♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ It's 3 o'clock, so I'd like to go ahead and call to order the Lexington-Fayette-Urban County Council Work Session. Today is June 3rd, 2025. And the first item on our agenda is public comment for issues on the agenda. Now, the way the public comment works is that when I call your name, you'll need to come to the podium right over here, and you must say your name again for the record, and also state your council district. And if you have not given your time to someone else, you will have, if you don't have time from someone else, you will have three minutes. We have a lot of people signed up for public comment. We are strict about the rules, so at three minutes, I will cut you off, just so you know. Now, we do have a few people who have yielded their time, so I have to confirm that you are here in the council chamber. Otherwise, you cannot yield your time. So let me just check those to start with. Is Eric Evans here? Yes, ma'am. All right. And did you yield your time to Shalise Lissamby? Yes, ma'am. All right. Thank you. Is Dylan Schell here? Yes, ma'am. All right. Did you yield your time to David Shad? I did. Okay. Very good. Now, the total amount of time that you can speak with yielded time is nine minutes. So I take the first three people who have yielded their time to someone, and if you are number four, you can either get up and speak yourself or not speak. So is Tana Fogel in the house? Yes, ma'am. Hello. All right. So a lot of people have yielded their time to you, but I can only take the first two, which will get us to nine minutes for you. So that is Ada German. Are you here? Yes, ma'am. Where are you? I'm here. Okay. Did you yield your time to Tana? Yes, ma'am. I'm right here. Ma'am? Yes, ma'am. Yes? Okay. And Mia Ann Freeman? Yes, ma'am. Did you yield your three minutes to Tana Fogel? Yes. All right. So Lonnie Cowan and Leanna Hamilton, I know that you signed up to yield your time to Tana Fogel, but she already has nine minutes. So when I call your name, you're welcome to speak on your own. Now, is Marty Jones? Let's see. Wait a second here. Melissa Tibbs. Are you here? Melissa? Melissa Tibbs. So when we get closer to hearing ‑‑ okay. Melissa Tibbs, did you yield your time to Marty Jones? Yes, ma'am. And Marty's right there. Okay. And all right. That'll get us started. Now, this looks like maybe over an hour of folks who speak, and the council rules say no clapping, no booing, no verbal reaction. You're welcome to do this if you really like it. So here we go. The first person to speak is Abby Latimer, followed by Lyndon Bond. Abby, welcome. And remember, you're going to state your name and your council district. Thank you. My name is Abby Latimer, and I'm in District 5. Good afternoon, and thank you for taking the time to hear from me today. I've been a practicing palliative and hospice social worker for over 15 years, in hospice settings, hospitals, at homes, first freestanding facility in Hazard, Kentucky, and I'm now an assistant professor in the College of Social Work and College of Medicine. My focus is on improving care for unhoused older adults, and this group is the fastest growing segment of an unhoused population, with many experiencing first‑time homelessness after the age of 50. So many of my patients I've cared for have shared stories of living with family members and friends who have passed away or have been evicted when landlords have renovated older homes and raised rents to unaffordable levels, leaving them with nowhere to go. Kentuckians are especially affected. As you know, our state's health outcomes are among the worst in the nation, and our older adults are some of the most vulnerable. I cared for one patient with cancer who was struggling with the side effects and vomiting and had nowhere to go to use the bathroom as he was living unsheltered. Unhoused older adults are often unable to access shelters due to physical limitations, cots on the floor which can be impossible for them to navigate. They often feel unsafe due to their vulnerability, and they can't access their secure medications. Nationally, 21% of people experiencing homelessness are 55 and older, and locally that figure is even higher, 27% in our latest count. That's hundreds of our neighbors in desperate need of age‑appropriate support and housing. My colleagues and I conducted a hospital point in time count on the same night this year as our count and identified an additional 10 older adults living with other people or doubled up, and one in an emergency shelter. Nearly 35 were paying more than 30% of their monthly income on housing costs, and 14.5% were worried about keeping their housing. It's just really emphasizing the reality that so many more are at risk of losing their housing today. So the issue is that we don't have enough beds. This lack of accessible, low‑barrier shelter puts a strain on our service providers, police, fire, and especially our hospitals, which are frequently called upon to serve these individuals. A centralized service hub would not only better serve the people experiencing homelessness but also improve public health and safety by reducing encampments and the impact on the community. So in closing, I just urge you to champion this vision, a safe, accessible, and supportive campus that includes a low‑barrier shelter. It's not just an investment in these individuals, but also the overall health and safety of our entire community. Thank you. Thank you. Next is Lyndon Bond, followed by Shalise Lissomby. Welcome. Thank you. Hi, Lyndon Bond, District 11. Good afternoon. My name is Lyndon Bond, and I am a resident of District 11 and am also an assistant professor at the University of Kentucky's College of Social Work. For the last 15 years, I have been working with people experiencing homelessness, including as an outreach worker, case manager, advocate, and now as a researcher. As a researcher, my work primarily focuses on examining our current homelessness response systems and how they can be improved to better meet the preferences and needs of those who use them, with an emphasis on co‑creating research and recommendations with directly impacted people. I am here today to talk about the importance of funding and developing resources to meet the needs of our unhoused neighbors here in Lexington, building on the findings to be shared here today from the Lexington Emergency Shelter Study. As homelessness continues to grow, both nationally and here in Lexington, our communities need to be prepared to step in and support our neighbors. One of the best ways we can do this is by ensuring that they have a safe place to access resources and shelter as they work to locate permanent housing. Lexington, like most of the country, does not have enough shelter beds to provide shelter to everyone experiencing homelessness throughout the year. While allotting funding towards the development of a new shelter can help alleviate some of this gap, it also creates an opportunity to address unmet needs of our current system. For example, there are currently many barriers that people face in seeking shelter. I have been told countless times, both in my clinical practice and in research, that congregate shelters make people feel unsafe or like they're in jail, cannot accommodate their partners or pets, and that these factors result in people making the difficult, yet often rational, decision to sleep in unsheltered situations. Throughout my work, I've heard time and time again that strict curfews, overt or mandated religion-related activities or policies, and strict curfews and abstinence-based approaches to substance use make it hard to choose shelters over sleeping outside. A commitment of a low-barrier shelter, hopefully developed with the direct input from people who have experienced homelessness, could reduce the very valid concerns people have about accessing our current resources. Further, with the enactment of HB 5, an increase in low-barrier resources is now more important than ever. When our unhoused neighbors are fined or arrested for not having a place to live, or swept from the place they normally stay, they risk losing their belongings, including vital documents, medications, and irreplaceable sentimental items, or risk having to move further away from support services, including health care or mental health or substance use-related treatment. Rather than continue to penalize people for experiencing homelessness, the city has an opportunity to develop a stable interim environment to support people working towards permanent housing and increased well-being. Committing funding towards the development of a low-barrier shelter and resource center will not only meet the growing demands of our system, but will do it in a more person-centered way that recognizes that a one-size-fits-all approach is not always the best approach. Thank you so much for your time. All right, thank you. Next is Shalise Lissamby, who will have six minutes, and followed by Susan Acton. Welcome. Hi. I'm Shalise Lissamby, and I come to you from the Center for Accessible Living, and we have a campus here in Lexington called Independence Place, where I am the direct supervisor and office manager. One thing we do is we provide services to those who are disabled or differently abled. We operate from the perspective that housing is a human right, and it's also health care. We have unsheltered sisters and brothers who are not only humans with souls, but have disabilities, and we know that those who are sight-impaired, hearing-impaired, medically fragile, those with extra medical needs, differently abled, and those with fixed or low income or zero income, and that we are already in a housing crisis, and finding housing for that section of this population of homelessness is extremely difficult because it's not accessible. We know that the current homeless shelters also are not as accessible as could be and need to be to actually be able to have these people in their shelters. So we know that homelessness is now criminalized, and if you're on the street in a wheelchair, you may be arrested for just being on the street in a wheelchair with no place to go. And the biggest gap that we're seeing is that there's no shelter for them to go. So my background in working with the homeless, I come to you with a background working with severe mental illness. I worked with the Lexington Housing Authority doing the Mainstream Voucher Program, which is for those who are disabled and homeless. I did work at a homeless shelter for a short time before coming to Independence Place, but we very much are advocates for those who are differently abled, whether you can see that or not. Thank you. Thank you. Next is Susan Ecton, who will be followed by David Shad, who will have six minutes. Welcome. Thank you. I'm Susan Ecton. I'm from the Eastland Parkway Neighborhood Association. We're in the 6th District with Denise Gray. We realize that the unhoused population is continuing to grow, and we applaud that you are working on a long-term plan. We realize that the Eastland Bowling Alley property is an unhealthy eyesore to our community. We appreciate the efforts to distribute these solutions throughout the city rather than concentrate them all in one area. However, the Eastland area already carries a very heavy load with the Catholic Action Center. This has had a major impact on many small businesses in the area, with the Winchester Road Eastland Shopping Center area being a major corridor from downtown to the interstate. It has the potential to be a great location for businesses. As you are aware, the Polo Club area is being built, and it is exploding. Yes, yet the unhoused that hang around throughout the day and night deter businesses from this location and citizens willing to shop there. The well-established neighborhood of Eastland Parkway is adversely impacted by the unhoused sleeping in wooded areas around the creek and the park. Drug paraphernalia and trash are a daily, constant problem. Please consider other locations other than Eastland Bowling Alley. We are already overwhelmed. Thank you. Next is David Shadd, who will have six minutes, followed by Mae Barbosa. Welcome. Good afternoon. My name is David Shadd. I'm in the 9th District. I am the Chief Programs Officer of the HOPE Center. I've been at the HOPE Center for, oh gosh, 14 years. It doesn't seem like that long, but in some ways it seems like much longer. One of my jobs, I oversee the emergency shelter. I oversee our street outreach programs, HOPE Mobile. So a lot of the stuff that we do, no surprise to anyone on the council, is that we work a lot with the homeless population. Originally just men in our emergency shelter, but now with our outreach teams we work with men and women, also families. And there are a couple of things about our population. Number one, they're aging. They are aging. They have health issues. They have significant deficits that make it difficult for them to live in a congregate shelter like ours. I think we run a great program. I think our shelter is great, but you know what? It's not for everyone. If you have mobility issues or you have trouble getting around on your own or you can't take care of your basic needs, those are criteria for staying in a shelter like ours. Where do you go? So, you know, what realistically happens is that you fit those individuals in wherever you can. So they're forced into a location where their needs are not met. The services that they need are not provided in the way that they need to be provided. They are this gap in our system that I think we as a community need to take a look at. A couple of winters ago we operated the winter shelter, which was designed to be a low barrier shelter. And what that means is that anybody can come in, whether you're intoxicated, whether you have severe mental health issues. One of the other things that a congregate shelter is people who have a lot of anxiety or who don't like being around other people have a considerably difficult time, people who are paranoid. They may have trouble in a congregate shelter. So, again, that's one of the areas that is very difficult to live in a shelter like ours. I bring low barrier shelter. One of the things that I discovered was that there are a lot of people who need services in a way that we as a community are not providing. Couples, people with pets. This is Pride Month. People who are in that LGBTQ community. A lot of trans individuals are really struggling with our current shelter system. It doesn't meet their needs. They're forced to make a choice that doesn't really fit with their personal feelings or fit with who they think they are or who they feel like they are. And they're facing a very difficult challenge in our current shelter system. There are so many gaps. And I think one of the things with this feasibility study is that we are able to look as a community at our entire system, look at the gaps, and find a way as a community to fill those. I'm also the chair of the advocacy committee with the Office of Homeless Prevention and Intervention. And we discuss a lot of these issues, a lot of the areas that we as a system tend to struggle. But I think as a community we have to recognize there is more that we can do to serve our homeless population. The easy solution is to house. But we all know that there is a significant lack of affordable housing. And even affordable housing is not affordable to some. So we have a very low-income population, maybe a no-income population. They don't have the same options. Even our affordable housing complexes, they cannot afford. One of the things that we do is we have some emergency housing assistance. And I will say even some of the worst areas in Lexington, you're still dealing with $900 a month rent. You're still dealing with security deposits of $1,000 and application fees and all this. It makes it very difficult to be homeless, to be low-income, and to move into housing. That's not even to take into consideration issues like eviction histories or not a great rental history or legal problems. So there are just so many gaps. This affords us the opportunity to look at those gaps and try to address where we can improve our system. And I think those of us in the homeless community are very appreciative of the direction of this study and really hope that you all will support this and support our homeless community. And I thank you for the time. Thank you. All right. Next is Mae Barbosa, followed by Kendra Lathery. Welcome. Hello. My name is Mae Barbosa, and I work at Lexington Rescue Mission. I didn't prepare to come here, but I just, when I was asked to come, it is my heart and service to speak for those who may not think they have a voice. So I want to share my personal experience with homelessness and my professional. I have worked in addiction recovery for ten years and hearing the stories of women coming off the streets. And I now work at Lexington Rescue Mission as a case manager. So we have worked with a single father of two working nights with nowhere. He worked third shift because he had nowhere for his children to sleep at night time. And so he paid a babysitter so his children would have somewhere to go at night time. And during the day he took care of them. So we were able to help walk alongside him as he went through this journey of homelessness. And we were able to house him. He stayed in taking his kids to the parks or libraries during the day because he had nowhere to take them. We are dealing with a lot of the seniors in our community who are facing homelessness because they can't afford the rent. Or don't have any resources, don't know how to obtain resources to help them navigate the issues of life these days. So I have been able to work with alongside a man and a woman like him who had a TBI. And all he needed was advocacy to help. He had been homeless for two or three years. And he had a TBI. He didn't know the resources that were available to him. I believe that a permanent shelter, homeless shelter, housing would be able to have people like myself in them. To help people navigate the systems and the resources that are available to everybody. When personally, I just want to talk about my own homelessness. I was in addiction and being homeless with trauma and mental health issues. And when there's nowhere to be stable, it's hard to accept the help that is out there. And I just want to thank you all for your time. Thank you. Next is Kendra Lathery followed by T.C. Johnson. Welcome. Hi, my name is Kendra Lathery. I'm a 2025 graduate, 18 years old. I don't really know exactly what to say, but I just kind of want to share a little bit of my story and hope maybe it will help you all understand why these programs are so important. I was in foster care for a while and then I got granted back custody to my dad. After about a month of living with my dad, he kind of just kicked me out and didn't want anything to do with me. If it wasn't for Ms. T.C. and her program and everything that she's done for me, I wouldn't have anywhere to go. I wouldn't have anywhere to be. And it's really hard to be 18 years old trying to get out into the world, trying to be a part of the community where you feel like you don't have help, you don't have anyone that supports you. And it's hard to have a voice when you have to stand in front of people and be so young and not be experienced, not know what to say, not know what to do. But with Ms. T.C., I was going through a really hard time at risk of being homeless, at risk of not having anywhere to go. And she's given me a job, given me resources, and trying to make sure that even after this job, after this program, I have somewhere to go. And it's important to realize that, yes, there's older people that do things they shouldn't do, but you have to think about the youth community to people that don't have anywhere to go. And people that need the help, and it feels like you shouldn't shut down a program, you shouldn't stop assisting people because there's some of us that genuinely don't have any resources. Ms. T.C.'s programs are really important because without her, I wouldn't be able to do stuff like this and wouldn't be able to have the opportunity to sit here and tell you all how important it is. That's all I really have to say. All right. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Next is T.C. Johnson, who will be followed by Lella Still. Welcome. Good afternoon. Thank you all for having me. You are welcome to put the mic down a little. Thank you. I actually have some things to pass around while I'm talking. I just want to talk briefly about the face of homelessness. Can you say your name for the record? I'm sorry. T.C. Johnson. I'm actually District 2. I'm also on the Office of Homelessness on the board. I want to briefly talk about the face of homelessness. There is no face. At the end of our school year, we had over 1,100 Fayette County Public Schools students that were McKinney-Vento. They were our homeless students. We had over 700 bus routes that we had to actually extend out in addition to already being short of our transportation. But out of that 1,100 of those students, our biggest population was from preschool to fifth grade. We had over 600 students that experienced homelessness. This year, I have had several families that have had to resort to sleeping in a car, had to really struggle. We've had a lot of grandparents this year. Currently, I have a grandmother that's an amputee with three little boys that is in a hotel. We need shelter. We're all just one moment, just one disaster. We're thankful that the tornado didn't hit Fayette County because then we all would be facing some type of homelessness. It doesn't have a face. Definitely, it's with our children. We definitely need to support our children right now. Also, to just talk about that we have a stigma about what homelessness is and why it's not just financial hardship. There's been a lot of death this year with not just students but with their families. I had one mother, she passed. Our kids went to her grandmother. The grandmother passed. So they're actually with their great grandmother. This year, we've had a lot of grandparents that have had to take in their children, their grandkids because of homelessness. We've had several parents, mothers that have ended up in the hospital that have been ill. I had two elementary school students that ended up in the hospital with pneumonia because they were sleeping on the floor, on a cold floor and they ended up with pneumonia in the hospital. So this is so important that we continue to support our students and that we look beyond what we see on the corners and on the street and recognize that it is also our children that we have. Just to kind of real briefly, I had 46 of my high school students were unaccompanied minors. This year, I have a camp with 12 seniors that were homeless and they are doing great. Thank you all for your time. Next is Leila Still and you'll be followed by Tana Fogel who will have nine minutes. Welcome. Raise it up a little bit. All right, so I am Leila Still and I live in District 6. So like I said, I'm Leila Still. I'm the Director of Behavioral Health Social Work for UK Health Care. So I oversee and supervise social workers at Eastern State Hospital, Good Samaritans, Adult Behavioral Health Unit and the new IMPATH Unit which just opened this past year. So I oversee the teams working directly with our patients who are experiencing the most acute mental health crises. And a good number of the patients that are admitted to our facilities are also experiencing homelessness. And that could be chronic homelessness or individuals that are newly homeless. And I'm also a member of the city's Homelessness Prevention and Intervention Board. So over the years, we've seen an increase in homelessness at Eastern State and our other facilities, but our shelter beds have not increased to meet this need. And for women in particular, this is a huge issue. The shelters for women are often full and we have no place to send the homeless women in our community. This past winter was especially challenging for us, those of us working in hospitals, to find shelter following discharge. Like David Shadid said, there was no winter shelter this year and there was a hotel program that was full immediately. So hospitals were not able to access any of those hotel beds. And so we desperately need these resources for our citizens leaving inpatient psychiatric care. Shelters serve a need that is otherwise unable to be met. It is nearly impossible to transition from an inpatient hospitalization to permanent housing. We know already the barriers with permanent housing. So shelters really serve that need for us and individuals that are discharging from hospitals. So this increase in homelessness paired with the decrease in shelter beds means that more people essentially are living on the streets. And as other individuals have already said with the passage of House Bill 5, the Saver Kentucky Act, homelessness is now a criminal offense. So we have to start thinking about the downstream effects of homelessness and what that means for our community to have unhoused people more living on the streets. So it's costly for individuals to be hospitalized or incarcerated due to homelessness. That's a huge cost. And I ask who's paying these costs. I think we're all paying these costs, whether it's through shelters or hospitalization or incarceration. And so to have individuals without a place to sleep at night, it's not safe. It's not safe for them. It's not safe for the community. It's not fiscally responsible. And it just doesn't seem to make sense to not invest in more shelter beds when we have more individuals that are homeless. Thank you. Thank you. Next is Tawna Fogle, who will have nine minutes. Welcome. Hello. My name is Tawna Fogle, and I'm a proud resident and a proud person to live in the first district. And Tyler Morton is my council member. That is an extra. She wanted to come up and hug you, and I told you she couldn't because she might get shot. Anyway, let's get to the business. Most of you have heard me for two years, so you already know my passion about the unhoused. We have paid money for Mr. Holmes to do a study. And he is going to present that. I don't believe that the main problem is whether or not you all believe that we are in a state of emergency with people who are homeless. I don't believe that. I believe the issue is whose backyard will it be built in? That's the biggest issue. Please do not let that issue keep you from voting that we need another shelter. And so the way I see it is I'm a lead organizer for Kentuckians for the Commonwealth. It's who I'm working for. And the Poor People's Campaign, also for the faith leaders here in Lexington. So I come with a lot of registered voters when I'm speaking. Y'all get that on your way home. So what I want to say is we have people here. And I heard something about, you know, trash, drug addicts, and all of that. Most of y'all know my story. I was a drug addict. Me and my son, we were homeless. So I have personal experience with homelessness. So if you could close your eyes and just picture not the person who is laying on the curb on Martin Luther King, but those children that Ms. T.C. talked about and the elderly people. If you did not see Channel 18, please go back and watch Channel 18's report on seniors. I'm 65. I'm a senior. We never know when we might fall into homelessness. The people in eastern Kentucky went to sleep one night and woke up and their home was gone. They were homeless. The people in western Kentucky had a tornado come through. They became homeless. So when we're talking about location, and I know, Council Member Brown, I know your passion about the end of North End and how heavy it is. I know that. But I also know that people like to stay in their familiarity, their community. And if you check the zip codes of how many people, and we do have that data, and that's on another day for a different time, how many people live in that zip code and how many people? I have been working with the Bryan Station students that are in the McKinney-Vento. So I have personally seen it. I personally experienced it. But I'd be darned if y'all didn't elect me to city council. So I don't want you to think that drug addicts can't become something and get back to the dream that they had before they went to prison or before they became homeless. I'm preaching to the choir. Y'all already know. I don't even want to take the nine minutes, believe it or not. I just wanted to come up here and make the point that it's not the issue of the feasibility study and the fact that y'all know that we need another center. The people who are holding it down, like the HOPE Center and the Catholic Action Center, they're holding it down, but it's so many people. And please, please don't go on the fact that people are infiltrating Lexington. We have Lexington residents that need shelter. Think about it. Someone in your family may be a drug addict, maybe not. May be an alcoholic, maybe not. But in an instant, you can become homeless. And what would that look like? Would you like Lexington to be the proud city that we are, that says when an issue arises, we will give every thought. And I know my council member is going to be working to make sure that we have, because if he's not, I'm going to be on his door, but I already know that he is because he's compassionate like I am. And we don't want to see people in the street. The temperature's dropped down below 30 this past winter. The temperature is going to rise above 100 this summer. We will have issues, but if we have the right people in place and the work that they have done, I know that Mr. Holmes did not take this study lightly because I was on him. He didn't take it lightly, and he did a good job. And the people in this room, if you can have compassion for the next, are we not our brother's keepers? I'm finished. Izzy got to wave. I wish I could use the other three minutes and do filibusters, but I don't feel like it. I've got work to do. And Council Member Chuck, I'm counting on you, for real. I know your compassion, too, and the rest of the council members. It was great serving with you all for two years. You all heard me preaching it, so go back in your memory. And, Council Member, you're looking beautiful up there. Let me just say that. So I'm going to go sit down now, but I hope I said something, and I didn't come up here to be a comedian. I hope I really infiltrated the life. And, Council Member Brown, I know you're compassionate, too. So where is it? If it's not in your backyard, whose backyard will it be in? Please let it be in somebody's backyard. Take a look at train out there on Mercer Road. It's empty. Thank you. All right. Now, Lonnie Cowan, you had wanted your time to go to Taunafogel. Where are you? Do you want to speak? You'll need to come to the microphone if you want to speak. You don't have to, but if you'd like to. Okay. Is it? Is it? There you go. We've got a portable mic. You are welcome to use. All right. Welcome. Yes. My name is Lonnie Cowan, and I am in the first district. But I would like to say to each and every one of you, just take a look at yourself in the mirror. Do you love you? And if you love you, you know you're going to have to love others. Patsy and I, we were doing our home visitations just last week, and we saw numerous of people on the streets. One of them was with a little baby. It was cold that day, and she had no place to go. We have to look at other people before we look in our own comfort zone to try to help someone else. There are many people out here, as Taunafogel spoke, with the Catholic centers and the HOPE centers and all that, and I have experienced those organizations myself. I'm with the Chronic Pain Support Group of Central Kentucky. So I know about these individuals and people. Matter of fact, a year ago, one of the ladies, she was at a church and she froze to death. She had no place to go. So I'm saying look at your heart and know all of you are compassion, and I know you are going to do the right thing. By doing another center visit, we definitely need that. Like I always say, together we can do so much, alone so little. We must keep the torch lit with love, and that torch is love one another. As she just said, love one another as I have loved you. So just keep that in mind. It would be wonderful to know, as Taunafogel mentioned, to look back and say, Lextonians do care. They do have a heart. Thank you. Thank you. Now, Leanna Hamilton, are you here? She's here, but I speak in her place. Well, hang on just a second. Oh, okay. She had signed up to give her time to Taunafogel. Okay. So are you signed up? Did you sign up? Ma'am? Yes, you wanted to speak in her place? Yes. What is your name? Ann Freeman. Okay. All right. And Leanna is not speaking, correct? Correct. Okay. Why don't you go ahead? You'll have three minutes. Welcome. Thank you. Good evening to everyone. I'm Ann Freeman, and hearing the comments and so forth, I would like for everybody, all of us, to give personal attention to the fact that where the homeless may be and others may be and where you are, momentarily, that could change. If it was not for the mercies of God and the goodness of God, we would be in the same place that a lot of other people are. Don't take it for granted. Well, I got this, I'm all right, and they shouldn't be like that. Don't ever take the blessings of God and the goodness of God for granted. Because when we do, we never know where mercy is going to stop, when we would be in the same position with others, with our house being taken off the foundation, our house being burnt up, our house being floated by the waters and so forth. So I would like to encourage all of us to consider your blessings, consider your brothers and sisters, and understand the very fact, the reality, if it's not for God's mercy, there go I. If it was not for the mercies of God, we would be in that very same place. So I really want to encourage all of us to consider the next person, consider our brothers and sisters. Does it hurt to see someone on the street corners every day? Well, they must be doing pretty good. They smoking and they got their signs up and they're there every day and some are eating and so forth. But we never know the mindset of that person and what brought them there. We never know all the situations that have put people in places of being homeless. So as you sit in the position to help make decisions, put yourself in that place. Sleeping in a van, sleeping in a car, staying on the streets. Our church is on the west end and I've seen a lot of people, in fact there's a mattress between our church and a building. When people are homeless, if you see them, consider yourself and thank God and pray for them in Jesus name. Thank you. Thank you. Now, I apologize to the next person if I massacre your name. Is Chris Primo here? I'm sure I said that wrong. You're next and you'll be followed by Christina Woodson. Welcome. Hi, my name is Chris Primo. Okay. It's okay. I'm from Louisiana and I'm in District 1. I have something prepared to say but I do want to start off with saying that I work at New Life Day Center. I work with some of the most vulnerable in our city. 90% of them are not housed. They're either kicked out of the main shelters or they choose not to go to the main shelters. They are sleeping on the streets. We had one pass away this weekend. He was found face down where he sleeps. Yes, it's important to think about the kids and it's important to think about the elderly. But don't forget about that population that's squished in the middle there, the drug addicts, the people with mental illness. They're out there without a net. They're out there, most of them self-medicating, most of them off of their medication. And they have nowhere to go and they don't fit into our current shelter system that we have. David mentioned LGBTQ youth, trans individuals do not fit into our current shelter situation. Non-binary individuals do not have a shelter to go to in Lexington. This is not okay. Like I said, I work at New Life Day Center. I live in the same neighborhood where these issues play out every day. I hear concerns about people have with shelters in their community and I understand those worries. But what I also understand from years of walking alongside of youth, families, adults without housing. It is not the answer to pull back. The answer is not fear. The answer is not less funding. The answer is more. More beds, more trauma-informed care, more access to mental health support. We are not dealing with a temporary crisis. We are dealing with structural failure that continues to leave people sleeping outside in tents and in doorways and in cars. And we made that illegal. And we are under-resourced and under-prepared for what is coming and for the demand. Every year we do the winter shelters and all those that are unhoused are going into these winter shelters. And it's hundreds and hundreds of people that are overflowing our shelters every year. I want to be clear that emergency shelter is not the end goal. It is the first step. But right now the first step is missing far too many of our neighbors. When there's nowhere to go, how do you get back on your feet? When we don't invest in emergency housing, we are cutting people off from safety, from stability, from dignity that they deserve. And I'm almost done. Just remember there's a broad variety of people that are experiencing homelessness in Lexington. And a lot of them we turn and look away from every single day. That's it. Thank you. Next up is Christina Woodson followed by Rolanda Woolfolk. Welcome. My name is Christina Woodson and I'm in District 6. I have a few pictures to hand out. These are from the Hope Center and they're showing people that are sleeping in the hallways. Under 24-7 fluorescent lights. And I work closely with the Hope Center so not bad mouthing them in any way but just to show the overflow. I work for New Vista through their 28-day rehab called the Schwartz Center. So I'm going to share on my professional experience with this but also as my personal experience. As the intake coordinator and community outreach for this shelter, the majority of our clients come off the streets and don't have phones. And because the shelters are overwhelmed, they end up going into hiding so that they can avoid getting arrested or other issues that may cause them long term. So without these shelters and without the options, even though we work closely with the ones that are open, they're always overfull. And we really pride ourselves on being a recovery ready community. But we have done an amazing job of getting the rehab, the sober living, expungement clinics. But the missing piece is affordable housing. So these people end up back on the streets with nowhere to go. So all of that work that we spent, all that money and all the funding that Lexington spends on helping the opioid crisis just goes right back out the window when they don't have anywhere affordable to live. And then they don't have a shelter even to go back into. And if they do have the shelter, it's not safe and it's back on the streets in the same condition that they came from. As my personal experience, I wanted to share really quick. In 2021, I left a domestic violence situation in the middle of the night in the winter. And unfortunately, the shelters were all overwhelmed. So me and my child ended up on the street. And we did end up getting to stay in a hotel for almost four months. The only reason we had that hotel option is because I happened to get a back refund from taxes that just came out of the middle of nowhere that I'd been waiting on for three years. Without that, we had experienced homelessness. And I wanted to talk a little bit really quick about how the location will be very important. When someone is homeless, they're constantly having to go from resource to resource to resource during the day. And when it's not in a centralized location, then you're setting them up for more and failure. They're spending all day just trying to get somewhere to eat, somewhere to get clothing, somewhere to get their child to school, and then back into the shelter in time at night so that they have a place. And the majority of these places, like you can see in those pictures, are not safe for families, children, or even those that are struggling with SUD and that are trying to actually seek treatment. That's all I have to say. Thank you. Next is Rolanda Woolfolk, followed by Joshua McKinley. Welcome. Rolanda Woolfolk, 2nd District. I'd like to thank FOGL and everyone for doing the study on homelessness. We see it a lot in the Georgetown Street area to the point that we help, me personally, helping folks in Douglas Park that are homeless. February the 14th, on Valentine's Day, we hosted our seniors dance. And we have one fellow that was on the porch. Called for outreach to come out. They came out. It's like, are you going to take him with you? He's like, no. He got a fifth with him. He's good. So I go out and asked, why didn't you go with the people? He said, they didn't say nothing to me about going anywhere. I said, well, we got to get you out of this code. I'm going to call back and see if they can come back and get you. You going to go? He said, yeah. I don't want to be out here. So called. Post come back. Said he had a fifth on him. He was doing X, Y, and Z. So I was like, OK. If they're not back by the time I get off from work, I'm going to take you over to the Hope Center. I did. Because they didn't nobody come back. So when he came back in April with another fellow, itching, thinking he got infantile or something. So come to find out, I had to take one, the other one, to the hospital in my car. He was treated so badly. I was like, why? Come to find out, he was infested with bed bugs. So it dawned on me on why the other one was itching so bad. He had bed bugs, too. But I stayed with this one the entire time to receive services. And he was able to get it. The other one I had to call the ambulance for to get services. And within the next day, he was back because didn't nobody want to service him because he didn't have no family with him. We got to do better with what we got now. And if we don't do better with what we got now with humanitarian, we're going to continue repeating the cycle. Just getting another shelter don't mean nothing. If we don't have low-income housing for these people to live in, we ain't going to get no better. Affordable housing is a term. It ain't affordable to these people who need housing. Housing, not a shelter. Housing. Thank you. Next is Joshua McKinley. And you'll be followed by Marty Jones. Marty will have six minutes. Welcome. Welcome. Thank you so much. My name is Joshua McKinley. I represent District 11 when I'm speaking. As far as my personal district, I honestly don't know because I just moved like two months ago. But anyhow. So I'm speaking on behalf of Arbor Youth Services to express our strong support for a dedicated family shelter. And to urge you to prioritize this need in upcoming funding decisions. Arbor Youth Services is Lexington's only emergency youth shelter exclusively serving children and youth from birth through age 24. We operate two facilities. One for children 0 to 17 and one for young adults 18 to 24. While we remain committed to our mission of supporting homeless and runaway youth, our current infrastructure presents a heartbreaking limitation. We are unable to keep families together due to the structure of our age specific shelters. In the past year alone, nine families have chose to deny services because our shelter could not accommodate parents and children together. Only 11 families have been successfully housed, underscoring the scarcity of available and appropriate space. Four families are currently in shelter living in difficult conditions without adequate space for family cohesion. We regularly encounter parents who are faced with an impossible choice. Sleep separately from their children or remain unsheltered. This is not a choice any parent should have to make, and yet it is a daily reality in our city. A city funded family shelter would fill a glaring gap in our homelessness response system. It would ensure family unity, a critical component for the emotional and psychological well being of both parents and children. Provide a safer, more stable environment for families facing housing insecurity. Reduce barriers to accessing services, education, and long term housing solutions. The need is not hypothetical, it is real, it is immediate, and it is growing. Arbor Youth Services is ready to continue being part of the solution, but we cannot meet the needs of families alone. We urge the council to invest in the infrastructure necessary to provide shelter to families. Because no child and no parent should have to sleep apart in their moment of greatest need. I also want to add just real quick, because I know I got a few times. I really liked what Chris Primo said, adding about that our youth, when they leave our shelter, they become those people, and what David Shack spoke. So thank you for your time, thank you for allowing me to be here. Have a great day. Thank you. Thank you. Next is Marty Jones, who will have six minutes, followed by Laura Carr. Welcome. Good afternoon, Marty Jones, District 11. As I said, my name is Marty Jones, and I'm the Director of Housing and Homeless Services for Community Action Council. Community Action has operated its emergency family housing program for nearly a decade. EFH, as we call it, provides shelter to families experiencing homelessness who couldn't go to existing shelters without separating. During the pandemic, LFUCG contracted with Community Action to operate a season-long congregate shelter, which it did so in 2020-21 and again in 2021-22. During the winter of 2022-23, Community Action again was asked to operate a non-congregate shelter, but this time it was only when LFUCG activated its winter weather plan. Further, Community Action operated an 18-month transitional housing pilot project during 2022 and 2023 to temporarily house individuals and families who were experiencing homelessness. Lastly, through funding from LFUCG, Community Action has expanded its EFH program during the past two winters through the use of hotel rooms to provide emergency shelter to families with children. I mention all this to say Community Action has first-hand experience in providing shelter and crisis housing to individuals and families who are experiencing homelessness, and I contend to the limitations of the current shelter system and of the seasonal efforts to expand the overall shelter capacity. First of all, there aren't nearly enough shelter beds for the total number of persons experiencing homelessness. The beds that are available are either not accessible to a significant number of people or present barriers that preclude a large number from accessing them. Individuals with mobility or health issues, multigenerational families, and couples with no children are usually not able to stay at any congregate shelter due to household composition and or shelter capacity. Although Community Action has its EFH program, the number of families we can serve at one time is constrained by the units we have available and the funding to provide hotel rooms. On numerous occasions, I've been part of a back-and-forth between service providers or internally among our staff who are trying to find a temporary place for a household recently evicted in which a parent is caring for an adult child with a disability or for an adult with mobility issues who can't move themselves from a bed to a wheelchair or a pregnant couple who lost their housing after a temporary loss of income and wish to stay together and do not want to separate to go for different shelters. The seasonal shelter options that have been implemented are intended to help overcome this shortage during the coldest months of the year. Although they do expand the number of shelter beds for the winter, they are not year-round and are unavailable outside of winter. In addition, because of their temporary nature, it is a challenge to hire dedicated staff to work with those in seasonal shelter. This is important to note as the central purpose of shelter, besides providing an emergency place to stay, should also be assisting participants with housing. The absence of adequate staffing makes this more difficult. As an illustration, since its inception, 72% of households in our EFH and 43% of households in the THPP pilot project I mentioned earlier obtained permanent housing upon leaving the program. Both of these programs have dedicated staff to provide case management and other services, including assistance in obtaining housing. In contrast, 15% of those in our winter shelters operated by Community Action obtained housing upon exit. There is one final point I'd like to mention. The image that comes to mind for many when the issue of homelessness is discussed is that of a male or female on the streets who often appears to be under influence or have a mental illness. Although this scenario may be the most visible, it is not representative of the majority of those experiencing homelessness. Homelessness affects a cross section of the population, including families with and without children, those with chronic health conditions, and the elderly, and the current system isn't able to provide the safety or shelter for a significant number of those experiencing homelessness. Thank you. Thank you. All right. Next is Sherry Baptiste, followed by Sharon Price. Sherry? Is Sherry here? Sherry, welcome. Thank you. If you'll state your name and your council district, and you'll have three minutes. Sherry Baptiste. Good day. My name is Sherry Baptiste, and I am the case manager supervisor at Salvation Army. First, I would like to thank you for providing this platform to address one of the most pressing challenges facing the community, homelessness. According to the 2024 Lex count, there are 825 individuals in Lexington are experiencing homelessness. This number is more than a statistic. It represents real people, neighbors, veterans, families, each with a story, each deserving dignity and support. Many people don't fully understand the scope or the limits of what our shelter provides. Yes, we offer a safe place to sleep, but we also serve hot meals, provide hygiene facilities, offer case management, and help individuals navigate the path to stable housing. We are a lifeline for many. However, what often goes unseen is the strain on our physical capacity. Our shelter was not built to meet the growing demands we now face. We are consistently operating at or near full capacity, and despite our best efforts, we simply cannot accommodate every individual in need. This gap between what we can offer and what is needed is one of the most urgent challenges we face. Without expanding resources and space, we risk turning people away, not because they don't need help, but because we physically cannot provide it. In conclusion, homelessness is a complex issue, but it's not insurmountable. With compassion, commitment, and collaboration, we can all make a difference, and that is my hope. Let us work together to ensure every individual in Lexington has a safe place to lay their head and not be criminalized for simply being homeless. Thank you. Thank you. Next is Sharon Price, who will be followed by Terry Crow. Welcome. Hi, everybody. I'm glad to be here today. Again, my name is Sharon Price. I'm the Executive Director of Community Action Council that's located right here in Lexington. And we have been a longstanding partner in the city's housing and shelter network a long time. But I want to start by thanking all of you, along with Commissioner Lanter and his staff, for all of their incredible, incredible hard work. It is a lot of work that goes into taking care of the business of the city. And so, what we're discussing here today is a complex challenge with no easy answers, and I appreciate everyone's efforts. Community action has been deeply engaged in supporting our unhoused neighbors over the past decades. From operating Lexington's first shelter for nontraditional and two-parent families, to expanding our reach through street outreach, emergency hotel placements, transitional housing pilots, and temporary winter shelter operations. All of those are necessary. Each of these efforts reflect our agency's commitment to a shared mission of ensuring that those in crisis have access to safety and supportive shelter. What we're seeing today is a system that is under significant strain. The number of people in need far exceeds the available shelter space. In our emergency family housing program alone, the increase in demand has been striking. Last year, we served 20 families during a temporary winter expansion. This year, 41. A huge increase. This is important because it affirms how important it is for shelter programs to offer a pathway to stability. A space where people can begin to rebuild. That means having access to case management, developing relationships with trained staff, connecting to essential services, and making real progress toward permanent housing and employment if necessary. When our staff operate in stable, structured settings, we see strong outcomes. and supportive environments are necessary to meet the complex needs that we are encountering. Homelessness, it has already been said, is not just a statistic. It is the people in our community. It's our people. It's all of us. Community action stands ready to help in any way necessary. We remain committed to working with everyone in this room to build solutions that are not only responsive in the moment, but also strategic and sustainable for the long term so we can build a city that works for everyone. Thank you all so much. Thank you very much, Erin. Next is Terry Crow. Welcome. Thank you. Good afternoon. My name is Terry Crow. I'm in District 8. I work as the Victim Advocate Supervisor at Sexual Violence Resource Center of the Blue Grass, formerly Ampersand. We specialize in preventing and responding to all survivors of any type of sexual harm. I'm here to speak briefly in support of the desperate need for safe, trauma-informed emergency shelter and long term housing and to give you a very small glimpse into how sexual trauma and homelessness intersect. There is a huge correlation between experiencing homelessness and being a survivor of sexual trauma or because of sexual trauma. At Sexual Violence Resource Center, every single day in our office and in Lexington's emergency rooms, we are faced with attempting to help Lexington's survivors of sexual trauma find emergency housing and long term housing to be safe and away from their perpetrators and for other reasons that they may need shelter. And every day, we have to tell the vast majority of these clients that there's basically no shelter or housing for you. There is likely no room for you at Lexington's emergency shelters and there's little to no financial support for you for longer term or permanent housing. I ask you, what do we want our Lexington to be? What do we want to create? How will we choose to care for our fellow citizens and survivors of sexual trauma? How many times should we as advocates have to say, there's no emergency shelter for you? How many times can survivors of rape and other types of sexual trauma have to hear, there are no options for you? Choosing to not fund additional shelter is a choice to perpetuate harm and neglect. We need more shelter and long term housing for Lexington's citizens experiencing homelessness and we needed it yesterday. Thank you for your time. Thank you very much. Council members, that completes those who have signed up for issues on the agenda and I thank all of you who took time to speak to us. Thank you. Now, the next item on our agenda is docket, which we don't have a docket today. We do have a council work session May 27th motions. Motion approved. Thank you. Council member Ellinger moves approval. Council member Gray seconds. Are there any corrections, additions, comments? All right. All those in favor, say aye. Aye. Is anyone opposed? All right, that passes. We have no budget amendments today and no budget adjustments. We do have new business. Motion approved. Thank you. Council member Ellinger. Council member Savignee seconded. If you have questions about new business, now is the time to log in. All right, I don't see any questions. All those in favor, say aye. Aye. Is anyone opposed? All right, that motion passes. There are no communications from the mayor for appointments, donations, or procurements and that brings us to continuing business and presentations. So, I'll entertain a motion to approve council capital projects. Motion approved. Council member Gray moved. Council member Curtis seconded. Are there any questions? All those in favor, say aye. Aye. Is anyone opposed? All right, that motion passes. And this brings us to social services and public safety. Council member Jennifer Reynolds. Thank you, mayor. The April 15, 2025 social services and public safety committee meeting was called to order at 101 p.m. on April 15, 2025, which is what I just said. The February 25, 2025 committee summary was approved unanimously with no additions or corrections. Our first presentation was an overview of the services and resources the sheriff's office offers to crime victims. Kathy Witt, Fayette County Sheriff, spoke about Amanda's Center, which provides referrals and coordinates with other community resources that offer services to victims of domestic violence and their families. Victims are supported throughout the process of filing for protective order, which is renewable every three years. The sheriff's office helps anyone. Victims can be of any gender or race, and there are deputized workers to assist them wherever they are. No action was taken on this item. Next, Michael Cravens, managing attorney in the Department of Law, presented the sober living ordinance. Regulating this ordinance will require balancing several interests, including those of vulnerable populations, recovery residential operators, regulating bad actors, and neighborhood residents. The proposed ordinance requires operators to obtain a recovery residence license, proof of certification, and a zoning compliance permit. Cravens explained that obtaining a zoning compliance permit certifies that the use of property is appropriate for the zone and differentiates a recovery residence from a residential home. He pointed out that the ordinance does not regulate the misconduct of tenants. The house owner is responsible for evictions. This item remains in committee for further discussion, and no action was taken on this item. Finally, Stephanie Thexton, domestic and sexual violence prevention coordinator, discussed the It's Time Lexington, a citywide action-oriented initiative to end domestic and sexual violence in our communities. They are expanding partnerships with initiatives that focus on children. She reviewed the program's mission to create a culture of safety and empowered stakeholders through advocacy, education, collaboration, and service coordination for communities impacted by interpersonal violence. Sexual assault remains the most under-reported crime, with 63% of sexual assaults not reported to police. She explained the culture of sexual violence and said it is not just about individuals, individual actions, and individual responses. It's about systems and what we promote and tolerate in our community. No action was taken on this item, and the meeting was adjourned at 2.51 p.m., and that concludes my report out. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you very much. Does anyone have a question for Councilmember Reynolds? All right. Thank you. That moves us to the LexTran Microtransit Feasibility Study, and I believe we have George Meyer, who is the consultant. Are you kicking us off, or Fred, are you kicking us off? Fred comes from LexTran. Thank you, Mayor Gordon, and thank you, Urban County Council, for inviting us here to share with you our Microtransit Feasibility Study. As we get into this, I'd like to introduce the members from the LexTran staff. We have Emily Elliott, our Director of Planning and Community Development, and Gregory Butler, our Manager of Planning and Community Development. From the LexTran side, they helped oversee this project and help it come to life. I'm pleased to introduce Mr. George Meyer from Nelson Nygaard Consultants. He was our project lead on the consulting end, and George brings with him a real national perspective of Microtransit Feasibility Studies and other projects, as well as some real local involvement as he was part of the team that helped with our Comprehensive Operations Analysis in 2022. So when I say he was the man for the job for this study, I truly believe that, and without further ado, Mr. George Meyer. Welcome. Thank you so much. Yeah, let's, how do we get to? Okay, so today we're going to talk about what we've been doing for the study. It began back in November. Right now we're going through a recommendations development, and so let's jump right into it. Before we talk about the various components of the project, though, I do want to talk a little bit about what microtransit is. And so here, sometimes it's best to understand microtransit by understanding what microtransit is not. Over on the far left, you have fixed route bus, which I'm sure all of you are already familiar with. It's the most efficient type of bus service there is, and I say that because it travels on predetermined schedules and alignments to and from major activity centers along major corridors, serving very high density development. It picks up lots of riders. It becomes more efficient as it picks up those riders. The next transit mode, which sometimes can be considered transit, sometimes not, is ride hail. This is a curb-to-curb service, very similar to taxis. You probably recognize them as Uber and Lyft services, but the differentiator here is that they've folded in technology improvements that makes booking trips and trip dispatching much more convenient. The key here, though, is that the vehicles are not ADA accessible, and what I mean by that is that folks with mobility impairments, ride hail does not make accommodations for. Which leads me to our next mode, ADA paratransit. You'll recognize that as the local service wheels by LexTran. This is limited to eligible riders with disabilities that somehow prevent them from using the LexTran fixed route bus service. This is an origin-to-destination service, a door-to-door service, and reservations are typically required the day before, but it does operate countywide. With microtransit, our last mode down at the far right, it's essentially transit's version of a ride hail. So we're borrowing the technology from ride hail, that trip dispatching, you usually use a smartphone to request trips, incorporating that into a service operated by a transit agency. The thing about microtransit, though, is that it becomes more expensive and less efficient with higher ridership, and it is required to serve those with disabilities. I do want to talk about some of the case studies, some of the lessons learned that we found out through talking to various other microtransit programs at other agencies. We talked to five different agencies, six different programs. We got a diverse set of operations and technology perspectives. We talked to each of the agencies about their project purpose and use case. They just about all began as pilots. Most of the time they were implementing microtransit in areas that were too difficult to serve with fixed routes, so that could be areas of very low density, very low ridership areas. We also interviewed them about funding, and a lot of times funding came from a mix of entities, so local, state, and federal. Some of the local funding examples were from local governments, local businesses, even community colleges. Fares typically accounted for a very small portion of overall operating costs. We also talked to agencies about implementation and operations, where again, fares were very interesting. Some agencies were charging zero fare, others were pricing fares at a premium. Some of the major outcomes or kind of lessons learned through this process, a big thing that came up over and over was the issue of capacity. Microtransit has capacity limitations, and if you see spikes in demands, that capacity, the service can be overwhelmed and you end up with a degradation of service with things like denied trip requests and potentially frustrated riders. So agencies advised to try to control demand with things like limiting zone size, pricing fares effectively. We also conducted an existing conditions and market assessment. We produced a ton of analysis, a lot of different maps. I think a lot of it can be boiled down to the three that you see here, though. On the left, you see the distribution of service over Lexington, so what you have in terms of fixed route right now, or transit supply. The second map that you see is transit demand, so we did demographic analysis. We looked at areas that had high propensity for transit, mapped that. The third map that you see is a combination of those two maps, where we've highlighted areas of high need but low supply. These represent great areas for microtransit to come in and fill that void. So now I'm going to talk a little bit about the recommendations development. Before we actually get into zone specifics, there are a handful of zone best practices, if you will. The first thing that we want to keep in mind when drawing zones is we want to complement that existing service. So a lot of times agencies will have fixed route, as Lexran does already. We want to create zones that funnel riders to that fixed route service so they can connect and opens up a world of opportunities for riders, specifically at strong anchor points. You also want to avoid cannibalizing or competing with those existing services, so you want to draw those zones that don't just duplicate fixed route service. You want to draw those zones also that would include a mix of trip types, so we want to cover areas that have demographics that have high transit propensity populations, but then also include areas for folks to go, connect folks to jobs, shopping, medical locations. Another big thing with drawing microtransit zones is considering the zone size. So we've learned that approximately five square miles is a good kind of rule of thumb. They can get bigger or smaller, kind of depending on that density of development, but it's a good starting point. You also want to design zones that are at least two vehicles, and so with two vehicles you really reach a much more efficient in trip dispatching than one vehicle. You also, lastly, you want those zones to be easily understandable and also approachable because at the end of the day, if folks are intimidated or riders don't understand how to use the service, then they might not ever even try it. So really there's a lot of different things coming into play here. I just talked about the best practices. We incorporated lessons learned from the case studies. We identified the gaps from existing conditions analysis. We also held staff workshops, and then there was an engagement component as well where we did a public survey and then stakeholder engagement to get a better idea of community interests. And so ultimately we've drawn a series of zones throughout Lexington Fayette, but we also understand that funding isn't unlimited. We needed a way to prioritize these zones, evaluate these zones, so we did a zone screening process and evaluated each zone on things like population and jobs, access to services, benefits to fixed routes, and so on. And so depending on what exactly goals you're setting and what problem that you're trying to solve, each of the zones, they excel in various areas of that evaluation process. But what we did find is this zone right here, as you can see on the map, the northwest zone, excelled kind of across the board. And a lot of the reasons why it did so well was because it brought a lot of economic opportunity, a lot of access to jobs, healthcare access, the demographics were right for microtransit as well, and then it also gave a lot of opportunities to connect into the existing fixed route network. We wanted to get a better handle of what total operating costs could look like, so it's a relatively basic math operation where you're making service assumptions. Okay, if service starts at 6 a.m. and it ends at 8 p.m., you've got two vehicles out there, it's operating throughout the year, and you use an hourly cost of $95, which is typical of like a turnkey service, and then add in some administrative costs on LexTrans part, over a two-year pilot period, that comes out to about $2.4 million. We also estimated ridership, and on an annual basis, the northwest zone would likely have about 19,500 riders, and if we're pricing microtransit fares at about $3, more of like on the premium end, we could bring in about $60,000 annually in fare revenues. We also calculated some performance metrics, which helps for comparisons, and we get a passenger's per hour of about 1.9, and a cost per passenger of about $60. So there are a variety of funding opportunities. Each funding opportunity kind of has its own limitations, and so we created this slide to parse out each of those funding opportunities. The federal formula funding is a big one here. LexTrans currently allocates all of their federal formula funding, though, to paratransit, and a lot of their maintenance needs where a lot of that money goes to. There's also federal grant funding available. Right now, however, federal grants are kind of on the limited side, and the process for that is extremely competitive. There's also local funding options, like local governments or, for instance, ballot initiatives, or local partnerships, as we saw in some of the case studies, colleges and universities, or even major employers. The thing about a lot of the local funding, however, though, is it relies on that continued support, and if that support goes away, then the service could also go away with it, which makes making those longer-term plans much more difficult. And then at the end, we have got some supplemental funding, things like advertising and fair revenues. Those represent relatively small amounts of the overall operating costs, though. So let's say that microtransit, it looks like it's meeting the agency goals, and we do end up securing funding for it. Here are some steps, some things to think about as implementation strategies. You definitely want to start with a pilot, preferably on the longer side, too, or even if you could, three years would be great, and that's in order to test that market and learn a lot. Microtransit hasn't been in operation in the area, so testing that market and learning is an important part of this. You also want to make careful, conservative policy decisions, and that's to avoid overpromising and under-delivering, and that's one of the big things that we learned in the case studies, it's very, very easy to do with microtransit. You also want to advertise the new service because it's going to be new to riders. You've got to go through an education process and teach folks how to use it, and then tracking is very important. So tracking monthly and then reevaluate every six months. So in conclusion, you know, I think the big takeaway for me, at least, has been that we microtransit, you know, it's got benefits, it also has drawbacks. And I think it's important to kind of understand both sides of it, understand what microtransit is really good at, what microtransit is not so great at. It's really good at filling service gaps. Fixed route service doesn't operate very efficiently everywhere. You know, staying to main corridors and picking up lots of riders through high-density development, that's a fixed route service. But microtransit can kind of fill in those areas that are too difficult to serve with those fixed routes. It's also incredibly flexible. So in terms of pickup locations, drop-off locations, it's also flexible in terms of timing. You know, if you give a passenger the opportunity to just pull out their smartphone and say, you know, I want to be picked up from my house, taken to my job, and a vehicle's there in 15 minutes, passengers end up loving that. On the drawback side, though, it's expensive. So the cost per trip is very high compared to other modes. And so I mentioned earlier about comparisons with those key performance indicators. It's an estimated $60 per trip for that northwest zone. When we compare that to fixed route services, it's only about 5. It also has upper limits in terms of productivity. And when you look at passengers per hour, microtransit's typically on the 2 to 3 passengers per hour. When we compare that to electric and fixed routes, it's on the order of 22. So it's less productive, and it's more expensive considering, like, those comparisons to fixed route service. Thank you very much. All right. Thank you so much. And now we'll have questions or comments from Council Members. Council Member Beasley. Thank you, Mayor. And thank you for your presentation. I just have a few questions. Can you hear me? They can hear me. Y'all can hear me, right? Will this be a door-to-door service? I can't say for sure right now that it will be door-to-door. There are a variety of options. So a lot of them are curb-to-curb, is what I like to call it. Or it could be intersection-to-intersection. There are also options where it could be even hub-to-hub. I think it's all about designing service that doesn't generate too much demand for how much supply we're able to offer. Because when you get into a situation like that, service declines, and then you end up with frustrated passengers. So I can't say for sure right now that it would be door-to-door. At best, I think it would be, from the passenger's perspective, curb-to-curb, most likely. Okay, so I think we funded $250,000. Is that right, Chuck? How long is that money going to last for a pilot? You said that two or three years would be the perfect storm, but the money that we've already allocated, how long is that going to last? So $250,000. So if we go back to the cost side, over a two-year period, we're looking at about $2.3, $2.4. We'd have to just do a little bit of math and figure out at a turn-key rate, that's also another assumption, of $95 an hour. I don't know, maybe a few months. We'd have to do a little bit of math on the back end to figure out. And so you said it would be about $3, so that's what the rider would pay, is $3? That's right, yep. And that would be, it's like the bus would be one way, like now it's a dollar to catch the bus each way, right? That's right. So it'd be $6 for a trip? That's what we're looking at right now, yes. That's not horrible. All right, thank you. Thank you, Council Member Morton. Thank you. First, I want to start off with kind of just a scenario so I can get a better understanding. So could you tell me how this transit scenario would work? From a resident from Masterson Station that needs to go to Walmart on Richmond Road, how would that work under microtransit? So the Walmart on Richmond? Correct. So pretty much all the way from Georgetown Road, need to get all the way over to Richmond Road. So under this specific scenario, microtransit probably isn't your best option. Microtransit's more of a localized service, so it's not your best option for long distances or crosstown. I would encourage that passenger to take the fixed route. But does microtransit assist with the fixed routes, correct? So depending on exactly where that passenger is starting from, they could, if we look at the map, could take that microtransit service to connect to that initial fixed route. So it could cut down on that initial walking to the bus. Let me fill in on that a little bit. So from Masterson Station, that's not included in the microtransit zone as we are describing here. However, if you were somewhere around Georgetown Road, maybe the St. Martin's Village neighborhood, you could use microtransit there to connect into fixed route. But if your destination is somewhere outside of the zone, you will have to connect to fixed route and use that for the remainder of your trip. Okay. Cool. So then, well then similar, what about a resident near Cardinal Valley that needs to go to the Amazon on Leastown Road? So in that case, if both of those, the origin and the destination, is within the zone, you were likely able to make that trip only on the microtransit service. Okay. What does that look like? Talk me through how that would work. Open your app and say, I need a trip at this time. Should the supply be available, they would schedule your trip. The vehicle would show up depending on if we're curb to curb or intersection to intersection, depending on where it is that we've agreed to pick you up. You would go to that place. We would take you to some agreed location where we would drop you off, so near Amazon. Okay. So in that agreed location, it doesn't have to be a bus stop? It doesn't have to be. In some deployments of microtransit, it can be. So that's one of those decisions that we'll have to make should we move forward with a pilot study. Are we going to do a more open, anywhere to anywhere, so a curb to curb sort of service, or limit that to just bus stops or virtual bus stops? There's a few different ways to make that work. Okay. Cool. Okay. Let's see. So off the top of your head, what's the rate for the wheels program? What's the rate? Yeah. How much does it cost for those to use wheels? To use wheels is $1.60 if you are within three quarters of a mile of a LexTran fixed route. If you're anywhere else in the county, so outside of that three quarter mile buffer, it's $2. Okay. So, and if the concern of finances disappeared, what would be the plan to implement the microtransit program? Would it be contracting with, yeah, what would be the plan? Yes. We would initially contract that service out. Longer term, I would like to see this be part of the services that we deliver over the long term. If that were to be the case down the road, we could look at bringing that in house. But I think initially to demonstrate the proof of concept, I think we would put an RFP out to bid, take bids, the evaluation, and then have a service stood up after that. Indeed. And then lastly, what would you consider the about average time for someone looking to get to their destination with microtransit? Average time of transport? It depends on the demand at that moment in time. So this is a little bit different than your Uber and Lyft trip because you are usually the only person on Uber and Lyft. This can be a shared ride service, so you're not always going directly from your origin to destination. So depending on what demand is at the moment is really what's going to depend on your trip times. But it would be similar to what you would expect if you were going to Cardinal Valley to Amazon. Thank you. Thank you. Council Member Lynch. Thank you, Mayor. And thank you for the presentation. I have a question regarding the slide about case studies, funding, and operations. You listed on the funding side in that left block that some cities are seeking grants to fund their pilot studies. And I was just wondering, what were the origins of those grants? Are they federal grants, state grants? What do you commonly see other cities are doing to fund the pilot project? Right, yeah. So it kind of depended on when each of the programs began. So some of these programs are years old. We wanted to talk to agencies that didn't just start their programs, so most of the programs had been around a few years. So a lot of those grants are no longer available. And that will be in the report. We could include which specifically grants were used at that time. That would be great, because I'm very curious about what sources of funding, where those grants came from. And then on that same slide on the other side, under implementation operations, you say that passenger fares vary by agency from zero to a premium price. And I just want to know a numerical range from zero to what are you seeing being kind of the highest prices charged across the United States? So there was an example of, it was either 350 or 375 was, I think, the highest one. And that was in response to overwhelming demand. So they had, this is in Des Moines, DART. And they had previously, I think, had their fares maybe about 175. They had it the same as their fixed route service. But they were struggling with surges in demand and not being able to handle, they didn't have the capacity to handle. So they had since, actually pretty recently, I think, had, it may have been about 350 per trip. That kind of reminds me of kind of the surge pricing that some of the Uber and Lyfts do. Is that kind of a similar model? No. So for microtransit, you have your fare costs. And that's the price that you pay. It's not variable pricing. So it's always the same price. So it doesn't really have that tool, I guess, like an Uber does to increase prices to suppress that demand or take advantage of that demand. You don't generally see microtransit or transit agencies change fares on passengers. Okay. Does that make sense? I think. So it's always, so for DART, for instance, the microtransit fares are always $3.50, regardless of time. Okay. And regardless of demand. Correct. Okay. Let's see, what's my time? Two minutes. My next question, and this is just for clarifying, on your ridership and fares slide, you listed fare box recovery ratio at 5%. I didn't know what that was. Oh, yeah. My apologies for getting into the weeds there. So fare box recovery ratio is essentially you take your, and we use the approximate fare revenue of $58,500. What percentage does that account of your total operating costs? And that's 5%. That's pretty typical of transit in general. Transit does not pay for itself from fares. Fares usually only account for a fraction of the total costs. So that's what that represents. Thank you. And I believe my last question is, and Mr. Combs, you may answer this, if and when we do get microtransit, would it permanently alter some of the fixed routes if it's introduced in a specific zone, would that permanently alter those routes? If it's a long-term solution, it could. And if we look at the zone here, the route in purple, that could be transitioned over to the route in orange, which would give the route in orange enough frequency to support the microtransit system. So we would work with our fixed routes to make sure that they are sufficient to meet the demand of bringing those extra people onto the fixed route service. So there's a potential for some changes to the fixed route service, yes. All right. Awesome. Thank you so much. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you. Council Member Savigny. Thank you, Mayor, and thank you so much for the presentation. I think it was on one of the last slides. You had a couple of columns, and I see that cost per passenger, $59. One before that. One after that. Keep going. That one there. I think it said cost per trip. You basically said you estimated $59.75 in the zone, right? Yes. So I guess what I'm thinking of is why microtransit and why not just actually pay an Uber driver to do that same service? Because my guess is that your typical Uber in that zone is maybe $20, like maybe. And if you did Uber ride share, it would be probably less. And I understand the value of kind of connecting to our network, but it seems like you could almost do that with a partner. And I don't know if Uber is actually doing that. You know what I mean? Yeah. No. Great question. And we talked to agencies that are doing that. So we call them transportation network company, TNC in the industry. We call them Uber and Lyft. So a TNC partnership. So a partnership with Uber and Lyft. And yeah, we did talk to a couple of agencies that do have those types of programs. And they do generally, they're less expensive overall than traditional microtransit. There are definite trade-offs with going that route though. Some of the struggles include not having drivers available. So we talked to one of the agencies that was connecting into their fixed routes with Uber and Lyft. Passengers got up to go to work 6 a.m., couldn't get a ride. And that's just because the Uber drivers didn't want to. There are also drug and alcohol testing complications. There are certain rules around drug and alcohol testing that are actually kind of a little uncertain right now that makes things a little bit complicated going that route. But to answer your question, yes, there are agencies that do TNC partnerships, Uber and Lyft partnerships. And generally they are less expensive, but you're not getting the same level of service generally. So in your six, you said five or six different case studies that you did, is that kind of the typical rate? Is that $59 per trip, $60 per trip? Is that a typical rate for those case studies? Very normal, yeah. And so $60 was for the northwest zone. There's actually a little bit of a range between this zone and others. There are a couple zones that were a little bit cheaper, some zones that ended up being quite a bit more expensive. But yes, it's typically a relatively expensive service. But yeah, that's pretty normal for a TNC service. You mentioned Des Moines. So did they do it more than a pilot? Are they citywide because they're comparable in size or a little smaller? So they did do a pilot. It's a permanent program now though. It's in a limited area. It's not citywide. The only location that we talked to that was citywide only operated citywide in late evening service. It's generally, you want to be careful about operating a citywide service, especially with the size of Lexington. Thank you. That's all I have. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Councilmember Reynolds. Thank you, Mayor. And just thank you for the presentation and the work that you all did on this. To piggyback on what Councilmember Savigny said, so in other cities, were most of the pilot programs a small zone like this? Yes. You usually see zones that are kind of on the smaller side, except for that one Tulsa example where they did have zones that, and it was multiple zones covering most of the city. But yeah, you generally see zones that are kind of smaller in size. But I know of other locations where those zones are larger. You just need to be very careful about that overall demand and also trip distances. So if someone's taking a trip that takes 20, 30 minutes, that's going to be inherently less efficient than a much shorter trip. And then for the pilot programs, if they started with a zone similar to this one, then some of them decided to grow and to have larger or multiple zones? Yep, absolutely. So I would probably implement on a zone-by-zone basis. I don't know if I would really add, like the northwest zone that I was showing, probably big enough. And if you're growing from there, probably implement a brand new zone. One of the other zones that's kind of meeting the goals of LEXTRAN based on our evaluation criteria. And from there, after that first zone, there's five others. The first zone that's proposed, half of it is basically in my district. And it's an area of high ridership. I know there's a lot of concentration of housing. So yeah, I was just curious about would a zone like that actually hit the needs of what we are saying is lacking and want with micro transit? You know, one of the more interesting parts of this study that we came across was we looked at the wheels, the paratransit data. We plotted all of the origins and the corresponding destinations for paratransit trips. And we looked at how many trips could be completed with each of these six zones. And the northwest zone completed, meaning both the origin and the destination from the wheels data, a disproportionately high percentage of trips. So I think that that was one of the standouts for that northwest zone. And so yeah, I do feel good about completing where people live, where people work, where they need to go. This area is standing out. And so how much does it cost Lextran per person to have wheels as a service? So not their fare? Yes. It is similar to this number here, between $55 and $60 per trip. So it's the same? Very close, yes. And then the fixed routes are completely ADA, just the regular fixed routes, not the wheels. Are they completely ADA accessible? Yes, the vehicles are. Some of the bus stops are not. Some of the bus stops aren't? Some of the bus stops are not. Okay. So I'm just trying to think how we would connect one from another. And do we have, we talked in here about how much time it might take, how many riders per hour on microtransit for wheels. Do we have that information? Yes. It's also about two trips per hour. And the reason that we look at that as being a little bit less than microtransit is wheels is the door-to-door service where an operator would assist someone perhaps with a mobility issue to the door. That would not happen with microtransit. And with wheels, if somebody needed the service, it might not always be as quickly? Yes. The difference with wheels is you have to schedule your trip the day before. And with this, you could schedule your trip much more, the same day, much more quickly. Okay. All right. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you. Council Member Baxter. Thank you, Mayor. And thank you all for the presentation. Excuse me. As you were looking through other communities to kind of get an idea of their pilot projects and stuff, did you come across anybody that had done kind of like a hybrid between a paratransit and a microtransit? Because I've asked in the past about would it be more beneficial for us to just expand the wheels program into something that would be more accommodating for more people. So did you come across anything that was like a hybrid? Yes. So that's becoming more commonplace. And microtransit really hasn't been along for very long, but it's growing. And that's an area within just the past couple of years we've been seeing more and more examples of. What we call that is commingling or sometimes under a single contract. You can have both the paratransit service and the microtransit service all under one contractor. That sometimes brings efficiencies. And then you can bring that microtransit technology over to the paratransit side. And yes, so absolutely we've been seeing that very, very recently. That is a trend. Okay. And then as you were looking into service providers of who we would contract with, were there minimum contract lengths? Like was a two-year contract a minimum length, or would we have the option to do a shorter contract? You mentioned the $250,000 may last a few months, but I would venture to say that there's not very many service providers that would offer a short term contract. Very good question. We talked to each of the peer agencies about their contracts, but we haven't talked to providers about contracting with LexTran. Okay. And then just for further clarification on microtransit, can riders request a solo ride, or are they all solo trips, or are they all commingled? Usually you see like a ride share, and so agencies would have multiple trips in one. So it's possible that someone could have their own vehicle, but that's usually just due to low ridership at that moment in time. You generally want to, it's more efficient to bundle those trips. So that's what you see And then going back to the fare box recovery ratio, did you say that a 5% was typical of most transit in general? Absolutely. Even with fixed routes, off the top of my head I couldn't tell you what LexTran's fixed route is, but that's pretty common. Even with other agencies, other modes, sure. Okay. I think that's all I have for now. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you. Council Member LaGrie. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you for the presentation and for answering all of our questions. It's been really helpful. I have a couple of questions that I think mostly circulate around the financials and the operating costs slide that you shared, and I just want to seek some clarification. So I'm looking at the total cost for a two-year pilot, which is $2,341,800 approximately, and I think that that's just for that northwest zone. Is that accurate? That's right, yes. And is this two-year financial overview for this pilot, is that based on a curb-to-curb service, or is that based on a curb-to-fixed route type service, or some kind of hybrid? So it's based on having two vehicles out there, so it could be a curb-to-curb service. If it's curb-to-curb, you're running the risk of not being able to get to additional passengers as quickly. If you operate a service that's a little bit more restricted, maybe an intersection-to-intersection or a hub-to-hub model, which if we had more time I would have loved to talk about those models, but you have various kind of levels of control where you could have, it's still those two vehicles, but it's a hub-to-hub model, and it would cost the same, but it would run a little bit quicker because those vehicles are able to get to that hub, multiple passengers, drop them off, and then continue on their way, rather than taking that additional time to go to that destination of that rider. So it stretches the services a little bit more thin when you operate and you give that flexibility, but it's ultimately the same cost. So if you did have a model where you were traveling, you were having the vehicles travel to a hub, then they could go to a main transit center and then travel to their final destination from there, or a different type of hub, like a major stop, for example. So when we're thinking about the user base, again just for these two vehicles in one area, that northwest corner, who would be the main user base? How would we determine how many trips could be taken and by whom, or what if there's a huge amount of demand, what if people are expecting curb-to-curb, but then they're getting curb-to-stop? How do you manage expectations, and how do you decide who gets to use the service if there is a large amount of demand? Do you have a sense of that? So micro transit generally is open to the public, so anyone who is interested in using the service would be open to using it. So great questions. In terms of the cost of it, in terms of managing that demand, we've drawn these zones. We feel good about being able to operate this zone with two vehicles. That's not the case for all of the zones. Probably there's one zone in particular that would most certainly require three vehicles, potentially more, but it's about being careful about those decisions. And there are lots of different flavors of micro transit, like with the hub-to-hub, the curb-to-curb. Fares are a big part of that. Lots of the different levers that you can pull to kind of control that demand. One thing that we really, we heard over and over from the case studies work was that don't make it too attractive right off the bat. If you don't limit demand from the start, that kind of, it makes it much more difficult to put in restrictions and limit demand after passengers already see this great service. It's much better to come in at a fare price of $3 and have demand that's too low and eventually go down, if that ends up being the case, much better to be in that position than the reverse. And we talked to agencies about their fare prices and their zone sizes, and there were cases where they're having to lay in more restrictions because the service, as one might understand, becomes wildly popular in certain cases with service to community colleges or even high schools. That's an unexpected market for some of these agencies that it catches on with a certain group, and then the agency needs to figure out what to do with overwhelming demand. That's a tough place to be. Mayor, do you mind if Mr. Combs jumps in? I know my time's up, or do you want me to sign back in for him to answer? Well, did you have a quick answer, and then you can sign back in. To add to that answer, the amount you see on here, the $200,000 for the annual administrative cost, that is something that we had committed to do when this conversation started. That included the procurement, the marketing, and the contract oversight. A big piece of that is marketing, and part of that is going to be customer engagement. We have to get out in front with these narratives to make sure that everybody understands how the service works, what it does, and as long as we continue that communication, we feel like that some of those issues that you brought up could be mitigated. Thank you. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you. Councilmember Curtis? Thank you, Mayor, and thank you for the presentation today. I'm going to get right to it and kind of pick up on some of the stuff that Councilmember LeGre was talking about, because when we previously have discussed microtransit in this body, we've discussed it as the term I remember was first mile, last mile, and that is a very different concept, and it seems like we've sort of shifted to a default of curb to curb, and I was wondering if I could get some clarification on that. So first mile, last mile, I would define as a service that penetrates deeper into neighborhoods, can take riders from where the fixed route is currently going farther along than where they can, they're able to just walk or wheel or however, you know, get to their destinations. I would still describe this as a first mile, last mile service. Because of that coverage, there are plenty of areas throughout this zone that are likely too difficult for some passengers, for some folks living in these areas, to get to the fixed route, and so this service would cover those areas and be an option for those riders to be able to connect to the fixed routes. So, you know, I would still call this first mile, last mile. Sure, thank you. And something that I've been wondering is we've talked about the different types of trip requests that would be, like, in this proposed, I'm trying to determine if the drivers have the ability to deny a request for a ride, basically. I don't believe so. Okay. So if somebody, you know, just says, you know, within obviously this five-square-mile area, you know, I want to go from one corner to the other. Right. Yeah. So, sorry, I'm trying to, so not for, like, safety reasons, right? Right. So we're talking, oh, yeah. So as long as the pickup location, drop-off location is within that zone, a driver will be scheduled to complete that trip. Okay. And we discussed the possibility of, you know, a hub-to-hub model that has been utilized elsewhere as opposed to this, you know, curb-to-curb model. For us as a legislative body, what input would we have on determining that? Or is that something that would be determined solely by Lextran or solely by the person or the company that we contract with? I think that might be a Fred question. I'm just wondering a little more about the process. That very likely would be determined by us at Lextran, and it was going to be driven heavily by what we can afford. Okay. And we put this out to bid. I think we're going to get that feedback of with $250,000, you know, you really have to limit your demand, and you might only be able to afford this model versus that model. So that would come out, I think, out of the procurement process. Okay. And, you know, one of the concerns that I hear a lot about microtransit is that it's essentially, you know, taxpayer-funded Uber. And a lot of folks don't necessarily see the value in that, but in our discussions, we've talked about it as being complementary to our fixed-route bus services as they exist. So I was wondering if you could speak a little bit to how within this proposed area the two things are going to be hypothetically complementary to each other rather than it coming across as taking money away from improving the fixed routes. And this goes back to Council Member Morton's question as well. If your destination or origin is outside of the zone, you will need to access the fixed-route service to use the microtransit. It really all comes down to your origins and destinations. If you are completely within the zone, then microtransit, should we do a curb-to-curb service, might be a viable solution for you, and that would potentially bring more people into the fold of transit. We would expect that not all of their trips would be within the zone. At some point, they're going to need to go outside of this boundary. So hey, give the fixed route a shot, and maybe we grow ridership that way. For everyone else, in a lot of the medical trips that I've heard the need for, the majority of healthcare is outside of the zone in the city. So you're going to have to interact with that fixed-route service in order to complete your trip. Okay. And then real quick before my time is up, I have one clarifying question. So when we talk about the $3 fare, it doesn't matter the distance of the fare, it is just a flat rate, $3? The way that we have this estimated now, it is a flat $3, but we would include transfers onto fixed route for free. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Councilmember Sheehan. Thank you, Mayor. I have a question about the number of vehicles on the route. So you mentioned that this zone, you feel like two vehicles are most appropriate, but other zones, it might be three. What is the determining factor in how many, or factors that determine how many vehicles are recommended? So the two big things are population and employment. Those two factors will drive transit ridership more so than any other factors. And so you want to, well, it's the population and employment that lead to ridership numbers, which then in turn lead to how many vehicles do you need to adequately serve that number of riders. Could you say a little bit more about the employment piece? Right. So employment generates a lot of transit trips. So that's true on both the fixed route and really any type of transit. So in the ridership model that we use, it incorporates population and employment and then kind of spits out a ridership estimate. And then can you talk a little bit more about the restrictions that people have put into place? Because you said that some places have had to put in more restriction. And I don't imagine that's popular, right? So that a community, you know, experiences a pilot, it becomes, you know, widely used, and then suddenly some of those services are being taken away. So what restrictions have been put in place in those communities and how has that been received? Yeah, that's a great question. The things that we saw, one of the biggest ways to kind of tamper demand would be to increase the fares. And we saw that you can make the zone smaller and not include certain areas that had been included previously if demand is too high. And you're absolutely right, that is not a popular thing to go through. And we heard loud and clear from the agencies that we talked to, you know, be very, very careful not to make that, you know, at least to start, don't make that service too attractive and deal with a demand issue, capacity issue. And, you know, employment is one of the things that people have brought up from the community on who might want access to a service like this. Other, you know, folks have talked about healthcare, getting to doctor's appointments. But those, but it's primarily a focus on people who can't move themselves around our community, right? Who might have mobility challenges that restrict them from driving or not have a car. Like, so there might be, there's very specific subsets of people. So I'm wondering, and you might not have this answer today, but, you know, how do we tailor to meet the, you know, tailor the restrictions or the service to really meet those who really need it first? Absolutely. So when we did the demand, like right here, demand for transit service, that takes in a lot of demographic information like low income, zero vehicle households. And so we were first off able to look at that demand for transit and zero in on those communities that need it most. Not only that they need it, but then, you know, maybe the fixed route service isn't serving it very effectively. And then we can go over here in that zone screening process. I just have a population right here, but it's actually a lot more complicated than that. We've got demographic variables that we look at, including disabled population and zero vehicle households, minority population, low income population. And so we have these zones and can evaluate based on all of those criteria and prioritize the zones that are fulfilling the specific demographic needs. Yeah, and I'm wondering, like with not even just picking the zone that we might focus on, but then also within that zone, how do you prioritize the rides? So a big component of this, if we go back to the slide on the modes, so microtransit on the far right, so it must include accessible vehicles. So somewhere in that fleet, the best programs I've seen, all of the vehicles are accessible, wheelchair accessible, or, but they at least need to have, you know, by law have some wheelchair accessible vehicles. And so those trips will be accommodated. I haven't necessarily heard of prioritizing those trips over other trips, but definitely part of that service. Thank you. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you. Council Member Ellinger. Thank you, Mayor. And I want to thank my colleagues for all the questions, and I want to thank the board for the feasibility study. We asked for that, and the committee asked for it, and you all have presented. I expect there's going to be a full report out at some point, because this is just, we gave you kind of a quick timeline to get this done, to get it in between when we were doing first and second reading of the budget, so you came with that. But I assume at some point we're going to have the case studies that you'll actually show what you did, because I'd like to see the ones that you did and do that, because somehow I've become the microtransit person on the council and in the community, and I'm glad to be that, because I'm very for public transportation. So in order to have a successful public transportation, I think two things are the most important. You have to have convenience and frequency, to get people out of your cars that have cars to use it, and to get people on public transportation, make them have access to it. And to get back to what Council Member Kerr said, I think it's kind of a duel. It fills the gap, so it's the first mile, last mile, but also you can stay in your zone, too, so it can do both. One of the issues that I'm always looking at is, and this would be long term, we have 25, I think, fixed routes, correct? And not all the fixed routes are the same, I don't think. Some of them are busier than others. And when we look at other communities, when they went to microtransits, some of them had structural changes that they did when they looked at the pilot and said, you know, this could be going long term, this could be some changes that we make. So I think that's something that long term we'll look at. One was brought up is the cost, but when we look at the wheels cost, it's similar or more expensive than what I think microtransit is going to be. So yes, you see that number, but it's also what we're paying right now, that you have to have a CDL license for the wheels program, right? For the wheels? You don't have to have CDL for wheels? Do either of them have to have CDL then? Just only for LexTran, they have to have the CDL? Okay. And the one that kind of intrigued me, could you go over that TNC again that you brought up about the partnership with the Uber and Lyft and how that one works? Yep, yeah. So we did have a couple examples of, and I don't really have a specific slide on TNC partnerships. So we did have examples of that, and it's essentially a contract between the transit agency and Uber and Lyft, for example. There's also, very importantly, you need to fold in an ADA paratransit component too that's operating a comparable trip to that Uber and Lyft service, because they do not have that service. But yes, there were a couple examples that we talked to. And the co-mingling, where the pair and the microtransit, could you speak on that again? Because that was kind of interesting how that worked. Yeah, and so those opportunities arise specifically when, and we've seen a trend of this over the past couple years, especially where an agency will go out and they'll have, they might have separate contracts for their paratransit and microtransit services. But more and more, these microtransit companies are able to also, are offering paratransit services. So we've seen some agencies decide to kind of streamline their contracting and operate both services through one contract, and that really kind of opens up the door to operating, using the same vehicles, same providers, but accomplishing different types of trips. And the technology for this is amazing. It can figure out trip dispatching and which trips need to be, that paratransit trip that might go across the county, for instance, or that microtransit trip that is restricted to a certain boundary. So we are seeing more and more of that commingling between paratransit and microtransit. One thing that really, when we brought in the VIA to come here and speak a couple years ago, is the person that came in always uses the public transportation. They flew into Bluegrass and they had to go to Beaumont. It took them an hour and a half to get there because they had to go transfer and all that. So that is something that I think we could do better on that. From Mr. Combs, one thing I would like to have, and I think I have requested this before, is I would like to see the 25 fixed routes and see what our ridership is on all of those and what does it cost per rider on those two. Because I know I am on the route five with Nicholsville and it is really crowded, but I think that is probably one that is more utilized and probably not the best one to look at, but it is probably our best one but not our worst one. I would like to see what our ridership is and our cost per rider on each route, if I could please. Thank you. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you. Council Member LaGreve. Thanks, Mayor. Thank you. I just want to pick up a little bit along my first line of questioning. So we talked about the framing of this service and that if we were to pilot it, we would want use but not too much use, right? So right now, what I'm seeing is that we're talking about approximately $60 an hour for this proposed service versus $5 an hour for fixed routes, and then you all shared, is that accurate? So per trip, not per hour. Per trip. Yes. Okay, yes. Thank you. And then if people were to use it more, potentially the cost would go up, not down? For microtransit, if there is enough use, either you need to reduce that demand or the solution is adding more vehicles. And so with fixed routes, the capacity is so much larger usually. You don't get into trouble with demand until you're reaching 60, 70 passengers per hour. With microtransit, there's a much more narrow band. that you're looking for, so you don't want it to be less than two riders per hour, that's not a productive service. Also, if you're hitting six, seven, eight riders per hour, that's about the natural limit that most of these microtransit services are able to supply. So does that kind of answer your question, yeah? Yeah, it does, that is helpful. I'm curious, and maybe this is a question for Lextran, but when I think about your all strategic plan and your budget, if a pilot like this were to move forward, I mean, it's not an insignificant cost. So over $2 million, $2,300,000. So what would be sacrificed in order to move forward? I know you guys have talked a lot about wanting to improve frequency and convenience on your fixed routes, getting more ridership, making those fixed routes be as efficient and effective as possible. Would this come at the cost of that? Can you talk to me a little bit about, and again, we're just talking about this one pilot for this one area. As things stand, we're short the funding to make this pilot happen, the way that we've described today, without some help with the funding above and beyond what we've been offered, we need more funding. I don't think we're in a position that we would sacrifice anything else for a pilot. There are places in the city where we need to add frequency, that we would move more people per hour, per trip, than what a microtransit service would provide. So that's really where things stand with us. We're happy to do it. Again, as we illustrated on our cost slide here, going the wrong way. What we have committed to do is that marketing, the contract administration, the procurement, that comes at a cost to us. And we're happy and willing to do that. But for operating, we're going to need some real help to make this a reality. I'm concerned about not having enough funding to start, because we might not get the information back that we need to make better decisions in the future on having this long term. So I do think that we would need more support from somewhere. Okay, thank you. That's it, Mayor, thank you. Okay, Council Member Lynch. Thank you, Mayor. One question I forgot to ask is that, in your presentation, you said that the app-based fare payment system presents challenges. So what are some of the challenges you're seeing in some of the other communities with that form of payment via the app? I'm just curious. So that's with regards to when you're paying for fares, the technology provider will come in and offer an app, and that's very straightforward. Transit, though, from an equity perspective, you've got some passengers that may not have a smartphone. They might not have a credit card or means to pay through an app. What do you do in that scenario? And we saw various instances where literally a fare box is from what you would see on a 40 foot bus is put into a cutaway vehicle for micro transit. I talked to agencies that have a pouch to collect cash fares. So really that, I think the limitations and the challenges are around also being able to accept fares outside of that app environment and having a more inclusive service. Thank you. That looks like all of our questions. So thank you very much for being here. We appreciate the presentation and your answering all the questions. Thank you. Thank you so much. Yes. All right, council members, I have just a few brief remarks to introduce the next presentation, which is our Lexington Emergency Shelter Study of 2025. You will see that the shelter shows a 34% increase in the number of people in our community experiencing homelessness since 2020, and this increase mirrors our state and our communities around the country. And we all know that these numbers have put a strain on our shelters. In recent years, we've used temporary shelter to get through the cold months, as you all know. And that is an expensive way to address an ongoing issue. So we're looking for a more permanent cost effective answer. This study offers information that can help us make decisions. I want to emphasize the study doesn't lock us into anything. It just offers information. And so I am going to appoint a mayor's task force on homelessness. This is a huge undertaking to address this challenge. The task force will start meeting in the fall and bring recommendations back to the council. So with that, I'd like to call on my Commissioner of Housing Advocacy and Community Development, Charlie Lanter, who will say a few words to introduce our speaker. Thank you, Mayor. I have a lot more to say, given the late hour, and I know you all are anxious to hear the presentation. I will make this brief. I just have a lot of thank yous to give out. Thank you to Councilmember Fogel, former Councilmember Fogel, who pushed for the funding of this study last year. That was a big help, obviously. Huge thanks to Ed Holmes and EHI for the work they did on this. I think Ed maybe didn't know quite what he was getting into, and he learned that people have some very strong feelings about homelessness. So we look forward to hearing from him. I would encourage everyone to approach this with an eye towards, what do we agree on? Lexington's a compassionate community. We agree we can do better, and we agree on the need. And so with that in mind, let's just listen to what the need is without worrying too much about the locations. I know there's a lot of hype around some locations that are mentioned in the report. Those are illustrative examples. Two or three of those aren't even available anymore. They're literally nothing to worry about. They're not even for sale. The idea is, that's the kind of property we need. That's the kind of location we need. It's meant to give you an illustrative example. Would we like to use one of those? Couple of them actually would be a nice fit, but that's for another day. Another conversation for another day. What we're here to talk about today and focus on is the people. The people who are in need and what are the next steps so that we can try to meet their needs. So with that said, welcome Ed Holmes to cover the presentation. Thank you. Welcome. Thank you Charlie, Mayor and Council. We appreciate the opportunity to come before you to talk about the shelter study. And I think it was framed well with what the commissioner had added. But also what you heard today from individuals talking about the shelter. And we're gonna go through this in a, not a quick way, but given the length and hour of the day. I wanna talk about the numbers. And you've heard the numbers and you've heard the counts. You know, we're increased, homelessness is increasing within the city. And that's pretty obvious from 2023 to 2025, it's increased 13%. And just between 24 and 25, it's increased 12%. It was 8, 25, and 24, and it's gone up to 100 just this year alone. So the numbers are showing that the total homeless population is growing. And that's something that's inevitable and it's occurring. It also shows there were 67 unsheltered individuals within the community. And the voices and the people that spoke today highlight those numbers. So it's more, here it's just numbers, but you've heard the faces that are behind this. You've got emergency shelter population of 810 with 498 beds. So if you do the math, it just doesn't work. And the homelessness has increased since 2020 by 34%. These are, once again, the numbers put into a utilization. Out of the 810 individuals, there's 498 beds, so you see the disparity. The utilization rate is 162.7% with 810 person shelter. It's an enormous imbalance that's occurring. And the implication is the emergency system is overtaxed and it's reliant on temporary accommodations. What we've done in the analysis in looking at the study is we've done a projection. And if we take this out to 2030, the projected homeless population is going to be 1,882 individuals. And that's just continuing to grow. The required beds, you'll reach a need of 1,028. And given that current inventory, there's a gap of about 530 beds that's going to continue to grow. So as we go out, and 2030 is five years away, so you can start to see the gap and the disparity that's existing within the shelter system in itself. And like Charlie mentioned, there's a lot of discussion about what sites would we use or recommend. These are examples, so before everyone gets upset or concerned about these are the sites. We want to go through what the location criteria we looked at. We wanted to look at underutilized properties. We wanted to try and stay within a close proximity of New Circle Road to make sure the shelters, wherever they are located, are accessible to services. Zoning was another key feature that we wanted to address. You heard a lot of talk about low barrier access and ADA accessibility. Those types of things are definitely something that we wanted to look for. And so we came up with just an example of what, if the mayor puts together a task force, these are some of the criteria that needs to be looked at. Transportation, accessibility, zoning, environmentally clean properties that could be possibly used. Areas where people can walk safely. And so we looked at about four sites, tried to equitably distribute them around the community, knowing that anyone that would look at these, every neighborhood and every community has some concerns on what's going to be located. So what we tried to do is look at potential for adaptive reuse, take a vacant building or abandoned building or abandoned site, and how can you reuse that site creatively? Here's some examples that have been done, and we'll talk about those as well. Here's one, the Tanbark site, that's a vacant, abandoned healthcare facility. Would have been ideal for a shelter, but that one, as I found out recently, is off the market that has been sold and acquired. But we did that, we tried to give some landscapes and visuals to what you could really do creatively with the site. Some landscaping, and you could have a wellness center, shelter, dormitory, transitional housing, and the self-contained site on the corner of Man O' War and Taste Creek was a little further out than we would have liked for it to be. But a reuse of that type of facility would have been excellent. Other reuses, the former Catalina Motel, I think that's been one that's been discussed before. Possibly needs to be demolished, but the site lends itself, given the accessibility from the road and the networks. It could create a viable shelter resource center for more than just an emergency shelter. But you could have a service hub, health and wellness, landscaped and designed so it could fit within a neighborhood or an area, and you almost wouldn't know that it's there. The former Eastland Bowling Alley, another one that the site probably needs to be torn down and removed. But most of the sites, we also had an acreage requirement of about four acres. We felt you needed about four acres to effectively create a concept of a resource center that would serve the need. So as you start to look at addressing the need for shelters, there's a set of location, state, criteria, and standards that should be considered to meet the needs of the community. And then the final one is the FedEx Distribution Center. It's out off Mercer Road in Greendale. FedEx is moving out of that site, and it's large enough to accommodate with some creative adaptive reuse. You could create a housing hub that would meet the needs and provide the services. Once again, it gets a little further out. Transportation and accessibility would be a concern, but the report goes into details. So the process is more important than the site. As you as council members deal with the concerns of neighborhoods and neighbor concerns of they support housing and shelters, but not in their neighborhoods. So I don't know which neighborhood you would find in Lexington that you would find that. But, I mean, the need and the desire is there. So I think through some creative uses, you can find that it will work. Cost, you're spending currently over $2 million a year for your winter shelter program. And it lasts about four to five months. Capacities, 150 to 200, and the daily operating costs is anywhere from 37 to $44 per person, and you're getting the basic shelter. And last year, you were getting that through the hotels. So there's no stability, you've got to re-approve it every year. And you're going to spend two, two and a half, or even more. You get short term relief for that three to four to five months, and then you have to start over again next year. A five year cost estimate, we've done some projections on five years, and the report goes into detail. But you're going to spend in five years about $11 million. And for that, you get nothing after the five years are up. Then you've got to start over and do it again. Well, you do get shelter for the four or five months people are living there, but that investment is not reoccurring. So you've got to do it again. If you just look at a permanent shelter on a year round basis, it may be take two and a half, $3 million one time up front acquisition cost. Operations, including services year round, continuous operation within the shelter, anywhere from $3 to $4 million. But some of that is actually being spent by service providers now, but that's where you would go there. But it's a year round continuous need of solving the shelter problem. And you could probably cover 250 to 500 people per night. Then you get to wrap around services of case management, health care, and support. Daily cost is pretty much the same as you would see on the winter shelter. But the benefits of this is high permanent infrastructure, long term structural improvement for about a $27 million permanent system. These are based on some national cost that we're doing our projections on. So what was recommended, once again, is a low barrier shelter design. What I hope the council will consider and the task force will look at when you start looking at this is, not if you can do it, but trying to come up with what would be an acceptable site, is when and where you should build a shelter. And then taking design considerations, I think you could create an attractive facility that focuses on the needs of the recipients. If a facility is designed to provide shelter, medical care, and other essential services, it'll meet the needs of the community. And you'll start to see, hopefully, a decrease in homelessness. It could be centrally located that would serve the areas, create a master plan. That's what I think really benefits with that four acres. You could really plan out a facility that addresses the needs. And it's a provision for services and provide a gathering place. One that's being done close by would be Louisville's community care campus. Louisville understood the need to address their shelter problem. $68 million is the price tag for it, $10 million soft costs. And the General Assembly appropriated about $20. The General Assembly and Metro government picked up $22 million of that. Low income housing tax credits is for another $19, but it's a community. So, and it's being built within the Smoketown neighborhood. Anyone familiar with Louisville, that's in the inner city. So Smoketown and the city was able to come together. And this is a facility that's being done and addressing some of the needs. So the challenge, I think, that's before you as a council is how do you do this? How do you address the need to solve what you heard everyone that came up here earlier today talking about? The need for additional beds in this community, because it's not going away. You can spend $2 million a year, not get anything for it, and turn around and spend $2 million and get another year. But if you invest that $2 million and leverage it with some other funding sources, finding a suitable site, you can create this resource center here in the community that I think would serve the community well. With that, I'll be happy to take any questions you may have. And Jeff's here, he's the numbers person, so he can answer a lot of the data if you have that. Ed, thank you very much, and we'll have some questions now. Council Member Beasley. Thank you, Mayor, and thank you all for all your hard work on this survey. I just have a few questions. What's a service hub? What's going to be in that building? Well, that could encompass a variety of wraparound services, health care, counseling. Jeff's probably more familiar than I am, but it's a variety of services. So essentially, what we're trying to emphasize is that we would not be looking for shelter alone, but it's going to serve as a service connection point. For example, we have a very fragmented shelter system currently. Men go to one shelter, women go to another, DV survivors go to another, youth to another. It's very difficult for somebody without a lot of knowledge to be able to navigate that. So this would include something like an outreach center that would be able to directly receive and help someone navigate our system. And depending on the parcel of land that we acquired, we would also have the opportunity to do things like introduce other forms of service. For example, we could look at developing permanent supportive housing on that property. That could leverage additional funding sources like our affordable housing dollars. We could look at introducing things like transitional housing dollars, potentially go after federal funds like continuum of care program. It just opens up, with enough space, the ability to do this. But I think another thing that's really important to understand is that communities that have had a high amount of success in reducing their homeless population have typically done that through robust partnerships. We typically here have less than 60 organizations at any given time that are a part of our continuum of care. But by offering the ability to have a building and a setting where they can easily interface with this population, a community like Houston would have over 100 community organizations that would be operating in their area. And most of them, or many of them, delivering on-site services at a campus like this. Is that what we're looking to do? Are we looking to have an emergency shelter, some type of transitional housing, and then some type of, is there an in-plan? Like when they come here, we're going to house them for now. And I'm assuming that we're talking about men, women, families, everybody. We're going to house them for now, and then we're going to get them into transitional housing and eventually, hopefully, to permanent housing. Is that what this campus looks like for you? That would be something that I would see for this. One of the major challenges and the reason that we need a resource like this, we typically are a community that focuses on housing first. But our affordable housing market has resulted in a 200% increase over the past five years in the length of time between enrollment and move in. And that is when someone does have a voucher or rental assistance available. So essentially, we need interim housing for people to be able to access while they are awaiting permanent housing resources. I think that's the reason for the four acre minimum site is to be able to accommodate. That's all I have. Thank you, and thank you all for all your hard work. Thank you, Council Member Reynolds. Thank you, Mayor, and thank you, Ed, for your presentation, all the work you did on this. We've been waiting for this information for a while. I guess my first question, I didn't see it in the presentation strictly. What was the biggest gap? Was it women, children, families? We know what we have available right now, and we know we have gaps, but I guess I was expecting a little bit more of a specific breakdown. Okay, yeah, it was detailed in the study, but the gap is growing with children, single households, and- It can fluctuate from year to year, and that's part of the reason why it's hard to say with confidence what the most significant gap is. Right now, we are seeing the highest amount of growth for families with children. We had a significant number more households and persons on this year's point in time count, consistent with some of the comments that came from groups like Community Action Council, seeing a tremendous high demand for their winter shelter for families. That's currently where we see the most growth. Now, in contrast, a couple of years ago, we would have had a much lower level of family homelessness, probably lower than we had seen in many years, so it can change. But right now, it would be both our more chronically homeless population and families. So- Households increased 71%. 71%, okay, yeah, I was just thinking if we did have a campus or a location, what would be the main focus, or are you thinking it would address all of the different needs? And I'm sorry, I haven't seen the whole study yet, but. So you're thinking it would be multi-facet and include everybody? I think that depends on what ultimately we would elect to do in terms of, for example, the parcel of land that we would have available in the service model that we would introduce. There could be opportunities to do a separate shelter for families and for single individuals. Or it could be something that's all inclusive. A lot of it's going to come down to the location that we select and what that location lends itself to do. Okay, and then, so under this model, the city would build and operate this, either a campus or shelter. Yeah, I think that could be done, or public-private-type. I know, that's why I'm asking the question. We would not, Bill, we would not. We would never operate the shelter. Okay. That's not the plan. Can you explain to the public how this would work? There isn't a plan. That's part of the conversation today, is how do we develop a plan? Okay. Our vision for how this would work is how it's working already, which is, think of the Hope Center. We own the building, they operate it under a contract with us. I would never advocate that LFUCG operate a shelter. I just don't think the local government is the best entity to do that, based on many factors. Efficiency being probably the largest, our staff costs are higher. But I think we would absolutely be working with a local partner, or partners. So we're saying this is our need, and then we're putting this out there for some partner to take over and operate this? Right, right. Okay, thank you for clarifying that. In Louisville, it's the Volunteers of America, I think, that's going to be operating there. And I know that, Jeff, you mentioned that we have a kind of a backlog in affordable housing and people being able to get to units, but do you see the correlation of the lack of housing units that we have available into our, in our increased numbers of, in the homeless shelter, in the homeless population? Well, I think one of the correlations in households that increases the lack of affordable housing. Go ahead, yeah. Definitely, I would say many of the households that were served by the Winter Project with Community Action Council for Families reported having recently been evicted. We have a discrepancy between HUD fair market rent values and what our market rates are for every unit size. But that gap tends to increase as the unit size increases. So it's incredibly more challenging when you have more household members to be able to obtain and maintain stable housing that's affordable. Well, I know that we need more emergency shelters, so I'm in favor of that. But I also wonder if we could more aggressively attack the affordable housing issue that we have in different ways than we are right now. So, I think that might help this issue. So, thank you. Council Member Sheehan. Thank you, Mayor. Like Commissioner Lanter, I would like to thank former Council Member Tana Fogel. We're seeing this report and having this discussion due to her advocacy when she was on council. And I want to acknowledge Commissioner Lanter and Jeff Heron and your team for the work that you have done in this area, and of course, Mr. Holmes for working as a consultant on this. One question that I have is, we are continuing to, if we're going to start a task force in the fall, that's not going to be enough time to get anything in place to stop us from having to do another implementation of something for the winter weather this year. But once a location is chosen, what is the approximate timeline you see for projects like this in other municipalities? How long does it take to get a space open? Well, zoning's an important part of that. But if you get through the regulatory hurdles in less than a year, it would still take, I'd say, two to three years from planning and design to construction and opening a facility. So, you just figure you're going to spend another $2 million every year for the next three years. So, to me, the longer we delay, right, then the longer it takes us to get to that place where we are seeing that we need to be. One question, this might be more for you, Jeff, but one question a resident sent me about the study and the potential solutions we're seeing is around pets. We know that one of the barriers to getting into shelter is that people have pets. And most of our shelters do not allow you to go into a space with a pet. We do have a good relationship with our humane society, and they help house pets temporarily. But is this one of the places that you might see a solution to those particular households? Yes, and some of the example models that were cited within the study are going to be examples of shelters or campuses that would be able to serve pets, that is a significant barrier. Typically, we do have good partnerships with things like the Humane Society, but due to their capacity, they usually can only do that short term, and sometimes that isn't available. We've explored things like groups that might be able to help with fostering. Usually, that also has a very, very small capacity and doesn't meet the need. We saw a significant, significant number of persons served in our winter shelter program this year that had pets, and that is something that we would have to be able to plan for. Right now, the only shelter that currently in our system is able to do that is Greenhouse 17, who's done an amazing job incorporating that and has found that it is a tremendous reduction in barriers to shelter. I think the challenge that a lot of our other shelters would have in adopting that model is the space limitations that they have. As you heard from the Salvation Army, right now they don't have enough space for people that they're trying to serve, let alone trying to increase that to also include pets. And I don't know who might answer this question, but we're seeing federal funding being cut, we're hearing rumors of continued cuts. How should we be thinking about that conversation and those discussions in this discussion? I think that it definitely lends urgency to our need to develop a formal plan and move forward on the notion of shelter, I think permanent housing is going to get more challenging. We also have to consider what the inflow and the outflow of our system is. Right now, we're already at a point where our outflow is significantly less than our inflow. And what we're seeing in the proposed budget come October 1, it could be approved that there could be significant reductions to HUD funding that would drastically change our continuum of care program. We would be limited to only being able to provide up to two years of assistance to an individual. Effectively, permanent supportive housing under the continuum of care program would be no longer. Additionally, we would have a number of persons who are currently experiencing homelessness, like those who are on housing choice vouchers, where there would be a proposed 44% reduction. So we are already seeing our local housing authorities scale back on issuing vouchers as they brace themselves for that change. So we're not talking just solely about our current homeless population. We're talking about a population that is poised to grow as additional affordable housing options become less available to them. And based on when this study was done, that potential increases is or is not included in this projection for 2030? It was not included in the 20. So potentially the problem could be bigger. Yeah, okay. I'll sign back in. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Council Member Gray. Thank you, Mayor, and thank you, Mr. Holmes, for your presentation. And as a wonderful resident of the 6th District, I do appreciate you and all that you have done. So I had some residents who were here from the 6th, actually this is the most residents I've ever had at one time at a meeting. So, which tells you the 6th District does care about this issue. We heard residents from the Eastland neighborhood who are weary, weary about the location that was put in this. Although you said it was just a suggestion, it has put the 6th District on edge since Catalina and the Catalina Inn and Eastland Bowling Alley are adjacent to the 6th District. And for the Eastland Parkway Neighborhood Association, they are extremely on edge since the Catholic Action Center was placed there. And no one let them know it was coming. So, and right now they're dealing with the fallout of the facility being there with individuals in their yard, which I've seen using drugs and not wanting to go to those facilities. So my question goes along this. With your study, with everything you've done, and this may be a question for the commissioner or for you, Jeffrey Heron. Going forward, how do you think we should examine where we place, how do you think we're going to address the longstanding pattern of sitting high impact services, such as shelters, sober living facilities, and low income housing disproportionately in Lexington's north side, east end, and near the downtown area? So what do you think? Well, I think we went through a series of location standards and tried to be sensitive to where a shelter would be located, recognizing that you didn't want to impact the north end from what we've seen and heard. That's why you saw the FedEx facility, the Tandbark facility sites, as examples of when you look at underutilized properties, you try and look at it on a broader scale outside of those areas that are impacted. But also knowing that the majority of services that are being utilized are within the downtown and the north side, and the east side of downtown Lexington. So you try and be measured, recognizing if you push it out into some other districts, you need to make sure there are certain things such as transit, walkability, or accessibility. But I agree that we don't want to over-impact or over-commit to a neighborhood that's been sharing the major line share of those types of facilities. But the ones, the Eastland Bowdoin Alley and Catalina are two eyesores, it's pretty obvious that something needs to be done with those. And you can design creative and effective shelters or resource centers that look nice. But hopefully through this task force that we'll be able to address how and where to locate a site that would be acceptable. And just to also build on that a little bit, there is also a homeless shelter that is coming to the 6th district at the Ramada Inn. A private owner has purchased it, and regardless what's going to happen or the say so of the residents, it will be there near the interstate. But looking at your study, I do see certain areas such as families, such as our youth, such as individuals who have pets, who are having difficulty locating shelter locations. And also to bring in the Hope Center. The Hope Center predominantly focuses on men. Yes. Men, let me say it again, men. However, not addressing the fact that women and youth are also homeless. So in your study, did you see any other cities and how they were dealing with the underserved individuals who are without homes? Yes, there were some case studies. I think it was Austin, Texas that deals with it in a much larger context of a community that addresses a whole host of uses within a contained community. That dealt with women, children, and men as well, and families. And veterans, so yeah. Well, thank you for all that you do, and I'm glad you're a resident of the great 6th district. Thank you, sir. I have a six o'clock commitment, and I apologize, Ed and Charlie and Jeff, but Council Member Brown is going to take the chair. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Mayor. Next, we have to speak is Council Member Morton. Thank you, Chair. Well, first I want to make a quick statement, just so I can control my own narrative. So first, I want to be clear, I believe in investing in the least of these. I believe in investing in communities that have been neglected. I believe in investing in solutions that address poverty. I believe in investing in people. Frankly, I'd rather invest and assist our unhoused community with solutions when it comes to capital funding, rather than city hall, rather than any capital expense that we have coming up, because my philosophy is to invest in people. But I'd be remiss if I don't shed light on oversaturation and concentration in an area of town that has been neglected, in an area of town that has all of the challenges, President Lexington, that have been neglected as well, and tied to the major needs to invest in folks and invest in their existing challenges. So like I said, I'll control my own narrative before those that try to. Every day I'm up here advocating for the least of these and for the underserved, and I think I do that a lot, and I think a lot of folks see that. And that's what I will continue to do. So with that, I'll go on into this thick study. So I guess, in the executive summary, number two reads, expand geographic distribution of shelter facilities to underserved areas of Lexington. Most of the shelter facilities are in historically underserved areas on the north side of town in Lexington right now. So what does that mean by expanding geographic distribution to underserved areas? Well, to take it to other geographic areas other than the north side of town is what we're saying, because the majority are located within the north side. So look at other underserved geographic regions of the community. Okay, and then on page 16, under other housing types, number one speaks to transitional housing, with only 61 of transitional housing versus nearly 500 current emergency shelter beds available. Transitional housing seems like a critical need for our community. Would you agree? Yes, I mean, obviously there's a need for a variety of housing, yes. Thank you. If we were to build into the system of adequate transitional housing, wouldn't our need for emergency shelter beds actually be reduced? It should, but addressing that, and Jeff might be better able to answer that question, I'm not quite sure. So to some extent, the two are gonna overlap, but additionally, there's going to be a need. With transitional housing, you typically have limitations. If you do site-based, you're gonna have a fixed number of units that are available. And if you have a scattered site, there's oftentimes time that it takes to secure the units. So either way, what I think we're gonna find is that we're still gonna need some kind of increase of our emergency shelter. The challenge is that we just don't have immediately available places that people can go. With transitional housing, we're still gonna have some kind of a need for additional shelter beds as well. Thank you. As we keep going, let's see. I will say that I'm greatly concerned about the trend of families and unaccompanied youth increasing at the rates that state in this report, which is very concerning to my eye after looking at that. For both youth and veterans, expanding and or strengthening outreach is recommended. What are our plans to do this and what does that look like? Okay, what was your question again? I'm sorry. Youth and veterans expanding and or strengthening outreach is recommended. So just what are our plans and what does that look like? Well, the veterans, I think that number hasn't grown as much in terms of the homeless population. But there is a need to continue to address the housing needs of the youth. That population, I think, is about 34% of significant increase. Okay, so then I guess as a follow up, why haven't we considered doing in-house outreach or having a city outreach? We didn't, the scope of our report wasn't to address that level of outreach. I mean, our housing department. We don't do outreach with city staff for the same reason I would recommend operating a shelter with city staff. Partner organizations can do it cheaper, more efficiently, more effectively, have more experience. And also, there's complicating factors when the people who are going into an encampment or interacting with people experiencing homelessness, if they are government, because it's a detriment. Those people often don't want to talk to people who are from the government. They don't want to interact with people who are from the government. It makes the outreach less effective when you're a government employee. Okay, and then just as the last question before I run out of time, moving on to chapter four. Well, I'll wait, actually, because I'll wait, I'll wait, I'll sign back in. All right, thank you. Next, we have Council Member Savigny. Thank you, Chair, and thanks so much for the presentation and for all your folks' hard work. I just have kind of a question, because at the beginning of when we were listening to public comment, there was the discussion about the student population. And the student population seemed like, I think I heard her say it was like in the 1,000-ish of possible homeless kids. And then I see 1,000 here. I kind of feel like we may be really understating the real issue between homelessness, lack of housing. And I just, I don't know how to explain that number. So, and maybe if one of you have got some ideas so that I can connect the dots. So, T.C. Johnson had spoken on the number of McKinney-Vento students. That is going to operate under a different federal definition of homelessness. So definitely, we would be talking about a higher level of community homelessness operating under that definition. The point in time count numbers operate under the Department of Housing and Urban Development's definition of literal homelessness, which is persons who are in emergency shelter, on the streets, places not meant for human habitation. The other difference is going to be that McKinney-Vento's definition expanded to include things like couch hopping, living with a relative, living in a hotel that the family is paying for themselves without assistance. Those are not deemed homeless under that HUD definition. But additionally, ours is on one night to give a snapshot of what homelessness looks like on a given night, versus the cumulative school year would be the figure that T.C. spoke to. Okay, all right. And I'm wondering, are there any communities, for the sake of simplicity, I'm going to call it like crowd sourcing. Is there any community that's doing, attacking the issue with thinking, I'm thinking a bit like foster care, like hey, I'm a certified foster parent. Therefore, I can take these kids, or I could take this family in because I have room for this family and their pet. And just like a foster system that pays someone to actually be the person that's housing and feeding this person. Is there a program that we've ever considered that's like that? And I don't know if any of our partners are doing that. It just, I would think that there's, if there was a program, we might actually, it just might be a different way to approach the problem. I'm not familiar of any, the closest would probably be maybe some of the scholar houses that you see would be addressing some of that, but I'm not familiar with any. And I didn't know if there's also a way on the homelessness issue with kids. From personal experience with, I had family members who were watching, were a foster to a kid whose mom was homeless. There's a funding source that comes in through foster care when you're dealing with families and children. And I'm wondering if there's a way to funnel that funding back to the parent for housing. Does that make sense? Because all that parent needed was a stable form of housing. And do they get brought in front of the cabinet for neglect? Their kid gets taken from them, and then someone else is going to get the money to take care of their kid. Whereas if they had the money to take care of their kid, if they were given that money, they would be taking care of their kid. I think you're probably referring to something like kinship care. And we just, we unfortunately do not have access to any of those kinds of dollars that is being given on the basis of the child's placement, not necessarily for housing costs alone. And we presently receive no state funding to assist in addressing homelessness. Yeah, I guess what I'm also, I guess my question is, have we ever looked at that as a, it's the entire problem. And so that's another source to at least help try to solve the problem. Unfortunately, I'm just not aware of any examples of that. I appreciate it, and I really do appreciate your work. And I look forward to this, the Mayor's Task Force. Thanks. Thank you, Council Member. Next, we have Council Member Ellinger. Thank you, Chair. Ed, thank you for this. Could you explain to me what the low-barrier shelter design is and the definition of what different ones are and why you chose this one? Well, the low barrier means that they generally accept anyone regardless of some of the issues they have. And the low barrier designs make them accessible because a lot of the, we surveyed, I think it was up to 100 homeless individuals. And accessibility, access, and I think you heard it on the, at the Hope Center. If you have the double bunk beds, it's not accessible for a lot of individuals to take that top bunk. So you want to create designs that make it accessible for people to enter, use, and with wheelchairs or other types of accessibility. So it's that more accessibility type. Now, when you say accessible, but there are also, I think, if you have any alcohol or drugs or any of that. Is that included in that too? Because when we talk about contracting this out with somebody else, do we have any in the community right now that would have this kind of model? I would say, at best, we would probably have medium barrier shelter presently. And some shelters would exceed that and it would be what I consider high barrier. Low barrier reduces barriers in any area, anything that might constitute a barrier to shelter. Typically, there are going to be basic grind rules like not bringing drugs and alcohol on the property, not bringing weapons onto the property. But someone could, for example, come onto the property if they're intoxicated. Because they would be the right level of supports there. Accessibility from a disability standpoint would also fall under that. But it's also about having a shelter that can accommodate mixes that don't currently fit into the categories that we have. So not forcing families to separate, which could be a barrier. Community Action was talking about seeing a lot of multi-generational families. We have a lot of families that, we have a lot of couples without children. And we have a lot of individuals with pets. So basically, just reducing all of those barriers by equipping a shelter with the ability to serve people that don't neatly fit into those categories. Looking at the things that are barriers to them, accessing it, and reducing those. But not necessarily creating an environment where just anything goes. Typically, they are structured, there are rules that typically, those that reside in the shelter would have a role in developing and enforcing and being a part of. And overall, it creates a much easier access for individuals. So would we set the guide rules? Or when we contract out with somebody, would they set the guide rules in? So I think there's two potential answers to that. Definitely, I think if we are in the position of establishing the shelter, we have the ability to do that. The other thing that we also would be able to do is the annual funding that we give to shelters. We do assess a number of different areas. And typically, the funding that we give is doled out based upon their scores in certain areas. Thank you. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Council Member. Next, we have Council Member Sheehan. Thank you, new Chair. We had a good turnout for public comment today, but I want you to take notice that it was from service providers in our community. And it's pretty powerful to hear from experts that are asking us to heed their call for the recommendations from this study. Housing is healthcare. We've heard that before. And per our charter, we are responsible for health and welfare services and public housing. I serve on our Homelessness Prevention and Intervention Board. And one of the challenges that we see is that it is much harder to connect people to transitional and permanent housing when they are unsheltered. So this model with shelter, healthcare, and other services will get them connected to housing and permanent stable housing faster. So while I will continue to advocate for that permanent housing and building more of those units, because ultimately we want that stability for our community residents, we need to get people housed more immediately. So colleagues, I will hope to see your support as we move forward with the mayor's task force and as we evaluate proposals like the ones recommended from this study. Thank you. Thank you, Council Member. Council Member Morton. Thank you. Thank you. So in chapter four, just moving to chapter four, I understand that no decisions have been made in the process to determine a location. It's much further down the road. However, I would like to talk about some of the factors when we're going to consider the shelter location. Specifically, under practical consideration, can you tell me why avoiding saturation of services isn't considered under the practical consideration? Why avoiding saturation isn't considered under that? Yeah. You know, what the report talks about, not doing it. And I'd have to read that section to see why we didn't include it, but the overall theme is you don't want to oversaturate a neighborhood. And that's what we try to encourage in your site selections and your location standards. And then, but it is under community integration. And it is recommended to both avoid oversaturation and to select a location near potential partners, such as non-profits, religious organizations, or social service agencies. These two statements, to me, I think are kind of contradictory. Moving along, number five suggests that the location should be in an area with low crime rates. Consideration avoiding oversaturation and looking for a location with a low crime rate are important to me, and specifically, actually, to my district. And so, I wonder why three of the four example locations are north of Main Street and are areas that are oversaturated, and two of the four locations are in areas with high crime. That actually within my district. So, I know these locations, examples are only illustrative. However, I would argue that each of the possible locations should demonstrate the ideals that are laid within that summary. I'm also concerned about the criteria for potential locations in Lexington, specifically that the location should be near downtown Lexington services within or adjacent to New Circle Road. And I want to point out that the only properties adjacent to New Circle Road are on the north side of town between Woodhill and Newtown Pike. The neighborhood and community leaders in the first district are hesitant, and some are opposed to adding additional services in this oversaturated area. And if you just look on, if you just put it in Google, you can see where they are. We have the Hope Center, which is in the first. We have the Catholic Action Center, which is in the first. We have the New Life Day Center, which is in the first. We have the Lighthouse Ministries, which is in the first. We have Arbor's Youth Services, which is in the 11th, but right down the road from the first. We have Salvation Army, which is in the 11th, but a block away from the first, two blocks away from the first. Lexington Rescue Mission, a block away from the first. Women's Hope Center, Community Action Council, which is in the second, but right across the street from the first. And majority of the city partners that came here that I didn't list, the majority of the city partners that came here to spoke that were asked to come speak today, most of the time, more than likely their location is within that area. So let me emphasize this point again, and in the correct way, being that this has been misinterpreted. The community leaders from the first aren't against services. They are hesitant and opposed to adding additional services when they are already concentrated, when they already have existing challenges that are not being addressed. They are not against providing services to those in our community who need most. Frankly, many of those in that same community have also been neglected when it comes to the solutions versus their existing challenges. So with that being said in closing, we must do something to address our unhoused needs, whether it's an emergency shelter or transitional housing. And it means investing in our people, in the underserved communities before they get to this place of homelessness, now and not later. And with that being said, to me, it's not a question of when or if it should be funded. It's just a question of where is the best place, and I look forward to being a part of that conversation. So thank you. Thank you, Council Member. Mr. Holmes, I don't see anybody signed up, anybody else signed up for questions. So I'll just weigh in and thank you for your work on this. Charlie, Jeff, you and your team for all your work on the study and addressing the issue of homelessness in our city. And then I'd be remiss if I also didn't acknowledge Council Member Fogle and her advocacy. I think it's been stated, she is the reason that we're at this point. And I'll also say that I can't help but keep thinking about what this council did in regards to source of income. And how that could play a factor and is playing a factor into this whole issue. And I think the scope of this study was focused on emergency shelters and what we need to do moving forward. But I think we still also need to look at the policies, the strategies, the funding, and our partnerships as a government on how we move forward. So I'm interested in supporting the work of the task force, but I think it's important who's on the task force, the leadership of the task force, and the scope of work of that task force as we move forward. Thank you for that. And I guess that takes us to the next item on our agenda, which is council reports. So council members, please sign in. And first we have Council Member Sheehan. Thank you, Chair. I first want to point out that my new legislative aide is here with us today. She's in the back of the room, Sylvia Cassidy. And if you see her around the hall or want to come and stop by and say hello, please swing by our office. So welcome to LFUCG. And then I have two quick neighborhood announcements to make. One, we have a sewer project that's going on in the Island neighborhood and Lakeside Drive and along that kind of area of town. Residents should have gotten a card in the mail if they are affected by the project. There is a meeting on Thursday at 6 to 8 p.m. at the Lexington Senior Center. So if you live in that area, please attend the meeting. You can also always reach out to our office if you have questions before or after the meeting. And then it seems like everyone is getting a Publix in their district. Our location is proposed on Romney Road, and this has been a location that has been much discussed in the neighborhood. We've had a former neighborhood meeting about this project, but we have the next meeting with the construction team on June 10th, which is next Tuesday at 6 p.m. It's going to be at Christ the King in Hayman Hall. So if you are interested in learning more about that project and the timeline is getting closer and closer to getting started, please come by on Tuesday at 6. Thank you. Thank you, Council Member. Next we have Council Member LaGrie. Thank you, Chair. This one's simple. I need to place Empower Lexington into the EQPW committee. That's it. Was that a- I don't need to make a motion, because I'm chair. All right. Thank you, committee chair. All right, next we have Council Member Lynch. Thank you, Chair. A few announcements, because we have a lot going on in the second district. The Bluegrass Fair starts on Thursday at 5 p.m., so please come out for food, rides, pig racing, dog shows, pageants, and lots and lots of more awesome things. So the Bluegrass Fair starts on Thursday at Madison Station Park. Please come out. Also, this week on Friday, Parks and Recreation is hosting a summer playground day in Douglas Park from 2 to 4 p.m. Please come out during that time frame to have lots of extra fun with our Parks and Recreation staff. Also, Farm to School Market at Sandersville Elementary School is going on. It starts this Thursday. It's going to happen once a month. Another big shout out to Damon Sexton, who's the frisky at Sandersville Elementary School. So that market will be happening on Thursday from 3 to 5 for this month in June. Also, the Pharmacy Market Grant Opening on Florence Avenue happens this Saturday at 1 p.m. Please come out for the ribbon cutting and then shop thereafter, please. Also, next is Saturday, West End Day is Saturday, starting at noon in Douglas Park. Please come out, bring your family, bring your kids. It's going to be a great day for the West End. Also, thereafter on Monday, there is going to be Old School R&B Bingo. On Monday, from 6 to 7.30 at the Black Williams Neighborhood Center. So please come out, and they are also needing volunteers. So if you have some free time from 6 p.m. to 7.30 on Monday, please come out and volunteer at the bingo because we need some extra help. And then lastly, we're going to host a caring place who is working in partnership with the Senior Services Center. President Rashian and I are going to start hosting their community engagement sessions regarding the villages model that we are trying to bring to Lexington. And so the community engagement session happening in the second district is going to be on June 17th at 1 PM at the Black Williams Neighborhood Center. And there will be community engagement sessions throughout the city, and I think just about all the council districts. So please, council members, encourage your neighbors to come out to learn about the villages model, because it's something that I think would be great to adopt city-wide here in Lexington. And a caring place will be coming back to us in the fall to give us an update on the study that we funded last year. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Council Member. Next, we have Council Member Beasley. Thank you, Chair. I just have two quick announcements. On Thursday, June the 5th, from 5 to 8, Parks and Rec is having a carnival at the Tate's Creek Community Center. There'll be inflatables, popsicles, popcorn, and games. Make sure that you all stop by and see that. And then if we can't put anything else on June 7th, it is Cops and Bobbers at the Gaines Way Pond from 10 to 1. You can bring your kids out there. It's free fishing weekend, so you won't even need a fishing license. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Council Member. Next, we have Council Member Morton. Thank you, Chair. This past week, I had the opportunity to attend several meaningful events across the district. First, starting with the historic St. Paul AME Church Community Block Fair. I was honored to join the historic St. Paul AME Church for the Community Block Fair. While there, I learned a lot about the church's history. And a special fact was that this site was the site of the Underground Railroad that I did not know, right in the first district. So, an incredible piece to our city's history. I look forward to exploring this further and finding ways to honor the legacy of this church. And that's just some of their, they're working on getting all of their artifacts together. And so, that's just some of the stuff, and that's some of the block fair. Moving on, I also stopped by the Family Fun Day at Marietta Park, which Marietta is shared by my district, District 12 and District 6. And somehow, Marietta Park is split between District 12 and District 6, so I was in both, I guess you would say. So, that was a great time. I was grateful for Parks and Recreation and the Joyland Neighborhood Association for their work in bringing the community together and creating such a vibrant space. And that's actually a familiar face, Brown should know. And then, lastly, Black Soil's grand opening, which has been mentioned by my great colleague, Council Member Lynch. As Black Soil KY celebrated their grand opening of Pharmacy Neighborhood Market this Saturday from 1 to 6, we're offering 20% off purchases, and that same 20% will be donated back to the community, to the neighborhood association for other folks that are in need of food to be able to use that through a gift card and get food. So, I encourage you to stop by Black Soil, see what they got going on, and come on out on Saturday. And then lastly, I would like to add one item to the committee. I'd like to make a motion to refer the winter weather program to the Social Service Public Safety Committee. I'm allowing for council to be a part of the conversation and ensure we receive critical information in a timely manner before the winter begins. So, I move. Second. All right, a motion was made and seconded to put the winter, the emergency winter shelter program into SSPS. Are there any questions to the motion? Seeing none, all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Are there any opposed? Hearing none, that motion passes. Next, we have Council Member Reynolds. Thank you, Chair. I almost called you Mayor, but then I remembered you were Chair. I just kept going. So, I just wanted to mention a few announcements. This Friday, June 6th, from 12 to 1.30, Moms Demand Action is hosting Wear Orange Day at Courthouse Plaza. So, if you are around and want to stop by during your lunch hour, it is an event to support survivors of gun violence. Make sure you wear orange. And then, Saturday, June 7th, from 4 to 9, is Swahili Day at BCTC's Newtown Campus. And that is with the Marafiki Center, and we're going to be celebrating African culture. So, please come out for that. And then, next Wednesday, I am hosting a district-wide event at the Marksbury Family Branch on Versailles Road Library from 5.30 to 7 p.m. It will be focused around infrastructure projects. It will be focused around streets and roads, traffic engineering. And we're going to have staff from the city there to help answer questions and talk about some of the things going on in the district. So, I hope that anybody that lives or works in the 11th will join me. Thank you. Thank you, Councilmember. Councilmember Morton. My apologies. I've got a late message that I would love to shout out. So, this Saturday, June 7th, this is a full day of events. This Saturday, June 7th, from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m., Consolidated Baptist will be celebrating the 29th pastoral anniversary of Pastor Gaines and First Lady Sarah Gaines. They'll have music inflatables, community resources, food, fun activities, and games, and a musical guest by Mr. Jason Claiborne. So, come on out to Consolidated as well if you've got time. Thank you. All right. Thank you, Councilmember. That brings us to the end of council reports and up to public comment. And we have two people signed up for public comment. The first is Crystal Mosley. Is Crystal Mosley still here? I don't see Crystal Mosley. And then we also have Rick Day. Is Rick Day here? All right. I don't see either one of those two. So, with that, I'll entertain a motion to adjourn. So moved. Second. All right. There was a motion to adjourn and seconded. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Consider us adjourned. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.