# Council Work Session - February 24, 2015 > Auto-transcribed civic record · February 24, 2015 - **Permalink**: https://meetings.lexingtonky.news/meeting/3590 - **Source video**: https://lfucg.granicus.com/player/clip/3590?view_id=14&redirect=true - **Date**: 2015-02-24 - **Last revised**: February 24, 2015 - **Length**: 28,182 words > ⚠️ **Auto-generated content.** Audio from the official Granicus video was auto-transcribed with OpenAI's open-source Whisper large-v3-turbo model, run locally by The Lexington Times. Structured facts were extracted with GPT-4o; the narrative summary was written by Anthropic Claude. Verbatim wording may contain errors. See [methodology](https://meetings.lexingtonky.news/about/methodology) or [report a correction](mailto:editor@lexingtonky.news). --- ## Meeting Overview The Lexington-Fayette Urban County Government met on February 24, 2015, at 3:00 PM in the Council Chamber at 200 E. Main St, Lexington, KY 40507, with Mayor Gray presiding. The council addressed nine agenda items during the session, covering routine government business including zoning matters, budget amendments, and various administrative approvals. The meeting included multiple action items that required formal votes, with the council taking a total of 10 votes throughout the proceedings. No public comments were recorded during either of the designated public comment periods for issues on the agenda or issues not on the agenda. The council successfully approved several key items including requested rezonings, budget amendments, new business items, and the mayor's report, while also receiving informational presentations and council reports. ## Attendance The following members were present at the February 24, 2015 meeting: • Mayor Gray • Mossotti • Ford • Kay • Stinnett • Henson • Farmer • Bledsoe • Scutchfield No members were recorded as absent or late for this meeting. All nine listed members were in attendance. ## Votes and Decisions The meeting included ten motions, all of which passed unanimously. **Procedural Approvals** • **Docket Approval**: Motion by Mossotti, seconded by Ford, passed unanimously • **Summary Approval**: Motion by Kay, seconded by Stinnett, passed unanimously • **Budget Amendments**: Motion by Mossotti, seconded by Henson, passed unanimously **New Business Items** • **New Business Approval**: Motion by Farmer, seconded by Henson, passed unanimously with a condition that Bledsoe recused from voting on item B • **Item H Removal**: Motion by Kay, seconded by Ford, passed unanimously to remove item H and send it to the General Government & Social Services Committee **Funding and Scheduling Decisions** • **Neighborhood Development Funds**: Motion by Kay, seconded by Scutchfield, passed unanimously to approve neighborhood development funds for February 10, 2015 • **UK Alumni Drive Presentation**: Motion by Kay, seconded by Farmer, passed unanimously to schedule a presentation by UK regarding their work on Alumni Drive at the February 24, 2015 work session • **Consent Decree Presentation**: Motion by Stinnett, seconded by Farmer, passed unanimously to schedule a consent decree presentation at the February 17, 2015 work session **Final Actions** • **Mayor's Report**: Motion by Farmer, seconded by Kay, passed unanimously to approve the Mayor's Report • **Adjournment**: Motion by Farmer, seconded by Henson, passed unanimously All votes were conducted as voice votes with unanimous approval. The only notable condition was Bledsoe's recusal from voting on item B during the new business approval. No transcript timestamps were available for these voting actions. ## Budget and Financial Actions The meeting addressed several significant financial authorizations totaling over $1 million in expenditures and grant acceptance. **Grant Acceptance** • **L0162-15**: Authorization to accept $603,120 in federal funds from the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet for the Old Frankfort Pike Scenic Byway Viewing Area project, representing the largest single financial item on the agenda. **Equipment Purchases** • **L0167-15**: Authorization to purchase a Superior Roads Model PHP 5000 Asphalt Patcher from Global Environmental Products, Inc. for $316,160.00 • **L0165-15**: Authorization to purchase a portable FTIR gas analyzer from RAECO for $70,749 **Personnel and Administrative Changes** • **L0155-15**: Authorization to abolish two classified positions and create new positions in the Division of Parks and Recreation, with an associated cost of $160.00 • **L0164-15**: Authorization to execute Amendment No. 1 to Agreement with Bluegrass Area Development District for $18,357.54 **Infrastructure Projects** • **L0174-15**: Authorization to accept construction easements for the Gainesway Trail Project valued at $5,000 • **L0175-15**: Authorization to accept construction easements for the Loudon Avenue Sidewalk Project valued at $5,000 The combined financial impact of these actions totaled approximately $1,018,546.54, with the majority representing federal grant funding for transportation infrastructure improvements. The equipment purchases focused on road maintenance and environmental monitoring capabilities, while the personnel changes involved restructuring within Parks and Recreation operations. ## Public Comment - Issues on Agenda The meeting included a designated period for public comment on issues listed on the agenda. This agenda item provided an opportunity for members of the public to address the governing body regarding specific matters scheduled for discussion during the February 24, 2015 meeting. No specific speakers, comments, or discussion details were recorded for this public comment period in the available meeting documentation. The item was structured as an informational session, allowing community members to provide input on agenda topics before formal deliberation by the governing body. This public comment period represents a standard practice in government meetings to ensure public participation and transparency in the decision-making process. The outcome was classified as informational, indicating that the comments received were for the record and consideration by officials rather than requiring immediate action or response. ## Requested Rezonings/Docket Approval The council considered and approved the docket for requested rezonings during this meeting. Council members Mossotti and Ford were the key speakers who participated in the discussion of this agenda item. The item was presented as a resolution for the council's consideration. While specific details of the individual rezoning requests included in the docket were not provided in the available materials, the council moved forward with approving the overall docket that contained multiple rezoning applications. The discussion involved standard procedural consideration of the rezoning docket, which typically includes various property rezoning requests that have been submitted to the city for review and approval. Such dockets generally contain requests from property owners or developers seeking to change the zoning classification of their properties to allow for different types of development or land use. Following the discussion led by Mossotti and Ford, the council voted to approve the rezoning docket. The approval allows the individual rezoning requests contained within the docket to move forward through the city's standard review and approval process. This type of docket approval is a routine but important function of city council meetings, as it enables property development and redevelopment projects to proceed through the municipal approval process. The unanimous or majority approval suggests there were no significant objections raised to the rezoning requests included in this particular docket. ## Approval of Summary The council considered approval of the summary from their previous meeting. Kay and Stinnett were the key speakers during this agenda item discussion. The council voted to approve the summary of the previous meeting. No specific details about the content of the summary or any discussion points were provided in the available materials. **Outcome:** The summary was approved by the council. *Note: Specific transcript timestamps are not available for this agenda item.* ## Budget Amendments The council considered various budget amendments during this meeting. Council members Mossotti and Henson were the key speakers on this agenda item. The council reviewed and discussed multiple budget amendments, though the specific details of the amendments and the nature of the discussion are not available in the provided materials. The item was presented as a resolution requiring council approval. Following the discussion, the council voted to approve the budget amendments. *Note: Specific details about the amendments, discussion points, and transcript timestamps were not available in the source materials provided.* ## New Business The council addressed new business items during this portion of the meeting. Council member Bledsoe recused himself from participating in item B of the new business discussion. Key speakers during the new business segment included Farmer and Henson, who presented or discussed the various items brought before the council. The council ultimately approved the new business items that were presented for consideration. *Note: Specific details about the individual new business items, the nature of the discussion, and the reasons for Bledsoe's recusal from item B were not available in the provided materials. Transcript timestamps were not available for this agenda item.* ## Continuing Business/Presentations During the February 24, 2015 meeting, the board heard presentations on various topics as part of their continuing business agenda. The session included informational presentations addressing substance abuse and violence intervention programs. Key speakers for this portion of the meeting included Kay and Scutchfield, who delivered presentations on their respective areas of expertise. The presentations were designed to inform board members about ongoing initiatives and programs related to public health and safety concerns in the community. The substance abuse presentation likely covered current trends, intervention strategies, and program effectiveness in addressing addiction and related issues within the jurisdiction. The violence intervention presentation would have focused on prevention programs, community outreach efforts, and strategies for reducing violent incidents. These presentations served an informational purpose, providing board members with updates on important community health and safety programs. No specific actions or decisions were recorded as outcomes from these presentations, indicating they were primarily educational in nature to keep board members informed about ongoing initiatives and their progress. The continuing business format allows for regular updates on various programs and initiatives, ensuring board members maintain awareness of different departmental activities and community programs under their oversight. ## Council Reports During the Council Reports segment of the February 24, 2015 meeting, council members Kay and Farmer provided updates on various municipal matters. The reports covered different topics of interest to the council and community, though specific details of the presentations were not captured in the available meeting documentation. This agenda item served as an informational session where council members shared updates on their respective areas of responsibility or recent activities. Both Kay and Farmer participated as key speakers during this portion of the meeting, delivering their respective reports to fellow council members and attendees. The reports were presented in a discussion format, allowing for potential questions or clarification from other council members. As is typical with council report segments, this item was informational in nature and did not require formal action or voting by the council. The reports served to keep all council members informed about ongoing initiatives, committee work, or other matters relevant to city operations and governance. The specific content and duration of each report, as well as any questions or discussion that may have followed, were not detailed in the available meeting records. Council report segments are standard components of municipal meetings, providing a regular opportunity for elected officials to communicate updates and maintain transparency with both their colleagues and the public. ## Mayor's Report The Mayor's Report was presented during the February 24, 2015 meeting. The report was delivered by key speakers Farmer and Kay, though specific details of the presentation content were not provided in the available meeting materials. Following the presentation, the Mayor's Report was approved by the council without recorded objections or significant debate. No specific concerns or discussion points were documented regarding the contents of the report. The approval of the Mayor's Report represents routine acceptance of the executive summary of municipal activities and initiatives during the reporting period. *Note: Specific transcript timestamps and detailed content of the Mayor's Report were not available in the source materials.* ## Public Comment - Issues Not on Agenda During this portion of the February 24, 2015 meeting, the public was invited to provide comments on matters not specifically listed on the agenda. This is a standard agenda item that allows community members to bring forward issues of concern or interest to the governing body. No specific speakers, topics, or comments were documented in the available meeting materials for this public comment period. The agenda item was designated as informational, meaning no formal action was taken by the governing body in response to any comments that may have been received. This type of public comment period is typically used by residents to raise awareness about community issues, request future agenda items, or provide input on ongoing municipal matters that are not scheduled for formal discussion during that particular meeting. The outcome was informational only, with no decisions or formal responses required from the governing body during this portion of the meeting. --- ## Decisions - **Motion** — passed (0-0): Approval of the docket - **Motion** — passed (0-0): Approval of the summary - **Motion** — passed (0-0): Approval of budget amendments - **Motion** — passed (0-0): Approval of new business - **Motion** — passed (0-0): Remove item H and send to General Government & Social Services Committee - **Motion** — passed (0-0): Approval of neighborhood development funds for February 10, 2015 - **Motion** — passed (0-0): Schedule a presentation by UK for their work on Alumni Drive at the February 24, 2015 work session - **Motion** — passed (0-0): Schedule a consent decree presentation at the February 17, 2015 work session - **Motion** — passed (0-0): Approval of the Mayor's Report - **Motion** — passed (0-0): Adjournment --- ## Full transcript The End ¶¶ Have you had a taste of George? I haven't gone yet, but I will. Would you mind? What happened in the tent? What happened in the tent? What happened in the tent? Oh, oh. Oh, she had feet on my first eat today. All right. All right. Hello, everyone. Hello and welcome to the work session of the council. First on our agenda for the February 24th meeting is issues on the agenda. Mr. Mundy, is anyone signed on for issues on the agenda? All right. Thank you. It's related to the presentation Kevin is saying. Kevin may want to make a motion to move those people on sooner or further than later. What is this related to? This is about the heroin presentation. Oh, okay. There's people here for that. We may want to have a motion to go ahead and hear that and move them out. All right. Well, since this is on the agenda. It is. We might as well go on and hear them. We need to make your motion. We can go ahead and hear them right now. We need to make a motion. All right. Why do we need a motion? It's on the agenda. I was going to move it up. Oh, okay. You're going to move the entire. All right. Councilmember Stenet has a motion. Thank you, Mayor. because there are a number of people wishing to speak to item number e as in edward under continuing business i'd like to make a motion to amend our agenda and move it to the beginning to now so they can speak and leave because we have a lot of other business to attend to second so moved second motion by council member stent second by council member farmer is there any objection to the motion all right hearing none then we'll move um item 5. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Under continuing it's item 5. It's item 5. Oh, yours is item E. I'm showing item Roman numeral. 5. Alright, item E or 5. Under continuing business and presentations, we'll move that up. And I'll ask those who have signed up to speak to this issue to, I'll ask you to come up one at a time, please. beginning with Shelly Elswick and Ms. Elswick if you'll come up yes she all right to Michelle you're going to defer your time yield your time to Michelle McCarthy okay next on the agenda is Lindy Woodward okay all right Alex okay I asked I said unless there's objection there was nobody objection there was no objection I asked him this was objection yeah All right. Michelle McCarthy. Okay. So Ms. Woodward has yielded her time to Alex. Mary Lynn Houlihan. Mary Lynn, okay. You do wish to speak, right? Okay. All right. And Anita Franklin. All right. So we'll begin then with Lindy Woodward. No, who yielded? Okay, who do? Just a winner. Alex, so everybody yielded to Alex. All right, not everyone, but three did. Okay, Alex, come on up. We'll get through it. Thanks, Alex, and welcome. Good afternoon. My name is Alex Selzwick, and I'm a recovering heroin addict. And I'm here today not so much to bear witness to the horrifying experience that is drug addiction, but more as a testament to what can become of someone who gets suitable treatment. Since I just have a few minutes, the best I can offer is a snapshot of the two lives that I lived, the one untreated addiction and the other treatment and recovery. On September 13, 2013, I woke up in a sleeping bag on a tarp under a bridge in Dayton, Ohio. I was homeless, friendless, and suicidal. I had more syringes in my pocket than dollars. Just nine months before, I was preparing to graduate undergraduate school and apply to law school. Now I was holding a sign by an interstate on-ramp and putting heroin in my arms every couple of hours. I was miserable in a way that I can't describe to you. I hated myself for hurting the people that I loved, and I couldn't stop. I wanted help, but I didn't know where to find it. Today, my life looks a little different. In fact, yesterday, February 23, 2015, I woke up about 4.45 to the sound of my alarm in a warm bed that I call my own. And when I played basketball with a group of guys who I love and respect, I went to breakfast and laughed with my dad. I went to work and put in my eight hours. When I got off, I came back to my humble apartment. I made dinner. I talked to a friend who's struggling the way that I struggled. And then I fell asleep watching SportsCenter. This is the good life. This is the life of peace. But unfortunately, this is the life that too many people that I care about, too many of my friends, will never get a chance to know, either because they won't be introduced to the treatment that they need or because we've already buried them. I'm under no illusions about how I've been able to get and remain sober. Despite my ego's protestations, it has nothing to do with my willpower or my strength. In fact, it has little to do with my own constitution at all. It has everything to do with the people and the resources that were placed in my journey and on my path. Most everyone I care about outside of my family is either in active addiction or in some phase of recovery. Most of my conversations are about heroin legislation. Most of the books on my shelf are addiction memoirs. And most of my time is spent helping friends who continue to struggle with addiction. I live this stuff every single day. I get a call about once a week from a friend or an acquaintance, from a mom or an uncle, who has a child who is struggling with an addiction who needs help. And it's a shame that they call me. It's a shame that resources to treat loved ones' mental illnesses are so unknown or so unavailable that they turn to me. And it's a shame that in spite of the fact that I live this every day and that I'm surrounded by recovery, when they call me, I'm unable to point them in the right direction. In the short time that Savvy's been in existence, it has already begun to coordinate resources to make treatment available to those who are sick and suffering. The fruit born of this office will have and is already having an impact on our ability to address the problem. I am begging you, please make this office permanent so that my friends can live the life that I get to live today. Thank you. Thank you, Alex. Now, who wishes to speak next? Is it? You all? Yeah. Okay. All right. Great. First, I would like to say thank you, Alex, for sharing your story and being so honest about your experiences. as a person who's worked in the addiction treatment field for the last 16 years and also served with the Fayette County Heroine Task Force for the last couple of years. Sorry, Michelle McCarthy, 3624 Timberwind Lane. Thank you. But working with that group, all of it being by volunteer work, those of us just dedicating our time and efforts to come together, to work together on various projects, while we have been able to get a tremendous amount accomplished over the last couple of years. Definitely, as we have continued to see our overdose rates go up in Kentucky, right now we are in the top three states in the country for continued increases in overdoses. Fayette County has continued to see an increase in heroin-related overdoses. We do not seem to be getting over this epidemic anytime soon. We need to be able to pull all of our resources together that we can. And while we have been doing that on a volunteer basis, it becomes extremely difficult to continue to coordinate that effort long term without a unifying office to be able to oversee that. One of the most common frustrations that we hear from the public is even knowing where to start when they or a loved one, a friend, a co-worker needs some sort of help, needs some sort of treatment. If you just take a few seconds to go online and search the term addiction treatment, you will get so many results, you will have absolutely no idea where to start, what information to trust, or who to turn to. And so it becomes even more of a defeated feeling. It becomes more overwhelming for the individual to decide, for the family to try to process through. and when somebody is in the throes of active addiction, is in the middle of active withdrawal, to be faced with 5 million decisions and 5 million choices and be expected to make the right one alone, I don't think is a fair expectation for us to have. Every other type of health care, we have some sort of organized efforts to address the issue. People don't feel ashamed to find treatment for their cancer, to go to their doctor to talk about their diabetes, or even today to be able to talk about depression or bipolar disorder. we do still see a lot of shame and stigma associated with addiction. And so to bring it to the forefront, Fayette County can really set a model and set an example for the rest of the state to follow on how to address this problem from the ground up locally, regardless of how many resources you may have from the state and federal level to assist you. We've actually already seen some of our efforts from the Heroin Task Force in the past start to reach past our county. We've sent out resources to every county in the entire state. And we've even gotten communications from, I believe, Oregon and a couple of other states saying that they have already heard about the good work that Fayette County is doing and have asked us to communicate with them and share resources with them. So I think this is not just a prime opportunity to actually show that we can be a model and help these other communities and states around the country, but it is to show our residents in our own county that their lives matter. Thank you. Thank you, Michelle. Mary Lynn Houlahan. Mary Lynn. I'm Mary Lynn Houlihan. I'm at 233 Fontaine Circle, and I'm the Director of Victim Services for the Commonwealth Attorney's Office here in Lexington. So I'm here to talk about SAVI from the victim's perspective. I work with crime victims on a daily basis, and a lot of the reoccurring themes that I've heard from them over the years are some of the things that SAVI hopes to address. One of those is the communication between the many agencies that are responsible for dealing with crime, the criminal justice system, and assistance to crime victims. Sometimes there is a lot of resources in a community, but identifying and remaining abreast of those resources or centralizing them becomes a job that is outside of everyone that's working individually. For an office like mine, the breadth or scope of my position doesn't allow me to also take the time to centralize resources, make them available to the members of my community. And so I end up helping the same situation over and over instead of being able to help a broader, the broader community effort in this area. And it is so important. A crime happens, it gets all of our attention. There's all sorts of things that come into play for that victim. But when you hear from victims, one of the things you end up hearing is that the immediate time after the trauma is the time that they felt most alone and most abandoned by their community because they don't know where they can go for the help that's needed. So Savvy can be a source for centralizing the information, smoothing out, streamlining the communication between agencies, and making the path, the very difficult path, easier for victims to take, connecting them to the resources that we have in our community, not necessarily every problem doesn't need more money or more people. We have a lot of good that's happening, but to connect those dots and put those services together for the benefit of crime victims will help us in so many ways. One of the other ways that this endeavor will end up helping us is the communication with the crime victims and with the different areas of our community so that when something bad happens, all this misinformation that's happened to other communities about who's doing what and blaming agencies and pointing fingers, we don't want that to happen here. And I believe through good communication, we can keep that from happening here. People will know that our law enforcement are out doing the good job that they are asked to do and that we are responsive to victims' needs and information. We want to provide it to them. So SAVI can be a big part of connecting the dots between both agencies and the people that we want to serve. Thank you. Thank you, Mayor Lynn. And next is Anita Franklin. Greetings, Mayor Gray, council members, ladies and gentlemen of the audience. My name is Anita Franklin, founder of the Antonio Franklin Violence Intervention Project, known as VIP. Our motto is, let's get better and do it together. Our organization was formed after my son was innocently shot in Duncan Park in April of 2014, which resulted in his death only three months after his 21st birthday. Antonio had dreams and aspirations to graduate from college and to pursue many dreams and aspirations. With the sacrifice of his life, I do feel that he received the ultimate degree, and that's to be with God. being safe, wow, that was something he couldn't receive here in Lexington. We just want to join with Savvy and say how important it is for our community. How ironic on the day that Tonio was shot, he was killed under a mural that stated, years from now, no one may remember who I was or what I've done. What matters is that I was important in the life of a child. Antonio Franklin Jr.'s Violence Intervention Project, or VIP, the mission is to be committed and dedicated in finding solutions to help repair, rebuild, and restore the dreams of our youth here in Lexington, Kentucky. We deserve to make it a safer and vibrant place for us to live and our children to be raised. VIP has joined forces with multiple organizations here in Lexington to focus on stopping the violence and drug addiction, such as SWAG and the newly formed group, SAVY. Today, I would like to voice how important and necessary groups such as SAVAR are and how the components can benefit our community. We can no longer be silent, and now it's time for us to positively react. We cannot turn our heads or have deaf ear. You have to excuse me, because as I speak before this council, I think about my son and the children here in Lexington. Tomorrow, it could be you, it could be someone that's affected in your family. We must stand for all of our youth and the citizens here in Lexington, Kentucky. We may not be in a place in life where we can have zero violence here in Lexington, but we are challenged, everyone at the sound of my voice, to stand together and unite for our community. Once again, VIP supports Savvy. Thank you for your support. Thank you, Anita. I thank everyone for joining us today. Next will be Commissioner Beth Mills, who will make the presentation. Good afternoon. I just wanted to talk to you a little bit about how we got to today. Commissioner Clay Mason started the Heroin Task Force when he was here. and they did a whole lot of work looking at the heroin deaths and what we might do to stop those, and a lot of the folks in this room joined him. Subsequent to that, we had a lot of people. The mayor and I met with the sisters working against gun violence individually. The week here you've heard about in these chambers, there's a lot of grassroots efforts around gun violence. We know everybody that's killed by guns are not also involved in drugs, but it seemed like a prime opportunity to get an office together to deal with this full time. In the state legislature, they're dealing with a heroin bill, and there have been 10 different versions, and they're having difficulty getting anything passed. As I tell everybody, Fayette County is not Kentucky. We have the opportunity here to be a leader in this arena, and we have the resources in this community. It's a long-term effort. This is not the one answer, but at least I think it's worth doing. We have a lot of experts in this community in this area, one of whom happens to work for me. Amy Baker is employed by me, and prior to coming to me, she was the Deputy Commissioner for Substance Abuse with the Department of Corrections. So she has a network. She knows what she's doing. We have the Domestic Violence Prevention Board in my office, and over 30 years, they have done just this. They've collaborated around partner abuse and child abuse, and our arrest and enforcement rate in Fayette County now for perpetrators is 75 percent because they have been around, they've gotten grants, they've got the police trained. That's a good model for this same office. So we have all these people here who can do this, but we need to pay someone full time to pay attention to it. And we have Amy Baker. So we have her. We also want to introduce you to Gio, Gerald Gibson, who works with people who are victims of violence, who's doing a lot of work in this community. So I think this is certainly worth, the mayor has given us great support, and I think this council will see the need for this office as well. But before Amy comes up and speak, I would like for Commissioner Bastin to speak to this. The divisions of detention, fire, and police have been intricately involved in all our meetings. All of these issues touch them. I want the group to know that this is not just about treatment, it's also about enforcement. We need to get the people who are creating some of these problems locked up and put away. So, Ryan. Thank you, Beth. As you know, I served as police chief for the last seven years and was confronted with a lot of the issues that SAVI has set, I think, very well to address. You've heard from some folks here who have a lot of passion, an extreme amount of passion about the issues because their lives have been touched by it significantly. Many times I felt like as police chief that we were limited from an enforcement capacity and being able to actually affect some of the issues to the level that they might be able to be affected in a positive way. I think a collaborative effort within the community, using some of the passion, some of the skills, some of the resources from the community, if we mobilize as a community, will position us to be much more successful than just trying traditional enforcement roles that we've tried before. So I'm very supportive of this. We have to have someone driving the train to get anywhere, to get from point A to point B, and I think that's what we're asking here today. Heroin was something that wasn't on our radar screen until September 2012. Prior to that, we had significant issues with opiate addiction in the form of pills. Some successes, I think, were realized legislatively and through enforcement and education with that, but then heroin came in, and it came in with a vengeance. Uh, we, we didn't have it on the radar screen with police until September 2012. And in 2013, we had 44 confirmed overdose deaths from heroin in this community. So it's, it's something that is very serious and something that's going to take all of us, uh, with all the resources and passion we can find to be successful with. And I applaud the efforts of this group. They've worked tirelessly along the way to get where they are. So thank you. Thanks, Chief. Amy. All right. Thank you, everybody. And I just want to say thank you for hearing us today and also to all of our partners for showing up and sharing your stories. I've been coordinating the work of the office, but as you can see, there's a great number of people involved in doing the day-to-day. when Commissioner Mason and Commissioner Mills presented in September of 2014 and said we would pilot this project and come back to you in March and let you know what we had done, I had no idea that we would have the energy and enthusiasm and have accomplished what we've accomplished so far. I didn't think I'd be sharing all that with you today. So a lot of what I was going to say, other folks have said already, so I won't repeat that because I know there's a lot of people here. But I do want to share with you what's happened since we had our initial meeting when we all got together in November of 2014. Okay, a little background. Beth and Ronnie both touched on this. From 2011 to 2014, there were 19 homicides in Lexington where the victim was between the ages of 15 and 25. From 2013 through today, Lexington has seen a dramatic increase in heroin overdose deaths. And one thing that I want to just echo what Commissioner Bastin said is we weren't talking about heroin in 2012. We were talking about pills. Before that, we were talking about something else. Since I've done this work since the 90s, we've talked about a number of drugs. And my guess is we will continue to talk about different drugs after we finish talking about heroin because it's just cyclical. And having an office that gets in front of this and is proactive, I think, is a great idea for the city. So on November 21st, about 70 of us, many people that you see here, council members back there with you, people from the CAO's office and the mayor's office, we all got together down at Bluegrass Ad to talk about substance abuse and violence prevention. And we had everyone in the group explain why they were there, not really who they were or where they were from. We wanted to know why you were there to talk about drug abuse and violence. And it really laid out an excellent frame for the work that we were going to do. The group was made up of professionals, those who'd lost loved ones, advocates, activists, moms, people in recovery, people who'd lost loved ones to violence, people who'd lost loved ones to overdose. It was a wide and varied group. That shouldn't be in there. Okay, sorry, that was just a duplicate. A number of issues were identified that day. um we get to my hard copy so i can read that better um how to increase the capacity to provide violence prevention and programming to youth how does a person find substance abuse treatment where does a person go to detox where do they go after detox how to increase parental involvement with youth how to best utilize current resources to reach the maximum number of youth how to reduce misconception and barriers and how to increase the number of substance abuse treatment options. So during the meeting, we all broke down into one of five groups. We had violence prevention, substance abuse prevention, substance abuse treatment, justice, and victim services. Since that time, all of those groups have continued to meet. They've all identified chairs, and they've all continued to do work. The Justice Committee, what I want to go over now are just a few of the preliminary goals that each group has identified as a need in our community. And this, again, is just a snapshot of the work that's been going on so far. But the Justice Committee wants to explore alternatives to detention for youth, research best practices regarding those who are incarcerated and addicted, work with the local reentry task force to identify housing and labor options for those leaving incarceration, and identify substance abuse with treatment referrals for those in need of services. That issue came up throughout all of the groups, whether it be justice, victim services, violence, or whatever. People wanted resources to treatment. People wanted help. And sadly, it's not an easy thing to find, much like Alex touched on when he spoke. The Substance Abuse Committee turned into one committee. The Treatment and Prevention Group wanted to meet together to not duplicate services and just to make the most of the resources that they had together. Some of the goals identified by the committee were developing a web-based, user-friendly directory of substance abuse treatment options and information, advocate for expanded access to substance abuse treatment and detox services, advocate for greater access to life-saving overdose prevention, form a clearinghouse for substance abuse information, and to promote extensive public education to address substance abuse stigma. Mary touched a little bit on the Violence Prevention Committee. I'm sorry. No, excuse me. The Violence Prevention Committee, their goals were to increase parental involvement and engagement through existing community action centers, enhance activities at existing community centers and reopening closed parks and community centers, increase engagement with youth through relationship building, reduce misconceptions and barriers that contribute to police and community mistrust. And lastly, our Victim Services Committee, which Mary touched on earlier, work with victim advocates to develop a protocol to reach out to victims of violent crime, work with hospital chaplains to develop a coordinated response when working with a victim of violent crime, and develop a mentoring program consisting of those who have lost loved ones to violent crime and to support those going through the legal system. This afternoon, you've seen a few of our partners, and I just wanted to put a list up, and sadly, this isn't everybody, because we started putting this list together a few weeks ago of folks we've been working with since this started. And as you can see, there are so many agencies and individuals who are involved in meeting after work and meeting during work and meeting during lunch to talk about these goals that I've just addressed. And just sitting in my seat, I realized that BUILD wasn't on there, Bluegrass Reentry, and VIP were three that I left off, so I wanted to make sure I mentioned them. But in addition to our community partners, I can't say enough about the support we've had here from LFUCG, from the Division of Police, Fire and Corrections, Partners for Youth, Juvenile Probation, the CAO's office, the mayor's office, and the council office. And I can't stress enough that it is a community-wide effort. So many folks are involved. There's so much energy. We are learning so much about resources that already exist in our city but people didn't know about. things that we need to do to make things better for addiction and violence prevention, but we're bringing all the correct people to the table to continue this dialogue. As Commissioner Mills said, there's not going to be any short-term goal. We're in this for the long haul. My counterpart, my experience has been in substance abuse prevention and treatment, But I want to introduce Geo Gibson who has been working with us since October in violence prevention. So I just wanted to say hello. Sure. How you doing, counsel? Gerald Gibson. I just want to say this. Coming aboard this savvy office here, I mean, it's opened up a lot of other doors for me. and not only just for me, but an opportunity for a lot of other people to get help. And I realize this, a lot of people do really need our help. And the reason why I stress that is because, you know, I had a pretty rough life myself, and so I know what it is to be out there and not knowing where the help is. And I believe that, you know, this can be a wonderful joint effort because I really believe I'm in a room full of great people, and I've learned to surround myself with a lot of great people and to become the man that I am. And I just want to, you know, put in 110% and do whatever I can, just like Alex said, you know, to help other people in their walks and hopefully to help other people become successful and, you know, make better choices and be productive people. That's pretty much what I just wanted to say. But thank you. Amy left me with next steps. I get to do the ask. Budget season is upon us, and these are some things that we'll be asking for in the budget and some legislative action that we would like to ask of this council. Amy is a program administrator in my office. Her position will be reclassified as a coordinator for substance abuse intervention. It will be a modest salary increase for her, and that will come to you in a human resources action if this office is established, about a 7% raise. We want to hire G.O. Gibson as a full-time violence prevention specialist. He is currently employed with the county attorney's office, working with young men who've had trouble with gang intervention or people who are incarcerated. He has left them part-time, and the police office has been kind enough for their funds to fund him 20 hours a week. Is that what you're working with us now, G.O.? We would like for him to be hired full-time to deal with the violence issues to work with Amy because our expertise is substance abuse. He would be a program specialist. The other thing we would need for the office is basically some training costs, some operating expenses, meeting and travel. We have already, out of my budget this year, we have already hired some evaluators from a professional organization to evaluate GEO's program that he does with young men to see if it's evidence-based. Because of Senate Bill 200 in the state, they're asking for alternatives to detention, but they have to be evidence-based in order to count. We are sending two people to Green Dot training, one of them is one of the sisters working against gun violence, and one is a professional, to be trained on how to have a Green Dot community to stop violence in a certain neighborhood. So there will be some cost to that. We're asking that this council establish an ordinance so that we can have a board to oversee the work of this office, and that would come to you. And the other thing we have is two years ago, we had the Youth Violence Prevention Conference, which some of you may remember. I know that the mayor and Chris Ford were present. We promise to do that every two years, and that will be coming up next fall. We want to add substance abuse, and I will tell you that Bluegrass.org has already agreed to give us $10,000 to bring in national speakers. So this won't all be city cost. We may ask the council to NDF funds or ask for some help in doing the conference, but Kentucky One has also been a good partner. We did it two years ago. We did it free of charge, and I don't believe that the government invested more than a couple thousand dollars in the entire conference. So these are the things we'll be asking for. We think it's something that needs to be a permanent part of the Department of Social Services. And I'll let Amy or I or Gio, any of us, be glad to answer questions. Thanks, Beth. All right, I'll open the floor to questions or comments from the council, beginning with Council Member Stennett. Thank you, Mayor. And first I want to start off by thanking my colleagues for agreeing to hear this presentation today. And thank you for those who were on council last year to help initiate this pilot program and also for everyone here today who is going to consider this in our budget. But I also want to take a moment to thank Alex and Ms. Franklin and everyone who came today and shared their stories with us. Because if you were back there at our meeting, like Councilman Hinton and I was back on March 11th, or I'm sorry, November, back in November, you heard the stories and why people are passionate about this issue and how they got involved in helping it. And, you know, it takes courage, Alex, to come to that microphone and Ms. Franklin to share your story. But you have more than courage because courage only happens once in a while. You have will. Will is getting up every day and fighting that battle. And you've shown us that you have that will. And that's remarkable. And everyone working on this, Amy and Gio, you come from the opposite ends of the spectrum. But you've met in the middle. And this middle is this office. And I appreciate both of you in sharing your stories. If you haven't sat down with Gio, do so because it's a remarkable story. If you haven't sat down with Amy, listen to where she comes from. She can tell you things that we wouldn't even fathom working with people out in our community today. So this is important to me. It's one of the reasons I came back to this council. It has to be an office that we fund. It has to be something that we take passionately, not just from an enforcement standpoint or from a social service standpoint. It's a financial impact on our community, too. Whether you're rich or poor, live on the north side or south side of town, it affects everybody. No one is immune from this. So everyone in this council has someone they know who's been through this. And it will keep affecting our community. It will affect our jails, our fire department, our police department, and on down the line until we take a stand. And as they said, we're already being recognized nationally. So we're already doing good work. Thank you, Commissioner Mills. I know today is one of the last times we'll get to see you before this council. Hopefully we'll see you Thursday night. But I want to thank you and Commissioner Mason, who's not here, but Commissioner Baston for helping carry this forward and his work when he was police chief. And, Mayor, thank you for allowing your people to take an active role in getting this moving forward. And thank you again to everyone who's coming today. And we hope we'll see a lot more of you as we make this a permanent home here in government. Thank you, Council Member Farmer. Thank you, Mayor. Commissioner, may I ask you a question then? Sure. So the next steps part is something you're going to include in your budget request then? Yes, sir. It will be in our budget request. Very good. I appreciate that. All right. Thank you. this addiction knows no boundary in terms of status, gender, background. It's a despicable, it harms the human spirit in ways that we can't understand here today. There is great courage in the people that have spoken here. and it's just, it's, we need to celebrate those people and how well they've done rather than dwell, but we need to help as many people as we can. And this is just a, it's a, I'm appreciative of tough presentations and this one in a certain respect is a very tough presentation. It's a very sad thing and there's none of us in this room that wouldn't do anything we could to stop someone from becoming or remaining addicted. So I appreciate your all's time and very much your courage. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Council Member Farmer. Council Member Bledsoe. Thank you, Mayor. I echo very much what Council Member Farmer just expressed, so I won't ditto. One of the things I've worked with a lot of the nonprofits that are on that committee, and what they've continuously said to me is we need a hotline. And so I just thought I would bring that up. I'm sure you've heard that quite a bit, but I think that's something that we really need to consider. I know when I'm in crisis, Googling is not the best option for help, and calling 311 and asking someone to give advice on that is probably not best either. I definitely want to speak to that. That's one thing that's on our wish list, because when you Google substance abuse treatment, chances are an out-of-state private organization for-profit is going to pop up, and it's not really an option to a lot of folks. We want to get information in a person's hand that can help them that day. We need resources available to folks that can save lives. Much like Alex mentioned in many discussions we've had before, people can't find treatment. They don't know where to go. And sadly, when we find the treatment that's available in Lexington, there's not that much of it. And for a lot of our programs, we have month after month waiting lists. And so we definitely want a hotline, but we also want to be able to increase access so when we give you that information that here is treatment, that when you go there, they say we have a bed for you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Council Member Bledsoe. Council Member Maloney. I do want to echo what the council said, but also this is a crisis, and I think this message that we're sending needs to be sent to Frankfurt, and they have to make a decision too, and I'm proud of what we're doing. I had an interesting conversation with a doctor over the weekend and he explained to me how the herring goes where you can use the needle three or four times and what effect it has to the medical is going to be devastating from what he tells me so if someone, for instance, who has used herring a lot won't have the regular blood type that this person has so if he goes to the doctor and has to have a blood transfusion They may have A, and they give him A, they have blood clots. The problem is they have three or four different kinds of blood types. And this is a serious problem. I'm proud that this council has taken the lead on this, and hopefully Frankfurt will get off their tail and do the same thing. Thank you. All right. Thank you, Councilman Maloney. Councilmember Ford. Thank you, Mayor. Councilmembers, I want to thank Commissioner Mills and Amy and all the supporters who've come out to share this information with us. I share the sentiments that have already been expressed in regards to how this is impacting substance abuse, our community, for far too long, and how in many ways it does lead to violence and oftentimes needless violence. I am very much encouraged, though, by the widespread support that we have around the community that has corralled around this effort. And I think it gives us locally an opportunity to continue to show leadership in different areas. And this is an area I can speak for myself and I take liberty to speak on behalf of the council. The area of substance abuse policy, we could benefit from knowing more about it. And I want to ask if it's okay, Mayor, if I can ask Amy a question. to have somebody of Amy's experience in this gives us a head start as we hope to get this office up and going off the ground. You mentioned something, and so did Chief Bastin, in regards to heroin being the epidemic it is now, but also giving us a forecast that as soon as we get our hands around this, there'll be something else. Talk a little bit about how you foresee the savvy office, the community leaders, helping us to not be caught flat-footed and preparing for the next whatever it may be. Sure. Well, of course, we don't know what drug is going to pop up next, but just looking historically at what has happened, you've seen different trends for different drugs. You know, we've seen cocaine pop up and go down a little bit, even though it's not gone too far away any of the times. We had a problem with pills statewide, and legislation was introduced to squash that, and now with the heroin problem, the problem has popped up. What will happen if we institutionalize this office is it will give us a chance to become proactive instead of reactive, and we'll work with our partners, because as you saw on the list and as you see in the room today, we're working with as many people as we can. We're welcoming whoever wants to come on board to help get in front of this. So while we can't predict what's going to be next, we can set up a system, because if we increase access to treatment for substances, it's going to work for any substance that pops up. So it's hard to predict the trend of what drug will pop up next, but we know that it will just by looking at historically of the trends. There's always a different drug that's trending. Amy, again, thank you. I think that this program and the services to be rendered by this program can serve benefit all across the community. So I support it. And again, I thank you and everybody here for your efforts. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Council Member Ford. Council Member Evans. Council Member Ford kind of stole my thunder. That was the crux of the issue that I had because I come from the social work background, public defender. And I've talked to some of you about that. And it is just like as I'll call him Chief Baston, Commissioner Baston said that when I was there 15 years ago, 14 years ago, I had maybe one heroin case. But now that's the main drug. You know, it was before heroin, it was crack cocaine. Before that, it was just powder cocaine. Before that, it was LSD, you know, and so forth. So that was, I wanted to make sure that the community knows, that the council knows, and that that is part of your focus, that it is substance abuse, regardless of what that substance is. And making sure we address those underlying issues that lead people to whatever substance they're going to choose. Absolutely. And making sure that that is the focus, because, again, the substance of the day will change. Absolutely. and making sure that we really address the underlying issue, and I do thank you. When we talk to treatment centers around the city who are involved with our group, anywhere from 80% to 90% right now of the folks involved in their programming are addicted to heroin. So right now that is the drug that's on the radar screen. But it will be something else, sadly. Thank you, Council Member Evans. Council Member Henson. Thank you, Mayor. I won't echo what all the others have said, and I certainly agree with them. And I'm so very thankful that we have the—for Lexington, actually. I'm thankful that we have the caring people in our community that we do, because it is, in my opinion, drug abuse is an illness. And I think Amy in your presentation or someone was talking about being afraid to, you're not afraid to get treatment for cancer or other things, but you're ashamed or whatever for drug addiction. But if you really want to know how widespread it is, I would say talk to any of our first responders. The coroner's office I'm friends with, many of the paramedics, and our police department. And that's all I'm going to say. I had one incident that I thought was the saddest thing, and it's when a person doesn't make it. Every person in our community is important, no matter what your background is, where you came from, all of that. As far as I'm concerned, you're important. I was curious about something, Amy, and I don't know if you have the answer, but the Narcan. does it just revive folks that are overdosing on heroin or does it work in on other? The way I understand it, I am certainly not an expert. It's for opiates only. Okay. I was curious about that because as we move forward, I think heroin is just so deadly. Pills are bad, and they take a long-term effect, is my understanding, on the body. I mean, even you may overdose on them, but the likelihood is less than heroin. But, you know, it just, your heart, everything will shut down. So I really, really do appreciate your work, though. Thank you very much. One of the primary goals that we touched on that Council Member Evans and you also addressed is we've got to de-stigmatize getting treatment for substance abuse. And that's one of the primary goals that the treatment group has determined that they want to accomplish is so folks can get the much-needed life-saving help that they need. I always look at our young people, too, as, you know, and how do they get to this point? So what can we put in place with Partners for Use and different programs, whatever, to where we can prevent as many as we can from getting to this point? So thank you. Thank you, Council Member Henson and Council Member Scotchfield. Thank you, Mayor. I want to thank everybody that came here to speak. the stigma that surrounds getting help. I have a family member that didn't get the help, was afraid to come to family, afraid that we would judge them, ended up spending time in prison, has been struggling to get their life back together. And that's a struggle that every person that deals with this has to face. And I think, you know, it's not just getting over the addiction because the outside world that doesn't understand that it's a disease. They blame the person. You went through treatment. Why aren't you better? My family member struggles all the time, unfortunately works in the service industry. And so, unfortunately, that has a stigma to push people. And I just, I think this is something our community needs, and I'm glad that we're bringing forward. You know, talking about Peggy, just Council Member Henson, sorry, just mentioning, you know, what can we do, Partners for Youth? My daughter, it's kind of scary, is in eighth grade right now. And over the last week, she had an assignment that was due last week that she kept on putting off because she kept on saying, I have more and more days to finish it. So finally on Sunday night, she was working on it. And what they've all been assigned is a different drug. And my daughter had been assigned to Rufies that she had to write a pamphlet on why a child should not do this. Now, I don't know about you, but it's kind of scary that we're just having this discussion with 13- and 14-year-olds. But the reality is we are having this discussion with 13- and 14-year-olds. And those are the type of discussions. And the more that we put it out in the public eye, the more that it's no longer a stigma. It's something we can help people get treatment for. So thank you all. And, you know, I think our schools are doing a good job of not hiding anymore behind that little veil. But thank you. Thank you, Council Member Scotchfield. Council Member Stennett. Thank you, Mayor. I just had one to follow up with Commissioner Mills on the structure of the office. I know we have Amy in there as the coordinator, the main seat, and then Gio, who primarily works with men at this point, correct? Primarily, you know, but he'll work with any youth. Boy or girl? Oh, sure. My concern was... Us is with men at this point, isn't it, Gio? But I know in our corrections facility it's mainly men, it's only men. Was there any discussion about having someone on the female side like Gio that can work with female people who are incarcerated and young women? That might be a long-term goal. What we want to do first, GEO has a program called OMAC, and we're in the process of evaluating. Tell everybody what OMAC is. It's pretty cool. Operation Making a Change. And we have gotten the county attorney's office to speak to the judges, and they have now court-ordered young men to this program. You go to OMAC or you go to the juvenile detention facility. And GEO's already started a 12-week program with these young men out at our day treatment center after hours. Um, right now it is with, but we want to get it evaluated first. We have hired, uh, CHESS, which is a, um, human, all social services, we love acronyms. But it's a professional group that does evaluation. And they're doing research on GO's program to make sure it's strong and it's solid. So I'm kind of, we want to make sure what we're doing is working before we replicate it. We do have a lot of female involvement, though, in the violence arena because of folks like Ms. Franklin, the sisters and supporters working against gun violence, those are all mothers who've lost their sons to gun violence. Most of Mary's group in victim services are women. So I'm sure that they will have some ideas. The truth of the matter is, though, most of the gun violence that's happening in our community is happening with young men. And so it's very ironic. Amy and Joe and I have talked about it. Every committee chair except for Larry Johnson is female. and we really need some males to step up to the plate and take some leadership in this. And that's why we're so important to have Gio, because these young men can relate better to a man. We had a 25-year-old in the initial meeting stand up, and he said, I'm here to tell you, drugs and guns are glamorous in my age group. And that's just the truth. So since that's the truth, we need to come at that full force. We need to find a way for these kids to snitch so that we can make some inroads into putting people away. We need to find kids to find another way, that guns and drugs are not the only way. So, Gio's real versed on that. He's good at talking to these kids about other alternatives, and he's got a good BS meter, as they'd say. He knows when these kids are trying to pull a fast one. So, we're fortunate to have him. Thank you, Commissioner. Thank you, Mayor. Jim? Sure. Go ahead, Jim. Well, you asked about the OMAC program, and yes, it's all males right now, but like you said, there are a lot of our young girls and young ladies that are inquiring about why don't we have anything for them pertaining to that. And so we are, I am looking forward to doing something like that, But the OMAC program, I started at an elementary level. And so there's different levels to the OMAC program. And Operation Making a Change is what it stands for. So elementary, we start at the elementary. We follow into middle school, high school, college. I'm working with the adults at the correctional county jail over there. So far we've had two graduate classes. I'm on my third class there. I had at least 100 kids graduate from up north from YDS Youth Development Center with the OMAC program. So saying that, you know, we won't always see the results, what comes out of it. Some of these kids might go different directions. Some of these guys, but they come back, they write letters, and, you know, people don't see that part. But like Beth said, we are trying to track it through data so that other people can see that. it is making a difference. So it's different levels to the OMAC program. I don't talk to the little kids more in depth with the entire content of the program. I know I've got to be mindful that these are children. So there are certain ways that I'll do that, but we try to build them up and help them not identify that they don't have to be followers and end up in street gangs, on the street corners, end up in jail. You know, a lot of our little kids, they see their family members going to jail, being victims of abuse and stuff like that. But, you know, we try to mentor these kids and let them know they don't have to turn out that way. So that's Operation Making a Change. Thanks. Thanks, G.O. Anyone else? All right. Just as a footnote, I want to also thank everyone who's been here today and all the effort that you all have put into this for several months. And I see Commissioner Mills shaking her head and grinning like we have become accustomed to. And Council Member Stennett mentioned that this is her last work session, but maybe we'll have her at the council meeting on Thursday night. But what Beth has illustrated throughout every project she's initiated has been leadership from the heart and then through the head in really remarkable ways. and she doesn't want to make a big deal out of this, so I'm not going to do it. But I am going to share that on Friday afternoon, if anybody wants to go to the Senior Citizen Center, there's a big party for her. What time is it, Beth? 12.30 to 2. 12.30 to 2. Okay. Thank you. All right, that allows us to go to our next agenda item, and that is we will revert back to the regular agenda. and so Roman numeral two item Roman numeral two is requested rezonings and a docket approval I don't know of any rezoning requests all right so I'll accept a motion for the docket approval all right motion to motion to approve by councilmember stenton second by councilmember Henson is there any discussion on the motion all right council member lamb I don't have a I don't want to speak to the motion on the floor so I'll wait until the motion is over I have another motion okay thank you all right there's hearing none then we can take a vote all in favor please say aye opposed no Motion carries. Council Member Lamb. Thank you, Mayor. As everybody knows, since we had to cancel last Tuesday's work session, we've had to kind of slide everything up. And the University of Kentucky Alumni Drive reconstruction presentation that was scheduled for this afternoon was scheduled by a motion for this day. so we felt like that it was imperative that we make a motion to reschedule it to the March 3rd work session, and that has been confirmed with UK. They are able to do that and come on March 3rd at the work session, so I so move. Second. Motion by Council Member Lamb on the reschedule for the alumni drive issue. Second by Council Member Farmer. Is there any discussion on the motion? Council Member Farmer. Totally supportive of the move. During our Environmental Quality and Public Works Committee meeting earlier today, representatives of the U.K. were here, and we had other questions about their traffic patterns. And the presentation may for sure be about Alumni Drive, but it may have some other parts to it that could be very educational for council members new and old. Thank you. Thank you, Council Member Farmer. All right. Any further discussion? All right. Hearing none, then we can take a vote. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed, no. Motion carries. All right. Next on our agenda is a motion to approve the, or I'll ask for a motion to approve the summary. Is there a motion? I move. Second. Motion by Council Member Farmer and second by Council Member Henson. Is there any discussion on the motion? All right. Hearing none, then we can vote. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed, no. Motion carries. Next is budget amendments. Is there a motion? So moved. Second. Motion by Council Member Massadi, second by Council Member Farmer. Is there any discussion on the motion? All right. Hearing none, then we can take a vote. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed, no. Motion carries. Next is new business. Is there a motion? Move approval. Motion by Council Member Farmer, second by Council Member Henson. Floor is available for discussion. Council Member Farmer. Thank you. Just a couple of three, Mayor. First one is item E on page 15. Request council authorization to certify Global Environmental Products, Inc., as a sole source vendor for purchase of Superior Road Model PHP 5000 Asphalt Patcher. Did you find one cheap at this time of year or what? We have Director Miller, who is the man of the week, approaching the podium. Yes, he is. And Commissioner David Holmes. Albert, did you get the... Were we short one? I did not hear the question. I think I was asleep. Don't let it be said that Albert doesn't speak the truth. I'm just kidding. We all thank you again for y'all's work. Did we have a patcher? Is this a new patcher? Give us some patcher update. Sure. What we're looking at, the one that's on the docket, is it's a sole source, as we said. And what it gives us the ability to do is operate it year-round. Okay. It allows us to use hot mix in the summer when the plants are open. It allows us to use the cold mix that we presently use in the wintertime. And it also compacts it. It has a roller that actually is like the pavement roller that you would see out on the street. Yes, sir. And it compacts it into much more of a permanent fix. Very versatile tool. It is wonderful. And how soon would we or will we? If once it passes council, the PL will be let, and once they get to PL, it will be 120 days. Well, I think we won't be using coal patch by then, but thank you very much. Next winter. Okay. It's all good. I think that's all I have. Thank you, Albert. Thank you. That's it. All right. Thank you, Council Member Farmer. Council Member Maloney. Thank you, Mayor. Two, we have a couple questions. One, I like the first one is on E. If you could have someone come up, someone add a little bit on E, that would be okay. That's the same one, right, Council Member Maloney, on the pothole patcher? I just want to add more to it because Albert and I, when I was commissioner, Albert and I went to a conference in Chicago and found this thing, and this was amazing. And at that time, we were having nothing but pothole problems, and our equipment kept breaking down. And I'm really excited about this. And you're saying we can have it done in 120 days. Is that correct? That is correct. That's what the manufacturer tells us. So what I may do Thursday night or summer on, maybe ask for a second reading on this, because I'm telling you, after what we had last week, you haven't seen nothing yet because the potholes are going to start happening, folks. So I'm excited. I wish we'd have done it a little bit quicker, but I'm telling you, you're going to be amazed on this part. It's the only one. You may ask why we didn't do bedded out or nothing. It's the only company that makes this truck, and that's why we couldn't go out and get another bed or anything on it. Yeah, and that's correct because it's the only one that does not use emulsion. And we cannot get emulsion in this area in the wintertime. And this one, like I said, it uses the product that we buy. It's the cold mix and then also, of course, the hot mix that we use. So it's a very versatile and it's a one-man operation or, I'm sorry, one-person operation. And you're being made, and that compares to today, Albert. It's a one-person operation, too, but it takes emulsion, the one that we have presently, and it was bought back in 98. And it's the aging of it has presented some issues with it. Another question on how long, like if we have a regular pothole, how long would it take to cover that pothole? I mean, I know compared, it was a lot quicker than what we have with a normal machine that we have. How long was it? Right. Presently, we have a two-person crew that goes out and shovels off the back of a truck to do a pothole. This one will be average speed, I think, 50 miles an hour, of which most of our roads do not exceed that. And Manowar Boulevard in places like those particular places, it's a lot safer for the operator because of the surrounding, what he has around him. It has arrow boards on it. It has cameras on the side and in the back. So it's a machine that's not only great to fill potholes permanently, it's also very safe for our operator and everybody else. Thank you, B.M. Thank you, Mayor. The other one I have is question W. If you have someone speak on W, please, if you could have someone come up. That'd be Mr. O'Mara. This is item W, which is the bonding. And I've looked at some of the bonding capacity of what you're doing. And one thing that comes to my attention is what we had last week. It's another part of it. The salt barn is in that bond. Is that correct? No, sir. The second salt barn is not in that? This is not a new issue. This is refunding or refinancing existing bonds in order to get a better rate. So is the second bond in that rate? And this is 2009-2006 bonds, and the current – when we started this process, there were savings in the market, very considerable savings, and those have somewhat diminished. But we still would ask you to pass this so that we can monitor the bond market between now and the end of the year, and if there is another dip that we could take advantage and save on our total debt service. Well, the reason why I asked, I looked on it. I thought what you were bonding. There were different things you all were bonding, trucks and automobiles. That was the issue we did in November, which has already been issued. This is redoing bonds that are already in place from 2006 and 2009. So these projects have already been done. You're just going back and refinancing. Yes, sir. So what you, well, what I could have sworn I saw a bond. I'll get back with you on that when I saw one. Thank you. All right. Thank you, Mr. Maloney. Council Member Stenet. Actually, Mayor, I tried to catch you before you moved to new business, so I have an item for budget amendments after you complete new business. Okay. We can go back. All right. Back to budget amendment? Yes, sir. Okay. We're ready now? Yeah, let's just go back. Should we vote on new business? After we vote on new business. Does anybody else wish to speak to new business? All right. If not, then we can take a vote on the motion. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed, no. Motion carries. Okay. Mr. Stenet. Thank you, Mayor. I move that the budget amendment request list on pages 3 and 4 of the work session and packet be amended to add budget amendment to provide for streets and roads, for additional salt and contract snow removal in the amount of $488,000. Funds are being reallocated from budgets for various utility accounts within the general fund. So moved. Second. Motion by Council Member Stenet, seconded by Council Member Masati. Is there any discussion on the motion? Mayor, if I could say before anyone asks, 254 of it was for contractors, 234 of that is salt. And that's the anticipated amount? Yes, sir. Right. not fully committed. Turn the spigot off. At this point in time. Right. All right. Thank you. All right. Is there any comment or any discussion? All right. If not, then we take a vote. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed, no. Motion carries. Thank you, Councilman Stenning. All right. That allows us to move on to continuing business and presentations. And first on our agenda is the General Government and Social Services Summary by Council Member Ford. Thank you, Mayor. Council Members, on pages 49 through 53, you will find the summary for the General Government and Social Services Committee meeting held on February 3rd. because we have so many presentations, I'm going to attempt to give an abbreviated summary. We called the meeting to order at 101. All committee members were present. Vice Mayor Kaye was also in attendance. The first item of business was approval of committee summary. The previous committee summaries, those passed without dissent. The second item of business was to review items in committee. we removed two items that were on the docket. A motion to remove building security from committee was made by Council Member Gibbs, seconded by Council Member Akers. It passed. The second motion to remove was to increasing commitment to partner agency funding. The motion to remove was made by Council Member Akers, seconded by Council Member Henson. It passed, also without dissent. And we reviewed many of the remaining items in committee. The third item of business was the standardized cell phone procurement process, which was presented by our CIO, Aldona Valsenti, who overviewed the recent CAO policy that spoke to cell phone procurement. There was discussion by the committee. It ultimately resulted in a motion to remove the topic from committee by Councilmember Akers, second by Councilmember Henson, and that motion passed. The next item of business was a review of the aquatics program design. Roger Damon of the Department of General Services provided an overview of the plan to move forward with a master plan for aquatics. This is allowed by our fund balance, a reallocation of approximately $150,000 to move that effort forward. There were no questions, and we anticipate future updates in future meetings. The next item was the Bluegrass International Center. It was by Isabel Taylor, our Multicultural Affairs Coordinator, in regards to the community's effort to bring this satellite program to the Versailles Road campus. Due to timing, council members, you had that information on page 51 and 52. Lastly, the last item was the Lyric Theater strategic plan. This item was placed in committee as a counseling referral. A budget link referral Paula King the treasurer of the lyric Provided information on the new strategic plan that spanned from 2015 through 2019 She also indicated that the lyric recently completed its first independent Audit there was much discussion from committee members Subsequent to her presentation a motion to remove the item from committee was made by councilmember Evans second by councilmember Henson It passed the motion to adjourn was made it passed the meeting adjourned at 247 that concludes the summary mayor Thank you Councilmember Ford. Next is our budget finance and economic development summary by Councilmember Stenet. Thank you Mayor. Two will attempt to be abbreviated given the length of our agenda. Our first meeting of the year began with our election of committee chair. I was honored to be able to serve and elected as chair. Our next appointed Councilmember Maloney as the vice chair of the budget finance and economic development committee. The summary was approved unanimously from December 9th. Next up was presentations, our monthly financials by Commissioner Bill Mara, Rusty Cook, our Director of Revenue, and Melissa Luker, our Director of Budgeting. Just a couple highlights on the economic indicators. Our employment rate was down to 4.4% through November. And then home sales, once again, were up year over last year from 618 to 794 home sales in the month of December. In our big four accounts of revenue year to date, employee withholdings were down 1.9% or $1.6 million. Our net profit continued to increase at 4.3% or $423,000. Our insurance premium tax was up as well through December 6.3% or $819,000. And then franchise fees were up 20% or $1.8 million. Again, some of those were due to timing variances. Overall expenses year to date through December for the first six months were under budget by $7.8 million. Total change in position through the first six months of the year was $12.2 million. Next on our agenda was committee referrals and we went through the committee list and removed several items and we concluded our meeting at 134. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Council Member Stennett. Next is the planning and public safety summary by councilmember Massadi Thank You mayor two motions came out of that meeting meeting came to order at 1 p.m. a motion to move the fire code amendments urban County code of ordinances 9-11 9-13 9-3 and 9-13 to council was made by farmers seconded by Henson he brought to the full council second motion to move taxicab ordinance to council was made by Henson seconded by acres meeting was adjourned at 2 45 p.m. that's all mayor thank you thank you Council member Soddy and next is environmental I'm sorry was there a motion she's got to bring was there a motion I didn't hear it sorry I would move those motions both forward so moved was there one motion or was there two I can I can separate a motion to move the fire quote amendments as I said UCG code of ordinances 9-11 9-13 9-3 and 9-13 to council was made by farmer and seconded by henson i so moved to move to the full council so moved motion by councilman massadi second by councilman henson is there any discussion on the motion all right hearing none we can vote oh councilmore farmer i i guess it's not really on the motion but on the style of the report which really doesn't have the minutes it just has the two motions in it i don't i don't know why that happened either okay well this is this one the one you have just made is one that i had a hand in and we did have good discussion at the meeting and handed out today was a version of what the fire chief had asked for and it did pass without any uh pass unanimously so i'll be very supportive thank you thank you councilmember farmer the second motion was to move the taxi cab ordinance council member just yeah we'll need to get the vote on it okay any if if there's no further discussion then we can vote all in favor of the motion please indicate by saying aye opposed no motion carries okay thank you mayor and the second motion was to move the taxi cab ordinance to council was made by second i'm sorry henson and seconded by acres and i so move on behalf of council member henson so motion by council members are second by council member Henson is there any discussion on the motion council member Lamb yes and I know that it's inappropriate to recognize someone that wants to speak while there's a motion on the floor perhaps but there is Mr. Sheehy is here and would like to address the council regarding this issue I didn't know if it would be appropriate or if the council would allow him to speak he handed out a memo prior to work session to us all? Well, unless there's an objection, I would say that it's appropriate, and since we haven't taken the vote yet. Ned? Okay. I didn't hear Mr. Sheehy. Now I get who it is. Ned Sheehy approaches the podium. Thank you. Ned Sheehy, 813 Hildean. I really didn't want to come to this process in this manner. We were trying to address some issues about the ordinance changes. We had been guaranteed that the industry was going to have ample time to discuss any revisions of the ordinance, of which we did not. We were asked questions. I was asked questions on my cell phone while I was heading to Frankfurt on how the issues would work out. if you want to vet these issues altogether there's a lot of problems that we could have yes lowering the number from 25 to 10 may sound like a reasonable issue getting rid of a call center does not so much sound like that when you then get rid of the the possibility of needing to have a meter in the cab you don't need to have manifest to show who was in your cab and you don't need to have the mechanism for people to collect information. I just think when you vet all those things together and you get maybe a conglomeration of 10 guys who have cars, they want to start up their own company, they no longer have to prove that they have the ability to have a call center, meters, or the collection of data as to who they transport. I think this was a little fast when you take all of this into consideration at the same time, and I really would like to have a little bit more time to discuss it. All right. Thank you, Mr. Sheehy. All right. We have a motion. Is there any further discussion on the motion? Council Member Farmer and Council Member Henson. Council Member Farmer. As is reflected on page 57, during this time of the meeting, I was absent on a separate conference call. So I wasn't in the chamber or part of the discussion or the deliberation or the motion here. And I guess I've kind of got two things. First off, if I recall correctly from that day, what had been enclosed in the packet turned out to be a little bit erroneous, and we were handed a copy that day of an updated version of what I guess was finally debated and then passed. And then because of the style of this report today, I think we're absent of the ability to look into the minds of some of the council members and their commentary about this. And certainly we've heard from an affected party here saying, I don't feel I've had due process. So to me, I'm not sure what is a burning issue that needs to be immediately remedied here or is there time for the council to deliberate and consider based on the fact that, at least from one person, we feel like there's been little outside commentary about this process? All right. Council Member Massadi is chair. You want to speak to the question? Yes. Yes, sir. We did have discussion at that time during the plan committee, if you all remember. I recognized Mr. Sheehy that represented Yellow Cabs, and I cannot recall the other gentleman's name at that time, but I had them both come to the podium and speak and talk about some of the concerns and we discussed it for quite a long time if I remember and I think Councilmember Henson provided us with a new updated ordinance at that time because there was a couple of changes that had to be done and we discussed those at that time too and I apologize that's not reflected in the minutes here today. When I spoke with Mr. Schoeninger, I voiced my concern about having too much information in the packet sometimes and that we would just go to the motions and that's what happened. So next time I'll provide a little bit more background, but in the discussion process we talked about being expedient with some of this, and I was a little too expedient, I'm sorry. So next time we'll have some more discussion, but we did talk about that at length in the committee meeting. All right. Thank you, Council Member Mossade. Council Member Henson. Thank you, Mayor. In addition to having a great deal of discussion about this in committee, earlier this week I sent out a summary of the changes that will take effect. None of the changes in this ordinance say that it's mandatory. They're all optional. So with the exception of lowering the number of taxi cabs, and I just feel like that that is very fair, that a company could begin with 10 taxis rather than the 25. But even prior to the February 10th committee meeting, this has been discussed numerous times. So I feel like it's time to move it on. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Council Member Henson. Council Member Maloney. I'm not on this committee, and I followed this taxi cab back in the 90s when we were dealing with 25, 30, 50, 10, 5, 1. And my question is, if it's fair for those folks who have been there for all these years, and I'm not trying to say I'm buddies with any of them. I'm just trying to figure out how do you sit here legally and say they follow these rules, and then you're going to turn around and say we're going to have other taxi cabs come in with only 10 cars. And, I mean, I just, I mean, I don't have, I don't understand how you want to do some of the changes and all that. And what led to this is because of that one cab company that they finally have done some enforcement on. But is it really fair, and I'm just looking from being, I dealt with this in the 90s, so I don't want to sound like Fred Brown, but I am right now. But, I mean, I went through this a long time on these cabs, and I'm just trying to be fair to everybody, and it's why 10? I mean, what is the reason we did 10, and why not 25? I mean, has there been that many complaints on our cabs that are that bad, or are they – I'm just curious what led this to 10? Do you want me to answer that? I didn't get the question, but it sounds like Council Member Henson wants to answer it. No, I think Council Member Henson does. Council Member Henson. Council Member Maloney, I just wanted to provide you with a little updated history. With the Uber and Lyft moving into Lexington, that was the reason that this was reduced, because the taxi drivers themselves, they felt that they were at a disadvantage, and that this was done in an effort to make them more competitive and become equal. And they use Uber and Lyft, use apps. And this was just letting our taxi cab companies have the option of doing that as well. So I hope that answers a little bit. And I did see documents where we did debate this back 80 years ago. Well, the question I have on that is I did not support that Uber or whatever, that cab company, because I have more of a safety concern than me. Because if I had that cab that night and I'm drunk and I gave it to a friend of mine that I don't know and he wasn't picked him up and he was a child pedophile or sex killer, he's sitting in that car. and it caused, I just thought there was no regulation that I have concerns, and I think the state has took care of that problem. They did. I hope the state has to take care of that problem. Now, to make them go up with technology and make them more creative, I don't know, making the 10 cars is going to make them do that. That's what I guess we're trying to do. Thank you. Thank you. Councilmember Lamb. I just wanted to clarify that the reason that I have spoken with concern of this, it's not because of the language per se. It's the process that we went through. I spoke with both Mr. Sheehy and Mr. Daugherty prior to this February 10th Planning and Public Safety Committee meeting. And prior to that, neither one of them had seen this draft ordinance, which directly pertains to their business. I realize and respect that these are not mandatory changes. However, it does affect their businesses. And I am being the person I am about transparency. Again, now this came forward today, and I just found out before work session that Mr. Sheehy had not been notified that this was coming before today. So I just feel like that we need to make sure that when things, when ordinances are going to affect companies in our city, that we need to make sure that they're aware of changes that are coming their way so that they have an opportunity to speak on them if they have problems with it. And so I just wanted to clarify that is my concern. Thank you. All right. Thank you, Council Member Lamb. All right. No one further signed on to speak, so we can vote on the motion. All in favor, indicate by saying aye. Aye. Opposed, no. No. All right, let's vote electronically then. All in favor, please vote electronically yes. Opposed, electronically no. All right. All right. Who's not on? Amanda. Hey, Amanda. It's a tie. Not yet, it's not. Oh. Oh, lovely. Welcome to the meeting, Mayor. Yeah. Where is the spot for me to vote? It's gone. What this does is puts it before the council. I think you have to just do it verbally. I don't. It puts the ordinance. It does. This is a report out. would report out to... I vote yes. Yep. Thank you. Yep. All right. That allows us to move on to the next issue on the agenda. Which is the presentation on the consent decree. No, no. Environmental Quality. Yes, sir. Yes, Council Member Farmer. Thank you, Mayor. These are the minutes from our meeting on January 20th. Let's see. First off, we approved our summaries. We had a, we were going to have a presentation about Woodland Avenue, which we had today. Item number three on our agenda pertained to Columbia Heights. And I'll go ahead and read this motion, which is, you can see on page 63 of our packet. This was a motion to refer to council a resolution authorizing and directing the Division of Traffic Engineering pursuant to the code of ordinances 18-46 to designate the following streets in the Columbia Heights neighborhood area as being prohibited to know through trucks and authorizing and directing the Division of Traffic Engineering to install proper and appropriate signs in accordance with the designation. McCaw's Alley, Park Avenue, Ashland Terrace, Columbia Avenue between Woodland Avenues and Marquise Avenue, Marquise Avenue between Ashland Terrace and Columbia Avenue slash Sunset, south ashland avenue between ashland terrace and sunset drive motion was made by council member gibbs seconded by council member stendet and it passed eight to two with myself and council member lane uh in the in the negative but at this time i would so move on behalf of the committee second motion by council member farmer second by councilman ford is there any discussion on the motion Council member Farmer. I'm going to speak against this. Surprising. Oh, thank you. Yes. I think we're still at a time and place where, as with the last issue we talked about, yes, we've talked about taxis and things around taxis before, but this council and these folks haven't. as it relates to this particular issue, I don't feel any ownership from the neighborhood over this. No one from the neighborhood has appeared before this council in any capacity to ask for this to happen. As is reflected in the minutes, at the time we met, Kroger had not been notified that these street changes were going to be made. However, I have made it my business to be in contact with them, and they have, in my opinion, no reservation about this. They're fine with these streets becoming no through trucks. I just think that it is to a certain degree an overreach on our behalf to make this change on this many streets with other than three emails that I received after some comments when we talked about this in committee no one else showed up and said I want this. This is something I need this is something I've got to have. And I just think it's something that to me I would I would maybe ease into this rather than do all these at once because I feel like this was trying to inoculate something that hasn't happened or isn't happening and to a certain degree in another whole frame and vein will add to a lot of signage blight in the neighborhood other than that it's a great piece of legislation thank you thank you councilmember farmer councilmember Gibbs thank you mayor actually I have in my hand a petition from 80 residents from the neighborhood which I could distribute it but in the interest of not wasting paper I didn't I'd be happy to do that for you. So there was a petition circulated. Also, I was present at the Ellsford Neighborhood Association when they voted unanimously. There were about 25 members of the Neighborhood Association. They were fully in support of the Ashland Terrace Retirement Home, which is a very big deal up there. I have a letter from the management there, very strong pleading with us to put the no-through-trucks resolution through. Kroger has been contacted. It is a constant farmer mentioned and Kroger has no objection. I got letters from several people, you know, for example, Mark Barker in Columbia Heights. Any let any email I got was in favor of it. I got no emails that were opposed to it. So my sense is there's considerable support for it in the area. Thank you. Thank you, Councilor Gibbs. no further discussion then we can vote on the motion all in favor please say aye aye opposed no no all right the account the motion does carry um councilman farmer thank you mayor the next item on our agenda was item four which was uh as at least it's labeled here ferndale pass in buck lane this was a uh a request for a multi-way stop to be placed which as the minutes reflected that and a page 59 going into page 60 we had a rather in-depth conversation about this which led to a motion to refer Ferndale pass and Buck Lane multiway stop study to council which it had been studied by traffic engineering and they had sanctioned it this was made by the vice mayor and seconded by councilmember Evans passed without dissent and you can see it on page 66 and I would soap so move on behalf of the committee motion by councilmember Farmer and second by councilor acres is there any discussion on the motion hearing none then we can vote all in favor please say aye aye opposed no motion carries and thank you mayor item number five for our meeting that day was the West Second Street speed limit analysis which again had some background discussion to it of changing the designation on that part of the street from 35 to 25 miles per hour let's see traffic again had looked at this we had not quite as full of discussion but a full one that led to a motion that is you can see codified on page 68 this is a motion to send the West second speed limited analysis to council change the speed limit from 35 to 25 seconded by the vice mayor and the motion passed without dissent and I would so move on behalf of the committee at this time motion by councilmember Farmer and second by councilmember Akers is there any discussion on the motion all right if not then we can vote all in favor please say aye aye opposed no motion carries thank you our next item of business was the Todd's Road widening update which was a good update about the background work that's going on in terms of liens and parcels and things being considered for that and some of the right of entry work that we have paved the way for in the past. And then let's see, kind of, we went right on here. Item seven was the Division of Water Quality Projects report, which Mr. Martin gave an excellent report to, and he made some comments that are really framed well for our discussion we're going to have later on in today's meeting. However, this discussion on this day in our meeting led to no motions. Item 8, we reviewed our financials, which we did today, and part of them were actually in the Budget and Finance Committee earlier. That resulted in no motions. And finally, our last item was a motion to adjourn, which we did so at 3 o'clock. That concludes my presentation, Mayor. Thank you. Thank you, Council Member Farmer. All right. That allows us to move on to the presentation on the consent decree, next steps, and the presenters will be Commissioner O'Mara and Director Charlie Martin. Thank you, Mayor. I think most all the council members should have gotten a copy of their binder, either found it sitting on their table or gotten it through your legislative aid. The last time I was here talking about consent decree and projects and costs and those things, I promised that I would get that distributed to everybody before we had that discussion. So what are you saying about this? The agenda for today, you can see there, the first two bullets are going to be more of a look back on how we got here, as much for the benefit of some of the newer council members as opposed to some of you who have been here for a while. I'm going to turn it over to Bill. He's going to talk a lot about the third bullet here as far as the impact. We're going to kind of share that one, and then it's going to come back to me and compare some of what we're projecting as residential sewer rates benchmarked with other cities. Starting with the look back. I've been working on this since 2007. You see that subtitle there at the very top of it. I think that gets lost to a lot of folks because they don't always necessarily hear about the consent decree all the time. I live and breathe it pretty much every day. I brought my broken down consent decree binder with me. I think I need to get a new cover for it. We've spent a lot of money to this point in time on that, as you can see there, is that not only in capital expenses but also in studies and plans and overall management. We started out in 2007 not really having a really good understanding of how our sewer system worked and, more importantly, what it was going to take to fix some of the problems that we have. And so there was a considerable amount of investment that was made in that understanding. But at the same time, capital projects have been going on all along, is that there were 24 pump stations that were listed in the consent decree as requiring remedial action. At this point, based on what's shown on this slide, eight of those 24 have either been eliminated or corrected. So there's been a lot of work that's been going on in the background and not necessarily what everybody would be seeing. How do we do that? A lot of ways, obviously with current revenue streams that we've been receiving through the Sanitary Sewer Fund or Fund 4002 as we refer to it. But also we've been leveraging ourselves with a lot of grant and loan fund, particularly through the Kentucky Infrastructure Authority. They're the state agency that administers all of the grants and loans. Grants, you know, we were able to mine that quite a bit in the early days of the consent decree. Since the probably about 2009, you're seeing less of grants. They've almost nonexistent at this point in time and seeing more of the loan fund type of things. I know that I am due to submit a more detailed list of the grants and loans that we've gotten to this point to the Environmental Quality and Public Works Committee. I got that done last Tuesday during our snow day, and so I'll have that in the packet here moving up. But as you can see, we've gotten a considerable amount of low-interest loan money and grant money in order to do the projects that we've done to this point in time. I could have the customary spreadsheet that shows all of the projects, and you wouldn't be able to read it, obviously, with spending the kind of money that we're talking about spending. I like this slide because this really tells you what it's all about. Since 2007, we've eliminated nearly 50 million gallons of annual raw sewage entering streams in Fayette County. That's what this whole thing is about, is to stop the overflows that occur every time that we have an even reasonable rain event, or snow event for that matter. is that the infamous overflow that we have near the reservoir along the guardrail across from the old Lexington Mall. We have an alarm in there that tells us whether or not the flow is coming up. Saturday night, I got an alarm because we had warm weather. We had a little bit of a melt. It also went off on Sunday as well. So we've got a lot of work still to do, but we've made a lot of accomplishments as well. Of the ten worst pump station overflows that we have, we have six of them already taken care of. including numbers 1, 4, and 5. So they're big contributors to that number that you see right there. Okay, how did we do that? I'm blessed with a great team. I get to stand up here a lot of times and tell you about it, but I've got a lot of folks behind me that don't come down here that make all this stuff happen. And part of that they do is through sound project management, dedication, engineering efforts, ways to be able to figure out how to be able to deliver this project in a way that is efficient and cost-effective as it possibly can be. The one bullet there you see where we've cut costs by $60 million so far. Those of you who were back here in the previous council, I was here in November talking about this. This had to do with the award of the town branch storage tank. Originally, we had projected that at being roughly $2.32 a gallon for 44 million gallons. We'll see some reworking of the project. We did it in phases, but we got the phase down to where it's now costing us $0.87 a gallon. So from $2.32 a gallon to $0.87 a gallon for 44 million gallons, that's a lot of money. That's a lot of money. And so those are some great opportunities that we have already been able to utilize so far, but we're going to continue to utilize moving forward. All of these efficiencies, all of this project management has really delayed what I have said all along is going to be an inevitable time where I have to come back here and say it's time to raise rates. Back in 2008, Don Blevins, former council member, stood right at this podium and said that we will have to have future rate increases. In 2011, I stood here with former director of budgeting, Ryan Barrow. Basically, we were saying at that time we thought 2012 was going to be the time frame for having a rate increase. Those efficiencies, project management, KIA loans and grants have allowed us to put off the inevitable as long as we can. But we're at that point now that it is time that we have to raise rates in order to be able to do, continue doing the work that's required under the consent decree. Here's why. And please note is that the FY18 number is different in your packet. I caught that as a typo this morning. It didn't match the two slides after it. So that is the correct number. But let's just talk about this in general. You see a three-year spend of $265 million. If you go back a couple slides, I talk about that we spent $132 million in nearly eight years. So we're talking about spending twice as much in half of the time. Why is that? The storage tanks. Many of you have heard me talk about these storage tanks before. It's a big component of our overall sanitary sewer remedial measures program, like most cities. Nashville has them. Knoxville has them. Cincinnati has them. I only just named three of them off the top of my head. So we have them as well. They're only 7% in the overall number of the projects, but they're 55% of the total cost. Dialing back to what I said before about Town Branch and the value engineering effort there, The effort that we put into that has a huge payback because it is such a large component or a large cost of this overall project. And so saving money in storage tanks is a huge, huge mission for us. And it's one that we spend a lot of time on every couple of weeks. We meet with the mayor every two weeks regarding where we are with the consent decree. And I know we spend a lot of time talking about storage tanks. In this particular next three years, six of the eight storage tanks that are in the projects are either going to be built or under construction. I don't know how well you can see this. A lot of people have asked about where are these tanks. Basically, the yellow dots. Right here is Town Branch wastewater treatment plant out on Old Frankfort Pike. Down here is West Hickman in Jasmine County just to the south of Veterans Park. clearly we had we're on a hill and so everything drains away from the downtown away from Ashland out into the edges of the urban service boundary and so we have to have tanks in strategic places in particularly at the treatment plants because if we get all this all this flow it's got to go someplace it can't go into the creek and so it has to go into the tank at the treatment plants likewise you've got some of the smaller drainage areas you see these ones all around the perimeter of the urban service boundary those are where existing pump stations are right now we will build these storage tanks in order to collect the excess flow that comes when it rains and then slowly meter it back into the system you have a couple of other remote locations where we have what we call in-system storage and that's basically is to prevent having to build a bunch of pipelines that are really in pretty new shape or very difficult to replace. It's cheaper and more effective to build the offline storage. But that gives you a snapshot of where the storage tanks are proposed to be. This graph really illustrates that hurdle that I was talking about is that where we've been spending money all along, but you see that there is a fairly significant hurdle that we have to overcome here in the next three years and how the storage tanks themselves impact that. You see that in the FY15 bar, the red is the storage tank expenditure, and the blue are the other projects, and you see how it turns upside down. The storage tanks are necessary in the front end because, as I said before, you've got to have some place for all this flow to go. But it also does have a new development component to it as well because we have a capacity assurance program that basically says that we have to be able to certify new connections to the system. In most cases, for every gallon of storage that we build, we get one gallon of credit that we can use to allow new service connections. So as we talk about rates going upward pressures, balancing that with new customers is a good thing for us. And these tanks allow us the ability to be able to leverage those new customers as they come online. I mentioned before about tanks. The original RMP remedial measures plan for those tanks that were not at the treatment plant originally projected at $3.83 a gallon, a little bit more than what Town Branch did because they're smaller tanks and plus they're in remote locations, i.e. have to buy the land for them. We're at the treatment plants, we don't. And, well, now the model has been adjusted to where we've been able, through value engineering, to reduce that cost by almost $1.30 a gallon. And that's without bidding any of them yet. But those are estimates. So the value engineering that we spend on this as far as refining the design and making sure that we're not gold plating this, even right now before we've built the first one, we've saved potentially another $46 million of projected cost from what we originally were started at. Everything we do is about trying to reduce costs and still deliver the project as it is. But that being said, we still have to deal with rate pressures. So I'm going to turn it over to Bill here a little bit to talk about what our financial model has said regarding our rate pressures. Thank you, Charlie. I just have a few slides, but they might be kind of instrumental on what we're going to talk about. But this slide has a whole lot of information on it, so I'd kind of like to walk you through it. We're at 2015. We had a cost of living increase only last year at 2%. So the average residential bill of 4,000 gallons is $21.75 a month. We have cash and we have KI loans to draw down. So funding sources are about $27.8 million. And we have projects that could be bonded at 21.2 and KI projects that have already qualified of 25. So we're talking about a capital need of about 47, a little less than 47 million. So you can see that that far exceeds the total funding sources for the year of 2015. So we have to start dipping into our cash and get ready for that large spend, three-year spend, large spend level that Charlie just talked about. So in order to cover that, we need to be prepared to go to market and ask for revenue bonds. Well, in order to go to market, investors want to know already how are you going to pay for it. So they're looking for rates already in place in anticipation for the debt service that we're talking about going to the market. So that's why we come to you first and ask for a rate increase before we actually go to market to sell the bonds. If we reverse that, they may not sell them to us, or they will definitely sell them to us at a more expensive rate. So it appears the time is now. We tried to delay it by leveraging what is the actual construction spend. And while they're doing the assessments and while they're doing the engineering, we held back and didn't do the rates as projected because the construction spend wasn't at the level that it was originally predicted. We also mined the KIA loans, those 1.7 construction loans. They're wonderful in this type of situation because you only pay interest. It's like building a house. You only pay interest on the draw that you take until the project is completed. Then you convert it to long-term debt. and start paying penalty and interest. So we're mining those construction draws on these KIA projects. We're also using the cash, and one of the things we did was we refinanced the existing bonds. There were three existing bonds out. They had requirements from the 1990s way over requiring dollar reserves that we have to just sit on. So we refinanced those. We have new indentures that are much lower for all this future bonding, and it also freed up about $2.5 million that we're using for cash funding this year by releasing some of those reserves that we had to have in place for those existing bonds. So we've stretched our dollars as far as we can, and now it's time that we have to go to the ratepayer and ask them to contribute more. So we're asking for you to consider a 12% increase for the rate this July 1, as well as a second rate increase next July 1. Now, for the average household of 4,000 gallons, that would mean an increase from $21.75 a month to $24.36 a month. And in the second year, it would go from $24.36 a month to $27.29. Now, our model says we will have to do another 12% increase in 2018, but we're not asking you to pass that. We want to get more of the actual construction cost in the hopper so that we know what true costs will be. And then if we still need a 12%, we would come back to you, but it might be 8% or 10%. I don't want to mislead anybody. We are still looking at rate increases to pay for this half a billion dollar spend. but we want to be as prudent in managing what those rate increases are. We don't want to ask for a rate increase that hindsight would say we didn't have to have that money paid any earlier than necessary. So that is illustrated in the next slide. The blue line is our current historical rates. We had rate increases back in 2008 and 2009, and then we had only cost of living increases since then. The red line shows we originally forecasted 10% increases starting in 2012, and so that is where the rate payer would be if we had gone with the original rate model. So instead, we're proposing this green line. We have delayed those rate increases until now, asking for you to do two of those 12% increases. That's the 2435 and the 2727. That is below what the original forecast would have produced, but we didn't need to spend the dollars until we've gotten to this place, thanks to the KIA low-interest loans, the value engineering, and the cash that we were able to free up with refinancing of the bonds. So that's kind of from a financial point of view where we are today and why we're asking what we are. Okay, we've got a couple more slides. People always ask, you know, well, what does this mean in comparison to what other people are paying? And so you have a couple of bar charts in your packet that have a comparison to that. I think I got a lot of this from Huntsville, Alabama. They published a similar type of thing on their website. But I had somebody go back and check rates, I guess, for all of these other cities. This basically is one of other cities in the southeast region. Many of them have consent decrees as well. Not all of them, but a lot of them do. You see some mix and match where some folks charge more for outside the city than they do inside the city. But to me, the big takeaway was as much as it is difficult to ask people for more money or to raise rates, that comparatively I feel like we're doing pretty good compared to what everybody else is doing. We're still competitive because we're down here on this end of the graph, not over here. Where Atlanta is, who's been on a consent decree for quite some time, and they're like nearly $70 a month. And so we're still down in the lower 20s. Did a similar graph. The Bluegrass Area Development District does an annual publishing of sewer rates for local cities. And so, you know, they do that for water and sewer as well. And so did a similar comparison. Basically, we're pretty much the middle of the road. Danville is over here on the bottom here. And then over here on this side, this is Winchester and Richmond. Now, I want to just look at this one, the third to last one, and the last one. Both of them have consent decrees as well. So if I look at where we are compared to where they are, I feel like it is, like I said, as difficult as it is that we're in a fairly good situation compared to others. so what we're here recommending I think this is I speak for Bill is that this is finance and water quality's recommendation is that we that we ask the council to consider a 12% increase that will be effective July 1 of 2015, followed by a 12% in 2016. We've had a financial model in place, month-by-month expenditures that we've been working on for over a year. We constantly are refining this. Even into last fall, we were looking at it, we were projecting this to be somewhere in the 14 to 15 range. And so we just continue to work this thing, and we feel like we have worked it as much as we possibly can. and we feel like 12 is a solid number to recommend to you to consider. We're also recommending that you consider this by March 19th. I know that's somewhat of an aggressive schedule, but we're anxious to be able to get this resolved. I know that Bill has got some programming issues as far as from a building standpoint with Cincinnati Waterworks in order for them to be able to adjust to their building stuff so they're ready to go in July 1. So I think the more lead time that his group has, the better off that they will fill. So with that, let me entertain whatever questions that anyone may have. I think we're up. All right. Thank you, Charlie. Thank you, Bill. And we have several council members who have signed on for comment or questions, beginning with Council Member Farmer. Thank you, Mayor. First off, I wanted to compliment yourself and your administration for working hard to find these efficiencies and to put them into play. Let's go back to the graph that shows, I guess, what's on page 96. Impact on average residential bill. It's the one with the two lines, this one. Okay. I'm trying to get to it here. Let's see if we can get this thing done. And really that. We may have lost communication here. It's somewhere in there. When you look at it, in my mind, it shows, and really this is a very compact presentation, and it gives a lot of really good information that we as decision makers on behalf of the citizenry all need and need to understand. The fact that we are in a pleasant position underneath the original forecast has to do with the very effective work of the two gentlemen and many others who made the presentation to us today. We have used Kentucky Infrastructure Authority money that has been the least expensive money in a huge way that we could find. There is no more of that. Charlie and his folks have done the best job I think they can. I'm so sorry that Council Member Lane isn't here today to have a cost accounting discussion. But the work that has been done to find economies, to find efficiencies, to find the best way to give us the best bang for our buck as far as the EPA and the consent decree are concerned is what brings us to the enviable position of having not had raises over the last five years. I think it's very clear that, well, and Charlie, you said you had it, But, I mean, you know, this is what we're trying to do. This is a lot to do. This is, you know, tens over, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars. And it's nothing that any of us here would step into lightly, but I think we have gotten to the point on this curve where unless we step in with a little bit of leadership, I don't know. If we don't do this, what would happen? I guess that's a really great question. And I'll direct that to you, Bill, or whoever wants to take it. I'll take that. Please. I'm glad I brought my consent decree with me because there is a section, unfortunately it's one of the longest sections in here, that talks about the stipulated penalties for when you don't do certain things. For the remedial measures stuff, it is $1,000 a day for days 1 through 30. Hold that up so we can see its cover and how big it is. My cover's falling off. This has a doorstop ability about it, but go ahead. Yeah, this has been my well-marked-up book for a while, the consent decree. But it has escalating fines that go from $1,000 a day all the way up to $3,000 a day. I have a note that I wrote to myself way back when that I had shared with staff. If we're six months late with something, it's $191,500. All right. To me, though, and really it's a question for Bill, without a rate increase, when do we run out or what happens? Without a rate increase, we haven't shown the bond community that we have the capacity to pay back the bonds. And so they will be either very difficult and expensive or no one will bid on our bonds and we won't have a funding source. That's as concise as the presentation. Thank you. I think that everyone's place is a motion as well as a draft of the ordinance and I think this is an excellent time for the council to have conversation among itself and hopefully we'll have decision and leadership. Thank you very much. Thank you Councilmember Farmer. Councilmember Lamb. Thank you Mayor. I actually Councilmember Farmer asked one of the questions that I was going to ask just for the public's view what, you know, and I spoke to Charlie earlier about this, is if we don't increase the rate, what are the fees? And you've already answered it. And I think that's very important for us to, for the public to know. Now, I guess one other question is, is once we build all of these facilities, do we need to be, do we need to continue to maintain this fee? or at some point will we be able to reduce or what's the plan after 2026? Well, you know, Bill probably needs to weigh in on this as well because of the structure of the loans, but, you know, these are going to be long-term paybacks. And so even once all the infrastructure is built, the paying for it is not over. It's like when you bought a house, you moved in and you paid for it for the next 20 to 30 years. So we will be paying for this for a long, long time. Then also, too, is that even though we're upgrading all this infrastructure with additional capacity so it doesn't overflow on the rain event, I mean, we still have 1,400 miles of pipeline, 30,000 manholes. I mean, there's a lot of moving parts on the ongoing operation and maintenance of a utility. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Just to add on to that, the bondholders asked the same question, and so they will be requiring reserves for maintenance. to make sure that everything doesn't fail as soon as that last bond is paid off. We have projected in five years from now that we will start having to put dollars into maintenance because everything is new, but then over the course of a 20-year bond, the last 15 years, things start to age. We're also required to hold in cash 90 days' worth of operating costs to make the bondholders comfortable with iRisk. So that's just the operations, the electricity and all of the things just to keep the sewer system going. So these are all requirements of the bondholders in order to sell the bonds. Thank you. I do say I hope that we, and knowing that this is in Charlie's, Mr. Martin's house, that we will plan proactively down the road and make sure that we take care of this issue for a long time and not end up having to be back in the same boat down the road. And thank you for all you do. Thank you, Council Member Lamb. Council Vice Mayor Kay. Thank you, Mayor. I think that there are a few things that everyone on council understands but that the public might not understand. And so I just want to make a few comments that have to do with the larger picture. And I would start by saying this is work that we should have been doing for a very long time, and we knew we needed to do it, and for whatever reason, we did not have the political will to invest in infrastructure that needed to be fixed. This is not a new problem. It's coming due on our watch, but it's the right thing to do. It's something we should have been doing, and we should be doing it whether we have a consent decree or not. But we do have a consent decree. And so even if we don't want to do the right thing here, I don't think we have any choice. it's very clear that we either fix the problem or we pay fees and fines that would cost more than fixing the problem. So the only question really before us, I think, is how do we do it? And as a couple people have already said, and I'll echo this, we're very fortunate that we have the staff in government who are approaching this in a spirit of hard work, efficiency, effectiveness, and are saving us a lot of money over what we would otherwise have to be spending for this project. So nobody wants to raise fees, and nobody wants to pay raised fees. But this is a bill that is coming due, and I believe that it's very clear to people on council, if not to the people in the public, that this is something that we absolutely need to do. So I commend the work that's been done. I look forward to continued conversation on council. I will not make a motion at this time, but I will support a motion or make it later to move this issue forward. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Vice Mayor. Council Member Brown. Thank you, Mayor. Page 94, the impact on rates of current construction schedule for fiscal years 2016-2017. There's a slide for that. A couple of questions there. Bill, that's yours. I have my abbreviated packet, so tell me which slide that is. It's the impact on rates of current construction schedule. There we go. That one right there, yes. Two questions. I don't think one of the questions, I may not be able to answer it from this slide. What is our budgeted amount that we spend, excluding all the capital projects, for maintenance and operating? I can get that answer for you. I don't have it on my cheat sheet, but I think it's in the $30 million a year range you're operating. All right. So how are we raising that $30 million? Because obviously the fees do not generate that much. Is that correct? Actually, they do. The fees that you see there pay for both the operating cost as well as the capital. So we're already covering our operating costs as it stands today and then throwing off additional dollars. But it is not throwing off enough additional dollars to pay for the capital outlay over the next three years or the debt service that will be required for the bonding that we will have to commit. Let me understand this then from what you're saying. The cash number under physical year 2015 is $9,711,394. That appears to be excess over our operating? That's correct. Okay. I understand that a lot better. So because I was trying to see the rate increase when you went from 9.7 to 12.976, I was trying to calculate that 12%, and it doesn't calculate on that number. We'll generate approximately 5.4 million with the first rate increase. and then will generate about $6 million with the second additional. That's not in the data anywhere, and I'm trying to think of those numbers that we're actually generating from this 12 percent. So $5 million and another $6 million. Correct. But that's also on top of cash. In other words, when we're looking down at 2017, we're looking at $14 million. then you're saying that we're going to continue in $9 million plus excess with our fees that we have now per year. Yes, sir. So where is that accumulated amount? If we've been getting that in the past years, where have we accumulated that? I've asked them so that they can raise this, but if you look at the capital balance at the bottom. Yeah, I don't have it on my sheet. Okay. That's what I'm looking for. Okay. We have about $46 million in the bank right now. Okay. And that's one of the reasons we didn't ask for a rate increase, because we were building up a war chest. But if you'll look over there by 2018, that $46 million capital balance will be spent down with these rate increases to $1.5 million. With the rate increases, okay. With the rate increases, it will diminish from $46 million to $1.5 million. Okay. And then let me ask you this. It says the KIA loan proceeds, do they, I think Bill alluded to it, Do they go away after 2017? No, sir. We turn them into permanent financing, and they become part of our debt service commitment. We'll have debt service. We have debt service of about $5 million by the time 2018 comes just for KIA loans. And that's going to be, what, a 15-year debt service? 20-year debt service? Yes. Okay. But that number you know yet, it's $5 million? Well, we're projecting. These are all projections. If we spend what's been approved at the spend rate that's being projected, and we do this spend rate on a monthly basis for rolling 36 months to try to come up with our cash flow needs, and that's why we're not asking for that third 12 percent because we want to see how well this projection tracks to actual spend. We have a lot of shovel ready, and we're going to throw a lot of cement down. I'm just trying to catch you because you all have been working on this for several years, But on the issue, the bond issue looks like $16 million, $32 million, then $40 million. That's going to be the total, at least through 2017, be $48 million additional bonding that we're doing. Right, $88 million for this three years. Yes, for three years. But we will continue to have to bond at that 30-some odd. And that will be another bond debt service of. That's correct. It compounds. Of extra dollars, right? Yes. Okay. So are we using any general funds in this at all? We are not. This is a revenue fund based on sewer fees. That doesn't mean general fund couldn't contribute. Correct. The general fund can. Okay. At the expense of the other projects the general fund supports. I understand that. I think everybody else does too, but I just want to throw that out. Sure. And then when we're talking about the six tanks that you're going to have done within the next two or three years, and that's the bulk of the cost, I guess, the tanks. And are those each tank individualized? I mean, are they different prices on each one of them? Yeah, there are. I mean, the site conditions may dictate in some cases whether or not it can be a cylinder or it can be a rectangle or square. A rectangle or square is going to cost more than the cylinder will because the cylinder has more of a pre-engineered aspect to it. And then also different volumes. I mentioned before the town branch, we're saving a lot of money because it's a big tank. So it's the economy of scale I think we're recognizing there as well. So I guess the bottom line is that it really wouldn't be prudent to have any of these rate increases in sunsetted because we're not there at that point yet. And when I say sunsetted, when do we stop this rate increase and when can we drop it back? Is that just too far out there that we can? Well, our model stops at 2026. Right. And that's when large rate increases diminish more to cost of living, but we still have all that debt service that we just issued that still could be an average of 7 to 10 years. So it's premature right now to really project all the way out to 2026, because Charlie's going to be saving us millions in the next three years, right? That's right. If we can pull back to a 5% increase by 2020, that's great. Okay. Well, you know, I just want to see that there's hope out there for my grandchildren, okay? Thank you. And mine. just to expand on that a little bit is that one thing that council member farmer mentioned and i'm not exactly certain that that's the case yet i mean we continue to work kia we're going to work every you know low cost loan or grant opportunity that there is i mean it's an active ongoing thing for us a couple of times to the kia said well you know i think you're just about indebted enough here and then they call and say hey we've got some more money do you want to apply, and you bet we do. So we'll continue to mine that. Secondly is, you know, I had the slide up there that showed what everybody else is paying. All of us cities are saying the same thing, is that, you know, we want to comply with the Clean Water Act and all that, but it is a very costly endeavor, and there is a lot of pressure that goes on in Washington as far as trying to deal with some of the infrastructure challenges that many cities face. Back in the 80s, there was what was called a construction grant program. Everything was done through grants at South Town Branch was built, basically, or was remodeled. And a condition of that was lessened to actually have a sewer user fee because my understanding was that prior to that grant, there was no sewer user fee, which I think then goes back into Vice Mayor Kay's point is we didn't pay for it before because we didn't want to, and now it's time to pay for it. So I wanted to add that. Thank you, Councilmember Brown. Councilmember Massadi. Thank you, Mayor. I don't think there's one council member up here that wants to raise a fee, but I don't think we have a choice. If you allow me to digress a little bit like Councilmember Brown and Maloney do, I remember standing in basements that were filled with raw sewage. And what do you say to a constituent? There is no acceptable answer for that. I remember looking in streets and seeing manhole covers spewing with garbage and feces and just terrible things. And, again, a public safety hazard. So we need to do this. We have to do this. So I would urge everyone to consider that. You know, this is about our public safety and our public health issue, that we have to recognize this. But I do have one question, and I think we all did receive this email over the weekend. And it's about the backup that we have, or I shouldn't say backup, but the backlog we have in their sewer user fees. I think we're at about $4 million. And that's a big number that we're still not able to collect. Do we have any, I mean, have you been able to, well, you've got the slide for that. Thank you. You're prepared. I have a slide for that. I don't have a map, but I have a slide. We are making inroads into our backlog of receivables. It's not as quick as we would hope, but we are making inroads, and as soon as I can get to the right sheet of paper. We now have the opportunity to stop service for failure to pay, and we started that in June. We didn't have that opportunity before that, and that's actually what utilities do for the issues that are hard to pay. We have shut 550 people's water off. We've had legal actions to bring in an additional 300,000. We have 300 active payment agreements with people who entered into payment agreements in lieu of having their water shut off. And we have basically moved from a 95.8% collection rate to a 96.1%. I have to say that we were rather blessed to be running at a 98 to 99 percent collection rate when it was a combined bill. I don't think that's a reasonable expectation for us, but we do think we can do better than 96 percent. And between legal actions and shutoffs and payments, those payments are going to be slow to show in your collection because they're going to pay over time. It's not like they come in and make a lump sum payment and it goes and reduces your accounts receivable. So our collection rate slowly will get better as these payment arrangements come forward and make their payments. I appreciate that. As long as we're making some headway, that's good news. Thank you. Thank you, Councilman Mossade. Councilmember Henson. Thank you, Mayor. I agree with all the council members here. I think we're in consensus that this is something we have to do. We should have been collecting these fees probably 40 years ago. I think Vice Mayor Kay spoke about that. But I'm curious, and I think our citizens get upset if there's a really high percent increase. And I didn't know if we had looked at possibly leveling that out to where they would know. I mean, I think it's good that we've saved money, and we should continue to do that regardless of how much money we have. But. Well, Councilmember Henson, that's what I was trying to illustrate here with the original forecast. We could have gone with that original forecast, but we would have collected from rate payers before we needed to spend that money and would have had far more than $50 million sitting in the bank when we started this big spend. And as far as cost of capital, cash is king. It's always the cheapest. But we chose, and I personally advocated not to propose these rate increases until we had the spend rate on the construction that warranted it. Right. So instead of 10% increases the last two years and ongoing, we are now looking at three years of 12%. And that's much better. And so as this is trying to show, even though 12% is a lot, it's still a lower price point than where a taxpayer or a ratepayer would be if we had started the slower trend as was originally predicted. Now, quite honestly, you know, I've shown that our current model is saying we'll need three years of 12 before it'll start to go down to 8 or 10 or 8 to 5. But we'll wait and see, and maybe that third year can be 10%. But I think I want to be honest, we're not at the end of the rate increases. We're in that beginning of the middle. But we had an initial one to get us started, and we're now starting a series of rate increases, whether it be 15, which is what was looking like last summer. But with the redoing of the bonds and some of the value engineering, we're now proposing 12 and hoping that that will migrate down over the years. So you don't project anything higher than 12? Today, I do not. That's all I can say. See, and I guess that's what worries me a little bit. Well, we talked to the University of Kentucky about economic forecasts, and he said the only thing that he could guarantee is that it would be wrong the day after he made it. So this is our best, and it is an educated guess, and it's prudent and financially sound, I believe, and it is the best we have right now. But as we get better information, it will get better as we go forward. Okay. Thank you. Thank you, Council Member Henson. Council Member Stenner. Thank you, Mayor. This feels like deja vu to 2008. 48% back then was pretty shocking. So I can tolerate 12 in our discussion today. Just a couple of questions. Going back to then, I know the question back then was asked, So maybe the law department has the recollection. I know David Barber is back there. Can we legally do a sunset on a utility fee, utility type that's based on usage? I think back then we said no, you cannot. I know we get asked that a lot, and I'm sure this discussion today will prompt a lot of people asking, can we set a sunset in the future? But if I recall, we cannot do that on this particular fee. I think it creates an issue for you all if you do. the way you would handle that is at a future point in time you could readjust the rate when the numbers showed that that's what you should be doing. But there's nothing we can put in an ordinance form. I think that would be a problem. Yeah, I think that was right, 2008. The other question I was going to ask, can you confirm, Mr. O'Meara, and those numbers up there, the rate increases, they coincide with the collection rate of the Lexer bill, right? We have both the gross billing as well as the bad debt or the lack of collection, and it's reflecting our current 96%. And that 2.8%, whatever it was in your chart, how much does that represent? About $2 million. $2 million? Okay. And then the last thing I was going to ask, given that this is probably our largest capital undertaking we've ever done in government and our city's ever seen, have we thought about creating a public advisory board to oversee these rate increases going forward and to oversee our capital management of the projects? Because I think transparency, when we're spending this much money, We have it for parks. We have it for a lot of other parts of government. We don't have anything for this for the public. And I know there was value when we created the water quality management fee and having the public help us. There was value when we did the capacity assurance and the public being part of that task force. But why wouldn't we want to create an advisory group, a public of citizens, to help us manage this going forward? Have we thought about that at all? I personally have not. But to have stakeholder input and transparency is always positive. The only thing that I would have an instant caveat is advisory is great. If we put another layer of approval in there, then we've got longer in order to react. So I think advisory is a good suggestion. Just curious if it had been discussed or talked about. I know we have it on a lot of other parts of government that will have near this kind of expenditures. So just a thought to throw out there. That may be something down the road we can look at. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Council Member Stenet. Council Member Scotchfield. Thank you, Mayor. Talk about a no win. Shoot the messenger. Yeah. Now, one of the things that has stuck out with me on your presentation is we were looking at the level of water rates in different cities. and one of the things you said was, well, we're not Atlanta. They've been under a consent decree for a long time, something along those, paraphrasing. Aren't we on our way there? Well, let me answer that, and then Charlie will give you the true story. But what I said was we're at the middle of rate increases. So are our rates going to go higher? Yes. How high are they going to go? That's what we want to wait and see. Now, is it comparable to where Atlanta is? I personally don't think so. But that's what those construction, we have a construction boom, and costs are 120% of what we projected, then we have to react to that. So there's lots of unknowns, and that's why we only want to ask for a two-year commitment and then reassess and look for a two-year commitment and reassess. I don't think we're going to be Atlanta for a variety of reasons. One of which is they have been doing it for a while, and we have the benefit of learning from their mistakes. That's one of the things that we've been challenged to do, the mayor has challenged us to do, to make sure that we examine what these other communities are doing that are ones that are ahead of us and learn from those things. So that's a big advantage for us. Secondly, I mean, we've all been in the metro Atlanta area over the last 10 to 20 years. I mean, the boom that they had, that put incredible pressure on their infrastructure, much more than what we're experiencing here in Lexington, Kentucky. And then lastly is that during the course of the consent decree, I was on a conference call that involved EPA and others, and there was a conversation about Atlanta paying fines. They were paying anywhere between $150,000 to $200,000 a quarter in civil penalties. We haven't paid a dime other than the initial fine. We work really hard to make sure we make every one of those deadlines because we don't want to spend a dime more than what we have to. So I don't think we're on a projection that's going to continue to have rate pressures. But we're doing everything in our powers to make sure that we don't become the end of that graph that you see. I have at least one more question. You know, we're saying the taxes need to increase because of the mandated projects by the EPA degree. Have we approved some projects in this cluster of projects that have not been mandated? Are there unmandated projects being included in this $600 million price tag? I would say yes. There are projects in here that are part of doing business. We were doing things already that basically prevents the next consent decree. If we don't do them, if we don't upgrade the sludge handling facilities at Town Branch, I'll use that as an example, then we've got sludge all over the ground and they'll be back. So, yeah, I mean, there's a large number of specific projects, and that's a big cut of this pie, but then there are other projects. Believe me, we are not looking for elective projects to do. My folks are basically sometimes we're choking on this as far as the sheer number of projects that we have to manage. We really haven't increased our staff dramatically since 2007. Basically, reorganization, people coming from engineering and from streets and roads, is really what's changed our numbers, not necessarily just adding a whole bunch more engineers. A few years ago when we started down the stormwater fee, one of the things I wanted to look at was building a model, a stormwater model. Well, after a year of that, I said, we're not doing that anymore. We don't have to do this, and we're not doing it well, so don't do it. So there's not any fluff in here as far as what I would consider there to be. These are all essential projects either to meet the consent decree requirements or maintain compliance to prevent the next one from happening. I had one more question. Bill, I just got a message from a constituent, and this is something that we haven't discussed. We talk about the impact on each one of the individuals, which we will feel, because we're seeing increases in our Time Warner bill everybody said is going to go up. We have all these other things that keep on coming down. What about businesses? We're talking about this person that sent me the information was going to have increases of $7,000. and this is not a manufacturer, what's going to be the impact on our businesses in town? Well, my accounting answer is everyone will pay their fair share. And to expand on that, we reached out to our top 10 users and spoke to them about this. None of them said, oh, my gosh, they all had been tuned in and knew to expect this. So it does have reality check on whether it's an individual, a family of seven, or a large organization. But that's one of the philosophies of using a user fee is so that it's usage-based and so that everyone is paying some share of how much they're using the system and putting demand on the system. All right. I'm glad to hear that you did reach out to some of the larger consumers because I think that could be an unintended cost that people, it's going to hurt the bottom line. Right. All right. Thank you. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Council Member Scotchfield. Council Member Evans. Yes. Thank you, Mayor. I'm a little confused because I thought I kind of heard two different answers about we're in the middle of raising the fee, but yet we want to consider going back to Council Member Henson's idea or thought of maybe being able to reduce it. I guess I'm concerned about giving people false hope. So should we even be talking about the sunset clause or the possibility of reducing it if we are where you are, you say we are in that trend? I mean, what, I'm just thinking about the person that might be sitting at home listening to this. It just seemed a little contradictory to me. So it's kind of like what's the real projection? My presentation is we're looking at rate increases for the foreseeable future. We've modeled them out to 2026. So I don't see any realistic expectation of drawing rates down in that period. We may flatten the amount of ask increase. That's what our model says, although we want to take it two-year chunks at a time and reassess. thank you thank you mayor council member farmer thank you mayor would it be fair to say that in sewer districts in general when you're looking at rates isn't this always a kind of a bell curve it goes up it peaks then it begins to come down we hope so yes thank you that was quick You know, I think we're in an informed position. We have tremendous folks that work throughout the government to make sure that, especially in this particular area, that we're spending money as wisely as we can. I think in terms of giving the opportunity to have legislation that lets not just individuals but businesses who pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for these in terms of our larger folks. If we were to pass this legislation, they would know what to budget for for the next couple of years. We'll know what to look for in terms of what's getting done, how well we're doing our job, and the difference that it begins to make because ultimately the waters of our county and certainly our agricultural community will be improved. They're improved each day because of the work that we've been doing over the past years. So with that in mind, I would like to make a motion to place on the docket for the February 26, 2015 Council meeting and ordinance amending section 16-48 of the code to increase disposal rates for sewage, amending section 16-59 of the code to increase fees for sanitary sewer service rates, and amending section 16-60 of the code to increase sanitary sewer tap-on fees, all on July 1, 2015. in july 1st 2016. so moved second motion by councilmember farmer and second by vice mayor kay is there any discussion on the motion council member vice mayor kay now thank you mary i have a small question about the draft ordinance on page five at the very bottom of the page there is a section that talks about people who are 65 or older who are receiving Social Security disability etc meet certain income criteria can apply for a discount up to 30% of the total bill as I understand it is there a provision for notifying people about this how will people know that they qualify and can take advantage of this. That program is run out of adult services and that's why Commissioner Mills has come up. The question of notification, we would have to see if it is through social service venues or whether we've put a notice on the bill. And I can't commit that we have put that on the bill in the past year. Well, I guess I have an interest in seeing that however it's done, whether it's on the bill or otherwise, that people who are eligible for this know that so that they can apply and get a discount. That's pretty significant. Well, we have, there's application process and evaluation, and we maintain that monthly and annually. So I know it's been an ongoing program and it has a history. So there's quite a few people that have availed themselves of it. But we'll check on how that's communicated. Great. Thank you. Thank you, Mayor. Beth, can you speak to it now? I'd like to say it's for people that are 150% of poverty. It's not just for Social Security or people over 65, and it's by ordinance. So they can call Adult Services at 258-3810. And in the past, it has been on the bills that went out, but I don't know if it's consistent. and I would agree with O'Mara on that. But we have also given those people a separate payment plan if they're behind on their Lexer as well, and all of that's funded through sewer user landfill money. I guess final comment. I would suggest that to accompany this information about a rate increase that we do something, and I don't know, I don't have a specific suggestion, to make sure that as much as possible those who qualify know they qualify and know how to apply for the discount. We would be glad to notify them in their bills. Great. Thank you. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Vice Mayor. All right. Does anyone else wish to speak to the motion? All right. If not, then we can take a vote. All in favor, please indicate by saying aye. Aye. Opposed, no. Motion carries. All right. Next on our agenda are council reports. If you'll sign up for a council report, please, and we'll go with that. Vice Mayor Kay. Thank you, Mayor. I do have a motion to make, but before I make it, I want to basically echo what I've been hearing from so many people in so many ways about the great job that the people who work for our city did in responding to this snow event. I would not say that every single person was 100% happy with the way in which it was done, but I would say that given the challenge, it's amazing how few people were not satisfied with what the city had done. It was a terrific effort. I know in my own neighborhood there were people working outside at 1 and 2 o'clock in the morning. multiple nights to make sure that people could get out of their homes and out and do shopping and so on. So basically kudos to all of the people who worked so hard to make that possible. And then secondly, at the request of the administration, I moved that the reorganization of building security to the Department of Public Safety and the reorganization of the Chief Information Office, Information Technology, and Division of Enterprise Solutions be placed in the General Government and Social Services Committee for consideration at the committee meeting scheduled for April 7th. So move. Second. Motion by Vice Mayor Kaye, second by Council Member Ford. Is there any discussion on the motion? All right. If not, then we can vote. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed, no. Motion carries. Thank you, Vice Mayor. Council Member Henson. Thank you, Mayor. I wanted to bring attention to Beth Mills, who's leaving us after this week. And you had mentioned it earlier, but the city's been very fortunate to have her on board. and she's a social worker in every sense of the word. And plus she has a very, very intelligent lady that can manage as well. So she's going to be greatly missed, and I just wanted to thank her for her service. And she's done wonderful things with the department, worked really hard. And then secondly, I do want to thank Streets and Roads. I've never talked to Albert Miller more than I did the last four or five days. But everything turned out great. I think we got some compliments, mostly requests. Not a lot of complaints, really. just when are they going to get to my street and things like that. But I do really appreciate all the hard work because I know how it was cold and just very treacherous. But thank you, Albert. Thank all the truck drivers. I gave up. At first, I was going to request my own truck, but I've decided you all can handle it. I think you did a good job. And then last, the Southland Association is having their annual meeting tonight at the Alinka Temple. I believe it's at 6 o'clock. So that's all I have, Mayor. Thank you. Thank you, Council Member Henson. Council Member Maloney. Thank you, Mayor. I too want to commend Albert and Commissioner Holmes and also everyone in government who helped out last week. And hopefully we won't have to look for this for another 20 years or 25. But I'd like to talk about a compliment. Mayor, when you came on and you let me be CAO, we had some tough times. And one department was on the life support, and that was social service. and you allowed me to bring Beth Mills in, and I'm proud to bring her back. And the first week we were there, I knew she would get to the ground because we had kids that were not getting their lunch. So her and Irene packed up their car, moved one down to Frankfurt, and were able to get the lunch. The following week, workforce was a big thing on her map. When she knew that we were being abused by workforce, now look at it, we've got an opportunity to bring workforce. It was all because of that lady back there sitting there. Then slowly she brought back adult service. She allowed Connie Goffey to get there. She brings back family care service, which was a loss. So everything started coming together. Stephanie Hong became youth service director. Laura Hatfield, as you know, Mayor, what she put together, and you and Chris Ford, that lady back there, was able to put all that together. And Christy for the agencies. The senior citizen center that you all see, it's all because of one person. That lady right there, she came to me and she had a dream and I let her go with it. And I want to commend Sally Hamilton for allowing her to fulfill that dream. If it was not for Beth Mills, none of these things would have happened. So I want you all to know, it was on life support, but now it's back to where it's moving great. And whoever replaced her is going to be very lucky to have, because she did something that I didn't think anybody could do. But I knew she would be the only one that could. She will be missed. She will have great times on her trip and the grandkids. And I definitely miss her making fun of you, Mary, when she does you a little joke. But, Beth, I mean what I say. You're the best, and you always will be. And people need to know what you really did for social service. I mean that. Thank you, Beth. Thank you, Richard. That was great. Councilmember Lamb. Thank you. That's a tough one to follow. Richard, I echo you on everything for Beth because she's an amazing lady, and this government is a better place for her to be here. So thank you for everything you've done, Beth. You're amazing. And there's a birthday person amongst us this afternoon. There's, I believe, Council Member Stinnett. Happy birthday. And you're welcome. And so also, I know everybody else is saying it, but I want to say it too because I have just really so appreciated Albert Miller and David Holmes and every single person out there. And I'm not going to just say one division because there's a ton of them. You guys have done amazing work this past week in working under conditions that not normal people have to, you know, you just don't have to do that stuff on a normal basis. Thank you. I want to encourage people to still take into consideration that there are people with disabilities who need to access buildings and parking spots. Please think about that. And, you know, in this week, try to make sure that those spaces are clear and the ramps are clear. And actually, additionally, I wanted to thank the citizens who did clear their sidewalks. I know that it's the safety of their neighbors. And it is a great danger in walking out there on that ice. And I know we have an ordinance in place, but I don't know that it's enforced very well. And I think that's something that we do need to look at and see if we can do something to help the elderly to better be able to take care of the sidewalks. and then also I was honored to attend the Division of Fire and Emergency Services Awards Banquet on Saturday. It was a crazy weather situation, but that was my first opportunity, and I want to congratulate all the people that they honored, and that was pretty amazing, and I was very proud to be there and to be there for the ceremony. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Council Member Lamb. Council Member Brown. Thank you, Mayor. I, too, want to add kudos to the streets and roads and everyone that was involved in the snow removal. I think even as late as today, they're still doing some cul-de-sacs. And I recall back years, we haven't had this much, 12 inches or better, but very few times. but with this type of weather, I think we probably, the city has probably done the best job that I've seen, especially in the area that I live in since I've been there, and I've been in my area 37 years. So commend everybody that was involved. It was a great effort. I want to commend you, Mayor, for keeping the public involved to the extent of what we were doing, having those press conferences. I think, you know, we all have to come together, and I think this was a good time, and I'm proud of what we did. You know, just like anybody, you don't do it 100%, but the effort was 100%. And having said that, I would like to put into motion that we take the snow and ice control plan that we have that I think is kind of outdated because it was put in in my ancient days 20 years ago. And I would like to put that into a public works committee for us to study that. There's several things there, and I think the administration would agree that while it's fresh in everybody's mind, let's look at it, and we don't have to be in any real hurry maybe if we don't have any other 12 inches of snow. So I would like to make a motion and put that in committee. Second. Thank you, Council Member Brown. There's a motion by Council Member Brown and then an early second by Council Member Farmer. Is there any discussion on the motion? I know there's a lot of support for it and good timing. All right. If not, then we'll take a vote. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed, no. The motion carries. Council Member Bledsoe. Thank you, Mayor. I just wanted to, again, thank everybody in the neighborhoods who, some people suggested this was baptism by fire. I think it was more baptism by snow a little bit the last week. And last night, just as it happens to occur, we had our first 10th District Neighborhood President's Council, and we had 35 people representing 17 different neighborhoods in the 10th district come together. And one of the things we discussed was the snow removal plan. So we had very high attendance. It was a lot of fun. And I want to specifically commend Commissioner Holmes and Albert Miller, who came last night and talked to the group. It set the bar very high, so if you're a commissioner, look out. They all agreed, so I'll be asking you next. I also want to thank Commander Kurt Singer and Lieutenant Barry and, I'm sorry, Sergeant Barry and Lieutenant, oh goodness, I lost her name. Harry. Connie. Sergeant Barry and Connie, Lieutenant Connie, and I can't recall his last name, so I apologize. They came and did a great job just speaking to our neighborhoods. If nothing else, I think most of our neighborhoods left going, oh, I have a better picture of the larger scale, not just my neighborhood, not my road, but the larger picture. And that was really, really helpful. So I want to say thank you for taking the time to come do that. And I look forward to having our next one. And I'll be also running to the Southland Neighborhood Association meeting. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you, Council Member Bledsoe. Council Member Gibbs. Thank you, Mayor. I'd also like to commend David Holmes and Albert Miller on the job they did. Also, Cindy Bishop, who's now famous in the newspaper article. But she's the one who ventured into my neighborhood, and I got to talk to her a bit. There were streets that have never been plowed before. There was never a plow before in Bellcourt neighborhood, and Cindy was there. We're very, very appreciative. I want to echo what Susan and Fred said about we need to think about getting the streets cleared, The sidewalks cleared is very, very bad for pedestrians, particularly disturbed about businesses that don't clear their sidewalks. I walked downtown on Wednesday, and there were businesses that were open for business and didn't have anybody out clearing their streets, sort of places. I'm not going to shop in those places. But I would like to see us up the enforcement on businesses in particular. Just one other thing. I've recently been appointed to the Lexington Tree Board, and I'd like to bring some tree-related information to the council. At the last tree board meeting, Dr. Red Baker, who's the chair of the UK Forestry Department, spoke about UK's new Forest Health Research and Education Center. The center is working to expand research and educational programming to address threats to our trees from invasive species and other dangers. I expect most people have heard about the emerald ash borer, which is a horrible destruction. Today I was just reading about this tiny little insect native to Asia, which is destroying hemlock trees. These are just a couple of threats to our forest. So I move that we place the work of the UK Forest Health and Research Center as an item for discussion in the Environmental Quality and Public Works Committee for the March 10th meeting. So moved. Motion by Council Member Gibbs and second by Council Member Henson. Everybody understood the motion? All right. Is there any discussion on the motion? I've got a question. Okay. You referenced the March 10th meeting. Have you confirmed with the Chair about our agenda? No, I have not. I don't know if it's full or not. Do we have to do it March 10th, or usually we leave it open to the Chair? I'll leave it to the Chair to decide. Okay. You had to chat today. Thank you. Thank you. All right. Okay. Any further discussion? All right. if not then we can vote all in favor please say aye aye opposed no motion carries there is no mayor's report today i would just want to echo what everybody else has said already mentioned praise for beth of course and uh what albert albert has done uh as well You know, I think Albert's the first one that would never ask for praise. He's one of the – I described him as the director of streets and roads, but director of plows and salt this week. And Tracy Thurman is also here. Tracy was here to answer any questions that we might have about waste management. But she pulled together some e-mails that she had received this week or today and yesterday on the work that had been done by waste management and almost doubling capacity or the throughput was how much? Your 300, 1.6 million, come up to the podium real quick. Just so your guys will, I'm saying guys gender neutral now. They'll want to hear that you've reported on what. Yes, on Monday, you know, of course we had the holiday last Monday, and we would have made that up on Wednesday. So yesterday was more than double. So we were at 1.6 million pounds. So it's over 800 tons that they collected yesterday. So it's a great team effort. And I can't say enough, again, about Albert myself because he staged out crews. And when we ran into ice, you know, he was there on the spot. And it was a great team effort for our department and for the government. I think that's what Tracy said there is a good footnote to the whole thing because there was enormous collaboration. That's what Sally and Glenn were describing yesterday in the commissioner's meeting, just a lot of collaboration. And that collaboration included the council members who you all's patients, they were describing that you were often calling, but saying, I know you're busy. I know you're busy. And Albert showed me, he says, yeah, I got a stack of work orders that tall, Mayor. Anyhow, thanks. Thanks to all of you. Okay. Yes, sir. Yeah. No, you've been going through what you're saying, Councilman Cushfield. Go ahead and say it. I apologize. I know that constituents have been calling nonstop, and we absolutely understand their concerns. But as Mayor Gray just said, we have been contacting. We have been contacting. So I just wanted to reiterate that. Yeah. You mean on behalf of your constituents? On behalf of our constituents. been contacting. Yes. We have been calling and requesting. Thank you, Mayor. I'm sorry. Yes, ma'am. Council Member Stenet. Oh, I don't want to forget today and leave here, but our Director of First Impressions, Pat Tatum and Lex called. Those are the people that took those calls, as well as our 911 call center. So, Mr. Stack, thank you to all those people who worked hours and they're the ones that actually took the calls. And thank you for all the job those men and women did because they were our first line of defense. The calls to 311 were double, weren't they, Sally? Almost double. Aldona, you had those numbers. What were they? I don't have the numbers in front of me, but they were almost double for each single day and very few abandoned calls. Wow. Yeah. Wow. Okay. Well, thanks, everybody. Mr. Mundy, any public comment for issues not on the agenda? All right. Then I'll accept a motion to adjourn. I will. Vice Mayor, second by Councilman Massadi. Unless there's objection, we're adjourned. Thank you.