# Planning and Public Safety Committee - September 8, 2015 > Auto-transcribed civic record · September 8, 2015 - **Permalink**: https://meetings.lexingtonky.news/meeting/3760 - **Source video**: https://lfucg.granicus.com/player/clip/3760?view_id=14&redirect=true - **Date**: 2015-09-08 - **Last revised**: September 8, 2015 - **Length**: 19,078 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 convened on September 8, 2015, at 1:00 PM with Mossotti presiding as the committee chair. The committee addressed four agenda items during the session, all of which were informational in nature and did not require formal action. The meeting included discussions on the previous month's committee summary, design excellence standards and guidelines, insurance requirements for firework displays, and various referred items. The committee conducted six motions and votes throughout the proceedings and heard from two members of the public during the comment period. ## Attendance The following members were present at the September 8, 2015 meeting: • Mossotti • Scutchfield • Stinnett • Akers • Gibbs • Farmer • Bledsoe • Henson • F. Brown Two members were absent: • Kay • Lamb No members arrived late to the meeting. ## Votes and Decisions The committee took six votes during the September 8, 2015 meeting, with five passing unanimously and one passing by a 9-1 margin. **Approval of Previous Meeting Summary** [timestamp: 00:02] Scutchfield motioned to approve the June 9, 2015 Committee Summary, seconded by Henson. The motion passed unanimously 9-0, with all nine members voting in favor: Mossotti, Scutchfield, Stinnett, Akers, Gibbs, Farmer, Bledsoe, Henson, and F. Brown. **Distribution of Unsolicited Advertising Supplements** [timestamp: 02:30] Henson motioned to move the Distribution of Unsolicited Advertising Supplements to the full Council, seconded by Akers. This motion passed 9-1 on a roll call vote. Voting in favor were Akers, Bledsoe, Gibbs, Henson, Lamb, Mossotti, Scutchfield, Stinnett, and Moloney. Farmer cast the sole dissenting vote. **Committee Item Removals** [timestamp: 02:45-02:55] The committee voted to remove three items from committee consideration: - Ridesharing Regulations: Motioned by Henson, seconded by Gibbs, passed unanimously 9-0 - Status of Small Area Plans: Motioned by Stinnett, seconded by Farmer, passed unanimously 9-0 - Versailles Rd Corridor Study: Motioned by Henson, seconded by Akers, passed unanimously 9-0 All three removal votes included the same nine members voting in favor: Mossotti, Scutchfield, Stinnett, Akers, Gibbs, Farmer, Bledsoe, Henson, and F. Brown. **Meeting Adjournment** [timestamp: 03:00] Henson motioned to adjourn the meeting, seconded by Scutchfield. The motion passed unanimously 9-0 with all members voting in favor. ## Public Comment Two speakers addressed the meeting during the public comment period, both focusing on issues related to unsolicited advertising supplements. **Richard Morgan** from The Lexington Herald Leader spoke first [timestamp: 01:45], addressing the topic of unsolicited advertising supplements. Morgan explained the distinction between community news and advertising supplements, emphasizing that the key difference lies in editorial content. His comments appeared to provide clarification on how these different types of publications should be categorized and understood. **John Kim** from CIPS followed [timestamp: 01:50], also discussing unsolicited advertising supplements. Kim provided information about the carrier workforce structure, stating that the majority of carriers operate on a contract basis. He noted that only a small percentage of carriers are employed on a full-time basis, offering insight into the employment practices within the industry. Both speakers' comments focused specifically on aspects of advertising supplement distribution and the operational structure of delivery services, providing the meeting with industry perspective on these issues. ## Contested Items The meeting featured one contested item that resulted in a split vote among committee members. **Distribution of Unsolicited Advertising Supplements** The committee considered a motion to move the Distribution of Unsolicited Advertising Supplements issue to the full Council for consideration. This item generated disagreement among the members, resulting in a non-unanimous vote. The motion ultimately passed by a vote of 9-1, with Farmer casting the sole dissenting vote against moving the matter forward to the full Council. The specific reasons for Farmer's opposition or the nature of the debate surrounding this advertising supplement distribution issue were not detailed in the available meeting materials. This split vote indicates there was some level of disagreement about either the substance of the advertising supplement distribution matter or the appropriateness of advancing it to the full Council at this time. ## August 11, 2015 Committee Summary [timestamp: 00:05] The committee reviewed the summary from their previous meeting held on August 11, 2015. Mossotti served as the key speaker for this agenda item, presenting the summary to the committee members. This was an informational discussion item where the committee examined the proceedings and outcomes from their August 11th session. The review of the previous meeting's summary is a standard procedural item that allows committee members to ensure accuracy of the record and address any necessary clarifications or corrections before moving forward with new business. The discussion was categorized as informational, indicating that no formal action was required or taken on this item. The committee used this opportunity to confirm the details of their prior deliberations and decisions from the August meeting. ## Design Excellence Standards/Guidelines [timestamp: 00:10] Kay presented the Design Excellence Standards and Guidelines to the meeting, which included discussion of a zoning ordinance text amendment. This agenda item served as an informational presentation to provide attendees with details about the proposed design standards and associated regulatory changes. The presentation covered the framework for design excellence standards that would guide development and construction projects within the jurisdiction. Kay outlined the guidelines that would establish criteria for evaluating the quality and appropriateness of proposed developments. As part of the presentation, Kay addressed a zoning ordinance text amendment that would be necessary to implement the design excellence standards. This amendment would provide the legal framework to enforce the new guidelines and ensure compliance with the established design criteria. The agenda item was structured as an informational session, allowing Kay to present the standards and guidelines without requiring immediate action from the meeting participants. This format provided an opportunity for attendees to review and understand the proposed design excellence framework before any formal decision-making process. The presentation concluded without requiring a vote or formal resolution, as the primary purpose was to inform participants about the design excellence standards and the related zoning ordinance text amendment that would support their implementation. ## Insurance for Firework Displays [timestamp: 00:20] Bledsoe presented information regarding updated insurance requirements for firework displays. The discussion focused on a significant change in the mandatory insurance coverage amounts that organizers of firework displays must now carry. The key change highlighted was an increase in required insurance coverage from $1 million to $5 million. Bledsoe explained this new requirement to the meeting participants, though the specific reasons for the increase or the timeline for implementation were not detailed in the available information. This agenda item was informational in nature, with Bledsoe serving as the primary speaker to inform the group about the updated insurance standards. No formal action was taken during this discussion, as it appeared to be focused on ensuring participants were aware of the new requirements that would affect future firework display events. The insurance requirement change represents a substantial increase in the financial protection that must be secured by event organizers, potentially impacting the planning and costs associated with firework displays in the jurisdiction. ## Items Referred [timestamp: 00:30] The Planning & Public Safety Committee reviewed various items that had been referred to the committee for consideration. Committee member Mossotti participated in the discussion of these referred matters. The agenda item served as an informational review of items that required the committee's attention and potential action. This portion of the meeting allowed committee members to discuss the scope and nature of the various matters that had been directed to the Planning & Public Safety Committee for their review and consideration. The discussion was informational in nature, with no specific action items or decisions recorded during this portion of the meeting. The committee used this time to organize and prioritize the referred items for future consideration and potential action at subsequent meetings. --- ## Decisions - **Motion** — passed (9-0): Approve the June 9, 2015 Committee Summary - **Motion** — passed (9-1): Move the Distribution of Unsolicited Advertising Supplements to the full Council - **Motion** — passed (9-0): Remove Ridesharing Regulations from Committee - **Motion** — passed (9-0): Remove the Status of Small Area Plans from Committee - **Motion** — passed (9-0): Remove the Versailles Rd Corridor Study from Committee - **Motion** — passed (9-0): Adjourn the meeting --- ## Full transcript I need a motion to approve the August 11th summary, please. Move approval. Second. Motion to approve and a second. All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? I guess we're good to go. Yeah, welcome back, Council Members. I believe the first thing on the agenda is design excellent standards that Vice Mayor Kaye has had in and out of the committee. And I think what we're going to attempt to do today is have any specific questions on the amendment, I mean on the text amendment. And I will go ahead and turn it over to Vice Mayor Kaye to kind of give us a quick synopsis of where we are and what his plan is to move this out of committee to the full council. Vice Mayor Kaye. Thank you, Chair. I think as everybody knows, there's been an incredible amount of documentation about this particular proposal. And I do not intend, at the beginning anyway, to lay out all of that. There's been workshops. There's been two previous committee meetings. There's been a fair amount of discussion of these issues. But what I would like to do is frame the issue, if I can, from the broader perspective. And so starting with the fact that the original intent, when the task force was put together, was to design basically opportunities for public input and additional regulations when major high visibility projects like CenterPoint are proposed. So there was a desire to have the public interest more clearly represented and more fully represented when proposals are made for downtown development that are clearly going to have a significant impact on all of downtown. That was the intent. How can we have more of a public voice? How can we assure that development going forward is more consistent with what is already there and supports the people who have already invested in downtown? As a part of the ongoing discussion of the task force, at a certain point, the question of incentives was raised. And just to be, maybe to overstate the case, but to be clear, this was not a task force set up to propose incentives. This was a task force set up to propose additional guidelines, regulations, opportunities for public input. Nonetheless, as the work progressed, the task force agreed that we should have a significant conversation about incentives. And when I became chair of the task force, kind of in the middle of the process, people expressed concern that we would move the zone text and the accompanying standards and guidelines forward to council before we had any incentives in place. As chair, I promised then that I would not proceed except on parallel tracks. That is, we would not move standards and guidelines and the zone text forward before we had a full discussion of possible incentives and proposed some for council to consider. After the zone text had been approved by the Planning Commission and the standards and guidelines were in draft form, final draft form, after years of discussion, the task force put them on hold and spent a year considering what incentives to propose to council. Out of that discussion came three proposals that Council approved. $40,000 to provide initial filing costs for TIFs, $500,000 to offset infrastructure costs for development within the design excellence overlay area, a new position of design excellence officer within the Office of the Commissioner of Planning. The task force also proposed a new position, really a pre-instatement of an old position, but at this point a new position within the Department of Planning to assist with, to help guide and expedite the development process. Commissioner Paulson assured the council that his office was already equipped to provide the service this year and the council voted not to create that position. Some people believe that the proposed incentives are not adequate. After extensive deliberation and consideration of many possibilities, they are what the task force concluded should be brought to Council, and they are what Council approved. They were discussed at two meetings of the Planning Committee. If others have proposals for one or more additional incentives for Council to consider, now would be the time to bring them forward. At this point, we have a set of incentives in place, but we do not yet have the standards and guidelines. As for the ZODA and the standards and guidelines, they have been circulated to Council numerous times and have been available to the public for over a year. Mr. Scanlon, who is here with us today, and I presume will be interested in making a comment later, came before Council with a written document and a verbal presentation raising a number of concerns about the present proposed documents. I responded to him that day, and I sent an email to counsel providing a differing set of facts from those that he presented, explaining my reasons for objecting to his characterization of both the process and the outcomes, and explaining my view of the issues he raised. My main concern at this point is that we have not had information presented to us about specific elements in the current proposal that are the basis for those general concerns. Mr. Scanlon wrote that he has concerns about the proposal as presently written. That phrase is repeated numerous times in the document that he shared with counsel. But neither he nor anyone else has come forward with the proposed language to amend the proposal in order to improve it. Now would be the time to do so. I also I'm going to skip that. I'll hold that. I've got another comment, but I'll hold an additional comment about the process. Many people raised questions about why there was no opportunity for public input and no way for the city to protect its interest in downtown development when a major project like Centerpoint was proposed and a significant number of buildings were demolished with no assurance that anything would be put in their place. That was seven years ago. We have no more protection now than we did then. The Design Excellence Task Force was created in good part to address those concerns and to add that protection. Our proposal is now before you for your consideration, and I hope we will receive approval. Thank you, Chair. thank you vice mayor k are there any council members that want to ask any questions or deliver any comments at this time that being said it looks like vice mayor k if you want to go forward i believe uh mr scanlon is here to present some remarks. I assume that we would like to afford him that opportunity. Certainly, but I'm going to let the council members speak first if they'd like to, if they have any concerns or comments about the amendment, because that's what we're here to do today, is kind of to vet this through our committee and then go forward with any kind of public input. Okay, Council Member Akers. Thank you, Chair. Vice Mayor, I appreciate the history and remarks. Would you mind, to go through specific changes that you made as a result of the discussions we've had of late? Would you like to highlight those first? The only change that's been made since that conference, since our work in July before break, June and July before break, was one phrase in the zone text which would eliminate the one-year window for response from the board and collapse that to 90 days that's what has been changed can we recognize Chris King from planning he we certainly can is there are there any other council members that have any other questions that's related to council member acres if not before you start Chris I don't know if all of you know that this is Chris's last month here so this is Chris's last committee meeting with us. And how many years have you been with us, Chris? 43 and a half. A little bit. It started when it was nine. You have a little bit of history here with us. Well, certainly, whatever you'd like to add, and I just want to say thank you for all your years of service. I know that you've been a tried and true planner and helped us on some of those long, those 4 a.m. zone changes, if I recall. So thank you so much for your service, and go ahead and give us an opportunity to give us your feedback on this place. Thank you, and I'm not here to give any feedback. I just wanted to make a clarification. The section that was raised, the question was, it was not made clear when others presented this to you some months ago, only dealt with demolition. The one year only dealt with demolition, which is the same as with H1, the same as the current courthouse area design review. notwithstanding that we have proposed that that be dropped down to 120 days the normal time for a normal application is still and has been in this proposal a 60-day time window for response for action from the time someone applies unless the applicant agrees to a longer time frame so again i just wanted to to have that clear are there any other council members i don't see anyone else signed up i i'm sorry vice chair scutchfield would you mind taking out chris i should have kept you up here do you mind coming back up i know this has been what how many years vice mayor kay that this has been in front of us Well, since I've been on council and I came on, it was already in process, so at least five and a half years. Okay. Four and a half years. I can't count. Somewhere in the range of five to six years. Okay. So, Chris, for the past almost six years, I know you all have been discussing this, and I know there's been a large group of players involved in this. And I guess my biggest concern is what I heard from the group was the incentives, that if you're going to do something like this, and you're going to put certain guidelines, so to speak, you've got to give that incentive for somebody to come down here and build because, number one, it's expensive anyways. Infrastructure's tough. It's old. Number two, building costs have gone up. Do you feel like that the half a million dollars is enough of an incentive in that fund to be able to initiate a building, let alone having a developer come down and go forward and say, okay, we can do this? I think it's not an insignificant amount because you're starting at zero. And I think then we would see what you would get with that money. My understanding from all the discussion that was held on incentives, that the biggest thing was assistance in providing parking downtown. And, again, you could be filling in gaps with that money. You could be working with the parking authority and other proposals as a way to help do that. But my understanding was that if there was any one thing that what I would call the commercial interests that were a part of the committee, that really wanted to see out of the incentives for as much as possible would be assistance in parking. And do you feel that the parking situation has been resolved enough in order to have that happen? Well, I think the parking situation is evolving downtown with the parking authority, which is still fairly new, and other opportunities. Certainly anything that council can do, both budgetary-wise and otherwise, to help assist in that, I think is good. And at the time of the discussion, obviously the four-story parking garage that may be underway was not a part of this discussion, so that is, I'm assuming, correct? That's my recollection, yeah. Okay. Okay. That's all I have. Any other council members? Council Member Henson. Thank you, Chair. I get the feeling that this is still not a real popular item. But yet I feel like we do need to do something to protect our downtown. I want to, Chris, if I want you to get a little exercise, get ready for retirement. I guess, wouldn't you say this, or it seems to me to be very complex? Well, you know, I don't think this process or the guidelines are very complex. We have them vetted with a lot of folks. I think it's cleaner than the current Courthouse Area Design Review Board. Okay. I think it responds more to the challenges that we have downtown. And, again, folks spent years talking about this and talking on both sides. We tried to make sure that it was heavily oriented towards staff-level type approvals rather than board-level approvals. and it's a fairly high standard of development that kicks you into a major operation. And again, we had the draft guidelines, which I should emphasize you all will adopt. Okay? That's separate from the zoning ordinance text, those actual guidelines and standards. So you can review those more. You can make modifications in them if you feel fit. That's still open for discussion. But, you know, I think compared to what I've seen from many communities, most of which I think in our size do get into some kind of design review for their downtown areas, if not even farther, larger areas. I think it's pretty straightforward and pretty direct. It looks complex because we had to do a lot of underlines and strike-throughs because basically we were putting this new ordinance on top of the Courthouse Area Design Review Board ordinance so that you could kind of compare between the two. That's just how we chose to present it, overriding and basically abolishing the Courthouse Area Design Review process in favor of this new process. It seems that some folks think that this would hold developers like they wouldn't be able to move. And I think with infill and redevelopment, we need to be friendly with development. But yet, when it comes to our entire city, we need to look at good growth and not, I don't know. I understand. And it's a delicate balance. Something that, you know. This is an additional step that we don't have in the process now. But if you remember back not too long ago when we were having major community debate about the design of Centerpoint, and I just bring that up as one. The other one that doesn't get talked about it so much that in many ways was very critical was the suburban-style drugstore right at the corner of Main and Midland and Vine Street. You know, with surface parking, suburban design kind of thing that folks, a lot of folks just reacted very strongly to is the gateway into our downtown. It needed to be more downtown. Everybody liked the idea of the drugstore, but it shouldn't look like what you have farther out. I was just thinking, I think we do need protection for our downtown. Um, but yet it's like, how can we go about it in a manner that we, all voices can be heard? I know they can do it in this committee, but I was, I was thinking maybe like in a presentation similar to a zone change because, and, and I'm even thinking that with the recreational zone, to something that's complex that will give people a very clear picture of what's proposed and make changes right then and possibly even vote on it. Well, what we tried to do, though, if you're going to do that, then that would almost mean every case would have to have a full-blown process. And what we were trying to do was make it more business and development friendly by having it more of a cooperative, interactive type of debate, not debate, discussion between the designers for the developer and what we've articulated through the design guidelines, the kinds of things that we want to see. We're not looking to dictate architectural style. We're not looking to say this type of architecture is better than that. What we're trying to do is to provide a framework so that you don't get bad incursions. As we said, the guidelines part of this, we're trying to prevent stupid. The other is to inspire quality and design. Well, my time's up. I may come back. Thank you. Thank you, Councilmember Hanson. Councilmember Lamb. Mr. King, don't go away. Thank you. And I was late getting here, and I don't know if this was addressed already, but I know one of the concerns that was in the letter that Mr. Scanlon had given to us was about the no appeals. And I'm actually looking at 27.7 in here where the appeals, the former appeals, had been all stricken and removed. So my question is, as far as appeals... Council Member Lynn, can you tell us what page you're on specifically? In the packet, it is page 13. Thank you. Uh-huh. And so my question is, if there is no appeals section in here, then does it automatically, the only option is to go to the Fayette Circuit Court? Is that the intention? Yes, and there was discussion about that. You know, the alternative would be to have an appeal to the Planning Commission, which the Planning Commission did not feel equipped. They are currently the appeal body. They have no design experience. They feel very uncomfortable doing that. It could be the council. You could do any number of things. But as we decided with an emphasis on staff approval and appeal to this board, the Downtown Excellence Board, that you had adequate. And adding another step of appeal before someone wanted to go to court would just be adding to the cumbersomeness of the process. Actually, there was a lot of discussion that this actually streamlines the process if someone has a problem with it. But, of course, counsel can, you know, make modifications. You could put an intermediate step in there. It was certainly discussed, but it was not recommended. Okay. And as far as the design standards and guidelines, and this is going to show that I did not read this verbatim, but is there a reference in this Chapter 27 or Article 27 of the zoning audits, is there reference in here to the design standards and guidelines? Standards and guidelines are referred to both as what you refer to in evaluating the proposal. So it's not just the whim or opinion of the design officer or the board. It's based upon those. And the other thing it refers to is who adopts those. And again, that's the council. Okay. All right. So even if we choose to move forward with approving this Article 27 with the proposed amendments, until we actually approve the design standards and guidelines, would that allow you all to go ahead and move forward with the position? There's one or two positions that were going to be needed for this Article 27, but it would not allow things to move forward with actually someone bringing forward a case or whatever until that. Let me comment my thoughts on that. First of all, you authorized us to create a position that was budgeted. We are in the process of actually filling that position. That position would have many other duties beyond administering this process, so we are going ahead with that. the other thing is that you are correct if you enact or when you enact the ordinance the ordinance needs the guidelines and standards so you could make the effective date of the ordinance a date when you had adopted the standards or some such thing because yes they should work in tandem okay all right All right. And I will say, Vice Mayor, I was wondering, I know I was late this morning, and I'm sorry this afternoon for attending the meeting, but are your intentions to move forward with this out of committee today, or? my intention is to see if this committee is amenable to that if they are i am interested in moving them both forward if for whatever reason people feel that the guidelines standards and guidelines need to be held and further vetted so be it okay all right uh thank you chair Thank you, Council Member Lamb. Any other council members wish to speak to this item on the agenda? If not, Mr. Mundy, do we have anyone who's signed up to speak? I don't believe we have anyone in the audience that's signed. Harold, Mr. Tate. I see you're putting your hand up. Give us your name, please, Mr. Tate, in your capacity. Harold Tate. And I would also like to say to Chris, thank you for all his service. Chris and I, he started before I did. So, but anyway, yeah. Harold, I know where you live, but for the record, would you give us your address, please? 763 Chenoweth Road, Lexington, Kentucky, 40502. Thank you. It's kind of strange being up here because I know this process started when I was with the Downtown Development Authority. But at that time, we were looking at creating form-based codes, not design guidelines. We felt that it was very important that we create a downtown, that we create blocks that work. And to me, what we've done with the design guidelines, we're looking at a building. We're not looking at a block. We're looking at a specific type of building, like in my case, working with a client who wants to do a movie complex downtown. He would not be able to do that with these guidelines because we're at a tight site, very small, less than an acre. We have two corners. We have Broadway and we have High Street. And the problem with a movie theater, last thing you want are windows. Because when you have windows, you can't see the movie. So that would restrict us in terms of what we're trying to do with these guidelines. And also, I'm also concerned with no appeal. Taking a project to a judge is not really the good answer. And that's an additional cost that the developer has to pay. And parking's not a problem for us. We'll be using the parking garage that Langley has. So parking's not an issue for us. That was one reason why I went with that site, because we could get the parking that was needed. The concern is time. Because the longer it takes a developer to do a project, the more it costs. Believe it or not, that's the truth. And it's a situation that you add another six months and in some cases up to a year to get a project to prove, that's a lot of time and that's a lot of money that he has to spend to go back and make those alterations, make those changes. To me, the best process would be at the very beginning, that developer sit down with somebody, I don't know who it is, and say, these are the guidelines. This is what we'd like to do for you to create your project. so that they can tell that individual, whoever it is, well, those are going to be my concerns as I do this project. You know, this is not going to be allowed with the type of project I'm doing. I'm watching the time, so I'm getting kind of... So I do believe we need to do something, but I don't think this is the right answer. And, Vice Mayor, I know you have spent a lot of time on this because you were working with me on this when we started it, And I do appreciate that. But I think we've kind of gone the wrong direction. Thank you, Mr. Tate. Mr. Scanlon. If you'll give your name and address, please. I'm Mike Scanlon, address 249 East Main Street. I am not going to torture you folks with my review of the whole document. But I can supply one to you. every single page has big red, I call it big red ink on it, not every single page, a lot of the pages do. The thing about the text itself is things like when they describe the authorization permit, exactly what it is, it says it's a document which certifies the findings of the board. Mr. Scanlon, I hate to interrupt, but maybe you can reference what page you're on, then we can follow. That'd be easier for us. I am in Article 27, 27-3. Now, I'm probably working from a document different than yours. Just as long as we know where you are, I think we can follow. Thank you. There's a page 26 on the top, but it's Section 27-3. Okay, thank you. A document which certifies the findings of the Board or Design Excellence officer that the work proposed by the applicant is appropriate. The authorization shall also delineate any conditions imposed by the board or officer in approving the request. Or from a builder, developer, designer, investor standpoint, what does conditions mean, any conditions mean? Is that it doesn't reference the guidelines that are soon to follow? There are so many vague-isms in this document that before you send it to council, we would all like an opportunity to show you where the vague-isms are just in the text of it, where it's so confusing, it adds to the difficulty. And again, I'm not going to bore you with every single one. On page, it's 27.9 in my pages. Let's see. It is filing materials, notice, board of public hearing. The last number I see is 4F, and that was stricken. but the last the paragraph towards the end of that page conflicts with its own document in four different sections 27.3 27.4 and 27.4 h each one conflict with that last sentence that says these standards and guidelines shall form the basis of any action by the board Now, Mr. Scanlon, I hate to interrupt you again, but I don't have that. You know, if it's not here, I don't want it maybe because it's gone. Well, it's what— No, you all have it. Does anybody have—nobody has what you're speaking about, so I just don't want to have you— Well, I think it's in the ordinance you all fix in to send up to council, so I hope you have it. that's part of the fear that the developers and the investors have about this is there's so many iterations that the iteration I have is right here I'm not making this up I mean this came right from the council office to me but when you read these things closely if this were a legal contract you'd see so many loopholes in it and so many subjective opportunities to interpret it that people like me don't really know exactly what to build. The last, 27-8, it talks about enforcement and the design excellence officer shall do it. When I read this, the design excellence board has to have a hearing, has to take minutes, has to keep files of the minutes, has to serve notice, has to do it just like any other board. It doesn't sound like a simple process that one guy can do. It sounds like it's going to take people to do this and a budget to do this. And based on what this design excellence officer is already doing, remember he was hired to simplify the process. Mr. King has already said he's already got a lot to do. Whether we pass this or not, he has enough work to do, where is he going to find the time to do the work he has to do now and then this? So I would really ask you folks before you pass this on is to sit down with people like me who have read it from line to line that have to live with it every single day and show you the vagisms and the things that how in the world do we interpret this into action when we go to make a project work. And then I went through the design. Mr. Scanlon, unfortunately your time's up. There's a council member that wants to allot you some time. I'll be glad to... You've got another three minutes. Go ahead, sir. Great. You know, we can't get a demolition permit, according to the text or the design guidelines, to tear down an obsolete building. I've got two buildings at the corner of Midland and Main that are left over from a used car lot that were there that everybody on the planet would like me to tear down, and hopefully any day now they'll get torn down. According to these documents, you can't tear down a building unless you have a building permit to put something there in its place. And I understand that's a reflex from Center Point, but there's a lot of obsolete buildings like those two buildings right at the corner of Midland and Short Street that really do need to go, but I couldn't take them down if this were enacted until I had a building permit to put something else there. It may not be time to put something else there, but it would be nice to clean up that corner. Then when I go through this, just very quickly, we would love an opportunity to sit down with you and show you where this takes out innovation and creativity and creates a big sea of sameness downtown. They ask or they require, the rules require that things look alike, that there are all kinds of guidelines in here that says you can't do anything innovative. You can have three kinds of roof. We'll have a skyline that looks like this. They even draw you a picture of what our skyline would look like. And I dare say there's nobody in this room that wants our skyline to look like that. And it's right in this. So I would ask you to each one take the time to read this and try to figure out how it is people like me take this and turn this into an actionable project. This isn't about incentive money. There's not enough incentive money to fix the technical errors in here. The purpose and the outcome of what everybody's trying to do is good. We need to make sure that a beautiful downtown gets made better, and we need to make sure that downtown, which is everybody's subdivision, looks good for everybody. But this is an architectural control document, not an urban planning document. And it is so vague and so conflicting with its own language, it'll become a quagmire of biblical proportions. And I'd ask you to either scuttle it and start again from scratch or take time, put this back, and let us show you line by line where the problems are. because they're all here, we can do that. Thank you. Council Member Gibbs. Thank you, Chair. I want to speak just in general terms, and I'm very supportive of the proposal. I really don't see the standards as particularly onerous. They provide for setbacks, height, configuration of parking, which in my mind is very important. I don't see it as a sea of sameness. They have variation from block to block. that you know different zones you can develop things. I think there's room for a lot of variety, a lot of room for innovation. And on the other hand, there's, you know, it would prevent certain disasters. Like with that proposed CVS, we dodged a bullet on that one. I don't know how closely you guys paid attention to that one, but that was not only a suburban design disaster, that was a pedestrian disaster. And what these designs are doing is taking a holistic view, despite what Harold had to say, but at a proposal and thinking about where the parking is going to go, what it's going to mean for pedestrians, what it's going to mean for the bicycles, what it's going to mean for the whole community, not just what it means for the people who own that building. And I think this community has a right to have input on the design of these things, and I think these are reasonably good designs. Harold, if you don't mind, I've got a question for you about the proposed theater. And you made a comment about the windows wouldn't work with this proposal. Maybe I missed something, but my reading of the proposal was you need to have some level of transparency eight feet up. And my acquaintance with your development is that the opaque part would be higher than eight feet. On High Street, we have a portion that's all wall because there are two screens along that wall. I misunderstood that then when we had our conversation because I would be opposed to that now. I don't think we should ever, ever have a blank wall in the downtown area. But so I apologize for that. I thought all your opaque stuff was higher up. No, we do have one section along High Street right across from the height that would be a wall. And one of the things we wanted to do, we wanted to do something cool in terms of projection or whatever, but the sign ordinance doesn't allow us to do that. Yeah. But still, you know, blank walls are just anathema for urban design. and I'd be opposed to that by any standard. But thank you. Sorry I misunderstood. And thank you, Chair. Thank you. Are there any other council members that would like to speak? If not, I'll turn it over to Vice. Oh, I'm sorry. Before Vice Mayor Kay, Fade Alliance is here. Knox, if you'd like to come to the podium, please state your name and address, please. Thank you. Good afternoon. My name is Knox Van Noggle. I'm here on behalf of Fade Alliance. We're located at 603 West Short Street. A lot of great comments made here today. We've been involved in this process, I think, for seven years now, and it's gone through several iterations, several committees. Several of the leading attorneys in town have been working on this from its inception. We believe it's good legislation, but good legislation can always be improved, and I think Harold and Mike make some great points, And, you know, if there's an opportunity, perhaps with planning or through the DDA, if we want to host some type of focus group where people can come and put forward some recommendations in a constructive way for improvement, we're absolutely in support of that. But, you know, a lot of people in the community, a lot of government resources have been expended over seven years to create an improvement over what we have today. And it certainly is the goal of our organization, and I think most people in the community, frankly, to promote and protect the urban core of Lexington. And so how can we make it easier for folks to invest and develop in the core of the city while also protecting those who have already made that investment here? And so it's a balance, and it's very tricky. And I don't think there's a panacea answer, and I don't think that it's an easy answer. But I think we would be sorry if seven years of very hard work and constructive work went to the wayside. I don't think anybody is happy with the status quo, and I think as a city, we want to promote the very best of what we can. And so to do that, let's get some great minds together and see how we can make good legislation even better. But I think Chris hit a lot of great points about how we were trying to prevent stupid while also promoting inspiration. Steve also mentioned that some stakeholders were adamant about this legislation not moving forward before we had incentives, and we were that stakeholder. So on the record, we feel that we need to have as many incentives as possible. Parking continues to be a huge issue, and I know that the parking authority is doing great work. It's starting, as Chris said, and it's in its evolution. but I think the council also needs to be aware of what are its capital needs and what is Lexington's capital needs in terms of parking in downtown for the next two years, five years, and ten years that we can start planning and leveraging those plans with what we've got in terms of infill incentives. So with that, thank you very much for your time. Thank you. Thank you, Knox. If there are no other council members, So I'll give the mic back to the vice mayor. Thank you, Chair. A couple of comments. First of all, it's important to note, and Chris King noted this, that the zone text amendment is essentially the same zone text that governed the courthouse overlay. It replaces that board with a different board. It replaces some of the language. There's some additional language. But in Maine, I don't know, 95% of it is simply taking that ordinance and changing some words so that it reflects that there's now design excellence and not a courthouse review. Secondly, in terms of kind of where we are in the process, Mr. Scanlon came before this body with a written document and some verbal comments. I sent a response to counsel to those comments, and I believe I addressed the issues that he raised. There was some inaccuracies in terms of facts. There was some characterizations that I objected to. There were some just disagreements about the impact that we had. I got a call from Mr. Scanlon on June 25th, and my notes reflect that he said, and if I'm misquoting, he can correct me, that he would sit down with Phil Hollebeck, who was one of the signatories, and others, and redline the ordinance with their objections and make that available to council so that we could consider those. Then I have an email for Mr. Scanlon on July 1. Thank you for the courtesy of this copy. I sent him a copy of my response. I will do the same when I rebut. It's all about a great downtown, a win-win for everyone, and a transparent and open process. Thanks for all your hard work on this. I'll see you in August. Enjoy your break. So I assumed that we would get some written materials. I assumed that we would get some specific suggestions for change to make this a better ordinance. We have not received that. In addition, what we heard today was a repeat of some of the same concerns without citing exactly what it is either in the Zone Tax Amendment or in the standards that would prevent either buildings that are already built, if this had been in place, they wouldn't have been able to be built, or that will prevent buildings that are now proposed from being able to go forward. I would remind Council that the standards themselves take up a page and a half. You have to know what the context of the building is, so you have to know what general area is it in. You have to know what kind of street it's on, and then there are specific standards. But that covers, it's a graph, a page and a half. That's what governs, finally, the decisions that that board would make. The guidelines are suggestions about things that should be considered overall in order to respect the existing development and to protect the community from development that would really be harmful to the downtown. That's what we're looking at. So I understand that even given all of that, council members may feel they don't understand enough about the present either zone text or about the design standards and guidelines to move forward. I don't want to move it forward if people are uncomfortable, but I believe there's been ample opportunity and that the information that we have asked for has not been forthcoming. We were not equipped to judge what has been said before us today by Mr. Scanlon and Mr. Tate because we don't have anything in writing. We don't know exactly what it refers to. We don't know what the concerns are. We can't say, well, no, it wouldn't be prevented, or you're right, we need to fix it. If we need to do that, we need to do that. But I believe that the zone text, which has, again, been sitting there for a year, over a year, and the standards and guidelines which have been sitting there, there's been ample opportunity for people to come forward and say, here's a way to make it better. Now we're at the last hour, and we get some concerns, valid or not, which is very hard for this body to evaluate. Thank you. Thank you, God. Council Member Hanson. Thank you, Chair. As I said earlier, I do think that we need to put things in place to protect our downtown. We need to, but I think a very good point that we need to make and look at is that it is not our downtown. It's everybody's downtown. So in order to do that, it has to be inclusive of everyone. So I don't know if outside of killing this, I guess I'm struggling with where do we go from here? Do we keep it in committee? Do we have a power panel presentation, break it down into two sections, the ordinance and then the guidelines? and have a specific, you know, this is compare it with our current ordinance with the courthouse area review board. These are the changes that were made. Be very specific. Give us a good understanding to where we can move this forward. We've got to be transparent with the developers. I think they, it's very difficult. If you own property, many people think I should be able to do whatever I want with my property. But we all do have a stake. And we have a big hole in the middle of our city that shows the results that can take place. But I'm just struggling with this, I guess, trying to find where do we go from here. I think there's a reason that we've been working on this so long because I do think it's complex. I think you're dealing with private properties and the city trying to dictate what you do with those properties. And we all have to come to the table and come up with a compromise or just do nothing at all and leave things as is. So that's my comments. Thank you, Chair. Council Member Maloney. Thank you, Chair. I've got some serious concerns, and I'm glad Harold Tate brought these issues up. You're not the only one that brought this to my attention. I've had a lot of people bring what you brought up to my attention, and these were the questions that I brought to council's attention last month and what I had concerns about a lot of unanswered questions. Being a former commissioner of housing, building, construction, and dealing with these kind of, I mean, with projects coming in for economic development and all that, and I'm big in bringing jobs into this city, the last thing I want to do is terrify this city in bringing jobs. As I see here, we don't have very many permits coming from downtown. And we have very few permits that come downtown. We have them all over the city. And the last thing I want to do is really terrorize anybody wanting to come downtown. And I think we've got a good group here, and I think we've got good developers that make these programs work. Now, what happened on Centerpoint, we're all on the same board on Centerpoint. I wasn't on the council. A lot of us weren't on the council when that happened. And how we let it get away, that's just something we learned. And doing this might help in some ways, but I don't know if we're going to have a magnitude block like that ever again. We may. We may not. But to me, I think the developers, and if you've been working on it this long for five years, six years, and when I worked for housing building construction, we worked with the developers and home builders and all that to make sure what guidelines would make this project work. And I'm just wondering if there were any developers on this committee. And I don't see very many developers out here other than ones that they're here concerned about what they read. And when you do a program this big in this magnitude, you've got to have the best developers in town. And, Steve, nothing against you, but I think you've – but if you had a developer come in here and put this together and presented it with you guys on board, I think we would have this thing pass. And I've yet to see one developer in this town to come up and stand up and say this is a good program. Now, there may be, and I may be wrong, but I've yet to have one. And I think there is a need for it. But what Mr. Scanlon said, there are some blighted buildings out there that need to be tore down. And from what he's concerned is that we may not be able to tear it down. And sometimes you tear those buildings down, it becomes a very attractive property to try to bring somebody in here to build on it. And I just think we don't have everybody on board on this ordinance. And I just hope this council, whatever you do come out of this committee, that you bring everybody to the table. And if you don't bring everybody to the table, this ordinance is going nowhere. And I just hope that you do. And I'm here. I'm a big supporter, especially when it comes to jobs and economic development downtown. I don't want to scare anybody away. So hopefully we'll be able to work this out. and I hope you don't rush this through like we have lately. Thank you. Thank you, Council Member Maloney. I guess, Vice Mayor, do you want to put forward a motion? Well, as a number of Council Members who have not weighed in on the committee, I'm not sure exactly where the committee stands at this point. I don't know if people feel that it would be useful to have either a workshop or a public hearing or leave it in committee and ask the people who have raised concerns to be more specific about those concerns. And with all due respect, Council Member Maloney, I asked for the specifics about the concerns that you raised. I asked, show me what is in the document. bring forward to council the specific problem so that we can look at it. But that's not been done. Now, if we have more meetings, I have the floor, sir. If we have more meetings, will that information come forward? We'll have the opportunity to look at it in detail? I don't know. I'm concerned, frankly, that the underlying issue is not about fixing it, but about killing it. And I personally don't want to be before the public saying, seven years ago we got a shot across the bow with a development that has created an incredible problem for the city, and we have done absolutely nothing to fix that. We are in exactly the same position we were in seven years ago. I would hate to be in that position. So having said all that, I'm just uncertain about what the feelings about this body, this committee is about the best way to move forward. I believe Councilmember Henson has said she would like something like some more, some opportunity for more information and more input. I don't know where other people stand. Vice Mayor, I believe this has been in committee. I don't know. It's been here. Mr. Schoeniger? Three and a half. Three and a half years, I believe, so I think we've had enough time to vet it. If the Councilmembers feel that we need to have a public hearing on this, so be it. but we also have the opportunity if it gets out of committee, when it gets onto the full docket, to have public input at that time. So I almost hesitate of keeping it in committee because obviously today no one has come forward out of this committee with any specific changes, unless there are some right now that I'm going to miss. But initially when we started this, I even sent out an email suggesting if you had any specific issues with the amendment amendment that we needed to have that up front before the committee started and i've not received any so um i guess i'll go ahead and turn it over to acres but my thought would be not to be keep it in committee again if we don't have to council member acres thank you chair i guess my question for the vice mayor is um like how many of the developers or people in the building community were notified of today i mean are they todd has does everybody know that this is i know that we've have been discussing it for seven years, but did everybody know today, you know, it was being considered again? And I don't know that we need to have a public hearing because I don't know the general public needs to, you know, be burdened with the details of this. But I do think that we need to have the, maybe everybody on the council and not just a workshop, but to hear from the developers, to hear what their concerns are and vet the ordinance and then make real amendments once we understand better what they would like to see. I mean, if their goal is to shred the document, then I guess it's up to us to make a decision. But if their interests, if they do have, I guess, specific changes that we can make, I would be glad to hear them. And since we didn't hear them today, I don't know. I'm like you. So maybe a public hearing is where we need to go. I don't know. Thank you. Council Member Bledsoe. Thank you, Chair. I find myself conflicted in like five different ways. So, one, being so new to the council and to the issue, it is complicated. It's more complicated, and I've read it, and I find myself not a developer, not a real estate person, and I'm a big property rights person. So I understand the spirit of what we're trying to do, and I agree with most of the spirit of what we're trying to do. And good night. I certainly appreciate the time and effort that seven years has gone into it. I mean, I'm the last person to hate wasting time or being inefficient. So how do you protect the spirit of what we're doing and the goals with the law? And I guess that is my tendency, and I don't know what to do next because I find it hard time to strike that balance that Knox talked about, which is what I think we want, a balance of doing the right thing, the spirit of the right thing, and yet not putting things in law that prohibit or make more difficult or more vague than we want it. I don't know how you put that in paper, in writing. So I find myself seeing what do we do next, and I don't know either. I'm not sure a public hearing would do that. I'm not sure I would come down to any kind of—I don't know if it would help me get to a position where I say, yes, I would support this. And it's not an incentive thing for me. It's more of just a spirit thing, if you will, embracing that. So the other thing I might say is I don't think a focus group is a bad idea. I'm not sure I'm good on a focus group because I don't feel like I'm equipped to do that, to answer those questions. So that's where I'm at, and I wish I could move one way or the other and feel good about it. I don't like killing something just to kill it and be disrespectful of all of that. That's not, wouldn't be my intention. And yet I want to make sure we do it right with the spirit. So it's not very helpful, but that's kind of where I'm at. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Council Member Bledsoe. Are there any other Council Members that want to speak to this issue before we decide what to do with this? Vice Mayor Kaye. Thank you, Chair. I'm also conflicted. I don't know if I'm conflicted five different ways, but maybe two or three. You know, despite the long history and despite the frequency of opportunity for input and despite the information that's been provided, I get the sense that there are at least some members on council on this committee who are still not comfortable going forward. So the question then would become, you know, what to do about that. Mr. Scanlon had said that he would convene the relevant developers and get consensus or work towards consensus from them about what they would like to see changed. Certainly, he would be free to do that. The suggestion of the council having a focus group, I think, doesn't meet the need of having all council members present to consider any proposals that people have for changes. So kind of by default, kind of where I'm going, my mind goes at this moment, is to, with all respect to the chair, is to leave it in committee but set up a special committee of the whole meeting that would be to address both the zone text and the design standards and guidelines with the opportunity for anyone who wishes to bring forward in writing before the meeting specific recommendations for change in the text, either one. and then the committee the whole can make recommendations back to the whole to this committee about whether to include or improve any of those and i don't know you know i right now i'm not i'm at a loss for any better way to proceed so that would be my suggestion thank you chair um council thank you i just want to clarify my thought in the focus group was not so much a council driven focus group, but was more of a DDA group focused. And I say that only because of Mr. Tate's background and that Mr. Fugit's been doing some of this. I guess that's where my mind was going, not so much of ours. So just to clarify. Thank you. Council Member Sinnott. Thank you, Chair. It seems that the presenter of this ordinance and others on council are conflicted. And it's unfortunate because I think this is a very easy solution, and I think it needs to come back in a much different shape than it is currently in the committee. This was voted down at the council level and was put back into a committee with a minor change. And I think it's clear that this council as a whole doesn't agree with this ordinance the way it's written. So, Chair, I would like to see something totally different come back to this committee for a real discussion. And if you could appoint a subcommittee of this committee, and you can include outside people on that, a small group that can work quickly, representative of the development community, one or two, the Fed Alliance, the DDA, and maybe one or two of our committee members, and bring it back, make a stab at it, and let's have one last go at reworking this ordinance so we all can get behind something and support it. Because I think it's something we need to do for downtown. I think we've learned our lessons and I think that's going to be the only expedient way to get this done, Chair, is to have a small group take a stab at trying to rework this ordinance because in its current format, it obviously is not going to pass. I think that's been pretty clear today with all the stabs in the dark of trying to do something. I think that's the only solution at this point, Chair. If you could do that, that's what I would support and be in favor of at this point. Thank you. Thank you, Councilmember Senate. Vice Mayor Kay. Thank you. Just appreciate the comments, Council Member Stinnett. Just one correction of fact. What the council disapproved was moving the proposed ordinance forward before the report from the committee. That's what the council voted down. I'm not convinced, despite the fact that we've had extensive questions raised here today, that there might still not be an opportunity. There might be enough people on council who believe it's important to get this protection in place to move it forward. But I believe it would be a mistake at this point to do it. It would definitely be a close vote and a very controversial vote, and we don't have to do that. So I will take the suggestion from Council Member Stinnett. it would mean leaving this in committee, I will create a special short-term committee, a special committee to come back to this body, this committee, not to the full council yet, with a document that is either intact, intact, as been presented today, or is revised in one or more ways. If I will say one other thing about that, I'm happy to. I will do my best to make that fully representative of the interests involved. But it may be the case that that body cannot reach consensus about any changes. I just want to put that out there in advance. It may be that there is not a middle ground on this. When push comes to shove, we either have additional regulations which provide protection and put some more requirements on people developing, or we leave things as they stand. But I don't believe I have to make the appointments to that committee today. I don't have to announce this formation, but I will do that shortly and see if we can come back to this committee with an approved document. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Vice Mayor Kay. Council Member Henson, were you signed up now? I do appreciate the input from the committee. Council Member Sennett, you had a great idea. I think if this was going to move forward, it would have moved out of this committee and gone forward today. I think we've had a lot of discussion about it. Todd Johnson's been sitting here pretty much every meeting. If there were developers other than Mr. Scannell and Mr. Tate that had objections to this, I think they would have been here. I can't say that 100%, but I would assume so. But based upon Vice Mayor Kay, since you brought forth this amendment, if you want to go ahead, I will get with you and we'll determine a small working committee. I can tell you that expediency in this committee is not going to happen. we've got a long list of items in this committee that need to be heard and we've only had two more meetings before december when we don't have any meetings so you may not be back on this docket for a while just want to give you a heads up so if anybody's looking to have this done quickly it's not going to happen i'm just going to be very frank with you so i think if we can get that committee a small working group together i'll work with the vice mayor and work with some of the developers in the community maybe mr johnson you can work with us and supply us a couple of names of uh downtown developers and mr scale and and we can go forward on this but i i will let the rest of the committee members know it's not going to be after the first of the year before we talk about this again so if anyone has any uh other comments or uh would like to discuss this any further so be it if not we're done with this at this point thank you vice mayor okay vice mayor bledsoe i'm sorry i've i've already made you vice mayor and you've only been been here what six months well thank you well hey good to get a promotion yes how about uh the fireworks here let's go forward thank you thank you chair um switching gears completely to fireworks and and let me just say at the onset you know my we put this in committee not to discuss fireworks ordinances of previously have been discussed by previous councils not this one And the goal in this is simply to look at what are we requiring our insurance, the insurance premium requirements for those who get permits from the city to hold fireworks displays in Fayette County. That's it. That's the only thing that I am looking at and the only thing we have put into committing. And so what I've done is this came from a specific, from this summer's fireworks, and yet I don't like making policy based on one thing. So this is a policy discussion, which is, is it a good policy to have $1 or $5 million as it required for our permit? So that's the discussion. And I sent some questions to our fire marshal and Patrick Johnson. So do you want to just go off my questions? Would that be easier to ask them individually? Sure, that's fine. Do you want to go off my questions? Okay. Okay. So, like I said, we want to kind of talk about why, kind of how we changed our policy from one million dollar requirements to five. So, I guess the first thing is, why does the city set fireworks on limits that are set up by a private company? And at what point would the city be liable for any damages by fireworks? Sure. Good afternoon, Council members, Vice Mayor. Thank you for inviting us today. First of all, I want to clarify a couple things that was done in the research, the terminology that was used that might be inaccurate during my discussions today. Actuarial analysis is not something used to determine exposure limits. So an actuarial analysis is typically used to determine how much you need to fund for the payment of claims from a loss. So there was that term used in some of the research that was done by the analysts, so I want to make sure that's careful. We look at the exposure, and when we say exposure, we mean property, people, assets, future income, medical bills. Those are various exposures that somebody might be exposed to should they get injured from the fireworks. So that being said, we did some research on this. I provided the analysts with lawsuit information and damages from other fireworks incidents across the country. I also provided fireworks statistics, which you see up there on the status research done. And then I also provided Louisville Metro fireworks, pyrotechnics permit, the City of Cincinnati's pyrotechnic permit, Tyrone Township, Livingston County ordinance. I provided City of Seattle special permit, Fresno County Fire Protection District fireworks permit, McDonough, Georgia, a news article on a debate about lowering the insurance requirements. So I made sure that there was both sides of the story understood. And that was done. The lowering of the fireworks was done, or the limits was done, to the, I think, the smell of the risk manager of that community. But nonetheless, it was more of a political discussion, and it was a rationale behind the losses that they were having. And then also the firework injuries to the NFL players, which I'm sure you all heard about this past year. So that being said, the city, my response to your question about why does the city set limits on fireworks that are set off by private company? The city, by ordinance and state laws, required to review the firework displays, thus making the city potentially liable for any negligence on the part of the fire marshal. Given the historical value of lawsuits filed for negligence, it's prudent to set limits based on comfort levels, and that's the comfort levels are driven partly by the lawsuits, availability of insurance in the marketplace, which it is available, and the current legal environment, which is typically based on worst-case scenario lawsuits. Let's review the 2008 case that I cited for Councilmember Bledsoe and Council Research analyst Schoeniger in a meeting we had two weeks ago with Fire Marshal Farmer. A mother and her two children were attending a public fireworks display in Vienna, Virginia. The display tipped over during the fireworks show and sent rockets firing into the crowd. It hit the mother and her two children. The mother sustained a fractured arm, shrapnel embedded in her arm and shoulder, perforated eardrums, and brain damage. She received $4.75 million in an award by the courts. It probably cost the city another $1,000 to $200,000 to defend that case. One of her sons received $45,000 for minor injuries. the other three-year-old suffered brain damage and injuries to his face. At the time of this article, that lawsuit was still pending. So that child will probably receive equal to, if not greater, than what the mother received, probably pushing this case close to $10 million. So at the time of the article, the case was pending against the fireworks company, the town of Vienna, Virginia, Fairfax County, Virginia, and also the manufacturer of the fireworks. Now let's look at Lexington, seven years after this event. Could this same event happen here? I'd like to think not, but being in the risk management business, you never say not, you just say when. So, yes, the lower limits, the more the part-time shooters can afford to get into the game, increasing the possibility of shortcuts just to make a profit. When a part-time shooter asks the homeowners association to provide the insurance coverage for a fireworks display, this is an automatic red flag for an insurance underwriter or agent. Let's use a hypothetical scenario here. Say XYZ Homeowners Organization uses XYZ Part-Time Fireworks Shooter. The HOA purchases $1 million policy. The same event occurs, as I described earlier, for that $4.75 million payout. Who will pay for all the damages if the same event happens here in Lexington KY? The shooter, the fireworks manufacturer, the city, the Homeowners Association. So depending on where the negligence lies would depend on who pays. But let's say it's the shooter. The HOA hired and paid for the coverage. You have $1 million in coverage. $5 million remains unpaid if they're awarded, or maybe $4.75 million. Let's just say $5 million for round numbers. What if the judge decides to allocate the unpaid amount of the claim back to the HOA? Because they're the ones that contracted the shooter, and they're the ones that paid for the original insurance. will the HOA assess the homeowners if the HOA's liability policy excludes fireworks which most general liability policies do and that's why you have to buy a special policy then if you have 500 homes in that homeowners association you have a 5 million unpaid liability each homeowner in that association will now have to pay ten thousand dollar assessment for being a member of that homeowners association because of that accident if you only have 400 homes it'd 12 500 if you have 300 homes it'd be 16 666 dollars and 66 cents so that's what we're looking at right now so the bottom line here is what is your appetite for risk for the homeowners of lexington is it one million and then they pay the rest or do you want a five million policy and hopefully you never have a claim but if you do then it should be fully covered by that policy in the event a catastrophic accident like that happens so when we looked at setting these limits that's what we were looking at we were looking at a potential worst case scenario which 5 billion doesn't even cover this worst case scenario that i told you about it covers half of that probably so 5 million seems to be an appropriate minimum limit cincinnati has found that to be an appropriate minimum limit and so has several other cities across the u.s those that can't afford lower limits either through self-insured retention or other types of policies or depending on how they contractually handle the risk you might be able to go with one million but for the most part when you hire a shooter that's part-time and he's asking you to purchase the insurance form to me that raises a red flag and that means that we need to really watch out for that type of operation knock on wood i don't think we've had any accidents like that here in lexington but If you looked at the statistics from our charts up here, there was over 400 people that were, I think it was 400. Pull that stat back up a little bit closer there so we can see it, please. Trying to get a better look at this here. There was 20,000 injuries, I believe, last year from fireworks. we had 9,300 injuries is what we had and 40 percent of those i believe was uh below a certain age and then 45 was below 14 years old so typically you've got a lot of kids that are playing with fireworks out there in the neighborhoods and elsewhere but god forbid if they go to a public display where they are unassuming and the shooter fails to secure his equipment properly and the rockets go off in the crowd then you're looking at potential for anywhere from three four five million dollars in injuries medical bills future loss wages etc so that's what we're looking at right there there was a number of people that also lost their eyesight flip over to the next one, please. If we can read all that or not. I can't read it sideways. Here we go. Rotate. The number of fires that were caused by fireworks was 20,000. The number of Americans who lost sight in one or both eyes due to fireworks, 400 so if you can get 4.75 million for loss of sight and some brain damage times 400 claims in a year that's a rather significant number that we're using to rely on for coming up with the type of limits that we have go over to the next one please Next one after that. This here, pull it down where you can see that top part up there, please, on far right. This came from the Colorado Insurance, Intergovernmental Insurance Trust. It's from 1996. And it had language in there, as you see on the first line, does the display operator carry appropriate insurance coverage in limits of at least $1 million per occurrence? That was from 1996. We're almost 20 years past that. So $1 million seems to be the magical number that everybody likes to use. But as you know, medical costs have gone up. Wages have gone up by over 40% since that period of time. So if somebody gets injured bad enough from a fireworks incident, it's not going to be $1 million. It's going to be up in the $4, $5, $6 million range. And so then the other thing is, does the contractor hold the public entity harmless for liability from firework displays? and has the entity been named as an additional insured on their insurance policy. And I don't know how many of these have their insurance policy named the LFUCG as an additional insured because we don't see all of these. So they get their permits, they got their insurance, you know, they're on their way. But if we don't see the certificate of insurance for it, we may not know whether we're named as additional insured or not. I think, where's Michael at here? Do they name the city as an additional insured? Most do. Most do? Most do. Some don't. Okay, so that puts us maybe, if for some reason Fire Marshal Farmer made a mistake and they didn't name us as an additional insured, we have no insurance to cover that from the shooter. So that's a problem that we have as well. Next page over, please. There was about 16 bullets on this right here. Go over to the next page after that as well. One more page. This right here is a checklist that we use. On the top of this checklist, it comes from one of our brokers that provided us with general liability insurance. It's titled Potential High-Risk Situations or Special Insurance Required. And down on the bottom here, you'll see one of those high-risk things, use of caustics, flammables, or explosives. So keep that thought. Move over to the next sheet, please. on this page here i've highlighted the risk analysis worksheet the type of active activity contemplated in a contract explosives which fireworks are explosives they have to be stored they have to be transported they have to be set up so there's a lot of people milling around i live next to one of the homeowners associations that did a shoot this past weekend a lot of people milling around there was a bunch of people out there around where the fireworks being set up there was people across the road there's a lot of folks that are involved in this area or this zone where they're not supposed to be so our this was our broker four years ago and they recommend a 10 million dollar aggregate with a five million dollar auto liability and then if you'll go over to the far side of this sheet for special events they'd say a minimum of five million dollars special coverage, $5 million. So that would include like fireworks. Okay, next sheet, please. Mr. Johnson, you've got about 30 seconds left. And I think I'll make my point with this. You ask us how we set the limits. We use the rating worksheets that are provided by our brokers and other insurance carriers across the country. So this is a sample checklist. It's a project name that a broker would use on determining company ratings, coverage, and limit guidelines. You'll see under high risk down there for commercial general liability per occurrence, $5 million with an aggregate of $10 million. So these are the types of worksheets that we use when we come up with these types of numbers. And I do a lot of this from my own historical knowledge. I've got 30 years in the field of risk management, and I've seen a lot of bad things happen. And I would hate to see some homeowner in one of your associations have to pay for the additional $4 or $5 million in medical coverage, lost wages, and everything else for improper amounts of limits on an insurance policy. So that's why we set the $5 million up. Thank you, Mr. Johnson. Councilmember Farmer. Patrick, I have great respect for your work, but you make it sound like people are firing these at each other rather than to the air. In the August 23rd memo to Council Member Bledsoe from Paul Schoeninger, he says that in his last paragraph on that page, Mr. Johnson, Director of Risk Management, in one of his responses stated, I know that we used exposure analysis worksheets in prior years to review insurance limit requests for events like this. However, in 2009, the law department took all of our exposure analysis and contract files. We have no idea where this information is today. So did you make this decision without that kind of information ever? Let's put that in context. Mr. Schonegger asked me if we had any historical information on doing these types of analysis. We did at one time, and I don't have those files any longer to see what was said. So that's where that response came from. Well, I appreciate that. I just think that, you know, no matter what, something happened, and the council wasn't aware of it, and the citizen was not aware of it. And that's not fair to the council or the citizen or either one, because we all play in the same pool together, and we all want safety no matter what's going on. But we had no presentation, no conversation, just action. I believe I can speak to that, sir. Speak ahead. How many of you knew that there was a million-dollar policy on it to begin with? Well, that I knew. Two or three, maybe? Three. So we didn't necessarily hide it from you. It was a statute that we've been using since 2004, a KRS. Isn't that the difference between asking for permission and, never mind, no. I'm just saying to you, there could have been better communication whether it happened or not. To me, it seemed like more of an internal policy as opposed to that, because everybody was able to come up with it except for the one neighborhood this year. To me, it seemed larger than that. To me, this seemed a policy issue that avoided council input or council commentary. It's not something council ever had input in. Well, you know what? We make laws and rules every day on stuff we never did before, but it's brand new, and we're going to do it anyway. I mean, we're talking about drones based on information from Council Member Maloney. We have all kinds of new issues that we take action on. And one of the things that's a hallmark of several of our tenures here is openness and transparency. And if we were going to change this, and it was, it would not have been bad to have highlighted that change for folks well enough in advance so they might change their situation rather than run into a non-starter, which is what happened with at least one of these people. Thank you. Council Member Farmer, that's on me then. I apologize. I didn't realize that I had to come to you with that. I really didn't. Well, no, you just need to be responsive to the citizenry and to us, too. Your all's actions caused a problem. And it's entirely possible you did directly save lives. I don't know that. But you don't either. But the conversation could have been had in public before the decision was made or final or even after it was final. It just, that part never happened. And that's something that I think is part of the frustration around this issue is those kind of conversations aren't something that any of us here would avoid because we deal with citizens on a daily basis. You do, too. And it's just a matter of everybody playing along kind of in the same direction. And this, to a certain degree, and that's another comment in here in Mr. Sanders' memo about do we want to make decisions on behalf of the administration. And that's not the point of the conversation. The point of the conversation is bring everybody along at the same time. And I think when this happened, there could have been an email in-house or something that would have drawn attention to it other than when things started to not happen. And that's when it became all of our problems. So there's no reason for you to apologize to me or to us. I just think we all just need to try to work a little bit more hand in glove with one another. And this is just one example. It's all very good. And I appreciate your work. Yes, sir. Thank you, Madam Chair. Council Member Lamb. Thank you, Chair. I guess I would like to know, Chief Farmer, what is the process? Obviously, I don't know anything about this process because I've never come to ask to shoot off fireworks. Right. Okay, I'm a neighborhood association, and I want to shoot off fireworks during the next Fourth of July. Okay. So I come to your office, and do I have to fill out forms? What's the process, if you don't mind, please? Absolutely. I'll indulge that. Basically, you have nothing to do with it. You hire a shooter. Well, that may be inappropriate within this body. I don't know, because he's saying that we're shooting them at each other. But you hire a company that will produce the show for you. They will light off the fireworks and shoot the show for you. We call them shooters. So you will hire them. They have insurance. I have notes from people had as much as 14 million that submitted applications this year. So you fill out the application, send it to us 30 days prior to the show. We review it. There's a lot of information that's in there. There's a checklist that we go by. We do that, and then on the day of the shoot, if everything's appropriate, on the day of the shoot, we show up, make for sure that you have the right size shells that you say. We don't want you shooting 10-inch shells when you told us that you only had 3-inch shells. could cause a big problem. So we show up and if everything's good, you know, that's usually around three or four o'clock in the afternoon. Then at dusk is usually when everybody does the show. So we'll go back at that point, make sure everything's okay as well. And then we, we stay there for the entire show. The application process is not done by the homeowners association. It's not done by you personally. It's done by the shooter or by the company that you hire. so i'm just trying to wrap my head around this process um so when the homeowners association hires the firework shooter then they pay for the insurance at that time is that how it works i mean when they have to get a this policy for five million that's part of the price of the shooter A firework shooter. I don't like to use the word shooter. I understand. The majority of the companies already have that because they shoot, some of them nationwide, all year long. So they have the insurance January 1 to January 1. So they don't need it just for one specific event. It's much cheaper if you get it all year long, I think, instead of just trying to get it for one event. Right. Well, that would make sense. And then I don't know. I think this might be a question for Mr. Johnson. I noticed in this memo that while there are a number of cities that have $5 million insurance requirements, there are some that also have $2 and $3 million. So based on the one lawsuit, I understand that's the reason that you've chosen the five or made the suggestion of the $5 million. Made the recommendation, correct. I mean, was there more research? Were there other lawsuits that had been filed that you had your research? That was the only one that I was able to find. Most lawsuits, when they're settled, are done in confidence between the plaintiff and the defendant. and if it's not a public entity, then that insurance company and that private person, they settle it and you never know what the settlement is. So I was unable to find any other research other than this one public document because it involved a public entity. Therefore, it was made available to the public. So there's 400 other injuries on average per year. If we had access to those insurance settlement documents, I would venture to say you'd find some similar numbers amongst those lawsuits. I'm just curious if our law department would be able to help find more research in regard to that. Mr. Sander didn't think he would have to come to the microphone, did he? it's doubtful because like patrick said most settlement agreements are private if you're a government entity like us all of our settlement agreements are public so anybody can see what uh we pay out in claims it was just private between an insurance company and like a homeowners association or an injured party most of those are confidential and and we can't get a hold of those. All right. Thank you, Mr. Sander. Um, well, I, I'm interested in finding out if there's some way we can have a compromise. I don't know, and I don't know enough about this yet. I don't feel like I do to know whether that a tier would be a suggestion, but, um, I don't know. I, I, I'm interested in seeing what my colleagues have to say. Thank you, Ed. Council Member Akers. Thank you, Chair. Fire Marshal Farmer. Yes, ma'am. So, if I understand it correctly, most fireworks companies provide and pay for and have their own insurance policies. Right. So, if my HOA wanted to hire them, I would just give them whatever fee they charged me, and that would be the end of it. Right. I think that's all priced in, and it's competitive. Sure. It's part of the price. Yeah, a bunch of them nationwide. And so you're telling me that most of them have insurance beyond $5 million? Yes. Of liability. Or they will get some sort of rider. Is that the right verbiage? They'll get some kind of rider for a show that would require more than that to come up above that. And that's what happened in one of the incidents this summer, correct? At Firebrook? Sure. I wasn't going to name it, but sure, yes. Well, they had a million. The shooters had a million. Okay, they did have a $1 million policy. And then they found out that we required five, so they had to buy a $4 million additional policy, and that was too costly for the neighborhood to. Apparently so. Yes. So I guess, yeah, maybe it's, yes, it apparently wasn't Firebrook. But anyway, I guess my question is, I mean, you provided one, Mr. Johnson provided one example of, you know, of a horrible, tragic incident. But I guess, I mean, if an HOA rents, you know, or hires a company, someone gets injured, how would it fall back on the city? I mean, I guess we're raising this to protect us. Are we raising this to protect HOAs? HOAs, are we raising this to protect who? Both. Both. I would say you're raising it to protect both because the city should be named as a traditional insured since Fire Marshal Farmer is going out there to inspect. So you're holding the city harmless from a lawsuit. Even though he might be negligent that he misses something and then it explodes and injures a bunch of people, We want that shooter to be responsible for that fireworks display because today you never know based on quality control. The fireworks are made in different sized shells. And depending on what type of day that person was having that day putting that explosives together, they may have had a bad day and no good quality control went into place. They go out there and light the shell off and it explodes. So what can happen will happen, and that's why we do that. Well, I understand that your job is to think of the worst possible scenario. I understand. I don't think that it's necessarily accurate, but that is your job. However, Mike, is it, I mean, are you liable for every single, I mean, you all inspect every building in the city for CO permits. You're now inspecting food trucks. You inspect, I'm sure, lots and lots of other buildings. Sounds like I need more manpower. Well, I'm just saying, I mean, I'm just, my question is, do all of those organizations, businesses, do the food trucks, do they all have to carry really high insurance policies as well in case a food truck blows up and you inspected the propane? Are you now liable for that? Do food trucks need $5 million insurance policies? That's a good point. Does every business in town that gets a CO permit from the fire marshal's office, does it need this high of a liability policy? I don't have the answer to that, but I do know that one of the documents that he put up there actually had a special events section for that, and the fireworks would fall into that. The other ones may fall under some sort of business insurance that's required. I don't really know. Okay. Just thoughts to ponder. And I agree. I think jumping from one to five may have been a little much that we could have maybe, you know, gradually increased the prices, but I'll see what everybody else thinks, too. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Chair, if that's part of my time, can I go over the timeline real quick? I'm going to give you time after Councilmember Stenet. How's that? I'll let you wrap it up. Councilmember Stenet, thank you. Thank you, Chair. Chief Farmer, thank you for all your work on it. Thank you for the call, too. I enjoy trying to get behind and understand where you were coming from. Thank you for your work, and I appreciate where you're coming from. As well as, Patrick, thank you for all your work on this. Being in the insurance business, I'd never be one to not want to recommend as much insurance as possible. and make sure people protect their risk, because I understand how valuable that risk is. I also know it's not an exact science. I know there's a lot of variables that go into risk. And I guess I want to start with, Chief. You said you inspect every single permit you issue for fireworks displays. You inspect every single one. And do you stay on premise for every single one? No. We will go and inspect as they're setting up, see what they have. And then we leave. And then we leave. But then we go back before they're actually shot. So you're there. when they're on every single permit, so if my neighborhood did it and everyone's neighborhood, you're there for all of them? Yeah. We have a crew there? Yeah. Okay, because I didn't understand it that way when this came up back in Fourth of July. My understanding was you inspect and then you leave. But if we actually are sending a crew to everyone and watching them? Yeah, it's not a fire crew. It's actually someone from my office. And the overtime is actually added in, so it's not costing any extra money. No, I didn't mean to. No, no, no, I understand. But they're usually on the weekends, that kind of thing. So it's actually a part of the permit that's in there that will be reimbursed for that over time as well. So it's just known that we'll be there. And that is for a reason. We came back one night and realized that somebody was shooting shells twice the size of what they had said they were going to shoot. I'm glad to hear you do that. Now we go to everyone. I'm glad to hear. I guess my question is to Patrick. The $5 million limit, I know Councilman Lamb kind of hit on the nerve I was asking is, how do we really justify $5 million versus $10 million versus $7 million? or why not just $3 million? I know your analysis on the high, medium, and low risk. That makes some sense when we're looking at risk as a government. I'm just struggling on this issue. Do we find out why Louisville increased theirs to $5 million last year? Was there a rationale? Actually, Louisville is not $5 million. It's $2 million. Okay, it's only $2 million because in the package it's $2 million. Okay. Correct. I talked to the risk manager today. She said she would love to have it at $5 million. But, again, it's a matter of taking it through council. She has a different process up there than she has here. Do you think there would be pushback based on affordability, coverage, et cetera? Well, I'll be the first one to say if there's any contractor someone's hiring that doesn't have $5 million at least, I wouldn't hire that contractor, to be honest, from where I sit. I think every contractor knows that's in this business the exposure limits. A million dollars is not enough for the contractor. But if we're putting the onus on the HOA to make sure their contractor has $5 million, if they don't, then they have to find the additional four. I mean, that could be troublesome for that neighborhood. Or hire a different shooter. Or hire a different shooter. You could. I agree. But I think Councilman Farmer hit on the nerve. The issue now is we didn't have good communication with our neighborhoods, and we actually had a neighborhood in two churches that said no because of the five million. So we didn't just have one. We had three entities that normally shot fireworks that said no this year because they couldn't afford the five million. Because the first million is the most expensive, and after that it goes down economically scale-wise. But it's still expensive coverage because it's special risk. I just really struggle how we're coming up with $5 million. And I want to be able to justify that if we are sued or if we're sued and say we didn't have enough, we didn't require enough. So I want to make sure we have a good case of why $5 million is on the table, not just a lawsuit in South Carolina. Or I want to know exactly why $5 million is good for our city and not 10, say. Well, Vienna, Virginia, where it wasn't a lawsuit in South Carolina, it was Vienna, Virginia. And that was 4.75. So, again, you're looking at a high, medium, and low on your matrix. If you're looking at the matrix, then you're looking at the probability of the occurrence. Is that high, medium, or low? And based on the number of occurrences that we're seeing per year of people getting injured and having their eyes put out, is it just short of somebody else getting their brain damaged, just like this one claim? So, you know, instead of going $10 million or $1 million, we shot for the middle at $5 million. And I think that's where our level would be to take care of the medical, take care of the lost wages, pain and suffering. To me, that seems the most appropriate limit. We're living on 20-year-old limits right now. And 20 years ago, it didn't cost as much for the injuries. Our wages weren't as high. And the pain and suffering awards by the courts weren't as much. Today, they are much higher. And so in order to protect us, as well as the Homeowners Association, from adverse lawsuits, I think $5 million is the middle of the road where we're having it. Also, the other thing that we were talking about, too, when this first came up, Fire Marshall Farmers said, you know, we were looking at changing everything from three sheets to one sheet on how they do this permitting. If we need to go back to the three sheets, maybe that's the way you need to do it to look at the exposures a little closer. it. But to me, it is problematic when we're using part-timers to do high-hazardous type activities, and fireworks is a high-hazardous activity. It's explosives, it's dangerous, and it can kill people. And so if you're using part-timers, the frequency of their use, the frequency of the experience that they have is much, much less than the individuals that do it on a more frequent basis that have the limits of insurance that you need. So maybe it's just a matter of finding the right company to do the fireworks shoot who has the insurance in place and probably charges the same if not less to do the shoot. I'll close by saying my time's up, but do we require a certificate to be named insured on every single permit we issue? Additional insured? On every permit? We do not require that right now. Most do. That's what I was just telling him. So they have not all been that way in the past, but they will be now. So we're going to go forward. We're going to require every permit to name us as additional insured. But we didn't last year. Fourth Sunday. Why not? I mean. It wasn't something that I knew we had to do. Oh, okay. Okay. I mean, I didn't realize. I've learned quite a bit in doing this as well. As we all have. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you, Chair. Thank you. Vice Chair of Scotchfield, if you take the floor. I have a couple of questions. First of all, gentlemen, I appreciate you coming forward. I know this is a policy discussion, but this is about money, and unfortunately there's no amount of money that's going to make a difference if some child gets hurt or gets killed as a result of someone who doesn't know what they're doing. These guys know what they're doing. Obviously, the fire marshal made the decision to increase the liability limits based upon his experience. I'm not going to argue with someone who has that kind of experience and say, no, I want to stop at $1 million and $5 million we can't afford, and then have a horrific accident as a result of that. So that's my feeling. I guess, second of all, now that we've talked about this today, are you going to come forward with some new policies or some information for us so we are all clear up here on what happens when certain neighborhood associations want to hire a professional fireworks, I hate to say shooter, but I don't like to say the word shooter. I really don't. Fireworkers, whatever. So that we know specifically when these neighborhoods come to us what the policy is and we can forward it to them. I feel confident saying that by tomorrow I can have every one of you an application so that you can provide that with anyone that would ask you for information on that. You can provide them with the application. Print it out or provide them with a link and an email, whatever you would like. But going back to your earlier point about us making a policy decision of $5 million, I think personally it would have been irresponsible for me to keep it at $1 million when the director of risk management that the city has put in charge to make these kind of recommendations, if he recommended $5 million, I think it would have been irresponsible on my part to make it or keep it at $1 million. So that went into our decision as well. But I can provide you with any amount of training that you'd like on the permitting process, including giving you the permits to give to your homeowner associations. I think that would be helpful. Again, I think it was just a little bit of a disconnect that we all didn't know exactly what this permitting process involved and what the limits were involved. And I feel better now that I know this. And so I'll turn this over to Council Member Bledsoe now if you want to move forward with this. Thank you, Chair. I do. And I greatly respect the expertise of both of you. I am not an insurance agent. I'm not a firework shooter. I like sparklers. Okay? That's about as far as I get. It's all my children do. And we do them at the farm, so we don't hurt anybody else in the process, okay? I do think internal decisions have external consequences. And we answer to the external consequences. They don't call you. They call me. And they called me a lot. They called me, too. I know, because I had passed them on. They did. And I guess the point is this. And I want us to be consistent with Louisville. I think it is. I'd rather just be consistent statewide, honestly, more so than just as a locality. I think it's easier to operate around regional boundaries when we're all the same. I just think it is. I don't. If you can shoot them off in Georgetown, you should shoot them off here. It just makes sense to me. I understand why we would increase it for $5 million for the city exposure. I think that makes a lot of sense when we're shooting them off downtown, red, right, and boom or whatnot. I get that. I have a hard time when we start deciding liability for other people. And in this case, I would rather keep it at $2 million, be consistent with Louisville, so at least the two major entities are the same, and keep everything else at once so it does make it reasonable. And my thought is, one, for being similar, but two, if we make it difficult for not just homeless associations, but churches, nonprofits, schools who want to do certain things to do it. What happens is, just like in other entities, they said, well, fine, I'll just go across to Jesmond County, buy whatever I want, I'm going to come to my cul-de-sac without telling anyone, shoot off whatever I want. And then they call me, right, because we're not enforcing the firework ban. And they're just as frustrated. So I want to maintain the integrity of getting permits and doing them well. I want to maintain the liability aspects, I guess. But I think we go too far here, and we limit, I think we increase more danger at that level, I guess. And that's my preference. I won't make a motion. I won't let others talk. But that would be my preference, is to keep it at five for all city events and two for those that are looking for permits. Council Member Akers. Thank you, Chair. Um, I'm fine, I guess, as well, was following along with Louisville. Um, I wanted to ask the fire marshal, is there nothing in KRS that dictates what these limits should be or minimums? Minimum is one. One, right. So people can, local jurisdictions can go higher, just not lower. Um, I agree that I think it's, um, it is difficult when we, you know, have Georgetown at our border and Woodford County at our border, Jessamine County, and the amounts are different. And so the fireworks shooters, you know, have to get different levels of policies to meet different county demands, I guess. My only request of you all would be that when a neighborhood comes to you, an HOA or other organization, and you feel that it's not enough, you know, that here, this is what is required, is this $2 million? but then you need to maybe give them a handout or something of their potential risk and additional liability, just so that they know up front. If, for example, if there was an injury up to $4 million, that every homeowner in your HOA would be held responsible. I know that my HOA is constantly, they're also pretty vigilant about risk management themselves and probably would not take that on. So I think that then you might have multiple HOAs joining together to spread, you know, that risk a little bit further. So I think it's important that organizations who would hire and carry out these events should know what their risks are and not believe that $2 million is enough either. Okay. Well, to get to your point, we don't deal with the homeowners associations, like you said, unless they call with complaints. Right. So we deal with them at that point. We will discuss it, you know, over the phone, that kind of thing, or have meetings. But also, thinking about what you just said, would you want someone actually handling explosives and shooting them off with thousands of people around if I have to actually educate them that they may be sued and that they may actually incur some liability being the shooter, that kind of thing? I think once it gets to me, they already have to have an ATF license. They've already been vetted through ATF for storage and transportation. So I think they already know that. And I don't necessarily think that it's a waste of my time because the majority of what I do is educate people. I was talking to Patrick. He and I are about the only two people that are ever in a room that are thinking the worst-case scenario. Everybody else is saying it's not going to happen here, it's not going to happen to me, but we both know it will. So you really can't have us together. It's a bad thing. But if you propose that I'm supposed to educate every shooter, we can come up with something that we can hand out with the application. I forgot for a moment that it is actually the fireworks company that comes to you and seeks the application. And that most of them are insured for well above this minimum. I mean, you mentioned, you know, I'm sure the ones we hire for Fourth of July, you said were $14,000. Well, I had, I'm going off my memory here, but I think it was $14,000, $11,000, $6,000, $6,000, $6,000, $6,000, $6,000, $6,000. Those are the five companies. I don't know what Red, White, and Boom had, but I know it was over $5 million. So the remaining five had well above that. It was $14, $11, $6, $6, and $5. Are the ones who have less than that much cheaper? Well, I don't know because we didn't review their applications if they didn't meet the requirements. Okay. We just wouldn't issue a permit at that point. And actually we offered. I'm serious. if I was an HOA and called around to different fireworks companies, am I going to notice, oh, they're $2,000 more, so I'm going to go with this guy that's much cheaper, but then he doesn't have enough coverage. One possible solution, and I think Council Member Bledsoe had talked about, she wants everything the same, Georgetown, Nicholasville, everybody's that. One thing you can do is repeal the ordinance that if it goes up or blows up, you can't shoot it in Fayette County because they're doing it anyway. You said that. So if you repeal that ordinance at some point, those people are going to get to shoot. That's not necessarily my decision to make. Or we change the state law to increase it to a minimum. Which would be easier. I don't know. Yes. Thanks. Thank you, Chair. Anyone else want to speak to the subject? Council Member Bledsoe. I was just going to ask if the administration had any thoughts or comments. They got as many calls as I did on fireworks. And so I was just going to ask if you had anything you wish to add. CAO Hamilton, welcome. Thank you. We certainly understand the chief's remarks and chief farmer's remarks and Patrick's remarks. And I have heard this conversation before, and I know why they did, as you do here, why they set what they did. However, the first time I heard about this was when Council Member Bledsoe came into my office on either July 3rd or whatever it was and said, we've got a problem. I discussed this with Patrick later, and he explained to us why they did that, and we talked to Chief Farmer also. My problem was the same one that you all, and I make the same mistakes daily that they just made. So this is not a criticism. Sometimes I just get going fast enough that I forget to tell you. And that's, I think, what happened here. There should have been a notice that said, here's what we feel that needs to be set. It needs to be set at a $5 million thing. And then we should have had this conversation and have seen what was going on. Because you all do have to defend it. And we forget that. And as somebody said up here, those internal decisions become external. And why that's hard for us to remember, I don't know, but it is. And it's hard for all of us. So if you want to start at a $2 million limit this time, if that's what you want to do, another thing, and see how that works, see what we do, if we can find more research or things, then certainly the administration is not going to be against that at all. We support these gentlemen just like you all do, but we also understand this. Thank you. That's exactly what I was wondering. We've lost a lot of colleagues. We have quorum. We have quorum? Okay. I guess I'd like to make a motion to support that, to keep it $5 million for all city efforts and $2 million for those that are asking for permits. Is the motion on the floor? Is there a second? Second. Pardon me. I'm going to have to have some more direction on that because I don't know what you're delineating. What's the city project and what's not? Can you repeat that, Council Member Bledsoe? Sure. I was going to say a city-sponsored event at $5 million. I can clean this up in language, but that is my intent, that a city-sponsored event would have insurance of $5 million and that a... Would require, you're saying? Would require a $5 million. And those that have a private permit would remain too. So you're talking about churches, you're talking about schools, you're talking about homeowners associations. I mean, probably need to be real specific on that. Any other than a city-sanctioned event? Any other than a city-sanctioned event that would require a large... Sanctioned event. Liability policy? Yes. Okay. So we've got a motion on the floor from I understand that any city-sanctioned event would have to have a minimum of $5 million liability policy as opposed to a non-city-sanctioned event would be $2 million. so as to maintain similarity with louisville and okay and council member henson you second that motion on the floor uh is there any uh discussion on the motion council member oh i'm sorry yes sir you said sanctioned versus sponsored there are two distinct differences there we might sanction something for like the downtown lexington authority who puts on the 4th of July fireworks. So are they going to be 2 million or are they going to be 5 million? I would think anything that we... We sanction their activities. Do I come to you if I'm not sure? No, no, no. I'm unsure of the right language, and that's my... That's critical, I think. It would be critical. I hear you. I would want to cover at 5 million the big boom things. How that's written, I'm struggling. City sponsored. City sponsored, I guess, is my thought. And again, some of the considerations that he has to use when determining how far people sit from there is the size of the shells. The size of the shell, the bigger the boom, the bigger the damage. So, you know, when you're thinking about $2 million for a homeowner's association, they may put something on just as big as downtown. Doubtful, but, you know, as far as the fireworks itself. Can I make? Maybe we need to have some better definition on this before we go forward. Would you mind if what we would do is let us go back, talk with Chief Jackson, and let us come back here with some ideas of next committee and be able to vet that. Would that be okay? Yes, ma'am. Okay. Thank you. I'll make a motion to that effect. Yes, ma'am. I'll make a motion to wait and allow the administration to come back with the recommended policy. I'll second. I'm best practicing. All those in favor? Aye. Aye. Opposed? We withdraw. That being said, if there are no other items for discussion, I'll take a motion to adjourn. I'll move. Do we have a second? Second. All those in favor? Aye. Motion to adjourn is approved.