Music We'll be right back. Thank you. Thank you. ¶¶ Thank you. ¶¶ ORCHESTRA PLAYS We'll be in our meeting in just a moment as soon as all the computers are up and running. Welcome everyone. like to go ahead and call to order the council work session for August 23rd 2022 and I trust everybody's got their granicus up and running now first item on the agenda is for issues on the agenda and we have one person signed up Dottie Bean. Oh it's not? Okay. All right thank you. So next item is there's no docket and so if I could have a motion to approve the August 16th work session summary. Thank you. Councilmember Ellinger moves and Councilmember Plumman seconds are there any questions all those in favor say aye anyone opposed all right that motion passes and there are no budget amendments today so we'll turn to new business if I could have a motion to approve thank you vice mayor moved and councilmember Baxter seconded and if you have questions please log in Council Member Ellinger. Thank You Mayor. Number H with Commissioner Albright I think. Welcome Commissioner. Could you could you tell us how this program is going to work? Well I will do my best. It uses cell phone data and then it anonymizes that data over about a six week turnaround period and their Their proprietary software allows it to separate by vehicle mode so it can tell cyclists and pedestrians from motor vehicle users. And then we can use that data for planning purposes and then also for like origin destination and some other places where we don't have ready count information. And then once we compile, how will we use the data then going forward? A lot of it will be transportation planning. Like I assume Scott Thompson and the NPO will be some power users. Our traffic folks will use it for turning counts and, again, origin, destination, things like how traffic's moving through a neighborhood maybe, if they're using cut throughs and things like that. And this is the first year of the program? Yes, this is new to us. Okay, and then we can renew it if we want to going forward? Yes, if we find that it's useful. And when will we find out the data? When will that come to us to know? Well, the way it was put to me was if we started using it today, it runs on about a six week lag, So that we could start looking at data starting in July as soon as we set up the program. But it will always be on a little bit of a delay. So we could start using it pretty quickly once we get the agreement in place. Thank you. Looking forward to it. You're welcome. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you. Council Member Maloney. Thank you, Mayor. My question is on E. Commissioner Armstrong. How are you all going to pay for these? because when I made this motion, my intent was not to go this way, but it seems like we're going this direction. So how and when do these people get their pay? Welcome, Commissioner. Thank you, Mayor, and thank you for the question. I actually put a pretty rudimentary slide up here real quick, just showing the different divisions. As you all know, just before summer break, The council unanimously voted to allot $5 million in one-time non-reoccurring funds to be used in the divisions of E911, Community Corrections, and Police regarding retention and hiring. The administration started working very closely with some divisions, including law, finance, HR, the divisions affected, and with the unions. Today, you'll see three different plans for those three different divisions. Some of them have some things in common and some do not. These are based on information that we received and was agreed upon by the unions that were affected by these memo of understandings or agreements that are a part of the packet today. Overall, the process went pretty smoothly, to be honest with you. It's pretty timely in getting this done. A short synopsis is, as outlined in the packet, Each current employee will get a retention pay of $4,000, and every new employee coming on will get a $3,000 hiring credit. We'll go to the slides real quick. This is Lexington Enhanced 911 Retention Hiring and Pay. These are the dates that are associated with it. You notice it says buy because it's not an exact time frame. Also down here on the new hires, six months after hire, $900, and one year after hire, $2,100. Could you go to the next, please? Community corrections, you'll see up there some of the dates actually match the last slide. October 15th seems to be a pretty popular date with all three of the divisions. That's split up, 1760, 2240. Out at the community corrections, we actually have two different unions, and they requested two different payout schedules. And those are listed up there as well. And down at the bottom, after talking Director Farmer, her staff, and talking with the union, they decided it would accomplish the task better if the payments to the recruiting classes starting during this time frame received four different supplements. Last slide, please. Lexington Police Department, again, October 15th seems to be a popular date. That pretty much mirrors the other two in some ways. Then you'll see down here the recruit class follows closely after that. Down at the bottom it talks about new hires and there will be lump sums on the dates indicated. I appreciate that. My intent wasn't to do this, but it's going to motivate the police in those areas that need it. We originally talked $5 million. I had a couple of my colleagues that were going to amend it up to possibly $8 to $9 million, and that never happened. And I did not see that this was foresee this. Mine was for all public safety. We have the fire department that has worked hard during these tough times, and we want to keep them here, and I want to keep the morale there. But my biggest concern is that when I look at this, I don't think it puts a dent in y'all's concern because there's other places that have given up a bigger bonus if you sign up. And I'm afraid that somebody is going to take this bonus, and then in six months they're going to go to another place and get a larger bonus. and that's not what my intent is but I fit but if you are convinced that it's gonna make the morale keep people here I would go on that but I didn't feel that but I but I'm hoping it does so I just want to go on record to let you know that I not what I and I said that publicly that we need to keep these employees make it more motivated especially for people in the police department between three and eight years that have been leaving keep our fire department motivated and i just think we're just not going the direction that i really intended to go to but that's fine thank you i would point out again it's not reoccurring expenses so we were limited by the amount of money that was allocated with that being said five million dollars a lot of money but whenever you spread it over so many people that number goes down whenever you take into consideration that four thousand dollars per employee that does not include to them the i forget what you call it the fringe the fringe aspect of that that has to be included as well so So that money does somewhat disappear quickly, to be honest. If you remember, that's how ARPA was as well. Thank you. Council Member Baxter. Thank you, Mayor. Don't go anywhere, Commissioner. Oh, yes, ma'am. I'm sorry. I have a question about item G. Just curious if you can tell me a little bit more about what this Pathfinder software does. Okay. Actually, I'll defer that. Oh, okay. Okay. Thank you. Yes, thank you. I'm not sure exactly what you're asking. I'm sorry. Just can you tell me a little bit more about what the software does? I'm not exactly sure to be honest. You give me a moment. I can try to look at it and see. That was the last second addition to the meeting today. Was it a particular item number on here? It's not a particular item. number on here. It's item G on the packet and then the detail is page 11. Yes ma'am, I see it here. Okay, so Pathfinder if it's related to the Cellbrite reports, what I understand that is when we do forensic analysis on Cellbrite for phones, we end up with a lot of data and we need better storage solution for all the data that comes with those reports because there's so much data that comes from the analysis if it makes any sense okay that helps thank you so much sorry with that thank you mayor that's okay anything else sorry okay thank you councilmember Kloiber thank you mayor Commissioner Armstrong can I just one one last second thank you I have to echo some of the same concerns that councilmember Maloney brought up but I want to focus more on the the split between retention and recruitment. Because even if reasonable minds can disagree about how to split up that money, those were the two focuses. So why did we decide to focus it so heavily on these one-time bonuses for the retention for this one year instead of recruitment that may have paid more dividends for multiple years? Well, if you think about it, there are more current employees than vacancies. Therefore, if you allot more for those individuals that you're wanting to keep because they have the experience that you want to retain for a longer term. Also, you have to take into consideration new employees are great, but it takes a certain amount of time for like in the police department. It could take a year before they get trained. So it's very important to retain the employees we already have. That's why they have a higher allotment as well. $1,000 may not sound like a lot to some people, but $1,000 is significant in that aspect. Whenever it comes to the allocation for recruitment, we did utilize $100,000 of the $5 million for actual advertisements with the Division of Community Corrections and E911, and we were utilizing that to supplement other funds that they were already budgeted. So the amount that we put aside for recruitment is much less than the amount that we put together in retention, if you look at a gross number. And I'm not sure if we have the gross number, how much we put in those two different areas or not. Well, from the approval. Do you hear that? 85% went to retention, 15% went to new hiring, which is what we thought would be best in a certain area. All right. Well, again, obviously we hope that this works out. We wanted to give you guys the most best tools that you could have in order to improve the situation. and we'll have to trust in your judgment that this is going to be effective. So thank you. We feel this is the best way to utilize the one-time funds, yes. Thank you. Any other questions on new business? All right. All those in favor of approval say aye. Is anyone opposed? All right. That motion passes. Thank you. We'll go on to continuing business. Could I have a motion for neighborhood development funds, please? Second. Thank you. Council Member Plowman moves approval. Council Member Bledsoe seconds. Are there any questions? All right. All those in favor, say aye. Aye. Is anyone opposed? All right. That motion passes. Now it's time for our American Rescue Plan Act Annual Update by Jennifer Warrenma, who is the ARPA Project Manager. Welcome. Thank you. Well, thank you all so much for the opportunity to speak to you today. Before we start, I wanted to tell you I have quite a few of our individual project managers here, mostly because I wanted you all to see how many people it's taking to get this done and how much I appreciate all of their efforts. Also, who's not in the crowd are probably a lot of the sub-recipients and our external partners who have also been fantastic to work with through this process, so I wanted to say thank you before we start to them as well. Do you want to have them stand up so we can actually see how many there are? That'd be great. Don't be shy. Come on, come on, come on. Thank you. Okay, so we will go ahead and get started. I've practiced, and I'm trying to do it under 15 minutes. It's a lot to go through. So I'm going to give you all just a very brief ARPA update today. I'm going to talk about our executive team that's assisting me multiple times every day with decision making and keeping this moving forward. Our staffing update, a funding update, a project engagement, and a project status update. I have some updates on our subrecipients and various projects that you all have approved. Some project photos and upcoming and ongoing as well as some links for you all. So if I haven't emailed you enough links, there's some more links in this presentation. So just a quick update. We have received now over $121 million of our federal money. I will say we have received it in two tranches, really four, because we're getting both a city and a county allocation. And you'll notice in 2022, we actually received our final tranche in July. And I want to give a huge thank you to Commissioner Lanter who pressed and pressed and pressed the treasury to get us that funding. We anticipated getting it in June. After multiple emails to them, we finally were wired the funds. So a big thank you to Charlie for helping with that. Our executive team, all of these spaces I'm sure are familiar to you. I wanted to point out this group of people because these folks are helping me every single day make sure that this project, this ARPA project gets done and gets done in a timely manner. And so while all of these folks on here are not necessarily funded by ARPA, they are helping me every day. And so I wanted to thank them publicly, put their names up. And if you'll notice the last name, Brittany Griffin Smith, has written every single one of the subrecipient agreements with more to come after Commissioner Casey gives her update today. I'm also incredibly happy to report to you that all of the ARPA funding positions that you all have approved for us are filled, including, you'll see up there, a financial coordinator in grants, which was finally filled last month after multiple efforts and a lot of effort, I should say, from a lot of folks. I want to thank the grant staff. So we've got somebody up there that's focused now solely on our ARPA projects as well as many of their other staff. CAO Hamilton and I did want to bring to your attention as we've moved forward through and we're about six to eight months in from the February allocation, that it is probable we are going to have some additional ARPA funded positions come forward. One of these will likely be a project manager in general services to help with some of the projects that they're managing. We are also going to come forward with a part time clerk, which will be a construction manager and a part time clerk administrative in the social services. After Casey gives her presentation today, you'll see why we think we will need that, is that is very voluminous, it's a lot of subrecipient agreements. So since we had an opportunity to present to you today, we wanted to bring that forward as an FYI. So you can look for those to come in the near future. All right, so the funding update, I know you all have seen this very recently, but as you know, you've allocated right over $119 million, and we have $1.3 unallocated. We have spent through July 31st a little over $24 million and encumbered an additional $7 million. And CAO Hamilton likes to tease me that half of that actual number is premium pay, so I feel like I need to say that. But we have also worked really hard to get additional monies expensed through this process. And as Casey is going to talk to you in a bit, we're going to be ready here shortly to put another $6 million or so encumbrance on with the nonprofit capital grants. Just a reminder, these are the projects that you all have allocated under various expenditure categories. That's really a Treasury term to say where does this fit. I do want to point out two things on this slide. The public health, which is the public sector capacity, that's the social services personnel that you all approved. It's a $6 million allocation that shows nothing is expensed yet. But the reason is at the end of the fiscal year and then at the end of next fiscal year, Commissioner Hensley is going to help us sort of allocate that back and reimburse us. So although that's showing we haven't started, we have started. It's just more of an accounting difference. And then the other thing I want to point out is EC6, which is revenue replacement. And as you all will likely remember from our February Committee of the Whole meetings, revenue replacement is an interesting category that gives us an opportunity to fund things the government would normally do with Department of Treasury ARPA funding. And so there are multiple projects within that 44 projects that could have easily fit in another category on this list. For example, there's negative economic impacts, there's public health. Selfishly, many of the communities, including ours and myself, have categorized things here because it is really less onerous in terms of reporting to the Treasury. So we essentially tell them, listen, here's our revenue calculation that we think we lost, and we're going to go ahead and categorize all these projects here. And Ashley Simpson helps me in the finance department with that revenue loss calculation, which is right now at about 70 million. So we're trending, we have a little bit left in that category that we're saving to categorize there if we need to in the future. And then obviously the administration is myself, the project managers that were listed, and then we also have a construction contingency here of around $2.6 million. And you'll want to remember that figure when Casey comes up to give her presentation. This is just a little look at what we've, the categories we've expensed out of. It's pretty self-explanatory. And I wanted to take just a bit of time here to talk to you all about how we are continuing as an ARPA project team to engage the public. So while you all had a very robust engagement for public ideas, we continue to do that. So we have our ARPA email address that we continue to check. I get lots of emails on that every month or so. And then I put just some examples up here of what our project managers are doing out in the community to tell them, hey, we've got all this federal money, and we really want to know what you'd like to see in your neighborhood. So you can see, I'll give an example, the Meadowthorpe Park playground. Surely you all have seen these out in the playground, but you can scan the code and tell us what you'd like. We've got one on the end that says, here are some features we would love to bring to you with American Rescue Plan Act. What do you like? And then the middle, Teresa Maynard put together, this was to tell our community partners, our nonprofit partners, that we had $6 million that we would be able to allocate to them and invite them to a webinar to learn all about the process and what that grant would look like. So those are just some examples. Surely you've seen them shared on social media and perhaps out in the parks themselves. Now I want to quickly talk through the project status. I did put together, I think it's a bit easier, a spreadsheet for you all that is in your packet that lays out each project and where we are. And CAO Hamilton told me last week, well, not start at 17. Jan, you got to give some more information. So I wanted to say that the fiscal year 2024 projects will obviously not have started yet. And we have some fiscal year 23 projects that are just now getting underway. So since I'm reporting through the end of July, the 17 number is a bit high, but it is what you'll see in your packet has not yet started. We have 39 projects that are completed less than 50%, but are underway. Seven that are completed 50% or more, and we have 15 that are completed or substantially complete. So I work with our project managers multiple times a week to find out if they paid out their final invoices. So I think 15 is a good number. we're gonna keep pushing. Hopefully this time next year these numbers are higher. So this is just a quick snapshot of what is completed. Obviously you all know that the premium pay is complete, the employee supplements are complete, and then it goes down the line, the fiscal year 22 projects. We have expensed those completely out and they are completed as well. Parks and recreation is really an animal in and of itself. We've got about 55 parks projects in addition to what I've already showed you on this list. So our phase one projects, you can see there, most of these, and I work with Chris Tutankton Parks multiple times a week as well, most of these are complete. We're just paying out invoices. So you've probably seen, and hopefully your constituencies have been out enjoying a lot of these features that we've put in. We also have some other things that may not be quite as noticeable, like roofing and HVAC, that are complete or substantially complete. And we also have some aquatics projects that are complete. As you can see here, we've got some diving boards. This is a snapshot of the subrecipient agreements that we have executed, are in Legistar for you all, and they are underway. I did want to note on the BCTC Dental Hygiene Clinic, they're going to be breaking ground this fall, and you will all be expected, or you'll all be receiving an invite, and of course can attend. And then we also, as you know, the Village Branch Library had its groundbreaking just the other day. I saw that was shared quite frequently on social media as well. So that is very exciting. So those are some bigger partner projects that are underway or almost underway. I did want to pause here for just a moment and let you all know the Lexington Farmers Market Project, the Salvation Army Project, and the Hope Center Project, These are external partners that we have had multiple meetings with. These projects we don't have subrecipient agreements yet for because they're in various stages of starting their project. So, for example, they could be doing some additional fundraising, dealing with schematic designs, acquiring property. There's any number of things, but our dialogue continues. And what CAO Hamilton and I would like to do, if you all are agreeable to it, is come to you after the holidays, first of the year, and give you an update on where we are. We need a bit more time with some of these to sort of square away what their next steps will be. And then finally, the big nonprofit capital grants, which you'll hear about in just a moment. We are very, very close there to proceeding. but I did also want to let you know there'll be a number of subrecipient agreements that we will have to execute. And then I wanted to take a minute, I made a little cheat sheet, am I doing okay on time? Okay, I can do it. Okay, so I just wanted to let you know, I think this is really the most important part of this presentation. Regrettably, I only have three minutes left, so I'll hurry. But I wanted you all to know what ARPA is doing out in our community. We have allocated funding to preserve over 60 affordable housing units for seniors, develop 144 new affordable housing with much to go. We've got over $8 million of affordable housing money that will be given out. The winter warming shelter through the CAC that you all approved helped 209 residents and the transitional housing pilot that Commissioner Lanter is spearheading with our external partner has already enrolled 16 households. To Amy's credit today, Amy Baker's credit, RSLA was expanded because of ARPA and you all made that commitment. She has assisted over 600 individuals in the RSLA program to date with more to come and this is really interesting but in July alone she served 131 people with that project and that's all thanks to your all's additional allocation in RSLA. Yeah I thought that was a pretty big number that I wanted to share. Safety Net is an external partner and they have actually provided case management already to 23 adults and their 40 children and the Safety Net program just started a couple months ago. And then finally just to sort of wrap up that we've done, we will do 58 park improvements. 22 of those are in qualified census tracts and I did want to note we have 31 projects in qualified census tracts across our community which I think is just outstanding. Here are some project photos. I always love a good photo and Amy Wallet and our parks team Paul Hopper has taken many of these. You'll see some infrastructure improvements. Our built environment is improving all over the county. We've got some one Lexington participants in the bottom middle. And then I really wanted to point out, Council Member Legree I know was here, but the picture in the middle on the top, we cut the ribbon on this fantastic structure at Woodland Park. The smiles I saw that day from the therapeutic recreation participants really made me really understand why we're doing this for our community and I can't really say more than that except for it was really moving and so I wanted to point that out to you all because I just thought that picture just really summed up that that ribbon cutting and then upcoming and ongoing so meetings meetings meetings we have lots of meetings lots of emails Parks and Recreation updates us every month we get monthly and quarterly sub recipient reports and I want to sort of end here with this is the administration budget so Sally and I as well as budgeting have been tracking that you all allocated about five million dollars to the administrative budget we're under spending that slightly and there may be some left over we don't know yet we have to get farther into the process to see but we are going to continue to track that and when we have a better feel we'll come forward and let you know if that could potentially be allocated to additional projects and then what I hope to hear from you all today is am I updating you enough? Are you getting what you need when your constituents call? Are they able to access the website and understand it? I had a meeting last week with a council member. We're gonna go out into the community and maybe film a little video to show the neighbors what's coming from the American Rescue Plan Act. So let me know if there's something that our office and myself can do better for you. And then there's all the links you can read in your spare time. Brookings is doing an excellent job tracking ARPA investments. It's not been updated since the big July reports, but it's really neat to see what everybody's doing, and they do track Lexington as well, probably better than I could do visually. So that's it. Did I make it? Okay. All right. Thank you. You're just fine, and now it's time for questions. All right. Council members, if you'll log in, please. Council member James Brown. Thank you, Mayor, and thank you, Jennifer, for such an informative presentation, and And your hard work with all this money you have to account for. And then everybody that's working on this effort. My first question is, in regards to changes that have come down from the federal government in regards to this funding and the use of it, those, initially, those sub-recipients that we don't have agreements on, Are we going to try to, there's the intent to hold them to the details of their original application, but I would see some benefit in having some flexibility because we want to maximize the use of this funding. And if their original application was constrained due to the regulations that we were dealing with at first, if there's an opportunity to maximize those dollars and get a better use of it, Are we open to looking at that in regards to those agreements going forward? Yes, that's actually an excellent question. I will tell you, when we were categorizing particularly outstanding subrecipient agreements, that's what I'm referring to at this time, most of those are actually categorized under revenue replacement council members, so that gives us that maximum flexibility. So we are able to, and I'll give you an example. We'll take the Hope Center. The Hope Center is an organization that you all give money to on a regular annual basis for whatever the case may be. And so my narrative to the Treasury has been in terms, and I'm using just this Hope Center as an example, this is a subrecipient that we would partner with anyway. And so we've done this. We own the building. We've partnered with them. We've given them money for operations. We've given them money for building improvements in the past. So I've categorized that they're under revenue replacement because it has been historically a partner for us, and that does give us flexibility. Some of the other expenditure categories are very specific. So there are certain things that they will not allow under those categories, and so that's why we've put it right there. So I feel pretty good about the ability. Now, if one of those outstanding subrecipients came to us with something that was totally different than what you all approved or what they submitted to you all, i would not feel comfortable making that call i would want to come back to you all with any potential changes if they were drastic yeah and i agree i think that makes sense but i just wanted to make sure that you know since the rules change maybe opportunities change so and they and i will say too um just for the public's knowledge i know rick mcquady has kept you all very in the loop the rules change substantially for affordable housing projects um and i know the board's been made aware of that it was covered fairly comprehensively in the national news but now they allow those longer loans which were which was something they would not allow to begin with that took a push i think at both the state local state and national level and then the treasury went ahead and changed their guidance on affordable housing so that does give the affordable housing board a significant amount of flexibility versus how it looked even two months ago it it does i appreciate you sharing that and the other thing i'll say too is you know we had a meeting last week and and i've been hearing from some constituencies that i serve in regards to the best use of this money getting back into the community and some of the communities that it was targeted towards i was very impressed not by just your presentation today but the way that you uh... work with the i think that pinpoint locations were projects and were money monies are being spent and are being invested. And I think that's exactly what we need in regards to having some form of accountability in regards to this money. So I appreciate all that work and all that effort. And you provided us with more information that we needed. And I know you will continue to do that going forward. And I do want to. You're very welcome. And I did receive an email late in the night that I got this morning that Chris Dorj is actually working on that for all of you. So what I've done is put together all of our projects and all their addresses, submitted that to GIS, and I hope in the next couple of weeks to have a map for each of you that's highlighting in your council district what are we doing. Pinpoint where it is, what it is, and some of that is actually going to be augmented even further if Casey's presentation is successful today and we have even more nonprofit money to give about so we'll have quite a few more locations on those maps but in addition to giving them to you all i also intend to post those on the arpa website so your constituencies can see what we're doing and in each of the the council districts welcome councilmember maloney thank you thank you jennifer appreciate your time because i had a meeting yesterday with a couple non-profits that are getting their budget ready for the fall for winter and when they deal with homelessness okay and they set money aside for hotels They relied on the city two years ago. We did $750,000 in partnership with them with hotels. And then last year the homeless numbers really increased drastically. We went up to $1.4 million. This year I hear the numbers are even more than that. We still have money set aside for these nonprofits to start working for hotels because the winter months are coming around just two months away. And I like to be proactive instead of reactive. So do we have money for that program to continue on? I know we've got five years to spend all this money. Yes. But to me, this homeless number is really getting scary, and I just want to be sure these people have a place to live in winter especially. Well, I can tell you that the winter warming shelter money that you all allocated has been completely expensed out. So that project from last winter, last fiscal year, is completely spent. As you all know, the ARPA funding is funding the Homelessness Office, the OP, as we like to call it, $750,000. I would have to defer to Commissioner Lanter about specifics on the $750,000, if you don't mind, council member. Sure, that's fine, because the non-profit asked me this question. Sure, sure, and I apologize, I can't answer, but Charlie may be able to speak better to what that will be allocated for. there's not currently council member millennia any plans to run that winter warming you move up close to i can't hear you there's not currently any plans to run that winter warming shelter again there's no funding from arpa or any other source at that level we do have the the annual allocation for opi which comes from arpa so it's kind of indirectly arpa that as needs are presented we could explore different options for how to address the problem in the winter that's that's not something we did prior to the pandemic and so it's it's it's something we'll have to revisit whether we want to continue to provide that level of service because there's also some drawbacks when we do that i mean i hope you all look at it soon instead of waiting to the winter month because i that's why i'm bringing this up now so we can be proactive the other question on the eviction that we had 20 something million dollars that we gave to to community action. How much money we have left there, and can we help some of these folks who have been evicted and not been able to go through the program, there are homelessness that can be in these hotels for the winter months. Could we use that money to use, and I'm just curious how much money we have left in the community action, and where are we on that? Sure. So actually last week, council approved an additional allocation to community action of i think it was 3.5 million that we just transferred to them last week so they've got an additional 3.5 million that actually represents all about the balance of our our money the lfucg's money however we are currently in negotiations with the treasury department and kentucky housing corporation to receive additional funds like we have previously we fully expect to receive those we fully expect to be able to continue the operations of the program that program as you know does pay for a 30-day hotel voucher when someone has had an eviction that that piece of the program will continue now and through the winter and it is also available for those individuals who are in the hotel to also be able to pay deposit and first one two three months rent what's needed depending on their eligibility to get them set up in a new place so it's actually that's already in place and could certainly be used to serve that population. Okay. Thank you. That's one I didn't know. Thank you. Thank you. Council Member Fred Brown. Thank you, Mayor. I'm really impressed about what you've given us an update here and the work the team has put together. It's really been informative as far as I'm concerned and it's given me information back as to our accountability. you know what you're going to see, what is this, a five-year time frame that we have to spend it or we have to have it allocated? Yes, so what we're going to do per the Treasury is by December 31st, 2024, we have to have allocated every bit of this. By December 31st, 2026, we have to have spent all of it. And then a few of us, myself and likely a few of the project managers, will stay on about six more months to make sure that all that final reporting is turned into the Treasury. I don't have a crystal ball, but you can be assured in the future there's going to be a lot of communities that the government is going to come back and say, you didn't respond, we're going to audit the funds that you made, and there may be some paybacks. But I think the monitoring that we're doing and the information that you're putting together, I think is going to stand the test. That's me personally from an accountant's perspective. That means a lot, thank you. So the reporting to the federal government, the treasury, is that just once a year? No, it is quarterly. We report on spend in progress quarterly. Then the big report that was submitted a couple weeks before the end of July, that is programmatic spend. spend it talks about how we're focusing on equity why we've allocated money here and how we're tracking the impact it's making on the community so that's a lot more involved it was almost 300 pages but the quarterly reports are merely spend and then let us know your progress and how many people you've served do you envision that maybe in a couple of years maybe before that that we will know maybe an exact number that we have left that hasn't been spent or that we can allocate to other things or we may have to give them some back. I can assure you that CAO Hamilton will make sure to the penny we know how much we have to spend because we aren't giving any back. I mean that's One thing, on the subrecipient update that you have on page 31, I believe, it has the Lexington Farmers Market, Salvation Army, Hope Center, nonprofit capital grants. What's the estimated cost that we set aside for those four groups? So on the, sorry, let me go back to that slide. So nonprofit capital grant is $6 million because we've been working on it nonstop for three weeks. So I know that. The Hope Center project, $2 million. The Salvation Army, $2 million. The Farmers Market, I believe, is $4 million. Yes. So it's a substantial amount of money- $14 million? On this slide. Mm-hm, yes. But that's still up in the air, but whatever- Yes, those are outstanding, yes. Okay. And I think the other, let's see, I had one other item. Oh, the other item was right now the projection is that we have a million two that we have not spent. That's right. What's the plans that we can do with that 1.2? Is that going to come forward from the administration or? Well, I love to spend money. I'm sure I could think of something. But what I would say is I would like if you all would consider to give us a little time. Let's get through the fall. Let's see where we get with this. I want to keep watching our administrative expense every month and see how we're spending there. We continue, as you all see every week, we continue to do budget amendments. We close out a project. We might move a little bit back into contingency. We may need to spend a little out of contingency to make a project move forward. So CAO Hamilton and I will keep an eye on this and be brainstorming about how best to bring that forward to you. But I think ultimately we would like either feedback from you all or perhaps we'll come with a plan, how we think, what we think we need to do with anything that is outstanding. Great, thank you for the presentation. You're welcome. Thank you, Councilmember Reynolds. Thank you, Mayor, and thank you, Jennifer, for this amazing presentation and all your hard work. You are so detail-oriented, I love it. And your team has done a fantastic job, so thank you to everybody. Just quick question, when we talk about our ARPA funded positions, including your own, how, and I know you said some of you might stay on longer, but Are they only funded through 2026 or are they just kind of, they're only, like there's an expiration date or how does that work? Yeah, I think unfortunately, I hate saying that up here, but I think I do have an expiration date, yes. So what I would say is that, and I'll give you an example. So the nonprofit capital grants that you're going to hear about in a bit, we'll have, we're going to propose a few part time positions for that. We're going to track that and see how that goes. We get those all done in a year and then those positions are no longer needed. We'll see. I think we'll see, particularly in the Parks Department, because their project number is just so voluminous, 55, 60 different projects there. You'll see them stay on and help me with reporting through the end of that term. So I think it just really depends on our spend and as projects get completed and drop off where we are. But I would anticipate there will be a handful of us that will stay on through the spring of 20, gosh, 27 to help with that final reporting and such. Okay. And so they're ARPA funded and then they will kind of phase out as they're not needed anymore. Yes. They don't, the ones that I put up on the list do not have any general fund impact. They are all federal grant funded. Okay. All right. Thank you very much. Sure. Councilmember Lamb. Thank you, Mayor, and thank you for the presentation, and thanks to everybody that's sitting here in this chamber that was part of this and all those that are filling in for those that are refocusing their time and energy during this time. I mean, it is truly a large government initiative, and I do appreciate it. You mentioned about the website. Yes. And I just wanted to give you an opportunity, because of the level of uniqueness with this and the amount of money and the massive amounts of projects and the people that it's touching out in the community, the opportunity for transparency here and allowing the public to really see inside our doors and seeing what it's being spent, how it's being spent. I was just curious how you all are focusing on the website to make sure that that transparency is there so that the public can really just see it. Yes. Well, that transparency is top of mind, not only for myself and the administration and our team, but the Treasury demands it. And I'll give you an example. When we had to submit our big annual recovery report, not only do they want you to attach it as a PDF, but they want a link to your public website. that shows that it's out there for the public to view. So, and that document is obviously probably more comprehensive than anybody really wants to read, but it has every detail. So not only that, but we also, I work with Ashley Simpson every month. She puts together some great, like a snapshot. What have we obligated? What have we expensed in each category? We have a little donut chart up there that shows you all what we've spent. And then there are links to the details. So if you wanna see from June to July, what did we spend? There's a spreadsheet that's going to show you. Here's the progress that we've made. We also kept on there, and I intend to keep on there, all of the public engagement we did to get to this point, even though that's over. I think it's really important for people to understand why things were allocated the way they were. What was the process that you all went throughout in the community to make sure that we were listening, and then allocated money as the constituents asked us to do. So we've left that there. Additionally, the ARPA at Lexingtonky.gov, I get lots of emails. They started out asking for money, and you know, people had interest. How do I get ARPA money? Here's what I'd like to do. And then through that, they've sort of changed. We had some through the nonprofit capital grant process that we, of course, directed to purchasing. We've also had some of the national think tanks. Mathematica emailed me a couple weeks ago and said we want to see what Lexington's doing, how they're doing it with the money, what you're doing with the money. And so sort of updating them. They had some project specific questions. And so anytime anyone reaches out to me, I'm trying to give them what they need and maybe a little bit more. But I'm always open. If you hear from your constituency that something's not making sense or they'd like to see it displayed a different way, I would love that feedback for them. Well, I didn't expect any less of an answer because I mean, you know, it's just outstanding how you all are all managing this. And I just really appreciate it because I think it's so important for us to use this opportunity to educate the public about what all we and our local officials are doing and supporting. And this is one of those opportunities. It's almost like once in a lifetime. I agree. So thank you so much. You're welcome. And thanks to all of the employees that are out there that are working and helping. And thank you so much. You're welcome. Thank you, Mayor. Any other questions, Councilmembers? Well, I want to thank Jennifer. She's very modest when she talks about who's looking at how our ARPA is going. We are now known in the country for the right way to do this, and there are many cities that have not spent one dime yet. And so I want to congratulate you and your team because they are absolutely focused on doing this exactly by the book with the Treasury, and it's all good for our community. So thank you for your dedication and your team as well. Thank you for the opportunity, and I appreciate it very much, and I hope Casey is ready. Thank you. Thank you, Jen. So with that, we have Commissioner Casey Allen Bryant and our nonprofit capital funds program. Welcome. No pressure at all. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for allowing me to be here before you today. I am extremely excited to bring to you the progress that we have made on these nonprofit capital grants program. The difference that we're about to make in this community is outstanding. And so again, I'm just very excited. Just as a reminder, some of these slides you've probably seen a little bit before, but just in case you've forgotten, we live with it every day and we understand that not everybody does. The Nonprofit Capital Grants Project, it is a one time grant. And so we're not going to be reallocating years after years like we do with other program such as the s are just one time and it's for our local five oh one see threes they are major categories that can be spit for this project so can either be facility or operational market into a little bit more detail in for the eligibility we're looking at community partners that have that proven track record you know they've been in our community have worked in their community we're looking at their missions their goals and i'll go over the crack the specific criteria for the rsb rsps and how we read them the grant funds must be used for agencies that have facilities located in fayette county and that are serving residents of our lexon fayette county community they of course must be a five-oh-one c three you know that was important and there were regulations such as they had to have a gold star of transparency that was was listed and that was one of the criteria that we had We also wanted to see if they were in some kind of projects where they were trying to acquire land or change land. We wanted to make sure that they either owned their facility or they had a current long-term lease. And we define long-term as being three years or more remaining on their lease. And they had to have the ability to spend the reward money by April 30th, 2024. for. So in terms of some of the cost facilities, you can see we've broken it down here. We had a gamut of project proposals. Really not anything for environmental remediation unless you include the revamp of the sewer lines. That could be environmental, of course. We We had some systems changes, some plumbing. We had changes to new roofs and improvements. We had parking lots, lighting, and repavement. We had some acquisition of property. We had just a wide gamut of projects that were listed for facility improvements, including for operational. We had, of course, a lot of vans. We had projects that were submitted for generators and HVAC units. And for those who were using their kitchens for their projects, we had new kitchen equipment. So we had a little bit of everything. We had a lot of security systems that were listed that you'll see in our awards. In terms of our grant award allocation, when I came to you before, we had decided we knew that we were probably going to get most of the requests for facilities improvements, and we knew that that was probably going to cost more. And so we divided it up, our funding pool, from $4 million for facilities and $2 million for operational. Now, the minimum requests per agency for facilities and operational were at $100,000 and then $500,000, respectively. Though the maximum was $500,000 and $250,000. And we realized that agencies may not have one particular project that would equal the minimum. And we saw that when we received our projects that were put forth submissions. And so they were allowed to actually bundle their projects to get up to that minimum. And many of our agencies did just that. In terms of our evaluation criteria, we were looking for agencies that were serving that marginalized population. I mean, if you remember why ARPA was given out to local governments, we're trying to remediate some of the damage from COVID, right? And so we're looking at those marginalized human populations. And so they had to submit items such as their mission statements and let us know what type of programming that you do. not because we're giving money for programming, but to evaluate whether they directly or indirectly facilitate provision of services for those vulnerable populations in Lexington, Fayette County. They had to also have the demonstrated need. It couldn't be just because they want a van or because they maybe want a new HVAC unit. But what was it? They had to, for example, we had someone who submitted for a new roof ceiling. They showed pictures, and they demonstrated how they needed the new roof and ceiling. We also would maybe get code enforcement statements, so why they had to have something fixed. We also needed to look at the applicant capacity for completing the project and meeting the OPA requirements. And so had they ever received federal grant funding? Had they ever received funding from us? the persons present, their employees, had they ever had any experience with similar projects or managing similar projects. We also had to look at that operational feasibility. Were they, are they, were they going to be able to meet that deadline? Remember that April 30th deadline is what we, what we're looking for. And so other kind of items that we were looking at was the timeline. And have they had that experience with procurement process? Where they have letters of commitment for additional funds. Because remember, there was a ceiling. And so as we know, property values are up. And so $500,000 may not be enough for acquiring a piece of property, but do they have plans for getting the rest of those costs? And then their cost analysis. We were looking to see were these reasonable costs. Now, at this point in the game, they did not have to submit their bids, but many went ahead and got bids if they were able to and submitted them so that we could see this is a feasible cost for Lexington County area. So, bringing you up to speed. So, that was the process. That was the program, what the cost covered. And now to actually what happened. We were extremely, I had no idea when I presented the process to you a few months ago that we would get the response that we did. There were 56 responses from, 56 agencies that responded. And as you can see, it was over $21 million. That's over three times the amount of money that we had. And as predicted, most of it fell into facility improvements and about a quarter of it falling under operational investments. Each agency had from either one project that they submitted to five, six, seven projects that they submitted. Remember, they were allowed to bundle to reach that minimum. So once we had the responses from the 138 projects from 56 agencies, we then decided to split them into four equal groups, and it was based purely on the alphabet. There was, there's no random sampling. We just divided them up by the alphabet and alphabetized them by the name of the agency. We had four committees to score these four equal groups, and we gave thoughtful consideration to the members of these committees. And we decided to have someone from general services, code enforcement, the IT, computer world, of course social services, finance, and grants. And that gave us a wide range of experience for what we knew what kind of projects that we were going to be getting. so people could have that experience to grade them. We thank all of these committee members, these representatives from these six departments and divisions. They spent countless hours reviewing these agencies and projects. Each of the committees had about 34 projects that they had to review. And if you can see the criteria, there were many documents that had to be submitted that they had a review and they did an excellent, excellent job. We were able to meet with each of the four groups just to give them the opportunity to discuss all of the projects. Of course, we did not change any scores. We stuck strictly to the purchasing and RFP guidelines. We then, as a work group, and when I say work group, that was the commissioners, myself, Commissioner Ford, Commissioner Lanter, Commissioner Hensley, and we were, of course, advised by our purchasing guru, Todd Slayton, as well as the heart of social services, Ms. Teresa Maynard, who has lots of experience with our ESR. and we met and went over the scores from the four committees. And then we came up with our recommendations. I do want to add, I may have said it, but I want to say it again, that the process that was used to review these RFPs was a rigorous process. process. We again stuck strictly to all policies and rules attached to it. However, it was not a scientific process. And when I say scientific, we did not randomly sample and put each agency and project in the randomly sample and put it into the groups. We did not have inter-rater reliability for the scores between the reviewers. And in fact, taking that into consideration, instead of looking at each project, just the score, we looked at them as the ranks. Because again, this was not scientific, however, it was very rigorous. What we decided to do was to look at the top rankings. So whether it was the top 10 or the top 11, we took those from each of the four groups. instead of compiling all of the scores from the four groups because of the aforementioned reasons that I have given. So again, we took the top 10 or top 11 of each group, and we are further recommending that each are funded at the full ask. Now, this is where we come to a crossroads, and it's no surprise to you. I know all of you have read your PowerPoint ahead of time, and so you know where I'm going with this. I will say that I want to give that we are doing recommendation for the full ask. We are at a unique opportunity to be able to 100% fund these projects. We have not been able to do that with ESR. We've not been able to do that with a lot of grant projects that have come through the government. But we are with these. And these are capital projects. and when we asked the agencies to give their proposals and to give their costs we asked for those realistic quotes we asked for them to include contingencies and that is another reason why we're asking for that full ask that hundred percent funding for it so what are these two scenarios look like if we either do top 10 or top 11. For our top 10 ranked 40 projects, and that's about 20 agencies, we have, you can see the numbers here, our totals for group 1, 2's, 3's, and 4's across the facilities and operational improvements. And we are under, fun, actually, for facility improvements we allocated four million for it we would be under for it with operational we would actually be a little bit over it over our allocation of two million dollars however as a totality we would leave about two hundred and forty three thousand dollars on the table out of that six million dollars if we did the top 10 right for the top eleven right and that would be forty five projects being funded at a hundred percent ask that's about 23 agency we would be over slightly for our budget for facilities and so our again our budgets four million dollars allocations which you originally had given us the operational investment would be over about four hundred and fifteen thousand dollars over the two million dollar allocation and our total for the facilities and operational investments for the top eleven ranked projects is six point four million dollars you can see are exact amount for hundred eighteen thousand two hundred thirty nine dollars I was saying that in my sleep last night because this is our final recommendation we're at a crossroads right now and I knew we have not discussed with we have not sent out scores to our agencies because we are at this crossroads we can either fun the top ten that's forty projects and leave money on the table at the six nine dollar allocation or we can go for four hundred eighteen thousand two hundred thirty nine dollars uh... if you so choose and find forty five projects at twenty three agencies as our community and that With the support of our mayor, CAO Hamilton and WCAO Brown, is our final recommendation. Again, this additional funding would allow us to fund 45 much-needed projects for our nonprofits who are in our community who do this work every day at 100% of their ask. And with that, I will now entertain questions. Thank you very much. I can tell you we're a professor in nursing. Very nice, thank you. What questions do you have, council? Council Member Kloiber. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you so much for all the information. I'm sure it's good to see these things coming to fruition and having so many people apply. It's always heartening to see that. Will we have an opportunity to look at the actual list before being requested for this approval of more money? because it becomes difficult to say we're going to allocate $400,000 more if we haven't seen what it's actually going to. Well, funny that you would say that because we are prepared to share that with you. And so, do we have that? And it has not been shared with the agencies, is that correct? It has not been shared with the agencies, correct. So, this was, you need to understand that. Is that my cue? Would you be willing to let us maybe debate it in theory first and then come back to the actuals? That was more of what I was going for instead of putting it out there today. I just wanted to make sure that we would have the opportunity to discuss this. Yes. Okay. so what i was going to say is depending on what you say today we will be um blue sheeting with the listed projects and amounts on there but we are prepared to share with you if if you so request thank you councilmember baxter thank you mayor um and before i forget my my thought i In response to that, I am concerned about knowing any of the organizations because we put this in your all's hands because we trusted you to make the decisions for us. And I think allowing us to be privy to that information is unnecessary. I think you guys have done great work. I think we gave it to you for this reason, and I think it muddies the water significantly if we know who is in the process before the decision is made. That's just my two cents. Can somebody please tell me what our current balance is of the ARPA contingency account? Please. So we have sort of two pots, unallocated, if you will. So the first amount, that's about $1.3 million, is completely unallocated. The last allocation was made, Council Member Plowman, I think through the budget process, allocated a bit more money to the Mary Todd Park, so we pulled that out of there. The other, what we're proposing is since this is a project that has previously been approved at the $6 million, dollars we were hoping that you all would consider taking the additional money out of the 2.6 million dollars that's in the arpa contingency um but in full transparency you could really take it from either there's no rules either way um but our to answer your question 2.6 and that's where our suggestion would be to pull it okay thank you so much you're welcome um commissioner i really appreciate your presentation and i know you and your team has worked so hard on all of this and for the committee members that invested their time as well i think that it is it's been a wonderful process to see i can't wait to see the end result and recommendations um i would be in support of the additional funding thank you thank you thank you councilmember baxter councilmember bledsoe thank you mayor and thank you commissioner for your presentation for the hard work I just for a couple things so there was 50 56 agencies that apply did I hear you say at the end if we did all top 11 there would be 23 different agencies funded yes ma'am okay and there were 138 projects this would give us 45 of those projects I'm assuming those top 11 may have been bundled with two or three to make that number work that way so they did not have to reach the minimum it was the projects that were ranked not necessarily the agencies and so for example we have one project that's like $1,500 and it goes all the way up to 250,000 they had to bundle it to apply they did not have to meet that minimum to be to be rewarded to be awarded on the project list yes ma'am okay okay so I'm gonna ask a really dumb question maybe but so if you had different groups, they all may have ranked differently. Remember, they could have been very strong, very weak. There's no way to know, because it's not scientific, if their ranking or their thinking was the same. One person's two, it could have been someone else's four, that kind of stuff. So the process was at the end, if they ranked in the top 10, the assumption is that 12th project wouldn't have been the top 10 of the next group. No, right. It corrects. That is our assumption, Right. Okay. And then I'm just curious, when you put these groups together, did you do any due diligence to make sure that made sense? Yes, we did. We analyzed this in many different ways. And this is what we felt like was the fairest consideration because of the fact that there were different reviewers for all four groups. And we did not. It wasn't, as I said before, a scientific process of how we made sure that each reviewer was scoring the exact same way, right? There was some subjectivity. We did a training with them, but still, you all have been on committees and whatnot. We've had to review things. You're all still going to review it very differently. But every single project was reviewed, and then they were ranked within their group. We then took out of group one, for example, their top ten, their top eleven. Some of them represent, some of the projects are from the same agency. So one agency in that top ten may have had three projects, right, because we looked at each individual project and not the agency itself. Okay. And I completely understand. I mean, it's very hard to do this in a way that's completely equal or fair. So I understand you're doing the best you can, and I think your process is very thoughtful. This is not a criticism, and we're just making sure that I understand. So a group doesn't get funded, and they say, well, I was just put in the wrong group. Would my partner have done better if it had been another one or vice versa? It sounds like you've looked at all four of those projects for 45. Was there a natural breaking point in those groups that you went, or was it just a financial one? So how they were divided into each of the four groups, is that what you're asking? No, out of those four, did you compare the four groups together to say, yeah, these make a lot of sense, and we're not overlapping, we're not giving too much to certain agencies or not? Oh, definitely, definitely. We put all of them together, and that's where we said, wait a minute. there's one group that scored a little bit higher. Is that really fair to other groups who maybe they had a more, how do I put this nicely, scrutinizing reviewers? So, yes, we did look at them all in totality to make sure that it was as fair as possible. Good. I mean, I think we're trying to put it all over the community and invest the money as best we can, and I think you've done a really good job trying to do that well. and from a very objective point of view. And I'm, like Councilor Baxter, encouraged and curious to see where it all lands and what it does, and I'm excited. 45 projects is a lot, and 23 agencies is pretty substantial considering how many we have in Fayette County to work towards. So I look forward to seeing that. Thank you. Thank you. Council Member James Brown. Thank you, Mayor, and thank you, Commissioner, for the presentation and the hard work your team did to get us down to 45 applications to consider. I think Council Member Baxter and Council Member Bletsoe shared a lot of my same sentiment and comment. I think this process has been unpolitical or not politicized, and I think we should keep it that way in regards to making the decision on whether or not we fund this additional request going forward. But I would think that the process that you put in place and have undergone to get us to this point, I think to try to keep that integrity in place, I think, is what we need to do going forward. So that the recommendation that y'all are bringing us is to put more money towards it to make sure these agencies get funded. I'm in support of that. And just to add to that is, you know, I think this category, this nonprofit capital grant, I think when we originally talked about it as a council, I think that amount was higher than $6 million. So if we're talking about adding, you know, just. $418,239. Well, I won't just say just adding that, but I think adding that amount to it and getting it out to agencies that serve our community, I think, is the best thing going forward. So thank you. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you. Council Member Maloney. Thank you. I appreciate your presentation. I pushed for this for $9 million, and we only got six. I think you could have used the other three from what you were telling me, Because to me, this was a very important organization for nonprofits. For folks that don't get the money that we give every year to certain nonprofits, this was an opportunity to open a window for one-time money to come into them. They already have established their credibility to show they need to spend their business to bring more jobs and to be in those neighborhoods or whatever. My intent was not to fund the same group that we fund every year. My intent was to, even though if there were some good ones, I agree that we should fund some of those. But like there were some that came to our committee. They have never asked for money that are non-profit. They were going to double the staff. They were going to be able to, not to use this money, but to build the building. They had money to increase the staff on their own programs. And that was my intent, is to be able to double or bring one-time money, not for the program. But for them to able to escalate that program into those communities and keep politics out of it. And I think you all have done a great job. I kind of wish you would wait until after January to present this because some people are going to see some things that, well. And I kept my hands out of it. I had about six nonprofits that called me. I said, apply for these. They were great nonprofits. They all should have had it. Hopefully they get it. I have no clue. I stayed out of it. But the whole intent is to double what they can do without us ongoing expense. And if I see us doing a program, a new group comes in and gets it, we won't follow them, and they're going to come back here in another year and ask for more money because you help us get this program started, we need more money. That's not my intent to this. My intent was that we just build the capital project. they double and keep the money oncoming with their programs they have. And I don't think you, I hope we don't see that next year or whatever. If we end up giving one of these non-profit money, they're going to come back and say, well, you gave us $500,000, we're going to need another million dollars this year to keep this thing going. That was not my intent. So hopefully, and I think from what you're telling me, that's not going to happen. But I do appreciate what you've done. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Council Member Lamb. Thank you, Mayor. And I just want to first say I totally support adding $418,239,000. And you know why? Because 45 fully funded projects. That's what I hear. I appreciate what my colleagues have already said. I think that we have already learned over the years through our ESR process. We know how to fund this, and we know how to work through this process to make it to where it is fair and it does not wrap around an elected official, no matter who it is, anything. And that's the way I like about our community. I like our government that we do that because we really do that well. And so thank you and thank your staff and all those that participated in this process. You know, this is just another point of where I'm so proud of our community and our local government and what we choose to do and how we choose to do it for the right reasons, and then we get to see the outcomes. The fact that these are fully funding 45 projects is amazing. I mean, that just warms my heart. So I appreciate it, and you can count on my support. And I tell you what, I just think that it goes back to what Ms. Ruin was talking about in her presentation, the vast amount of change that this is for our community. And I appreciate what the mayor was saying, that we are being touted out in the national community of what Lexington's doing. I mean, we've got it. and we're doing a good job and i am so proud so thank you so much thank you councilmember land thank you i'll go to councilmember mccurne who hasn't spoken yet and then i'll come back to councilmember clover thank you mayor commissioner and to your team thank you all great work um i mean everybody in the administration that's had their hands on this is excellent and i I am very thrilled to see 45 projects being funded from this. I will also be supporting the $418,239. My question for you is, is this requiring any contingency, any match from any of the nonprofits, or is this just here we're helping fund the project, any additional cost beyond this is on you? That's it. You have worded it very well. they were to get as much of a reasonable cost as possible they were to estimate as much of a contingency as possible and that was the final ask so if it was two hundred thirty six thousand dollars I mean that's what we are prepared to reimburse them for their projects and are they allowed to use any grants or any match funds from the state or local dollars outside of this I mean if they apply for ESR and they receive some funding from us are they allowed to use that funding to go towards this as well? Well, I would first like to address ESR. It's programmatic, so this is for capital projects. So what is so beautiful about this program is that there's very few grant programs out there for capital projects for nonprofits. So I want to say that first. That makes me shiver with excitement just to think about that, first of all. But they did have to tell us how, if they needed additional funds. And it was mostly for those who So we're looking at that maximum amount, and so like mostly acquiring a property, how they're going to get their money. We will be writing the subrecipient agreements, and we can put in whatever that we need to. Brittany, do you want to answer specifically about if they are allowed to ask for match funds? I mean, this is the money that we're giving them. It's by reimbursement, and so whatever they spend, they send us the invoice. We will reimburse them. provided that our construction manager, which hopefully you all, when we ask you for that, will say yes, making sure that, of course, that they have done the projects and it's going as preceded and the invoice is actually true as it is. And so, I mean, that is the only really stipulations that we have. No, I think that helps answer my question very well. And I, again, just want to reiterate, thank you for all you guys' work. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Council Member Kloiber. Thank you. One thing here, just looking at the numbers, it looks like we could have done 43 or 44 of these and still been under that 6 million number. And it looks just from the numbers themselves that the two tied projects in Group 1 account for almost a 10 percent of the total allocation of that 6 million, just with those two additional projects. And I don't know the breakdown of those two and if one of them is overweighted. But was there any desire or looking into fitting it within that budget? I mean, I'm very grateful everybody's very excited about putting more towards the ARPA funds now. I wonder where that enthusiasm was when we were actually allocating the $6 million as opposed to the $9 or elsewhere. But now that we're so excited, I'm curious, because if we could have gotten those $43 or $44, what was the thinking there about saying, let's increase it by 10% for these last two projects? Well, again, we went by the, so I'm going to address this in multiple parts. We went completely by the rankings, and so we couldn't decide, for example, in group one, eleven, we couldn't say we were going to take one of them that was tied for eleven and not the other one. So it was either one or, both of them or none of them. So that was the first of it all. And then these are capital projects, and so funding them at 90% could mean the difference between them being able to do the project and not being able to do the project. Unlike with our other grant programs like ESR that are programmatic, if we only give them 90%, then they just take that fewer participants in their program. I fully understand, which is why I'm glad we're fully funding these projects. I guess the question is, if we could have gotten 44 projects at the $6 million that we allocated, why wasn't that presented as a recommendation instead of saying we're going to go with the increase? Not to cut you off, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Because we had that number 11 tied in group one. So that's why you have 45 instead of 44 projects. And you said that originally the groups were made alphabetically. They were made. So we took each agency, no matter how many projects they had, and we split them up into four groups alphabetically. It just so happened to have worked out that each of the four groups had about the same number of projects. That was in our favor that it worked out. And so it was about 34, right, of projects that were in each one. And so that's how that they were split up. Okay. I just, I wish we had had an example here that just went exactly to what we requested, as opposed to this, you know, we're leaving 230 on the table or we need 400 more. But I am also in support of making sure these programs are funded, as I was during the original ARPA conversation. So thank you. Thank you. Vice Mayor Kay. Thank you, Mayor. I want to first echo all of the positive comments that my colleagues have made without necessarily reiterating all of them, but my appreciation as well to everybody. And then I have the honor and the pleasure of making the following motion. I move to allocate an additional $418,239 of federal funding awarded under the American Rescue Plan Act to the Nonprofit Capital Grants Program, bringing the total allocation for this project to $6,418,239. And I further move to place on the docket at the August 30, 2022 council meeting any necessary budget amendments reflecting this increase. So move. Thank you. Council Member Lamb seconds. Is there any discussion? All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Is anyone opposed? All right, that motion passes. Thank you. Commissioner Allen Bryant, thank you very much. You and your team have done a wonderful job. I appreciate you all. With a very difficult, very difficult challenge. So we really appreciate it very much and look forward to these capital projects. Thank you. Thank you, guys. Thank you. Next is council reports. So if you'll log in, please. Councilmember James Brown. Thank you, Mayor. I just want to make mention that we canceled today's Planning and Public Safety Committee meeting just because there is still work being done on a lot of items that are in the committee and didn't have any update or report yet. We don't have a meeting scheduled for that committee in September, but we have several items that are going to come forward sometime in between now and the end of the year, so we may have to call a special call meeting of that committee to address some of them. But I think just timing wise and a lot of work still being done caused us to cancel today's meeting. I just want to reassure folks that work is being done and that nobody's dropping the ball at City Hall. So, thank you, Mayor. Thank you. Council Member Bledsoe. Thank you, Mayor. Just two things. One, this Friday night at Moondance Amphitheater, Nevermind is coming to be our band. I love this band. I could not be more excited about this at all. So, I hope at 7 o'clock on Friday night, if you want to hear the best 90s band, you will join me. They'll have Sav's Chill, we'll have West 6 and some other stuff. I know Whitney will be there if nobody else. And we're going to have a good time, so I hope you'll join us there. I also want to mention that the Friends of Moondance, the Moondance Foundation, has been working all summer long by collecting resources to help pay for the improvements at Moondance privately, since they are not in some areas where you can try to do that other ways. They've been working very hard. In fact, they're having a concert in September put on by these local volunteers and neighborhood leaders that will help again raise money for some additional shades and seating some cool things there so that's gonna be an awesome experience and then on Monday DV8 is turning five and if you were here in 2017 we had Rob and Diana Perez come and talk about their mission and their goal for opening that up I cannot believe it's been five years that blows my mind they've had a hundred and forty six different people have worked with them over the last five years as employees which I think is pretty impressive and Monday to celebrate they're offering one dollar croissants. If you've had their croissants you would note they are worth way more than one dollar so I would highly suggest going and partaking enjoying a one dollar croissant leaving a tip for them. They offer second chance employment for people in substance abuse recovery and are doing a phenomenal work in our community so I'm excited to celebrate that and it's always a good excuse to have a good cinnamon roll so yes that's all thank you. Very good thank you. Councilmember Baxter. Thank you Mayor. Just wanted to give everyone in in the community a heads up about some new fun events that are coming to shillito park and other parks across the city as well but minor first um minor first on the calendar um parks and rec is is returning with freaky flicks this fall um the first two will be in shillito as i mentioned on september 10th they will be showing black panther one of my son's favorites so he's very excited. And on September the 17th, Ant-Man will be shown, and that is the Nature Hop kickoff event. So just wanted to let everybody know that the movie begins at dark around eight o'clock, and the movies will continue through October 15th, and you can check out social media and our city website for the other dates as well. And then in addition, I wanted to give our police hiring process a plug. They, in preparation for our next hiring window, The police department is scheduling four hiring prep courses for potential applicants to just learn more about becoming a police officer. So those dates will be August the 24th, September 14th, October 26th, and November 16th. They are all free and optional to attend. They will be held at 6 o'clock at our police training academy at BCTC's Newtown Pike campus. you do have to register and you can register on our city's website or you can contact my office for more information but it's the classes go over all the different parts of the hiring process so that's something exciting and then last but not least I have some pictures last Friday that's Friday Saturday was the big brown truck pool and our Lexington Police Department won The truck pulled benefits Special Olympics of Kentucky. Lexington Fire Department also participated and about $40,000 was raised for Special Olympics. So just wanted to thank everybody in the community for coming out for that awesome event. So, thank you, Mayor. Thank you, great pictures. Councilmember Reynolds. Thank you, Mayor. This Wednesday is the second to last Lexington Farmer's Market in Garden Side Plaza off Alexandria Drive. So I hope people will come out. Four to seven. There's been some really great vendors, including locally roasted coffee. That's fabulous. So come and check it out this week and next week. And then this Saturday, Flights Between Fountains, presented by Field and Main Bank, is going to be taking place in Triangle Park. And so it's going to be an event from 1 into 7 p.m. There's going to be music. and then there will be 10 samples in a commemorative tasting glass where you will try different wines and you'll purchase a $40 ticket and then that will include wine samples and live bands and food from the new Señor Timmy will also be available right there in Triangle Park which is some really good Mexican food. So if you're interested in tickets or more information, go to the DLP's website, downtownlex.com. Thank you. Thank you. Council Member LaGree. Thank you, Mayor. I was thinking about this during Jennifer's ARPA presentation, which was wonderful, about all the improvements that have been happening throughout our city, and especially at our parks. And I just wanted to note, we had a very positive and uplifting and special press conference about the new pirate ship at Woodland Park. And I don't always have constituents texting me about positive things. But I want you to know how excited third district residents are about the new pirate ship. And how nice it has been to be able to share news like this with people in the district and throughout the city. And I wanted to thank all the project managers and staff with Parks and Rec who are helping make these projects possible and successful. And I guess on that note about Woodland Park, I also wanted to say thank you to everybody with Parks and Recreation and Lexington Art League who came together to make the Woodland Art Fair another grand success. It was really crowded. I know a number of council members were there. There were so many wonderful artists and performers and the music and the events and food trucks and beverages. It was just a great event and so thank you to everyone who made that possible. and thanks for showing up for the arts and in one of our special parks so i just wanted to share thank you mayor thank you council member ellinger thank you mayor i was at a downtown lexington partnership meeting this past thursday and some of the issues that were brought up was some of the loitering and issues on downtown with some of the parking lots and speaking to the police and lieutenant gordon was there and he was talking about there's something that possibly we could do do going forward that I want to do, I'm not going to put in committee now, but we're going to do some research on it, get back with you all, because other communities are doing it where if it's a private property, we really can't do anything on that and tell them what to do unless there's something posted. And we work with the owners of that parking lot. I looked at Tampa, Dallas, they have a trespass affidavit program that we can work with the private property owners. So it's something we're going to be looking at to come back because I know the police, and I've talked with Council Member Legree, We're going to be meeting this Monday with some of the property owners to see if there's something we can do to help out with the police and the property owners. Because they tell them to leave, but they really don't have any authority if the property owner isn't there that's going to enforce the trespass there. So going forward, we're going to try to see if we, because we know we have an issue with downtown, and see if we can do something to help improve and give the police a little more help in this situation. So we'll be getting back with you on this, but looking forward to see if we can bring something forward with you all. Thank you. Very good. And the owner of the one lot that has had some issues was on our last work group meeting, which was a good thing. So thank you for that. Any other council reports? All right. There's no mayor's report today, and so it's time for public comment. And we have one person signed up. Dottie, you know the rules if you'll come to the podium and state your name and your council district, and you'll have three minutes. Welcome. Okay, my name is Dottie Bean, 1364 Deer Lake Circle. I live in Deer Lake Circle. I live in the 8th District. I'm going to be brief today since I've already been here three times before to talk about this. My request again today is for the council to schedule a public hearing on the new roll call center on Sarin Drive before any more construction takes place on that site. It appears that project is on a fast track since the site preparation is already underway. Some ground has been, let's see, some, oh, I'm sorry, some gravel has been spread there, and the land has been disturbed, and some large culverts and other materials have been delivered. Today, I would like also to know if any of the funds from the American Rescue Act are being used to pay for any part of that project, and whether that requires a public hearing to be held before spending them. Again, I'm requesting the council to hold a hearing about the entire project so that neighborhoods in the area have a chance to comment on moving that roll call center from Gainesway Center to Veterans Park next door to the fire station. In the event this is denied, I would like to know who the person in government is who has been assigned the task of shepherding this through the design and construction phases and whether the design phase has already been completed. So that's all. Thank you very much. Commissioner Armstrong, would you, after the meeting, talk with Ms. Bean about the funding and some of those details, please? It's not ARPA funding. Thank you. We have one more person who would like to speak. Amy Clark, and you also know the rules. If you'll state your name and your council district, and you'll have three minutes. Thank you. I know the rules. It's this thing that always gives me trouble. My name is Amy Clark, and I live at 628 Castle Road, and I have asked that when the time comes, I may need three extra minutes, not more, and perhaps Ms. Legree, Council Member Legree, would be willing to make a motion. I'm here to give some items of information and ask for your help as Council Members. There are two zoning changes coming forward citywide. One is to deregulate parking, and I'll explain what that might mean, and one to change the statements of intent that come at the beginning of every zone in our zoning ordinance. They come for a vote before the planning commission, not you all yet, that comes later, this Thursday at 1.30 in council chambers right here. These are ZODA. They aren't changes for a particular piece of property where you know that there's mail notice made to all the affected owners in a 500-foot radius. And I know that many of you take real care to make sure that your constituents are aware of these zone changes when they come forward because you know that they matter very much to everyone in the neighborhood. Let me go forward here. So I would ask that you do your best to make your constituents aware of this kind of zoning change. Each of them is really quite large. They affect the whole of the urban area, and in one case both. One proposes new statements of intent for each of the urban zones, not the ag zones. A zone's intent gives the general type of use that's intended for that zone, say highway business, and usually something about its density if it's a housing zone or intensity, plus general guidelines, maybe where it should be located on a highway, its orientation to roadways, frontage or whatever, the site design, how you do yards and so on. And then the body of the zone, and this zoning change doesn't concern the body, fills out special details, specific details, with a list of the uses permitted, big long list, and how wide the yards can be and all the rest. The intent of the zone is an important factor in making decisions on zone changes, judging whether the zone is suitable for the property proposed for the change. But it also guides decisions on ZODA, text amendments, changes to the text, the regulations that belong to that zone. The intent ZODA is a text amendment, but the intent of a zone could guide further amendments within any given zone, such as allowing the new uses. There's one coming forward before long about allowing digital signage, for example, in the downtown business district. Amy, your three minutes has ended. Thank you. Yes. May I move to provide Ms. Clark with two more minutes? All right. Is there a second? Council Member Ellinger seconds. Any discussion? All those in favor say aye. Aye. Anyone opposed? That motion passes. You have two minutes. The Zota text has had little time for public study and discussion. There was an early draft and a much changed one. came out about August the 4th. The R2 zone, I think, would be the best and biggest example of what may be heavily impacted by the intense zone change. It is being changed to allow a mix of housing types. It no longer limits R2 to duplex use. It's part of a larger revision of the whole R2 zone, and it's my belief it belongs together with the whole of the zone and that the intent should not be changed in advance of considering the whole of it. It would allow up to 12 townhouses or a building, a sixplex, as it is being developed. And the lot size would change to about the size of a townhouse lot, 15 feet wide. This is where current R2 zoning is located and you can look to see if there are any of your constituents in R2 zoning which would change radically. Under the guidance of this intent, it could permit the specifics of the zone to change. And you'll see that there are only 6,000 properties zoned R2, but it would matter very much to them. The other change is the parking ordinance, a zoning change to remove all minimum parking requirement countywide, all zones, all uses. It removes the maximum parking limits, which matters very much to me, in the infill and redevelopment area except for single-family detached houses. please restore the parking cab. It would be my wish that they be restored for the other sorts of property in the area around the university, the rest of the infill area. Thank you very much. Your two minutes has expired. Okay, I thank you for your help and consideration in making these very important text amendments. Thank you very much. Better known. All right, now we've come to the end of our agenda, so it's time for a motion to adjourn. All right, I had a few. All those in favor say aye. Aye. We are adjourned. Thank you very much. Thank you. you