SAXOPHONE MUSIC SAXOPHONE MUSIC SAXOPHONE MUSIC SAXOPHONE MUSIC SAXOPHONE MUSIC SAXOPHONE MUSIC SAXOPHONE MUSIC SAXOPHONE MUSIC SAXOPHONE MUSIC Good afternoon, everyone. It is 1 o'clock, so I'm going to call our meeting of the March 4th, 2025 General Government and Planning Committee to order. Our first item of business is the February 4th, 2025 Meeting Summary Approval. Are there any additions or corrections? Seeing none, I'll take a motion to approve. And a second. Any discussion on the motion? All in favor, say aye. Any opposed? That motion passes. Our next item on our agenda is the Downtown Area Master Plan. Our first presentation will be from Long-Range Planner, Boyd Sayway, and he has information on reconnecting to our downtown. Council Member Legree, since this is your item in committee, would you like to say a few words to introduce it? Yes, Chair. Thank you so much. Thank you all for your time today as we continue our conversation around the Downtown Area Master Plan. For a little bit of background, especially for our newer colleagues, my office presented on this topic to the Budget, Finance, and Economic Development Committee last year, and since then, we've taken significant steps forward. With funding now in place and the RFP process officially underway, we're moving from concept to action. And today's update will outline what comes next and how you can work to support this important initiative. So thank you so much, Mr. Sayway, and to the entire Long-Range Planning team for your hard work on this effort. And I look forward to the presentation and the questions that we'll receive. Thank you. Thank you very much. Good afternoon, Council Members. My name is Boyd Sayway. I'm a Senior Planner with Long-Range Planning. I'm here to present some information on the Downtown Master Plan RFP. The Downtown Area Master Plan is a direct response to the 2045 Comprehensive Plan, specifically place-making policy number 13, which calls for an update to the Downtown Master Plan. The 2045 Comprehensive Plan was shaped by extensive public outreach, where the community identified a new Downtown Master Plan as a key priority. Recognizing this need, Council Member Legree led efforts to secure funds to develop a Downtown Area Master Plan. Once completed, the plan will be considered by the Planning Commission as an amendment to the 2045 Comprehensive Plan, ensuring it aligns with Lexington's long-term vision for a vibrant, livable, and well-designed downtown. This framework will guide future land use decisions, reinforcing a strategic and sustainable approach to downtown development for generations to come. The last adopted Downtown Master Plan came from the 1965 Urban Renewal Project, incorporated into the 1973 Comprehensive Plan. Like many renewal efforts of that era, this plan prioritized large-scale redevelopment, often at the expense of existing communities and historic urban fabric. Urban renewal in the 1960s drastically reshaped downtown areas across the country, frequently favoring new infrastructure and commercial expansion of a neighborhood presentation. In Lexington, one of the more ambitious proposals included a highway cutting through the city center, an idea that was ultimately never realized, but affected the area's disregard for existing urban communities. The defined downtown area was almost exclusively designed for commercial and retail use, reinforcing a business-first approach that left little room for other types of development, public green space, or a more balanced human-centered urban environment. Since the last adopted Master Plan, Lexington has added roughly 170,000 residents. Without a defined area or framework, downtown has evolved organically, but lacks a cohesive strategy for future growth. The 2007 Downtown Master Plan, envisioning the future, was not formally adopted. This limited its use as a basis for development or policies. With this Master Plan, there will be anti-displacement efforts. A successful downtown plan requires input from residents, businesses, and institutions, each voice shaping a more connected, livable urban fabric. Engaging the public in meaningful, inclusive ways will be central, ensuring that every stakeholder has a seat at the table. Once a consultant is brought on board, they will guide outreach efforts, working closely with planning staff to cultivate a shared vision for downtown future. The engagement process will capture the diverse perspective, needs, and aspirations for the community, creating a plan rooted in local identity and long-term sustainability. Investments will be focused within existing neighborhoods, fostering growth that enhances rather than displaces, ensuring that improvements serve current and future residents. Neighborhoods with H1 overlays will be supported to remain vibrant, not static, balancing preservation with economic vitality. Key objectives of the Master Plan will include building on successful projects like Gatton Park and Town Branch, encouraging stronger public-private collaborations, prioritize investment strategies that promote long-term stability and opportunity to everyone in the downtown and surrounding areas, promote a sense of belonging while encouraging thoughtful investments that benefit both current and future residents, strengthen partnerships between downtown and key academic institutions like the University of Kentucky to the South and Transylvania University and BCTZ to the North, improve connections to surrounding neighborhoods, making downtown more accessible through walkable, pedestrian-friendly design, ensure the future development, welcome people from all backgrounds by supporting a mix of housing, businesses, and public space, create a thriving, people-focused downtown that enhances quality of life and economic opportunity for all. The infill and redevelopment area map provides a starting point for defining the downtown study area. The infill and redevelopment map was developed using the 1934 Sanborn Fire Insurance Map. It outlines preliminary area the consultant will work with. The selected consultant will refine this area based on data, community input, and planning best practices. Important to note, and I hope I make this clear, as clear as I can, this map is a preliminary framework, not a final destination. The downtown area will be refined during planning, primarily within the infill and redevelopment area, though some adjustments beyond this may be considered. The selected consultant will refine it using data, community input, and best practices. The downtown area master plan will follow a structured and transparent process to ensure its success. Key steps include issuing an RFP to invite experienced planning firms. Once selected, the consultant will begin research, stakeholder engagement, and data collection. The first public engagement event will coincide with Lexington's 250th anniversary celebrations, providing a platform for community input. Over the course of the 18-month contract, the consultant will work with planning staff, stakeholders, and advisory committees to conduct data analysis, engage the community, draft the master plan, and finalize recommendations for adoption. The final plan will guide sustainable and inclusive growth for downtown Lexington. As we move into the next phase, selecting the right consultant will be essential to bringing our shared vision to life. Engaging with the city will ensure that our design approach will align with funding opportunities and broader policy goals. Community input and collaboration are at the heart of the process. We invite Lexingtonians, especially those from around and within the downtown area, to stay involved and help shape a vibrant, sustainable future for downtown Lexington. We look forward to working closely with council members as every step of the way to create a plan that reflects both our aspirations and practical needs. Thank you. Your insights and partnership will be valuable as we embark on the transformation journey to our downtown landscape. Thank you for your presentation. Colleagues, go ahead and sign in if you have questions or comments. Council Member Lynch. Thank you, Chair, and thank you for the presentation. I just have, I guess, comments about the key objectives of the plan. I would like to add a little bit. I don't know if I can, but the first bullet point regarding on the key objectives of the plan slide, sustainable growth, redevelopment, and preservation are one of the actionable strategies. I would like to add for you all's consideration, and for the consultant to consider, adding without displacement. I think displacement is something, especially in this area, geography is something that we have to be mindful of, especially with the report that the Neighborhoods in Transition Task Force gave us. So I would love to see sustainable growth, redevelopment, and preservation without displacement. I think that's something that should be considered, even the second bullet point, increasing housing options and investment opportunities without displacement. I want to make sure that we keep that in mind so that we, folks aren't, as the consultants are doing the work and engaging the community, we realize that that's a risk for this area, and we want to be cognizant of that in gathering that data and work and having those community engagement conversations. So I would want us to keep that on our radar. And then, let's see, and then my next question is just how many proposals have we received to date? We don't have an exact number, but we've had several inquiries. If you go look at the questions people are asking, it's from all over, so it's hopefully, they're not just asking questions, but they'll apply. Okay, awesome. And that's all I have for right now. Thank you, Chair. Council Member Sivigny. Thank you, Chair. And thank you very much for the presentation, Boyd. A few quick questions. The downtown plan was not adopted in 2007. I guess, is the vision for this process for us to adopt a downtown master plan, and what actually happened? Does someone have a historical perspective of what happened in 2007? Yes, thank you very much. Hal Bailey, Manager of Long Range Planning. That 2007 study did not follow the typical procedure that we go through to adopt plans as an element of the comprehensive plan. It was done from a private side associated with the DLP. For this to be adopted by the Planning Commission, there's a certain process that we want to ensure it achieves. That's not to say that the previous plan did not achieve things. The Town Branch Commons was a recommendation from that plan. Several other elements in changes we were able to achieve, but we want to make sure that this has the weight and service of the comprehensive plan, and we can put it into place well into the future. I can't remember on your slides what role, because downtown basically, a lot of council districts have some sort of play in that map. What role do you feel like the council will play? Will we have a specific council discussion to talk about what we feel and then what we know some of our neighbors are asking about? I'm just wondering. Going with the infill and redevelopment map, the infill and redevelopment map includes six council districts. That's District 1, 2, 3, 5, 10, and 11. One thing that we want to make sure that comes from this master plan is public engagement. Who knows the district members better than council? That's one of the things we'll depend on the council members for is the engagement part. Then some of these policies and funding also falls in the hands of council. We'll depend on those three things mainly from council. Thank you very much. Thank you, Chair. That's all I have. Thank you very much. I just wanted to follow up on some of the questions that Council Member Lynch and Council Member Savigny asked. I didn't know if you wanted to go into any more detail about the neighborhood stabilization and displacement mitigation aspects that are involved with this downtown area master plan overview and how we're framing that with the consultant and how that might be connected to some of the neighborhood and community outreach. I know that neighborhood engagement is going to be a really important facet of this process. If there's anything else you'd like to share along those lines, I think that might be helpful. Context. As I said, one of the key things in the RFP is community outreach. We have to make sure that everyone is involved in this. We'll rely on not exclusively rely on council, but whoever all the RFPs we receive, we'll make sure that public engagement is a big part of that. As Council Member Lynch mentioned, displacement is also a key part. It's actually in the RFP that has to be part of the study's anti-displacement efforts. Thanks for that clarification. I've also had some questions about the boundaries of downtown and how we're thinking about that. I know that you talked about the infill and redevelopment map as a preliminary starting point. Some of my neighborhoods and business districts proximate to downtown have been curious about how they fit into this conversation. It's my understanding that the consultant will play a role with defining the downtown area. Is that accurate? Mr. Seweg, could you please speak into the mic? Thank you. That's loud. Right now, we don't have a downtown area-specific boundary. That's one thing that is in the RFP to determine what that is. We hope the consultant will get that from data from public engagement and best practices. It's one of those requirements. As you can see, the name of the RFP is reconnecting to our downtown. Connections will also be very important, whether they decide this will be the urban core and this will be various districts and how we connect them. That is very important. It's a way of connecting and also finding a boundary. All this might just be included in one boundary or it might be outside the urban core. We don't know what the consultant will find because it will be a data-driven and public engagement-driven practice. Okay. Thank you so much for that additional information. Thank you, Chair. Council Member Reynolds. Thank you, Chair. Thank you so much for this presentation and Council Member Legree for your hard work on this. Obviously, part of my district includes downtown. I care a lot about this as well. When we talk about engagement, are we including the businesses? I know that the DLP had wanted a retail study that looked at the nighttime and daytime economy. I wonder how are we engaging them and making sure that there's good communication and work between neighborhoods and businesses? Public engagement is not just the people who live in the community. The businesses also. So far, we are not the consultants, but we've talked to downtown businesses. We've talked to council members. We've talked to the institutions, UK, transit. We are reaching out to everyone. We have to make sure that all voices are heard. There will be a business study aspect of this. There will be a housing study aspect of this. There will be an entertainment aspect study of this. So all that will be in the final master plan. Okay. Thank you. I want to continue to hear more about that. Thank you very much. Council Member Morton. Thank you, Chair. I know the question has already been asked about the boundaries. But I'm also interested in the boundaries being that the first district is very close to downtown. Well, we have consistent downtown, but also some of our areas are some considered downtown, but in other cases, they aren't considered downtown. So I guess what criteria or direction will be given to the consultants when setting those boundaries? If the consultants are going to set those boundaries, I guess, how do they plan to build it? Are they going to be with our input, or how's that going to work? As I mentioned, Lexington doesn't have a downtown boundary. Part of the RFP specifically requests that the consultant come up with an area that is considered downtown. And part of that will be data-driven, public outreach. So if we come to your district, make sure that you're there and all your constituents are there to tell us where they think downtown stops. And that's how we'll form it. It's not by guesswork. It's not one person doing it. It will be a whole community. The whole community will come together to determine where that is. So then, under a community-centered approach, it mentions the plan will focus on investments within established neighborhoods ensuring that the development benefits existing residents. What do these investments consist of or look like? Say that again? Under number three, community-centered approach, the last bullet, the plan will focus on investments within established neighborhoods ensuring that development benefits existing residents. What would these investments look like? What are these investments? Like, for example? That's to be determined by the consultant. And one of the things that feeds into the anti-displacement, we don't want to have investments that push out people who are already in the neighborhoods. We want investments that will benefit the neighborhoods. So the consultant, that's one of the challenges they'll have to face and that's one of the questions they'll have to answer. Thank you. I don't see anyone else signed in, so thank you so much for the presentation. Thank you. Next on our agenda is a presentation from CivicLEX Deputy Director Kit Anderson on strengthening Lexington's boards and commissions. Council Member Lynch has this item in committee. Would you like to make any remarks before she begins? Thank you, Chair. Yes, I would. This committee item was born out of a former item I placed in committee reviewing our housing related boards and commissions to assess if tenant representation was appropriate. That item is now the Landlord and Tenant Advisory Board and still in committee. In performing that research with Vice Mayor Wu and Council Member Shin, we discovered that we had more questions than answers regarding all of the city boards and commissions. This council allotted money to commission a comprehensive review of all of the city's boards and commissions and I'm excited for you all and our neighbors to hear and receive this report out. I'd like to thank Vice Mayor Wu, who joined me on this journey, LaShawn Barber and Tori Cruz-Falk, our legislative aide, Alicia Larmore, Melissa McCart Smith, Tiffany Brown, CIO Liz Rogers, Arthur Lucas, many of the commissioners, directors, staff, and community boards and commissions members who participated in the study and the work and the surveys that we sent out, and of course thank you to CivicLEX for taking on this huge endeavor and giving us a report out today. So thank you to Kit Anderson, Richard Young, and the CivicLEX team. You may take it away. Thank you. Can you guys hear me? Great. Awesome. Yes, thank you so much for having us here today and I do want to thank Council Member Lynch and Vice Mayor Wu and Melissa McCart Smith in particular for helping us navigate this process and steward this work, but as Council Member Lynch said, we are here today to report out on a fairly lengthy report that is included in the packet for today's meeting about strengthening Lexington's boards and commissions. So, what is this report? What is it trying to do? Three main things. We were trying to gather data and information about the boards and commissions that currently exist. At the time the report started there were 70 listed online and we just wanted to understand what they are and what they do. We wanted to assess what is and isn't working with those boards and commissions, both for the members themselves, the staff they work with, and for the community at large. And finally, we wanted to make recommendations for changes to improve those things that aren't working and look at specific goals. And I do want to note what isn't in the scope of this project, which is any, this is not a legislative document, it's not a budgetary document. Ultimately changes to boards and commissions will be up to the staff of the boards, the members of the boards, and the group in front of us today, but we hope these recommendations will point in interesting and helpful directions for things that could happen. So, just a little bit of background. The two organizations working on this project, CivicLex, which is a non-profit here in Lexington focused on strengthening civic health, and... Hi, I'm Nick Lyle, I'm with CivStart, I'm one of the co-founders. We are a non-profit innovation hub dedicated to sparking innovation in government, and in particular for this project, we leveraged our technology expertise as well as national networks to support research on best practices and various solutions for boards and commissions management. Thank you. And we, yes, we were the two project teams working on this project. So, how did we go about this work? I will very briefly cover our methodology. There was a lot of different strategies we used. We started out, as I mentioned, just mapping the boards and commissions, seeing what's out there, what exists, who are they staffed by, how many members do they have, when and where do they meet, all those kind of key logistical details. We followed that up, we knew that meetings are kind of the main mechanism that boards and commissions get work done, so we knew we needed to see those in action. And our team attended 41 board or commission meetings over a three month research period and learned a lot through that process. Then we knew we needed to hear from the experts on boards and commissions, which is the members themselves and the staff they work with. So we surveyed both of those groups at some length. Some might say the survey was too lengthy, but we needed to dive into the process, the resources, the legislation, the recruitment, all of these different aspects of boards and commissions, how they currently impact staff and members, and how staff and members might like to see them change. We followed that up. Sorry, we're jumping back and forth here. Yeah, so I personally reached out to six cities who I had extensive conversations with and sometimes received supplementary written information. Those cities were Salt Lake City, Utah, Raleigh, North Carolina, Grand Rapids, Michigan, and Boulder, Colorado. The cities of Sacramento, California, and Dallas, Texas were also included in the Peer Cities research, which is included in the larger report, as they shared written reports pertinent to the goals of the RFP. And I also personally participated in at least 21 meetings with LFUCG staff and other technology stakeholders, either by myself or in conjunction with CivicLEX. Many of those people are listed in the research, but I'll save our time here. And finally, we knew the last part of this project, a big goal of it is to bring new people into boards and commissions and make sure they represent the communities that they serve and impact. And we knew public engagement absolutely had to be a part of that process. We really focused our engagement on breadth over depth, knowing, or sorry, on depth over breadth, knowing that community awareness of boards and commissions is quite low. We really needed to be able to talk to people face-to-face about them, about what they are and what they do, before we could really get their input. So we focused on 260 face-to-face conversations in locations across town, the Downtown Transit Center, Gray Line Station, the North New Circle Road, Walmart, and we also convened a focus group of Fayette County High School students to really get a fresh perspective on boards and commissions and learned an incredible amount about really the user experience of trying to engage with boards and commissions from their eyes, which is maybe my favorite part of this. So, what did we find out? Quite a lot, it turns out. One of the very first things that we realized is, with there being 67 active boards and commissions, it's really important to be able to break these down into categories before you can say very much that's meaningful about them, because they have different strengths, they have different weaknesses, they have different purposes. So we ended up organizing the boards into these five categories that you see here. And as briefly as I can, advisory boards are residents convening to advise the city on some sort of community issue, so things like the Senior Services Commission or Tree Board. Quasi-judicial boards meet and make deliberations on items and make judgments on those items, so think about like Planning Commission, Civil Service Commission, things like that where they're kind of passing judgment on a specific item. External boards are kind of an interesting group. They are boards of external organizations who, for whatever historic or financial reasons, have an LFUCG-appointed board. So you can think about the Lexington Public Library Board, the Airport Board, the Carnegie Center, all have LFUCG-appointed boards. Fund-based boards manage funds and make decisions about how those funds are used. So you can think about pension boards, the Agricultural Extension District, things like that. And place-based boards are similar to advisory boards, but rooted in a place. So community center boards, parks advisory boards, things like that. So I'm going to step in and talk a little bit about that Pierce City research and some of the findings that came out of it. There is a lot here that can be but I'm going to be very brief right here. So some of the things that we found were obviously there are many shared challenges of boards and commissions, as I'm sure you all know if you've talked to Pierce and other cities. Recruitment and retention is a representation broadly, including recruitment and retention, time commitment expectations, and perceptions or realities of politicization of appointments are recurring issues. Inefficiencies in many processes, inconsistent records management, high vacancy rates, and other issues were common across different cities. And unclear roles, which you'll notice and we'll talk more about all of these things in our recommendations section. Boards acting outside of their scope, challenges with defunct boards, or boards that need sunsetting were also common challenges. I'm just going to briefly comment on that technology is just one of the strategies for mitigating these challenges and is complemented by all sorts of other processes, policy, and budgetary considerations. Very quickly, some of the best practices that other cities shared included getting more active in recruitment strategies, comprehensive onboarding, and clearer role definition. Talking a little bit more specifically about technology, which is the other area that CFSTART supported, we...oh, sorry, I'm mixing my papers up. Some of the LFUCG technology processes varied tremendously across different boards, as I'm sure you all are aware, so these are not at all universal recommendations, but rather oriented towards how a sort of average board can be improved to a high functioning level. Some of the things that we saw working well included hybrid meetings, providing access and opportunities for board members and residents to participate. Google Drive, it's a bit of a mixed blessing. It works really well as a widely accessible technology for document creation, collaboration, and storage, but is currently sort of not officially owned by the city and connected to other city document technologies. And then finally, the website management. We talked to Melissa McCart Smith about some of these processes and the new website features in addition have increased the ability of boards to have visibility, access, and transparency online. More getting towards some of the things that need improvement. Granicus software is a big...obviously Granicus is used in many different ways by the city. We're talking specifically about some of the boards and commissions modules utilized by Melissa in particular, and there were some key limitations that are documented, I think as a part of Appendix 3 in this report, as well as incorporated into various recommendations throughout the recommendation section. Calendar notifications, so I mentioned the new website has increased functionality on this, but a dedicated sort of follow and notification system could make a really big difference for residents learning about upcoming events, and as Melissa and Lily sometimes found out, last minute changes to those events and their scheduling and locations. And then finally, or not finally, document management. I kind of briefly touched on this with the Google Drive section. And then digital literacy, so just many boards and commissions could benefit from digital literacy training that could both improve the functionality of the board, as well as removing a barrier to participation for some potential members who might not be as well trained on those things. Great. Another big aspect of our findings was an assessment of the demographics of current board members. Some of them match Lexington quite closely as a whole, and some of them have some pretty significant disparities. Both gender and sexual orientation more or less match the demographics of Lexington as a whole. A kind of moderate match was the race ethnicity of board members. So as you can see in the chart here, about 66% of current board members identify as Caucasian, compared with about 68% of Lexington as a whole, according to the most recent data available. The most underrepresented ethnicity of boards and commissions at the moment is Hispanic. About 9% of Lexington County residents are Hispanic, compared with about 3% of board and commission members. Moving into more significant disparities, age was a pretty significant disparity between board members and Lexington as a whole. Particularly young people are significantly underrepresented on boards and commissions at the moment. You can see on the chart, 16% of Lexington residents are between the ages of 20 and 29, while only 2% of board and commission members are between the ages of 20 and 29. So young people are significantly underrepresented, middle-aged and older people are overrepresented. Education level is another big one. So as you can see on the chart, almost half of board and commission members have a master's degree or a doctorate. The data on that varies, but about 20% of Lexington as a whole has a master's degree or higher. So that was a pretty significant difference we found. Finally, housing situation. In our survey, 91% of board members said they are homeowners. The data on Lexington as a whole is based on housing units and not on individual people, but we do know that about 44% of Lexington's housing units are occupied by renters. So Lexington is close to half renters compared with 91% of board and commission members. And finally, the slide seems to be missing, but also representation by district was quite uneven. Districts 4, 7, 8, and 11 were significantly underrepresented. You can read more about that in the report. Finally, in our member survey, this is really just a hint at a much longer analysis, just comparing quantitatively boards by categories. You can see up here there's differences in how effective the boards rate themselves to be, how much recruitment they do, whether or not they think they need to be more accessible, really defining those categories. And finally, recommendations. What do we think should happen from here? So there are four big areas that we think could be improved within boards and commissions, and within that there are both priorities and opportunities. We see priorities as raising boards from a deficit to a baseline level, and we see opportunities as a chance to go beyond that. So that is how they are formatted in the report. Representation, we think, is important because it is the function of boards and commissions to bring community into government and to represent the people that they serve. Next, and there are a variety of strategies that we think can help address that. The first big area is functionality. This is something we see at CivicLEX all the time. You can spend a lot of time and energy trying to get more people involved in something that you're doing, but if you don't have kind of a baseline level of effectiveness of the systems that you're trying to bring people into, it can result in frustration and disillusionment. So we think that having some kind of basic fixes for functionality will be very important. The third big area is accessibility. We think this is important both to make boards and commissions more accessible to members of the public to improve their work and policy outcomes, but also because accessibility is a big on-ramp to representation. If people don't know that these boards exist, if they don't know that everyday residents can be members, if they don't know and where to go to a meeting, then chances are they will not become a member themselves. So we need to broaden the pool of accessibility to improve those chances. And finally, transparency. This is really about the legitimacy of the boards and the trust in government and trust in institutions. We think that it can be improved in a couple really simple ways. And we also think that, like all of these other goals, it will feed into the other goals, right? So a more transparent board will become more accessible, which will increase representation, and we really see all of these goals working together. So, next steps. Apart from everybody reading in depth the 90-page report, we will be releasing Boarding Commission snapshots that really dive into individual boards and include an opportunity for the boards themselves to comment. You'll notice in the report most of these recommendations are not about single boards, and so that'll be our opportunity to look at that. And we will also be anonymizing and publishing all of the data that we've gathered throughout this process for anyone to view. So with that, thank you, and let me know if you have any questions. Thank you for that presentation and for the related report. Colleagues, please sign in if you have questions or comments, Council Member Curtis. Thank you, Chair. First off, I just want to thank everyone at CivicLEX for putting this report together, and again, to Council Member Lynch for her work on this, because this has been something that's really eye-opening for me as somebody who is between the ages of 20 and 29, is a renter, and lives in the 4th District, which has the lowest representation on our boards and commissions out of all of the districts. So it's particularly important to me that we're engaging these groups of people, and I know from my personal experiences that we were getting towards this sort of at the end of the presentation. There is a high level of distrust in government, and I was wondering if you could speak a little bit more to the concrete actions that you could imagine us, as Council Members, taking to increase that trust and to sort of create an on-ramp for folks who might have that distrust to engage with boards and commissions. Absolutely, yeah. I mean, I hate to say it, but I think all four of these areas of recommendations can contribute to that and can build trust. I think functionality, a resident showing up to a meeting and it running well and being at the time and place that they understand it to be at is a trust-building thing, right? I think representation, when people see themselves represented on these boards and commissions, they're more likely to feel like they can engage and trust them. I think some of the transparency recommendations are very straightforward, but a big trust-builder. Making sure that minutes are online. Making sure that what the board's exact function is is listed online and is available to them. Making sure that the point of contact for them to ask further questions is available. Really, I think simple things like that can absolutely build trust and make people feel like if they don't understand something, they have options to figure it out as opposed to just like a wall. Awesome, and I do wanna, again, thank you for that. I do want to ask if you think there's merit in what you've seen, if this was something that you studied. I haven't had a chance to read the whole 90-page document in depth, but I have had a chance to skim over most of it, and I really do appreciate that document. It's wonderful, and I think it's gonna be a wonderful resource for us on council to make some of these changes, but specifically, have you, like, pardon me as I'm gathering my words, I'm wondering about the merits of an individual council member, for lack of a better term, recruiting people to join boards and commissions because when we talk about community outreach, if we're putting information about the vacancies on boards and commissions in our newsletters or on our social media pages, we're reaching sort of the same people that we tend to reach and who are already kind of engaged with local government in one way or another, and if we're trying to bring folks in the community into it who haven't been engaging thus far, is that something that y'all considered as part of this study? Is that something that y'all have had conversations about, and if not, is that something that y'all would be willing to discuss with my office the merits of? Yeah, absolutely. I think our perspective on recruitment from both the kind of member side and public engagement side is the broader the better, right? I think the more daylight we can bring to this, the more awareness of these vacancies that people have, the broader recruitment will be, so I think absolutely council members recruiting should be a part of that. I think other strategies should also be used. The biggest thing that we heard from the public about recruitment was two things. One is that a lot of members of the public didn't know that they could be on boards. They thought that the boards were city staff or people who were elected or people with very specific qualifications, and the other, and I think this goes back to the trust building also, is removing some of the barriers to recruitment and to being on a board, whether that's a really niche knowledge and knowing someone who's telling you that this is even happening, or things like meeting times and places, requirements, things like that, looking at those barriers as well. Thank you so much. Thank you, Chair. Council Member Sviggum. Thank you, Chair, and thanks so much for the report and your work. I've got kind of a little question that I didn't go through the report yet, but I did go through the slides. Understood. But I will, I promise. Is it available in Audible? Yeah. So did you uncover any data that would suggest that many organizations exist that don't need to exist, whether it be for-profit companies, non-profit organizations, and boards and commissions? Did your work uncover any of that? Was there a specific question? It was like, do you feel like you need to exist? Yes. So we did ask both members and staff about if they think, the way we phrased it is, are there any boards that you think need to be consolidated or dissolved? And towards the end of this report, we report on those findings. Some boards, it was suggested, could be consolidated about things like code enforcement, combining those together, things like that. I think in terms of assessing whether boards need to exist based on their current level of activity and functionality, there are certain baselines that could be applied in terms of if meetings are having quorum, if vacancies, how many vacancies there are and how long those are lasting, how frequently boards are meeting. I think feasibly, you could develop a list of criteria and see which boards do and don't meet that and obviously give them an opportunity to respond to that. But there are definitely markers, I think, of more versus less active boards. Yeah, so I would be curious if when you give us those kind of detailed commission reports if there would be some of that information. Just because I actually do think like this body is the one who creates boards and commissions and approves them, I believe. And I do think that we should on at least biannual basis kind of review the existing, just like we review things that are in committee, we should kind of review organizations and just say, is this, do we still need this? Is it being met? Or is there an internal department that probably is managing this just fine? And they can have a different method of gaining public input, so. Absolutely, yes. And snapshots will include both some of those markers and an opportunity for the boards themselves to comment on their status and goals. I know there are individual boards that would like their duties to change. I think some of them would like their structure to change. There's different goals that they have. Thank you, thank you so much. I appreciate the work. Thank you, Chair. Council Member Lengre. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Council Member Lynch. And thank you, Ms. Anderson, for your presentation. I had a couple of just like next steps, you know, types of questions. And, you know, I'm specifically looking at like under functionality item number eight about staff capacity and their support of boards and commissions, which I also think is connected to, for example, item number 14 under transparency with knowledge sharing and making sure that the people who are staffing these boards and that the board chairs like have the ability to streamline their processes, to share best practices, et cetera. But it also seems like that could have a staffing impact because that would be a lot for just one person or even several people to manage given the number of boards and commissions we have connected to LFUCG. So I guess I'm curious about what you all see as next steps for making any of these items actionable and what type of kind of processes you'd like to share about what could be next there. Absolutely, yeah, thank you for that question. I think that there are different ways that implementation could be addressed and some of those strategies we cover in the report. For lack of a better example, I think the model that comes to mind for us would be similar to something that happened with the public input subcommittee, right, where if you as a group are interested in picking some of this up and working through it, I think a subcommittee could be formed and look at those legislative and budgetary changes and what those might entail. We have a list of implementation items and that includes things like hiring another staff position to coordinate this centrally and potential budget impacts from that. But I think working through that as a group would be the way that would most likely happen. Okay, thank you. I appreciate that and this sounds like a manageable set of next steps potentially, depending on how we go about things and I appreciate the detailed report that goes along with it. So thank you. Thank you, Chair. Vice Mayor Wu. Thank you, Chair. To answer your question, Council Member Svigny, if you want CivicLEX to do an audio version of this report, it may require another RFP. Thank you, Kit, Nick, and Lily, and your team. Some really good information and there's a lot to absorb and colleagues, I would encourage you to go through the full report as several of us have. There's a lot of really good information. Some things in here like I kind of expected or thought I would find and there were definitely also a lot of surprises and a lot of the recommendations I found to be really interesting, especially paired with looking at our peer cities. I thought that research was really interesting. I'm always a fan of borrowing ideas from other folks and not all of them will necessarily apply to us directly. So we have to really tailor them to the way this government functions and the way our boards and commissions function. I have a couple of questions about the snapshots. Yes. So that's still in progress and remind me again what the deadline is for submission of responses for those and then is your intention to fold them or amend them into the existing recommendations what you find or are they gonna be kind of a standalone add-on of information? Yes, thank you. So in terms of the snapshots, we will be sending them, the draft version of them to the points of contact we have on file this coming Monday, March 10th and currently have two weeks for those staff points of contact to respond so that makes the deadline, I believe it's March 21st which is the next Friday. In terms of how they will be incorporated in the report, the structure right now is that they are a standalone. They're a separate attachment that speaks really specifically to the boards themselves where all of the recommendations go by category or by boards as a whole. I absolutely think that the snapshots could be a really key part of implementation where some of these changes and maybe they aren't even legislative or budgetary changes but shifting the role or duties or staffing of a board could be worked through as part of an implementation process. Yeah, I absolutely agree with that. I wanna make sure that folks know that whatever changes come out of this body to improve our boards and commissions are not gonna be done sort of from our distance. That it's gonna be done in conjunction with particularly I think board chairs and staff but also board members in general because we have to make sure whatever recommendations that we put forth make sense and works for everybody and actually address the problems that we're seeing. In the past, this kind of look has been done but not anywhere close I don't think to the level of depth that we've looked at it. We have looked at boards and commissions in the recent past for mainly representation, demographics, things like that but I don't think we've ever taken a dive this deep on just effectiveness, efficiency, how we make things accessible. And one of the things that I came into this government sometimes critical of government is that we sometimes have a tendency to commission reports, have thorough studies about things and then it goes up on a shelf and we forget about it and then five or eight years later we do another report and this cycle continues. I can assure you as somebody working close in this process that that is not gonna happen this time and that this robust list of 54 recommendations is our starting point to really do some serious work on improving these processes. As Council Member Lynch mentioned earlier, this process all started with a conversation around tenants on boards and one of the conversations that's also come out of this process was talking about how to educate and develop community champions and advocates. So with that in mind, a slight tangent, I intend to place in the GGP Planning Education Academy and I'll announce that during work session later today. Thank you, thank you, Chair. Council Member Reynolds. Thank you, Chair. I also want to thank Council Member Lynch for working on this and CivicLEX and CivSTART. You all have done some fabulous work and we all need to dive into it a little bit more and I'm just really appreciative of this. I think now having participated in so many boards and commissions, we can see the discrepancies, how things are totally different from one to another, often how people get frustrated because they're not sure what direction it's going or what purpose it serves. And then also sometimes there's a lot of confusion between the types of categories that the boards are and I found that really helpful how you broke it down. Some are external and there's just city appointed members on it. Some are not, some are internal, some are advisory. And all of that is super, super helpful. So I really look forward to diving in more and seeing those snapshots. And then I think for me as a chair, I feel like if we had some sort of across the board format of these are the things that are going up on the website, these are the things that aren't, these are the rules as to when you have to have agendas out and when you don't. This is the very, very clear, I know that people still tend to get confused about those things like what has to be publicly noticed, what doesn't. And I think if we can all be on the same page, if we can have some sort of training so that when we do have new members and we do have new chairs, they can go through some sort of a training and get on the same page, then that would at least help us run them more smoothly. There's a lot of differences between them, so they're not all gonna look the same. But just having some sort of same page to start on will be helpful. So once again, thank you and thank you. Council Member Lynch. Thank you, Chair. And I'll just wrap up unless anyone else wants to speak. Thank you again, Kit, Civilex, CivSTART for the report. Colleagues, you all pointed out a lot of the things that the report pointed out and that are on our to-do list to work on. I just, in reading the report, I thought the opinions and expressions of the high school students was very telling. If you all don't read anything else, go to read those because these high school students were going to these boards and commissions meetings with some context provided by Civilex, but just going to attend. And it was, I could barely hear what they were saying because there were no microphones. There were a lot of side conversations and we're not sure what they were talking about. Sometimes there was an agenda, sometimes there wasn't an agenda. And so they said in quite honesty how frustrating and confusing some of our boards and commissions meetings were. And these are young people wanting to get more involved in the governmental process and were left confused. Some didn't even make it to a meeting because the meeting said it was supposed to happen on the city's website, but it didn't happen or maybe it happened in another venue, another location that wasn't publicized. So we have a lot of work to do and I'm very, very thankful for the work and the study that was being done because now we have a ground level foundational point that we can only build upon. So next steps, Vice Mayor Wu and I are going to convene a subcommittee to tackle all of the recommendations that have been suggested in the report by CivicLEX and CivSTART because we know we've got a lot to work on and we want to get it done to make sure that our boards and commissions are accessible to everyone in the community and that their processes and procedures, agendas, minutes, everything is transparent and available, easily available, more easily available to the public so that they can be more engaged in government and how the city runs. So we will be having a subcommittee coming soon. Thank you, Council Member Lynch. I don't see anyone else signed up. Thank you for this report and all the work that you all put into it. I think we have a lot of recommendations and things that we can build on from here, so we appreciate it. Thank you so much. Our next item on our agenda is the annual report on short-term rentals from Director of Revenue, Wes Holbrook. Council Member Brown, you're the sponsor of this item. Would you like to provide any opening remarks? Yes, ma'am, thank you. Thank you, Chair. I just want to say, and I think it's just relevant to point out that I think we knew when we passed local policy that it was going to be multifaceted and that we were going to have to phase different portions of this policy in to effect. I just want to state that this policy and policies are crafted for our community. I think we've engaged a lot of stakeholders in regards to neighbors and operators and that we're committed to continuing to review this policy and make adjustments where we see fit, so it's the best policy for Lexington. So with that, I'll turn it over to Wes. Thank you, Council Member. So I just want to start off by going through our policy timeline just for the benefit of everybody and to have a little refresher for those that weren't on council yet. So the short-term rental ordinance was passed July 11th, 2023. And following that, we had a six-month grace period for current short-term rental operators to register their existing units, both with planning to get their zoning compliance and then also to come and get their license with the Division of Revenue. Starting in January 2024, we started working on investigating and identifying and enforcing non-compliant operators. We also issued an RFP for compliance software and selected Granicus. We had a compliance hotline that was launched in late 2024 and then there was also an ordinance amendment late last year. And then in January, all short-term rental licensees were required to renew their special fees license. This is when we do regulated fee license renewals generally and so short-term rental licenses being a regulated fee falls into that bucket as well. So just starting off with short-term rental compliance, this looks at what the short-term rental listing landscape looked like whenever we first started using our identification software with Granicus and what it looks like now. And so you can see that over time as we've gone through our identification and compliance efforts, you've had more units that have gotten registered and we've had some citations issued. The actual number of listings in the jurisdiction has decreased and that's been fairly gradual. You see a little bit of an uptick at the end but in general, the trend has been going towards under 1,000. And just looking at where we are with our short-term rental compliance, there are 979 current listings. There were close to 1,300 whenever the software went live. We've issued 16 total citations. 14 of them were for unlicensed violations, two were for nuisance violations. There's been one more issued since then at least, since this presentation was prepared. We had one appeal that was successful. One individual appealed their citation for operating unlicensed and had that appeal upheld. And then we have $7,000 of citations outstanding and then a little over $4,700 in citations paid. There are at least four properties up for citation currently and then we're working on noticing an additional 78 properties. So we're getting pretty close to having everything identified or at least to the extent that we're able. As you go on Airbnb and VRBO, sometimes the operators do a very good job of masking what the location is. There's no address, there's no identifying pictures for the property. And so some of those units are just very hard to identify. Looking at the renewal process, like I said, the short-term rentals are a regulated license and so that must be renewed annually by January 31st every year. And if the operators fail to renew, then that resulted in the revocation of their license, both the division of revenue and then potentially with zoning compliance, their zoning compliance as well. Since this was really the first year that we had a renewal process, we tried to take some extra steps to make sure that our licensees knew what they needed to do so that way there wasn't any question when we get to February 1st. I didn't hear, I didn't know. And so we sent out two letters to the mailing addresses for the licensee. Might've only been one if they registered early because we tried not to send duplicate letters. We requested some outreach from Airbnb to the licensees as well as doing some direct outreach either by phone or email by our staff. We did get a little bit of a hiccup in January with the winter storms and we were still receiving renewal packets that were postmarked before January 31st as late as a couple weeks ago. So that created some significant delays for us and for our staff to get those renewals processed. But I think we've gotten everything we're going to at this point. As far as what renewals look like, similar to whenever people do their initial registration, our renewal's $200 for the year for the first unit and each unit after that is $100 per year for the license. We had 438 initial properties. We had 274 additional properties on top of that for a total of 712 renewals total. That totaled $115,000 in revenue. Because this is a regulated license, that money has to go to the regulation of short-term rentals. So that goes to fund our software costs and then also our staff time and costs for monitoring those properties. One of the other things that we touched on was we did implement our short-term rental hotline late last year. It's answered through a call center that's connected to our software. So we get a notification that something has come through, that someone's made a complaint about a property in Lexington, or through our hotline number rather. And then if the property is licensed through us, that's attached to the property in our software. They can upload pictures, videos, it can either be a voice call, or you can submit it electronically. And it also can alert the emergency contact for the property and the non-emergency number for police if requested by the complainant. Up through last week, we had 31 calls. We had one property that got quite a few calls over the weekend, so this number's a little low now. But in general, most of the calls we've gotten have been general inquiries. We have had some complaints related to noise, some related to unauthorized STRs. And these are really just our valid complaints. Sometimes we'll get a call and it'll be a complaint about a short-term rental in another jurisdiction. We got one that was related to a short-term rental potentially operating in Bowling Green. That's not anything we have anything to do with, so that's not included in these numbers. So we tried to trim it down, so this is actually what relates to specifically to short-term rentals in Lexington. Whenever we do get a complaint, we get an email that looks similar to this. We can listen to the voice call, and it tells us the property address. This just happens to be one that was more of a general inquiry. But just to show you what the type of information that we get, it tells the call time, the caller's name, their callback number, if it's a property that we have licensed, the property's contact person, and whether they were called or not, and then what the address is, the permit number, and then what the reported issue is. So for this one, it was somebody who was trying to renew their short-term rental license and couldn't find how to pay online. So that's one that we called back and followed up with. But whenever we do get a complaint, whether it's noise, whether it's something related to trash or parking, it comes in a format like this. If there are multiple reports on the same address, like we saw this weekend, you'll see that number continue to grow. So we saw seven or eight complaints about one address. And so by the time you got to the last one, it was, this is the eighth call for this address this week. And so that's good for tracking as well as we continue to see some of these issues on specific properties. This is just one of the things that we can look at quickly as we're trying to monitor this. There haven't been many calls. I said there were 31 valid calls. Some of these were related to testing. So you see 45 all time. Some of them were related to testing. Some of them were those calls like reporting an address in Bowling Green, and then the number of calls that we have just over the past 30 days. So that way we can sort of easily track where those issues are. We also have information about a specific property. It'll highlight if a specific property has so many calls in a period of time. So that way we can really highlight where the challenging properties are. And then we can also see who is making those calls. So if we have somebody calling from one number and reporting multiple units or making multiple complaints, we can see that as well. Just as a reminder, we talked about this in the fall, but we do want to make sure that people have the hotline number and then the web address that they can go to to make complaints if there are issues that are happening in their neighborhoods. So that way we can investigate those and address those. And that's a quick overview of what's been going on. I'm happy to take any questions that council may have. Thank you, Director. Colleagues, go ahead and sign in if you have questions or comments. Council Member Baxter. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Director, for the presentation. I know you guys have worked so hard to get this all off the ground, especially the hotline and everything. And I think that's been really beneficial for our community, so thank you. I just had a quick question about the number of, I'm trying to go back in the presentation to find it, the number of recently identified and noticed properties. Yes. Are those all typically related to the license expiration? Or are they also? So those recently identified properties, one of the things that we get through our software is it pulls the listing from the short-term rental platforms and then tries to find some sort of information from some other source to verify where the address is. And so in some instances, that could be two years ago, there was a Zillow listing for this property, and the front door matches this front door, and the window in the kitchen matches this kitchen, and it goes through and identifies those things. And so because of the detailed nature of some of that, it just takes a little bit of time to find. And so we're still getting, not as many as we saw at first, because there was maybe some lower-hanging fruit, but they're still going through that process of trying to match those up with the listings with some sort of verification. Okay, remind me again when that software went live. We started using the identification portion. It's been up since at least July, but it might have been a year before that as well. Thank you, I appreciate it. Thank you, Chair. Council Member Svigny. Thank you, Chair. Thanks so much for the presentation. Council Member Baxter kind of asked my question. So do we have an actual gap between people who are registered now and who are running their business, basically? We still do. Without registration. And some of that is just the nature of any type of business. You'll have some businesses that are coming on who maybe don't know the rules or are trying to skirt the rules. And those, as they come on new, they'll get identified in that process. There are some that just have done a really thorough job of making sure that their listing doesn't have any identifying characteristics, and it makes it extremely hard for us to see where those are. So the gap is, let's see, we have 712 licenses, 979 listings, so the gap is a little over 200. Okay. Thank you for that. And then you mentioned, can you pay online? We can. So we use, yeah, so not just for short-term rentals, but broadly we use JP Morgan and Payment Us, so we have an online payment piece, and then we can also take payments in person and over the phone. So we had a link set up that our short-term rental operators could use in order to pay online. And can they select, can they do auto-renew? Not currently, no. That's something that as we work on getting our licensing piece, that's the last phase of this project with Granicus. As we get that up, that's something that we'll be looking at trying to implement. Yeah, I would just say the easier you can make a business, run their business, oops, sorry, the easier it is overall. So most people turn on auto-renews just because they don't want to deal with the issue. Yeah, I think we've tried to build the airplane while we're flying it in some ways, and so we're always trying to make sure that we can add those improvements. And do you have, does your, do you require emails? Because it seems like it would be a lot easier to just push emails with notifications. I mean, I get one from the Secretary of State every year about renewing an LLC. Seems like it would be similar. Once we get the software, the renewal software that our licensees can use in order to do their renewals, that piece should be in place. And if not, then that's something we'll continue to push and work on. Yeah, that would be excellent as well. So I do appreciate it. Thank you much, Chair, that's all I got. Thank you, Director. I don't see anyone else signed in for today, so we appreciate your presentation and all of the work that you and your staff have done for short-term rentals. Thank you very much. Okay, colleagues, on our agenda, we also have two items for information only, just to give, but I'm gonna allow the respective sponsors to give just a quick update on these items and what the next steps are. So the first one is electronic digital billboards. Council Member Baxter, do you want to say a few words? Yes, Chair, thank you. Council Members, just as a recap for some of our new colleagues, we, in the fall of last year, sent a ZOTA over to the Planning Commission in regards to digital billboards, and that was sent back to us in December with a few changes. So when I took over sponsorship for this item for previous Council Member Worley, I wanted to make sure that everybody was on the same page with the changes that the Planning Commission sent back to us, so that's why it's included for information purposes here. I also wanted to let you know that I'll be reaching out to you individually to set up meetings to talk about your specific concerns with the policy or any ideas that you have to make it better so that we, if we proceed in any way, we can do it all together. So just be on the lookout for me to reach out and schedule those meetings, and if you have any questions in the meantime, I'll make myself available. Thank you, thank you, Chair. And the next update we have is from Vice Mayor Wu for Lexington's Preservation and Growth Management Program. Thank you, Chair. Though this is just a very brief update, we do have a couple of slides, I believe, Haley. As I mentioned in our last GGP meeting back in February, the planning staff and I have been working to create some engagement opportunities for Lexington's Preservation and Growth Management Program. There you have our timeline as it looks right now. We've got two information sessions here this month, and I'll tell you, give you some details here in just a minute. In May at GGP, we're gonna have our initial draft presented. Between May and September, we're gonna have more public input and engagement. September 9th, we're gonna have an updated draft with draft changes of that presentation, and then we believe we're gonna be slotting in some more engagement there. So there's gonna be a lot of robust public engagement. Next slide, I think, has some details on these two initial information sessions. They're at two different branches of the public library, first on Sunday, March 16th, 2 to 3 p.m. at Marksbury Family Branch, and then Wednesday, March 19th, 5 to 6 p.m. at Eastside Branch. The content of these two presentations and information sessions will be the same, but I definitely encourage my colleagues to show up to one or both of these and be present. And as I said, this is very early still in our process, so it'll be very much an information session. We want to make sure that we're able to incorporate constituent feedback and participation in our process early and often, as folks have told us through the work of the Public Input Subcommittee, and we want to be able to meet our constituents where they are, so going to different parts of Lexington. Additionally, Theme Eagle 4 of Imagine Lex 2045 calls on the council to create a process that is informed by robust public engagement. So not only will we have these in-person sessions, they'll be complemented by ongoing feedback that we'll be receiving through the council's online tool, Engage Lexington. An initial survey for this project will be live March 16th, the same date as our first info session, and run through April 15th, and will help us inform our process. So definitely, colleagues, attend these sessions and promote these events in your newsletters and communications with your residents, and then you can visit engage.lexingtonky.gov to register for Engage Lex and stay up to date regarding all the good things that we have going on. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Vice Mayor. Our last item of business today is the list of items referred to the committee. Are there any changes that need to be made at this time? Okay, seeing none, that is the end of our agenda, so I will adjourn our meeting. Thank you, everyone. ♪♪ ♪♪