# Environmental Quality and Public Works Committee - October 22, 2024 > Auto-transcribed civic record · October 22, 2024 - **Permalink**: https://meetings.lexingtonky.news/meeting/6254 - **Source video**: https://lfucg.granicus.com/player/clip/6254?view_id=14&redirect=true - **Date**: 2024-10-22 - **Last revised**: October 22, 2024 - **Length**: 11,939 words - **Speakers**: Clerk, Chair > ⚠️ **Auto-generated content.** Audio from the official Granicus video was auto-transcribed with OpenAI's open-source Whisper large-v3-turbo model, run locally by The Lexington Times. Structured facts were extracted with GPT-4o; the narrative summary was written by Anthropic Claude. Verbatim wording may contain errors. See [methodology](https://meetings.lexingtonky.news/about/methodology) or [report a correction](mailto:editor@lexingtonky.news). --- ## Meeting Overview The Environmental Quality and Public Works Committee met on October 22, 2024, at 1:00 PM in the Council Chamber at Lexington-Fayette Urban County Government, located at 200 E. Main St, Lexington, KY 40507. The committee addressed five agenda items during the session, with one formal vote taken to approve the August 20, 2024 Committee Summary. The meeting focused primarily on informational presentations, with staff providing updates on three key operational areas: the Annual Snow Plan, the Annual MS4 (Municipal Separate Storm Sewer System) Program, and Community Outreach activities. Committee members also reviewed items that had been referred to the committee for consideration. No public comments were heard during this session, indicating the meeting was primarily focused on internal committee business and staff reports rather than public input on specific issues. ## Votes and Decisions The council took one formal vote during the October 22, 2024 meeting. **Motion to Remove Agenda Item** The council voted to remove the item "Explore Lexington Sustainability Options" from the meeting agenda. Council member Fogle provided the second for this motion. The motion passed by voice vote, with no formal roll call conducted and no recorded opposition. No other formal votes or decisions were recorded during this meeting session. ## Approval of August 20, 2024 Committee Summary The committee considered Resolution 1065-24 for the approval of the meeting summary from August 20, 2024. This routine procedural item involved reviewing and formally approving the written record of the previous committee meeting. No specific speakers were identified for this agenda item, and no transcript timestamp was available for the discussion. The item appears to have been handled as a standard administrative matter without significant debate or discussion. The committee approved the August 20, 2024 meeting summary without recorded objections or amendments. This approval formally adopts the written record of that previous meeting's proceedings, discussions, and decisions as the official documentation. **Outcome:** Approved ## Annual Snow Plan The meeting included a presentation on the Annual Snow Plan (agenda item 1034-22), delivered by Director Alan. The discussion covered the city's comprehensive approach to winter weather management, focusing on three main areas: salt usage, route optimization, and stakeholder engagement. Director Alan presented the annual strategy for snow removal operations, outlining how the city plans to manage winter weather events throughout the upcoming season. The presentation addressed salt usage protocols, detailing the city's approach to managing salt supplies and application methods to ensure effective snow and ice control while considering environmental impacts. Route optimization was another key component of the discussion, with Director Alan explaining how the city has refined its snow removal routes to improve efficiency and response times. This strategic planning aims to ensure that critical roadways, emergency routes, and high-traffic areas receive priority attention during winter weather events. The presentation also covered stakeholder engagement initiatives, highlighting how the city plans to communicate with residents and coordinate with various departments and external partners during snow events. This includes public communication strategies to keep residents informed about snow removal operations and expected timelines. The agenda item was classified as informational, meaning no formal action was required from the meeting participants. The presentation served to update attendees on the city's winter preparedness and ensure all relevant parties understand their roles in the annual snow plan implementation. The discussion provided an overview of the city's comprehensive winter weather response strategy, ensuring that all stakeholders are aligned on procedures and expectations for the upcoming snow season. ## Annual MS4 Program Bailey Young provided an informational update on the Annual MS4 (Municipal Separate Storm Sewer System) Program during agenda item 1122-22. The presentation covered key aspects of the municipality's stormwater management efforts, including current inspection activities and compliance status with regulatory requirements. The MS4 program is a critical component of the city's environmental management strategy, designed to prevent pollution in stormwater runoff that flows into local waterways through the municipal storm sewer system. Young's update addressed the program's ongoing operations and regulatory compliance efforts. The presentation focused on three main areas: stormwater management practices, inspection protocols, and compliance monitoring. These elements work together to ensure the municipality meets federal and state requirements for stormwater quality protection under the Clean Water Act. This was an informational presentation with no action items or decisions required from the governing body. The update serves to keep officials and the public informed about the program's status and ongoing activities to protect local water quality through proper stormwater management. The MS4 program represents an important regulatory obligation for the municipality, requiring ongoing monitoring, reporting, and implementation of best management practices to prevent stormwater pollution from entering natural water bodies. ## Community Outreach Update Angela presented an overview of the organization's community outreach efforts during agenda item 0500-21. The presentation focused on two primary areas: environmental education initiatives and engagement strategies with diverse communities. The update covered current outreach programs designed to educate the public about environmental issues and promote community involvement in environmental stewardship. Angela discussed ongoing efforts to connect with various demographic groups and communities to ensure broad participation in environmental initiatives. The presentation included information about engagement strategies being used to reach diverse populations and make environmental education accessible to different community segments. This appears to be part of a broader effort to expand the organization's reach and ensure inclusive participation in environmental programs. As an informational item, no formal action was taken following the presentation. The update served to keep meeting participants informed about the status and scope of current community outreach activities, particularly those related to environmental education and community engagement efforts. The presentation provided stakeholders with insight into how the organization is working to build relationships with various community groups and expand its educational impact through targeted outreach programs. ## Items Referred to Committee Agenda item 1066-24 addressed various items that have been referred to committee for consideration during the October 22, 2024 meeting. This was an informational discussion item designed to update attendees on matters requiring committee review. The agenda item served as a procedural update, providing transparency about which issues have been forwarded to appropriate committees for detailed examination and recommendation. This type of agenda item is typically used to ensure all participants are aware of ongoing committee work and upcoming deliberations. No specific transcript timestamp was available for this discussion, and no key speakers were identified in the meeting records. The item was classified as informational in nature, meaning it did not require formal action or voting by the body. The outcome of this agenda item was purely informational, serving to keep meeting participants informed about the committee referral process and ensuring transparency in the handling of various matters requiring specialized committee attention. --- ## Decisions - **Motion** — passed (0-0): Remove item 'Explore Lexington Sustainability Options' from the agenda --- ## Full transcript Music Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I'm going to call our meeting of the Environmental Quality and Public Works Committee October 22, 2024 meeting to order. Thank you all for being here. The first item on our agenda is approval of the August 20, 2024 committee summary. Are there any additions or corrections? I'll take a motion to approve. Second. Motion made by Councilmember Sevigny, seconded by Councilmember Legree. Any discussion on the motion? Okay. Hearing none, all those in favor say aye. Any opposed? That motion passes. Our next item on our agenda is the annual snow plan update. Here to present that today is Rob Allen, Director of Streets and Roads. Welcome Director Allen. Chair, counsel, thank you for the opportunity to present today. There's a change in our plan this year and I'll go through it pretty quick. Some of the things that we're going to go over is how our salt per ton prices changed, how we look on salt, routes, service levels, what the big change was in the snow plan, how we coordinate within LFUCG and with external agencies, sidewalk snow removal, how we're staffed, and how we communicate the plan to administration and public. You can see here is a rolling five-year table showing our expenses for salt and usage, plus how often we have deployed. The first number is what we call a full deployment, which is an entire shift, both water quality and streets and roads, rolling out. And then what we call partial is a supervisor and at least three operators. and I can tell you without doing hard math on average, it's about 6,500 tons a year in salt usage right now and five full deployments and six partials on average. And you can see, of course, it varies from 1,700 to 12,000 tons. It just depends on the amount of, of course, snow we get and what we have to do. So currently, right now, we have 8,800 tons. The old barn at Old Frankfurt, which we are phasing out and should be replaced by Thanksgiving, and then our newest barn at West Hickman. And, of course, we have a budget allowing for the purchase of an additional 5,700 tons of salt. So if you factor in, we could buy 14,000 more tons and we're only averaging 6,500 tons the last couple years. We've done pretty good managing our budget as we continue to shrink that to match our usage. I was going to mention there was a pretty decent increase, about $13 a ton in the price of salt. It's across the board. And then route rankings, rank one, of course, are primary arteries, the spokes in the wheel, man of war. Two are connecting streets. Three are neighborhood collector routes, Sandersville Road, you know, Todd's. And then, of course, rank four are local streets. Also like to point out rank threes are usually local streets with a school bus route on them. So we give them a higher priority. Service levels. Normal snow for us is one to four inches. We do the current plan that's presented. If we get five to eight inches of snow, we will add unranked residential streets that connect. And then, of course, if we get eight or more inches, service level three, we try to clear as many streets as possible. So we engaged UK to do a snow route optimization study. Our legacy system, no one could justify how we were doing what we were doing other than we'd always done it that way. The routes were based upon basically shapes on the map and you can see the wide variance of mileage between the different zones. One there is six and the highest is 155. And we weren't being very efficient with our assets and that was one of the things with the manpower shortage. We were looking at ways to improve our performance with the assets we did have. There were 16 zones. Now there are 11 of those three extra zones. One is Man of War and then you have what is East and West County. And this shows, this is how it's currently done or how it was currently done. We have actually switched over. The different colors show the specific boundaries. And then UK presented us with three options. We selected the medium option. It was the best option as far as the amount of time that it takes to clear all routes. It had balance as far as mileage and predicted salt usage. It also clustered the routes and clustered them near one of the two salt barns. And it was built for expansion in the Polo Club, Todd's Road area, Citation Boulevard, Masterson Station. So this is scalable. and it's actually pretty easy once we get into it here you can compare truck time miles things like that how now it's more balanced with the number of miles especially 38 to 27 52 to 16 an average one to four inch snow a snow plow operator can treat about 25 miles so you put that in that. Here's an example, or not an example, it's actually the map of the new zones. You can see how they've changed geographically, but they're essentially the same size. And here's an example of a zone. Each zone itself has four routes. Every zone has four routes. So as an administrator, it certainly makes it easier to see where we're lacking in assets and where we need to apply more help. But each zone itself is broken down, as I said, into the four routes. This is an example of what one driver would treat during a shift and the different roads, rankings within it. and it also lists, for example, the salt barn that the truck primarily operates out of, and that's to minimize windshield time and be more efficient. And here's the county. All roads in the county are ranked the same, and we treat them essentially the same. That's, yeah. These are school routes that last winter, when we had some problems with schools getting access. We've added these pieces to the snow plan in conjunction with Fayette County Schools. They were added last winter, and they are now a permanent part of our snow plan. Sidewalk snow removal. This is performed by Environmental Services. Over 84 miles of sidewalks and snow greater than an inch. triggers sidewalk clearing. It does not begin until, of course, the snowfall stops. And then they also need to coordinate with us because snow plows are really bad about covering up sidewalks. So we have to make sure that we're not undoing what they work very hard to do. And this is an example of how they prioritize their routes. and there's more they have five ranks and director carry will correct me if i misspeak or say something that is incorrect you can see the breakdown on the rankings and how they have adjusted their plan you can see the bottom one rank five they have dropped the outer loop of man-of-war to a rank five. It was determined that to complete the plan in the prescribed amount of time they needed to adjust that, and it didn't make sense to do both sets of man-of-war sidewalks when if you make one accessible, it really works for the public, both for recreation and getting around. And if coordination in case of an emergency, this pandemic or any other problem, we do have an informal agreement with District 7 to support each other, both with equipment and personnel. Annually, we update our contact information with the different agencies, both internal and external. We also, internally within our department, for example, if something was to go on with waste management, our drivers in streets and roads would be able to fill in on the routes. We've planned for that for the last couple of years. The Commissioner of Environmental Quality and Public Works, she would be the coordinator of all that. And then we also have what we call a plan for critical assets. And that, of course, is our hospitals and jail and water facilities and things like that that absolutely have to be cleared no matter what. Our snow plan is designed to complete within 48 hours of precipitation ending. The sidewalk snow plan is 96 hours of precipitation ending. And remember, their trigger is snow greater than an inch. And we know how quickly our weather changes and it can melt off within a couple days. We have 67 commercial driver positions in streets and roads, mechanics, loaders. We use with 11 zones. We use 44 drivers across two shifts. That's 44 drivers between streets and roads and water quality. Water quality helps us with 29 commercial drivers from sewer line maintenance. Of course, they all can't drive in case there is a sewer problem, or we have building a contingency in case they have to report for a sewer line break. Then Environmental Services, they have five CDL positions to work on sidewalks. They use their landscape labor to help, and they also let us use a CDL driver on a permanent basis. We also have five contract snow plows from Red River and volunteer drivers from water quality parks, waste management, code enforcement. and there are some backup drivers also in environmental services. If there was a real problem, we could shift CDL drivers from sidewalks to roads. And so we had a stakeholder meeting August 28th. Lexitory and Fayette County Schools, District 7 were invited, allowed to give input, and then, of course, presenting here today. And at the end of the week, we will post the snow plan on the city's webpage for everyone to refer to. Our communication plan, I push an email internally and externally for folks involved with snow removal or making decisions about what we're doing and what is currently happening. The commissioner pushes an email or communication to the administration and the council. And then public information informs the public and works with our socials. And LexCol, of course, gathers service requests and refers them to us. And then there is the snow and ice control plan link. So as I mentioned, hopefully by Thanksgiving, you will see a new dome on the old landfill. It has 50% more storage capacity. The current barn was rated at 3,000, and it's now down to 1,800 where it's been condemned. So we're going to have 11,500 tons of salt. Prior, 10 years ago, we averaged using 12,000 tons of salt a year. So this pretty much is going to put our entire salt usage for a year under roof, which mitigates waste and is more environmentally friendly. So we're pretty excited about that. We've also purchased storage tanks and brine maker to make our own salt brine. The state has been generous and shared with us for the last couple decades, but a couple years ago we ran into a problem where their production was limited to only their plows. So that really inhibited our ability to pre-treat. So we made the decision to go ahead and invest in our own brine maker. Plus, if something happens to their brine maker, which has happened in the last two years temporarily, we could support them as they have done with us. I'd like to thank our partners. These are certainly not all of them, but whoever plays a big role with us is LexCol, Parks and Rec, Police, PIO, Water Quality, Waste Management Code, Environmental Services, Facilities, Fleet, Fire, and GTV3. Couldn't get this done without all them helping us. And then Dr. Blanford and his team, Nathaniel and Zoo, did the optimization study. And I'd also like to point out that they previously, several years ago, did the snow route optimization for the state when they reworked all of their snow plan, which is what kind of we used as a basis to rework ours. But really a different animal. And then with that, I guess we have a short time for questions. Thank you, Director. Colleagues, log in if you have any comments or questions. Council Member Lynch. Thank you, Chair, and thank you, Director Allen, for your reports, and I especially love your tie today. I just have a couple questions. The stakeholder meeting you had in August, did all the invited partners show up? I'm just curious. Did they attend the meeting? I'm trying to remember. I'm not going to say yes without reviewing the notes, but I do know we have been in contact with all the partners. There's been some change, for example, at Fayette County Schools and Lex Tran, and we have been, myself and the commissioner, have been talking to both of those agencies before and after that meeting, but I don't remember whether they were there. It was a Zoom meeting. Okay. But yes, they've had input and they have participated. And then my last question is, how often do you all have the stakeholder meetings? Is it just a once-a-year thing? It's a once-a-year thing. Usually after the start of the fiscal year, and I know it's hard for folks in the middle of July or August to think about snow, but it really does take a lot of planning and movement to make changes. Thank you. Thank you, Chair. Council Member Reynolds. Thank you, Chair. Thank you for recognizing me since I don't serve on this committee. Council Member Lynch kind of asked my question. But so in terms of engagement with Fayette County Public Schools, is there, are you all working together to come up with the routes? Or what does that feedback look like? You know what happened in the past two years with snow issues and kind of the pushback that we got from the public. And I just want to make sure I understand the process as clearly as I can. Well, yes. The director of transportation and several individuals within Fayette County Schools has my cell phone number as the commissioners. And we coordinate both on an individual event basis and overall. We have been working with them since last year when we made those changes. And they are informing us, for example, when they add new bus routes, if we need to add those to the plan. And we do not treat every bus route, so we are looking, of course, at traffic volume along those bus routes, and we have slightly altered some of the snow zones at their request to get to more buses, per se, that travel multiple route. But, yeah, the lines of communication have really opened up since last winter. Okay, that's good news. Thank you. And if parents have questions or concerns about bus routes being cleared, should they direct that to the city or to Fayette County Public Schools? Well, we would be the best agency, but I would have to posit that it probably has more to do with temperature than precipitation as far as whether schools are in or not. Okay. Thank you very much. Thank you, Chair. I don't see anyone else signed in. Thank you, Director, for the presentation. And I do appreciate, you know, the periodic reviews. So thinking about, you know, making our systems more efficient is always very helpful. Thank you. Next on our agenda, we have the annual MS4 Municipal Separate Storm Sewer System Program update. Here to present that today is Bailey Young, the MS4 section manager. And we have Deputy Director Greg Lubeck. Our presenter has switched. What was that? Our presenter has switched. Are you doing our presentation? I'm doing it today. Yes, I'm not Bailey Young. She is right back there in front charlie she she's the new ms4 program manager she's been with us since march and didn't think it'd be quite appropriate to have her up here quite quite this quick in front in front of you all so i'm going to go ahead and do this understood as council member shan said this is our annual update to the eqpw on the ms4 program municipal separate storm sewer system what that is is when When it rains and the water collects on the streets and yards and goes into the drains, it eventually discharges to a creek, which is a water of the Commonwealth. We have a permit from the state which regulates that water being discharged into the creeks. So the MS4 permit has these 10 program elements, and you can see there are some for public engagement, some for pollution prevention, some for monitoring and reporting. Today, I'm going to concentrate on the pollution prevention section, those five items there in the middle, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and go through quickly what happens when your office gets a call that there's green water in the creek or something. So there are several different departments and sections or divisions within EQPW and sections within water quality that conduct all these inspections. The illicit discharge detection elimination is our compliance and monitoring section. Same with construction site runoff. Post-construction stormwater management, that's when all these developments get done. and they've got their ponds and other things in place. Bailey's group and sewer line maintenance are the ones who go out and look at them and do the maintenance. Pollution prevention for municipal operations, that's the Division of Environmental Services. And then industrial facilities, that's our compliance and monitoring group. You can see down on the lower right the staff in each of those groups that do this work. So there are 24 people that conduct all these inspections through the course of a year. First one is IDDE, illicit discharge detection elimination. Something has gotten loose from somebody that's running down the street into a storm drain. That's an illicit discharge. As you can see, in 2023, we received 187 calls on illicit discharge. and eight NOVs, terrible to get old, were issued. Most of them were no action. They went out and investigated, and it really wasn't an illicit discharge. But the NOVs were a written notice to the person who was doing it that you have to stop this and go clean up whatever it is you were letting go. So you can see the pictures there kind of show you the things we look for, that nice bright green water running out there. shouldn't be running out there. The next part is what we call dry weather screening. Dry weather is when you haven't had rain for three days and you go out and look at the storm pipes that are discharging to the creek. They should not have any water coming out of them if all they're collecting is rainwater, right? Three days, it should have dried up. So if there's water coming out of it, well, it's coming from somewhere. So you can see what we call a major outfall. 36 inches or greater with 50 acres draining to it for basically residential. If it's an industrial zoned area, it's a 12 inch pipe with two acres draining to it. So when you got an industrial site, you're looking at a much smaller area because you probably know where it's coming from. 2023, there were 440 of these throughout the MS4 permit boundary, which is basically the urban services boundary. The permit requires that we screen 20% of them each year. It's a five-year permit, so over the course of a permit, we've looked at all of them at least once. When they go out and do this dry weather screening, the left column are the physical indicators they're looking for. Is there damage to the outfall? Are there deposits or stains in it, which meant something went through there at some point? abnormal vegetation, where the water discharges into the creek, if the water there is of not so good quality, pipe benthic growth, that's stuff growing at the bottom of the pipe under the water, odor, color, turbidity, how cloudy is it, and floatables, whatever people throw out car windows. So if it's flowing, we'll take a sample and we'll test it for those parameters, chlorine, fluoride, ammonia, detergents, pH temperature, and TDS. total dissolved solids. Chlorine and fluoride give an indication of drinking water. Ammonia is sewage and then detergents are, well detergents, temperature and total dissolved solids. If the water is real cloudy there's some kind of solid getting into it that's making it cloudy. The next thing we do, the compliance and monitoring is construction sites. These are probably the ones you all hear about the most. There's big development going in, there's muddy water running off everywhere. So this is what we do here is it's land disturbance on commercial properties, residential subdivisions, single home lots, urban county government capital projects. We watch our own projects. Demolition projects, then like I said, ESC complaints. Every site is inspected at least a month, once a month. And if it's what we call a targeted site, which is disturbance greater than five acres or if they have a permit to work in or around a stream we look at those twice a month just to kind of keep keep everybody on their toes our inspectors use the same form that the contractors and builders use to get their land disturbance permit that way everybody's looking at the same things and and the same what what they are And all this is covered in Article 10, Chapter 16 of the Code of Ordinances, which was, I don't know, 10 years ago or something. Here's some things we look at. Curb inlets out along the curb line where the water runs off the street in. Picture on the left is an example of a good installation. You can see there's rock bags and some blocks there to stop, slow the water down before it gets to that inlet, let the sediment fall out, then the water goes through. On the right, well, not so good. curb inlet protection. Vegetative buffers. If the work is around a stream, they're supposed to maintain a 50-foot vegetated buffer from the bank of the stream to wherever the disturbance is. Picture on the left, you can see at the back, there's still a good stand of trees and grass, and then the work is proceeding up the hill. On the right, well, they got right down to the stream, and that would get them a-talking-to from the inspectors. silt fence. This is that black fence you see up all over the place around construction sites. On the left, you can see it's a pretty long slope. There are three rows of silt fence there. Each, depending on slope, but you'd get about 100 feet between rows of silt fence, so that's a pretty good installation that they've got it going up the slope. And on the right, there's an installation that needs a little attention and care, and you can see that below that one, the creek has become cloudy. Construction access. When you're doing construction work, you're supposed to have a gravel entryway off of the public right-of-way, 12 feet wide, 50 feet long, made out of stone. Lower left picture, that's a good entrance. As a matter of fact, it's traveled all the way up to the building. On the right, that's probably a home building site or remodeling site, none at all. And then as our inspectors go look at this, here's their order of progression through things. First time they'll go out, it'll be an informal notice, maybe a conversation on site, most likely an email to the contractor. And if they don't get any response out of that, then they issue a formal notice of violation, again, a written document that has what the violation is and when it needs to be corrected. So you get two notices of violation. When you get to getting the third one, it goes to a citation. And the inspector puts together what's called an enforcement referral package that ends up on my desk, and I look at it and sign it, and then it goes down to environmental services to go to the hearing board. And once you get past that, you start getting into more severe things, administrative orders, stop work orders, permit blocks, and criminal prosecution. I know we've had some people we've put on permit block. Is that correct? I don't think we've done any of the others at this point. So it's a progressive discipline kind of thing where if you keep messing up, we're just going to keep getting harder and harder and harder on you. Now, post-construction stormwater management. Construction is all done, all the grass is growing, streets are paved, houses are built. There are post-construction stormwater facilities that we have to go out and inspect. There are 1,243 detention basins. Those are the dry basins. When it's not raining, they empty out and they turn dry. We inspect each of those twice a year. Retention ponds, those are the ones that always hold water. We go out and look at those quarterly. Private water quality control devices, that may be inlet inserts or what we call manufactured treatment device on a property, those get inspected annually. If there are water quality devices on urban county government property, like in parks or at community centers or something, we look at those each year. Underground detention basins, those are typically on commercial properties. That's so they could have detention. It's a relatively small site and not take up all the space on that site that they would need for a building or parking lot. And the final one is what we call the critical culvert inspections. There are 49 of those that get done at least monthly. I'm going to touch on those a little bit more in a second. So we go out and Bailey's inspectors look at these things, and if they see a problem, they'll send a warning letter to the owner of the facility. If that doesn't get the problem resolved, then we go to notice a violation, notice a violation, and another enforcement referral. Now, there are some parts of these that the urban county government takes care of. detention basins, we will take care of the concrete pieces, the pipes and outlet towers and paved ditches. We have ways that if we see something needs to be fixed, we have a unit price contractor that we can give them a work order and they will go fix that. They also do things like clearing out flumes and things like that. So we record all that and they report back to Bailey and she marks it off the list that it's done. There's some pictures of detention basins. The one on the left, there's a little outlet pipe coming out, and you can see all that erosion around it. Somebody threw a little bit of rock in there trying to do something, so we had to go do that. and on the right is a basin with a concrete flume that's been cleaned out, and it should be functioning as it was designed. This is what we call an inlet insert. It's on a parking lot. You can see on the picture on the left there's a bunch of leaves and other stuff in it. When we go out and inspect it, we will let them know, hey, that needs to be cleaned out. The picture in the center is after it's been cleaned out. The picture on the right is when the grate's been put back on it. That's to settle out floatables from getting into the stream. This picture is a bio infiltration swale. It's supposed to look like the one on the right. When we went out, it looked like the one on the left, so we went through the enforcement stuff and got it to look like the one on the right. Critical culverts, as we call them, there are 49 of those. Like I said, we do them at least once a month or within three days after a one inch rainfall. That picture there, for anybody that knows, is the cave out at Parkside. That's a great big cave that drains a whole big neighborhood out there along I-75 and North Broadway. That's one of these culverts. And the other end of the scale, there's this one. This is over at Lexington Cemetery. You can see how all that debris builds up against it, impeding the flow of water. So we'll go out and clean it. And this kind of shows the difficulty in some of this, that, okay, it's in the cemetery, this relatively small thing. So that's people going out there with shovels and wheelbarrows and getting that stuff off the grate and out of the water and haul it away. Municipal operations. So we have 96 LFUCG stormwater quality controls that get looked at on a quarterly basis, some retention ponds, detention basins. There are some other things, like I said, manufactured devices, these big boxes in the ground where pipes will go in, debris will be settled out of it, then it discharges. There are four municipal waste facilities that get inspected. Municipal facilities that have a stormwater pollution protection plan, there are 50. Those are, you'd see the place where they are, there are fleet services, pools, golf courses, natural areas, parks, maintenance facilities, and our pump stations. There's a partial list on the right of some of these facilities. Municipal waste facilities, environmental services goes out and looks around at the transfer center and the recycling center and there's the things they look for on the right. In the picture on the left you can see something they would have pointed out to management that, hey, some of the material is coming out of the bales and it's laying around loose on the ground. We need to watch that and get it picked up and look at make sure the bailing is going right. Industrial facilities permit requires we inspect at least 90% of high risk. Commercial facilities are 14 of those each permit cycle, five years. A high risk facility has reasonable potential to discharge storm water containing pollutants of concern at at a significant level. Examples, horse and livestock facilities, utility operation centers, storage and fabrication sites. We have to look at 70% of the industrial facilities. There are 64 of those. We gotta look at those every two years. That's any facility with a KPDES permit. I got about two more slides. Okay, go ahead. So there's a list of the industrial facilities and the high-risk commercial facilities that we have in our inventory as of 2023. And these are the things that when compliance and monitoring goes out, this is what they look at. Stormwater BMPs and materials management, how are they conducting their operations? Are they cleaning up litter? They have leachable material covered, they have spill kits, they have secondary containment on fuel tanks. And now the very end, 2023, all these groups working on this conducted 12,151 of these inspections. That's a little bit of work in the course of a calendar year for 24 people. And with that, I will take questions. Thank you for the presentation. Council members, you can sign in if you have comments or questions. Council member Legree. Thank you, Chair. Thank you for this presentation. It was really thorough. You all do a ton of work across Fayette County, and you're also very responsive to us, which we appreciate. I just had a question about if residents see a construction site where they think pollution may be happening or they see perhaps a site without a silt fence or something similar, is there a way for residents to report that? But how does that work? The best thing to do would be call 311. It will get into 311, then it goes into our Acela system, then the compliance and monitoring people will get that report out of Acela and go do their investigation. So 311 is the way to go. Sometimes people try to go through our office, and it's good to hear on Mike that it's best practice to send them to 311 so it can be tracked properly. Yeah, otherwise you're chasing through how many people to finally get to the right person. Yeah, exactly. That's it, Chair. Thank you so much. I don't see anyone else signed in to speak. I just wanted to – oh, my computer's shutting down. That's not good. The other day I was in a meeting about the sampling process, the water sampling process, with a lot of our community stakeholders and partners that are involved in that work. Could you talk a little bit about the volunteer aspect of our water quality measurements? Well, yeah, the volunteers we used when we were doing what we called the Watershed Focus Monitoring Program, where we went out and took a whole bunch of samples in various creeks and things throughout the seven watersheds. We relied on volunteers a lot for that. no way staff could have done that because during the summer there were 10 consecutive weeks of going out and going to all these sites. Couldn't have done it with staff alone. So we really appreciated the volunteers that we had come out and help and the groups that we had helping us find volunteers. Now right now we're in the process since we've done the watershed focused monitoring program, okay what's the next step? looking at a different stream sampling program that we've talked to the stakeholders about. I think you were at the stakeholders meeting, then the work group meeting, so you've heard that. So we're still moving forward with that to get it submitted to the state by the end of the year. And how does that work relate to the permit? that we're Well, in the permit, the last permit, the watershed focused monitoring program was a permit condition. It's a five-year permit. There are seven watersheds, so there was some overlap, so we obviously went past the end of the permit with the last two. We're working with the state right now to get a new permit. They've administratively continued the 2015 permit, and in 2019 we told them that by the end of 2024, we would submit a new monitoring plan to them. And that's what we're working on right now to get put together to get over to Frankfurt in the next six weeks or so. Well, it seems like a big undertaking, so I appreciate everyone that's involved in that work. Thank you. Any other questions or comments? I don't see anyone else sign up. Thank you. All right. Thank you. Our final presentation today is the community outreach update and it's part of the backyard composting item placed into committee by Councilmember Legree. I will turn this over to her to provide some background and introductions. Thank you, Chair, and thank you, Angela, for being here to present to us. Before things are fully turned over to you, I just want to provide a little bit of context for our committee members. So the item on today's agenda, which was originally labeled as backyard composting, began as a pilot program in 2022. And I'm excited to hear from Director Poe about the progress and impact of the initiative. However, we know that this program represents just a small piece of the important work being done by the public information and engagement team. So Angela will not only provide us with an update on composting, but will also offer a broad overview of the team's efforts to engage our community and then share insights into the work her team is doing across Lexington and maybe what's next and what we can support and expect from them. So Angela, thank you for all of your hard work on this. I'm looking forward to hearing this update and I'll go ahead and turn it over to you. Angela Brown Thank you. Thank you for the opportunity to kind of broaden the scope of the presentation as well. I think it's really important to put it in context. So do I get to click anything? Oh, I do. Here we go. All right. So we're going to start out at bird's eye view, and I'm going to zoom in real fast to the trees and the frogs and the ferns. So public information and engagement, that's a section in the Division of Environmental Services. And I'm just going to talk briefly about what we do, specifically the community team, the programs, which includes the backyard composting program, the events that we do, and the direct community outreach that we're working on. So our mission is to inform the public about the services provided by EQPW and engage the public in behaviors that benefit our community. So we're telling people what we do as a department, but we're also trying to engage them in behaviors that help us do our work more efficiently, make the city better, things like recycling properly, things like picking up after your pet, things like we promote the volunteer opportunities for the watershed that we just spoke about. So we work with the seven divisions in the department, plus we also partner with the Lexington area NPO, in part because there's so much overlap with several of the divisions that are in EQPW. So I report to Jennifer Carey, and we have three kind of teams as part of our section. So the marketing team does the website, does social media, does paid ads, that sort of thing. The education team, they're actually all contractors, but they report to the city and are assigned to us full time. And then the team I'm going to focus on today is the community team. They're running our events, our programs. They're the ones who are looking the community in the eye when we're doing events. And the marketing team is more through some other medium. And the education gets to play with our K-12 students and educate them on what we do. So, this is just I wanted to make sure to bring attention to the staff that do the work. We are a big team, but we are constantly busy. And because we are serving those seven divisions plus the Lexington area MPO, a couple of the community folks are here today, so I just want to acknowledge them and the work that they do. I feel very lucky to have the team that I have. I feel like they're some of the hardest working people we've got in government, and I just appreciate them very much. So again, thank you for letting me expand the topic and be able to brag on all of them today. So quickly, I want to hit on our programs. We have a geocache program for both stormwaters and greenways. It's kind of like treasure hunting, if you aren't familiar with it. We have a program that just opened last Friday called Art by Nature. This year, the theme is Monarch Way Stations. The exhibit is open at the Living Arts and Science Center. Go See Trees is also going on right now. Fall is a busy time of year for us. We collaborated with the tree board and the Go See Trees are also part of the downtown tree walk that the tree board is launching. We have Creek Sweep. We hear a lot about litter, it ties into water quality, it's a waste management issue. Creek Sweep is a kit that we can provide residents who want to help address that problem. We have special collections we do to help protect the recycle center. Specifically, it is campaign season, as some of you are probably all too aware. And then after that, we have the holiday season. So campaign signs are something that can end up at the recycle center and should not. And so we offer a special collection to bring attention to that, and then we can properly recycle and dispose of those things. Similarly, we do that with holiday lights because around the holiday season when people are plugging in their lights and they realize they don't work, if they put them in the blue cart, they end up at the recycle center, tangled in all the equipment, and cause all sorts of issues at their busiest time of year. So that's something else that we run. Storm drains, there are lots of things you can do with storm drains. Greg was showing some of the images of storm drains. We encourage groups to stencil them or to do original artwork on them. And there's also a storm drain adoption program. We are starting to, there are lots of signs out in the community along trails and parks. And some of them, quite a few of them, are the responsibility of our department. We haven't historically kept track of those. So we don't know where they are, when they were put out, who paid for them. And so Seth has worked really hard on developing a map so we can start tracking those and knowing the purpose and where they are and when they were installed and where we need to order a replacement, if we need a replacement, and all that good stuff. And we also, this hasn't been a big time consumer for us. We didn't really have much interest in this last year outside of what was going through the mayor's office. But if people want to engage in those traffic box wraps that you see sometimes out in the community, that application process starts with our office as well. And they are great. The SafeStreetWits ones that are out there have been out there for like seven years and they still look fabulous. And then, of course, I will talk more about the compost workshops in depth. All right. So just quick by the numbers. We've had geocaching 193 total finds. 74 of those were stormwater 119 were greenways since we launched the program in 2019 we've had over a thousand fines once this program is up and going it's actually pretty low maintenance and so it's a good way to engage people without spending a lot of time it's also something that is self-guided and available all year round so people can do it whenever they want art by nature this year we had actually I think we ended up around 96 or 97 artists this year and I believe over 130 pieces. This is last year, sorry that's why this year our numbers are up this year. So last year we had 90 artists, 121 pieces and did six related events with nearly 2,000 participants. On top of that several K-12 classes went through the gallery as part of their living Arts and Science Center field trip, which is a great benefit of that partnership. Go see trees. We had 30 passports return last year, but those passports represent groups, often families of people who went through it. We have learned this year, this year it's been more popular in the first week than it was last year total. And I think part of that is we have historically spread the trees out through the entire county. And this year they are all clustered together. So that is a lesson learned that we will apply moving forward as we will focus on areas and moving around town. Special collections. Last year we had 398 Coroplast signs plus approximately 300 of the bag type signs that we collected. And holiday lights we had over 2,000 pounds. Creek Suite we promoted through six official events and we had over 300 of the bag kits distributed. storm drains. 217 were stenciled. We had one artistic drain completed and 10 different drains were adopted. The adoption is the thing we really want to push further. I've got a storm drain right in front of my house. Basically all it means is if I see a problem with it, I call 311 and let them know and help keep it clean, make sure my neighbors aren't sweeping leaves into it or anything like that. Interpretive sign tracking, we have 48 signs mapped currently, but we estimate that's less than 20% completion. So we've got a lot of work to do on that. There are a lot of signs out there and getting that done. So those are the programs that we do. So those kind of aren't specific days. Those take place over a longer period of time. things that we are looking to change moving forward. The Community Environmental Academy is coming back. We get asked about that, not infrequently. And so with the addition of Atlanta, we are going to be able to bring that back. And it will take a different form, and we haven't exactly figured that out. But come February or early March is when we anticipate putting out the application process for that. And the reason that we're going to change it is to make it more accessible to the folks that we really want to reach through that opportunity. I already mentioned promoting the storm drain adoption program more actively. We are doing a pick up and play pilot. That is hard to say quickly. Funded through the corridors commission with parks as a partner. And so that came out of we had a young man who was an intern for us when he was in high school at Bryan Station. He did a big Lex Litterfest event, and he pointed out that a lot of the ball fields and sports areas around town, if the players don't dispose of their trash properly, it really mucks up the fields and makes them look bad. So he came up with this pick up and play idea and the quarters commission decided to fund it. And so we've got trash can wraps and banners and signs up at different fields throughout the community. Thanks to parks partnering with us. All right, compost. Here we are. So just to go back to 2022 when we started this, there has been a deep interest for a long time in organic material disposal. So this started as an alternative option from sending things like apple cores and orange peels and things to the landfill. You aren't supposed to put any food, any of that sort of thing in your yard waste. That only gets mulched. It isn't processed. It doesn't get as hot. And so we ask people not to put food in their yard waste bins. That's for yard waste only. So what were people supposed to do? Hence the backyard composting program. This is a way that we can reach those who are interested in doing it. One of the things that waste management has been battling for years is a contamination issue. People using their yard waste carts or recycle bins as trash cans or just not knowing what goes in it and putting the wrong thing in it or putting things in plastic bags that shouldn't be. right now our contamination rate for yard waste is 50 to 60 percent and for recycling it's 30 to 35 percent so we really by having people do their own compost in their backyard they're make they're the people who are interested in doing it and doing it properly it also eliminates the need to transport this material the staff the trucks all of that stuff so last year was a third year of the program, we did it with a total budget of around $15,000. Most of that money came from the 1115 fund, which was waste management. And some of it came from 1101, our general fund. And that is because Jada Griggs, the senior program manager for sustainability, recognized that there are people who don't get collection from the city who want to participate in this composting program and because of the funding, if it was just the waste management funding they weren't going to be eligible. But this sort of diversion program is so important to the Empower Lexington plan that Jada and Chrissy and the awesome community volunteers have been working on that she really wanted to contribute and will continue to contribute this year. So we did five workshops last year, which is more than we've done in the past. The other thing that we did was we moved them around Lexington, so they weren't all at McConnell Springs, which is what we've done in the past. Seedleaf is the composting expert, and so we had them facilitate the workshops for us. We had 128 households participate. 98 of those were in service, so paid for with the 1115 funds, and 30 of those were out-of-service households. The in-service filled up really quickly. We had a robust wait list. So if people contact us and tell us they can't come, we let extra people, you know, we call, we go down the wait list. The out of service, that was added really last minute, but it was still nearly full. So we added that after we started promoting the workshops and still we almost filled up the out of service. We had 40 no-shows. 33 of them were in service and seven were out of service. us, again, we were able to fill most of those spots by using our wait list. All right. This is the miraculous piece, the miraculous change compared to last year. The challenge of this program has been historically how do we get people their composters once they've gone through the workshop? Because if you come to our workshop, what you get is a voucher that helps you pay for a composter of your choice. That was a real logistical nightmare for our team to figure out. But we, Jennifer Myatt, found this online store that basically does it for us. So if you went through the workshop, you got the voucher, and you needed to complete that purchase before the store closed, and then we had two scheduled pickup days. We had 82 composters ordered, 96 sales. There were some other things that weren't composters. So if you want to build your own compost or maybe you've got some other supplies, everybody picked up their stuff, which is miraculous. Fifteen minutes goes up really fast when you're here. All right, so similarly, we're going to do seed leaf-led workshops, various locations, late February through early April workshops. We're going to fund it the same. Our goal this year is 150 participants, and we're going to continue with the online store. One of the changes that we've talked about in our office is adding some indoor options for folks who have small yards or no yard. Right now we do offer worm compost bins, but those can be hard to manage. And there are products like Mill or Lomi, if you're familiar with those, those are name brands, but that are kind of like mini compost machines that you can have in your house. What would you like me to do? How much more time do you need? How about five minutes? Sounds good. Okay. Thank you. Can you put it up here? Thank you. Because clearly I do not have good time awareness today. Okay. So these are the events that we do. So we talked about programs. These are events, specific days, specific time. I'm not going to read all those to you. Pilot events, there's eight major events that we plan in 2024. We had nearly 5,000 interactions. We collected 585 gallons of grease. Doesn't that sound fun and appetizing? Servicing 121 cars at Gobble Grease Toss. With our trailer and tabling events, we had 17 total events with 2,300 interactions. And then you all, I think, are very familiar with Tree Week. We do other, that is not organized by us, but we have Water Week and we have Bike Month. and other things like that. So those are our collaborative events. Four of them that we participate in, we do coordinate. We did a total of seven activities with 603 interactions. So looking at events beyond, again, I mentioned Lex Litterfest. The Pick Up and Play came out of that. This year we decided to cancel Nature Hop, which used to be one of our collaborative events, and it was pretty popular. trailer, but it was a little more peripheral to the goals and objectives of EQPW than some of the other stuff that we do. And given that even with the amazing team that I have, we have limited capacity. So that was just a thing we decided to knock off. We have a trailer that we take out for outreach opportunities. Some of our staff have gone and traveled to other places and seeing them where they've basically turned them into traveling museums of sorts. And so we really want to up our game with the trailer and make it useful for a traveling museum with displays that we can even change out so that we can hit all these many, many, many topics that we covered. Next Saturday, we have a Coldstream planting party. That's with the Green Space Trust. We got generous grants from that. And we're also adding Waste Reduction Week, which will come up here in mid-November. which is a time, you know, as the holidays approach, people are making more and more and more trash. And so that's why we're going to talk about waste reduction week there. The last piece, this is the newest piece, and this is the piece I think that is really important. And I will speak quickly for two minutes and 40 seconds. This is us going out into the community very deliberately trying to build bridges with parts of the community that haven't historically engaged with us or we haven't historically engaged with. So the choir knows Live Green Lexington. They follow us on social media. They engage on our events. They apply for our grants time and time and time again. We want to make sure that every resident, every citizen, every faith community, everybody that qualifies knows and has a path to apply, for example, for a stormwater quality incentive grant. And so we have been out making these direct contacts and just sitting down with folks and listening and trying to help them out in ways that we can that are within the scope of the work that we do. So Alana's only been in the job for six months and actually was just promoted from environmental initiative specialist to the manager of the community team. And she's got a lot done. And this isn't fiscal year 24 numbers, this is just since Alana's been here. She's met with 26 complex managers representing 3,500 residential units. We're prioritizing affordable housing properties, provided dogway stations, move-out packets, move-in packets, meeting with neighborhood associations. going to churches and talking to church groups and talking to them about the grants and things that are available really trying to just go out and figure out who all in the community do we have some shared mission with and building bridges with those organizations and then again one of the things that I really want to do and that we have done and then we kind of got just distracted and weren't able to follow through, but bringing back translation, not only English, Spanish, but also having things in Swahili and having things in Arabic and having things in Mandarin and making sure that as we make these connections with these populations that may not have spoken English first, that we've got things and languages that they're comfortable communicating in. We have a speakers bureau that's coming. I already mentioned expanding translation and being more strategic. We can't be everywhere all the time. So one, those partnerships are important, but two, being strategic about where we go and how we spend our time. Look at that. Colleagues, go ahead and sign in if you have any comments or questions. Thank you for the extra time. Council Member Lynch. Thank you, Chair, and thank you, Angela, for the presentation. I have a question, sort of a personal question. Do you all recycle the metal stakes with the yard signs as well? So when we collect them separately, don't put them in the blue cart. I'm going to say that 90 times in the next few weeks. We either reuse them or, yes, we recycle them through a different metal recycling program. Great to know. And then when you all revive the Community Environmental Academy, is it open to council members to participate? We'd love to have you. Yes. Okay, awesome. Thank you, Chair. Council Member Fogle. Thank you, Chair. Council Member Lynch, you're always trying to get a one-up. But I know that you're the jogger, so you go right ahead. My question is, I know you said some of your team is here. How diverse is your team? Well, we have, let me look, let me pull up my chart. So we are, if you look at the fifth slide that lists our staff, Some of it is cut off. Some of it is cut off. Go ahead. That's okay. I'm going to say that we are a pretty Caucasian looking team. We do have some people that are of mixed race and we actually have a pretty high LGBTQ identifying portion of our team. And like always, some people go straight to the race. I was really talking about like, well, thank you for that too. So I'm thinking about youth and culture and men, women. And so I was looking at that diversity, like age difference, and do we have youth engagement? We do have youth engagement. So the staff that I listed on the slide are this, there we go, thank you. The staff I listed on the slide are the staff that we have regularly in the office. We do have some other interns that are not in all the time that help us with events and things. So we have everything from young college students all the way to folks who could probably retire if they wanted. Okay, thank you. And when you were talking about where the events are held, do we have a lot of events over on the north side of town? some of these events that you're talking about. And I really am interested in that ball field comment that you made to see, because we have a lot of parks, baseball fields, football fields. So I wanted to make sure that that included like Douglas Park and Green Acres Park and all the parks that are constitution. I believe they have a big influx of youth right now playing football in those parks. I know that Trayvon started with Castlewood Park. That's where the Lex Litterfest was. Right now we're only in five parks, and I cannot name them for you, unfortunately, right in this moment. But we did deliberately spread them out. So I can't tell you which ones were on the north side of town, but we deliberately didn't pick a cluster all in the same area. The thought is that if pick up and play catches on and is popular, we tried to, the wraps, it was the first time we had them. And so there were some issues with they weren't quite big enough, so we had to send them back to be adjusted and fixed. So we're still kind of slow rolling that out. But it has been very popular. Trayvon had some great pictures of kids and ball fields and, you know, standing with the cute little wraps. I wore one around the office the other day. I threatened to wear it. It's just like if you all are old enough to know the terrycloth wraps that you had when you went to the pool when you were a kid, it kind of looks like that. And so, but they were a little too snug for the trash can. So we're still wrapping that out. But I would love to be able to expand it. We designed them specifically so it didn't change how parks needed to service the trash cans, and they are washable. And so it should be a program that we can grow pretty easily with minimal change in operational behaviors, if that makes sense. And so one thing I would like to do is have great communication with you all. This is a great thank you for this presentation. we just had the Wimburn and the Douglas Park, their homecoming. And so there was a lot of confetti and everything. So we just had the children pick it up. I said, in Parks and Recreation, we were thinking about you. It was like, we're not going to have them come to this park. We're going to take pride in this park. And there was so much trash because it was a big homecoming for the little Broncos and the Browns homecoming. And so I would love to make sure Kristen contacts you all and make sure you all know events that's going on in our parks, our homecoming and things so that we may be able to get some of those extra containers. Thank you so much. Absolutely. And I look back at Atlanta because that is one of the neighborhoods I know that she's been working a lot with. And we've been talking about one of the dumpsters over in Douglas Park. And so it's on our radar for sure. Okay. Thank you so much. Council Member Sivigni. Thank you, Chair. And thank you so much for the presentation. Just a quick one on the compost piece. Is it at one time you said you basically had a waiting list. So is it like do we have a capacity issue or is it, I mean, because it doesn't seem like a ton of money. It's not a ton of money. It's mostly a capacity issue. So the structure is that they attend a two to three hour workshop where they learn about the different types of composters they can pick from, how to properly use them, how to properly troubleshoot basic common issues that come up with home composting, and then they get the $50 voucher. We try to keep the classes not too large, which is tricky. We allow 30 to 35 households per workshop. And then we encourage them to bring everybody in the household because ideally everybody in the household is composting as well. So we can have up to 90 people at one of those workshops, even though it's just for 35 households. I guess, is it possible to do those virtually? I mean, it seems like we could just like if I get a ticket, I have to take some sort of online education and take a test. I mean, it seems like we should be able to do that. We can definitely look into that. And we certainly have some software that we use where we could administer the test for folks. Yeah. And so it was mostly the education piece that was your bottleneck, was the education piece and having that many people attend so many classes. Yes, I will say just from a behavioral standpoint, one of the other things is I feel like the program, I feel like the program success in part is based on people do have a little bit of skin in the game before they get the voucher. And so I don't, you know, it's a hard balance of like if we just gave away the vouchers, everybody would want one and they might even get the composter but are they actually using it and so trying to find that sweet spot of where can it be as accessible as reasonably possible but we're still only getting those people who are authentically engaged in the program and minimizing their landfill what they're sending to the landfill. Thank you that's all I have thank you so much again for your presentation. Thank you. Councilmember Lickrey. Thank you Thank you, Chair. Angela, I have two questions, and they're both kind of about outreach. You know, based on the type of feedback that you all have gotten from your attendees, I know you do a lot of different types of outreach. So what have been the most impactful tools for you all? Like, I know that I get your mailer. I learned a lot about what's going on there. I know I've seen billboards, but can you talk a little bit about that outreach in addition to your tabling and how you make sure to connect with as many people as possible using different mediums? Yeah, that's a big question. So the mailer is, I will confess, when I first started and we were doing a mailer, I was shocked and ready to kill it. But after sitting through some of the HHW events and the paper shred events, people always would pull up and have it sitting right next to them. And I walk into people's houses and have seen it on their fridge and that sort of thing. So that is a useful way. And especially when we get into busy seasons or if there's something particularly important going on. I think about when we had to pause paper recycling for a while. Those mailers were so, so important, not only for us, but for you all. Because people were like, but I didn't know, but I didn't know. And it's so hard to make sure everybody knows. And the mailers are a good way to say, well, we at least sent this to your mailbox. Be sure to be on the lookout for it. So those postcards and the newsletter is a very valuable tool. The other thing that comes with pros and cons but has been very useful is our social media is pretty active and people engage with it. And it's a great listening device for us to be able to, if we post something about recycling, for example, and people have questions or confusions, It really helps us know how people are receiving the information that we're offering and kind of be able to fine-tune our messaging to make sure that we're constantly being clear and answering the questions that are most commonly out there, which is another reason a lot of the face-to-face events are also helpful in that, because what do we hear? A specific example, if you'll allow, when I first started, the pick up after your pet messaging was focused on when you're out on walks or out in public. And people weren't thinking about it and applying that messaging to their backyards at home. But from a water quality standpoint, that's just as important. And one of the barriers to that, one of the reasons people were like, I'm just going to leave it, is they thought it was fertilizer. They're like, eh, easy. It's fertilizer. Dog poo is not good fertilizer. Fun fact for the day. But having those conversations out in public and tabling with our big pile of petunia poo that you've probably all seen was a really good way. I don't know that we would have gotten that same insight without having those in-person conversations. That's why we do so many different things in so many different ways. Thank you, and I think that's a great example that leads into my next question. You had talked about Alana's role in community outreach and connecting with neighborhood associations. How can council and council members help with connecting your team and your outreach team to their neighborhoods and their neighborhood association meetings? What would be helpful for you all just with us and our work and that type of thing? Yeah, if you all have connections to active neighborhood associations, active faith communities, any active group that isn't plugged in and that you know is going to be interested, please connect us. because we don't know what we don't know a little bit, and we don't know the people that we don't know. And so if you can help just be that connection piece, that's so, so useful to us. And I would say the next key major timeline that that would be important is, again, compost workshops will open up right after the New Year's, probably in late January, early February. Stormwater quality incentive grants go live around February, March. And we've just got a ton of events that take place. And the Community Environmental Academy will open up probably around that same time frame. So if we can get connected with these folks by the end of this year, that would be really valuable and help us start building our own bridge with them before those things happen. And would we reach out to you or to Alana? Like, what is the best way for us to... I'm going to say just, Liliana, will you stand up since we're talking about you? I feel really weird. So this is Alana. She's amazing. And I would suggest just directly reaching out to her. Like I said, she was just promoted to the program manager for the community outreach team. will be hiring a replacement for the position she was in, where she was doing that direct outreach. But she's got her fingers kind of in that all the time and will be able to respond more timely than I would. So send it to Lana's way, please. Council Member Focal. Just a quick question on the faith leaders. Could you provide Council District 1 with the list of those faith leaders so we won't duplicate the services, Lana? I know you're not at the podium, and I'm not going to say, can you give me the list of the 31? But can we get a list of that so we won't duplicate those? Okay, thank you so much. That's it. I don't see anyone else signed up for today, so thank you for your presentation and all that you're doing in the community. Thank you. Colleagues, we do not have any other presentations for today. We can look at our items referred to committee. If there's anything anyone would like to give a quick update about or remove. I'm going to make one motion for my item. Number two is explore Lexington sustainability options. in that we kind of turned into the updates around empower lexington so i may turn that into an annual update later but i would like to make the motion now to remove that item at this time so moved we have a second from council member fogel all in favor say aye aye any opposed okay thank you um seeing no one else signed in or waving at me i am going to adjourn us thanks Thanks everybody. Thank you. I'm a time.