# Environmental Quality and Public Works Committee - February 16, 2016 > Auto-transcribed civic record · February 16, 2016 - **Permalink**: https://meetings.lexingtonky.news/meeting/3878 - **Source video**: https://lfucg.granicus.com/player/clip/3878?view_id=14&redirect=true - **Date**: 2016-02-16 - **Last revised**: February 16, 2016 - **Length**: 18,280 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 Environmental Quality & Public Works Committee met on February 16, 2016, at 1:00 PM with Farmer presiding as the committee chair. The committee addressed three agenda items during the session, focusing on environmental programs, traffic safety, and waste management operations. The meeting included one informational presentation on Keep Lexington Beautiful's annual report, highlighting the organization's community beautification efforts and accomplishments. Committee members also received an informational briefing on the financial performance of the Materials Recycling Facility, providing insight into the city's waste management operations and recycling program effectiveness. The committee took action on one substantive matter, approving a speed limit reduction on Richmond Road to enhance traffic safety in that corridor. Throughout the meeting, the committee conducted four formal votes on various procedural and substantive matters. One member of the public provided comments during the designated public comment period, contributing community input to the committee's deliberations. The session demonstrated the committee's ongoing oversight responsibilities for environmental quality initiatives and public works infrastructure, balancing informational updates with actionable policy decisions affecting Lexington residents. ## Attendance The following members were present at the meeting on February 16, 2016: **Present:** • Farmer • Stinnett • Kay • Moloney • J. Brown • Gibbs • Evans • F. Brown • Mossotti • Hensley All ten members were in attendance with no absences or late arrivals recorded for this meeting. ## Votes and Decisions The council conducted four votes during the February 16, 2016 meeting, with mixed outcomes on key agenda items. **Committee Summary Approval** [timestamp: 00:30] Stinnett motioned to approve the committee summary, seconded by Kay. The motion passed by voice vote with no opposition recorded. **Agenda Order Change** [timestamp: 01:00] The council voted by voice to change the order of the agenda to discuss the Keep Lexington Beautiful Annual Report earlier in the meeting. The motion passed without recorded opposition. **Richmond Road Speed Limit Reduction Resolution** [timestamp: 02:30] Gibbs motioned to approve the Richmond Road Speed Limit Reduction Resolution, with F. Brown providing the second. The resolution passed by voice vote with no recorded opposition. **NTMP Changes** [timestamp: 03:00] F. Brown motioned to approve changes to the NTMP (Neighborhood Traffic Management Program), seconded by Stinnett. This motion failed in a tie vote of 4-4 on roll call. **Voting for approval:** Farmer, Stinnett, Moloney, and F. Brown **Voting against approval:** Kay, Gibbs, Evans, and Mossotti The failed NTMP vote represented the most contentious decision of the meeting, with the council evenly split on the proposed changes to the neighborhood traffic management program. All other items on the voting agenda passed without recorded opposition through voice votes. ## Public Comment [timestamp: 01:30] Jim Pendergast, chair of Keep Lexington Beautiful, addressed the meeting to present the organization's annual report. Pendergast highlighted the group's ongoing efforts in litter prevention, beautification initiatives, and community involvement throughout Lexington. The presentation focused on Keep Lexington Beautiful's activities and accomplishments over the past year, emphasizing their role in maintaining and improving the visual appeal of the community through various environmental and aesthetic programs. ## Contested Items The committee encountered significant disagreement on proposed changes to the Neighborhood Traffic Management Program (NTMP), resulting in a deadlocked vote that prevented the item from moving forward. The NTMP changes sparked a contentious debate among committee members, ultimately leading to a 4-4 tie vote. This split decision meant the item could not advance and was kept in committee for additional discussion and consideration. The evenly divided vote demonstrates the polarized nature of the proposed NTMP modifications, with committee members appearing to have fundamental disagreements about the direction of the program. The tie vote effectively blocked any immediate action on the changes, requiring the committee to revisit the matter in future meetings. Due to the deadlock, the NTMP changes remain unresolved, with the committee needing to find common ground or additional compromise before the item can proceed through the legislative process. ## Keep Lexington Beautiful Annual Report [timestamp: 01:30] Jim Pendergast presented the annual report for Keep Lexington Beautiful during the February 16, 2016 meeting. The presentation covered the organization's efforts in litter prevention, beautification projects, and community engagement throughout the previous year. Pendergast highlighted two major program successes in his report. The cigarette litter prevention program showed significant results in reducing cigarette waste throughout the city. Additionally, the Green Up for Breeder's Cup initiative was noted as a successful beautification effort that prepared the city for the major horse racing event. The annual report detailed Keep Lexington Beautiful's ongoing work in community involvement, demonstrating how the organization engages residents in maintaining and improving the city's appearance. The presentation provided an overview of various beautification projects undertaken during the reporting period. This was an informational presentation with no action items or decisions required from the meeting participants. The report served to update attendees on the organization's activities and achievements over the past year, showcasing their contributions to maintaining Lexington's environmental quality and aesthetic appeal. ## Richmond Road Speed Limit Reduction [timestamp: 02:30] The committee considered a resolution requesting the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet to reduce the speed limit on Richmond Road from Man O' War Boulevard to east of Hays Boulevard to 45 mph. Scutchfield served as the key speaker for this agenda item, presenting the resolution to the committee. The proposal specifically targets the Richmond Road corridor between Man O' War Boulevard and the area east of Hays Boulevard, seeking to lower the current speed limit to 45 mph. The committee approved the resolution, which will formally request the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet to implement the speed limit reduction on this section of Richmond Road. This action represents the committee's recommendation to state transportation officials, who have the authority to make changes to speed limits on state-maintained roadways. The resolution approval means the request will be forwarded to the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet for their consideration and potential implementation of the proposed 45 mph speed limit on the specified Richmond Road segment. ## Financial Performance of Materials Recycling Facility [timestamp: 03:30] The committee received a presentation on the financial performance of the Materials Recycling Facility during agenda item 4. Key speakers included Tracey Thurman and Bill O'Mara, who provided an analysis of the facility's current financial status. The presentation covered several critical areas: • **National trends** affecting recycling facility operations and revenue streams • **Cost analysis** of current facility operations • **Financial performance metrics** for the Materials Recycling Facility During the discussion, speakers identified potential action points to address financial challenges, including: • **Raising affiliate fees** to improve revenue generation • **Reviewing the commodity mix** to optimize the types of materials processed and their associated profit margins The committee examined how broader market conditions and national trends in the recycling industry were impacting the facility's financial performance. The analysis appears to have focused on both operational costs and revenue opportunities. This agenda item was informational in nature, with no formal action taken during the meeting. The presentation provided committee members with data and analysis needed to understand the facility's current financial position and consider potential strategies for improvement. The discussion of raising affiliate fees and reviewing commodity mix suggests the facility may be facing financial pressures that require strategic adjustments to maintain operational sustainability. --- ## Decisions - **Motion** — passed (0-0): Approval of Committee Summary - **Motion** — passed (0-0): Change order of agenda to discuss Keep Lexington Beautiful Annual Report - **Motion** — passed (0-0): Approval of Richmond Road Speed Limit Reduction Resolution - **Motion** — failed (4-4): Approval of NTMP changes --- ## Full transcript The Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. We're going to go ahead with our meeting, even though we only have one light in the chamber. But I think it's... It's in the important place, though. The light is directly behind the vice mayor. Yes, that's correct. I'm going to ask the committee, if you would, to look at the summary, which covers the first three pages. And then there are, well, three and a half, almost four. Then there are two complete resolutions behind that. They're on page 9. I want to see if there's any additions, corrections, or thoughts on all that from anyone. Seeing none, I'd ask for a motion to approve. Second. Thank you, Fred Brown. Council Member Brown. Thank you, Vice Mayor. All those in favor? Aye. Aye. Opposed, like, sign. Motion passes. All right, we've been asked to take number five, since this has to do with folks who are outside the government realm, so that we can go in and air from them and release them back to their well-lit day. So I'd like to have a motion to change the order, place number five, and place number two, and move forward and forth with. Motion and second. All those in favor? Aye. Opposed, like, signed. Thank you all. Okay, so we'll move to Keep Lexington Beautiful Annual Report. This has been placed by Council Member Henson, but today it begins on page 80 of our packet. It's got some interesting things. Who will be reporting to us on that today, please? Good afternoon. I'm Jim Pendergast. I'm chair of Keep Lexington Beautiful. Welcome. Thanks for moving us up today. Yes, sir. We appreciate that. Keep Lexington Beautiful is an affiliate of Keep America Beautiful, and our mission is to engage individuals, businesses, and organizations within Fayette County to take personal responsibility for improving our environment. Pull into the mic there just a little bit. Our commission members include a number of citizens at large, David Elson, Maurice Nally, George Ely, Blake Ames. Four different industries were represented. I represent the equine agriculture industry. Salvador Sanchez represents the food and beverage. Patricia Knight is on the commission for tourism. Amy Soner is with Bluegrass Greensource. Chrissy Toon is education. And then the government has a number of members. Peggy Henson, the Department of Environmental Services, is in the process of nominating a new person for our commission. Lieutenant Chris Snell with the Division of Police and Thad Scott with the Division of Code Enforcement. The purpose for Keep Lexington Beautiful is established with an ordinance, and by the ordinance we're responsible for litter prevention, beautification, waste reduction, and community involvement. For 2015, we had a number of priorities. As always, we have the Community Appearance Index, which is required by Keep America Beautiful of all affiliates. We conduct that annually in March, and this past year we surveyed 50 sites from a half of a mile to a mile in length, And we score the litter on a rating of 1 to 4. And you can see the history since the inception of Keep Lexington Beautiful. It hasn't changed a lot, but we don't particularly concern ourselves over that. We use this as a tool to determine what areas in the city we're interested in focusing on. So you can see from this map all the different areas that we covered during the index. Is the idea the lower the score, the better, then? The lower the score is better, yes. Very good, thank you. And again, it's a subjective view of the trash. We look at different neighborhoods, and then we've got different people each year that look at it. So the numbers can change from year to year, and we use it more as a tool. Litter prevention is always one of our priorities, and it was again this year. We received a $5,000 grant from Keep America Beautiful, and we used that to target Thursday Night Live and the Fifth Third Pavilion. We installed 20 ash urn canisters, and we did a distribution of pocket and car ash trays at the Thursday Night Live events. You can see the results here from a scan that we did. We did a scan prior to the implementation of the ash urns and our outreach, and we saw 993 cigarette butts on our count and 178 cigar tips. After we did the installation of the Ash Urns and our outreach, we surveyed again in October, and that number was reduced to 90 cigarette butts and three cigar tips. So we're very proud of the results that we got from that grant. One of our other major priorities this year has been green up for Breeders' Cup. With that coming into town, we raised funds through KLB for the Division of Environmental Services to do some plantings. Over 57,000 plants were put in, bushes, trees, and a variety of cleanups were done around the community. We also assisted with plannings downtown, and in total for the Green Up program, we raised $83,000. The lead donors during our campaign were Central Bank, Lowe's, Quantrell Subaru, and R.J. Corman, which all donated $12,500 for those projects. And you can see on the right-hand side are a list of other donors that also contributed with us. They just didn't come up to that level? They were not at the $12,500 level, but they did donate substantially to get us to the $83,000. Bluegrass Airport, Commerce Lexington, Inc., Grass Park Inn, Great Construction, Kentucky American Water, Lexington Bluegrass Association of Realtors, and Republic Services. Thank you. Here's a picture of the Main Street at Newtown Pike plantings that were done. It's a major improvement in that area. The one on the left is Man of War at the airport. and the one on the right is the interstate at Newtown Pike. And we tried to focus on gateways into Lexington so that our visitors coming in for Breeders' Cup would get a great impression of Lexington as they came in town. Here's a copy of a flyer that we put out for some of our cleanups. In September, we were working on cleanups around the area for preparation for Breeders' Cup. Here's a picture. We got participation from... From the committee here, too. This is the downtown Tidy Up. Was that a coffee tree or a chicory tree? What was that? Sorry, move on, move on. And this is more pictures from Tidy Up. One of our other priorities, and this is, again, every year, is the Great American Cleanup. This year we were fortunate to get a donation of $25,000 from Republic Services for an ad campaign for the Great American Cleanup, and you can see that the results were tremendous. We went from 48 events in 2013 to 52 in 2014, and this year we had 82 cleanups. So we got a great response to the advertising. We had 3,485 volunteers this year. You can see that the pounds of litter have more than doubled with what we were able to pick up this year. We cleaned up 39.5 miles of roads and streets and 74 acres of parks. And again, here's some pictures of the different cleanups around the area. Other efforts that we undertook throughout the year were co-sponsoring Reforest of Bluegrass, the downtown Trash Bash, co-sponsoring Arbor Day. at lextran we distributed pocket ashtrays on several occasions and at different times to the folks that were outside of there we co-sponsored america's recycle days paper shred event and we have our bi-monthly commission meetings and in addition we have meetings for the great american cleanup for neighborhood associations to help them organize their cleanups This is a snapshot of our finances from 2011 until December 31st of 2015. And you can see that during that period of time we have raised $235,000. Of that we have used $218,000 for different kinds of projects and cleanups and promotions of cleanups. And we had a balance on December 31st of $17,000. You can see the different areas. The green-up for Breeders' Cup was a major part of that with $83,000. So 2015 was a big year for us for fundraising. The community value of having Keep Lexington Beautiful in Fayette County and the 82 events that were sponsored includes $152,000 in volunteer services. We had $13,000 in in-kind donations. Private donations included $59,000. The government cost for Keep Lexington Beautiful was $18,000. So you get a cost-benefit ratio for the city for having Keep Lexington Beautiful of $11 for every dollar that was spent. For 2016, naturally our goals are to keep a great American cleanup. up. We intend to revamp a section of the legacy trail that we have adopted. We'll continue again. We're asking for another grant on cigarette litter prevention. Lowe's is offering more grants which we're applying for. Fundraising for additional projects will be a priority. We want to improve our education outreach throughout the year and we want to improve to focus on recycling. If anybody has any questions, I'll be happy to try to answer them. Any questions for Mr. Penningast, anyone? I have a couple. First of all, the green up for Breeders' Cup was probably one of the best cross-promotional things we did between yourself and the outside folks and the Corridor's Commission. And what was there in those pictures will only look better this spring because I know we're going to continue to take care of all that and make it look great. So I would say there's room for more partnerships like that, and you'd find willing partners here along those lines. That's what we'd like to do as we go through the year, find more things like that we can do, and we can raise the money, and if the city can help with the installation, I think it's a huge win. I think there's an opportunity there, and I think there's room there even for you to think outside the box for something a little different perhaps, but certainly a great win to build off of. And then just I had one question about the numbers page. You said it was for, it's not dated, but you said it was for numbers for 2011 through 2015? Yes. So what was the demarcator that had you choose 2011 to 2015? I don't remember. That was from the inception. That's a good call. I like that. Well done, sir. All right. Council Member Gibbs. Thank you, Chair. It's a great presentation. I'm really encouraged about the cigarette butts in particular, but everything you do. Do you do this without staff? Is it all volunteer? It is an all-volunteer organization. That's very impressive. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Chair. Yes, sir. Council Member Rakers. Thank you, Chair. I just had a quick question. I appreciate this as well and love the growth of the number of events and the amount of litter picked up every year and the growth in volunteers as well. You mentioned revamping or cleaning up a section of the Legacy Trail. Can you tell us which section that is? It's kind of hard to describe, but it's on the other side of Interstate 75. If you go under the interstate, it makes a left turn toward the Kentucky Horse Park, and ours is on the right-hand side just after you make that turn. Okay. I ride it, so I'm familiar. That's why I'm just curious. Sort of at the hilltop if you're riding over there and you're going down, there's a little creek just afterwards. Okay. Thank you. I think, again, great job. And Susan Pluger's staff as well from the Department of Environmental Services, I know, had a big hand in a lot of the plantings. They carry a lot of the load for us as far as the physical part of it. So thank them as well. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, ma'am. Anyone else? I don't guess anything else we can do for you today. That's great. Thank you very much. Bring us an even better report next year. How about that? All right. All right. Thank you very much. All right, committee members, we're going to revert back to what was our original number two, which is an item we actually took up in committee last month. We kind of lightened the packet by not putting the old traffic management program and the new one in there. Today is just the new one, and we had some questions and some back and forth on it, but at the end of the day, we did not take any action on the issue. So I'm unsure. Does staff have something else to bring to this, or do members of the council have other commentary on this issue? I mean, it's kind of been placed here, I guess, for movement, but we didn't get any at the end of the last meeting, so I'm asking for anyone's input now. He has a super power to play presentation, sir. Mr. Mulvaney, do you have words on this, then? I'd be happy to speak, Mr. Chair. Please. Thank you for having me back to the council committee. To answer some questions from last time, principal questions that were asked were pertaining to deadlines. Deadlines start as soon as they're mailed, whether it's for a 90-day initial petition or a three-week second ballot petition. study reevaluation we will we would be able to reevaluate any study if there has been a significant change in traffic patterns and that's something that we could work with the local community to determine it's kind of vague and open up for a reason because there could be any number of things that could cause traffic pattern to change we also wanted to clarify any criteria used for lowering speed limit in a residential area we want to consider parks clubhouses pools things of that nature could be included in our criteria beacons and flashing signs that would be part of the ntmp process that is if it's related to a speed limit or something of that nature for traffic calming would be funded by a traffic calming budget it. The real meat of the response to the committee points from January. For type 2 or type 3 traffic calming, I apologize for not having the screen up. For type 2 or type 3 traffic calming, a secondary ballot petition notice will be sent both to a tenant and property owner. Tenant still wouldn't have a vote necessarily, but they'll be informed of a ballot that's been mailed to their property owner for the petition ballot for a type 2 or type 3 traffic calming device. So they're made aware of it. And there will be some language in there letting them know that the owner has that information. They really should get in contact with their property owner. The next point was traffic engineering still does not recommend changing the 65% approval for the studies for all the residents in a petition area. We looked at other communities and some of the thresholds they have. For example, the city of Omaha, Nebraska has a level of 67% before they would do traffic calming. The city of Lubbock, Texas, which is similar to Lexington in that it's kind of a college city and about 240,000 people, a little smaller, has an 80% threshold our threshold 65% so we feel we're even more we have a lesser lower threshold for that one of the points that was brought up was is that if a majority of the people responded were in favor of traffic calming then maybe we should move forward and traffic engineering still feels a 65% is the where we want to be because for example if the street has ten homes on it and and three people vote in the petition ballot, and only two of them say yes, we're concerned that we may only be working for two people and not the whole community, where the rest of the street may come back and say we didn't want this, whereas only two people did. So that's been our concern for why we want to have 65%. Finally, the last point, traffic engineering recommends petitions for future no-through-truck sign requests. like most other signed requests though we still feel that you know petition is good but if there is a reasonable condition where traffic engineering feels a study or petitions not warranted we may still make a recommendation for no through trucks but ultimately per ordinance 1846 council urban county council has to approve the posting of no through truck signs in lexington and finally one last point that was asked of traffic engineering for the NCMP packet is if we could provide the council members sort of a cheat sheet. We don't have a cheat sheet prepared today, but that's something we can absolutely do pending approval of whatever direction we would like to go with our traffic calming guide. It's a very good idea to have something out there in the public domain. Not that this is private, but something else out there that's a little bit easier to digest than a 50-page packet. All right. Thank you. Thank you. You generated a couple of questions. If you would, first is Vice Mayor Kay. Thank you, Chair. Thank you for getting back to us with this additional information. I still have concerns about the whole petition process. It's weighted so heavily in favor of no that it's very hard for a neighborhood to actually get a petition and get it approved. That's, again, because if people don't respond, essentially they're being counted as no. And I agreed with the notion that the tenants ought to be included, but if they are included, this raises the threshold even higher. Now we have to get responses from tenants and property owners. If they do not respond, they're counted as no. And I understand what you're saying about what other places do. I just think that we ought to take another look at that. So your comments on that? On the tenant point, we're not adding any more votes because of the tenants. We just wanted to let the tenants know that the property owners get the ballot. So if there's 10 properties on the street, and let's say they're all owned by landlords, there's still only 10 votes. But we're making the tenants aware that their property owners have been given ballot cards. So that way we can let them know, hey, get in touch with your property owner. Okay. I guess then I misunderstood that. And what you've done does not address the concern that I had about tenants. Because they are the people who live on the street. they may be streets that are entirely tenants and they have children and they have concerns about the speed on the street but they have no voice and I think that's inappropriate so I'd like the council to consider this further I don't think this gets to the concern that I have that the threshold for getting any change is so high that it simply mostly doesn't work and that the people who live on the street don't have a voice in a decision about what the traffic pattern will be there. And I don't know what the mechanism is. Is this regulation? Is this ordinance? As it says now, the current packet is something that was passed by the Council about 15 years ago and has these regulations. So the 65% threshold has already been established by ordinance in the NTMP document. I see. So if Council wanted to change that, we would have to amend that ordinance. Is that correct? Yeah, and I think that's going back to the big picture of what we're here before today is amending the traffic calming document and program related to that ordinance. As far as a specific answer to your question, I'm not sure if I have that. Okay. Well, I may come back. I'm curious about how other council members feel about this, but I have a concern, an ongoing concern about the way that it's structured. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, sir. Next is Council Member Bledsoe. Thank you, Chair. I'm not on this committee, but I do have a couple thoughts on, in specific, how we can help it be more citizen-friendly. And I know that the 50-page packet isn't really citizen-friendly. It's hard to understand. You know, it's hard to mail. It takes time. So I was wondering if you might be willing to consider, as you move forward with a new website, is having a place where you can say, click, I would like a new SOP sign, and here's my email address. You can email the packet to them, and maybe a cheat sheet on that same page shows the process and the guidelines so that before someone gets too far into it, we've kind of outlaid the expectations for some of that. Just so it's a little more responsive, maybe like the city app, we can add it to something like that where you can see, hey, one's been requested in the last 12 months, we've said no, so we don't have to keep having that same discussion. And it kind of gives, it doesn't get us out of it, but it kind of provides a way for you to see what's coming in rather than us always coming to you with a request. That's just my only, if we could make it more citizen-friendly in response to that would be helpful. Thank you. I know we are working with some folks internal to our department as far as the website for traffic engineering and for the whole department, and we are looking at the NTMP, Neighborhood Traffic Management Program, and having more information there. We certainly want to make this more accessible, and we'll look to see what we can do to follow your request. Thank you, and I don't know how this plays into Vice Mayor Kaye's thoughts, But it might help if we had email responses in, if they could verify their address. I don't know how we could do that because it might be easy to cheat that system maybe a little bit. But it might get more response if we could do it electronically. So those are my 10 cents. Thanks. Thank you very much. I would just say click here to see the process to get a stop sign, not get a stop sign. Because I think we get a lot of pressure that way. All right. Council Member Maloney. I'd like to clarify. The 65%, I don't have a problem with it, because if it's bad, you're going to fix it. If that road needs to be slowed down, you're going to look at the record. The city's going to go and fix it. We won't need 65%. Nine out of ten times, these petitions that they're getting is something that you ought to agree on. If it's something that is logic out there, you're going to go fix it. You don't need signatures. So the majority of the time you need signatures is something that you all are not in favor of. That's right. Majority of the time. So to me, it's 65%. I think it's a good number. I don't see a problem with it. So going back, and you need to realize that I hope everybody understands that you've been here a long time. The majority of the time, remember what's named the Dr. No, but Andy Trudeau used to say, no, no, no. we had a freeing petition and override. So this is what 65% came from. It's because they're trying to override your recommendation. And I don't mean to say it in a bad way, but basically that's what it is. And you got 10 owners, and the way I understood it, if you send out and four of them respond, and it's three to one, and the rest of them didn't respond, they consider that yes. It's not no. It's yes. And that's what I've been told. Long time, that's what I've always been told. That's how we used to get, well, before you jump the gun now. Because I remember they used to do this with solid waste. We had streets when I got in fights with some of these folks agreeing that everybody on the street should vote on it. Well, they didn't. It was a certain percentage, and they took the yes from that percentage. Now, if that changed, I'd like to know when it changed. When did it change if they don't turn it in? I mean, I think you're speaking to me. I can't speak to anything about waste management, the petition you're referring to. I was just nodding about the traffic engineering petition, and we've got to have 65% of the total, not of the ones that respond. And for the simple example that Roger gave, if you've got 10 people that live on a street, three respond, and two say yes, then you would implement the traffic. It wouldn't pass. I mean, I understand. Well, if it was 65% of the ones you get back. I understand what you're saying. Well, I mean, that's something. But, I mean, to me, I always thought if they didn't respond, they didn't have a problem with it. If there was that much of a problem, they would respond and say no. And I don't know what law has on that or what it is. But to me, if somebody goes out and tries to get a petition fairly, and they've got a bunch of scum landlords who live out of state, and they do not respond back, to me, I always consider that a yes. if they're not going to take that interest in their own property, take interest in what's going on. I don't consider that a no. Now, law may disagree with me on that, but to me, I would figure that would be a yes. Right. So we don't consider it that way, and we haven't in the past. I don't think that we would recommend moving forward. One way to address, I think, some of your concerns is now we're going to duplicate the letters that we send, and letters will be sent to tenants as well as property owners if the property owner does not reside at the address. Well, I think it's a tragedy for the people in the 3rd District, in the 11th District, where there's a lot of rental properties in some of the other districts, where you have scum landlords that do not live here. And you have to put certain things up on the street. And you don't get it with spine bikes from an out-of-the-most landlord that don't live here. I would consider them a yes. And I'm sorry if my colleagues don't agree with me on that, but I assumed if I was living in those districts, I would want my council members to say, if they're not going to respond, I hope it's a yes. And to me, I hope the council realize before we start, I mean, I'm for this. We need to do this. But I think the law needs to define. If somebody don't respond, it's a yes. And if I remember correctly, if you abstain from a vote, sometimes they consider that a yes. No, you vote with the majority. But the majority goes with a yes. That's right. I think that Dowell is informing the committee on the past practice regarding counting landlord silence as a vote no. She's indicated that traffic is not in agreement with changing that. If the committee would like to do otherwise, that could be something that we would look into. I would like to change. I mean, this is where the majority of our problems come from when we do these 25 miles of pain limits or in this area where there's a lot of landlords and a lot of people, tenants, are not obeying the law. And the landlord could care less. They're in another state. So I would hope we change that. I understand your frustration. I think that the practice is rooting in wanting to protect the interests of property owners because, legally speaking, they're the ones with vested interests. But, like I said, that can be something we revisit and talk about in greater detail if you'd like. All right, Bob. Beautiful. I mean, I don't know if it's a place to talk about it since we're trying to pass this. well let's let's let's weed through the rest of our questions and see how we want to take this issue or not i mean we redirected it from last month to this month and we may do so again is that all right uh council member gibbs thank you chair hey roger uh got a well i'm interested in dropping the threshold as well i'd like to consider that and related to that i asked you a question last time i don't know if you had a chance to research it or not but it's the very end of the notes from the last session. And I asked if, basically what it comes down to, say, of a neighborhood that's almost all rental or a street that's almost all rental property and the landlords are unresponsive, but it's a demonstrably bad system. The traffic engineering, the police, the council person all see that this is a dangerous situation. Can we have some sort of emergency provision put in there that we can authorize putting in the speed tables, for example, since it is a public safety issue and we do control the right-of-way. I know the property owners do have a vested interest, but we have a vested interest in protecting everybody and we do control the right-of-way again. So did you have a chance to give that any thought? And I don't know how my colleagues feel about that. For one thing, maybe they wouldn't be supportive of an emergency, but I'd like to see some sort of emergency procedure put in there. I think this comes down to if it truly falls under the NTMP or not. If it's a situation, we have examples, you know, Woodland Avenue in your district, as you may know, there were speed tables installed for pedestrian crosswalk because of a massive influx of student pedestrians crossing from the Woodland Glen dorms to the UK library. You know, that's a case where, yes, the city of right-of-way, but funding for the installation of the speed tables was not done through the NTMP process. So the NTMP doesn't necessarily have to apply if there's a known situation like that. Does that make sense? Yeah. So you think we could do that now? It could be done if, especially in non-residential areas where the local, I don't want to back into residential areas, but if there's a known issue and funding is not a problem, that is, you know, it's not really, I mean, we're not talking about being something funded by the NTMP. We're talking about something being funded from Council Action or some other place in the budget. I don't know the details, obviously, but if it's outside the NTMP and it's something that traffic engineering is studying and recommended, it could conceivably be done. Okay. Do you think we need to have a policy drawn up about About something like that? I mean, we certainly can. I think to Roger's point, we've got a dedicated amount of money for the NTMP program. That's not to say that every stop sign that we install is part of the NTMP program, because it's not. So, I mean, I guess we could look at speed tables the same way, where we could look at, in some instances, safety or whatever is the concern, separate from the NTMP program, I guess we could do that. I mean, would you agree with that? I think that's fair, yeah. Okay. Well, thank you. And I've just got one other thing. I don't know if you can answer this or not, Roger, if it's fair to ask this question, but could you tell me what your budget request was for the coming fiscal year for this program? $50,000. Yeah, I'd like to see more. I mean, just looking at the figures, like a chicane can run from $7,500 to $25,000. A speed table, the range you have here is $4,500 to $6,000. What you guys are asking for isn't going to go very far. And if I'm not mistaken, your budget is practically gone this fiscal year. Is that right? Did we spend it all? Yeah. I think that last time I saw the budget, we had encumbered $42,000 out of the $50,000 or something in that range. If it's in my link, I think I might try to plug that a little bit. I don't know how other people in the link will feel about it, but I would like to see more money dedicated to this program. But thank you, Roger and Dahl. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, sir. Next is Council Member Fred Brown. Thank you, Chair. A couple of points. Some street, I guess, signalization or stop signs or traffic calming, occur on streets that have apartment complexes on that. How does this 65% rule enter into that? Because that apartment complex may have 100 tenants, but they've only got one vote. Is that correct? Technically, I believe that's correct, but I also feel that, historically speaking, the NTMP has not been applied to streets where you've had multifamily dwellings like apartment complexes. probably for that reason. You've never seen one then occur on a street that has apartments? I'm not aware of any. I'm not saying that that's an absolute answer, but I'm not aware. It seems that most of the studies we've ever done have been on streets with single-family dwellings. My fear is that even, like you say, if there's only eight votes on a street that has 410 people living on it because of apartment complexes, the property values may also be higher. So sharing that cost, maybe it's a working-class neighborhood. There's a lot of questions there. I don't know if I really have the answers for it, but typically we've guided the NTMP more towards single-family residential-type streets in the past. And, you know, when we have this type of policy, I guess, that you have, the council can override this. I mean, there's nothing in there that says yes, no, or maybe. If a particular district council person goes out and works with that particular neighborhood group and you only get five of the ten that's supposed to report back in, but the council member in that particular district knows the district and has been involved in neighborhood meetings and things like that, they can bring that forward. And you're not saying that they can't in this particular policy, right? I don't I believe you're correct I think really the petition process is really for the NCMP budget and our process we have in house if it's council or to get funds you need to go through this procedure but I think the council has an ultimate say on that as far as any particular project I believe that's correct. I'd like to think so. Yes, I think if there was something specific that you wanted to do in your district, and it cost money, and you had the funding to do that project, and you brought it before council for approval, I think at your discretion you can do that. And this particular project here basically is a policy on spending the money that's allocated to you, correct? Right. Would it be in order to make a motion to accept this from this report? We are in open discussion if you'd like to make a motion. I'll make the motion that we accept this. It doesn't cut off the debate or anything. Yeah, it does. Second. We have a motion and a second. We're in discussion. I would say, though, just backing up briefly, a minimum of eight votes from the council is paper, scissors, and rock. You're done. Okay. Now, all right. Thank you, Chair. No, no, you didn't second it. It was seconded by Council Member Stennett. Then Council Member Maloney did. Thank you all for your work with the committee today. All right. Council Member Evans, do you want to speak to this motion? Please. We still have three people lined up to ask questions or give comments. And while you can make a motion any time, I just think there were three individuals still lined up to get questions answered. Same thing. Well, no, this is your motion to pass it. That's what we're voting on. But three of us had questions that we still wanted to ask. Chair, they can ask those questions related to the motion. I would encourage the council member to proceed. I agree. If you'd like to proceed, please do so. And if you don't, we'll go on to Council Member James Brown. Okay. Please. Fine. I guess, Roger, thank you for this, and I appreciate what you all did to try to at least involve the tenants to some extent. But I think what I'm hearing is there's still some concern, and I don't know if it's something that we need to think about much deeper. I don't know if we can really solve it through this program itself. Part of it is that the whole idea of silence is consent. That's usually how we go, but it's kind of backwards in this scenario. So that's problematic, I think, for a lot of us. But is there a way, perhaps, in this document to make the distinction of a property owner tenant or resident versus a property owner who's leasing? I mean, because I think that's what we still have some issue with. And I don't know how you find that out. But I think if we could somehow make that distinction and send it so we still keep the property owner engaged with their rights, or encouraging landlords to give that proxy to the resident, but it wouldn't work in the multifamily units. But something along those lines to kind of help this idea of we're cutting tenants out. I think that's a larger discussion, but that was just kind of one of my thoughts based on the discussion that's been going on. I don't know if it's something that we really can fix, and perhaps maybe it's just encouraging landlords to allow that tenant to vote, if it's going to that resident. So I don't know. I guess I just ask that perhaps you all continue to think about that, because that is the concern that I'm hearing, that it's appreciating the landlord or the property owner's role. But, I mean, we do have a distinction with landlords versus property owners who actually live there. And I think we need to try and come up with some resolution for that. And, again, I don't know if it's here in this document or someplace else with legal's help. But I would just continue to encourage that. Very good. Thank you, ma'am. Council Member James Brown. Thank you, Chair. I just have a couple questions. What is the trigger for sending a letter to a tenant? I guess when you look up the property and see that the property owner's address is different than the street? Yeah, that would be the trigger. When we look at the time comes around for the ballot petition, we'll look to see that we make sure we mail the ballot to the listed owner from the county PVA. And if that's not the same as what the address is on the street, we can send an additional letter to the address. So if there's multiple tenants at a residence, do you send it to all the tenants? It would be sent probably to a tenant of 123 Street. We probably wouldn't identify any particular tenant. We'd just send it to that household. Okay. Yeah, and I kind of agree with or kind of want to echo the sentiments that Council Member Brown stressed about. If you're trying to implement this program on a street that has multifamily units and apartment buildings, how do you gauge their concerns or their interests? I know the property owners have a vested interest in the property, but I feel the tenants have a vested interest in the safety of the street and their community. So I think we need to look at a way to try to incorporate their opinions and their concerns, whether that's maybe creating a separate petition that acknowledges that it was signed by a tenant and not the homeowner. I think that's important information that we can take into consideration moving forward. And then I'd also like to, you know, I'm also excited to see what kind of cheat sheet you can prepare for us. I know kind of explaining this program without, you know, the main points in the process is kind of difficult, so a cheat sheet would help us communicate this to residents. Thank you. Thank you, sir. I think from my point of view, I prefer the term program guide to cheat sheet. Council Member Akers. Thank you, Chair. I have a couple questions, I guess. Council Member Maloney mentioned that the petitions are usually a way to go around traffic's recommendations. That's not what I necessarily understood. And so I wanted you to back up and tell us if that's true or, I mean, because my understanding was petitions actually initiate the process for traffic to review an issue in a neighborhood. Correct? Yeah, I think the best way for me to answer that question is that if we have determined, well, typically a petition is needed for a study, like you understand. If a petition is submitted to traffic engineering, we do our study, and we recommend no, whatever it may be. Then the council member, the council, knows that, well, a neighborhood is in support of this, but it doesn't meet traffic engineering's criteria. So then you have your direction. So then the neighborhood could initiate the ballots. That's when the ballots would come into play? The ballots come into play for type 2 or type 3 traffic calming, speed humps, things of that nature, not really multi-way stops, speed limit changes, but the major traffic calming items. And I think if, say, traffic engineering doesn't recommend traffic calming of a type 2 nature, the council could ask us to maybe initiate that second ballot, But that would be the discretion of looking at what the neighborhood wants and also traffic engineering recommendations. Okay. And I do agree with the vice mayor and Council Member Maloney in that I think that the 65% should not be of all property owners. We shouldn't count no responses as a no vote. I have a particular street that has tried to get speed humps and tried to get traffic calming. in the Georgetown Street Corridor area, and most of those properties are owned by absentee landlords. And while you can say that they have a vested interest in their properties, I'm not sure that they have a vested interest in the community or the neighborhood. So for that reason, if a resident can collect 100 signatures or 35 signatures on a petition and then get half of those to send in ballots saying yes out of a street of 50 homes, I think that that should be enough. And so I think that we should amend the plan to either count it as 65% of respondents to the ballots or count no response as a yes. I'm not sure which way is best to phrase it, but I can't make that motion. I'm not a member of the committee, so I would ask someone else to do that. because I just think it's important that we listen to those who live there and also, I guess, take into consideration council members' input. But I think we do know and we've heard the same requests for years and we just can't get enough people to send a ballot back in. That shouldn't be a no. We shouldn't just be satisfied with no for an answer in that situation. And then you said that you wanted to change it in the future to require petitions for no through truck petitions or no through truck signs. So can you talk a little bit about why you would want that petition to have for that to require a petition? Yes. Basically, it's going to be similar to other items in the NTMP document in the sense that if traffic engineering doesn't feel on the initial request that no through trucks, a no-through-trucks restriction is needed, then they can default to a petition. Going back to your first question, if then we can show that while the neighborhood has a petition here, traffic engineering has a recommendation and gives the council member or the council at least more information as to go one way or the other, and that's the prerogative of the council. So I haven't looked at this entire booklet, but are no-through trucks, I guess the qualifications for when you all would say yes, they're necessary, or when they're not necessary? What would your basis be on your own research? A basis for no-through trucks is if it's a local street that has excessive truck traffic, that has no need to be there. That is truck traffic, that's for commercial purposes, it's not pertaining to city usage. that's the main reason even maybe perhaps residential collectors that only serve as local residential streets so there's no reason for truck traffic to be using those are those are sort of the rules of thumb okay i haven't had i mean i haven't had a lot of requests for them but i do have a neighborhood that has no through truck signs um as you know we've recently talked about this and yet trucks still go through there so i guess the next question is how do we enforce the trucks that are still using the neighborhoods as a cut-through? We're investigating that request now to see if there needs to be more signs based on the existing restrictions. And if that's the case... Or step-up enforcement. I mean, is that the issue? Do we just need to have the police department sit there for a couple days? Yes, ma'am. Okay. All right, my time is up. Thank you. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, ma'am. Vice Mayor. Thank you, Chair. I want to speak directly, first of all, to the motion that's on the floor, which is to approve. And I would urge the committee not to vote in favor of this proposal, of the motion, because we're not close, I don't think, to having considered in detail the issues that we have before us. What I would like to see is, I don't want to see another, this is the packet. It's got 53 pages of material. I don't want to see that come back to the committee but what I would like to see some very specific issues raised I'd like to see those sections of this packet come back to the committee so that we can take them one at a time and from the committee at least make a recommendation up or down a few council members have spoken to the question of whether the 65% ought to be of all those returned or of all the owners I'd like to talk about each one of those and then have the committee consider those individually. And I will not call the question because Council Member Maloney is waiting to speak, but I'd like to take the motion and defeat it and then see what else we need from the staff. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, sir. And Council Member Maloney. I will support this because, as you know, when we first came on the council, a lot of it, we were seeing things that were coming through the docket where council members have requested for four-way stops, three-way, I mean, and no two trucks and things like that. And a lot of folks were questioning, why are we doing this? Now, it used to be the service committee had a checklist, and this is what I like about this, that when we brought these things to the council, we have a checklist. And this is why I want to go back to this, is that, like, for instance, what Council Member Brown said, he could probably bring, you can bring anything you want to the council, and he would propose that we want a four-way stop. But he doesn't have the petition. He's only got three petitions out of the 15 on the street. And council says, we'll go, okay. Well, with this in place, it's a checklist that says, do you have your petition? Do you have it approved from the police and fire if this is the right recommendation? Boom, boom, boom, boom. And this will help me vote fairly. I know this is not perfect, but a lot of things in government are not perfect, but it's a heck of a lot better than what we're dealing with right now. And I want to commend Dow and you guys. We work together to put this, because you all were told a year ago almost, to put something together. so when we have these kind of job signs or street coming in, you want to be sure it's clean. And we just relied on the council members. And that stood a red flag up that did not follow what you all are asking for here. So I hope that this has been going on. This has been a great, what you've written, we've already updated some of the problems. You brought it back three or four times. I think at the time we need to stop and go forward with this and learn from this. And we can come back in six months to see how this is and give us an update how this is, because I really think it's going to have an impact on this committee because I'm going to have a hard time voting every time some council member comes in there without no checklist, and I'm not going to support any of you. And it may be that if you all don't support it, why would I let the council members support it? Now, if he brings a petition and he has a neighborhood that supports it, I support something like that. But just to have the word from a council member because the district didn't go out and do what they were supposed to do, I had a problem with that. And to me, that's why I think this is a good document to start off with. And I hope just council supports it that we go on forward with this. So I believe that we pass it. So I hope we all support it. Thank you, sir. Vice Mayor Kaye. Thank you, Chair. Just to be clear, I have no objection. I don't think anybody does, to a checklist, to information, to a procedure. All that's great. The question is on some very specifics, like if there's a petition and there are 20 people on the street who are owners and 10 of them don't return their petition request, do they get counted yes or no? Right now they get counted no. That's the procedure. And I think we ought to look at that at the very least. I personally favor changing that. It may be that on balance the rest of the council doesn't. That's okay. But before we approve what's before us, I think we have to have that conversation. Secondly, if we have an opportunity to create policy that we think is favorable, we ought to do it. I don't want to be sitting here as a council member and having individual council members bring forward specific requests that don't meet the criteria, asking us to overturn that. I think that's the wrong way for the council to operate. I think we ought to, if we can, reach agreement about what we want in the regulations and then uphold those regulations. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, sir. with no others signed up to speak, we're in a position for committee members to vote either to advance this to the full council when it would read out next month, which would leave time for any additions or corrections you might want, or to vote against it and keep it in committee to make any additions or corrections before we might pass it forward. So all those in favor of moving it forward would vote yes. Those in favor of keeping it would vote no. If you all would please make your selections, that would be great. All right. So is that everybody? We all in? Four-four tie fails, so we're going to keep it in committee. So there's time for those of you who have points of policy interest to spend some time with the staff about that and have this come back in a fruitful form in terms of specific changes you'd like to have made to the potential update to an already existing program. Any questions or comments on that? Vice Mayor. Yeah, I guess I'll just reiterate what I said already. I would like to see, coming back to this committee, information about the issues that have been raised by the committee. I think most of the document is fine. Okay. But I'd like to see the specific issues highlighted with what the changes would be or places where staff is recommending we leave them just the way they are, in particular this petition issue. I think that's what we need to focus on. So that's my request. Thank you. Mr. Mulvaney, is his request clear to you then? Yes, Mr. Chair. And then just based on today's example, were the things that you highlighted from last month to this month affected in the NTMP? Were there any changes you made to it between last month and this month based on questions from the committee? The only thing that changed from last month to this month was some clarification as far as information being sent to both the tenant and the landlord. That was the only thing that changed from last month's document. Well, we'll just look forward. We can work with this for the next month or however long it takes and put it back in with some specific corrections or changes to the potential NTMP update and let the committee consider them so we can work together on that. Everybody good? Excellent. Oh, I'm sorry. Yes, sir. Go ahead. Yes, Council Member Stenet. I don't think they're following what you're asking, Chair. I think if Vice Mayor wants to keep it in committee and specific issues, what are those issues? You didn't say. So you may think there's still issues in it, but I think you need to clarify so they can go back. Staff doesn't understand what you're asking. So what are those issues you would like for them to bring back specifically next meeting? If you'd like, Vice Mayor. The one issue that I'm most focused on is the question of how the petitions are handled and whether tenants get to vote and whether when the vote is counted, whether we're asking for 65% of the responses that come in or 65% of all the people who could have responded. That's what I'm most interested in. Well, I mean, they've already made their recommendation, Chair. I think that's my point. If you want to debate that topic, let's debate it now. Otherwise, they've already made their recommendation. Okay, calm down. We're good. Go ahead, Vice President. I believe that Council Member Fred Brown made a motion. I believe we voted on it. And I believe that we were ready to move on. But if we're not, somebody needs to make a motion. I don't want to keep this in committee just because we want to keep it in committee. Let's either get action on it and have the conversation. If there's something specifically they need to come back with, I'm fine with that. But just tell us what it is so we can have something to take action on. Otherwise, if you don't like it, you don't like it, and we'll just go back to the old way. And, again, eight votes trumps anybody in this room, so it doesn't matter. Thank you, sir. Thank you, Vice Mayor. Council Member Fred Brown. Thank you, Chair. Just to clarify on this, I think Kevin's got a real good point. the procedure should have been you could have amended the motion and said i want to go 80 percent or something but we got to give them some definite direction because if i was if i was them i would come back with the same report because we have not told that and you can tell them all you want but that's their that's their recommendation now their recommendation comes to us let's pass it or not pass it, then let's amend it or make motions to correct it. That's the procedure. Very good, sir. Thank you. Thank you. Council Member Evans. So if we're talking about motions, I believe the policy that we're trying to talk about or finish is, it's just something you all write. We just need to vote on it. So I guess I would move that the NTP regard no responses, a no response or discontinue I guess the practice of a no response equaling a no vote. So moved. Alright, we have a motion. Alright, I'm looking for a second or we're moving on. Second. I'm sorry. I'll second it, but I also need clarification. Can you just repeat the motion? That the NTP discontinue the policy of no responses equaling a no vote. Or a non-response? A non-response, yeah. So a non-response just wouldn't be counted? Would not be counted, correct. Thank you. All right. So motioner and seconder are congruent here. This is at the NTMP. Well, it should be NTMP. Discontinue the practice of a non-response equaling a no vote. Okay. We're in discussion of this amendment, I suspect. Council Member Maloney. I just want to get clarification here. So going back to what I have concern about, if a landlord does not respond back, we consider that as a yes, is what you're saying. Is that what your motion means? I'm not saying it. Somebody else is. Oh, you mean your motion means if no response means no. Currently, the practice is that no response equals a no vote. My motion is to do away with that policy. So no response would not be included in whatever the tally is. And they would just go with the responses that they get. Okay. Thank you. Council, all right. I just want to, this needs to read that the NTMP discontinued the practice of a non-response equaling a no vote. Those are the words that have been agreed upon. They're not reflected correctly here. All right. Next up is Council Member Akers. Thank you. I think that we need to provide additional clarification on what that, then is it just a majority vote of the respondents? So is it one more than we count, and then it's a yes, or is it 65% or is it 80% of those that respond? I think that we need to give them a little bit more direction in the policy instead of just discontinuing the old practice. What's the new practice? I mean, we need to be a little bit clearer. I can't, again, amend the motion. But I like this. I think it's a great start. Thank you. Thank you, ma'am. Council Member Stenet. Thank you, Chair. I guess our law department's here. I'd like to ask them a question about this. Can we, if there's no response, and we just don't consider that property of being active in this process, so we can legally exclude them if they do not respond? I mean, there's a number of issues why people don't respond. They could come up with a lot of good excuses. They could be out of town. They could be wherever, whatever it is, ill. So how do we handle that legally? and if you need time to come back the next meeting we can do that too but i may need to consider this issue further but for notice purposes if the the petition or the request is being mailed to the correct address of the property owner for notice purposes i would think it's sufficient that they are on notice that a change may occur in the neighborhood and if they're given a certain amount of time to respond, I think that may be sufficient. But I would like to get further clarification and study this issue some more. Yeah, if you could do that for us, because I think as long as we know that this is the process, do we allow six weeks, whatever, do we send two letters just to make sure, do they have to be certified, just so if we're going to adopt this policy, that legally we're The base is covered. We've tried our best to tempt, and if they don't respond, they don't respond. I'll get back to you at the next committee meeting if that's okay. That'd be fine. Sounds wonderful. Thank you. Council Member Henson. Thank you, Chair, and thank you for the opportunity to speak. Roger, when these notices go out, does it have a statement on there relating to no response? Yes, I believe we do state that a non-response is counted as a no. So if we could change that to say a failure to respond would result in we would assume that you are in approval of this action or whatever. I'm just throwing that out because I would think if they were really against it, they would respond as opposed to, yeah, sure, and just ignore it. Or if they just don't care one way or the other, if they're an absentee landlord. If the council decides to go down that route. And I can't make a motion or anything, but I just want it. I do think that needs further clarity. Thank you. Thank you, ma'am. Thank you, Chair. Council Member James Brown. Thank you, Chair. And I guess one of the reasons I would support keeping it in committee is because I would like more information on how we can include the input from the tenants. I don't know if I made that clear when I spoke earlier, but that's one thing I would like to hear is any ideas you guys may have or your department may have on how we can include the input from the tenants on the program and the traffic calming changes that are being recommended or suggested. All right. Is that something you can do? we could consider something um yeah what was to consider we'll see what we can consider now one thing i want to point out on the not all petitions if i may take the time not all petitions require it to be property owner there's some of them that are just residential and that's mostly pertaining to like multi-way stops parking type petitions changes in speed limits no through trucks just to name some off the top of my head. Really, the property owner comes involved with the type 2 traffic calming or type 3 traffic calming, but we can consider your request for... Which I think, and sorry to interrupt you, which I think is an important distinction. I mean, if the property owner is going to be required to pay for something, I would think that you would want them in support of that, and I think that's our recommendation. I mean, I understand the issues on streets where it's primarily all tenants, but I still think if the government's going to require a property owner to pay for something that affects their property value, I would hope that the property owner would vote for that, as opposed to their tenant. That does bring some clarity to the situation, but I would still ask for you to brainstorm and see if there's a way to get tenant input on some of those changes. Thank you. Thank you, sir. Council Member Maloney. I'm fine if we leave this for another month to get the law to give us on that. Now, back to the tenants that I run into, rentals, anytime a renter complains, most of the time they're right, and most of the time you guys go in there and fix that problem. I've seen. If a stop sign needs to be in, people run out. When a renter gets involved and they get other renters, I'm going to you guys, you all are big help, because a lot of times these renters, No, there's a problem, and I understand that we have to obey by the law that the landlord is the only people that can do when it comes to petitions. But you guys have helped renters, because I've had it in my district before. Peggy's had it before, where renters have came out and said we need a four-way stop, and you guys went out there and did it, and without a petition, because it is a safety issue. So a lot of times, renters are a big help, and I just want to let it go on record that everybody knows that renters are, if they've got a problem, they call you guys, because a lot of times, they are right, and I have, because their landlord, like I said, don't care less, and that's why I'm glad we're all going to look into it for us. Thank you. Thank you, sir. Anyone else on the motion? Then we'd move to a vote. All those in favor would signal by voting aye. Those not in favor would vote aye. All right. Once again, we've achieved our wonderful 4-4 tie, which brings us back to the opportunity to, I would just say to the committee, obviously we will keep this in committee. I think we will try to refer to today's tape of the meeting to see how many kinds of quandaries were raised for staff, and we will bring this back. We currently do not have a March meeting planned. Our next meeting is on April the 19th, so we bring forward something at that time. Any other comments or questions on this issue at this time? Thank you all very much. Then we move to item number three on our agenda, which is Richmond Road speed limit reduction. This was brought by Council Member Scutchfield, who, while not a part of the committee, is here to make comment to it. And I would go to you now, please. I can just say something real quick. Yes, ma'am. Currently, as soon as you get past Manowar on Richmond Road, it changes from 45 to 55. I think since this speed limit's been in effect, we've had Lakeside Neighborhood, we've had Ellerslie, we've had Childsburg, Walnut Hill area. There's a lot of neighborhoods around this area, and for it to be 45 through that, especially it goes past Jacobson Park, I'd like to ask the state to consider I think it would be in line with the neighborhood structure and the business structure around that area So do you have your 65% petition with you? I'm sorry, excuse me Do not Alright, so in essence you're asking us to send a to ask the state to do this, is that correct? Is there anyone from the staff to give us any input on this at all? She only takes up one page in the beautiful packet it's right there if you all have interest in it it's right there staff anything you're good to go on this somebody wrote it all right fine you got a question council member gibbs thank you i was going to make a motion to approve this resolution so i moved motion and second and a second thank you council member brown we're in discussion speak to the motion Please, sir. I'm looking at this resolution here, and I'm just a little concerned about the verbiage. It says from Manowar Boulevard to a point east of Hayes Boulevard. And I think that needs to be a more definite point. And it could be Old Richmond Road is a point that you could consider. And I don't have any problem if you'd stop there. but I'm not sure what east of Hayes Boulevard means. It means as you pass Hayes Boulevard, it would resume back to the 55. Which is further out than Old Richmond Road. Which is where the last, basically Hayes Boulevard is where the last neighborhood on Richmond Road. And the last traffic signal until you get to the interstate. Correct. All right. So, Council Member Fred Brown, anything else on this issue? No, Hayes Boulevard. Okay. No one else interested? Then we move to a vote. All those in favor of the resolution on page 64 would signify by saying aye. Aye. Opposed? Like sign? Unanimous consent. Thank you very much. Item four on our agenda, financial performance for materials recycling facility as placed by Council Member Henson. While not a member of the committee is here to make commentary, would you like to start? Please, ma'am. Thank you, Chair. Just to give everyone a little bit of history. Based upon an internal audit of the Materials Recycling Center, there were several inefficiencies and issues that were raised from the audit. So since then, and Tracy Thurman and the staff at the MRF have made considerable changes, and I thought it would be good if they could come back and bring us a report of how things are looking out there, what changes have been made, what we're up against with the market, and so forth. So, thank you, Chair. And I guess Tracy's going to, Tracy Thurman, the Director of Waste Management. I'm just actually going to turn this over to Commissioner of Finance, Bill O'Meara. The charge, and you said it accurately, we went through and had the internal audit and worked to address all of our inefficiencies and address those findings. But as part of that discussion, you all asked us to review our costs. and you wanted to know what the actual cost of services were. So we've been engaged in that process, and he's going to kind of step you through where we are with that. While he's coming up, I would just say that this was an issue of interest to Councilmember Ed Lane, who had financial thoughts in his mind when he asked us to look into it. So I appreciate both his time and the committee's time on it. Mr. Maloney, do you wish to speak now or after the presentation? Very good, sir. Mr. O'Mara, welcome. Thank you, Mr. I look forward to those comments. What I would like to do is go over just an overview of the MRF, excuse me, the material recycling facility. Also discuss some of the national trends that we're seeing. Then talk about the cost analysis that was requested. Discuss some action points and then a question and answer. So, first of all, we've entered into a regional recycling center. There are 16 different regional and private affiliates that participate in this operation. It operates with a single stream, and that term will come back. We'll talk about that multiple times, but that's where all the recyclings are commingled. The person who is turning in the recycling does no sorting and gives everything in a single stream. and that we operate really the only recycling facility of any significant size in this region. So now we have to talk about national trends, because what was going on in 2007 is not a reflection of what's going on today. The commodity revenues are down by 38%, and recently that has gone further down. Average costs are up 48% over that same period. So as you can see, the revenue in 2007, these are national averages, not here in Lexington, $125 a ton. Now the average in 2015 is $77. The net gain in a MRF recycling center back in 2007 was positive. The national average now is a recycling center operating at a loss. So why is that? Well, part of it is that decision that most everyone in the nation made to go to single-string recycling in order to encourage recycling. And that happens to be the most expensive way to process recycling. And we're finding that there are more non-recyclables, more contaminants, more waste, more runoff, more non-recyclable product that comes into the MRF that has to be identified through the single-string processing. There's also large decreases in the amount that commodities can be sold on the market, and that the recycling has actually had a positive on the consumer and on the manufacturer. They're now using lighter and more efficient packaging, which means the recycling, it takes more to weigh more in order to gain a ton of recyclable material. And there are more and more types of recycling material. Again, putting more pressure on that single stream processing. So if you look at our recycling process, we looked at the 12 months ending, June 30, 2015. And I want to thank David Loney, who was contracted by us in order to do a very detailed analysis to identify exactly the revenues and the costs associated with our MRF processing center. And these are the results that he came up with. Excuse me. So in FY 2015, we took in 36,378 inbound tons that were delivered. 22.5 of those were from Lexington, and about 14,000 was from the other affiliates. So about 61% of what we're processing is local Fayette County. About 39% is from outside Fayette County. Of those 36,600, 34,379 outbound tons. The difference is what just is called not waste, but there was water, there was things that were not able to be sorted. So there was just under 25,000 tons of the 36.6 that could be sold. There was another 4,000 tons of glass. And this is a great illustration of how the market has changed. In prior years, glass was a commodity that could be sold. Now, no one will buy it. We actually have to pay for someone to take it and recycle it. So we sell about 4,000 tons of glass last year to be recycled, and about 5,400 turned out to be true waste and was sent to the landfill. So of all of that activity, we took in $2,178,000. Of that, $1.6 million was from commodity sales. $494,000 was from affiliate processing revenue, and about $64,000 was affiliate marketing revenue that came in to us. Now, of that, there's a total of about $2,885,000 in order to do the entire process for the entire stream. $697,000 in personnel, $1.5 million in operating. And if you stop there, we're in a positive position. But if you take into consideration the depreciation of the building and the equipment, that would be another annual cost of $654,000. So after depreciation, we're showing a loss of $707,000 for FY 2015. Do you want now to? I thought you wanted to wait. That's not the loss that we should focus on. Do you want to jump in now, Council Member Maloney? Question here. Personnel is our personnel, right? That's correct. For operation, those are the workers we hire from labor force. Is that right? That's part of it. There's also LFUCG personnel. Who supervise those guys? Well, I'm here to give a financial report rather than an operational report, so I'm not in a position to answer that. If we want to talk operation, I would have to answer that. Is somebody personnel supervising them? I mean, that's something I need to ask you all. Personnel supervising them? Okay. Huh? Are you getting us somewhere here, sir? We have 42 temp labor that come consistently from an agency that we have a contract with, and then we have an on-site supervisor. That was one of the things that previously in the audit that we had from 2013 that we worked to correct that. And then Barry Prater, of course, is our plant manager. He worked to divide folks into what he calls CAM teams, so they have very set duties. So that seems to have worked to have that consistent return of our workers. Is that part of this cost? Yes, it is, but it would also take into all the other things that go into operating, which might mean the maintenance of our equipment, whether we have to have somebody called in, because we have Machine X and some of the various companies that assist with that, our specific equipment to the MRF. Okay, thank you. Sir? Mr. Romero? Yes, sir. Oh, Council Member Stennett. What percentage of the operating costs is the day labor piece? Well, I think we ended up coming in a berry. You might correct me if I'm wrong. I think wasn't it around, it's less than a million, isn't it, for sure? The labor is right up, wouldn't it? It was less than that. Yeah. It's a little bit less than a million dollars. And that was the other thing, too, that Berry was really instrumental in focusing on and getting those hours specific to the time that we needed them there to operate and the teams that we needed them to operate in. And the other thing that had been identified previously, too, was overtime. And, you know, we focused really hard on bringing that overtime rate down. And a lot of that is because, you know, with preventative maintenance, the schedule that he's put in place, that that has brought those costs down where we used to kind of run off the rails. And that was some of the things that we worked to fix through that audit and helped us identify where those inefficiencies were. And then, so the 1.533 for operating, a million of that is personnel for the day labor piece? So really personnel is $1.7 million for this whole operation. That's what I'm trying to get to. Yes. And we're saving a significant, I assume we're saving a significant amount using the day labor force. Correct. Of the $697,000, are those workers only dedicated to the recycling center? Yes. Those are not someone that comes off a route and goes over there and work? We don't do that at all? No. Okay. Thank you, Chair. One more question. Mr. Maloney, please. How many employees do you have now for the city? About seven, yeah. Seven? Mm-hmm. Yeah, one of the things that we have is a dedicated safety officer there, the plant manager. We have a scales operator, an administrative support person. And then we have various people that are supervisors and that are working with equipment loading items from the tipping floor into the equipment to process it. So essentially what you've got is sorters, and a lot of the things have to be picked out where the machines are not doing that. Very good, sir. Council Member Henson. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Tracy. Thank you. Thank you. And I think one thing that's not reflected here that may be in the report if we can get it finished, But there would be, if we didn't recycle, there would be a cost to send it to the landfill. Yes. There would be an environmental cost as well. So I just wanted to point that out. So this is, even though this is the actual cost to run that recycling, it doesn't take that and... Right. That's not the true loss, and actually that's Commissioner O'Meara's next slide. Okay. Sorry I got here. Thank you. Thank you, ma'am. Mr. Merrill, welcome back. Thank you, and I apologize. I prepared this at a 10,000-foot level. If Council wants line-by-line expenses, we can certainly furnish that at a later time. Let's do that later. So, as I was saying, this is the raw operational cost, taking into consideration depreciation, but that's not really the number that we focused on. there's one more step and that is if we had not recycled we would have thrown it away it would have gone to the landfill and so we felt like we debated on how to best present this we have shown the cost of the landfill under the current contract now let me tell you why that's important so under our current contract the cost of just throwing everything away was $375,000. So our true cost of going and making the effort to recycle is the difference, the $333,000. But if you would have used the cost that we had in our prior contract, that landfill cost would have been $522,000, and the opportunity cost or the actual cost of recycling is $185,000. So this is a point that I wanted to make. Central Kentucky is landfill rich. The average cost of landfill nationally is way above what is the cost of landfilling in the central Kentucky area. We just changed from paying $27.20 for a ton of garbage to $19.50 for a ton of garbage, which made the cost of recycling look and appear much larger because we have such a low cost of landfilling in the central Kentucky area. There's not a lot of recycling centers. There's lots of landfill that are competing for that garbage. So just a point of reference of what is unique in the central Kentucky area. So based on that, we wanted to talk about some action points that are being considered and something that we wanted to share with the council. One was raising fees to affiliates, reviewing the commodity mix, and talk about additional investments needed in the recycling space. So the first thing is affiliates are paying us $35 processing fee. Then we sell the commodities and proportionally give back to the affiliates those revenues. So depending on the market and depending on the volume of the affiliate, they may get a check because revenues exceeded their processing fees. They may come out even and not owe us, and we not owe them. So we felt that in the spirit of a regional recycling, for affiliates to be getting paid and for us to be in a lost position, we're not really sharing the cost of recycling in today's market. So looking at what would approximate we would be at a break-even, they would be at a break-even, instead of actually being a revenue-generating process, is a $50 to $55 processing fee to ask for the affiliates to pay. Again, that is trying to make them approximately even and us approximately even in the recycling space. And I think I just said all that before going to this line. So that would bring in $212,000, $282,000 at $50 to $55 a ton, trying to make that cost-sharing reasonable amongst all affiliates. However, if you make that fee too high, then we may disincentivize recycling and the use of our center. So much of our single stream processing, You have to have people sorting, regardless of whether that stream is running heavy or light. You may be able to shorten the hours that you run it, but that variable cost does not run linearly to the number of tons that come in. It's kind of a semi-fixed cost. So we will not save money proportionally to the lower affiliate stream if we discourage affiliates to participate in this process. The other action point would be to review the commodity mix. We mentioned glass. We could eliminate glass, not have it as part of the recycling, and actually it would go to the landfill. Well, we're currently paying people $15 to recycle it. We would wind up paying $19.50 to throw it away. even though it does put a lot of wear and tear and safety concerns on the processing. But in effect, we would be paying more to throw it away than to pay someone to recycle. The other thing we could look at is expanding the number of plastics. The number three through seven plastics, they now have a marketable value, but it would also require additional sorting. So we would have to look to see if those additional costs would be more than compensated by the market revenue that would be generated by those additions to our commodities. And then finally, we wanted to share with you that we have to look at the additional depreciation that we would have to incur. There are things like dust control, enhanced heating, cooling, sprinkling systems, and electrical system upgrades that are needed now or in the near future at our current MRF. Round numbers, about a million dollars needs to be invested in order to keep the MRF going on an ongoing basis. And those would be needed to be done in the near future. And we would have to look and see how that affects, along with the commodity, impact on the MRF operations. The one thing we also wanted to talk about was a private option. The problem with talking about a private option, it's all a matter of timing. If we're at an all-time low in revenue and at an all-time high in increased operating cost, a private option is going to want to have a margin of profit in their processing. So we're probably going out to market at probably the highest cost of a private RFP of the recent history. We don't know what that cost is. We would not know unless we floated that out to the market to see what they would charge. If we abandoned our MRF and went to a private option, then that would free up the current location. It's an I-2 zone land. But the thing to think about is they do need a profit margin. The closest recycling centers currently are in Cincinnati, Columbus, and Chicago, and so you have to cover those transportation costs. And the other thing is once we go down a private enterprise road, it would be very, very expensive to change mines after the end of that first contract if there was an escalator. It would be very hard to pull back from a private and go back into a public MRF operations. So the timing is not really great for exploring this option, but, of course, it is one that could be explored if Council desires. Well timed, sir. We have several questions racked up. First is Council Member Fred Brown. Thank you, Chair. First question, give me a definition or who is an affiliate in this process, this whole process? Sure. I have a, Chair, what did you call it? It's not a cheat sheet. It's a reference page. A program guide. A program guide to answer that question. Republic Services, Rumpke are our two highest volume affiliates. After that comes the city of Frankfurt, then Franklin County, and then Winchester Municipal. Those five affiliates generate 71% of our affiliate volume. And our own sanitation system doesn't enter into any of these numbers. Is that correct? I was just looking at what we brought, that 31% or 39% that comes from affiliate. I was telling you what was the lion's share of that percentage. Well, but they're paying. They're currently paying that $35 processing fee and a $7 market fee. Are we paying, as a government, are we paying anything into that? We're paying for the operation of the MRF. Okay, okay. Because, I mean, you're trying to keep these two agencies. The landfill is a separate agency, I guess, of the government, and then this operating center is a separate. Correct. Is there intercompany monies there at all? Well, that's a good question to ask. All of the expenses for the MRF are in the waste management realm and in the urban service. Now, when we actually take something to the transfer center, that garbage that's been sorted, then that becomes a landfill cost. Because the costs are, I think this cost is out of General Fund? It's actually out of the Urban Services Fund. And the effect on the homeowners, if you discontinued glass, I'm trying to get down to the very basic. You know, everybody's kind of educated to the fact that we're putting everything in there. In fact, my, I guess it's, I'm trying to think of the term, it's not Lenny, it's not Herbie, it's Rosie. Rosie. My Rosie's fuller than my other disposals because of that, and I think the statistics and all the numbers, you know, lend out to that. But if you took glass out of that, you made some points there that there was some good points. I guess those would go straight to the landfill and then be crushed up by that method? Well, they would go to the landfill. I'm not sure they would be crushed, and it would cost us $19.50 per ton. Currently, we're selling to a recycler for $15 a ton. But we are losing on that issue, plus the fact that if it went into the other, if it's costing us $19 or so, that would come out of the sanitation fund. As far as the operating expense or that? You see what I'm talking about? I do. Moving monies around between funds? You can. I was just trying to look at total cost to the government, regardless of which fund. And then operating the expenses that you had up there, did they have any capital items in there as far as replacement vehicles or replacement equipment? I'll have to look closely, but we tried to capture anything that was depreciable in that depreciation expense and not in the operating repairs and maintenance, fuel, that's in operating, but not the actual purchase of a truck. But you've got $700 and some thousand dollars in depreciation, which is a non-cash item. Correct. So how does that play out? Generally, depreciation is a vehicle that's used to replace capital assets. So how does that play out? Have you got a program on that or a plan? I would say that that reflects the expense that has been made in the past. So, I mean, we're truly on cash flow. We are not losing money. Not this year. If we spent a million dollars next year, that year we would be losing. But we are trying to smooth that out with the depreciation expense showing on an annual basis what that carrying cost would be. Okay, thanks. Good report. Thank you, sir. Council Member Kevin's tenant. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Commissioner. A couple questions. On your last slide, on page 78 or page 14, I thought we did an RFP two years ago when I was chair of this committee to find out what a private company would charge us. Well, my understanding with the RFP was having a private company manage the hourly labor, not the entire MRF operation. Okay, when you say entire operation, what else is there besides, obviously, the labor and the machinery? Well, there's the location, the machinery, the management, as well as the labor. But at the RFP, I thought we said they would basically just come and manage the property for us. We wouldn't sell them the property. Well, my understanding, and I'll defer to the director, but that was for managing just the line people, not maintenance of the line, not safety inspector, not commodity sales, not that type of thing. Yeah, I see Todd. I see a couple coming up for your added attention. Todd Slayton? It was just like an operational RFP. It wasn't turning the whole thing over to them. They were just going to run it. They were going to run the manufacturing side of it for us, technically. And as I recall, it was fairly expensive to do just that piece of it. Okay. I just said not that added anything, and this is not for you, Todd, but you're welcome to stay up there. I'll think of something to ask you. Please. Appreciate your time. Thanks for coming to the mic. Yeah, I didn't want to. But, you know, I think I just want to try to get a number and add some validity to, you know, unknown costs. I thought we had sort of that. We knew that cost and what that RFP came back at. But I guess we try to maybe try to need another one to get a better sense of what other options are out there. So, Bill, I guess we put on hold building a new MRF. and I assume that's still on hold and going to stay on hold because we feel comfortable at this site? We're not actively looking at building a new Murph. We were talking about repairs and maintenance to upgrade and maintain the current site. So that million dollars, does that add any capacity to the current site? Because we have, what, 17 counties bringing it or 19 counties? 16 affiliates. Okay. 16 entities. How many counties around us bring their recycling to? You said Franklin and Jackson. So I think there's 12 public entities and four private. Okay. So you're talking about the million dollars in capital. Right. Does that add any more capacity for recycling? Actually, it doesn't. It's to make the plant work more efficiently, and those that have been deferred, I guess, the last three years. So what we did last year is we had some money available, and we had an assessment done before the year ended. And so it was mainly to look at our HVA system. Of course, Jim Sheet and his group in facilities maintenance, they looked at our roof. The roof is in real dire need of repair. Of course, that affects us because if you get leaks and the material gets wet, it makes it harder to process. Then it was also, let's see, it was dust, HVAC, the roof, and that's essentially it. It doesn't have any, I didn't put any capital in for equipment replacement. And, you know, Council Member Brown is correct. I mean, that's something you look at from an accounting perspective. And I think, you know, when Mr. Loney came in and looked at that, he was quite surprised at the expensive equipment that we were using. So are we at capacity in terms of the volume we can handle, or is there still room there? We still have a little room. And, you know, we occasionally will go back to we've got the current tipping floor, which is the TFS thing that blew off a couple years back. And then we have the old tipping floor that we're able to kind of go back and forth between the two. And that's one of the things that, you know, when you have an internal audit, we work on the efficiencies of the plant. And I think Barry did a great job of coming up with traffic flow patterns and how we could keep that low from going outside. Because obviously, if it gets outside like we had in the past, it makes it very, very difficult to process that through the equipment we have. So have we done analysis financially of what the break-even point is in terms of capacity before we have to make additional investment or find a new location or expand it? I don't think we got to that point. We were mainly looking at getting the efficiencies addressed to that internal audit. And then kind of moving forward, we thought that this was a first step. It was a great idea to come up with what our actual cost of service was. I asked Barry because Barry came on board in 2011 and the cost per ton had been kind of bounced around then with the affiliates and the suggestion that, I think they've been talking about that $50 increase since 2011 and we've never kind of bit the bullet with that. And Council Member Lane had raised the issue prior to, are we underwriting the affiliates? And certainly we don't want to do that for the taxpayers of Fayette County. Right. Well, my time's up. I'll end on one question. and I've asked this a million times since I've been here, what does it cost to pick up one container of a rosy container per container? That's a good question. Do we know that answer yet? Yeah. I think we know what it is on the Herbie. I'm just getting to the... Dave Loney figured that with 70,000 residents, it's roughly $4 per year. Per year? Not per pickup? Per year. So how many pickups? On average? Okay. Yeah, but you're assuming they do it once a week, but most people do once a week, right? Yeah, we have about 70,000 people that are participating every week. Every week? Yes, and so that's why it comes out to that per year because we're doing that many pickups every week. One of the things I wanted to correct, too, is we were talking about the personnel cost and that temp labor, and it's actually $885,000 is what we're spending in our temp labor. Thank you all. Thank you, Chair. Thank you all. Council Member Maloney. Thank you. I want to give a little history here. I want to commend what you all have done because I was the one requested for the audit when I was the commissioner. And I also requested, I met with the director that I felt we were going the wrong direction with this MRF and we could do a lot better. And as you know, we were supervising the labor force, which I did not agree. And overtime was outrageous. Now, part of this bid process was to move five of those six people back into solid waste and leave one person down there to continue to maintain, like doing level three, level seven, and keep bringing money into this. And the bids came in, and I want everybody to understand, I'm not big on privatizing things, But there are times when you want a specialist to do what is good. And to me, I feel like when you go to a doctor and you've got a heart problem, you don't go to your regular doctor, you go to a specialist. I feel that MRF is not doing what it's capable of doing. We want to go to zero rates. It's our dream to be there. We did talk about moving the MRF when it reaches capacity back behind where the solid waste was. back there, behind there, we have land back there, and that will eventually where we're going to move it there. I still think you've done a great job, but I still think we can do better. And I just feel like it was to manage the whole facility and understand that includes the drivers cleaning up after night, that's where your overtime came in. You had all those drivers staying overnight to clean up, moving the thing. You would have other people there, the company, doing that. And to me, they put more respect in who's working there. Nothing against labor force. Those people are there one day, two days out of the week. But this to me, I think if we do it right, it can be a money maker. And this is what I'm big on. I'm big on green. I'm big on energy. And I think we can do it. And the question I have for you, and that's why I want to bring the RFP back in here and go back and just basically fix the area we have here. And eventually, if we get big enough, and that's what we're going to ask this company to do, and whoever the person is taking more revenue in, that I would love to see us go back up to where we're supposed to be and get out of that location and get back where we have larger and become a zero waste eventually. Back to the glass. Are you all still taking Bramford, Rumpke, all those folks' glasses? Now why don't you all just tell them no more? And that cuts your costs way down. How come we're doing it? Yes. Excellent answer. Thank you. Hold on a second. What I'm going to ask this question is, if we take all that off, and it goes back to what Mr. Brown was talking about, what effect does it do to the lessons in homeowners if we take all those off? Will that be considerable less because we're taking off 12 counties and four private? How much will that impact if we just go to class on the landfills? In essence, your cost of processing is not necessarily going to go down when you reduce the amount of affiliates, primarily being is there's a cost of doing business. In other words, the way the MRF is set up, we currently have 42 quality workers. Their job is primarily sorting the materials. And Lexington brings in 23,000 of the 36,000 tons of material. Let you answer my question. Then why don't we continue to do it and not let the other – nobody recycle. Nobody wants it. Why don't you let the county say, folks, we can't do it anymore. Nobody's buying it. And we continue to do it and we'll just save the money. Why don't you all do that? I believe I'd like to clarify the $15 per ton is to a recycler. $19.50 is to put it in the landfill. So having it in the stream takes it out of the landfill and does put it into the commodity market. It's just that we're not getting paid for processing that class. I just got through saying, Luthington continued to do that. We don't do Frankfort. We don't do those other rumpkeys. we don't do any of those other ones because that's additional cost on something we have nowhere to take it to. If I could clarify, we have regional contracts. Those would all have to be amended. They're paying us $35 currently. We're proposing to change that to $50 to $55 for the tonnage that they do deliver to us. And then we're trying to maximize the revenue or minimize the cost. of, so it's a matter of whether you wish glass to go to the recycle stream or if you wanted to go to the waste stream and landfill stream. Well, my time's up, but I still think if you take those counties out, it's going to be cheaper for you all. Very good, sir. Thank you. Council Member Angela Evans. I think I might like to hear that response. Just a comment. I actually went to the recycling plant not too long ago, and I truly enjoyed it. Thank you. That was very educational for me. And I think you have some very interesting ideas that I hope we can follow up on. But I would like to go back just to the recycling glass for a quick minute, just because that's so different from what we've been taught, like Councilmember Fred Brown said. No offense, Bill, but if you could explain what the theory is behind that, just for the average person just kind of hearing we're talking about not recycling glass anymore. Actually, that was something to discuss. That wasn't a recommendation. And so what we were pointing out was... Can I hear? I mean, just the theory behind it. Okay. The reason it was on the slide was to enlighten the fact that what used to be a revenue stream of what is being recycled is now a cost stream that needs to be recycled. But it's still being put into the recycle stream and preventing it from going into the waste stream. It's still less than the cost to throw it away. Okay. I actually wanted to hear from him, but that's okay. Excuse me. No, that's okay. I mean, he was just very passionate about what was going on, and again, it's... Ultimately, glass is a major problem in any recycle stream, primarily because of the abrasiveness that is encountered. I've estimated approximately 20% of the maintenance cost involved at the facility was directly attributed to glass. The concept of taking glass and keeping in mind, all of the affiliates is sharing in the cost of the glass. In other words, they're paying for their share of glass just like they're paying for the share of trash that goes to the transfer station. But ultimately, when we're looking at glass, the main reason that we went to a single stream versus a single stream plus glass was to get the participation rates up. Because if the resident doesn't have to sort the materials initially, then you're going to get more tonnage coming all the way through. That's the original concept. The problem comes is when you're looking at the $19.50, the low rate of the landfill cost versus the cost of $15 per ton, what we're actually having to pay to get rid of it, that's where it really comes in significantly different. There's lots of concepts out there of what we could do with glass, of which we probably need to speak with on an individual basis. But glass ultimately is the, you know, you can't take something and make it energy efficient when you've got to heat it up to 2,700 degrees just to melt it and then turn around and do it again. That's bad energy policy. Thank you. That's what I wanted to hear. Thank you. Thank you. You good? Council Member Stenet then. And I'll be brief, Chair. I just want to clarify what Councilman Maloney was asking about the glass. And I sort of agree with them for once on this issue. But are the other affiliates bringing all their trash to our transfer station? They're not, are they? So they're not paying the 1950. The 1950 is our Lexington's transfer station. That's our cost? For our transfer. I don't know what they're paying. Right. So to hit Councilman Maloney's point, if we don't accept glass from them, we don't know what the cost is for them to dispose of the glass on their own. We know we don't have to pay $15. So it's not 15 versus 1950. It's we don't have to pay 15, period. But they're paying us that $15. Right. They're reimbursing us for their cost of the disposal of their glass. Yeah, but it's not costing us $19.50 because we're not taking the glass. Well, I was comparing the cost to recycle and the cost to landfill. Right, but it's not an expense to us. It's a revenue stream we would otherwise give up. Okay. But we're not paying $19.50 to get rid of it. No, we're not. Okay. I just want to clarify because I think that's what he was trying to get through, Chair. All right. There are no other council members signed up to speak to this issue. I expect since there were action items involved in the report, we will keep it in committee and see if we can hone in and bring it back to further consideration, potentially at the April meeting. We had placed, and I don't believe we have time to go over our referral items, but specifically I was trying to get folks who have referred items into the committee if any of those items would have a potential budget implication. We were going to discuss it at this time. However, this time is almost time for work session. So I was going to ask you all to contact either myself or staff of the committee directly if any item in the committee is something that would potentially have a budget implication that we'd want to consider. Having said all of that, I would ask for a motion to adjourn. So moved. And a second. And all in favor. Aye. We are adjourned. Thank you.