["Pomp and Circumstance"] ["Pomp and Circumstance"] ["Pomp and Circumstance"] ["Pomp and Circumstance"] ["Pomp and Circumstance"] ["Pomp and Circumstance"] ["Pomp and Circumstance"] ["Pomp and Circumstance"] ["Pomp and Circumstance"] ["Pomp and Circumstance"] You ready, Vice Mayor? Did I leave that damn folder? Oh, no, I didn't. Thank you, Michael. Hey, good morning, everyone. We'll go ahead and get started. I'll call this meeting to order for the Budget Committee of the Whole for May 27 at 10.02 a.m. And we'll go straight to our agenda. And the first item on the agenda is the monthly financial update, April 2025. Commissioner Hensley is here, but I see Wes coming to the podium. Director. Good morning, council members. So this is the monthly financial update for fiscal year 2025 for the month ending April 30th. So just looking at where we are overall, we always show our actual performance compared with our adopted budget. One thing to note is you can see we didn't have as much of a spike in revenue in April as we had budgeted to. We'll talk about that and give some information about how we've seen things come in in May. So that's maybe less of a concern as we look at our posted numbers. Just as far as some of the factors to consider, revenue collections are narrowly exceeding budget through the first ten months. And after our largest collection month, our variance to budget is 0.4%. Personnel's running within 4% of budget with a variance of about $10 million. Operating savings will be less than reported due to open purchase orders that will be paid out in the next fiscal year. But all variances are being analyzed to capture savings right now. And then April reporting includes transfers made for budget allocations added during the fund balance conversation in October. And those are added to the budget and completed during the current year. The revenues have already been realized in the prior fiscal year. And so you can see some of the deficit on paper created by that, even though the money's already been collected and is ready to be expended. Those transactions are valued at $20.2 million. We're happy to talk about any of these as we go on. Just jumping into the revenue for FY 2025, and this is actual to budget. We're still seeing some good growth over budget and payroll withholding. We had a little bit of underperformance in the month of April. But we're seeing things continue to come in in May that with an April 30th deadline for those payroll tax withholdings, you typically see that back and forth between the months. That's offset in the next month. Net profits, we did not realize the amount of mail that we were expecting as soon as we were expecting it. And so we had about a five to six day delay in getting started with our processing. Largely due to the fact that we didn't get things delivered until about a week later for the April 15th tax mailing. We've seen that come in and we've actually gotten to a point where we're running even with prior year, when you look at actuals in May, but that's something that for report April 30th we're not going to see. So we basically saw about $6 million right now worth of net profit payments that got moved into May that we saw, that we're anticipating seeing in April. Insurance underperformed. The reason for that is because we stopped processing most everything else to process net profits. And whenever the mail came in late, we couldn't process insurance, and so it just got delayed again until May. Franchise fees compared with budget has started to improve after the first of the year. That's something we hope to see continue with the rainy weather. It's likely impacting people's watering of their plants and turning on to their air conditioning. That may start to waver a little bit, but that's a pretty strong variance to budget compared with what we saw through the first part of the year. So we're hoping that holds, maybe expands a little bit. A couple other lines I want to note to budget. First, services. We've seen services underperform for a large part of the year. We have seen our excess fees in collections. That's finally come in to budget, and we're realizing the benefit of that positive variance. Golf course collections are performing well to budget, to the tune of about 360,000 over budget. And then we continue to see the benefit of the state EMS fee kicker programs that are providing additional EMS funds for some of our runs. The only other one I want to note, just to budget, is on other income. That includes our penalty and interest and our miscellaneous revenues. And so we've seen more collections come in than anticipated. Some of those things are hard to predict, and so they're hard to forecast for a budget year. But we've seen those come in strong and provide additional $1 million over what we anticipated. All right, looking at the year over year collections, we've seen payroll be pretty strong through most of the year, close to 5%. We're seeing that hold a little bit, like I said. It underperformed last year's April by about $800,000. So we maybe fell off just a little bit, but we're seeing that come in in April. Net profits again, where we were anticipating getting the mail a little closer to April 15th and being able to finish processing it over the course of the month of April. We saw some of that push into May. This variance should start to get pretty flat as we see the May report. And then insurance, even though we saw underperformance to budget in April, we're still seeing overperformance compared with prior year. And especially once we see the May report and we get all of that insurance processed and posted in the report, you'll be able to see how much more it's performing over budget. Franchise fees, again, is performing very strong. You can see also on services, even though we are performing well to budget, so that shows that we forecasted some of these lines and are doing better than anticipated to budget. We did see the large decrease in excess fees in collections, which we've talked about in a few other months. And the detention center fees compared with prior year are also down. I'm happy to hit on any other lines that council members may want or look back and talk about any of the actuals to budget, unless you are ready for me to kick it over to Director Luker. All right, council members, any questions for Wes? Wes, I'm not seeing any, but I do have a quick question. So in regards to processing, do you have what you need in your shop to make sure things are getting processed? And is this just part for the course? We typically, once we get all of our April mail, we typically take about 15 to 20 days to process the vast majority of it. Because of the delay of about seven days where we didn't see things come in, it just pushed that processing time a little bit. We have made some changes in efficiency. We used to take until June, as an example, to process. And now we're getting it done by the end of April. So I think we've put a lot of things in place that are giving us the tools that we need. We're going to start working on some online filing options. We've added online payment. And so we're continuing to add those pieces that we need to be able to process efficiently. Okay. Sounds good. If there's no other questions, we'll hear from Director Luker. Thank you. Good morning. Let me go back a slide. All right. So for the first ten months of the fiscal year, we are within about 4% of our personnel budget. Those savings, there's not one big category that stands out among our personnel accounts that it's making up that. We've got savings in full time. We've got savings in overtime. We've got savings in payouts. So we've got some savings just a little bit of everywhere in there that's making up that variance. With our operating, we've got significant savings in professional services. We've got savings in operating supplies. We've got savings in vehicle repairs and fuel. We've got grant match savings, which some of that is timing as grant matches book toward the end of the fiscal year and as part of the close. But so, just want to point out with these significant savings, as you all are aware, the mayor's proposed budget includes $18.3 million of a pre-fund. So some of these savings that you see on the screen right now are part of that pre-fund that we'll be bringing to you along with the budget later. Not this month, it's still May. Later in June, we will be bringing that forward with the budget. So some of these are already being used for that. We've also reallocated some of these savings for emergency things like the Jack's Creek Pike. That was $800,000 of the savings that are showing up here that have now been reallocated for another project. So there's a lot of movement here within the expense side of the savings for various things at the end of the year that are coming up. So we're watching that closely. We're seeing a lot of budget amendments come through our office and budget adjustments as people are moving things around to get things done before the end of the fiscal year. If we look where we were compared to last fiscal year, you can see we are spending more in personnel and in operating. We're just not spending to budget. The insurance expense, you may wonder why that is significantly lower than the prior fiscal year. In FY25, we had some balance in the risk insurance fund, and so we used that balance to offset our expense for FY25. That balance was not available in FY24, so that's why there's such a significant difference there in that insurance expense category. Otherwise, we're spending ahead. Capital, we talk about every month. That's when the ebbs and flows, depending on the projects and what we've got funded in the general fund, because a lot of times our capital gets moved over to the 1105 capital fund, or it's in a bond fund, and so that one ebbs and flows. The bottom line is we're spending more than last year. We're just not spending to budget yet. So that basically summarizes up the expenses through April. If there are any questions. Council Member, are there any questions for Director Luker? Clear as mud. All right. So, Council Members, if there's no questions about the monthly financial update, then we'll move to the Mayor's late items. Hello again. So, for the new Council Members, every year we try to be perfect with the Mayor's proposed budget, not have any mistakes, anything change. Unfortunately, we are not perfect people. We have mistakes, or you guys approve things from the time that the Mayor's proposed budget has been released until now that we need to make sure we get incorporated into the budget. So we have various items here that I'm going to go over by fund. Some are budget neutral. Some do change the amount of the balance. They either add to or take from. Some is just moving accounts around, and some are things that you all have approved since we had the Mayor's proposed budget presented. So what we typically do is I will go through all of these, and then Council Member Brown, if it appeases you, we go through and approve each fund. So your suggestion is what? You said you're going to go through? Go through and explain them all, and then you all can approve them by fund? Yeah, we can do that. Okay. So for the general fund, we have a change to the revenue side. And don't get too excited. There's an offset. This is due to the way that the alarm fee in a registration for police is budgeted. So we need to budget the full revenue and the full expense for that, as opposed to how it was in the budget. So we're increasing, you see the top line, we're increasing $150,000. But if you go down to three lines into the next section there, you'll see the expense of the $150,000 where it's an offset to get that budget correctly for accounting purposes for the fiscal year. We have another accounting correction, which if you go to that second set of blocks, it's to correct the account code that a software is in. And this is to comply with GASB standards. There is no cost. It is cost neutral. The next one that's the accounting correction is the police one that we mentioned with the registration revenue. And then we have a couple clerical corrections. The professional services for the sister city's director salaries, that should have been increased by 3% whenever we gave a 3% raise to non-SOAR employees. And that was left out of the budget. So that is $1,976 that we're providing an additional budget there. We also, the fund split for the short term rental software was incorrect. And so we are correcting that. So as a result, there's an additional expense of $28,890 that the general fund is taking on for that software, getting that corrected. We have the next one is a personnel correction. And that is to correct the account for a new position in parks. We are just correcting the account for that. It was budgeted as a non-civil, but it is a civil position. And so we're moving the money from one account to the other to get that straightened out. And then items that you all have approved since the mayor's proposed budget. We have the abolishment of unclassified grants manager creating a classified position of parks and rec superintendent. It's cost neutral. We also have another unclassified, abolishing an unclassified position of emergency planning coordinator and creating a classified position of emergency planning coordinator, also cost neutral. So these changes to the mayor's proposed fund balance result in a decrease to the fund balance of $30,866. So the new balance in the general fund is $1,024,228. We'll go to the urban fund. Both of these items you all have already seen here. This is just the urban impact of it. So the first one is the accounting for the software in law, just changing the account there, budget neutral. You'll see the short-term rental software. That is actually a credit to the urban services fund because it shouldn't have been allocated to that fund. So we have a net positive change to the urban services fund of $8,025. And the fund balance now is $871,926. We will move to the map fund. So since we presented the mayor's proposed budget, we got updated revenue estimate from the state for our map revenues. And so we have an increase of $840,927 to our map fund. So that changes our total budget, not remaining budget, to $7,540,927 in the map fund. Similarly, with the county road aid fund, we got the estimate after the mayor's proposed budget, and it has increased $60,726. Our new total revenue for that fund is $919,020. With our sewer operating funds, we have some accounting corrections. So the first one there is getting the correct account for a lease on AEDs. It's budget neutral. The cost is just moving accounts. And then we've got the law software account change as well, again, once again, budget neutral. And then we have the clerical correction for the short-term rental software, which is a positive of $12,305 to the sanitary sewer fund. So our net change to the sanitary sewer fund is $12,305. That fund balance is a little over $27,421,363. Then we have the water quality fund. This is the same law software, budget neutral, just changing accounts. So there is no change to the water quality fund. The water quality construction fund, we are correcting the account string for the MS4 program management from capital to operating. Just an account change, no dollar change. And we're also changing the account code for stormwater professional services. Just an account change, no dollar change, so that there's no impact to the fund. The landfill fund, we're updating this budget for electric service related to landfill properties. The budget that was provided, there have been some upgrades and things that have gone on out there since the budget was provided. So there's an increase in the cost of electricity, and that's an increased budget of $30,000 in the landfill fund. So that would leave the fund balance of the landfill fund at $3,915,944. And then finally, we have the right-of-way funds. And this is the correction for the short-term rental software. So it is a positive to this fund of $8,560. The new fund balance after this change is $104,848. And that is all of the late items. I will take questions if there are questions. All right, you do have some questions. Let me ask Law before we go on to questions. Is there a way to – would it be appropriate to make a motion to approve the proposed changes to the late items? Or do we need to do them fund by fund? Can we just do a blanket motion? You can do a blanket motion. Okay. All right, thank you. All right, first up is Council Member Gray. Thank you, Chair, at large. Question for you. It has – these are not – my questions aren't about necessarily the numbers, but it's the use of acronyms. And I know many of my colleagues know my feelings about acronyms. Could you explain for any residents who are watching, what is GASB? That's the Governmental Accounting Standards Board. Good. And could you clarify – you stated MAP several times. What is the MAP? Municipal Aid Program Fund. And what is that? That is the funds that we get a portion from the state of the gas tax and some of the car registration tax as well. Thank you. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Council Member. Next is Council Member Ellinger. Thank you, Chair. I want to follow up with that municipal aid program, the extra 840 and then the 60. So do we have an extra 900,000 in to spend? Yes, there are additional dollars in both funds. And have we allocated how we're going to spend those going forward? They have not been allocated. The county road aid program funds, that is an agreement with the fiscal court, with the county judge executive. So we have – They'll be making that decision? We have to work with them on those dollars. But on the 841, that's our decision? Yes. Okay. That's what I thought. Thank you. Thank you, Council Member. Next is Council Member Savicny. Thank you, Chair. Thank you for the presentation. My question is also on the MAP funds, the $840,000 worth of those. I guess one way we could do things with that is to apply that. It seems like it's supposed to be paving and transportation type things. And I think I've also done – I think we've also done occasional sidewalks or bike lanes or things like that with it. Is that within the scope? Yes. So it has to be used – there are certain roads. It can't be used on the county roads. It has to be used on the municipal urban roads. And so it has to be dealing something with the transportation. So we've done different engineering projects. We've done paving. We've done sidewalks. We've done curbs and gutters, those type of improvements. Okay. That's what I need to know. And it will affect my presentation some because I have the EQPW stuff. And I think we'll be approving it as is, as I present it. But I do think it would be something that we should look at. Because I think we could easily fund one of those items that are in mine and then free up money for something else. Hours. Hours. Sorry. Thank you, Denise. Thank you, Council Member. I will add, or maybe somebody from the administration might want to speak to the MAP funds and how those funds are used in a variety of different applications across the city. And with our concerns about the impact of federal funds, I think we might want to just be cautious about how we reallocate those funds until we know the clear picture going forward. That's correct. We use a lot of the MAP funds in engineering as matches for federal funds that we get for projects. So if we don't get those federal funds, then we would need more than just the 20% match. Because we get it, it's usually an 80-20. And so if we were going to do the project, we would need the full amount. Okay. All right. Thank you, Director. So are there any other questions to the Mayor's late item presentation? If not, and I'm not seeing any, I would entertain a motion to approve the changes as presented. So a motion was made to approve and seconded. Are there any questions to the motion? Hearing none, all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Are there any that oppose? All right. That motion passes. All right. Going back to our agenda, and then I failed to mention that the ARPA information is in your packet for information only. We'll go straight to the LINC report out presentations. And we're going to start with Councilmember Ellinger and the CAO and Community Development LINC. Councilmember. Thank you, Chair. And I want to thank my colleagues that were on the committee, Councilmember Hale and Councilmember Reynolds, and also the staff that helped prepare this for us. You can see on page 33 the LINC agenda. There was 12 of them here that we went through. And on page 34 you'll see the general fund overview from what was the department's divisions, the Office of the Agencies, the fiscal year 24, what was adopted in the mayor's proposed budget. There was a $945,612 increase on that. We'll move right to the first one, which was LexCALL on page 35. And the highlights, allocation changed slightly based on calls received. Allocation to the general fund increased from 22 to 23 percent. The urban services remained at 73 percent. The sanitary sewer allocation decreased from 5 to 4. No new or expanded or capital funded. And the LINC recommendations, the LINC accepts the mayor's proposed budget allocation. Government communications. Continued funding for LinkedIn and Facebook for recruit ads for human resources. Slight increase in funding for closed caption due to covering two additional planning commission meetings each month. No new or expanded or capital funding. And the LINC accepts the mayor's proposed budget allocation. The next one, human resources. And if you look at the adopted through the mayor's proposed, there is the medical insurance fund was increased by $4.3 million. That's one. And we might have somebody kind of come up there. Erin, you might kind of just explain that, just how we've changed that. And you can see budgeting is a tough field right now during this month. If you all don't mind, I'm going to sit today. So our health insurance has changed year over year over year. And of conversation every year is the amount of that health insurance that the government is going to absorb. We have absorbed a significant portion of that health insurance cost over the last six years. And the subsidy on top of the portion that is the employer's share is north of $15 million this year. And so that's representative in the increase that is in this health insurance number. Obviously, I don't think there's anywhere in the country where health insurance is going down. And so that is not anomalous to the government. But that is something that we continue to look at. We know that to be an employer of choice, that is important to our employees. And we do everything that we can to try and keep those costs low. But that's just not something that is something that the government can maintain forever. So we are still continuing to work. Our health insurance renews at the beginning of the calendar year. But we are seeing an increased cost for the government this year on the employer. And we'll be looking at the employee side as well for the upcoming calendar year. Thank you. Thank you for the explanation. Some other of the highlights. We increased funding for additional training for employees. Reduced funding for professional service for police fire promotion process because testing is done every other year. Increased funding for professional service medical for biannual police physicals. Increased funding for the overall of service award gifts. Funding provided for a full share of the CSA for employees who participate in the spring share. Launched a new health incentive program this year. Aimed to encourage individuals to achieve their health and wellness goals. There were no new or expanded capital funded. And we accepted the mayor's proposed budget. The chief financial officer. I mean chief administrative officer. Thank you. There was an increase of $240,000 in that. We had no significant budget changes. And no new expanded. The link accepts the mayor's proposed budget allocation. And in partnership with the administration continuing with ongoing policy discussion regarding the DEI position. We spoke with the CEO. And the CEO is going to come back to us. Because we still funded the DEI in the CAO's office. And we also moved that individual over into the human resources. So that one is still funded. We're looking at what changes we're going to do on job description or titles. And the CAO is going to come back to the council with those suggestions. The grants and special programs. No significant budget changes. No new or expanded or capital funded. And we accept the mayor's proposed budget. Code enforcement. The highlights increased funding for sidewalk assistance from $300,000 to $400,000. Continued funding for the housing repair assistance program for $200,000. No new or expanded or capital funded. And we accept the mayor's proposed allocation. The commissioner. We had a $500,000 increase. And, Kelly, if you could kind of explain how that increase is. One of the major things that happened in this year's budget, and you'll see it across all of the links, is that the health insurance for all of the divisions was centralized to the department level. And so you'll see some significant changes with health insurance being moved to the department. And that's the major change in the commissioner's office of HACD. So instead of the health insurance being at the division level, it's been moved up to the department level. Thank you. So funding, under the highlights, funding approved by the affordable housing, we used the 1% of the prior year reoccurring revenues. This is pre-funded for fiscal year 26. That's $4,879,460. Funding provided for the Office of Homelessness Prevention and Intervention was budgeted at $1.467,329 million, which is 0.3% of the prior year reoccurring revenue. And this was pre-funded for fiscal year 26. $2 million funded for winter warming is pre-funded for fiscal year 26. Funding to update strategic plan. Funding provided for one new outreach coordinator position. And we accept the mayor's proposed budget. The last one was community and residential services. The highlights funding for Black and Williams Center gym operations. Emerging financial assistance funding of $300,000. Funding provided for one recreation supervisor for Black and Williams Center. A vehicle, the capital reallocation fund of $28,375. And the league, after meeting with the community and residential services, recommends an additional part-time position for the Black and Williams Center. And if you look on page 30, where we talk about the recommendations, the part-time employee for Black and Williams Center, recreation supervisor position was funded for the center. However, more than one individual needs to be on site or available in case of emergency and assist with program and safety. Director of community and residential services currently covering any gaps in supervision at the center. So we felt like we needed to have another part-time person help. So that is our link. And I'm here along with my colleagues. We'll answer any questions. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Councilmember Ellinger, for your presentation. Councilmembers, are there any questions for this link? First, we have Councilmember Savigny. Thank you, Chair, and thank you, Councilmember, for the presentation. Is the number for that part-time position reflected in the numbers up there that we're going to approve? Because you don't have it. It just says Mayor's Proposed Budget. It should be on page 30. It's $20,160.32. So just to add some clarity, what was shared? Commissioner, do you want to explain it? So the request for the part-time position, our part-time staff are not actually budgeted at an FTE. They're given dollars. The division is given dollars to be able to fill that request. And so at the request of the link, one of the recommendations that was offered is that as divisions and departments recognize savings, which we will do in the first month of the year, in July and in August, we can reallocate those savings as soon as they become available to put money into that part-time account at the Black and Williams Center to provide for that additional part-time personnel. So as opposed to it being a full-time individual, which is allocated dollars on the front, and it really is just a bucket of dollars to be used for those. And we can recognize that through savings, even in the first couple of months in the year, if that is amenable to the link and to the council. Thank you, Commissioner, for that clarification. Yes, sir. Councilmember, do you have any? Were you finished? Councilmember Curtis. Thank you, Chair. And again, thank you for that presentation, Councilmember. I have a couple of questions regarding the link recommendation about the partnership with administration continuing with ongoing policy discussions regarding the DEI position. This is just something that I've gotten a few questions about from constituents, and I just wanted to clarify. So for the sake of clarity, that position is budgeted for in fiscal year 26? Correct. Awesome. And do we have a general timeline about when we're going to come back to that discussion? And I guess that would be a question for CAO Hamilton. Thank you for the question. We're researching now, sort of across the country, to see what people are doing with that position. And so I hope to come back to you after you are here in July, late July. Wonderful. Thank you so much. And I just appreciate that clarity. That's something that folks have been asking me about. So anybody who's listening and keeping an eye on that, know that that position is still funded and we are still having ongoing discussions about how to best move forward with it. So thank you so much. And thank you, Chair. Thank you, Council Member. Are there any other questions for this link in their presentation? Seeing none, we'll move to the next link, presentation or report out. And that's EQPW. Council Member Sevigny. Thank you. Thank you, Chair. I want to thank Councilwoman Denise Gray, Council Member Handel Greer, and their aides for working with me as I chaired my first link. I appreciate the entire staff of EQPW and Commissioner Albright's support and knowledge that allowed us to make some great recommendations and good decisions. Lastly, I really appreciate my aide, Alyssa McKenzie, and core staff, Kelly Farley, that are responsible for so many things, but they also helped make this presentation flow well and did double-check the math. So who knew budgeting could be so much fun? This is the group of businesses that we'll be discussing today in that order. And if you look at the overview, we've got $185,372,806. One thing you might notice is the capital reallocation fund, which is slightly new, which was previous bond issues that principal has not been used, and Commissioner Hensley was able to reallocate to some capital items within EQPW, which we appreciate. You'll also notice that there's only about 11% of the budget that's from the general fund, as EQPW uses a lot of other funds. Streets and roads highlight the few items here. They've extended snow removal contracts, so we have some more of those, which will help us. Long-line striping was a big deal. They asked for $100,000 increase year over year, and the administration increased it by $200,000, and we now have three contractors doing striping. It's the number one complaint that we get from constituents. Another area that we did some work on is ADA ramps. Currently, they contract with two different companies. There's a significant jump in fiscal year 25 with a million dollars worth of funds supporting that. The link recommends accepting the mayor's proposed budget with a process change. On those ADA ramps, we've been getting a lot of questions as council members when something is happening, and people call us and say, why is this happening, what's going on here? We want to make sure that signage is included at the sites so that constituents understand what's going on while their construction work is being done. The link also recommends the continued moving away from paved bonding. All right, streets and roads. Fiscal year 25, the adopted budget had $12 million of paving bonded, but there was a decision made at fund balance to adjust it by $2 million and reduce the amount bonded to $10 million. The actual amount bonded for paving was $10 million in 2025. Also note that this is where the capital reallocation fund comes in, which used to be previously bonded dollars. For 2026, the bond projects are basically paving, maintenance, crack and seal, rejuvenation, and ADA ramps. The link recommends the approval of the 24-124-857 fiscal year 26 budget for streets and roads with our process recommendations. Okay, water quality. One thing we did ask in our link was if there was any sort of effect that terrorists might have. This was the one area that might create an issue. The primary pump suppliers for water quality is from Finland, so just keep that in mind. The focus in fiscal year 26 for water quality is more focused on staff development than adding crew. There was an observation that the call crew in April for all the flooding was not as prepared as needed to be, and so we needed to focus a little more on training. Lastly, the Mint Hill pump station design and land acquisition is one of the EPA remedial measures projects included in this budget, roughly $2 million. The link suggests we approve putting the funding in the fiscal year 26 budget with the requirement that prior to moving forward with the design, a presentation will be made to the EQBW committee at its August meeting on the strategy for the design to be more inclusive to the Area 1 expansion and the Blue Grass Airport expansion, also noting that the 2023 sewerability study placed the pump station at a different location for less cost. The EQBW committee will then move on the best strategy to move forward to the council. This should not impact timetables for the project to move forward in a 2027 budget item for the design and implementation. The sanitary sewer fund 25 fiscal year adopted a $20 million transfer and none for 26 because there's a backlog of work in progress for those transfers. We expect those to come back in the fiscal year 2027 budget and just for reference, the fiscal year 24 budget had an $18 million transfer. The link recommends approval of mayor's proposed budget of $71,596,813 with a requirement of the recommended discussion and approval on the Mint Hill Station expansion design in August 25 prior to the design documents bid. Okay, environmental services. This is always an interesting topic for a lot of us. Funding provided for the Lex Grow Trees private property planting program of 150K, funding was provided to expand the panhandler van programming up to five days per week, weather permitting for 60 grand, pre-prunded providing for sidewalk snow removal equipment, which we all love, 134,700, and a ground mounted voltaic rack system for 40K. Next slide, the link recommendations. The one thing that we looked at was there's always a bunch of part-time people in environmental services and there's usually requests for full-time and we found a way, so we want to expand the mayor's proposed budget to include changing two part-time employees to two full-time employees in requested roles to support increased corridor, greenway, and trail maintenance. We did work with CIO Hamilton to swap out some part-time personnel cost savings and contractor cost savings as an offset, so it will be budget neutral. Other items that we want to make sure are considered in the pre-funding or fund balance discussion in October, we do want to revisit the Lex Grow Trees grant program for 500 grand in the fund balance and the codification of a grant process to make this grant initiative more sustainable and permanent. The weatherization program was not funded, so we would like to reconsider that at fund balance for 500,000. Solarized Lexington was not funded for 500,000 and we'd like to reconsider that at fund balance. And then wayfinding signs and welcome signs, $340,000 was requested. We'd like to reconsider that at fund balance. We currently have signs at Versailles, Newtown Pike, and Athens-Boonesboro, and this one was going to be for Menowar and I-75. And then lastly, revisit the program manager and public information engagement section position and the environmental initiative specialist in the 26 fund balance conversation. That's environmental services. Now we're to building inspection. Really, the administration officer and building inspection was not funded. That person was designed to help send out building inspection enforcement notices, which would have increased income in that area with the new position. They felt like it was going to be three quarters covered with that from fines and liens, but in the interim, they basically moved those duties to an administrative specialist, so we will see some net gains in that department and maybe consider that position in the future. So the link recommends approval of the mayor's proposed budget for building inspection of $3,754,873. Next one, traffic engineering. There wasn't any big changes here. There's funding for traffic signals, funding for fiber optic and camera network expansion, which will help areas around New Circle Road to Liberty Elementary, and I'm sure also the police will be using those same fiber optic networks. Funding for new projects from capital allocation and the map fund. Next slide. The link recommends approval of the mayor's proposed budget for traffic engineering of $15,205,949. Waste management. All right. There's a variety of things in waste management, but one thing is they proposed and funded a waste study focusing on the next five years. How can we add more customers and make commercial and residential curbside service fully funded without dipping into the urban services fund balance? So making it efficient. Another thing is you'll see on waste management the cost of the waste management contract jumped $5 million as that was a new award this year. And what's important, the link wants you to understand that the budget is using $4,136,000 of the urban services fund balance. So we are running this business at a loss which isn't sustainable. So I hope we can get some efficiencies from our study. Next page. The link recommends approving the mayor's proposed budget for waste management of $47,553,934. Engineering. There wasn't really much significantly changed in engineering. There was some focus on corridor improvement, capital projects, shared trail sections, and they did have a 1% reduction in their general fund ask. So moving on to them. The link recommends the approval of the mayor's proposed budget for engineering of $7,843,338. And lastly, but not least, the EQPW administration budget. The big things here, there's funding for the solar study on Haley Pike of 250. There is the street sweeper route study at 60 grand. The recycling and yard waste contamination reduction is a direct result of the waste digester task force, meaning that we had to clean up our waste stream before we moved to commercial and residential composting. So I'm excited to see that in the budget. Next slide. The interesting thing that you're going to see here with this budget, it's odd because it went from $2,500,000, or $2,000,000, what is that, $597,000, to $6,275,000, which is quite a big jump. This is primarily due to all those big jumps are mostly the health insurance subsidy that was talked about. So it is probably the best place that you can really see it. It kind of shouts out at you that it is a problem in general, but it's good that we are doing this for the employees, but it is something that does have a pretty big impact. So the link recommends the approval of the mayor's proposed budget for EQPW admin of $6,275,231, or 323. That's all. Any questions? Thank you. Thank you, Council Member Savigny. Council Members, any questions for this link? First, we have Council Member Baxter. Thank you, Chair, and thank you, Council Member Savigny, for your presentation and your work on this budget. I don't have a question, I just have a comment based on the link recommendations for the Mint Lane pump station project. I just want to thank you for looking into that more. There's a lot of concerns that have been raised from my constituents regarding that pump station, so I look forward to furthering that conversation. Thank you. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Council Member. Next, we have Council Member Reynolds. Thank you, Chair, and thank you, Chair, as well, for the presentation. I just wanted to clarify, it looks like, for the horticulture, civil service positions, and I don't see Director Carey, I don't think, but I just wanted to clarify that the cost savings is because of, we're going to be doing it in-house as opposed to having a contractor, is that correct? It's, there's two pieces of it. It's moving part-time employees to full-time employees, so there's a difference there, and then there, so we're taking some of that budget, and then we're taking, yes, we're eliminating, we would be eliminating a contract, because they would be doing some of the contracted work. Okay, so, and then? And it's funded for, it's a half a year. We basically said start in January. Okay, for both. Yep. Okay. So it's net, so it's net neutral, okay? Great, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Council Member. Any other questions before I chime in? I don't see any. To Council Member Savigny's link recommendation about Mint Lane and going forward, I just want somebody here from the administration that can speak to that and the timeline and the fact that it's a consent decree project is what the link requesting manageable? Thank you, Council Member. Yes, sir, it is still manageable within our 2030 timeline to take a little time to do this well. Okay, and what are we, and so that's going to be presented to us in the committee, in the committee meeting? Yeah, I spoke to Director Land, not Land, sorry. Martin. Martin, Director Martin. I spoke to Director Martin, and he said he could be prepared by the August EQPW committee meeting, and I spoke to the committee chair, Council Member Legree, and we can put it in there, and he said he wasn't really going to release, he didn't want to release documents until the end of September anyway, so I think it works out that it's not going to impact it at all. Okay, okay. And what council district is it in? Is it in the 12th, or is it in the 10th? It's in nine, but it's barely in nine. Okay, okay. All right, well, that sounds good. Thank you, thank you, Commissioner. All right, any other questions for Council Member Savigny? Seeing none, we'll move on to the next link, and that's Council Member Lynch. Thank you, Chair. I would like to first thank Council Members Sheehan and Boone for joining me on this journey. Also, I'd like to thank my legislative aide, LaShawn Barber, who put together phenomenal budget binders for my council members and myself, and additionally, I'd like to thank Layton Garlington and Olivia Grigsby for their help on the budget link process this year, and, of course, always thank you to Kelly Farley for keeping us on track, answering our questions, and guiding us along the way. So we're going to dive into the finance, economic development, planning, and preservation budget link. This is on the slides of the divisions that we talked with and budgets we covered, as well as a couple of partner agencies. Next slide just gives an overview of what was adopted in FY25 and what the mayor has proposed for FY26. So starting with the Division of Finance, in the Commissioner's Office, the link is proposing to accept the mayor's proposed budget for that office. Next, we move into the Accounting Department. So the link, after extensive discussion with the Accounting Department, we decided to add a position, propose adding a position of Deputy Director of Accounting at a cost of $145,424. Just to give you a little bit of background of why this position is so important and why we feel it's important to add this position, this person will assist in the management responsibility for the timely and accurate preparation of financial and statistical reports in accordance with the city's policies and generally accepted accounting principles. Additionally, this position will oversee, review, audit, and approve all accounts payable, payroll, and other accounting records. I know we all want those records of payroll to be accurate as well as our audits. This person will assist in the implementation of the fiscal management program of LFUCG, including maintenance and analysis of all general ledger accounts in coordination of the year-end audit. So a lot of big responsibilities for this needed position. This role is critical because the department and division's continuity of operations plan, as well as the individual's responsibilities for caring for critical accounting functions in the absence of a director of accounting. So when the director is not available, the deputy director will stand in to take some of those duties. This position will increase department efficiencies. It will help with the new accounting principles and standards that are given each year. They're continuing to be more and more complex, so we want someone that can help assist with these matters in this division. This position will also allow for splitting of tasks and will ease the current burdens of staff that are currently in the department. It will add for ease of knowledge sharing across the department as well. In my budget link, we discussed with the division about when thinking about cost savings, would it be better if this position started in January, or if it's better, would it be funded initially at the turn of the fiscal year? And due to the very integral role this person will play in our audit, the division would love to have that person staffed as soon as possible so they can participate in two audits, not just one, but two audits, to see how they roll before our current employee who is retiring after many, many years of dedicated service to the city. So we want someone in that position sooner rather than later so that they can see how the city's audits run so that when our current staff retires, they'll be able to take it on full steam ahead. So it's a pretty critical role to the city, and the budget link feels like it's pretty important for us to have this position in place. So this is our proposal regarding the accounting department. For budgeting, our link is accepting the mayor's proposed budget. For procurement, the link is accepting the mayor's proposed budget. For revenue, the link is accepting the mayor's proposed budget. Moving on now to our Office of Economic Development. The link is proposing to accept the mayor's proposed budget. Moving now on to our Division of Planning and Preservation. For the Commissioner's Office, the link is proposing to accept the mayor's proposed budget. For the Planning folks, the link is proposing to accept the mayor's proposed budget. For the Historic Preservation Department, the link is proposing to accept the mayor's proposed budget. For our PDR Program, the link is proposing to accept the mayor's proposed budget. And then we move on to our partner agencies, first being the Lexington Children's Museum. I just want to make a note of the highlight there. For FY26 pre-funding, it's proposed for the design and planning of the new museum in downtown Lexington at $400,000. As you may recall, they're entering a capital campaign to build a new children's museum. And the administration has promised, I believe, a $2 million commitment, made a $2 million commitment to the children's museum. And so the first installment of that $400,000 for that $2 million commitment is in the pre-fund list for that. But otherwise, the children's museum will be receiving their normal allocation of $225,000 for FY26. And so we are accepting the mayor's proposed budget for the children's museum. And then lastly is LexArts. And we are proposing to accept the mayor's proposed budget for them as well. I'm happy to entertain any questions that anyone may have. Thank you, Councilmember, for your presentation. Are there any questions for this link? Councilmember Lynch. First we have Councilmember Baxter. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Councilmember Lynch, for your link work on this section of our budget. I want to look at the deputy director of accounting position. I just have a few questions there. And it may be more for the commissioner or potentially CAO. So it's my understanding that this staff member who is currently, let's get her to say in office, who's currently employed, plans to retire in the next two-ish years. And I guess my first question is, is this typical procedure for us to hire somebody two years ahead of a potential retirement as part of their training? It just seems a lot. I understand the importance of the position. I'm just trying to figure out if this is typical. Is there somebody that can answer that question? I'm going to assume I know the answer, but this is not typical. Yeah. So, Councilmember Baxter, I will say that we felt like it's critically important because the duties that this deputy director will have will be a lot of duties. And I'll go ahead and say that the person that's doing them currently who's retiring is a unicorn. She's been doing it for decades. And so she's going to be hard to replace. So we want to go ahead and get someone in there to be cross-trained appropriately because they will be handling some very critical things within the accounting department. And so we feel like having those two years of a government audit under their belts will be super helpful when they start after our current employee retires. And keep in mind that she's estimated to retire later on, but she could retire tomorrow. Sure. Commissioner, is there any current cross-training of this position? I know Councilmember Lynch said that the deputy would step in if the director was unavailable. But if she was unavailable today, what would be the process? So we have several senior accountants. We have four, actually, that have their subject matter experts. And we have one senior accountant that has in the past stepped in when we have had vacancies, and she does provide a level of expertise. assurance for us. She also is on a similar retirement timeline and so that's not a long-term plan for us. We did put this position in knowing that we were a little, you know, we were ahead of schedule. We are planners by nature and we've been through the budget cycle just a few times to know that this probably was not going to get funded, but kind of just putting that out there ahead of schedule. And so, you know, we were very surprised and very appreciative that it's been considered, but kind of well aware of the fact that we probably weren't going to make that. Just wanting to let everybody know. So, you know, we do have staff that step in and fill her role when she's not available. And we have seasoned and qualified staff. We just are not going to have, we don't have an heir apparent, if you will, because we have some seasoned staff that are going to be retiring in a similar timeline. Okay. And just to clarify, the level of funding is for a full year? It's not? That's correct. Okay. All right. Thank you. That's all the questions I have for now. Thank you, Council Member. Next, we have Council Member Reynolds. Thank you, Chair, and thank you, Council Member Lynch, for your leadership on this link. I just wanted to follow up on that question. So, Commissioner, this was requested in the Mayor's proposed budget and not filled, correct? Yes, ma'am. Okay. And then, for the way that it is being funded, I don't know if this is for Council Member Lynch or whom, when you say starting fund balance, do you mean that some of it would come out of whatever fund balance we have to fund the ongoing position? Yes, that is correct. So, the way it would work, if you all will recall from your budget book, we begin with anticipating a beginning fund balance of a million dollars. We then bring in revenue, we subtract expenses, and then we have an ending fund balance. Now, the late items that Melissa just brought forward would have reduced that ending fund balance. This would also further reduce that ending fund balance because it is a recurring expense that would need to come from a recurring revenue source. So, that would reduce that ending fund balance. Okay. Thank you. I wanted to make sure we're not using one-time money for ongoing positions. Okay. I appreciate your answers, and I will take it into consideration. Thank you, Chair. All right. Thank you, Council Member. Next, we have Council Member Ellinger. Thank you, Chair. Can you tell me why the Mayor, even though it was requested, did not put it in? I want to set the stage. This is a very important position, just as Council Member Lynch has described. It is one that we did consider. When we got ready to do this, I told the Commissioner, I said, put it in, and let's see where we are. This was not one that we ruled out immediately. Put it in, and let's see. When we went through the budget, we looked at it, we talked about this position a great deal, and we decided that we didn't have room for it. You didn't what? Didn't have room for it, meaning couldn't afford it right now. That's the reason we did not do it. Because it is unusual, it is two years out from retirement, and we felt that we could wait another year. I also understand the argument that Council Member Lynch put up for funding it, and I think that's very valid. But this came down to choices of what we thought we could fund and what we couldn't. We chose some other positions to fund other than this one. And since you all made that decision, can we fund it now, or what's your recommendation? The funding right now, when we went through and we went through with Council Member Brown to look at ways of what the link wanted of how we would fund it, the only way we felt that we could fund it was to reduce that fund balance. And that fund balance is not one that we're going to have, we want to make sure everybody understands that. Not one that we're going to have in the fall, it's one that's right now in that budget. And we will reduce that fund balance to fund this position. You're talking about when we present a balanced budget, we always have a fund balance usually a million, a million and a half, and we're going to just reduce that now. Uh-huh. And you remember, there have been years in the past where we've had a real low fund balance coming in there. I remember one year in gray, it was $300,000 or so. It's a pretty large fund balance right now. So I guess my opinion is, and I didn't need to be flippant by my thing, it is unusual for us to fund a retirement two years out. If we were ever going to choose one, this would probably be the one. But you also, when you did your calculations, you thought that we could do it next year and we didn't have to do it this year. I did. Because, again, I was restrained by money. If a perfect world, it would be great to have it for two years. Thank you. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Councilmember. Councilmember Savigny. Thank you. And CAO, could you just come back up one more time? Thanks. I do think it's an important position. But typically, you have a plan when you have an important position phasing out. Are you doing some job share cross-training internally with the possible internal candidates that you can see fulfilling this job? I'm going to let the Commissioner answer it. But I don't think so. This is a different kind of training. It's not like we've got two accountants that we're cross-training. This is a certain type of person. You've seen Phyllis do this before. This is a real specialized training. Would you agree, Commissioner Housel? I think we have some excellent accountants. And I think they're exceptional at what they do. I'm not certain that we have anybody that is ready and willing to take on and step into this position, at least that they've indicated to me right now. Okay. All right. Thank you. That's all I have, Chair. Thank you, Councilmember. And if no one else has questions, I'll just kind of weigh in a little bit on that position. I appreciate the LINC's recommendation and their due diligence and their guidance on funding this position. I think this is probably a unique situation. And I think our finance department knows what they need. And I think if they feel like they need somebody now to go ahead and get some experience under their belt and get somebody ready to take over this role, and they found a way to fund it in this budget, I'm going to be supportive of it. So thank you for that. The other question I'll ask, and this is for Kevin Atkins. We put $2 million in the public infrastructure fund last year. I know it was a request from at least a few councilmembers to put additional funding in it this year. How is that account or that fund currently sitting, and how are those monies being utilized now? So the account is a little over $1.3 million right now still available. Okay. So we felt like that was an adequate number. If it became problematic that we could talk to you all in the fall as part of those discussions. But based on kind of what we have seen historically since that fund started, $1.3 is probably more than adequate to get us through another fiscal year. Okay. I appreciate that. Are we seeing applications and projects just not qualifying, or are they found in other funding sources, or are we just not getting applications like we- We've got one under consideration now that the board will likely hear, Economic Development and Investment Board will likely hear at their next meeting. And then we have one that we worked with for a few months, several months, but we just, it could not cross the threshold of public infrastructure. It was all more specific to that actual site. Okay. Okay. All right. Well, that helps me. I just want to keep an eye on it and see if it's something that we need to consider in the fall when we have our fund balance discussion. Thank you. All right. If there's no other questions for this link, and Council Member Lynch, we'll move on to the next link report out, and that's General Government, and I'll turn it over to Council Member Baxter. Thank you, Chair. First of all, I want to thank Council Members Brown and Curtis for your work and dedication to examining this part of our budget. I'd also like to thank my legislative aide, Elizabeth Withers, for all of her preparation, and Kelly Farley and the administration for all of your help in answering our questions as well. So, here you'll see our link agenda and the departments and offices that we had in our link. And so the first one we'll go to is the Council Clerk. And you'll see that there's a 3% increase in the budget for Granicus. This is their normal increases. The range is 3% to 10% on our contracts, and so we're on the low end at 3%, so we'll accept the Mayor's proposed budget here. In the Council Office, just a highlight that I wanted the public to know more so is that this budget includes not only our core staff and all the operations, but it's also personal and operating expenses across 15 Council Offices. So, we will accept the Mayor's proposed budget here as well. Moving on to General Services, the big highlight here is that we have funded, or in the Mayor's proposed budget was the funding for a new General Services Capital Project Manager, that administrative officer senior, and we will accept the Mayor's proposed budget there. Facilities and Fleet Management, we're accepting the Mayor's proposed budget. For Parks and Recreation, you'll see a new fund line item here for the Parks Fund, and you'll see that it is at $7.9 million. We're estimating about $8 million, so there's about $100,000 of contingency left there, just in case. But the highlights for Parks and Rec is the phase one of the Parks Master Plan community engagement, as well as funding for three new schools in the ESP program and one new recreation specialist for the Pam Miller Downtown Arts Center, so we'll accept the Mayor's proposed budget there. Moving on to Information Technology, we are accepting the Mayor's proposed budget. In Computer Services, just to highlight here, flip to the next slide, we wanted to draw a little bit of attention to the Microsoft Co-Pilot deployment, just because we had some significant conversations in our link kind of around AI in government, so a recommendation from the link is a referral to general government and planning regarding our AI policy and implementation review, so that we're having that discussion as a whole, so we will be accepting that budget. Enterprise Solutions, we are accepting the Mayor's proposed budget there, as well as Internal Audit and Law, we're accepting the proposed budget. In the Mayor's office, some highlights is the funding for one new, one Lexington position, and funding for the Complete Streets initiative at $175,000. We will be accepting the Mayor's proposed budget, but we are requesting that the administration develop a presentation for us on an overview of the organizational flow that includes this new position, and how the new position and the organizational flow meets one Lexington's strategic plan goals that we heard about in the fall. So, our link is a little different, that we approve the budgets for our constitutional offices, so there's a list of them there. Circuit Judges, we're accepting the Mayor's proposed budget. The Commonwealth's Attorney, we're accepting that budget as well. Accepting the budget for the Coroner, the County Attorney, the County Judge Executive, the County Clerk, and the Property Value Administrator. We have one partner agency that we reviewed, it was the Lyric Theater, and we are accepting the Mayor's proposed budget there, which includes some improvements to the facilities. And I am happy to answer questions. Thank you, Council Member, for your presentation. Are there any questions for Council Member Baxter in this linked report out? Council Member Curtis. Thank you so much, Chair. I just really wanted to take this opportunity to do two things, which is to one, follow up on our conversations about artificial intelligence, and clarify for anybody who's watching this, that in our linked discussions, we did have a robust conversation about where Microsoft Copilot would be deployed, and we are not creating a sort of, what's been proposed is not creating a sort of Pandora's Box situation. This is a very contained, very focused pilot program that is not public facing. We're not all of a sudden going to be doing what I think a lot of us have come to know AI through, where all of a sudden it popped up on our phones and it was our only option. That's not what we're doing here. So I just wanted to provide that clarification. And I also just wanted to express my immense gratitude to Council Members Baxter and Brown for their willingness to both guide me as a newbie through this process and to accommodate the needs that I had regarding some medical stuff that I was going through during our link process and make sure that I was included to the fullest extent possible. It was very, very kind of you all and I deeply, deeply appreciate it. So thank you. Thank you, Council Member. Are there any other questions or comments about this? Seeing none, we'll move on to the next link report out presentation and that's Social Services and Public Safety by Vice Mayor Wu. Thank you, Chair. Start off by thanking my fellow Council Members, Council Member Morton and Council Member Beasley for being a part of this process with me along. And thanks, of course, to Kelly as always for keeping us on track, as well as our aides, Tori, Adina, Sarah, and Renee. As you all can see, SSPS is the biggest chunk of our budget and encompasses a lot of important divisions and departments in public safety, social services, as well as our partner agencies. Looking at the funding overview, the bulk of the funding comes from our general fund, $292 million, and the other big chunk comes from the Police and Fire Retirement Fund, about $92 million. All right, first department is Emergency Management. The highlights are that the CSEP funding is expired. CSEP is Chemical Stockpile Emergency Preparedness Program, and we have gotten rid of our chemical stockpile here in Central Kentucky as of 2023, so that funding is phasing out. And then we have a warning siren for Kelly's Landing at $49,000, and I believe that Kelly's Landing ribbon-cutting is tomorrow, so that'll be important. And we are accepting, the link recommendation is to accept the Mayor's proposed budget on Emergency Management. Public, whoops, sorry, skipped one, E911. The funding allocation is based on call volumes, general fund is 48%, E911 fund, 52%, and then our subsidy of about $1.9 million is required because the expenses exceed revenues. The subsidy is in the form of a transfer, and it's pre-funded through a general fund reallocation for this year, FY26, so our link recommendation is to accept the Mayor's proposed budget. Public Safety Administration, we've got funding for two months of a new security officer position at the new Senior Therapeutic Center, coming soon, and as well as two months of a part-time security officer at that same center. Link recommends acceptance. Community Corrections, go to the second page, yep, highlights. We've got some shifts in budget to account for vacancies, filling of vacancies. We're continuing to fund recruitment efforts. As we know, recruitment and retention is important and not always easy. We're continuing to fund the Hope Center contract, provide recovery therapy, and then we have some capital projects as well, cell medical monitoring system, boiler replacement, door software, and staff radios, and you'll see the different funding sources there. Link recommends acceptance of the proposed budget. Moving on to police, we've got funding for two new recruit classes. We are reprioritizing funding for clerk positions and police rehire retiree positions by request, and then we have funding for DNA testing technology services. Next page, I won't go over all of these. As you can see, there's a bunch of equipment replacement, vehicles, helmets, hardware, we've got some mobile radio refreshes, we've got K-9, and all the different funds that they're coming from. Link recommends acceptance of the budget. Fire and emergency services, we are funded for a full year for the 21 firefighter positions added with the SAFER grant, and an additional 13 firefighters we added mid-year for EC13. We're funding for two new recruit classes and continuing to fund the wellness coordinator through UK, and we've got some big, big capital funding items as well. We've got the design phase for the training academy facility. Those of our colleagues who went on the fire field day got to see kind of in the back what that land looks like now, and hopefully be able to envision what that new training facility looks like in the future. We've got heavy fleet replacement, of course. That's always a huge chunk. One heavy rescue, two engines, and an EC, and then turnout gear, and EMS equipment replacement plan, and all the various funds that they're coming from. The link recommendation for this division is to fund one additional social worker to staff the community crisis co-response team for half a year, starting in January 2026 at a cost of $40,001, and we are funding that from the firefighter overtime budget from the sworn budget, which at the moment in the mayor's proposed budget is $2.5 million. Other than that, we are accepting the mayor's proposed budget. Moving on to social services. First is family services. We're continuing funding for custodial and operational supplies. Those are increasing due to new clinical space for the hands program as well as youth services staff, that those costs are increasing by about 20%, and we're continuing to fund our contract with FCPS for bus transportation. Link recommendation is acceptance of the budget. Aging and disability services. We've got, as we noted before, the two months of the two new senior and therapeutic center personnel, including six positions listed below, administrative specialists, custodial worker, public service worker, two recreational specialist seniors, and a program manager senior. So I think we're all very excited about the senior and therapeutic center and all that it entails. Link recommends acceptance of the budget. Youth services. We're renovating the family care center clinic. That's $50,000 from capital relocation fund and funding for probation and court services and summer youth job training program. Those salaries are moving to partners for youth under the commissioner's office. Link recommends acceptance. Social services administration. Funding provided for the summer youth job training and recovery support living assistance fund, $300,000 to fund 50 clients per month at $50 per client. Link recommends acceptance. And lastly, partner agencies. The biggest item of note is CASA receiving an additional $278,000 in their mayor's proposed budget for their operating expenses. That brings us up to the same level as our surrounding counties in terms of the municipal contribution to CASA's efforts. And Link recommends accepting the mayor's budget. That's all I got. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Vice Mayor, for your presentation. Council members, are there any questions? And first we have Council Member Reynolds. Thank you, Vice Mayor, for that presentation. I know from experience that link is very, very large and it's a lot of really important information, so thank you for working on that link. I would like to go to the community crisis co-response team social worker position. I just have a few questions about that. So was this a position that was requested for the budget this year? Council Member Morgan, do you want to speak to that? No, it was not. It was an item I put in as a link recommendation. Okay. So is this for an additional social worker? So we're just starting the co-response team, right? And we have somebody. So is this an additional social worker to that or how is this supposed to work? Yes, this would add essentially and this will expand that team. So we have one unit that is Monday through Thursday for ten hours. This would provide an expansion of that team. Okay. So I'm super supportive of this model and I'm always about expanding paramedicine and using social workers. But I guess my concern is that this was not something that was asked for and that it might not be something that the fire department is ready for because we just started this for the first time. Could I bring Chief Wells up to ask a few questions? Thank you, Chief. You know how I think it's important to use social workers and that I'm a big fan of expanding our hours. And I know in talking with you, you have been too. Is this something that you feel like you're ready for or how do you feel about this position since we're just starting this specific program? Well, this is something that I have had conversations with Councilmember Morton about and I'm so very grateful for his passion and his dedication to this program. And as you have all heard me say at some point in time, the residents of this community decide what level of service they're willing to pay for. You all allocate that via funds to me and we'll make it happen. And Councilmember Morton knows what my hesitations have been because as you all know, I'm very much a planner and I like to have a good data set and I like to be able to come at you with a comprehensive plan. And ultimately, we will make work whatever this body decides is most important for our community. Okay, but this wasn't part of the plan for this coming fiscal year? That's correct. I did not put it in there. I felt like we were going to probably try to accumulate maybe a larger body of data. We have some very preliminary stuff, but some of that has caveats to it. So there was a period of time when they didn't have a vehicle that had lights and sirens on it, so that really skewed the numbers as far as when they were arriving on scene and what they were able to do. The preliminary numbers, to me, look pretty good and I think at some point, certainly adding a second team is going to be the best possible scenario for this community. When that is, that's something that we can work through collectively. Do you think that this is a position that potentially could be grant funded? I think, and this is Jason's opinion, I think of all of the programs that we have, the one that stands out as most likely to be grant funded would be something like this. So that would be a potential funding source instead of maybe overtime? Overtime is a concern. We work very closely with the mayor's staff to come up with a number that we felt could get us by, but there's no fat in that number. So that's certainly a concern for us. Do you usually use all your overtime every year? I think our, yes, very close to it. And that number fluctuates so much. A couple of years ago we had a number of members who were deployed with the military and so that inflated our number. So it's very susceptible to ebbs and flows. With that said, I think our estimated overtime usage for this current fiscal year is going to be around 2.7 and 2.5 was what was allocated this year because our staffing level is a little bit better this year. Okay. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Council Member. Next is Council Member Savicny. Thank you, Chair. And I just wanted to take the time to thank the mayor and her staff on the CASA allocation. I'm a CASA. I do know how important it is. It's really money that you can spend up front. It really has an impact to money down the road. So I do really appreciate it. And to all of you that are new, like I think we've asked for this about three or four times in a row. So it's nice to see it actually come to fruition. Thank you so much. Thank you, Council Member. Next is Council Member Morton. Thank you. And I'll shed a little bit of light on just the crisis response item. So as we continue to build a safer and healthier Lexington, we must respond to a reality that is both urgent and deeply humane. The increasing number of people in our community experiencing mental health crisis. So we know that right now we're headed towards possibly a mental health crisis. We know that suicidal ideation and suicide cases were at its highest last year, 2024, and they're upticking this year. And this unit, what it does is experts, mental health clinicians, social workers, firefighters that can respond to crises, 911 scenes, and provide expert assessments and get those folks the resources and services that they need. So just with the preliminary data that Chief Wells has highlighted, I'll talk about the month of March first. So the month of March, we know that there was about 4,000 EMS calls. Out of those 4,000 EMS calls, a total of 271 could have met the need either for behavior, health, ideation, or suicidal ideation. Out of those 271, 27 were responded to. So 10%. To me, that shows a need for it at the least. With that being said, while some calls may have required law enforcement due to safety concerns, it's pretty clear many more could have been served with this expanded capacity. Let's go keep going. What crisis response does, it builds trust, especially in communities where interactions with law enforcement previously and in the past have not been so kind, I would say, in certain cases, and especially during mental health crises. When folks are having mental health crises, they should have someone that's an expert or have someone that can give them guidance and lead them towards the direct lane and resources they should have. It reduces escalation. Clinicians are trained to de-escalate and provide trauma-informed care. It connects people to long-term help. By referring individuals to resources like our new mental health 24-hour hospital, our new empath center by the UK Healthcare and other community services, we can really start to get those folks the resources they need. And then lastly, it eases the burden on our police and also our hospital systems by freeing up officers and ER folks when they are needed most and putting them where they are needed most. So why expand now? Expanding now not only sustains the program, we know it's based on federal grants, and we all know where federal grants stand, where we lie right now, so it sustains it, but also it expands it. It provides for an extra unit, which means it doubles the service. To me, I actually wanted to expand it right now, but through compromise, and I thought that even through expanding it could provide better pilot data, better information in general, but through listening to the concerns of LFD and then listening to some council concerns, we have decided to wait to gain more data all the way up to January so that they can have the data to figure out where is the best expansion needed for right now, so that they can have the data to see what they would like, but then also knowing that we have an E911 triage worker inside of E911 that will be able to assist with dispatching, crisis response, but also helping folks that are calling with mental health concerns. So like I said, I know there's some concerns relying on grants. I would not want to rely on grants for anything right now, at least for the next three years. Like I said, it sustains and expands, but then also the overtime funding. We know that in the fund balance, if there's a need to put $40,000 towards overtime for the fire department, we can do so. We can add more if it looks like they're going to run out of overtime. So that can hit that concern. And then lastly, if we want to save lives, reduce trauma, and strengthen public trust, we must invest in a second crisis response team, and first of all, maybe invest in more than that, to fund through stable, sustainable sources rather than temporary grants, and that is why I put that forward. Thank you. Thank you, Councilmember. Are there any additional questions? Councilmember Hale. Thank you, Chair. Chief Wells, currently, how many crisis response team social workers do we have right now? So we have one mental health professional. He's actually a master's level counselor, which is, I think, per the agreement that we have, it could be social worker, counselor, any type of mental or behavioral health specialist, and one firefighter. So there are two members assigned to that team. Have we ever had an incident where they were overextended, like they were already called out, and then we had a call happen that we couldn't send? Yes. Yes, sir. And I can't tell you how frequently that's happened. Our data, our RMS system is great for putting data in. It takes a lot of work to get data out, so we're crunching numbers, and Councilmember Morton's numbers were exactly on. He was right on with his assessment, but we don't know how many of those are happening at alternative times. We don't know how many of those were not suitable for a CRT response, and I don't know how many times they were overlapping. We'll work on getting that data, but I don't have it yet. Okay. Is it safe to say that it happens frequently? I would hate to speculate, honestly. I just don't know. I'm sorry. Thank you, Chief. I want to say I would support this, because I think even one time is too much for a situation like crisis response, and we are funding other things, and something like this is kind of important, and I wouldn't want to put it off for however many years we're putting off, waiting on grant funding or whatever. So, thank you, Chair, and I do want to just say I do support this with you, and thank you, Councilmember Morton. Thank you, Councilmember. Next, we have Councilmember Baxter. Thank you, Chair. First, let me say that Chief made mention that he is a planner, and we have had the conversation on numerous occasions how impressed I am with the level of preparedness that our fire department puts forward. I am hesitant to add something to the budget that wasn't an initial request, but I understand the reasoning behind adding the position. Also, I have big concerns about taking money from our overtime budget, and I want to make sure that I am clear on the numbers. I think I'm looking in the right place. The original request for overtime was 2.9 and some change, and the proposed budget was at 2.5. Is that correct? Yes, ma'am, that's correct. Commissioner, can you help me understand the difference between the request and the proposed? Yes, ma'am. When we calculate overtime need, we look at a couple of different things. We're looking at historical spend, and we're also looking at staffing. A significant portion of the overtime need for fire in particular depends on the amount of staffing. We have increased the staffing at fire the last couple of years. As the staffing goes up, the overtime goes down. As Chief mentioned, we do have those anomalous situations where we have more military deployments. Obviously, that is something that we don't necessarily know in advance. If that happens, we have to make adjustments mid-year and account for that. As we were doing those calculations and adjustments, we felt that the 2.5 was appropriate. That being said, if there is more need during the course of the year, we obviously have to make that happen. Same with police, same with corrections, same with waste services, same with all of the different divisions. If there's a need, we've got to make it work. I said I was hesitant on decreasing the overtime budget. I realize it's only $40,000, but it is a further reduction in overtime. I also have concern because this is a new program. We haven't had time to work out efficiencies and see how best to utilize this team. I feel like we're jumping the gun a little bit on adding someone else to the team when we don't have... Chief, when actually did we institute this team? It was just in the fall, right? This year, March. Just a few months. While I understand the intent, I don't know that I can be in support of adding this position at this time. That's all. Thank you. Thank you. Council Member Savigna, you've already spoken. I'm just going to chime in and then I'll come back to you. Just sticking with the same issue. Right now we have this co-crisis response team and it's made up of three people? First of all, Council Member, I apologize. I misspoke. It was February, not March. I apologize for that. There are two people who are assigned. One firefighter, paramedic, and one clinical counselor. It was originally designed with three people, though, correct? Is that supposed to include a police officer, a firefighter, and a social worker? The way that the program was actually written is it is a mental health professional who is paired with a first responder. That first responder could be a police officer, it could be a firefighter. Due to LPD staffing issues, we felt like the low-hanging fruit, honestly, was for us to utilize one of our firefighter paramedics. It's not necessarily an individual who we hired or was added to our authorized strength. That's somebody who is covered with overtime. Then we also have this position out at E911 that works in conjunction and it's to service the dispatch for calls for service in addition to working some of these situations out on the phone if at all possible. Honestly, Council Member Morton probably is more informed on that and the progress of that than I am. I think that's very, very exciting to see how that develops, but that will be someone who is specially trained to route those calls to the appropriate entity. For clarity, that position at E911 and the social worker position are grant funded and the only person that's not grant funded is the sworn firefighter? I believe that's correct, yes sir. The other question I was going to ask was about deployment. I'm clear on that. I'm supportive of this position because it's funded at six months as well, right? It's half a year to start in January. Yes sir, I believe that's the intent. By then, you would almost have a full year of data to better inform how to function these teams or this team. That's correct. I do have one more question and it's for the Partners for Youth summer job training program budget going under the Commissioner's office. Commissioner, is that to help us better access those funds and get those students paid? I felt like that was a big lift with HR and payroll to make sure that we were doing that. Is that part of the reason that we're putting this money in your office budget now? It's several reasons. One is my belief that the finances need to go with the programming part and that creates efficiency as well. What was happening before was our program coordinator, Ms. Shackelford, would have to coordinate with our director personally for all of those things to get people paid and get on the payroll and check timesheets and it's inefficient. It needs to be in the same person in charge of both programming and the financial part. In terms of HR, we are able to have both interns and a part-time person to help with some of the logistics for those six weeks. Okay. Alright, I was just wondering about the change and it sounds like it addresses some of the concerns that I have. Alright. Thank you, Commissioner. You're so welcome. Chair, if I may. I was seeing Ken coming up. I wonder if he had... Commissioner, do you have anything else to add to this? Okay. Alright, Vice Mayor. Thank you, Chair. Just to kind of piggyback and reiterate some of what Council Member Morton said, I shared a lot of the same concerns when this recommendation came up, but I think ultimately I shared Council Member Morton's concern about federal funding uncertainty. We have had a pattern, particularly with the paramedicine program, of creating grant-funded positions, seeing how well they worked, and then making permanent funding through us and then potentially applying for grants to add positions. And I think that's been a really good model that has worked for us. In terms of the timing, what made me more comfortable with this recommendation was pushing it to January and funding it for half a year. Those alleviated some of my concerns. As Council Member Brown says, we'll have nearly a year to be able to assess this position and how to deploy that position. So there were a lot of things and I appreciate Council Member Morton's willingness to compromise on this particular issue because this is not the form that was brought to us initially. But I think this made myself and Council Member Beasley comfortable with it. And in terms of the overtime, we have an opportunity to revisit that at fund balance. I cannot imagine this government not funding overtime to the level that this department needs it. So I think we have opportunities to fill those holes if they come up, if they exist. All that to say, the link with these changes and compromises, we're very comfortable with bringing this recommendation forward. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Vice Mayor. Council Member Morton. Thank you. I guess this is a quick summary. So we're talking about crisis. As we know, crisis takes place 24 hours, 7 days a week. This unit is 4 days a week, 10 hours. So we still can't meet that full threshold, but we know that they're working Monday through Thursday, 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Crisis has taken place Friday, Saturday, Sunday from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Crisis has taken place Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday from 6 p.m. back to 8 a.m. So no matter how, if expanded or where it's expanded, I believe that the LFD would have ample opportunity to figure out the best place to put this second unit, where it's best fit, whether it's two in one shift to keep piling, whether it's two on Monday through Thursday, the second shift, whether it's the Friday, Saturday, Sunday, first or second shift, I mean, crisis is not going to stop. So we know availability is a big question. This isn't a District 1 thing. This is a citywide initiative. Crisis takes place in every district in this city, and folks deserve to have access to resources and services when they have a crisis. Does it work? Well, the month of March, 271 calls they could have responded to, 27 calls responded to. That's 10%. Out of those, out of that 10%, 65% of those calls either received resources or they were transported. It works. And we're giving it time to see where to best fit all the way to January. So the concern related to it being this pilot program, they will have a lot of data by come January to figure out where they see where they believe is best fit. Not where we see it, where the LFD sees best fit. And then, let's move on. Overtime budget. As mentioned, $40,000, I don't see that as a big swayer, and we'll have conversations in the next three months, three to four months, and we can put $40,000 back in there. We can put $100,000, whatever is needed to fund LFD to make sure that they are effective, efficient, and responding to the needs of the constituents of Lexington. The triage worker. So the triage worker, it's going to be pretty hard for a triage worker to dispatch a unit. So, that's the issues that E911 is kind of working out. What can we use this triage worker for? Well, right now, we can't use it for dispatch. It just can't be used for dispatch. There's one unit. But if we had multiple units, it could be used for dispatch. It could be used for what Councilman Brown was saying regarding trying to in lower level instances, talking to those folks, giving them resources on the phone. So this is a it can be a well, a collective group of E911 folks in the field providing emergency assistance. Let's just say medical, direct medical assistance to those in need. So, let's not wait until the next crisis to take action. The need is already here, and the solution is here. Let's lead with care, and let's lead with courage. I believe it's the right time. The right time is now. Thank you, Councilmember. Next is Councilmember Gray. Thank you, Chair. I appreciate you. So, I just wanted to say that I fully support this budget amendment, your proposal for your link. This is a major concern, especially regarding the next generation of leaders. And I have seen our paramedicine team is award winning. And I know that people around the nation reach out to our department about our program. And we should be continuously leading the way because last year, and still this year, we're seeing increased number of individuals of all age groups. Particularly bothersome to me are those who are under 18 and who are having the suicidal idolization right now. So, this is our time to be, to put our people first with our budget which is what our job is to do. And just be considerate also how overworked our staff, our employees are. They're doing such a great work changing lives, saving lives every single day. And I'm hopeful that we'll be equally supportive in ensuring that we have the funds going towards this program. Thank you. Thank you, Councilmember. Next is Councilmember Reynolds. Thank you, Chair. I just really want to be clear that I am in full support of this model. I have been for years. I have wanted our fire department to move to something like this for a long time. My main concern is imposing on a division something that they feel they're not ready for. When I know that we're in a position that we can lead and we can do things, I just want to, I feel very torn because I just, I want to make sure that we're doing this in the right way and that with the support of everyone that we're working with. So I just have a question to something that you said, Councilmember Morton. When you said that this could be, they could both be dispatched, the idea of this new team is to cover hours that the current team is not covering or they're covering the same hours? That would be up for LFD to decide. Like I said, there's times where possibly that folks, Monday through Thursday, 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. that there's another call coming in. So for instance, if you get a call on the north side of town crisis, that team is on the north side of town. What if you get a call on the south side of town where there are no responses? Nobody can go out there. Even if it's the same call on the north side of town. It's the second call. So it's providing just double services. But that would be for LFD to decide if they want to put that within the same, that policy within Monday through Thursday, the same shift if they wanted to go to Friday, Saturday, Sunday. So it's an expansion based on the data that they receive that they feel is best in where they see fit. I think that's a distinction. And then I think there's a lot of logistics to work out. If we're using a firefighter or an EMS person that is already being used elsewhere, then that takes a lot of planning to pull them for overtime or for a shift and then multiple shifts. Like I said, I'm very torn because this is something that I believe in. I'm not sure that this is the appropriate way to go about doing it. That's all. Thank you. Alright, Councilmember. Thank you. Are there any other questions for this link and this report out? Seeing none, we're close to 12 o'clock. I think y'all got the email that we're going to break for lunch now and come back at 1230 and when we come back we'll entertain a motion to approve link recommendations and then go into individual council requests. So with that, I'd entertain a motion to recess. Motion to recess. Second. Motion was made to recess and seconded. Are there any questions? All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Seeing none, opposed. We're in recess. Thank you. Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Silence All right I need a I need a motion to come out of recess. Motion to resume. All right we'll go ahead and get started and we'll I'll entertain a motion to come out of recess. Motion to come out of recess. Is there a second? All right there's a motion to come out of recess and second it. Are there any questions? Hearing none all those in favor please say aye. Aye. Are there any opposed? Hearing none we are back in session. All right so we'll pick up where we left off and I think all the links have reported out and now we're going to move into motions from the link chairs in the same order that they presented so we'll start with you Council Member Ellinger. Thank you Chair. On behalf of the link I move to approve the Chief Administrative Officer in Housing Advocacy and Community Development link recommendations including the addition of a part-time employee for the Black Williams Center at a cost of $20,162.32 to be paid for by recognized personnel savings in fiscal year 26. So moved. Second. All right a motion was made to approve that link recommendation and second it. Are there any questions? Seeing none all those in favor please say aye. Aye. Are there any that oppose? Hearing none that motion passes. Council Member Ellinger do you have any other motions? No Chair that's all thank you. All right thank you. Next we'll move to the EQPW link. Council Member Savigny. Thank you Chair. On behalf of the link I move to approve the Environmental Quality and Public Works link recommendations including all process recommendations including but not limited to the Council's review and approval of the EQPW link recommendations. All right a motion was made to approve the EQPW link recommendations and second it. Are there any questions to the motion? Hearing none all those in favor please say aye. Aye. All right a motion was made to approve the EQPW link recommendations and second it. Are there any questions to the motion? Seeing none all those in favor please say aye. Aye. Are there any that oppose? Hearing none that motion passes. Council Member Savigny do you have any other motions? No Chair. All right moving to the next link Finance Economic Development and Planning. Council Member Lynch. Thank you Chair. On behalf of the link I move to approve the Finance Economic Development and Planning link a review of accounting position at a cost of $145,424. All right a motion was made and seconded. Just for clarity Council Member Lynch is it to be paid for from the FY twenty five fund balance? Yes. Okay. All right are there any questions to the motion? Seeing none. I'm sorry go ahead. Council Member that would be the FY twenty six fund balance. All right so Kelly did you get that? All right. Any questions to that motion? So it's reducing the starting fund balance for the FY twenty six budget. All right if there's no questions all those in favor please say aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. prioritizing connections amongst educational institutions, students, and workers, and that has a cost of $90,000 to support career awareness and experiential learning. The second strategy, which says strategy one up there, is to create and elevate a tech council as a centralized convener of Lexington's tech-based ecosystems. The recommendation from them will be $300,000 in the first year to support a schedule for the organization to achieve financial stability over five years, so there'd be a waning amount of money for that, with money decreasing each year in a pretty transparent manner. The tech councils primarily, the cities that are overachieving with the tech employment have very active tech councils, which tend to be that area's primary hub for employers that they filter information through, and that group is the group that tends to be the promoter of the city for tech jobs. The third strategy is supporting Lexington's innovation and entrepreneurial capacity by building on high-growth opportunity, so that has an ask of $100,000 to scale existing entrepreneurial programs, startups, and connect companies to first customers through direct assistance. And the last strategy is to accelerate the marketing, branding, and storytelling of our tech ecosystem by focusing on tech-enabled applications industries, and that's $140,000 to continue to support tech applications vertical with Bluegrass AgTech and develop new marketing and branding around tech-enabled verticals. So the total funding is $630,000. I am proposing that as a pre-funded item as we finalize this year. I think the first one is probably the most important, but the second one will come right after it, the tech council piece. So if there were one item to approve, it would be $90,000. If there were two items, it would be 390 for strategy one and two, and then the additional two are a total of 630. So do I make that in the form of a motion so that it can be discussed, or would you rather it just be discussed so that we... No, I think, yeah, I would hold off on making a motion so everybody gets to present, and then we'll go through it and make motions. But right now, I think it's a good opportunity to take some questions. Yeah, happy to take questions. All right, first we have Council Member Lynch. Thank you, Chair. Council Member Savigny, are these strategies taken from the report? Are these the recommendations that we'll get in the report when we hear it at the end of June? Yes, yeah, we were trying to... Unfortunately, we were trying to get them to give us our results in March prior to the mayor's proposed budget. And they just were not finished with the field work to get it to us on time. So we will see them in June. And then, personnel-wise, have you worked out, with Kevin Atkins, I'm guessing, personnel-wise, who's gonna be accomplishing all of this? I have not worked that out, but I would say that the thing that says strategy one up there, which is actually the second, it's Lexington's Tech Council, as a convener, there's a group called TAB that exists today. So it would be probably supporting that group or deciding if we were going to morph that into some sort of quasi-paired agency. And the other piece is the connections, I don't know if that would come necessarily out of his office or not, but we haven't gotten that far down the road. Thank you, thank you. Thank you, Council Member. Next, we have Vice Mayor Wu. Thank you, Chair. Council Member Savigny, do you have the exact date of that presentation? I think it's June 24th. 24th. And where is that presentation happening? I think it's in BFED. BFED, okay. I'm wondering, too, in terms of the timing, I know you said you've gotten a preview of that presentation, but the rest of us have not. And I'm a little leery to support this level of funding when we haven't seen that presentation. So I'm wondering if you would be, and you don't have to answer this question necessarily, but if you would be open to having this discussion as a fund balance discussion after we have seen this presentation and been able to get some questions answered. While I'd be willing to have it as a fund balance discussion, I don't want to not, I want to approve, I would want this body to try to approve something because I hate doing studies that we actually then don't do something. So, but I would entertain a partial, like a partial funding. Okay, and you said right now your funding source is to pre-fund it? Yep. Okay, thank you. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Vice Mayor. While I'm waiting on other folks to log in with questions, Council Member Savigny, I'll just, maybe I'll ask Kevin Atkins. Council Member Savigny said strategy two is now probably the number one priority in regards to strategies. And Kevin, that looks like something that could be administered from your office or through your office. Can you speak to that? I think strategy two really helps kick off this whole initiative. If I was listing them in order of priority for myself, as I mentioned to Council Member Savigny, two would have been my first. It fits in with what Amy Glasscock does today. And I think if you look at what this does, some of the work going on up at UK, the hill getting ready to open here next month, I think, and just some of the other work that are going on with the tech groups around town, this is the piece that we can put into place fairly quickly and be administered by our office. And then I think as we move down the other strategies, it requires setting up an organization, you know, a professional, group of professionals to help lead this. And then you move on down the rest of the items. Okay. Now, I appreciate that. And I guess that's why I asked. And Council Member Savigny, I appreciate all your work and leadership on the study and getting it executed and bringing these recommendations to us. And I'm with you. I think that once we've had a study and we have a consultant like Techonomy engaged, I'd like to keep them engaged with us moving forward. And then also the work or the conversations that we're having around digital accessibility, I think that strategy too ties right into that in Kevin's office. So I would support funding that now and maybe having a conversation about some of the other priorities and fund balance. All right, Council Members, any other questions, comments? Seeing none, we'll move to the next. Thank you, Council Member. We'll move to the next individual council requests. And that's Council Member Ellinger. Thank you, Chair. And I've made a request for 250,000 to LexTran for a microtransit pilot project. The community has been asking for a pilot project for the last three years. LexTran, who is here, is finishing up on a feasibility study and they're gonna be coming back to the work session here on June 3rd. And as we've discussed microtransit, it helps fill in the gaps on the fixed routes for people who, on public transportation, for their jobs, hospital, pharmacy, grocery, many different reasons. And this would help us move forward on the microtransit by taking the feasibility study and moving forward with a pilot project. So I would request 250,000. Thank you, Chair. And I would use it from work administration on pre-funding. Thank you. All right, thank you, Council Member. Are there any questions in regards to this individual budget request? First, we have Council Member LaGrie. Thank you, Chair. As Council Member Ellinger mentioned, representatives from LexTran are here. I have a couple of questions for them, if that's all right. Thank you, Mr. Combs. I was curious, Council Member Ellinger mentioned this, but I know you all are in the process of doing this feasibility study, and you're about to report that out to the board and also share it with Council in an upcoming presentation. Can you share a little bit about how this $250,000 would relate to your timeline, your process, and your approach for a pilot when it comes to microtransit? Thank you. Sure, and good afternoon, everyone. I'm happy to be here. We are currently finishing up that feasibility study that will be reported to the board tomorrow, and then after that, we'll be back here in June, as Council Member Ellinger said, to present that to this body. Our timeline really depends on funding, and we'll see from the study that there are areas in the city where we think microtransit could be effective. It's just a very expensive service. So once we are able to identify and allocate enough funding, we would then go through the normal RFP process to identify a contractor. That would be a turnkey service model where we would allow a contractor to fully build out that service and provide it. So really, our timeline depends, once the study is complete and our recommendations are sort of published, it depends on when we can identify enough funding to make a pilot happen. And when you're saying identify the funding to make the pilot happen, what kind of impact, if you're able to share, and maybe we're getting ahead of ourselves for the presentation in the near future, but what kind of impact would this $250,000 have? Where does that number come from? I'm just curious about that in relation to the bigger picture. I'm not sure where the number came from. And I guess where I wanna put our, because we're asking you, and it's all about priority, so I felt like we need to have some skin in the game here and use this as good faith to move forward and look at when we start doing an 80-20 match, if we can go, because you're gonna be the one that's gonna be out here being in charge of it, and I thought this would be a good start that you could use this money as an ability to go get more money and show that we're in good faith that we will move forward with this. Sure, if there are opportunities for grants that come available, we're unsure of when and if that's gonna happen. If that does come to fruition, then absolutely, this would be a wonderful use to take this money to match federal grants. There's a bit of uncertainty around those at the moment. I can't say if or when that will come around again. If we're talking about a $250,000 pilot project on its own, we would have to really narrow down the problem that we're trying to solve. That would be maybe something that could work on late nights, maybe that's a weekday service that would run to help support those late night hours, something like that. We would just have to tailor the pilot to fit the amount of funding that we have. Council Member Ellinger, when you say pre-fund, what does that look like in practice for us as we're looking for the source of this funding and understanding it in relation to the rest of the budget? And I'll defer to either the chair or... Thank you. You're welcome. So typically with our pre-funds, we take current year savings or additional revenues that we see are either expenses that are running below or revenues that are running above. And we would go ahead and, as part of the budget process, do a budget amendment to go ahead and fund the items now. And so we would be taking savings from the FY25 budget in order to do this the way it's proposed. And how much money do you all have available for pre-funding just as we're having these various conversations about individual requests? We're working on it now. And we know as we, what we presented today was 10 months of financials. We still have two months of budget to add to that as well as two months of expenses. But we can't really give you a number because I don't know, but we're trying to squeeze what we can out of that. We've already got 18.3 million in the mayor's proposed budget as part of the pre-fund. Are you able to share a ballpark or? I'm just trying to figure out how do we make informed decisions with a number of requests from individual council members. So we can't get millions, I can tell you that. But we could probably get a few hundred thousand. It's just, it's really messy. And so the higher we go, the more places we are pulling from and we're, at that point, we are in the couch cushions, we are under the couch, we've moved the couch, we've done all of that in order to get it. But I think we can get a few hundred thousand, but a million or more, that's gonna be very difficult. Thank you, my time's up and thank you for letting me put you on the spot about that. Thanks, Chair. Thank you, Council Member. Next, we have Vice Mayor Wu. Thank you, Chair. Mr. Combs, can I ask you, if we were to fund this 250 for the pilot project, is Lextran prepared to match that in any way or to complement that fund? I need to have that discussion with our board of directors. I'm not able to answer that today. Okay. And so this kind of leads to my next question and I don't know that you can answer it either, then how long of a pilot would we be looking at, potentially? That would depend on how we tailor the service. If we shorten the hours of operation, we could extend that for a longer period of time. If we have a longer hours of operation, that would shorten the duration of the pilot. It just depends on how we tailor that service. Okay. My biggest concern with this recommendation, and it actually echoes my concern with Council Member Savigny's recommendation, is that we have your feasibility presentation coming to us in a couple of weeks, but we don't have it in front of us yet. So again, we're being asked to fund something where we don't have a lot of these questions answered and we haven't had the opportunity to even ask these questions. And it sounds like on your end, on Lex Transit, there's still some unanswered questions as well. So while I think a lot of us support microtransit, the concept of it, this feels a little bit carpet before the horse. And then to Council Member Legree's question to Director Luker about us, and I don't know what the rest of my colleagues are, where they're going to be pulling their funding for their asks, but if we have more pre-fund asks, we're kind of pushing into another sort of unknown amount of money. So my thinking is, if we're not going to get these presentations in time for us to make these decisions today, it would make more sense for me to have these conversations at fund balance when we have more information, when we have more questions answered, and when we have a solid fund balance number so we know what we're working with. Here, we're kind of tapping into an unknown and we're funding some unknown ideas or projects. So that's my two cents. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Vice Mayor. Next, we have Council Member Baxter. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Mr. Commons, for being with us today. You said that the feasibility study will be presented to the Board tomorrow, and then what happens after that? Do they have to vote on whether or not this is something that they would want to move forward with, or what is the next steps? We would have the conversations with the Board to determine what their interest is, and yeah, I mean, they would be up to the Board just to determine whether or not that's something that they would be interested in funding. Okay. That would likely not be into the next year's budget. So our FY26 budget is already sort of set. This would be an FY27 budget conversation. Okay. And then you also said that you hadn't had the conversation about match funding with the Board yet, which I completely understand. Do you feel like if LexTran wasn't prepared to provide matching funds, that $250,000 would give us any amount of good working data to see whether or not this would work in our community or not? It would be a very small-scale pilot. I don't know that I've seen one that small, so I don't know if I can give you examples of a $250,000 microtransit pilot study. Maybe someone, maybe we can look and see if we can find an example of that, but I do think that it would be a very narrowly tailored pilot project. And this can be a conversation for the presentation too later, but on average, what have you seen in other communities as far as the cost of a pilot project? It's probably somewhere around a million, between 700 to a million. Is that fair? Okay, thank you. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Council Member. Next, we have Council Member Gray. I no longer have a question. Thank you, sir. Thank you. Next, we have Council Member Curtis. Thank you, Chair, and thank you, Mr. Combs, again, for being here today. And I know that we've had extensive conversations since January about the feasibility of a microtransit program, and so I just really want to ask a question directly, which is that in all of those conversations, we've been talking about the pilot project as a potential for the fiscal year 27 budget, and I know that we just touched on that, but is that still how Lextran is viewing it as a possibility for the fiscal year 27 budget? Yes, it would be FY 27. Okay. Yes. Thank you. Thank you, Council Member. While we're waiting to see if anybody else has some questions, I'll just kind of weigh in as well. And I guess I really don't have questions. I'm just gonna speak in support of it. I'm supportive of this. I think, you know, there's been some folks in our community asking for this service, and I think Lextran has been cooperative in doing their research, funding the study, putting their money where their mouth is to see if this is a viable solution for our community. The same folks have been advocating to us to do the same, and I think this is an opportunity that we can show our commitment to funding a pilot or partially funding a pilot to get us the information that we may need to move forward and that this is a viable option. Even if Lextran can't match it completely or we give the board enough emphasis or support that they feel comfortable funding it by supporting this, I think is what we need to do. With the understanding that microtransit might not meet everybody's expectations, but I think we won't know that, whether it does or it doesn't, until we actually do a pilot and follow through. So I'm supportive of this request. I think this is an opportunity for us to put our money where our mouth is and help Lextran get the information that they need to move forward. So thank you, Council Member. Next is Council Member Savigny. Thank you, Chair. And I just wanted to ask our financial people, because you just made me aware of something, because several of us are going to be probably looking at pre-funding items. I know there's a timing consideration, and could you just share with us what the timing consideration is? Because we run out of time to get something approved. Yes, so budget amendments have to be read in separate meetings, so we can't do a double read on budget amendments. So in order to have the pre-fund with the budget, we will have first reading on June 10th and second reading on June 12th. And so any items that are going to be part of the pre-fund in order to get through in time have to be decided prior to that date so that we can get those on for Council approval. Thank you, that's all I have, Chair. All right, thank you. Are there any other questions for Council Member Ellinger? Seeing none, we'll move to the next individual, Council Member, individual request, and that's Council Member Boone. Thank you, Chair. I plan on making a motion to remove this item. You want to do that now or after? All right, I move to remove the individual recommendation number nine. Initially, we were going to need the funds to make the repair on Jack's Creek. On Friday, the bid came in lower than expected, so the recommendation is no longer needed. Thank you. I move that Council Member Boone's individual Council request and second it. And second it. Are there any questions to the motion? Didn't have enough money to build it. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Are there any that oppose? Hearing none, that motion passes. Thank you, Council Member. All right, next on the list is, I'll, well, I'm two in a row. I'll go ahead. So this request is a request to fund the LexTran Downtown Connector Route, and this is a pilot as well, to start next spring. $250,000, those are real numbers. Those are hard numbers, and I think LexTran can speak to it. The vehicles, we have secured funding for vehicles through the MPO grant, and I think we can get those ordered and have those ready to roll next spring. And this funding will help fund the pilot for all of next year, all of next spring through the fall, and that will give us a lot of information about what we need to do going forward and what the real cost may be. So Council Members, I'll entertain any questions to this item, and I think LexTran is here as well to answer questions. All right, Vice Mayor Wu. Thank you, Chair. Mr. Combs, my questions will be for you. At this point, do you know what the potential scale of the pilot will be? We've looked at several different options. I think we've landed on three days a week. Is that where we sort of landed on? And that would cover, was it eight hours a day? So, I mean, we look at it in terms of hours per day. I think four to midnight is sort of what the committee that we were working with has landed on, but for us, it's just eight hours a day. How long is the pilot? It'll last all summer. So we're trying to get from April to October, we're landing. Okay, and obviously next year, April through October, okay. And in this pilot, is LexTran doing any sort of match? We are operating the service, so the technology, we already have. So, and we're doing the capital. So our dollars will go towards the capital purchases of the vehicles. But the trick is, we can use those vehicles in other revenue service when the trolley is not in operation. Okay, is there a difference to this pilot starting on time in April if we fund it now versus if we funded it in October? No, I think we should be okay either way. But funding it now would give the board a little more comfort in going ahead and getting the vehicles procured and ready to rock and roll. Okay, thank you very much. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Vice Mayor. Next is Council Member Savigny. Thank you, Chair. Forgive me for my naivete. I don't know exactly what the downtown, pilot downtown connector is, so could you just describe? Sure. Describe what the plan would. It's essentially a fixed route circulator that would run from the warehouse block, so National Avenue-ish, over to the distillery district on Manchester Street, and that would happen during times where we feel like we'd have the most activity between those centers. So 4 p.m. to midnight, four days a week. Thank you, that's all I have, Chair. All right, thank you, Council Member. Next we have Council Member Baxter. Thank you, Chair. So I might need you to, I'm sorry. So you mentioned securing funding from the MPO to purchase the vehicles, or what was the funding from the MPO for? I know I'm on the MPO, but I would like for you to tell everybody else, because Mr. Combs said that their capital funding would be purchasing the vehicle, so I'm trying to figure out. It's the match, yeah, so we'll be matching the MPO's capital dollars. And I think that match amount is 280,000 is the match that I think LuxTran has to come up with to match, I think, 460,000 from MPO. And what do these, you said that the vehicles could be utilized in the off hours of this pilot project, what kind of vehicles are they? So these would be like cutaway vehicles, so they're not quite as small as the van, they're not quite as big as the bus, they're sort of in between. Looks a whole lot like the paratransit vehicles that we would have, the bigger ones of those, but they'd be wrapped in a special branding. But yeah, they could operate as fixed route vehicles when the circulator's not in service. Okay. And you all feel like you have the capacity to run this program in addition to everything else? Yes. Okay. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Council Member Nix. We have Council Member Gray. Thank you, Chair, and thank you, Fred Combs, for being here, and the others from LexTran who are present here today. So the vision for this program, or what have you, is for strictly downtown, correct? Yes. And so have you been in communication with the downtown council, is that what it's called? I know we're working on a downtown plan, I believe, and I'm just wondering how this incorporates with the corporation, the organization, and also the city plan for downtown. Yes, we've worked with a small group of stakeholders to get input on tourism and not life and those sorts of things to make sure that we are helping the vibrancy of downtown. So we have had input from those stakeholders, yes. Okay, and do you have a projected ridership estimate or anything such as that? I don't think we do have, no, I don't think we have one. And do you, for these, you said it was going to be the transportation, the modes of transportation were going to be what style of vehicle? They're called cutaways. What is that? Cutaways. Cutaways? Cutaways, mm-hmm. Cutaways, what's a cutaway? It's essentially a larger, like an F-350 or F-450 with the bed of the truck converted into a bus. Okay, all righty, thank you. We can do some mock-ups and things to make sure that it's clear on what it is. I would appreciate it. We can do that. Very much so, thank you. Thank you, Council Member. Next, is that Council Member LaGre. Thank you, Chair. I have a couple of questions and thoughts, but Commissioner, can I just ask you a question directly, if you don't mind? Thank you. I just want to seek some clarity on my previous question, which is just, how much money do you think that we are dealing with when we're talking about our funding that's available? Are we talking about a couple hundred thousand, or are we talking about 500,000? As far as the funding requests, you all have been so kind as to provide us this list in advance, and so we've been working to try and identify funds for, to be able to pre-fund these items that were able to be pre-funded, the contracts that we could get in place, and we're in good shape to be able to do that. And so we've been able to kind of put in place, get with law and to try and work to get contracts, or get started and get the funds to meet the timelines that were requested in advance of this meeting, and so we've already been kind of working on identifying the funds for some of those. They are gonna be a little bit messy because they do require personnel, being able to pull the personnel, and that's part of the reason we wanted to show you guys the financials today as well, and help you not be concerned about being able to pull those funds. We have operating savings, we have personnel savings, and the revenues will be there. They're also just lagging a little bit behind. We wanted to give some assurances that that will be there as well. It does reduce the fund balance that you will see in the fall, but some of those things we're able to work through as we're providing the funds for those. So as far as the dollar amount, tying in an exact dollar amount, there's gonna be sufficient funds for what you're wanting to prioritize. I just wanted to give some assurance that that's there. So what you're saying is that there are sufficient funds for the items that have been placed on this list? Okay. All right, that's helpful. Thank you for that clarification. Council. Let me just give a little bit of clarity. Okay. I just wanna be clear. Okay. I think from our conversation with the administration that they felt comfortable up to a certain level with this list and that's a million dollars or less. Okay. And I think I shared with them that we would have a conversation and try to be under that amount. I think anything outside of that gives them great concern. So just FYI. Excellent. That's what I'm trying to hear. Because the list is almost $2 million and from my conversations, I didn't feel like they felt comfortable. Okay. It is an ever moving target and it's really hard to put a pin in that. Just. I understand and respect that. This is very helpful. And what I do wanna say is that I am supportive of this downtown circulator for years. Downtown residents and stakeholders and people who live right outside of downtown have been asking me for something similar to the trolley or a fixed route circulation, especially in the afternoon and evenings. I think this will be really positive for people who are visiting downtown and for residents. And I appreciate your work on it and your advocacy, Council Member Brown. And it also keeps people off the roads if they have been drinking, especially if they're going out. And I think that's a really good thing. So thanks so much. And thank you all for your help and response on those numbers. Thank you, Council Member. Next we have Council Member Curtis. Thank you, Chair. And I wanna just build a little bit off of what Council Member Legree was saying because that's been also very helpful clarifying this process for me, again, as a newbie. And so just following up on that, if we've gotten, I don't know if the microphone situation is sorted out, but I just wanna ask a hypothetical and forgive my potential ignorance on this subject, but what would happen hypothetically if we allocated or approved pre-funding for things and then we did not have the money to meet those, like if we voted today and then the money was not there, what would happen? We would run a deficit for the year. Okay, thank you. Council Member Reynolds. Thank you, Chair. And thank you for everyone's comments. I wanna thank Council Member Brown for working on this because as Council Member Legree said, those of us that represent downtown have been asked to provide something like this for a long time. In part because there's areas of our downtown that are not easy to park, and so folks have a hard time getting to the distillery district and other places downtown easily because they don't always have an easy, accessible place to park. And then I know, speaking in my district, the distillery district runs out of space and then the road becomes unsafe. So I really appreciate the work that everyone put in on this. I'm thankful that I've been part of many of these conversations to get to this point. And I do want everyone to understand that this was very well thought out. It took in a lot of stakeholders, including Visit Lex, who understands the type of people that would use something like this, both visitors, and then we know that our own residents as well. So I'm in favor of this. I think that it is an important step forward. If we think of other cities that we've visited, there's a lot of cities that have a shuttle service, a trolley service, some sort of service that allows them to get around downtown. They can get on and off easily and safely. And so I really think that this is a good step forward and something that many of our residents and also our businesses have wanted for a really long time. So I just wanted to say that. Thank you. Thank you, Council Member, and I appreciate you bringing up the other partners involved. Visit Lex, LexPark, DLP have all been engaged. And I'd be remiss if I didn't thank Alicia Larimore and the council office for helping to coordinate and hoard some of these cats, crowd some of these cats to make this possible. The other thing I'll say too, in addition to helping circulation and transportation downtown, I think LexTran was real thoughtful in including some Third Street stops and Jefferson Street stops in the projected path of this connector where they could bring in Connie Griffin Ballot Towers, the Lyric, the Met, as well as the Distillery District and the Warehouse District and some other stops downtown. So I think they were real strategic about the opportunities and some of the stops they provided to this initiative. All right, so if there's no other questions, we'll move to my next request. And I'm actually gonna make a motion to push this to the fund balance discussion in the fall. I had some preliminary conversations with Kevin Atkins about it, but we need to flush this out more to bring it more in line with some of the other workforce grant programs that we have out there. And then also additional conversations we need to have with Community Action to make sure that we can execute this and get folks the training and certification that they need. So, Vice Mayor. All right, on behalf of Council Member Brown, I move to push this conversation and this ask to fund balance. Thank you. Second. All right, so a motion was made and seconded to push this item to fund balance discussion. Are there any questions? All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. All right, are there any opposed? Hearing none, that motion passes. And then we'll move to Council Member Reynolds for her request. Thank you, Chair. This request is to add additional funding to our sidewalk connectivity. The mayor included a million dollars this year in her budget, which I was really grateful for. Quite a few council members have supported additional sidewalk connectivity, having a fund in order to be able to do that. We have not for many years had a sidewalk connectivity fund. I thought that one million was a good start, but that we could add additional money to that, considering that the list that we have for connectivity is millions and millions of dollars. So that is why I have this request of 500,000. I think that I am open to different funding sources. If certain things don't get funding, there might be money for pre-funding, but I am open to multiple ways of funding this. Thank you. Okay, thank you, Council Member. Are there any questions about the presentation? Vice Mayor Wu. Thank you, Chair. Either Director Burton or Commissioner, so in terms of kind of your project list and timeline, what does it look like to you in terms of if we were to inject an extra half million dollars into this fund for sidewalk connectivity, when would this money be used? Can you use the money immediately? Do you have projects already stacked up? Can you give us an idea of what that looks like? So the biggest challenge right now is capacity. We're down an engineer and just got turned down on an offer to another engineer to replace him. So it just becomes a capacity issue, is you give me a billion dollars, but I can't spend a billion dollars. So another half a million maybe, but I can't guarantee it just because we're still short an engineer and I don't know when we're going to replace him. So with your current capacity, do you feel confident that you all can use the mayor's budgeted million dollars in this fiscal year? I think so. We're still balancing on do we want to design a million dollars worth of projects or try to build a million dollars projects. The problem with building a million dollars worth of projects is that we already took all the low-hanging fruit from the tree and got the easy projects with no right-of-way utility issues. So now we're into the ones that have those bigger challenges so a million bucks doesn't go as far. So we'll have to look at balancing those two, but the million dollars, again, I guess to answer your question, a million dollars doesn't go very far, so yes, we can spend that. Okay, so in that respect then, timeline aside, then if a million dollars doesn't go as far as you would want it to with these more complicated projects, how helpful is the additional 500,000 at this moment? Without knowing exactly what our scope's going to be like, it's hard to answer because, again, we haven't decided are we going to try to design 10 projects or pick one or two of those and try to build them all the way through construction. So once we've really decided on that, once it's funded and we know what our true scope is, then we'll scope to fit the budget. So if you give me $200,000 versus $2 million, we'll scope to fit the budget, whatever that budget is. As we like to say in the restaurant industry, you'll make it work. Right. Thank you very much. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Vice Mayor. Next is Council Member Lynch. Council Member Reynolds, my question is for you. So when you wanted to put forward this proposal, did you have any specific projects in mind or is this just to generally add more money to this line item? So the city has a list of gaps of connectivity for our sidewalks and we have a list that's really large and we have like a smaller list that's still really large. So I wanted to put this money into that fund for that connectivity list. So this is not like, oh, I want to put this all in my district or I want to put this place. I feel like overall in the whole city, we have a lot of huge gaps and so I want this money to go towards filling those gaps. Thank you. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Council Member. Next, we have Council Member Savigny. Thank you, Chair. And this might be another question for the Director. The sidewalk connectivity program in general, I think, do you use MAP funds for that? We have not. The primary reason being MAPs are usually, we typically use those for larger projects, for matching, for grant funds. Okay. But I don't think we've used them in the past for just explicitly a sidewalk fund, especially on neighborhood streets. This year, did it, this year the amount that's in there, wasn't it in, isn't it bonded? Was that the amount that was bonded, the sidewalk connectivity program? Well, there wasn't any this year. There wasn't in that? No, we haven't had that bond since 17, maybe, 18? Oh, for the upcoming one? Yes. That's? Yeah, the upcoming one, I think it's bonded. Yes. Correct, yeah. Yeah, just one of my number-swizzling ideas would be to take MAP money that is, the MAP money that's being used for paving, free up, add to it, and then free up that, say, add $500,000 to it, because it's already in paving, free it and take $500,000 off the bond and flip that bond money to this program. Just as a method, I think that it could be done if we wanted to. So, does that sound correct, Commissioner Hensley? You could do that. Okay, thank you. That's all I have. Thank you. Council Member Curtis. Did you have a speaker? No. You did not speak on that. Well, I apologize, Council Member. Council Member LaGuerre. It's okay, Chair. I may have a follow-up question for you, Director Burton. I know that we spent a lot of time talking about this during our link and talking about your capacity and approach, and I know Council Member Reynolds, as you said in your statement, that you'd be open to funding this in different ways. So, I just wanted to ask a couple of questions. So, my understanding, based on our link discussion, was that you all are gonna focus on the plan, right? The plan of what you could fund and also what you could execute as step one. And so, how much will, can you remind us how much that plan will cost and kind of the order of operations? So, again, we'll scope to fit whatever budget we have. So, the step one will be, once we know what our budget is, it's a million dollars. So, let's estimate how many projects, working with council and administration, how many projects do we want to do? Do we want to, I think we developed in the estimates I sent last fall, we could probably design eight or 10, maybe more projects with that fund. Or we could take two projects and take them all away from right away to construction, from design to construction, rather. So, step one will be figuring out which one of those we're gonna do at your direction. And once we have that, then we can program out those dollars through the fiscal year to figure out when we're gonna spend those funds. I guess what I'm trying to figure out is like, do we have an option to bond more funding now and or do we have the option to bring this back up at a potential fund balance conversation? I want to do what will have the most impact and what makes the most sense to help us execute as many impactful projects as possible. And what I'm trying to figure out is like, what approach would get us to that outcome? So, I don't know, Council Member Reynolds, if you had other approaches in mind you wanted to share or you wanted to wait? I think one possibility would be to use that MAP funding for this. And I think we have the capability of doing that. Is that right, Commissioner? Yeah, I think as far as the bonding would go, that would require additional recurring revenue to pay the debt service. And that's not probably the most ideal situation at this point in time, since the recurring revenue's not. We're not adding to the recurring revenue. So, some combination of MAP funding and or fund balance would probably be the best option. Thank you. Okay, thank you, that's helpful. Thank you, Director, that's it. Thank you, Chair. Vice Mayor Wu. Thank you, Chair. First off, being a member of the Street Safety Task Force and I think just having walked around the city, we all know sidewalk connectivity is really important and we have a long way to go with it. My concerns have been expressed by colleagues as well in terms of kind of figuring out what the funding source is. I think if we can make MAP work, I think that would be a good way to go. Because I think if we keep tapping this pre-fund idea, at some point we're gonna get really stretched. And I think with all the different priorities that we have, and I always find at these conversations with budget, it's never about the inherent value or worth of the ideas, it's always about how do we make it work, where does this money come from, when is the best time to allocate this money. So, my question to Council Member Reynolds, and again, you don't necessarily have to answer this right now, is would you be willing to take that number down in light of sort of the capacity issues that they have with staffing and engineers and or would you be willing to push it to a fund balance conversation? I'll go ahead and answer. I'm willing to cut it in half and do 250 right now, MAP funding, and push the other 250 to fund balance. Thank you. Thank you, Chair. Council Member Savigny. Thank you, Chair. And I'd just like to propose one other option, I think, for Council Member Reynolds. First of all, sidewalk connectivity is one of the things that I get tons and tons of phone calls on. So, I do really believe that it's super important. Since paving is basically $3 million in MAP, about a $5 million bond and about a $5 million in the capital reallocation, my guess is we could take the capital, we could take capital reallocation dollars for this particular project versus fund balance and take some more MAP dollars for the paving versus the bond that I proposed the last time. If you all want to tell us exactly where you want to go, we can try and figure out how to get there. Yeah, I just think the capital reallocation fund might be, since it's a capital item, but I guess it's already bonded. It's already, the vast majority of it is already bonded, so it may not necessarily matter. Okay, got it, all right. That was it, just trying to clarify. Thank you, Chair. All right. Council Members, are there no other questions to that? All right, so we'll go back to the top of the list and we'll start with you, Council Member Savigny. Thank you, Chair. And just to clarify, what I heard you mention was that there's about a million dollars worth of pre-fund that we would feel comfortable being supportive of. Is that correct? No. What I said. Okay. What I said is that the administration shared with me that anything over that amount caused them great concern because they know they won't have a final fund balance number until weeks away. So anything over that. Got it. Draws them concern. Okay, all right. So with that being said, I'm going to propose two of my items be funded. So I move to approve $390,000 as a pre-funded item as a result of the techonomy study supporting strategies one and two, managed by LFUCG's Department of Economic Development with additional consideration to the remaining strategies in the fund balance discussion. So moved. Second. All right, a motion was made to fund, is that strategies one and two? Yeah. Either way you look at them, they're one and two, whether they're flipped or what. At $390,000. And seconded. Is there any questions to the motion? Vice Mayor Wu. Thank you, Chair. Council Member Savigny, if both these items were to be funded right now in our budget process, would they both be implemented or begun between now and say October? Also given that we're still not seeing this presentation for another month? Yes. Would you be open to, you had said your number one priority of the two was the $90,000. It sounds like if you were to kind of rank them, right? And then the $300,000, would you be willing to push that $300,000 to fund balance? Well, if it's not approved, then yes. I would, as proposed. Okay, thank you. Thank you, Chair. All right, Council Member Gray. Thank you, Chair. And actually my question is directed to what you just mentioned to my fair council colleague to my right. When you say the administration, who and what are you referring to? Who or what? The finance department and the CAO's office. Okay, thank you. No. Okay. All right. Council Member Baxter. Thank you, Chair. I think I would like to piggyback on Vice Mayor Wu and go ahead and make an amendment to go ahead and fund strategy two now and push strategy one to fund balance. So moved. Second. All right, a motion was made to amend the motion and that was to fund strategy two, which was $90,000 and then push strategy one to the fund balance discussion. Yes. And seconded. Are there questions to the amendment? Council Member Savigny. Thank you very much for the amendment. Council Member Baxter. Here's my big thing with budgets. If we're not investing in things that are revenue drivers, okay, we will not change, okay? And like we funded the study to be worked on. It was worked on. These were some recommended strategies and the best cities in this category of work are cities that have very strong tech councils, okay? So I really believe it's important to fund that. I believe when I've added everything up, I have figured out that we can fund 390 of mine, 250 of microtransit, 250 of downtown connectors. And I think Council Member Reynolds, I think we can do with flipping some money around. So all I'm going to say is thank you for bringing it up, but I think it's super important that we invest in revenue drivers versus just expense items. Thanks. Thank you, Council Member. Next we have Vice Mayor Wu. Thank you, Chair. Council Member Savigny, I do not disagree with you on the philosophy and the principle behind what you're putting forward. Can I ask our Chief Development Officer, Kevin Atkins, a question kind of relating to that timeline and implementation piece again. You know, in the original recommendation, there are four different strategies to be put in place. Can you talk a little bit about what that timeline would look like if we were to fund strategies one and two now versus if we were to fund strategy two now and potentially fund strategy one in, say, October? Well, as I mentioned earlier, we would start on strategy two first. And I think that we would wait until after the presentation that you all are going to get on June 24th to see if there's any changes within the premise of those documents. That can be done in, you know, my hope would be by the end of summer. I mean, that's just starting to bring collectives together and getting those folks working together. I will say as related to strategy one, that takes a little bit longer. You're starting from scratch. There's not an organization in place now of a tech council. It would have to go through a process, depending on how we set it up, appointment or something similar. You know, my true guesstimate is sometime before the end of the year. Okay, thank you for that. And Council Member Savigny, again, if we were having this conversation in fund balance, having had the presentation before us, having had our questions answered from this tech study, and, you know, theoretically having the fund balance to do this, I think I certainly would be in support of this initiative. So I'm just not in as much of a hurry, especially, again, I'm going to keep saying this particular thing, we don't have the presentation. We haven't had the presentation in front of us yet. That's a month out. So I think Council Member Baxter's amendment is a good sort of middle ground that we can get the ball rolling with strategy two. By then, we'll have the presentation in front of us. We can have a real good discussion about it during fund balance and potentially fund not just strategy one, but potentially three and four as well. Thank you. Thank you, Vice Mayor. All right, if there's no other questions, then we'll vote on the amendment. And is everybody clear on the amendment? All right, restating the amendment. So it's to fund strategy two for $90,000 for the tech study and to push the strategy one of $300,000 to the fund balance discussion. That's the amendment. All right, all those in favor to the amendment, say aye. Aye. All those opposed, say nay. Nay. Can we get a screen? Point of order. Were we voting? We're voting on that just on her amendment and then we'll come back to the main motion. Yeah. Thank you. All right, so it looks like that amendment passed. So now we'll come back to the amended motion, which is to fund $90,000 and then push the $300,000 strategy funding to the fund balance discussion. All right, if there's no question to the new, the now amended motion, all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Are there any that oppose? That motion passes. All right. All right, thank you, Council Member Savigny. Next, we have Council Member Ellinger. Thank you, Chair. I make a motion to allocate $250,000 to Lextran for a microtransit pilot project. So moved. Second. All right, a motion was made to fund $250,000 for the Lextran microtransit pilot. And I didn't state this prior in the last motion, but I'm gonna state it now. Funding is coming from pre-funding dollars. All right, so that motion was made and seconded. Are there any questions to the motion? Seeing none, all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. All I heard was the cough. All right, so all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Are there any that oppose? Hearing none, that motion passes. The next item, and I'm gonna ask the Vice Mayor to make a motion for me. Unless you want the Chair. Here, I'll take the Chair and I'll let Council Member Brown make his own motion. Thank you. All right, I make a motion to fund the Lextran Downtown Connector route pilot project for $250,000 as pre-funded as well. All right, we have a motion and a second. Discussion on this motion? All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? All right, that motion passes. Chair's back to you. Thank you, Vice Mayor, and then I think that brings us to Council Member Reynolds. Thank you, Chair. May I ask a question of the Commissioner really quick? Yeah. Commissioner Hensley, if my calculations are correct, I could do this pre-funding based on what we have approved at this point, and my item is the last item. Yes, ma'am, we could try and make that work. I'm sorry? We can try and make that work. It will be tight. Okay, I'm still gonna do the 250. Oh. Okay, yes. There's a smile, I like that. Okay. I move to place $250,000 in additional funding in the Sidewalk Connectivity Fund. I will use that from FY25, or, yeah. Pre-funding, FY26, pre-funding. And then, 25, that's what I said. That's what I said first. Okay, FY25 pre-funding, and then the other 250,000 I move to be discussed at fund balance in the fall. Second. All right, a motion was made to fund $250,000 for pre-funding for additional sidewalk connectivity and to have a discussion at fund balance for an additional $250,000 for sidewalk connectivity. That motion was seconded. Are there any questions to the motion? Hearing none, all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Are there any that oppose? Hearing none, that motion passes. All right, council members, I think that brings us to the end of our agenda. Before we close out, I just want to thank, I just want to thank my Link Chairs. I thank all the Link Chairs. I think you all have done an excellent job this budget season. I really appreciate having the Link Chair meetings. I think you all came with some good ideas. I think we collaborated, and I think you all showed strong leadership in this budget cycle. I'd also like to thank Kelly Farley, our budget analyst. Thank you, Kelly, for all the hard work that you do for us. You do for us. Per council rules, per council rules. Per council rules. All right, now, and then I'd like to thank the mayor's office and the CAO and their teams for working with us, as well as Commissioner Hensley, Melissa, Ashley, and your team. We appreciate collaborating and working with you all. When we come back at work session, we should have a motion to be able to walk these changes on to the mayor's proposed budget, and then we'll probably also entertain a motion to cancel Thursday's meeting. So, we'll do that at the work session. So, with that, thank you, council members, for your time, patience, and availability, and I'll entertain a motion to adjourn. I move. All right, and seconded. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. This meeting is adjourned. yay. Yay. Yay. Yay. Yay. Yay. Whoa. Yay.