Chill Vibe Music Chill Vibe Music Chill Vibe Music Chill Vibe Music Chill Vibe Music Chill Vibe Music Chill Vibe Music Chill Vibe Music Chill Vibe Music Chill Vibe Music Good afternoon everybody and welcome. I'll now call to order the May 13, 2025 meeting of the Environmental Quality and Public Works Committee. Thank you all for being here. I appreciate you. Our first item on our agenda is approval of the April 22, 2025 committee summary. Are there any additions or corrections? Okay, hearing none, is there a motion to approve? Second. A motion to approve from Council Member Hale, a second from Council Member Gray. Is there any discussion on that motion? All right, seeing none, all those in favor say aye. Aye. All right, any opposed? Okay, that motion passes. Our first presentation today is a presentation from the Division of Water Quality on the Incentive Grant Program. Council Member Savigny, as a sponsor of this item, I want to go ahead and turn it over to you in case you have any introductory remarks. Yeah, thank you very much, Chair. And I had put this in committee just recently, and I really do appreciate the effort that Director Martin and his team did to put this presentation together. And they took some good input from me, which I appreciate, and looking forward to seeing what they have to say. But I think what we'll find is it's a great program, but it's been around for a little bit, and sometimes it's good to just review and see if there's things that we could do to make it better. So thank you again for the presentation. Thank you for the introduction, then. Yeah, it's been around for a while, and I am the one presenting today, but I'm hardly the subject matter expert. I brought a couple of friends along with me sitting in the back row. Bailey Young, who I think you know is our MS4 coordinator, and Greg's there with her, and Frank Mabson, I think he may be hung up in traffic. He's the program manager as well. So when we get to questions, even if you stump the chump, then I might have to refer to them. So agenda-wise, you can read that. What I was really hoping for today was to help educate the committee members about a program that's been around for a long time. You see the grant awards, you see the change orders, you see the cancellations, and I've always wondered whether or not we needed to fill the gaps in a little bit about what this program is really about and why those things are happening. So hopefully by the time I get to the end of this, you'll feel a little more comfortable about new business items that are appearing on the agenda. So the water quality management fee actually started from the consent decree, and when we were negotiating the consent decree with USEPA, they made a lot of issues about the fact that Lexington did not have dedicated funding towards water quality, and they were pretty insistent on it being part of the consent decree. And so we did. In 2009, there was a task force that put together what became the code of ordinances related to the water quality management fee, and one of the recommendations of that task force was to create the incentive grant program. The business community at that time was really very vocally wanting a credit program, which is somewhat different than a grant. What we found was is that other communities that had an incentive program had it, but they weren't using it. So why do something that nobody else is using already in the begin with? We came up with this grant program, which has turned out, I feel like, very well. We've been recognized nationally for it and otherwise. The starting point, though, was $1.2 million per year for grants under the categories that you see there with an allocation towards residential and non-residential. It was probably at this point I realized when I was reviewing this, I probably needed to review to folks how the grant funding or how funding in the water quality management fee even comes about. Everything is based on an equivalent residential unit, 2,500 square feet. So no matter how big your single family home is, you count as 2,500 square feet, one ERU, and you're billed for one ERU. Institutional, commercial, and multifamily residential, they're considered to be class B type of properties, and you calculate their ERUs by dividing their total impervious area by 2,500 to come up with an equivalent residential unit for them. So when the grant was first discussed, that allocation between residential and non-residential, there was a purpose for that because at that time, roughly 75% of the revenue was coming from those non-residential, commercial, and institutional properties. And so there was a sense, I think, of fairness of what they were trying to do to allocate that. All right, now that I've explained that, we dial forward. When the task force recommendations became the ordinance, it became 10% of total annual revenue would be towards the grant program. And you can see how that has grown over time. Not only do we have rate increase that are due to the CPI, but also we're just a growing community. There's more impervious area than what there was before. So $1.2 million has come over $1.6 million by FY25. So how does that money get allocated whatever year that it is? Again, class A properties are single family residential and farms. A farm, regardless how big they are, they're considered to be one ERU. Again, there was also this sense of fairness at that time. They felt like everybody in Fayette County needed to have some skin in the game, so to speak. So one large farm, no matter how many barns they have and all that, that parcel is considered to be one ERU, class A property. So in the grant funding, 17% of the grant funding allocated for any particular year goes to class A neighborhoods. Mostly this is HOAs. A single family resident cannot apply for a grant. You can't apply just for your house. It has to be basically for the neighborhood. So you get a lot of HOAs that have common property, clubhouses and things like that, that are wanting to do things that better their circumstance for their residents. In order to be eligible for that grant, they have to provide a 20% cost share. And then the maximum award that they can get is $120,000. Class B education is just what it is. It's education. UK, Fayette County Public Schools, Living Arts and Sciences are three that come to mind that have worked this area quite a bit, Blue Grass Green Source being another one. There are 6%, 20% beyond the first $3,000 of grant money. The idea was there was a work group that followed the task force that recommended this $3,000 be excluded on the front end just to try to make it fair for people who are just trying to do education. And the max that they can get is $40,000. You see the same breakdown for class B, which is the large institutional commercial type of properties. 77% of the annual funding allocation goes towards that category. Same kind of match with a much larger cap than what they had before. Column number four, that's something that's kind of come along over the last few years, especially in the post-COVID inflationary times. You had a lot of people that put together a grant application. And by the time they got around to building it, costs had changed. And we sensed that there was a need to be able to have some type of change order format. And so this is what we came up with, because otherwise we'd have people just canceling their thing and returning their funds. It seems like it's working fairly well. Not always. Every time we're able to rescue a project because they cannot exceed the maximum amount of the grant that they're eligible for. So if you're a class A, the most you can get is $120,000, even with the change orders. We didn't want people coming in with a $115,000 project and change ordering it into a $300,000 project, obviously. The last column there, there's only one grantee that we've had for that. It's been UK. It was an innovative project, and the board that governs what we do now, that provides the recommendations to council, they felt like it was important to continue looking at those opportunities. The innovative project we funded before, it was UK. They're harvesting rainwater and using it in their cooling towers at the physical plant, which is great for us, because, number one, they're reducing flow that comes downstream, but even more importantly, they remove all the trash and all that that ends up getting in that before they use it in the cooling tower. So it was a real win-win for them and us as well. All right. The next six sheets, I'm going to probably run through these a little faster. You can better see them in your packet than you can in others, but I wanted to comment a little bit on each one of these categories and how we score them. You can see that the purple lines kind of emphasize what percent of the allocation of the scoring goes towards, and you'll see that reoccurring through all of these. But in Class A neighborhood scoring, really the point of emphasis is on the footprint of the improvement or the contributing drainage area. Obviously, the bigger impact that you have broader, the higher level of points that you're going to score. The level of commitment by the grantee, are they really, really engaged or not? The cost effective of it as well is important in the scoring categories. So just to give you some examples of some of the folks that we have awarded in the past, Waterford, they have multiple times worked in this grant program because they've had those two ponds that are out there at Bayonet War and Clearwater that have continued to provide problems for them. That's challenging for a homeowner's association to try to be able to take on that kind of thing. And so their level of commitment has been commendable because they've really, really stayed at this. Unfortunately, sometimes the converse of it, when I talk about people who have returned money in a future slide, all the homeowners, as you all know, HOAs don't always agree all the time, so we'll just kind of leave it at that. The education score sheet, again, project impact being the highest percentage of scoring or more weight is given to that along with target audience. The target audience is important to us, is that if you're only reaching out to a small number of folks, that's not as beneficial as somebody like UK or Fayette County Public Schools or Bluegrass Green Source, that's what they do. And so when we started down this path of funding education things, I always said this, is that most of the people I know didn't quit smoking cigarettes until their kids convinced them that they needed to do that. So the same thing maybe applies here, is that the future leaders of our world will help maybe change the way the habits of some of the other people are doing it. Because at the end of the day, we spend a lot of time just picking up after ourselves. Class B infrastructure, these are the large ones, the 77%, ones that are capped at $360,000. Again, project impact is really, really huge for us. Footprint parcel classification is kind of a different point of emphasis for this compared to the others. We want to target ones that have storage tanks that are storing chemicals or other things that are at risk. They have to do the minimum standards, they have to do that. The whole idea with the grant was to get people to do more than what they were required to do and incentivize them to do that sort of thing. The post-construction educational opportunities are important to us as well, is that if they put in a best management practice and then they're bringing people through and they're learning about it, then we're killing two birds with one stone with that. So for an example of one that we have recently funded is a feasibility study for a property in the distillery district. They want to incorporate green infrastructure in their entertainment venue. But the fact that you've got an audience, a captive audience every night or most nights of the week, that's a real win for us. Some of the other ones that we have done have been like large parking lots. There's one out off of Palumbo. It's a concrete jungle out there, and anything that we can do that reduces the amount of sheet flow that comes off those things with pollutants, grime, grit, whatever, has a benefit for the folks that are downstream. So when we were putting this together, Council Member Svigny had asked about this, and so I wanted to make sure that I included a slide that talked about grant cancellations because they unfortunately do happen. When we put the slide together, it was a little bit surprising to us because we thought it would come out a little bit differently. Cost is obviously a problem, especially if you're dealing with a homeowners association, as I mentioned before. They have limited resources, and they have to make sure that they use them wisely in a way that is beneficial to the group as a whole. Leadership changes had a big impact on it, more so than I thought it would. The horse park originally had a grant from us a couple years ago, and then they declined it when the new administration came in. Not a bad thing. It's just changing priorities. There was one company that got a $300,000 award from us, and then when it came time to try to get them to sign the paperwork, they wouldn't return our calls anymore. And it turned out that they basically closed up shop in Lexington, and so they weren't responsible for the property that they were originally trying to get a grant for. So you see this, is that the large number is in the class B, because that's where most of the money is. Again, 77% of any year's allocation is devoted to this. I did a little quick rundown on the sheet that I have here, is that six projects represent $1.7 million of that. So it's when those really big projects decide to bail out and they're a big award, they have a big impact to this. But otherwise, it's the fact that only 13% of the total amount of money that we have awards been given back to us, $19.6 million, that's pretty good. At least I feel good about it. Again, we've got to try to make sure that we try to set things up in such a way as that they do the things that we want to have done and that are beneficial to overall water quality, but at the same time set them up for success. So, opportunities. This is kind of a mixed slide of ones that we're already doing and things that we could build on. First of all, incentivizing new applicants. We've kind of talked about ourselves. Maybe we modify the score sheet and give extra points to people who haven't been awardees in the past. Prioritizing water quality enhancement and water quality reduction. That's quantity reduction. That's what we always do. I mean, the bullets that are below that are basically what we're doing already, not funding improvements related to water quality and quantity. I know early on when I would review some of these myself, I'd find people that wanted to put in trails and bike paths. They wanted to expand their parking lot. Part of it be pervious and the other part of it impervious. Well, why would we pay for you to build more parking lots? That's not what this program is supposed to do. Same thing with getting people to understand is that if you want to expand your parking lot, that's great. And so you to put down asphalt or concrete is going to cost you X. And then putting down pervious pavement is going to cost you X plus Y. We're only playing for Y. We're not playing for X. The idea was to get you to incentivize you to do something more than what you were required to, not give you a way to do it. The last part of it, and this is something I think that Bailey is really going to try to run with here as far as introducing more of a research and monitoring component of the BMP effectiveness. I've got one more slide to go. I'm almost done. And make sure that we're really and truly getting bang for our buck. All right. So the direction as we see it, and obviously we may come from this presentation with a new set of direction, but we'll see where that goes. But, you know, results-driven implementation, that's what we really want out of this program to begin with. And then secondly is quantifying the effectiveness of those best management practices or BMPs. I didn't include this in the slide, but some of you have seen me show this before. There's a map that shows all the streams in Fayette County, and they're colored red, yellow, or green. Unfortunately, most of them are red or yellow because they're not meeting their designated use. They're not in attainment. The whole idea of all of this program is to change those colors from red to yellow to green. And so that's what we try to do with this. So that's it. Thank you so much, Director Martin. Colleagues, now's the time for discussion, questions. And we have one council member signed in thus far. Council Member Sheehan. Thank you, Director Martin, for the presentation and for giving us that overview and some things to think about. I don't have a question about this program per se, but the comment that you made just a second ago about the map and the color and the streams. How much does the surrounding counties' water quality impact the color of our streams when you're looking at that map? Or are you looking at only the areas that are really just directly affected by us? I'm sorry. We're looking at Fayette County, and it just so happens that Fayette County is basically sitting on a hill. Everything drains away from us, and so everything that you see is largely reflective of our urban presence, which is in the core of that. So, no, unfortunately, there's not really anything to share with the adjoining counties as far as blame or responsibility. In some cases, they resent the fact that Lexington's water is flowing to them, and they expect us to do something about it. Which makes it all the more important that we're doing projects like this and having programs like this. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Councilmember Sheehan. Councilmember Curtis. Thank you, Chair, and thank you, Director Martin, for this presentation and also for all the work that you've done in the 4th District. Again, I know you mentioned the Waterford project specifically. I know that that's been extremely important to a lot of my constituents, so thank you for that. My question is basically, simply put, how can we as district council members be better partners in communicating the availability of these grants to people in our districts? Since there is that requirement that it be an organization rather than an individual homeowner, and not everybody belongs to as well organized an HOA as, say, Waterford. Well, first of all, I can say for the most part, the council members have been fully engaged, and I think that's a compliment to you all but also to Frank and Bailey, what they do. I know they've done outreach with some of your aides and stuff like that, and we need to continue to do that and do that well in advance of when grants are getting awarded. We don't want to do it six weeks before they're due. And having people understand what the categories are, and so we're always willing and available to go and speak for ten minutes at a neighborhood association meeting or what have you, always following the police, that's fine. We'll be happy to do that because, like I said, there's good information on the website. It's getting people to look at that and realize, oh, gee, I got one of those things that fits that, is the hardest part. So we're willing to do whatever we can to do that. I know you are, and I appreciate it very much. So thank you for this presentation, and thank you for taking the time. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Council Member Curtis. Council Member Savigny. Thank you, Chair, and thanks again for this presentation, Director. Just a few things about the water quality fees. I mean, so those show up on basically everyone's sewer bill, right? On the Lexar bill, yes. Yeah, on the Lexar bill. So those came in with the consent decree, didn't they? Or did they come in before that, just so I know? Yes and no. I mean, the consent decree, we basically agreed to the consent decree, and then it got appealed at the Court of Appeals. So there was this lag time between the time that the council authorized the mayor to sign it before it actually became official and signed by the judge. In the interim of that, the city moved ahead with this water quality management fee, and so, yes, we knew it was going to happen, and so we moved ahead with it in advance of when we had to start. Okay, and the fee, the general increase in fees that have occurred basically from the inception to now is based on mostly the amount of impervious service, because the unit price has always been the same. I just want to make sure I understand that piece. The two factors have influenced the increase in revenue. Number one is that the fee has the escalator that is tied to the consumer price index, and so every April, I think, the consumer price index is checked, and then that is applied to both the sanitary sewer user fee and the water quality management fee. With the exception of one year, right after COVID and the pandemic ended, inflation was rampant, and the council, at our recommendation, decided to forego it that year. Okay, and so I would think that the increase in fees was mostly from the CPI over that time. I got off down the wrong rabbit hole because I forgot to tell you the other part of it. Increased building, I mean, there's this more footprint and stuff like that. We're a growing community, and so that makes a big difference. I mean, when we look at expansion, I was in a conversation last week. I mean, it's going to grow again resulting from expansion. I guess my question is do you think, getting to the real question, so do you guys actually, when someone submits something to build on a property, do you basically, do you calculate a fee for that? Yes, we do. We have two people that are devoted to reviewing development plans. They basically scale off the impervious area and develop a billing file for that particular parcel. And then how does it work if someone is, say, there's a 15-acre site, and they're going to put in a little subdivision of single-family residentials? Do we deal with the street stuff? Because nobody really would pay for that piece. Is it typically just per resident? You're just basically doing a number per resident? Yes. If it's a residential subdivision, it is per parcel for single-family or multifamily. Public streets are exempt from the fee. Private streets are not. So private streets are treated like a parking lot because we don't control what their use of them is in one way or another. Railroads are also exempt, though I'd throw that in there. And then we've recently had some cases that we're looking at land that was basically a farm of some sort or mostly green field turning into a parking lot. And we're granting grants to somebody who basically puts an impervious or a pervious parking lot on green space. Correct? Yes, because they have the legal right. I'm not an attorney. I just find they come up and tell me I'm wrong here. But I would think as a property owner, they can put in asphalt as long as it meets zoning regulations and stuff. And what we want them to do is not do that. We want them to do something better than that. So that's why through the grant program we've tried to set this up for us to provide them that additional funding to do what we perceive the right thing to be. You know this, is that corporate America, if there's not a return on their investment, that they're not going to do that. And the whole idea of this thing was to try to shorten down that or shrink that return on investment so they were motivated to do this. My first starting point of this thing is when in 2009 Lexmark had tons of parking lots out there that they weren't using. And I thought to myself, the easiest thing for them to do is to tear those things out of there using our grant money, because they're not going to do it otherwise because they weren't costing them any money, but they were getting ready to. So, you know, it's all about trying to not control what people do or don't do. It's about trying to get them to do it better than they would have been required to under standard specifications or requirements. Yeah. Thank you. My time's up. Thank you, Council Member Savigny. Council Member Brown. Thank you, Chair, and thank you, Charlie, for the presentation and all your work and your team's work with this program. What more can we do? You know, I think you do a good job of awarding these grants, especially to projects, and I think you just gave the example, that don't have to make these improvements, but we want to incentivize them to make these improvements. But a lot of folks in the community, they don't understand that. I remember one was awarded to, I think, a non-profit arm of a business that was doing a redevelopment of probably a brownfield site, and they got a big award from us. And I remember hearing the comments that we're just giving more money to big business to do the minimum. How can we improve that communication? Do you or your team have any ideas, quick talking points or any materials that we can share to let folks know the benefit of this program and that we're not just co-signing projects that were going to happen anyway? I think we can talk about how internally how we might do that and maybe report back to you and to the committee about how we might do that. And I think we've got all kinds of ideas about how to try to improve this thing. And so anything we do that improves participation in a meaningful way, we'd want to do that. It's kind of like the question I was asked earlier. It's like how do we reach out more to people? Sometimes that's hard to do. And, yeah, any help or any direction that you give us about people that we need to talk to to inform them more about how they can benefit from what we have to offer, I'm all ears. Yeah, and I think I am too. I think it's just we probably, and I would ask you this, is to help us come up with some of those talking points, how to get that message across and make the point. I can hear Bailey writing this down as you're saying it right now. Yeah. And then, Council Member Savigne, I was also going to ask you, what are your next steps with this item and where do you plan to go with it? Your mic is already on. Thank you. My plan is to basically take this and work with these guys that work on these grants and come up with some ideas of different ways that we could tweak the program to really kind of hit the opportunity part that they talked about at the end. So focus on the opportunities, focus on the things that you just talked about to make the program just a little bit better. So that's my intent, and my intent is to work on it. I actually have an intern starting this summer, and we're going to work on it together, and hopefully by the fall we could have a rollout so that the new – basically these come out, they're timed. They come out in the beginning of May and in July, depending on which type of grant. So I just want to make sure that we give adequate time, if we're going to change the program at all, that we give adequate time to the applicants so it would be to be finished this calendar year. And I have a follow-up. Excellent. If you don't mind, I'll ask a couple of questions, and then I'll throw it to you from there. I have a question, Director, about the innovation and experimentation column. You mentioned that you'd only ever had one grant application of that type. Could you talk to me about – or talk to us about why or, you know, what it would take to see more applications in that column or in that category, or do you want that? I think we probably need to encourage the technical and engineering community to help us with that. Because, you know, all the time we were talking about, well, creating this category, well, what do you call it? I don't know. It's innovative. So if I knew what it was, it would already have its own category. They're kind of those ones that don't fit in any of the others, you know. I mentioned before, you know, is that certain categories have certain things, like the HOA things has trees in it because you're trying to encourage people to improve the tree canopy or do this. In the Class B infrastructure, a lot of emphasis is on pervious pavement. You know, there's always something that doesn't fit into that, and that one with UK was the only one that didn't fit in those bullet points. And if we see another one, we certainly want to pursue it, but I guess I'm not smart enough to figure out what that one is. Well, I'm sure you are, but I appreciate that response, and that helps me understand, you know, you're all's process for determining what fits where and why this one was different. Let me say that a little bit differently. We didn't want to reject somebody because they don't fit in one of those buckets. If it has a benefit to water quality and it doesn't, I still want to hear about it and see whether there's some way that we can partner with them because, again, like that one turned out as a win-win proposition. It was great. Exactly. That's very helpful, you know, and I'm thinking a little bit about what Councilmember Curtis asked and what Councilmember Brown was just kind of speaking about as well, and, you know, I know that there might be neighbor associations or groups, entities that would be interested in applying for grants like this, but oftentimes the grant writing process can be intimidating to people, especially if there's not that technical expertise. Now, just for the people who might be watching and who would be interested, do you all provide workshops or grant writing or technical assistance as people are exploring, you know, the possibility of applying for these grants? I wanted to answer yes, and I just got the confirmation that I could answer yes, we have, and we obviously need to do more of that. You know, in the early days of this, there were a lot of what I would call the smaller and medium-sized engineering firms that were reaching out and contacting potential candidates for this and helping them along a little bit, kind of do it on spec more or less. At that time in 2009, 2010, that was when we were going through the recession, so a lot of them were doing it trying to keep their doors open, and it really worked well for them. There is somewhat of a niche in this type of thing, and getting those folks hooked up with the people who have needs is important. Something else I thought while you were talking and going back to Councilmember Brown and Councilmember Curtis is that, you know, we have a board that basically instructs us on how to do this. It isn't Charlie and Bailey just deciding this is what we're doing. We have a retired engineer, David Lowe. I think most of you know him from parks and stuff like that. And so if you or your aide wants to come out and join us for a board meeting or two and learn more about the process and maybe make some of those suggestions, because the board is very much on board with that as well, too. Great, thank you for that, and thanks for your openness to exploring the possibilities for shifting, improving, sharing information about this grant. And Councilmember Savigny, I think you had some follow-up questions or statements. Yeah, a little bit of both, and I appreciate it again. So one thing that some of you mentioned, there are organizations, like I've applied for I think five and got all five of these prior to my experience here, but one of them, the hardest one, is the infrastructure one. They ask for quite a bit of detail on how you're going to do your parking lot or what are you going to do to kind of make this happen. So I do think that people like Friends of Wolf Run are in a category by themselves because they really are focused on stream health, and they have a lot of sub-recipients that they work with that are really small that don't have the talent to put together a good package. So I think that that type of organization probably needs to be uplifted. And I do think there's opportunity. I think there's a category of opportunity for an engineer to actually work with, let's say, a large parking lot that's out Nicholasville Road that is just where the office depot is and that whole thing on the left, right? I mean, there's some places that could use some sort of collaborative method to redesign what their parking looks like. And maybe if we did grants that are design-based grants, that would be an opportunity to have someone else selling the program for us, like an engineering firm. We do fund feasibility projects. Have we done a lot of that? Probably not as much as we probably could, but feasibility has been one. And like I said, some engineering firms, that's what they're now mining. I think that the Waterford one actually decided out as a feasibility, if I remember correctly. So that's why they've gotten so many. They did a feasibility, then they did phase one, then they did phase two, and we're walking all the way through that. But you're right. I mean, you look around town, there's tons of opportunities. Yeah, there's a lot of opportunities. So I do really appreciate it. I appreciate the quick turnaround that you guys did. I really, really, really appreciate it, and I look forward. We're going to have some fun working on it this summer. I do appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you, Director Martin. Thank you, Councilmember Savigny. And I don't see anybody else signed in. So next we'll have a presentation on our Waste Contamination Reduction Plan from the Division of Waste Management. And this is going to be given by Director Antonio Baldone with our Division of Waste Management. And, Councilmember Savigny, you're also the sponsor of this item, so I want to turn it over to you to provide a background and to make any introductions you'd like to make. Thank you again, Chair. And thank you very much for being here to present this contamination reduction work group. This came out of the Waste Digester Task Force. This is the first piece of what needed to be worked on, and we set timing in place so that each piece would be worked on over time. So the first piece we had to do is clean up. We have like a 40% issue with contamination. At least it was when we finished the task force at the end of last year. I'm sure now it's 100% better. We're close. So anyway, so I look forward to the presentation because it's nice. This is something that is the first step for us doing more things and getting eventually to commercial composting. Thank you. Okay. Well, thank you all. I do have a few of our team here as well. So Charlie's not the only one that brought the heavy hitters today. About four of them. So I thank them for being here as well as we kind of go through here. So as the councilman said, a lot of this was a plan of where we're at right now, right? And kind of going through this process of what was to come out of the waste digester task force. And what came out of that was a new work group, which is the contamination reduction work group. And that contamination work group, we started our first meeting January of this year. And we have met constantly, consistently every month all the way up to this point. And as we kind of go through this slide, you'll kind of see some of the overview, some of the things that we've learned, some of the things that we know that we have to improve on. And then to the councilman's point, wasn't quite 40%. But one of the things that we did learn and know in going into this particular work group is that our contamination rate for recycling is currently sitting at about 35%. Which is very high compared to the national average. The yard waste is 60%. So we have a lot of work to do. And that's one reason why this work group of Waste Management Pi, as well as you all, is going to be so crucial in our plan in moving this program forward. The other thing is the work group members specializing in operation management, collection, enforcement, and efforts of education and outreach, as I've already stated, as well as our recycling and yard waste facility management. So what was the approach that we did? The first general approach that we did with this is kind of look at it on the front of, we need to take it back to the basics. And we need to see how is our crews actually collecting? Have we informed them correctly? Do we need to do education in that regard? And then so come with that also comes the empowerment of them making decisions. And we'll kind of talk more about that. And then also celebrating our workforce when they are doing the job that is necessary and that we are requiring of them to do. The next piece of that is a public outcry. And that public outcry is really in the form of just an education. And we will kind of go into that. And then the ugly word that don't nobody like, the enforcement piece. And that's where we will probably get. We have some resistance here and there, but we want to work together in making sure that we get all of that worked out properly. Then comes our processes. How are we doing with our carts, our dumpsters, our audits, our affiliate agreements, as well as our cart removals? So these are the three approaches that we've done thus far, and the three approaches that will build on to what will be our next steps as we move forward. So as I've already stated, from a staff milestone piece, we wanted to put all of our frontline workforce through an actual tour of the facility. And in doing that, we actually know that when we show them, they can actually do better. Because we don't want our sanitation engineers being any individuals that are not informed on what to pick up. And they should know what they're picking up and what needs to be or what is not accepted. Then also you see on here is the Commissioner of Excellence Award. And this is an award that we started and we believe that it is running full steam. We have competitions going on in the shop right now with supervisors as well as frontline workers. So this is something that we want staff to take pride in as we build this contamination out, our contamination plan out, excuse me. Our next is our public milestones. And public milestones, many of you all probably have already received this, but it's postcards and the mailers. And making sure that we are reiterating what is acceptable and what is not acceptable. One of the things that many of you all have probably heard is the wishful cycling. We have a lot of those within our community of people that want to recycle something and do not know what can be recycled and what can't be recycled. So that's why these type of informational pieces are so, so important as we continue on with this plan. The relaunch of our recycling education plan, process for recycling dumpsters. Our recycling dumpsters are currently right now at multifamily residents as well as commercial businesses throughout Lexington and Fayette County. Historically and nationally, you will find that a lot of your contamination does come in the form of multifamily units. Why? The dumpster may be too far away for the recycling, so what do they do? They drop it somewhere else, or vice versa. If I'm coming out of my home and I have garbage and the recycling dumpster's right here, I dump it right there into the recycling container. So these are some behaviors that we know that in these next few months, as well as over the next few years, that we're going to have to make sure that from where you sit, as well as where we sit at, that we're going to have to have a collaborative effort in getting this done. Ongoing outreach, mass and social media, blitzes, as well as tabling. So these are when we're taking it back to the grassroots. We want to be at the church picnics this summer. We want to be at the family reunions if necessary. Because when we know, as our community knows more, they'll do better. And that's really where it all starts at. Next piece into that is the process milestones. And you all can't tell, but right there on my right, there is an individual that is standing right there by that dumpster. And she was full fledged into this, that's our commissioner. So she helped with our audits this March and April of this year to identify where are the heavy players coming from, right? And when we did this, one of the things that this audit was to do, it wasn't to wag a finger at any neighborhood, is we had to see where do we need to focus our attention at. Do we focus it on the granola areas to where we know people are recycling great? Or do we focus it on the areas where there could be a language barrier? Or there could be a dynamic there that we need to explore a little bit different. So this is a great opportunity when we did this in March and April to really identify where those sources of contamination possibly are coming from. To that point, the residential recycling routes, we collected 2.4 pounds of material off of 64 routes. And that's a whole lot of material when it comes to recycling. And much of that was because we did find some bad behavior items in there, if you will. So some of our worst offenders were car parts, medical waste, food waste, of course. And a lot of this is, sometimes when you have Junior go outside to throw the trash away, he takes the trash and puts it in the recycling container. So some of it is just mistakes. Some of it is, I just want a second garbage can. I don't care about recycling. We need to identify these things if we want this number to decrease to the number in which we will talk about here in a little bit. The work group has also linked the highest contaminated sources to specific recycling routes and residential areas to focus on next phases. Which is something that we'll talk about here shortly. One of the biggest things, we've actually talked about this yesterday in our staff meeting, is the recycling carts. We want to change probably some colors. We're going to ask some of you all's opinion on that, especially this committee. And we want to kind of go to a more national standardized color for recycling, right? Many of you all may know, or if you don't know, but yellow is a composting national standard color of recycling. With Lexington-Fayette growing the way that it is, we will have people that would transplant here, where they were big recyclers in California. And they are going to be a little bit mixed up by our colors. So we want to make sure that we get our color pieces together. One of the things that you'll see on top of that in this, and we'll talk about that here in a second. But the additional routes that we'll audit, so let me just back up for a second. The additional routes that we'll audit will be commercial and multifamily, as well as business routes, which are currently being done as we speak. Private haulers, many of our affiliates around this county are bringing their material right here to our home base. We control our home base. We just need to make sure that they know what they can bring in here, and that we also expand our education efforts to actually go outside of Fayette County. With our pie group, as well as our waste management group, and making sure that the information that we're giving to Central Kentucky is the right information. So when that material comes back here, then we know how to process it and process it correctly to where it does really go to our diversion rate. Our downtown route, now many of us know our downtown route has a lot of challenges. One of them, how many carts we have down here? I'm very surprised at how many we do have, but those are things that we will work and we've identified even in this small time this work group has been established. Cart colors, right? We are looking at what is considered to be in-mode labeling. And what that is, is we will get rid of the stickers. We did not bring one of our carts down here to kind of showcase this, but we can easily show that or feel free to come on out and schedule a time with me and we can walk through that. But what in-mode labeling does, it allows us to get away from the stickers. Many of you all know that the stickers fade. They start being scratched off, marked on. What in-mode labeling does is, this is a imprint that is actually inside the cart. Doesn't fade, doesn't wash away, doesn't do any of the things for the life of the cart, which will be a great benefit to us as we push forward this contamination plan. Also, RFID tags and tracking. Right now, currently, we are outfitting four rear load vehicles to have the RFID tracking mechanism on them. So that way we can start tagging and knowing, one, where's the contamination coming from, right? Then two, how do these carts keep getting legs? I think that's a question all you all have, too. How do they get legs and end up at a bar, and the bar's using them for trash? So what the RFID will allow us to do is to do that. And then I've already talked about the imprint and the labels on the lids, which will be a big piece. The proposed next steps, and where we're at with this. Right now, and I think this is the one that's going to make everybody's ears perk up, and probably give us most of the questions. But we want to develop, or propose a development for city service for curbside audits, standards for the level of contamination. The way that this would work, this would actually be boots on the ground, not choosing the information that we've already identified, and knowing where the contamination is currently at. So not picking on no specific resident or area, but we would know where it's going. That way we can get boots on the ground and get information to it. The first one is a green tag. A green tag means that you've done a great job, atta boy. We'll pat you on the back and make you a recycling ambassador for us in the near future. The yellow tag will be that that says that you know what, we're going to take it. But we do want to talk to you because there's some work to be done there. And then the red means that you failed. On the next slide, I'll kind of go through what does those steps look like. So that way everybody kind of can have a full picture of both. But then also training to all auditors. When we start doing the boots on the ground approach, we want to make sure that everyone, it doesn't matter if it is from the PAC group, the waste management group, the labor max individuals that we'll use. Whoever we use for this particular boots on the ground approach, we want them to be heavily informed on what they are looking for. That also goes to the notification to our customers, right? So we want to make sure that the postcards have went out. Card signs, this is going to be a big one. I talked about the recycling ambassadors. This is a time that a person can champion in their neighborhood. Sometimes I don't know their neighbor, you all may not know their neighbor, but they know their neighbor. And they may be able to talk to their neighbor a little bit better than we can. So we want to use anybody and everybody possible to make this program a success. Oops tags, the oops tags is just something that is giving that general information of, hey, this is what's happened. This is what it is. Don't recycle the t-shirt in there. Textile recycling can't go in here. And then determine the consequences for ongoing contamination. Next piece there, draft curbside processes. All routes will be audited regularly. This is something that internally, we already are getting a schedule on. We want to make sure that from where we sit at as the waste management leadership, that we are looking at that material quarterly and reporting back so that way we can get a real good handle on where we're at. If we are either going up or down in contamination, which will be a big help. Routes with high contamination identified at the MRF will be audited. Focus on removal of three, I guess that means my time's almost up. Gosh, all right, well let me hasten to a close. But the number one with the red oops tag is, and I won't go through each one of these, but you can kind of see that each tag, or each time a red tag is given, that that approach is not to immediately remove. It's immediately to educate, educate, educate, and now we will take. And that's where the support of this body is going to really help us with really getting this thing husband and moving forward with lowering our contamination rate. Three strikes, or red strikes, fall off after 12 months, excuse me. And the provision for carts to be reissued after a certain number of years, or if there is new proof of a resident living at that location. Here, I'm going to skip down to that last bullet point, because one of the pieces in here, this is kind of off, and I want to make sure that I'm explaining this correctly, okay? So I do, and we can send out a quick little adjustment to this body. But we are proposing our timeline to be 3 to 5% decrease by the end of the fourth calendar year quarter. So that would be October, November, December is what we're looking at, okay? So that's the end of the calendar year. It kind of gets mixed up because when you're talking about fiscal year, calendar year, so we kind of put this on a fiscal year basis, but it really should have been a calendar year basis. Additional 5 to 10% decrease by the end of the first calendar year of 2026. So that would be the first three months in the new year. That's where we would want to be at, 5 to 10% decrease. 6 to 10% decrease in the second quarter of that year. And then by the end of the calendar year, 2027 is where we would probably see our huge decrease numbers coming together and being anywhere between 10 to 20%. Now, I will say this, a lot of this would depend on how aggressive we partner together on this. This can be moved very slow, or it could be like my granddaddy used to say all the time, you can run on the treadmill and not be going nowhere, so we can look at it that way. But I think that if we really look at this, our staff and waste management is fully on board, fully ready to go, full steam ahead. And then I know that many on this council are as well. So those numbers, we will get corrected over to you all, so that way everybody has the correct numbers. And then the council support, as I've already stated, support of the OOPS tag, cart removal process, assistance with the communication, approval of new carts contract, which will be expiring September of this year, and approval of the new affiliate agreement, which we are in the works of doing right now. So that does it for me. I do have questions. I'm sorry that the buzzer went off. I wasn't paying attention to the timer. I guess that's what that's up there for. Thank you so much, Director. You did a great job. You covered a lot in your time period. Colleagues, I'm waiting to see who's going to sign in to ask questions, because I'm sure we'll have some. No one's, it's frozen? Do you have a question? Councilwoman Gray, go ahead. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Director Baldwin, for your presentation, and thank you to your team for being here. Question, so are you foreseeing us replacing all of the, what I call, carts or Rosie, Herbie? Yeah. I mean, that could possibly be something over time, but not immediately. Because when you start going through that, that's a heavy lift. One, on budgetary, but then also the education that has to go behind that. So this would be a slow roll out, so when a cart needs to be replaced, such as a recycling cart or a yard waste cart, then that's when that change would happen. For the yard waste carts, what we are proposing is just a color change of the lid, which would go from, I believe it's black or gray, and go into a yellow lid. It will still have the same gray body. The cost would still be pretty much the same, because the resin is still a frequent resin used by the cart manufacturer. Also, I know that I was on your budget link since we are in budget season, everyone listening and watching. So do you have any additional budget requests for, or do you foresee anything? I think it's still too early to probably do that one. I think as we continue through this year and identify some things, there could be some ask that we would potentially ask in the next fiscal budget. But I think that right now, I think that we are full steam ahead with what we have and how we're going to operate. Of course, as I talked about with the cart contract, we are putting the colors in there to say that, okay, if we did change colors, right, then it's already in the contract. We don't have to try to go back to the drawing board and figure out something. So, hopefully that answered your question on that one. It did. That's all I have for now. Thank you, Chair. Thank you so much. Council Member Hale. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Director, for the presentation. Just a quick question. For the approval for the new cart contract, do we have a, estimated cost of what that would be to replace the carts or even the downtown area? Yeah, and I will say this, that our team has looked at possibly looking at just changing out the downtown area and making that more uniform and starting kind of over with that. But that's still kind of early stages. Because of the price of resin and the different tariffs that are going on right now with the government, it is very hard to probably pigeonhole a cost into that. I can shoot over to you where we have spent in our current fiscal budget for carts to kind of give you a guesstimate, if you would, of maybe 10 to 15% added on to that of what it could possibly run us now. Okay, thank you, yeah. Can you do it for me, please? Yes, sir. And last, the enforcement piece with the public, what does that look like? Is that the oops tags and the removal of a cart for violations? So the enforcement piece is kind of your last resort, but our enforcement officers there at Waste are going to be one of those front lines to get that education. So the oops tag is an education piece. The red, yellow, green tag are education pieces. The enforcement piece is something that, of course, as a body, waste management, PI, as well as council, we want to make sure that uniformly we're moving forward together on that. So we wouldn't move forward with any type of enforcement efforts of removing carts, fining, or anything crazy, it's going to be mainly, right now, just a lot of education. If we can inundate the individual with education, talk to those individuals, you may find that the individual really doesn't want a recycling cart, they just want another garbage cart. And if that's the case, then we need to change our approach to that particular resident. And I think that we will find that a lot of times here in the essential business district. That's all I have. Thank you, Director. Thank you, Chair. Thank you. Council Member Boone. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Director, for your presentation. What is the industry standard, I guess, for contamination? And I guess how far, I know you put some numbers up there, but how far are we off of that kind of goal, I guess? Well, I mean, nationally, the national contamination rate, that's every, from coast to coast, is 17%. From a Midwest standpoint, because all recycling is different in any city or any state you go to. So what you will find a lot of times over here in the Midwest areas, it hovers around about 20%. So if it hovers at 20, the national is at 17, and right now we're sitting at around 34. It is a reachable goal that we can obtain. The thing is, as I've said, what is going to be our approach to that? Do we want to try to come very aggressive, or do we want something that is somewhat aggressive, but effective? And then I think from there, we can really start chipping away at that. And I think that's what our team was kind of hoping to get out there, was to say that three to five. Because we didn't want to just say five. We want to be transparent and honest with that. It's three to five, because if it's going to be 3%, it's 3%. And if we only get 3% off of it this time around, it's good, because it's better than where we're at. But then how do we get to that five in the next calendar year? So that's where we're kind of at. So you're sitting at about 17 nationally, 20% Midwest. All right, thank you. And as far as the 12th district, obviously we don't have Herbie's out there, Recycle Ben's, or whatever. What do you propose as far as education for us to share with 12th district constituents of how to get into recycling, if they've done already? I think most of it is going to be with the mailers and different things. But I would also kind of lean to our education experts and our SME's with Jennifer. I don't know if you have anything that you would want to add for a education piece and getting more engagement from the community in which the councilman serves. You guys can come up. I'm not going to hobble. For people who are, so 12th district, which is a lot of rural areas, and then for people who are in town who have private collection, and then some of the districts, you still might have recycling, even if they have private collection. We do want to maybe outreach a little bit more to the affiliates, just to make sure that what they're handing out is standardized, so that they're handing out correct information that's clear and easy to follow and is what we're recycling. The other thing we can do is encourage using the recycling drop off locations. So we're working on expanding those, because I think there's only four. There's only about four right now, but those are dumpsters that anybody can use for recycling. So people who don't have recycling at their home or at their apartment complex can always take them to the drop off locations. So I mean that, for people who don't have city collection, there are options, and we want to make sure that they know what they can recycle too. Great, thank you. Thank you, Jennifer. Thank you, Chair. Thank you. Council Member Morton. Thank you. Thank you for your presentation, and thank you for your leadership. So do we currently have a cart removal process, and if so, what does that look like? We currently don't have a cart removal process, and I think that's where, for our staff, we wanted to come present, kind of let you know where we're at right now with this particular work group. And then what we are foreseeing in the future, that if we do have some bad players within our service area, then we want to take those carts at a time after we've done all of our education efforts and exhausted those education efforts. What does that look like? And I think that as we work together and as we report out, we may find different things that say, hey, this is a better approach to removing of the cart, and can you come and speak to this town hall? Because many of these residents, our constituents that we're going to talk to, need to hear that this is how this is going to go. And this is kind of part of our pie and waste management partnership with the council, is those tabling events. That's where those are hot and heavy. I can tell you at my last stop, that's where it starts at. It's really going to start with the boots on the ground, getting into communities and finding out what we need to do. Okay, great. And then once, so say, once it's taken away, I'm just assuming we're asking, we're just telling those folks to just throw all the trash, everything they collect in the green bin. So just- Everything that would be landfill, yes, sir. Okay, thank you. Council Member Savigne, thank you. Thank you, Chair. And thank you for the enthusiastic presentation. You are a ball of energy, and I really do appreciate it. I'm like Kelsey, they said that he's got a way of making coffee nervous. Same way, you know? Are any of these ideas, things, because I know you came from Louisville. And are any of these things ideas that are kind of tried and true that you implemented in Louisville? Yeah, I believe if it's don't broke, you can fix it. I think if it works, it can work. So the oof tag is something that we did, the yellow, red, green tag is something that we did, recycling ambassadors. These are tools that have worked in a city that technically from a service provider, waste management here services more residential homes than Louisville. Right now we're hovering at about 100,000 homes here in Lexington Fayette. City of Louisville only does 86,000. So if we're able to do that approach and get the contamination rate to where it's at in Louisville to Lexington. I mean, we're cooking with some fire. And I think that from that point, a lot of us will probably be going on the road to have to speak to talk about what we've done correctly to make that a success. Great, thanks. I had a constituent recommend, and it makes sense to me. Is there an app, it seems like there would be an app that you would be able to, just like I do with MyFitnessPal or something, scan a particular thing. And have that thing say, yes, in your district, that's recyclable. That is one of the things that our team is looking at in this new cart contract. We want to be more customer focused. And doing that is one of the vendors that has approached us does offer a service such as that with the carts. That would be a QR code, individual could easily scan it, get all of the information of what's acceptable, what's not acceptable. They could even tie that system back into our back office system to where that's how they report a damaged cart. So it puts the onus on the customer to really make headway and it gives us a customer focus. I do think, I mean, most of us are creatures of habit and I buy the same things almost every week at the grocery store, right? So it's like my wife's spinach container, I know it's recyclable or not. But I do think there's this concept of getting muscle memory there for people. And then could we consider, I know we have smaller carts available for regular garbage. Is there a way that that becomes more of the standard? And then to be honest with you, I find the larger recycling containers are so much big cardboard that it's really tough to get into those things. You've got to do a lot of work to get it in there, to get it into any container. And I didn't know if we ever thought about larger containers for that or if there's any communities that work with someone like Amazon for me to actually leave my Amazon boxes on my doorstep since they seem to come once a week at least to my house. And is there a way to back, like basically do recycling in a different way as well? I think what I'm going to unpack there is a few things. But the first one, when it's related to that process of being a creature of habit, that's true. I think that it is repetition and doing as much training as possible. As far as kind of like an Amazon partnership, I don't know of any city that's doing that. But it's funny that you might have been in our court meeting with our leadership. You might have been a fly on the wall or something, because we was talking about a lot of these things with the possibility of offering some different size carts, right? Manufacturers do offer usually 95 gallon, but they've also shown us 98 gallon carts, and then you also have the 65 gallon carts. And a lot of times, many cities use those, especially in the Midwest. They use those, a lot of times elderly people are using those. If you have an exemption or someone has a tough time trying to maneuver one of the larger carts, you will find that individuals will request the smaller carts. Have we had discussions on, do we want to use a smaller cart more for garbage and the larger cart for recycling? We have not, but there are cities that do that. But we do have a framework to look at, if necessary. Thank you, I'm out of time. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Council Member Brown. Thank you, Director. Thanks for your presentation. I remember when you were getting interviewed and you had mentioned your experience on the national level and being knowledgeable, and I think that's coming into play now. I had a similar question to Council Member Morton, and it was about what you do existently. So we don't take away carts now for bad actors, we just put them back out. What about, do we have a sticker or a tag policy now? There is kind of door hangers or a tag that just says that you have done X, Y, and Z. But I think that this is where this work group is actually showing us where some of our gaps are at. Whether it be in the enforcement piece, whether it be to kind of streamline and see what steps do we need to do with enforcement to kind of help our enforcement efforts with officers. Is our process intact? Because we don't want to go out there and write an NOV on someone if we don't know what we're writing it up on, right? What we want to do, make sure that all of everything that we've done thus far, and kind of showing up, our process is really in line, is it proper, is our education right? Are we doing what we need to do on the follow-ups? A lot of times in enforcement, that's the biggest thing. No one's following up. So we can sit something out and that behavior continues. We will find that a lot of times with our dumpster service, that the bad actors are still doing the same thing. But there's a lag, what I've discovered, and the team has discovered. There's a little bit of a lag from reporting, is the driver reporting? And then getting back to enforcement. And that's what we're clearing up right now with a different SOPs as well as process flows and workflows to try to have all of those processes work together collectively. That's why it was so big and huge for us to really get our drivers in that MRF to actually see what needs to go in there. What doesn't need to just get dumped just because it's in the container. So it's an ongoing effort, it's eating an elephant one bite at a time. But I will say that one of the gaps that we've seen is that gap between communication as well as how the enforcement needs to maneuver to make it an enforceable thing, not just a tag on the cart or a door knocker or something of that nature. Those are not very effective when it comes to continuously processing and continuously looking at this. So that's where it's going to come into play, kind of like what the councilman said, repetition. The reason I ask is because my recycle bin was taken out, but then I noticed when it got pulled back, it still had all the things in it. So I didn't know if somebody had looked in it and I had something in there that was wrong or it wasn't the right day. Now are all the trucks, so is it a mix of trucks that folks have to wheel it to the back and it gets dumped? Or are they all getting picked up by the arm? No, so we have what is called fully automated trucks and semi automated trucks. Your semi automated trucks are usually your real load trucks. Your fully automated trucks are your side loader trucks, so that's where the arm comes out from the side, dumps the container. And it's usually just the driver in there and sometimes a grounds person if they need to maneuver around a car to bring a container out. But majority of that is either semi automated or fully automated on our residential collection. So we're using both trucks? We do use both. And then of course we have our dumpster service for commercial. Okay. And then, so you said the national color for compost is yellow. What's the national color for recycling? Blue. Blue? Yes. Okay. All right. We're in line with that. All right, thank you Director. Thank you Chair. You're welcome. Council Member Gray. Thank you Chair. And I'm back, Director. First of all, question. Many of my colleagues know that I dislike acronyms a lot. Could you explain to anyone that's watching what PI is? That is the Public Information Education. Am I right? Engagement. Engagement, I'm sorry. Public Information Engagement. Thank you. So, they learned and I learned. Okay, and I had a request to ask this question. Have you considered drop off locations for recycles, recycling? I know prior to COVID, or during COVID maybe, we had the bins in the public parks. I know in my district, I've actually asked for them to be moved because we were out of parking in our parks. Have we rethought going back to other locations, not necessarily the parks right now, but other LFECG? Yeah, we're actually still in the early stages of where we're going to deploy those containers at. Jennifer may have more information on that right now, of where they may have been getting some information. But as of right now, I'm not aware of it. You're exactly fine. I will just step in because some of this is prior to Director Baldwin's tenure. But as you all are aware, we've had a lot of complaints about illegal dumping and overflowing at the drop off locations. And a lot of the land owners, including the parks, have asked us to remove them for those reasons. So we are still struggling to make sure we have locations that our trucks can reach to swap them out as needed. And the public can reach, and that are also potentially in a place that's accessible enough that there may be discourage the illegal dumping that happens, so it's been a challenge. I bet, I bet. Well, thank you, thank you, Commissioner, thank you, Director, and thank you, Chair, thank you. Thank you. Director, I have a couple of questions before we wrap up, if you don't mind. Number one, I want to say, as someone who has performed a smaller scale waste audits, thank you all for all of the time and effort that I imagine that's taken thus far. I mean, that's a ton of work. And also, I'm appreciative of the really detail-oriented work that you all are endeavoring to do, cart by cart, street by street. That's a lot of work and we really appreciate it. Thank you. And I know it'll help us get to our goals. I also am really interested to talk to you all more, it doesn't have to be today, about the RFID tags, the downtown route. I know that we've been in conversation about how we could make the downtown waste management process more efficient, and what's really happening with all those various carts down there. And you're right, they absolutely grow legs, they go to bars, they socialize around downtown, they're doing a lot downtown. So, I know that we have some space there to be thoughtful and innovative, and I know that there's some downtown groups that are really interested in being involved with that process, and being of assistance and support. I have, I guess, a couple of questions to follow up on some of what my colleagues have asked. With the cart removal, I know we're talking about the recycling carts, they're rosies as we sometimes say here, and I know there's quite a kind of a process to get to the spot of cart removal. So just so I understand, if the recycling cart is removed, then it's like they're not going to be recycling at all for a while, is that right? And then maybe there's a process to revisit and put it back in place, do you mind clarifying? Yes, so what our proposal was, is that yes, it would have been removed, after it was removed, after 12 months, they would be eligible to retain it back. But that would have come with education, and then just something that just says, hey, we're in agreement on the understanding of just kind of small MOU, if you will, to just say, hey, this is the recycling, this is what you can put in here. And then, just keep in mind, kind of put it on the slide as well, if someone moves out, that person moves out, and the new person comes in, it's not a wag at the finger at that address, it's just that individual at that time, so if they call us and say, hey, I'm new, can I have a container, we would gladly bring one back out for that particular resident. And I assume that some of that education about next steps, why, and what have you, would be included in that final notice, so. That makes sense. I know that some of this is connected to the bigger picture kind of work of our initial work group, which is connected also to composting, citywide composting. So it sounds like we're starting today with recycling, with working on that waste stream, managing that process, trying out some education and enforcement pieces, some audits. But then I imagine, and correct me if I'm wrong, but we would then have to move on to, what does that look like for other receptacles, like yard waste, or what happens next? I don't want to get too far ahead of things. So, I mean, we wanted to tackle the giant first, in our opinion, which is the recycling. And then, as we went, and say this is a year from now, two years from now, and we're like, okay, let's start our efforts with the yard waste. The yard waste, with the containers itself, we would already start implementing. So the color change, as well as education, what to put in there. So you're almost running the race with both of them. Is this that the recycling piece, is this head of, just a little bit in front of it. But then, as we continue to roll out, bring on new colors, educate people about colors, about the carts. And that's where the yard waste piece would kind of start coming into play. So it's going to be something that's going to run continuous, but it's also something that won't probably get started right away, because most of our efforts, if not all of them, are focused on the recycling. And we've kind of made downtown its own little baby, so we're kind of focusing on downtown. So this is two contamination plans in one, and then building out the yard waste in the third phase, if you will, of that. Okay, yes, thank you for that, that's really helpful. And thank you all for being willing to put this presentation on very quickly, and for giving us an update on your work. And I have one final question. I don't want to put anybody on the spot here, but I just would love for you to settle a constant, it seems like a constant debate in my life. A to-go coffee cup, okay? Recyclable, not recyclable. I'm going to break up a real expert then. Okay, recyclable? Yes, Ms. Julie Hatter. Come on up. She would love to be the tiebreaker in this. I just want to make sure I get this right, because people ask me all the time. And I don't see it on the informational kind of sticker or magnet. Maybe those are updates. So what is the answer? Yes, Chair, and the answer is yes. They are accepting that product, and this is part of our education and outreach as we get our new equipment. We will be putting out new education information that includes those new materials. Okay, excellent. Okay, so the coffee cup, to-go cup is recyclable. Well, what about the lid? And the sleeve, yes. No lids. No lids, all right. We've got it. Thank you all for your time. Thank you to your team. We really appreciate it. We're excited about next steps, so thank you all so much. Colleagues, that brings us to the end of our agenda. And unless anybody has any updates about any of their committee items, or they'd like to remove anything, and I'm seeing none, then we'll call this meeting adjourned. Thank you all, thank you all so much.