Music Thank you. All right, folks. I'm looking over to LexTV. Are we good? Okay. All right. Welcome to the General Government Social Services Committee. And thank you for your patience while we had to wait for a couple of members that got stuck in traffic. Go figure. So this is the November 15th, and the first item on our agenda today is the October 27th, 2022 committee summary. I ask for a motion for approval, please. Second. All right. Motion by Council Member Sheehan, seconded by Council Member Fred Brown. Is there any discussion on that motion? There being none, all in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? All right. Thank you. And just so all of the members have knowledge about this, since we have four of the actual committee members that are absent today, all six members of the committee will need to stay in their seats for the entire meeting or else we'll lose a quorum and if we do that then we can recognize Councilmember Bledsoe which she's so gracious to be here today too we can do that so all right so the next item is the Explorium update and I am so excited today to to welcome Colby Ernest the new director and I know you have been very busy at work and so I we're excited to see what you have to present to us today so welcome and you have 15 minutes. Thank you council member Lamb I appreciate again the opportunity to come in today and and to share with you some updates about the Explorium and then what we've been up to for the past six months express my gratitude as well to the council for your commitment to this organization and also before I get started we want to point out I do have four board members in attendance today that just wanted to show up and give their support of the Explorium as well. So thank you all again for coming. In March of this year, Council, when I came and presented to you, I shared with you plans about the Explorium, planned programs and planned events that we wanted to put on, you know, what the Explorium can be. And I'm excited that today I can actually share with you what the Explorium is and what we've done and who we are and what we're going to be moving forward. Over the past six months, we have dedicated a lot of time and effort into the museum. We've done a lot of much-needed updates and repairs to exhibits and galleries throughout the Explorium, two of our most popular being the sketch pad and the bubble room. We've also unveiled a new website where you can get online and purchase tickets to come to the Explorium and see all the exciting events and programs that we have coming up. We've also started the conversation with many local partners, businesses, and entities about how we can collaborate moving forward at the Explorium, and we are also wrapping up a strategic plan as well. Also, when I last met with you back in March, I expressed to you the importance of the city's support to be hand-in-hand with the Explorium as we move forward to increase educational opportunities for children outside of the classroom, and as we strive to bring our community together in a unique environment that you can't find anywhere else and to learn and to play and to connect and I thank you for your commitment to the organization and I'm excited to ecstatic to share with you what we've been doing over the past four months. Council members with your support the Explorium has welcomed well over 10,000 people to our museum since July 1st and as you can see we're well above our numbers from last year but not only that we're reaching and going beyond the numbers that we did in 2019, obviously before COVID impacted the Explorium so much. But we're excited to see those numbers in 2022. We've also reached an additional 3,500 plus through community outreach efforts, through programs and activities that we've gone out to do outside of the Explorium walls. I hope this symbolizes to you what it does to me, which is the need for a great children's museum in this town. And the strides that we've made in one year to bring people back to the Explorium to explore more. Since July 4th, we have implemented our Explorium Experience Department, which is putting on programs and events at the Explorium weekly, including Story Art and Let's Build, which you see at your top left. We've also participated in many community outreach activities, including Keeneland Kids Club Family Day, various STEM nights at local elementary schools across our community, where we've reached over 3,500 people. We also hosted our first Buseum since 2019, which is our annual Halloween event, and we were excited to welcome as many attendees to that event as we've seen since 2013. And we are welcoming back, thankfully, field trips back to the Explorium for fun and engaging experiences, rotating through our galleries and exhibits as well. And on Sunday, maybe the most proud I've been since I've been to the Explorium in the past year, we were fortunate to host our first Explorium Sensory Hours. When we last met, I discussed with you the importance that the Explorium of Lexington has in the city, and no event has shown that more than this Sunday. We opened up our hours for children with sensory sensitivities and their families to come into the museum outside normal operating hours. We lower the lighting, we highlight some of the exhibits that might be overstimulating, and we bring in partners that can share resources with them, how they can also provide impact on their families, like Allegro Dance Project and the Lexington Police Department as well. And that is what the Explorium is. It's a space for children to learn and grow, and it's a place for families to connect and a place that brings our community together. It exists to support the children and families in this town and the needs of our families, and that's what we will provide. To maximize our ability to make that impact, we have created the Explorium Experience Fund. And as you can see, it is our attempt to ensure that every child has the opportunity to learn through play at the Explorium. This fund allows for low-income family discounts, field trips from Title I school discounts, free community outreach programming, scholarships to any of our camps, and special events just like the Explorium Sensory Hours, which were at no cost to families to attend. Children's museums help children develop essential foundational skills. They light a creative spark for discovery and lifelong learning. They are environments where families connect in meaningful ways. They contribute to local economies, and they are a central hub for community partnership and engagement. I shared all of these points with you when I was here in March, and I believe in them more now than I did then six months ago. And they've been central to the conversations that our leadership and board have been having over the past six months. In April of this year, the Explorium started in earnest a five-year strategic plan process with the Community and Economic Development Initiative of Kentucky to focus on how the Explorium can become one of the best children's museums in this country, and most importantly, how we can make a significant positive impact on the children of this city and our state. As you can see, we focused on five primary areas, primary goal themes, finance, programs and exhibits, marketing and PR, development and facilities. Displayed in front of you now are just a few of the many goals that the board and leadership have set for ourselves over the next five years, and I'll just read them off briefly. The Explorium will expand the offering of STEM, arts, and humanities-based interactive exhibits and programs that highlight our community and our community partners. The Explorium will be a steward in our community that spurs creativity, collaboration, and innovation. The Explorium is committed to providing an interactive and engaging space that maximizes the ability for children to learn through play. and the Explorium will provide new and engaging programs and events for a diverse range of children and families. And one that I failed to leave off but is just as important is that the Explorium strives to sustain our operations by earned revenues and fundraising as well. As we finalize this plan over the next few weeks, I look forward to sharing it with each one of you and having further discussion about how we can work together to inspire even more imagination and curiosity. And council members, with your support, the Explorium is changing the narrative. Our visitors are noticing, our community is noticing, and it will be very hard for anyone not to notice in the coming year. Again, I and the board and the staff appreciate the commitment that you've made to the organization, and we look forward to an exciting future on how we serve this community and the citizens that we serve. and thank you all for having me again today i appreciate it thank you so much and i also appreciate and value the the board members that are here and took the time to be here today we appreciate your commitment to this this very important part of our community too i really appreciate that uh council members uh council member plowman thank you chair and looks like you've been really busy these past few months so that's great congratulations i had a question i I remember when looking at Explorium over the past few years in terms of their operations, and one of the big things was that there was so much money from operations going to leasing the space. What are you thinking and doing about that these days? And I think we even looked at some collaborative things that you might consider with other organizations. So when I say that over the past six months we had these five goal themes, I think facilities has been this overarching primary that we've all gone back to because facilities for the Explorium, obviously in order for us to meet our goals and how we want to impact this community, where the Explorium is and the space that we use is pivotal to that. So we are currently in the space that we've been in since 1990 at the corner of Short and Algonquin Street. And we are in a lease within that space currently through June of 24. So part of our process moving forward, obviously, is looking at potential renegotiations of that lease, again, to address maybe the costs that you've addressed, Council Member Plowman. And then also simultaneously setting our goals to see where we want to be in five years and making sure that that space will allow us to achieve those goals. What is that square footage? I don't remember. So the total square footage of the space that we lease is around 22,000 square feet. The actual museum space itself is about 14,000 to 15,000 square feet. We have office space, and then we have some multi-purpose space that we use for birthday parties and field trips as well. And how many employees to date? Nine employees. So about a year ago, there was three of us. So we're excited that we've been able to invest into our employees. We have a full-time director of our play and learning department, which leads all of our education programming. We have a full-time manager of our experiences department, which runs all of our programs and events. Myself, we have two full-time in the museum and then another four part-time working in our museum as well. On your sensory event, I noticed that it was the organization, the children's charity organization. Is that going to sustain it moving forward since they no longer exist? It's unfortunate that Children's Children's Children no longer exists. We believe in that program very much, that we will continue it, and we're confident that we will be able to find other donors and funders in the area that will want to support that event as well. Super. Thank you very much. Thank you, Chair. Council Member Baxter. Thank you, Chair. And as Council Member Lamb said, the amount of board members that are present today is a testament to how serious we are, because I'm on the board as well. and I just really want to thank you all for taking the time out of your day to be here and having a inside seat I guess if you want to say to the progress that we've made I'm so inspired and really excited for the future of the museum and I want to thank you Colby for all of your hard work I know it hasn't been a super easy road but super impressed with the amount of work that you're putting in and really appreciative to have dedicated board members as well to serve alongside so thank you that's all I had thank you chair council member bledsoe thank you chair for recognizing me Colby's done a great job and I want to echo what and councilmen Baxter said about having leadership and having a board that's supportive I had some one of my neighborhood leaders email me just yesterday and said I've been traveling I took my grandkids to museum I want to make our exploring amazing what do I do and so I sent her your way and I think that says a lot people are coming back and wanting to do something here and willing to invest time and effort, which is what it's going to take to get you where you want to go and where our community needs to go. There's nothing but opportunity at the Explore Room, and people want to be involved and they want to support, and thank you for directing them my way. We're meeting in the morning, so thank you very much for that. I appreciate that. We'll do it. And I just wanted to echo the sensory processing material. My son has that, and when he was younger, taking him into environments where you weren't sure how he was going to react as a parent was just as terrifying as wondering, well, what the parents were going to say about you and they didn't know why he was reacting that way. And so providing those hours with other families that are looking at it and are being sensitive to that, I think is huge. I would have gladly paid twice to have an environment that was more sensitive and more safe, if you will, than offer them for free. So I think it's a great thing. I hope you continue to do it. And I think there's more people in our community actually looking for those kind of experiences. So I applaud the effort, and I'm happy to connect you with some other groups who have similar passions who may want to invest in that opportunity. Yes, thank you very much. It was very fulfilling. We had a lot of – most of the families that were there told us that, you know, typically 30 to 45 minutes would be about the extent that they could really do a family outing, and we didn't have anyone leave before an hour and a half of being there. That's huge. When you're paying to go to a museum where you're not sure how long – or to any activity, honestly, with a kid where you're not sure how long they're going to make it, that's a large investment. And so having some freedom and flexibility there, I think, is huge. So well done. Thank you. Thank you, Chair. Well, again, I just can't applaud you enough, and I'm excited about the new, and there's new energy, and I'm so pleased. Given the fact that I won't be here next year for future updates, I'll still be paying attention, and I do have three grandchildren. I appreciate that. that maybe I'll have a little bit more time and can take them to the Explorium. Yes, please do. But I don't see any further comments of my colleagues. I appreciate your time today. I appreciate your board's time today for being here. Thank you for your commitment, and keep doing the good work and keep raising it up. Thank you, Council Member. I appreciate it. Thank you all. Thank you. Thanks. and next on our agenda we'll we'll we'll invite miss isabel taylor who's our multicultural affairs program coordinator to the podium and i look forward to this presentation i know that there's there seems there's a lot of information in here but i think that you provided a lot of information for for visual but not necessarily all of that is going to be in your 15 minute presentation so No, we're going to go pretty quickly through particularly the first part. And thank you all for having me here today. And thank you for the flexibility, Chair, to be here today. Appreciate it. So I'm going to talk today about GlobalX's work and update you on our international population. But I'm going to start off with ARPA, the Treasury's requirements for Title VI. And as you know, I'm the Title VI officer for LFUCG, and the CAO's office asked me to make sure that our recipients, subrecipients, are aware of how we need to comply. And so I'm going to walk you very briefly, very quickly through that. And ARPA, the U.S. Treasury, mentions the Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. they have three protected status, race, color, national origin. The interesting part about how ARPA, the Treasury, puts it is they include including limited English proficiency. So that's how serious they are about providing language assistance. And then they add a lot of other titles that I'm not privy to. So the last part here in the limits and the parameters of Title VI, it applies to our subrecipients of federal funds. And it also applies to their subrecipients if they receive federal funding. So ARPA, the U.S. Treasury, expects evidence-based reporting. And we're required with that evidence-based reporting to not discriminate and also to use them in a non-discriminatory way. So our subrecipients are going to be asked to provide us once a year with a report on a very brief report on what they've done to comply with Title VI. So if we get audited, we provide that. And if they get audited, they have something to show. It's going to be a very brief narrative with just identification of the limited English proficient community, how many employees they've trained, and what dates. How do they identify the LEP? Do they use I Speak posters? What kind of programming they've done with multilingual populations? and the languages they've encountered and so forth. So I have offered to provide all of the recipients, subrecipients with an annual language analysis which I provide to all of our directors and all of our Title VI liaisons in all of the divisions. So if they request that, they'll have that and that will be their base for that. So of the trainings that I provided with the assistance of the CAO's office with Jennifer's assistance, in November of 2021, I had done 41 different subrecipients' trainings, and about nine of the ARPA people fell into that, so we didn't require that they do it again. From May through October of 22, I had 10 ARPA trainings, Zoom and in person at Global X. We trained, 79 representatives were trained. Some of the recipients brought six people to the table. They were really so, like BCTC and others like that, they had a lot of programs that were going to be, their frontline people were going to be in charge of. So I'll review how I track the LEP population because the numbers are hard to believe this year. So I want you to be real clear on where I report that from. So this is an important chart for two reasons. The middle part shows limited English proficient, which is what the Treasury is interested in. And you see that the student age group from ages 5 to 17 are 10% of the population. So that's a great easy number to work with. School aged children that are learning English and they are 10% of the total LEP population. The second thing that I would like for you to notice is the working age group, 18 to 64. 75% of them don't speak English of that group of non-English speakers. Of course, we have people from all over the world that speak fluent English. We're not concerned with them in Title VI. We're only concerned with the ones that we have to provide language assistance in our programming. So workforce development, we need to see how we can provide more extensive workforce development opportunities. So Fayette County Public Schools provide us with the English learner, and my baseline has always been 2006 when I started tracking this. We had 1,500 students, so using that 10% rule, we multiplied it by 10, and we had a total population of about 1,500. It doubled by 2010, and I rounded it off to 3,200, or 11.1%. So a year later, the 2010 U.S. Census comes out, and they're slightly higher than us, 11.3%. They were 1,400 people in their house-to-house count. So I felt that it was close enough. It was conservatively under our estimates, so I was real comfortable with it. This year, in 2022, we have 8,540 EL students. That means 85,000 people, 85,400 of our total limited English population of the total of the county, right? So it's 26.5% that I'm estimating are limited English speakers here. The top four in languages, you see in 2006, 27 languages. I was real surprised we had that many then. In 2022, we have 96 languages in the public schools. And the top 10 still jockey among these, Spanish, Swahili, Arabic, Nepali, French, Japanese, Mandarin, Kenyarwandan, Korean, and Portuguese, and you'll see why I'm naming them. When you see this, this is our E911 calls for the fiscal year that just passed. And so you see that Spanish, Swahili, Kenyarwandan, it's really a great representation of our top languages in the city. What worries me is that we are tracking some 206 languages. We don't know how many are live, but you'll see later on in my Global X presentation that we, our clients, speak about 145 languages. And so what happens to communication with all of the small groups, all of the, you know, 100 language groups that we're not communicating with? So part of our aim for 2023 is with the help of the new people that we will be having come in, we hope, we need to make inroads into getting community leaders in those small groups. It's really important, particularly that was shown us during the pandemic. So I wanted to show you this because this is how we track some of our information as well. This is our entry diagnostic form, and you'll notice that we have country of origin. It's really important for a lot of languages like Swahili or even Spanish. What country are you from so that we can get the right interpreter for you? They self-identify high, intermediate, or beginning in English. And we also ask, how long have you been in the United States? Why? Because if they are brand new, they're not going to know our medical systems, our insurance systems, our banking systems, even our school systems. So we're going to have to be a little more careful and a little more supportive to explain our culture and our systems. and if they've been here five years, ten years, thirty years, they can tell us what's going on, right? So what language is spoken? Why don't I just ask one language? Well, because a lot of people that are coming from overseas, they don't just speak one foreign language. They may speak three to five or more. And so if they speak Swahili and Kenyarwandan and French, for us it's a lot easier to deal with French in-house. So since the pandemic, we're asking, what's the best way to communicate with you? Do we text or can we call you so that they recognize us? And then we need to practice that because when we need to advise them that there is a pandemic, there's testing, there's vaccines, then we have a better way of reaching a lot of people. The second part of our intake sheet was all of the most often seen areas where people need help, labor issues or code enforcement issues or legal issues, whatever it is we have the most often seen so that we just check it off and in the back we write down the specifics and who we refer them to. Because most of the time we have to transition them to the referral agency. We can't just tell them to call this number. So this shows you a little bit of the breakdown in the languages that we see at GlobalX. You can see that we have a couple of indigenous languages, MAM, Acateco. and then we have all the people that come in speaking various languages. What it does for us is it helps us understand the language groups so that we can ask. If people don't self-report, we can ask, do you speak this, do you speak that? So it's always a learning curve for us, and this kind of information helps us. This is showing you the countries, and you can see that Afghanistan is big up there, as is the refugees in the Republic of Congo, the DRC, Mexico, and about 25 other countries. Here it is. So this is where you can see our community referrals. The top portion that you could almost see in the first slide on our intake sheet was all of the LFUCG that we most often police, code, etc. Social services. This is the community referrals. Bless you. In two sections, the first part is wraparound services, really. CRCKY, Food Bank, Greenhouse 17, The Nest, all of those are very often people that we can send them to, whether it's medical, surgery on Sunday, Mission Lexington, etc. The bottom part is the human rights and legal services part, where it's a little bit more complex and we need to do a little more digging as to who do we send them to. Labor law, do we send them to Kentucky or is it big enough and broad enough to send them to the federal contacts? So some of the factors that are most important for us to remember when we are receiving clients from around the world is their trauma that they walk into our place with. Polytraumatic experiences from destruction, food deprivation, physical trauma, torture, et cetera. forced migration is is huge grief and loss loss of identity loss of status loss of normalcy loss of foods friends family support and acceptance all of that is important as to how we speak to them and how we get information from them so cross-cultural communication is always a key for all of us and for our clients as well because it's a two-way learning curve right they need to know our body language you don't shy away from the police when you know you need to look them in the eye and to them that's disrespectful and so it's a two way training and educational part so there is high stress of intercultural dynamics within the family as well the generational power and imbalance really affects these families so oftentimes I get calls or we get calls and people ask how are refugees doing? How can we help them? But I also like to show you how they help themselves, how other immigrant groups help themselves and us, because I would be remiss if I didn't do a little advocacy. So this chart shows you, it's a lot more clear on this side, this chart shows you the middle income where the US household the dotted line is a US medium for household income and you see that refugees cross it they have a direct a pretty straight line they start at the very bottom at about 20,000 and during their working lifespan they they far outpace our median income and so they pay taxes and they pay back a lot one of One of the first things that refugees are required to pay back are their flights here. They have to pay. Within three months they have to get a job and then they have to start paying back their flights to the U.S. If they have a family of nine kids, they have to pay all of that back. So they do pay. We follow trends that are national. immigrants, 13% of the population nationally, and look at all the entrepreneurial and innovative companies that they have started up. That's true here in Kentucky as well. We're about 5% of the population, but you see 20% of Fortune 500 companies based here were founded by immigrants or their children. Their housing wealth and their other wealth is very impressive. So, So there's foreign investments, there's exports, all of them generate jobs, all of them generate taxes. So Kentucky's global exports, 33 billion in goods and services, they generated 1 billion in state and local taxes. This is old material, it's gone way up since I last used this. So what are the challenges here? It really is a lack of infrastructure with that number of the population and those numbers of languages and cultures because language is only one barrier to communication. We have a lot of cultural elements that we need to learn about. There's two problems here. Interpreters. We may have 200, up to 200 languages, but we've got interpreters, trained interpreters, for about 42. And it's hard to keep interpreters. It's hard to get them trained. So that is something that we need to focus on and support the people that are trying to train for us. And, again, the multilingual and workforce. They need job training. Access to services and information. we need to do we global X need to do a better job of providing them with the workforce opportunities that are already available. I talked to Elodie and she was telling me about some programs even I wasn't aware of. So we're trying to relay that information. The communities are very frustrated that they don't get job trainings and they don't get an entry into learning English either on the job or for the job. So access to services information. Misinformation is a big challenge, both on the social media as well as false expectations that we have of them and they have of us when they walk in. So again, the two-way education is going to be very, very helpful. And we're going to try and do more of that as more people come in to help us. That's it. Trina Brown is our new administrative senior specialist. She's a great big help. We are working on a referral map. This map that we're working on currently is, if you all remember, some of you remember the language maps that we had in 2009, 2012. and it showed us the different areas where different language groups were. And the big surprise for me was that the Japanese population wasn't up at the top near Toyota, but they were down here. Why? Because their school is down here. And so a lot of them were there. So that helps emergency management when we have a chemical spill, when we have something else that we need to provide information to that neighborhood. know that there might be Chinese, Japanese, or some other Asian language. We haven't been successful in getting that kind of information from the public schools again so that we can make a new map, but we are doing a different kind of map that I've been wanting to do for years and last year one of our UK interns helped to find the material so that I could show people This is what we need. It was a map for refugees and other limited English speakers because everybody on the map had multilingual access to their programming or to their information. So we are not sending people to organizations that don't have language assistance. We're sending them to people that can provide them, and so they're not lost. We hope to continue with workshops in the domestic violence field. Judges are telling me that they're seeing too many Swahili speakers and Kenyarwandan speakers, so we have to focus on various communities, the Syrian community, etc. We hope to get maybe some grant funding for the videotaping of the driver's education that we have on YouTube for Swahili, French, and Arabic. We would love to have it. We already have the translation to Japanese. We'd love to have it in other languages, some of the other top languages, including Spanish. Again, I say we need to connect better. We need to do better outreach. Right now, I've asked Dr. Rania Belmadani to update our interpreter lists, and part of what I've asked her to do is to pull in the interpreters to give us needs assessments because those interpreters really know the patterns of need in their communities. One of the most important things that we're doing right now, the financial literacy, We're doing one-on-one, and this is by request from agencies and limited English speakers, helping them to understand how to buy a car. What is the financial, what is an interest rate, what is a bank account, everything from the bottom up. And then winter workshops. I'm very anxious to get going on winter workshops because we have people here walking around in flip-flops, and they don't understand hypothermia and frostbite. So we need to help them understand how to be energy efficient so that they don't pay $600 electricity bills and that they dress well for the freezing temperatures. Ms. Yates, excuse me, Ms. Taylor, I do that every time. We have exceeded the 15 minutes, and I don't, do you need like another five minutes, or are you close to being through? I think you have like four more, three more sheets. I think we're finished. you all know about the mayor's international advisor commission and how much they've helped us well that's probably one of the most important things that you have in your office I think that if my colleagues would would like for her to be able to finish I would like for you all to make a motion to give her like five more minutes if you don't mind all right so there's a motion a second is there any discussion on that motion there being none all in favor please say aye. All right thank you. Any opposed? I appreciate it because I do I mean this is a very important part of this of your organization so thank you continue. The Mayor's International Affairs Advisory Commission has worked tirelessly through the pandemic to get us translations of important critical medical information on a timely basis and sometimes it was coming out of the mayor's office like every hour on the hour and the Chinese Association the through one of our commissioners and the dr. watching masking now dr. shan-shin Wang they had teams of people helping us and we were able to send our translations to the governor's office and to radio Lex and to other disseminators. So a big thank you to that group of commissioners that were so involved. There's an emergencies and health committee, and there is an outreach committee that is very active. We have the emergency operations center director who has been coming to some of these as well. So we're pulling the health department, et cetera, into those. They, I think, will be in touch with council themselves. The leadership is very interested in updating the council on some of the areas that they see as that need for you to be aware of. So I'm going to not steal their thunder and let them come before you. But we also have at GlobalX, we have the Lexington Human Trafficking task force and that is sadly one of the highest growth problems in all over the world and here as well and then we have the UK International Hospitality program so that's it we have the International Art Gallery we have a global X web page that we're going to be dedicating to all of our prior exhibits to to keep the public aware of the beauty that is coming from around the world but also to educate ourselves about geopolitical economic and humanitarian events around the world. If I could go back to the Mayor's International Affairs Advisory Commission, one of the commissioners, Dr. Deborah Alexander, is working in Washington DC trying to get the Afghan act through Congress. It's been presented to both houses already so it's an adjustment act which was what was required for the Vietnamese for the Cubans for other people that have come under very limited protection and so we need that for the Afghans as well that's it for me all right thank you I know that you made mention of one of your staff members I thought maybe you might want to speak just and speak about the other staff members of your in your office if you don't mind just to enter I know they're not here but just in we have a dr. Rania Belmadani who is the language access specialist and she is fluent in French in Arabic in Spanish And so that's been extremely, extremely helpful, particularly during the pandemic as well. And then we have a part-time person, Yolanda Piniya, who is, she has degrees in IT. She's an architect. And she's been helping a lot with some of the educational material. She does our newsletters, but we're hoping to expand that position to be a language access specialist for all of Latin America because we've got 23 countries here that are all very different culturally and linguistically. And we're hoping to add the African language access specialist. and we have 64 languages from Africa. So we're hoping that that person is multilingual, maybe up to five or six languages. All right, thank you. I will acknowledge my colleagues if you all have any questions or comments. You all are very quiet. Thank you all. Well, I appreciate this, and I know that I personally know that the International Affairs Advisory Commission has been working on some things now. I'm not as familiar with it lately, but I know these subcommittees were working, and I was hoping that they were going to be able to bring something forward to this organization or this committee, but hopefully in the coming year they'll be able to do that because I do think that they have some unique information, and it would be really a good opportunity for them to see how we work and us to know what they're working on and everything, because I know you wear multiple hats in your arena. Some of the other committees that are very, very active, the Immigration Committee at one point had 16 different attorneys because the immigration laws were changing every day, and it was in different areas. And so we had experts on everything from the international student population to the business visas to the DACA students to the, you know. So it was a very, it is a very hardworking committee. And it's one that that information is critical to a lot of people who are passing out of one status and going into the next, and they may not know they need to. So that's a very important one. The other one is the International Business and Workforce Development Committee. And so you will be probably hearing a lot more from them. Awesome. I appreciate that. Thank you for your presentation today. All right. Thanks. All right, colleagues, we'll move on to the next item in your agenda is, in your packet. It's the actually, it's the redistricting ordinance. And first, let me say, before anybody even starts to think about it, in your packet, this ordinance that is included, I just want to say for those that are looking at the packet, on page 40 of the packet, under subsection E, subsection 4, there was this number in here. It says each member shall attest that he or she will not run for district council member for five years after appointment. That has been corrected, and it's supposed to say three. So, colleagues, you all have a new ordinance at your dais here that is correct. So when you're referencing any questions or comments, you might want to make sure that you look at the extraneous one out of the packet. we did talk about this last week or at the last meeting and I feel like that the updates are all reflected in here we do have Evan Mr. Thompson here from the law department if anybody has any questions but are there any comments or questions about this ordinance today please council member Fred Brown Thank you, Chair. It looks like there's been quite a few changes here. And from a legal department, is there anything in there that addresses that we should look at a little closer? And one thing that you just mentioned, Chair, was that each member shall attest that he or she will not run for district council member for three years. Well, now it's three years after appointment. Is that legally viable? I mean, you know, you can't tell somebody that they can't run for an office just because they serve on a committee. They'd be attesting that they basically promised not to, not that we're requiring them not to. The only changes that I'm aware of to that ordinance, and I was the one that made them, was the ones that were made by motion at the last committee meeting. I believe it was the vice mayor's suggestion about at least, I can't remember what the number was, I don't have the paper on it, at least so many elections that was changed. And then it was also by motion to have to change the five years to the three to allow, I guess it would be to not make it as strict. There was a question, too, about the last time about being redistricted out of a district. and I was supposed to bring it back to you and I was just glad to know that if you're redistricted out of a district, you can still run in the new district assuming that you didn't move to that new place in a shorter amount of time. So basically, if you just moved yesterday, that probably wouldn't work. But if you've been living in that same house for a while now and you get redistricted into a new district, you can run in that district. That was one of my objections probably, and you answered it, but you didn't answer it legally. You cannot say that a person can't run. They just promise you. Well, we get a lot of promises out there, but whatever comes through is another thing. So why even put it in the language? I think it was the subcommittee's belief, and I don't want to speak for them. I was just an attorney helping with them, but was to, and I'm sure the chair can speak to this greater, but I think the idea was to, because it would be difficult to require them to not run, I think that has some potential charter considerations and concerns, that to at least hold their feet to the fire in some way, and you can potentially use the fact that they might have changed their mind or not have been truthful, in the actual election itself. But that's all political concerns, and I don't want to get into those. Well, that was my concern, the politics of it. So I don't know. I'd be glad to speak to it. Whoever was involved in the, you know, what was your rationale? Councilmember Bledsoe and I both co-chaired this, and so, I mean, I'm glad to speak to it, and then you can tag team right on. I think that one of the concerns that was brought to this work group and one of the reasons why it was created was the fact that in this last situation, there were two people that did run. Now, I can only speak to one, but I believe it's fair to say for both, because one was my district. It was not the intention. but we thought by putting this in here that you're going it takes out that whether it was intentional or unintentional and you know you can't keep somebody from running for office period but you can advise that it that it is not at the will of that council member in that district that they're appointing someone so that they can get a leg up and win a race that's that's for mine and council member bledsoe if you want to Thank you, Chair. I agree. And I think part of the concern was if we as legislators are not supposed to have influence on our delegates who are serving in that room, what does it look like to the public if someone else is sitting at the table and then has a vested interest as well? And if we're trying to remove the perception or perceived influence, this is a way to ensure at least some transparency in that. And then if they decide to run, they decide to run. Like you said, there's something that can stop it. But at least it forces the conversation and at least provides some way to allow that person to say, okay, well, I was there, I'm still running. And they may still win. I mean, they have. There's no legally binding in that. But I do think it raises the question from being an assumption to being something we're asking. And I think that's the difference. We assumed maybe in our nominations that they had those intentions or were mindful of those things, but there's no guarantee. and this is a way of making sure that Lisa thought about it before they get on the in the circle. Okay, thank you. So are there any other comments or any questions or statements from any of the other work group members or anything? No? I will say that Council Member Legree was one that had the question about living in the district and being redistricted out, and I knew that she was not going to be able to be here today, and we talked at length about this on Thursday night, and it's not my intention to rush things forward, to not allow others to have communication and discussion about this. So it is my, I would like to be able to be involved in the voting of this. So I would like to ask that we not report this out at this meeting, at this work session, but I would ask my colleagues to support reporting it out on the November 29th work session which gives time for our other members that aren't here today to be present when it's reported out, as well as the rest of our colleagues to have a discussion on the 29th. And then if it is at the will of our colleagues, then they can move it forward and still get first and second reading in this calendar year in 2022. So having said that, is there a motion to, I think just a motion to report it out would be a motion that is in agreement with it, I think. So is there a motion to, in that, Council Member Baxter made a motion seconded by Council Member Sheehan to move the ordinance forward and report it out on the 29th. And is there any discussion on that motion, any concerns or cautions? There being none, all in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? All right. Thank you all so much. I appreciate it, and I'm thrilled that we were able to bring this to discussion, and I know on November 29th we'll have a good, robust discussion. The last item in your all's packet is the division and program review for LexTV and LexCall. This, again, is for information only. I appreciate research analyst Jennifer Sutton for your work on this. I also want to thank Chris Edwards with LexCall, I mean LexTV. I still call you GTV3. and Kendra Carter with Lex call for their willingness and time to prepare for this and work with our council core staff to have this information for available for everybody to understand what their dynamics and what all the good things that they do in our for our community and for our government I really appreciate that so that is free information and I will take a few minutes of privilege here because this will be I didn't know if I was going to be here today but This will be my last committee meeting. And yes, I'm going to get through this, and I've already worked myself into it. And so I've been chair of this committee since April of 2015, and very proudly so. I have enjoyed working with each and every one of you all. We have done a lot in almost eight years, and I am proud of it. I also want to give a lot of great debt of gratitude to the staff members. Currently, Jennifer Sutton, the research analyst, and prior to that, Hillary Angelucci, Craig Benz, and they were the research analysts. And I want to give accolades to my aides, Kelly Farley, Kenny Bishop, and Craig Kamak. You know, you're not a chair of a committee without having lots of help around you. all of the administrative staff, the commissioners, everybody that has prepared amazing information and all the agencies out in the community. I mean, you know, one of the big things I would say to colleagues going forward, if you want to chair a committee, go for it, but make sure that you look at other people's interests when you're doing it. It's not just for you, and it's for the community and this government as well, because we have so much out there in the community that we can share with the public through this venue, which is so important to me. And it's been an honor, and I appreciate that my colleagues have supported me these four terms to be able to sit in this seat. And whoever follows up under the new structure of committees, well, I'll be watching probably a little bit. And upon that, I will call for my last motion of adjournment. I've got a question, two questions. Oh, sure. Or two statements. The General Government and Social Services Committee has a referral, a lot of items on the referral there. Yes, sir. And you, of course, have got some as chair. Yes, sir. Do we want to do anything with those before going forward? Well, I personally would say that I'd like for them to stay in. and I think that how we've handled that in the past is that once the new committee structure comes up in January and then the new chair and the new council members can come along and if so at that point, whoever wants to take over those items but I would definitely not request any of the items that are under my name to be removed as of today. I would beg you not to do that. That's okay. I just wanted a clarification on that. And then the other thing is that being chair, which committee members and council members pretty well know how that goes. And I don't know that the general public knows so much, but it's an extra job. And I've been privileged to be chair of several committees. But I've always, the reason I've been able to chair is because my legislative aide has done most of the work. And as you mentioned there, and I think that's rightfully so, you give credit to where credit is due. But it's still a certain amount of privilege to lead a committee, and it means that your fellow council members have some credibility to you and some fact that the experience and what you can do to handle it. And I, for one, thank you for the leadership that you've given for the last, I guess, six years? Is that eight years? Okay. And it takes a little bit of extra work, so I appreciate that, and I think fellow council members appreciate that. Okay? Thank you so much, Councilmember. Councilmember Floman. Thank you, Chair. I have been on the summer and I've been serving the past. she wrote it so i have a reading flow content the interaction with our folks in their presentation so thank you councilmember baxter thank you chair um and thank you for your leadership as well you've been a great mentor and uh you will be missed um i just had a question real quick about whether or not it would be appropriate to have an annual update from the explorium i don't know if we typically do that with organizations like theirs but i thought it was worthwhile since they're making so many changes to maybe at least have a one-year update and and i don't think that's a bad idea i think that i I have kept them on there and ongoing each year just to educate ourselves about what, but since they do have a lot moving forward, if you would like to make a motion to move that under annual period updates, I think that that would be certainly accepted. Okay. I move to place annual review of the Explorium on our standing list of referrals. All right. All right. There's a motion by Council Member Baxter, seconded by Council Member Plowman, to move the item number one, the Explorium, to an annual period update. Is there any discussion on that motion? There being none, all six of us say hi. Hi. Hi. Any opposed? All right. Thank you so much. I appreciate that. All right. Well, I was going to ask Ms. Maynard, I know you all have already moved the items and dispersed them appropriately. I assume, I don't know, I'll give you an opportunity to see how the new items will be dispensed amongst each of the new agendas come January? Yes, ma'am. We shared the list as it was at the quarterly cow where we discussed changing the committees. And since then, our staffers to the committees have been updating those as items are referred. We have them all done. we're doing one final review and then they will be included in the appropriate committee packets for the new year and our new people coming into office that i've spoken with you know i've let them know that if an item council member's gone they can certainly take that item on for themselves when that time comes and as you will probably remember we do that big review in the first meeting of all the items and committee and the status so that'll be part of it too awesome i I appreciate that because this is a unique opportunity where the structure of the committee is going to be changed up. So I appreciate that very much. Thank you, Ms. Maynard. All right. Yes, there's a motion to adjourn. Second. Motion and second. All right. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.