# Social Services and Public Safety Committee - June 13, 2023 > Auto-transcribed civic record · June 13, 2023 - **Permalink**: https://meetings.lexingtonky.news/meeting/5842 - **Source video**: https://lfucg.granicus.com/player/clip/5842?view_id=14&redirect=true - **Date**: 2023-06-13 - **Last revised**: June 13, 2023 - **Length**: 15,875 words - **Speakers**: Chair > ⚠️ **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 Social Services and Public Safety Committee convened on June 13, 2023, at 1:00 PM in the Council Chamber, with J. Reynolds presiding as the meeting officer. The committee addressed two informational agenda items during the session, focusing on key public safety and code enforcement matters affecting the community. The meeting featured presentations on "Recruitment, Retirement, and Retention for Public Safety" and a "Code Enforcement Update," both serving as informational briefings for committee members. These agenda items provided the committee with updates on critical operational aspects of public safety services and municipal code enforcement activities. The committee took one formal vote during the proceedings, while no public comments were received during the designated public comment period. Both agenda items were handled as informational presentations, allowing committee members to receive updates and ask questions about these important municipal services without requiring formal action at this time. ## Attendance All members were present for the meeting on June 13, 2023. **Present:** • J. Reynolds • W. Baxter • J. Brown • C. Ellinger • T. Fogle • B. Monarrez • D. Gray • F. Brown • D. Sevigny • K. Plomin **Absent:** None **Late:** None ## Votes and Decisions The committee conducted one formal vote during the June 13, 2023 meeting. **Approval of May 2, 2023 Committee Summary** [timestamp: 00:00] Elliott Baxter made a motion to approve the May 2, 2023 Committee Summary, which was seconded by Gray. The motion passed unanimously with a vote of 10-0-0. The following members voted in favor: • J. Reynolds • W. Baxter • J. Brown • C. Ellinger • T. Fogle • B. Monarrez • D. Gray • F. Brown • D. Sevigny • K. Plomin No members voted against the motion, and there were no abstentions. ## Recruitment, Retirement, and Retention for Public Safety [timestamp: 00:00] Ken Armstrong, Commissioner of Public Safety, delivered a comprehensive presentation on staffing challenges across the Department of Public Safety's four main divisions. Armstrong provided detailed analysis of recruitment, retirement, and retention statistics for the Divisions of E-911, Fire & Emergency Services, Police, and Corrections. The presentation covered current staffing levels, attrition rates, employee seniority data, and compensation structures across these critical public safety departments. The Commissioner examined workforce trends affecting each division, highlighting how staffing shortages and retention difficulties impact service delivery. His analysis included pay statistics that provide context for understanding recruitment and retention challenges within the department. Armstrong's presentation addressed the interconnected nature of staffing issues across public safety services, from emergency dispatch operations in E-911 to frontline police and fire services, as well as corrections facilities. The seniority data presented offered insights into the experience levels within each division and potential upcoming retirements that could further impact staffing. This was an informational presentation designed to provide officials with a comprehensive overview of current workforce conditions within the Department of Public Safety. The data presented serves as a foundation for understanding the scope of staffing challenges facing these essential services and the factors contributing to recruitment and retention difficulties across the department's divisions. ## Code Enforcement Update [timestamp: 00:00] Alex Olszowy, Director of Code Enforcement, delivered a comprehensive presentation on the Division of Code Enforcement's authority and operational scope. The update focused on educating attendees about the department's role within the municipal framework. Olszowy outlined the relevant chapters of the Code of Ordinances that govern code enforcement activities, providing the legal foundation for the division's work. He explained the various types of problems that fall under code enforcement jurisdiction, giving attendees a clear understanding of what issues the department addresses. The presentation included a detailed explanation of the complaint process, walking through how residents can report code violations and what steps follow once a complaint is filed. This information aimed to help community members understand how to properly engage with the code enforcement system. Olszowy also shared significant facts and statistics about code enforcement operations, providing insight into the department's workload and effectiveness. The presentation served as an informational briefing to increase transparency about the division's activities and help the public better understand the code enforcement process. The update was purely informational, with no action items or decisions required from the governing body. The presentation aimed to enhance public awareness of code enforcement procedures and the department's role in maintaining community standards. --- ## Decisions - **Motion** — passed (10-0): Approval of May 2, 2023 Committee Summary --- ## Full transcript Music Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. We'll be right back. Crossgate, whatever the. Good afternoon, everybody. I will now call to order the June 13th, 2023 meeting of social services and public safety. Welcome, everybody. the first item is the approval of the may 2nd 2023 committee summary are there any additions or corrections all right hearing none yes did you have something council member ellinger no but I'm trying to do the numbers here and I don't think we actually have a quorum unless you did you recognize councilmember lynch is to be part of the quorum I did count her I think we have six no we have six do we have six okay I was doing my counting okay sorry you're right okay um so there was an extra approval and a second all those in favor opposed Okay, thank you. Moving on, we have a presentation on retirement, recruitment, and retention for public safety. And I wanted to ask Sam Savigny if he had anything that he wanted to say to introduce this item since it was his item in committee. Thank you, Chair. Yes, I was excited to take this on. And I was happy to be working with our commissioner to put it together. I went through just some basics with him of the things that I was interested in as a new council person in seeing. And I'm glad that he put it together. And I think this was supposed to be an annual thing. And I think at some point we have to decide if we want it to continue to be an annual thing. But it has not been done for two years. So I'm glad to see that we did put it together. and I appreciate all your hard work on it, Commissioner. Thank you. And thank you, Commissioner Armstrong, for being here and doing the presentation. I have told Commissioner Armstrong that he has a few extra minutes since this is a lot of content. So thank you. Well, first and foremost, I would like to thank the council, and especially Council Member Savigny for giving me the opportunity to talk about this very important topic today. As you can imagine, looking at the presentation is a very complicated and voluminous topic, to say the least especially considering we'll be discussing four very important divisions within lfucg that have different needs different factors that impact their staffing and significantly different job tasks and employee hiring requirements i appreciate the extra time i will do my best to meet that 20 minute time frame but again as i indicated earlier it's going to be a little bit of a push and i'll get through it as quickly as i can with that being said i do have representatives the division or the director for each one of the four divisions we'll be talking about today. We have Chief Weathers from the police department. We have Chief Colvin from corrections, Director Patton from E911, and we have Assistant Chief Larkin from the fire department. Unfortunately for us, Chief Wells couldn't be here today. Fortunately for him, he's out of country and enjoying much nicer weather than we are here. In respect for your time, I will go as quickly as I can. That being said, I will hit the high points. There is some redundancy or some commonality that exists in the presentation. To be honest with you, when we're talking about the commonality, I don't think you're going to be surprised by any of that because for the last three or, well, two or three years, maybe three, this is something that's very common throughout government whenever it comes to hiring and retention of employees and the workforce issues that we're facing with philosophical change, change, especially in an age group that we many times target. We always think of Lexington as being a uniquely different city, and I agree with that, but with that being said, we face the same challenges as many other cities do as well. Many cities are facing the same issues we have whenever it comes to hiring people, but especially in the public safety field. And we know that if you watch TV, read articles, if you do some of the research that we did in preparation for today's presentation. It shouldn't be a surprise. I will say the administration, the chiefs, the directors, and the council have taken a number of steps over the last few years to kind of alleviate this and combat the issue. And while there are some bright spots we'll discuss today, there's still a lot of work that has to be done. Simply spending our way through this issue is not going to work, to be honest with you. We see that in other organizations as well. We all support good pay and benefits for our employees. but to properly retain and hire new employees. So returning to our staff levels pre-COVID, there is, in my opinion, some factors outside of our control that are going to have to change and we will need to recover from. So with that being said, I'll go ahead and start with the presentation. these are the questions the general questions that were brought about whenever i was having my discussions about the preparation of the uh presentation today number four and number seven obviously talked specifically about pay and how that's increased over some time this is not a pay-centric presentation that is not what this is designed for um with that being said if that's That's something that the council wants in the future where we do a regional swap of city, compare the cities with the four divisions or just one division or two. I'd be more than welcome to do that as a presentation or gather that information for you. Many times whenever you look at that kind of comparison, you have to do more in the deep dive than just starting pay too. For instance, I was talking to Assistant Chief Larkin. There are some fire departments in the state of Kentucky that started a higher rate than ours, but they don't have collective bargaining. They don't have steps, so those employees many times are, and I'm sorry if I use this term, well I'll use the correct term, non-collective bargaining here. For instance, ideally the council's going to approve the 5% pay increase. In those cities, those fire departments, firefighters would get 5%, but they wouldn't have steps or anything along those lines. Some cities do, some city don't. It's hard to just do a straight across comparison. When you talk about pay too, you look at some of the organizations we commonly hear from, whether it's Louisville or KSP. Whenever you talk about policing, I've got to be honest with you, apples and oranges, being a police officer in Lexington is much different than being a state trooper. It's significantly different. And being a police officer in Louisville, I don't know why you'd want to be, but if you were, it is significantly different too. And if you're there, please come down and join us. We'd be glad to take a look at you. Going on to the next slide. These are the last presentation that we did back in 2001 regarding this topic. These are some of the questions from the past council. I just wanted to include those to show you that we have been working on those matters and to alleviate any concerns that you may have about some of them too. The ones I've highlighted in my discussion today is section two. greatest impact in corrections. So whenever the next one down, backfill overtime. Just to make it clear, we have some slides on mandatory overtime or staffing overtime later that we'll have in the presentation. Okay? Police department, I'm sorry, the fire department and the police department have what's called mandatory backfill. Which essentially means every post has to be filled. If some post is not filled, then you must fill that spot with mandatory overtime. E911 has their minimums. If they go below those minimums, same with police. But this is both contract and CBA required and operationally required when we talk about police, or I'm sorry, fire and corrections. That's why you see, whenever we talk about overtime later, you see a much bigger number in those areas when it applies to gross dollars that we spend on that number three delayed replacement i mentioned this back in 2001 could possibly reduce non-first-line response services now we haven't seen that yet especially as it applies to police department fire department's been okay in those areas e911 we're facing some issues still with a reduction in personnel there but director patent and her people are working real hard and you'll see how that's going to be be alleviated a little bit future, future on in the presentation. That's also the opportunity where we look for other ways to, you know, address the matter. You know, whether it's through technology, better routing software, our camera systems, those kind of things to help supplement the operations that are occurring right now. It's not a replacement. It's a supplement that helps job their job a little bit easier. Increase in overtime, and that's general cost. Now, with that being said, well, again, I'll talk about overtime a little bit more. And when we get to the fire department, you'll see an interesting trend that occurred last year that really drove up their overtime numbers. But I'm really hoping that that corrects itself. Staffing levels. Now, someone would ask me, why did I pick these two dates? Well, October the 1st, 2022. The reason that date was fixed is because that's whenever the past council was having a number of decisions and a number of decisions were made in regards to retention bonuses or retention payment, increased in pay in January, some different things that were going on. Up to that point, they started to go into effect on October the 1st. Then the other date, the reason I picked that one is because that's the most recent one that I had the numbers. I don't want anyone watching the presentation or home here to think that we're softening the numbers in some way. These numbers can change every day. Now, with that being said, most of the time it's to the negative, so I'm not hiding that. In other words, if you have a recruit class like the police department does that started with 24 and they lose three people the first two weeks, that may not show up there. That's not intentionally. It's just I had to pick a date to make it cut off or I was going to be changing it all the way up to the presentation today. A little caveat there, if you notice, E9-1 has made a difference of eight additional positions. So they went from 22 to 14, which is a good move. The fire department's a little convoluted in the fact that it shows that they went up 10. but if you remember thanks to the safer grant work and chief wells and chief larkin and their hard work we were able to get the safer grant which added 21 firefighters so that's a little bit of a misnomer there you know um if you look at it a certain way we're to the good 11 rather than to the bad of 10. corrections obviously big improvement there and then we have the only one that truly went in the wrong direction in my opinion was the police department with an additional five again that number could be six today but it's not going to be two because it can only go up to the negative next slide attrition numbers highlighted in red most notable e911 that was a big attrition number those two years remember that was either during covid or immediately following where we had such a transition in the workforce interest in public safety and government work as a whole it is interesting 2022 three out of the four had their highest attrition numbers if you notice that i thought that was interesting well with that being said the year before 2021 110 from corrections that's a big number all right when you look at the averages down there uh the only one that changed was fire and it actually and again i know it's in red which would make you think negative but it's actually a positive there that their attrition went down everyone else's went up for instance corrections went up 10 per year and the police department went up 14 per year next one seniority gives you an idea where we're standing as of the fifth of this month now without that being said i I know there's some confusion sometimes whenever people will say, well, on the fire department, there's 95 people eligible for retirement. Okay, or the police department, 110 eligible for retirement. Okay, where that number comes to, I think, where it comes from is that when you have 16 years of service or more in the police or fire services, you have the ability to buy what's ghost time or service time for four years so what that does is that if you've got 16 years and you're willing to pay the amount to buy that for which normally it's a pretty big number but people do it to be able to retire they could immediately retire so that's where that number those people are eligible that does not mean that they have over 20 years on that's a little bit of a hard thing to follow sometimes so i apologize if i'm not explaining it well i can go back to it if need be all right we worked a lot on this slide and i hope i'm giving council member so big i hope i'm giving you what you want here uh i worked on this to try and get an understanding of it and what we were shooting for here and this is the slide all the out of all the ones i did that i feel the least comfortable about but we'll go through as best i can and already i know there's There's an error, thanks to Chief Lowe. The police number is not 3808. It should be 3080. Not a big difference because it doesn't change the final number, though. That was just me fat fingering things. Made a mistake, but it doesn't change anything there. You see that big number up there for the fire department. It will be on the slide a little bit later. That is specifically linked to a significant increase in sick time during this time frame by our firefighters. And just to give you an idea, and it's on the slide later, but in fiscal year 20, we had 955 hours used. In fiscal year 22, over 16,000 was used. That's a huge difference. And again, with the mandatory backfill, that's where your overtime comes from. All right, so what I'm hoping this shows is that, and bear with me here. So when you look at the total number of hours overtime, that number is then divided by 52 weeks a year and the number of people that on average would be eligible to work overtime during that week. I flunked eligible, so. Okay, I'll say it again. Okay. When you see the total number of overtimes, which is the third category, we'll do five. 95,108. You would divide that by 52 for the number of weeks in the year, and then divide that by the next number, which I don't have with me, is the number of people that would be eligible to work overtime. So that would not include an assistant chief or a deputy chief or a major or anything along those lines. It would not include them. Now, with that being said, you see that most predominantly in corrections, you have some people that really work the lion's share of this, to be honest with you. But this is average per week. There are some people that work no overtime. There are some people that work 24 hours a week of overtime. But this is what it averages out to. And just to make it perfectly clear, this is staffing related. Staffing related, operational related. This is not grants, you know, like doing speeding on the interstate or anything along those lines. It's not football games. It's not those kind of, it is true staffing related. Now, with that being said, I was talking to Chief Lowell and Chief Weathers about this too. For instance, with the police department, they have plenty of opportunities. People don't sign up, but they do have to on occasion have people do mandatory overtime. Now, with that being said, as I indicated earlier, both corrections and fire have mandatory staffing. So corrections probably uses it, I think, Larkin, you'd agree, corrections uses it a lot more than even fire does, right? The mandatory all the time. Yeah, a lot more. A lot more. Pay considerations. All right, again, this is an interesting chart. Remember, E911 is non-collective bargaining, okay? So any pay increases they receive is based on the yearly cost increase that the council approves or doesn't approve. And if you look at the little key I put down here at the bottom for E911, that's call takers and dispatchers. Now that is starting pay for them. That's minimum salary. Some people will come in and actually make more because they have experience. You know, out of all of our divisions here, E911 is actually the one that does what we would refer to as laterals. They do. Because if you have experience for sales and you come here, we'll pay you for that experience. And you stay in the same retirement system. That's something else to think about here. When we're talking about these three divisions, or four divisions, we're talking about three different retirement systems for all of them. So, but that's call taker and dispatcher. Then whenever you look down under fire corrections of police, you see an S and a T. The S stands for starting pay, the T stands for topped out pay, the topped out. So at the bottom of the slide, you'll see topped out occurs in firefighters at 14, but it's about ready to go 15, right? I think so, right? I think it's about ready to go 15 to match the other ones. Corrections is 15 and police are 15. So when you look at the category with a T, that is the topped out step. That's how much the officers are making in that topped out step, not including overtime, not including any other benefits. Now with that being said, up until 2002, both police and fire received a yearly stipend from the state for training purposes of $4,000. That changed in 22 to $4,300. And those amounts are not included in the total listed in the chart. So for instance, whenever we look at 2019 and we look at, I'll just pick police starting pay was $40,252. Then you would add an extra $4,000 to it. So it's 44,000 x number, okay? Other pay considerations, I'm going to fly through this real quick. These are just some of the things over the last couple of years that council has approved and administration has worked on retaining employees and increasing the likelihood of new hires. With hiring, I'm not supposed to use the word, incentives. I'm not supposed to use the word bonus, so I'll use incentives. One thing up there that we didn't list, I was talking to Chief Colvin about, is I kind of forgot that, that we also pay employees for recruitment. So if they're able to get someone to come in and they're able to stay and become an employee, they get some money for that as well, which is great because I think we all know our best recruiters are the employees that we have. They always are. So the only pay considerations up here that stay in effect is for police and fire, and that's the fourth point. or the $4,300 I discussed on the last slide. All right, now I'm going to try and pick it. Well, there's no way in the world. So, yeah, I didn't realize it took that long. So the current question is from council. We broke it down by each one. Number one is a perfect example. We start with E911. About every one of those squares in the first section applies to every one of the divisions we'll be talking about today. Pretty much. Changes in the hiring process, shortened the time, we've worked on that. Advertising, showing up at recruitment events as a public safety team, we've been doing a lot more of that. We're doing a lot more social media as well. Continuous recruitment. Now, because of the hiring process, both corrections and E911 are truly our best example of continuous hiring because the process for police and fire are much longer, the classes are much bigger, those kind of things. But Director Patton's trying to hire somebody every day just like everybody else, but she can get them in seats a lot quicker than her peers. The next one, single spigot biggest inhibitor. The employment process, the change in attitudes toward public service, individuals not interested in working weekends, nights, holidays, missing out on a few birthdays here and there. You know, the job is dangerous. You've got to be out in the heat. You've got to be out in the cold. You've got to be out in the wet. In some cases, you have to deal with people that don't like you just because they don't like you. okay you want me to stop okay because there's yeah okay thank you thank you that's all right um and that's just something you're going to hear across the board to be honest with you with all of them now i would be careful here in the fact that e911 especially with the hiring processes that are in place they have seen what the directors indicated me as a jumped in qualified candidates and she links that somewhat to the paying increase of course we as we all know there are different factors that always play a part but since the increase in pay we have seen a jump in applicants when we talk about police and fire it's a little too early to say yes or no i was talking to chief well or well excuse me low earlier about the police process he says they have seen a a 20% jump in applicants for the next class, is that right? For the October class. For the October class, they've seen a 20% jump in applicants there. That's not saying viable applicants, but applicants, so maybe there's an opportunity there. But we are still very early. Don't forget this, especially as it relates to pay, only started in January. So competitive pay and Prioritizing benefits, again, the 5% that they're going to be receiving here soon is directly linked to non-collective bargaining employees here in government, unlike the other three entities. Going to the next, and I promise I'll speed up, ma'am. Fire, social media efforts to increase the footprint. Chief Larkin can talk a little bit about Eastside and Southside Tech School, which is a great recruitment tool. While we might not see a benefit today, we could in a couple or three years. And that's, it's like minor league baseball, before you get to the majors, you want to get a good look at anybody and get them out there on the field to see how they do. So that's a great opportunity, and it's a great public service and community service type aspect where we get a lot of positive interaction with people. Again, with fire, current process is used as long and cumbersome. The change in workforce, no big surprise there, we've already discussed that. it comes to what cities are best in recruitment we're not seeing anybody that's best in recruitment now i will say this we've seen some that are starting to make their numbers but then whenever you delve into it because they're lowering their standards unacceptable don't lower your standards we'll work through it we'll get through this you know we've had shortages in the past we'll get through this but lowering the standards you know it's it's a recipe for disaster most of time so we have to be careful again the fire mentions that they feel like that's increased their number of applicants as well the increase in pay traditionally the fire department through all this has has seen a decrease in the the number of viable candidates, but they haven't seen it to the level that the other entities in this department has. With that being said, they've been able to keep their numbers reasonable. But everybody wants the biggest, best pool to pull from and to actually get individuals from. So number six down there, I mentioned this earlier, the use of sick time is what really drove their overtime big time last year. going from 953 all the way to 1675. That's a huge jump. And some of that was mandatory. Now, we're hoping that that corrects itself in this fiscal year and so far it looks like it might have, but there's no guarantee there. See, next one is corrections. I've already touched base on some of this, but there's a lot of good work that's going on out there with our new chief. Really bringing the recruitment activities back up into the 21st century, especially as it applies to the interview now software. And I think the police department's using that as well. And they can elaborate on that if you're interested. Other market opportunities, the negative public perception of law enforcement, that's hitting both our policing corrections the hardest. And then workforce changes, I can't talk about that enough to be honest with you. Let's see here. Number five. That essentially, and I'm going to roll that up into one big thing that we think that will help, especially out there at the detention center, is the spree decor or a more positive work atmosphere. Now, that's hand in hand with increasing the staffing, too, because if you're constantly working a day of overtime every week, it wears on you both mentally and physically. But a lot of positive things coming on out there. We've got a number of community groups that are coming in and working with them and showing these detention personnel how much we truly appreciate the effort they do out there. You know, we constantly talk about how people don't always know or appreciate what our corrections officers do because they're behind, what do you say, concrete walls and metal doors or something? Still doors and thick walls. Still doors and thick walls. Well, we're trying to at least put a crack in there so people can see what's going on but not get out. But kind of get an idea of what's going on out there to kind of make the officers and the employees appreciate what they do and show them how much we appreciate them as well. Got a lot of good employees out there, and that goes across the board for all public safety. Police department. A lot of things here we've already covered as well. Getting out there, getting involved. The block of instruction on internal recruiting, that's a great idea. I mentioned that earlier. about how our best recruiters are our own employees. And actually, I know Corrections does it, fire and police, and I know Director Patton encourages her people, but there are incentives associated with that. They're given T-shirts to wear to go out and start conversations, whether it's at the gym or Kroger or wherever it happens to be, to try and get some good qualified candidates in there. And it is making a difference, especially when we talk to Corrections. Salary increases across the economy for employees with significant lower risk of personnel, personal safety, excuse me. Next one. And again, I'm sorry I'm not giving all this the need to. You know, we hear this quite a bit. Smaller agencies are more fully staffed. It's a lot easier for smaller cities to get personnel, whether they retire and go work there or just their generalized number. They also hire lateral transfers. You'll see somebody from Northern Kentucky work for Southgate one day, Kenton County the next, and then Campbell County the next, because they have the ability to do that. Because of the retirement system as well. Which by the way, our retirement system is in a much, much better state than the states, if that makes sense. So almost every large department, which would be our size or bigger, is experiencing staffing issues. The R program down there, I can have Chief Weathers or Chief Lowe talk to you about it. But you're also seeing a huge push nationally. You're starting to see commercials and advertisements, whether it's on social media or on TV, from departments that are reaching out trying to hire people from our city. Do you all remember whenever they had the billboard for Louisville Police Department on New Circle Road? Well, so that's getting more and more common. That kind of stuff is getting more and more in common. All right, last slide, believe it or not. Well, technically. So I was also asked to put the collective bargaining agreement statuses on here. These are the dates associated with it when the contracts expire. If you notice down at the bottom, most negotiation processes start six to ten months before the contract expires. The next one set to expire is December 31st, 2023 or later on this year. If you have any questions about that, Dave Barber, you're here. Yeah, Dave's here. And sorry for taking all your time, but if you have any questions, I can either try and answer them or one of the folks in the back can. I would like to go back real quick one slide. I made it, I forgot to mention something. Whenever you look at this slide too over here on the end, where it's for employee per week and it's this year, so it's the second category. For instance, fire is 2.3, correction 7.8, and police 1.7. You have to remember that's just since the beginning of this year. Most overtime occurs during the summer, so that number will change and it'll probably go up and won't go down. I forgot to mention that. And I think that's all I have. you so much commissioner armstrong and i'll entertain questions from my colleagues council member ellinger thank you chair thank you commissioner for this update could you go to page seven please where it says staffing levels on 10-1-22 and when we're looking at that yes sir when we're looking at that those numbers when you're including the numbers are you including the present classes that are that are in there yes that even though they're not on the street that that they would actually be in the numbers because that doesn't mean that they're still going to end up being on the street. Well, this slide addressed was vacancies. So if you have someone in an academy class, it's not a vacancy. So you're including those, and what are each numbers that we have in the classes right now that would be in each one of those different? Police is 24. We have 1 in 6, 1 in 18. 1 in 6 and 1 in 18, so 24. Fire, 35. 35 fire. Correct. Have 12 in and 10 in the FTO phase. So 12 are. And how close are we to all those getting through the class? Sorry. Well, the police just started. Right. The police just started. Fires graduations next month? Yeah, that's July. Yeah, we just got some July 14th for that one. Yeah, I just got the invitation here. Yeah. Thank you. And correction? June 22nd. June 22nd. right now just to clarify something historically historically we've always had academy classes so when we talk about numbers of people being out on the street i was asked to provide the number of vacancies those individuals aren't considered vacancies but we always you know we're never going to have never have a hundred percent sure staff never going to have it it's not it's an it's an impossibility there are times whenever you have an academy class and by the time the academy class cuts out you're in the exact same boat you were because you had that number of people retire so that number whenever we talk about 20 30 vacancies that number has always existed even when we were fully staffed we always had 30 vacancies well i don't like using word vacancy we had 30 people in training yeah we're not at 100 authorized strength is what you're you're saying and we're never going to be with it it's an the only people that have ever done it was the jail as i understand did it one day four years ago or something like that for one day one glorious day they were fully staffed so um on our our classes how have we been doing on once we get them in and we're then they're finishing what percentage what's our normal percentage and well the normal the normal attrition in each one of the academies are a little bit different right um the normal attrition for police is normally about 25 percent why don't you all come up on here come on they ain't gonna bite you police is normally about 25 to 30 right about a third let's let let's let them get up here so we okay about a third for police fires 20 percent 15 18% corrections? 83% retention right now. Okay, so 17. And how are we doing that with the next classes? Because I think you just said with police, what were the numbers that you gave us that are left in the classes? Well, one class they recently had that's coming to the end only has six left and they started with 20. 18. 18, I'm sorry. So they lost two thirds. Right, that's where I was trying to get to. are we doing and what is the normal and what are we at right now? And that seems like a pretty high number. Yeah, that's probably the highest number I've heard from a class of that size ever, not making it out of the academy. And what classes do we have going forward with each one? Fire is currently slated to have one in October up to 40. Fire's got a class up to 40. Police just started a new class, like I said, and they're going to have another class when? October. so they're going to have one in october corrections is a ever-moving you know that they can do a lot more classes when's your next class you think 26th with 20 and we're already building the academy behind it okay so june 26th with 20 new yeah so when we do the classes and we need say we want 50 people to make the numbers easy well let's just say 100 to make the numbers easy um do we do 150 knowing that we're going to lose 50 percent or do we just try to get what's qualified and then just just keep who we have. We do over-hires. Yes, we do. We do. We allow over-hires. But with that being said, you have to have the qualified over-hires to hire them in the first place. For instance, the police department chief, he was authorized to take up the 50, right? As many as I could get. The words out of my mouth, as many as you can get, get them. I got 24. My time's up. I'll come back. Thank you so much. Thank you. Council Member Baxter. Thank you, Chair, and thank you, Commissioner, for this presentation. I know that all of our public safety departments are working as hard as they can right now, and it's a thankless job. So thank you for working so hard for us. I have a few clarifying things I want to ask. So I want to go back to the seniority slide. Sure. When you were talking about buying time, I just want to make sure that I understand it appropriately. So when you say they're eligible for retirement at 16 years, that means they're eligible to buy time. Yes. Now, they could have bought it before. They could have bought it when they first came on. Well, actually, you could be here five years, right? Under the old agreement, you could be here five years. Yeah, okay. So you could have bought it before you hit 16. Okay. It's an example of working 16 but on paper showing 20. Okay, so if there are those individuals who have bought time over the years, they are calculated in that eligible to retire number. Is that appropriate? No, it's not. No, this is only 20 years plus of service time. Period. Yes. Okay. I'm just trying to wrap my head around when we hear numbers of so many 100 plus people are eligible to retire, what that actually means. if it actually means we have that many who have 20 plus year service or if we have that many individuals who have bought time. I mean if you'd like to we could find that information out. Well I just want to make sure that we are sharing the most transparent. Oh I'm sure there's no doubt in my mind whenever we talk about more than 20 years we with the fire police department for instance it's 59 right um i would venture to guess with 16 or more years that bought for you're going to have five to ten more maybe i'm not really but i don't know that okay that helps thank you um okay then going to um it's page 16 it's the second slide of the fire questions um when we talk about the use of sick time and that huge jump sure i'm just wondering if there's any type of correlation is that you think it's like overtime backfiring on us and people are just worn out like what do you think that number is attributed to yes ma'am i'd say a little bit of both uh i understand that you know 2021 was when cova was going on i mean as a 31 year veteran plus uh i've used zero sick hours in my career uh chief wells is the same way but i mean we would we'd show up to work literally like bleeding with bones sticking out and probably some days we shouldn't have been there but when covid happened we told people to stay home and i think that kind of caught on now if you look at the hours right there i can tell you that we kind of compared to where we are in 2023 at this time in 2022 it's about a 25 drop so that's kind of trending in the right direction obviously not as much as we'd like to but yes ma'am every every time we have someone calling sick it essentially is going to be a liability for overtime sure so i guess my my thought or recommendation would be if there are repeat i don't want to call them offenders but if there's someone who's taking a lot of sick time i would hope that you are following up with them to make sure there's nothing else going on or that yes ma'am our shift commanders have i guess i'm going to express kind of double down on that a little bit and that have that might have also have helped over this past six months okay thank you commissioner i have one more quick question for you um i have spoken to each individual chief and director patton about ways we can look at at recruitment that we haven't in the past and people that we can appeal to that maybe we haven't thought of in the past. So my question is, do you feel like we are at a point where we need one specific recruitment, retention, retirement person, that that is their sole focus, or do you feel supported enough in your capacity and with whatever help hr is providing you do you feel like you have enough resources or do you feel like we need to look elsewhere i i would say it may be premature to go in that direction quite yet because we have made a number of changes especially over the last year and i'm getting some positive feedback maybe not on the time schedule we wish it was all on okay i mean honestly but with that being said some of the changes are just now starting to pop up the one thing we're not going to be and we actually i take that back there is something that the council and the public can do that would help us tremendously and that is vocalize their appreciation for our employees as much as possible because the negativity out there in the world is stifling to our employees at times you know you pay for the sins of others that's how it is that's how it is you know one police officer does something one firefighter does something three thousand miles away from here it might as well have been somebody in our own police department or fire department bringing a positive light light back to a profession or a field and i'm talking about public safety as a whole that deserves recognition and admiration for these men and women willing to sacrifice their weekends, their holidays, their nights, their birthdays, and sometimes sacrifice their lives, just like that young deputy did up in Scott County, is something that I think, sadly, the only time people think about is when something like that happens. And that's the sad part. Now, back to your question, I apologize, I'll get off my soapbox for just a minute. I'll be glad to talk to you more in depth in regards to that topic. I see some benefits, but also that centralized effort to kind of recruit is something we've been talking about, whether it's a video, just promoting public safety as a whole and start running it in some of these other cities that are trying to come over here and poach on us. I'm perfectly fine with that, you know, because we need to sell not only the job, but the city and the quality of life we provide people here. And I think that's where we're going to beat a lot of these other cities. Thank you. I'm out of time, but I'll come back. Thanks. Thank you, Chair. Thank you. Council Member Gray. Thank you, Chair, and howdy to you, Commissioner. My question is regarding recruitment of our black and brown populations and what are we doing differently to reach those communities. Okay. What I'll do is each different division will have a different response to that, to be honest. Indeed. I will say this. We haven't seen any significant, at least my, this is anecdotal, right? So I don't have statistics for you today, okay? But I think we're seeing a decrease in the number of individuals that were interested even before some of the 2020 events, right? With some of the negativity coming out of the press in regards to law enforcement specifically. And it was never super high, but I think it's dipped. Now, I'm being told that we may see a rebound there, and we're starting to see it, which is a good thing, but to what level I can't speak to that. So what I'll do first is, who wants to do police? All right, Assistant Chief Lowe can talk to the police, and we've got fire and corrections, and Director Patton's hiding back there, but I'll bring her up. I was going to call her up. Thank you for the question, Council Member Gray. I'd say the main thing that we're doing in the police department is we have a diversity recruitment committee, which is a group of people both inside the police department and also partners that we work with in the community that represent minority communities. And we meet on a regular basis to get feedback on, because we can't come up with all the best ideas of where we should go and where we should recruit. So we get input from members of the community. A perfect example that came out of that is the Minority Business Expo that's coming up here. soon here in Lexington. We're one of the sponsors for that event. We'll have a recruiting table. We'll have recruiters there. Additionally, as we go to other areas of our region, we recruit both in the state of Kentucky and in surrounding states. We're very cognizant of who we send to recruiting events so that we show the representation of the members of the police department and try to attract people from different groups and send people that look like who we're trying to recruit to those events. Thank you. And that also includes, does that also include people who speak other languages such as Spanish since we do have a growing Latin population here in Lexington? Yes, we do have Spanish representation on that. Thank you. Director Patton. Good afternoon. good afternoon E911 itself has not experienced a hardship as far as african-american employment of course the goal is to have you know one look like the community it serves we have had difficulties in finding Latino personnel that are actually interested in E911 and we have right now we have one part-time Latino individual and we have one full-time African-American who speaks Spanish so we are continuing the effort in that area before I became director I was actually in charge of hiring and recruitment so I show up to events that aren't the typical events neighborhood programs super sundays at Douglas Park go to the places where people of ethnicity are and that has served us well typically you know on workers are female and and white and And our statistics are way beyond that. And recently, we are actually getting male applicants. And one of the areas that we have been reaching out to are from our public safety partners, say someone for instance, who may not be able to make it through either one of the academies, if they're interested still in public safety, that there's a job for them to do. still be a part of the public safety team. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. So as far as minority representation, in every phase of the hiring process we make sure that there's representation. We have been recruiting heavily at historically black colleges and universities. recruit our head recruiter fire captain is african-american and we've also like I think the commissioner alluded to earlier we've been reached out here locally understand that only 34.7 percent of our firefighters are actually living or from Fayette County and I think that that's an issue so we have build a relationship with east side and south south side technical schools uh just recently i mean literally past this past weekend i spent a good part of the weekend with about 13 from their fire science program uh oddly and i say oddly enough because i'm used to a kind of a male dominated you know fire department and when i said because i started 31 years ago but half half of the fully half of the students there were female so I think that that's a very positive thing for that but we ran them through fire school through a junior firefighter program and course and have received really good positive feedback you know I think we can recruit and possibly hire some of these some of these younger younger people in the next 18 months to two years because the age being 19 i know some of them turn 18 this year actually later on this year so they very well could be represented in the next or next process or the process after that so we look to it we look to continue that relationship those programs with fayette county public schools are doubling in size from the last i heard from from their instructors so we see that as a real opportunity thank you thank you you can well okay or that's fine good afternoon um the division community corrections is the most diverse agency in public safety somewhere between 23 25 percent we have um recruiting teams that are are very diverse in their makeup that we send throughout the community. We, too, are interested in a relationship with particularly Kentucky State University because my last tour with the division, we had this relationship, and it proved fruitful for both of us. I check in with Arthur Lucas often about tips that he can give me to look at diversity recruiting. Glenn Brown is a good resource. I have Glenda George as the HR manager. She's involved also. And lastly, I think that the division has a reputation as being a diverse and inclusive organization. So I think that that bodes well for us, and we do get a lot of referrals from our own employees. And I think that's what bolsters our efforts at diversity. Thank you. Thank you. Council Member Lynch. Thank you, Chair, for acknowledging my questions because I'm on this committee. Thank you, Commissioner Armstrong, for a great and thorough presentation. I love a thorough presentation, and you presented it very well. It kept my attention, so I appreciate that. Just a couple of questions. I've read the definition, but I would love to hear what is authorized strength? What does that mean, to make sure I'm understanding it? Okay, and authorized strength is the amount of employees that the council has authorized a maximum number of those sworn positions to exist in LFUCG and that funding is available for such. Okay, thank you. That was helpful. And then my second and last question is regarding slide 16, regarding the fire department. Number five, what would slow people from leaving? You listed service and disability and identifying and addressing workforce priorities. could you explain a little bit more there uh over chief market thanks chief no i can't i didn't make the slide uh but uh i i can provide you some numbers as as far as uh what percentage we've seen that have retired with service time uh those that have resigned or left the job for other uh other careers a few of them have been well they essentially resigned that's basically it as far as I really don't know that we have an answer because generally our people when they retire you know hey they've done their 20 25 30 years and you know it's it's okay it's it's it takes a toll on the body it takes a toll on the mind and uh you know obviously we work towards that retirement so that probably doesn't answer your question again that that was one of the ones i wasn't that familiar with are we maria so bullet number two is talking about uh really diving into why people are leaving and figuring out how to keep them staying we've got quite a few you know when we talk about retention we tend to see female firefighters leaving sooner in the in the five to ten year range because they're starting families and they're unsure how to make that balance work so it's figuring out how to help people see how they can balance the job and work and what is important to them because this generation really seems like time off is what's important to them time at home with their families spending time with with other people and so figuring out those priorities and giving them the work environments that'll encourage them to stay on um is why did i call you up here thank you that was helpful and my last question related to disability are we seeing high numbers for of our employees getting injured and have suffering disability as a result of the job are you talking specifically about fire or general? I guess fire, since it was uplifted in this bullet point. Have you seen an increase in the number of people filing for disability? I don't think so. I'm sorry we didn't really research that. I don't have our disability numbers on hand, but when you consider the recent change, and I see recent in the last 10 years, we've gone from a 20-year retirement to a 25-year retirement. So now if you come on the job you're 25 instead of working till 41 you're working till 46 or if you come on when you're 30 now you're working till 55. So it's a pendulum swing that we've seen in the past there was a 25 year retirement and then we were losing a lot of people in those last five years to retire disability retirements. And so we went to a 20 year retirement and then we we had this swing of not keeping people around long enough that it was really affecting retention. So we went back to a 25-year retirement, and we're going to continue to see that as the people in that 25-year retirement continue to age. We're going to start seeing more disability retirements in that last five years. So, yes, what we see trending forward is going to be more disability retirements because we're asking them to work longer at a job that's very physically demanding. That was very helpful. Thank you both. Thank you, Chair. Thank you. Council Member Sivigny. Thank you, Chair. And thank you, Commissioner Armstrong. You did a great job, and the folks did a great job. I really appreciate everybody's leadership. I've just got a couple of questions. One is, I actually found the numbers of people at 20 years, I didn't find that alarming. I thought that actually looked pretty good on that slide. We had basically 10% in that category, which I thought was good. And I don't know if there's, do we actually need to do an incentive to keep people longer, or is it better to actually let them leave? Does that make sense? Because I know people, when I was talking to the chief in Michigan, we were talking about the concept of, you know, you can leave and you can go to another job that's a little less demanding, but it could be over in Fayette County Schools, or it could be over, you know. So I'm trying to get an idea if we need to incentivize it or we need to just let it go. Well, the council has in the past incentivized some retention efforts there. So based on the outcome from those, that may give you a preview if any additional funds were allocated to do such. I think whenever it comes to retirement, and you're talking to someone that has retired in the past, that it's an individual decision that when you can leave, draw retirement, get another job that's not as stressful, safer, something along those lines, you've kind of earned the right to do that. I've never in my time ever tried to talk anyone out of retirement because I feel like each individual person has their own motivating factor. So I'm sure there's some people that would say that would be beneficial, and there would some that would probably, it wouldn't make any difference. Since we've done the pay increase, since we've done the retention bonuses, we've still had people leave for other jobs. We still have. And I'm not saying no to it, or I think it's a bad idea. What I'm saying is I'm not sure if there's analytical information to show that, yes, this will do X, Y, and Z. I'm not sure that exists or it will ever exist. I appreciate that candid feedback. Thank you. My next question is about I was glad to see that we started three police classes in a year. I mean, so I think that turn time helps. You mentioned the lag time in hiring as being an issue. And I don't know if we've ever looked, and I don't know what we ask somebody to do between the lag time, like between when they put their application in and when they actually start, if there's a way that we could actually do something incentive-wise to say, hey, here's some online class that I would like you to do X, Y, and Z, and after two weeks in the academy, you know, we'll give you a bonus of X because you did this on your own time to educate yourself. I don't know if anyone's thought of something like that. I'm not sure how it would work. There would be some questions there, I think maybe, that you're kind of employing them before they've been employed. I know the detention center does something interesting. They call it gray shirts, which is essentially they'll hire people to get them on the hook, as it were, until the academy class starts. It's a great program. They started a couple years ago. It could be two weeks, three weeks, up to a month before the academy class actually starts. And then they start in the academy at that time. Yeah, I bring it up because in the tech field, and there's a lot of technology that you guys are using, but in the tech field, when we would hire somebody, certifications matter. So sometimes outside certifications mean something. and it's just kind of a way to keep somebody maybe on the hook and then offer an incentive for those certifications i'll be glad to sit down and talk to you and bring in the directors to see if that's viable in some way thank you very much that's it thank you chair thank you council member baxter thank you chair um okay just following up on what i asked about earlier have we We conducted our own or researched focus groups to figure out why. Is there research out there that says why people don't want to apply to public safety positions currently? I mean, there's kind of an obvious for some areas. But, you know, it's and I'm assuming that our armed forces are probably seeing the same trends. Is that true? Okay. So I guess I'm trying to get at the bottom line. And, you know, if we have recruits who drop out in the process, are we asking them why they have left? Yes. Whenever individuals leave service of any type in any of the divisions, they do an exit interview if they're willing to do it. Right. Okay. And the reasons they leave are as varied as you could imagine. Sometimes it's family health care in Florida, so I got to leave. Sometimes it's child care and, you know, I can't, someone you brought up, I can't work a 24-hour shift. I'm a single mother father. I can't do that. Sometimes it's, you know what? No, thank you. Do we compile that information? Do we track it? Yeah, and yes. I guess my thought is that if there is something that's showing up over and over again, and it's something that we may be able to address, then that could be a first step. And the ones I'm talking about the most many times are your first five-year people who I just mentioned. Now, other ones that have the 20 years in or anything along those lines, they're leaving to go get another job elsewhere. And when we talk about pay, we're never going to be able to compete with that Because if you can leave here and make 65% of what you're making here and go there and make essentially what you're making here too, that's a 65% raise. I think that I'm a firm believer that if you aren't an expert in whatever it is you're trying to do, that you rely on those individuals who are the experts. and you all are all experts in your individual departments and divisions and you're maybe not necessarily marketing or recruitment experts and so when I asked the question earlier about do you feel supported or do you feel like you have all of the tools that you need I want to encourage everyone in public safety to look outside of our organization if we need external help from a marketing company which I know police has you all done some videos and things like that you know if if we need that external help i i think we need to go there you know we need to think outside the box director patton and i have talked about maybe we recruit individuals or we look to recruit individuals who are interested in social work maybe we don't look at well and i have had that same same yeah i mean we've talked about it as well i just i want i don't want to i don't want us to keep ourselves in a box i want us to be able to think creatively and and think outside of that box that we've always been in um so i would disagree that we're in a box right now you don't think we're in a box no i don't think so well that's really good that's great and what i mean by that is i feel like the people sitting behind me think outside the box and doing what they can to fix the problem and that's we're not and i don't think the council or the administration or anyone has kept them in that box i think and i don't mean to say that i don't think you guys are doing an amazing job i just want you to have all of the tools and all the resources possible to help sure and we appreciate that yes very much if there is something out there that you're like man i really wish we had x you have to let us know so that we can get that for you yes and we appreciate that we're really good thank you chair thank you i just want to thank Thank you to you for being here and answering every single question that we have. I know it's not always easy on the spur of the moment. And I know that all of you have been working really hard on recruitment over the past few years, and we have seen improvements. So I appreciate that, and I want you to know that, yes, we appreciate you and all of your employees and what you do for us every day. And I agree with Council Member Baxter when we were talking about ways of framing things And oftentimes I have a background in cross-cultural communication, and so when we talk about how we frame things and how we message things has a big effect on how people receive it. In this case, I think how we phrase people being involved in public safety, like service or social work, that we're serving the community, I think really resonates with a lot of people right now. And so I think that might be a good angle. And also appreciate your efforts around trying to reach minorities and the bilingual community, especially in Spanish, since we have such a large Spanish-speaking community in Lexington. And I know I've been saying this for a few years, but, you know, I've seen how public safety interacts with folks in my district and just the importance of having that language piece. So anything more that we can do or that I can do, I know I'm making several different videos across public safety in Spanish, and I'm happy to help in recruitment anyway to try to reach out to that community and get folks involved so that we have more police officers and fire corrections and E911 that are all able to communicate with our Hispanic community. So thank you once again, and thank you, Commissioner. Real quick, I just want to thank all their involvement here and all their hard work as well. I know you did, and Council Member Baxter, but they worked very hard on this, and their teams worked very hard on this. And I think, especially considering some of the staffing issues we've faced over the last couple years, the city of Lexington has not suffered at all. I think it's because of the hard work of the men and women that wear those uniforms that come to work every day, even whenever we're short in certain areas, they get the job done and they make our cities such a beautiful and safe city to live in. I'm very appreciative of it. And if you are, again, like I said earlier, please encourage you and your constituents to tell them. Because one small word of thanks makes a world of difference sometimes. So thank you very much for the opportunity to speak about this. Thank you. And the other thing I forgot to mention was just the overtime and how much I appreciate everybody putting in so much overtime to keep our city safe. We know what it's like to work long hours, and we really appreciate everyone working long hours for us to keep things going. So thank you. And now we're going to move on to our code enforcement update. This is an item that I put into committee a while back and then worked with Director Al-Chevy and also with Council Member James Brown at one point. And we made some changes and decided to keep this update in committee because it's important that we know what's going on. and that way we can ask questions and try to interact because I think one of the top things that we hear from our constituents often is about things that have to do with court enforcement. So, Director, thank you so much for being here. Did I hear that you might be retiring? That's correct. That's correct. Well, we're going to miss you, so this might be your last presentation then. Thank you for being here. Thank you for having me. i'll set the table for the new committee members this was put in committee back in 2020 for a what was called a code enforcement review and that was a basically inquiry into what it is code enforcement does and how we do it this presentation today is simply the new data with the same exact information that was requested before so it's going to be an update and i hope for the successors and the the following committees as if this stays in committee like this this will be the data you asked for um and just this is what's it's not really a change we can go back to the old ones we can discuss them i have the old ones but essentially the updates and the things we've done in the last since 2020. and we'll see how this works so the first thing that we needed to set straight was when people hear code enforcement anything with the word code in it they kind of think belongs to us and it doesn't our authority and scope is very specific in the code ordinances with chapter 2b for the hearing boards and the appeals process chapter 5 chapter 12 sections 12 1 through 5 related to housing issues of nuisances abatements the authority of our department commissioner which is Charlie Lanter now our ability to do penalties and how those penalties are enforced the accumulation of snow was a new ordinance that was put in shortly before it in 18 chapter 14 is where we are assigned our citation authorities chapter 1410 basically says which sections of the ordinances code enforcement has the authority to enforce we also have a small part of the zoning ordinance which is the nuisance signs the wire signs the annoying ones that are out there every weekend we collect those weekly the problem types that we deal with are typically housing and disrepair or some that are unfit for human occupancy which results in condemnations but we use several codes in the process of enforcing and getting violations abated. Property Maintenance Code, the Kentucky Building Code, the Kentucky Residential Code, the Kentucky Fire Standards of Safety, the International Energy Code, the Kentucky Fire Protection Code which is aka NFPA 101, NFPA 54 which is fuel gas, the Mechanical Code, the Kentucky Plumbing Code, and the Electric Code. So if that's That's why people think anything would code in it belongs to us. We have a lot of codes to deal with. Then we have our nuisances. That's our most popular, popular complaint as you get those reports through LexCol. Tall grass and weeds, trash and debris, junk vehicles, sidewalk obstructions, and those pesky nuisance signs. Sidewalks, displacements, defects, tripping hazards, snow, which we have in five years have yet to actually have a snow event that met the ordinance. So it's been a little bit, I can't tell you how well that's working. I guess it's good because we haven't had to issue any citations related to snow removal on your sidewalks. And we also have a small section related to unsolicited materials, which is where mailings are not delivered in a proper location. That was a big deal when I first took over in code enforcement, and it is dwindled off to one or two complaints a year. So I don't even track it for the purposes of this report. This is a breakdown of our process for housing. We don't need to go through all these, but for all intents and purposes, we, by ordinance, give notices to individuals that we find in violation. Those notices have a timeline in which they allow people to get the repairs done. Sometimes it's 30 days, sometimes it's 60 days, depending on the circumstances and the severity of the code violations. Emergencies are immediate notices for repair, usually within one day to five days. If you don't get that done and you have not made arrangements to get the work finished through a compliance schedule with us, that's when the citations begin. The citations per the tables and the ordinance escalate with reoccurrence. So the number of violations times the number of times you're being cited for those violations, the fines keep going up. Ultimately, our goal is to get compliance. The fines can be a deterrent. Sometimes the fines backfire on us a little bit, and we end up with properties in foreclosure because the people simply don't have the means to repair the property. We've cited them. We get to a certain dollar amount. we've basically put them in debt to the city at least five thousand dollars is generally the threshold then we have to try and collect that through a foreclosure process at that point it goes begins a legal process and the enforcement actions on our end stop the nuisance complaint process is very similar we get the complaints notice typically for them is seven days or 14 days a normal violation is 14 days same thing if they don't get a hold of us and explain why they can't get in compliance at the end of the notice time they're eligible for civil penalties those civil penalties are set up the same way escalating with reoccurrence so the first one is 100 then it goes to 250 to 5 to 750 to a thousand to fifteen hundred dollars for not mowing your grass sidewalk complaints are 90 day notices this is a little bigger endeavor it's also a smaller niche in the construction market flat work guys in concrete are busy it's a labor intensive to tear out sidewalks so we give them 90 days typically to get that done plus we have our sidewalk assistance program which most people take advantage of but believe it or not we still only have about one in four of our applications through the cases actually apply for the grants it's amazing that it's still that low given given the times that we had through covid but that is still statistically valid and I would have to say that in the coming in the coming years we'll have to reevaluate our budget on that because of the cost of concrete and labor we have adjusted our fees our reimbursement from a five dollar square foot which is half of what the going rate was for just panel replacement and bumped it to 750 so So this year in this budget, I can say we exhausted all the funds. The money's gone. The significant facts for us are we still, it was under Vice Mayor Kaye that we created a more transparent way to follow what code enforcement does on the 311 website and on our webpage you can get to our cases that are active and see the status of them under the case numbers you can look them up by address it'll give you the case it'll give you what's going on and the public can keep track of whatever's going on in their neighborhood or whatever they're most interested in and they can always call us to ask for the status but that map is actually out there and available for everybody and it's very very useful uh and and quick and quickly gives you a quick synopsis of what's going on we are in conjunction with building inspection currently trying to achieve accreditation we got a brick grant it took only two years to get through that process but we have done our application with the international accreditation service and we are going to have our on-site assessment scheduled in the near future i doubt we'll see accreditation before i retire we are the secretariat for the vacant property Review Commission which we are simply the staff that does the inspections and gathers the information to present to that that commission we are also work very closely with OPI the Office of Homeless Prevention and because Steve Gehafer my foreclosure specialist goes out and we're the ones that have to try and help get the places cleaned up when they're done so and based on the premise of the way we have these time frames for people depending on private property and public property and the note and and getting them relocated in the assistance from jeff's group then we'll do the follow-up and to get the property cleaned up at the end so but we go out to there so we assess those and we basically clean get those cleaned up when we move out we are still basically required by the state to have 12 hours of continuing education for our certified staff inspectors but we have as a part of the original committee we do extra training for soft skill training which was considered to be a need in code enforcement and we've continued to see it and to be honest it's even been in our recruiting and our interviews that we're looking more on the soft skill side than the technical side the technical side has gotten to be harder construction people are not necessarily leaving this business to come to code enforcement they build inspection and grants we have the same basic requirements so we're pooling from the same group of people and all of us have vacancies right now but these are the basic qualifications for a code enforcement officer as you can see they're not super extensive the kicker is the one and two family test and qualifying for the state program to be enrolled in the building inspector certification program which requires two years of working with building plans a lot of candidates don't make our list because of the construction plan review requirement the nuisance control officers associates degrees with two years of related experience in government service or the equivalent this has changed significantly from the first presentation we did we had a lot more attrition back in the 2015 to 2019 window since 2020 seven employees have moved on only one's resigned six of them took pay increases and they're still within the urban county government i currently have two vacant funded positions three trainees and i just got a letter for retirement for another one yesterday or this week so So not bad. And this is the slide you all like the most. This was a compilation. There's no report I have to do this manually. And I can't really read that from here. But if you can see the council districts are listed, the total number of cases from January of 2022 through the end of May of this year, there's the total number of cases the total number of citations the district's numbers specifically to your district then their rank based on percentage of the of the total the interesting fact here is the citations are down about a thousand from the time i did this in 29 in 2020 the ranks did not change much a little bit between 11 and 6 I think you swapped third for second councilmember Reynolds the citations dropped only about 500 but the appeals dropped almost 7% so the process of coming to us to get relief seems to have diminished some in terms of what the appeals board does we left out all the COVID years because of the fact that we weren't issuing citations we weren't doing interior inspections and all those numbers wouldn't be very accurate what I can tell you from the slide that I did august 2018 to december of 2019 back for this first report and yeah there were 668 appeals in the same time period for 21 so 20.99 we think that's a significant improvement improvement that one we're handling the business without having to go through the appeals process and getting these these people through the hoops it takes to get these cases off the books and off and basically get us out of their hair the appeals process goes through by our ordinances we have to we issue a notice what's wrong and what and when it has to be evade abated by a notice is not appealable a notice is simply telling you that you have a violation on our eyes and we've cited you under the ordinances at that point if you disagree with a notice and contend that it's not in violation you just give me a call we'll review it we'll decide send somebody back out and look at it again and decide whether that violation truly is valid nobody's infallible so sometimes we go out and go nah supervisor says this i don't think this warrants a notice citations on the other hand are only appealable by state law to the appeals board you can't appeal them to me i can't help you that appeal has to be filed within seven days per krs then the hearing's set the hearing officers are appointed by the mayor have their hearings they rule the findings of fact they have the options of upholding the penalty they can hold it in abeyance and give them time to get it corrected or they can dismiss it and say code enforcement you were wrong this is not a violation that's only happened once in my five years so our guys are pretty good about recognizing what valid violations are and that's a credit to them their training and just the continual work of staying in the knowledge of what the ordinances are and that's all a lot by in the code of ordinances for 12.1 and 12.2 by definition. What is a junk car? What is tall grass? What are invasive species? So with that and with that in play, uh, I said we've only had one violation overturned and it was because we couldn't prove whose property it was actually on. So the owner said it wasn't theirs. If there's no objections, I'd like to ask that. Um, do you need five more minutes director? i probably don't need quite that these are the last slides for your benefit based on the cases so you could see them by the map on the dots for your districts okay we'll just a few more minutes it's fine thank you so this map was requested before 2022 the total number of sidewalk cases in 2022 that was actually i believe that was a record then year to date we're running on track to do a thousand again this year the maps are cluttered because there's a lot of numbers up there the nuisance is 5900 2300 we're going to be that's 46 our nuisance may be down a little as projections go on but we had 1300 complaints filed in may from 900 in april from 500 in march so we're in we're in the season housing pretty consistent year to year 2600 Citations city wide, 1952 and that based on the same time period that 1952 and 649 together is about 2601. We had 3182 back in the 1819 window. So we were also down on the number of citations we're issuing. And there, I made it to the end. Thank you so much for your presentation. I never finish on time with you all. It's all right. We have an important meeting at 3, but we have time for some questions. So, Council Member Civigni. Thank you, Chair, and thank you so much for the presentation. It was good for the first time sitting through it. It was very informative, and I've got a quick question because I actually had this come up, and I didn't quite know. I don't really know how to explain this to a constituent. But we've had constituents call, and they call, and they complain about one thing. So let's say it's a sidewalk. And then afterwards, let's say they call, and then it's tall weeds. And I think, is there an issue in the system? I'm just trying to clarify. Is there an issue in the system that you can't issue, like if you if you issue a second citation to the same person for a different thing is there there's like a timing issue or something like that almost like can you only have one thing open per address or you have to do them all at the same time or something like that no they're they're they're problem types so a sidewalk is a violation of a certain ordinance right a nuisance is a violation of another ordinance and the housing is a violation of another set of ordinances. If there's already an open case for the nuisance, we won't open another case. Okay. So if there's an open case that is still within the time frame, it's like, okay, it's still open. The same thing is still open. If we created those cases, they'd be misleading in terms of the number of complaints we're actually logging. We'll have five or six neighbors maybe call 311 at the same address, because they all caught it at the same time. Right. There will only be one case. Okay. For that address. Okay. Do the people get notified or do they just get a link to the system so that they know it's been logged or whatever? No, they don't get a notification because we don't track who does the complaints. Right. They're anonymous to us. Okay, all right. all right cool well thank you very very much i appreciate it great presentation thank you councilmember gray thank you chair and nice talking with the cash nice to see you again yes again so i just need some clarification by the way thank you for your many years of service to lexington as our working with code enforcement i know it hasn't been easy but i am i've enjoyed our meetings thus far. I don't know if you have, but I have. I enjoy them all. Good. I get every new council, I get to do this all over again. So I've done a few. The joys. So I just need clarification. I know that there's been some discrepancies in what exactly is graffiti as it regards to sidewalks and this is something that I spoke with some residents last night at my district-wide meeting I know that during our through email exchange I know to my legislative aide it was expressed that etchings or or swats because that were actually into the cement wasn't considered to be graffiti? No, in our ordinance definition, we have no jurisdiction over graffiti on sidewalks. We have it on walls and fences, structures. We don't deal with it on a tree. We don't deal with it on sidewalks. The sheriff's department had a program to remove graffiti from the sidewalks. And the sheriff's office has related to it. But that position is vacant, and I understand they have not filled it. But that was a program they ran to remove graffiti. They have some grinding or some process they had that they could get it out. And technically, I don't have any ordinance related to graffiti sidewalk to actually order somebody to remove it. Gotcha. Well, actually, in our ordinance, Section 14-3.1 in the ordinance, it states that graffiti is drawings, inscriptions, or markings of whatsoever or character or description written, sprayed, painted, etched, or otherwise applied to a building, wall, fence, tree, sidewalk, curb, or other structures. And it goes on to, in section 14-3.1, subsection 2b and 3, it states that an etching equipment is any other instrument that can be applied by pressure or any other contact with a surface, including, but not limited to, glass, metal, plastic, concrete, or any other surface which can cause graffiti. So I just need clarification. And it says it's a misdemeanor. That's a criminal offense, which is why I don't enforce criminal offense. That's not what we enforce. Okay. Okay, so it's not, so it is graffiti, but it's not? Graffiti in our definition in 12, too, for us, just goes to the walls and fences and building structures. You don't see the sidewalks and stuff added, because that's a misdemeanor. That's under a different section of 14 than ours. Okay. We have part of it related to the buildings that we charge the owners to have it removed. But in the public way, it's like the railroad trestles. don't have any means to make the railroad clean those and it's always a story they've been a problem on the sidewalk even from kids writing chalk on sidewalks can definitely be called graffiti so that's just something that we actually it's a criminal offense not a civil offense right and there's no one to enforce it so that's yeah i'd say that was the sheriff that was that and they didn't enforce it they just cleaned it yes they just went out and cleaned some of this stuff up and then our streets and roads folks will help us too when it's in a particular spot that they that they got it but my understanding is they don't necessarily have the equipment either but they get they get it they get a contractor or somebody that has a blaster because they say that stuff can be pretty intense i just wanted you to clarify yes i was our civil side versus the misdemeanor side because we have no criminal authority as citation officers yeah that goes that goes back to the big guys and thank you for that clarification that's just something that actually it's up to the council to clarify and to make sure it is enforced properly so i thank you for the clarification on the record so you could add that to the sidewalk part of nuisance and sidewalk problem types but it would be you'd have to kind of make sure you get the sidewalk specifically mentioned. Okay, we'll talk before you retire. Thank you. Thank you. And thank you so much for the presentation and working with me over the years. I will miss working with you. A few questions. Backing off of what Council Member Gray said, we really have had a lot of issues with graffiti over the years, and nobody takes charge of who is supposed to enforce it, who is supposed to clean it up. Now the sheriff's office is not doing that. They wouldn't do it before on certain surfaces. I've dealt with it on signs, on fences, on all sorts of different things. And so I think that is something that we need to firm up of who's going to clean it up and who's in charge of enforcing it. But then when you and I had spoken several times about just sometimes that I have dealt with people that really have felt targeted and almost pushed out of their home by repeated calls on their property and people who cannot afford to pay the penalties and all of that. I had asked, is there a way that we could track something like that when maybe it's hard because maybe they are in violation of something, but maybe they could have the opportunity to get it fixed, but instead they're kind of getting slammed from every side. Do we have a way to track repetitive calls on one location or anything like that just so that we can maybe look at trends for certain properties? We can look up the case history for the last four years since the software that went into place in July of 2018. And the number of cases on any individual property. The legacy stuff is past the open records retention window, except for condemnations. But we now, with the owner occupied properties, when you say somebody's pushed out of their home. One inspector now, the housing repair assistance program that we created an ordinance, the new ordinances we did back in 2018 that we passed effective January of this year. That program now has, that officer has, we started out with 109 owner occupied homes out of all of our housing cases. We're down to 71. We've got 49 that have been approved under the program. We've already fixed 27 of them, and we've spent about $155,000 of that funding for FY22. So we have, for the ones that are the owner's side, we can help. That program is working, but, say, again, if it was a house that we already have on our radar, we've either got them in the program and they're applying for the assistance, or they don't qualify. So of the 71 current, we got 49. That's 69% have qualified. Now the other 31 we really can't do much with as far as assistance from our end. Remember, we're enforcement. So the issue for us is we can send them to a program, whether they jump through all the hoops to get through that program and get back to us to get the work done, And then for us to inspect it and close out the case is kind of the different widget that we have. And the one reason I did kind of put that in a silo with one individual was so that we wouldn't be scurrying with 15 different code enforcement officers trying to deal with these homeowners and have a mishmash of the way we handled it. It's working out well. We're even getting people wanting to turn themselves in to get their houses fixed, but we want to make sure they qualify first. So as far as being pushed out by code enforcement at this point with the owner occupied, that is being looked at individually now. Well, I have seen this. Landlord properties, the ordinance doesn't change that out. You know, the ordinance doesn't say that if it's an owner house, you've got this set of violations versus a tenant house, which has a different set of violations. And that was where, that's where we get caught because now we're at least with the program, we can look up PBA before we go out there and find out if the owner lives at the address that we're going to. And that automatically puts it in another man's hands or another woman's hands, whoever's going to be running that program. Well, I think, yeah, I'm so glad we have that program because I think it has helped a lot of people. And apart from that, there's not any type of payment plan, correct? We don't settle on the debts owed the city. So it's a lien or a citation outstanding balance on every account of a house. To pay it off, you go to revenue and write them a check. If you want to make a payment plan, that's a promissory note that has to be made typically through the law department. And they will take the payment. And as long as they stay in good standing, my understanding, the terms, I don't see the promissory note or the terms thereof. So typically compliance is one of the conditions. They have to work on getting it fixed in order for them to stay in good standing. Very good. Well, thank you so much once again for your time. I think some of us will be following up. And also thank you for your service to the city. Thank you for having me. And this probably would be my last hurrah here. Thank you. And now I'm going to follow up with you all about the items referred to committee. some of the council members are not on this committee that have items in committee and we are on need a little break so if there are no objections and we've finished our business for the day we are adjourned thank you