Music Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. We do have our quorum. I will now call to order the February 6, 2024 meeting of the Environmental Quality and Public Works Committee. The first item on our agenda is approval of December 5th, 2023 committee summary. Are there any additions or corrections? Okay, seeing none, is there a motion to approve? Second. Okay, I'm going to give that motion to approve to Councilwoman Gray and the second to Councilmember Sevigny. Any discussion on the motion? Okay, hearing none, all those in favor say aye. Any opposed say nay. Okay, that motion passes. Thank you, everyone. The next up on our agenda is a presentation from Council Member Ellinger on microtransit. So I'm going to turn this over to you. Thank you, Chair. I think Council Member Renner is having issues with her computer. Thank you all. And first I want to thank my Let's Lay Vade who helped with this presentation, Shannon Settles, and also LexTV with getting everything queued up for me. And Via and Sarish especially. It does say on here proprietary and confidential, but I do have their permission to use these slides. So everything is fine with that. And also I want to thank Build. I think if anybody's from Bill, would you please stand up? Thank you. Our decorum is here. No clapping or anything like that. You can cheer and clap very quietly to yourselves as I present. But I want to thank them just to give a little history with what they've done for this community. Back in 2014, we passed the Affordable Housing Fund. And because of Bill and their tenacity to get that, now we have had $30 million that the council's put in, and we've been over-leverage that for about $400 million. So this was a big issue with microtransit that they have been pushing, and I'm happy to work with them and move this forward. And with that, let's say what is, here is going to be that, we'll go here to the, what is public transit and why is it important? Investments in transit benefit cities and communities. Every dollar invested in public transportation generates $5 in economic returns. A household can say nearly $13,000 might take in public transportation living with one less car. Home values were up to 24% higher near public transportation than in other areas. Traveling by public transportation is 10 times safer per mile than traveling by automobile. These are just the economic benefits. We also have environmental ones that we'll be talking about with traffic gas prices, greenhouse gases. Next. Investments in transit benefit cities and communities. A 1% decrease in unemployment boosts economic output by 2%, but up to 30% of potential workers lack reliable transportation. Poor health reduces potential economic output by 15%. However, 1 in 5 Americans without access to transportation go without medical care. The digital transportation revolution currently underway is driven by powerful national trends. Transportation now is at your fingertips. Eight plus million U.S. ride hauling trips in 2021. Ridership isn't king anymore. Now it's about customer experience. That's the number one top of the list. The federal government wants to drive a reduction in greenhouse gases. 27% in the U.S. in 2020 was caused by transportation. The moment is now to capture new riders. Gas prices are up. Congestion is returned to pre-COVID levels. An introduction to microtransit. Microtransit, sometimes called on-demand transit, is public transportation that captures trip requests and group passengers into shared rides in real time. Microtransit, like most on-demand mobility services, is less a completely new mode than an evolution of existing modes enabled by technology. Unlike many of the other shared modes, microtransit can take many forms in how it operates, the types of vehicles it uses, and the forms of partnerships that enable it. Microtransit is not a one-size-fits-all solution. Rather, it is one of many tools available to help meet the mobility needs within a community. Anyone can use the surface. Fleet of vehicles roam a defined zone. Pickup wait usually is 10 to 25 minutes. Can travel anywhere within the zone. Riders typically pay a regular bus fare. You must make a booking to travel. Next. How microtransit is deployed by cities. There's two options. There is one that would be just a software partnership only, but when speaking to LexTran, they would prefer a turnkey partnership, which would have the software, the fleet, and the drivers, and the operation and support teams. Next. The community impact. Microtransit helps residents access the services they need, keeping them healthy, happy, and productive, cover more neighborhoods, attract employers and retain workers, improve access to health care, reduce traffic, and improve quality of life. Via's examples, Via works closely with other partners to create transit services that meet the community's needs. You can see that in Memphis, 73% of the riders did not own a personal vehicle. Birmingham, Alabama, 80% more jobs accessible within a 30-minute ride. Chandler, Arizona, 54% of the trips are to and from schools. Riders rely on transit solutions to provide efficient, affordable mobility options. Affordable 80% of riders make less than $50,000 per year. 70% of riders don't own a personal vehicle. 50% of riders identify as people of color. 30% of riders have a disability that affects their use of transit. 6% of riders use our solutions to work. 30% of riders use their solutions to connect to other transit options. Examples of changing public perception of transit. Here is Wilson, North Carolina, Jersey City, and Baton Rouge, and just how they improve theirs. The next one are quotes from mayors from Jersey City, Seattle, and Arlington. Microtransit solutions are valuable to diverse communities. The Rider Experience. Directly engaged community members is critical to success. You need to market, you need to target your messaging, and engage with riders. Riders are able to book and track trips through a variety of methods. Smartphones, web application, call-in bookings. An example here with Via, the Rider App. and you can see how it's it's similar to what we have here at lextran with my my step and I was actually on it this morning I was debating on if I was going to take a lextran or drive down here and I had to go to the dry cleaner so I chose to drive my car but I'm very fortunate because I live on a route that's on Nicholsville Road I can get on the 5 and I can be here in 15 20 minutes as quick as I can get here in my car, but not everybody has that option. But using the app makes it very easy to do. Next slide. While most riders will be directed to an efficient virtual bus stop, riders with mobility challenges can receive curb-to-curb service. You can see the difference between the virtual and the curb-to-curb. Via technology and support services are designed to ensure every rider can access and thrive in the transit network. wheelchair accessible vehicles, options for unbanked riders, that would be people who don't use mainstream financial services, call-in bookings, web accessible rider tools, multilingual rider apps, multichannel communications, micro transit success stories. I've included three in here. The first one is Memphis. They have poor access to jobs in downtown Memphis and the medical district paired with inaccessible parking surrounding the area. Solutions. Replacing an underperforming mixed route shuttle and added an on-demand flexible affordable transportation option for the underserved Memphis area, made it easier to reach the medical district without a private vehicle, alleviates the city's need to build additional transit infrastructure by allowing riders to connect to existing underutilized transit options. Columbus, Ohio. Transit coverage loss of several fixed route bus lines due to pandemic-related drop in ridership. Solution. In partnership with VIA, CODA launches first micro transit service in July of 2019. Since then, they have introduced three additional zones. Riders can connect to 19 different fixed routes. And that's what I want to try to emphasize here. We're trying to fill in some gaps. We want to work with LexTran. And I'm really glad that Emily Elliott's here with LexTran. She's going to speak after I'm done and talk about how we can work together to make public transportation even better here in this community. Along with, riders can book rides through a mobile application or by phone, and riders are free if making a connection to a fixed route service. 96% of the CODA Plus riders have rated the service as 5 out of 5 stars. The next one is Birmingham, Alabama. I'm going to play a little video from the city council and people who are using it. This is the Birmingham On Demand microtransit vehicle. This program has been going on for six months now in the city of Birmingham in a limited service area. And rides are $1.50 per ride anywhere in the service area. We've had about 15,000 rides over the past six months. I'm Councillor John Hillion. I'm riding with Birmingham On Demand. They are a very valuable resource, especially for those with mobility issues such as myself. They make getting around the city a lot easier, and it's very cost-efficient, too. This is how you get to the grocery store. This is how you get to the doctor's appointment. This is how you get to work, and it's only $1.50. since. I'm Stephen Horton. I'm the chair of the Transportation Committee and the Council for District 8. And guess what? I'm riding with On Demand. I've been using VIA to ride back and forth to the MAX bus station. I also use MAX bus and also the VIA when I can't get a bus. As you see, it just got through raining and there are convenient alternatives. If you can't get the bus, you can get beer. The first thing I want to talk about is we've got some politicians that see needs in this city. And we've got counselors that was Darrell O'Quinn and John Herriard that seen a need back in December of 19. But they said, hey, we need some better transportation in addition to our good transportation of Max. Hi, I'm counselor Crystal Smitherman. I'm Ryan with Birmingham On Demand. So in order to use the service with Birmingham Villa, all you need is a telephone number and a credit or debit card. We'll pick you up at one of our pinpoint locations and then give you a call so that we can make sure that we're both at the designated location. And then we'll pick you up and then you'll ride in a clean environment to whatever drop-off location of your choice you chose. They wish for more opportunities. They wish for expansion. So I think it's important that we continue this service, but we continue by expanding it as well, making sure more people have opportunities. And the thing I like the most is, you know, all things being equal. If everybody had an opportunity to get a job, it's access to get to that job would be the most critical. So I think it's important. I find that the impact that VIA has on this city is enormous, and that's speaking from a driver's perspective, because I meet a lot of the people, and a lot of people are able to access hospitals, jobs. Numerous of people have gained employment, been having access just to get to the job back and forth with VIA, so they really, really love it. Funding a microtransit program. For any man with a swollen prostate, do not drink water. I know that prostate problems have nothing to do with the prostate itself. But with something disturbing that your swollen prostate and the... I just want to see if you guys are paying attention. funding a microtransit program. And this is where you all can get involved here. In this slide, VIA helps the partners identify access funding for turnkey services, and that's what we would be wanting here. From federal funding dollars to federal, state, and local grants to public-private partnerships. Examples of how microtransit services are funded, and you can look at the different cities and their funding sources. And the next one is examples. VIA leverages our industry experience connection to help partners turn pilots into long-term sustainable funding sources. And that's what I'd like to do is turn this from a pilot project, and we'll talk about that later, but into a sustainable funded service. And with that, you can see the last page on how they collaborated with the, can be funded similarly through unique means based on local dynamics. So once again, it's all, look at each community, but we have an opportunity here with the money that we have set aside in the capital projects, that we have over $35 million in that, that could use 400,000, that we could do an 80-20 match and actually get raised $2 million and be able to do this. I'll ask Emily to now speak on, they have in their comprehensive operations analysis, they have a report and they actually talk about mobility on demand and I'd ask her to talk about some of the challenges that we have to look at and try to help in the funding and work together. that we're going to talk about user experience, use cases, zones, which will be a big one, ridership vehicle demand, estimation, limitation, implementation, cost estimates, funding sources, marketing, and then finally the implementation and the phasing in. And then Emily Elliott, and if you could give us probably we'll need probably five more minutes if you don't mind, Council. Council Member Ellinger had asked me to allow for some extra time to have Emily Elliott speak so five minutes yeah is that good okay thank you hi good afternoon i'm emily elliott i am the director of planning and community development with lextran um so i just want to thank um council member ellinger and uh build for bringing attention to public transportation in lexington it's exciting we love what we do we love serving people. We love serving our community and providing mobility solutions to people. So microtransit is an excellent discussion. I think for Lex Tran, some of our challenges, you can see one right here in front of you. Funding. Currently, a microtransit program is not budgeted or funded for Lex Tran. So it's a conversation, this comprehensive operations analysis that we did, and the on-demand portion is just a small portion of that analysis. It analyzed both our fixed route system, paratransit, and the potential for a future horizon for on-demand services. That was in 2021. So it's something that we've been thinking about and we've been considering, and we're trying to stay on the pulse of trends throughout the nation. But there are some limitations. How do you fund it? And how do you fund it in a sustainable way? How do you build a program, whether it's a pilot or a long-term program, program that both serves the needs of the community but also doesn't outpace itself so much that it becomes ineffective. So for LexTran, we need a strong definition of success when we're putting a program like this together. What does that look like? Where are our community needs and how are those met? There are gaps in public transportation. It's sort of an inherent thing when you're operating it. Everyone is not always going to get served. For people with disabilities in Lexington, we have a complimentary service, a paratransit service called wheels that can allow them to get around. But that service as well as our fixed route service has a gap from about 1230 to 1 a.m. until 5 to 6 a.m. So if someone's working a third shift job, we can get them there, we can get them home, but we can't necessarily do both for them. So that is a gap that would be filled. There are lots of folks that have specific and particular needs and maybe medical appointments are mentioned a lot. Maybe that's a consideration. But all the things for everyone is really difficult to define if we're successful in that way to allot enough funding and to make sure that we're not trying to be Uber and Lyft. We're trying to be public transportation. Uber and Lyft exist. they fit a niche, but this is a subsidized public transit agency funded program that helps alleviate some of that end user cost. The agency then eats that cost. The agency then also has capital costs. Turnkey programs are great. They provide everything. That is definitely the solution that we would be looking at, but we'd also be interested in targeting certain areas of the city, areas that we know may lack good coverage of public transportation, so maybe you don't have great access to a bus stop. So that would be in there. In our packet for our on-demand, we already identified four zones, and there are two on the north side and two on the south side of town. So we would want to concentrate on those zones and making sure we already know that the need is there. We've done some of the studies on that. You know, the other thing, and I'm moving really quickly, I'm sorry. The other thing about this is it needs to plug into fixed route service. A curb to curb service is not going to be the most sustainable and the best. It's another car carrying someone in traffic, in congestion, from point to point throughout the city. Plugging into fixed route service is imperative. That's what allows that trip to be more efficient. That's what allows it to be more affordable. So someone, say, in the identified zone, sort of on the north side of town, would plug into a virtual bus stop or a designated area. These solutions have the ability to walk them to where they need to go, to let them know when their ride is going to be there, and then they're plugged into the fixed route system. So we're not taking funding away from the fixed route system, but we would be augmenting that. But that's one of the challenges because it's difficult to say, you live in this zone, you qualify. You don't live in this zone, you don't qualify. and knowing where that has the most profound impact on our community. You know, this requires a lot of flexibility. It requires a lot of thought and a lot of answers to questions that I don't think we've made it to yet. But without funding secured, we are not prepared to apply for grants yet. When we're applying for a grant for something like this, we're guaranteeing the FTA that we have the funding secured, and currently we don't and it's not budgeted. So that's something that I think moving forward we would all like to consider and we would all like to look and just keep continuing the conversation and be open about how this would work in our city, how it would make our city better. Thank you, Emily. And I'd just like to sum up if it's okay. In summary, if we want to get more people using public transportation, we need to make it more convenient and frequent. With Microtransit, we had the opportunity. The Council today can partner with LexTran on a pilot project. We have set aside $35 million in our capital account. We could designate $400,000 for a grant that could be leveraged for $2 million, 80-20 for a pilot program. LexTran would help us with the grant, put out the RFP, and work with the company who will provide the turnkey operation for it. Complete Streets is one of the Council's top priorities. Public transportation falls under that category. The time is now to make public transportation one of our priorities and by partnering with Lux Tran with Microtransit, we will be showing this community it is. Who is with me? Since I am not on this committee, I cannot make a motion, but the floor is yours to do it. Thank you for the time. Thank you. Do you want to stay there if people have questions or do you want to come sit? Okay. I'm fine here or there. It doesn't matter. Council members, I see some folks already signed in for questions or comments, so make sure you sign in to be able to speak. First up is Councilwoman Gray. Thank you, Chair. So my first question is, by the way, thank you colleague, City Councilmember at large, Chuck Ellinger, for all the work that you've done on this. It's, you've taken it up and I really appreciate it you spearheading this on behalf of BUILD. So thank you, BUILD, for bringing this to our attention. Now, so Emily, you mentioned that some gaps in the Lex Tran services. You all are, I'm slightly confused because you all are in control of the hours that you operate. So, and you're also in control of your budget and you mentioned that you all have not budgeted or planned for this program and I'm just curious why. So when we completed our comprehensive operations analysis this was not a near this was a long-term plan so there was not a the plan when we worked on this was to make more frequent and better service currently in the city. We are right now experiencing some Operator shortage and hiring just like literally everyone else. So expanding to a brand new service while not augmenting the service that's already there and working for people was not a near term or even a midterm plan at the time. So it's not currently budgeted now. Do you all have plans to budget for it? It's a discussion. I can't speak to exactly how much and this and that. But it's definitely a discussion to see what the need is and what the demand is and hear a little bit more from the community so that we can have a little bit more of an idea and a plan so that we're not just budgeting something with no strong barriers to make sure that it can operate appropriately or take money away from other currently operating routes or services that we have. I understand. So to my dearest colleague here, Chuck Ellinger. Or Emily, you can jump in here as well. I know on the MPO, on the Transportation Policy Committee, we spoke about some grants. You actually asked a question about federal grants and federal funding for this program. I'm just curious, what funding possibilities did you hear of on that level? Well, I'm not the expert, but I see our NPO expert. Chris, would you mind talking about this? I hate to put you on the spot, but since you're here, and you know better than I, and we did have this slight discussion in the last NPO meeting. Right. So there are probably about 17 different programs under the federal program where there's an opportunity. The challenge is that they are very competitive opportunities, And some of these programs, as many as 9 out of 10 applications are not successful. So that's part of the challenge that we have is that the demand nationally for transit services way outstrips our ability to fund it, whether it's from the federal level, state level, or even here locally. So that's something that we have to keep in mind is that historically we've horribly underfunded, in my opinion, public transportation. And so we are happy to have any conversation to be able to expand transit services to our citizens, because we estimate that about one-third of our population is not able to physically operate a motor vehicle, either because of their abilities or because of their incomes or just because of their age. Thank you, sir. And I guess I'll just follow up with that. So when I made that suggestion about the capital money, the $400,000, if we could designate that there, then we could use that money. And as Emily had said, that we could then go after the grants, but we'd have that money designated that if we were able to achieve one of those grants, then we would have the money with the 80-20 to do it. And that's why I'd like to designate that money now so we can go after those opportunities. Thank you. But what concerns me is that Lex Tran did not plan for this. I know that this is a conversation that I personally have had with Build, as with many of our other colleagues have had with Build, about this program that we certainly do need. So that's just my concern about this right now. I think the biggest issue with that is, like everything, is funding. And they can only do so much. and this is an opportunity where we can leverage some money that we have and work with them. They would still run the program. We don't want to take over Lex Turan's job, but this would give them an opportunity to fill in some gaps where they'd like to fill in. Thank you, Chair. Council Member Fogel. Thank you, Chair. And thank you, CM Ellinger, for bringing that to us. I would be honored to make that motion. One thing I do know is that this opportunity is going to be for everybody. The only thing that when I heard Alabama talk about debit card and credit card, I know that most of citizens don't own those. And so that would be the only flag. The other thing I know is that it would help our seniors and people in the rural areas get into the city and enjoy what we have. And we have expanded. And I love our seniors. I'm one of them. But I love our seniors. And actually, what we're talking about is our seniors have paid taxes all their lives. And this is not the city's money. This is their money. This is the community money from taxes and from working. And so we're actually asking to give this money right back to the citizens of Lexington. I love this program. I know that if we all are in agreement and $400,000, okay, what will make it work? It looks adorable. I know that Lexington, I've watched Lexington grow all my life. This is my home, and the transit center has expanded. that I remember when you were on Limestone and Loudon and then you moved services and that you provided transportation. Just like any other industry, we have a lack of folks who can work, willing to work, then the buses. So I'm saying all of that to say this, build is resilient. And when they go after something and put their teeth in it, like bullying and payday lenders, don't forget, I mean, they'd be doing some good work. I'm not going to be standing against them. And I've been a part of Build for a while now. And I think this is something that we definitely need to look into. I'm one council member, but I want to say that you have my full support. I would like to make that motion whenever it gets to that part. I would be honored somebody might jump up and make it before me. But I'm just letting everyone know that this is a much needed service. to fill those gaps. And Madam Chair, that does it for me. Thank you. Chair, if you don't mind, I would like to just answer one thing, which you talked about the unbanked. So that is an issue that I did address in there, and you can find other ways if you don't have your normal financial debit or checking that we can work, and they have worked with people who are unbanked. Council Member Lynch. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Council Member Ellinger, for a great presentation. Thank you to Build for bringing this forward. I enjoyed the conversation that I had with your representatives last week. So my questions are really nuts and bolts questions that you brought to light throughout the presentation. And my first question is regarding VIA. I know there are many different companies out there that do this same kind of service. is VIA the preferred company for this potential venture, or are we looking at several different companies? We would put out an RFP and it would be independent. And once again, we would work with LexTrain because LexTrain is going to come up with the RFP and what our parameters were and how we're going to do it. And LexTrain would be in charge of that. And we would open up to any provider. We've just been fortunate that VIA has really helped us out and got us to this point. but it would be open to anybody. Okay. Awesome. Let's see. My next question is regarding the curb-to-curb service, which is really nice, those of our neighbors that utilize the curb-to-curb service instead of the virtual bus stops, would they end up paying more for the curb-to-curb service? Would that be a potentially higher cost? You can talk about what, when you talk about a premium service and how that works, but our goal would be to have it the same amount for everybody, and that's public transportation, you want to make it affordable for everybody, and that is the goal. Once again, that does now cut in to how much that you can provide, because that goes into the grant and how many people you can serve. But yes, there are opportunities to have a premium service, but I think our goal would be to have it be part of what LexTrain with the dollar and as Emily and I both said is we want to make this part of the fixed route too. That's how it makes the whole system better is if we can tie into the fixed part of it too. Could you all explain the virtual bus stop? What is that? So a virtual bus stop is just a designated geo-located area. So it could be anywhere. It It could be in front of a particular store that people are very familiar with. It could be sort of a centralized location in a neighborhood, like an intersection or something like that. But it's geo-located, and so if you're using an app, you are able to get that location. It's provided to you so that you can travel to or from that location. And so a virtual bus stop may be on an end plugging into a fixture at an actual bus stop. and then if me and three of my neighbors want to ride together and we all book an on-demand, it may be a centralized location for the three of us to come together. But it's geolocated on the map, and most of these apps are able to provide you the information, the walking information to get you to and from without significant confusion. So these bus stops would not then be a traditional bus stop that would have a bench to sit on or a shelter to cover necessarily. It could be in front of Walmart, for example. Right, and these are on-demand. So with the fixed route buses, with the amenities, we know, and amenities are placed based on ridership and utilization and requests and those sorts of things. So we know people are utilizing those. These virtual bus stops are, you can, you don't have to if you want to. So it's all, you are calling for the service. You're making a request to be picked up. So a virtual bus stop allows you to have a centralized location in an area. And then people can come to it. And, you know, you can plan things like safe lighting, you know, sidewalk connections, that sort of things, so that people can, it can be accessible for them. But because you wouldn't necessarily know the ridership to start out, an amenity wouldn't be placed like a bench or a shelter or whatever. Thank you. Let's see. I guess my last question would be, Council Member Ellinger, could you go? over one more time for me your proposed costs or funding breakdown the 400,000 80 20 who who was pays the 80 who pays the 20 so if you if you look in their comprehensive analysis and if you there was basically six different options you had two in the north two in the south and then they also combined the two in the south and two in the north so looking at that and this these were 2021 numbers. So everything has gone up, as we all know. So what the $400,000 would be, would be able to do an 80-20 to work with a federal grant then that they would pay 80, we would pay 20. And that would give us the leverage on that. And that would be able to do, probably do either, depending on once again, we work with Lex Tran, they would come at the RFP, but it would be either probably the North Zone or the South zone and and that would probably be able to do that do the pilot see how it works and then hopefully if it's if it's beneficial then we would improve it and go forward from this but it'd give us an opportunity to to have the pilot and and see that it that it works and it brings more ridership in thank you council member ellengrin thank you emily and thank you chair council member lecree Thank you, Chair. I want to pick up on Councilmember Lynch's previous line of questioning, just to get a little more clarity on the 80-20. So my understanding of what you're sharing, Emily, and Councilmember Ellinger, is that that $400,000 would be the 20% LFUCG match for a federal grant. Now, does this federal grant exist? Is there an open application window? Do we have someone to write that grant? Can you tell me a little bit more about that part of the process? Well, ironically, there was one that just came up on February 2nd, so we missed that opportunity. And as Chris, and Chris, you once again, you're more, maybe the expert on this, if not Emily, when you talked about there's 17 different ones, and we also have with the bipartisan the, what's the? IJA. Yes, that one. So there's opportunities out there right now, and that's what we, by designating the money, then we would have an opportunity then to go after the grants. We'd work with Lex Tran on going after the opportunities for those grants. And Chris, you gave that kind of... Yeah, yeah, we need to clarify here that just because there's something identified in the IIJ doesn't mean that there's actual opportunity that you can apply for at this moment in time. And some of those programs are annual notices that go out. Some are every two years. Some are only once over the five-year period. So there's a lot of variability there. And, of course, the challenge that the federal government is going to want to see is, who are you serving? They want specific details about how you're going to provide this service. There's quite a bit of background work that would need to be done before submitting an application. And I think that's part of the challenge. I think the key is in order to get it, you have to have the funding so that they know if they do do the grant that they'll have the funding there that they can do the 80-20. And I think that's the biggest part that we can do at this point is designate the money there so that we can then go after the funding to get it. Because if we don't have it, we could have every opportunity on grants, but if we don't have the money, it's not going to happen. Right. And then the other thing that we also have to keep in mind, some of these programs are looking for an overmatch in order to be competitive. As I mentioned earlier, in some of these cases, nine out of ten applications are not successful, and some of the successful applications provide more than the minimum 20% match. That's something else, depending on the program, we'll have to keep in mind. Okay. I have a couple more questions. I still have two and a half minutes. My understanding is that were we to be competitive for a federal grant, were we to gain that grant, that 80% to go with our earmarked potential $400,000, then we're talking about maybe if we get it several million dollars just for a pilot program. So the grant would be for a pilot program that would serve one or two quadrants of the needed target areas, and then someone would need to work with LexTran to help them answer the questions, definitions of success, associated cost increases, timing, and environmental traffic congestion. So would that be someone within government like yourself who would work to determine those parameters? Yes, someone within the government, whether it's within the MPO or more likely us, would have to coordinate with LexTran. And we do very frequently on matters such as this. One thing to keep in mind, I do have some familiarity with the service that's operating in Arlington, Texas that was cited here. Keep in mind they are serving an area similar to our urban service boundary, but for two years they needed $30 million to provide that service. And only 40% of that came from federal dollars. The rest came from a mix of local dollars. So if this were to come together for a pilot program, then not only would we need to determine how much money would take to continue the area of the pilot program beyond the duration of the federal grant, but also we would have to determine how many millions of dollars it would take and where that money would come from in order to serve the entirety of the community. And what you're saying is in a similar space in Arlington, that costs $30 million. And that was for two years, yes. For two years. two years. And that's the other thing the federal government is going to want to know is how are you going to sustain this service beyond the lifetime of the grant. Okay. That's helpful context. I'll log back in if I have other questions. Thank you so much, Chris. Thank you. Chair. Vice Mayor Will. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Council Member Ellinger for bringing this forward and working with Lex Tran and build on it. I think like Council Member Lynch, my questions are also kind of nuts and bolts on this. I support the idea. I think it fulfills a need that we really have in Lexington. And some of my questions go back to the idea of the grant as well. Are we setting aside $400,000 in order to potentially get $1.6 million in federal grants? Is there a specific grant that we're looking at? Or how do we come to this $400,000 and then a a total of $2 million. How do we come to that figure? By looking at their comprehensive analysis and their zones and the cost that it was going to be to be able to implement what they had put in their analysis. And so a couple of years ago when we did the comprehensive operations analysis, there was an in-house model and a turnkey model. And at that time, our turnkey model ended up being about $1.4 million, just over $1.4 million. And so we're sort of just adding costs because everything is more expensive as sort of an estimate to what a pilot might look like. Okay. And then so when you talk about turnkey, and that's the direction that you all want to go into, right? So when you talk about turnkey, that's essentially a third party that you'd be contracting with that's already kind of built out to do this instead of you all creating fleet, creating staff. Exactly. So that would allow someone who already has established vehicles, already has some established software. So instead of bringing in new vehicles, bringing in new software, new staff, all of that, they are able to sort of package everything and present it as an option that's ready to go. And do you all do that from LexTrans perspective? Do you all do that in a RFP kind of mode of finding? Yes, so it would be, there would be a scope of work and a call for projects and a full RFP process for fair and open bidding. Okay. So, I'm kind of curious to sort of thinking about it in terms of a pilot versus full implementation. I think Mr. Avilia talked about 30 million over two years in a comparable city. How do we test, how do we gauge the success of a pilot program at the scale of a pilot? And that's really difficult and that's one of the questions that we keep coming back to. How we've heard a lot from Build about different gaps in transportation and different needs that they feel are being met. But that we would need to reach back out into the community and find out what they need from us, where they're finding gaps in our service, and then attempt to frame a pilot in a way that meets those. And then there needs to be specific parameters. Is ridership a parameter? Of course it is. Is customer satisfaction a parameter? Of course it is. waiting time, all of those things, how well does the software work, there are all of these things. And then when you're working with a contractor, of course, there's sort of those gauging those items and how well all of that goes. So for us, it has to be very specific and it has to be a well-defined project so that we have a specific metric. Because if it's just everybody all over all the time, it makes it really difficult to know was this successful or if it wasn't, why isn't it successful, those sorts of things. Do you have an idea of how long a pilot program would last? Not currently, no. Okay. That would have to be laid out in a scope, in a grant, all of those sorts of things. There would be a full timeline associated with that. Okay, great. Thank you. Thank you, Chair. Council Member Brown. Thank you, Chair. Microtransit, I don't know who's going to answer the question, But didn't we have a program called Wheels at one time that served this particular purpose? It was a public, I think it wasn't a nonprofit, but I'm not sure. So Wheels exists. It is a complimentary paratransit service for people with disabilities. So you have to be qualified. It is not open to per se everyone because it is a qualified service. And the crux of that is that based on the nature of your disability, you are not able to ride a fixed route bus. So whether that be a cognitive impairment or a physical impairment, that you are unable to get to and appropriately engaged with the bus system. Are you all still taking? Yeah, we did 160,000 trips last year. You still do wheels. So that's part of this micro transit situation, isn't it? Isn't that one of the pegs in the? Yes and no. No. We have heard from some community members that they feel that this should be part of it, but that service currently exists. And what we don't want to do is take away funding from a service that currently exists and put it toward another one. So should items be accessible for people with disabilities? Absolutely, at 100%. But is it designated solely for people with disabilities know. But this micro transit, what we're looking at here, it would be a very expensive project based on the history we already have and the numbers from some of the other cities. And the ongoing cost there, we don't really know what it would be. And then when we're talking about, I mean, you know, anybody on Medicaid gets free transportation services. Is that not correct right now? So FTSB, Federated Transportation, operates a non-emergency medical transport for folks with Medicaid. So it must be to or from a medical appointment, and it cannot be an emergency. That be part of the ridership that this microtransit would be involved in? I mean, is that... Not necessarily, no. That would not be considered a gap in transportation. That would be considered filled by that service, not operated by LexTrain, obviously, but it's a service that's currently available and operates. Now, this is obviously, if it was worthwhile for revenue purposes, you'd have some for-profit companies coming in, putting the money in their capital vehicles and things of that nature, and actually establishing something. Obviously, we don't have that. Is there anybody out there, any outreach there, or would that be the RFPs that we're looking for? It would be RFPs that we're looking for, yeah, absolutely. And obviously there's revenue generation from this. In other words, this is not a free service that we're talking about. No, there would be some revenue generated from fares. The cost of the trip to the end user is important. The cost of the trip to the transit agency is also important. So that would be part of an evaluation process was knowing if the trips were sort of outpacing the cost of the service or the anticipated cost of the service. I like the idea of just having a pilot program because I think this is a big item. I don't think, as you mentioned, in Texas, $30 million over a two-year period, I believe. But the federal grant area that we're talking about, there's a time limit, I guess, on federal grants where you would get the money and have to actually use it. So, you know, in answer to what you're supporting, Council Member, the grant, if you got a grant award and you matched it, you would have a certain amount of time to make that grant, you know, use that dollars there. Are we ready to do that or do we need to get more information on this whole program here and maybe with a task force? Because this is community-wide type of thing. So, you know, that's where I'm coming from is, you know, how quick do you do something there to pour money into it until you really got a good plan? And when we're talking about zones, I'm about running out of time, but the zones you're talking about, how do you arrive at that? And what would Lexington, you know, how many zones would you have to have for Lexington? So in our analysis, there was a ridership and vehicle demand analysis. And so they looked at these zones, and that's how they arrived. These were the areas where there's active fixed route ridership. So currently in those zones, there are active fixed routes running. And so they were looking at the demand for the fixed routes, the actual ridership on the fixed routes, and then assessing how this demand zone might sort of work for those folks to plug them either into the fixed drought that may not operate in that zone. That's not necessarily, there's not like a plan to remove fixed drought in any of these zones or anything like that. But to say based on information that we already have, these areas would be ripe for offering an on-demand service based on the level of current ridership and the demand that we're seeing. Thank you, Chair. Council Member Savigny. Thank you, Chair. And thank you for the presentation. And thank you, Council Member Ellinger, for your presentation. I've got just a few questions, and I do appreciate the folks from BUILD supporting this and kind of bringing this up. And I think it's kind of cool, so I do think there's a place. My questions are I'm hesitant to just say let's give them $400,000 to figure it out. Now, I would say that we do a lot of $200,000 studies at LFUCG. I've seen a lot of those. So that's kind of one thing. My questions are, because we don't really have great oversight into your books, but your budget was about a $36 million budget this year. Correct. And are you telling me that this isn't high enough on your radar to spend about 1% of your budget to invest in? Like, we give you that responsibility to manage transport of the public. And I'm just kind of curious about that. Yeah, so it's on our radar. This analysis will very soon be out of date, and we will need a new analysis. These are done, the horizon is usually one to five years. So it's about a five-year project. 2021, we're at 2024. So, you know, we're going to need this again. We're going to need a new study. We're going to need more information again. At this point, being that it was not a near or a midterm project, we were not anticipating studying it in a more intensive way currently. Um, so we were more focused on making the near and midterm improvements to the system that currently exists, um, managing the operating expenses of those systems that currently exist, um, and looking to this as a, as a future project. But as part of your budget process, I think you come to this, this body to get your budget approved. Is that right? Yes. Okay. In May, April, May. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, and is it something that is on your board's radar to maybe include in your budget for next year? Yes, we've had a number of discussions with the board. Okay, great. And then understanding that the, and we're just going to wing a number of $15 million a year, you know, so let's say this costs $15 million a year. your budget's 36 and that's based on a tax rate of .060, I think it is, or somewhere close to that. Six cents for every $100 valuation. Yeah, yeah. So we'd probably, that number would end up having to double. So I think as a council, we have to basically say we're willing to double the tax rate for that type of public transit. And that's a big swallow, right? And I think that our constituents are going to hold us accountable. Absolutely. They're going to be just like, they're not going to care that much about LexDran. So I think that that's just important to note. I personally would like to see you guys move this up in your priority list. I feel like BUILD has done its job of raising the issue really high, and I think we're at this meeting because of that. But I also think there's going to be ample opportunities to apply for grants over time, and I think I would love to see it higher in your priority list in order for us, as compared to us driving it. I think I would love to see you guys drive it more. So thank you so much. That's all I have, Chair. Council Member Menares. Thank you, Chair. And thank you both for your presentation. I'm not going to go into concerns for funding. I think my colleagues have already gone into that quite a bit. I do like the idea of filling in gaps as a mom and currently a mom of college students. They actually graduated from a Fayette County Public Schools magnet program, and I had the benefit of them graduating from the MSTC program at Dunbar. One of the challenges sometimes as being a parent to magnet school students is transportation. Is there a minimum age requirement? A minimum age requirement? For riders. For fixed route or on demand? For rider. So for fixed route, there's not a requirement. So a child rides at no additional expense up to age seven. Also, as a mom, that feels a little weird that a seven-year-old might come and pay and get on the bus on their own. So if I'm teaching someone to ride the bus, I'm going to ask a parent to use their discretion. There's no requirement. There is a behavior expectation. There is an expectation that an unattended minor who is in need, we offer safe place services so that they will reach out if they're sort of interacting with the system for some reason. But there's not a specific age requirement. At age seven, they have their own ticket, if that makes sense. But, for instance, we have some very wonderful middle schoolers who do some similar traveling throughout the city, and we have some very unruly high schoolers who probably should not be traveling unattended. So that's really at the discretion of the responsible adult in their life and an inappropriate conversation about public transportation. And so same for this on-demand option, should this come about? That would be a discussion, and that would need to be a parameter. I cannot speak for VIA's parameters on a requirement like that. Okay. And then I know that one of the things that was mentioned in the presentation was messaging and how important that would be. One of the things on your slide was how this may potentially increase on average housing prices by 24%. And we hear a lot about how our housing prices are already inaccessible to a lot of people. So just thinking about the fact that most of the people that would need this are already individuals that come from a low-income background. And then, although this is a great option, and I support filling in these gaps, the idea of messaging where we're already saying that the added bonus of this is also the fact that housing prices are going to go up by 24%. I'm not sure if that's what that slide actually meant, but I can understand what you might think at. But I think having a good, reliable public transportation system does, and it's mostly on corridors that are going to help people who are going to want to live near public transportation. So I guess from that standpoint, it will raise your property value up, which I can understand where we're talking about pricing of houses is expensive, but it also does show that the importance of what people think of public transportation. Thank you. That's all I have, Chair. Council Member Baxter. Thank you, Chair, for the recognition since I'm not on the committee. I do appreciate the conversation. I know I came in late, but I was watching it on my phone as I came in. So I do appreciate the conversation, and I do want to commend Build for identifying a gap in the community and coming to us with a solution because a lot of times people will come to us with problems, but they don't help us figure out how to fix it. So I commend you guys for trying to look for solutions and appreciate this conversation. I think with anything new that we do in the community, setting expectations is really important. And I know that Emily, you spoke to that a little bit, especially if we get as far as applying for a grant and we don't get it. I think that's something really important to keep top of mind. So I do have a few other quick questions. It's my understanding, and I think in the Lex Tran, I know in the Lex Tran information, there was mention of some voucher programs. And so, Council Member Ellinger, I was just curious. It's my understanding that a voucher does exist that would subsidize Uber and Lyft rides. And I was just curious if you had looked into those as options. Not a lot. I am familiar with it, but Emily's probably more familiar with it than I am. And so if you want to talk about it, you'd probably better feel for it. I'm not the expert. So these providers do work with cities, counties to provide transportation vouchers. So essentially there is an agreement made. There's a cost for the voucher. There's a sort of price point or a ride. And then those are provided at whatever parameter that might be agreed upon. And it allows someone to queue that ride and then they can use the voucher to subsidize either a portion or depending on the cost, the entirety of the ride. So it's very much like an organization purchasing sort of bus passes and giving them out. It's just sort of a larger agreement and some government entities have found that to be a suitable stopgap. Okay. I appreciate that information. I think it's important for us as we're considering new modes of transportation to make sure that we're including everything. And I know that in our conversations, we've talked about some of the improvements that we could make to our wheels program. And I know that there are some gaps there as well. Do you feel like any amount of funding that you may apply for in a grant would be better utilized on the service that we currently already have in our toolbox? Yes. So any amount of funding that is applied to current existing programs for improvements is amazing, and it's great, and it's very, very helpful. We are currently operating a paratransit system and we see the challenges regularly. We work regularly with their staff. We're in daily communication with them and looking at numbers and that sort of thing. So we already know some of those challenges and where funding could be applied to provide more vehicles to operate, to provide flexibility for scheduling, for end users, that sort of thing. So the answer is yes. could be money applied to those programs to work to improve them. One of the challenges that we had with this comprehensive operations analysis was that once we got everything running to a schedule, we found out that it was going to be, we were going to need more drivers and it was going to be more expensive. And so that limited what we were able to actively implement in this plan already. So funding to be able to have more vehicles on fixed route, more operators available, that sort of thing, it's huge. Well, I think anything we can do to address a gap is important. I do have initial concerns about this particular idea, but I appreciate the conversation and learning more about it. And I appreciate the board's dedication to looking into this option as well as others as you move forward to a new, your new study where you will, you know, look through all of our options. um yeah i think my biggest concern at this point is if we're trying to improve um if our goal is a city is um carbon neutrality adding more vehicles to the road is a concern of mine but i do understand that this is a potential solution and i would be interested in just having further conversations about it. It's appreciated. Thank you, Chair. Council Member Plumman. Thank you, Chair, and thank you for the recognition. I do not serve on this committee. I'm just curious, what is our current fleet? How many buses do you, not just regular buses that we have right now? The fixed route bus is 76. 176? No, 76. 76. Sorry. Thank you. Thank you. And have you studied or have you looked at, or Council Member Ellinger, what does this interact, bringing in this new service? How does that interact with the current profile of the fleet? And what does it do to the bus use in other cities? Do we know that at all? So it depends on the model that you use. I think the model that works best for Lexington and works best for a lot of other agencies is to feed into that fixed drought system. So you're not drawing ridership away because that is a potential. You can draw ridership away from current users, from what we're currently doing. But what we've been looking at and what Councilmember Ellinger was proposing is a feeder system. And so the system is zoned and it feeds into the fixed drought system. So it, in theory, promotes ridership of the fixed route buses, but it doesn't necessarily change the volume of buses or the operations of the fixed route. It's sort of in addition to that. I was just thinking just the cost of having that many buses that a lot of folks are not using for different reasons. For different reasons that I wanted if this would save us any monies going to this on that side. On that side. Not on the new program. So it's difficult because there's also the acquisition of vehicles for this fleet. They are obviously much smaller, so the cost is less, but there's difficulty nationally getting vehicles for all levels. So our fleet is currently, we've got several buses on order to be coming in. Many of them are at the end of their useful life, so they're on a replacement plan. but the fixed route should in a model run as as intended and then this micro transit should feed into that system so the hope would be that it would augment the system and not take away from it and not have sort of buses running without riders that sort of thing okay thank you and and council member ellinger you and i have talked about this and i am supportive we need to do something but I do think there's a lot of details that need to be you know refined or at least get going because it's a little premature right now I'm what we're gonna do and I do support looking at looking at this so thank you thank you chair vice mayor boo thank you chair miss Elliot are is Lex Tran contributing anything to this $400 or $400,000 match for to try to get these grants? There is nothing budgeted currently. So staff time and that sort of thing, but there is nothing, there is no dollar sign currently attached to it. Okay. And we've had a lot of conversations about obviously this particular ask for 400,000 that hopefully we can parlay into a total of two million dollars with the federal funding. We haven't really talked about what long-term costs look like, right? And you know, we have sort of these ballparks about 30 million for two years, so 15 a year. What is the balance of that kind of funding look like in relation to the city of Lexington, LFUCG versus LexTran? It's one thing to talk about having a conversation about putting in 400,000 to kind of test things out. It's another question of what are we long term on the hook for in terms of funding. funding. And I think that's one of our current concerns, is because we have these ideas in other communities and similar communities, we can do peer agency analyses, but what does a long-term sustainable funding source look like for this service? What expense does that take away, or what funding does that take away from currently operating expenses? And that's, you know, the associated costs will potentially increase with a service like this. it and then costs will increase if you need additional vehicles, if you need additional operators, all of those sorts of things. So we know that the costs are there. And we don't currently have a sustainable funding source for long-term usage of a program like this identified. Okay. I appreciate Councilmember Savigny doing the math so that the rest of us didn't have to, but those are a lot of my own concerns as well as to the, not just the short term but the long term sort of fiscal impact to the city government. I think it's always great when we're having really these robust conversations because we're spending your money, taxpayer money. And the other thing to note is we're in the beginning of our budget process which usually takes upwards of six months. We're actually beginning those budget conversations tomorrow. We have a joint budget retreat with the council and the administration. Having this big of a figure in front of us when we're just jumping into budget considerations gives me a little bit of pause and I think I echo some of my colleagues here about the fact that there are a lot of details and a lot of more things to kind of hammer out and for us to be clear and comfortable on. So that's kind of where I am on it. And I think I can speak for probably, I don't want to speak for other folks about that. I think we support the idea of it. And I think we recognize the gap and we want to find the solution. And this may well be the solution. But for me, I don't know if I'm ready to act today based on the information that I have in front of me to allocate nearly a half million dollars. Thank you. Thank you, Chair. I'm just going to note that it's already 2-10, and we have a whole other presentation that's probably going to take a while for us to get through as well, because it has a lot of public interest. So I'm just going to ask folks that are remaining to sign up to kind of move quickly. Council Member Reynolds. Thank you, Chair. And thank you, Council Member Ellinger and Build, for bringing this forward. And thank you, Emily, for being willing to participate and look at this as an option. I just kind of, when thinking about what the need is, I wonder if instead of maybe adding on a whole new service, if it were possible to take a look at the wheel service, which is kind of a microtransit, and just say maybe this is not working as well as it should. and maybe we should just redo how we look at those types of rides and maybe replacing it with something that is more micro or combining it. Because I know my office has received some complaints about that service, and we want those that are most vulnerable to have the transportation that they need, whether it's to a doctor's appointment or to work or elsewhere. And so my thought when we're talking about adding all of this money to look at this is maybe we need to redo wheels and it be this or a combination or something like that. So that's just my thought moving forward, maybe looking at how we view those types of rides that don't fit into the main routes. It's okay. Council member Fockel. I'll make this quick, I always pray before I know that last statement that I need to make. I've only been here a little bit over a year and like council member Savicki said, we come up and spend 200,000, 300,000 for a study, about a study that was a study. And somehow we find that money for studies. I believe in people, I believe investing in people. Since I've been here over a year, I've seen parks being built, dog parks being built. A lot of money going in a lot of things, but every time it's something about folks. Seems like we struggle as a council. I'm just making a statement that's just for me. Take it how you want to take it. It's not for anybody. I'm not throwing darts. I guess I always come to this council with Matthew 25, the least of these. And so this is an addition to what we're looking at. And even if we don't rush into it or whatever, it's $400,000. That's two studies that we will do on something else that we will fund. And so I just wanted to say that because I couldn't leave the council this horseshoe without making sure that we always think about how can we serve our community and the people who elected us to this seat. That's all I wanted to say. Council Member Ellinger. Thank you, Chair. Ms. Elliott, a couple things have been brought up about wheels, and I guess we need to clarify there. who can use it and how far in advance you have to call to use it. Yeah, so Wheels is complementary to fixed route. So it is for people with disabilities who cannot use the fixed route bus. So there you can have a disability and be able to utilize the fixed route bus and you do not qualify for that service. So you must have some, the nature of your disability must qualify you to say you're unable to in some way. As far as scheduling is concerned, reservations for trips can be booked two weeks in advance up to 4.45 p.m. the day before. and cancellations can be done up to two hours in advance same day. So in order to use wheels, you have to book it the day before. You have to book it at least the day before. Where in microtransit you can do it 30 minutes. So there is a difference there. There's some flexibility there, yes. Yes, thank you. That's all, Chair. Thank you, Council Member Ellinger, for bringing us this issue. Thank you to everyone from the community that is here and certainly Emily Elliott for facing all of these questions and Chris in the back from the NPL thank you it sounds like there is interest in exploring this conversation more and I agree with Vice Mayor Wu that we do have our budget conversations coming up and I think we can continue this conversation there given our time that we have at this point so I do want to thank everyone and then we'll move on to our next agenda item. Thanks. Okay, so our next agenda item is odor from the wastewater treatment plant. And this is a report from work that's being done with a consultant. This item was referred by Council Member Reynolds, so I want to turn this over to her for opening remarks. Thank you, Chair. I just wanted to briefly introduce this subject. Most of you are familiar with it by now. I've been representing the part of the 11th district that is near Leastown Road for the past two years with redistricting. And since that time, my office has received complaints about odor in the area on and off. And this past summer, at the end of the summer, those complaints escalated severely. I mean, I had probably 50 at one time, then later up to 80 people or more complaining about the smell. People that work there, people that live there, in and around the wastewater treatment plant that is kind of behind Lee's Town Road. So I set a meeting and went to Director Martin, and we had probably 50 people or, I don't know, a large group of people from two different neighborhoods meet, and we talked about why it was hard to localize the smell. And then Director Martin decided to look into it more, and then the administration as well. So I wanted to ask Director Martin to give an update of where we are now, what happened after that in terms of some different people that we brought in to look at the odor and where we're going from here. I want to thank him for his work on this issue, which has been really challenging with both of our wastewater treatment plants. I want to thank Councilmember Menarez, Plowman, and Lynch, who have also been dealing with constituent complaints. And I also really just want to highlight that I want to thank the administration for signing an executive emergency order to bring in some people to help us out. So I'll turn it over to Director Martin. Thank you. Thank you, Council Member. You did the introduction for me, so I'll just jump right into the agenda. Really today, what I want to focus on is bullet three. That's why I'm here. But we really need to cover bullets one and two in order to be able to frame what we're going to talk about as far as three and then leave enough time for questions. So sources and reasons of why you have odors in sewers, decomposition is going on all the time in a sewer system. And with lots of pipelines, lots of air release valves, treatment plants, and pump stations, there's many points in which that can happen. We operate two treatment plants, but we have seven drainage areas. So five of those drainage areas pump back over into a different one in order for it to make to a treatment plant. And so those long times of travel without oxygen typically is what will generate odors. And there's so many different places for it to come out of manholes. We have 36,000 manholes in Lexington. Every house and every structure has a vent pipe that comes out of the roof of it. We have air release valves on some of those pipelines as well. Typically a pressurized line, it follows the contours of the land. And so it goes up and down, up and down. And all those high spots all trap air in there, and there's vents in there designed to release air. And so typically that's going to be a foul odor that comes with it. And then the treatment plants and pump stations are very obvious. You see in red there, I try to characterize how long it takes sometimes for a particle of sewage to make it to one of those treatment plants. Typically, under normal circumstances, weather impacts this dramatically. Every fall, it seems like we have an uptick in odor, particularly because of the lack of rainfall. The sanctuary sewer is designed to be separate, but it's not really. There's always water getting in from some other source. When it stops raining in late summer, early fall, you see this uptick in complaints. And initially, before I started talking to Council Member Reynolds and Council Member Menardis, that's what I thought we were seeing. I'll talk about that in a slide later. This is more than just weather related, but I wanted to point that out is that weather is oftentimes a big contributor. And I've really wondered to myself whether or not that all of the work that we've done in the consent decree in making the system bigger in order to handle wet weather, this is the opposite effect of that that nobody really anticipated. I also will note on here that fall seems to be the bigger time, not only because of the lack of rain, but it's warm in the daytime and cool in the evening, and it has a tendency to trap whatever's in the air in the lower areas, such as around the treatment plants, which is where they are at. Okay, so one slide I'm going to devote to what we do right now. Basically, at the treatment plants and all the Class A pump stations, those are point source treatment. Basically, you've got ductwork in those buildings or in those structures that are pulling all the foul air to a treatment device, either a chemical scrubber or activated carbon type of unit. The idea is to collect it and treat it because it's there. In the collection system, we feed chemicals, basically an oxygen-based chemical because we're trying to provide oxygen to prevent the formation of odors. The lack of oxygen in the system, as I mentioned before, is what makes things go septic. So typically you're feeding a nitrate or some other type of oxygen to try to create an abundance of that in solution to where then the odors don't generate themselves. We also do treatment at specific air release valves because a lot of those are located in somebody's backyard. We've had complaints in the past, so we have inserts that go in the manhole where this air release valve is. There's roughly about 30 of those that are active right now. But we have 80-some pump stations. Each of them have these pressurized lines. We do not have them at every one of these locations. All right, so the meat of things is the escalation of complaints. And it says 2023, only because I kind of had that in mind when I did. It has continued. It has not gone away. If anything, I think that our customers are having a lot more patience. They're beginning to understand what the issue is. and that hopefully this presentation will help them. I've got a couple of maps up here just to kind of illustrate things. On the left, that was the number of complaints that I was getting through LexCol up until about October 20th. Well, as it turns out, all of the calls were going to Council Member Reynolds. All the calls were going to Council Member Lynch, and they weren't making into this. So the lesson I have learned from this is that LexCol is a great service, but the conversation oftentimes is going on on social media. it's going on you all know this already is that paying more attention to what's going on in next door and on facebook is going to be important for us moving forward because it really elevated itself when that same thing got applied to west tickman you know before october 20 we had a concentrated thing around close to the park area and stuff but as word got out council member reynolds mentioned a public meeting that we had at town branch with folks in her district we had a similar one with with Council Member Menard is with her district as well. And here came all the complaints. I can tell you this too, anecdotally, I'm inside that second zone. The first zone is within one mile of the treatment plant. The second one is two miles and I'm in that one. So I've been out a lot as far as talking to a lot of people and stuff like that, trying to get a better understanding of when these odors happen and why they're happening and what really what they're smelling because they seem to go maddeningly random. There are some days that you'd think there would be odors and they're not there, and other times I'm shocked. But what we've done in response to this up to this point is basically we've tried to be able to treat particular units that my nose told me is not working well. Before we had the meeting with the Meadowthorpe folks, I had my guys lift me up in a bucket truck so I could smell the exhaust of some of our scrubbers. that most of them are 15 feet off the ground. And she remembers this. I described one as awful and one as less than awful, only because it wasn't as bad as the first one. So we regenerated those units with some success, not the kind of success that I would like to have, but you'll see in a later slide it did help it a little bit. At West Hickman, I went out there, a lot of times at really weird hours because I lived there. You know, I went out one morning, one of those cold mornings, and I see steam coming out of the headworks, in places that I don't think it should be coming. And so what we found was is that some of that duct work had been compromised, and so they cleaned it out and rebalanced the odor collection system for it, and I think it's performing better. These ash tanks that we have at West Hickman, I found that on Thanksgiving morning. I went out there at dawn and steam's coming out of someplace that it shouldn't have been coming out of. We've regenerated that, and we've cleaned it twice. We probably spent $20,000 on that piece of equipment, and it's still not performing at a level that I would expect it to, and I'll talk about that in a second. Lastly is that trusting our noses. I'll be honest with you. I've worked around sewage my whole life, and so I think I'm a little bit nose blind compared to other people. And I think we would all agree. People smell things differently, just the same as they hear or see differently. And so we've created a unit price contract to be able to acquire the monitoring equipment that will help us try to be able to better diagnose when these things are happening and at what level that they're happening. The big thing that we did, and Council Member Reynolds mentioned this, was sign the emergency order that brought Webster Environmental to town to help us with this. Webster, that's their specialty, is they do odor control. That's their main course of business. And so what we had them do is come in and sample all of the high-risk locations at the treatment plant and provide us recommendations on what type of equipment needed to upgrade. No more of the searching in a dark room trying to find the switch that turns the odor off because, one, I don't think it exists, but also it's maddeningly frustrated to just go about things so randomly. The data that they found will be priceless to us. And so I've got a snapshot here of the data that they found. This is Town Branch, and it is an odor emissions rate graph. Basically, you can sample a concentration coming out of something, but if the exhaust rate is very low, it in itself doesn't contribute a lot. As opposed to if something has a medium level and it's got 10 big fans blowing it out, it's going to have a bigger impact to the surrounding area. So that's what they tried to do with this emissions rate graph is kind of normalize things. You see the three red boxes, the head works, the north primaries, and the south primaries. Those are the focused early action projects that we're going to be started on once we get this second contract underway, which is item K on a new business item for today. That's roughly 60% of the problem at Town Branch, according to the samples that Webster took. So it is low-hanging fruit. You might ask, well, what about the solids building? That's over there at 31%, and it's something that certainly needs attention, but it does not run all the time. We don't run solids on the weekends. We don't run solids at nighttime. We only run solids when we're filling trailers and taking them to the landfill, and obviously the landfill isn't open then. So we'll get that one in the future, but to me, it's not the one that we can move the needle on as quickly as we would like to. So West Hickman's a little bit straightforward because 66% of it's one thing. It's that dreaded ash tank that I've been working on since October, it seems like. It is 66% of the problem. And it does seem to coincide with what I know operationally has changed at West Hickman for entirely different reasons. So it will be the early action project as well is to replace that scrubber with new technology along with monitoring that is able to determine when the thing's going sour and when it's not so we can be more proactive about the way we deal with odors instead of reactive the way we've been over the last couple of months. Same thing with the solids building. It will be the next level. It runs more frequently than Town Branch, but still it doesn't run in weekends, nights, holidays, and things like that. That ash tank runs every day, all day. It's the one that really, really needs to go first. So that's what we've been doing with the treatment plant. I don't want to ignore the collection system and the ARVs or the air release valves because I think collectively all of these things contribute. And I want to put all of our eggs in one basket and say that's going to get it and ignore the other things. So what we've done is increased chemical feed rates at certain locations, and we've really engaged our chemical supply vendor in launching a chemical feed optimization plan. We want to feed just the right amount that is able to control the odors and not overfeed it and end up spending money basically flushing it down the sewer. Related to that chemical thing, I've got one example of a deferred maintenance issue that I wanted to show you as well. Okay, not going to make you read a graph today. The red arrow is the main point of it all. This is a location that is the East Hickman Forest Main that comes out behind Veterans Park Elementary School. And in September of this year, you can see that we were averaging about 78 parts per million of hydrogen sulfide at this location. That's in the manhole. What's getting out, I don't know. But in the manhole, that's way above what we would want it to be. Our goal was 10. So, with a lot of work over the course of November and early December, we were able to get that number down to the average for this graph is 4.4. And even right before Christmas, we were able to drop down to zero. Now this will be something we continue to work with on all different locations because it's very seasonally variable. Hydrogen sulfide, which smells like rotten eggs, generates itself more in warmer weather. And so we've got cooler temperatures, not only in the ambient temperatures, but also in the wastewater itself. This will be an ongoing thing that our program manager helps us with in making sure that we're optimally feeding chemical. It's going to be a lot of work at Town Branch. This is inside the Headworks building, the main building at Town Branch. And why it will be more challenging here is because there's a lot of pipeline. The sewage gets delivered to Town Branch differently than it does at West Tickman. and West Tickman is largely a gravity system, there's a lot of things that pump directly to Town Branch, to the Lees Town Road area, which includes as far away as Picadome, Coldstream, and Hamburg. So they're coming from long distances and stuff, and they all tie together, so there's not a real good sampling point to be able to isolate these things. We're going to have to do a lot of work with that. Again, that's what that consultant's going to help us with. This is back to behind Veterans Park Elementary School where the graph I showed you that we got to zero. I got to meet a lot of people on the trail in the park in October and November. They all had different stories about how odors come about, although almost to a man and woman, they said, that thing stinks. and what the picture on the left is a junction chamber that's right behind the school that odor escaped from it all the time so we came in and we refurbished this thing and sealed it back up so along with the zero numbers that we've been getting there recently I think we've got this kind of thing we need to do in a lot of different places seal up the leaks so there we get it to the treatment plants or other locations where we can deal with it okay I feel like I'm going really fast because i know you want to get caught back up on schedule and stuff the next steps is execute a long-term contract with the odor control program management that is item k in your agenda for today what they're going to do is they're going to design and construct treatment plant equipment the equipment that i had the red boxes around as far as at both town branch and at west hickman not more studying not more data collection the very first thing they need to do is to get these things designed and ready for construction. They won't get there fast enough to probably suit a lot of folks, including myself, including you, and including you. But I at least feel like now we can maybe turn the ship and put some wind in our sails to be able to get to a point to where there's actually a solution. I'm on my last slide here. I'm doing okay, I think. The optimization of the chemical feeds, I need to have somebody that's working with that. I obviously don't want to leave the chemical company that sells us the chemical to be in charge of that. So I want to make sure that we've got checks and balances. There's collection system work that needs to be done, smoke testing. We've got really weird things going on in certain parts of the collection system, and smoke won't lie. We're going to have smoke put in in key areas during the summertime to look to see where it comes out, particularly in people's houses, because if they've got some faulty plumbing and stuff like that, it doesn't matter what we'll do because they will still get odors in their house, and we want to try to identify that. And last but not least is assist us in providing progress reports to interested parties, including the council office, including social media, whatever it is. A consistent message is going to really be critical as we move forward with this. The last thing I'll say is that I've said this to a lot of people over the last couple of months, is that I believe we can do this. If we can do as well with air quality as what we've done in water quality over the last couple of years, we'll get this done. I really do appreciate there's a lot of people that have been very encouraging and had a lot of patience with this and I know it tries their patience a lot because it's not something you want to deal with. Thank you, Director Martin. I'm going to start with committee members. Council Member Menares. Thank you, Chair. And thank you, Director Martin, for all your work with this. I really appreciate you in a timely manner helping Council Member Reynolds and I escalate this to the mayor's office. I have a few questions and I know that some of them are questions that you answered with my constituents and you've helped me be the face of this issue for hundreds of residents in the fourth district. I appreciate you injecting yourself personally and like me making your cell phone available and just doing all the things to answer all the questions. So originally at West Hickman, we had said that we were going to replace the carbon scrubber. Was that replaced? Was it not? Why or why not? It was not because it was, the quote we got for it was $300,000. And as you can see from the graph, it was four to six percent of the issue. And that was, this data even came in after that. After we fixed the problem that I had discovered with the steam coming out of it, the sampling that we took there kind of indicated to me that that would not necessarily be beneficial. The other part of it is that Webster was telling us is that in some cases that carbon is not the appropriate application. And I think this is one of them, is that they are inclined to recommend a different treatment device for this head works. And so the idea of spending $300,000 for something that won't work did not seem like a good idea to me. Thank you. One of the major recurring questions that I get is regarding health concerns, both because of how long the residents are experiencing this at high levels as far as their concerns for the odor. And then second, part of what we've already said and even in your presentation was the treatment and trying to get this under control with added chemicals. And I realize that it's chemicals that we've been using all along, but maybe at increased levels. Can you address those health concerns that residents are having? The second one is easier than the first one, so I'll work in reverse. The chemical that we're feeding is calcium nitrate and sometimes sodium nitrate. It's a nitrate. As far as it's chemical sounds bad, this is probably about as inert as a chemical as you can get. Basically, all it's doing is it's lending oxygen to the sewage so it doesn't attack sulfate. because it attacks sulfate, then it turns into sulfide, which is then rotten eggs. So the actual chemical itself is not a problem. Be honest with you, the bigger problem is the chemical we use in the scrubbers, which doesn't get out any place else. But our staff dealing with a very high intense caustic and chlorine mixture solution, that's a problem. I worry a little bit about the long-term viability of using chemical scrubbers. Now, as far as exposure is concerned, you know, you've heard me say this over and over again. I'm not a physician, so it's hard for me to speak to that. I know that different people have different sensitivities to things and have different health issues and stuff. The only thing that I ever point to is that I've known hundreds of people in my career that work at wastewater treatment plants. And I can't say that I know any of them have necessarily experienced health-related issues associated to being exposed to odors that are with sewage. It's offensive. It is absolutely offensive. I get that part of it. But I would just tell somebody if they're concerned about from a health standpoint, they should consult a physician. I'm not qualified to answer that. Thank you. And then there are multiple increased calls to my office regarding the fact that the smell is now in their home where it wasn't ever before. And at first, we would mention that it might be a plumbing issue with their house, but because of the increased complaints about that specifically, what is our response to that? Well, I'm worried about that. And like I said, that's why I want to get this smoke testing going soon, because I know some people have done it. They've had a plumber come out and do it. And I wasn't involved with it to know whether or not that it was done correctly or not. But yeah, there's several people that talk about that they get it in their house. And most everything you read is that you shouldn't be getting it in your house. If you've got trapped vents, you shouldn't be getting it in. One person told me back in October, and I think I shared this with you, is that the way that it does get in their house is that they open their garage door in the morning to go to work. And in here, the odor then works its way in the garage, and they shut it. So now they've got that odor in their garage, but that in itself shouldn't be a constant thing. There's one lady in Cumberland Hill. She emails me on a pretty regular basis when she gets it, and she gets it in her house. And in that section of Cumberland Hill has always been bad. That's one of the number one smoke testing things because there's something else going on there more than just the treatment plant, I believe. But, you know, the smoke testing will be our response to that. is that we'll put out notices to everyone and obviously the fire department as well because you don't want to have smoke billing out of somebody's house unwittingly and not have the fire department know. But that smoke, if we blow it in the sewer and it gets in their house, that is the answer to that. Thank you. Council Member Plumman. Thank you again, Chair, for recognizing me. First of all, let me tell you, the person that you want to have in charge of this is Director Charlie Martin, because we've watched him all these years, and he knows what he's doing. But I know it's been frustrating, because it was early fall last year when we started getting phone calls, emails, and it was kind of like the process of elimination at that point. And it was difficult to talk to our constituents and say, we're working on it, we're working on it, But we really were. You really were working on that. So I applied to, I think, the different steps that you've outlined today makes folks feel better moving forward. I know we told many of our constituents to watch this today for a full overview of what has happened and what will be happening. So to those constituents, thank you for your patience. Thank you for keeping us in touch of what was going on at your different neighborhoods. the West Hickman pretty much is my district area and is that scrubber that there was something taken care of and it did succeed or is there still more work that's going to be that can be done on that? In my mind that scrubber doesn't work and it just hasn't worked we've had like I said a lot of work done to it and it just doesn't seem to have helped I even turned it off one weekend and I I let one of the guys that I deal with on a regular basis, also somebody who emails with me pretty regularly, because I thought, well, maybe we're just sucking foul air and efficiently throwing it up in the sky. And we turned it off for the weekend, and we had more complaints than we did beforehand, so I turned it back on. It needs to just be flat out replaced. I think it's undersized and is not capable of performing, given the level of odor that gets generated in that facility. I think sometimes when I drive through some neighborhoods, I smell it more than I smell sewage. And you said that it is going to be replaced. What is the timetable on that? Well, that is the answer that I can't give today because it is the number one. It'll be the very first task order that we award to Webster, number one. They'll probably put a lot of effort to it because they know their client wants that to happen. they will put together design we'll get it bid then the question is how long does it take for a contractor to build that and acquire the equipment that they need to have to be able to build that and in my line of business that's been hard i told the lady on sunday night when i was at her house unfortunately the amazon prime is not going to bring this and put it on our front porch in in a day but this this long-term odor control team that's coming in will be addressing that and yeah one of the things that i'm glad you brought that up because one of the other tasks are there interim temporary measures that can be taken in both plants to be able to bring in maybe skid mounted carbon units yeah granted it may not last us for very long but if they last us through this year to where the complaints that happen in the summer and fall or a fraction of of what we had right now, based on my view right now, that's money well spent. Yeah, it is. Well, again, thank you for continually to stay with us and to keep us informed and appreciate you. And constituents, again, thank you for traveling with us on this because it has been a frustrating journey. Thank you, Chair. Council Member Baxter. Thank you, Chair. Charlie, thanks for being here today and for all your hard work. I know we've dealt with some of the same issues in my district, and I think we've kind of come to some, our complaints have slowed down, so that's good. But, you know, when things break, I guess, if you want to put it that way, we always question what we're doing and if what we're doing is the best option. So as we look at our whole program, and I'm looking at our current, because you kind of blew through it. So on the page that talks about what we're currently using as far as chemicals are concerned. I'm still getting used to the clicker here. I think it's before. It says, I'll just start talking. So it says underfeeding has odor complaint ramifications. Overfeeding has cost and treatment plant compliance ramifications. What exactly does that mean? Feeding that chemical costs $2.60 a gallon. No, $2.67 a gallon. And if you're feeding 300 gallons a day, you start doing the math and it adds up pretty fast. What we're feeding at West Tickman right now, I'm sorry, at East Tickman Pump Station right now, You're probably talking about $140,000 a year just in chemical dosing alone. So the chemical that we're using, is that our best option? Well, it's the competitively bid option. Okay. We are in that, I don't know which slide you're on here, and I'm kind of flipping around here. We are looking at other options that are less expensive. So when I say chemical, and I think I put in parentheses other because other is on the table, is that because if we start feeding at those rates at multiple locations, it will become very expensive very quickly. We've found one new technology that's not new, I guess, but it's new to Kentucky. Louisville is injecting oxygen directly into a pipeline that's about 12 miles long along the river and apparently are having success with that. We've had a couple of conversations with them and are looking more closely at that because that's the capital cost of buying the equipment, but you're only paying for electricity after that. You're not paying for chemical. So how long has it been since we issued an RFP for these services? Well, we have not had anybody in charge of odor control probably since before the consent decree started, 2007. happen. We have always done odor control improvements when we have upgraded things, such as Council Member Minara has asked about the head works. That head works was built in 2018. Those carbon units were brand new, met the spec, everything at that time, the spec that was put out. We realized that odor needs to happen. What to me was missing is on the water end of things, we measure things all the time. our compliance measure is what type of pollutant that we're putting out. Our compliance is not air quality. And so there was not any real, what I would consider to be viable measuring stick to determine what we're really putting out or what we're not. And I said early on, that's going to change. Well, I'm not doing this guessing. I'm not climbing up in a bucket truck anymore either. Okay. And then I have a question for what's on the work session package today. Would you Prefer that I wait and ask it during. No, and you can ask me again. I'd ask you again. Okay. So my concern and you can explain why to me that this item of $550,000 was what says there was an RFP. Did we only have one respondent? No, we had three responses. We had three. We had three responses. We opened those on the 11th. The work group reviewed them and made a recommendation on the 26th, and it's on the work session for today. We are doing everything we can to fast track it. First of all, that not to exceed $550,000 is incorrect. If you read the memo, the design work for replacing the equipment at both treatment plans is estimated at $550,000. There's additional work that will be issued to them via task order for the smoke testing, for the chemical optimization and all that. And, Council Member Baxter, what we're doing is we're following the model that we used for the consent decree. When we found ourselves in this issue of catch-up, we hired a program manager. Basically, they're the staff that we don't have. They come in. They help us solve all of these issues because eventually you reach a point that you plane out. then you get rid of the consultant or you down there. You haven't hired a bunch of people in order to be able to solve it, what is really a short-term problem. Eventually, we'll be coming to you with an annual budget with them, similar to what we do with Hazen and Sawyer, which is also on your agenda for day. What we do with Tetra Tech in the stormwater program, what we do with Stantec in the capacity assurance program. Having a program manager that has people who have not only are experts in that field, but also have additional resources that they can bring to be able to solve the problem for us quickly, has been successful for us, and that's what I'm recommending we follow here, too. Okay. I'm out of time, but I won't come back to you at work session. Thank you, Chair. Council Member Reynolds. Thank you. I just want to quickly make a few comments. First, I want to thank my constituents again for bringing this to me and before us and kind of heightening our awareness of what was going on. And then I wanted to mention, you know, it's not ideal that we found ourselves in this situation and that we had a major issue with air quality. That's not ideal. But what we do have is a plan in place. So like you said, now we're going to be hiring a consultant to come in and give us a long-term plan to deal with the odor. So you had mentioned we haven't had that for a long time. And so now we're going to have that. So I think that that is crucial moving forward in terms of dealing with the odor issue. And then also you mentioned that you wanted to turn this presentation into a YouTube link and have a one pager. So we will have a link and then a page that we can all share with our constituents to help them understand, you know, what's happening. And then I'm going to ask that we have this calendar year, two more updates, one in about six months or something that says where we are. and then one at the end of the year, just so that we can keep people informed about how we're moving forward. This is an issue that is really important to a lot of people here in Lexington, and so I hope that we can continue to stay on top of it. Thank you again to Director Martin and to the administration. Thank you. Council Member Minaris. Thank you. And thank you again, Director Martin. My last two questions are very short because you've answered most of it when you answered Councilmember Baxter's last question. And because it's coming up again from constituents, because we're hiring a contractor again, and they're concerned over why are there not engineers available locally that we can hire, that we seem intent on giving our tax dollars to individuals who are from out of state. I know that you just mentioned to Councilmember Baxter about the expertise that this contractor brings and why specifically we need them when it comes to odor control? Well, yeah, we had three proposals, all of them very good, and all of them companies that we work with on a regular basis. The selection group, which was not just me, but they were members of the council office purchasing. It was a consensus that this was the best one. As someone on the work group, not me, mentioned, is if you want chicken, you go with the company that makes chicken. And that's what Webster does. This is their core business is odor control. They do it all over the country. And so I think there was a comfort level with selecting them. They are out of Louisville. The support or their subcontractor is Tetra Tech, who has a local office here in Lexington. So this is not people that are coming in from outside, even though it's not a home-based company in Lexington. And it still has an office here that has a long-term base with us. They also have a DBE that is an electrical contractor that's a female business that is located here as well, which I was really glad to see that because I'm always happy to see solid participation on a DBE level. And then lastly, with everything that we're doing now and then getting everything to what we would consider optimal, will the smell ever be at zero? Wow. That's the goal. I mean, it's just like overflows. You know, it's the every day I get up trying to figure out how to us to have zero to be perfect, you know, and if I don't start out every day that way, then I miss the mark. Well, I stand here and promise you that we'll ever be at zero. I can do that right now, but I'm going to tell you, I can do everything that I can that people will say it's a lot better than what it was before if not that it's perfect. I would love for perfect. Thank you again and I just also want to encourage my constituents to continue to reach out with any questions or concern and to continue report where they smell the smell at what time and thank everybody for their patience. Thank you chair. Thank you, Director Martin. One location for my district I would like to follow up with you on is the Lakeshore Pump Station that went through an upgrade. We've gotten some odor complaints of that particular location. I've talked with Deputy Director Lubeck about it, so I'll just follow up with you. Okay. Yeah, we still have them. They're not just located at the treatment plants and stuff. Council Member Gray had contacted me about a lady that's got odor that's out in front of her mailbox. That's one of those air release valves. But it's like four miles away from a treatment plant. So we need to attack all of it. Anyway, thank you. Thank you. Colleagues, if you could look at the items referred to committee, If you have any that you would like to amend or remove for today, we have a little bit of time to do that. Otherwise, we can hold those until the next meeting, but sign in if you do. I don't see anyone signed in. Just kind of a little preview. On March 12th is our next meeting. Currently on the agenda, sometimes this changes. we have the revenue and expense review of refuse, streetlights, and street sweeping. We also have Lex Grow Trees, the ad hoc tree committee presentation, and the annual energy improvement fund update currently scheduled. So again, that might change, but that's what's on the schedule at this point. So thank you, everybody. I will call us adjourned. Thank you. Thank you.