# Planning and Public Safety Committee - August 11, 2015 > Auto-transcribed civic record · August 11, 2015 - **Permalink**: https://meetings.lexingtonky.news/meeting/3734 - **Source video**: https://lfucg.granicus.com/player/clip/3734?view_id=14&redirect=true - **Date**: 2015-08-11 - **Last revised**: July 15, 2026 - **Length**: 12,375 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 Planning & Public Safety Committee met on August 11, 2015, at 1:00 p.m., with Mossotti presiding. The committee addressed five agenda items during the meeting, taking four motions to a vote and hearing two public comments. The committee approved three items: the June 9, 2015 Committee Summary, the Armstrong Mill West Small Area Plan, and a measure regarding the Distribution of Unsolicited Advertising Supplements. One agenda item—Food Truck Fire Safety—was postponed for further consideration at a future meeting. Items Referred were deferred. ## Attendance The following individuals were present at the meeting on August 11, 2015: * Mossotti * Scutchfield * Kay * Stinnett * Akers * Gibbs * Lamb * Farmer * Bledsoe * Henson No absences or late arrivals were recorded. ## Votes and Decisions **June 9, 2015 Planning and Public Safety Committee Summary and Motions** [timestamp: 0:03:07] A motion to approve the June 9, 2015 Planning and Public Safety Committee Summary and Motions was made by Farmer and seconded by Akers. The motion passed by voice vote. **Design Excellence ZOTA - Call the Question** [timestamp: 0:03:07] A motion to call the question on the Design Excellence ZOTA was made by Farmer and seconded by Gibbs. The motion failed by roll call vote with 3 ayes and 6 nays. Those voting in favor were Farmer, Gibbs, and Kay. Those voting against were Akers, Bledsoe, Lamb, Mossotti, Scutchfield, and Stinnett. **Design Excellence ZOTA - Send to Full Council** [timestamp: 0:03:07] A motion to send the Design Excellence ZOTA to full Council was made by Kay and seconded by Farmer. The motion passed by roll call vote with 6 ayes and 2 nays. Those voting in favor were Akers, Gibbs, Henson, Kay, Lamb, and Mossotti. Those voting against were Bledsoe and Stinnett. **Ordinance 0130-26 - Unsolicited Advertising Materials** [timestamp: 1:15:16] Ordinance 0130-26, regulating the distribution of unsolicited advertising materials, was presented by motion from Henson and seconded by Akers. The ordinance passed by voice vote. ## Budget and Financial Actions The meeting included approval of funding for a planning initiative in the Armstrong Mill West area. A grant of $104,775 was awarded to EHI Consultants, with Ed Holmes identified as the contact, to support development of the Armstrong Mill West Small Area Plan. ## Public Comment Two speakers addressed the meeting regarding delivery practices for printed materials. **Richard Morgan, Lexington Herald-Leader** [timestamp: 0:40:01] Richard Morgan from the Lexington Herald-Leader presented information about their carrier delivery system. He emphasized that the publication maintains a do-not-deliver list and conducts weekly audits to monitor delivery practices. The organization uses GPS tracking to oversee their delivery operations and has established processes to address customer complaints. Morgan stressed that the Lexington Herald-Leader is a news and information product rather than an advertising circular. **John Kim, CIPS Marketing Group** [timestamp: 0:46:02] John Kim of CIPS Marketing Group outlined their delivery protocols and quality assurance measures. He detailed their do-not-deliver (DND) processes and explained their use of GPS tracking technology to monitor deliveries. Kim highlighted the company's focus on carrier accountability and reported high delivery accuracy rates. He noted that CIPS Marketing Group has invested in technology infrastructure and local employment to support responsible delivery practices. ## Contested Items **Distribution of Unsolicited Advertising Materials** A significant dispute arose regarding the delivery of unsolicited advertising materials in residential driveways. Residents submitted numerous complaints about the volume of these materials being left at their homes, characterizing the practice as a public nuisance with environmental consequences. The Herald-Leader and CIPS Marketing Group defended their delivery operations, presenting documentation of their extensive compliance systems designed to ensure adherence to applicable regulations and standards. Despite these assurances, council members remained concerned about the impact on residents and the environment, indicating that the companies' compliance measures had not adequately addressed community grievances. The disagreement centered on whether existing delivery practices constituted an acceptable balance between commercial distribution rights and residential quality of life, with residents and council members on one side and the advertising companies on the other. ## June 9, 2015 Committee Summary [timestamp: 00:03:07] The committee reviewed and approved the minutes from the June 9, 2015 meeting without dissent. Key speakers on this agenda item included Mossotti, Farmer, and Akers. The summary covered actions taken on three main items: * Greenway Plan & Manual * Design Excellence Proposal * Food truck fire safety The committee approved the minutes as presented, with no objections raised during the discussion. ## Food Truck Fire Safety Fire Marshal Mike Palmer presented on propane tank safety and the inspection of food trucks. [timestamp: 00:03:44] Palmer emphasized that the state fire marshal's authority already covers food service establishments, which he indicated would eliminate the need for new legislation on this matter. The committee members who participated in the discussion included Henson, Bledsoe, Akers, and Gibbs, along with Palmer. The committee decided to postpone this agenda item. ## Armstrong Mill West Small Area Plan Jim Duncan of the Division of Planning presented the Armstrong Mill West Small Area Plan, which had been adopted by the Planning Commission [timestamp: 0:21:05]. The plan encompasses several key focus areas for the neighborhood's development and improvement. **Plan Recommendations** The Armstrong Mill West Small Area Plan includes recommendations addressing: - Infrastructure improvements - Pedestrian safety - Affordable housing - Community engagement **Council Discussion** Councilmember Brown raised concerns about the practical implementation of the plan, emphasizing the critical need for funding and implementation mechanisms to bring the plan's recommendations to fruition. This highlighted the distinction between planning recommendations and the resources required to execute them. **Outcome** The Armstrong Mill West Small Area Plan was approved. ## Distribution of Unsolicited Advertising Supplements [timestamp: 0:37:09] Councilmember Henson introduced an ordinance to regulate the distribution of unsolicited advertising materials. The proposed ordinance would require that such materials be placed on porches or in mail slots rather than left in other locations. Public testimony was provided by representatives from the Herald-Leader and CIPS Marketing Group. Both organizations emphasized their existing compliance systems and delivery protocols, indicating they already follow practices consistent with the ordinance's requirements. The discussion involved multiple council members, including Morgan, Kim, Bledsoe, Sennett, Akers, and Gibbs, alongside Henson. The committee voted to move the ordinance to the full council for further consideration. **Outcome:** Approved for advancement to full council. ## Items Referred The committee discussed several referred items during this portion of the meeting [timestamp: 1:17:24]. Key speakers included Akers, Henson, and Stinnett. The items under consideration included: * Taxicab ordinance * Ride-sharing regulations * Scrap metal detectors * Sky lanterns * Versailles Road Corridor Study Several of the referred items were removed from the agenda, while others were deferred to future meetings. The specific details regarding which items were removed versus deferred, the rationale for these decisions, and the concerns raised during the discussion are not available in the provided meeting materials. --- ## Decisions - **Motion** — passed: Motion to approve the June 9, 2015 Planning and Public Safety Committee Summary and Motions - **Motion** — failed (3-6): Motion to call the question on the Design Excellence ZOTA - **Motion** — passed (6-2): Motion to send the Design Excellence ZOTA to full Council - **Ordinance 0130-26** — passed: Ordinance regulating the distribution of unsolicited advertising materials --- ## Full transcript The ¶¶ ¶¶ Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the 1 p.m. planning and public safety meeting. I think all council members are ready to go. take a motion to accept them colleagues if we're ready um before we begin with the official business of today's planning and public safety committee i'd like to take this moment to remember our council colleague ed lane who passed away last week Ed was a well-known, successful businessman, and he represented the 12th District since 2005, and was a dedicated public servant who was passionate about Lexington. A celebration of life for Ed has been scheduled for 4 p.m. this Saturday, August 15th, at the Hillary J. Boone Center at the University of Kentucky campus. Visitation is 4 to 7 p.m., with a celebration ceremony from 7 to 8 p.m. I just want to say, Ed, thank you for your service to our community. And now we'll move forward. I need a motion for approval for the June 9th committee summary. Have a motion. We have a second. Second. Have a motion from Council Member Scotchfield and second from Council Member Akers. All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Aye. All right, Council Member Henson, you have the first item on the agenda for the Planning and Public Safety Committee in reference to the food truck fire safety issue, if you want to go ahead. Thank you. Do you want to speak about it, or do you want me to just get started? Well, I guess I could give a little bit of background. And this was initiated by the fire department over concerns with explosions from propane tanks. Yes. So I met with, and you are the fire marshal, Mike Farmer, right? And you have come up with a plan here to prevent an occurrence like this from happening in Lexington. That's the goal. Without legislation, I believe. Without new legislation. Yes. Okay. So I'll turn it over to you, Mike, and thank you for being here. Sure. Basically, I'll start by saying that I don't know how many presentations normally start with video presentations. But I have one. It's fairly short. And then at that point, I won't take up much more of your time after that. Thank you. Well, it's not unlike me to start some kind of meeting like this with confusion. So I can get started. It was some hard-hitting journalism from Entertainment Tonight that basically had spoken with a state fire marshal and had showed some tests that he had done, as well as video footage of the Philadelphia explosion. But I don't know exactly what happened to it. Chris is not here, and he was the one that had it. Okay. Okay. If you just want to go ahead and do your presentation, then we can put that video in towards the end. Thank you. So the tank that blew up in Philadelphia was manufactured in 1946. six. And the Department of Transportation says that they're supposed to be either replaced or re-qualified every five to 12 years. This obviously didn't happen. Interestingly enough, Philadelphia still doesn't inspect the food trucks even after that incident, but they are working through the process kind of like we are. We have on the next slide, I guess. So the disaster in Philadelphia is what started me getting involved in it because I felt like we were the ones that should take the lead in this as far as inspecting it and attempting to prevent it like council member henson said they had two people that died from this food truck explosion and 11 were injured it was in a downtown area and there are no municipalities currently that are inspecting food trucks in kentucky so we'll be the first as far as i know some of the jurisdictions that do inspect are some of the Bigger ones are Albuquerque, D.C., Houston, Boston, Chicago. And Chicago is kind of the gold standard for this. They require so much. It's incredible what they require these vendors to have. Some of the closer jurisdictions are Columbus, Nashville, Knoxville. And then some of the other ones are Norfolk, Des Moines, Pittsburgh, and Gilbert, Arizona. And Paul compiled quite a few of those for us, and we had some as well. So thank you, Paul, for that. since i created this powerpoint um there was one in minnesota and uh it was actually in the neighborhood parked in a neighborhood it destroyed 20 homes or damaged 20 homes and debris was found 500 feet away um there is video of not of the explosion but there are articles on the internet for that one as well that was in march i was supposed to go in march do this presentation March, and quite frankly, I was a lot more prepared then as well. I just got back from vacation, so my apologies for the ums and stuff. But there was also one in June. June 20th, there were four people injured in Indianapolis. The reason that one probably didn't take the media's attention was there were only injuries and no deaths. But that particular food truck didn't have a license since January of 2014. So there are a lot of these that are falling through the cracks, not just here. there has uh yeah you can see from there where will the next explosion occur we don't really know but they are increasing in number um you can see in 2014 there were four big ones at least that i could find on the internet and i don't exactly know i can't pinpoint why the explosions are increasing it could be just the sheer number of them nationwide are increasing it could also be that because of the lack standards and the lack of inspections so what i'd like to do is make for sure that nothing like that happens here. So we had entertained the idea of creating an ordinance, and we'd come to Council Member Henson for this as well, and Paul and Mike Sanner. And we ended up finding this statute. I don't recall who found it, but we found this statute, and it seems to work pretty well. And it says basically that the state fire marshal or his agents will administer and enforce all state fire regulations, laws, standards of safety, and regulations for food service establishments. Well, we couldn't find a definition for food service establishment in 219, so we had to go to 217. And I'll read just a brief snippet of that. It's food service establishment means any fixed or mobile commercial establishment that engages in the preparation and serving of ready-to-eat foods in portions to the consumer. So it seems to fit. we work under the umbrella of the state fire marshal and chief jackson was has been deputized by the state fire marshal so we are a duly authorized agent so that's the reason i say i don't think we need any new legislation for this and the penalties are under 219 you can see that so i intended to be brief because we don't need new legislation i don't need to come up here and sell anything but council member henson wanted me to try to educate i guess and tell you how it's going from here we have sent out letters since the june meeting i didn't i didn't speak at we've sent out letters to the trucks that are registered with revenue we've worked with revenue so that we are a sign off now before they can get their business license renewed we're going to do the inspection and sign off on there so that that's a really good first step we have done a couple of inspections since then and everything seems to be going okay. With the Breeders' Cup coming up, there's something there called the Feeders' Cup and it's going to be a lot of food trucks. So we really don't want to have something worthy of entertainment tonight or CNN or something like that to happen here. But that's all I have if you have any questions. Thank you, Chief Palmer. Do you have your video? Is it ready? Do you need to have it or are we good to go without it? I don't necessarily need to have it. I have sent it, I think, to all of you all in the past, or at least to the prior council members. I'm not for sure. We have one council member has a question. Council member Bledsoe. Thank you, Chair. I just have two questions. Is there a fee to get certification by the food trucks they need to pay you or the city? Personally, not on a professional note, but on a personal note, I have found that the fee thing does not go over well when I'm standing here. So I have said, no, there are no fees. We're going to do it during business hours. Now, what I had thought about was there are some food trucks that have fallen through the cracks as far as they're not getting their business licenses or we don't have their email addresses. So in an attempt to find those people, we're going to have to appropriate funds either. Somehow we'll have to work it internally through the fire department so that we can go find those people after business hours. But it's really been kind of a benign inspection, really. Everything's gone well so far. So I don't foresee there to be a lot of problems and no fees. Okay. So when they apply for the business license, this is just part of it. They'll just get a sign off from you saying? That's right. There is a business license fee, I'm sure. Sure. But there's not an additional fee. And then two, if they are in violation, I mean, is there any consequential fees or fines? Yeah. Yeah, there is. Let me see. For the first offense, now this is under the KRS. The first offense for a misdemeanor is $100 to $500 or no more than 30 days in jail or both for each offense. But that's not what we're wanting. That's not the goal here. The goal is to make for sure that they're safe. So we're going to work with them. If they aren't in compliance, we're bound by what we do to give them time to fix it instead of trying to. Great. Thank you. I appreciate it. Thank you, Councilmember. Councilmember Hanson. I just wanted to again thank you for being here and bringing this to our attention. I guess I was thinking about the inspections. I know that the health department also has to be made aware of where these trucks are, so you might be able to track them down through that. And I've been on vacation too, Mike. I'm going to say I'm a lot too. In reference to what Council Member Bledsoe said about the fees, you normally inspect other facilities throughout Lexington, right? That's right. Everything that we do so far is brick and mortar, but we are charged with every commercial structure in Lexington. And there's no fee to the brick and mortar for the inspection. It's just a matter of public safety and making sure. So I just wanted to point that out. That's right. So we don't really see the need to charge them a fee. Well, thank you. I enjoyed working with you. Yes, ma'am. Thank you. Thank you, Councilmember Hanson. Councilmember Akers. Thank you, Chair. Thanks, Mike, for bringing this. We have talked about it a little bit at length or somewhat at length. So will these inspections be annual with every renewal? Because I think they have to renew their license with revenue every year. Yeah, that's hopefully what it is, either a startup or a renewal. And will there be any kind of sticker of inspection or anything on the truck or on the gas tank or on something that shows that you have been there and inspected it? That's something that we may work towards in the future. We're still kind of filling it out. It's in its infancy. But right now, all we're doing is we have an inspection checklist that we go through with the operator, and then we get them to sign something at the end of it. We basically get them to sign the checklist for our documentation purposes, and then we do a report for our documentation. So right now, there is no sticker system in place. But I think it's a good idea. Well, I think, actually, if people do have to go through revenue, they can't get their permit through revenue without your inspection, that maybe it's revenue that needs to give that sticker or something. I mean, I just think that it would be helpful for the public. I mean, I come across a lot of food trucks. I'm sure most of us do. And so if we saw, you know, a pink or neon green or some, you know, color that let us know, and if we didn't, then who do we call to ensure that you know that this truck exists? Because I think that there's a lot of them that exist that aren't in revenue. Sure, I understand. I think you're right. Councilmember Henson knows a lot of them. I think you're right. But pink is your preference? Sure. Pink is good. Okay, good. Or neon green. You know, something highly visible and different than all the other stickers on many tracks, too. You know, a lot of them have stickers. All right. I think that's all I have. Thank you. Thank you, Council Member Rakers. Council Member Gibbs. Thank you, Chair. I was just wondering, in the Kentucky statute, it already has the five years for a propane tank. Is that already written in there? No. So how are you going to? That is a Department of Transportation regulation. Now, the way that we get to that statute is where it says that it's under the standards of safety. The standards of safety are adopted actually by this body as well, by the Fayette-Urban County government, as what we go by. So within that standards of safety, there are regulations through the NFPA documents, National Fire Protection Association. So we'll go by NFPA-1 documents. There's also a document that covers propane. So we'll be going by those. And they're adopted through the standards of safety. And apparently Pennsylvania didn't do that then, right? Well, Pittsburgh does do it, but I don't know that the state has done it. So it may be just jurisdictional like we're doing it. Okay, I was just curious. But it's in there. So it's five years, is that right? Well, the DOT reg says that it's five to 12 years that either has to be replaced or requalified. And there are a couple of places here in town that do requalify them. Okay. And the two that we've done so far this month, they haven't been, you know, since 1946 or anything. Great. Yeah. Good to hear. Thank you. Thank you, Chair. Thank you. Are there any other questions from the council members? If not, we'll proceed. I do have some members of the public that have signed up. Has anyone signed up to speak on this issue? If not, we'll go to the next item. Oh, I'm sorry. Would you all like to see the video? We're going to end with a bang then. That's fine. Go ahead. Proceed. Thank you. Okay. I'll be available for any questions after the video. Yeah. Well. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. so Thank you. I think we've got the, well, it was at the end anyways, but obviously it shows that there is definitely a need for the inspections and for the continuation of fire safety. and we'll go forward councilmember Brown it looks like you're up for the small area plan if you want to go forward with that please thank you chair for allowing me to introduce this and this is something that really just affects the eighth council district but it's a small area plan called the Armstrong mill OS small area plan and I really wanted to present this twofold for council members and then for the public out there to see what we have and what we can address and have I got some competition there but I would like to have the planning staff is here and Jim Duncan is going to present and you've got it in your packet there a few pages. He's going to present this and then I'd like to make some comments after the presentation and see if there's some questions related to it. Thank you. That's fine. Mr. Duncan? Thank you Madam Chair, members of the committee and for inviting us to present the Armstrong Mill West Small Area Plan to you. This is a small area plan that came out of the 2013 comprehensive plan. As the planning commission was crafting that plan, they identified several areas around town for further study, and this is one of the areas they identified, primarily because of the higher incidence of poverty, lower access to vehicles, and the limited access to healthy food. To orient you just a little bit here, the Armstrong Mill West Study Area is on the south side of town. This is Tate's Creek on the west, along the north, New Circle Road and Alumni Drive, and then coming along the east and south, Manowar Boulevard. It gets its name from Armstrong Mill, which bisects just about the middle of the study area. And to further orient you, this is the Tate's Creek Campus. The study area consists of about 1,900 acres. Over 16,000 people live here. The median income for this study area is about $10,000 less than the median income for Lexington. And a little more than a third of the residents earn less, households earn less than $25,000. And most of the people who live in this area are renters. following the adoption of the comprehensive plan we asked the council if they would be interested in supporting the small area plans through funding so that we could engage consultants to speed along the process the council was enthusiastic they supported this plan and that enabled us through a competitive process to select ed homes from EHI consultants to lead the planning effort and at the same time the council also allocated funds so that we could simultaneously have the Cardinal Valley small area plan going. Once we started the planning process, we realized there were a number of community, in fact, even unique assets in this area. The public schools, for one, this is the only campus of schools where all three schools are on the same campus with the Tates Creek campus. And then south of Armstrong Mill Road is the Mill Creek Elementary, so a good presence of schoolchildren here. Good public spaces as well. The Tates Creek Golf Course, an aquatic center. The Gainesway Park and the Gainesway Center. And the River Hill Park, so good open spaces in the area. Variety of housing types, including single-family, duplex, and multifamily housing. Lex Trans serves the outside and the interior of this area. and we realized there were a number of active neighborhood associations. As we do with all of our planning processes, it's a public participation and community engagement are centerpieces. And so we started off this process with a number of public engagement meetings where we sought input from the residents and from the people with interest in this area on what the issues are and what they see as the solutions to these problems. Our engagement included survey outreach, as well as interest group meetings and interviews. And all this process was guided by a steering committee, which included neighborhood representatives, business leaders, social service leaders in the area, as well as the government. Once we got into the neighborhood process, we realized, in addition to the issues that we had presented to the planning commission earlier, that there were some particular issues that the neighbors were concerned about, infrastructure being one of them, particularly for sidewalks, for pedestrians and for bikers. Sidewalks, bike facilities, those are in short supply in this area, particularly on the Armstrong Mill Corridor. The neighborhoods identified criminal activities that they were concerned about and also the property maintenance issues. So once we got all of this together, once we realized what the issues were to the neighborhood, through other public input processes, the neighborhood crafted a vision statement for the small area plan. And as you look at these, you see this isn't much different than what you would expect any neighborhood in the community to want for themselves. And so with this vision statement, we were able to build on six goals that would then further provide recommendations for us to turn into implementation items. The goals for the study area included public safety, mobility, housing, land use, livability, and placemaking. And within these six goals, we identified 52 specific recommendations for further action. Those could include such things as grassroots efforts, such as creating a neighborhood watch program, conducting a lighting audit for safety purposes, traffic calming analysis for safety purposes, big projects such as designing and constructing the West Hickman Trail, reinstituting some previous uses such as the Gaines Way Empowerment Center, and then putting wayfinding in the area to show people where they're going and to showcase some of the highlights of the neighborhood. In particular, we showcased connectivity and neighborhood livability, and from the plan we identified one of the catalytic projects of this area would be to redesign and reimagine how Armstrong Mill Road functions, certainly much more as a multimodal corridor than it does now. In this rendering, we show a multi-use trail on the north side of Armstrong Mill for bikes and pedestrians, and then a pedestrian facility along the south side, along with enhanced landscaping, intersection improvements for pedestrians and for vehicles, lighting and other things that would make this a more inviting corridor and enable people to move through and in and out of the corridor without having to necessarily be in their car. And for livability and in response to the need for access to better food, we recommend that perhaps one way you could do that would be to bring some farmers' markets into the area. So here we show a rendering in the Park Hill Shopping Center of what a farmers' market might look like. But it could also be in the Gainesway Center or someplace else interior, as well as perhaps a farmers' market mobile food truck as well. So these were just some of the ideas that came out of the many recommendations in the plan that were then presented to the Planning Commission in April of this year for adoption. The Planning Commission considered this and unanimously adopted the Armstrong-Mill West Small Area Plan as an amendment to the Comprehensive Plan. So this now becomes the guiding document for future decisions in this area. The plan is published online, and I have that information on a handout for you. And at this point, I'm joined by the director and Janice Westland, and if we have any questions, we'd be glad to address those. Thank you. Excuse me. Thank you, Mr. Duncan. Councilmember Brown, do you want to follow up with this presentation? Yes. Thank you. Thank you, Jim. Yeah, I'll leave that particular picture up. I wanted to present this to not only this committee, but I wanted to make sure that people across the community, especially in the 8th District, would be aware of what we're trying to look at the future and try to do some things for a particular area. the 8th district has been obviously neglected as far as some of the things that we're dealing with and I don't know how many people travel Armstrong Mill Road but it has been a rural road for years and years at one time the state highway department had that but it was deeded over to us and I don't know what year that was so we have maintained it by just keeping its rural character and just keeping it paved. There has been some improvements. In fact, there's a light that's going up. It's in process now at Armstrong Mill Road and River Park. And so that will slow down the traffic a little bit. So we do have some traffic concerns there. But this particular plan, this is probably the biggest concern and item was Armstrong Mill Road. How do we connect, and if you look at the map, there's a south side and a north side, but how do we connect the community, especially the 8th District area, which is pretty concise, how do we connect that? And Armstrong Mill Road was one of the connecting patterns there, but really you can't get across it except at a couple of places as far as pedestrians go. As you look at this picture that's on the screen, on the right there is a pedestrian bikeway path. And right now there was a grant that a former council member had worked on. And there's a grant already. It's about a $400 and some thousand dollar grant that's going to connect from the school, Tates Creek School, up to Armstrong Mill Road and then tee out at a couple of intersections. It's just a small portion of what's needed. And what we're looking at is if we could do that stretch all the way to Tates Creek Road and all the way back to Armstrong Mill Road. So if you can visualize that in your mind, Armstrong Mill Road actually goes outside of Manowar, but the focal points are Manowar to Tates Creek Road. And so a lot of things are involved in that, and I wanted to present that because this is part of the plan. I'd like to get some funding, and hopefully we can advance this 10-foot pedestrian bikeway all along Armstrong Mill Road. For most people's information, if you look down the Armstrong Mill Road on that picture, As you go on down to it, you'll go over to the right will be where the Tates Creek school system is. Well, right now, all you have down through there is just green space, which is owned by the city. But it's just that's where people walk that want to go to school. They have no sidewalks to get to school from Manowar or across from River Park or across from Appian Way. So, you know, to me, this is long overdue, and I want to do, you know, I want to try to get some funding and resources and grants available so that we can at least do a pedestrian bikeway and walkway all the way on Armstrong Mill Road on one side. Now, I couch that in the fact that that just solves a little bit of the problem. uh this uh the mpo which is our uh which we manage our overall uh traffic patterns and we have projects that go out there on roadways 2020 is on the list for armstrong mill road to have sidewalks and curbs and it's a 20 million dollar project and that was a 20 million dollar project a couple years ago. The feasibility of that happening even by 2020 is pretty small because federal funding is being cut, state funding is being cut. So maybe the alternative would be that we'll need to use some general fund money, some more grant monies, and try to at least get one section of Armstrong Mill Road. So if that's kind of the plea, that's really what I wanted to do on presenting. And And in this particular plan, and I'll close with that, it's got some areas that we're already working on that are in the budget. I've worked with the traffic department, and we're looking at some things that can be enhanced not only along Armstrong Mill Road but other areas. And they're already budgeted items, but there is a few things that aren't in the budget. And then the estimated costs and public safety involved in it, everything that kind of melds together. So I guess what I'm saying is I want this presented. I don't want this to be one of those plans that gets shelved. I want to promote it. And I'm really looking forward to working with some of the community because I want to get a mini task force so that we can keep on going and keep a little bit of pressure on planning and traffic to get some of the things done. So it's going to be a collaborative effort, but I just wanted people to know what was going on in the 8th District related to that. Thank you. Thank you, Council Member Brown. And we're not going to bind any of this, are we? I couldn't resist. You know, that was brought up, and to answer your question, you all have misinterpreted my bonding. You bond things that are long-time and that are expensive. You don't bond $100,000 items. Thank you for the clarification. Are there any other council members that have any questions? okay now i'll turn this over again to council member henson in reference to the advertising supplements from the herald leader you're on thank you chair i did want to comment on the small area plans and the importance they bring to our community and um because i had not been involved in a small area plan until cardinal valley came along the small area plan, and I know that there's been several done throughout the city, and I see them as being a fascinating process and a thing that we do need to move forward, not just pay the money and let the plan sit on the shelf. But I appreciate the Division of Planning so much for their work on these. Next, I'll move right on. Many of you have received complaints from constituents regarding the unsolicited advertising materials that are left in our yards and driveways. That was my reason for placing this in committee. There's really not a presentation. There may be folks here that have signed up to speak. In your packet, there is an ordinance that would require unsolicited advertisements or material be placed by the front doors and mail slots in your door, et cetera. And you can see from research that Paul Schoeniger, our research analyst, has done that in several cities they have adopted similar legislation that would prevent this from happening. We also have letters in your packet from Charles Martin, the director of the Division of Water Quality, talking about the effects it might have on, that litter does have on our water quality. And then one from the police department that states about giving a sense of no one's a home. Several of the advertisers left on a property when someone, you know, so it's a public safety issue, too. we did meet with the hero leader and there may be someone here because this is currently the hero leader is the only unsolicited advertisement that we're getting thrown into the yards or our driveway so I don't know if there's people signed up to speak or not but that's the gist of it thank you thank you councilmember Henson are there any other council members that would like to speak on this issue before I I believe there's five or six folks here from the public that want to speak on this. If not I'll go ahead. Looks like the first one is Mr. Mark Fielding. I'll refer back to Richard Morgan. Okay. And it looks like we have Mr. or Ms. Devin Heber? I'll also refer to Richard Morgan. Alright. Mr. Morgan. Looks like you're on deck here. Thank you, Chair, and thank you, Council. We appreciate the opportunity to speak today. For the record, I'm Richard Morgan. I'm the Audience Operations Manager for the Lexington Herald Leader and Conductive.com. I want to provide the Council with some history and current information on the Lexington Herald Legally News and Information publication, which is called Community News, a four- and six-page publication containing local Lexington and surrounding county news and local business advertisement. I'm going to ask real quick, have all of you all seen this publication and know what it looks like? Okay, I did bring copies for you all today if you had not seen it. In August of 2014, we redesigned and relaunched our weekly product from a mail-delivered mode of delivery to a carrier delivery operation. One of the several guiding business factors that impacted this decision was the need to continue to ensure our local customers in advertising a specified date in light of the decision of the U.S. Postal Commission to close the Nantino Main Post Office Processing Center. Our business and industry also continues to grow through a transformation that results in us looking for ways to become more cost-efficient, which directly impacts our ability to maintain local Lexington jobs and at our newspaper company. I know that we invest over $12,000 per week in the delivery of the community news publication. The money is paid directly to Lexington residents. That is important to our economy here in Lexington and Fayette County. We get calls from Lexington residents if they don't receive the community news, wondering where it is. They rely on the community news publication for editorial news, content, groceries, and other sales. Kroger, a large employer of the Lexington and who is a major advertiser, depends on us for the weekly distribution of their food insert, too. We have a partnership with Kroger that if their customers do not receive their inserts on any given week, their customers personally call our department and we ensure delivery of the publication. We average over six other local insert business advertisers in this publication each week as well, and advertisers are pleased with the results and trusted delivery of the local news and information publication. We launched this product a year ago with relatively minor complaints and continue to get minor complaints. However, we are aware that some of the council members have been receiving complaints from constituents. We have quickly addressed all complaints and have brought to our attention. Our president published a roof for Friday over the past year and in recent months. He has reached out by meeting with the mayor and several members of the council with personal business to discuss the concerns and our commitment to ensure that our weekly news product community news delivery be handled with the utmost care as a business partner and employer in Lexington and Fayette County. I assure you, as the one in charge of operations at the Lexington Herald-Leader, that the Lexington Herald-Leader and its distribution partnerships marketing group has gone to great lengths in addressing those concerns. Our procedures for handling complaints are strenuous, and we monitor and address all concerns in a timely fashion. We have many ways for readers that do not want delivery to communicate with us. We publish on the front page at the top of Community News each week an email address and a phone number for readers to contact us to opt out of receiving. We also provide this information to Council members, the phone numbers and email addresses that have been placed in several of the Council members' newsletters. We strive to make certain our carrier delivery, our quality product, in the event of our carrier errors, which is due to carrier turnover, can happen. All it takes is one phone call or one email to us and we're on it. We maintain a do not delivery list. And at this time, there are 1,563 requests on that database. We provide the community news to over 134,612 households each week and over 534,000 each month in Lexington, Nicklausville, and Versailles. In May, we went a step further in addressing the same issue of delivery to Versailles and vacant homes. We have received from the Office of Building and Associate Realtors, LBAR, a list of Versailles' homes and filtered them out of our distribution list. And we also get a list of vacant homes from the Fayette County Property Evaluator Assessor's Office and take them out of our list. Our delivery partner, SIPP's marketing group, is also state-of-the-art technology that is used for tracking delivery and pickup results and quality control. Our SIPP partner is here and will discuss in detail their quality assurance and distribution processes monetarily, which includes conducting weekly routine audits and making adjustments as needed to hold their carriers account for accurate, timely, and prompt delivery placement. It would be added proof that our do not delivery list, weekly quality assurance delivery placements, and pickup or product dogs by SIPs Marketing Group, we take this serious. We are aware that the Lexington Urban County Council voted to further explore whether it can ban or regulate the placement of advertising circulars. Community news is not an advertising circular. It is a community news and information publication. The Lexington Herald Leader has asked the community to take into account all the measures that we have and continue to commit and provide necessary controls. An ordinance which regulates the community news publication will be counterproductive and costly to the Lexington Herald Leader's ability to further satisfy our customers and local advertising businesses. It would also directly cost the Lexington Hero leader causing job reductions and eliminations. We feel it is unnecessary governmental restriction that would hurt local businesses in Lexington. Thank you for the opportunity, and I welcome any questions. Thank you, sir. I believe there's two others that would like to speak. We have a Mr. Pickett, Adam Pickett. Okay, and then Mr. Kim. Thank you. Like my colleague, Mr. Morgan at the Herald-Leader, I'd like to thank the council for this opportunity to speak on behalf of my company, CIPS Marketing Group. My name for the record is John Kim. I'm the vice president of operations at CIPS. As has been noted, we deliver approximately 134,000 community news circulars per week to the residents of Lexington, Nicholasville, and Versailles. As we do in all the markets we service with this type of delivery, we place an added focus on do not deliver requests. or as we've referred to them, DNDs. This is always a fluid process as we want to give the consumer an opportunity to request for this product to cease to be delivered, and we process these requests weekly. We average approximately 140 DNDs per month out of the 534,000 products we deliver during that time. Of these complaints, we make additional efforts to satisfy those residents by contacting them and individually adding them to our D&D lists, as well as provide additional services, such as picking them up from their property as requested or when available. In most cases, the residents are satisfied with simply getting the acknowledgement of their requests and adding them to the D&D list. There are times when these D&D requests escalate, and it's our protocol to create a hot list of VIP requests where we require the carrier to take a photo of the address to ensure that a paper had not been delivered and it also has a date and time stamp on that image so that we can confirm non-delivery as well as reinforce to the carrier that this is a resident that does not want this paper. Furthermore, we use state-of-the-art GPS tracking applications. We plot the addresses of these DNDs on our manifests and the carrier paperwork. We're able to track the carrier's route through these neighborhoods with a date and time stamp so that we can see when and where they delivered their product. So as we get an average of 140 D&D complaints, an average of perhaps 11 of those will escalate to a repeat. And then those are the repeats that we will focus on creating these VIP lists and ensuring that the proper protocols are started. When the carrier does not sufficiently execute these delivery requests, we will terminate the contract with those carriers and replace them. Since we started, we've had to replace nearly 100 carriers, not all for performance issues, but I think it shows that we are actively working with these requests and ensuring that if delivery is not executed properly, we have steps to ensure that we do put people on the routes that will respect the delivery requests. We've invested significant resources into tracking solutions so that we can monitor and verify where the carriers are delivering. As I mentioned, we use a customized GPS tracking solution with the waypoints of these routes plotted into our database. And each carrier is required to use this application from which we create weekly delivery reports and update our delivery manifests with these DND requests every week. And these reports are archived for three years. We're also proud of the fact that in every market we work in, we provide employment to to the local citizens and contribute to the local economy. Since we've started, we've contracted or employed over 150 local citizens. We provide a desired service to the local residents as well as local businesses. And in an audit of one of our other markets that we service with this type of product performed by certified audits of circulations, it showed that we had a 98.4% delivery accuracy rating, 99.2% of the product was received in good condition. 92.6% of the consumers enjoy receiving this product. And the one that was most interesting to me was that 87.6% of the people receiving this product had their purchasing influence by the product they received. So I think that plays into the advertiser component of this question as to whether or not there is an impact of this product onto the local businesses and local economies. The overall monthly D&D requests represent approximately 0.025% of our total monthly delivery. And in many of our established markets, we receive far more complaints from residents about non-delivery of these coupons than we do of these unwanted deliveries. However, we do take every non-delivery or do not deliver request seriously. And frankly, for our business, it's the single most important concern that we face in this type of market delivery. We're aggressive in our efforts to ensure only those residents who want to receive these products will do so And we have stringent processes and protocols in place to respect ongoing D&D requests And we will always work with the resident and client to take all reasonable additional measures To help resolve complaints, such as picking up the product from the streets We feel the attention that CIPS focuses on this issue and resources, both technical and personnel we employ to mitigate these concerns are what separate our services from other similar companies and other markets. And it's why we are largely recognized as the industry leader in this field. We'll continue to be proactive in managing the D&D requests and provide the local community with a well-executed product and delivery. Any questions? Thank you, Mr. Kamen. Thank you, Mr. Morgan. I just wanted to bring to the council members' attention page 22 in bold has the change that would be applicable to this ordinance. And it looks like we have some council members with some questions. Council Member Bledsoe. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Council Member Henson, for bringing this. We've talked about it a lot. I have received a number of calls. In fact, it's the highest number of complaint calls that my office has received is on this issue, and what do we do. Likewise, I thank you both for your presentation as well. I do have a couple questions. How do you distinguish between what is an advertising supplement and what is a community news? What's your criteria? Criteria? The criteria is editorial content. An amount of it as compared to advertising, or just that it exists? That it contains news content. Before we made this change, we had a publication that we did mail out called Find and Save. If you're a home delivery subscriber now, you still get Find and Save on Wednesdays. And when we made this conversion is when we switched to community news. So when we added some news content to it, that turned it into more of a news publication along with an advertising supplement. So it was really trying to get away from just providing people who were non-readers of the Lexington Herald leaders some news content from us. because we know that our circulation numbers, our home delivery subscribers, do not get this publication. It's just designed for people who are not subscribers to the Herald-Leader and to give them the opportunity to receive those advertisement supplements, but also to see some of the news content that we can provide to them. And the hope being that they would decide then to join the Herald-Leader? That they would subscribe to us, yes. Okay. And the second question I have is, of the 150 local citizens, I'm assuming these are part-time. These are not full-time positions. Is that correct? For the most part, the carrier force that we have, our contract base, we do have full-time employees, but it's a small percentage of our overall employed personnel. Okay. I have a number of other thoughts, but I'll stop there. Thank you. Council Member Sennett. Thank you, Chair. I guess I have a question. You had mentioned that you stopped using the mail, the U.S. Postal Service, and that's how traditionally this had been delivered for a number of years. And you've gone back to the throw-in-your-driveway method. What's the difference in cost for that? The cost for us is cheaper, and I'll explain to you why. It's not just in the distribution costs, but it's also in the size of the community news section. The post office regulates us on the number of advertisements and page counts that we can have. is we increased the page count and the advertisement, the cost raises. So it restricted us to be able to put more advertisement inserts and expand and change it to an editorial to go through the post office. The other issue we had with the post office is that they could not guarantee the exact day of delivery when that would hit our customer base. So if it got out late in an area, the advertiser wasn't able to recoup all their ads from the previous day. And what we do with SIPS Marketing is our primary days are Tuesdays and Wednesdays. And with their tracking software, if an advertiser calls us and asks us, have you delivered this area of town, we were able to bring it up and show them what time the carrier delivered and the time that he was on route and the time he left route. So we actually use their monitoring software. We have access to their monitoring software here at the Herald Leader. So we're able to track, too, what a carrier is doing. So even though SIPs Marketing watches it, we watch it too, because we monitor routes too. Mr. Felding and myself and a contractor that works for us also goes behind them and monitors the distribution of the product. Because if I'm not correct, the distribution center is actually staying here in Lexington now. So you all could potentially go back to using the post office, but I think from what you just said, you're not going to, because one costs and seconds timing of the accuracy of delivery in terms of the timing of it. Yes, sir. And I think that's when we all started getting the calls, of course, and that's when the issue arose. So I guess my next question is for our law department. A copy of this ordinance, is this similar to what Louisville passed a year and a half ago? It looks very similar, and I assume this is a brand-new whole. The whole ordinance is actually brand-new, not just page 22, but the whole section would be brand-new, and it would apply to everyone in the community, not just the Herald-Earer, of course, but anyone that wanted to advertise in this method would thus be prohibited from using this method going forward. Yes. To answer your question, first of all, this ordinance was modeled very closely after the ordinance that was passed in Louisville back in 2009. Okay. And this ordinance does speak generally as to unsolicited written materials, not just advertising. It's any unsolicited written material as defined in this ordinance. So it's a little more general than just advertising. And is it any material, for instance, we're all here to run campaigns, hang on the door? Did it exclude hanging on the door as a potential method of advertising? As long as it complies with the methods that are set forth in this ordinance. I think this ordinance sets forth like six methods that you can do that. As long as you're consistent with that, you're in compliance with this ordinance, no matter what type of written materials you're using. Okay, and it applies to all entities in Fayette County, not just the newspaper? Yes. And on enforcement, we have it under two separate boards, And I assume that's for the public safety issue one, and the second is our sanitary sewer system. I mean, in my neighborhood alone, I found 12 in the sewer system after the last delivery. So that's why the two different boards, there's no way to get under one board? Well, it's under one board. As this is written, it's been placed. The appeals would go to the Environmental Hearing Board as this ordinance is written. So it would be the one board that you're really just amending there. Okay, I read infrastructure hearing in there would get the bulk of it, it seemed like, but maybe you're interpreting different. Well, I mean, you could give it to either one. It's just which one is that the best fit for and also which one, you know, is it consistent. I think one of the concerns was you don't want to overburden one board at the expense of the other board. That's what I was getting to. One's more active than the other. Yes, infrastructure is already doing a lot of citations and that kind of thing. That's what I was going to, okay, you answered that. Environmental isn't doing as much right now, so it may make more sense from a workload standpoint to put it with environmental than infrastructure. Yeah, that's exactly where I was headed. So, and then on the fine, it's a civil penalty? If you enforce it, yes. You can issue a civil citation and then issue a civil penalty. If that's, you know, that's the way that the enforcement would go in this ordinance. And how did you come up with the penalties, the $50, et cetera? That was suggested by Council Member Hanson. she was you know louisville for for your information uses a 100 and 200 penalty this was just a 50 and what was it 150 but yeah it was it was a question of council member hansen so as long as it's reasonable yeah that's open for debate and discussion i understand that i just want to make sure i wasn't wasn't missing anything there's a minimum or a maximum we had to stay within because then on some of our ordinance it's 500 and and up so i just wanted to make sure i had that correct and why not a why not a criminal penalty why just civil i mean you're not taking I mean, the criminal would certainly still be available as an option, but I think civil is both logistically easier and also the standard of proof is a little less than criminal. And so it's a little easier to enforce things civilly than it would be to go do a criminal citation in district court. And my time's up, but I'll ask you one final question and let you answer. Who's going to enforce this and how are they going to track down the entity that's responsible? Because we have this issue on code enforcement where we actually have to go a little beyond. Who's going to actually do that in LFUCG? As this ordinance is drafted, the citation officer, this ordinance would authorize citation officers. The code enforcement would be the citation officers. So, and that's the way Louisville does this. Essentially, they take the, they're the initial point of contact. The public comes to code enforcement and says, here's the problem. I'd like to file a complaint about this. Okay, I'll chime back in. Thank you. Thank you, Council Member. Senate, Council Member Akers. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Council Member. Senator, I thought you asked some good questions. I just want to, I guess, support my colleagues. And I represent the 2nd District, which is the west end of Lexington, lots of suburbs. And this has been the number one complaint since, well, before we actually introduced it. That's why it was brought forward. And even since we haven't actually taken any action yet, I still receive concerns and questions asking why we haven't done anything about it yet. I also wanted to ask, you mentioned the do not deliver requests of 140 per month. And when we first started talking about this, I did share the phone number to call the Herald Leader. Is that the number that goes to CIPS? Does that go to you all? Or does it, I mean, when I called, it was a recording at the Herald Leader. It goes to the Herald Leader. because lots of people have told me that they have called and that they still receive them. And as far as, you know, I am on the Vacant Property Review Commission. I do walk and run in my neighborhood, and I'm also a realtor. So I see lots of properties that are either vacant or not. I see lots of these in driveways with vacant properties, in storm drains, piled in yards where people are either on vacation or foreclosed on or whatever's going on with the property. So I appreciate your data that you're really trying to keep that to a minimum, but it still seems to me to be a major problem. I guess my one question was the civil penalties. It says per violation, but would that be per day of delivery, or is it per household? How does that work? It would be per violation. So it would be per violation. You could issue a citation for each violation, essentially. So if all 10 of us, or however many of us are here today, if each of us called 311 and issued a complaint that we received it and didn't want it or whatever, then that would be $50 for each of us? My, yes, yes. I think that, assuming we could find a violation on each of your 10 properties, yes, it would be 10 violations. And how would you confirm, I guess, the violation versus someone just calling to complain? Would they have to take pictures? Would they have to bring in the paper that they got in the driveway? That would be an issue that would have to be worked out with code enforcement in terms of how they would actually follow up on these. but that'd be one option would be take pictures document however you can and then have the property owner keep the actual materials so that they can have those for any appeal or whatever okay i think that's all i have thank you thank you chair thank you council member acres council member gibbs thank you chair uh just a few comments i support the ordinance i want to make that clear. To be honest with you guys, what you're doing, I consider littering. If the people who delivered those pizza delivery flyers, they put them on my door, on the doorknob, or they're sticking to the door, if they pitch to my front yard, I would consider that litter. And I get loads and loads of complaints. I'm concerned about the sewer system. Both you folks, you know, touted the employment opportunities. I think if you delivered these things responsibly, you can employ a lot more people. And I think that would be the thing to do. But thank you, Chair. Thank you. Council Member Gibbs. Council Member Farmer. Thank you, Madam Chair. And I, too, thank the gentleman for coming to talk to us. Just to clear something for me. So the first gentleman works for the newspaper and supervises the supplement, and the second gentleman works for the company that delivers the supplement. Is that correct? That's correct. So in a previous conversation, maybe it was here or in a different venue, I don't recall, it seems like there was the expression of heartburn on behalf of the paper that if we'd made this change, it would in some way infringe on the right of free speech in some capacity. Do you share that opinion, or can you make comment to that end? Sure, Castle Farmer. It would be a First Amendment issue. I mean, we don't want to go that direction with it because it is a news publication. And let me – you asked a question, if you don't mind, I'll answer back to you about our relationships here with SIPs Marketing. I am a Lexington Herald-Ear employee, and I'm in charge of all audience operations. So not just the community news and our Sunny Select publication, I'm also responsible for all home delivery and retail distribution and hauling. So this is just part of my job. And we have distribution partners who handle different publications for us. SIPs handles our community news publication and our Sunny Select shopper publication. We also have a distribution partner who handles our home delivery distribution. who's an outside contractor. As someone who is one of the dwindling few who receives the paper. I'm with you. And in a very real sense, I feel like because of the trouble that my carrier goes to to create a relationship between our house and the carrier, and at first I was, you know, it's like any other managed or client relationship, I said, if you're going to do this, if we're going to do this driveway delivery, I need for you to do a little bit different based on where my sidewalk is and where my driveway is, and that was taken into account. We have a good relationship, and I get my paper, and it's all fine. However, on the Wednesday delivery of this particular supplement, at the beginning, and I haven't followed that closely recently, but at the beginning, it was very haphazard, and it was very sloppy, and I'm not singling you out. I'm just saying what I saw because there's a difference between the carrier getting that paper across the sidewalk to where I feel like it's in my property, I'm going to go get it. At the beginning, with this supplement, it was barely onto the apron of the driveways, and I'm like, Council Member Stenet, they wound up causing us a problem with the EPA consent decree because they're stopping up the sewer. So, I mean, I'm not sure what the sense of the council is going to be on this legislation, but I wanted, have you all taken that kind of input into account? We have, and I receive calls. The calls that come in through the answer machine, most of those come to me. I personally call these people back, or I have an administrative person who does. So anybody who calls the Herald-Leader and says they no longer want the community news, we reach back out to them to tell them that we got their message and that we'll try to get it stopped the next week. But we have a two-week window because of the way we transfer data back and forth with SIPS. But if we get somebody that calls me, I will automatically send SIPs an email and tell them that, you know, we've got somebody who no longer wants the publication. You know, when we started this publication up, we did a rollout, and their staffing here was new, and they were recruiting new carriers. Now, some of their carriers are also home delivery carriers, so it's a shared thing, but some of them were not. So it was all in the educational process of what the delivery standard was. You know, our delivery standard to a community news subscriber is for that paper to be above the sidewalk, into their yard or driveway. All right. The other delivery standard is for us, and this is what I monitor heavily, is to look for, you know, I get out and ride every Tuesday and Wednesday, and I pick different areas of town. And if I go in an area and find something wrong, then I go back in the next week to look again to make sure the problem's been corrected. So what I look for is a delivery standard of where it is, the placement of the product. I'll also look to see if I see anything stacking up. Because we tell our standard with SIPS is that they get out there and they see one laying there that they're supposed to not deliver another one the next week. And then we go back through and look for cleanup purposes. So we've added some things along the way because we have found that we needed to add things along the way. Very good. And one of them now is for the past two months, we go back out on Thursday in the areas where we've had that we have physically seen issues and we have heard of issues and go back through those issues to make sure somebody's come through there and they're picked up. If they're not picked up, then we will pick them up. And I will tell you that last week I was in Mr. Gibbs's district, found an issue. I actually got a call from somebody that lives in the area that knows I work for the Herald Leader. said, I think you need to come out here and look, which I did, found the issue, called our local SIPPS representative, sent an email to the owner of SIPPS, and said, look, here's some pictures that I took. This is not standard. They were able to go out there within the next hour, correct the issue, and SIPPS terminated the carrier. So we're very much on this. I mean, I spend more time on community news and making sure it's delivered correctly now to not do anything else in my job trying to make sure that we're staying at the standard pretty good sir thank you thank you madam chair thank you um vice chair scutchfield before the next round of council members that have already spoken speak would you mind taking the chair so i may have uh i have a couple of questions mr morgan i should have asked you to stay up here i apologize i certainly understand what your job is and i appreciate what the herald leader is trying to to do as far as gain some more advertising revenue obviously it's not about the first amendment it's about distribution in my mind i still get a lot of calls i like some of the council members walk my districts and run and you know pay attention to what's going on and i've called for my neighbors that have vacant properties i've called on other behalf of other constituencies and the response has not been great. I'm just going to be real honest with you. And I have to call again. And sometimes we get a response, and then two weeks later, that material is back in that driveway. And then these are houses that are two or three doors up the street, so I pay attention to this. And I guess it's the frustration that we feel constantly as we try to get it done and try to stay ahead of it. We call you, and then we're good for a couple weeks, and boom, we start all over again. Like in any job with a lot of different carriers, you're going to run into this. But this seems like something that's a a continual process that we haven't been able to get a fix with yet. So I'm looking for that magic answer here, if you can give it to me. Well, I think the magic answer, Ms. Moscone, is that this was a learning process for us. You know, this was not my background. I've been at the election earlier for 37 years. My background has been distribution the whole time. And I was involved in a publication that we used to put out before we went to the mail called Bluegrass Today, and it was delivered in the same standard. It was just delivered by our home delivery carrier force. It wasn't delivered by another group. And we have learned things by trial and error of what to do and what not to do. And I think that the things that we're doing now is we've added actually a 30-hour part-time person to work with us on the community news section and to send these to like to try to help do the data side of this business and making sure all the data gets to SIPS correctly. And then we've also added this contractor, and he has two people who work for him that gets out and do field verification that are not hooked to SIPS but are actually more eyes for me to see. So I think the goal is to pump more resources into the verification process to make sure, and that's why we added this position and added the contractors that go out on Thursdays and Fridays and look in the areas that we've heard of trouble in to make sure the products are getting picked up, and if they're not, we're trying to pick them back up. And there is no other alternative as far as getting this information out like you do skirt, I mean putting it in a holder and a receptacle and wherever? No, ma'am, because the advertisement inserts that are in there, those advertisers want it delivered to the residents' homes. Okay. Thank you. Thank you, Vice Chair of Scotchfield. Council Member Henson. Thank you, Chair. I wanted to make some comments on some of the comments that have been made. And I do know that I have the same feeling as Council Member Massadi about First Amendment, is that we're not saying it can't be delivered. It can't be get the information across to individuals. It's just the manner in which that is distributed. And I will also tell you from my personal experiences, I get to hear a leader every day, but I also get the circular, which I am not supposed to receive according. so there is inconsistencies in the delivery. I don't have a problem with it. I can walk out and pick it up, and if I've already looked at it, put it in my recycling bin, no problem. But the other thing that I brought up was with individuals with disabilities and the elderly, people that cannot get out of their home, they can opt out, But many times I don't think that information has been readily available. My first instinct was, after meeting with the Herald-Leader representative, was to possibly work with the Herald-Leader and see if we couldn't resolve these issues in some manner. But due to the inconsistencies, I really feel like that we should move this ordinance, move it forward to the full council. So I will make that motion to move the ordinance forward to the full council. Second. We have a motion to move the entire ordinance forward to the full council by Councilmember Henson, seconded by Councilmember Akers. Any discussion? All those in favor? Question. I'm sorry. Councilmember Stinnett. Thank you. I guess I have a question for Mr. Morgan. It is from the Herald-Leader. So I know you're saying it's a First Amendment right, but in our ordinance, it says you can still deliver it to the front porch. Is that going to be an issue? Why wouldn't that be easy for you to do? Because the phone books are doing it. The pizza folks are doing it. Why couldn't you just transition to the front porch or hang out the door? Well, two things, Councilman Stendert. One thing is that it would increase the cost of the publication for us to deliver it because the amount of time it would take for somebody to walk a neighborhood and deliver these products would greatly accelerate the cost of the publication. The second thing is, you know, we no longer offer porch service in Fayette County for our Home Delivery Herald Leader unless you pay for it. And one of the reasons we did that was that it allowed the property owner to give us permission to be on their property up around their door. I mean, we're concerned about safety for our carrier force. And, you know, throughout 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning, you know, somebody who had their paper porch, they knew it was coming and was going to be on the porch. So for us, we see it as, you know, it's going to cost us more money. But the second thing is the safety of our carrier force. All right. Very good. Thank you for answering that. Thank you, Council Member Henson, for making the motion. That's all. Any of the other council members have any questions? All right, we have a motion on the floor. We have a second. All those in favor? Aye. Those opposed? No. Motion passes. Thank you. I believe that's it for what's on the agenda. All we have to do... is take a look at the last page if you all wouldn't mind some of the items that are in committee Mr. Farmer looks like yours is first the H1 notification process do you want to leave that in committee yeah I have a way forward on that with the council with committee staff so I'd like to leave it and then come back to my other well you have downtown traffic study here and a couple others. We might as well just go. The downtown traffic study is something that's kind of evergreen, and I think they'll come back with another update on it, if you will. The last two are items that I took over ownership of for the previous council member, and I need to get a little work done on those or else we can pull them out. But I haven't set two on each one, but I'm glad to. Those two are the scrap metal detectors and the sky lanterns. Do you want those pulled? No, we need to take a look at what we may or may not do before we pull them, but I'll do that between now and next month. Sounds good. Thank you. Council Member Akers. Okay. We have, again, Council Member Henson. I believe our taxicab ordinance is going to come up, or was supposed to come up in October, I thought. This was actually on the docket and prior to second reading. It was tabled until the 27th, so it will come back up at the council meeting. And it will probably be placed back into committee. Okay. So we'll just leave it there if that's okay? That's fine. And I guess Council Member Akers, before you sit down, let me know how we're doing and explore the providing assistance to low-income homeowners with code compliance. Yes, I had to check with our planning staff on that one. He is ready whenever the committee is ready to hear him. Okay, so we're good to go on that one. Yes. Okay, thank you. And ride-sharing, is that also with the taxicab ordinance, Council Member Henson? No, I think that's a separate item, so I would move to remove ride-sharing regulations. Do we have a second? Second. All those in favor? Aye. Okay, that one's been removed. And Council Member Stenet, it looks like you have the status of small area plans. Move for removal. Second. Okay, that one will be removed. And Council Member Henson, Versailles Road Corridor Study, did we not discuss that somewhat before? We did. We had a presentation. What I would like to do, both on the Versailles Road Corridor Study and the Cardinal Valley Small Area Plan, doesn't necessarily need to be a committee item, but we will have periodic updates. So I would move to remove it from the agenda items. Is there a second? Second. All those in favor? Aye. So that's been removed. We've went over the other three items, and I believe Council Member Bledsoe, I think that's coming up, your fireworks display insurance. That's next month, isn't it? I think it's September. We're ready. Okay. Sounds good. All right. I'll take a motion to adjourn. Second. All those in favor? Thank you. Thank you. You said I was in my early place.