Everybody, look my baby She gets She gets She gets She gets I found an island in your heart Country in your eyes All the changes, lies in line Break on two to the other side Break on two to the other side Break on two out Oh yeah Rain to sea Week to week Day to day Hour to hour Day to straight Deep and wide Break on two to the other side Break on two to the other side Break on you, break on you, break on you, break on you Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah Thank you. Thank you. guitar solo Thank you. guitar solo Thank you. guitar solo guitar solo Thank you. guitar solo Just a moment. We're short one on a council as far as the quorum is concerned. We think there's one lost in the hall somewhere. Thank you. We still haven't found him, but we're going to go ahead anyway. Okay. First item on the agenda is a summary from the March 6th meeting. If you would like to review that and then we will. Move to approve. Second. All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Get that out of our way as we normally do. We have several, I won't say several, several sounds like a double handful. We have a few partner agencies is what we call them, entities that support economic development. And we've asked a couple of them to come visit, and they said they would and have. and first on the podium is Lexington Convention and Visitors Bureau, Mr. Browder. Good afternoon, everybody. I want to thank the council for the invitation to present. I hope that the information I provide is of value and is helpful in understanding what the economic impact of tourism is on Lexington. And I took the liberty of putting this as our first slide. We're very proud that we just launched a brand new Visit Lex website last Wednesday. We've been getting rave reviews on it, and if you have a chance, we'd love for you to take a peek at it at your leisure. It's very informative. We've got a lot of background work still to do, but it's been really a nice project. It does a great job of presenting the city. Visit Lex, our mission and vision, quite simply, Visit Lex sells and markets Lexington as the destination of choice, basically by presenting nothing but good news and good things, positive images and experiences to the general public to try and get them to visit our destination. From our perspective, the sun's always shining, the fences are always white, and our smiles are infectious, and that's basically all we try and talk about out there and try and get people to come visit us. I'm going to move fairly quickly through four topics today. I certainly welcome any questions that come up during or after. It's a lot of information. I tried to consolidate it down to the 15 minutes that we have today, and our hope is to talk about the tourism economic impact, what our team does to try and affect that. our 2013-14 accomplishments and some of our future objectives. Tourism in Kentucky and nationwide is a major employer in most states, and it's actually considered a major service export by the federal government. It's very unique in that while, for instance, bourbon is produced and shipped out of state, the visitor centers and the distilleries remain, so we have the opportunity to sell them repeatedly without them ever leaving the state. So it's our service that's considered an export. The beauty of tourism is it's almost just repeat money. The distillery visitor centers, the horse farms, Keeneland can never leave. So we have the opportunity to resell them over and over again. One of the things that we look at, and while each individual entity tends to market itself, Keeneland markets itself, the horse park, Ashland. Our job is basically collectively to put them together and package them so that it's presented as the destination, hopefully creating overnight stays and vacations. The Kentucky Department of Tourism just recently, just I think in the last week or so, released their 2013 economic impact numbers related to tourism. You can see that it's a It's a rather large number at $12.5 billion. The good news is that number is actually up 2.6%, $319 million over last year. $1.3 billion in tax revenues, that's up $83 million. $2.8 billion in wages, that's up $71 million. And $175,746 tourism-related jobs, that's up 1,740 jobs in the state. How that relates to the region, we took the numbers from all of our surrounding counties and showed that $2.8 billion is represented here in the Bluegrass region in terms of tourism spent. And it represents 22% of what is spent in the state. Obviously Fayette County is number one with $1.8 billion. Lexington represents 15% of the state tourism income. As it relates to Lexington, we broke this down a bit. $1.8 billion, as I just mentioned, is direct and indirect expenditures. Those expenditures are up $54 million from the prior year. State and local taxes combined are up 6.3% and that's $16 million. And wages are up 5.5% with an increase of $13.2 million. And we've added 450 jobs, tourism-related jobs in Lexington. I wanted to share a minute just to tell you about the VisitLex team and what they do so that you can better understand how we try and impact these numbers. Each of the five areas that I'm going to reference are supported, of course, by financial and operational support. So I didn't necessarily get into those particular departments. Destination marketing. We have a team of individuals. Their job is to focus on leisure travel, and they're responsible for all of our print collateral, which are magazines, trade publications, things of that nature. You'll see us in Oprah Magazine and Gardens and Gun, Southern Living, trying to introduce Lexington to their readers. Collateral, that ranges anywhere from printed materials that you see in the visitor center our visitors guides we also which i'll touch on later we collaborate with other cvbs to print bourbon tourism guides we even have a brewgrass trail collection of brochures so that falls under the collateral area public relations we've kind of split that twofold we do some regionally and within the state because we have a lot of in-state travelers almost 33 percent of our visitors actually stay with family and friends so we don't ignore what happens locally and how important that is, because while we may not get the hotel revenues from them, we certainly get to spend in restaurants and retail stores and some of our attractions. A second thing, we do work with the state of Kentucky in terms of international travel. We have a partnership with, again, I'll mention later, Northern Kentucky and Louisville and the state where we are focusing on the United Kingdom and some other countries over there to try and get the English-speaking countries to visit our areas. Travel writers this year, we had 47 travel writers that we brought in from all over the United States. That includes us paying for their airfare, their accommodations, and getting them and spending. Poor Nikki on our staff spends days with them when they're in-house. But we take them on all the tours. We'll take them to Keeneland. We'll take them to restaurants. Some of them have different specialties, culinary. Some of them are sports-related. But we spend a lot of time with them to try and get articles written. and we've been written up in the Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle, we've been in New York, Charlotte. So it's been a very successful venture for us. Consumer trade shows, we focus a lot on equine and bourbon. You'll see us at Whiskey Live. You'll see us at Equine Affair in Massachusetts and New York areas. So we spend a lot of time there. We partner with our respective attractions. In many cases, the bourbon industry will join us, or someone from the equine industry will join us on those trade shows. CVB collaboration. We work with CVBs throughout the entire state. A lot of our collateral are in the CVB offices at the gateways to Kentucky. We are participants in the Kentucky Tourism Industry Association. We work with the Kentucky Hotel and Motel Association, the Kentucky Restaurant Association, because all of them are partners of ours. And then there is a Bluegrass Region promotion arm where we focus on focusing on the region as a whole. Lexington's a wonderful place to visit, but we're really, really grand when you include all the entities around us, such as Shaker Village, the state capitol, and some of those areas, of course, the distillery. So it really makes a wonderful destination. Fortunately, we have the majority of the hotel room, so while they're visiting the region, we tend to benefit from the hotel overnight stays. integrated marketing we have a team of individuals who focus obviously on our new website um it's a lot of entry that continues to keep it updated and accurate especially trying to keep in touch with all of our industry partners uh social media we're very very active on facebook twitter etc all of the active sites um visitlex database we spend a great little time with our marketing efforts to try and build that database up it supports our e-newsletters and a lot of the other information that we send out calendar for events it's a moving target here i don't know if you know this but there's over 840 events a year in lexington we try and pick out which ones are very very important to tourism and and people are picking their vacations include them in our calendars as well and then we create special event landing pages for events like that we work with the the towns of the SEC so that when we have football and basketball games, we can send information down to them, and they link it to their websites so that people visiting for away games to them, they know what to do and how to enjoy Lexington. Visitor services. Grand story, as most of you know, we're down in Victorian Square. We moved there quite some time ago, a little over a year ago. And in there, we offer, obviously, directional information to people who are looking for anything within the region and the state as well as locally. We obviously try and keep them local as much as possible. We schedule tours, which could include farm tours, bourbon tours, history tours. We set up hotel accommodations for them if they happen to be passing through or they'd like to stay an extra night. We establish restaurant reservations or restaurant recommendations. We provide shopping information, and especially we make reservations for events in the area. We have a destination services department. A lot of the conventions that come to town are basically they're coming in in masses, and they're leaving in masses, so it's very important to give them support when they get here. So we will help them with registration workers. We'll help them get in contact with local media. We present collateral material to them, local information, maps, And, of course, we work with the city in terms of banners and signs and posters as they go around to welcome them. Destination sales, we have a sales team that focuses on group and convention business. They represent all of our 67 properties, so it could be a tour group or it could be a citywide convention. They attend trade shows. Obviously, they do a lot of fam and site inspection trips, venue scheduling, lodging group room blocks, and they do a lot of solicitation for business. Basically, they're focused on four things right now. One is to make sure that the conventions that are already booked definite have accurate and current information as to anything that's going on in downtown. Even though they may be coming in in the next two or three years, we have to keep them fully informed. We try and book citywide conventions for the future. and that it means a group. When I say citywide, it means a group that is using multiple hotels. So if they're using multiple hotels, we'll try and make sure that they fit into the Kentucky Horse Park or they fit into the convention center or any other venue that we've got in here. We solicit what we call single property leads, meaning conventions and groups that fit in a single hotel. It could be a 50-room group. It could be a 200-room group. We try and get leads for our partners out there. and then finally we have to sell the dream. We have groups that are right now we're talking to about the year 2020 and 2021. So we're painting a wonderful picture today, but also telling them what there is to be in the future. So some of the accomplishments from a lodging perspective, some really, really good news, and this is calendar year 2013. Our occupancy increased to 62%. It's the second highest on record. 2007 was at 62.8. There was another year further back that also hit 62.8, so there were two of them for the number two spot. Our average daily rate increased 3.8%. It's the second highest on record behind WEG, which was, as you can see, it was just a little bit more. And our REV part, which in the hotel business is called revenue per available room. It's actually how many rooms you have in the building, not necessarily what you sold. It was the second highest on record. I'm sorry, it was the highest on record at $56.60. If you add up the number twos and the number ones, it was a record year for Lexington and the hotel business. They produced $157 million in hotel room revenue in the city. Some top accomplishments we have with the organization. As mentioned, we launched our new VisitLex brand, introducing our new name, logo, and graphic standards. You'll see that our blue horse is more of a stationary horse now, a little more streamlined, the same horse it always was. It's just we've left the background a little bit. We've launched the VisitLex site, which I mentioned earlier. Our visitor center set a new visitation record. We serviced over 25,000 people last year, and it's extremely unusual. It is listed in TripAdvisor as the sixth most popular attraction in Lexington. It's one of the only convention centers in the country that's actually listed as an attraction. Our convention services team serviced 332 groups that utilized over 125,000 room nights last year. We don't service just the groups we booked. We offer our services to all groups. So if, let's say, the Marriott Griffingate, their sales team booked a group at their hotel, they know our services are available we will still go out there and help them with collateral registration workers and so forth and so on so we service a lot of groups in town definite room night bookings by the team in 2013 exceeded 77,000 room nights that's booked in 2013 and beyond that was an all-time record represents over 12 million dollars worth of economic impact we officially introduced the Brewgrass Trail. It features our craft breweries that between there's four here in Lexington, one in Paris now, and one in Danville, and we have two more on the horizon. It has become very, very popular as a destination tool, and we figure it's a great piggyback onto the bourbon trail, and it's been very, very well received. We collaborate collectively with all the breweries. We introduce what we refer to as hop spots, where there's bars and restaurants that feature local craft beers and we let the breweries decide who the hop spots are so it's a great partnership that we've got going we launched share the lex it's a social media campaign where we invited the lexingtonians to share what they feel is precious about lexington it was wildly successful we thousands and thousands of participating people on those sites and it continues to this day i looked at it yesterday and i think there were at least 14 more entries just yesterday alone And they're posting everything from a jewelry craft show to somebody having lunch with friends out at Wallace Station. So it's very popular. If you can get a chance to take a peek at it, it's been really well received. We hosted the first successful Beyond Grits restaurant week to build momentum as a destination city for culinary. We've got some great independent restaurants. If you've seen our Beyond Grits book, it features 100 independent restaurants in the city. We have far more than 100, but it's the top 100 that's listed in TripAdvisor. We did not want to be restaurant critics. We were just trying to make sure that when a customer walked in and said, where's a good local place to eat, we were able to answer the question. And it's grown into something that's been very, very well received. I think we've been doing a little over a year, and we're already on our fourth reprint of the book. I mean, I think we've given out over 60,000 books already. We've partnered with, as I mentioned earlier, with the Department of Tourism with the state, Louisville and Northern Kentucky, to relaunch Visit Kentucky USA to introduce our destinations to the international travelers. Some of the little things we dig up and look for is we actually have sign-in sheets at our visitor center, and you'd be surprised at least two or three times a month we have people stop in the visitor center from Australia. We've dug down and researched that it turns out there's direct flights from Australia to Chicago, and the average Australian rents a car for 34 to 36 days. So they're driving, so we're looking for them. And so we kind of look at it very closely and see where we can capitalize on it. We partnered with UK Athletics. The NCAA did something very unusual this year. Each year they tend to introduce a few more championship series, and they decided to do it one shot, interviewed all the championship series for the next three years, which was very overwhelming to those of us who don't necessarily have big offices. But it was over 800 events that they put on the table for one-time bid. And we partnered with UK. They went with us to the NCAA offices in Indianapolis. And while we have captured a couple things, some new things that have not been in Lexington before are the 2015 Women's Regional Volleyball Championships and the Eastern Regional Track and Field Championships. So we're really excited to start opening up our community to more sporting events outside of the basketball arena. Future plans, and some of these are within the next year and some are a little bit more long term, but we will be working on them this year. We want to establish a visitor center presence, permanent and mobile combinations in the Kentucky Horse Park and at Keeneland to maximize our exposure and enhance economic impact on the city. hopefully help people with restaurant reservations and things of that nature and let them know what else there is to do in town. We want to create a unique, high-quality garden history and architectural tour. We've been working with some well-known people in the area. John Karloftis is on board with it, and we're trying to figure out how we can take, I don't know if you know this, but between what was Walnut Street, now Martin Luther King, and to Jefferson Street, and from basically Main Street going back towards Transylvania, there's 115 historical structures back there. We took maps and laid out. There's 30 of them that you can actually go in, and then we took maps from the Bluegrass Trust, and we took them from the National Historic Register and started marking where these homes were. We've got a great possibility for the tours. Just for the architecture alone, if we start adding the history and the gardens to it, I think this will be very, very popular. So it's going to take a lot of work, but we hope to get there soon. We're creating the Destination Institute to train and develop what we call super ambassadors. Our intent is to educate tour bus riders or drivers, taxi cab drivers, anybody on tourism and help people actually be tourism ambassadors. So Julie Schickler and Visitor Center is taking that task on. We have started, actually it was almost a year ago, working with the UK Gatton School on an economic impact calculator so we can start measuring what we consider to be the true economic impact of convention business. Our hope is that each year we're going to expand that so we can grow it to sports groups, equine groups, and major events in the area, and we can get a true comparable number that we can use year after year. our intent is to create a mobile app something that's GPS oriented so when somebody's standing right here a pedestrian can say hey where's the restaurant and it's going to tell them it's this way and it's that way so that's kind of a long term plan but it's going to take a lot of work but I think with the amount of information we have our intent is to break it down in terms of everything from churches, museums attractions, restaurants even retail so we're hoping to build that It's going to take some time, but we're really looking forward to that one. Finalized plans to incorporate Big Lex Blue Horse as the city icon. We have been working with the city, different people in the city right now, to try and make it more of a formal agreement, but we are very quick to release the rights to it in terms of areas. Like if you go down to Triangle Park right now, you'll notice the banners along Vine Street. They all have the Blue Horse and say Lexington across the bottom. Lori Houlihan worked on that project with her team. We've also approved ones for Newtown Pike. Obviously, a couple of the council members here have it on their stationery, so we're working with Scott Shapiro to make that a lot more widespread. We want to establish Lexington's version of Louisville, calls them the Rose Award. It stands for Recognition of Service Excellence, and we want to try and recognize anybody and everybody, basically the top performers in the hotel industry, the attractions industry, the bourbon industry, who are beneficial to our tourism components. So we'd like to maybe one day hold a big banquet and recognize all those people. And then we're working with some key horse farm owners right now on completion of what we call horse country. We're actually going to let them use a section of our office as a satellite downtown office right now because they're working on a farm. But they have right now, I think, 22 farms that have bought off, and they brought up the Disney Institute in terms of how to set up a quality horse farm tours, and we're going to try and formalize it so it would be very similar to the Bourbon Trail, but this will be all focused on thoroughbred horse farms. And so we're looking forward to that one coming to fruition. And that's basically everything in a nutshell. If you have any questions, I'll try and answer them for you. Excuse me. Council Member Clark. Thank you, Chair. A very interesting report. I'm very impressed, and I've been thinking about some of those things that you've talked about, and I just like what's going on. And I was wondering what your relationship with U.K. and how you work with U.K. to plan events and particularly conventions that are U.K. sponsored. We actually work very closely with them. We have what we call a hometown host program. The best way to explain it is most conventions, especially in the association business or the education business, won't go to a town unless they have a representative there who's a member of their association. It doesn't mean that person's a meeting planner. It just means they're related, but they won't come if we don't have what we call a hometown host. So once we find the hometown host and there's an interest, we actually become their eyes, ears, and arms to try and make it happen. But we work very, very closely with the school. You might have just recently saw one called NCUR, N-C-U-R. It's National Council University of Research. We just had 4,000 students here about two weeks ago. That was generated by University of Kentucky. And it's a wonderful event, and it's the best attendance they've ever had in their history. So I think we're going to see them back in a few years. But we work very, very closely with the school. That's good to know. So several years ago I proposed to UK that they literally build a visitor center on Coal Stream right by the interstate. We know how many people go by on the interstate at that intersection. There must be thousands and thousands and thousands every day. And so it was my idea to build a visitor center there that said UK and have UK stuff to sell and schedules and athletic stuff and all that. And nobody bought that idea. It didn't surprise me. But I was thinking of the same thing, a visitor center for Lexington, maybe a joint center for Lexington and UK, because you put some signs up on the interstate that would indicate that was there. I can imagine a tremendous interest there because of what we can offer in Lexington and also U.K. I don't know that we've spoken with the right people yet at U.K. It's a pretty big operation. But we have talked about actually adding a University of Kentucky section to our website one day. We obviously have to get a lot more information, a lot more collaborative with them in terms of their visitation. We provide them with visitor's guides and all the tools that we have in our visitor center. We just don't have, we're not quite synced yet, but we do know that there's a huge opportunity there. In terms of their, they don't hand out a lot of visitor's guides. They're students, and their electronics are more important to them than most things. So we're trying to figure out a way to make sure that we can be very, very useful. We work very closely with WUKY in terms of radio stations and things like that to communicate with the students and try and help the parents. Good. Well, thank you very much. Thank you, Chair. Council Member King. Thank you, Chair. Again, I also thank you for the presentation. I had a question at the very end of your presentation. There's a reference to the horse farm owners and a horse country tour. I know there's been an interest in having more of the horse farms be available and open and more a part of the tourism scene. Can you talk a little bit more about the direction that's going in, what the thinking is now, what's maybe new and different in the way that horse farm owners are thinking about? It's actually been spearheaded by the horse farm owners, not Visit Lex. We're just trying to be advisors and consultants in the process. We help them in terms of pricing and other information, and some of the tour operators locally have been meeting with them. the intent was and I think it was on the horse farm side is they were a little concerned about the misinformation that goes out so they wanted to basically say if you're going to give a tour of our farm let's get the information accurate so that's how they started getting involved in the process and a lot of what our staff does in the visitor center believe it or not is the first thing they do in the morning is get on the phone and find out what farms are open and we have to call all of them and you know because some Some days they are, some days they aren't, and some days it's only from here to here, so that when people call us, we can start placing them at the farms. This will be a, I think their intent is to put it as an online ticketing process where you can actually buy a ticket to get onto a farm and you can pick your farm. So they're going to find ways to do that, you know, and they're working with the tour operators as well. So it's a very structured program. And they've been working on it for at least six, eight months now. And the question has always been how you have people on these farms without interrupting their operations. That's why they're running it. So they're figuring that part out. I know they have at least 22 farms. I think they've got 25 farms actually signed up and have actually put money in this. And these will be available, as you said, kind of for an individual? Because right now you pretty much have to sign up for a tour with a tour company. Actually, you can go as an individual. It's just very, very difficult to book. Nobody knows where to look, and if they don't find us. But this is going to simplify that? This will hopefully simplify that. But it will be available to individuals and tour groups. Okay, great. Thank you. Thank you, Chair. Vice Mayor Rorden. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you, Mr. Browder, for your presentation. I actually had an opportunity to meet with those farmers, some of them, and they've been working on this for quite some time, these horse farm tours. I think it's going to be terrific. The reason they brought Disney up was to, because Disney, I think, is the master of the experience, right? and so they were able to consult with them and I think it'll be a result of some of the discussions that have been taking place around town about the difficulty of getting on a horse farm and seeing it. So I'm quite excited about that. I had one question for you on your lodging page. Yes, ma'am. So it looks like Lexington's hotel occupancy is going great guns, and I know that varies from month to month probably, but I was curious about the 62%. And you may have mentioned this and I missed it, but what is the kind of industry standard and how do we compare with a Louisville and a Cincinnati? I know they're bigger, but they're in the area in terms of percentage of rooms filled. I don't have Louisville and Northern Kentucky's available, but the national average for hotel occupancy is a little over 58%. 58%. So for years we were basically running a national average at the 58%, 59%. Okay. And then I presume like with the World Equestrian Games and big things like that, we go way up. We had big balls. Okay. So are you pretty pleased with 62%? I'm very pleased with it. Like I said, it's one of the highest we've had in a long time, and it's very encouraging. So far this year, we only have our figures through March at this point. I don't think I have April's. I'll have April's numbers next week. But January and February, even over these numbers, we were up about 3%. In January and February and March, we actually dropped a very small percentage because March this year compares to last year when we had the NCAA basketball tournament, the first and second rounds here. So we kind of lose a bit there. But all in all, we're still up for the year so far. And the fluctuation month to month, I know this is an average, correct? Yes. 62 percent. So do you see a bump up in, for example, April and October when Keeneland is here? Our peak months are definitely April and October. They are. Okay. All right. Well, I appreciate this. It looks like things are going well from your end. Well, it takes a lot of people to make this work. Right, right. We can't take credit for it all, so. I understand that. And I want to just say I love your visitor center. Thank you. I think it's a very unique place where anybody can go in there and find something of interest. A tribute to the staff that works in there, the TripAdvisor ratings where people write in, we've never received less than a five-star from anybody. So it's very encouraging that they're doing a great job as usual. Very nice. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Council Member Lane. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Browder, I just wanted to say that I think Visit Lex is doing a great job. I've had a good bit of feedbacks come in, and people have been very complimentary about your services over there. So I'll start out with a little compliment. Thank you. My question is, the Rep Arena and the Convention Center are still under a pending plan to be renovated and restored for the next 30 years or something, a new project down there. My question is, is under the current plan, it would be to demolish the convention center, which means we would not be able really to have that facility available while it was under demolition and reconstruction. And I was wondering what kind of a plan you had in your back pocket to work around that problem. I mentioned it a little bit when I talked about group sales a little bit earlier. where of the four steps that we're asking them to do, one of the ones that we have dialed up a little bit more was the search for individual property leads. Our objective is to try and, regardless of when everything happens, we want to keep the funnel full. So if we do or don't have the center, we can at least get group business into the individual hotels. Visit Lex actually only books about, of all the room nights we book, Only about a third of the room nights actually utilize the convention center. The other two-thirds are actually utilize the horse park and individual hotels. So on our basis, it's the smaller portion of what we do. Lexington Center Corporation books the bulk of the business into the center. They obviously, and some of the individual hotels. For instance, the Hyatt might book a group that we're not related to that uses the convention center. Or the Lexington Center might just book an event in there like the Kentucky Crafted event or those type things. So there's a lot of activity from a lot of players that go in there. We're just trying to figure out how to take our one-third and spread it into other venues. We haven't stopped selling the convention center because the second something opens, we're taking it over there and making sure we can try and get it in there. So we've just dialed up a different component to it. We started that about eight or nine months ago, and it's been very successful. Oh, very good. If I could just add that the group sales team at the CVB for the first quarter, I hope they can keep the pace up, actually is ahead of their booking pace for the first quarter of this year, and that's new groups for the future. So all of those bookings were actually ahead of what our projections were. So if we can't quite visit the center, we're going to find somewhere for it. Well, another question I had, and it sort of relates with the horse park, and based on some national media I was just reading recently, it appears that Lexington is in the final group for consideration for the World Equestrian Games. Could you give us any kind of an update on that or your viewpoint on that? I wish I had an answer for you because I asked the same question over and over again. All I can say is that everybody that's involved in it seems very encouraged. you know I think it's a little bit of a cop out they say we have a 50-50 chance but when there's only two cities in play that makes that pretty obvious I need to hear 51-52% but I understand there's still a lot of moving parts on it but they're still very very encouraged about not only the horse the world equestrian games but I also understand there's a strong possibility of getting the breeders cup here too so if we could get that that would be a wonderful win for everybody Well, if the International Equestrian Federation elected to come here for 2018, we would be in really good shape because we've already upgraded the horse park, made a lot of the improvements necessary, and we would probably have more hotels available. Yes. So would you say we would be in a really good posture to accommodate that? From a standpoint of an infrastructure, we are leaps and bounds ahead of Quebec. I think if there are holdups, I think it has more to do with sponsorships and things that are outside of our control. I think it's down to money, you know, what maybe the World Equestrian Games, what the state and all the entities involved are willing to put up. So I think it's more in that stage. nobody on the other side is questioning what we have in terms of facilities. We absolutely could host it again. Okay, thank you very much. My time has expired. Any other questions from the council? I have a question. Yes, sir. Your blue horse. Yes. Why is he blue? It was a little before my time, but there was a company, I believe they're out in New York called Pentagram, was asked to come look at the logo for Lexington. I think our last horse was pink. But they came and looked at the horse, and I think it was basically to play off of the Big Blue Nation and the Bluegrass region and everything, but the horse itself is actually the famous race horse, Lexington. Yeah, well, I understand that. So I think to put that twist on it was to make it an icon for Lexington itself. That's where the blue came from. Well, I just, you know, especially with basketball, horses can drive, but they can't dribble. Right. So I just was curious about, you've got to be a guru in basketball jargon to understand what that meant. But anyway, I appreciate your coming, and I teed that up just to get that out about the wildness of the Big Blue Nation. I appreciate it. Anyway, thank you again. If any of you have any questions later, I'll please feel free to give me a call. Will do. Thank you all. Thank you. Our next presenter is Jim Clark. and if Jim would come up and talk to us a little bit. Thank you, and I appreciate the opportunity to talk about the role of the arts in economic development here in Lexington. My comments will be rather brief. I'm focusing on three distinct areas in which the arts contribute to economic development. One is financial impact, the other is quality of life, and then the other, which is not necessarily a new topic, but it's one that's come back up recently of creative placemaking. And in terms of financial impact, back in 2012, we participated in a nationwide economic development study. More than 182 municipalities participated in it. our data was driven by more than 411,000 residents attending arts events, arts and cultural events in Fayette County alone, and 159,000 people from outside of Fayette County participating in our arts and cultural life here. The direct arts spending of our five largest arts groups exceeds $5 million. And then in total, it's $8 million for Lexington's arts groups, and that would include even organizations that we don't fund, like the Opera House. Indirect spending accounts for $10 million, so total direct and indirect spending is $18 million in Fayette County alone. From this study in 2012, it demonstrated that more than 80% of that money stays within Fayette County. And that makes sense in terms of the type of contractors that are used to help build sets and work with the groups in theater, dance, music. The Philharmonic are musicians. And then when you look at all the sets that are constructed at the Children's Theater, the craftspeople that are involved with that are numerous. So 80% of the 18 million stays within Fayette County as a result of arts activity. And then quality of life. I think that is probably one of the strongest areas that we can tout here. But that exists on many different levels. And we know that within education, our young people, when they're exposed to arts participation, arts engagement in their academic life, they not only do better academically, they also become more socially engaged. They're more likely to take on leadership roles within their school and without the school, when outside of the school. but they're also later on going to be more active in community life. When you go through to the university level, the arts can play, I think, a more important role than we are playing now. We know that by having quality arts programs that have good internship or fellowship programs, that the University of Kentucky and Transy can sell that to prospective students and say that you can not only have a great academic life, you can get some great experience working within quality arts organizations at many different levels. And we've seen that to be true. We knew that several years ago, LexArts was the first arts organization to offer the graduate-level assistantships, where we paid, I think it was $9,000, and then received 20 hours a week for the academic year of service from students. The level of applications increased by 30% within the arts admin program for the chance to compete for those graduate assistantships within the fine arts program at UK. So we know that there's a connection there between what we're able to offer in the practical world and then also what the universities could take advantage of in offering practicum. We also know, anecdotally, that several companies view arts, and especially the arts and education component, be important in terms of locating their businesses here. That came up recently with Tiffany and Company. They mentioned that in the newspaper, that it was the quality of arts and education that was attractive to them. And now Tiffany is expanding the number of employees because of the high level of craftsmanship that they found here in the bluegrass. But we also know that Bingham McCutcheon decided to locate their global services division here in part because of the quality of life and the arts and education component. And I think it's no small indicator of our success in that sort of recruitment process that Tracy Whitley, the COO, decided to move to Lexington and become a part of our community and is this year's chair of the LexArts Fund for the Arts campaign. So we know that we're able to attract businesses and individuals here because of the arts, the quality of arts. But also there's this idea of the creative professionals that a lot of cities our size are chasing. that there are people making decisions based on quality of life issues of where they want to live, not the kind of jobs that are in there that they're chasing. What we're doing is, I think, offering through our programs of where professionals and amateurs can work together, like Lexington Singers or the Chamber Chorale or the Community Orchestra, that you have a chance to come here, have a great job, but also pursue a hobby as a singer or as an instrumental player, whatever. We've seen that to be a very strong draw. And I know that Dr. Karf at UK Medical Center promotes the arts greatly to the potential surgeons and doctors and other administrators that they're trying to attract to the UK's medical center. So we know that by offering that sort of complete lifestyle, that that is an economic development tool to be used. And lastly, creative placemaking is something that has come to the fore lately. And we've seen this in different ways. North Limestone is being transformed through this vision of creating an art makers or creative professionals environment with the North Limestone Community Development Corporation. And we worked with them to secure a $425,000 grant from Our Place America, which will assist in transforming more than 30 shotgun houses into renovated homes and art studios. Also, through that process, we're enabling people who live in that community to stay there and renovate their homes as part of that. so it's going to create a more dynamic and reinvigorated neighborhood. We also know that developments like the capital project for the Living Arts and Science Center, the $5 million that is going into the expansion of a new facility as well as the renovation of the Kinkade House, will have a significant impact on the Martin Luther King neighborhood. We know that it is going to basically become a arts and cultural destination. Whether or not you go inside the building, there's going to be opportunities for cultural experiences outside in the newly landscaped environment. And also there's plans to use the large plate glass windows as projection screens to have art events taking place in that facility. So we know that there's the direct ways that we can support economic development through our own spending as arts organizations and attracting audience members to spend their money here in Fayette County. We know that we have an impact on quality of life, and we also know that the arts can significantly transform neighborhoods. Thank you. Excuse me. Vice Mayor Gordon, please. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Jim, thank you very much. I, well, you know how I feel about the arts, so I don't need to say that. I just think our community would be a poor community without the arts. I would like to take an opportunity to thank you I think you're, are you within 30 days of retirement or about 40? 43.5 but who's counting? Well I want to take an opportunity first to thank you because for your, is it 12 years? Yes in Lexington as our head of LexArts And I think you've brought us a long way. Those of us who've been involved with it for a while can easily see that. So first of all, thank you to you. As you go on to the next chapter in your life, I'll be following you soon. And I think it's kind of also an opportunity right now, while we have Jim Browder in the room, to ask a question about whether Lexington now has, and I'm really asking both of you, has enough, maybe you already do this, but do we have enough mass of arts events, arts, you know, murals, arts sculptures, whatever, to market ourselves around that mass, and is there any partnering going on with the Convention and Visitors Bureau for that? Well, the Convention and Visitors Bureau has always been a great supporter of our efforts, and I believe there's opportunities to work even more closely. I think one of the greatest opportunities on a cultural basis that the arts have not pursued, and that's because we tend to be focused on Fayette County, is the regional assets that exist. And I think there's a real opportunity of putting together regional tours that would not only include things like the horse farms, but also other cultural attractions that exist. I mean, from Paris to Versailles, Georgetown, Frankfurt, Richmond, there's any number of attractions that should be included and be packaged as a regional arts tour, an arts and cultural tour. Would you agree, Jim? I would agree, Jim. Just very quickly, I'm a huge proponent of public art and all things art, And the answer to your first question, is there enough to market? Yes. Is there enough? No. I mean, I'd love to see more. I think Lexington is quickly on a path of becoming the cultural center of Kentucky. And it is because of its art, and it is because of its music, and it's because of its heritage. And I think the combination of all really adds to the unique nature of Lexington. So I'm a huge proponent of it. That's really good to hear from both of you. And don't forget, we now have the, I think frequently people, when they're talking about the arts, forget writers, the written word. We have the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame right here in Lexington. And so that's good perspective, I think, to see where both of you feel we are and what some of the opportunities are. because I think, yes, people love to come here for the horse farms and to see the rural area, but we also have lots of other things, including our arts. Well, and I think there's some opportunity to look at our cultural assets. You mentioned our literary tradition, but it's also our traditional music and bluegrass heritage. and I think academically speaking, both those areas open us to significant outside funding, philanthropic funding of supporting the humanities side to the presentation of bluegrass and traditional music and then our literary heritage. And that's something that really hasn't been pursued here. And I think that's an area where whoever... See, now it's going to be a lot easier for me to talk about LexArts and what it should be doing. But whoever takes my place should find an opportunity to partner with our academic institutions to find those links between the humanities and the arts and pursue national funding for that. And I think that's one thing with our Chamber Music Festival. So we have the Bluegrass Chamber Music Festival with the Lincoln Center folks that kicks off the summer. and then we have the Lexington Chamber Music Festival, which concludes the summer. And those artists that participate in that, under the direction of Nathan Cole, who's homegrown and was a member of CKYO, they're here because they love coming here. And these are very busy artists who convince their music directors to let them out of their annual contracts for a period of time to come here, And that is no small matter. It is because they came here once, five, six years ago, and really fell in love with this place. The fact that Lincoln Center Chamber Ensemble keeps coming back is a testimony to the quality of hospitality, but also the uniqueness that this place has to offer. In fact, we will be getting four to five more murals this summer. We are working with Jessica and John Winters on that right now in terms of finding walls for these artists. And that's a very powerful thing that Jim knows. In terms of word of mouth, these international artists who came here starting two years ago to do the murals, that word has gotten out that this is an interesting place to come. and they're coming here without artist fees. They're coming here because they have the freedom to create something. And, I mean, last go-around, the only things that we covered was travel and their supplies and hospitality. And these are artists that if I had tried to pursue them as the head of the Arts Council, their artist fees, you know, if you did it in a traditional manner of pursuing a commission, would be $40,000 to $50,000 just for their fees. But they've had such good experience, and they've told their colleagues about it, that we now have another group of artists coming in under the same condition of no artist fees, but they're going to create some great artwork for us. So there will be quite a bit for us to market. And actually, I wanted to mention one more thing in terms of quality of life, and we talk about how that is important to our residents. But one area in which it's overlooked is how the arts can enfranchise communities that perhaps don't feel all that connected. And there's two things that we're funding right now. The Music Works program that Central Kentucky Youth Orchestra has created on North Limestone at Arlington Elementary. I attended a concert that they gave that was at the Larrick Arts and Cultural Center. And one of the grandparents came up to me afterwards and thanked us for our support because otherwise heard, granddaughter would never have gotten to play a violin and to feel a part of something as important as CKYO. So it's creating, through our funding, we're able to create those portals or access points. And that's one of the things that I'm most proud of in our tenures, is getting the groups to be more responsive in terms of community outreach and finding ways to enfranchise people and share all this great talent that we have. But also we're working with Bluegrass Youth Ballet on a bilingual dance instruction program in the Cardinal Valley area. And again, that's something that these kids would normally not be able to have access to quality dance instruction. Thank you to both of you. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Jasmar Clark. Thank you, Chair. Jim, you know you're talking my language. And the vice mayor beat me to the point of thanking you for your service. I think it's been exceptional. and I know that you leave with a feeling of accomplishment, and yet I know you see opportunities in the future as well. One point I wanted to expand on just a little bit and just comment on the fact that you are absolutely right, the relationship between UK and Transie and our community, the town-gown relationship is in its infancy. I was told several years ago that you'd never create any kind of condition where you would have a reasonable town-gown relationship, but we've proven them wrong. You look at the opera program, that is an incredible town-gown relationship, and even the Philharmonic is in a way, and other, I could go on, of course, Friends of Music that we created. it probably could be so much more, and I think it's something that we ought to consider very seriously because that could be a spark that would be even greater than what we have. But I think people don't realize how wonderful our arts community is here. I look around and see the things that are going on now that were not going on not very many years ago, and it's a significant growth in what we're doing in the arts. And I agree, I could not agree more, that the quality of life of a community has to have a significant arts program or the quality of life is dependent on the arts, among other things, of course. I also want to mention that I think that we can't forget that the arts in our schools is also extraordinarily important and plays an important role in making the arts important in the community. Anyway, I want to thank you, Jim, for what you've done, and you have the thanks of our community in this council. Thank you very much. Thank you, Chair. Councilman Erling. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I just wanted to make a very short statement and say thank you very much. You've done a great job here, and I'm not sure where you're heading, but I hope it's a place you really enjoy and love. And thank you so much for... It's called 6th and Broadway, my home. So you're not leaving town. Okay. Well, good. Well, thank you very, very much for everything you've done. I realize some of the last recent years have been really tough because the economy's been soft and philanthropic donations sort of flatten out, and it makes it even more difficult to do the job you're doing. But thank you very much for all your service to LexArts. Thank you. Now I get a turn. I, too, wanted to thank you, Jim, for what you've done for us. And it's been leaps and bounds. I was on the arts board for six years maybe, and on the Fund for the Arts maybe four years, and was chair of the Fund for the Arts, you probably didn't know this, in 1988, when we went from about $200,000 to over $400,000, and we thought we were really sitting pretty. So, you know, my feeling about art in general is high. You might not have ever guessed that, but it happens to be a fact. And, again, good luck to you, and maybe we'll be seeing you elsewhere someday. Great. Soon. Thank you. Again, thank you. Thanks. We now have our quarterly information from, I'm not sure now, it's the Mayor's Office of Economic Development. And are we going to have the pleasure of Kevin Atkins at the podium? It's hard for you to hide back there. I didn't know whether there were some salient points here that you wanted to point out on Commerce Lexington. It's not trying to hide. It's an easier place to take notes because you've got a desk back there to write with. That's true. No really points as regard to the reports. These are just as they were submitted by the agencies per their purchase service agreements. And so we just forwarded them on to Paul to share with you all. Has anybody perused those and has a question, which I can't answer? Oh, yes. Thank you, Kevin. I guess I'm just a little concerned. I brought this up the last time we met. there's degrees of how much information we get from these partners. And do we do any follow-up to say, hey, you're not telling us how many jobs, you're not telling us, you know, we're not. If the forms that we're asking them to complete aren't giving us the information, I just don't feel like we're getting a lot of information from them. I actually agree with you. In fact, a couple of weeks ago in the LINCS committee where we started working through the economic development partners, we talked a little bit about that with Council Member Clark. The form was established as part of the LINCS process last year. It was the first time that such reporting, to our knowledge, had been done, and it was a LINCS suggestion. So that's the form that we've used this year. The discussion we had in the links committee was the need to possibly, not possibly, but to alter the form based more on the mission of the agency. In other words, if it's about the quality of place, you know, something like the DDA does. They may not directly recruit clients, but they create the environment, and then they work with the developers interested in downtown, which thus leads to job creation. So how do you more accurately gauge that? DLC does events. When Bingham came to town, for example, Thursday Night Live was one of the things that they went to and cited as something that really occurred that excited them about Lexington. So how do we create a more of a better reporting mechanism for them? So I'm agreeing with you. We just got to get there. Okay. And I guess the other thing, we call these partner agencies, but we have our social services partner agencies, and then we have these that are economic partner agencies. I think we need to either figure out how to call them something different to differentiate kind of how they're set up. the social service agencies, what they report to us has a score on whether they get a score for that if they were a previously funded social service agency on their application for the following year. Do we look at any of this information, or are we planning to, as we move forward, on whether we continue funding and to levels of funding? If I understand your question, we do scrutinize each request. These are the ones that have submitted, and granted, they submit them regularly each and every year for funding. But, yeah, I mean, we go through the request. They don't necessarily, what we recommend is not necessarily everything that they're requesting. Okay. And, you know, I know that we created this form, I think, in the last year. And so it is going to continuously be a work in progress. But I think we do, when we have government funds going out to help fund these agencies, we need to make sure that our ROI, return on investment that the government gives them, can be put on a sheet of paper. We can see what they're doing. And the forms as they stand right now I don't think are giving us that. Thank you. Thank you. Council Member Wayne? Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I was just going to ask a brief question. You're sitting with the heartbeat of economic development for our community because you're sensing people contacting the mayor's office and Commerce Lexington. You're dealing with a lot of people. What is your sort of seat-of-the-pants assessment? How does the economy look here, and how does economic development, new job creation seem to be moving? Well, I think things are, you know, they're never where you want them to be because you always push to strive ahead even further. You know, we're above where we were. We've gotten back above the lows of the recession. The interest level is continuing to pick back up. I mean, we have more people coming in and asking questions about the community and what it has to offer. We've got interest back to our partner agencies. We've got a lot of interest in what's going on downtown and the developments going on there. So overall, good, obviously better than it was a few years ago when nationally things were not good, but we're continuing to, you know, we're never satisfied. My only other question is 21C Hotel has been sitting there in limbo for a certain period of time, longer than I sort of anticipated. I thought they would be under construction pretty quickly. Is there some major hang-up there that's preventing them from starting construction? I think you're going to discuss that here shortly in the council work session, but there's still a lot of excitement with that project. It is moving forward, and the 21C folks are looking forward to being part of the Lexington community. Thank you, Ms. Jackins. Any further questions? Thank you, Kevin. to this thing and talking back. It's different than any other situation. Are there any issues that need to be struck from the committee referrals? I gather not. Is there any that need to be added? Oops, I'm sorry, Peggy. Council Member Henson, yeah. Thank you, Chair. I really think that the insurance tax to support Affordable Housing Trust Fund could be removed at this time, so I would make a motion to remove that. Second. We have a motion and a second to remove the insurance tax to support Affordable Housing Trust Fund. All in favor? All in favor. Any opposed? That is done. And also, I would move to remove the food truck review because that was reviewed and moved on for an additional year. Second. Second. All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Well, that's progress, and it took longer than two-tenths of a second. Thank you. That'll be it. Thank you very much, Council Member Hanson. Any others? We're getting down to somebody else to make a motion. Thank you.