like to table this discussion until our work session on April the 15th, so moved. There's a motion by Council Member Farmer to table. There's a second by Council Member Myers. A motion to table is not debatable, therefore we will, if Council is ready to vote on the motion to table. All in favor of the motion to table, please indicate by saying aye and voting electronically. I'm not seeing the... Might be a tie vote. Oh, it's a tie vote, Mayor. All right. That's easy. All right. Roll it, baby. How do you do that? So I don't have an electronic voting? No, I don't. It's something in this new thing. I may not know how to do it. All right. But I can put it in. Well, I'll vote in favor of the motion and I'll vote in favor of the motion in acknowledging what Vice Mayor Gordon had to say about our process and what others have said about the process going forward. We have the time between now and the budget and then after the budget to address this in a meaningful way with the new information and with the vigorous debate that I'm sure that it will present for us. So the motion to table passes. All right. Yes. Council Member... All right. Is... I'm sorry. What is it? The... So on the... The motion is to table. Till April the 5th. Till April the 5th. 15th. That has passed. And now, council members wish to speak? Yes. To... Council reports. Council reports. Yeah. Is that next on the agenda? Yes. All right. Next on the agenda... Mayor, I just want to say something. Okay. Relating to the report. If people are interested in an electronic copy, they can get it at lexingtonky.gov. It's on the homepage. Thank you. All right. Thank you. I was in. All right. We're now at council reports and I'm going to open the floor to council reports. Beginning with... Okay. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. Okay. All right, we're now at council reports. Beginning with council member Myers, then council member Ford. Thank you, Mayor. We know that there's a property on Trent Boulevard in the 8th District that was purchased by the Bluegrass Ad, and we went through a process. This council supported us in the neighborhoods in passing several resolutions and sending those to the state. The outcome of that has been that the property is being sold, and we've got the people who are purchasing the property here today to do a quick presentation. So I'd like to bring to the podium Craig McAnally to introduce our guest. Thank you, sir. Thank you, Council Member Myers, Council Member Ford, then Council Member Kaye. Okay. Mr. Mayor, members of the council, thank you for the opportunity to make this presentation. Oh, okay. I'm sorry. I missed that. Okay. Okay. Great. Craig, go right ahead. Thank you. Okay. Go ahead. Yes, sir. And can I say that several council members have given me some time, so we've got enough time to do the presentation. Thank you. Okay. I'll try to make this real quick. I know you've been here for a long time. I appreciate the opportunity to present this project to you today. It's been a controversial project for the Bluegrass Area Development District, and back in June when I was given the task of finding a buyer for this property and to find an appropriate use, it was quite a decision for me to make whether I wanted to tackle something like this. But I believe things are working out, and we found an appropriate use for the property that we've worked out with the Neighborhood Association. We appreciate the cooperation and the assistance from the Lexington-Fayette-Urban County Government and Councilman Myers, especially appreciate the staff of Lexington-Fayette-Urban County Government that worked with us on this project. Today I'd like to introduce to you Mr. Tom Fielder, who is with the Fielder Group in Rouse Development, who was a blessing to us that came to us with this project and introduced us to the Episcopal Retirement Homes and the Model Group, who are the people who will manage the property and develop the property. Tom is an architect and an attorney, and he is the forerunner for this project for us, and I'd like to bring him up to give you a little more information about the project. Thank you, Craig. I'll be very brief. I know it's been a long afternoon. When I first met with Craig in the Area Development District, they talked about this property in traditional real estate development terms, and I told Craig, I said, you know, you don't need a real estate developer. You're looking for a community builder, and we can find those community builders, and one of the premier community builders in the Midwest is the Model Group, and in their association with the Episcopal Retirement Homes have done phenomenal things. So I would like to introduce Steve Smith with the Model Group. Thanks, Tom. The mission of the Model Group is to transform communities. That's what we do, and when we went to the Trent site, what we saw was an established neighborhood, predominantly single-family homes, that was headed one way or another. It had been impacted by the economy. My suspicion is that it was impacted by the banking crisis, the foreclosure crisis, and this was a community that could be tipped towards stability or could potentially and very harmfully slide to more and more instability, and a big part of the reason was that there was a gigantic, vacant collection of buildings right in the center of that, and that's one of the things that our company does is we try to come in and take on developments like that that are going to be transformative, that can bring stability to these neighborhoods, and interestingly, we didn't schedule this today because we knew what the debate was going to be about, but interestingly, the solution for this actually is affordable housing for seniors, but it's not just affordable housing for the sake of affordable housing, which is interesting. I've heard the consultants talk about the need for affordable housing, but in our experience, when you can, if you can point affordable housing that is also economic development, the positive impact that has on neighborhoods is just astounding, and so our approach, again, the mission of our company is not to do affordable housing. It is not to do market-rate housing or any other kind of housing in particular. The mission of our company is to transform communities, and we have seen again and again that affordable housing done well can be a powerful part of economic development. So the key, putting together the financing for these things is very convoluted and very tricky, but once you get to the point where you're building, you know, as you can see in the picture here, the bricks and sticks, doing the actual construction ends up being the easy part, right? It's the financing on the front end, but most importantly, the services that are provided to the residents and the ongoing long-term management of that is absolutely critical, and so we have a fantastic partner in Episcopal Retirement Homes. Once we started doing business with Episcopal Retirement Homes, we actually transferred our entire senior portfolio over to them, and all projects moving forward that we develop as affordable housing, we partner with Episcopal because of their approach, and so I'd like to introduce a couple of folks from Episcopal Retirement Homes to talk about their approach, and that is Jay Kittenbrink and Kathleen Eisen. Thanks Steve, and thanks to the council here. We appreciate you taking the time to review this and to listen to us today, and like Steve, I applaud you for your vision and looking at affordable housing. I've spent 32 years working in affordable housing, and it's nice to see somebody paying attention to it. At any rate, to get into Episcopal Retirement Homes, and I don't know whether we're going to go back to the presentation piece or just, okay, I promise you the picture will come back up at the end. We have partnered with the model group on a number of projects, and if you go to the next slide, our company has been around for 60 years. We started with the continuing care communities, which meet independent living, assisted living, full skilled nursing, and dementia care. We have two of those campuses. We did have three. We sold one in Columbus a number of years ago. That only served a small population of the seniors, so we began to look at affordable housing a number of years ago and began to grow that area. In the 60 years, over 30 of them, Episcopal Retirement Homes has been working with affordable housing. Go ahead to the next slide. These are a few of our communities. Marjorie Lee was the founding community. It is a continuing care campus for fairly well-to-do seniors, and that's the first of our properties and the one that was endowed to get us started. Go ahead to the next. This is Dupree House, which is another of those campuses. The next slide shows Dupree Cottages, which is a very innovative style of nursing care where the residents are in charge and determine when they get up, what they eat, what they do, and it's their home, and we work there, and it's very different than most nursing homes you've ever seen. What we're talking about is affordable housing, and the bottom part of that is St. Paul Village, which is an affordable community in Cincinnati, and that's what we want to focus on here today. Go ahead to the next. So our mission is to enrich the lives of older adults in a person-centered, innovative, and spiritually-based way, and that is really what focuses us each time we go out and try and do these things. We come to communities, we ask questions about what will meet their needs, not come in and say, oh, we've got this box, and it will fit your need, okay? So go ahead on to the next. Just to give you a little background on our financial, you know, our affordable living component is about a $53 million company, about $3 million of that in current assets, and the next slide shows that it's about $27 million of debt, and therefore about $26 million in free capital. I'm going to introduce Kathy Eisen, and she's going to talk about the services that we provide that really make us differentiate from other affordable housing communities, and I think that's what's brought us to where we are. Although we are a powerful financial company, it's what we do for seniors that I think makes the difference. Good afternoon, or almost evening. Thank you for allowing us to come here this afternoon. My name is Kathy Eisen Lind, I'm Vice President for Affordable Housing for Episcopal Retirement Homes. Next slide, please. Next slide. Okay. It is our mission truly to raise the bar for housing for low-income seniors. We don't just look at this housing as safe and sanitary housing. We very much provide services, and that is the hallmark of what we do. It is our goal to have our seniors age with us as long as possible, and provide the necessary services for them to be able to age in place. When they leave us, generally, or in affordable housing for seniors, when they no longer can live there, generally they go to a Medicaid nursing home, sometimes prematurely. We try to lengthen the time that they're with us, and hopefully this is the last place that they ever live. We do this by providing a multitude of services. We always connect with a home care company or several, and a lot of times our communities look a little bit more like assisted living than they do independent, but we help our residents age in place. Next slide, please. The other services that we provide, and this is all through ERH philanthropy, we raise money to provide these services. We try to bring a bus. Sometimes it takes a while to get the funds that we're able to raise for that, but a bus and a driver. Our residents need to get out, not only to the grocery store or to the shopping mall, but they like to do fun things. They go out to dinner together. They go to amusements together. Sometimes they go to the casino, because that's what they enjoy doing. We do what they want to do. Service coordination or a social worker is extremely important, because they help them get the services that they need, so we always have that. We connect with a church. Many times it's an Episcopal church, but if not, it can be a church in the area. We look to the residents to help us do that. The spiritual services are important. It's not only the services, the Bible study, but it's also the churches help provide volunteers. When volunteers support us, we can have many more activities. It's our goal to get our residents out of their apartments, engaged with each other, neighbors becoming neighbors, which is extremely important. We plan activities for them. We do have a volunteer coordinator, again, based around what the residents prefer. We always try to have a wellness component. We try to build in a room where we have exercise equipment, and we're able to get funding for that through grants. And lastly, we truly have health education and screenings. We help our residents understand their health needs, and we try to meet those needs. So we do make a difference in terms of our model through our philanthropy and through the services that we provide. This is somewhat unique to senior services and senior housing. Next, Steve will come back and finish. So again, just to sort of tie that together, what we have is the mission of the model group, which is to transform communities. We really believe affordable housing can be the starting place for economic development, a jumping off point to say, let's also do market rate, let's do some retail, let's provide jobs, opportunities for businesses to locate and provide jobs in these neighborhoods. And so we couple that mission with the mission of ERH to enrich the lives of older adults. And what we've ended up consistently with are some outstanding projects. This is just a couple examples of developments that we've done in various neighborhoods in Ohio and Kentucky that have been transformative. We can click through these fairly quickly and just keep on going. There's some additional sites that's a YWCA we're working on. We'll pause there for a second. That's 1393 Trent Boulevard. And this is how we found the property. This is the property in its current configuration, as you can see. It sits on a beautiful site with lots of green space. It's surrounded by a neighborhood that is a predominantly single family, but as you can see, it needs a lot of love. So Mr. Fielder came up with some designs. We can go to the next and final slide, where this is actually the existing buildings. You'll notice the rake of the roof line there on the back and the front, but very creatively has framed out the porches, added some porches, done some interesting work on the dormers and the colors to really transform this building. All of these units will be flat to make them very easily accessible for all the seniors and allow them, as Kathy said, to age in place for the longest amount of time as possible. We have 54 units. 40 of those units will be one bedrooms. Two of those units, I'm sorry, 12 of those units will be two bedrooms. The reason for the unit mix, frankly, was a lot driven by, as we're doing a renovation, what does the building want to give us and to provide as many of the units as we could for the seniors. So 54 ended up being the right number. We are actually reducing the density on the site from what was there. We're taking down one of the buildings, but be able to renovate the rest. We just believe and have seen it bear itself out in other neighborhoods that by, A, removing blight from a neighborhood and replacing it with something that is not just great affordable housing, but is high quality housing, period, that is among the best in terms of design and architecture and aesthetic in the neighborhood regardless of income size. And that's how you get to the transformational impact and the economic development impact of affordable housing. And so that's the presentation. We are just thrilled to be in Lexington, and I would be happy to respond to any questions. Thanks very much. We have several council members that are on the lined up for council reports. And are there any comments or questions? Any additional? Council Member Myers for this group. I just wanted to see if there's any questions. Thank you very much for coming. And I just want to say that the picture, the rendering that we showed is actually one of the buildings transformed. And so that's exactly what, pretty much exactly what things are going to look like in the future there on that property. So the neighborhood is really excited and we're really pleased to have the partnership here. And I don't know if they said, one of the things they do is they're going to have a nurse and a nurse practitioner come once a week to serve the residents there. And so there's a lot of things that they're doing that I think are innovative, at least for Lexington. And so hopefully they can get involved. And you know, we've got the small area plan going for the 8th district also. And so we're going to get them involved in that as well. Thank you very much for coming and we look forward to working with you. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Council Member Myers. Council Member Beard, is it related to this presentation? Yes. All right. Tell me a little bit about, are these rentals? Can people purchase them, condo-like? Tell me a little bit about how that works and, or is it a mixture? Yeah, these are, this is senior housing. They are apartments and they are to remain affordable. They're financed with the 9% low-income housing tax credits, which means that the rents will be set at 60% of the area median income or lower. Okay, thank you. That's exactly what I needed to know. Appreciate it. Thank you, Council Member Beard. Council Member Ford, then Council Member Kaye, and Vice Mayor Gordon. Thank you, Mayor. Is this your council report now, right? Yes, sir. All right. Yep. I just have a brief announcement. Today, we were scheduled to have a district, a 1st District Neighborhood Association's leader meeting at Coulterman Park Shelter. We notified via email and I hope everybody was apprised of the notice of our need to cancel that meeting. That meeting will not occur this afternoon because of circumstances, but we will reschedule that meeting for hopefully for late fall, I mean late March, I hope. I'm disappointed this afternoon, not personally. I'm disappointed for low to moderate income people in Lexington that want to stay here and want to live here and work. I respect the council's decision. I think that we missed an opportunity to lead. The argument has always been the desire not to raise a tax. Now I think people on the outside looking in, the citizenry of Lexington, perhaps see it as the tax is not the issue, it's just not wanting to fund it. It's not that important to us. And it's a council's decision to do it. When Mayor Gray was Vice Mayor, when this started long ago, he commissioned a council task force that met 24 times to identify the funding source. And it's always been the 1% insurance premium tax. I know council does not like to be blindsided, so to speak, but there was nothing new really that Council Member Kay presented today except for the funding source, and that's the ultimate issue. If the council doesn't want to fund it, let's let the citizens know and let's move on. I'm very disappointed, Mayor Gray, and I'll say this publicly, in your vote to table discussion. If we were talking about Rupp Arena, I'm certain that that seven to seven vote to table would have gone different. This council has written a couple of blank checks to the administration. And our citizenry, particularly in regards to affordable housing, has not had responsiveness. It deserves $7 million to 21C. Lincoln and I, we approve it, but we study affordable housing for six or seven years and we can't take a vote on it. Rupp Arena, we dropped $5 million to give us that shiny design we had. And I'm going to try my best to evaluate all these projects that I'm comparing objectively. A day like today makes it very hard to do. $5 million and a drop of a hat, Rupp Arena. $1 million to a job fund that is the council's purview to create the affordable housing trust fund if we so choose to do it. It's a dedicated fund. And that's what was attempted here this afternoon. The need is evident and I do pledge to continue to work. But it was not a good day for the leadership of this council and for low to moderate income people in Lexington. Thank you, Mayor. Council Member Ford, I will come back to your comments after we get the council reports. Thank you. Council Member Kaye. Thank you, Mayor. I'm going to take the privilege of council reports to also comment on what the council did not do this afternoon. I too am disappointed. This is work that people on council surely know and many people in the community know. It's been going on for many years. It has been postponed many times. It has been referred to committee many times. It has been tabled many times. We've done it once again. As Council Member Ford said, this ordinance was not substantively different from the same ordinance that was on the table a year ago that members of council and others have had full opportunity to review and consider. The difference was we took out the increase in the fee. I'm hoping that as we go forward that this council will in fact understand the need for a dedicated fund at a minimum of $4 million to address the incredibly important issues of housing and homelessness. I would add just a couple things. One, in terms of the way the funding was proposed, there was definitely a slip between the cup and the lip in terms of my understanding of what the fee actually applied to and what it would generate. I think that's a relatively simple fix. We can have .75% as opposed to 1% and that adjusts it. If people have other questions about aspects of the ordinance as proposed, that's fair game and we can have a full discussion of that. The last thing I would say is this. Money in the budget is not the creation of a trust fund. All medium or large, money in the budget is not creation of a trust fund. In order to get the work done that needs to be done, we have come to this conclusion many times. We need a dedicated source of revenue that goes into a trust fund so that plans can be made and activities move forward in a way that will be helpful to our community. I remain optimistic. I believe that I have heard when I talked to every single member of council before I brought this forward, I believe what I heard from them was a genuine interest in addressing this issue even if we don't see the ways to address it in exactly the same way. I remain optimistic that we will come to agreement about a significant dedicated source of funding so that we can begin to address this issue. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you. Council Member Kaye, Vice Mayor Gordon. Thank you, Mayor. Three things. First, I wanted to congratulate Assistant Police Chief Robert Stack on his retirement from the Division of Police and to thank him for his almost 28 years of service in the police and to congratulate him on his new position as Director of E911. So we will still be working with him and I thank him for his service and his future service. Now, at 3 o'clock today when we sat down at our meeting, we were given the document Lexington's Affordable Housing Challenge and Potential Strategy and none of us have read it to my knowledge. And I think even though we've taken a different action on the fund itself, it would be appropriate for us to vet this document and know what's in it. I don't know if anybody here knows what's in it. Maybe Council Member Kaye has read it. But with that, I would like to move to place this document simply for review and discussion into the Planning Committee. Motion by Vice Mayor Gordon, second by Council Member Henson. Is there any discussion on the motion? All right. Then we can take a vote. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed, no. Motion carries. Thank you for that, Council Members. I think it will be good for us to see what's actually in here. I know we got a synopsis, but we can actually have a full discussion of the document itself. And then finally, as to what happened today with the affordable housing motion, I actually take a different viewpoint on things. And I greatly respect my Council colleagues and their opinions of what happened. What I think happened is that the Council did dedicate itself to take this issue up after we see what the Mayor is going to do in his budget. We took a very common sense approach. I think that there were too many questions that came up in this discussion and too many amendments which left us scattered. And I don't think that's how we want to be as a Council and a legislative body moving forward with one of the most important issues we've ever had. This is something that requires our attention and we have agreed to give it. And I'm not pessimistic, I'm optimistic, like you, Council Member Kaye, that we will come to some sort of decision. There has been no coalescence of the Council to this point about how much money should be in the Affordable Housing Trust Fund. I think everybody knows we need to fix our problem, but we still have a variety of answers as was shown today in our meeting. So I'm optimistic and I think we will get there and I think that whatever the Mayor puts in the budget is important to go into the Trust Fund and we'll work from there. So I appreciate everyone's work on this and we have a very short six weeks until your budget address and so I look forward to that. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Vice Mayor. Council Member Lawless. Thank you, Mayor. I have one announcement. Tomorrow Wednesday at the Lexington Public Library on Main Street downtown in Conference Room A, there will be an opportunity for the 3rd District residents and anybody else I guess who would like to come. You don't have to show proof of residency. To meet with the Code for America interns and dialogue with them. So that's from 6.30 to 8.30 at the downtown Library Conference Room A. I also have a motion to make which I'm going to do and then I have a comment about today. I found out quite by surprise this week that there is no city or governmental agency that has the right to cite, fine, and then abate dead animals in people's yards. Which, trust me, can be really very nasty. And that had not ever come up and everybody that bounced around was surprised too. So I'd like to make a motion to place the issue of animal remains on private property in the urban service boundary in the Public Safety Committee for the purpose of creating an ordinance that will allow a division of LFUCG to cite, fine, and abate dead animal carcasses. So moved. Motion by Council Member Lawless and a second by Council Member Allenger. Is there any discussion on the motion? All right. All in favor please say aye. Opposed no. Motion carries. Now I'd like to comment on our pretty long day today. One of the issues about bringing it forward right now was if we were to raise the tax, it would have had to have been done by the end of March. And thank you to Council Member Kaye for your work in coming up with a different approach to it. And I appreciate that. So while I would have liked to have seen that pass in some form today, I do think it was a good discussion. And at one point, Council Member Ford, you talked about how great it was that we were able to debate and discuss and disagree without being disagreeable. So I'm disappointed somewhat that the can's been kicked down the road, but I'm very optimistic we'll come up with something for the upcoming fiscal year. At the same time, I'm very disappointed that then it had to become very disagreeable in the council report. So I hope that we can all move forward on this and respect each other's differences and disagreements, et cetera, without making it about one person or personal. There were 15 people here voting today. So with that note, I hope we don't have as big an Arctic vortex as we have had. And thank you very much. And I hope to see a lot of folks tomorrow at the library. Council Member Hanson. Thank you, Mayor. I have a motion and then I will also make my comments. But I moved to place on the docket for the March 6 council meeting under the reading of ordinances and first reading of ordinances and ordinance amending ordinance 13-214 to make the increase in the fine to $250 for parking in a handicapped parking space effective 60 days from the date of its passage. Motion by Council Member Hanson, seconded by Council Member Beard. Is there any discussion on the motion? All right. Hearing none, then we can take a vote. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed, no. Motion carries. Thank you, Mayor. And for my comments, I just want to say that me, of all people sitting here, understand that passion for something. And I appreciate that very, very much. And I will also say that I will support, absolutely support, a trust fund. We may disagree on the amount. I'm not sure that hopefully we will come up with a good solution. I think the new funding that's been brought forward was more creative than just raising taxes. I think raising taxes is the easy way out. So I really like what was proposed. It was also my understanding it wouldn't go into effect until July 1. So I didn't see what the rush had to be. I think it's an opportunity maybe for us to be a little more creative in how it's written. I know that, like I said earlier, there's many, many, many properties out there that are affordable housing or low-income, income-based housing. But the one component they don't have, many of them, is the creativity. The creativity to move people along, to get them to where they want to be, where they should be. But I would also like to know how the new position will play a role in the trust fund. If that position will oversee this trust fund, if this board that's in this document, in this ordinance, will oversee this trust fund. But, you know, I have a lot of questions. I think they need to be answered. And also, I look forward to the mayor's response as far as the amount. So thank you very much. Thank you, Council Member Hanson. Council Member Clark. Thank you, Mayor. Just some further comments. I do believe that it was the responsibility of this council to place an issue such as the homelessness, particularly since it was placed in the hands of a homeless commission with the charge to make a recommendation of the council. Having said that, though, knowing the mayor as I know him, and his concerns about this city, I am absolutely confident that we're going to see at least $4 million in the budget for homelessness. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Council Member Clark. Council Member Beard. Thank you, Mayor. I guess, Mike, I'll just abbreviate these comments for five or six minutes. I really only needed a week. I didn't need six weeks or three months. I only needed a week. I spent, again, as Council Member Ford mentioned, I was on the same task force that met 24 times. And I did that while I was having three major operations and never missed a meeting. I just was afraid that this thing was drifting into ready, fire, aim. And it could have taken the rest of the week to iron out some things, and we could have brought it to this body next Tuesday, and it could have gone to the docket, and no harm done. So I will go along with what has happened so far, but as I say, I just wanted the opportunity to read the information and push some numbers around and see how they came out at that end. And we could have gotten it done next week. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Council Member. Thank you, Council Member Beard. Council Member Akers. Thank you, Mayor. I, too, think that we made good progress today, and I know that there are people that are not happy with the decisions that we made or the votes that we took. But I think knowing that nothing would go into effect until July 1st, that we have time. And I know I have actually followed this issue personally and professionally since before I came on Council and Council Member Ellinger was running the task force years ago. So I am familiar with it, but I was not familiar with some of the language of the specific ordinance. I mean, sure, the concept, and yes, I've read the commission report, and I know that there's a problem, and I know that we need to address it, but I just didn't feel confident in the details that we were presented with today. And so that's why I was a little hesitant and why I think that there was so many suggestions on how we can allocate it differently or this much percent instead of this much percent. There's a lot of questions. I was concerned about what will be cut. I mean, obviously, if we're going to take $5 million out of the budget, what's going to lose $5 million? How many staff are we going to lose? How many firehouses won't get built, et cetera? So I think that we have other things to consider, and it's irresponsible to just take $5 million and run with it without thinking about the consequences of that, as well as staffing. How many staff will this require? The consultant mentioned pairing the subsidies with upgrades to housing and then having someone go out and make sure that the housing has been improved. Who's going to go do that? Do we have the staff that's going to look into that? Do we have – how many social workers will it take to do the applications and manage the number of people that we're handing out subsidies to? So I think there's just a lot to consider, and I want to consider it, so I look forward to that. And lastly, switching gears, I wanted to share a couple of announcements. Next Monday night, the Georgetown Street Area and Neighborhood Association will be meeting Monday, March 3rd at 6 o'clock at the O'Rear Center in Douglas Park. The Heritage Night will be held at Meadowthorpe Elementary this Thursday, February 27th, from 5.30 until 8 p.m. And lastly, my second installment of – it's now called Take a Second with Siobhan – will be held Thursday, February 27th also at 3.30 this time at the Grey Goose on Jefferson. So I hope lots of residents from the district can come out and we can talk for an hour about whatever you like, including the Affordable Housing Trust Fund. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Councilmember Akers. All right. Councilmember – all right, okay. Well, Councilmember Ford, I said I would respond to your earlier comments. I've learned in this job – you all have heard me say sometimes, if you have a deep need to be loved, don't run for mayor. Yes, ma'am. I often say, too, that, you know, sometimes it's wise to step back, take a deep breath. I appreciate the passion that Councilmember Kaye has brought to the issue of affordable housing, and I appreciate the passion that you have as well, Councilmember Ford. But that's not exclusive, really, I don't think, to you all. Our jobs – all of our jobs – are to balance the community's needs, to try our best, to adjust and adapt, to listen carefully, yes, often, to advocate for a point of view. But I think it is – you're right, it is disappointing when we would pit one compelling initiative need against others in our city, when really, at the end of the day, we're all trying to elevate our city and elevate everyone within it. And so, you know, I give credit for good intentions. I'm sure that as we navigate through this budget and through the many competing, challenging demands and opportunities that we have, that we will – I have an unshakable optimism, sort of like the Vice Mayor said, that we will get there, and that at the end of the day, our city will be better off because we've worked hard. And sometimes we've had tough, challenging debates that sometimes do come down to sometimes, you know, a little bit of a personal attack or a political attack, but, you know, that's probably why we're here, and so we just have to accept that. So, thank you all for allowing me a little chance to comment, and I think that's all for the day. Yeah, let's adjourn. We can take a motion to adjourn. Move to adjourn. Do we have something else? All right. Do we have something else? All right. There's a motion. Oh, Mr. Mundy, is anybody signed on? Okay. All right. Thank you. Then there's a – unless there's an objection, we'll stand adjourned. Thank you. Thank you.