Stay here when the lights come on but O2 radiation is emitting from my diode being stuck in the lead, where O2 radiation can occur to drain back the current for a short period of time. Stay here when the lights come on but O2 radiation is emitting from my diode being stuck in the lead, where O2 radiation can occur to drain back the current for a short period of time. Stay here when the lights come on but O2 radiation is emitting from my diode being stuck in the lead, where O2 radiation can occur to drain back the current for a short period of time. Stay here when the lights come on but O2 radiation is emitting from my diode being stuck in the lead, where O2 radiation can occur to drain back the current for a short period of time. Three o'clock. So I'll go ahead and call to order the Lexington-Fayette-Urban County Council work session of January 21st, 2025. And I'll call on Vice Mayor Wu who has a motion. Thank you, Mayor. I would like to add to today's work session agenda presentation from the Department of Environmental Quality and Public Works to be presented after the one Lex year end report. So moved. All right. Are there any questions? All those in favor, say aye. Aye. Anyone opposed? All right. That motion passes. Thank you. That brings us to public comment for issues on the agenda. We have a few people signed up. And the way this works is that when I call on you, you'll need to come to the podium. And you'll need to restate your name and state your council district for the record. And before we start that, I just need to check on people who are giving their time, yielding their time. So is, let's see, is Tanya Lindsey here? Okay. Are you giving your time to Shonda Snow? Okay. Thank you. And I think everyone else is speaking. So Shonda, when it's your turn, you'll have six minutes. So first is Chambra Mulder, followed by Shonda Snow. Welcome. My name is Chambra Mulder. I am in the second district. And so I'm here to speak about One Lexington. The first thing I want to do is thank the mayor for supporting One Lexington and the council for supporting One Lexington. I know they'll give a great report of the work they do. I'm a licensed psychologist. I've been serving Lexington for a long time. I've been away for a while doing state and federal policy work around mental health. But I do understand the work that they do and the trauma that our children are experiencing in this community. And I respect the work that they do. I have two things related to a news article that came out about an audit of One Lexington. And the first thing I did was I saw that the audits are done routinely. And routinely there are issues with process. So I understand the audit. But one of the things I wanted to say for people who have something to say about that particular audit is, I see on page 15 that you are approving or hopefully approving a human resource manager at a salary of $85,693.92. Now, I'm sure this person probably works in this lovely, warm building from 8 to 5. But the people of One Lexington do not work from 8 to 5. And I don't know their salary. But I can guess that it's probably not $85,693.92. So I think that when people have an issue with that, they should look at the salaries of other people and the work and the amount of time that these men put into the work. And the second thing I wanted to say, as a result of the audit, I would like to ask the mayor and the council, would they be giving them an administrative staff to support them in tightening up the process or whatever going on with the money and the grants and all of that stuff? Because from my understanding, they do not have an administrative staff to take care of those things for them. And so I would like to see ñ I often hear the mayor talk about the great work that One Lexington is doing. I've been here from the beginning when One Lexington started, and I know that they're doing something new. They're doing something great. We see the results. And I would like to see more support, money, people, human bodies. I often see them asking for volunteers to help with the kids on field trips and things like that. I understand that will probably continue to happen. But an administrative person, possibly a couple more people to scale up the work that they're doing so that we can see more results for our kids and our community. Thank you. Thank you very much. Next is Shonda Snow, and you'll have six minutes. And you will be followed by Linda Froelich. Welcome. Proud of you. Thank you. Good evening, council. My name is Shonda Snow. I'm in the 5th District. My son, Christopher Snow, was murdered maybe seven years this year in April. And I have a cold case, and I was wanting to let you know that I'm still working with my cold case detective, Detective Hope and Detective Music. And then also, Mayor, while you're here, I was wanting to get a meeting with you, and I just wanted to know about the open-door policy because the fact that I have another issue, a mental health issue that goes on in April with my son's birthday is in April. And last year, April 11th, last year, I called the police on myself last year. I was homeless, and I was assaulted by the police last year. They tried to kill me. Last year, April 11th, last year, I went through an investigation with the Internal Affairs, and I'm not going to give up on this. And I want to work with the police. I want to work with you all because I have something to offer. This was an encounter, a religious encounter. I'm not the same person. And I wanted to, if you have an open-doors policy, I've talked about what transpired on this evening, which I didn't give up on that night, on April 11th. I had a warrant in another county, and I was treated like an animal. I was handcuffed around my back. They put the hobble on me for more than 20 minutes, and out in the rain. I thought I was going to die. And I want to talk to you about mental health because it goes on in the country. I survived it, and I want to talk about this. I want to move forward. I'm in trauma counseling with Mr. Devine, and he's a mentor, and I think he's doing a great job. All of this, it's up to him, really. We all need to love one another. And I just want to get some justice for myself, for my son, and for myself with police brutality. And you all have the pictures. The pictures are graphic. And no one should be treated like this. No one should be treated like that. I called on myself, and I asked to be put in the police car, and I'm not getting the proper responses even from the open records. It's not what I needed. They're going on. They're going on after the fact when I was put in the paddy wagon. I wanted you all to see what went on before the paddy wagon. That's all I asked. And I met with Mr. Whitaker from the NWACP. And Tonya Lindsey is my chihuahua with a pit bull bike, and I'm not going to settle for less. I'm not going to settle for less. And, Devine, I love you too, Devine. You're a strong man. Don't let this. This does not define who you are. I love you guys too. That's it. Thank you. Devine, do you have Ms. Snow's contact? Okay. Thank you. Okay, thank you. Thank you. Next is Linda Froelich, and you'll be followed by Anthony Skinner. Welcome. Hi, I'm Linda Froelich. I'm from the 10th District, and I'm here today just to share a little bit about my experience during the recent snowpocalypse. I want to say that this was a very unusual event, and I think that people in the city worked very, very hard to make it possible for people to move about as quickly as possible. However, the efforts that the city made were primarily concentrated on getting cars moving instead of helping people who are trying to avoid using their cars in that dismal weather getting around by bus or on foot. And the thing that really kind of shocked me was that there were buildings, such as the county health department, that four days into the event still didn't have sidewalks cleared. People had to walk on the street on Loudon Avenue. Even downtown, trying to just get from the library to the bus station, the sidewalks weren't cleared, and there are snow piles that are making it difficult for people to cross at regular crossings. All that, not to say bad, bad, bad job, but really to say, as we move forward and we're trying to figure out how to address issues like that in the future, to move up pedestrians and people using the bus and people having to use wheelchairs on your list of priorities. Just to make sure that as streets are being cleared, whether it's downtown or arteries, that pedestrian areas, sidewalks, crossings are cleared so that people can move about. It's not just people using their cars that have to go shopping. Everybody has to go shopping. Everybody has to go see the doctor. Everybody has to live their lives. And if they don't have a car, then it makes it that much harder when we do not keep our sidewalks and our crossings clear. So that's just to remind, we are out there, we need to be considered as you move forward in creating a new snow plan for potentially events like this in the future. Thank you. Thank you. Next is Anthony Skinner. Welcome. Hello, I am Anthony, District 6. Most of you know me as Tony Wavy. I'm a painter, rapper, a lot of activism work in the community. And I just wanted to speak on the behalf of one Lexington and all the amazing work that they've been doing. I've only been here in Lexington for two years. Originally from Michigan, moved to Charlotte, North Carolina when I was ten. So that's a big city compared to what Lexington is and the growing city that it is. And the biggest difference that I've seen is the work that these brothers are directly doing in the community. I wanted to speak on the behalf of all the younger people in this generation, because what they're doing is having a cause and effect on how young people see themselves, how young brothers see the people around them in their community. The work that they're doing, whether it's snow, I've seen them in the snow, I've seen them in the heat, I've seen them in the streets. And I just wanted to say that it is so important, it is so important that we have people that are directly advocating for our young people going out in ways that haven't been seen. I've been able to directly work with them, whether that be speaking to the young people, showing them my art, showing them my music. So they're giving them outlets, whether that be performing. They're giving them outlets, whether that be through art or directly going out shoveling. All these different things and aspects of the community in ways that we haven't seen before. So the work that they're doing, it goes without question, because not everybody's doing that. Even in big cities, not everybody's going out. So to be able to witness that and also be a part of that has been truly an honor. And it's a resource that we need to continue to elevate and push. Whether that be adding more staff, getting more staff, more funding to the things that they're doing, because I've seen them doing without money and with. So to have that impact is truly beautiful, and I just wanted to speak on behalf of that. As a young person, as an artist, as a creative in this community. And what they're doing is, like I said, it's so important, I can't stress that enough. So on behalf of 1 Lexington, I just want to say thank you guys for all the things that you guys do, whether that be in the churches, whether that be in the schools, at every school. As soon as I got out here, everybody knows Devon's name, everybody knows 1 Lexington. So for them to have that good name, wherever you go, I think that just speaks volumes to who they are and what they're doing. So that's just my piece, and when we look at people, we look at their heart. And we look at the heart of the men and the women that work in 1 Lexington. It shows who they are, and we see the fruits of what they're doing. So we measure things by the fruits of what they have planted, and the seeds that they're planting. I know that it will continue to grow and sprout, and we speak blessings on them, and thank you all for listening to me. Thank you very much. That ends our public comment, and so I'll entertain, and thank you for all of you who spoke today. I'll entertain a motion to approve the docket. Motion approved. Thank you, and Council Member Baxter seconds. If you have an item for the docket, please log in. All right, all those in favor of approving the docket, say aye. Aye. Is anyone opposed? All right, that motion passes. Next is the summary for January 14th, 2025 work session. I'll entertain a motion. Council Member, I mean, Sheehan, and Council Member Reynolds seconds. Are there questions, corrections, additions, anything? All those in favor, say aye. Aye. Is anyone opposed? All right, that motion passes. Next, we have budget amendments. I'll entertain a motion to approve. So moved. Vice Mayor Wu, seconded by Council Member Baxter, and please log in if you have questions. Council Member Ellinger. Thank you, Mayor. Page three, the last journal entry, 152581-82. Can I get a, yeah, I think it's Kevin, yeah. Welcome. Just give me a little, explain this one to me. Yeah, so this is, those of you who were here, so last year, well, two years ago, we received one of the Kentucky Product Development Initiative grants from the State Economic Development Cabinet for $2 million. We're now in a position where we've spent some of that, and we've filed our initial reimbursement for portions of it. So this accounting stream sets up the account where all that can come into. Got you. Thank you. That's what I thought. It's a bookkeeping. Thank you. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you. Kevin Adkins, my Chief Development Officer. I'm going to ask any other LFHCG folks who answer questions to please introduce yourself at the podium and tell what you do. Thank you. Next is Council Member Morton. Thank you. I have a question. Page number three, journal entry 152594-95 is regarding Arborist for Youth Services. Third one down, correct? Third one down, correct. While you're coming. Could you just help me understand this budget amendment? I understand that the money is being removed from Arbor Youth Services. I guess what is the circumstances that makes this necessary, and how would these monies be used, or how would this match grant be used? Please introduce yourself. So I'm Theresa Reynolds, Director of Grants and Special Programs. So this is just an administrative correction. We're moving money from an $8,000 account to a $7,000 account so we can spend it on rapid rehousing assistance for Arborists. Thank you. Thank you. Anyone else have a budget amendment question? All right. All those in favor of approval say aye. Aye. Is anyone opposed? All right. That motion passes. Thank you. You have some budget adjustments for your information only. And next we come to new business. Motion approved. All right. Is there a second? Council Member Sheehan. And please log in with your questions. Council Member Morton. Item C, please. Sorry. Thank you, Chair. Item C, just for public transparency, and it will be Chief Weathers or his staff. What is the purpose of the Magnet Forensic LLC software? How and when will it be used within the department? Likewise, can you talk a little bit about the process of using this investigation tool and when it is worn and when it's not? Introduce yourself, please. Absolutely. Yes, ma'am. My name is Chris Cooper. I'm the commander of the Bureau of Training and Wellness for the Lexington Police Department. To answer your question, Magnet Forensics is the company that creates a product called GrayKey. GrayKey is a forensic software system that is used to examine mobile phones, which we find that are in a locked state. To further answer your question, it is not our discretion when to use that. We do obtain search warrants and or consent to use that software to access what's in that phone based on the circumstance. Thank you. And then, if you could speak towards item D, can you just shed light on the importance of this training and how it will help our officers? Absolutely. So that Fundamentals of Crash Dynamics course, it is one of approximately four or five courses that IPTM, a nationally known training company, puts out. And in summary, it's to basically further educate our collision reconstruction investigators. So in times of extremely serious collision incidents or some that may rise to criminal standards depending on the circumstances, these classes go in. Each class has a little bit different focus. This one in particular focuses on physics, a lot of time distance analysis, projectile and airborne things. Pretty in-depth stuff that ultimately will help those investigators determine what exactly happened in these collision investigations. Thank you. Very well. And then, lastly, just item G. Thank you. And then, can you shed light on why this position is needed and how this position will benefit the Department of Waste Management? Welcome. Good afternoon. I'm Glenda George. I'm the Director of Human Resources. Yes, Waste Management is one of our larger divisions that has a lot of personnel related issues. And in order to help Director Baldwin and his staff, we would like to put an HR manager out there similar to what we've done with Community Corrections to assist with handling all of the HR related issues. So that way we would have someone on site to assist and that will free up Director Baldwin's time to handle the operations of waste management. And we've done this out at Corrections, I think the person started in 2023, and that has gone really well. And so we would now like to do that for waste management as well. Great, thank you. Thank you. Does anyone else have any questions about new business? All right, all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Is anyone opposed? All right, that motion passes. Next, we do have communications from the mayor for appointments. I'll entertain a motion to approve. So moved. Second. Council Member Baxter moves, Vice Mayor Wu seconds. Are there any questions? All those in favor, say aye. Aye. Is anyone opposed? All right, that motion passes. We do not have donations today. We do have communications from the Mayor Procurements. I'll entertain a motion to approve. Second. Second, all right. Vice Mayor Wu moves, Council Member Curtis seconds. Are there any questions? All right, all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Is anyone opposed? All right, that motion passes. And that brings us to continuing business and presentations. And first up, I'll call on Council Member Brown for the Budget Finance and Economic Development. Thank you, Mayor. The Budget Finance and Economic Development Committee meeting for November 19th, 2024, summary and motions. The meeting began at 103 PM. First, the committee unanimously approved the September 24, 2024 committee summary. The second item on the agenda was a monthly financial update. Commissioner Hensley presented the financials for October 2024. Revenue collections are slightly exceeding budget through October with a positive variance of 3.7%. Director Luker's shared personnel is within 0.7% of budget and they are watching payouts closely for retirements and sick checks. Operating variances is going down even after adding 8.5 million to the budget for capital projects. No action was taken on this item. The third item on the agenda was Commerce Lexington Regional Competitiveness Plan Talent Update. Betsy Dexter, Executive Director of the Commerce Lexington Business Education and Network presented on the Commerce Lexington Regional Competitiveness Plan Talent Update. Part of the overall regional plan is to develop a new regional talent attraction retention marketing website and digital marketing campaign to increase awareness of the region as a place to live and work. Ways to engage in this initiative are to follow greater Lex on social media, explore the look at Lex.com website, spread the word, and use the resource hub. No action was taken on this item. The next item on the agenda was the council budget review process. Kelly Farley, council budget analyst presented on the budget review process. The budget review was conducted to identify opportunities for improvement by collecting feedback. Suggestions to improve the FY 26 budget process are to provide budget overview training and budget process workshop for council members to find the purpose and goals of the retreats. Encourage council members and staff's attendance at the mayor's budget hearings and schedule link chair check-in meetings throughout the process. Next steps will consist of exploration of new link structures and plan development for the FY 26 budget process. The committee adjourned at 2.04 PM. That completes my report. Thank you, Council Member Brown. Does anyone have questions about the report? All right, thank you very much. That brings us to the Kentucky League of Cities legislative update, and we have J.D. Cheney with us. He is the CEO of Kentucky League of Cities. Welcome. Thank you, Mayor and members of council. I don't think I've done a legislative update in this setting before, so we'll try to do that. I know the clock's running on me, so I'll try to be brief. If you're not familiar with the Kentucky League of Cities, we've been around about 100 years. We represent all the cities in the Commonwealth of Kentucky. All 409 of Kentucky's incorporated cities for the past 100 years, and one of our main missions is to represent city governments in Frankfurt and in Washington on legislative matters and impact city governments across the state. We're governed by a board of directors. You all are represented under our bylaws. The city of Lexington has a permanent seat on the KLC board of directors, which designates a mayor or a mayor's designee from both Lexington and Louisville as permanent members. So you're all's board member on behalf of Mayor Gorton is Kevin Atkins, your chief development officer who votes and attends those two hour long board meetings going through every bit of legislation. We set an agenda for city governments across the state every year. If you're not familiar with that, it generally has to do and founded upon the principles of local decision making is best made at the local level, and that is becoming, sometimes with some of the newer legislators, even more of a challenge. Used to this principle of home rule would resonate with legislators, and they would not take governmental action to preempt local control. We're having more and more pieces of legislation that are introduced, it looks like, over the past couple of years that insert the state in what I would call a number of local matters. Before I go into the top issues on KLC's legislative agendas, I do need to have a mea culpa and apologize to you on behalf of our organization and Shante as well. I understand that we were supposed to do a parliamentary procedure training last week or the week before last, and we had a scheduling mix up, and we're not here. So on behalf of our organization, I think some of you all were in attendance and anticipating that training. And so on behalf of the organization, I'm terribly embarrassed by it, and I apologize to you all for the scheduling mix up. That's not a typical League of Cities response. But let's talk about the agenda items. We have a new legislative team in Frankfort. I'm obviously not Gracie Kelly, who's our Director of Governmental Affairs. I serve as the CEO of the organization. Gracie is sick, and so I am her fill-in today, but Gracie runs our legislative program. She's director. We also have a legislative council, Government Affairs Council, Lauren Lewis, Nick Storm, who you may know from Spectrum News. He's our Government Affairs Communication Manager. We have Deanna Branstetter, who's worked for a couple of governors, who serves as our legislative coordinator. And Scott, who's here, who's our research economist, is your on-the-ground legislative team in Frankfort. So get to know those folks. You'll start getting emails from them once the session gets going. The top priority that the board ranked as their top priority is to correct the road funding formula. If you look at how the local government portion of the state sales tax, which is split to local government, it's highly in favor of what we would call more rural areas, or unincorporated areas through the state. Right now, about 80% of all the local government portion is heavily favored to county governments or rural portion. Now, Lexington's in a unique position as a merged government. You get a share of both the county allocation and the municipal road aid allocation. But because the formula is so weighted in favor of unincorporated road miles in that formula and not the municipal road aid, city of Lexington is probably, not probably, most definitely probably not receiving the funds in proportion to what you all spend out of your all's general fund on maintaining city streets. As what other units of government should. So that's the case for all those 400 cities throughout the state. Municipal road aid is heavily tilted in front of the, for the counties. And so they've put on the agenda for us to modernize that road funding formula. So city governments, Lexington and Louisville included, would be able to spend less out of their general fund revenues. And get a greater share of the state gas tax. And we've got some facts and figures on that that shows the way that breakdown is a little, is inequitable and needs to be fixed. There is a big discussion in Frankfort right now regarding how to properly fund the state road program. Whether or not gas tax receipts are going to be viable over the long term. That's going to be a big policy decision that's being made. But so many cities and county governments rely on that portion of the state sales tax, state gas tax to fund local maintenance and repair of city streets. One of the other issues that the board of directors wanted to do, and this is in pending litigation right now. But we're tied to an old provision of the Kentucky Constitution and Kentucky statutes which limit the number of cities that can impose a restaurant tax. Many cities throughout the state impose a restaurant tax for the purpose of funding tourism or other type of tourism related infrastructure. That's not available for Kentucky's largest cities. And our board of directors would like to see some clarification, not to mandate to do the tax. But to allow city governments across the state, regardless of how they were previously classified, under the old constitutional system, to be able to elect to do that. I don't know about the prospects of the legislature tackling that issue, just to be frank about that. Because it is in pending litigation, and typically the legislature is unwilling to take a legislative stance while pending litigation is occurring. So there's a case at the court of appeals right now that the city of Hazard has prosecuted. It's challenging the constitutionality, the distinction between cities. So, but nevertheless, our board thinks it's important that you all as local leaders, you all are in the best seats to make decisions about how to fund the operation of your local government. And that all cities need that option. We've talked for a long time, we're blue in the face. I think over the past two decades, I'm coming upon 24 years with the League of Cities. And there's not been a legislative session go by where there hasn't been discussion about the need to modernize the way that revenues collected by the local governments. Our constitution, we're operating under 1891 provision. It was amended in 1901, but 1891 with a small amendment in 1901 that restricts the legislature from allowing you to collect any types of taxes other than franchise fees, occupational taxes, insurance premium taxes included in that occupational tax provision. And then, of course, ad valorem taxes on real and personal property. That's it. It's not a restraint just on local governments. It's a restraint on our legislature to be able to modernize. So we've talked for a long time about a constitutional amendment that would enable the legislature to consider other types of taxes or being able to do that. Now, we were full force on this, and I'll be quite frank about it. Full force, probably for two decades, Mayor, talking about the need to do that. And with the discussions over the past couple of sessions that, well, if we pass this constitutional amendment, you need to completely give up occupational taxes. And I can tell you the math doesn't work, but for one or two cities in Kentucky, it certainly doesn't for the city of Lexington with regard to your all's reliance on the occupational tax revenue. It's not a one for one trade on being able to do that. So this is going to take a little work to continue to massage out before we would be prepared to look at a constitutional amendment. County Employees Retirement System, for those of you that aren't familiar with your budget, I will tell you that the separation of the County Employees Retirement System from the State Retirement System has been one of the biggest budget saving things that we've accomplished. There are several folks that continue to file legislation or pursue legislation that would put the County Employees Retirement System back under the state umbrella. And for those of you that have developed the city's budgets in the past couple of years, you understand that the investment earnings and the separation has allowed and yielded savings to your all's, to every local budget through the state, because of the success of the investment earnings and focused governance of the participants in the system, rather than having the state mandate higher employer contributions and other factors. So that's an important thing. And the very last thing I'm going to bring up, as I mentioned before, we played a lot of offense, I think, over the past couple of decades. I want to point out that part of working with the legislature is playing a lot of defense. And I probably wouldn't have given as much credence to the proposal by some lobbying interest to mandate the state collection of local taxes. It seems like we've been there and done that over the past, it's probably been a decade since we've had any serious fight on that. And I now have to give that more credence. I think, I just left a meeting with my counterparts with the county association, who are equally as concerned with the legs that legislation's gaining, that would mandate that local governments allow the state government or some third party entity to collect your local revenues. I think for Lexington, when you look at occupational taxes, is it close to 70%? It's been so long since I chaired that revenue commission, Mayor. It's 70 or over 70% of your all's revenue. Councilman Brown, I believe for Lexington, it comes from occupational taxes. Having the state or any third party entity make that election or have the state legislature mandate that the state or a third party entity that's not a choice made by the local government is a big threat to local independence and local decision making. Our board has unanimously opposed that. I understand that Keiko's going to do so. That's going to be a bit more of a fight in the legislative session that I would have anticipated. Let's look at the track record of the state with plain unemployment claims. Let's look at the track record of the state government with regard to collecting our telecommunications tax revenue and other types of experiences we've had with state government. We have legislators now who would like to have you come to the legislature and ask for money to operate your city rather than have you collect and locally decide and make appropriation decisions at the local level. And I think that's a slippery, tremendously dangerous slippery slope with regard to centralized collection. I ask Lexington to continue, along with the rest of cities and counties throughout the state, to continue to oppose any effort to have any mandate for a local government to have an entity other than what the city or county decides to collect its local revenue. And I think that'll be a tremendous fight. We have about, probably about 25 items on the legislative agenda that the board's debated to make corrections. Whether it's on open records and law enforcement exemptions of the open records and a myriad of other issues that help with the efficiency and administration of city governments. And fundamentally grounded in the principle that local decisions are best made at the local level. That's what we'll continue to advocate for. It's a foundational principle of our organization. But if you, I hear that this is not the thing to do anymore. I promise you this is not, I'm not going to capture your money if you do capture this QR code. It does take you to the full legislative agenda where you can read each of those items if you have not seen that. And you will know what the board prioritized in this very short legislative session. We look forward to working with you, I'm down to a minute. And I'm happy, I do not know what protocol is, Mayor, whether that is to take questions or answer questions or not. If you need me to come back to another work session, or you want to have discussions about the way we're representing you, because it's our job to help represent you all. Even though you have advocates in Frankfort every day, we want to be sure we're representing the city of Lexington and the policies that you all embrace as well. Thank you very much. We'll see if any council members have questions. All right, first is Vice Mayor Wu. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Mr. Cheney, for the presentation, and I really appreciate the work of your organization. The two words that stood out from the entire presentation for me is always home rule. We were elected by the people of Lexington to do the business of the people of Lexington, and I think we're better at it than folks that are a little distance away from us. In terms of the revenue diversification, that, you said, requires a constitutional amendment. That would be brought forth by the state legislature to put on a ballot, is that correct? Yes, sir. That would have to be approved by three-fifths of the House, three-fifths of the Senate, and then it would have to go before the voters of Kentucky for a majority of those voting to approve the constitutional amendment. How close have we gotten? Have we ever gotten to a full floor vote on it? We passed in the 2021 session, 22 session. It passed the full House with 85 votes and failed to gain enough support of the majority caucus in the Senate to pass the Senate floor. With the majority caucus member support, I will add this for the Senate, with the majority party members plus the minority members of the House, Senate, we did have enough votes on the floor to pass it, but it was not put to a vote. Thank you for that. And I know you said there's a list of 25 more things that we can look at from the agenda and we don't have time to get into all of it. Is there anything that you would consider kind of Lexington specific or something that would potentially impact Lexington in a great way in that list? I think every one of those, whether it's compliance with open records, whether it's health insurance benefits for retirees, they're going to apply, every one of those pieces of legislation would apply to the city of Lexington or impact Lexington. Perhaps in a more minor way than it would some of the other smaller cities in the state. But all would apply to Lexington, but I do not think there's anything Lexington specific on the agenda that would apply solely to urban county governments. I would say buckle up, you're probably going to see legislation that's specifically drafted to apply only to urban county governments or consolidated local governments, which is Louisville, or urban county and consolidated only given the unique position. But so far, at least in the bill tracking that I'm aware of, there hasn't been anything filed or anything that I'm aware of that would apply uniquely only to the urban county government. All right, thank you for that. And then one kind of big picture question, really kind of to get your opinion on, what impacts do you potentially expect with the changing of the federal administration, how they may impact or potentially even trickle down from the federal level to the state level to us? Do you see any sort of either philosophical changes or actual material legislation that might be coming our way, not this year necessarily? In terms of the federal impact on state legislation or federal legislation that would impact local. My number one concern, and this should be a major concern for all cities across the country, is a discussion in Congress, both with members of the majority party and minority party, is about the tax exempt status of municipal bonds and the ability for municipalities to sell debt. And if that is eliminated, that's a huge budget impact on the federal budget. But if that's eliminated, the marketability of local government bonds is going to be dramatically impacted. I think there may be some momentum and discussion for that than we've seen probably over the past decade, and that's something that we'll have to stay very engaged on from the federal perspective. And that's probably, at least at this juncture, councilman, probably the biggest concern with the change of administration. And I do not think the presidential administration has weighed in on that issue, but we're seeing it proposed by some members of Congress. I appreciate that, and I appreciate the work of you and your organization. Thank you, Chair. Thank you. Thank you all. Thank you. Councilmember Morton? There's several more questions. Several more? I thought that was done. I thought I was dismissed. Well, I don't have nothing much for you. Just for the full agenda QR code, that's not really hitting, that's not working. Could you just give, I guess, the website name so that folks can know how to get access to it? Yes, if you go to www, I guess we don't do wwws anymore. My people back here are cringing. Go to klc.org, and if you do that and you click on the legislative tab, you'd be able to download the full agenda. And if not, you can email me at jd at klc.org, and I'll send you a PDF copy. Thank you. Councilmember Reynolds? I'm sorry, Councilmember Lynch is next. Thank you, Mayor. And thank you, Mr. Chaney, for the presentation, and thank you for the advocacy you've done for us in the past. We really appreciate that. And I just have two questions. I know this is a short legislative session, so things are moving quickly. So if we have any specific questions or advocacy issues that we would like your help with, do we just contact Ms. Kelly? Kelly or me, gkelly at klc.org, or you can email me jd at klc.org. Or, we're on TV, aren't we? Or I'll give you my cell phone number off of TV, and you're welcome to call me there. Awesome, and then my second question is, I would love for my colleagues to additionally consider this after this short session is over, a follow-up presentation from you all to let us know what happened. I don't know if that's scheduled, that's something we can put on our calendar. But I would love for you all to come back and kind of give us another overview of what happened and what we can expect as a result of this short session. Would love that opportunity as well, as many times as you all want. But definitely for a wrap up and discussion in preparation for heading into the longer session. I think that would be extremely helpful to understand what you're all's priorities are. We would love to be here, and happy to accept an invitation at any time. We'll have staff here, I can tell you, parliamentary training snafu will not ever occur again, Madam Administrator. Thank you so much, and thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Council Member Reynolds. Thank you, Mayor, and thank you, Mr. Cheney, I always appreciate your updates. My question is actually a little different. There are a lot of different ways that you can be involved in KLC as a legislator. And you guys offer a lot of seminars and different workshops and things. And a lot of times, we don't know how we can participate, and we have a lot of new council members. So if we want to be involved, and we want to know what's going on, and what opportunities there are for us to get involved, what should we do? I think that klc.org really does, not trying to oversell the website, provides a great opportunity. And another recommendation, the former mayor of Versailles is now the chief member services officer for the league. So we put an elected city official in the role of running our member services department, which provides education and strategic planning and runs the member benefits in addition to legal and legislative issues. There's a whole host of things that the organization engages in. And I think it would be time well spent if the council was interested in having Mayor Troggett. I don't call mayor anymore, but Mayor Troggett from Versailles, who's now our chief member officer, to come over and just go through those things with you, such as the seminars, the training, the certification, the training incentive programs, the strategic planning, the community development resources, and all of the other benefits of being a member of the League of Cities. Because that's extended to not only the administration and council members and council members' staff, but city employees as well, to be able to engage in those things. Because that's the mission of our organization at the end of the day. Councilwoman is the only reason we exist, is just to back you all up in order to help you do your job, to serve your constituents. That's the only reason we exist. We don't pay shareholders or other things of that nature. So the more engaged that you all are. We did take note that several of you did attend, or a couple of you did attend the city official orientation. And we're trying to be very specific instead of just saying, well, come and listen to the mayor or council form of government. because Urban County government is unique compared to these other forms of government. So we want to be sure we tailor that training for you all to the extent that you all are going to participate and be engaged. I really would recommend, in addition just to taking a drive through the website, is if you all have an opportunity at some point to engage Mayor Trogget to come over and talk to you and run through those resources and opportunities would be fantastic. I really appreciate that. I want us to be able to take full advantage of what you all have to offer. And is there a newsletter that would update us? Hopefully, my understanding in my role, hopefully every one of you are getting every Thursday, I believe now, direct line, which talks about grant, KLC direct line, which talks about grant opportunities, other city news. And then every Friday, I believe you have Capital Watch, which talks about federal or state legislative or executive branch news. As well, which will keep you up to date every Friday on this bill's moving, this bill that impacts cities. So you should be getting two emails, one every other Thursday and during the session, once every Friday. Am I right about that, Scott? Okay, once every Friday that would give you that story. If you're not signed up or you're not receiving that email and you want to be on that distribution list, just email me at jd at klc.org and I'll be happy to be sure that's rectified. But that goes out to about 5,000 city officials and employees throughout, city employees throughout the state. Thank you very much. I appreciate that you answered my question perfectly. Thank you. Thank you, Mayor. Council Member Gray. You guys are like the state legislature here, having to testify. Thank you, Mayor. I just had a, I arrived late, so I didn't hear what you said before. But I'm curious, how many council members have applied to be on any of your boards? And how many have been for the past four years or so? So the last we had, we had Councilwoman Lamb. So that would have been six years ago? About. And then Council, how long has Susan, or Clerk Lamb been retired from council, so that may be six or eight years. She served about four years. Then Councilwoman Amanda Mays-Bledsoe served for three years. Of course, she ran for Senate, and so when she was elected to Senate, she's no longer a city officer. And then we have the permanent, under our bylaws, Lexington and Louisville have a permanent seat, which designates the mayor of both Lexington and Louisville, or their designee, to permanently serve on the Board of Directors. So on the board, Lexington and Louisville's always represented, but Lexington has had, you know what, you're gonna throw tomatoes at me, Councilman Brown. Councilman Brown was on the Board of Directors for a two year stint, right? When he served as President of the Kentucky Black Caucus of Local Elected Officials. Okay. So we've had a good history, I think, of council representation. Okay, so I'm hopeful that, I applied, just so you know. I asked that because I did apply, and I was declined because you said you had too many representatives from the city of Lexington. And so I was just curious, what is the process so that besides the mayor, we have council members that are, we're on the same level as the mayor. I would like for us to have council members as part of this discussion as well. Yes ma'am, so there's a nominating committee that convenes every year, there's nominations. Nominating committee considers whether there's open seat or vacant seat and makes a recommendation to the membership for a vote. And so I'd say keep, and sometimes it takes a while. I know I can name an example of a mayor in one part of the state without pointing it out that's tried four times and hadn't been able to get a slot in the region because it's divided based on regions of the state. So you have to slot in with a vacancy in the region. And I think Lexington and Central Kentucky is in the, I know it's the sixth congressional district, but the sixth region. And right now you've got the mayor of Nicholasville, the mayor of Richmond, and where else? Winchester, that have slotted into those district seats, but they turn over. So I would encourage you to keep talking to the nominating committee and continue to apply. Yes, and I just look forward for not only the mayors to be permanently on there. Maybe we should have council members that are representing Lexington as well that are permanently on that as well as Jefferson County. Thank you. Thank you, ma'am. Thank you. JD, it might have been before your time, but Council Member Gorton served. Yeah. 20 some years ago. I'm sorry, it may have been before my time. I would never intentionally overlook your service, Mayor. It's been a while ago. We don't seem to have any more questions, so thank you so much. From my perspective, KLC does a wonderful job and we appreciate very much what you do for cities. Thank you, Mayor. Appreciate your all's time, Council. Thank you. All right, next is our One Lexington presentation. Divine Karama and his team of One Lexington are here. Welcome. Good afternoon, Mayor, Vice Mayor Wu, new and seasoned council members. First, if you don't mind, if everybody don't mind, if we could just get a quick moment of silence for those that we've lost to gun violence. Thank you. One of the uncomfortable things about doing these presentations is we have to talk a lot about things that really don't matter to survivors. They are important things that make the work sustainable, but I think we have to be grounded in the experiences of those who've been directly affected, so I wanted to start there. Secondly, I wanted to acknowledge some people that are here with us today. Several non-profits that we work with, we got three young people that are here with us, some survivors that we've had the privilege and honor to be able to work with, as well as some other community members. I want to start just showing you my team's heart before we get into the work. Kenneth Payne, who was our newest member, joined us about a year and a half ago, and was a state social worker for ten years, and is a minister, and was recently engaged. We're going to pray for that brother. He thought one legs was tough. But then also Larry Johnson, who is our community outreach coordinator. And Larry, long before he joined the city about two decades ago, before we had names like crisis response advocate and violence prevention and cure and CVI. Larry was walking the streets in the late 90s doing this work before he was getting paid. Larry Johnson is a survivor. He lost a son to gun violence. A man who was a good friend of mine. I was actually in jail when my friend in trouble passed away. This is passion work for us. This is work that we've been doing way before we got to One Lexington, and I want you to know that. Way after One Lexington, I'll still be doing this work. As a former illegal owner of a firearm, to somebody who has lost a first cousin, to somebody who has had a gun put to the back of his head, seen a childhood friend shot in the head at a party. Gun violence is something that has impacted my life. I don't talk about it much, but I want you to know where we are founded at when it comes to this work. And so, let's talk about our work. I'm going to be respectful to you all because you can't read. So we're not going to go through the history of One Lexington, how we got here. All of that is available, obviously, in our end of the year report, but also our website, because there's some important things that I want to make sure we have enough time to touch on. But we are a city initiative that leverages community partnerships and government funding to address youth and young adult gun violence. As you can see, one number up there that has changed. Our age purview used to be 13 to 29, but we have since lowered that to 10 to 29. Even though that is our age purview of direct services and programming, because of the layover, we actually serve about 75 to 80% of the gun violence that happens in our city. So if there's a conflict between two 40 year olds and one of them, God forbid, loses their life. If they have children in that home that are in our age purview, we still provide services and program for that incident. And so really, the majority of the gun violence in the city, we are working one way or the other through prevention or intervention. The peer model is, it's interesting because this is actually what we work through as a city. There were a lot of models out there. There was GVI, there was CVI, there was CURE model. People were saying we should be doing what they're doing in Chicago. This worked really well in Baltimore. And there were a lot of evidence based programs that worked, but they worked for those specific cities. We needed something that was going to be Lexington focused. And so we thought CVI was a good base model. And that is where PEER comes from, Prevention, Intervention, Enforcement, and Reentry. But we coupled that with a strategic planning session where we brought over 40 community partners together and we extracted their expertise. If you remember, we had a series of community forums where we wanted to hear from survivors. We wanted to hear from the community. We did youth surveys so youth could have a voice. So the strategy that we're currently using is not some plug and play that we pulled from another city. But it is something specific to Lexington, and I'm very proud of that. And we'll be talking a little bit later towards the end of the presentation on the update of that plan. Because in this world, there's new trends. There's new things happening. There needs to be new voices at the table. And so we want to make sure that after two, three years of progress, we want to continue that. So we're going to be updating that plan this year, and we'll talk about that in a little bit. And so this is the part that is a little tough. And not just today, but in general. Because as a government organization, we have to answer to the people. And the people want to know, is what we are doing working? You want to know, is what one Lexington and its community partners doing working? And so we have to talk about these things, because this is how you measure whether something is working or not. But again, when you have a mother who has lost a child to gun violence, or you have a fiance who lost her significant other to gun violence, they don't care about stats. It doesn't matter if we only had two homicides last year. That doesn't mean anything to the two mothers who lost a child to gun violence. And so again, my apologies to any survivors that are in here. This is in no way to minimize your experiences and what you are living through. But this is the nature of the beast, and so we have to talk about it. And so you'll see here, these are some overall gun violence stats that kind of chronicle our time at One Lexington, which began in the summer of 2021. As you can see here, you're seeing a gradual decrease, not just in homicides, but also overall shootings. 2021, we had 135 non-fatal shootings. We had 66 last year. 66 too many, but that shows that progress is being made. For those of you who are a little bit more visual, like me. And these numbers focus on our age purview specifically. And as you can see, 2021, we had 24 young people that we lost. And in 2021, in 2024, we lost 10 within that age purview. 89 shootings in 2021, down to 37 this past year. When we started doing our research across the country, what we noticed was after the pandemic, gun violence nationally started to decrease a little bit. While most places saw a 15 to 20% decrease in gun violence, Lexington saw about a 55% decrease. What that tells me is that it was more than just a post-pandemic leveling, that we're doing something special in Lexington, still not doing it perfectly, still more work to be done. But I believe it is the connectivity of survivors, of non-profits on the ground who are doing the work, individuals who you may not see on the news, who are mediating conflicts before they even get to us. The school system, all of us working in concert, I believe, is the reason that we're seeing progress. We still got a long ways to go. This is a brief and kind of basic financial breakdown. As most of you know, we recently just went through our internal audit, and I'm hoping that we'll get some questions about that process, because that is a process that we thoroughly enjoy. To be honest, I think we'll be much better because of it. But a couple things I want to focus on this, and I'll leave it there just for a second before I change it to show you some other numbers, but just some quick bullet points. One thing we're going to do is we are probably going to shift the funding from our summer program to our in-school mentoring program. That is something we've seen and that has been super fruitful over the last two or three years. Our summer program is great, but that's eight weeks. Our in-school mentoring program and some of our leaders of that program are here today. They are touching our most vulnerable young people, many of which have been directly affected by gun violence every week. Right now, we are in 29 different schools. We have boys groups, girls groups, and we are touching the most vulnerable young people in those schools, including our alternative schools. We currently have groups at Audrey Grievous, we had a group at MLK, the Learning Center, and Success Academy. Many of those young people who are in those groups are system involved or who have been involved in the cycle of violence. As you can see here, most of the spending that we make, a third of our budget is pre-allocated. We never see, we never touch, that goes to grants and other things, but is our crisis response. And that is money going directly to those who have been affected by gun violence. Whether through food support, whether rent, relocation, temporary housing, property damage, utility support. And I'm sure there may be some questions about this, so I know Kenneth, who leads our crisis response, has got a breakdown. How many families do we actually serve in 2024? How much of that went to rental support, relocation? These are the type of things that we'll be able to answer for you, and not just today. Just remember that our door is always open. Anytime you want to meet with us and really get into the weeds of the work, open door policy, please just holler at us. So, I want to keep it moving, as you see there, grants, or it takes a village in school mentoring, which is beginning to tick up, which is a good thing because more schools see the value. Most recently, the principal, Kevin Payne, at Southern Middle School said that not only have behavior referrals went down, but grades are going up. And that wasn't even our intention. But if we can get these kids to deal with some of their untreated trauma, if they got somebody that they can connect with and trust, that makes them better once they get into the classroom, so that's encouraging. Obviously, these are things I'm not going to cover too much. These are some initiatives that we have. You can go to the website, learn more about our mentoring programs, youth mediation, as well as some of the community partnerships that we work with. Building Bridges to Opportunity is a grant that we got through the Governor's Everybody Counts initiative that is founded in scholarships. But because of the great work we were doing here in Lexington, the Everybody Counts team gave us flexibility to do something really unique. So through this funding, we are expanding our Be the Change scholarship program to all high schools in Lexington, or all public high schools, including alternative schools. So those go to rising seniors of color who are entering into tracks that lack diversity. So when we talk about disparities and equity, this will directly address that. So education, nursing, social work, mental health, the criminal justice. We want these young people to not just get out there and protest, but be the change that they want to see. Also, we have skills scholarships for those who want to get their CDL. Maybe they want to go to HVAC, maybe they want to be a barber. Also in this funding, and I'm hoping to field questions about this, is trauma-informed care support for any parents who have lost children to gun violence or students who have been directly affected by gun violence. Another highlight from 2024 is something that we have not really been able to put legs to yet, but it's something that I think is going to be impactful in the future. We work with Senator Givens on a youth employment bill. This was founded in a 13-year-old telling me back in 2022, Mr. Devine, it's easier for me to get a pole than to get a job. So he told me straight up, I can get a strap before I can get a job. So how do you expect me to stay out of the streets and I can't work? And so when we did a presentation in Frankfurt, we worked with some senators on this bill. And so now 12 and 13-year-olds in the state of Kentucky that's been signed into law have the ability to work for a 501c3 non-profit with a lot of protection centered around that. So hopefully you ask questions about that, we can dive into that. When Lexington had a chance to visit Washington DC, we were one of four cities to be invited to go to Capitol Hill and advocate for CVI work, which is just community-based violence intervention. Law enforcement does their part, and it's great, but the community has to do its part. And so that is what we're trying to do through CVI. We met with lawmakers on both sides of the aisle and advocated so this work can continue. I'll close with this, because I know Tyler looking at me like, I told you 15 minutes. I'll try, bro. I'll close with this, and maybe I can get to some of the other stuff through the questions. But this is super encouraging. The CEO of the Housing Authority gave me a call last year and said, we are having, I am having to evict several families due to incidents involving juveniles. They're brandishing weapons, they're bullying, they're vandalizing. And when you get, and for anybody that doesn't know this, when you get evicted, you cannot get public housing for three more years. So, I can stop. That's your 15 minutes. Can I finish that thought? Yes, she may finish that thought. I appreciate it, I'll be quick. And as somebody who's lived in public housing before, if you are in public housing, you're most likely already in deficit. Whether that's emotional, financial, dealing with different challenges. And so, to get evicted from public housing can be very difficult for a family moving forward. So they said, could you reach out and engage some of the youth in the area? And what that letter says before is, in our two and a half months of engaging that specific property, there have, even up until this date, there have been zero issues of bullying, violence, vandalism since our team and our community partners got out there on the ground and started engaging these young people, which just shows you the importance of the actual work on the ground. And so, my apologies for not getting through everything, but obviously, we got some Q&A. So, if you want me to touch on some things we didn't get to touch on through the presentation, if you want to talk about our end of the year report, whatever you want to talk about, me and my team is here to answer any questions that you may have. Thank you. Thank you very much. We do have some questions. Council Member Beasley. Thank you, Mayor. You see me, Director? Hi, how are you? Hey, I was looking for you. Okay, so let me just start with a disclaimer. I have met with you already, right? Since I've been in office. We've talked about the budget. That's what we're about to talk about now. It's uncomfortable, but we're about to do it. Okay? All right, so I do have some questions for you. So, in the audit, every time you had a response, there was one from the chief of staff responding to whatever you said. Is that who you're supposed to report to? Yes. Other than your ProCard, have you paid anybody with any other financial way except that ProCard? No, we don't have the ability to do so. You've never used PayPal? Yes, but through the ProCard. So if they send us, say, a PayPal invoice, we can pay it through PayPal, yes. And is PayPal a thing that the government or Lexington uses? Clearly. Yeah. Yes. I don't know. So in the audit, you said that when you first started here, you would split the payments. Because you thought it was specific to a company and not a day. Is that correct? No, so I think you're talking about the first finding of the audit, where the split transactions? Yeah, like if it's $3,000 and you did $1,500 and then you did $1,500 again on the ProCard. Yes, and so to give everybody context, there were hoodies that we were purchasing. 200 hoodies for kids who graduated our in-school mentoring program. So we had to purchase 200 hoodies. So 200 times 40 is the $8,000. The way that I interpreted it was, as long as I was under $2,500, I was good for that transaction. And so that is where I split them up. I did 24, and then I did 24.99, and then I did 24.78 to stay below that threshold. But what I learned is it's actually per merchant. So me splitting those transactions up didn't matter because it was still going to the same merchant. That was in 2022. Once we learned that, we haven't had an issue since. Sorry, I'm trying to write it down. No, you're good, you're good. So the grants that we gave out that we did not give to 501s, who did they go to and were they under the umbrella of a 501? So like for instance, OMAC, OMAC is under the PAL umbrella. PAL is a 501c, OMAC is not, is that correct? That's right, and so yes, that is how our grant program works. A lot of the organizations who are on the ground doing the work provide peer support, might be smaller grassroots organizations. So we opened it up to 501c3s, but if you didn't have a 501c3, you could apply through a larger organization that has a 501c3. Kind of like another example would be MADE, right? MADE is through Urban League, so they apply through Urban League. What was missing, and the reason that became a founding, was just a clerical error. We showed in the Q&A, the frequently asked questions, the application, the press release, the promotion to the community, is this is a program where you can apply for the grant for yourself or through a 501c3 organization, but that was missing from the contract between us and CAC. But we operated under that intention, and the community was well aware. So any organization that got a grant that didn't have a 501c3 themselves, they got it through a larger organization that did have a 501c3. So there is nobody that got grant funding that either doesn't have a 501c3 or didn't apply through somebody that has one. And we have that paperwork? Yes, we have all of it. Can you bring that to me? Yes. Thank you. Yep. Sorry, all council members would like that. I think Larry wanted to add something with a little more context. Some of those paperwork came through me, and we made sure that the 501c3, even though in the contract or the memorandum of understanding, the 501c3 is the one that signed. The agency name or the program name was there, but the 501c3. So if it was my 501, but you were applying for it, I'm the one who signed the paperwork. You had to agree to do that and to be the fiscal agent for that. Okay. I would like to see that. All right, you ready? Here's a tough one. Okay. The vendors that you are using for One Lex. Yes. Are they the same vendors that you are using in Believe in Forever? No, that is an odd question. I'll do- It's not an odd question. The only reason I say that is, in just the context of everybody here, Believing in Forever is a non-profit that I have that I worked through before joining One Lex. The only operating program that we have through Believing in Forever currently is our code drive. So we don't work with any vendors. The only thing we do through Believing in Forever right now, since I've joined One Lexington, is our youth code drive. Because all of my energy, all the mentoring, everything that I was doing on my own, I now dedicate to the city of Lexington. So we don't do anything through Believing in Forever, but our code drive. And our status is 501c3, our status with the state is good and solid, and that is easily verifiable. So I don't work with any vendors with Believing in Forever. So you didn't use Stolen Roses for hoodies for a code drive that you just did for Believing in Forever? No. Okay. No. My time is up, thank you. You can log in one more time. Thank you. Thank you, Council Member Sheehan. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you for your work and thank you Larry and Kenny. I appreciate you all being here to answer questions and for everything that you've been working on. I know this program has evolved over the years. I've seen it since I've been on council. You've increased staff, you're expanding your programming, you're changing some of your programming in response to things we've asked for, things the community has asked for. I would like to actually go back to the PowerPoint and the last slide. That's the, what is next? Yeah. I would really like to know in particular on this slide about the community forums you have scheduled and the youth feedback and the survivor feedback that you're talking about here. because I think those things inform how you work and where you go. No question. One of the reasons that we believe in our approach and strategy so much is this isn't Devon Karama's head creating these programs and services. It is being informed by what you see on that board. So we have been delayed a little bit. It's looking like we're going to have to cancel another forum tomorrow because of the weather. We were supposed to start during the week of the snowstorm. We were going to do a community forum at Cardinal Valley. We were going to do a first district community forum. We were going to do one in Taste Creek, and then we were going to have a survivor specific forum only for survivors in collaboration with NAMI, just to make sure that there were plenty mental health professionals that were there on site. Our goal was to get all of those forums in before February 4th, which is our strategic planning session. The youth surveys will actually be completed by the 200 plus youth that we serve each week through our in school mentoring program. So we got parental permission, and so we're going to ask them a series of questions so we can get their feedback. I'll have to look at the exact numbers because they have to put it when they register. But many of our young people have been directly affected by gun violence, so they have their own experiences. And so what we want to do is bring in the survivor's point of view. We want to bring in the community's point of view, the youth's point of view, and these other professionals. I think right now for our strategic planning session, we have public safety signed up. We have the school system signed up. We have several mental health professionals, people that run non-profits. We have survivors. We have our entire ecosystem signed up, and we want to hear what they have to say. And we want what we do moving forward to be informed by the community. And we're also in talks with Jennifer. I know Jennifer led the task force over the last year and a half. And so we're working with her to see how we can work her recommendations through the task force, through our strategic planning session. So it's not just our eyes on those recommendations, but let's see what our partners in courts. Let's see what parole and probation feel about some of these recommendations. Let's see what the community feels about it. And so we're looking forward to working with her on that. And so this is a process. Whatever we get out of this will not be implemented until next year, until 2026. And so we're trying our best to move responsibly, but in a way that encapsulates everybody's voice. Well, and going back to what Ms. Mulder said in her public comment at the beginning about the administrative support. I would like to talk to you a little bit more about that and what your needs might be there as we go into this next budget season. But talking about all of this data processing, talking about scheduling all of these things and working to get all the community partners there, all of the emails and calls, and I'm sure that come into your office like that. Those administrative tasks can take away from the strength of your programs where you're out in the community. Or vice versa, yeah. And so I feel like that is a conversation we should be having to allow you to be successful in the ways that you see you can be. And I would be open to that. Can I add this? That actually, when we really turned a corner on a lot of that is when we hired Kenneth. because for a while it was just me. And then Larry was with me, but he was also spending half of his time, I think, with Be Free. And so we were really one and a half trying to work all of this. But when Kenneth joined our team, if you look at the audit, the majority of those issues were 2022, and there was no perpetual issues. Everything was one offs, right? It was this happened, we learned from it, and it hasn't happened again. And so could we use more support? Yes, but I want that to happen responsibly. And I really want to hear what the community has to say about what we need. Some of Kenny's responsibilities have now been moving to the crisis response program as well, right? That's right. Thank you. Thank you, Mayor. Welcome. Thank you. Council Member Lynch. Thank you, Mayor. And thank you, Devon and Larry and Kenneth for all that you do. Know that I see that and I appreciate all the work that you're doing in our community, especially in my council district. And I just have a few questions about your presentation regarding the neighborhood engagement walks. How many did you all do in 2024, and how many did you do in council district two? Yes, so we did two in council district two this year, and we did 14 total. And those were full-fledged neighborhood engagement walks. Now sometimes, like today, we're just going to go to East End and just go door to door and check on folks, maybe pass out some flyers. So we don't really count those as news, but we do a lot more engagement. But as far as getting the food bags from black soil, going out, bringing our community partners in, connecting them with mental health services and all of that, we did 14 in 2024. Awesome, and kind of since you have already talked about the gun violence task force recommendations that we made, I want to piggyback on that and say that was one of the recommendations that we put forth is that, I'll just speak for myself. As a council member, I would love to again participate. I've done it with you all once, and I would love to do that again. So as you all do those, and I know sometimes it's not always appropriate for us to attend or go. But as part of our recommendations, we want to be notified and loop us in because I personally would like to help when you do those neighborhood engagements. Definitely, we will. And one thing I want to say, just kind of doubling back, is our crisis response. You talked about Kenneth, council member Sheehan, being so bogged down with the crisis response. That is something we really want to give back to the community, to be honest. We've heard that from a lot of people, and we feel when we go through our strategic planning session, that's what the experts are going to tell us. We've built an incredible crisis response, and that is a lot of things. That is how we support survivors. That is how we respond to violence. We would love to see survivor support in the hands of election and rescue mission or a swag, right? An RFP, because they don't have to deal with the red tape that we have to deal with. And I think a survivor-led organization will be able to administer those services better than we could. But I think we've done our due diligence in building something strong. And so we do feel this fiscal year coming up, that that's a RFP that we are looking to send out. Because like I said, things come and go in government, and we want as much of this funding, but as much of these initiatives in the community's hands as possible. If you remember a couple years ago, we did that with Lexington Rescue Mission and Safety Net for those council members that were still here. So I just wanted to squeeze that in, because that's important. We're trending that way, and that's what the community is kind of telling us. And then my next question is about the families that you help with relocation assistance or temporary housing. Do you all follow back up with those families to see if they're able to get into permanent housing? So what does that look like? Yes, we do. To a certain extent, and I'll just be all the way transparent with you, we just don't have the bandwidth to do case management and long term follow up. We just don't. And so what we do do is we stay in touch with them with bi-weekly emails, just checking in. Hey, what do you need? How are you doing? We send out phone calls. We make text messages. We're following up with families. And if they do say, hey, I'm still struggling with this, or hey, I need a recommendation letter for this job, then we'll do whatever we can do. Sometimes it's things one elects can do, sometimes it's some of our community partners. But that is another reason we think the survivor support piece needs to be in a non-profit that is fully staffed and has the bandwidth to do more than what we do. because yes, we are helping people in emergency situations, and that is great. But I think there's so much more that the survivor community needs. And I don't know if we have the full bandwidth to be able to provide that, but we're doing the best that we can. So I appreciate that question. Awesome, and then my last few questions are in regards to the internal audit report. So have you received, and Larry and Kenneth received training regarding usage of the P card at this point? Yes, yes, we have. Okay, and how many P cards, are you all allotted? We only have one. Okay. Yeah, and I know one question that we got from a couple of folks, and it may be a question that some of you asked. We keep that P card on hand, because in our work, it's emergency. So I might be walking out on Florence Ave, and somebody's saying they're about to cut my lights off. I haven't worked for the last several months because I lost my son, can you please help? And in that moment, we gotta be ready to be able to do that. So it's always on hand, either by myself, Kenneth, or Larry, but the majority of the time, it's with the person who does the reconciliation. So for those early years, it was me, because I was doing everything, but Kenneth's been doing it as of late. And so yes, we've been adhering to everything. And any issue we've ever had with the P card, we've been able to correct it immediately, and it hadn't been an issue moving forward. You now have a process in place when you're using the P card to attach the receipts and verification for all those purchases and things like that. So the receipts were always there, right? And for me, I thought that was enough. I don't come from this world. So to me, I know that whatever charges we're making are valid, and there's a receipt in the folder, so we good. But through this audit process, which is something that I've loved, because I want to be better in this space. The couple, the activism and the stuff we do out there, is that we learned that an internal auditor doesn't know what led to that purchase. So now what we're doing, instead of just putting a receipt in the folder, now we're putting the entire paper trail. The registration where the family had to talk about what they experienced or what they went through. Who referred this family to us for this gift card. If there's a W-9, if it was something that we were paying for. All of that now, as of I think July 2024, all of that now is connected to the receipt. So let's say in another few months where they do another audit, it will look totally different because now all those supporting documents are in that one file. That's something I wasn't even thinking about when it was just me going to scenes of homicides and calling mothers and mentoring programs and so to me the audit has been a blessing because we've learned so much. I think we'll be better for it. We're already sharing up processes and I think more lives will be saved if we operate more efficiently. So. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Vice Mayor Wood. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Director, for your presentation and for your work. I think community based programs like yours are vital. I was going to say vital now more than ever, but really vital every year, no matter which direction the stats go. In terms of the audit, I think those folks who have maybe not been through audits. To me what they're about is the details and the process of how we do the work that we do. The council has been through an audit, basically every department in this government at some point has gone through an audit. And what that's about, those details mattering, is about trust and the trust of the voters and the residents and being good stewards of the taxpayers' money. We are all spending your money. So we need to be able to prove that we are doing what we say we're doing in the way that we're doing it. Our processes and our rules are in place to make sure that there's good fiscal management. And I think, as you expressed, a positive enthusiasm for an audit. Yes. That's my attitude as well, bring it on, because I want to shine a light on what we're doing. Very often when we fail, the areas that we fail in is not due to intent, it's not we're trying to get away with something, it's we were in a hurry, we didn't cross the right T, we put something in the wrong category, we used the wrong card. Stuff like that happens, I think what matters is how we move forward and being better about that stuff, and really sweating the details, because I think those are important. You talked earlier, when you kind of talked about the approach to the work of One Lexington, that you didn't want to take a cookie cutter approach and kind of take wholesale an idea from a different city or a different place and kind of apply it here. So you're kind of taking piecemeal things that you like from different programs. And one of the ones that you mentioned was CBI. Yeah. If you're not kind of taking the wholesale approach of something like CBI, can you speak to what parts of CBI you're not using and why? Yes, I'm glad you asked that. I love to talk about this work, it truly is a passion. My wife says it sounds like I'm always talking on a podcast when I come home and talk to her, so yes. To give you an example with Lexington, you take the housing projects, right? You could take Bluegrass Aspendale, where my family is from originally, you can take where Larry's was from, Charlotte Court. When those projects were torn down in a city the size of Lexington, you no longer have your most vulnerable people all in one spot, right? They're kind of all over the city. So the CBI model says, in a city like Baltimore, you target this block. If you target this stoop, you are going to have a bunch of those underserved individuals who are in the cycle of violence hanging out, right? And that is not necessarily the makeup of Lexington. And so that would be an example of something CBI encourages that really doesn't work here. Which is why you have to have a little bit more of a holistic and root causes effect. But then also, I think that alternative sentencing is important. And I think school partnerships are invaluable. Like without our partnership with Fayette County Public Schools, we would not be able to touch our most vulnerable young people all at once in a controlled space. Just being honest with you. And so that's just one example. And then the other is gangs, right? A part of the CBI model was predicated on targeting gangs. Well in Lexington, it's a little different. This is not Chicago. Now you may have groups, you may have young people who are operating in what they call a gang, but where's the structure? Where's the bylaws? Who are they answering to? Who is the hierarchy? So we gotta be real careful in the language that we use and how we are approaching these young people. And so there's a few other examples of that, but that is why a cookie cutter approach is not going to work for Lexington. If you're trying to do what they're doing in Chicago and Baltimore, it's just not going to work. Yeah, I appreciate that answer. Can you talk a little bit about what kind of raw data that you all are collecting? Because what we always like to know is how do the efforts of your team in its multi-faceted work translate or correlate? And hopefully cause the positive changes and the positive trends that we see, right? So how much data, what kind of data are you all collecting to try to correlate that data? Because I think A, it'll make your work better. And B, hopefully we can create those kind of models for other communities as well so they can say, hey, this is a proven model that works. Here are the numbers. We want to take this on as well. In the first year and a half, we didn't collect any data because we just didn't have the bandwidth. I wasn't thinking about data. I was thinking how to keep these two young people from shooting each other. But as we began to evolve, we start looking at markers. And so now through surveys, through registration forms, we're very intentional about what we put in so that we can collect that data. As well as some of the post-surveys after programming. What we've started to see through the data that we've collected is the majority of the young people, at least that we work with and our community partners work with, we're starting to be able to see the markers. Single parent homes, this is the biggest one, untreated trauma. The majority of those young people were already affected by gun violence, but never had that trauma treated. Through the data that we're collecting, we're able to see that. Food insecurity, free reduced lunch, which is a way to measure poverty. But we need to go to the next level to truly focus on root causes, which is why last year we contracted the University of Kentucky Communicate, our community innovation lab. And Dr. Haynes is here with us today. They are helping us to get that data so that we can really, because senseless violence is preventable. Now can you prevent all violence? But senseless violence, there's data that says that. But we have to do that kind of work that you're talking about, Vice Mayor, to be able to collect that data so that we can truly prevent some of the stuff that is happening. So we're working with UK and we're building a model to be able to collect that kind of long term data. Because once we collect that, though, I will caution you, it's no longer a one Lexington project. Because when we're talking about root causes of gun violence, that's the incredible work that Charlie Lander's doing, affordable housing. That is all of you all. That is public safety. That is parks and rec. That is the healthcare system. So once we get this data and you start pulling the layers back, this is no longer one Lexington trying to solve this problem. It's going to be all the city government and the entire community. Yeah, thank you for that. And thank you to you and your team for that work. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Council Member Gray. Thank you, Mayor. And thank you, one Lexington team. I do appreciate you all for all that you do. And how you're ensuring that our next generation of leaders get basically the wraparound services that they do need. And you know I'm a big proponent of our youth. I'll do anything for our youth. But I'm curious, I'm not sure if another council member has already asked this, I'm so in the zone. How many of the Fayette County Public Schools, how many of the Fayette County Public Schools is that one Lexington goes to their school? 29. 29, and we're still doing that right now. We are, we have, right now there's only three facilitators. There's myself, there's Mr. Terry Dunford, and there's Tanya Walker. So all 29 of those weekly programs are being facilitated, and dually as well, my fault. All 29 of those programs are being facilitated by the three of us. In regards to, I have to, you know how to go through this. You know I do, and- No, you're good. I gotta do my job, and I'm like, I gotta bring up some stuff that I really don't want to. Of course. That's what we're here for. Yeah, that's what we're here for. Council member Beasley asked about a specific vendor. Yes. I think it was- Soul and Roses. Soul and Roses. You stated that, Soul and Roses, sorry. Soul and Roses. It's all good. Soul and Roses. I have Soul too, and I love Roses, so there it is. You stated that your non-profit, Believing in Forever, solely does the coats, right? Coat drive, that's right. And not that vendor. To buy coats, no. No. Most he would ever do through Believing in Forever, he might just give us hoodies to give to kids, but it's coat drive. So, we don't purchase any coats from Steve for the coat drive. Because November 2024, you stated that you were thanking them on a social media post, and I just had to bring that up, unfortunately. For what? Because we hadn't given any coats away yet, so I'd like to know what we thanked them for. I will read exactly what you said. Okay. After a limited collaboration 80 hoodie run with Soul and Roses 8, we have officially sold out. Thank you everyone from your support. I think you mean for your support. You say the names, and I use the Nipsey Hussle model of creating income from the art grind. Rest in peace. And then, I know, right? And then pouring it back into our community. And then you say all proceeds go to Believing in Forever Inc. That's what it says. Yes, fundraiser, yep. I just, yeah, I had to bring that up. But back to this that I really do want to talk about. No, but I think that's important. That was a signature hoodie for me. That was my signature hoodie. We didn't buy hoodies for anybody else. And I think that's an important distinction. I don't understand what you're saying. You gotta say it a different way. Are you saying you were buying those for yourself, meaning you, Divine, or for Believing in Forever, or for One Lexington? No, it was a signature hoodie that Steve made for me, and he sold those in order to give back to Believing in Forever. We didn't sell hoodies to anybody. We didn't give hoodies to young people. So when you say vendor, we are purchasing services for Soul and Roses to give hoodies to the kids in our program. We didn't do anything like that with Believing in Forever. Excellent. Thank you for clarifying that. No problem. Is that it? He's got the hoodie on now. So, council members, we do not get pro cards. So there's some questions that I know it's your time, but I think it's best that the director of purchasing, I believe, Todd Slayton. He answered this question right here, because that's something that council members, because we don't get a pro card, and maybe you can answer these better for us so that we can better understand the audit of One Lexington. We, in the statement, it says that the pro card was used 14 times in the span of, for personal uses, over the span of two, around about two or three, I don't, two or three days. We don't get pro cards, so is that a normal fallacy? Has this happened before? It has. Okay. My name's Todd Slayton, I'm the Director of Procurement. You were close. We used to be purchasing, but that's fine. I forget that all the time, too. So the pro card program, just to give you some background, we have, that's been in place for the whole time I've been here, probably 15 years at least. We have about 250 card holders now, I think every division has one. Some pro card holders use their card daily. Some people, it may be once a month, once every six months. It is just for purchases of under $2,500. It's designed to streamline the purchasing process. A purchase order transaction, it's about 14 steps, and it goes through about six people. A pro card transaction goes through the card holder, their approver, which is typically a manager, and then it gets reconciled, and again, it's that small dollar purchases. We have had instances where someone inadvertently made a personal purchase with their pro card. They whipped out their MasterCard, thought it was their own, and it was actually the city pro card. I would say in the last 15 years, it's happened maybe six or seven times. It's typically caught, I think maybe in almost every case, it is self-reported by the card holder. They get their receipts. They see their transactions when they have to reconcile them, and they realize, hey, I bought something for myself, and I used the pro card. And there's a process whereby they can repay that to the city, and it goes back to revenue, and gets refunded to the appropriate account. The procedure now is, it's a warning for one instance. And that instance in Devine's case was, it happened, all the transactions were reconciled at the same time. It all occurred within a couple of days, and it was self-reported to us, and it was repaid using the proper process. The process as it stands now, you get a warning. If it happens again, you get a 30 day suspension, and then after that, I think you lose your pro card privileges. But that's kind of the process now, Council Member. Thank you, sir, Director. Thank you for your explanation, because we don't know. So thank you. That's good. That's all my time for now, but thank you. Thank you, Council Member Reynolds. Thank you, Mayor, and I just want to thank the One Lex team. I have always believed that you all do really hard work, and you work long hours, and you are not thanked enough, so I want to say that publicly, and I've always thought that. I wanted to be really clear that I view my job, much like many of my colleagues, to try to make our government better throughout government, every division. It is our job to ask a lot of questions about everything, and sometimes our employees can perceive that as being negative. But whether it's about snow, whether it's about gun violence, whether it's about odor control, it is all in response to our constituents to try to make our government work better. And I hope that you will understand that is not- Learn that. It is not anything but that. One question that I have, and you kind of touched on it when you were talking with Vice Mayor Wu, is what other forms of measuring your success you have besides the shooting numbers? We know that those can be influenced by a lot of things, and I'm sure you all have a huge part in that, but it could be multiple factors. In this plan that you have to work with UK, are you going to have surveys for the parents, for the youth, to try to say what kids are staying in school, what kids are graduating, what kids are staying out of violence, anything like that? Yes, I was hoping Dr. Haynes was still here, but all of that will be a part of it. I think the other thing that is difficult with gun violence, it is a community problem that is not controlled. It's not even controlled by neighborhood. And so, there also has to be a way to measure the impact within the community. So, to give you an example, right now, Dr. Haynes is working with our in-school mentoring programs. So now, we're going to get the data. What were their grades? How many behavior referrals did they have pre-program? What are their grades? How many behavior referrals did they have post-program? That'll be data that we'll be able to use. But to be honest, I think the biggest struggle, and it is definitely possible, and that is why I'm looking forward to February 4th, because we're going to need our experts' opinions on how to do this. But I think the data can't just be collected by one Lexington. We're going to have to look at data within a court system. We're going to have to look at data from public safety. We've got to look within our school systems. I think there's a lot of ways that we can measure success, because for us, and I'm speaking as a black man, and obviously we serve all races, but this disproportionately impacts our young boys, our young men. And so, for us, how do we get way upstream? How do we get way ahead of this? And the only way we can do that is that empirical data. There is a couple of coalitions that are local and state run that I'm in the process of being a part of, where they're pulling these different community partners together to work on getting that data. It's just not all centralized. The school system can have one set of data that we could follow, but that could be completely different than what the courts have. And so there has to be this centralized way that we can pull all of this data and then make sense of it. And so I wish I had a clear answer for you, but I think that is the hard, tough work that we got to be thinking about moving forward. It can't be just a continuum of care. We got to transition to perpetual possibility. And the only way we do that is move away from just program, services, program, services, and truly focus on those root causes. Thank you. Yeah, I think it's important for grants for saying, hey, our program is working to just go beyond those numbers. And gun violence is also more than just homicides, right? Because we know that in the past few months since October to now, we've had 78 instances of things happening with a gun from wanted endangerment to robbery. Not only that, Jennifer, it's self-inflicted, accidental gunshot wounds, self-inflicted gunshot wounds. We'll get more community partners that are saying you also need to focus on mental health. And I don't want to say the word to trigger anybody, but there's other elements centered around firearms that we have to incorporate. So I'm so glad that you said that. And it's not even just homicides and shootings, non-fatal shootings. What about shots fired calls? Right. Armed robberies. So again, that's a lot and a lot of different spaces that I think that is the next level of our work is pulling all that together. I have a few things, but I might have to circle back around. The next one, can you explain your philosophy about trauma-informed care? And when you do try to work with trauma-informed care, where does that money go and what does that look like? Yes, so I'll speak intentionally just to the summer program for the sake of time. Myself and Kenneth are graduating fellows of the Neighborhood Healers Project, which was ran by Dr. Candace Hargons at UK, and we are trained in mental health first aid. Which means Kenneth and I can acknowledge and we can see somebody that might be suffering from untreated trauma or a mental health condition that we can't diagnose. But what we can do is we can connect them to resources out there. And then also part of that is destigmatizing. So what we learn with a lot of our mentoring groups, I'm getting in there with the boys and they're dealing with some heavy trauma. Things that they dealt with as a child that I don't have the professional expertise to truly minister to. Now I can be cool with them and dap him up and take him to the studio and I can be unk. But for him to truly get the help that he needs, we have to have mental health professionals. So in our summer program, every Tuesday, we connect with the Andrews Brothers, which is three black males through North Carolina that do a lot of work here as well. And they do kind of a trauma-informed care support group. And then we leave that open to parents if they want to follow up and do more extensive therapy for their child, which has happened. And now with the building bridges to opportunity, we can pay for that extensive counseling if that child's been directly affected by gun violence. Which was one of the slides earlier, just kind of showing the continuum of those programs and services and how they connect. But to me, it's the metronome of everything, is untreated trauma. And it's, yeah. Thank you so much. I'll follow up in my next turn. Thank you. Thank you. Council Member Hale. Thank you, Mayor. Devine, I'm going to say thank you, and this is just not out of just decorum. So I'm going to say thank you for really just from my heart for what you do, what One Lex does. Because a lot of those gun violence victims and families I know personally, and just growing up and being from Lexington, I know a lot of these families personally. So I really tip my hat to One Lex, and I thank you all for what you do. I do want to ask a couple of questions. How many paid employees are working with One Lex? So it's just three salaried employees or paid employees. Myself, our crisis response coordinator, Kenneth Payne, community outreach coordinator, Larry Johnson. However, we have contracted the services of Tanya Walker, who runs our summer program now, She She The Goat. And we also contract Terry Dunford, who is facilitating, I think he facilitated five in-school mentoring programs, weekly programs last year at all of our alternative schools. And then finally, we contract four crisis response team advocates. So these are four individuals with unique connections to different parts of the city. If there's a shooting that happens in East End or West End or Cardinal Valley, we will deploy one of those advocates that has a unique connection to that community. And then they'll go connect with the family. So a lot of times you'll hear, well Devine ain't calling our family and he ain't hit us up. And it is because that's what I was doing and it wasn't sustainable when I first started. And I was taking on a lot of that trauma and I wasn't equipped for every situation. So having these crisis response advocates, making the contact with the families and then they come back to us and we devise a plan how we can support short and long term. So just three employees and we're contracting five other individuals. Do you have volunteers for mentorship and how many of those do you have? So with mentoring, it's tough and that might be a whole other presentation. But when you're battling people's work schedules, their backgrounds, it's difficult to get enough people to help us with the in school mentoring, which is why so much of it falls on me. I do 13 schools weekly, myself, upon everything else that I'm doing. So volunteers are very big in our crisis response. So when we're doing neighborhood engagement walks, several churches have been huge, whether it's Bracktown, whether it is Memorial. There's been a ton of people from the faith community that come out and volunteer every week. And then also when we do our youth engagement. So when we do Roots and Heritage Festival, I think there was like eight years in a row that they were fighting at Roots and Heritage Festival. So the CVI model says you go to where the conflicts happen. So we were going out there at night during Roots and Heritage and a lot of those volunteers would come into opportunities like that. Yeah. Talk, speaking of community engagements, how many of those engagement walks happened in District 7? And particularly like the Woodhill area. Yeah, I'll have to look one for sure. But I'll have to look. I think last year, to be honest, I think it was just one in District 7. I think the majority last year were in District 1 that we did, I believe, last year. But we can get that for you, and we can let you know for sure how many were in each district. Okay, and finally, have you engaged any of non-profit organizations that can provide opportunity to youth 12 and 13 to take advantage of the Youth Employment Bill? That is the next piece of responsibility for us, is now we have to build an ecosystem centered around that law. The law is one thing, but now it has to be working. So we've let some of our non-profits in our ecosystem know, but what does that look like? Do we build on what Partners for Youth's already doing? Do we create something new? This is something that we hope to get out of the strategic planning session on the 4th, because I got to hear their feedback to know. You know what I mean? Because I don't even know where to begin that process. Yeah. Yeah. We'll set up a meeting. We'll talk. We'll talk more. Thank you. Thank you. Sorry. To respond to your question about Woodhill area, last year I think we was out there twice. And one of those times we set up and we had volunteers that came and grilled. And then that was one way that we engaged the community. But we also work a lot with Urban Impact, with Lexington Leadership Foundation. So a lot of times, if there's an incident, we'll reach out to them, because that's kind of their area. And they'll reach out to us, so we collaborate with them. So we've only done two technically news in Woodhill, but we've responded to several incidents in Woodhill last year. I would say probably about five total. And a couple of those incidents involved when there was current activities where we got a call, there's guns out, people look like they're about to shoot, we fly out there. Okay. On a dime. Okay. Yeah, that's right. I guess I'm looking at things a little too uniformed. A lot of our work is responsive. So it may not be a schedule new, but we out somewhere. So thanks for bringing that up. Thank you. Thank you. Council Member Morton. Thank you. And thank you Devon, thank you Larry, and thank you Kendra for your service. So I want to go just talk about the target demographics first, and then we'll go into intervention, and then we'll go to this hospital violence intervention. So can you highlight how individuals are identified and targeted for intervention? And the follow up to that would be, does one Lexington feel that we are adequately reaching people who are at most of risk of committing gun violence or becoming victims, and what can we do to reach more individuals? Yes. So from our age 10 to 18, elementary, middle, and high school, we use markers. And this isn't 100% proof, but it is the data that we've collected, the small data we've collected. So for instance, when we work with Edith J. Hayes, and the Frisk says, okay, what type of student do you want? We're looking at those that are in single parent homes, those that are on free reduced lunch, those that may be dealing with food insecurity, those who have been directly affected by gun violence, or another form of untreated trauma. That's usually our marker. The thing that we've added the last year has been any violent instances in the school building. So if they've shown signs of being violent, maybe getting in a fight, or threatening violence against another student, that is usually our markers of who we pull in. From the 18 and up, it's whoever's system involved. Until we are able to responsibly get that data that you're talking about, we are working with those who are already in it. So that is working with the judges and being an alternative sentencing option. Or working through the voyage movement, or goodwill ignite, and working directly with those who may have a gun charge, or were previously system involved. Because there is data to support that. That if they've already been in that cycle, unless they're given a long-term pathway out, they're likely to re-offend. And that's exactly what I was going, more so thinking with our criminal system, knowing that we have stuff on the record, whether it be gun charges, whether it be one endangerment to shooting, anything like that. So knowing that highlight, but also at the hospital level, folks that are coming in as GSW's gunshot wounds, knowing that they are victims. We have our finger on the pulse of making sure that we're touching those most at risk of being victims, but most at risk of being perpetrators as well. So then, just to go into the intervention question, how does one Lexington intervene? What does this process look like? And then how many altercations or conflicts did one Lexington mediate through 2024? I'll have to look. We sent out our report today. I'll have to look at how many mediations we had. I can't remember, but it's in our end of the year report. But those mediations look like a lot of different things, and a lot of them are off books. There were a couple people that were here today, I think they've left. But we got people that are frequent in spaces where a lot of these conflicts happen, that work with us off books, and help to diffuse these situations before they even get to us. So some of it looks like that. To be honest, a lot of it. But the continuum of our programming has created so many mediation opportunities. The scary thing about doing a summer program is you are pulling kids from all over the city. And the way things are now with the music, and the drill, and the beef, and all the homicides we've had the last seven, eight, nine years. A lot of these kids are beefing, and we may or may not know that, and here we are pulling them in this uncontrolled space. So there have been several conflicts where gun violence has been threatened that we've mediated either within our summer program or the relationship that we built. Most recently, and this young man is no longer in this district, behavior reasons, he had to go to another district. But he said, yo, if you don't come and talk to us, it's going to lead to something. I had a relationship with both of them. I was able to go to Frederick Douglas High School, sit them down, mediate that conflict. Not because I'm a special person, but merely because they trusted me because of the relationship through the in-school and the summer program. So a lot of those opportunities are built on relationships. You could be the most street-credible dude in the world, but if you don't have that connection with them, they won't trust you. So it's that relationship building. Yeah. And I fall in the age of 18 to 29 myself. And I would love to help any way that I can help with the intervention process for the age, knowing that we need to intervene and find different ways to intervene within the age limit and work towards those folks. And lastly, I want to speak towards the hospital-based violence intervention. Actually, I work in the OR, so I respond to any gunshot wounds that come in Lexington or anything that comes to UK that is my patient, I'm at work. So speak a little bit about the hospital-based violence intervention. Does One Lexington have this? If so, what does it look like? Can you provide examples of how this method is implemented and the outcomes of it? Yes, and first, before I do that, I do want to extend an apology to Council Member Reynolds. I knew her before I got at One Lex, so sometimes I refer to her as Jennifer in this space. You have earned that title, so I apologize, Council Member Reynolds. Sorry about that. To your question, the hospital violence intervention program, our based intervention program, is a part of CVI model. The city of Lexington used to have it, but when I came in, they were in the process of passing that on to Project Peace. So Project Peace is an extension of Lexington Rescue Mission, and they currently run that program. So they're working in concert with the social worker at the hospital. And to tell you, Council Member Morton, while those strategic planning sessions are important, what we found out is the hospital at the time didn't have a social worker that was on call at night. They was working eight to five. But as you know, the majority of the gunshot victims are coming in overnight. So those are the type of things that they learn through their partnership with Project Peace to put that social worker on. Because a social worker, because a HIPAA, has to make that first connection to make sure it's okay for them to connect with Project Peace. And so that has been vital, the work that Dr. Bernard does, they'll be at the strategic planning session as well. Every city with a functioning, strong violence prevention model has a hospital-based violence intervention part of it. So that's a great question. We no longer do it, but I think it's better being in the hands of the community doing that. Yeah. Thank you. I'm going to go to the council members who haven't spoken, and then I'll come back to those who are signed up to speak twice. Council Member LaGre. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you all so much for this presentation and for all of your hard work in so many different ways in our community. It sounds like it's been quite the process to build all of these programs and initiative and also to build trust and relationships over the last couple of years. And I know that takes all different types of labor and a lot of time. I also want to say thank you for being so open in your responses and for being transparent, especially as Xero's process has evolved. I had a couple of questions just that you've started to touch on. And I think that they are probably connected to the next phase of One Lexington with a strategic plan. You mentioned the idea of a shift from, I think, an ecosystem of support to an ecosystem of opportunity. And I am interested in learning more about the youth employment piece that my colleague, Council Member Hale, asked about, but I'm also interested in your scholarship programs. Can you talk a little bit more about the amount of those scholarships and what that's looking like in the community with the skills scholarships and other initiatives? Definitely, and I want to thank you, Council Member Legree, and also those of you who were around when things were really, really bad. And nobody really believed in this program or was too sure. Those of you that have been here for a while supported us when it wasn't the popular thing to do, and so we truly appreciate it. We wouldn't have been able to grow without the council, so thank you. Thank you for asking that question. Kind of working backwards, starting with the scholarships. The reason we feel the Be the Change scholarship is so important is because it is specifically for students of color. Getting into fields that lack diversity, which can lead to some of the disparities systemically that are the root causes of the violence that we now see. Whether it's the justice system, whether it's in the classroom, right? Whether it's like Council Member Morton said, working within the healthcare field, mental health. That's been a huge deficit the last year is we're de-stigmatizing mental health and we get more people of color that want mental health support, but do we have enough Latino practitioners? Do we have enough mental health specialists of color who these people, which it takes work in our community to de-stigmatize. Once you get them there, they want to be able to connect with somebody with that shared experience. So you have to start somewhere. And so I think getting these young people into those tracks is how you look for our systems to be more equitable in the future, for more equitable and better outcomes that I think can keep the community safer. And so that be the change being expanded to all public high schools, and this is the part that I really love is our alternative schools. I think that that's big. Working back to your first question, we have to. Because in 20, 30 years, Lexington could look completely different. Right now, Fayette County is a majority-minority school system. So if we aren't creating things as fluffy as a strong nightlife, this diverse, because I ain't got nowhere to take my wife, that's how you keep talented people of color here. So things as fluffy as a nightlife scene, or what does downtown look like, to are there opportunities, are there jobs, right? And so I think that's what we got to start looking at. I appreciate that, and I was glad to hear that you mentioned Partners for Youth and some of the kind of synergy that could happen there with youth engagement in the non-profit sector. The other thing I wanted to say, as I was listening to everything that you all are trying to accomplish with the strategic plan, is that I was wondering if there are people embedded in that planning process who can help to, and I think Council Member Sheehan mentioned this a little bit as well, gather and synthesize all of the data that you all are hoping to bring into that strategic planning process in terms of the various types of input that you'll be receiving from stakeholders. Do you all have someone who can assist with that? Okay. Yes, so the entire UK Innovation Lab will be on site doing that, but they'll be doing it in concert, and you'll remember this name, our national partner, Cities United. So UK knows how to get the data and knows how to break it down as long as they're given a model to break it down through. And Cities United will kind of come in with the larger picture and say, here's what your roadmap needs to look like, right? Here's what the data, national data, says. Here are some of the root causes that data backs up, and then they'll kind of run it through CU's model. And so I'm excited about that part. My mind don't work like that, so. That's great to hear. It sounds like that'll be really valuable support for that important process. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you very much. Thank you. Council Member Curtis. Thank you, Mayor. And first off, I just want to say thank you all so much for the work that you do and for being here today. And also just for showing a lot of grace in translating the activism work into government work. That's often a very bumpy transition for folks to make, and I appreciate both the transparency you all are showing. It's been bumpy. I'm sorry, could you repeat yourself? It's been bumpy. Yeah, and yeah, I'm very grateful for that. I wanted to touch on something that you had mentioned when you were responding to some questions from Council Member Reynolds, which was about the role of trauma-informed care. And you started touching on suicidality. And we talk a lot about what work you all do to prevent these conflicts from emerging where there's a perpetrator and a victim. But one of the things that I'm very curious about is, again, not just the statistics around, because I recall you mentioned tracking statistics as it relates to suicide by firearm in Lexington. What role does that play? Are you all providing the same types of services that you provide to somebody who's a victim or a family of a victim of gun violence in terms of homicide or inflicting gun violence upon another person when that person is doing it to themselves? So we do with our services, but as of right now, just being transparent, there's zero strategy from one Lexington right now in regards to self-inflicted gunshot wounds. Or how can we prevent that, or how can we service that outside of just our trauma-informed care support that is woven throughout our gun violence strategy? And so that, again, actually, for those of you that registered for the strategic planning session, one of our questions when you register is asking, do you think accidental shootings and self-inflicted gunshot wounds should become a part of one Lexington and its community partner strategy? And as of last night, 97% of the people that registered said yes. And so again, that is the evolution of this thing, right? It is a working model. It is something that never stops evolving and getting better. We have to continue to get better. We have to continue listening, because I wouldn't know, as of today, January 24th, where to even start. So that's why you pull your experts in, your community partners in, and I think that's got to be a part of this model, I think. Thank you so much for that. And I just want to follow up with that, that that's something that I'm very interested in supporting you all as you're going through those conversations about. As somebody who, myself, survived a suicide attempt, it's important to me that we address these causes in young people in marginalized communities of gun violence that are not just external. A lot of the times, the conflict is internal, so I would love to work with you all on that. Thank you so much. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you. Council Member Brown. Thank you. Thank you, Mayor, and I'll just be brief. I just wanted to add my voice to those of support. We appreciate the work that you and your team do. We know that it's complicated and there's a lot of challenges. I think you're the first to admit that. And as long as we continue to support the work and you and your team working to get better, to reach more people and to change more lives, I think that's what our role is here to do. The other thing I'll say too is, you've been asked a lot of tough questions today. I appreciate the way you stood and answered those questions and provided some clarity to some of those misconceptions and misunderstanding out there. So I would encourage other council members to reach out and have one-on-one meetings and try to get some more clarity and get more information about what is really going on. So thank you for that. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you. Now we'll go back to second time around. Okay, never mind. Council Member Ellinger would like to speak. Thank you, Mayor. And thank you, Vine, and you can call me Chuck. I'm good with that. Chuck. I'm not in the same age group as Council Member Morton. But I am looking forward to when we meet that we'll probably hopefully extend this to all ages. I know you do indirectly, but I just want to personally thank you and your team for all the work that you do. I think it's important when we start talking about gun violence, you all are the important people. You are the people that we contact. I was here before this, and I've seen what you have done and how we have made great strides in this. I think one thing the council and the city needs to know is you're all nationally recognized. They contact you all. The program you're doing here is not just election, but it's going out through the whole country, because people see how successful you have been and how much you have made changes. As you said earlier, one is too many, but we can look back and see what we've done in the last three years, and it's been actually, I think, amazing. And I think everybody else does too, and we just want to do what we can to give you the support. And I guess one of the issues that, and I've been around long enough that we've dealt with a lot of audits. And I've seen some really bad audits and some issues. I was on the airport board when, if you look back at what that one was, and dealt with that. If there are any issues, I know it's been raised. And when I've looked at that, and as Councilman Brown said, I think you've gone through and you've been very forthcoming and talked about everything that you have, that was addressed and has been corrected. Is there anything in there that you want to go through and talk about that has been brought up, that has been corrected? I know I have a credit card and a debit card, and they're both blue. And I have- Get you every time. Inadvertently grabbed the wrong one at time and paid for it. So I know that, and I don't think that was malicious. I think that just can happen by an accident. So I, is there- Thank you, Councilman. You can call me whatever you want. First I want to say this, because I appreciate y'all's sentiments. Like from the bottom of my heart, I truly do. One thing a lot of people don't know is we put our lives on the line, and we don't have firearms or vests to protect us. The only thing we have is our connection to the community, and there have been situations where literally our lives are on the line. So I truly appreciate what you all are saying, but I would be irresponsible to even take a fraction of the credit of why we are seeing the beginning of a turnaround, because we've still got a ways to go. There are community organizations, individuals who were in this fight way before I was, who I stand on their shoulders and who inspired me to get to this position. There are non-profits who are putting in the work and going to spaces that I cannot go. There are individuals who don't have a non-profit that nobody will ever know that are doing things that are helping to decrease violence. We look at our police department, even though that's the other side, they enforce the law. But they got beat up in 2020, but what are we seeing now? Despite being 100 officers short, we're seeing better community policing practices, we're seeing the use of technology. And so this is, when I say all hearts on deck, I'm not saying that as a catchy, that's not a bar. Like that's real, like it is all of us that are doing this. And we are just blessed to be in a position where we can help coordinate some of this. But this is not just one Lexington, and I appreciate the love you are showing us. And I think our value is being that centerpiece. But to your original question, the only thing I can't wait to show you all, we almost printed up a bunch of copies, right? It's just to see the difference in the documents from 2021, 2022 to now. We just got done helping a young lady who lost a child and a significant other to gun violence in the last four years. Fell into depression, like many survivors do, out of work. The breadwinner of that household no longer with us, so she's trying to figure things out. And so anyway, through those conversations, looking at that document that's in that folder, that the auditor would go through, it has the entire paper trail, whereas in 2021 it didn't because I just didn't think it was important. Not because we were trying to do something to trick somebody, not because we were trying to be irresponsible, not because we weren't just keeping good records because we didn't care, we just didn't have the bandwidth and we didn't know any better. And now we do. And so that's the only thing, and I want people to know, we love the audit process. Because there were so many gems and jewels that's going to make us better. And so I think, to me, that's it. And the other thing is, every finding was a one-off. Nothing ever happened before that or after. It was a mistake, a process that wasn't screwed tight enough, and we cleared that up. Uh-oh. You want him to keep going? I mean, I love him, but he'll keep going. The only thing I wanted to add was, we initiated the audit on the mayor's behalf because we knew it was a new program. You all supported it back in 2021, I think, is when Devine came in with a whole set of new ideas on how to do things in government that we don't normally do in government. So it was at the mayor's request that we initiated this audit, so we wanted to learn what we could do better as well. I think there's still a lot more transparency, things we can help with, that we can really use your help. There's a lot of small-dollar things that work very well to get kids in a program like this that otherwise they would never, ever give them the time of day. And we sort of need your help in figuring out how to best help you articulate that to the community as well as us. So, more than happy to continue that discussion, show you everything we've got. You've seen a lot of it. We put it out in open records requests and a lot of other ways, but it doesn't work in the understanding of it without the full context around it. So, I hope that conversation continues. Well, thank you, and I see my time's up, so I'll just end with this. We're all in this together. We're all a team together, and you're leading the ship, and you're doing a great job, so keep it up. Thank you. Thank you. Now we'll go back to second round. Council Member Beasley. Ready? Yes. Yes, I'm ready, my bad. A little thirsty, but I'm good. We'll get you a drink. I'm straight, I'm good. All right, so one, I don't think that everybody here knows that you and I had a relationship before today. Like, the first thing that I said to you was not, did you look at this audit and how bad you messed up, correct? That's a fact. I've been to all your forums in my district, right? And let's not forget, you came out and pounded the pavement with us. Every ten minutes, right? Yes. So you did community engagement with us before. Yep, all of that. So I just want to make sure that you know I do appreciate the work that y'all do. Of course. And I'm here to do it with you. Okay, that too, I love the fact that you want to put the survivor part into a non-profit for a survivor-led non-profit to do that. We talked about this last week. I think it's a great idea. They're in spaces we can't get in. Nobody knows what that mom needs better than a mom who's already been there. My other question to you was, and I just want you to think about this because sometimes I go off the reservation. Maybe moving one Lex from just the mayor's office, maybe into the public safety spot, so that you have more help and more support. Don't look back there, I didn't ask somebody's permission. I'm talking to you. I didn't ask the mayor. I'm looking at my cousin. I didn't ask Ken. I didn't ask nobody. I didn't ask nobody. I will say this, and I will say this on record. We have an incredible understanding and relationship with public safety. And a part of that understanding is respecting each other's boundaries. There have been times that we've kind of entered in their world a little bit too much. And they've kind of had to say, okay, there's been times where they've had to relinquish some things that they used to do. And instead of maybe taking this kid in, maybe giving me a call. And so I think that coordination is important. But what I think is important, just being all the way honest with you, is even though we have that great understanding and working relationship, there is still a deficit in trust between not just public safety and underserved communities, but government. These people I've been working with for the last 20 years, as soon as I got this job, they like, is this divine or one Lex? Like, they didn't even trust me anymore. So I think in order for us to continue that great understanding with public safety, we have to have that safe distance as well. Because our kids have to know that they can trust us. That we're not taking that information that they share with us when they say I got in a shootout last night, and that I'm trying to get them locked up, right? And there's also been situations where we've been out in spaces where gun violence was actually happening. A council member was with us, but I'm not going to say that person's name, right? Where we were probably in spaces in a certain situation that we shouldn't have been in. And so, traveling around the country, I think a healthy distance and a great understanding is how community-based violence prevention models and public safety work together. If you bring them too close, until there's more work being done to bridge that trust gap, I think it could be problematic on both sides, and we don't want to get in their way, and I know they don't want to get in ours. And so, we got a great relationship, I think. They do their job, and we do ours. It's probably the best way I could. Now, being in another place, that is possible, but I'm not sure public safety is that place. And I do think that there is a certain leverage and importance that is highlighted on this issue with it being in the mayor's office. So, look, we all got opinions, but I am open to that in a strategic planning session to see where the community thinks we would be most valuable. And I want to hear your voice, but just public safety, you know. All right, I look forward to it. I'll see you on the fourth. Yes, I feel you. I got it. I got it. I got it. If you need something, text me. All right, I got you. All right, Council Member Reynolds. Thank you, Mayor. If you can give me brief, brief responses, because I just have a few points in my five minutes. Going back to the trauma-informed care and counseling, you mentioned that that was a part of the summer youth program. Is there anything that you all are doing to plug survivors and families into trauma-informed care counseling throughout the year? And then, very briefly, what is it specifically? Yes, I feel I am, but a survivor may tell me something different. So we do bi-weekly check-ins, and now that we got that Building Bridges initiative, we can actually cover the therapy costs for survivors. So any parent that has lost a child to gun violence can get their therapy or counseling or trauma-informed care services paid for through our Building Bridges initiative. Also, other immediate family members can get that same counseling paid for. So maybe a brother or sister that lost a loved one or a sibling to gun violence. And so, we haven't started back yet, but we were attending the police victims advocates used to do the SOS sessions. Which is where I met some survivors that had lost kids or lost loved ones prior to me being at one Lexington, so I may not have knew them. And so, that is another space that's more of a support group, but to be honest, that's just access to services. There's probably a piece that we're missing. And that's why I say this probably needs to be in the hands of a survivor-led group or a different organization with more bandwidth. We've connected some survivors to those services, and it's been fruitful, it's been great. But I just feel like there's still a piece missing. Some of that could be the trust, because though I've been affected by gun violence and lost a child, I've not lost a child to gun violence, and that is something that nobody could understand. So you're not able to offer the, you don't necessarily offer or plug people in directly, but you have support to help them if they want to do that. So we do that too. So we do, especially when they're looking for something specific, like I want a woman or I want somebody of color. We have certain agencies that we have relationships with that we can make that direct connection. But I'm just speaking more in general. It makes sense, yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. Thank you. And I just want to put on the record that you are open to incorporating task force recommendations in the strategic plan and working together to address some of those. Definitely. Thank you. I think I mentioned this previously, I had a school in my district contact me and say that they were concerned that they had received money from One Lex and they didn't understand why they received money and they didn't know what to do about it. What would that be in reference to and how can we improve that? Yes, so part of our funding, our scholarships, it's in the scholarship bucket of our funding and it's actually been doubled by the Building Bridges to Opportunity Initiative. Because we pick schools that are located in districts that have seen the highest number of gun violence per the police transparency page, right? So we identify elementary, middle, and high schools. We give a $1,000 donation to the middle schools and high schools and a $500 donation for them to use that for either direct services for anybody who knows anything, I know Council Member Gray knows, being so connected to the schools. The Frisks are like the heartbeat, they know what's going on with our kids. So they can use that funding for direct services to kids affected by gun violence or what we're encouraging, some type of program, some type of messaging. And so schools have done different things. They've done assemblies, they did t-shirts, stop the violence t-shirts. One school did yard signs. One year, all five high schools that got the $1,000 grant did a big full day workshop for students where they got to learn about trauma informed care. So it's just a way to get the schools being a little bit more active in the violence prevention space. And they're already active, but just getting them a little bit more active. Could we up education around that, since this was a Frisky who had contacted me and had no idea what they were supposed to do, and they said, I don't know anything about gun violence, how am I supposed to- And so that wasn't, that's on me. All right, that's fine, I just wanted to mention that going forward. Really quick, last question, I know that you have had some folks that you've contracted with in the Hispanic community to do outreach. And now I know that you've lost one of those people. What is your plan to address that? I've gotten some folks in my district that don't know what you're doing because of language barrier. So that individual actually came back to us, so he's decided he's going to stay with us. But what we are in the process of doing is one of the young men that we actually met in a crisis response to Cardinal Valley three years ago. Now is training under, we can say his name, training under Nestor to take Nestor's spot. So this is a young man who was in that cycle, directly affected, now has a job, turned his life around. He's directly connected with a lot of the young people in that community and can get in spaces Nestor can't. So Nestor is actually training him up to hopefully maybe take his spot. But we also want to take others into consideration who may want to step up and take Nestor's spot. We don't really have a process for that, it's very targeted. We just pick people who we feel can make the impact. And we couple that with training opportunities, conflict resolution, all of that, but it's all about relationship. So if you have people who would want to step up maybe and do that, we would consider them as well. But Nestor's still with us and he's training up this young man to take his spot potentially. But we're open if there's anybody else that might be interested. Thank you. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Council Member Gray. Thank you, Mayor. So I have just one more question. Sorry, my phone is ringing. Evidently, the media wants to talk to me. So I noticed that in the, going back to the audit. Yeah. When that they state in 2024, they state the age 13 to 29. But on the website it says 10. So when did that age change? I'm just curious. So this was last year. People had talked about it in the first strategic planning session in 2022. But we wanted to talk to more health care providers for that younger age group. We wanted to talk to education or teachers at elementary schools and admins. We talked to parks and rec coaches. We wanted a little bit more information on how to serve that demographic. So that was just last year that we lowered it to 10. So I think most of the audit was like 2022. Yeah. Gotcha. Yeah. And lastly, I just would like to say that I know that repeatedly on the website, and I've heard you speak. I know that one Lexington has contributed to a decrease in gun violence. However, statistically around the United States, it has decreased. But I just, when we say take credit for when crime decreases, we also, on the flip side, when and if it does increase, we got to take credit then as well. Yeah. So. I would say to that, that I definitely got beat up all of 2021 and 22 when I first got this job. So I definitely took the brunt of the spike. But even bigger than that, the reason I give credit to the ecosystem that's doing amazing work is because nationally you saw about a 15, 20% decrease, but Lexington saw a 55% decrease. So that just tells me that something a little different is happening in Lexington than nationally. And I think it's because of the people on the ground, survivor-led organizations, nonprofits doing the work. I just think there's a, when we go to other cities, they don't have this kind of connectivity. They just don't. School system doesn't work with city government. Nonprofits, I think I recently saw the podcast on Facebook where a nonprofit director was talking directly with a survivor, right? Like that doesn't happen in a lot of other places. And so I think if we can foster that connectivity more, we can make more strides. And the more of this we can push into the community's hands, I think the better. And I just want to just state publicly that the one thing that I do adore about this program is that it's everyone working together from the nonprofits to our public schools to our mental health to even our physicians. And people on the street, on the ground, just regular folk who are there to make sure that we put a decrease or a cease to the gun violence and the violence itself. So that is all I have. Thank you so much for everything. Thank you. Thank you. Council Member Curtis. Thank you Mayor. I'll be very brief and this is just a comment that I meant to give earlier. I wanted to thank you, the folks in the crowd and on the horseshoe who are directly impacted folks for sharing their vulnerability and for showing up. I've been to a lot of council meetings over the past year and every time something with one Lexington comes up, there's always a crowd of people here to sing the praises and talk about what needs to be done going forward. It's not easy to be vulnerable when you've gone through such experiences. And so I just wanted to express my appreciation to everybody who continually shows up and makes themselves vulnerable because we're better as a city for you all doing it. Thank you. Thank you. Council Member Morton. If I could, to Council Member Curtis. Just, I was hoping it would be a question. I was told it would be a question. I don't want to say this person by name, but they know who I'm talking to. I did make a mistake a few months ago in a public setting of mentioning a survivor by name and talking about some of the services that we offer. Again, I don't want to bring any attention to that person because they may not want me to. That person is here and I just want to sincerely apologize that I didn't mean to compromise the trust between you and I. I was just trying to explain the impact of a program, but I was wrong in that. And so I want that on the record and to be said publicly as well. Thank you. Council Member Morton. Thank you. And I don't have any questions. I just got to sum it up. So if you want to take a seat, you're all good. We're all good. I promise you, I ain't got no questions. We'll catch you. But if not, you can stay there as well. So I just want to speak a little bit about my connection to gun violence and then, I guess, essentially why I'm here. So as a kid, I had a cousin member, and I was about nine years old or a little bit less, that died of gun violence here in Lexington. And that's traumatic. It resonated with my family and it still never goes away. I remember attending the funeral to this day, and it never goes away. Just three years ago, my brother actually died to gun violence. And I got his picture here, it stays in my office. Just three years ago, it's here locally. So gun violence, I mean, and whether it be at Douglas Park sitting at the dirt bowl game and hearing shots fire off and have to take my brother to give him cover when Kwame passed away and get shot. I mean, gun violence, it could be every week or every day thing in the first district, and it is very important. So let's talk about my calling. Over six years, I've worked at the university hospital as an anesthesia technician, directly serving those who are gun violence victims. And what happened was, I was a neuroscience pre-med major, aimed to be a surgeon, wanted to make big bucks, did not plan on being here. But I had a kid come in, gunshot wound, rolled in, and anytime you're up moving around, anytime you're talking, we say, you're going to be fine, you're not essentially DOA or you're not needing for resuscitation. So we tell them, you're going to be fine. That kid didn't make it. He ended up passing in the OR that day. So what that did, that opened my eye. They told me, we have one patient on this bed that we're helping, but there's a mass community, undervalued, underprivileged community that is struggling with challenges that need help. So I changed my major from neuroscience pre-med to a major in sociology with a minor in philosophy, so I can study that community. So I can see why these certain communities are impacted with these challenges, whether it be gun violence or any of these challenges, and what we can do to fix it. And with that being said, gun violence is multi-faceted. There are many moving pieces, and it's important to emphasize that there's not one answer to gun violence. It is a collaborative approach, like you were mentioning. Likewise, I think we should be intentional when highlighting statistics, because, and you mentioned this, gun violence could be down. But when one person dies, that is everlasting, and that lasts in the community for a long time, if not forever. So ultimately, I believe we have to continue taking more responsibility when addressing the gun violence challenge. We need community intervention tailored to specific communities, meaning that West End intervention may look a little bit different than the East End. East End intervention may look a little bit different than Taste Creek, and vice versa, same with Council Member Reynolds' district. And making sure that we're using our community centers. I say our community centers, it's almost like it could be a one-stop shop, where we're offering wraparound services, where we have youth programming, where we have youth engagement, where we have year-round youth mentorship, where we have youth job training, all of these things for this community. And ultimately, what it addresses, if we could do something like that, is going to address the underlying issue, which you mentioned, poverty. That's one of the underlying issues to gun violence. We know that it could be retaliation, we know it could be all different things, but poverty is the underlying issue, and that's what we need to address. Those social determinants of health, neighborhood and built environments, health and health care, social and community context, education and economic stability. We need to make sure these kids living in poverty have a chance to dream. I always say, I had everything that I needed, I didn't have everything I wanted growing up, but what I did have is a platform. My family provided me a platform for education, for outlets, so that I could be what I wanted to be. And unfortunately, these kids, some of the kids in the first district and throughout Lexington, they don't have that platform. I call it a bottomless platform. They stand on it and go right through, because they don't have that platform to dream or dream. So we, as a city, I believe we need to help provide that platform. And it's through, like I said, making sure we're doing youth programming year-round, making sure we're doing youth engagement, making sure that we are doing youth mentorship, making sure that the job opportunities, economic opportunities, and making sure that we're just there for them. So with that being said, I look forward to working with you on Lexington. I look forward to working with our community partners. I look forward to working with the constituents of Lexington and the first district to address this challenge and keep moving forward. But we got to keep pushing through and come up with new ideas, new scenarios to address it and address the challenge. And hopefully we can get it down from 40 to 20, from 20 to 10, to 10 to 1. And that's it. That's it. Thank you. Thank you for sharing that. Thank you. Devine, that's our last speaker. And I think this has been a great presentation and back and forth with the questions. Thank you. And I do want to say, when I hired Devine, and I think it was, was it early 21 or late 20? Summer of 2021, June 6th, June 7th. I knew that Devine was unconventional. And I had an opportunity to hire some very conventional people. And this is exactly what we wanted. And to Tyler Morton, excuse me, Council Member Morton's. I'm doing what everybody else is doing. Council Member Morton's. Excuse me, Mayor, point of order. Mayor, point of order. Because time is of the essence here and we still have other items on the agenda, I'm going to ask, go ahead and continue to move forward with the meeting. Okay, this was a 30 second comment. I think we should go ahead and move forward. Thank you very much for the great work you do. All three of you. Thank you. Thank you all. Okay. It's time for council reports. Vice Mayor Wu. Vice Mayor Wu. Thank you, Mayor. In the interest of time, I move to push our presentation from the Department of Environmental Quality and Public Works to Thursday's meeting under presentations, so moved. Is there, Council Member Curtis seconds. Is there any discussion? All those in favor, say aye. Aye. Anyone opposed? All right, thank you. That will be Thursday evening. I don't see anyone signed up. Okay, Council Member Reynolds. I just wanted to say, I think we're really lucky here in Lexington to have such fabulous MLK Day celebrations. The unity breakfast, and then I wanted to mention the MLK celebration in March. And I wanted to thank co-chair James Brown for his hard work at putting that on. And we also have our own Tiffany Brown and Council Member Gray that are on that committee. And I just want to say that that program is always phenomenal. But yesterday was especially wonderful with Dr. Nile Fort speaking, and I just think that it is something that you all are giving as a gift to the community that is extremely inspiring and very meaningful. So, I just want to say thank you to you all for that. Thank you. Thank you, Council Member Gray. Thank you, Mayor. And up on the screen, we have it. Thank you, Lex TV. Okay, so it's just a friendly reminder that on February 5th, there will be a, well, well, we sent out the feedback survey. But I'll do that one first, or that might be the only one we sent. But just so you know, residents of the 6th District, I am still asking for your feedback and how we can improve as a city, and especially tackling the severe winter weather. I love hearing from the residents. I mean, this is the first time I've heard from you all in almost three years. I see that you all contact only when you have something really important to say. So, I need for you to complete the survey and give us the feedback so that I can do the best job possible in being your representative down here on council. And lastly, I'm assuming that was the only one that was sent. We will be having a town hall on February 5th at 6 PM to give the residents an update on the work that Council Member Shayla Lynch and I, as well as Director Lee Steele of Code Enforcement, have been doing this past year in order to improve the ordinances as well as what improvements we have made technology wise. You can already see some of the input or the impact of the work that we have been doing by looking at the code enforcement map on lexingtonky.gov. That is a major change from when I put this in committee. So, I hope to see you February 5th, 6 PM at the Frederick Douglass High School cafeteria. Thank you. Thank you, Vice Mayor Wu. Thank you, Mayor. Yesterday, two important things happened. First, we had our annual Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. celebration here in Lexington, so kudos, first of all, to council members James Brown and Denise Gray, just two of many who served on planning committees or otherwise pulled off a really terrific event. I think we found it reflective, inspiring, and even provocative with some really powerful insights from our own Christian Motley, a stunning poem from Frank X Walker, as well as guest speaker, Dr. Nile Fort, who gave us a lot of food for thought. Meanwhile, something else was happening 400 miles away in Washington, DC. We inaugurated a new president. For many of us, this has inspired fear, anxiety, and disappointment. But for just as many of us, it has strengthened our resolve to continue to fight for marginalized communities and work towards a better world for everyone. It won't be easy, and it won't be pretty. Funding may get slashed. Programs may be at risk. Families may be torn apart. Democracy may erode. Truth may be assaulted. Hate may be amplified. But no matter what happens in Washington or Frankfurt in the coming years, I have full faith and confidence in our local, non-partisan government, your government. To continue to support, uplift, and protect communities, no matter your country of origin, immigration status, gender identity, socioeconomic status, or anything else. And I also ask that you, the residents of Lexington, our Lexington family, continue to engage, organize, and work to support, uplift, and protect each other, no matter our differences. No matter who you are, you belong here. Dr. King once posed the question, where do we go from here, chaos or community? We know what our answer is. It's a resounding community. Thank you. Thank you, Council Member Morton. Thank you. I'd like to give the same sentiment. I'd like to take a moment to acknowledge and thank the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity for their hard work in organizing the MLK Day breakfast. I'd like to thank Council Member Brown and Council Member Gray and everyone on the MLK committee for organizing the MLK Day celebration tomorrow, I mean, excuse me, tomorrow. Monday, yesterday. With that being said, I would also like to express my gratitude to Dr. Fort for speaking at our MLK program. His words inspired us to reflect on our collective journey towards justice and equality. And just to hit a quote, faith is taking the first step even when you don't see the whole staircase. And that's for me, okay? So also, and I have a couple pictures up there that, and I'm sorry, Council Member Sheehan. I just snapped it, but I have a couple pictures up there from the march. Either way, I'm having an advisory board, and our first advisory board meeting is this Wednesday. We're thrilled to bring together our neighborhood association, community leaders, former Vice Mayor Kaye, Reverend Gaines. I have about 20 neighborhoods, roughly, in my district. And I was able to get representative from each neighborhood so that they can advise me so I can listen to them and make sure that I'm making the right decisions, not my own decisions. So we meet Wednesday, and it'll be very interesting. I'm allowing them to have their own flow, have their own powers, and I'm just there to give them updates, to listen to them, and give them information as needed. So that should be pretty good. Likewise, MLK Neighborhood Association was supposed to meet this evening, but they got canceled. So they'll be February the 18th at 6.30 PM, and I look forward to joining my great neighbors in the Martin Luther King neighborhood. And lastly, we'll just summarize it and end it up with Dr. Martin Luther King. I want to just share one of my favorite quotes. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. This quote serves as a reminder that we as leaders must advocate for justice, equity for all members of our community. It is our responsibility to ensure everyone feels heard, valued, and actively working towards creating a more just society. And so, I just want to give a shout out to Dr. Martin Luther King for his leadership. Thank you. Thank you for that. That leads us to public comment, and there is no one who wants to comment, so I'll ask for a motion to adjourn. All those in favor, say aye. We are adjourned, thank you.