# General Government and Planning Committee - January 16, 2024 > Auto-transcribed civic record · January 16, 2024 - **Permalink**: https://meetings.lexingtonky.news/meeting/6012 - **Source video**: https://lfucg.granicus.com/player/clip/6012?view_id=14&redirect=true - **Date**: 2024-01-16 - **Last revised**: January 16, 2024 - **Length**: 6,787 words > ⚠️ **Auto-generated content.** Audio from the official Granicus video was auto-transcribed with OpenAI's open-source Whisper large-v3-turbo model, run locally by The Lexington Times. Structured facts were extracted with GPT-4o; the narrative summary was written by Anthropic Claude. Verbatim wording may contain errors. See [methodology](https://meetings.lexingtonky.news/about/methodology) or [report a correction](mailto:editor@lexingtonky.news). --- ## Meeting Overview The General Government & Planning Committee met on January 16, 2024, at 1:00 P.M., with P. Worley presiding. The committee considered two agenda items, both presented for informational purposes: Global Lex and an Annual Item Update. No public comments were heard during the meeting. The committee took 10 motions and votes during the session. ## Attendance The following individuals were present at the meeting on January 16, 2024: * P. Worley * K. Plomin * D. Wu * J. Brown * C. Ellinger * S. Lynch * H. LeGris * L. Sheehan * W. Baxter * J. Reynolds No absences or late arrivals were recorded. ## Votes and Decisions The meeting included the following votes, all conducted by voice vote: **Approve the October 17th summary** [timestamp: 0:10:00] - Outcome: Passed **Remove item number 27 from committee** [timestamp: 0:52:19] - Motion by: D. Wu - Outcome: Passed **Remove item number 1 from committee** [timestamp: 0:53:33] - Motion by: L. Sheehan - Outcome: Passed **Remove item number 13 from committee** [timestamp: 0:54:03] - Motion by: J. Reynolds - Outcome: Passed **Remove item number 18 from committee** [timestamp: 0:54:33] - Motion by: J. Reynolds - Outcome: Passed **Remove item number 26 from committee** [timestamp: 0:55:04] - Motion by: J. Brown - Outcome: Passed **Remove item number 16 from committee** [timestamp: 0:55:35] - Motion by: S. Lynch - Outcome: Passed **Remove item number 3 from committee** [timestamp: 0:56:06] - Motion by: W. Baxter - Outcome: Passed **Remove item number 31 from committee** [timestamp: 0:56:36] - Motion by: W. Baxter - Outcome: Passed **Remove item number 15 from committee** [timestamp: 0:57:09] - Motion by: P. Worley - Outcome: Passed All motions passed by voice vote. Nine items were removed from committee during this meeting. ## Global Lex Isabel Gereda Taylor presented an overview of Global Lex, the city's international center, during this agenda item [timestamp: 0:11:33]. The presentation covered the following aspects of Global Lex's operations: * **Mission and Services**: Taylor discussed the center's mission and the range of services it provides to the community. * **Language Capabilities**: The presentation highlighted the languages covered by Global Lex's staff, demonstrating the center's capacity to serve diverse populations. * **Community Impact**: Taylor addressed both the challenges and achievements in serving the immigrant community, providing insight into the center's work and its effectiveness. This was an informational presentation with no formal debate or voting outcome recorded. ## Annual Item Update The committee reviewed the status of various items that had been referred to it, with P. Worley leading the discussion. The primary focus was determining which items could be removed from the committee's purview and which required continued attention or further action. During the review, the committee evaluated the progress and relevance of the referred items. Several motions were made to remove items from the committee's list, indicating that certain matters had been resolved or were no longer within the committee's scope of responsibility. The discussion resulted in an informational outcome, with no binding decisions or formal actions taken during this portion of the meeting. The review served to update the committee on the status of outstanding items and to clarify which matters would continue to require the committee's focus going forward. --- ## Decisions - **Motion** — passed (0-0): Approve the October 17th summary - **Motion** — passed (0-0): Remove item number 27 from committee - **Motion** — passed (0-0): Remove item number 1 from committee - **Motion** — passed (0-0): Remove item number 13 from committee - **Motion** — passed (0-0): Remove item number 18 from committee - **Motion** — passed (0-0): Remove item number 26 from committee - **Motion** — passed (0-0): Remove item number 16 from committee - **Motion** — passed (0-0): Remove item number 3 from committee - **Motion** — passed (0-0): Remove item number 31 from committee - **Motion** — passed (0-0): Remove item number 15 from committee --- ## Full transcript Thank you. ¶¶ Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. ¶¶ Good morning. things that we need to talk through. First, I will need a motion to approve the October 17th summary. Motion to second. Any discussion? Hearing none, all those in favor, please say aye. Any opposed? Thank you. Our first item on the agenda for presentation is Global Lex, and I'm going to ask Council Member Reynolds if she would please introduce the item and lead us in. Thank you, Chair, and welcome, Isabel. I first just wanted to say, well, this is something that's really close to my heart because I have spent my adult life working with the immigrant community and working abroad. And we are really lucky in Lexington to have an office of globalization. Not every city and not even our state government has that. And so we're fortunate to have that office, and Isabel has been with it and founded it from the very beginning. And they do so much work with our immigrant community on so many different levels. And so today I just had, you know, asked that there be an overview for those of you that are a little bit newer and might not know everything that GlobalX does. And then I think Isabel is going to go through different languages in our districts and kind of talk about her role as a Title VI coordinator. So with no further ado, we have this presentation. Thank you so much. Thank you, Council Member Reynolds, and thank you, everyone. Happy New Year. Let's see. So our mission statement is to support the city and its residents, both local and international, and we're trying to promote mutual understanding, civic engagement from our newcomers, and strong economic and artistic diversity for our international population. Can you all hear me? Okay. So the city center opened in 2015, and GlobalX staff currently has people that speak Spanish, French, Arabic, Swahili, Lingala, Shiluba, and other languages. Gaston Gandus-Sankai is our African specialist. Rani Belmadani speaks Arabic, is from Algeria. Aldo Gomez is from Costa Rica and he speaks Spanish and French and Aldo has like I mean Gaston has about five different languages so we are a multilingual center but as you'll see we need so many other languages here in the city we have an administrative senior Trina Brown and one AmeriCorps Vista, Hannah Faulkner, and we have through Sister Cities, we have a Korean intern who actually works with his government and he is going to be our liaison. He's going to be with us for a year. And we have two students from India who are sponsored by BCTC through the State Department. So we're very lucky this year that we have that kind of help. We provide the international community, LFUCG, and the public service, as do many of our divisions. The Multicultural Affairs Office, the coordinator, the mandate there was to identify and assess, to the service needs of foreign-born populations or what the federal government calls LEP, the limited English proficient. So if you hear me say LEP, it just means English learners. Under the Multicultural Affairs Office, we evaluate UCG services to that public. We develop and implement methods to collect demographic information. That's one of the hardest things. There is no repository for a person coming from abroad to say here, I'm here, and now I'm leaving. And so just as the census is, the gathering of that information is only a picture in time because people come and go, families come and go, students come and go. So we'll see a little further on how I collect that data and have been doing so since 2006. We provide technical assistance, maintain a database of services, multilingual services is what we focus on. And we track and I track relevant legislation that it could be international, it could be national, it could be state or even local that will affect our foreign born population or even our local population. And I am responsible for Title VI compliance for LFUCG. So it's on a macro level and direct assistance to the public. We have a lot of walk-in people that just come in and we do intake where we try to evaluate what is it that they need and what other services will they need as well. We serve as liaisons to community groups and agencies and organizations. We provide that direct language assistance. We give information on anything that you can imagine. We'll walk in, whether it's labor problems or they need police assistance or they need to know how to file taxes or it's just everything that you may imagine in your life that you need to find out how to do here. We do education workshops, we do referrals mostly to professionals like attorneys, to social services here or to other organizations that may be able to help to universities. And we represent LFUCG and the international population in boards, commissions, community advisory councils, and we participate in conferences and webinars. This year it's been particularly heavy with education and outreach in health related assistance. So there's been like four or five different conferences and webinars and panel discussions across Kentucky. There's a lot of interest in health. We do provide some translation and interpretation assistance as time permits and we either facilitate quality control other people's. We give LFUCG's public safety divisions a little bit of priority for obvious reasons. So our educational component is really a response to community requests, their priorities, their gaps of services, and for instance targeted English is our main concern for driver's education. We provided it in nine different languages so far, but we focus on their learning English, learn how to read the yield sign, et cetera. And you see that we have collaborative farming, emergency preparedness. We have taken training from the Department of Emergency Management so that we can train the other language groups in the city and we train every month with emergency management to be able to provide that assistance. We hope to have tax filing through the United Way this year, multilingual, and we've had over a thousand walk-ins in 36 different languages, but we don't count all of of the people that we help through telephone or emails or in their offices. So we will be doing, I hope, a better job of tracking that assistance next year. How do I get that information on what languages, what people are here, where are they from? And a long time ago, maybe in 2006, I saw this graph from the Pew Center. It was based on U.S. Census, and it was dividing the limited English-speaking population and the people that come here from all over the world that already speak English. So we don't worry about the ones that speak English. We're really interested for Title VI purposes with the LEP. So if you notice, it's broken by age group, school-age children, the working group, and then the 65 and older. Well, I noticed that the 5 through 17, it's a 10% of the total population. So we grabbed onto that number, and we started asking Fayette County Public Schools to give us their numbers in their languages because they really track it. And in 2010, the population that we had been tracking had already doubled from 1,500 to 3,200. And that year, when we were saying our local estimates are 32,000 because of that 3,200 of students, the U.S. Census came up with slightly higher. Made me feel really good that we were conservatively under by about .2 percent, two tenths of a percent we were under their house to house count in 2010. So I felt really comfortable after that using that 10 percent number. Fast forward to 2023, and Fayette County Public Schools reported 10,678 students learning English. They provided this number of addresses that we used to geocode those maps that we gave you by district. And so the EL students this year in 2023 spoke over 103 languages. The top are here. I do the first eight in a different color because I want to point out that the language groups that go from Spanish to Mandarin, they all are over 1,000 people in those language groups. And the federal government requires for Title VI, if you have a language group that is over 5% of your population or over 1,000, you must do critical document translation. And so currently I'm going to be working with the fire department. They need to have all of those languages. And so thank you for the assistance that y'all have given me, us at Global X, to take care of that. So in 2008 and 2012 we had different language maps where we color coded all of these little spots on the maps. But this year we couldn't do that. There's too many. There's just too many languages. And so we divided it by district. And I want to thank Dustin Baker for his assistance in doing these amazing maps. And also I want to thank from Fayette County Public Schools. It was a collaboration between LFUCG and Fayette County Public Schools to have the data available. and Dr. Tushan, Basel Tushan, who is also a member of the Mayor's International Commission, he's the one that facilitated our finally getting that information that we hadn't been able to get since 2012. So the census shows, currently shows our population of foreign language speakers is 13.6%. Our local numbers show that we had 233% growth, and I can't even tell you what our total population is in relation to our total Fayette County population, because we don't have accurate numbers from the 2020 Census. But we can see that the estimates show there's an increase of 74,780 people that speak so many more languages today. There's also discrepancies in Hispanic and black population, as you can see. So we're going to have to wait until 2030 to probably get a more accurate count. I am in talks with the census trying to see if there's anything we can do locally to acknowledge that we have those 74,000 people here that didn't get counted. But they're more interested in what do we do in 2030 so far. So Councilmember Fogeley, as you can see here, I'm going to just give a few of these maps just to point out a couple of things. Councilmember Fogeley has 21 languages. It's the least number of languages, but you have the most population, 17,000 people from those estimates, 16% of your population there. And I want to point out also that the top 12 languages across the district are not necessarily going to be the same 12 languages that you and your districts have. So other than the vice mayor and the at-large representatives, that collective number is not going to do you the same service. Council District 4 has almost the opposite. They have a much smaller number but double the languages. Council District 7, Mr. Worley, you have the most languages, 54 languages, and you have a pretty good size resident population there, 11,000 or so. This was my biggest surprise, the 12th district, which is where I live. And I did not imagine that we had 30 languages there. But there it is, about 15,000 people that speak 30 languages. So where does, where do people come from and why are they here? That's a question I get asked quite a bit. And so that's why I put some of the avenues of coming here. One of them is the Lexington, Lexington's Kentucky Refugee Ministries Resettlement Center. They resettle refugees, the humanitarian parolees, Congo, Butan, Ukraine, Afghanistan, Guatemala, Syria, Cuba, Haiti, et cetera. But in June, they had to request placement restriction from the State Department because and they're asking for their resettlement numbers to just be limited to family reunification. And housing was the main issue. They cannot bring people when there is not sufficient housing or up to par. So projected total for 2023 is 1634, but for fiscal year 24, the expected new refugee ceiling is 450. So you can see that dramatic change. They do have an amazing staff of 50 members, 50 staff, who speak 20 different languages. So that's really to be admired. I went backwards, sorry. The universities, I want to say they aggressively recruit because they do recruit talent for their post-grad research, their doctoral programs for the patents and the innovation and the entrepreneurship that they generate. And the direct economic contributions in 2017 it was about 65 million dollars for UK alone here in this county. And the university got about 58% of that. So the county got the rest for retail and other issues. So that's a big contribution. Professional recruits. What does that mean? It means in the arts, in the sciences, in medical care, professors, ballet dancers, baseball players, they come from all over the world. They're recruited to come for specific things. Equine and other farm owners, this is where we get a lot of farm owners. We have farm owners from Abu Dhabi, from England, from Australia, from Peru, from Brazil, from other parts. They bring their key staff. They bring their trainers. They bring their vets. They bring a lot of families here. So we see some of the avenues to that. How do they connect? A lot of our local groups, civic groups like the Bluegrass Indo-American Association, Chinese, Congolese, Japan American Association, they are established organizations that will help you if you need to find an interpreter. If we can't help you to connect a newcomer to your district, do call on them. They are so helpful and they've been here for some 20, 30 years. There's also the Mayor's International Affairs Advisory Commission. Through the commission we have three representatives from Asia, three from Africa, three from the Middle East, three from the Americas, three from Europe, and five local experts, for instance, former State Department people, immigration attorneys, people from the UK office, international offices, so that we have that local expertise as well. That's it for me if you have any questions. Thank you so much, Council Members. Council Member Plowman. Thank you, Chair, and thank you, Isabel. I always find it fascinating when you bring these numbers to us because I think a great majority of our community don't realize this international population that we have. A couple things. The 55, 65-plus, and that makes sense, obviously, because they're older, and I would think that generational folks, their children, their children's children, would assist in that. But what other things does your office do or what other things exist in the community that helps that particular profile? The people over 65? The people over 65, I think. Currently, we're introducing some of the new language groups to the senior center. And the senior center now has language classes, English language classes. And I think it's a way they are, we worry about them because they are in information isolation at that age group. They're not in the workforce, and they're at home taking care of kids sometimes, but it is a group that we do worry about a little more. It's harder for a person that age to learn English, and so we sometimes help people that are having a hard time passing the citizenship exam because they're elderly and it's hard for them to pass that English requirement. And so we tutor them until we see there may be at that stage, maybe 84 years old, there may be a learning incapacity, and so we will take them to a doctor to verify that situation. And so we do what we see they may need, but we can't reach everyone, So we have to count on organizations like the civic organizations. And you think about all the history that they've had. I mean, they grew up in their native language and then that's gotta be quite a challenge for them. I think you and I actually came in our positions about the same time as I remember. Over those years, what have you seen as a trend or something that's changed over the past eight years that- The trend in language groups is definitely towards Asian. The Asian population, whether it's India or whether it's China or Japan, we just have a heavy growth of Asian languages. And so we don't really have the expertise yet for that. So we have to count on universities and groups like the Bluegrass Indo-American. We have something like 23 languages from India alone. So, yeah. So we're having to do, the learning curve is high. Let's put it that way. Well, thanks for all the good work you do. Thank you. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Council Member. Vice Mayor Wu. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Ms. Taylor, for both your work and this presentation. This community and these services you provide are very near and dear to my heart and very personal to me. If you go back a number of slides, on the slide that starts with education, it talks about your targeted English multi-language education, kind of all those different modes. students, do you have a sense in our English learner communities which topics people are more in need of, you know, learning? Of course it's always individual to either the family or the individual, but as a whole, we do see gaps in driver's education. And we're talking, we're constantly, for the past, what, 15 years we've been talking to the state, and they have told me that they are starting to do translations, so that may improve. But that's what we focused on, is driver's education was the very first thing that I was asked for as I came on board, and it's still a request, because you can't go to work, you can't go to school or the doctor, et cetera, without driving. So we focus on that. We also currently we have Swahili and French driver's education classes, but we're targeting the English, as I said. Another thing that's currently coming up is financial literacy. A lot of people want to own a home, buy a car, and start a business. And so we have to tailor it to the level of background and education. And so it's challenging, but it's also a lot of fun. Thank you. We appreciate your work. Thank you, Chair. Council Member Ellinger. Thank you, Chair. On the page that had the Council District 12, I think there's a typo on that one because it says 5%. Shouldn't that be 15% with a number? Let's see. That may have come with the maps, but we will have it changed. Because it says you have 1,490, and it said that's 5%, and 10% was 1,100. So I think there's one missing on that. It's based on the residents in that district. So that's how it's done. The number will change. Okay. So it's 10% of that district's population or 15%. It's not 15% of the total. Because each district should be about the same amount of people in each district. And that's how we do our districts based on 100%. I can ask Dustin. Okay, thanks. It just seemed like it was out. We'll get back with you on that. No biggie, but just looked out of place for me. Thank you, yeah. And then you talked about, I was on the link that we presented to the budget, to the Cal, that we added the money. How are you using that? And then you also said you need to work with fire. And how is that going? It's been tremendous. Thank you so much for getting that, council members. It has really revolutionized what we can do. Previously, I would have a Greek person walk in and say, there's this document, can you translate it to English for me, or can you translate it from English to Greek because the government needs this for tax or whatever. We couldn't do that right on the spot because we didn't have Greek in-house. Today, we have all of those languages available. My concern is quality control because we don't know yet which languages are going to be just spot on or which languages need a little vetting. We always, under Title VI, have to have a little quality control, not only with translations but also interpreters. And with respect to the fire, the captain texted, emailed me this morning and said, Isabel, we need all of these languages. We're in a hurry. We can do that almost immediately. The slow part that I explained to him is going to be vetting it. The languages that we have in-house, we can do right away. We can read French. We can read whatever we need. But the languages we don't have in-house, we have to send them out to a trusted community member or a professional to vet it for us. Is this good? Now, it's going to be a lot cheaper to have someone read it for us. It's a critical document. If it's legal or otherwise, it needs to be correct. And so that vetting is important. Life and limb has a higher standard, right? So it's going to take time to build that infrastructure. of who can we count on to vet this quickly and how can we serve the divisions faster. It's a little overwhelming in terms of 12 languages that we're now required to provide critical documents in. And by the way, critical documents, it's going to be up to the division directors. Each division director will know what the critical documents are for their division. And so I'm assuming they'll come to us or they'll come to you since you have one as well. But it's exciting. It's early times. We'll see. But it's amazing. Thank you for what you do and what you do for our residents. Thank you. Council Member Gray. Thank you, Chair. Thank you. Oh, my pleasure. I'm just doing a service to the community. So since having the translation assistant, how has that benefited your department? Tremendously. We just took training this past week. So we had to do a little bit of training and we're extremely happy with it. We haven't had time to do a lot of translations, but what we've done, for instance, for the weather alerts, for our population, there's a lot of population that, again, is in information isolation and so we worry that they aren't listening to the news and et cetera. So we rushed out, Swahili, Shaluba, Lingala, French, et cetera. So I worry about the smaller language groups, and I'm hoping that through your offices we will be able to connect some of those families. There might be only one family that speaks Swedish or Urdu in your district. So if we find them, we can connect with them and send them information or just connect them directly to DEEM for their alerts. And other than that, how best can council support your office going forward? Well, as I said, if you would collaborate with the neighbors and the associations to include the international population, it would help us to know who's here, who needs help, et cetera, particularly in times of a crisis like a tornado, etc. I know that in Bowling Green, the foreign language speaking population got hit really, really hard. And there was no infrastructure. And so we've actually been advising them through our training with Dean to my counterpart in Bowling Green. And it really gives us a sense of urgency with the weather patterns that are turning strange, right? I think that we need to train our population. So if you want us to go to your district and train people, maybe send out alerts either through the schools or any way we can to connect with them. Thank you, and thank you for all that you do with our population that needs our help. Thank you for the support. Thank you very much. Thank you. Council Member Reynolds. Thank you, Chair, and thank you, Isabel, for the presentation. It was really helpful, and I like how it was laid out. I think probably most of my colleagues know, but I'm not sure what Title VI is. Could you explain about that? Language access is really important to me and we've made big strides now with the website and things like that. But what is Title VI and what rights do our non-English speaking residents have when it comes to getting language access? So Title VI is part of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. And it prohibits discrimination for three protected status, race, color, national origin. Long time ago, national origin, the language that you speak was very much a part of your national origin. And the Supreme Court ruled that the case was in California and it was Chinese students that were not being allowed to go to school. And the Supreme Court ruled that language is such an important part of national origin that we cannot discriminate someone because they don't speak English. And so the right that is for the limited English speaking population is a right to an interpreter or a translation free of charge from those agencies or organizations that receive federal dollars. If you don't receive federal dollars, then you don't have that obligation. But if you do, and we do, yeah. Is that? Yes, thank you very much. Yes, so sometimes most doctors' offices and hospitals receive federal funds and things like that. So if you know someone in your district that is not getting the help that they need, they can request an interpreter for free of charge. And I just think that's important because sometimes we don't know that. And then, like you said, GlobalX gives a lot of support to our public safety, to fire and police. And we can even do more there. Sometimes they get caught in difficult situations and need interpreters or multilingual employees. So that's another thing that I think we could really grow on. And I think we're always responding to the growth and to the different situations. For instance, the police called me at 11 o'clock. They could not, we have a list of interpreters, and they had called everyone on that list, and they couldn't find someone in the middle of the night. There was a baby death, and there was a huge crowd. You cannot use your telephone for a situation like that, right? So what we did was, in response to that difficult situation for them, was we created a list of people. There's about 48 or more people who are willing to come out at that hour of the morning in that shift from midnight shift especially. And we know a lot of women don't want to go out to a difficult situation in the middle of the night. But there are a lot of young translators that are very excited to go out and help the police in that situation. So we did that for the police, and we did that also for DEEM, because a lot of people are willing to help during the crisis, but some people have, some interpreters have family that they want to take care of. And so by adjusting the way we respond, we hope that we're helping the different divisions to meet the needs, the growing needs. Well, thank you so much. And I think we saw during COVID just how vital having your office is. If we don't have an office like that, it's really hard to respond to our residents in a time of crisis. So thank you again. And thank you, Chair. Thank you. Thank you very much for the presentation. I think that was really helpful. Thank you so much. Our next item, we have just a general annual item update for all the items referred to committee. I don't want to go through that long list and explanation, but our core staff, particularly Jennifer, did a great job of kind of summarizing what each of those items are and where they are in committee the last time they were heard, when they were proposed. One thing that I would ask all the council members in the committee to do is, or if there's members that have referred items not in the committee, is to take a look at your items and get with me, Renee, Jennifer, so that we can talk about where are you on the work with these items. Can we try to get them on agendas? We've got some really packed agendas coming up, so we need to communicate on those sort of things. And then are there some items that we can take off? And we can discuss a few of those here shortly. But I would like to see if we could, in the next little bit, get a handle on pacing out our meeting schedule over the next year of where these items are. And some may not be ready even within the next year meeting schedule, but some may be. So please communicate that with us after you've had a chance to look at it. And any other council members that have questions about those items, please feel free to reach out to my office or to the council member who is the sponsor of those items. And so before we move into just our items referred list and a few that I'd like to see if we can clean up, is there anybody just generally on the items list that has anything that they'd like to add or any questions on that? All right, well, then we'll consider that report and summary to be for information only today, but please let that start a communication. Vice Mayor. Thank you, Chair. I had some comments about my item number 27 before I make a motion. So this is the item follow-up from Infill and Redevelopment Committee regarding council-sponsored rezoning. This is one I kind of took over, and I actually also took over chair of the infill and redevelopment steering committee. So after much discussion with committee members, colleagues, former committee members, and staff, late last year I decided to dissolve the infill and redevelopment steering committee. The IRSC was first formed in 2000, so 20 plus years ago, And I really do appreciate all those who had contributed work and labor to this committee over its 20-plus years. I had a variety of missions. And I'm very grateful that infill and redevelopment has had champions in former vice mayors, mayors, and staff alike. So as most of you probably know, but make no mistake, infill and redevelopment is a top priority for me. And I'm going to continue to work on initiatives to make best use of our existing land inside the urban services boundary. So later today at the work session, I'll be adding several infill and redevelopment related items to the GGP committee. Therefore, I move to remove item number 27. So moved. Second. That's discussion. Thank you. We have a motion and a second to remove item number 27. Is there any discussion or question on the motion? Council Member Reynolds? Yes. Vice Mayor, because we're putting so much focus on infill and as we move forward, what would be your reasoning to dissolve something like that that could have the potential to help guide and move infill? So the infill and redevelopment steering committee was formed 20 years ago with a specific mission. They fulfilled that mission, and then it kind of, I'll be completely frank, kind of lingered a bit, and then it took on a few other missions here and there, but it's been essentially a little bit dormant, even though folks have been meeting every month since then. So when I took it over, I initially wanted to see if there were ways that we could sort of reactivate the committee. And after having a lot of discussion and a lot of thought about it, my thinking was that we would work on specific items that were related to infill and redevelopment without having this sort of overarching committee to filter through, because I also had conversations with folks in our planning staff who there was definitely a feeling that we did not want to put another layer of, I don't want to call it bureaucracy, but another layer between some of the items that we're working on. And for my recollection, do you remember what the original mission was? Like, can you state what the mission was? The original mission had mainly to do with what was considered the infill and redevelopment area. And that's still defined, but I feel like 20 years on, we've kind of moved past that idea. I think for a lot of people, when we talk about infill, that means inside the urban services boundary, as opposed to yet another smaller area inside that, because it used to be kind of like a larger sort of downtown area. And so I think for our needs today in terms of housing, especially infill means using our existing land that is within our urban services area. Okay, thank you. I think that might need to be stated clearly for the public because there's a lot of questions from the public around this. So that's why I'm asking. Thank you very much. Thank you. Any other questions or comments on the motion? Hearing none, all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Thank you. We'll remove that item from committee. Council Member Sheehan. Thank you, Chair. I also have a motion to remove if you would like those now. Go right ahead. Okay. For the first item, the Civic Lex public comment proposal, we did receive the final report from Civic Lex. And then from the recommendations, we did end up forming a subcommittee that's chaired by Council Member Legree. So I would like to make that subcommittee is listed down lower in the items. So I would like to make a motion to remove this Civic Lex public comment proposal item. So moved. Motion and second to remove item number one from the committee. Any discussion or questions on the item? All those in favor, please say aye. Any opposed? Thank you that item be removed. Council Member Sheen, did you have anything else? Thank you. Council Member Reynolds. Thank you, Chair. I have two items that I would like to remove. The first one is number 13. That was the intense ZODA. We had already kind of visited that, and I don't see anything further that I would like to do on that. So I make a motion to remove this item from the committee. We have a motion and a second. To remove item number 13 from committee, as that work has already been done and passed, any comments or questions on the motion? Hearing none, all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Thank you. We'll have that item removed. Councilman Reynolds, you said you had another? Yes. On 18, the review and implementation of capital improvement maintenance plan for facilities and fleets. There's a very similar item. That is also in the budget. committee, so I am going to leave it there, work on it there, and remove it from here. All right. Thank you. That's a motion and a second to remove item number 18 as redundant to work being done by the BFED committee. Any items of discussion or questions on that? All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Thank you. That'll be removed. Council Member Reynolds? That's it. Thank you. Thank you very much. Council Member James Brown. Thank you, Chair. I'd just like to update item number four. I think the plan is to have a review of short-term rentals policy in an April committee meeting, if the agenda allows. We will work as hard as we can to try to accommodate that. Yeah. And then also item 26, the accessory dwelling unit update. I think we've had that and made changes per the planning commission's recommendation. So I'd like to make a motion to remove that item. So move. Second. Thank you, Council Members. We have a motion and a second to remove item number 26, the accessory dwelling unit update. Any comment or discussion? Hearing none, all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Thank you. We'll have that removed. Council Member? That's all. Thank you, Chair. Thank you very much. Council Member Lynch. Thank you, Chair. I move that we remove item number 16 of Crown Act as we have passed that ordinance. Second. Thank you, Council Member. We have a motion and a second to remove item number 16, the Crown Act, as already enacted legislation. Any discussion on the motion? Hearing none, all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? That will be removed. Thank you. Council Member Baxter. Thank you, Chair. Item number three was addressed in goals and objectives and with the complete streets plan, so I make a motion to remove that from committee. If a motion is a second, any discussion on the motion? Hearing none, all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Thank you. That passes. That motion will be removed. I have one more to, Chair, please. Item number 31 was the subcommittee work for council rules, and we've completed that work, So I'll make a motion to remove it from committee as well. All right. We have a motion and a second to remove item number 31, the council rules subcommittee, as their work is completed. Any discussion on the motion? All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? That will be removed. Thank you very much. Council Member Plowman, would you please take the chair? Yes, sir. Council Member Worley. Thank you very much. One Stop Lexington was my item. We were going to have a presentation on new work that the city was doing. That presentation is no longer needed as that program is already up and running, so I move to remove that item from committee. Is there a second? Second. All in favor? Aye. Any opposition? That item is removed. Thank you. That's all I have, Vice Chair. And lastly, for our staff, the electronic billboards, there's a highlight to remove that from committee. We removed the subcommittee for billboards, but I've taken that item on as a continuing item, so we don't want to remove that. Are there any other items that anybody would like to give any update on or make any motions to remove? All right, great. Thank you. As soon as we possibly can for our February 13 meeting, we'll have the agenda and the packets out to you by way of preview so that we can all make use of our time as best as possible. It's going to be a very, very packed agenda. So right now we have three items from the planning staff, potentially two of which being an expansion area master plan update, which may not take too much time but may have a lot of questions, and then one that I think will take a significant amount of time, the Urban Growth Management Zoning Ordinance Tax Amendment. This is one of the largest tax amendments that we've had to our zoning ordinance in 20, maybe 30 years. So we hope to get through that in one meeting, but we may not. So I would ask everybody to have all their questions ready, put together. If you have any amendments or thoughts about amendments, to please send those to me beforehand so we can start trying to organize that meeting as best we can, because also we want to try to get through those items. And then as we put the agenda together, tentatively, we also have the Homeless Needs Feasibility Study RFP on that agenda so that we can get that work moving as fast as possible. So that meeting will be packed. Our April meeting is already starting to look packed. So let's try to get through as much as we can in that meeting. If nobody has anything else, thank you all very much. We will stand adjourned. Thank you.