Thank you. guitar solo We're going to take up our agenda. Before our May 6th, 1 p.m. meeting, even though it's a little past 1 p.m. As is our custom, I like for us to approve our minutes before we ask the council to do the same. So the first four or five pages had the minutes of our April the 15th meeting. I was going to see if there are any additions or corrections to those that have been placed in the packet. Hearing none, I ask for a motion to approve. So moved. Any discussion? All those in favor? Aye. Those like sign, motion passes. That will make that easy for work session. Council Member Stenet has been very kind to be in place to leave collection review in our committee. And it begins on page six. I think, Mr. Martin, are you going to give that? Or who's going to shepherd that today? Or did you want to say anything before we started? Okay. Thank you. So it says leaf collection program status and alternatives. At least here it does. Okay. There it is. Yes, sir. Thank you. I was asked to come and talk about the leaf collection program. Obviously, as we're working our way out of spring into summertime, it's not something that we're thinking about. But I know I learned a lot about it last year when I was asked to come down as the acting commissioner because that was my first foray into the new public works arena. So let's get started here. One of the things that I felt like I needed to do is go back and try to get a better handle on what are we doing currently. And so in 2013, the overview is this, is that basically there's 12 collection units that are available for leaf collection throughout the area that is provided urban services for leaf collection. Five Packer trucks, which is basically old garbage trucks, and then seven retrofitted dump trucks. I'll talk a little bit more about what that retrofitted really means. What we've been using is streets and roads employees, primarily 12 street sweeper drivers. They may rotate out on a given day depending on attendance and things like that, but obviously 12 drivers associated with 12 collection units. And then there's the seasonal staff that we hire. We've been doing this at least 15 years since I've been here, is that bring on the leaf people in the fall. This year we started out with 36, and we were down to 23 of them by January. And there probably is a lot of reasons for that, and I'll talk about that in a little bit here. um like i said i came down here november one and it was pretty clear is that that we had a goal in mind that we were going to finish in eight weeks with 12 pieces of equipment there was originally a starting date of i think it was actually early november and as it was approaching halloween i was looking out my window and i was seeing no leaves on the ground and everything on the trees if you'll dial back it was a pretty late fall and i know that i had some dialogue with some of the council members at least through their offices about pushing that date back and and everyone seemed to agree that it made sense let's don't start running leaves without there being anything on the ground so we pushed back i pushed back to uh to november 18th well this year we had another anomaly uh our first snow came on november the 12th so stepping back that you know we're using streets and roads folks who drive street sweepers when we're sweeping streets, otherwise drive snow plows when there's snow and ice on the ground. Now we're pulling them off and having them do snow removal as opposed to picking up leaves. And that went on through the entire fall and into early winter. And when I first compiled this data was late January. And you can see that basically we that we missed 16 working days due to weather that we don't normally have. Mix in the fact that leaf collection just seems to come around the holidays. You've got two days for Thanksgiving. You've got several days that are around Christmas and New Year's. Basically, we lost nearly 50% of the available working days because of the snow, the holidays, and just the simple timing of things. And so that creates what is a difficult challenge as far as leaf collection in a timely fashion just made it worse. Well, how will we communicate with the public about what we're doing? Is that we use the usual recipe that we use all the time, GTV3 with segments on that. We did print ads with the various publications, including the Herald-Leader, television ads. Mark York even appeared on a noon show segment on LEX talking about leaf collection. We did web banners on Kentucky.com, promoted through Facebook, which is obviously something that we're using more and more in the environmental quality and public works arena that's been very successful. And then obviously, you know, several of the council members had helped us through news releases or newsletters. so you know we did everything that we could as far as trying to get the word out about where we were with leaf collection but i think there's there's obviously a lot of room for improvement because i know when i got involved in it this is what i see on our website kind of a fairly static type of information is that you can type in what your zip code is or your house number sorry and then it will take you to the map but that map was the one that was developed in the beginning and didn't take into all the account of the missed days because of snow, because of holidays, or because of loss of production and things like that. So as I'll talk about a little bit later, we're going to have some suggestions or comments towards how we can make this more of a dynamic process to where when people are ready to rake their leaves out to the curb and want to have a realistic time frame of when that's going to come, that they'll get one, not one that is, that says a schedule that's realistically several weeks off schedule. All right, that's kind of where we're at right now. We've got these 12 units. The risks that I see in the program right now is that basically some of these units are pulled from surplus. Those garbage trucks aren't running garbage trucks anymore, I mean garbage routes. Instead, they were ready to be surplused. Instead, we pushed them into leaf collection service because we needed something in leaf collection. They're not operating 100% of the time. Those dump trucks, as I said, they needed to be customized. They end up, you've seen them, they end up having this cover over top of the back of the dump itself. That way they can blow the leaves in, and as they're driving down the road, they don't blow out of the back of an open dump truck. Well, those covers or those enclosures are sized for those particular units. And one of the things our folks found out is that we sit the enclosures off to the side during non-leaf season. and then we sell the dump truck, and then we try to put the enclosure back on the other dump truck, and it doesn't fit anymore because they're made just for those specific ones. So part of our risks in our current program is that we're running a collection unit, in my mind, that is not large enough and not dependable enough as far as from an uptime to constantly do what needs to be done in a very compressed time frame that leaf collection occurs. Another risk that I had identified was lost collection time. Right now, all loads go behind the old incinerator off old Frankfort Pike by Town Branch Treatment Plant. That works great if you're doing Meadowthorpe, but if you're doing Gainesway, there's a lot of windshield time that you lose driving all that distance, particularly with the dump trucks because they don't have the same capacity or much smaller capacity than what the Packer trucks do. so they're making twice or two trips over there a day as opposed to one and as we move forward in leaf collection and we continue to do vacuum leaf collection we're going to have to look at ways that we can spread out those dumping locations such as that we can reduce the amount of time we spend driving and increase the amount of time we do collecting. Other risks in the program, the Staffing, the exclusive use of streets and roads employees, in my mind, presents somewhat of a risk. And it really goes about the snow and ice removal. You can't predict the weather. We can generally predict when we think the leaves are going to fall, but if we have an early winter like we did this year, we will likely have the same outcome that we did this year as well as far as lost time vacuuming leaves. Over-reliance on the seasonal and temporary support. I said in one of the earlier slides we'd gone from 36 to 23 by January. I mean, that's kind of the nature of temporary help to start with. Temporary help is looking for a job. But once they've got that job, they continue to look for a more permanent job. And the longer you stretch out that temporary time, the more chance it is they're going to find a permanent job, especially as it gets close to the holidays because that's oftentimes when maybe retail and other folks are starting to hire. and so you end up losing them over time. I think we do have some stalwarts that have been part of the leaf collection thing for a long time. They just kind of like doing it. It's a side job. But otherwise, it's a very transitional group, and relying on them over and over again for a long period of time introduces risks. I already mentioned the single dumping location, the schedule. it inherently conflicts with holidays and end of year plans. I never really would have thought of this until it was explained to me by the streets and roads folks. But you know the holidays is when people definitely want to take off. You know this and especially in our environment where we have a use it or lose it type of thing. If you've got unused vacation at the end of the year if you don't use it it's gone. So if you have available time and it's the holidays and you want to be home with your family that's when you're wanting to take off well that's our peak leave time we can't really afford to have people take off and so realizing that there are people still have personal issues and not relying on a very narrow bandwidth of staff in which to do it I think is is going to be one of the recommendations or suggestions that we make moving forward bottom line was this is that I feel like this is my personal opinion there's too much emphasis on the start time and not enough on the completion time this is in your packet and to me this this picture says a thousand words you see them this they're collecting leaves here along that gutter and there's a nice little pile there look up in the sky and see how many of them are up in still on the trees that's our one pass no wonder we're not making it that is a one that's our single pass that's what happened this year in particular so we've got to started thinking I think more along the lines of what is the end time and not necessarily about what the start time is back to the staffing issue is that you know the 40-hour week without scheduled overtime I think invites the schedule creep if we had broadened out the responsibility among a larger part of LFECG staff for leaf collection assignments and we're able to I think think we would still be able to work some weekends and and get the collection up during the time frame we're trying to do this and still do snow removal so i think that in talking to some of the cities i'm going to talk about this in a minute here is that over time i think needs to be part of the equation because if you're losing a good saturday while people are raking their leaves out into the street or on the curb and we do that over and over again i think that's one of the things that creates the impression that we're falling behind further than what we should be. So now let's switch gears and talk a little bit about what other cities are doing. You'll have to refer to your packet because I realized that when I saw my packet that you probably won't be able to read this very well. But what this is is a list of cities that we did research on, as far as what is everybody else doing. And this first one here is a list of cities that don't do vacuum leaf collection at all, which was surprising to me. Nashville, Cincinnati, Louisville, even Nicholasville right down the street, they don't do vacuum leaf collection anymore. And talking with some of the folks, everybody all agrees the same thing. This is hard. It just is really hard because you don't know when the leaves are going to come down, But boy, when they start coming down, they come down like rain, and you just can't get your arms around it. But at the same time, bagging leaves is a hassle. Ann Arbor, Michigan is on there. I lived in Ann Arbor, Michigan for four years. I hated raking leaves and putting them in bags because Ann Arbor is a lot like our city, big, mature trees, and we had a bunch, a bunch of leaves. So I know that that is difficult. So if we look at an alternative of other cities that still do vacuum leaf collection, you see more of a mixed bag. Greensboro, North Carolina, I talked to that guy for a while. They're the only city that I found that had tried outsourcing some or all of their leaf collection. He didn't feel like it worked very well, but at the same time, he didn't leave me with the impression that it was a hopeless type of thing. I kind of left that conversation with, is it something that maybe we might want to consider to be able to augment our crews? Even if we do do that, that we might have to adjust the knobs, because with anything that you try differently, that sometimes unintended consequences come about, and you just react to them. But I think that there's some merit in looking at that more closely. Charleston, West Virginia, talked to that guy for a long time as well, and he was the guy that suggested the mandatory overtime. Basically, Charleston uses an all-hands-on-deck type of approach. It's not just one division. It's everybody that is involved in some type of maintenance activity, whether it be parks, water quality, streets and roads, waste, you name it. But they go at it, and they work days, they work weekends, they worked. He was the one that also left me with that mentality of you've got to think about when it is you're going to finish and not necessarily about when you're going to start. The last one that I'm going to highlight on there is Knoxville. Knoxville is the outlier because when I looked on their website and I saw that they collected four times a season I call this guy I'm like have you lost your mind he says everybody calls me and says the same thing is that I guess in Knoxville that they have a dedicated program they have a division of horticulture and so they they are really ramped up on their their leaf collection their bulky debris collection they have knuckle booms that travel through neighborhoods and pick up your stuff rather than you having to cut it into the two-foot lengths. So I put that on there because it's interesting, not necessarily because I'm recommending it because I don't know what that's costing folks in Knoxville, but it's an off-the-charts type of approach compared to the other 18 cities that I had contact. All right, so I looked at the history of this, kind of put what I thought as far as what risks associated with it, talk to a bunch of other people that are facing the same things that we're facing, and basically what I try to come up with is there are alternatives that I could present to this committee for further review, for decision-making, for some type of action. Here they are. The first one is the obvious one, is that folks that have some leaves and not a lot leaves that they need to be focused maybe on whether or not they can utilize things and take it into their own hands. I'll use myself as an example. You know, I live outside Manowar. My house was built in 92. I don't have, you know, a huge number of mature trees that are in my neighborhood. You know, I use the Lenny and I use the waste bags. I've got different alternatives because I don't have an overwhelming amount of leaves. And that some folks I've heard say that is that by the time the leaf collection guys get to me, I could pretty much have done it myself. And there are alternatives that we provide here in the city that do that. Using the waste container, using those provided waste bags is a really, really good opportunity. And there's nothing like being able to mulch it up and return the nutrients to your lawn. Now, if you've got an overwhelming amount of leaves, as some people do, It's an ocean of leaves. I mean, we need to consider some other alternatives, and here's the first one that I thought of. Shorten the duration of collection so that all customers are serviced at least seven days before Christmas. From a practical standpoint, some people get out. They're out there every day because they have the time to do it. When we hit that Thanksgiving weekend, that's a four-day weekend. Most people are out there doing it. At some time during the course of that four days, I'm convinced. And that I noticed from the number of calls that we had in November and December to Lex call, the spike occurred after the Thanksgiving weekend. So if we think about how can we say that we're going to be done, we're going to cover what we're going to cover by Christmas, seven days before. One approach would be 100% LFUCG operations. easier said than done because if we're going to do that i'm of the belief that we have to add additional collection units to the fleet we cannot cover the whole city with 12 units in a six to eight week span it just will not happen likewise that we have to have additional staff to be able to operate those units now if we have additional additional units additional staff may be doable if we transfer primary responsibility away from streets and roads so that when snow events occur that they're that the whole leaf collection operation doesn't shut down for a week at a time back to what i had said earlier is that you maybe approach this with an all hands on deck type of situation and you have multiple people sharing the responsibility and make sure those units are running all the time instead of having them sit idle while we get ready or transition out of a snow event. Mandatory overtime would be part of that alternative to consider as well. You know, nobody in streets and roads wants to have to work every weekend between Christmas and New Year's. I'm sorry, between Thanksgiving and Christmas. But some folks may want to say, I'll work one day out of those five-week period. Great. I made a little extra money for Christmas. That's not a huge burden. You place all the burden on one small group of people, it becomes, I think, very difficult to manage from a morale standpoint. But if you're spreading that overtime burden over a large group of people where everybody gets a little but nobody gets abused or anything, I think that that's worth exploring. Second alternative, very similar to the first one, is again focusing on finishing before Christmas. The real big difference here is using a blended approach, using LFUCG operations, but also augmenting it with some vendor-supplied services. I would still transfer the primary responsibility away from streets and roads. Again, share the burden, share the task. I still need to increase the uptime of the equipment that I have. I still need to do mandatory overtime in order to be able to shorten the time frame I'm working. But the thing I would add to that is I would issue an RFP to subcontract loose leaf collection in critical leaf zones. Now, everybody may have a different definition of what critical leaf subzones may be. I think that's something that we would talk about pretty extensively as far as if we were to choose this alternative. But it goes back to what my thought was, is that unless we increase staff tremendously, we increase the amount of equipment that we have fairly significantly, for something that only happens in a six- to eight-week window really doesn't seem to make a lot of sense. It almost seems like exploring this more in further detail, if we wanted to continue to improve the program, would be beneficial. Again, I think I said earlier is that you can go into things with best intentions, and the first time may not be as productive as you'd like it to be, but at the same time that you will learn some lessons. I have no idea whether or not the private sector is really capable in this market of doing this sort of thing. We've all seen them out doing those kind of things in large commercial areas and stuff like that. The guys pull up with all the trailers and stuff. And that's all fine and great if you're working at an apartment complex and stuff like that. But if you're trying to hit 25 streets in the middle of Chevy Chase, that might be an entirely different animal. those are two alternatives that i wanted to present to the committee irregardless of what alternative that we choose we recognize that there is the need to improve the communications plan um kind of revisiting again what we had done in the past you know we've had this dedicated web page and it displays a button that takes people to the leaf collection much like other cities are doing we're not a whole lot different than that where the problem was is that again is that there's not a ongoing fluid update to the maps that needs to occur the static GIS zone map is generated prior to the start of leaf collection is based on the schedule that's given and as soon as we were off schedule we had we had issues somehow we've also got to be able to keep lex call up to date as far as where we are and what we are doing and through the course of the year rob allen and his team was doing a pretty good job of keeping 311 apprised on what streets they were working on in a given given day or a given week what the plan was but we need to do a better job of that is and i think the way to do that is that the start of each leaf collection season set up the start dates on a default and give it to computer services but the system must need to be updated to allow modifications of those scheduled dates so there's not the email traffic going back and forth about where are you where you think you're going to be, that it becomes a regular occurrence as far as updating that information. And that GIS map is dynamically generated based on the scheduled modifications. And then the citizens' webpage reflects that as well. It is more of a real-time type of approach. That puts a little more burden on the people that are doing it because somebody's got to own that. Somebody's got to own it to update that schedule on a regular basis so it can be updated through the GIS system. The most significant part of that is the third bullet there involves significant programming changes to current system. If we're going to do that, I think we need to start doing that now or very soon because, you know, best laid plans, I guess. The key to this communications plan, though, is the people that are on the street and being able to relay the information to the folks in LexCol and in GIS or in computer services to be able to provide the updated dynamic information rather than going on the website and seeing the same map that you saw four weeks ago that said you were going to be at my house four weeks ago. Okay. With that, Mr. Chair. Thank you, sir. That is a fine presentation. It's engendered several questions. We'll start with Council Member Ellinger. Thank you, Chair. And I received a letter from a council aide from Council Member Masada, who is home and recovering from an accident, and we all wish her a speedy recovery. But she had a question. She would like to know if the leaf collection is citywide or just those within the urban service area. I'm pretty sure that you have to have full urban services in order to be able to get leaf collection. Right. And I guess the reason that she asked that, she says, if our goal is to keep leaves out of the storm sewers, shouldn't it be citywide for leaf vacuuming? That's a taxing question. I wasn't going to touch that one today. I mean, it really is. It's the question about whether we're doing partial or full urban services. As somebody who's in a full urban service district, I'm fine with collecting somebody's leaves as long as they're paying for it. Thank you. Well, doesn't everybody pay a fee that comes to you anyway? Pardon? Doesn't everybody pay a fee now that comes to your shop? Well, and I glossed over that, and I apologize for that. For the outsourced leaf collection, vendor supplied, I had requested, and the mayor approved in his proposed budget, $300,000 of water quality money that would be used for acquiring that vendor. Yes, everybody pays that. But on the urban services, what's been paying it today, not everyone pays that. Thank you. Perfect. Thank you, sir. Next is Council Member Stennett. Thank you, Chair. I appreciate the discussion today. I put this into the committee because it's long overdue, and I think the last time we seriously took a look at this was back when the water quality fee was implemented, and there were several references during that task force that possibly the water quality fee one day could take over this task and use the revenue from the water quality fee to fund the program. I appreciate the alternatives that are pointed out on the screen. I think there's a third alternative, though, that we would definitely need to look at, that's going 100% outsourcing it and see what those costs would be to do it 100% versus maintaining that equipment, which is very expensive and sits there most of the year in our lot. So did we look at that? Are we going to look at that as an option, Charlie? I felt like two might lead to your third option. Since I found nobody that was doing 100% outsourcing and the only person I found that had even dipped their toe in the pool had not had a favorable response I felt like it might not be a very responsible thing for sale they say oh we just need to outsource the whole thing and it just completely collapse on itself I felt like that if we started down it maybe and did a pilot for lack of a better term and we found it to be successful and give us the kind of benefit and reward that we were looking for yeah it would be a pretty easy decision to then react to that plus that allowed the market to adjust accordingly rather than just saying, hey, we want you to collect 100,000 tons of leaves this year for us in six weeks. Got any bidders? That sounded a little risky. Well, I would be agreeable to that. And, Chair, I know I'm not a member of the committee, but I think a motion to direct the administration to proceed with that RFP to see what our bids would be and see what that cost would be. I know we do a great job with our system and the folks that run it. I know Rob's here. They do a good job. I just don't think we've put enough resources behind them. We've over the years cut, cut, cut, cut, cut to the point now is we can't service the whole city, and we can't do it in a timely manner, as you pointed out, Charlie. I think the deadline before Christmas is a good deadline. I think anything after that, you know, it's a waste of time. And I think a lot of people do. What percentage, have we looked at what percentage actually utilized this service of the ratepayers? Is there a way to measure that at all? Do we measure that as we're picking it? Well, you know, this is, and CEO Hamilton and I have talked about this, you know, as I transition back into water quality and out of the public works arena, that there's a couple of things that I'm going to keep with me, and this is one of them because I've kind of started this. And that's something I want to look at is that I don't think that there has been very much really analysis of the data to this point in time of what alternatives there are. We just kind of keep going on and beating on the rock, and beating on the rock, as you pointed out, really isn't working. I know we know how many tons that we collect and stuff, but I don't think there's been anything to the level of analysis of like a time study or anything. I couldn't even speculate what a vendor would charge you, and I'm thinking to myself, am I charging them by ton or am I charging them by curb foot? Or by the hour, possibly. By the hour. Well, that could be even more dangerous. Yeah. Yeah, well, what I'm looking for, though, is some kind of measurement to say, you know, every dollar we spend in education and communication, as you outlined, increases the amount of people to actually do it themselves and put it into bags in the new Lenny container and actually utilize those things before sweeping them to the curb. Is there a correlation between every dollar we spend to educate versus spending a dollar to go pick it up? Well, I know Mark York's in the back, and I'm sure his wheels are spinning on how he would do that. But honestly, Councilmember Standard, I think that the focus has been so much on trying to just get them up, because we're oftentimes reacting to the complaints that are coming. It's like you're not going fast enough that there's not been a lot of collection or analysis of data. I think under option two, if we put the RFP out, we see what the price points are in the community and how much that will cost. And maybe we can target those areas that need additional services. But you said you have the tonnage we've collected over the years by year? Is that tonnage going up or down? What was it this year? This year was roughly 1650. Last year was roughly 1600. 1600 to 1650 tons. So we're about the same each year. We're not increasing or decreasing our pickup. Yeah, there was an uptick of it, you know, in that, you know, I think a lot of it depends on where you start. it also depends on the timing and stuff too. You know, again, back to the, um, the, the photos, it was my decision. I think I kind of came to regret it as time went on, but I told Rob start from the outside and work inward. He's like, no, we never do that. We always start in and work out. And, but I was looking out my window and I see all these leaves on the trees. And it's like, if we run through the, the core inner area first, we're not going to pick anything up and we're going to be right back there eight weeks from now. And so some of the uptick may you've seen is that you hit the peak place at the right time, as opposed to going through at the wrong time. There's so many variables associated with the data. It's, like I said, it's, that's one of the reasons I was a little hesitant on just saying, oh, we just need to outsource this thing totally because I don't, it's almost like going into a dark room. Sure. I understand. I'll close with this chair. You know, another option would be what do we give as an incentive for people to do it themselves. Do we give them a lower bill if they don't get the service? I mean, there could be a way to give people incentives out there if they actually utilize the bags and lending service versus us coming through their front door and picking it up. So maybe that's an opportunity as well in the future. Thank you. Very good, sir. Thank you. Next is Council Member Henson. Thank you, Chair. I don't know the history behind this and why we started this. But in your research, you found that very few cities vacuumed leaves, correct? I can't say very few. I would say the predominantly larger ones have stopped. Now, at some time, did they? Probably. Dayton, Ohio was on that list. I grew up in the Dayton area. They always vacuumed the leaves. But somewhere along the line, they made the decision to stop doing it. Right. I certainly wish that we held. This past year was a disaster with all the snow, and I don't think it would matter if we had an outsource or not. With the snow, you can't vacuum leaves, I wouldn't think. You're right. It impacts it. And Rob and Albert may correct me on this, but I know from my snow removal, when we go into snow removal out of the sewer business, it's not just the day that it snowed. It's the day before and the day after because you've kind of got this recovery transition things going around there. So you really lose more time than just the time that the snow was on the ground. Right. And we I mean, I'm I don't mean to blame anyone other than the weather, but it was, you know, that it was definitely a factor. I mean, I had streets that didn't get picked up till March or vacuum. It was. And it said mixing it into that. It said don't want to downplay this equipment issue. council member stentic kind of reiterated on it as well is that you know if if we're going to stay in this business and and not have the same discussion next year and the year after that at some point in time we're going to have to look at our equipment because basically they're running stuff you know on duct tape and bailing wire that's credit to the to the fleet services folks and be able to keep the stuff up there but it's the same stuff we've been using for year in year out. And it is a bitter pill to swallow as far as how we would be able to invest in something that sits idle 47 weeks out of the year. Yeah. And I see two very important components. One being it is not sustainable as far as energy efficiency. You're running these big trucks, vacuuming you know when you really could be putting the leaves and bags and linnies and instead of you know and then two the leaves that lay there and get blowed around and go into our storm drains and affects the water quality yeah you know i wasn't you remember this council member henson that i wasn't a big fan of leaf collection as part of the water quality management fee when we first did it. One, leaves weren't a regulatory requirement on my MS4 permit, so I was only focused on compliance issues. But now since I've had been on the front lines with leaf collection, I'm seeing it from the other side, and I've seen the light to some extent. It's not a 100% water quality issue, but there is a defined link there because people are going to do what they do. They rake them out and get them off my yard. That means somewhere at or near the curb, a couple of windy days and a little bit of rain, and it's flowing down the storm sewer, and we're removing it anyway at a much higher cost than we would if we were sucking it up off the curb. Yeah, if they lay there long enough, you'll have dead grass and lots of other good things to go along with them. So thank you, Charlie. Thank you, ma'am. Next up is Council Member Clark. Thank you, Chair. Charlie, it seems like to me we have three components that we have to solve somehow. We have to solve the equipment problem. We have to solve the duplicate personnel, and we have to solve the schedule. First about equipment, I want to know, is there better equipment? I mean, there's got to be some equipment that has been invented that is especially for leaf pickup with vacuuming and then doing something with the leaves that compact them somewhat. Is there any equipment like that that is available that some genius has invented that would make it a lot quicker and a lot easier, eliminate a lot of the dump time? There are other pieces of equipment out there. I talked to a couple of folks that they talked about different things. One has almost like a Vactor type of big tank on the back of the truck, and they use the thing to suck it up. But the problem is there's no one size that fits all. I brought this street up, and I was hoping there were a whole lot more cars parked on it than there are in the photo. But you can imagine what will happen. and some of the very narrow streets and stuff like that, that specialized piece of equipment that works really well on the big grassy median going out Richmond Road doesn't work worth a darn back in those neighborhoods, and vice versa. So you end up with a lot of different specialty equipment. The short answer is no, I have not found anybody that has the silver bullet as far as equipment. That's not the answer I wanted, Charlie. Sorry. The other problem is duplicate personnel, and obviously you've dealt with that, and I think it is a problem. And I think Rob and his crew did as well as anybody could possibly have done under the circumstances, but we have to find some way to eliminate the problems there. The third thing is scheduling. We've got to be very flexible in the scheduling on one sense. On the other hand, and I'm really guilty of this, and I admit this, and Rob will probably agree with me, the squeaky wheel gets the attention, and I can tell you that on probably more than one occasion, I called and said, I've got this irate homeowner whose grass is dying, and he's really bugging me. Can you get out there to do that? And I think we probably ought to just eliminate that. we probably ought to just stick to the schedule and say to the council members, sorry, but we're going to stick to the schedule no matter what. So, as I say, I'm guilty of that, and that's probably not a good idea. But those are my comments, and I think there are ways we can really make this work a lot quicker, a lot better, a lot more secure in terms of scheduling. So thank you. Thank you, Chair. He made that suggestion. It's not a bad suggestion. Thank you, sir. Last on the current list is Vice Mayor Gordon. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Charlie, thank you very much. Just a couple questions. Back on the pages where you surveyed other cities to see what they're doing, and a lot of them require leaves being bags. and do you have any, I guess it would be anecdotal information about those cities and people who choose not to bag their leaves but just leave them and let them blow around and that sort of thing? I mean, did they give you any information on how that worked? No, they did not. They, you know, as far as any type of enforcement type of thing regarding somebody, I would suspect that it's a lot like blowing grass clippings into the street, which we get a lot of as well. Is that with all the things that you're having to deal with is that they don't have the resources to try to go check it, chase it down. Nobody said to me is that, oh, and by the way, we go out and ticket people who haven't picked up their leaves. I mean, there's no law that says you have to rake them at all. Well, and a lot of people don't have trees, but they inherit their neighbor's leaves. I can't leave my garage door open because my neighbors blow into my garage. So, yeah, I know. Well, I know it was just briefly mentioned, but I want to go back to the idea of whether it would be possible for us to offer the homeowner an incentive of some kind to use their Lenny or bags. Have we ever, I know it might be complicated, but the people who get the service pay, they pay for it. And so and we're paying to vacuum up the leaves. So it seems like a positive incentive of some kind might be useful. Well, and it was one I had not thought of. And when Council Member Stanton, I wrote it down because that was one that I had missed. And it's worth thinking about. My initial thought of it was, is that, you know, OK, well, how do you return the incentive back to the homeowner? and if you've got a street where some are doing it or some are not, you're still driving up and down the street. But at the same time, thinking about it at the podium isn't going back and really thinking about it. And I think there is some merit. Let's explore that to see what we can do to incentivize maybe not individual homeowners, but particular areas. Again, like my neighborhood, my neighbors would probably up here kill me if they heard me saying this, but I don't think that we need vacuum leaf collection. It takes a few times, but I get it up and I put it into my container and stuff like that, and it's gone. It's fine. I don't feel like, you know, that I'm getting shorted personally that I don't get vacuum leaf collection even though I'm paying for it. I understand that from a broader standpoint is that public areas and certain areas that have a more significant canopy than I do, they've got to have it or otherwise we've got a problem. Well, I think if, and the mulching mowers, until you have to quit mowing, but I think the combination of the mulching mowers, the linnies, and the bags, if we can somehow get more people on board with those, it would help our problem. Because even if you have to go up and down the street, if there's not much on the street, it's going to take a lot less time for the vacuum leaf to go. I guess, like I said, what I would think, though, is trying to think about a geographically oriented incentive, because that way what resources we do have can be focused in those peak areas, and it still gets me where I think we need to be, shorten the duration. If you're going out and doing the military scorched earth approach there, that's where you need to be, at the right time, at peak time. Well, I like that idea of the seven calendar days before Christmas, and then if there's any other potential time, it could be focused where the need is. I mean, we do that with roads when there's snow. We focus on the areas where it's needed. We do it with a lot of our services. Of course, it's different because people are paying directly for this service. And just real quickly, I want to say all of it wasn't a disaster last year because I know in the 4th District there were quite a few streets. We had snow. They quit vacuuming up the leaves, and then the snow cleared off, and then they came back and restarted where they hadn't done. So I was quite impressed with that. Yeah, we know that. I mean, unfortunately, sometimes the negative overwhelms the positive, but we got a lot of positive feedback. And I know that Albert and Rob and the Streets and Roads folks worked really, really hard on it. Obviously, we all know they had their hands full this winter in particular, and so I appreciate everything they did. Yes. Mr. Chair, are you wanting a motion, or Charlie, are you wanting a motion on the RFP, or what? Basically, I was presenting you a menu of information that I was hoping that among this discussion, you guys would arrive at a direction to give me to proceed. So I'm not expecting any specific one, but if you have directive for me to what the next step is, have at it. All right. Then I would say, do we need to take action for you to put an RFP out? I don't think so. I think you can do that on your own. I think that would be the next step because Alternative 1 is all us. Alternative 2 has some outsourcing in it. You agreed to kind of do a follow-up for Council Member Stendon on kind of an Alternative 3 that would put the whole thing out. I respectfully would suggest that we do Alternative 2, which is the blended approach. Fine. Because that RFP will give us a price point, but it will also give us a performance point if we step through that door next year. Because that price point compared with the performance point kind of answers all the questions of whether you want to take that dramatic leap and go completely outside. This has done in enough time for you to put the RFP out and kind of come back to us with a midpoint before we launch into this. This fall, it strikes me. I think we're okay. And I would just say to you, I'll give you direction. I don't think that streets and roads should pick these up. I don't think that parks should pick them up. I think the Division of Sanitation should pick them up. They run more curb miles than anybody else around here and no more pickup points than anybody else. That's just my two cents worth since you're asking for direction. Anybody else got anything? Anything else you want? No, sir. Thank you very much. Appreciate your time. and your expertise and next up we have the two code enforcement issues which council member lawless has toggled in and asked for us to take this after she has arrived so if it is if it pleases the committee we would move on to item number four council member acres if that's all right with you i don't want to spring anything on you it's we're just because really we we would actually take a motion to change our agenda, but. Sure, that's fine. Yours is, yours. Should be quick and easy. All right, I was going to ask for a motion to change our agenda so that the next item we take up is the text amendment item, and then we come back to do the code enforcement items after that. I will move that. A motion. Second. And a second. I cannot second, actually. Discussion. All in favor? Someone else. Thank you very much. You are page 54, please, ma'am. Yes, page 54. This is a text amendment to the zoning ordinance, which would allow food trucks to operate in professional office zones, which is P1. There have been a few requests to the food truck operators in areas like Sullivan University is one example, the Kentucky Blood Center in Beaumont, Paragon Center on Haritsburg Road at Pasadena and Alexandria, as well as Corporate Plaza on Corporate Drive and other office parks, Alumni New Circle is another example. And so the planning staff drafted, in addition to the accessory use paragraph, number three under that paragraph, and it's underlined there, they would allow them to operate on the property if invited and would serve employees and visitors, but not necessarily open to the public. similar to the zone changes that I brought forth previously for industrial zones and P2 zones. Very good. Director Cain, do you want to make any comments? Do you have anything? Good morning. How are you? You don't have to say anything. I just, since you're here. But I guess specifically, Council Member, yours is to add the words, mobile food unit vendors may also serve this purpose and be parked outside of a building to serve employees and visitors, provided that the requirements of Section 15-11 of the Code of Ordinances are met. That's the specific tax change you're proposing. That's correct. And Section 15-11 of the Code of Ordinances is where we originally established mobile food unit vendors and all of the rules that they are required to abide by any time that they operate in the city. And it falls under, earlier in that paragraph, it talks about facilities for serving food for employees as an accessory use in the zone, and so this would just follow suit. Okay. Sir, welcome. Just a couple points of clarification. Although we did prepare the text amendment at Council Member Aker's request, we have not, as a staff, taken a position on this one way or another. We merely prepared the text amendment as requested. So it's an open question. Just a couple things that I would want to say. We don't have any opposition to mobile food unit vendors. I just note that professional office zones are usually closer to residential than the industrial zones that we've had. So there may be some concerns by neighborhood associations or others. The other thing that I would note that we did prepare this as an accessory use, so you would have to have an operating office. But as a practical enforcement matter, you know, you couldn't limit it to just the people that work in that building or are visiting that building. And again, whether that's a concern or not, certainly not in the larger parks, I don't think so, but maybe some others. But I want to say we have no objection to the Texas Amendment being initiated. As you know, part of the process, the Planning Commission would review. and we would also send letters to all the registered neighborhood associations so we could hear if there were any concerns coming back. Very good. Are you up? Vice Mayor Gordon. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Chris, before you sit down, thank you for your comments. And so I'm presuming that if we initiate this text amendment, one of the things I would have liked to have seen was a map. of the P1. Do you have that? When I saw that this was on the agenda, I did take the liberty of preparing some maps to show you where they are. Ah, very good. We have them here and can bring them up if you're interested. Okay, I would like to see that because one of my other questions was going to be what you just said is how will this impact neighborhoods? Where are these P1 zones? And so would they, I don't know if this has been vetted clear through or not, Councilmember Akers, but would they park on the property of the P1 zone or on the public right-of-way? This would be on, not on the public right-of-way. I think you already have a program that directs where those can go. We're talking on private property. Okay, so, and that is, where is that stated? Is that in the 15-11, or how would one know that? The zoning ordinance only regulates private property. Okay. So you all, through the code of ordinances, regulate public rights of way. So I do have, this is the text that was proposed, and I went ahead and did this to show you what the current ordinance does allow. As you know, restaurants per se are not allowed in the P1 zone. However, you can provide incidental retail sales and food service. The classic example is a cafeteria for a large office or within a hospital. Certainly the public can go in, but primarily it's geared towards that kind of operation. And that's basically what is being proposed in terms of this language. It would be an adjunct to that. And the same thing was done, as Council Member Akers pointed out, last year for the industrial zones. Before you go on, can I just ask one more question, then I'm finished. And maybe you'll be answering it along there. So when someone applies for a zone change to a P1 zone, is there a parking requirement? Yes. And knowing that there is a parking requirement, would this have any impact on the available parking spaces for that P-1 zone? It can, but let me explain how this works through the Code of Ordinances section that you passed, 1511. As a part of those requirements, any site that's eligible to have a mobile food location comes to our office and presents a site plan, and we designate on that site plan a designated area for mobile food units. And that's good for a period of up to two years. And we do that to make sure that no minimum parking. It can only happen if they're not, you know, getting below minimum. There are no spaces required for the mobile food unit itself. It's just assumed that, you know, it's not generating any as the ordinance is done. So we do that, and we make sure it's not in any circulation lanes. And once we have that area designated, they can move mobile food unit vendors in and out anytime, 24-7, subject to the health department rules and requirements. So again, as proposed, this would be an accessory use. So there would have to be an office building or other permitted use on the property to begin with. Right now, this map represents all the areas and all the different business zones where a mobile food unit vendor is permitted as a principal use. Basically, these are the same zones where you can have a restaurant, brick-and-mortar restaurant. So all of those locations are eligible. Any one of those properties could have a mobile food unit vendor located on them. As we mentioned, last year you passed an amendment to the zoning ordinance to allow, as an accessory use, mobile food unit vendors in the industrial warehousing zones. And this map represents all of those areas that were added when you passed that text amendment. So these areas are now eligible to have a mobile food unit. Again, these are industrial areas. If you think of the kinds of uses that are allowed in industrial, there was not a lot of great concern about intrusive effects of that, and they would primarily be serving people that were at those businesses or factories, those kinds of things. And the yellow of us, Sherpa. So when you combine those together, this map represents all the places where a mobile food unit vendor is authorized to locate on private property in Fayette County at the present time. This map indicates the location of the professional office zone. And as we noted, the proposal would add these lands to all the ones that you see here to be eligible for a mobile food unit vendor. So you're saying this slide plus the previous slide combined? Right. That's everything that's allowed today, where they're allowed today. If this text amendment that's proposed for initiation day were passed, all of these properties would then become eligible as well. And in the end, you would end up with this being the total coverage if this were passed into law. Well, those are pretty colors. Thank you. Are there other comments from the council or the committee? Council Member Henson. Thank you, Chair. Yes, ma'am. Thank you, Chris. I know they would still have to be approved for a site plan? Yes. Okay. Because I know that I had some issues in my district where the parking lots were very small. It was like a strip office, and they were setting up in the parking lot, and really no room for cars to even pass by them. So they would still have to have the approved. Right. Thank you. Yes, ma'am. Council Member Lawless, welcome. Thank you. Thank you. I think that the P1, there are a lot of P1 areas, many of which are out in the suburban areas where there's nothing but office buildings and people have to leave to go get food. But a lot of the P1s are, especially in the older areas of town, have been spot zoned to P1, and they're in a neighborhood. There is not available parking anyway. They're right blended in with residential. And I'm very supportive of these P1 office building parks. I think about the one out at Harrodsburg across from Beaumont. Hamburg has several of them. And, you know, I don't get out of downtown much. And so the application for those would be wonderful, you know, and I was an advocate for that a long time ago. So, however, it seems that it would be more appropriate that it be a conditional use rather than permitted in a P1 zone, blanketly. And that would be one alternative, but there's also another alternative. Within the P1 zone, there is a special type of creature called the professional office project that upon approval of a development plan by the Planning Commission on a site that's over 10 acres, you can have what's called a professional office project, and it gives you a break on parking and some things like that. and most of the larger parks like perimeter park corporate center the ones that you've mentioned have that designation so you know if you were concerned about proximity to residential as you note a lot of times offices were used as a step down from more intense commercial abutting neighborhoods because the activities usually over by about 5 or 6 p.m you know you could set either distance requirements or you could make them allowed in the professional office project may address the concerns that you have. Well, maybe a blend of the two where a professional office project would be able to get one if they wanted it, but it would be conditional if it wasn't. one of those. And it doesn't mean that it would never be appropriate, but I can think of many instances where it would be inappropriate. And there was a thing about just for the people who work there and their guests in the professional office projects, you know, patients or customers as well as staff. I can't imagine somebody driving out there to use the food truck. And so, you know, that could be scratched. But, you know, again, if those could be automatically considered and even striking out in their deaths, because how are you going to monitor that? And that those that aren't professional office projects, it would have to be conditional use. That would be a possible alternative that you could put forth. Thank you. Yes. Council Member, well, you've both spoken. So Council Member, pardon me, Vice Mayor Gordon. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I just had one more question, Chris. When this, if we initiate the text amendment, And so would all owners of all P1 properties be notified? No. Oh. Just when the truck shows up. Okay. Well, then let me ask how we would ensure that the P1 owners, some of whom probably have just enough parking for their site, How would we ensure that they are aware this is coming and that they give input to the Planning Commission? I don't know how you would do that. I'm not aware of any association of P1 landowners in Fayette County or anything like that. Again, that's true of every text amendment. We don't notify all property owners that might be subject to that zoning, just as when you pass a general ordinance that affects the entire community, not everyone gets specific notice. So as it gets advertised, as it does, you do have a requirement that we notify all neighborhood associations that are registered. So the word gets out there on the test. So then would it be on a case-by-case basis? I mean, I'm presuming that the person who would initiate the request to have a food truck would be the P1. Wouldn't it make sense it would be the P1 owner? We do require that the owner be the applicant, or that when the food truck operator comes in for the site plan approval, they have a letter. Because we have had instances where people have set up food trucks without owner's permission in the middle of the night, and they're gone, and things like that. Okay, so I think that alleviates my concern with that, because a P1 owner wouldn't just have somebody move in with their truck. They would be actually applying to have a food truck there. Absolutely. Yeah, okay. And then when that application is received, the surrounding area would be notified, correct? Right now, everywhere you do it, it's by right. So if they meet the technical requirements, if they're not in a required circulation aisle, if after they take up whatever parking spaces they take up for the food truck, they still meet the minimum parking for that lot, then they are automatically granted approval. Okay, that makes sense. But then when you said that all neighborhood associations would be notified, is that for the initial text amendment? For the text amendment, correct. Okay, all right, thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Yes, ma'am. Next, I'm just going to take Council Member Kaye, then come back to Council Member Akers. Thank you. Thank you, Chair. Chris, what we have here, of course, is principal uses and accessory uses. We don't have a list of conditional uses for P1. I presume there are some. There are quite an extensive list, yes. I think it might be useful to have that list so we can see what kinds of things the zoning ordinance presently puts in that category, and if this is comparable to those or different from those, that would be helpful. Thank you. Thank you, Chair. We can provide that. Council Member Akers. Thank you, Chair. So, Chris, you included this text amendment and this text specifically in this third paragraph because it aligns with the accessory use that's already allowed, which is facility serving food, I imagine, correct? Versus putting it in a list of conditional uses. You requested that it be the same as what was done for the industrial. In other zones. So we prepared this in P1. The only one that we had comparable was this section, and so we used the same language that we used in the industrial zones and piggybacked it onto this accessory use. So, again, it's very limited use. Again, the only place where a typical restaurant would be allowed in the professional office zone is, I didn't give you that section, but in a professional office project, as we discussed, with very limited outside advertising and entrances, and in a building of a certain size, you can have a restaurant. I believe, like I've been to the doctor at St. Joseph Office Park, and I think on the first floor there's a cafe, for instance, that has coffee and bagels and such for patients coming in and out of there. So I'm thinking that's probably what that refers to. That's exactly what this section allows. And so I want to clarify, too, that in the 1511 Code of Ordinances, section 1511.5 and then paragraph 13, specifically says that food trucks cannot operate or locate in a residential zone or in an area-zoned residential. So if that were the case, then they couldn't set up there for areas that are P1 within nearby residential zones. And then also I think that the offices and the food trucks would agree to having limited hours of operation based on the time that the business is open for business. I mean, from what I've heard and the requests I've received have been, you know, like for instance, Sullivan University wants to have a back-to-school kickoff rally for students and wants to invite food trucks. So the Blood Center wants to have an event at the Blood Center and wants to invite food trucks. So it's not that the food trucks are just going to randomly show up in office parks. But again, like you said, they have to apply for the permit and have the location and be invited to come. And so I think if we limited it to the hours the business is open, for instance, would be. Well, I would just caution that in terms of zoning enforcement and making that part of the zoning rules, we don't have people out at night. Right. If you're going to consider hours of operation, which is very, very rarely and only extreme cases dealt with through a conditional use through the Board of Adjustment. None of the zoning regulations deal with time the business is open. You might want to consider making that part of the code of ordinances or something where the police could actually enforce that. Okay. I think that's all I have. Thank you, Chair. Council Member Lawless. Again, I think like Sullivan and, you know, perfect example of a good use of that. I just am concerned about law office that's P1 in the urban core that it may be appropriate, but possibly the building to the right and the building to the left don't want it there. And again, I think I'm very supportive. I just think that we could have a compromise here would be that unless it's an office park-y kind of place, whatever project, that it be a conditional use. And it's not so much about the neighborhoods or residential, but in the urban core, there are a lot of little stretches of professional offices. Suburbs as well. There are a lot of those in the suburbs as well. Yeah, I don't get out there much, but I'll take a field trip. We could certainly prepare an alternative text amendment for the committee to consider. You know, I don't know. If it was the will of the committee. I just don't see a downside to having that option. And if it doesn't work, it doesn't work. To have, you know, if it's an office park or whatever, that they can get it automatically. But if it's in the urban core and very tight spaces where there's, you know, two or three P1s in a block, maybe like on, what's that street? High Street, maybe, you know, they have some office buildings that are used to be residences that are now law offices or accounting offices. Parking for it. But, and so, you know, is it going to be something that the people next door aren't going to be happy about? So I just feel like having a blanket P1 is okay. Then we have an opportunity to do something really great that provides a service, that gives opportunities that may have an unintended impact in certain situations. And I'd just like for us to avoid that. Thank you, ma'am. Thank you. Those comments have engendered more interest in the issue. First would be Vice Mayor Gordon. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I would just like to go back to what you said in relation to Council Member Lawless's point. If an applicant comes with this idea, you are going to look at the parking spaces available, correct? Correct. And that will have to be done. Correct. And if there are not enough parking spaces, if the food truck wants to be there and it boots out and they go below their minimum, it would not be approved. Is that correct or not correct? That's correct. They would have to have the minimum required by the zoning ordinance. Yes. Right. Sometimes in very busy offices even that's not enough, but that's more rare. And I mean, I think that's a safeguard in the situation where there's more than one P1 right in a small area, then it would, I think I'm correct, you could say if I'm not, it would mean that one P1 can't take away so much parking with a food truck that the others are impacted below the minimum. Is that correct or not? Well, it'd be calculated on that lot and that site. Again, they would have to show that they typically it's one parking space for 200 square feet for an office, general office building. So they would have to have that much. I don't really want to put you on the spot so you can plead whatever you want to plead. But are you comfortable with this? I mean, your shop wrote it. And so I have all faith that it's... We wrote it. We didn't propose it. Yes, I understand that. I will say it. Let me put it a different way, because I think this is important. You've seen for many years the impact of different zoning, accessory uses, conditional uses, et cetera. Is there anything in it that concerns you that you might like to see change? As I said, the only thing that does give me some pause is that, again, a lot of times P1 are very close to residential and were set up and agreed to by neighborhoods as a step-down buffer for more intense commercial. And if a food truck came in running a generator and generating smells, they might not be happy. So is there a way? That would be the concern I'd have, but again, that's just me personally. So is there a way we can change this before we initiate it to take that into consideration? Well, again, there are a lot of different ways. You could put a distance requirement from the unit from any residentially zoned property. You could, as has been discussed, make it accessible, pardon me, accessory, you know, allowed by right as an accessory in those projects, larger projects, designated projects, and make it conditional everywhere else. That would be another alternative. So, or you could leave it as is. Okay. All right. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you, ma'am. Then returning to Council Member Henson. Thank you, Chair. Yes, ma'am. Chris, isn't there already a restriction in there about a certain proximity to a residential zone or dwelling? Isn't there a reference to that? I might have it confused with itinerant merchant. I think that may be part of the ordinance you passed regulating the use of public streets for food trucks, if I recall correctly. Now, is this currently conditional use in a P1? No. It is currently? Currently, mobile food vendors, we allow them. Like if we've allowed the blood center that's having an outdoor fair or something, to have one for a weekend up to three times a year. We've sort of made our own ruling as what's kind of a special event, temporary special event. So currently it's already an accessory use? No, it's really not. It's not. It's not allowed basically in any of these areas under the zoning law right now. Say that again. It is not allowed in any of the areas shown on this panel. So it's not allowed in a P1 at all. Correct. And if we made it conditional, then they wanted a food truck. They could come down before the Board of Adjustment, apply for the conditional, and then they would be good from now on. I think, yeah, we could do that. Right now, as the code of ordinance is passed, when you designate a site, I think it's good for two years, and then they have to make another application. And since there's much more involved in going to the Board of Adjustment, because there would be notification and more formal hearing, we might want to revisit the Code of Ordinances section and maybe not put that two-year limit on it if you've gone to all that trouble. I think to be safe, I would prefer that it be a conditional use based upon issues that I've had in my district. and it's not just food trucks. You know, there's other vendors too. But based upon that, I think I'd feel more comfortable with a conditional use, allowing it in the P1 but under a conditional use. Thank you. Ma'am, Council Member Kay. Thank you, Chair. I think the question of adjacency to the residential areas is, for me, the key issue. Allowing them in industrial zones didn't raise that question. Allowing them in P1 would. The notion of regulating them by size, I think, is a little bit complex. So my suggestion would be to allow them, as suggested here, as an accessory use, except where the P1 has a certain distance from residential areas. And I don't know if Council Member Akers is listening to this, but I want to see if it seems to make sense to her as well. I'm saying make them an accessory use except where the adjacency between the applicant and a residential area is X, and we can figure what that out is, and then it's a conditional use. So they'd have to let the neighbors know if they were residential. I think that would kind of meet both the concern because I think they were a good idea. They'd be grayed out in some areas, but we do want to protect the residential area. That's my thoughts. Thank you, Chair. Council Member Akers. Thank you. I agree, and I'm absolutely fine with that. Putting a buffer of 500 feet or 150 or actually whatever Chris maybe wants to recommend. Maybe we look at how many, I don't know, look at the distances for those that are near residential and whatever you all think, really. I mean, I think that that's fair and reasonable. So we don't want to impede on neighbors or neighborhoods. That's not at all the intention. The intention is the office parks and the larger areas. So do you want this to come back to committee with some? Probably should. Some language that would include. I think we got Peggy saying make it conditional. The vice mayor had a point. I think Council Member Kay had a point. I'm not, I didn't catalog. And Council Member Lawless, yes, you too had a point. I'm sorry. We left that out. I just want to make sure we have a list of concerns or re-presentation points or re-edit points for this before it returns to us. I might suggest we could draft three alternatives. Of course, we have one as is. We could do one that would be as is but with a distance requirement for you to consider. and I could light up residential areas relative to these P1s as well and show you that relationship. We could do one that does the split where it would be conditional except in the larger ones. And really that professional office park designation is such a defined thing. I'm comfortable with that. I would get less comfortable. We said on a site of more than an acre with a building of, we don't want to go there. But I could put together a pretty simple one that would make it conditional, except in those larger ones. And then you'd have three different versions to look at. Do you want to bring them back to us in a month's time or longer? No problem. This is pretty simple ordinance drafting. Are you comfortable with the numbers? Yes, sir. Any other committee comment? We'll ask you to do so. And if you want to include some maps for the packet, that would be great, too. That will be fine. Thanks so much, Chris. Very welcome. Thank you, Chair. How are you here? Anything else? You good? I'm good. Let's open the leaf discussion, but last longer. I'm just kidding. We're going to double back on ourselves anyway, so it's okay. Thank you, sir. Thank you. Councilmember Lawless, we had taken action to rotate our order of business so we could revert back to item three, which is assistance for code enforcement compliance and or code enforcement fines. The first one brought by the vice mayor through the links process and the second one brought by yourself. Thank you. Would you like to speak to it or just have the report? No, I just said thank you very much for your consideration. Oh, yes, you're very welcome. Yes, ma'am, absolutely. So, Mr. Hollis, do you want to brief us, please, sir? Good afternoon. Good afternoon. This first item was brought by the link in full disclosure. I did staff that link last year, so I have a little bit of a head start on this item. But this relates mainly to assistance programs for people with code enforcement violations. So the first thing, just as an overview, the goal of code enforcement is not to issue fines and penalties and liens. It is for compliance, and that compliance means a safe and well-maintained community. And that's sort of where this came from in the link. There are several occasions where homeowners may get a citation, particularly on housing violations, where applying more penalties and more liens is not going to get us to that compliance. And that is why we do have some of these alternative programs, and I'm going to go through those today. Several programs are available to assist low-income homeowners with violations. there are some gaps in that coverage due to very specific eligibility requirements. First thing I'll do is go through the process of the three different types of code enforcement violations. First is the housing violation process, which is basically when you have violated either the International Property Maintenance Code or the revisions to that code that we have made in Chapter 12 of our code of ordinances. The owner is given 30 days to repair or 20 days to appeal those citations. If no action is taken, a compliance letter is sent, and then civil penalties will be issued. Those are issued based on the number of violations and the number of re-inspections, which is laid out in the table in the Code of Ordinances. Liens are then filed based on any unpaid civil penalties, and the city can initiate a foreclosure in an extreme case, obviously. The nuisance violation process deals with tall grass and weeds, trash and debris, indoor furniture, outside and junk vehicles. I'm sure you are all very familiar with this procedure. The complaint is inspected by code enforcement. The owner is given 14 days to address the issue or 10 days to appeal. As you're also all aware, there's a 24-hour emergency notice that does go out. In addition, those are obviously only in extreme cases. If no action is taken, the city can abate that nuisance and actually just hire contractors to address it and issue civil penalties. Those civil penalties are issued based on the number of complaints within a 12-month period at a particular property. And then liens are also filed on that, and the city can, again, initiate a foreclosure. The last type of violation the code enforcement inspects is sidewalk violations. The owner is given 30 to 60 days to repair any violations, 20 days to appeal. They don't take any action. There's a final compliance letter that's sent, and the civil penalty is issued based on the square footage of the unrepaired sidewalk per 30-day period. Once again, the liens are filed, and the city could technically initiate a foreclosure. I don't believe that that happens very often in the case of sidewalk violations. Just a few notes. Housing violations cannot be abated by the city. So the city does not have the ability to go out and actually just fix violations of the International Property Maintenance Code. Nuisance violations can actually, in fact, be abated by the city, so we can hire contractors to go out and actually take care of that issue. The cost of that is obviously billed to the owner. Code enforcement can demolish structures in extreme cases in order to limit demolition of structures. An appeal or eligibility for an assistance program stops the code enforcement process, so they are allowed to go through that process while they are under that appeal. An important note is code enforcement does only inspect the exterior of a building unless they are giving permission to enter, which is typically in a tenant situation where the tenant would give code enforcement the right to enter the premises. You cannot imagine a whole lot of situations where owner-occupied residents would allow code enforcement to come in and subsequently cite them. So it's typically in a tenant situation where they come inside. We have some existing assistance programs. There's the sidewalk assistance program, which has $75,000 in fiscal year 2014. It covers 100% of the cost for homeowners that meet the income requirements and 50% match for all others. That fund typically is exhausted within the fiscal year, so that all of those funds do run out. There are two programs, both the emergency repair program and the housing rehab program. They're actually funded through our federal allocations. The first is an emergency repair program for HVAC, plumbing, and electrical, up to $5,000. And the second is a housing rehab program. And this is a very robust program that is run through our federal dollars. It is a whole house rehab. So this is not a, if you just get a citation and you just have an issue with your gutters or cracked windows, they come in and they bring the entire house up to modern building codes, which is obviously a very expensive proposition. It is limited to $25,000, except in the cases of historic properties or if there are environmental concerns such as lead paint. It does not include accessory structures. So if you have a detached garage or anything like that, it would not apply. The waiting list for this program is currently a year long. So it was funded in the last approved consolidated plan to cover about 20 units, and those are obviously, there's more demand than is funded. There are also outside agencies that perform some of this work. The Realtors Community Housing Foundation, they perform exterior home repairs, emergency repairs for HVAC plumbing and roofing. They also have an accessibility ramp program. They do have very specific eligibility requirements. It has both age and income requirements. Community Action Council operates a weatherization program. It likewise has income eligibility requirements. And an organization called Assisted Better Living Everywhere does perform some. Their program is not as formal. They are referred, our social services department helped put this list together, and they do refer people there from time to time. I will also say that this is certainly not exhaustive. There are a number of churches and other organizations that do this work on sort of an informal basis. So our recommendations after having met with both grants and special programs and social services is that we're going to work to create a flyer that goes out with every single code enforcement violation that notifies all people of all the programs that are available to assist with these violations. In addition, we have talked with Commissioner Mills, and she had suggested that we hold training sessions with social workers and code enforcement officers so they can share information about the programs that are available and also some techniques because the social workers are very skilled in this arena. And the third recommendation is to establish an assistance program for housing violations in particular. Housing violations are not able to be abated by the city like nuisance violations are. And we already have an assistance program for sidewalk violations. So really the gap is in those housing violations. There's a couple approaches that could be taken. You could look at a coordination of volunteer-based services. There are a lot of churches. There's a lot of student groups that do community service. And you could try to coordinate those resources into a system that would allow some of these violations to be addressed without fines and penalties. You could also look at a matching grant program, which would be modeled after the sidewalk assistance program, that would provide funds. Funds would be set aside and it would provide them with an application process to address the housing issues that may come up. So with that, I'll turn it over to any questions. Well presented. I think you have engendered the vice mayor for questions. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you, Jonathan. I like your recommendations, and I just wanted to ask back on page 40 where you talk about outside agencies. I'm fairly familiar with the Community Action Council and their programs. Do you know how the Realtors Community Housing Foundation gets their elderly folks to participate? How do they advertise or how do they? I'm not sure exactly how they advertise their programs. I know that social services and grants and special programs are obviously aware, so any time there's contact there, they may be informed about that. I will note that the Realtors Community Housing Foundation does receive an allocation from our federal funds as well. So while they are an outside agency, part of that is money that comes through and is divvied up as part of that process. Okay. Well, I've read a lot about the work they do, and I think it's terrific for elderly residents. And I just was wondering how they get their pool of participants. I didn't know about that. So, all right. Thank you very much. Thank you, ma'am. Next is Council Member Kay. Thank you, Chair. Thank you for the presentation, Jonathan. I want to go back to the very first slide, which says, the goal of code enforcement is safe, well-maintained community, not the issuance of fines, penalties, and liens, which I would agree with. But I guess my question is, are the issuances of fines, penalties, and liens an effective tool for reaching the goal of a safe, well-maintained community? And I think what this presentation explores, that in some cases, They very much are the tool that gets to that compliance. But there are other cases where the person that's being cited simply does not have the means to maintain that house, and they're certainly not going to have the means to pay the fines or penalties. So the assistance will help us get to that compliance more directly. Okay. And from your presentation, it's clear that the programs that exist for support are somewhere between somewhat inadequate to woefully inadequate to meet the need. Is that fair? I think that they are, each program is narrow in its focus, and if you sort of made a Venn diagram of the population that they cover, there are major gaps. If you are just your average everyday homeowner that doesn't have the means to possibly maintain their home, you're probably not going to fall into maybe the Realtors Housing Community Foundation where you have to meet age requirements, and you may not quite meet the federal income requirements that some of our other programs use. So there's a gap there where that population is just not covered by the current assistance programs. Okay. And so I have been interested in this set of issues for quite a while, and I think we're making progress, and I'm pleased with the direction that everything is going. But is it still a case that the income from fines, penalties, and liens go back into the general fund? Is that correct? That is my understanding. That's correct. Has there been any thought given to requesting that those fines, penalties, and liens go back to code enforcement as a pool for assistance for those people whose income is not adequate to meet the needs? I'll defer to the law department on how you would capture that revenue, but I will say that from a practical standpoint, certainly those funds could be used to go into the pool of money that would fund our existing sidewalk program, possibly abatement funds, and also any potential new programs for housing. Okay. Basically, I agree with the thrust of this. It seems to me that the recommendations are solid and that what we really need in addition is more funding. My understanding is that the waiting list is a year, but it's not moving very fast. And so there's two things that happen. And again, this is somewhat anecdotal, but I know people who've been in this program, they get cited. They cannot afford to fix up the property. They make an application. Code enforcement stops, so there's no possibility of abatement of the, whatever the problem is. They are in this program for a year, a year and a half, sometimes longer, before their application even gets considered. So now we have a long period of time when not only is nothing happening, but this poor homeowner can't fix up because they think they might get assistance to do that. So I think there's a problem there which could be fixed by a little more funding. And maybe that's really an issue for council and budget. But I think that's a part of what right now gives people the impression that we're not vigorous enough in some instances in assuring that we actually have homeowners meeting the regulations. So, again, thank you for the presentation. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, sir. Next is Council Member Clark. Thank you, Chair. Jonathan, thank you for this. This is good. And I do remember the discussion from our link. And one of the things that I think our link was concerned about was that there needed to be more cooperation between social services and code enforcement. And we even, I think, thought about the possibility of a position that would share responsibilities there. So I think the idea of holding training sessions is a good one. Can you flesh that out a little bit to explain to me what those training sessions would consist of? This actually, they could be a variety of things. There's actually some value maybe even outside of what we're talking about today and sharing that information. One of the things that was really actually as I met with people about this topic, it became clear that the Social Services Department was very aware of all of the different agencies, both inside and outside of government, that have programs that could possibly assist in this arena. So I think that possibly we have a breakdown of communication where code enforcement is not even aware to direct people to certain programs. And those training sessions may include both code enforcement sharing information with social services about what they do and vice versa to connect the dots between those two. Right. Yeah, I agree with that. I think the communication is really important. And since social services deal with these kind of problems all the time, it's not really code enforcement's responsibility. but the cooperation between the two can really solve some problems here, I think. And thank you very much for that report. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, sir. I was going to go first to Council Member Ford, then back to Council Member Laplace. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Jonathan, for this report and for this discussion. The only thing that I wanted to impress upon the committee is that, fortunately, I had, as a staffer in this government, and I work the housing rehab program, and that's a program that goes back 30 years. And I just wanted to impress to the committee, and I know the committee understands this, but to the general public, it is a very complex process. David Jarvis knows. The demand on the program is great. I know when I was there six or seven, eight years ago, we set a goal to do 50 rehabs in a year, and we came very, very close to that, spent almost $50 million, if I'm correct. That wait list still maintained at a year long. So there's some resources there that we need on the staffing level as well as on the resource to the homeowners that will help expedite that process. But it's complex, and it's not going slow just by wanting to go slow. It's going slow just by the nature of the work. So, again, thanks so much, and thanks, Mr. Chair. Of those 50, how many would have been affordable housing clients? All of them, based on their income. Based on their income. And, David, the one good thing about, and Council Member Kay is correct, one good thing about once those homeowners initiate the process, they're well aware that it's going to be a year's wait. I will say in some cases, the end result of the improvement that otherwise wouldn't have been available to those homeowners is worth the wait in some cases. But the instant that David's Code Enforcement Shop cites a homeowner and they call upstairs and they engage the process, the pursuit of the enforcement stops at that point in time. And that's at least a pressure point stress off of the homeowner. But still, they still have to endure that needed work at their home and then also the duration of their wait. Very complex, but very beneficial program. We need to invest. Very good. Thank you. Thanks so much, Mr. Chair. Appreciate it. And last up, Council Member Wallace. Thank you, Chair. On option two, housing violation fines, isn't this already in place? I think we may be skipping ahead to the second code enforcement presentation. Oh, I'm sorry. All right, then if we're going to leave that one behind, I would say your list of recommendations are excellent, and we would look forward to your progress with all of them. Thank you. I think that, too. All right, so then that would take us to the code of enforcement fines. And let me just take a moment, because this is going to take us up to 3 o'clock. And I know there's a couple people here about the last issue on today's agenda, which is the Valley and Glendover three-way stop, which I don't believe we'll get to in 10 minutes' time, but I will tell you we will make it the first thing for our agenda next time, and I'm sorry to have taken your time today but not get you the microphone. Do you want to take this up now? So the second presentation is just a general presentation about code enforcement fines. So as we just went through, three types of violations, housing, nuisance, and sidewalk. the code of ordinances authorizes fine and civil penalty options for all three violation types currently to councilmember lawless point these are already in the ordinance there are opportunities to clarify several processes through code enforcement standard operating procedures so as we just talked about and I will sort of skip over this because there is a little bit of overlap here the housing notices are just when you violate international property maintenance code and they cannot be abated by the city. There are two options in the ordinances currently. There's a fine, which is technically a criminal fine, and that's $100 to $2,500 per offense per day. That is only used in extreme cases as it has to go through district court as it's a criminal fine. The most used option is the civil penalty route, which is based on this table. It escalates based on the number of re-inspections and the number of violations at the time of that inspection. And as you can see, even with the civil penalty route, those fines could rack up pretty quick if you have a number of re-inspections. There is also a $250 administrative cost that can be assessed by ordinance for these inspections as well. Nuisance violations, it's again issued for tall grass, weeds, and things of that nature. They can be abated by the city, and that cost is billed to the owner. The violations are either standard notices or they're a 24-hour emergency. Once again, both criminal and civil options. The criminal option, $100, $2,500 per offense per day, once again only used in the extreme cases. And then we have a table of civil penalties, which are based on the number of notices within a 12-month period at a particular property. Sidewalk violations, likewise, have both options. A criminal is not used very often. It's $25 per offense per day. The per square footage fine is typically what is used, and that's $10 per square foot, up to a maximum of $500 for each 30-day period in which the sidewalk remains unrepaired. So I'll just get directly to our recommendations on this topic. Sir. We have recommended that we establish a new standard operating procedure to clearly indicate where we are going to use the criminal route and where we are going to use the civil route. We will typically use the civil route. The criminal route is for very extreme cases, but we're going to write that down in a standard operating procedure so the guidance is clear. We're also going to establish a new standard operating procedure that provides guidance for when nuisance violations are going to be abated and the timeline for that abatement. Right now, we do use... There are some situations where we would not abate a nuisance, and that may be in a case where the property is secured and the contractor can't gain access to it. It may be a case where it's dangerous for the contractor to go in and abate that nuisance. And also if it's a particularly large nuisance, for example, if it was basically like a legal dumping site, and that property is going to be resolved through some other means, and the cost of the abatement is so large that it may not be in the city's best interest, we would also not abate that. we're going to establish all of those parameters and probably some others as to when things will be abated and at what time they will be abated. The last thing we will do is we'll clarify the existing standard operating procedure to provide specific guidance regarding notice timelines, when extensions will be allowed to be given, and have very specific procedures for when those extensions will occur. We do already have that in a standard operating procedure. Some of the examples are, obviously, some of the work can't be done when the weather is inclement, so we provide that as an option. There may also be, we'll allow homeowners that have other issues, financial or otherwise, to provide an application, and we will consider those. But we will, once again, clarify all of that through standard operating procedures. Basically, the goal here is standardization and consistency. No matter where you live in Lexington, we're going to have your experience with code enforcement be exactly the same. And we're going to write all of this down in standard operating procedures and follow that. A uniform code experience. That's right. Thank you. First is Council Member Kay. Thank you, Chair. And thank you again, Jonathan, for this presentation. Tempted to give you a one-word response. So I'll give you that first and then elaborate. The one word is bravo. I've been following code enforcement for probably two decades, well before I got on council. This addresses issues that I've been trying to see addressed for a very long time. This is absolutely the right direction to go in. I look forward to having this implemented and to having it combined with a transparent online system that allows citizens to track as well as the employees of government. Thank you very much for this work. It almost seems like a setup, but I will say we just initiated a budget amendment. We are, in this fiscal year, purchasing tablets for all code enforcement officers and also have set aside a little bit of money to do the first phase of our software implementation that will allow code enforcement officers to have access to the entire database ownership information in the field. That information will also be available to the council and the general public, So all of this will be very, very transparent. Terrific. So thank you very much to you. Everybody else has worked on this. Thank you, Chair. Yes, sir. Next is Council Member Lawless. Just briefly, would it be – I have a lot of thoughts on this. Would it be helpful if we sent in suggestions or concerns to you ahead of time? Absolutely. And we can certainly incorporate all of that. One of the things is that you can rack up a lot of fines quickly, but I can think of situations, one in particular, that's been going on for over two years with many fines, et cetera. So somehow to do that. So thank you very much, and I really appreciate your work on this, and I appreciate the work code enforcement does, and they're not usually popular so thank you thank you ma'am so hearing that i i hear that is kind of we're going to keep this in committee and hear what happens and it'll come back to us all right very well the last item on the agenda the second last is the valley and glendover three-way stop which time will not allow us to take it up today although as i have said i would make it our first item of business next time but then so the public would know the first thing that happens at our three o'clock meeting is a chance for folks to give presentations or make comments about issues not on the agenda if you're not afforded the opportunity now you can do so just in a few moments time at our next meeting or when the public planning public works committee meets again on june 10th which we would have this item up first is that good council member all right since we are short on time i would forego the opportunity to look over all of our referrals unless there's specific work that someone wanted to take up or make a motion on. If there is not, I'd ask for a motion to adjourn. So moved. We have a motion and a second. All those in favor? Aye. Opposed, like sign. Thank you very much.