# Council Work Session - February 26, 2008 > Auto-transcribed civic record · Council · February 26, 2008 - **Permalink**: https://meetings.lexingtonky.news/meeting/400 - **Source video**: https://lfucg.granicus.com/player/clip/400?view_id=14&redirect=true - **Date**: 2008-02-26 - **Body**: Council - **Last revised**: February 2, 2026 - **Length**: 11,823 words > ⚠️ **Auto-generated content.** Audio from the official Granicus video was auto-transcribed by OpenAI Whisper-1. Structured facts were extracted with GPT-4o; the narrative summary was written by Anthropic Claude Sonnet. Speaker labels and verbatim wording may contain errors. See [methodology](https://meetings.lexingtonky.news/about/methodology) or [report a correction](mailto:editor@lexingtonky.news). --- ## Meeting Overview The Lexington-Fayette Urban County Council convened on February 26, 2008, at 3:00 PM with Mayor Newberry presiding. The meeting addressed four agenda items, including committee updates and a proclamation, with the Council taking three formal votes during the session. Two members of the public provided comments to the Council during the meeting. The Council received informational updates from both the Corridors Committee and Planning Committee, providing members with current information on ongoing initiatives and planning matters. The Council approved a proclamation recognizing American Red Cross Month, demonstrating support for the organization's humanitarian efforts in the community. Additionally, the Council received an informational presentation on the Management Partners Audit Report, which provided analysis and recommendations regarding municipal operations and efficiency. The meeting combined both routine administrative matters and substantive policy discussions, with the Council balancing informational briefings with formal action on the Red Cross proclamation. The presence of public commenters reflected ongoing community engagement with local government proceedings. ## Attendance The Lincoln City Council meeting on February 26, 2008 had strong attendance with eleven members present and one absent. **Present:** • Mayor Newberry • CM Lane • CM Blevins • CM Stevens • CM DeCamp • CM Gorton • CM Myers • CM McChord • CM Beard • CM James • CM Blues **Absent:** • CM Crosbie No council members arrived late to the meeting. With eleven of twelve council members in attendance, the meeting had sufficient participation for conducting official city business. ## Votes and Decisions The Council conducted three votes during the February 26, 2008 meeting, all of which passed unanimously. **Approval of Meeting Summary** [timestamp: 02:30] CM Lane motioned to approve the February 19th summary, with CM Blevins providing the second. The motion passed unanimously. **New Business Items Approval** [timestamp: 05:00] CM Stevens made a motion to approve new business items A through G, seconded by CM DeCamp. The Council voted unanimously to approve all items. **Planning Committee Referral** [timestamp: 02:00:00] CM DeCamp motioned to place the operational recommendations for Infill & Redevelopment into the Planning Committee for further review. CM Stevens seconded the motion, which passed with unanimous Council support. All three votes were conducted as unanimous consent votes rather than formal roll call votes, with no recorded individual vote tallies or dissenting positions from any Council members present. ## Budget and Financial Actions The Council approved several financial authorizations and contract amendments during the February 26, 2008 meeting. **Grant Applications and Funding:** • Resolution 114-08 authorized the Department of Public Safety, Division of Fire and Emergency Services to submit an application to the Kentucky Office of Homeland Security for $23,893 from the Homeland Security Grant Program • Resolution 115-08 approved an amendment to the agreement with Community Action Council for Lexington-Fayette, Bourbon, Harrison and Nicholas Counties, Inc. regarding the use of HOME Investment Partnerships Program funds **Professional Services Contracts:** • Resolution 117-08 authorized a $100,000 professional services agreement with EHI Consultants for the Lexington East End Neighborhood Small Area Plan **Contract Change Orders:** The Council approved multiple change orders to existing contracts: • Resolution 119-08 authorized Change Order No. 1 with Bluegrass Contracting Corporation for the Meadow/Northland/Arlington Public Improvements Design Phase 2C project, reducing the contract amount by $36,038.83 • Resolution 121-08 approved Change Order No. 2 with CDP Engineers, Inc. for the South Elkhorn Pump Station and Force Main Improvement Project, adding $33,500 to the contract • Resolution 422-08 authorized Change Order No. 1 with HDR / Quest Engineers, Inc. for the Star Shoot Parkway Extension Project, adding $1,125 to the contract **Other Amendments:** • Resolution 116-09 authorized an amendment to Resolution No. 39-2008 regarding the contract with Zambelli Fireworks Manufacturing, Inc. The financial actions represented a mix of infrastructure improvements, emergency preparedness funding, and community development initiatives, with the largest single authorization being the $100,000 planning contract with EHI Consultants. ## Public Comment The Council meeting on February 26, 2008 included two designated periods for public comment, but no members of the public participated in either session. **Public Comment on Agenda Items** [timestamp: 00:30] • No public comments were made regarding any items on the meeting agenda **Public Comment on Non-Agenda Items** [timestamp: 02:30:00] • No public comments were made on topics not included on the meeting agenda Both public comment periods concluded without any community input or concerns being raised. ## Appointments The Council made one appointment during the February 26, 2008 meeting. • **Jim Buckles** was appointed to the Feasibility Study on Constructed Wetlands This appointment represents the Council's commitment to exploring constructed wetlands as a potential solution for the community's water management needs. The feasibility study will likely examine the technical, environmental, and financial aspects of implementing constructed wetland systems within the city's infrastructure. ## Corridors Committee Update [timestamp: 06:00] Chair CM Stevens provided an informational update on the Corridors Committee's recent activities during the February 26, 2008 Council meeting. Stevens reported on the status of three transportation grants currently being pursued by the committee. While the specific details of these grants were not elaborated upon in the available materials, the update served to keep the Council informed of ongoing transportation planning efforts. In addition to the grant update, CM Stevens announced the scheduling of the next Corridors Committee meeting, ensuring continued coordination on transportation corridor planning initiatives. The presentation was informational in nature, with no formal action required from the Council. The update reflects the committee's ongoing work to secure funding and advance transportation infrastructure projects within the city's corridor planning framework. ## Planning Committee Update [timestamp: 10:00] CM Gorton provided an update on the Planning Committee's recent activities during the February 26, 2008 Council meeting. The update included discussion of a motion regarding a feasibility study on constructed wetlands. CM Gorton presented information about the committee's consideration of this environmental infrastructure option, though specific details about the scope, timeline, or budget for the proposed study were not elaborated upon in the available materials. This agenda item served as an informational presentation to keep the full Council informed of the Planning Committee's ongoing work and deliberations. No formal action was taken by the Council during this update, as it was presented for informational purposes only. The Planning Committee Update represents part of the Council's regular practice of having committee chairs report back to the full body on their respective committees' activities and recommendations. ## American Red Cross Month Proclamation [timestamp: 15:00] Mayor Newberry presented a proclamation declaring March 2008 as American Red Cross Month in the city. The proclamation recognized the American Red Cross's vital role in providing emergency assistance, disaster relief, and community services to residents. During the presentation, Mayor Newberry highlighted the organization's contributions to the community and encouraged citizens to support the American Red Cross through volunteering and donations. The proclamation acknowledged the Red Cross's mission of preventing and alleviating human suffering in the face of emergencies. The proclamation was approved without discussion or opposition from the Council. ## Management Partners Audit Report [timestamp: 20:00] Jerry Newfarmer and Julia Novak presented the Management Partners Audit Report to the Council during this meeting. The comprehensive audit contained 424 recommendations aimed at improving various aspects of government operations. The presentation was informational in nature, with Newfarmer and Novak delivering their findings to Council members. The audit represents a significant review of municipal operations, with the substantial number of recommendations indicating a thorough examination of city processes and procedures. This agenda item served as a presentation of the audit results rather than a discussion requiring Council action or decision-making. The extensive scope of the audit, as evidenced by the 424 recommendations, suggests the review covered multiple departments and operational areas within the city government. The Council received the audit report as an informational item, allowing members to review the recommendations for potential future consideration and implementation. --- ## Decisions - **Motion** — passed (0-0): Approval of the February 19th summary - **Motion** — passed (0-0): Approval of new business items A-G - **Motion** — passed (0-0): Motion to place into the Planning Committee the operational recommendations for Infill & Redevelopment --- ## Full transcript ["Pomp and Circumstance"] ["Pomp and Circumstance"] ["Pomp and Circumstance"] ["Pomp and Circumstance"] ["Pomp and Circumstance"] ["Pomp and Circumstance"] ["Pomp and Circumstance"] ["Pomp and Circumstance"] ["Pomp and Circumstance"] ["Pomp and Circumstance"] ["Pomp and Circumstance"] ["Pomp and Circumstance"] ["Pomp and Circumstance"] ["Pomp and Circumstance"] ["Pomp and Circumstance"] First item on the agenda is an opportunity for comment from the public on issues that are on the agenda. Does anyone wish to speak? Seeing none, we'll move on down the list. Item two is docket approval. We don't have one today. We do have item three, though, which is approval of the February 19th summary. Any discussion? Or is there a motion? I have a motion from Councilmember Lane and a second from Councilmember Blevins. Thank you. Any further discussion? Those in favor, please vote aye. Those opposed, no. Motion carries. There are no budget amendments. We're down to items of new business. Item five. Is there a motion? I move approval. We have a motion from Councilmember Stephens. Did I hear a second? I'll second, too. Second from Councilmember DeCamp to approve the items of new business. Any discussion? I see none. Those in favor of approving the items of new business, let it be known by saying aye. Aye. Opposed, no. Motion carries. Takes us down now to presentations. The Corridors Committee. The Corridors Committee met last Tuesday at its usual time and place in the fifth-floor conference room. I was out of town, and Mr. Blevins, who was going to conduct the meeting, was felled by a mean and virulent virus so that the meeting was short, I'm told. But the committee did hear updates on the three transportation enhancements grants which have been received, one for Versailles Road landscaping, which is underway, Newtown Pike landscaping, which an RFP is being prepared, and the Old Frankfurt Pike stone fence. The fence, we received a grant some years ago for a repair of the stone fence on Main Chance Farm, but the university declined to participate in that because it required them to agree that they would maintain the fence in perpetuity, and they thought that was a little too long, so that the money was transferred to a transportation project at the junction of Alexandria Drive and Old Frankfurt Pike where the District 7 is constructing a roundabout, and as a part of that roundabout will be an old stone fence. A dry stone fence will be constructed on Colonel Davis' property, which is on the southwest corner of that intersection. So all three of those are underway. The Tates Creek median planting project, which was incomplete last year, will be finished this year by the Division of Forestry. We also are applying for a grant. This government is applying for a grant to place sidewalks on Tates Creek that would go from Lakewood down to the interchange with the New Circle Road, and the committee unanimously approved that application. We'll meet again on Tuesday, March 18th. Thank you very much. Any questions for Council Member Stephens? Seeing none, we'll proceed to the Planning Committee report. Thank you, Mayor. The Planning Committee met February 19th, 2008. The first issue on our docket was the Loudoun Avenue Phase 1 update, and Mr. Bob Baird informed us that they're currently working on the stormwater and sanitary sewer portion of that project. The second issue was constructed wetlands, and Dr. Dick Shore, a citizen, gave a PowerPoint presentation regarding constructed wetlands and how they can be used. And David Gabbert spoke about a concept study which he prepared in 1999, and out of this discussion, a motion came by Council Member Crosby for Mr. Jim Buckles to tell the committee how much a feasibility study would cost to study the feasibility of doing constructed wetlands in Fayette County, and the motion was seconded by Council Member Baird, and so I bring that as a motion. Any discussion? Seeing none, those in favor of approving the motion, let it be known by saying aye. Aye. Opposed, no. Motion carries. That concludes my report. Thank you very much. I'm going to ask Terry Burkhart, if you will, to join me at the podium here. Okay. As Council is quite aware, we have a lot of outstanding charitable organizations in our community, but in my book, one of the very, very best is that of the Red Cross, and this is American Red Cross Month. Actually, March is. And I have a little proclamation here that I wanted to read real quickly and pass along to Terry and the rest of our friends from the Red Cross who are here today. Whereas each March we formally recognize the American Red Cross and the critically important humanitarian role it plays in the bluegrass, and whereas for more than 90 years Central Kentucky has relied on the American Red Cross Bluegrass Area Chapter to respond to dozens of disasters each year and to shelter Central Kentucky families in their time of need, and whereas the American Red Cross Bluegrass Area Chapter helps local communities prepare for disasters by training thousands each year in health and safety practices, and whereas the American Red Cross is entrusted with providing support and assistance to the U.S. Armed Forces and their families in times of war and peace, and in that role the Bluegrass Area Chapter serves over 30 Central Kentucky military units sending hundreds of emergency messages to servicemen and women stationed overseas, and whereas the staff of the American Red Cross Bluegrass Area Chapter is 95 percent volunteer and salute those who answer the call to serve others in time of need. Now, therefore, I, Jim Newberry, Mayor of the Lexington-Fayette-Urban County Government, do hereby proclaim March 2008 as American Red Cross Month, and I encourage all citizens of Lexington-Fayette County to support this organization's noble humanitarian mission and to thank those who volunteer to serve. Thank you, Terry, and to all of the folks from the Red Cross. Thank you very much, Mayor. Since we are a volunteer-based organization, we'd love the opportunity to have some of our very important volunteers come up and get a photo with the mayor. That would be great. And thank you, Council. Sure. That brings us down to the presentation on the Management Audit Report. And given the magnitude of this particular item, I'd like to ask, and since we only have one presentation today, I'd like to ask the Council's indulgence to suspend the 15-minute rule, because I think there's a lot of material that we need to sort of chew on today. So let me begin by just a few brief words. Today is a significant step towards implementing those six pillars that we talked about last year. Last week we dealt with environment. This week we're dealing with the sixth pillar, that of having more effective and efficient government. I want to provide just a little context before we turn it over to Jerry Newfarmer and Julia Novak to give you the presentation today. When we were doing the budget last year, a lot of systemic problems came to our attention. These were not problems that were of our employees' creation for the most part. They were things that just sort of accumulated over a long period of time. And over the course of the 30 years or more since merger, we really hadn't gone back and taken a look at a lot of the systems that were presently in place. And as a consequence of that, many of our employees were unable to perform their jobs effectively because of the outdated systems in which they were operating. We really didn't have time dealing with the day-to-day issues to sort of take that comprehensive look. And you may recall that last year we requested funding from the council out of the fiscal year 07 budget to evaluate operational efficiencies and to identify potential cost savings. And at that time, we noted that it would take many months to complete that management audit and it might be the early part of 2008 before we saw the results of it. Well, we're here today to talk about those results and I hope to start to realize some of the cost savings associated with it. What you will see today is a proposal that contains or a report that contains 424 recommendations altogether. Some are very easy to implement. Some will require an enormous amount of effort on both your part and the part of folks in our administration. If all of those savings were to be implemented, we stand the potential of saving about $10 million a year. We would probably wind up adding about seven employees net, but there would be a substantial redefinition of a number of jobs within the organization. I guess the main context I'd like to provide today, though, is the financial context. Those of you who were here at 1 o'clock to hear the presentation by Commissioner Coe to the Budget and Finance Committee are aware of the fact that fiscal year 08 is going to be difficult but manageable, but we need to save every nickel we can in fiscal year 08 in order to deal with some really significant problems that are going to be coming our way in fiscal year 09. Right now, we are looking at a projected $25 million shortfall. If we have no new hires, no raises other than those we're contractually obligated to provide and no new programs. So that is a significant issue and I think adds to the urgency of trying to consider these recommendations as promptly as we can. The short of it is we simply can't continue to do business in the future as we have in the past. It won't work. In a little broader context, I would just observe that this is obviously a challenging time for all of us at LFUCG, but we have a once in a career opportunity to fundamentally change local government for the better, for the benefit of our bosses, the citizens of Lexington. We have a chance to make the organization work faster, better, and cheaper. I want to help our career employees overcome some of the obstacles that have precluded them from being able to perform effectively in the past, as I'm sure you do. And make no mistake about it, we're going to hear from some folks who object to this. There will be certainly some employees who are not pleased with the changes that are proposed for their particular areas of urban county government. I am confident there are those in our community who will attempt to politicize one or more aspects of this because they don't like the impact on their particular part of the world, and that's understandable and I think fairly predictable. But if we are able to adopt in substantial measure the recommendations that are made, I think we will have very effectively discharged our fiduciary duties to the citizens of Lexington to provide them with the very best governmental services possible within the confines of the revenue they have authorized us to receive. In short, I like to think of this about faster, better, and cheaper for greater taxpayer value. And having said that, let me ask Jerry Newfarmer to come forward. He and Julia Novak will run us through the PowerPoint presentation. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Members of council, good afternoon. The goals for this project, as the mayor indicated, were to do a complete professional nonpolitical review of the operations of the entire government, to look at every aspect of the services that you provide, the organization that provides those services, and to identify ways that the operations of the government can be improved. It has to be said at the outset, and I think we said this to you when we had an opportunity some months ago to introduce the concept of this project way back at the beginning, that this work is very much like giving a physical examination to the organization that is your government to provide services. And much as a physician would do in conducting a physical examination, we poked and prodded and looked at every aspect of the government. We looked at every single functional area of the government. The report that you are being given today systematically goes through and reflects the analysis that we have done with respect to all of the different lines of business that you're in. In order to produce it, we conducted a number of interviews with members of council, with all of the managers throughout the organization and key staff members. We did surveys and focus groups of employees and important stakeholder groups. We reviewed all the documents and all the procedures and all the rules of operation that applied, and we did a benchmarking analysis comparing your government with other governments across the country who are known for doing public services in a best practice kind of way. And we summarized all that in a report which is being presented to you today. This is work that, as a professional firm, we're qualified to do, and we have done on a number of occasions. We've had the opportunity to watch and to look at and to study the way services are delivered in many of the major governments throughout the United States. And while every single one of those enterprises is unique, and Lexington is no exception in that regard, your community is special, it is unique, it is different than any other community in America, and that's what makes it Lexington, Kentucky. The fact is that the services that you provide, the techniques that are used to provide them, are common in many places. And the goal of this physical examination, normally it's something that would be done once every decade or so. In this case, we're doing it, I guess, 30 years into the operation of the consolidated government. The objective is to strip away the archaeological layers of organizational reform that have occurred over those 30 years and ask the basic question, if we were to do it right, if we were to do a best practices model, how would we do it? In this case, it is every single separate aspect of the services that you provide. Indeed, your government, as general purpose local government is everywhere, is a conglomerate kind of business. You're in many different lines of business. You have 55 separate divisions providing major services to the residents of your community in quite different ways, using quite different skill sets and different techniques. What binds all of those service providers together is the commonality that they serve the residents of Lexington and Fayette County. So the people that are served by these disparate services that the government provides are the same. And the infrastructure within the government that the service providers use to help them deliver services is also a commonality that everyone has. And our charge was to look at every aspect of this. These numbers don't mean much, I don't think, in the aggregate, but the fact is, as the mayor indicated, that there are 424 recommendations in this report. What we have tried to do professionally in the report is to set forth in writing our analysis of every aspect of every part of the government's business, and then the recommendations, the things that we recommend that be implemented in order to improve the operations. In doing that, we are not being critics of your business. This isn't a human enterprise, human organization anywhere that couldn't be looked at by an outside party and examined without coming forward with ideas for improvement. So that's not unusual. What we've sought to do is to do that with respect, with respect for the organization that's in place and for the history of the services that are being provided, the culture of those who provide the service. Combine that with our understanding of best practice techniques so as to set forth an agenda for improvement, if you will. And that's what, in the aggregate, this report is. There are many, many changes that are suggested. We've suggested a number of changes that will clarify responsibilities and streamline the government. The recommendations in every case are very specific and are action-oriented. In fact, they're designed to be lifted from the report and put into an implementation action plan, to which can be attached milestones and timelines so that it's a transparent process, so that any third party could watch and monitor the implementation of the report. The report is intentionally positive. It's an agenda for improvement. And it's not so much a matter of finding things wrong as it is finding opportunities for improvement, ways of getting better. One of the key aspects of your government value system has always been continuous improvement, and this should be seen as an opportunity to take advantage of that. There are a number of recommendations that impact the government as a whole, the central core services of the government. Julia Novak, my associate who's our regional vice president who personally managed all of our staff work on this project, will go through with you in some detail, insofar as time permits, and talk about each of the areas of the government and some of the key recommendations, just to give you a flavor of what those are. But what I'd like to emphasize is that with respect to the corporate recommendations in the government, there are some real opportunities for improvement. For example, the best run enterprises, public or private, are organizations that have good systems in place for systematically planning the work the organization is going to execute, and then have good techniques and systems in place that their managers use to execute the plans that they've made. That suggests that two things are needed. One is a good system for deciding what those plans are, commonly called strategic or work planning, and the second thing is a common system of metrics for tracking success, for tracking the performance against those plans. Historically, neither of those key elements have been in place, at least not to the extent that they have now been developed and are used widely in local government throughout the United States. So we see those as a major opportunity for improvement, and that's set forth in the recommendation. In the area of information technology, there are quite a few opportunities for improvement, and Julia will talk a bit more about that in her part of the presentation, as I recall the way we have this thing structured. The core systems that serve all of the departments and agencies of the government, financial management system, personnel management system, information technology, those core systems serve everybody. And if you think about private sector models that you may be aware of, or perhaps indeed other government agencies that you may be aware of, each of those are areas, finance, personnel management, and information technology, that have seen enormous advances just within the last decade in terms of the techniques that are used in the best performing local governments of America. And that's been our model and our standard in bringing forward recommendations to you. The recommendations in this report range from the big picture items, such as the ones I was just talking about, to very, very specific. You couldn't have 424 recommendations without having a lot of specificity, and you'll see that in the report. The mayor's guidance to us as we went through this organization is look very carefully at absolutely everything we do. There are no sacred cows, and tell us in your best professional opinion how it ought to be. And so you'll see recommendations. For example, we recommended deleting the citizen advocate position. That's a charter position, so it would require an amendment to the charter to do that. But that's an old methodology. That's a 1950s or 1960s approach to government. That's back when we did ombudsman in New York City and Boston and places like that. It is a process for having at the end of the service delivery line we put the quality control person. Now what we try to do is build quality control techniques in the service delivery line as we do the service, and that's the modern technique for doing it. So we have a number of recommendations like that. We even went a step further and suggested that you reconsider the LFUCG sort of brand as a way of presenting yourself to the world. That sounds to us, and this is where, frankly, maybe having an outsider is not a good thing. I don't know, as outsiders, though, it sounds like a kind of a, like, why aren't you Lexington? Why don't you have a presentation to the world that you talk to each other about Lexington instead of LFUCG? So we said to the mayor, we want to put that in, and he let us do it. So that's in there, too. So there's a lot of specificity, but more importantly, there's some very big and some very important major recommendations in this report. My colleague, Julia Novak, will take you through the major functional areas, and then I'll come back and make some concluding comments. Julia? Okay. I hit the wrong button right off the bat. That's the one. Now you got it. Now it'll go. You have to point it back this direction. This is where the sensor's back here. There you go. Now you got it. Okay, I'm good. Thank you. Sorry about that. A little technical difficulty. Didn't have that this morning. Thank you for the opportunity to be here. I'm going to run through the areas of the Lexington government that are managed by the various commissioners. And obviously 424 recommendations. I promise I won't hit them all. I want to give you a flavor, however, for some of the more important ones and also for some of the items that you may hear about. If we don't tell you about it up front, you're going to hear about it from somebody else, maybe before you have an opportunity to read the whole report. So with that in mind, I will begin with finance and administration, which really is kind of the structural support for the entire organization. All of the services provided in this area are critical to effective service delivery throughout the government. We have 43 specific recommendations in this area that are designed to both improve the fiscal control, but without unnecessarily burdening the organization and the people who are in it with complex kind of gotcha procedures. We've recommended looking at streamlining contract approvals, using purchase cards, increasing bid thresholds, doing some things to seize revenue opportunities and improve customer service that have all been tried and true in governments across the United States and things that can certainly be implemented in Lexington. On the revenue side, there are two specific items I wanted to mention. One is to the Lexington government and the school board in the past had a practice of having the city collect the OLT taxes and then write a check to the schools. Some number of years ago there was a dispute about the fee that the city would charge for providing that service and though the schools set up their own infrastructure to collect this and enforce this tax on their own. Who suffers in all of that is the taxpayer who's paying for a duplication of overhead that's being done in two different organizations and our recommendation is that you reinitiate discussions with the school board to resume collecting that tax on their behalf. Parking is an area that in many cities across the country is not only a break-even game, but it also can be a money-making game, a business enterprise. One of our key recommendations is to develop a business plan to eliminate or reduce the general fund parking subsidy, which is somewhere around $780,000, $790,000 a year. Human resources and civil service is something that we heard about in our interviews with staff, we heard about in our employee survey, we heard about in focus groups. What can we do better? Fix HR. The Mercer Committee, the Attrition Committee, the civil service process, all pointed to as things that simply don't work well in this government. The civil service process itself is an albatross around the neck of this organization. When we were doing our review, we said to the mayor that this is absolutely the worst civil service system that we've seen. Many years of implementation without reform, and it's something that needs to be corrected. What was really interesting as we did our research and explored these issues, we did an employee survey. We had about 1,000 employees who actually responded to the survey, and we asked them whether they agreed or disagreed with the following statement, that the civil service selection process ensures that the best qualified candidates are selected for vacant positions. Over 57% of the employees in the organization disagree with that sentence. They disagree that civil service is really ultimately serving this organization well. So we've made a number of recommendations to kind of wholesale improve the civil service process, to create an executive class of service similar to what the federal government has with the senior executive service, and to look at ways to improve the process time. What's been put up in front of the council here is a number of process maps which are contained in your report. The six-page process map that goes across here is the number of steps in the process to hire someone, from somebody's going to leave to somebody's on the job. And it is an incredibly complex process, and all along the way there are decision points. And it checks, constant checks and balance in the system. The governing body obviously authorizes a number of positions. You make some policy recommendations. But in terms of who the individuals in those positions ought to be, there are so many checks and balances along the way that that comes at the end simply to get another delay to the process time. So those are some of the recommendations with regard to the HR system and civil service that we wanted to call to your attention. Like the finance and administration, general services to a large degree, not with respect to parks and recreation, but general services also provides support services to the rest of the organization. We've identified 72 specific recommendations in this area, and they represent some pretty dramatic organizational change in terms of how certain services would be delivered. In general, speaking in very broad general terms, facility management in Lexington is based on what department is perceived to own the building that they're in. If the fire department lives in the building, then they maintain it. If the parks and recreation department lives in it, then they maintain it. If social services lives in it, then they maintain it. And then general services maintains some of them, but not all of them. There's this mix match, and what you have is nobody responsible for managing the assets of this organization. We have recommended creating a new facilities and fleet management division, pulling those functions together, but really broadening the scope so that they would be truly responsible for managing the assets of this government, which are significant. Part of our review, we look very specifically and in great detail at the usage of over 800 vehicles in the Lexington fleet. We've recommended pooling or eliminating approximately 107 vehicles. The sale of the surplus vehicles will generate $600,000 in revenue, and then the opportunity savings for not having to replace those vehicles is over $2.7 million. Within parks and recreation, there's a real opportunity to kind of get back on track in terms of fees. This is a significant revenue opportunity for the city. There were the policies that are in place now that govern the fees that are to be charged for recreation services were adopted by the governing body in 2000, but fees haven't been adjusted since 2004. And so the reality is your current fees are inconsistent with your adopted policies. We've recommended relooking at those policies, making conscious choices about what level of subsidy you want the general fund to provide versus having user fees provide. Certainly we've recommended making Gulf an enterprise operation with no general fund subsidy, and then delegating the authority to match to implement the fee changes administratively to match the policies that have been adopted by the governing body. The final recommendation in the area of parks and recreation is regarding underutilized facilities. We specifically looked at the city's aquatic assets and how they were used and, in some cases, how they were not used. Now, it's very clear that some of the community's pools, even where there are no fees to participate, do not generate significant interest on the part of the communities that are there, and they're very underutilized. What we've recommended is closing four underutilized facilities, which would generate about $100,000 that the city would have to reinvest in recreation opportunities that might be of more interest to the communities. Hold on one second. It never fails. I never get sick, so my apologies. Next up is the Department of Law. The Department of Law, we identified 40 specific recommendations. I want to highlight two of them for the governing body because they talk about kind of how services are going to be delivered. The first is with regard to risk management. We've recommended kind of splitting risk management into two separate components. The legal functions for claims and litigation would stay within the law departments, and the other functions would move to the Department of Finance. And so we've recommended that that division actually relocate to the Department of Finance administration. Similarly, we looked at how work was managed within the Department of Law, how cases were assigned, be they corporate counsel items or litigation, and we've recommended that those functions be separated so that there's discrete work units who work on corporate functions or who work on litigation so that it's very clear who's responsible for different requests that may come up with regard to corporate counsel issue or who's in charge of litigation. Public Works and Development Department is a rather large operation for city government. We've identified 70 different recommendations that are designed to both improve the implementation of the city's capital plan, which is very significant, to make operational improvements, and to ensure that the city's infrastructure is properly maintained. The first recommendation, that was quick, is with regard to capital projects management. This was something that we heard a lot about throughout the organization, whether it was parks projects or sewer projects or engineering projects or building projects, that this capital project management was simply not a strength of this organization. And what we have recommended is that kind of similar to asset management, centralizing it within general services, that you would centralize capital project management for all CIP projects in a new division within the Department of Public Works and Development that reports directly to the commissioner. So they would have responsibility for parks, for garages, for facilities, for engineering, so that you wouldn't have, you would have all the capital projects managed in one central location in the organization. The Division of Engineering, the nature of their work, they review and award a lot of contracts to consultants, and the Commonwealth of Kentucky has some very specific regulations with regard to how engineering consultants, in particular, should be selected. So our recommendations in this area are designed to ensure compliance with those qualification-based selection processes so that you end up negotiating with the best qualified firm. You're not necessarily going with low bid, which is not always what you want, but to have your technical staff take a look at the qualifications and the prior work of the firm and make those recommendations. Development plan review is an area where the city currently has very little or virtually no role in terms of reviewing drainage drawings, stormwater plans that are submitted by the development community. We do a tremendous amount of work in the area of development review, process improvement, and this is simply not what we would consider to be a best practice. It would be very important for the city going forward to ensure that that regulatory responsibility that the city has is being carried out by having staff review and sign off on plans that are submitted by the development community. Traffic engineering. This is a real highlight from our perspective. You all should be very, very proud of the system that you have built here in this community for managing traffic. It's really a state-of-the-art center, one that we think very highly of, and, in fact, we thought it was doing such a good job that you ought to try to talk Jasmine County into contracting with you because you could do it for them, too. We think there's the capacity and an opportunity, perhaps, to bring in some revenue for the city, and the reality is that, as an abutting community, there's direct impacts there on some of the roads leading directly to and from some major arterials. Planning and historic preservation is an area we looked at very closely to look at streamlining opportunities for staff and also are the functions aligned in the right place. When we looked at the benchmark communities that Jerry mentioned, we had about 14 different communities that we looked at throughout the studies, and how is it done in different places. Typically, historic preservation is a component of the planning division, and we have recommended a move towards that here. The final recommendation I wanted to mention is related to reviewing and tracking development plans. Currently, Division of Building Inspection is purchasing plan tracking software, and this is one of those opportunities where an initiative is going on in one department that really has the opportunity to have a use in yet another department, and so that centralized role for IT that Jerry talked about is really important. Building inspection is an area where the city has seen a 34% decrease in workload since 2004. We've recommended eliminating three residential inspector positions, and then having on contract qualified firms to act on behalf of the city to do inspections when you kind of hit peak workloads so that you're not staffed for rush hour, but if you have a spike in the building industry, you have contract inspectors. We've seen this in many jurisdictions across the country, and it can work very effectively and keep your overall staffing numbers down. The next department is the Department of Environmental Quality, kind of the new kid on the block. The commissioner's been in place for two months now, and we've identified 52 recommendations, and between that and what the EPA has to say, we're sure she'll be quite busy for the next several months. First one is Office of Compliance. Right now, the DEEM, the Department Division of Environmental and Emergency Management, which is in public safety, we've recommended that the environmental management duties be reassigned to the Department of Environmental Quality, and there are two specific positions that are impacted by that that would move over to the Department of Environmental Quality. With regard to water and air quality, we'd like to see the city move towards implementing a stormwater utility that would provide your funding mechanism for stormwater management activities as well as all the ancillary support functions, and that you have a plan for capital improvements. Obviously, the EPA is going to give you some guidance on what that plan is going to look like, but implementing that and carrying it out is going to be critically important going forward. In 2006, the city commissioned a study of the waste management area. It was a study that we've reviewed in detail. There are some fine recommendations in that report, but there's not a plan to really move forward and implement those, so we have specifically evaluated various recommendations, and throughout our report, you'll see not only this general recommendation of having an implementation plan for that report, but our input on which recommendations you should move forward on and which ones not. A couple of specific items. One is to make participation in recycling and yard waste collection mandatory, including those areas outside the Urban Services District, as this makes the practice of recycling much more viable as a business, and it's also important long-term at keeping our landfills space available. Finally, with regard to waste management, we have a recommendation to move away from the current financing structure within the Urban Services District and come up with more of a user fee-based approach. Right now, trash collection is funded with property tax fees. That's not based on how much you throw away or how much trash you generate, but how much the property that you're living in is worth. The best practice in the industry and what you're seeing communities nationwide moving towards is more of a fee-for-service approach, and we've recommended that for Lexington. The Department of Public Safety is one that we enjoy the opportunity to review. We came in at a time of transition in the Police Department. We have 66 separate recommendations. What we found throughout this area was very professional staff that you have. Your leadership is excellent. You enjoy very low crime rate, fourth lowest among the benchmark communities, staffing ratios that place you in the top five in terms of police officers as well as firefighter staffing per thousand. So you certainly compare favorably to many of your peer communities in this regard. Code enforcement was an area, interestingly, that the city invested less in in terms of its peer communities and had less staff and less budget associated. We've recommended some new programs in this area that we are seeing advocated for nationwide to ensure the safety and the integrity of your housing stock, especially your rental properties. Having an annual rental inspection program should be a program that could pay for itself with the implementation of rental licensing, as well as a point-of-sale program to ensure that there's no major life safety code violations at the time a rental property changes hand. So we've made several recommendations with that regard. Enhanced 911, we've recommended consolidating your emergency management piece with E911 operations. Again, this is something that we're seeing as a best practice nationally, and it would work very nicely in conjunction with implementation of the city's new Public Safety Operations Center, or PSOC, that's coming online. Fire and emergency services. Again, this is an area where you do a great job. And so the recommendations here, one of them is to not change, and so maybe that's good, but there's been discussions about changing the way that you staff your engine companies, moving from three to four, three firefighters on an engine to four firefighters on an engine. We looked at your fire suppression plans. We looked at how you respond and what your initial response to a fire is. You are absolutely meeting national standards with your current deployment of three firefighters on an engine. Two engines as well as a battalion chief show up for initial response at a fire scene. That is well within the national standard. And it begs the question from our perspective of why would you go to four. You're meeting an appropriate standard. It's something that's recognized nationally. And if you go to four firefighters on an engine, you're looking at requiring 120 additional sworn personnel, obviously a significant expense for the city. At the same time, we also looked at how your ambulances were staffed for emergency response. Obviously, quality of care, stabilizing the patient until they can get to a trauma unit or emergency hospital services is what this business is all about. Lexington staffs its ambulances with three firefighters at this time. That is simply something that not one of the peer jurisdictions that we looked at does. Everyone staffs with two. Nationally, it's pretty well accepted, two firefighters on an ambulance. And this is something that you can implement that would provide the appropriate quality of care. You're not compromising the people who you're serving. And yet, the potential to reduce 27 positions and save over $1.4 million. Police department, staffed at a ratio right now of just over two per thousand. A lot of people talk in terms of how many officers per thousand and what's good and what should you have. We like to look at workload in terms of how busy the officers are because it tells us how much time your officers have. We use a term called uncommitted time. How much time they have to be proactive. The International Associations of Chiefs of Police recommends a formula that essentially says every officer should have one-third of their time uncommitted. Should have one-third of their time available to respond to dispatch calls for service. One-third of their time available to do administrative work. That third of their time uncommitted is when they have the opportunity to do community policing and be proactive in patrol. In order to meet that standard, an additional 14 officers would need to be assigned to patrol. That is certainly within reach for this organization. Even as additional officers are added, you have the opportunity to do what some cities across the country are doing and looking at kind of moving up, raising the bar even higher. How can we get our officers to 40 percent uncommitted time so that they have time to provide the type of community policing we want to see in our communities? There's also a number of positions that we looked at in the police department that are being performed by individuals with sworn powers and yet the functions themselves don't necessarily require that. In those situations, we've recommended civilianizing the positions. There's 27 such positions that we've identified that you could put the 27 officers back in patrol or in other functions of the government and fill those positions with civilians. The last area that I'm going to review for you is the Department of Social Services. We have 32 recommendations in this area that was really designed to ensure what I'll say is clarity of mission. You know, why do social services exist? Why are we in this business? What are the functions that we're providing? Are they the right ones and are the right agencies providing the service? Within the Office of the Commissioner, one of the things we identified was it would make sense to relocate the Partners for Youth Program, which is currently in the mayor's office, to social services. There seems to be a good fit there. There's a multicultural affairs coordinator position within the commissioner's office right now that doesn't seem to be a fit. It's not a social services function and it is not necessarily a function that needs to be provided, so we've recommended eliminating it. We have recommended adding a deputy commissioner position in this area as well. Family services, the city has a very valuable resource at the Family Care Center. The medical clinic part has been so successful, in fact, that it's really kind of outgrown the social service need that was originally designed to fulfill, and it's actually performing a crucial public health function. And the time seems right to initiate conversations with the Fayette County Health Department to look at having them manage that function rather than that being a function of city government. Likewise, in youth services, this is an area where the city currently funds and operates a day treatment center. There are about 30 such programs across the Commonwealth of Kentucky. Twenty-five of them are provided by the local school districts in those communities. Four of them are provided and funded, actually, by the Commonwealth of Kentucky, and one of them is provided by city government, and you are the one. And it begs the question, why are we in a business that is clearly education-related that no one else in the Commonwealth of Kentucky is in? And so what we've suggested is that there's a need to transition this over to the Fayette County schools. With that, I'm going to turn it back to Jerry to wrap it up. The mayor, of course, is the chief executive officer of your government and has some specific functions that have been organizationally placed within the mayor's office because of their importance. I'll just comment about a couple. Information technology is something that I touched on in my opening remarks and is an opportunity that has good promise for the city government. The first recommendation that I want to point out is that there is a process underway now for an IT application with respect to the development review system that we would suggest be extended to have a broader perspective with respect to customer relationship management. We take the same idea another step further with a more general recommendation to use information technology to make the government more accessible to the residents of the city in terms of its ability to access the government for services. You've taken some first steps with that with LexCol. The technology permits a whole lot more interactive experience for residents. I commented before about building service quality into the service as you provide it instead of putting it on the back end of the service delivery process. The use of information technology is an area that offers good opportunity to the government for doing that. As in the case of every one of our recommendations, there are models and examples in other major units of local government where these ideas have been put into effect. And so I know as we go forward we'll have an opportunity to engage in further discussion about it, but that's certainly true in the area of the use of information technology. The city of Dallas, for example, has a major customer relationship management CRM software in place with its 311 system where any citizen can call that number and, in effect, generate a work order that goes right into the public works folks or right into the people that are responsible for the street signs or whatever the issue or the problem is. That produces a more instantaneous turnaround and is coupled with immediate feedback or subsequent follow-up feedback to the customer. So that's the state of the art, and that's an example of what we were trying to do in this report is to bring that state of the art to bear and to bring those ideas forward to you. In the area of policy and budget, there is an opportunity that we strongly recommend, and that's to transition to a biannual budget. Like most governments historically, you do it every year. The technology now permits you to do it biannually. The best practice is that most forward-thinking cities are switching to a biannual budget every two years because the advantages are twofold. One is it fosters longer-term policymaking impact. Policymakers in this room and on your staff will think in longer terms in terms of the consequences and payoffs of the budget decisions that are being made. I mentioned the performance measurement system that would accompany these kinds of things. That allows for tracking. And the techniques exist so that you would do an annual appropriations process mid-budget. You just wouldn't have to do the whole big shoot-and-match every year, which saves, obviously, an enormous amount of staff time, which is expended to no advantage in terms of ultimate policymaking because the policymakers would still have the opportunity each year to influence the array of service delivery. So we talk about that in more detail in the report and encourage you to take a look at that process. The report, in effect, is a roadmap for improvement of the government. We've got recommendations that cover all aspects about the way the government does its business. Our goal was not just to save money. That wasn't the primary goal. The goal was rather to bring forward ideas for operational improvements that would make your government work better. I think the mayor mentioned in his opening comment that when you net out, you add the additional positions that are recommended, you take the positions away that we have identified as being surplus and not necessary to continue the service levels that you've established, and put all that together, the net is still actually an addition of seven positions in the workforce. So the goal is more effective services and to apply best practices tests throughout to how you do your business. There are opportunities throughout, and we've pointed them out, to adopt market rate fees. In terms of your fee structure, there are a number of fees that you currently charge for services where there's a direct connection between the user of the service and the cost of providing the service that are not at 100 percent full fee recovery, even though you intend that, because the infrastructure of the financial management system hasn't kept pace to allow those calculations. All that can be cured, and we've pointed that out in the report and identified a number of things as reflected on this slide that will help the government to improve. The fact is when it comes to implementation, that's the hard part. Doing all this analysis and so on is, if you will, the easy part. Many of the recommendations in this report can simply be implemented by the executive, the mayor and his management team, and don't require much consideration beyond that. Some of the recommendations in this report will require your engagement as policymakers in your evaluation and action to adopt ordinances or implementing regulations that permit them to be implemented. Some of the recommendations in the report go a step beyond and would require, if they're to be implemented, actually changes in your city charter or perhaps even an amendment to state law. One of the things that we said to the mayor after we finished our scan review of the entirety of the enterprise is that, particularly with respect to those key systems that serve all of your government operations that provide services to residents, the internal control system, financial management, personnel management or human resources, and information technology, the state of the art in terms of what's possible with those kinds of systems is substantially advanced from where you are. And devoting time and attention to reforming those internal systems is like unclogging the arteries to make your government work better. We talked about how long it takes to hire a position. Well, think about the modern state of the art in the private sector. Somebody runs an ad on Craigslist and does some interviews the next day and then hires their employee, and we take six or eight months to do it. Now, we're not suggesting that there aren't values inherent in that process that are important values that ought to be sustained. Even so, it is possible to compress the process and refine it so that we can get much closer to a best practice kind of model, and we're recommending that you do that. One of the really hard things about receiving a report such as this and the ideas that it contains is the tendency for people to react without reading the report and to jump to conclusions about what's intended or a consequence of what's intended. And I guess in a sense in public service that's unavoidable because that's the way it works. I want to just underscore the fact that what we did was a nonpolitical professional review of the entirety of the operations of your government, and we brought to you in this report our best ideas and recommendations based on what's possible. And if people tend to jump to conclusions or start lobbying a position before you've had a chance to examine it, I'd ask that you give it some thought and give it some time and let these things come to place, because there are real opportunities for improvement. We appreciate the opportunity to do this work with the city of Lexington. We know you have a meeting scheduled for this Friday, and I'll be back to be available to respond to questions that you have at that time. And we look forward to supporting you as you go forward. Thank you. Council Member Gordon. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you very much for your presentation. And based on what you just said, lastly, you know, we just received this, so most of us have not read it. And so I did want to confirm that you'll be at our meeting Friday. If we have specific questions, you could address them then. Yes, we will, and I'd be happy to do that. Look forward to the opportunity, in fact. Okay. I did have a couple of general questions. You mentioned that cost savings wasn't your only parameter. How did you put cost savings and efficiency and recommendations together? Because several of these you did mention we could save X amount of money. I mean, I'm particularly interested, I guess, in some of the general services items, and we could discuss it maybe in detail Friday, but in relation to saving money, being efficient versus providing services. Sure, that's a wonderful question, in fact, because they all come together. And so you have to consider each recommendation or each case individually and talk about that specific one. As a generalization, if I may try to respond to your question, what we try to do is, as we look at a particular aspect of your operations, if there's something that you're spending money on unnecessarily, then we would say stop doing it. So that's a savings. Now, what you do with that savings is essentially a policy question. Sometimes it's a case of if a particular employee or group of employees wasn't eliminated but did work differently, that you could enhance the quality of the services that you provide to your residents. So where that's the best practice, we've suggested that. Do that with it. So in some cases, we've given you some cues along the way, and we'll be happy when we have a chance to visit together on Friday to talk specifically about where those policy tradeoffs might exist. In some cases, though, we've had to be frank and candid in this report and say to you that you need to do some more investments. For example, in her review of the departments that Julia mentioned with respect to facilities, that you don't have a centralized facility asset management program, and you should. Any well-run organization would have that kind of capacity, would not have the historic decentralization that has been there. I mean, it's just the way it grew up. Well, in a modern organization, if you were starting from scratch, you'd pull the management of that function together, and you'd bring to bear on it modern facility management techniques. And so that's what we're recommending. So that may, in fact, require an additional expenditure or investment to get it up there. But what you don't see that's masked is the unmet needs, the preventative maintenance and the things that have not been done historically that will be disclosed when you do that. So to put this on as professional a basis as possible is going to require some of those kinds of changes. One of the – I don't want to ask this now, but one of the things I'll bring to you Friday is the discussion within parks of some of the services and some of your recommendations about golf and swimming pools and how you factored in other things other than utilization. And we don't need to, for me, go into it right now, but that's one of the things I'm interested in on Friday. I appreciate that. And I do actually want to comment about one of them. Okay. Because I think it's an idea that I'd like you to think about. Because, in fact, we recommend in this report that several of the swimming pools be closed, the swimming pools. And so the idea is different than it normally is the case. Normally what would happen, just a budget-cutting thing, you'd say close these pools. They're old. They're not utilized at a proper level, and that's the end of it. That's not what we're saying in the report. What we're saying is that if you're going to continue those facilities, it will require substantial capital investment to do that. They are underutilized because the people in that neighborhood have decided that they're not so much needed. So what we've said is what we recommend that you do is close those specific facilities, take the money that you would save, that you're investing in these high-cost recreation services that people aren't using, take that same amount of money and ask the people in that neighborhood, what recreation services would you use if you had this kind of money to spend? How could we enhance, for example, your parks or the recreation programming services in your neighborhood on things that you really want and would value here in the 21st century instead of this high-cost capital facility that people aren't using? So instead of just taking the money away and closing down the facilities and saying, the heck with you, rather what we've brought to you is a new best practice kind of idea that respects the neighborhoods that have those facilities, that respects the people in them, and says here's an alternative that you ought to think about. And this is a good example where it's really easy to sort of fall into the trap of saying, oh, my God, look what they're going to do before the idea gets aired. So that's why I spent a minute on it. Well, I'll look forward to our discussion on Friday. Thank you. Council Member Beard. Thank you, Mayor. First, I guess I'd like to say that the savings that the mayor outlined of $10 billion is roughly 2 percent of our budget, and it amazes me that it's that low. So my question might be, what are the savings on a gross basis, not a net basis, and then what are the costs on a gross basis, not a net basis? Is that in here? I haven't had time to do it. No, we haven't. No, we didn't. We did not calculate those numbers, and the reason we did not is that there are many. Our primary goal was not to save money. Our primary goal was to bring to you recommendations that would take your operations to a best practice kind of level. So that was the primary goal of this effort, not just to save money. If we were going to just be saying, okay, the goal is to save money, we would go in and we would say cut the number of police officers you have because that would save money, and we didn't do that. Rather, our standard is a best practice kind of thing. So that's the short-form answer to your question. Some citizens may think best practices is saving money. Well, obviously you want to do services in the most cost-effective way that you can possibly do them, and believe me, that's a test that we bring to this. At the same time, you have this array of services that you've decided as a government to provide to your people, and so you want to provide them, and so that costs money. I guess I don't understand how you can come to a net number if you don't know what the gross numbers are. Maybe this is something that was done internally here. Sure. My second question is your selection of peers, because I guess I don't understand that Kansas City is a peer with a professional baseball and football team and a metropolitan area of probably three and a half million as opposed to what's shown here. Cincinnati is maybe a million and a half people as opposed to 300,000. And you have to take into consideration, or I think you have to take into consideration, who you're serving and what is that population. Just because of where we are located, we service at one time or another a million and a half people here in Lexington. We're driving our roads and being protected by our police and fire, and that drives costs up totally out of proportion to what our actual population is. And I'm glad we will have an opportunity to kind of get down and study this somewhat and then get back after it Friday. I'd be happy to comment on that specific question as well as the others that you have on Friday. Thank you. Council Member Stennett. Thank you, Mayor. Just a couple quick questions. One, you mentioned that you didn't necessarily do your analysis based on the most cost-effective solution. But, you know, when you did compare our financials, I assume did you look at all of our revenue streams and how we collect them? Because one of your recommendations was talking about the fee, look at our fee structure. Yes. Were you referring to the fee structure in all of government and how we collect those revenues, whether it be a tax or a fee? That's correct. So you're looking at everything. Because I think it's interesting to know that our budget indicates that we're a healthy community. Right. But yet our capital investment is one of the lowest of our peer groups, which correlates to our long-term investment of infrastructure, which we're currently in the middle of a major overhaul of that. So I think that your findings there are almost right on target. Thank you. Just a couple things. One, looking at all the areas, and you have 424 recommendations, what kind of advice or what kind of encouragement have you given on how to implement all of those or tackle whether or not we do implement any of those? What is the next step, I guess? Well, I think what you're going to need to do is you're going to need to develop, first of all, a process for adopting the report and saying, okay, that's going to be our roadmap for implementation. Then what needs to happen is you need an implementation action plan that says, with respect to each of those recommendations, what are the steps you're going to go through and when are you going to do what that's going to cause it to happen? The fact is that all these recommendations taken in the aggregate is going to be additional work on top of all the work that your staff people are currently doing. So that needs to be factored in and put together. And normally what we would do is work with clients to develop an action plan so you know the timelines and when things are going to be done to have it be implemented. At one level, the complexity, what this report does is it sort of wells up the full array of the complexity of this government that you're responsible for. It's an enormously complex organism. And yet and all, it's in lots of different lines of business. You have 55 separate divisions in this government providing different services to people. So if you take 424 recommendations, that sounds like a ton, and it is, but in fact you divide it by 55, that starts to put it in a little bit of perspective. Obviously it's not a real thing like that, but that starts to put it in perspective because you're talking about a very diverse array of services that you provide. Some of those recommendations can be easily implemented and no doubt will be. In fact, we know of some that are already underway. Others will be far more complex, may require investments, may require policy changes, and so on to get implemented. But that's the challenge and the step ahead. So will you be staying on board with us and working on that action plan with the administration, with council? What is your next role? Well, our first next step is to be with you on Friday and to have a conversation and respond to questions that you have in that meeting, and we'll remain available to the mayor and his executive team to be whatever assistance we can be. Very good. Thank you. Thank you. Council Member James. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you for your presentation. Specifically, do you have, out of all the recommendations, some type of key or legend as to whose responsibility it will be to take care of that recommendation and be able to clearly identify that so that out of the recommendations we have our own personal list, each commissioner has their list, the mayor's office has their list, that sort of thing? Actually, that's a two-part answer to your question. It's a superb question. The first part is, as Julia mentioned when she went through, and you'll see the report when you have a chance to go through it, it's structured basically around each of the functional areas for which each commissioner is responsible. So that's the immediate and direct accountability link for implementation. But beyond that, getting back to Council Member Stennett's question about implementation, what ought to happen is the development of a detailed action plan, recommendation by recommendation, that says who's accountable for doing what when. That way you'll know exactly. You'll have a transparent process. Transparency is really good in doing this kind of work. And that remains to be prepared, to prepare that kind of implementation plan. In some cases, the recommendations are so complex, when the mayor goes to implement them with his team, he's going to have a team of people working to get that done. In other cases, it will be this particular manager takes the assignment and runs with it, and the accountability is very simple. So that kind of detail should be set forth in an action plan for implementation that remains yet to be developed. And who develops that again? Who develops the implementation process? We are available to assist the mayor and his team in doing that. The mayor and his team? Yes. Okay. Thank you. Thank you, Mayor. Any other questions today for Mr. New Farmer or Ms. Novak? All right. Thank you all very much for your presentation. Thank you. That takes us down to the council report. And it looks like Council Member Gordon is first. Thank you, Mayor. I just have one item that I wanted to raise awareness to the public. Our Fayette County police have nine narcotics and patrol canines, and these dogs are each partnered with a police officer, and so they're each a team. And when they do their work, our canines, all except for one of them, are not protected by bulletproof vests or stab vests, stab-proof vests. So there's a really good opportunity for people to help raise the $8,000 total that's needed for the vests for the canines. Dogtown Daycare and Boarding, For the Love of Dogs Bakery, Critter Sitters, and What's the Scoop are four entities that are sponsoring a golf scramble. It's called the Canine Vests for Life Golf Scramble Charity Event. And so I wanted to encourage the public, if you're interested in donating to the cause of Canine Vests or playing in the golf scramble, which is April 29th, you can go on the web and visit www.caninevestsforlife.org. I think this is a really important effort, because when a police officer loses his or her dog, the team goes down. And so I hope you'll check it out. Thank you. Council Member DeCant. Thank you, Mayor. I'd like to make a motion to place into the planning committee for review at their next meeting the operational recommendations for infill redevelopment as approved today by the infill redevelopment steering committee. Is there a second? Second. I have a second from Dr. Stevens to refer to the planning committee the operational recommendations from infill and redevelopment committee. Any discussion? Those in favor, please vote aye. Opposed, no. Motion carries. Thank you. Council Member McCord. Thank you, Mayor. Just real quickly, I wanted to announce next Tuesday night at 7 o'clock at Stonewall Elementary is the annual Stonewall Neighborhood Association meeting, and I would encourage the at-large folks to come out as well to be our guest in the 9th District. Thank you so much, Mayor. Thank you. Council Member Blues. Thank you, Mayor. Just two Neighborhood Association meeting announcements next Monday, March the 3rd, at 6 p.m. The Georgetown Street Neighborhood Association will meet in the O'Rear Center in Douglas Park. Many park issues to discuss that evening, and so I hope the neighborhood will turn out well. At 7 o'clock, the Green Acres Hollow Creek Breckenridge Neighborhood Association will meet in the community center in Green Acres Park. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you. Council Member Stevens. Ms. Lori Kidwell has been doing double-duty service in the council office now as a legislative aide, first for me and Bill Skelcombe and now for me and Don Blevins. She has announced her resignation as she's accepted a position with the Beshear administration in Frankfurt, and I wanted to publicly thank her for the good service she's done in the council office but also for the service she's extended to many citizens in our community, and I wish her well in her new position in Frankfurt. Anyone else wish to make a report? I'm seeing none. That takes us down to the Mayor's report. I have none today. The last item on the agenda is public comment on issues not on the agenda. Does anyone wish to address the council? Seeing none, we'll entertain a motion to adjourn. I have a motion from Council Member Beard and a second from Council Member Blevins to adjourn. Those in favor, please say aye. Opposed, no. Motion carries. Thank you.