# Environmental Quality and Public Works Committee - April 22, 2025 > Auto-transcribed civic record · Committee · April 22, 2025 - **Permalink**: https://meetings.lexingtonky.news/meeting/6409 - **Source video**: https://lfucg.granicus.com/player/clip/6409?view_id=14&redirect=true - **Date**: 2025-04-22 - **Body**: Committee - **Last revised**: March 26, 2026 - **Length**: 10,955 words - **Speakers**: Chair > ⚠️ **Auto-generated content.** Audio from the official Granicus video was auto-transcribed by OpenAI Whisper-1, with speaker labels folded in from Granicus closed-captioning. Structured facts were extracted with GPT-4o; the narrative summary was written by Anthropic Claude Sonnet. Speaker labels and verbatim wording may contain errors. See [methodology](https://meetings.lexingtonky.news/about/methodology) or [report a correction](mailto:editor@lexingtonky.news). --- ## Meeting Overview The Environmental Quality and Public Works Committee met on April 22, 2025, at 1:00 P.M., with Hannah LeGris presiding. The meeting covered two agenda items, both informational in nature: an update on the Lex Grow Trees program and a presentation on Lextran Services and Environmental Impacts. No public comments were heard during the meeting. A total of one motion and vote was recorded over the course of the session. ## Attendance The following members were present at the April 22, 2025 Committee meeting: - Hannah LeGris - Dave Sevigny - James Brown - Tyler Morton - Emma Curtis - Liz Sheehan - Joseph Hale - Amy Beasley - Hil Boone **Absent:** Denise Gray No members were recorded as late. Nine of the ten members were in attendance. ## Votes and Decisions The committee held one formal vote during the April 22, 2025 meeting. - **Approval of the March 11, 2025 Committee Summary** [timestamp: 0:03:32]: Tyler Morton moved to approve the March 11th, 2025 committee summary, with Emma Curtis providing the second. The motion passed by voice vote. No roll call was conducted, so individual member votes are not recorded. ## Lex Grow Trees Update [timestamp: 04:03] Heather Wilson and Lauren Gawthrop delivered a presentation to the Committee on the Lex Grow Trees initiative, with Hannah LeGris also identified as a key participant in the discussion. The initiative is funded by **$1.5 million in budget stabilization funds** and is focused on increasing Lexington's tree canopy. The presentation highlighted two core priorities guiding the effort: - **Equity** — ensuring tree planting and canopy expansion efforts reach underserved or underrepresented areas of the community - **Community engagement** — involving residents in the planning and implementation of the initiative The item was informational in nature, and no votes or formal actions were taken as a result of the presentation. ## Lextran Services and Environmental Impacts [timestamp: 44:14] Fred Combs delivered a presentation on Lextran's services, environmental impacts, and future plans. The presentation was informational in nature and covered ongoing projects as well as goals for the upcoming fiscal year (FY2026). Key topics addressed in the presentation included: - **Current services and environmental impacts** associated with Lextran's transit operations - **Microtransit feasibility** as an area under active exploration - **Bus rapid transit** as part of Lextran's forward-looking planning efforts - **Future goals for FY2026**, outlining the direction of the agency's service development The item was received as an informational presentation, with no votes or formal actions taken by the Committee. --- ## Decisions - **Motion** — passed (0-0): Approval of the March 11th, 2025, committee summary --- ## Full transcript ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ Welcome. I'll now call to order the April 22nd, 2025, meeting of the Environmental Quality and Public Works Committee. Thank you all so much for being here. We've got a great group, and we're excited about the meeting ahead. Our first item on our agenda is the approval of the March 11th, 2025, committee summary. Are there any additions or corrections? Okay, seeing none, is there a motion to approve? Move to approve. Second. All right. Move to approve by Councilmember Morton, second by Councilmember Curtis. All right, any discussion? Okay. Hearing none, all those in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed? That motion passes. Our first presentation today is the Lex Grow Trees item. Colleagues, this is my item in committee, and we're really excited to share an update on the progress of Lex Grow Trees. For a little bit of background, this initiative was made possible through council and the mayor's generous allocation of $1.5 million in budget stabilization funds back in 2022. And this support has laid the foundation for an ambitious, equity-driven effort to grow and protect Lexington's tree canopy, especially in neighborhoods where it's most needed. I want to give a special thanks to the dedicated members of our ad hoc committee responsible for helping to steward these funds whose time, insights, and passion have helped to shape the mission values and grant framework for the Lex Grow Trees initiative. Thank you to Naki Braga, who's here today, Councilmember Lynch, Councilmember James Brown, John Ciocci, Jennifer Carey, Heather Wilson, Diane Atchinson, Jada Griggs, Sandy Burke, and Michael Potipoff. Thank you for being here. And to the Impressions Marketing Team, featuring Lauren Gothrop and Laura McDonald. Thank you all, and to your team members, for helping to bring a strong identity to this program. Together, this committee has helped to build this initiative from the ground up with care, with creativity, and with a commitment to equity. Thank you again for believing in this work and investing in a greener, healthier Lexington. And with that, I'll go ahead and pass it over to Heather Wilson, who is our Program Manager Senior from LFUCG's Urban Forestry Team, and she'll be joined partway through the presentation by Lauren Gothrop from Impressions Marketing. Thank you and welcome. Thank you, Council. Thank you, Councilmember Legree. I'm really excited to talk to you guys today about our Lex Grow Trees initiative. To start with, I have a whole lot to go over today. It's going to be pretty quick and kind of high level because I did want to start with a background. For those of you that don't know me and haven't been part of this initiative, so I needed to start us off from the same groundwork. And so this is what we'll work through today. But like I mentioned, I do want to make sure that we're starting off from the same kind of understanding of why we're even talking about this, why this money was provided to us. Urban forests and trees are a vital piece of infrastructure for cities globally, Lexington in particular, since this is where we are today. Not only do trees impact all of our environmental pieces of our health, including stormwater mitigation, heat island effects, lowering city temperatures, but they are also vital in keeping us healthy, both in sound mind and sound body. Economically, they bring in people, right? And so increased tourism happens in cities that have really good tree canopy coverage because people feel welcome in those spaces. And so this is kind of the groundwork for why we're talking about urban forests in general. And then a little bit more background, mentioning that we did have our tree canopy coverage assessment. The first one done for Lexington was in 2012. We didn't have any idea what our canopy coverage was at that time, so we really had no idea of the economic input that our trees were giving us. So we did get that in 2012. I believe our overall canopy coverage at that time was like 22%. In 2021, we did a reassessment to find out if or how our canopy changed. In that time, our canopy did grow, and you'll see later in your packets what the canopy coverage was from the details that we got with that assessment. But today, with our latest flyover data from the USDA, our canopy coverage in Lexington stands at 25%. So we have grown 3% over those past, like, 12 years or so. Baseline for Lexington, our goal is 30% tree canopy coverage for all those environmental benefits that trees do give us. I do want to call out that LFUCD-owned properties have already gone above and beyond that 30%, which is amazing, and so it just shows that we are doing a good job on the things that we have some say over. There are other parts of Lexington that really need a lot of help, and so this LexGros tree initiative was really geared toward helping those other areas of Lexington increase tree canopy. Like Council Member LeGray mentioned, with that $1.5 million, we did create a tree ad hoc committee. They helped us put our guardrails on our program to make sure that we were spending this money equitably. The money wound up in the budget for environmental services, and while we could have spent it just out of our own thoughts, we really wanted to make sure that we were reaching out to the community because the voice of the community said that trees were important. You can see in that image to your left where your district falls in tree canopy coverage. Again, this is data from 2021. The last data was from 2023, and so it hopefully has increased in our district since then. One of our founding decisions was to make sure that we held a retreat to make sure that we kind of put the guidelines about what our priorities were for spending this money. We didn't want to just kind of willy-nilly throw it around. We wanted to be able to really call out specific areas of target to make sure that we were increasing and being able to track how this money was helping our tree canopy. These are our five guiding principles Initially, our first spending of money was to bring up to date a hazardous street tree cost share program, which is a program that the city has had for a long time. We'll talk more about this in a later presentation, but I just wanted to point out that we did spend roughly $200,000 on that program to make sure that we were addressing already standing concerns. Next, we engaged with Impressions Marketing to make sure that we were branding our story, getting our message out, reaching out into the community, and really engaging to make sure that people knew that we had this money available and was there to help them spend it. To make sure that we were following the path that we thought that we had laid out, that it was all working well, and to make sure that we were able to get over any roadblocks, we did have three pilot projects. We worked with Geomancer Permaculture, Seedleaf, and Trees Lexington to make sure that we were on the right track. We were able to get 389 trees planted through these three pilot projects. You can see we were also able to address our targeted goals in those projects. Following that, we decided, well, we made sure to create a rubric that we could gauge our applicants with as they were submitting for projects. Once we had that dialed down to make sure that we were hitting all the points that were necessary for going through and making sure that we were really addressing concerns and being fair in how we supplied money out to these programs, we had our application for our first round of grants open in March of last year, March of 2024. We wanted to have two rounds so that one, we made sure that we got this initial lift off the ground, but then also to make sure that we reached people that maybe didn't hear about this first round of grants. We had 22 people submit, or 22 groups submit, for projects. The request totaled almost $3 million. Total, we had 1.5 to start with. We'd spent a little bit, as I already went through, and since we wanted to make sure we had two rounds, we dedicated $500,000 to each round. You can see on your screens there, we were able to provide nine grant recipients with funding. Our total award for this first round was just under $500,000, and we were able to get a little bit over 800 trees in the ground with this project. This was our first round. It's very exciting. There were some road bumps that we had to figure out for our next round, but it was really great to see this widely accepted project and this much initiative from our neighborhoods to get trees in the ground. You can see that we also were able to engage with the community, which was a really big piece of this commitment as well. The grants for Round True opened in October of last year. We had that open along with Tree Week. Kind of a great kickoff to tie those two things together. This time, we did have 21 groups submit for projects. They totaled just over $1 million for this round. We had roughly $400,000 left for this program. I know it's not quite $500,000. I'll talk a little bit about why there's a little bit of difference here in a minute. We did have six that we were able to fund through this round of grant projects. We wound up getting just over 1,000 trees into the ground. There's reasons for the different numbers and how they were able to fund more in one and less in another. One of the highlights of this round, I think, was the creation of Tree Stewards and really getting that engagement with the community out and about and increasing education and awareness of how to take care of these trees. Following that, our other big lift was $150,000 we had set aside for a private property tree planting program. This was to make sure that we were really addressing those private properties that had the lower tree canopy coverage. We were able to plant 259 trees on 155 properties with a target of really addressing canopy coverage needs in Target Districts 1, 2, and 7. With that, I will turn it over to Lauren Gothrop to talk a little bit more about how we plan to move this forward in the future and what the results have shown us. Thank you, Heather, and thank you, esteemed council members, for having us here today, especially poignant on Earth Day, I recognize, so it's an honor to be here. Heather talked about how we assess the canopy and where we sat with that, what our goals were going to be. We wanted to assess the attitudes and understanding of Lexingtonians about trees to inform future education and managing efforts just to make sure we weren't making assumptions about what people felt about trees, what they didn't or did not like about trees, so we started with an online survey that we did back in the fall and we got, as you see, a little over 450 responses, completed responses back, 170 of those from those priority council districts, 1, 2, and 7. So we had it, we tried to keep it as short as possible while also getting some really good actionable information for LexGro trees and also for environmental services to use moving forward. You've got a lot in your packet here, this little booklet that goes into the details, but as you can see, we overwhelmingly Lexington loves their trees. They want to see more trees, they realize that trees improve their quality of life. We also measure things like, are trees messy? Considered high maintenance a safety hazard. So we have the pros and cons there, but you can see overwhelmingly people really love trees. And from that survey, again, 63% said that they wish there were more trees in their neighborhood. 34% said they're about right, and only 2% were like, we don't want any more trees. We also wanted to, again, measure understanding of kind of tree care and general tree maintenance. We're putting a lot of trees in the ground and we want to make sure Lexington has resources and an understanding if we do education campaigns to know how to care for these trees long term. So one of the questions that we included was, for example, mulching method. We got 40% of people giving the right response, which was good, but obviously there's a lot more room for education in there. So we wanted to follow up the survey with a series of focus groups to just kind of dive a little bit deeper and get into people's heads about how they're really feeling about trees and what they mean to them, the impact on their life, good, bad. So we ended up doing seven groups. This was last month and we're still finalizing the analysis of it, but we had 54 participants and we, once again, like the survey, recruited in the districts 1, 2, and 7 to make sure we were hearing from those constituents. And again, overwhelmingly, we had very impassioned discussions about trees. I picked up just a couple of quotes from some of those groups. A resident in District 2 said a treed neighborhood versus a non-treed neighborhood would pretty much determine where he would buy a house. A District 4 resident mentioned how she's very concerned about tree cover as we move into the future and the environmental impacts on her kids and grandkids. So people, again, showing a really strong appreciation and love and desire for more trees. So we went over a lot of stats and a lot of information, but I think it's best to hear from the people who were impacted by this program, so we have a short video to show you. ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... We were having problems with water puzzling in our yard. When I looked it up, it said having foliage and trees would help absorb some of the water out the yard. I'm very appreciative because it lowers the cost for me to be able to add landscape to my backyard. It made me be able to do it even sooner than I expected because there was no cost. I think it's a great program. We have a lot of trees, but we've also lost a lot of trees over the years to bad weather or age or disease or something like that. So we're real big on getting additional trees in the neighborhood and to get them for free is obviously a great benefit. ... ... It's one thing to plant a tree and walk away, and it's another thing to know you're putting it in a community that's going to value it and cherish and nurture that as it grows. We're really noticing the benefit of green space to people's health. It's been talked about for years, but I think city municipalities are really starting to glom onto the health benefits of that. You see the birds come back, the animals come back, the noise gets changed, our site is no longer so hot, and then that sort of grows out into your neighborhood. ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... If you invest $1 in trees, then the benefits that you get back is like $1.3 to $3 in benefits. It's benefits on air quality, water runoff, and I think the part that I'm most interested in is just health and well-being. How, by adding tree canopy, we can help people be outside and be healthy and enjoy the outdoors. Planting a tree is like such a practical material intervention on the landscape that gets you and your community making a positive impact right there in that moment, and then from that, it really helps kind of change your thinking out of that disempowerment to, well, what else can I do, or how else can I have a positive impact? There's such an undercurrent of enthusiasm and gratefulness for this grant and what it's been able to do to take us to the next level of planting. I just want the people who know how moved our neighborhood is, they're so grateful for all the support. ... ... ... ... ... Alright, so you can see we've created procedures, we have systems, we have information, we're poised to keep the momentum going for this program to meet the needs and desires of our neighbors and your constituents. With more on what's next, I'll turn it back to Heather. ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... .... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... .... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... .. ... ... .. .. ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... .. . .. .. .. . ... .. ... ... .. .. .. .. .. . .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. . .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. But really just a general introduction of who we are, what we're doing, what we're looking forward to, and then some of those environmental impacts that we're making. So to begin with some highlights that we've seen over this fiscal year, we've started the Transit Center Interior Innovation Project. This project has been many years in the making. We're so excited to get it off the ground. We are currently operating on High Street and MLK, I'm sure many of you have seen. The construction is going well, we're only a few weeks in. We're looking forward to getting that completed here in the next couple of months and getting back to regular service, but we're really, really thrilled to do this for our passengers and our employees. Also this year we completed a new collective bargaining agreement that was very important for us to not only have better wages and working conditions and strengthen our hiring and retention programs. We also launched two major planning efforts, including the Microtransit Feasibility Study, I'll have more information to share about that in a moment, as well as a strategic planning process that we look to get your guidance and input on later this year. We completed service improvements for on-time performance, most of that was on the north side of town. That was just small adjustments to schedules to make sure that we are meeting the needs of the community and helping overall efficiency of our service. We've made considerable progress on our major capital projects. One of those is a CNG fueling station expansion, which essentially doubled our capacity to fuel CNG vehicles. That feeds into our environmental impacts. Also we are currently working on maintenance facility improvements for CNG maintenance that will help us more safely maintain our CNG vehicles. We began implementation of two major technology system improvements. That's our CAT AVL system, which is Computer Automated Dispatch and Vehicle Location Systems. That's all back-end stuff that helps our agency manage maintenance and finance, but what it really does, public facing, is help our customers have more information about where their bus is in the city, when you can expect that to arrive, and then we also have some new display screens that are going to be in each vehicle where we can share better information to the public. Again, our focus on hiring and retention, if you recall last year, we were talking about an operator shortage. We've made so many strides in, we're nearly fully staffed with operators now, and that is amazing to say. It stuns me to say, but if our next couple of training classes come through, we will be fully staffed with bus operators. That's amazing work by the staff to get us to that point. Also this year we've held several paratransit community outreach sessions. That's both to inform our clients on paratransit about the service as well as get their feedback on how service is going. We've had many conversations over the past couple of years about some struggles with paratransit. I will have more information to share with you in May, but I think we've got some good news coming. Part of that paratransit conversation is around vehicles. We did acquire and place 10 paratransit vehicles into service this year, along with six fixed route vehicles, and all those six fixed route vehicles were CNG, clean CNG vehicles. To jump in about our services, we have 25 fixed routes, and we operate those 365 days a year from about 5.30 a.m. to about 12.30 a.m. If you look at our coverage, about 54% of households in Fayette County are within a quarter of a mile from a bus stop. About three quarters of households that are low income or carless are about a quarter mile from a bus stop. If you expand that on out to a half a mile, we cover about 80% of households and nearly nine out of 10 on low income and carless households. That speaks to where our services operate on the fixed route side, but what that doesn't touch on is the frequency of service. In the budget that we will share with you in May, what we are proposing is a continuation of our current service levels, which is on most of our major core routes, so most of the arterials, 35-minute frequency, so a bus every 35 minutes during peak period, with 70-minute frequency on nights and weekends. This is probably our biggest service gap, in my opinion, is we need additional frequency on those major corridors to get up to where we are at best practice in transit. Nicholasville Road is our most frequent corridor, is between 15 and 20 minutes. We do see the highest ridership there, but in transit, if you're looking to build ridership, frequency is the way to go. So that is, in my opinion, our number one focus on service gaps. We're not able to really address that in this budget, but we're looking for ways moving forward to get that done. There are also existing fixed route service gaps in terms of coverage. I think the biggest one of those is the Baptist Health facility on Polo Club. We've not been able to extend service to that area yet. We also know we have service requests for the Rural Activity Center, along with the soccer fields. Kearney Ridge, we're still working on that one. That one should be done soon. Along with the Urban Growth Boundary Expansion, so we have to keep those things in mind as well as the city continues to grow. There are some community conversations around new services that will require additional funding that we're not able to program into our budget, which include a downtown circulator, microtransit, and bus rapid transit. We will talk through each of those in its own slide in a moment. I also wanted to mention paratransit service again. That's our wheel service that is complementary to our fixed route service, which means if you, by nature of your disability, are unable to access our fixed routes, you're eligible to ride our paratransit service. That's a door-to-door service. You schedule your trip a day in advance, and we will help you from door-to-door. As we jump into these ideas that we're looking at, community conversations around both now and into the future. The first is a downtown circulator. This is a collaboration with the city and VisitLex, the DLP, LexPark, and other district stakeholders. You can sort of think of this as a trolley service. This would move people the way we're sort of talking about this from the warehouse block to the distillery district. It would be, depending on scheduling and frequency, that's sort of the things that we're working on now. Depending on how much operational funding we can identify, that would depend on the level of service that we can afford. Through our NPO, we have been able to identify some funds that would be available for the capital side of this project, and we're happy to see at least that. So this idea does have some momentum, should we be able to find some operating funds. So second is the microtransit feasibility study. That should wrap up this fiscal year, but there's a potential that it could bleed over into June. We just closed a survey. I don't have any of the information on the survey here, but I'll be able to share that out shortly. That's sort of where we are in that study now, is getting that community input. We've done some back-end data analysis to understand where microtransit might be effective in the city. Microtransit differs from our regular service in that it is a stop-to-stop or point-to-point service that is on demand. For our paratransit service, you have to schedule a trip a day in advance. Microtransit service is much more dynamic. You could do it same day. One other major difference is on paratransit, we cannot deny you service. So regardless of how overcapacity we are, if you call in a trip, we can't say no. We have to find a way to fit that trip into our schedule. With microtransit, it's a little bit different. We can. And in most of our peer agencies that we've studied, that does happen. When demand gets so great that capacity can't handle it, sometimes trips are denied. What we've really learned so far is we want to start small. Find a zone here. These are the zones that we've sort of identified both in our comprehensive operations analysis that we did a few years ago. We've refined that into our feasibility study. Maybe take one of these zones, see if we can fund it, and let's see what happens. Can it really augment our fixed route system? Can it bring more people into our fixed route system and help solve the first and last mile gap that we see in cities? There's a real potential for this to be a viable solution for those sorts of problems. We have identified five zones throughout the city. Most of those are outside the circle, with one exception spanning from Versailles Road up to Georgetown. But these are really the areas of the city where fixed route is very difficult to serve or the frequency is not such that we can serve it effectively. So again, this conversation is going to continue throughout the coming months and years. Again, we're happy to manage this service should we be able to find the funding to get it off the ground. And last of these ideas that we've seen in the community is the bus-driving transit. This idea started many years ago. Our first planning effort for this started in 2015, where we completed an alternatives analysis for Nicholasville Road. So an alternatives analysis would look at different ideas that we could put on the corridor, everything from light rail to BRT to more bus service, to identify what might be the best fit. BRT was identified as such and we moved forward with the Imagine Nicholasville Road study. And that called for elements of BRT along with additional recommendations for traffic flow and redevelopment. And currently there's another study going on that looks to model what would happen if we were to implement Imagine Nicholasville Road. So those recommendations coming from that study will be to inform our next steps on BRT. So moving into our environmental impacts, clean fuels I think is what we're maybe most known for. We've done some really great work over the past few years in transitioning from a diesel fleet into a CNG and electric fleet. Currently about half of our fixed route bus fleet are CNG vehicles. We reflect that again in our investments in the CNG fueling station and our maintenance safety improvements. So we think that CNG really fits our service well and we looked to replace the remainder of our diesels with a mixture of CNG and electric. We've also installed, and this is new, some solar lighting at select bus stops in the city. That's not only an environmentally friendly thing to do, but it's also a security improvement to where at night you have some light around your shelter. So when it comes to transit and environmental impact, the bold text is really the most important. Last year we produced more than 11 million passenger miles traveled. In transportation, the environmental impact is essentially measured through vehicle mile traveled, so like tailpipe emissions through the number of miles that vehicles travel through your city. As we move people from their cars onto transit, that's where we see really the most environmental impact. So 11 million passenger miles traveled, had you converted that into car use, I think you would see much more emissions. So lastly, looking ahead to next year, we are aiming to complete our major projects, which includes the transit center renovation, the ITS technology project that I mentioned before, finish up those CNG maintenance improvements, wrap up those planning studies, the microtransit and the strategic plan, and then on paratransit, we'll talk more about this in May, but we're ready to realize some of those on-time performance improvements that we've talked about over the past year or so. Hopefully I'll have good news to share with you in a month. We are looking to launch an operator barrier installation project. That's a security issue to protect our operators. We have a couple of federal programs that need to be updated, including our disadvantaged business enterprise program and our Title VI program. We do have additional fixed route service improvements in store. One of those hopefully will be the Kearney Ridge improvement. And lastly, we're looking to incorporate new vehicles into the fixed route and paratransit fleet. So we have 10 fixed route buses currently on order, four of those are electric and six of those are CNG. And then in our capital plan that we're looking to get across the finish line this week would include 10 paratransit cutaways to help improve the paratransit service. So that is my presentation and I'm happy to answer any questions. Thank you so much, Mr. Combs. Council Member Morton. Thank you, Chair, and thank you for the presentation. I just had a couple quick questions. So regarding the downtown circulator, do you have an estimate of the cost per route or what that's going to cost for the riders? Oh, fare-wise? Yeah, for the downtown circulator. It would likely be a dollar, the same fare as our regular service, yes. Okay, cool. And then moving on to microtransit feasibility study, when do you expect the microtransit feasibility study to be complete? Likely within a month or so. We're trying to wrap it up before the end of this fiscal year. Cool, cool. What are some of the lessons learned from the peer case studies? Could you speak to how you see this service working for the users and some of the lessons learned from the peer case studies? I think number one is start small. Try not to overextend yourself. One of the fatal flaws in a microtransit system is when demand outpaces capacity. So we need to make sure that we're sizing and scaling our pilot appropriately and be very clear with expectations of this is what microtransit is, this is what you should expect. So as long as we're clear in that communication, we start small, I think we have an opportunity to have a successful program. Great, great, great. And as I relate, I'm in support of microtransit and hope that LETS Trang will be able to implement it soon. Looking ahead, in the slide I'm looking ahead at 2026, it doesn't pretty much list, I guess, other than the feasibility study action item. So I guess when will we start to possibly see that roll out, I would say? It all depends on funding. If we are able to secure funding, we'll get a project off the ground as soon as we can. Good, good, good. Cool, cool, cool. Lastly, regarding some of the environmental concerns, you know, LETS Trang is within the first district on Loudoun, and all the time I hear of concerns of pollutants and greenhouse gases. Do you have any statistics tied to what is being released in that area regarding on Loudoun or in the first district, or any type of statistics related to that? We do have emissions data that's more bus service related, not necessarily of what, like our operations on Loudoun, but we do model emissions for grant proposals and those sorts of things. So there's industry standards that we can use, depending on how many vehicle hours that we operate. We can turn that into the amount of pollutants that we would pollute. Okay, thank you. All right, Councilwoman Gray. Thank you, Chair. And thank you, Fred, for being here. My question, last year, there were a lot of issues regarding wills. What have we learned, and what have we, how have we remedied many of the complaints? We've really approached this from several different angles. Vehicles being number one, and so we know that we needed to increase not only the vehicles that we had, but the capacity per vehicle. Many of the vehicles that we're using right now are vans, so the maximum capacity is one wheelchair and four passengers. That's not enough to make an efficient service work. So the vehicles that we've been buying are more like the cutaways you see in this picture, are a little bit bigger, and that really helps service efficiency. So the more that we can integrate new vehicles, the better off we're going to be. Second is this outreach. So we've been trying to get boots on the ground and be in front of people who use the system to not only educate them about policies and procedures, but also hear from them what do we need to work on, what do we need to fix. Another thing we've been working with our contractor on is operators and operator scheduling. So do we have enough staff to operate the service? And then are the staff at work at the appropriate time? So it's really been a multifaceted approach, and we've seen improvement. We're certainly not where we want to be, and not where we're going to be at the end of the day, but we are starting to see some returns. And so one of the complaints that residents did have regarding the wills is typically, for example, they have to be in an appointment a certain time. They call the night before, or whatever, I'm assuming the process is still the same. And they instead, one of the complaints that I have recently heard is that they made their reservation for their ride to their doctor's appointment, however, they were stuck on the bus. Basically for a while before they even got to their appointment, because there were numerous other stops. Yeah, and this is one of the education pieces that we've worked on. You are allowed to identify, if you're a customer, whether you want to time your pickup or your drop off. If you have an appointment, a medical appointment or any other appointment, and you say you're a reservationist, I need to be there at 10 AM. They will work backwards to tell you when that you need to be picked up to be able to make it there at 10 AM. Now, it might mean you are on the bus longer than you would expect, but that rolls into, as we look at a complimentary service, so the intent of paratransit is for it to be similar to fixed route. If you ride a regular fixed route service and it takes you 35 minutes to get from your origin to your destination, you should expect a similar amount of time on paratransit. But through outreach, I think we've done a better job of explaining, hey, if your appointment says you need to be there at 10 AM, let your reservationist know that, and let's try to work your schedule backwards to make sure you're picked up in time to make sure you're there on time. Same thing as the opposite. If you're going to the grocery and it doesn't really matter when you get there, but you want to leave at 10 AM, same thing. Just let them know that that's when you want to depart, and they'll try to work it in that that's when you're picked up. Understand. Thank you. And thank you, Chair. Thank you. Council Member Savigny. Thank you, Chair, and thanks so much for the presentation. Could you kind of give me a brief education on the technology for the actual running of a bus? So I know you have electric, there's electric buses, and I think you threw out compressed, I think there's probably compressed natural gas ones, and then you might have diesel ones. And I'm kind of curious as to where the technologies are right now. And where do you feel like the game is going, and what's being worked on, and what maybe is not quite ready for prime time? So this is more of an industry perspective. Yeah, yeah, just, yeah. And what are best in class cities doing with that? If we could rewind to 2016, LexTran took possession of electric vehicles. And in the transit industry, we were one of the first agencies in the country to try to deploy electric vehicles in our community. Those had some issues. Again, if you're on the cutting edge of technology, sometimes it doesn't work out as well as you would hope. But there was so many lessons learned from the industry that our battery technology has improved, and just bus builds have improved since then. So we are working with a different manufacturer now with our electric vehicles, and we see much better performance. But the way that I operationally think about it is the schedule for a bus. So if your bus leaves the yard at 5 AM and it comes back at midnight, that's a long day for a battery. We have several bus schedules that are built like that, so CNG is more appropriate for those schedules. We have others that maybe leave at 5 AM and come back at 6 PM. That's appropriate for a battery to last. So as the battery technology improves, we have ability to sort of move things around to make sure that we're still efficiently delivering service while leveraging this technology. And more industry-wide, we're seeing the movement to hydrogen. A whole different fuel, the way that the batteries work and fuel cells, and it's looking like it can also function similar to a diesel, which is what the industry wants, because to us, as long as it moves reliably, safely, that's what we're interested in. So I'm seeing more about hydrogen. We don't have any plans at the moment to invest in that technology. I think CNG is our best fit, but that's really, I think, where the industry's headed. And then kind of a follow-up, then, like on a bus, say we do bus rapid transit, there's a lot of places that do those kind of electrically, like on aerial lines or on an electrical rail or whatever. What about that type of technology? That technology is tried and true. We've seen it in cities for years and years. It's very expensive to put in. Is it? Yeah. So a traditional, if we were to do BRT and we were to look at electric vehicles, I think the battery pack would probably be more appropriate, just because we wouldn't want to put in the extra money for the infrastructure to do the lines or in-ground. Okay. All right. Thank you. Thank you again for the presentation. I appreciate it. Thank you, Chair. Thank you. Council Member Curtis. Thank you, Chair, and thank you for the presentation, Mr. Combs. I really appreciate all of the work that you've been doing to improve our public transit system here in Lexington. So I don't think it's any secret to you or anybody else on this committee that Nicholasville Road is a particularly important corridor to me specifically. And we were talking about that a little bit in this presentation. And so I was wondering if we could have a little bit of a conversation about the different ideas that were proposed in relation to that and the different studies that were going on. Because in my mind, when we talk about microtransit, we're talking about putting more cars on the road. And when we talk about BRT, the intention is to have fewer cars on the road. And so, obviously, these studies are still ongoing, but could you speak to, from your perspective, how those two different concepts, which my area of Nicholasville Road has been identified as one of the areas for the microtransit feasibility study. How those two concepts of BRT and microtransit might interact in that area. You're exactly right. Microtransit is a smaller scale. It cannot move as many people as even a fixed route bus can. BRT is intended to move a lot of people. So that's the primary difference. In microtransit, it's a first and last mile solution. BRT could be a regional solution, right? It could be bringing people from Nicholasville into Lexington. So they can interface really well together. If you think of larger cities with a rail network, bus systems can bring people to the rail station. We could feed the same way on a BRT system. We can bring people into the BRT and have the feeder system bring more people into the service, which in point gets more cars off the road, right? So there are different tools for different applications. A microtransit for Nicholasville Road, there's probably too much demand for microtransit to be feasible there. However, in those areas from Nicholasville, I think it's over to Harrodsburg, the Clays Mill Road corridor, essentially, that's a transit desert, right? We don't have service there. That's why that showed up as a zone, is a way to capture those people who don't have any other way and bring them into the fixed route system. And if BRT were there, that would be an excellent case to use it for. Awesome, thank you so much. And I really appreciate that, because it's something that we need to be attacking from all angles. It's a bad road. And so one of the questions that I had with relation to the microtransit, and I know that we're going to talk more about this in the future once that study is wrapped up, is as part of that study, are we considering the potential? I'm thinking about, in my district, the Wilson Downing Corridor. We have certain bus stops that are just literally people who have a front yard. There's no sidewalk. There is one lane of traffic for them to go on, and people just have to go and stand in someone's front yard. Do we see microtransit as a potential avenue for reducing some of those bus routes, or is that something that is going to be viewed more as an additional service in relation to those? It would augment the service. It would not replace it. So, yeah, the intent in, let me get to the maps. There we go. So what we would want to do is have the service be able to drive people into fixed route. And if you're in one of these zones, in any of these zones, and you want to go downtown, if you want to come here to a meeting, microtransit cannot take you the whole way. So you're going to have to interface with the fixed route service or find some other way, if that is your ultimate destination or if it's your origin. But for the first and last mile, it can be really effective. Now, if you're going to the grocery store, microtransit might be able to do the whole trip for you, depending on how those zones are put together. So it is putting together the different pieces of the puzzle for different contexts to make everything fit. So it's a really interesting problem. Yeah, thank you so much, and I'm really looking forward to seeing the results from that survey. And I'm looking forward to collaborating with you on this item moving forward and seeing how we can best address the needs of the folks who live in that area of South Lexington that don't necessarily have access to a car, who don't necessarily want to be stuck in traffic on Nicholasville Road all day, every day. And so I think this is really exciting, and I look forward to working with you. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Council Member Ellinger. Thank you, Chair. I'm not in the committee, but I appreciate you recognizing me. And Mr. Combs and Mr. Butler, thank you for being here. We have met many times here, and we can keep the screen up here because I have been a proponent of microtransit. And I'm glad that we had the feasibility study. And my question is, when do we hope to have the result? And will we have the result in time that will affect this budget? Or will we not be able to, because you're going to be coming, I think, May 6th to the work session to bring your budget. I haven't received it yet, but I have requested. And I think you said it would be in this week, hopefully. Yes. So I'm looking forward to seeing your budget. Because I've been on the council long enough to know, at one point, the city was the one that the Lex train was underneath. And it was part of our general fund budget, or our budget, that we had to approve when we had the referendum in 2004. Then, I think 61% of the revenues now is part of LexTran, comes from the property tax. And now you bring us the budget, but according to 96A.360, you still have to get our approval for that budget, correct? And if we don't, we can ask you to amend it, or we can disapprove it. Is that my understanding? That's never come up, so I'll have to look into that one. Well, that is the statute. So when you bring that budget to us, if we request microtransit to be part of that, and it's not in there, there is a possibility that we will not approve that budget. So my question is, are you looking at setting some money aside in this budget coming forward in the fiscal 26? I know the feasible study is probably not going to come until the end of this fiscal year, but looking forward to next year, is that something that we'll be having in there, or will that not be in there? No, it is not in there. You're not planning on putting any money towards microtransit in that budget? I'm not, no. Okay, and why is that? Again, back to the priorities, if we were able to expand service, it's frequency. And it's Polo Club, it's the new senior center, we don't have service to those areas yet. If I were able to spend more money on service, I think that has to come first. And then we're looking for funding partners. We're happy to manage the service, we're happy to help run the service. But at this point in time, diverting those resources into that, we have other needs that we need to fill. And I agree, I think frequency and convenience is going to be the main two areas that you increase public transportation. It's always going to drive more people to ride public transportation. And I personally think that microtransit is a way that we can do that. It fills that gap to get, as we were talking about, to use LexTran in the 25 routes. Have you looked at all the routes to see on the frequency of those routes to make sure that every one of those is, and once again, just like we deal with our budget right now, we have to look at priorities. And see if all the routes we're using is the best way to expend, or have you looked at the structure of how you provide the services and look at changes. Because there's other communities, as you've looked there, that are using microtransit now and using it successfully. Yeah, our COA looked at all of our routes, even the ones that perform less than what we would like for them to perform. But if we were to do any changes around microtransit, we would again want to make it fit together. It wouldn't be cost savings into microtransit, it would be, hey, if this route isn't working and microtransit can fill that gap, we can increase frequency. That's what we can do, and that's what we need to do. To make microtransit work even better is to have frequency on our core service. Right, and I guess my point is, if we have where we could, we want to get people to the fixed route. Yes. I agree with that, but we want to fill those gaps in. So, I'll leave it there. I look forward to hearing from you all on May 6th. Thank you. Thank you. Council Member Brown. Thank you, Chair, and thank you, Fred, for your presentation and your work at LexTran to make our public transportation more accessible to folks in our community. And for your investment into the facilities and vehicles. Going back to Council Member Ellinger's questions about microtransit, and thank you, Council Member, for your spearhead in this effort. And I know the study's coming out, but just to ask a couple questions about the study. Are most of the other cities or municipalities or agencies, how do they administer microtransit, is it mostly through third party affiliates? Yes. And so that would probably be something that you would look at here locally, where maybe to see if there's a third party company that could help administer that service. We would contract that service out, yes. And so I think the next phase would probably be a pilot. And so how long would you think a pilot would need to run to get the information that we would need to know if it's a viable option here locally? I would love to say three years. I would be happy with two. I think three is what we should shoot for. If we had to do two, we could get by with it. All right, just thinking about the availability of partners here. Are there, how many agencies did you think that may be here locally that could pilot that type of partnership? You mean other than LexTran? I think any other agency can do it. It's contracting out any other service. It doesn't have to be LexTran that manages this. I mean, we're happy to do so, but it doesn't have to be. It could be the city, it could be a business, it could be a group, it could be anybody. Okay. Yeah, I guess in my mind, I've always seen LexTran as the facilitator of micro-transit. Whether or not LexTran partners with another third party to do it, kind of like paratransit. I just, I guess in my mind, I've seen LexTran as the lead facilitator. Any ballpark on what, well you said a two year pilot would be the amount of time to get the kind of information that we need. Like in my mind, I was thinking six months to a year. If we went a year, any ballpark on what a one year pilot may cost to contract that out? It depends on how many vehicles you're placing into a zone, and what the service span is. But we're probably talking more than half a million a year. You said one and a half a million? More than half a million. One and a half, okay. All right, I appreciate your work on it. I appreciate you stepping up. I know it was a lot of pressure on you all to take the next step in providing this service and seeing what the feasibility of it would be here locally, in addition to what you're already doing. So I appreciate the step that you've taken so far, and I think we'll just look at it and see what steps that we can take together with this effort. So thank you. Thank you, Chair. All right, Council Member Morton. Thank you. I just had a follow up question, actually now to Council Member Brown's question. So you're saying about $500,000 for just one zone for the pilot. So then how much would the full, each zone cost? We'll have that with the feasibility study, because some of these are a little more expensive than that. So we'll have the full amounts when we come to the end of the study. Thank you. Is that it? Council Member Allinger. Thank you, Chair. And I'm going to follow up with both of those, because I didn't bring it up, but if, and I think that this is the right approach. If we do do a pilot project, and I think that's what we've talked about, and I think that's where we want to see if it does. Is there any way you can put money into this budget for a pilot project going forward? I mean, that would be my request, that we move forward. We don't wait another year on this. We put some money forward on a pilot project. Again, as brought up, I think the best way to do that is probably a turnkey operation that would be a third party. And that's where, you even have it in, I think, in your 2022 assessment that you put in there, is that would probably be the best way to do it when you look at the zone. So are you looking at, when you bring the budget to us, to be putting something in for a pilot project? Are you aware? Money-wise, there's nothing in there for a pilot. We're going to need external support. Will you all consider it? We can consider it, but. All right, thank you. Thank you, Chair. Thank you. Any other questions from my colleagues before I ask a couple? Okay, I'd like to turn back, if you all would, for a moment to some of the questions about bus rapid transit. And I don't want to put you too much on the spot here because I know some of this is a question of kind of planning, comprehensive plan, etc. Because the Imagine Nicholasville Road study was adopted as part of the comprehensive plan in 2021, I have gotten a number of questions about kind of the timeline involved. You mentioned in your presentation that an additional study is underway to model the implementation of Imagine Nicholasville Road, which obviously would then be connected to bus rapid transit. And the implementation of that initiative. So I'm wondering if there's anything more you can share about timeline, obstacles, opportunities, etc. Timeline-wise, I think this study is pretty close to being finished. That is out of KYTC and the NPO, they're leading that more than we are. So it should be pretty close. The outcome of that study is what we would need to help write a grant. And that is perhaps one roadblock, is we don't know what the future for federal grants really is at the moment. So once the study comes back, and with BRT, what it essentially is, is bus service that tries to pretend to be a rail service. It wants high frequency, it wants quick boardings, it wants stops that have some sort of place to it. Stops that are built up, that have development around them, so that feels a little bit more than maybe a pole in a grassy field. We don't have to wait to pull some of these elements into our current service. We don't have to wait on BRT to have more frequency. We did that on Nicholasville Road back in 2017. We don't have to wait on BRT to do faster boarding times. We're doing that with technology, as maybe we talk about mobile ticketing. That's a way to get people on board faster. So there's elements for us that we can do to make really good transit service. It doesn't have to be BRT. It can be really good transit service on Nicholasville Road, and that's important. For BRT in its own, it is very capital intensive, because stops themselves are typically connected with fiber. So fiber connections, more real time information. We're working on that on the back end as well. Signal priority is another component of this, and we have worked with the ITS architecture in the city to make sure that our data interacts with the technology that's being put in our stop lights. So some of the work is sort of already going on. It's just the big capital investment that, I don't know what the timeline is on getting a grant written and going for it. But some of the smaller stuff is already in the works. Thank you for that additional information. When I think about the experience on Nicholasville Road, currently I think it's a really challenging one, not only to the drivers, but to any road users. Aesthetically, practically, for cyclists, for walkers. So that was helpful information in terms of the idea of transportation improvement as the key element. Fast rapid transit being one way to meet that goal. But we also know that it's connected to infrastructure and to a lot of additional changes that we need to make for the sake of people and for road users. So thank you for sharing that additional information. I also am looking forward to hearing more about this downtown circulator. More people getting on public transit, even if it's step by step, makes a really big difference. So if we can get more users the way we have at the University of Kentucky and their circulator system within the downtown area, I think that could be a really great step for us. I mean, sometimes, as we saw with Week Without Driving, just getting people into new habits, trying new things, opens up a world of possibilities. They might not end up being everyday users of public transit, but it gets them closer to that daily implementation. So I'll be looking forward to learning more about that. And I also see that one of my colleagues has signed in, so Council Member Brown. That's good. Thank you, Chair, and I apologize. Fred, with the construction that you have at the transit center, I've seen folks standing on High Street the other day. Is there any plans to build any kind of temporary shelters or any kind of bus stops to get those folks out of the elements or give them some reprieve? We've looked at some different ideas. We are going to have ponchos and umbrellas and sunscreen and different things to pass out, small things like that. So to be determined, to be continued, but we'll follow up with you on that one. Okay, yeah, no, I've seen folks stand out, and I didn't think about it at the time, but I was like, they don't have the cover of the transit center anymore, so. All right, thank you for your consideration for that. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, excellent question. I had that question myself as I was walking yesterday, and it sounds like you are looking at ways to hand out umbrellas and ponchos, but the question of physical structures, there's only one there. That's to be determined. Is that a possibility, and is there anything that we could do to help with that possibility? Because it sounds like this will be a pretty long renovation project. The duration of the renovation should last probably October, November, so it's going to be all summer. Yeah, we're looking at ways for temporary structures, and the city has been wonderful to work with. Every question that we've asked has been answered promptly, and they've really been over backwards to help us. So we can certainly reach out to our partners with the city for help with locating different things, so for sure. Okay, thank you. Yeah, we want to make sure people are safe, dry, and can wait with dignity, especially during a big time of change. Colleagues, are there any other questions that you all have for Lex Tran and Mr. Combs? Okay, thank you so much for this presentation. We have a lot of different elements of what you shared that our colleagues are interested in, and we really appreciate your time, and thank you for bringing it to us. And colleagues, I don't have anything else to review for this meeting, so unless there are any other questions, comments, etc., we can call this meeting adjourned, and again, happy Earth Day. Thanks. ♪♪ ♪ There's a hard moon rising on the streets tonight. There's a reckless feeling in your heart as you head out tonight. ♪ ♪ Through the concrete canyons to the midtown lights where the latest neon promises are burning bright. ♪♪