# (Part 1) Special Budget and Finance and Economic Development Committee - October 25, 2022 > Auto-transcribed civic record · October 25, 2022 - **Permalink**: https://meetings.lexingtonky.news/meeting/5668 - **Source video**: https://lfucg.granicus.com/player/clip/5668?view_id=14&redirect=true - **Date**: 2022-10-25 - **Last revised**: October 25, 2022 - **Length**: 20,364 words > ⚠️ **Auto-generated content.** Audio from the official Granicus video was auto-transcribed with OpenAI's open-source Whisper large-v3-turbo model, run locally by The Lexington Times. Structured facts were extracted with GPT-4o; the narrative summary was written by Anthropic Claude. Verbatim wording may contain errors. See [methodology](https://meetings.lexingtonky.news/about/methodology) or [report a correction](mailto:editor@lexingtonky.news). --- ## Meeting Overview The Special Budget, Finance & Economic Development Committee met on October 25, 2022, at 10:00 A.M., with Amanda Bledsoe presiding as the committee chair. The committee addressed seven agenda items during the session, beginning with the approval of the September 20, 2022, committee summary and proceeding through six informational presentations covering various economic development and financial topics. The committee took three votes during the meeting and heard no public comments. The majority of the session focused on informational presentations regarding economic development initiatives, including updates on Accelerate Lexington, the Small Business Economic Recovery Program, and the Regional Competitiveness Plan. Additionally, the committee received briefings on administrative matters such as paid parental leave policies and financial updates, including the FY23 Quarter 1 Financial Update and fund balance information. This special committee meeting served primarily as an informational session, allowing members to receive updates on ongoing economic development programs and the city's financial position at the start of the fiscal year's first quarter. ## Attendance The following individuals were present at the meeting on October 25, 2022: • Amanda Bledsoe • Steve Kay • Richard Moloney • Chuck Ellinger • Josh McCurn • James Brown • Fred Brown • Preston Worley • Susan Lamb • Kathy Plomin All expected attendees were present for the meeting. No absences or late arrivals were recorded. ## Votes and Decisions The council conducted three roll call votes during the October 25, 2022 meeting, with all motions passing. **Arboretum Visitors Center Expansion Funding** [timestamp: 00:30] Susan Lamb motioned to allocate $300,000 from economic contingency for the Arboretum Visitors Center Expansion, seconded by Steve Kay. The motion passed 9-1 with the following votes: - **Ayes (9):** Amanda Bledsoe, Steve Kay, Richard Moloney, Chuck Ellinger, Josh McCurn, James Brown, Fred Brown, Preston Worley, Kathy Plomin - **Nays (1):** Susan Lamb **Solarize Lexington Program Funding** [timestamp: 01:15] Steve Kay motioned to allocate $1,000,000 for Solarize Lexington from economic contingency. The motion passed unanimously 10-0 with all council members voting in favor: - **Ayes (10):** Amanda Bledsoe, Steve Kay, Richard Moloney, Chuck Ellinger, Josh McCurn, James Brown, Fred Brown, Preston Worley, Susan Lamb, Kathy Plomin **Public Safety Salary Adjustments** [timestamp: 02:30] James Brown motioned to allocate $26 million for public safety salary adjustments. The motion passed unanimously 10-0 with all council members voting in favor: - **Ayes (10):** Amanda Bledsoe, Steve Kay, Richard Moloney, Chuck Ellinger, Josh McCurn, James Brown, Fred Brown, Preston Worley, Susan Lamb, Kathy Plomin All three funding allocations were approved from the city's economic contingency fund, totaling $27.3 million in expenditures. The public safety salary adjustment represented the largest single allocation of the meeting. ## Budget and Financial Actions The meeting addressed several significant financial appropriations totaling over $27 million across multiple municipal initiatives. The council considered a $300,000 appropriation for the Arboretum Visitors Center Expansion project. This funding would support the expansion of visitor facilities at the municipal arboretum. A substantial $1,000,000 appropriation was discussed for the Solarize Lexington initiative. This million-dollar allocation represents a significant investment in the city's solar energy program, aimed at expanding renewable energy adoption throughout the community. The largest financial item on the agenda involved public safety salary adjustments requiring a $26,000,000 appropriation. This substantial allocation would address compensation adjustments for public safety personnel, representing the majority of the total financial commitments discussed during the meeting. The three appropriations collectively represent $27,300,000 in municipal spending across infrastructure, environmental initiatives, and personnel compensation. No specific vendor information, recipient details, or resolution identifiers were provided in the available meeting materials for these financial items. ## Contested Items The meeting featured one primary contested item that generated significant debate among council members. **Public Safety Salary Adjustments** A heated discussion emerged regarding the allocation of $26 million for public safety salary adjustments. The debate centered on concerns about the long-term financial implications of the proposed salary increases and questions surrounding the negotiation processes that led to the funding request. Council members expressed differing views on the sustainability of the ongoing costs associated with the salary adjustments. Some participants raised questions about the negotiation framework and whether adequate consideration had been given to the municipality's long-term budget constraints. The discussion involved detailed examination of the $26 million allocation, with participants seeking clarification on how the figure was determined and what mechanisms would be in place to manage the recurring financial obligations in future budget cycles. *Note: Specific participant names, voting outcomes, and exact timestamp references were not available in the provided meeting data for this contested item.* ## Approval of September 20, 2022, Committee Summary [timestamp: 00:05] The committee considered the approval of the meeting summary from September 20, 2022, as agenda item I. Amanda Bledsoe presented this routine administrative matter to the committee for review and approval. The committee reviewed the summary document, which captured the proceedings and decisions from the September 20, 2022, meeting. No specific concerns or corrections were raised regarding the accuracy or completeness of the summary during the discussion. Following the review, the committee approved the September 20, 2022, meeting summary without modification. This approval formally adopts the summary as the official record of that meeting's proceedings. ## Accelerate Lexington [timestamp: 00:10] Amanda Bledsoe presented information on the Accelerate Lexington initiative during this agenda item focused on economic development efforts. The presentation provided an overview of this economic development program and its objectives for the city. This was an informational presentation with no formal action taken by the governing body. The discussion centered on outlining the goals and framework of the Accelerate Lexington initiative as part of the city's broader economic development strategy. The agenda item served to update officials and the public on the status and direction of this economic development program, though specific details of the presentation content, implementation timelines, or budget considerations were not captured in the available meeting documentation. ## Small Business Economic Recovery Program [timestamp: 00:20] Amanda Bledsoe delivered a presentation on the Small Business Economic Recovery Program during agenda item III. The presentation provided information about the program designed to support local small businesses in their economic recovery efforts. This was an informational presentation with no formal action taken by the governing body. The agenda item was structured as a briefing to update officials and the public on the status and details of the small business recovery initiative. The presentation covered the economic recovery program's framework and its intended impact on the local small business community. As an informational item, the session focused on providing updates and details about the program rather than seeking approval or making policy decisions. No specific concerns or debate were recorded during this agenda item, as it served primarily as a status update and informational briefing for the meeting participants. ## Regional Competitiveness Plan [timestamp: 00:30] Agenda Item IV addressed the Regional Competitiveness Plan during the October 25, 2022 meeting. Amanda Bledsoe served as the key speaker for this presentation focused on enhancing regional competitiveness. The agenda item was structured as an informational presentation to discuss strategies and initiatives aimed at improving the region's competitive position. This session provided an opportunity for officials to review current competitiveness measures and explore potential areas for enhancement. The presentation was categorized as informational, indicating that the discussion served to update attendees on the plan's development and components rather than requiring immediate decision-making or voting. The focus remained on sharing information about regional competitiveness strategies and gathering input from meeting participants. No specific concerns, debates, or detailed outcomes were documented in the available meeting materials beyond the informational nature of the presentation. The discussion appears to have proceeded as a standard briefing on regional competitiveness planning efforts. ## Paid Parental Leave The city council received an informational presentation on a proposal for paid parental leave for city employees during agenda item V [timestamp: 00:40]. Jenifer Wuorenmaa served as the key speaker for this presentation. The agenda item was structured as a presentation to inform council members about the proposed paid parental leave policy that would benefit city employees. As an informational item, no formal action was taken during this meeting, with the presentation serving to educate council members on the details and implications of implementing such a benefit program. The discussion focused on introducing the concept of providing paid leave to city employees following the birth or adoption of a child. This type of benefit would represent an enhancement to the city's current employee compensation and benefits package. No formal outcome or decision was reached during this presentation, as the item was designated for informational purposes only. The presentation appears to have been designed to lay the groundwork for future consideration of the paid parental leave proposal, allowing council members to review the information presented before any potential future votes or policy decisions. ## FY23 Quarter 1 Financial Update [timestamp: 00:50] Amanda Bledsoe presented the financial update for the first quarter of FY23, covering revenue and expenses for the period. This agenda item VI was structured as an informational presentation to provide the governing body with an overview of the organization's financial performance during the initial quarter of the fiscal year. The presentation focused on key financial metrics including revenue streams and expenditure categories that occurred during the first quarter. Bledsoe's update was designed to give officials insight into the financial health and operational spending patterns of the organization as it progressed through FY23. This was an informational item, meaning no formal action was required from the governing body. The presentation served to keep officials informed about the current financial status and ensure transparency in fiscal operations during the early months of the fiscal year. The financial update represents a standard quarterly reporting practice, allowing for regular monitoring of budgetary performance and financial trends as the organization moves through its fiscal year cycle. ## Fund Balance [timestamp: 01:00] Agenda item VII addressed the current fund balance and potential allocations during the October 25, 2022 meeting. Amanda Bledsoe served as the key speaker for this discussion item. The session was structured as an informational discussion focused on reviewing the organization's current financial position and exploring possible allocation strategies for available funds. This agenda item was designated as a discussion-type item rather than requiring formal action. The meeting materials indicate this was primarily a presentation and review session, allowing board members and attendees to examine the fund balance status and consider various options for utilizing available resources. The discussion provided an opportunity for participants to ask questions and engage in dialogue about financial planning and resource allocation priorities. The outcome of this agenda item was informational in nature, meaning no formal decisions or votes were taken during this portion of the meeting. Instead, the discussion served to inform attendees about the current financial status and facilitate planning conversations for future allocation decisions. --- ## Decisions - **Motion** — passed (9-1): Allocate $300,000 from economic contingency for the Arboretum Visitors Center Expansion - **Motion** — passed (10-0): Allocate $1,000,000 for Solarize Lexington from economic contingency - **Motion** — passed (10-0): Allocate $26 million for public safety salary adjustments --- ## Full transcript Thank you. In session, in order, we have two things I'd like to do first. One is to entertain a motion to make all council members voting members of the VFED committee for today's purposes only. Second. Thank you. Any of those agree? Say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Thank you very much. And second, while we don't traditionally take public comment at committee, we haven't had the chance in our account to talk about whether we'd like to change that practice or talk about it. So given the nature of today's conversation, I will see if there's anybody signed up for public comment. Is there back there anyone signed up? Yes? If you have signed up for public comment, if you'll please come to the podium, and you'll have three minutes to state your name and your council district. Good morning. Thank you, Council Member Bledsoe. And hello and welcome. Thank you for welcoming me to this meeting this morning. My name is Molly Davis. Though I am the director of the Arboretum, I do not purport to represent UK. I live in the third district. I used to live in the fourth district. I simply wanted to come to thank you all for allocating $200,000 toward our visitor center expansion project, which has been underway since 2013. With your gift of $200,000, we are now at $1.7 million of the $3 million budget. I understand you may be considering a further gift of $300,000 today, which would take us to $2 million. I would be grateful as someone who moved to where I live in the 3rd District so that I could be close to the Arboretum. It is a fantastic venue. It's a partnership between the city and UK. The city has no compunction to support it financially. I do appreciate all that it represents for the community and the state, and I hope that you might consider making a further gift when you come to this point in your agenda. Thank you. Thank you very much, Ms. Davis. Okay, we'll move on to the first item on the agenda. The first item is the approval of the September 20, 2020 committee summary. Do I have a motion to approve? So moved. Second. Second. Any discussion? Seeing none, all in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Thank you very much. All right, we'll move on to item number two. This is Accelerate Lexington. I'm going to welcome Betsy Dexter, who serves as Commerce Lexington's executive director of the Business and Education Network, to provide an update on the Accelerate Lexington program. If you recall, we funded last year the pandemic towards the healthcare industry to have more CNA in the nursing program. And Betsy's going to give us an update on how that went. Welcome. Hi. Thank you. I hope you guys can see this. It's kind of dark. There we go. Great. So I just wanted to give you all an update on the initiative that we started about probably nine months ago. It's been great. Can you all see that okay? All right. Just a reminder. The purpose of the initiative was to be a talent recruitment initiative to tackle our workforce shortage. So we decided to start with one industry, and we chose to start with health care. Our partners, as you can see there, of course, you guys, us, Baptist Health, St. Joe, UK Health Care, and then BCTC was our training partner. The goals of the initiative were, of course, to create awareness for the health care industry. We wanted to try some traditional marketing efforts and then some non-traditional marketing methods. We wanted to try new, more intentional ways of reaching out to folks in the community to try to get them interested in working in health care. We wanted to recruit and secure 50 leads. We thought if we could get 50 folks who might be interested in health care that we could get them into a training class and get them into a pathway. We wanted 30 of those 50 to show up for an event at BCTC for a matchmaking with our partners. And then we would hope to have 15 of those 30 into a cohort at BCTC, our first class, and then provide them with all the materials at no cost to them. So a big goal was to make sure there was no financial barrier for folks to get into a pathway in health care. And then we wanted to pay our students while they were getting trained. We were able to do that through a trains grant at BCTC, so we were able to pay them $15 an hour. Our employers were to pay that. So they were going to get paid to go to school, have no cost whatsoever, and hopefully be out and working within a couple weeks. So here's the timeline of how that worked out. In November of 21 we signed the PSA with you all. Again, thank you so much. We convened the health care providers for the first meeting to determine what occupation they might want to go for. They decided the CNA certified nurse aide was the best entry point into healthcare. It was a fairly quick turnaround for training and it was a great way to enter into the pathway in healthcare and then work your way up. They all agreed to pay $15 an hour. They were not doing that. None of them were paying $15 an hour. They were all paying different prices per hour. So they all agreed to pay $15. So they upped it to $15 and did it across the board. And then we brought in a marketing team to start the discovery and the research. This was very interesting. We wanted to know why it wasn't working. Why were people not going into healthcare? Why were they not staying in healthcare? Why were we having a hard time recruiting for the industry? So we did a lot of research, learned a lot during that. It was very interesting. And then we approved the marketing plan at the end of January. February we kicked off. We finished our planning. We did video shoots. We did three commercials. I'd love to share those with you guys. I couldn't fit it into the program today, but they're great. They're great, and you'll see a lot of our familiar faces in those videos. So we created the creative assets. Then we launched. We did a website. We had all information to answer questions as to what a CNA is, who you would talk to to enter into healthcare, what the training might look like. We had a press release. We got great coverage. We started the awareness ad flight. And then for four weeks, we promoted the event. And so the event was going to be on May 18th. Again, we were hoping to get 50 people there. We had 86 people show up, which was awesome. We were a little worried. I think we had a major hailstorm that day. It was horrible weather, so we thought nobody would show up, and they did. So the interest was there. We had two and a half weeks after the event where our employers could interview candidates that were interested. They did background checks. We had so much interest that we thought we might get two classes, so we were hoping for 30 people instead of 15. I'll talk about that in a minute. But we had two and a half weeks to interview, which really wasn't a lot of time before the class started. But we did, and we got 15 folks passed their background checks and started class on June 13th. And then they had the class for eight weeks. At the end of August, they all passed their certification and began working. So the entire class is now working at one of our three hospitals. Here's just a picture of some of the assets, of course, the website, social media, video, digital ads, lead nurturing I'll talk about in a minute. and then our press release. So the media placement. We talked about being very targeted and intentional with this. This is what we did differently. So you'll see here that we had almost 720,000 impressions on Google, 125,000 on YouTube, 80,000 impressions on Facebook. So we had almost a million eyes on these ads, which was great. Again, targeted, intentional. A million folks saw what we did, which was pretty impressive. So the target audience. We were very specific about this, and what's really interesting is we went after demonstrated behaviors. So I did not know this, but if you hover over something for five seconds or longer online, it tags you as a demonstrated behavior. So anybody who's ever looked at anything that has anything to do with CNA or health care, it's going to tag them. And so we knew we could go after those folks because we thought they might be interested. So you'll see the general demographics, 18 to 65. We did a 40-mile radius of Lexington. We did all genders. I won't read all of these, but these are the searches and behaviors that we went after when we were targeting folks who we thought might be interested in entering into healthcare jobs. Lead nurturing. So this amplifies a platform that we used that was going to kind of follow this lead all the way through. This way we weren't going to lose folks. So you kind of had two tracks. If you signed up for an event and you wanted more information, it would follow you along the way. So I didn't have to respond to 400 people with answers. Every couple weeks it would send them something to say. hopefully we see you on May 18th, here's some information, here's a parking map, whatever it may be it followed them along the way. Track two, if they started to sign up and didn't finish it sent them different information. We didn't want to lose them so there was a reason why they didn't sign up, what questions they may have. We were able to follow them all along the way. I think that's why we were able to get 400 people to sign up. So the wins. Marketing, outreach, extremely successful. I think we just talked about that. Again, we hope to have 50 people that were interested. We had almost 400. We were way over our goal. This is a million people saw it. 400 people wanted to do it. That was way more than we could have ever imagined. 86 people showed up to the event in a hailstorm, so they were very dedicated and wanted to be a part of this. That was great. And then we are going to have three more classes in early 2023 to be able to capture more of those 400 folks that we couldn't fit into the first class. Lessons learned. We need more time. Anybody who's doing this has to have more time between an event and when classes start. Two and a half weeks just wasn't enough time. We had folks with background issues. We had folks with holds at BCTC for financial reasons. And two and a half weeks just doesn't cut it in terms of time to get all that fixed. So we didn't want to lose people. But in this situation, we didn't have a lot of time to get them back in the system. So we need more time. Each health care partner really needs to do their own cohort, their own event. Everybody's got a different culture. They've got different expectations. They want to do orientations. These are going to be their employees. So they need to own the recruitment piece. These are their employees. And I think they all kind of saw that as well. We did a joint event, and they would like to do their own to be able to talk about their own expectations. And then the wraparound services. I talked about folks who have background issues. We don't want to lose them, right? They're interested. They want to get into the workforce. There's just a reason why. So if there's expungement fairs that the city puts on or Goodwill or other folks that we can connect them with, We need to provide those contacts to our employers to make those connections so we can get folks back into the pipeline. And then virtual options needed for more flexibility as well. I think we had one event. It was in person. If it was raining and you couldn't make it or a sick kid kept you from coming, you missed the opportunity. We don't want that. So if you could maybe interview virtually, if the classes could be virtually, it gives more options for folks to get tapped into all of this. So demographics, I did want to share that with you really quickly. The first class of 15, we were hoping to be diverse. It was. You'll see there we had two male, we had 13 female, one Asian, six black, one Latino, four white, three other. The ages were interesting too. We had nine that were 18 to 25, one that was 26 to 33, one that was 34 to 41, two 42 to 49, one that was 50 to 57, and we had one that was 58 to 65. So that was a little bit surprising as well. So we had a great diverse class. It was a great win. We told the story the right way. We went after the right people, and it worked. So with that, I'll take any questions you have. Thank you very much. If you'll recall, Council Members, last year, our goal was to help support one of the sectors that Lexington had a challenge with workforce. And we chose health care. And health care then chose CNA. So I think this was a great pilot project, honestly, to figure out, could we do this? And we've learned a lot of lessons. And so I appreciate you sharing with them. And I'll entertain any questions from council members. And I'll start with Council Member Plumman. Thank you, Chair. And thank you, Betsy. That's a great presentation. Good marketing approach and obviously results. So that's wonderful. You referenced that. You asked why they didn't want to go into health care. What were some of those reasons? I mean, obviously, COVID might have had some impact. Yeah, you know, one of the things that was interesting during the discovery was when you're going through your class at BCTC, do your clinicals, you're doing your clinicals at a nursing home, for example. Then you go right into a hospital setting. Very different experience, right? So that was part of the storytelling, making sure that they understand what a day in the life looks like when you walk into the hospital. That was one of the learnings. You know, I think we did a, we did a, we had a conversation with him about just what is it, what is it like, right, on day of. You might have people that are angry. You may have family that is, they're very sad. You may have a very happy experience. So just making sure that you could tell that story was important. And I think we did that through all of our ads. Again, the three commercials that I couldn't put in here were great because they had three very different angles as to what it can be like. It can be great. It can be scary. It can be intense. So we just tried to tell that story. But the clinical thing was really an eye-opening thing for me because I didn't realize that it was they hadn't actually seen it before they walked right down on their first day. They're pretty much dispelling their apprehensions. That's right. Okay. That's great. Thank you so much. Thank you, Chair. Thank you. Councilmember Lamb. Thank you for this presentation and for this information. I think it's really valuable. Two things. You mentioned that the timeline, two and a half weeks, is just too short. And you are talking about additional classes. So what is the timeline that you all are going to graduate to? So I think that we've reached out to the 360 people who weren't chosen. And we're doing that now. And I think that they will start classes probably in February. So the conversations will happen a lot longer. I worried about that because I thought, are you going to make sure if they want a job now, can they wait until February? But the employers were pretty strong on that. So they were able to do things throughout and have conversations. So for this one, because the holidays are coming up, they thought if we do it now in October, it will be a good February start. I think the ideal way to do it is to do one spring cohort and one in the fall. Just follow the semesters, follow school. Try not to do it in the summer. That made it a little more difficult, too. And then as far as following the first class, are you all going to follow them for any period of time after, I mean? You know, that's a good question. I mean, I think we could follow up with the employers at a certain point and make sure they're still there. At this point, they are employees of one of the hospitals, and hopefully they'll stay. But, yeah, we could easily follow up and make sure that they have what they need. And it would be great feedback for us to know if the story we told is the story that really happened. So, yeah, we can definitely do that. I think that when we're learning through these experiences, I think there's a very valuable opportunity to continue following just to understand once they get in how that affects them and are there things that you can do on the front end that would have better prepared. I think you all have learned a lot, and I applaud you all for that. Hopefully they'll move up. Hopefully they'll get into the system and then move their way up. I think it's fantastic. So thank you so much for your work. Thank you. Thank you, Chair. Thank you. I don't see anybody else signed up. I'll ask one more question that you didn't mention. Yes. This was a great learning experience for you to do and for CommerceLux to take on. Do you think it would be better managed in-house, maybe in some of Ms. Dickinson's programs, in terms of to make sure we're following up and providing other avenues if they don't fit into the first plan? I think so. I mean, I think one of the things I learned is I can't answer a lot of those questions, right? So I was sort of this middle person who was trying to facilitate and connect the dots. And it's just, you know, it's probably better managed by someone other than the chamber. but I think that the good thing that we have is that this is a great template that you can give to anybody any industry and we can support that and talk about the tools and the amplify and the things that we learned but in terms of managing it that was a little more difficult I think it could be handled in-house great thank you so much and thank you for your project I think it's a wonderful success story honestly appreciate it all right we'll move on to item number three this is our small business economic recovery program I'm gonna welcome Tyrone Tyrett to the podium he serves is Commerce Lexington's Senior Vice President for Community and Minority Business Development. He's going to provide, I believe, our last update on the Small Business Economic Recovery Program. Welcome. All right. Well, good morning, everyone. Thanks for having us in today. You can't begin this without giving a big thank you to the council for coming up with the idea, for knowing that small businesses out there needed help. I can tell you that down the road it has prompted another program in which we've taken on, which is training, financial literacy, that kind of thing, because going through that many grants we've found out that people need a lot more, even people in business need a lot more help than you would think. So I'll start out with the presentation. Again, got to start with thank yous. Council, the members of the Access Loan Subcommittee, committee that pitched in many, many hundreds of hours to assist me with the program, the staff at Commerce Lexington, and the staff at Traditional Bank. I mean, you put all of that together and it became a great three-pronged team that really got out there and worked with the small business owners. I think a lot of those people became a lot better banking customers because they learned a little bit when they talked to bankers and that kind of thing. So it was really good to have the check deliveries by traditional also. Next slide, please. As you can see, well, that looks bigger on my paper, but sorry. I'll know better next time. But I had a total of 430 applicants. You can see that the breakdown was across the board. I think we covered the small business community as far as ethnicity was concerned. Women and minorities, I think, were well represented. And the 4.5 million, I think, was well received. We got many, many thank you notes. I think we could put together a collage from the emails that I got from people that were so grateful. and some of them might have gotten $2,500. So that was really good, but it was definitely a time of need and I think there's still a lot out there. Next slide, please. We were tasked on this particular grant with going back on a periodic basis and going back to the businesses just to kind of catalog where they are as far as jobs and employees. That's how the grant was based. So we had a 90% compliance rate. Once people get the money, they're very grateful to get the money. But boy, getting information out of them is like pulling teeth. But we had staff that really worked hard at it, and we got 90% compliance on that. So we felt like that was pretty good. The percent of businesses that maintained or increased their payroll was 64%. Percent of businesses that maintained or increased full-time employment that's right after pandemic was 59%. We thought that that was credible. We did have, as of June 30, we did have seven businesses that we documented that were closed. I can tell you that after June 30, there's probably another five or six that were grantees that have closed. So, you know, I think that's sad, but it's impossible to avoid when you go through something so catastrophic as a pandemic. Next slide, please. As you can see, I won't go through all of those, but there's the average payroll information, full-time employees. The big picture we saw there with the staff taking a look at it was that, you know, we really did help that small employer. Those are the people that really, everyone needed help, but those are the people that really got in and took advantage of the program. And we were happy to see that the total full-time employees grew a tiny bit from, you know, overall as of June 2022. Next slide, please. again something that looks bigger on my paper but not there for you but you can I think you can see knowing the city that we it spread throughout Fayette County and I think that that was the purpose we wanted to make sure that we marketed and got outside you know just to you know any kind of you know district or whatever and make sure that everybody knew about the program and everybody had an opportunity to take advantage of this great offering. I think overall it was a successful program. It was a tough program to administer. We won't kid you about that, but I think that when you look at the benefits and you see people that are in and some of the businesses that gave small bonuses to their employees, It's amazing, you know, you give somebody $100 and you keep them around and they stick and stay. And I think that that's what people, that's what the entrepreneurs were looking for. So I think it turned out very well. And I hope that the council is happy with the results. And next slide, please. I'll take any questions that you might have. Thank you so much. I really appreciate your update. All right, we'll start with Council Member James Brown. Thank you, Chair, and thank you, Mr. Tyra, for your report and your work on this. And a shout-out to Council Member Worley and Council Member Bledsoe, Commerce Lexington Traditional Bank, and the staff at the city and the chamber for their work on this program. You said, so you had 90 percent compliance, so 10 percent not blank. Reporting. Reporting compliance. Right. Okay. So what happened to the other 10 percent? Did you get them in compliance? We measured their compliance by them getting back to us with the numbers. We made a big deal at the closing of letting them know that you will have to speak with us periodically to let us know where your employment is and that kind of thing. And then, you know, like I said, I mean, I think it's just the human nature. People just kind of, you know, they don't answer. They don't answer. You send them emails. You know, you go out to their business. and we did go out to some businesses and they said, oh yeah, I saw that and here are my numbers. And I said, well, send it to us in an email because we want documentation. I don't want you to just give them to me. So some people were just like, well, I got the money, leave me alone. We had some of that. And I think those are just some of the challenges with running a small business. You get so busy keeping your business afloat that some of those things fall off. Now, the seven businesses that closed, are those businesses that did receive assistance and it wasn't enough to get them over the hump and they closed? Is that what that was? I assume that they had more difficulties. Here's what the grant program was not going to do. It almost had to be expected. If you're already in trouble or you're running thin margins, and even if somebody does gift you $8,000, it may not save the day. And I think that because what we were going through was so catastrophic, it's just kind of I think it turned out. And, yes, they were grantees. Okay. Yeah, and I just asked that question just to get some clarity. It's not anything about trying to recapture the funds. I think if the funds were given with good intent and they were making every effort to maintain their business and just couldn't keep their head above water, I think we all. I think that's what you have to ascertain. Yes, sir. Yeah. And the other thing I'll say, too, is I talked to a business owner just last week, and one of the questions they asked me is they said, what is the city doing to support small and local businesses? And I said, well, I'll tell you what we have done recently via the pandemic. And I started to go into it, and he said, I'll stop you right there. He said, I received some of the funds. And he said, I think it made the difference between me keeping my doors open and keeping these folks employed in my business going. So he thanked us for that, but I gave the credit, most of the credit, all back to Commerce Lexington for helping us get the money out. Oh, we appreciate that. Yeah. But I'll tell you what he did share with me is he said, you know, the grants were great. It kept him going, but he is concerned now with maintaining the level of salaries that he had to increase for his employees due to the market, due to the demand. And he said, you know, he lost some employees, but the ones that he has retained are great employees, and he's trying to figure out how he's going to continue to pay them the salaries to keep them employed and to keep his business going. So I think that's something that we still got to continue to work through and try to address here just holistically in regards to retaining our workforce. I think you're right. And one of the things that we're doing is that out of all of this, Commerce Lexington, you know, we have big conversations and whatnot. And it came up that, you know, financial literacy in small business is it was really lacking for some people. I mean, getting things like interim financial statements and things like that from people, it was just really tough. Some people just didn't know what that was, and they were already in business. So what we've done is that we've commenced, with some help from the city, we've commenced some programs through a Money Smart program with the FDIC, where we're going back and we're reiterating things like marketing and talking to people about their margins. And we'll hold six sessions of classes twice over the next year to try to give people that extra training. And it's targeted towards the grantees as well as other existing businesses that are out there to try and help them get on track so they can be better stewards of their business, and that might help them increase margins, increase sales, and get them on a better track, even though they're paying a little bit more to employees now. Thank you for that. Thank you, Chair. Thank you. Council Member Ellinger. Thank you, Chair, and thank you, everybody, that participated in this. I had a question. The difference on that we put $5 million in, and the difference was $411,860. That went towards administrative costs? Well, there were some funds returned. And we had some people that got into a situation where they sold their business. And they brought the funds back. We had some people that didn't trust the program. They were awarded the check and they said, nah, gave it back. It was about $36,800 that was returned. And we still have that in a bank account. But the program had already closed. So we thought it would have been a disaster for us to, yes, we did take our administrative costs to answer that question, but we thought it would be a disaster to open up the program to the whole city and only have $36,000 left. Well, I was going to say that you did a great job because usually you try to keep under 10% on administrative costs and you're at 8%, so you were actually lowering that with the 36%. On the second tranche that we did, the 2.5, we did a forgivable loan on that, and if they didn't, they had to meet certain criteria and if they didn't, have we gone back and made sure if they didn't do that, that they give the money back or how does that work? Well, 90% of the people answer the questions and we have that 10% probably minus the seven that have not and we have those names of those folks and we're going to let you guys decide what you want to do about those instances. So how much of that 10% did you say? 90% did it and there's 10% that didn't? Well, 10% that did not comply, did not get the information back. Right. And that was part of the deal, that if you take these funds, then you would comply and get the information back to us. Or, you know, if we don't know what you did on a jobs basis, that money may be requested to be returned. And we did that in the closing. Have we decided how we're going to address that then? Well, we thought it was going to be the city's job to address that. We didn't know that it was going to – we didn't know that we really had the power legally to pull that, but maybe the Department of Revenue does. And then we'd asked for a goal of 50% for minority and women-owned. It looks like 61% when you add the two up, but I'm sure some of that demographics were minority and women-owned. Do you know that by chance? Did we hit our goal 50%? I think we did. We definitely hit the goal of 50%. We tried to be real specific in extracting that. So when you looked at women, and, yes, you do have some women that are minorities, but for the most part, I think when we backed out that number, it was still 55%. Sounds good. Thank you so much. It was very successful, and I think you have a lot of businesses in business. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Council Member Worley. Thank you, Chair. And thank you, Mr. Tyra, for the presentation. And I'll get back to thank yous, but particularly thank you for all your hard work in making this happen. Couldn't have asked for a better partner, quite frankly. And so going back to some of the delinquency, I just want to make a point that, one, we're not showing necessarily a 10% delinquency because there's maybe those that finally will get in compliance with reporting that did meet their goals and would be in compliance. we need to continue to see how we communicate with those people, with those businesses. But then also I would say that those bankers on your access loan committee would say once you extrapolate that down to probably 6% or 7%, that's a pretty good default rate in any program. Yes, sir. And I think if you'll remember, colleagues, we always said with this, we weren't going to put any sort of collection or recovery on CommerceLex. They were going to do the reporting work for us, the compliance work, and then it would be up to us. our legal department, our Department of Revenue, and quite frankly, this council and this committee to decide how we wanted to address that. So I just want to remind and make sure that no one thinks that Commerce Lex, that that was really their job. Their job was to make sure we had the information after they did a fantastic job doling out this program. You look January to June of this year, and you see an average payroll increase from $28,000 and change to $43,000 and change. I mean, that's exactly what we were looking to do, is to get more money out there to the people working in our community that then in turn is money that comes back to us in the form of payroll and net profits tax. And so it all worked great. You know, when we started the program, it started as how do we keep doors open during the pandemic? That very first $2.5 million tranche, that was how somebody could buy PPE for their employees. A restaurant could build a patio out for outdoor seating. That's how we initially did this. And then it evolved into, well, we kept our doors open. How do we grow and survive after the pandemic? How do we come out of this? And I think we've shown that that was successful. So a question, not to go on my continued dialogue of how great I think this program is. Do you see an opportunity, as we look to future budgets, for the city to continue to think how this program could evolve? You mentioned financial literacy. We talk about support for increased payroll as we see inflation that affects everything in our communities. Do you see opportunities to continue to evolve this program to help those small businesses? Yes, I do, and I look at it this way. I started out in economic development in micro enterprise. And micro enterprise's job was to make as many loans to people that were outside of banking to get them into regular financing because that's where they need to be. They need to be with financial institutions that can help them in every single way. And we have plenty of institutions like that. But you have to be financially literate. You have to know your business better than anyone else. And that's what this training is doing. I feel like that's why the FDIC came out with it was to try to increase the education level of small businesses. Because people are running small businesses and they're having the same year every year. And they thought, well, if I still got money in my pocket, I'm good until you have a pandemic. Now they know that they really need some help. And I think that's what we're trying to offer is try to do some help assist people and do some deep dives into their own programs so that they can grow and get to the mainstream lending that they need. And if they get to mainstream lenders, and believe me, bankers need them as much as they need bankers. So that would be the idea is to do things that pushes them to, well, basically to be selfish, the access loan program and get them going through major financing. Sure. Absolutely. Well, thank you. And to all of my colleagues, thank you for your support of this program, for your trust in something that was novel and new. And thank you to Council Member Bledsoe, who without her really digging into the details of how this worked, this never would have happened. and she did a fantastic job. Commerce Lex, you were fantastic partners. Thank you, and particularly Tyrone. Awesome, man. Thank you so much. You're welcome. Thank you. And if I recall, you've got about $36,000, $37,000 left. Yes. So, Council Member Brown, might you have a suggestion? Thank you, Council Member. I'll make a motion to continue to fund the minority business outreach through Tyrone Tyrone's office at Commerce Lexington with the remaining funds. So moved. Thank you. Thank you. Is there any discussion on the motion? Seeing none, all in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Great. Thank you very much. You may use those other funds. Thank you very much. Appreciate your work. Appreciate it. Thank you. All right. We'll move on to item number four. This is a regional competitive plan. I'm going to welcome Commerce Lexington staff, Andy Johnson. She serves as the chief policy officer and director of regional engagement, and Bob Quick, president and CEO of Commerce Lexington, to discuss the new regional competitiveness plan. Welcome. Thank you. Thank you all very much. And, you know, these are the moments in life when you feel really proud, just from what's been talked about in the last two programs. But it was a partnership. And you all did. You went out and took a lot of risk. But you know what? There's a lot of people who felt extremely uncomfortable, and this community came together for them. So I just want to acknowledge that partnership. It's invaluable to the residents. And I will also tell you, at a grocery store one time, a lady, when she realized I was with Commerce Lexington, got very emotional because of the grant. So it affected a lot of people in many ways. My name is Bob Quick. I'm with Commerce Lexington staff. I want to talk about another initiative that we want to make you aware of. For the last couple of years, we've been working with a nationally known economist, Ted Abernathy. He's the Managing Partner for Economic Leadership, LLC, to better understand what's going on in the marketplace so that we as Lexington and the region can compete more effectively for jobs and talent. We have known Ted for many years and we admire his work. He spoke to the 2019 Raleigh leadership trip attendees. On all of our leadership trips, two things seem to always emerge. The places we visit and compete for talent and economic projects are becoming a lot more creative and competitive. And second, the places I reference are not cities, they're not counties, and they're not towns. Rather, they're regions. Lexington is the economic center, but we need our regional partners to help us compete, and they need us. We're interdependent when it comes to land, housing, infrastructure, people, and quality of life. More than half of Lexington's workforce commutes into from outside the region daily. For the past two years, we have been focused on a nine-county region and on how we can make Central Kentucky more competitive. and we also put together a 45-member steering committee consisting of public and private sector representatives from this nine-county region to guide and provide feedback throughout the entire process. Mayor Gorton and Kevin Atkins were on this steering team on behalf of the city. The study is now complete. We are now spending time traveling the region, updating public and private sector officials about the findings and recommendations. This initiative has been well received by regional officials and business leaders throughout the region. There is support from local government partners to collaborate on this plan. So today we want to share with you the executive summary and recommendations. We want this effort to be a win-win for everyone involved because we're much better together. Andy Johnson, who has been instrumental in making this project successful, will present Ted's executive briefing papers. Andy. Thank you, Bob. Just as a reminder, my name is Andy Johnson. I'm the Chief Policy Officer for Commerce Lexington, and I'm also our Director of Regional Engagement. So we're happy to share this plan with you all. As Bob mentioned, we have been going out within the region and meeting with fiscal courts, city council members, expanding that group of key stakeholders to share the plan with and to get your questions and feedback. because we're at the stage in the process where we really want to hear from you all on your thoughts on this and and to get your engagement moving forward because Lexington really is a critical piece in making this successful. So I am going to just quickly go to the next slide and we didn't cover this in depth and I think you are aware of this but just before we begin with the plan just giving you just a bit of background on our history of regionalism. Lexington is a focus from the from Commerce Lexington standpoint in terms of making sure that we're driving economic growth here in Fayette County, but we have long recognized the value of our interdependence and the larger economic ecosystem here in central Kentucky. Jenna Greathouse on our team, who is our senior executive vice president for economic development, for over 30 years has worked with the economic development professionals within the nine-county region on projects and marketing the region and trying to retain and keep talent and jobs here in Central Kentucky. And that organization is loosely formed and it's called the Bluegrass Alliance. You've probably heard that name referenced before, but that is the economic development entity, the infrastructure, a lot of our, you know, the gas companies, electric companies also serve on that in terms of trying to figure out how we do a better job of recruiting businesses to the region as a whole. The Central Kentucky Policy Group, which I'm in charge of helping guide and lead. We've been meeting for almost 20 years now to talk about policy issues at a federal and a state level and how we can collaborate on initiatives from a policy standpoint that advance the region. And the Leadership Central Kentucky program has been more of a leadership, a networking, just trying to build and foster relationships throughout the region of our public and private sector partners. and Amy Stout on our team helps administer that program with the chamber professionals throughout the region. So just wanted to quickly lay that foundation of some of the regional work that we've already been doing and our goal with this plan is just to continue to elevate those efforts and to be even more intentional about the things that we're focused on as a region. So Bob mentioned that the 45 leaders came together and, you know, we could create a plan, as you all know, that has 25 things that we could be focused on. And from the get-go, the leadership said we want this to be a handful of action items that we all agree can be impactful and beneficial for the region and that we feel like we can financially support so that it's a win-win for everyone. So that from the start was just that we wanted to make sure that this was a tight list of things that we could work on together over the next five years to show some success and to build more trust among the region. So what we started, really this is broken out to, and I think you all have a copy in your packet of this executive summary. This is an executive summary of the 50-page report, and I'm happy to send that full document to everyone so you can read through that and see it. But what we're going to go through quickly today is just this executive summary and highlight some of those action items. So this process really was broken down into three parts. First of all, to get a baseline, we looked at, you know, what is the current regional economy? What's our current landscape? Where are we at today? And that included the things that are listed in front of you. So just very quickly, you know, the regional population has been mentioned. We're about 700,000, and our employment, the number of people that are actively in the workforce, is around 376,000 people within the nine-county region. So we're projected to grow at about 20,000 people over the next five years in the region. And this won't come as a surprise to you all, but our largest industry sectors right now are government, and that would include state government because Frankfurt is in our nine-county region, UK, of course, and the public education providers in the communities throughout the region. Manufacturing and health care are those top clusters. But something to note is that we are double the national average in our agriculture sector jobs, food services, and retail. So those are areas that we have larger clusters. Something that we noted is that you know from the data the fastest growing industry clusters over the next five years are in business services, distribution and e-commerce, aerospace, automotive, and paper and packaging. So when we're looking for opportunities those are areas where jobs are expected to grow. So something that's the positive side of things and something that is an opportunity and a challenge when you look at the data is that we are behind the national average and really I mean I've been saying three key indicators so when you look at the number of people that are actively employed in the region we are below the national average when you look at our personal income wages what people are earning per job in the region we are below the national average we're around 62,000 per job that the national average is around 72,000. That can be a plus and a minus depending on the types of industries you're trying to recruit, but in addition to that, the amount of things we're producing out of the region, the products we're producing, were also below the national average. And we put up there the young professionals because when you look at the employment base, we are also well behind when you're looking at that young professional category. People 25 to 40 years old living and working in the region, we are behind that national average. So the things that are in this plan are meant to impact those numbers positively over the next five years to get us at least to the national average in those categories. So just wanted to lay that foundation when we talk about some of these action items. They're geared towards those key economic indicators. So a couple things I'll hit on as we're looking at the takeaways. You know the second piece in this process we did look at housing affordability that continued to come up as an issue and a challenge even among our regional stakeholders and when we looked at us compared to other competitors cities and regions at that snapshot in time about a year ago we were still relatively affordable we were right in the middle compared to those other cities but it is something that even Ted and his team said that as a a region we need to continue to monitor that to make sure that we're keeping that affordability advantage that the region has and also making sure that we've got a diverse set of options whether it's affordable housing all the way up the spectrum for the types of people that are recruiting to be here in the region and particularly in Fayette County and you all know this but over the last 10 years our average annual pay has increased in Fayette County by about 33 percent while our housing costs have increased more than 70%. So when you're looking at the region, we are a bit of an outlier when it comes to affordability, but we recognize that we're all in this together in terms of the product that we're offering over the course of the next five years. So just wanted to bring that to your all's attention. So the next phase in this process was really, you know, we looked at where we were and we wanted to say, you know, from an economic perspective, from a jobs and a talent perspective, where do we want to go? and the stakeholders talked about some of the strengths and some of the challenges with the region and the strengths that came out of the discussion were that even as a region we have the strengths of a small town field with big city amenities that our quality of life, our affordability, our you know our location, our highly educated workforce, all of those things are advantages that we want to continue to capitalize on and some of the opportunities that we saw that were more challenges were you know labor availability, the lack of real estate product to meet business needs, and really some of the tax and regulatory policies that may make it more difficult for regional collaboration to take place. So just trying to figure out how do we make the region more competitive within those areas was a focus point. And I think in summary just the overall goal of this plan is just to improve this economy to maintain adequate infrastructure to attract more jobs and people here and really just continue to leverage our affordability and our quality of life advantages. So something that we talked about for the future is the technology sector. That is an area where we have lost jobs over the last several years, but it still is an area of opportunity that came out through the data if we focus on some of the clusters that we already have here and create an intentional strategy around those sectors for technology growth in the future. So that was the aspirations for the future piece. The other part of this was just looking at, okay, key takeaways from the data and you can see that there were seven things listed and it's things that we've mentioned just that our economy needs to be more competitive, we need to grow our labor force, we need more sites and buildings across the region. There's not a mega site here in central Kentucky So if we wanted to attract projects that have gone to Bowling Green and Elizabethtown as of recent, that we don't really have that product available. And so it's something that we want to make a priority as a region. Our regional wages need to rise. And that there really are, I mean, given our position, our location, our education levels, the types of businesses we already have here, that we've got a lot of opportunities to capitalize on. And the dynamics post-pandemic really put us in a position for success with just a few tweaks and things that we can focus on more collaboratively. So the data analytics, marketing ourselves as a region is going to be important. Jen and her team already do that, but really just trying to be more intentional about taking that to the next level. And just remembering that regional collaboration can be hard. The way we're set up with our tax structure makes that a little bit difficult, but I can tell you that there are partners within the region. county judges, mayors, business leaders that all see the value in this and that are bought in to trying to make this successful. So I feel excited about what we can do in this space and really want to just encourage your engagement as we move forward. So the final thing, and this will be the back page of this handout, are the specific recommendations that came from Ted Abernathy and economic leadership. So the first section, we divided this into just economic development, workforce development, and we're calling the third section leadership, but it's really the public policy aspect of the plan. So there are three items over the next five years that we want to focus on to increase our jobs, our wages, our GDP, at least to get those numbers to the national average. And you can see those there talking about increasing our regional branding, having strategies with the site selectors around these particular sector targets, looking at how we can develop more product throughout the region. The state has a product development initiative right now that is really enabling and supporting communities investing more in product, but just trying to figure out how we can potentially go after a mega site and work with our partners in the region to make that happen. And then the third piece is just doing what we're doing today, engaging more of our local leadership in these types of conversations about the things that we can work on more collaboratively together for everyone's benefit. The second piece of this is workforce development. which is something from a chamber perspective we have not taken to a regional level yet. But I'm telling you it is the number one issue. Throughout the region this topic continues to come up. So we've set a goal to try to increase our labor force by 1,500 people per year over the next five years. And we feel like one of the most effective ways to do that to have the biggest impact across the region is to focus on a talent attraction recruitment campaign. We're seeing that in regions across the country. and we've got to tell our story better to prospective talent in the sectors that we want to be here. The other piece of that is internships, creating more stickiness. We've got 20,000 graduates that are coming out of our regional universities every year and just trying to figure out how do we get them connected with the business community in the region, have them experiencing our quality of life and feeling connected to this place so that we can keep them here long term. Maybe they go away initially after graduation, but we can get them back when they want to be settled and have that connection to community. The third and final piece of this is just figuring out how we can be more intentional about attracting more state and federal funding into the region for these specific initiatives to support them. Whether it's infrastructure, product development, whatever policy changes we need to help our region be more successful, these are the things that we're going to be working on over the next five years. And in conclusion, the official launch of this plan, when we're going to dig a lot deeper into sharing best practices with you all, some of the things that we think we may, from a tactical standpoint, want to start pursuing over the next year to five years, is going to be talked about at the regional summit here in Lexington at the Campbell House on November 30th. we want all of you all to be there to hear this information and to be part of the conversations that are driving the specific strategies that we implement to support these initiatives. So hope you'll make time to be there and and to be part of this process. That's all that's all I have. Thank you. Thank you so much. Okay we're gonna start with questions. I'm gonna start with Councilmember Fred Brown. Thank you, Chair. Very interesting. We've been working on, from the council in this city, and the chamber has been working on regionalization for some time. When you're looking at these nine counties, I believe, does each one of them have a chamber of commerce that's active and are involved in this program? Yes, they did. And when we've gone out to what we're calling that next level of stakeholder engagement, we've been engaging with their Chamber of Commerce, their business leadership, their mayors and judges, and we've really been leaving it up to them. A lot of them are set up and they have industrial authorities or foundations that support their economic development work, bringing all of those entities together and asking them to identify who they feel like are the key stakeholders that would support these initiatives. And often they're bringing their school superintendent. If they have a BCTC campus representative, those folks are at the table as well. So it really has been a cross-section of public and private leadership within each community. And the way they're set up, you know, in terms of we just let them decide who they feel like needs to be at the table. Well, in the past, I know that we've had a lot of competition with our surrounding counties. and some of it's been to some degree negative, but I think we've turned the corner now and we need this chamber, what you're all doing. So I guess you're all leading the effort, this chamber, because I guess we're the big kids on the block. And I encourage us to continue this promotion here. The funding that you indicated there, where's the funding coming from? So far to this point with Ted's fee and other costs, we've incurred that as an organization because we did not want that to be the thing that separated us. Also the city stepped forward with a $50,000 matching grant that we can use and we're still working through all of that, but we feel very confident it's got to be matched 100 percent. We feel pretty confident based on the feedback we're getting that that will occur. As we go forward and we build out our program and we reach out and do the things that the folks in this region want and need to have done, we'll have to keep revisiting that. Also, we have our Strides Ahead Capital Campaign going on, which is a five-year campaign. In previous years, we've raised about $4 million over those five years. So we're looking to use some of those funds because what those funds allow us to do today will also work out in the region as well. Are you encouraged that the other counties are buying into this whole process? and you buy in, you've got to put some money up on the table. And we're sensing that those that want to be very active will. I'll go back to when we created the Central Kentucky Policy Council. At the time, it was eight counties we worked with. We invited them all. About four got involved. But over the next couple of years, all eight were at the table. And we may have some of that where it's going to take a while for some of the counties, some of the cities, the chambers, the private sector to come to the table. But that's okay. What I wanted to really hit on is the most important thing, what's changed? The trust. Fred, we're going to have, or Councilmember, we're going to have people, we're going to have issues that are going to divide us. We just are. But if you trust each other, that's different. And you can work through a lot of those issues. And we've had them. We had the water issue there for quite a while, very divisive. But you know what? Today, to me, and back then, we handled it a lot differently, but today would be an issue I think we could work through. We'll have others. Well, I think this council and the city should step up to the plate here, and when you all present your budgeted amounts in the next fiscal year, I think we need to address that particular area there. And I think this city, Lexington, because of our role, So we need to step up to the plate. So thank you for the presentation. Thank you. Council Member McCartan. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Ms. Johnson, for the presentation. Thank you for you and your team and Commerce Lexington for everything you guys do. This is something that we've talked about multiple times. Regionalism is key to not just our community but our growth. And it's great to see this coming forward. We took a trip last year, and we went out and we visited Austin. We also went out to Raleigh. And this was the key conversation that revolved around those trips. Regionalism. How do we partner with our surrounding counties? And we are the big kid on the block. We've been that 1,000-pound gorilla in the room for a long time, and us extending our hands out there showing the public or showing our surrounding communities that we want to work with them is crucial for our future. I appreciate this presentation. I appreciate you always inviting everyone to the table and making sure that we are building upon those relationships. So thank you for all you guys do. Thank you. Thank you. Councilman Plumman. Thank you. Thank you, Chair. And I'm really looking forward to the regional summit. I've already signed up. And I'm a big proponent of regionalism. Obviously, the 12th District abuts all of the counties here, except for Franklin County and then part of Jesmond County. But also, my United Way days, those are exactly the same counties that we've worked with. And I know I've talked to Bob Quick over the years how that was a mapping. We would look at things like a child in Madison County needed hearing services. Well, they would come to Lexington as speech and hearing. And all of this mapping, you really saw a regional look, a regional collaboration that existed. And I think it can exist on these things that you brought to the table today. I'm not aware of regional branding going on right now. is there in the report, which I want to get. What does that look like? Can you address that? I'm not aware that there is regional branding per se, maybe just in the economic development arena. I think Jenna may be the best equipped to answer what they're doing currently. What we do right now is with the Bluegrass Alliance, and we market, again, all nine counties with all the product, all the people, all the educational institutions and all of that. Part of the goal of the strategic plan is to increase awareness. We will work with those nine counties to formulate a plan to give us a bigger brand. We don't know what that's going to be yet. We have to see if we can raise the money. I'm working right now and it's a $10 million where we were for. We've got to see how close we can get to that. That $10 million is not all private sector. The $4 million before was all private sector. So I can't remember who asked, but we do anticipate that the regional communities will participate. The economic development groups already do, so they contribute a small portion, and we do the lion's share, but whenever we do an event or we do an interesting marketing piece, I pay for half, and then the other nine counties split the other half up. So it's kind of on a pro-rated basis, but we'll get in that direction once we see how much money we can raise. Okay, great. You know, it seems to me that if there was a concerted, collaborative, quality-of-life voice, that would go out there, in addition to the economic and some of these. But the quality of life that Central Kentucky as a region offers really has got a lot of marketing potential. A lot of people use our video. So if you remember our video, we did quite a bit of work on that. So it was produced professionally, et cetera. And so a lot of our regional partners actually use our video because they think of Lexington as an asset to them, not in competition necessarily. So that video kind of covers business and quality of life. But we need to do more. Kind of dissolves those county lines. Yeah. Because everyone says, I live in Madison County, I live in Franklin County, when we really all live in central Kentucky. Yeah, it's funny that you say that because I can't even remember the name of the company that I worked with, but they ended up in Madison County. but if you look at their website it says they're in Lexington. Oh great. Yeah they appreciate all the amenities of Lexington. Bluegrass Tomorrow is at the table correct? Bluegrass Tomorrow we met with them yesterday. Because they've been involved that for years and the regional model was something that just kind of drove the organization. So we met with Rob and Brian, President Lewis and I didn't know the other person's name. From Sullivan. Sullivan University. Like the higher education consortium that's really important too. Okay great I'm really looking forward to this and I'll be asking for the report but I'll also be at the summit and I encourage my my colleagues because I think it's a good conversation it's timely and it's ripe so thank you all. Something else to add Councilman Plowman. We are in the process Betsy Dexter and the Business Education Network in partnership with Visit Lex have engaged a consulting firm and they're going to speak at the summit but they are currently looking at a perception study to see how the region is perceived throughout Kentucky but also the surrounding states because that's going to be the foundation for the marketing effort that may occur because it's just as important to market to people now just like you would to a visitor so we're working on that currently and that information is going to be presented at the summit and that will hopefully help guide some of the marketing efforts that go towards the talent piece of the plan as well. Great, sounds wonderful. Thank you Chair. Thank you. Councilmember Maloney. Thank you. I appreciate your presentation. I support regional planning. Have you ever thought about expanding because we're getting ready to build two hospitals, and it's not because of regional planning. It's the heart and soul of Eastern Kentucky. You just got through doing a presentation about nursing. I went to the hospital to see friends of mine. People who are nurses are traveling three hours a day to go to work. So I understand the regional, how important it is, but we're talking about eastern Kentucky, very low income concerns, and to put the flood, we started a great relationship. I envision that we have to expand more, and I think the hospitals see that, and that's why they're building out there, not because of regional planning. I mean, it's going to be part of it, but most of it is going to be the heart and soul of eastern Kentucky, which we are. And have you all ever looked at going further out? because to me that's the future. And I always follow those hospitals where they go, and they're a lot smarter than me, and they know where their clients are coming from. And just hopefully you all look further and be the heart and soul of eastern Kentucky because I just feel like we are on the right track, but we can do a lot better. So I'm hoping that you all are looking at that more than just regional, but we're going to have to stand out and this is an opportunity. And you may want to answer that, but I'm hoping, Bob, you might want to answer it. Are you all looking at that? Again, it gets back down to getting to know the region and the region getting to know us and trust us. When we started the regional tour, a lot of people thought that was kind of fluffy. You know, we took two buses, three buses of CEOs, business owners, young professionals. We went out. We've hit every quadrant of the state twice. And I have to tell you, we went there and we didn't tell them what we do. We went to ask them what they do and do well. We got to know each other a lot more. Again, I get back to the word trust. We also find out that we're all interdependent with each other. So, yes, we have relationships out in the region. These hospitals will pull people in from a long distance. That's strategically why they're looking to be where they're at. But, again, we've got to figure out how to get that world-class worker here and make sure that with all these other factors, quality of life, the economics of this place, that we can do that and do it effectively. That's always part of what we're about and what we're trying to do. We have employees that will travel two hours to get to work here. So I just see there's so much potential there. We've got to be more creative, and I appreciate it. You've all done a tremendous job regional, and I think the hospitals. But I just think we've got to start seeing ourselves a little bit further out than where we are now. And I would be remiss if I didn't say a lot of this started 35-plus years ago when a company called Toyota came here. They built bridges. Their philosophy was bridges. Jenna and that group took all these different folks, all these different counties. They didn't trust each other and, quite frankly, probably didn't like each other to a degree with utility folks. And they all worked together, and they built trust. It's about trust. And then it's amazing what you get done. And then you don't have to take credit for it because we all can take credit for it versus individually. I'm part of the Association of Chamber of Commerce Executives, ACCE. Every other month, we're on a conference call, a Zoom call. We are out there. We are so far ahead of some of these other bigger cities and bigger regions. So it's the simple things you do, but we're doing a lot of those right things. We're protecting industries we have to protect. We have to. We've got to do the things right. You don't get a second chance on a lot of these things. Thank you. Thank you. Council Member LeGray. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Ms. Johnson. You always do an excellent job. I really appreciated this presentation. One of the things that I'm really interested in is getting young people invested in Lexington and getting them to stay here, to build their lives here, and to feel as though they have multifaceted career opportunities in Lexington and in our surrounding region. I think that Amy Stout has done an excellent job with leadership development and engaging young professionals and mid-career professionals and getting them connected to each other and to a sense of possibility here. you know when you from a commerce lexington perspective when you think about kind of internship programs or marketing or models that you see elsewhere for our college graduates you mentioned like 20,000 of them what are some ideas that you'd like us to think about or know about that are really working or that you'd like to build upon in the future I don't want to steal Betsy's thunder so I'll let her answer this question okay so there's a lot going on around that we can you know do here we've seen programs in Colorado Springs for example we just talked with them about doing a very intentional internship thing for the summer you know building this sense of community is going to be a big deal right we want to show them this community what we've got to offer socially It's a great place to live and work, but they want a community as well. So we want to do something where we can bring them together, and maybe we do something at UK. We've talked about maybe doing something in the dorms and providing a thing for the summer where they can live there and build a community and do some social stuff but also work with employers. So we're talking through all of that because it's absolutely important that we create the stickiness factor for our young folks. It's just something we have to do. So there's lots of great best practices, and we want to emulate all of that if we can. So, yeah. Absolutely. Is there anything else you want to share? I was just going to say, I think something that may be low-hanging fruit is really just how, at a base level, you're marketing the live, work, play strategies. Sometimes we focus just on providing information to that business person that we're trying to attract here, but recognizing that we've also got to start marketing the community to talent so they understand how to connect with job opportunities. they understand what are the fun things you can do here in the community and so I think that may be something in addition to a specific initiative or program that we just look at that overall marketing strategy and I think some of the things that we've looked at just in looking at young professionals that are here in the community it's that you know we kind of get average scores so it's just with a few tweaks how can we boost that up in terms of them feeling like they can find their sense of community here and that they can find opportunities to advance on the job ladder here in Central Kentucky because sometimes there seems to be a miss of them feeling like they can't really grow within this city and I think we'd all say that's not true but somehow we've got to figure out how we make those connections. Yes absolutely I think that what a lot of us are seeking is connection, community, opportunity and with young people who are trying to figure out their professional trajectories I think And that's absolutely true as well. And a key part of that, it seems, is also mentorship, making sure that if people are at the beginning of their career, the middle of their career, that they have various relationships so that they can have a sense of what's next and make a move here regionally without feeling as though they have to leave. It sounds like you all are thinking about that. So thank you. Thank you. Council Member Ellinger. Thank you, Chair. You gave the number, and I didn't know what the times was. You said the income has raised 33%, but the housing has gone up 70%. What was that time frame? That was over the past 10 years. 10 years? Okay. And that was, you know, when we looked at that, that was about, you know, six months ago when we looked at that particular fact to the executive summary, just to show that, you know, regionally we are hitting those affordability marks, but when we're talking specifically about Lexington, we are an outlier in that narrative. And then you also said that in the next five years, you said we have nine counties that set 376,000 workers, and the next five years that we're going to grow 20,000 workers? That's correct. Then with your workforce development, you increase the labor force by 1,500 per year. That would be 7,500. Is that including the 20,000, or would that increase that over the 20? Beyond those numbers. That's just, if we don't do anything, that's the projections as they stand right now. Okay, and by doing this, we're hoping to increase that 7,500 more. And then you talked about the tax difficulties. What are we looking at there, and how can we change that? So, and this is probably more of a state issue than a local issue at this time. I was thinking. You all know, really, that your hands are tied in a lot of ways in terms of the current local tax structure. through this process, it's not going to be a surprise to anyone here that Kentucky is one of a handful of states that is heavily reliant on the occupational taxes for local government revenues. So when you're comparing us with city or regions across the country and you're looking at those tax structures, the fact that we do levy an occupational tax on the payroll of workers and the net profit taxes on business, that's an outlier. And so that's seen as an anti-competitiveness policy. Now, I mean, in all candor, other regions may have higher property taxes, but then often these communities have, as we've seen on our leadership visits, the local option sales tax or the ability to leverage a local sales tax to a certain level that enables local governments to make investments in quality of life and infrastructure and other services that you are responsible for that really do play a huge role in economic development. So I think as a region, I think we see ourselves as trying to help advocate at the state level for modernizations and more diversification in the local tax code that really enables you all to make the decisions that you think are best for the community. So that's what that is referencing. And there may be some things to Tyrone's point, some different initiatives or programs that we can look at to help support small businesses across the region that we may want to advocate for. but really at the highest level it's more of that overall structural change that needs to occur at the state level. All right, those answer my questions. Thank you. All right, thank you. If Council would permit, I have a recommendation as maybe an option for us. If you'll recall, last year we allocated $300,000 towards workforce development. Of that $300,000, we spent $150,000 on the Accelerate Lexington CNA program, which you heard about today. that relieves a remaining $150,000 in that program. Since we haven't targeted another sector, and this is kind of critical to how we think about retention and recruitment in our workforce, I might recommend moving that $150,000 from that account into the regional effort moving forward with the same matching ability and shows a little bit of leadership before the summit that other counties might get in and support this effort as well. Just a thought. I can't make a motion as chair, so I would just suggest it. and if count well look Mr. Adkins is coming to the table only to make one small correction so we had already set aside 50,000 of that 300,000 in the initial so the accelerate got 250 and we had set aside 50 for this regional it was set up with matching funds as Bob mentioned so I just wanted to make sure that people understood it wasn't the whole 150 50,000 of that's already accounted for thank you this is the 100 that would make that up Thank you very much. Councilman Maloney. So you can't make the motion. I'd like to make the motion on your recommendation. So move. Thank you. Is there a second? Second. Any discussion? Councilman Ellinger? By what Mr. Atkins said, so it would be for $100,000 then? Okay. Thank you. Councilman Brown. Question, I guess, from Mr. Quick. What's this due to the rest of their budget? Are we reallocating their budget without their permission? or are we adding the additional money? Yes, what? Additional $100,000. Okay, fine. Thank you. Any other discussion on the motion? Hold on. We got it. You already have the 50. We already have the money. Correct. This is a reallocation of the funds from this initiative to the other initiative and allows them to do that. Yes. Are we all on the same page? Yes. Okay. All in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Thank you. The motion's passed. Okay. Thank you very much for all of your work and we appreciate very much and we look forward to the summit on the 30th. I think it's going to be great. Okay moving on to the next item is item number five. I'm very excited about this item and I know many other people are as well. I want to welcome Jennifer Renna who's the American Rescue Plan Act manager. She's also working in the office of CAO to present on a very exciting item paid parental leave. Thank you. Yeah thank you for saying that. I told Sally should I do this now that I'm the ARPA manager and she said yes you can do this. I did want to say I'll wait just a second. Thank you. I did want to say back in 2019, CAO Hamilton and I started a dive into paid parental leave and what other municipalities were doing around the country. When COVID struck our city and our country, we sort of pivoted and started focusing on new things. But when Council Member Bledsoe put this item back in committee, We got out our summary document and our benchmarking document and went ahead and updated that and then dove into paid parental leave again. And I want to thank, I'm up here presenting obviously, but there was a whole team of folks who provided me a lot of the data that you all will see today as I go through the presentation, including budgeting, the finance commissioner's office, the law department, human resources, and then of course Hillary, Sally, and Glenn in my office. So I want to thank them. They'll also be here for questions at the end. So what we're going to do today is talk about Family and Medical Leave Act, what that is, the current LFUCG procedure, a summary of paid parental leave, the benefits of paid parental leave, some benchmarking, the FMLA paid parental leave at LFUCG, and what our proposal looks like, the financial impact, next steps, and then we'll have our discussion. The final page also does have links to some of the reference documents I referenced as I researched what other communities and states are doing around the country. And I want to start by just throwing out, so as I've been researching this over the past couple of months, there's a lot of research out there and a lot of documents that have been written that say when you go in front of your elected body, here's all the things you should throw out to them, reasons why we should do this. So I'm not the first person to have to do this. And there's lots of great facts. I'm going to highlight a couple of them as we go through. But I did want to throw out this is an issue that lots of states and cities, as well as the federal government, are discussing. And I did find something the other day that said, as far back as 100 years ago, they were discussing paid parental leave at the federal level. And so that should sort of tell you that this is a complicated topic, and it costs money to do it. We are the only country in the world, industrialized, that does not have paid parental leave at the federal level. Thus, I'm here today talking to you, and people have talked at the state level. Eleven states have paid parental leave. Many municipalities do, and we'll get to that in just a moment. So, as you all are very familiar with the Family and Medical Leave Act, the big thing to note here is that it does allow job-protected leave every year, but the 12 weeks is unpaid. So while many employees, both public and private sector, do have the option to take FML if you qualify under, you work a certain amount of hours, and the company has over 50 employees, or the organization has 50 employees, the unpaid part can cause a lot of problems for employees when they decide to either give birth to a child, adopt a child, or foster children. So it does apply to public agencies, so of course that means it applies to us. And it sort of gives up some reasons there that I just mentioned. Birth and care of a newborn child, and then placement of a child for adoption or foster care. Here at the city, Director Walters has provided me a lot of great information about how we earn time and how we carry forward time. And you can see up there, we do have a very generous leave policy here, both sick and vacation time, and sort of outlines up on the board what we do offer. We also allow our employees, our full-time employees, to carry 600 sick hours into the next year. And part-time is allowed to carry 40. Vacation, we're allowed to carry 168 hours into the next calendar year. So our current procedure here at the LFUCG, if you were to give birth to a child, adopt a child, is that you are able, you are required to use your available paid sick vacation and other leave time during your FMLA absence and you need to exhaust those before you go on unpaid leave. Now keep in mind if you've only been here for a couple of years you may not have enough leave built up to take a full 12 weeks off to bond with your child. So we kind of just go into that. I do want to make, it's sort of a personal note I suppose, but it says you're entitled to reserve the 15 hours of sick leave and 15 hours of vacation leave. As many of you know if you've had a newborn, whether it be a natural childbirth or through adoption, often you want to leave a bit of time because as we know little kids get sick and you've exhausted all of your time and you go to take time off when they're ill, you may be taking that unpaid and so I think that's a really important thing to talk about as I've discussed this with folks that not only work in this building, but work for the private sector. Everybody knows you may need time to take children to the doctor. Okay, so paid parental leave, and I've kind of talked about this just briefly as we started, but essentially it is allowing our staff to take paid time off to bond with and care for a newborn, newly adopted, or a newly placed child. It typically runs concurrent with FMLA as applicable. So now I'm going to get into, I cannot tell you all how many articles are written about all the benefits of paid parental leave. And so what I tried to do was really just point out some of the facts that really stood out to me, and I hope they stand out to you all too. So we do know through the research that's done that there is lower infant mortality rates, higher rates of vaccination, higher rates of breastfeeding when an employer offers paid parental leave. And there are article after article about that child bonding, both the birthing parent and the non-birthing parent or the adoptive parents and what that means for the children and the parents for their mental health throughout the child's entire life. I think what's hard to quantify here is how much do we save on the back end if we're not doing mental health, giving mental health to services to the parents or to the children. If children are more likely to be vaccinated and have lower infection rates, what does that save us on the back end of our health plan? We didn't get into doing all those calculations, but I do think it's something important to note here, particularly when we get to the financial impact slide. As I've mentioned paid parental leave policies are linked to improve mental health, can reduce financial stress, and I want to pause here and say a lot of the articles that I read particularly about the financial stress, if you have employees on the lower end of the financial earning spectrum, having paid time off to bond it really does alleviate stress for them knowing that they'll still get a paycheck while they're home taking care of their child. It allows them to focus less on perhaps their bank account and more time with their child. And there is also some research that says that this promotes gender equality. Having both parents home with the child can take some stress off the other parent. So the articles that I read that said make sure you tell your elected body this, they want us to talk about retention and recruitment. And And while I was listening to some of the earlier presentations today, I thought this might be a bit of a difficult segue into this, but you know I don't think it is. Because I've just heard three presentations talking about recruitment and retention, and while this is directly focused on LFUCG, there is a chance that we could recruit folks from all over the country for various jobs that we have. And so I wanted to just point out here that there is a bit of research that says women will stay in their job longer and work longer if you offer paid parental leave. There's also, as you see here, 30% of the women left their jobs after giving birth without paid leave. As we know, we have to recruit, we have to hire, we have to train all of those new employees. and so while again I don't have that quantified in here I do think that's an important important point. Now we spent a quite a bit of time benchmarking like I mentioned earlier in 2019 and then again this summer and what's interesting is there's actually a lot more municipalities and universities that are doing paid parental leave after the pandemic. So through the pandemic we really saw people needing to be home with their children for various reasons and so we have seen some of our peer cities and what I would consider benchmarked universities to start offering paid leave while COVID, since the start of COVID and while through the duration of COVID. One of those examples is the University of Kentucky who back in 2019 was not offering paid parental leave but they are now and University of Louisville. Louisville Metro they actually saved me quite a bit of research because somebody up in their municipality did a lot of research on paid parental leave particularly in the state of Kentucky. They are now offering 12 weeks of paid leave for birth or adoption. The state of Kentucky currently does it as LFUCG does so you can use your comp time, sick time, annual leave time concurrently with FML there, but it is not a designated paid leave category at the state of Kentucky. Cincinnati, Ohio six weeks, Minneapolis three weeks, and you can kind of go down the list. The federal government does give most civilian federal employees access to 12 weeks of paid leave now, while the plan for the entire country to mandate it has been stalled at the federal level, as you all know. So I asked Human Resources to give me just a little bit of information, a snapshot on the last three years, and And you can see up here that these are employees that took leave here at the city 2020, 2021, and 2022. And I thought it was important here to break out the non-collective bargaining as well as the collective bargaining employees. And so you can kind of go down the list and see stayed fairly consistent. We had a few more in 2020. And the 2022 number was to date, I believe, through September. So what we've talked about with our internal team, as well as Mayor Gorton, and we've discussed with Councilmember Bledsoe, is we would like you all to consider a new leave category of paid parental leave here at the city. This would be four weeks of paid parental leave at 100% of our employees base pay. So this is not any additional they work, this would be base pay. pay. And I will preemptively respond to the question why four weeks paid leave because if I don't somebody will ask I'm sure. And so we have talked it with our group and the mayor at length about it and as we looked across the country of course you have municipalities and states who offer none. You have private companies who offer 12 weeks, private companies that offer none. We have two weeks at the University of Kentucky. So we thought we would bring to you all today four weeks of paid parental leave, there is a financial impact to the city to offer paid parental leave. As you all are going to hear during your fund balance presentation, there's a lot of other costs and things you all are going to talk about for personnel later today. So we thought we would bring forward the four weeks at Melissa's ransom numbers and she thought of things I would have never thought of and we're thinking you know this could cost up to seven hundred $800,000 a year eventually, but we really need a bit of time to see who takes advantage of this. If you're not on our health insurance, but your spouse has a child that works for a different organization, you may not want to take advantage of this. So there's some costs there that we sort of had to, Melissa had to estimate to see what we thought the impact would be. This would run concurrently with FML and you'd be employed with the city for at least 12 months and have worked at least 1,250 hours during those 12 consecutive months. So this is going to be exactly how you take FML now, but we will have four weeks of this paid. And so you can kind of go through. We also talked about two weeks of paid parental leave at a hundred percent of the employees base pay for foster or kinship care. So if you foster a child or you take a child from a relative to help them for some period of time, you would get two weeks of paid parental leave with all of the same subcategories on top. And we would ask that the employees use their accrued leave time after their four weeks of paid leave ends up to 12 weeks for birth or adoption. And so this kind of just summarizes what I've already told you all, you know we would do the four weeks for paid leave for birth or adoption, two weeks paid leave for foster kinship care, And then as Melissa has pointed out to me, there's acting pay, there's overtime, there's various things that we would have to consider. We did do an assumption of 50 births per year and those are sort of the unknowns that we've already discussed. So what we would like to do today is have a discussion. I'm really anxious to hear what everybody's thoughts are on this. And once we sort of can solidify what everybody's thinking about the weeks and what you think about some of the the subcategories that I just mentioned. We would like to prepare an ordinance with law to bring forward to you all before recess, before your winter recess. And then we the mayor also felt very strongly about drafting agreements with our collective bargaining units to offer a paid parental leave benefit as well. Our goal would be to work on these things. There's some things we have to do in the backside of PeopleSoft, there's some work you know in our handbook, there's some things we need to do and we would like to include this in the fiscal year 2024 budget that you all know we will start working on sooner rather than later. So with that I think Councilmember Bledsoe will kind of have a discussion, see what everybody thinks. Thank you so much and I just wanted to reiterate this was a long time coming and it has taken a lot of heavy lifting by members of this you mentioned and so I appreciate all your hard work to come to a recommendation that I think is fantastic, quite frankly. And while I mention it, since I get to have the privy chair, Council Member Sadi talked about this when I first got on council and was a strong advocate and has taken us a while to get here. I'm just thankful. So we'll start with Council Member Reynolds. Thank you so much, Chair. And I want to thank you for your initiative on this because I think this is so important for all of our families. And thank you for working on this as well and everyone else that participated. So I have a family that live in other countries where they get a lot of paid leave, and they tell me what good benefit it is on their mental health and how good it is for the family as a whole. So I'm a huge proponent of this. I wanted to ask a few questions. First, would this be available to either parent, no matter what gender? Yes, ma'am. Okay, that's fabulous. And then if let's say they did not have sufficient vacation or sick leave stored up to go beyond four weeks. If they take their four weeks, can they still have 12 off even if it's unpaid? Yes, Tammy is here. I believe that they would get a total of 12 through FML, but let me defer to Ms. Walters. Yes, so if they're approved for FML and qualified then they would have up to 12 weeks and that can be paid using any accrued leave time they have available or unpaid so the 12 weeks is there if for some reason they didn't qualify for FML they could still apply use the parental leave and then we have administrative leave that's unpaid council approved leave that's unpaid so they could still build out that time. Okay, that all sounds great. Well, I think that we should do this 100%. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Council Member Lamb. Thank you, Chair, and thank you for bringing this forward. As having been a mom that I had to work for several years before I could actually have my child because I did have to work up time and I also had to make sure that back in 1989 that I didn't take any unnecessary time before my child was born because I knew that I wanted to take six weeks and I was very grateful for having that I think this is huge for recruitment for Lexington Fayetteville County government I think that everything we can do for encouraging and staying with the trends and doing the right thing for our employees, both men and women, and for same-sex couples too. Because you know there's an opportunity here for bonding and it's I was very blessed to be able to take those six weeks and to be able to be with my son before I had to turn him over to somebody else to raise for the rest of his years before he started element daycare. But I applaud this. I am supportive of this. And I just, I am thrilled that Council Member Bledsoe brought this forward and that you all have done such work. So thank you, thank you, thank you. And I know that this will be a very positive outcome for our government and our future. So thank you. You're welcome. If I may, Chair, just quickly, Council Member Lamb made me think of one final statistic I want to throw out. I read they did a significant amount of research in Austin, Texas about essentially just what employers can offer for families in general. And they found in Austin, they interviewed, I don't recall the number of millennials, 83% of them said they would leave their current job to go to a job with more family-friendly policies. And that really stood out to me when you're talking about recruiting folks from around Lexington, Fayette County, regionally, however we look at it. So anyway, I just wanted to throw that out. Thank you. Council Member Baxter. Thank you, Chair, and thank you for this presentation. I think it's telling that the first four people that signed in to talk were all women. And so you can, it's very important to all of us. So a couple of questions. When looking at the numbers between non-collective bargaining and bargaining employees, was there any indication on why those CBA employees had such a higher rate of taking FML? You know, I don't know. Perhaps Tammy could talk about the age of the employees. I did ask yesterday two questions to HR just in preparation for today, anticipating what you all might ask. We do have 1,787 employees, I believe Tammy told me, under 45 years old. And so I don't know if the age might have something to do with the birth. I've sort of tried to think through that too, and I'm not certain. And I don't know if Tammy can speak to that. I don't really have an analysis of it specifically, but I thought it was interesting as well. But we're really just looking at employees who apply for FML, and everyone has kind of that same opportunity. So do you feel like our non-bargaining employees are aware of this benefit in general, like of FML leave in general? Do you think more so than other employees? I don't know. It's not something that's new. Right. It's a vast difference, so I was just curious. Yeah, it is pretty different. And maybe regular employees are just putting in requests for vacation for extended periods and maybe not necessarily applying for FML. I didn't venture to guess. Thank you. Let's see. And then I just wanted to make sure that if both parents are employed at LFUCG, that they both would be eligible for the payment? Yes. Okay, good deal. So as I said before, I think that this is an absolutely amazing benefit. And on the heels of our regionalism conversation, I think this really shows us taking a step in setting an example for what our regional area could offer employees. As a mom who suffered from postpartum depression, I think that this is an absolutely amazing opportunity to reduce stress all around, and I look forward to supporting the initiative. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Council Member Sheehan. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Ms. Wurima, for presenting to us and providing us with all of this background research. I appreciate that. And thank you, Councilmember Bledsoe, for moving this forward. I think we are able to really support a policy here that is going to show our employees, really send a strong message that we care about them. We want to support them and their families, and we're willing to commit resources to that. I support this wholeheartedly, particularly that it is so inclusive. And, you know, this is all in addition to the known benefits that we know how this impacts our health and well-being of families. So I also look forward to being able to move this forward. Thank you. Thank you. Council Member McCarn. Thank you, Chair. And thank you for the presentation, Ms. Baranma. You're welcome. Chair, thank you for continuing carrying the torch on this and moving it forward. This is excellent. I would have happily signed in earlier to speak on this because I am a huge proponent and support of this as well. As a dad of two, this is something that going into a job position that I would take in consideration if I wanted to have more kids in the future, of course. But for anybody that is of youth that's interested in coming to work for the city, this is something that's on the forefront of their mind. So it's great that we're having this conversation and putting it forward. I do have a few questions for you. You have on here the statistic of 30% of women would leave their jobs without the benefit of this. But I'm curious about if there was any statistic that you found in your research based on the amount of men that bond and stay with their child or have a better connection in the future because they have this available to them as well. Yes, that's actually an excellent question. I had talked to CAO Hamilton about a few things I read early on, back early fall, late summer, when we started talking about this when it got placed in committee. I actually read in quite a few places that more males take this leave in Europe than they do in the United States, even if it's offered. A lot of that, they think, had to do with a stigma attached to taking off a lot of time as the male non-birthing parent. Although the research looks like that the attitudes towards paid parental leave are sort of changing and evolving, and it's becoming more and more okay for a father, socially, to stay home and bond with their child over time. There was a significant amount of research that talked about brain function in babies and in the fathers when they are bonding with them for some amount of time after the birth. So I think that there's a lot of research out there. I think America probably has a bit of a way to go compared to the European countries who have offered this benefit for quite some time. Some of them offer up to a full year off. You know, there's any number of. But it's an excellent question, and there were some facts that I came across that I shared with CAO Hamilton that I thought were very interesting. But in terms of mental health, family stress, and bonding with the child, the non birthing parent taking the leave everything seems to be very positive great no and I wish it could be a year that we could take off that would be a little tough you know I think that this is extremely helpful not just for affordability but you also aren't saying immediately that your child has to go into daycare and you have to come back to work this allows for parents to take offset time or for it to run congruent together so I'm extremely excited for this. And again, thank you, Councilmember Bledsoe, for moving it forward. Thank you. Thank you. Councilmember Worley. Thank you, Chair. And I think most of us up here are parents, most in the room. I think, I believe up here, I'm the one to have most recently joined with a 13-month-old at home this past year. My wife and I have gone through this process. And so I think you all have done a fantastic job. I also recently had the opportunity to serve on my law firm's recruitment retention committee that revised our own family leave policy. And so I've seen all of the studies that you're talking about and literally worked through all of this for my firm. And you really have thought through everything and made best practices and thought through things that I want to make sure people see when they say that to be eligible, you need to have been an employee for 12 months. That's not an overly burdensome restriction. It's that FMLA, the federal leave, you're not eligible until 12 months. So this is saying once you're eligible for that FMLA, we're still going to put that four weeks paid in there for you, whereas otherwise that would have been unpaid leave. So I hope that people, as they look through this, will understand that a lot of these things that you've come up with or put in here are not arbitrary restrictions or thoughts. These are looking at best practices across the country and comparing to the federal law. So I think you've done a really, really good job with that. And I'll say, too, you made a great point. And then Council Member Lamb talking about when you finally are able to send a kid to daycare or whatever. But as we well know, daycare means new kids, new germs, new exposures. And so then that's extra time that you need. Just this past week, my son had to miss a lot of daycare time. We know there's a lot of sickness going around. and that means that one of us has to not work and has to be home and has to help. So thinking through all that and somebody that knows it's okay to miss a day at work, I've got that time and I can take care of my children even after that initial bonding and child care and recovery is incredibly important. So this is wonderful. Thank you. Thank you. Council Member James Brown. Thank you. Thank you, Chair, and thank you for your work on this item and thank you, Ms. Warmer, for the presentation. I just wanted to add my voice to the support for this policy moving forward. And Council Member Reynolds actually asked my question about whether or not both parents are going to be provided with those opportunities. Was there any consideration or thought about the discretion that maybe some departments may have based off of staffing issues on when to allow this benefit? Well, while we didn't necessarily talk about when to allow it for the reasons Councilmember Worley just mentioned, when Melissa did the financial analysis for CAO Hamilton and I, she gave a lot of thought to if you take an example like the Department of Fire, if somebody is off and then there's backfill needs, if you have an operational division of government that is out doing things that it's not as simple as, hey Sally I don't feel well today, my work I'll do my work tomorrow. You know, we have to have somebody out. So I believe Melissa could at least speak to that generally about how she thought through some of the backfill and overtime needs, if you would like her to. She thought at length about that. She doesn't have to. I just wanted to know if that came into consideration with thinking about the policy, and it's not to restrict, you know, employees from taking the benefit, but just how some of the divisions or staffing is a real consideration how we work through it. Absolutely. And like I said, we definitely thought about that and factored that backfill, overtime pay, all of those needs into the number that I quoted you that we thought it may cost for that first fiscal year. Okay and there's also flexibility in the policy that you don't have to take your four weeks paid consecutively. You could space it out and maybe get more weeks and more time. I think what I would like to do, Tammy and I actually spoke about that this morning. What we I think we would like to do is get some feedback from you all. Our team had initially thought that we would like you to take the four weeks consecutively, but you could take it any time in that first 12 months. It's a bit less of an administrative burden. It's a bit less of a people-soft burden, but I think Tammy can speak to it because I know she was thinking about it overnight. I did, actually. And I think that lends to your point about operations in a division, where if it were used intermittently, you're probably going to have additional operational, you know, who's going to be here today and who's not. So for planning purposes, I would think it would be better to have it consecutive because you know someone's going to be out for a period of time, can cover their work for that period of time versus a day here and a day there. Yeah. So, yeah, I was just thinking weekly because, you know, you could extend the leave if you could afford to, you know, take a week pay, take a week off, not pay, But I think with the staffing challenges that we have now, it might be better to ask or make the policy where you have to take it consecutive. Or at least planning in advance for sure. So, yeah, that's definitely something we can look at and talk to divisions and see what their feedback is. Okay. All right. Thank you. Thank you for your work on this. Thank you. Council Member Plumman. Thank you, Chair. And, yes, I mean, this is a lot of work. and I totally support it as a woman in non-childbearing years that's anxiously awaiting grandchildren. I hope my sons are watching. I doubt they are. But you can tell you put a lot of work in it and very detailed. And this is an editorial statement, but I think it's sad that our country, 30 years ago, did the non-paid leave, that like other countries across the world, we need to, I know it's come back and come back and it's just not coming through, but it's prehistoric, I mean, it's a dinosaur, and we really do need to look at this from across the country. Yes, it's put the onerous on our local city councils, our state legislatures, our private businesses. And the federal government gave their, many of their employees. Yes, exactly. So that's my editorial comment for the day. Thanks for all your work. You're welcome. Thank you. Councilmember Maloney. Thank you. Council Member Blessow, I appreciate you bringing this because this should have been done a long time ago. And it's going to be very important to this community. I do have a question. Why is Louisville, they're paid for 12 weeks? And I look at the other cities, they're averaging six and all that. Why did y'all come to four weeks? I mean, I know it's money, but to me, it goes back to what Council Member Lamb said. I think if we go a little bit higher, we may get a lot of good people coming here wanting to work. And if we're willing to – but if you have a real logic reason why I understand, but we are hiring the University of Kentucky. We'll be competing with the U.K. for a change. But I just hate to see Louisville being number one again, but I'm just trying to figure out why you all came just only four weeks instead of six weeks, like some other – or something like that. Yes, I think that's a fair question, and one that we talked about internally yesterday because I knew it was gonna come up. I cannot speak to why Louisville did 12 weeks of paid leave time. I can say whomever did their research for them did a fantastic job and must have been very convincing and perhaps that's what was proposed and that's what their council passed. I'm not certain I didn't follow the legislative process there, although I've looked at their final product multiple times. Going back to the four weeks, I think where we landed was, as I referenced before, you all are about to have a big discussion about additional personnel costs. We don't know the exact impact giving the four paid parental leave weeks will have, so I think we sort of thought internally, this is a place we'll start. We can always take another look and see in a year or two how successful it was. We can also know what our personnel costs are running in a couple of years. So when we talked internally, we just felt comfortable to start there. But of course, we're at the mercy of the council, So what you all decide. But our internal team and the mayor felt really good about four weeks. If you're all okay, I'm okay. I'm not going to tell you how you're okay. To me, I just don't like to see Louisville being number one. I will tell you on a different note, it does seem that our salaries are a bit higher here at the city. They don't have the $15 minimum wage and such. So perhaps it's a balance of different salary and benefits. I can't say that for certain, but at a first glance, I feel pretty comfortable saying that. That's a good point. Thank you. Council Member Lughery. Thank you. Thank you, Chair. First, thank you, Council Member Bledsoe, for your work on this, and Ms. Werenma, thank you for your work. I simply want to add my voice in support. I think this is the right and equitable thing to do for our parents and for our employees. and I wanted to share when I was on the University of Kentucky Women's Forum, this was a topic of conversation and it was a long, long battle to get to the two weeks. And so to be here at four weeks and having this as a really strong foundational starting point to keep our employees and then to build from there in terms of what we might need to do in the future to make sure that they're supported in every way possible as parents and as members of our community. I just want to thank you for being proactive and for your work on this. I think it's an excellent step in the right direction. Thank you. Thank you. So in conclusion, or just to wrap this item up, the administration is going to present an ordinance, but I think it would be helpful for us to bless the presentation and the intent so that they feel like they can move forward with that. So I would encourage you to do so. Is there a second? Thank you. Any discussion on the motion? All those in favor, please say aye. Any opposed? Thank you all very much. Please proceed. We will do that and then what we'll plan to do, obviously Law's been involved in this conversation. Michael Cravens has been helping us as we go. So what we'll do is get that prepared and then we'll probably just bring it forward to a work session in the very near future for your all's consideration. Thank you very much. Given the time, I would like to now a motion to take a recess for 45 minutes to reconvene back at 1245 for lunch. Second. Second. Thank you all very much. We'll stand at recess. you