Everybody, this is our last meeting of the year, which is exciting. Not that it's our last meeting, but it's December and holiday. Anyway, I would like to welcome you to the December meeting and officially open it up and ask for approval of the September 9th minutes. So, I read them, well, I glance over them every time. They're long and detailed and so, they're fantastic. So I really want to appreciate them. And when you make a motion, please, or approve or whatever, let me know your name if I don't know you already so that we can get that for the minutes. Do I have a second for the minutes? Second. All right. And any more discussion? All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? All right, fantastic. All right, so our first speaker is Josiah Fray from the Kentucky Division of Water, and he's going to be talking about Kentucky's nutrient reduction strategy update. So, thank you, Josiah. Perfect, thank you. Well, this is my first time with you all, so I appreciate you all having me here. Okay, well. Sorry. That's okay. That's fine. I was just going to see if I could maximize my overhead. So, yeah. So, I'm Josiah Fray. I'm with the Kentucky Division of Water. We, my role with the Kentucky Division of Water is overseeing our nutrient reduction strategy and then also kind of communicating that with the public. So, that's why I'm here today. We're pretty excited because we've spent a couple years in the process of updating this strategy. We had a draft strategy in 2014, and we've finally been able to update it, incorporate some of the things we've learned along the way and some of the input that we've received. So, I'm just going to go through a brief presentation and try to keep it somewhat Lexington specific for you all. So, you know, the question of why nutrients, and when we're talking about nutrients, we're really talking about nitrogen and phosphorus primarily. It's important for both the state and for, on a local level, because it affects our drinking water, it takes an odor. We have, when we have excess nutrients in the water, it often is as a result of erosion. And also, we have harmful algal blooms that can be associated with excess nutrients in the local water body, which become expensive to treat and to the public and a problem for recreation. And actually, before getting further into this, feel free to stop me at any point if you have any questions. But this is, our nutrient reduction strategy is a statewide framework for how we plan to address nutrients as a hypoxia task force member with the federal government and 11 other states. We are kind of tasked with reducing the flow of nutrients to the Gulf of Mexico. So, this is our Gulf of Mexico basin. You can see Kentucky is right here and everything in Kentucky drains to the Gulf of Mexico. So, that makes this, that's where little things we do at a local scale, they filter down to the Gulf and affect our neighbors. Every year there's a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico where excess nutrients are eaten up by algae and the algae dies and it causes an oxygen depletion in the Gulf of Mexico, which affects fisheries and affects what we can actually get out of there as far as fishermen have to travel further. It costs them more money and what they're able to harvest is much lower. So, it also affects the price of seafood. We also have downstream water quality issues on other states deal with this probably more than we do. Thankfully, we haven't had as much of an issue. Some other states have especially if they're groundwater dependent, they often have nitrate issues with their groundwater depending on their local hydrologist. So, that's kind of why this is important, at least in the state. One of the things that we've tried to focus on is how Kentucky is truly different. We're different than some of our surrounding states and other partners. We are one of the few states where everything in our state drains to the Gulf of Mexico, but our landscape is a little different. We have a large livestock industry here. We have the largest beef cattle herd upstream for that east of Mississippi. About half of our landmass is used as farming, but then when it comes to population density, we're kind of square in the middle of surrounding states or nationally in terms of population growth. There's these different considerations you factor in when you're talking about nutrients, talking about population growth and what that can affect wastewater facilities and septic systems, and then also you're talking about agriculture and you're also talking about industry. So, there's a couple different things that we have to keep in mind when we're talking about a strategy to reduce nutrients across the entire state and factoring in different stakeholders. The other thing that's kind of interesting and different about Kentucky is we have a really diverse agriculture system. I remember going to my uncle's Thanksgiving in Alabama a number of years ago and he was talking about how hard they've had at just keeping farmer's markets because everything is in cotton. That's not the case here. We have an abundance of farmer's markets because we have a great diversity of agriculture in this state. And it's in Kentucky. Everything from horses to livestock and your local growers as well. So, that brings us to what have we been trying to do and learn about this. So, we spent some time researching the issue and we have a loads and yields study, actually two of them, one that we did in 2019 and one that we updated in 2021, where we took our ambient rivers network and then we compared that with some of our USGS gauging data to see where we might have not just the highest amount of nitrogen and phosphorus leaving different water sheds in the state but also where do we have higher concentrations as a way of trying to focus in on our limited resources because of the state agency and you all know this as well, on a local level there are limited resources on what we can expend to focus and address more localized issues. So, you'll see here there's certain areas, whether they're orange or red, those are your higher concentrations of, this is I believe, phosphorus. Yet this is all publicly available so you can this is our website, you can go in here and play with it and explore different things. It helped us identify where we have higher concentrations within the watershed so that we can also prioritize. The other thing we wanted to know is where have we spent the most resources, where are we focused on our energy. In the Division of Water we have the 319 program, we have a number of programs, one of them is the non-point source 319 program and that's where we have been able to track inputs over time and where we've put investments and these are phosphorus investments that have reduced phosphorus in the watershed. The darker green being higher concentrations where we've reduced more, where we've invested more. Then the lighter green where we haven't invested as much and what you can see also is areas where we've had success, where we've actually improved water quality in these red these little red watersheds. So that gives you an idea of actual phosphorus, estimated phosphorus low concentration and investments in these watersheds. So we wanted to start from that background of where have we done the most work, where do we have some issues and then work from there. The other thing our loads and yields studies are telling us is that nitrogen and phosphorus on a statewide scale over time just goes back two decades at least. They're slowly increasing and it's kind of across watersheds. Some have a little bit higher like Traywater Green that's a very large watershed versus others. But it's relatively flat but slightly increasing and there's a number of potential reasons for that and I'll get to that in a minute. The other thing we wanted to look at is nitrogen deposition from air. So one of the things that we know or we suspect based on modeling is that one of the largest single largest inputs for nitrogen excess nitrogen is from atmospheric deposition. So over time you can see that that's been steadily increasing as different emission standards come into effect so that is moving in the right direction which is a good thing. So then we, looking at where we're coming where we've been, we also started looking at some of the things that we've already done. We piloted a wastewater treatment optimization program with University of Kentucky and some others EPA Region 4 to use a model that was developed by the University of Tennessee called BioTiger that helps certain size facilities. They basically turn their blowers on and off at their wastewater facilities and it saves them energy and it also decreases their, or can decrease their nitrogen output. So that's one thing that we've seen some improvement in. Princeton was one of four that really took this with both hands and did something with it. And they also save money, right? But this is not some sort of magic institutional control. It requires some finesse so we recognize that what works in one facility may not work for everyone. So that's one of the lessons we've learned there. And so this gets us to the idea of priorities. What are we doing as a state to, what we're doing to prioritize our resources. One of the ways we've done this is with our Ag Water Quality Ag Water Quality Appointment Tool. So, Kentucky has a law put in place in 1994 that producers have to have an Ag Water Quality plan to protect water water quality essentially. And there's a list of best management practices that they can use. And so we put all these things together. UK was very helpful in this as well. Into an e-form that links all these technical resources, funding resources, and then some considerations into a tool where producers can get on and build their plan. We were told it needs to be a TurboTax style tool and specifically we were told, I need to be able to do this in my PJs. So, you can listen to your PJs. So that is where we're focusing on a statewide scale. That is a large scale endeavor and we're working with our partners to get those resources out there and promote them. We actually just had a radio ads running on AM stations in the morning this fall and we've been attending conferences. UK has also been out there doing things as well. So, that's one of the things that we're working on on a statewide scale. We're also promoting best management practices so one of the questions we get a lot is what is the best best management practice? So, that is something we're working through but we're also working to promote and identify where we're expending these resources. So, on our water health portal, there's these implementation summaries so you can actually see where the state has invested resources locally. Another thing we're looking at is expanding wastewater treatment plant optimizations and adding some permit limits where applicable. So, with POTWs, you can see here where we got a star. Those are area facilities that have actually implemented optimization and so that's and these are all the majors. There's a number of minors out there that are included in this map. So, that's something that we're working through right now with our permitting group to see where optimization makes the most sense and where permit limits make the most sense as well. So, we're thinking through that critically because you don't want to tweak it to where phosphorus is alluded but nitrogen is not so you have to kind of consider that. The other thing that we're working on is probably more specific to this group is, well yeah, this group in particular but stormwater and MS4 general permit is being updated that should be out in the spring for public notice and that would be a general permit but that's where we're also focusing on the point source. So, that brings us to where are we focusing our priorities and this is our priority, new term priority areas map where we've taken all these considerations and we said this is where we're going to have to focus some resources. So, areas in red are where we have known are volatile blooms and the drainage areas going to them in the past and that impacts both drinking water but also recreation and then the gray are the areas where we have highest, consistently highest yields as far as concentrations of nutrients coming from the watershed and then the blue are areas where we have source water concerns and considerations that we need to factor in and we've actually partnered with NRCS on that and they are actively, they have a higher cost sharing rate for those areas so they're already, I think they're in year two or three at this point of putting additional resources in upstream areas to protect those source water areas and I'd be remiss if I didn't mention what that does practically is that we've factored these areas into our ranking systems for our state funded programs. So, those 319 or SRF these areas get a higher ranking. So, if they're identified as having higher nutrients, for example, if we're talking about central Kentucky those areas also rank higher in our funding programs. Which brings us to more of our education outreach, right? So, we've been, like I said before, we've been working to support our, I work on planning outreach and we've had a number of outreach initiatives through that and we'll continue to do that. We'll continue to fund resources for our volunteer lakes monitoring program and that's kind of a cool thing where we're trying to bridge this gap of identifying harmful algal blooms and other things that are concerns in lakes or reservoirs where we have blue train volunteers, they use little segi disks and then they record observations and then we parlay that with satellite imagery and then to identify large scale trends and kind of serve as a first cut, kind of an early warning system and then what we're going to be doing on the back end is we've purchased a drone boat that's a little it looks like a boogie board and we're working on getting some nitrogen and actual microcystin, so harmful algal bloom sensors that we can put in there and then go and do a first analysis of some of these areas. If we have volunteers saying, hey, we think there's something here, we can go out with this boat and test it before we have to do any lab analysis and it also protects our staff if there is something out there that we can send this boat in. It also allows us to get in places where we haven't been able to have access before. If there's not a good boat ramp or those sort of things, especially on smaller reservoirs it will allow us to do that a little bit easier. And then we're also working, our non-point source program has basin team coordinators that are working through watershed planning efforts and I know some of you all are involved in those things locally here. So that will remain a focus of our nature reduction strategy. I mentioned the harmful algal bloom tracking capabilities, that's coming. We're still working on the funding for all that. We're also going to keep updating our nutrient loads and yields study and working with partners for additional data. This latest study, we pulled in some data from Orsanco and so that partnership will probably continue. We're looking to potentially add another USGS station out to cover some of these, close the gap a little bit in some of these areas that are in kind of gray where we don't have an ambient monitoring station so we can get more spatial coverage for the state. And explore some of the other things that we're seeing. One of the things that we've started to see in our loads and yields study is that we have large amounts of precipitation 2018-2019 data. We had a lot of precipitation and fairly decent intensity. And it did some interesting things with some of our data sets. And so we're trying to we're going to continue to study that and identify what that may mean in terms of trends. One thing we've learned from other states is that in the hypoxic task force is that where you have really, really intense rainfall it sounds it kind of seems pretty basic. But where you have high intensity rainfall you're going to have more erosion. But what does that do in terms of planning? If we're focusing on certain types of BMPs but we're ignoring the ones that really address erosion then we need to shift our thinking. And that's where we're going. We're really trying to think about erosion on a statewide scale across partners, across stakeholders that that is will continue to be a driving force of nutrient loss throughout the state. We'll continue our long term monitoring this is a map of all of our assessed waters across the state through our water health portal. If you haven't checked it out it's pretty cool. We've updated it and put a number of interactive resources into it. So I highly recommend it. I think it's pretty cool. So that brings us to kind of what we're doing. Where are we going next? We're doing these sort of things. We need to be building this network of stakeholders and partners to have buy in for all of these initiatives. Get everyone at the table and work on solutions. One of the things we're doing right now through some federal funding is we're going to be allocating some funding towards MS4 POTW training resources. We're already working with UK on some of this on the MS4 side and Lindsay and KSA because we recognize there's a need for some uniform training across the board. Especially when you're talking about smaller MS4s and smaller POTWs that don't have the resources. We want to try and make that somewhat uniform across the state. We're going to be investing in agriculture BMPs. We're going to be setting aside some of our funding through the Division of Conservation to add additional agriculture and conservation BMPs on the ground. And really what we're asking at this point is we need to be able to tell the story more fully. So we know generally what the state has done. But one of the things that we also know is that the state compared to all of our other stakeholders and private partners we just do not represent the full picture. So we're trying to highlight both private and other public sector investments in nutrients and track those long term trends and tell that story on a large scale because we also know that there are lags when we do conservation work, when we reduce nitrogen and phosphorus coming out of facilities. There's often a lag time with being able to see that downstream waterfall monitoring stations. And so we need to be able to forecast a little bit of what we're doing and then be able to point that out both to our federal counterparts and to other stakeholders and partners to be able to tell that whole story because we need to be able to tell all the good work that's been done. So that's where we're at. We've been focused on it. If you want to, all these things are on our website at eec.ky.gov slash nutrient reduction. And that also has links to our Ag water quality planning tool and everything else. So I appreciate you all letting me come and talk to you today. We're pretty excited about it and hope to have some more engagement particularly in the next quarter where we'll be convening some specific work groups. So any questions? I don't know if I stopped for air during that. But I haven't passed out yet. Thanks for having me. Thank you. I always have questions. Sure, go ahead. I want to make sure somebody else has a chance to talk. A couple things. I'm really happy to hear about more assistance for the wastewater treatment plant. Because through watershed watch sampling frequently we find nutrient issues that could likely be caused by upstream sewage plant discharges. And then with the lake monitoring program I've been pretty involved with that. And I think that the way we do with the stream sampling, some kind of annual feedback to them would help keep them engaged. Just encourage them to continue. Sure, absolutely. And what we'd like to do, especially once you get this boat out there, is go ahead and test that out and show that to our lake volunteers. Just show them how we're trying to link all that together. And that's kind of the hope. We've just had delays. Some of that is coming through federal funding. And it's just been a process. There's a lot of things going on federally right now. And we're kind of caught up in the mix of it. But yes, I agree. That would be great. Basically, I have a question. You mentioned the 319H program. But I'm curious in terms of how much you're tracking what the Farm Bill funding is doing in terms of the EQIP and conservation programs and other things along that line. Because I see 319H as a few million dollars. But I see the Farm Bill as millions. Right. And that's not something that we... NRCS does track that. Their metrics are a little bit more opaque to us in certain things because they have more restrictions on them on a federal level. But we are working with them. In fact, we did a story on the hypoxic task force's success stories page. So if you google hypoxic task force success stories, I think under the finance tab we have a story where we talked about what NRCS has invested in these source water areas. I think it's something on the order of like half a million acres where they put practices on the ground. And then we're also working with them on a couple different initiatives like NWQI and MRBI, which are some specific funding programs designed specifically around nutrients and water quality. And they are, like in particularly NWQI, they are required to collaborate with us. So we're working with them on that. And we've talked about ways to track that using the same methods that we do with 319 to have a better idea of where all these things are coming into, where this funding is being spent. And on what scale, right? Because that's the other thing. Like you said, 319 is a million. Right. But it's much more, right? It's a lot more money. One thing we have been doing with the state cost share where they have a few million dollars a year is we've actually started applying the 319, the STEP-L program, which is just a very, very basic modeling program in Excel to track what they have been, or model what they've been doing in terms of nutrient load reduction on a statewide scale. So we've actually added that. That's also a success story on the FOXC task force webpage that we put up there. I think the estimates were somewhere on the order, like where 319 had maybe done, you know, a couple million, or I mean like nine or ten tons per year of nitrogen and phosphorus reduction. They've done on the order of three or four times that, right? So trying to get that full picture, and that's one of the things we're looking at. And then do you anticipate the strategy to lead into actual permit conditions in the next permit cycle, i.e. the next five years? Yeah. Yeah. They will be. That's one thing that our permitting group is working on. And actually that kind of began before we revamped this. That's been a long time coming. So some of those permits will have different considerations. Primarily we're looking at POWs in that sense. So POW, where it would make sense to do optimization work and where it would make sense to do permit limits. Now optimization is going to take some time because you're really talking about fine-tuning a process. It's not just installing equipment and then blocking away. And the other thing we're looking to do with that is we're actually partnering with our Office of Energy Policy. They've got some funding available, and they're going to pair that with some of the known issues that some DOT deputies have told them, saying, hey, you know, we want to do these things, but one of the things that they said was an issue is like some sort of a power switch. There's apparently some sort of power switches that they don't have, but they need to be able to link all their equipment together, particularly on the smaller side. So we're going to be leveraging that funding and pairing that with some of ours on the POW side to make sure that it works. Yeah? Will the SRF fund prioritize tertiary treatment for nutrients in wastewater treatment applications, even if they're maybe outside of a priority area? SRF doesn't have requirements to treat or to monitor nutrients necessarily. Because it's a loan program, everybody comes in and they apply for it. Now, if they are going to be addressing nutrients, there is a higher ranking in that SRF. If they're in a priority area. Right. But even if they're not in a priority area, if they're addressing nutrients, that also gets ranked higher. Thanks for bringing this information. I know I'm going to spend my Friday night looking at these maps and layers and stuff. Because something that was of particular interest to me was the map showing, you know, we've got known issues, there's been investments made, and showing the success rate is not... Well, there's room for improvement. And that's something that, as a practitioner, putting in BMPs and working with stormwater, I believe, I hope, and I want to know that these things work. But when we've got a watershed with a known impairment, we put BMPs or assets or resources into it, and that watershed's still impaired, it's hard to have that hope. Or for me, it's hard to say what I've done made a difference and even made an improvement. It sounds like kind of telling the success stories might be a way of getting into some of that smaller scale stuff, like incremental change. Could you speak of anything that would help give me some hope to continue on this path I'm on in terms of, like, is this really making change? Or what do I need to shift to demonstrate the value of the work I've been doing for 20 years? Yeah, that's a very good question. So one of the hats that I do wear is kind of coordinating success stories. So I kind of write those for our EPA department. And we've taken a more serious look at how do we track that? How do we know when we've made a dent? That really becomes very watershed-specific. And it gets complicated really quickly. We know for example that we can see E. coli improvements a lot faster than we can see E7 nutrients. And we're working with our water quality branch to identify those. We do the watershed planning and we do all these things on the front end. And then we do the work. And when do you know you've made a difference? Right? And so we're working with them right now to identify what we'll process to say, okay, now that we've done all this work, when are these triggers? And that's one of the things we're talking about with Watershed Watch, saying, okay, if you have volunteers that are taking the sampling, that can serve as kind of a first cut to give us a good indication. Okay, when do we send our teams out? Because we also have limited resources in monitoring. Again, that's also where these drone things come in and kind of get all that stuff together. In terms of when do we know, that's a little bit harder to forecast. We have some models and we can try and do some things. But I would say for you in particular, keep doing what you're doing. We need more people doing that sort of stuff. And if you have individual questions on the watersheds, I would reach out to your basic coordinator and we can get some different folks. But we are actively looking at that because we need to be able to show that what we're investing in matters. And the other part, the other big part of that is we know what we've done. We don't know what everybody else is doing. So one of the things we've, there are studies out there saying that for every dollar state and federal government spends, there's nine dollars being spent, for example, by farmers on water quality conservation. We've got to have those conversations to understand what scale we're dealing with. What scale other folks are doing and broadening that umbrella to include folks that we may not traditionally consider to say, alright, let's show this improvement. Let's quantify the success. And let's give ourselves a well-deserved pat on the back once we don't work. It's not a silver bullet answer. Any more questions? Thank you very much Josiah. You said sentiment is a major issue. You know, obviously I can think of a lot of people in this room that have done work trying to address erosion issues. But there's also permitting is a huge obstacle that's there. Would there be interest in the Division of Water putting together a task force to try to, you know, address ways to prioritize that and streamline the management of erosion and sedimentation throughout the state? It's a good suggestion. I'll second that. I think a lot of the permitting process is trying to prevent people from doing bad things. But in a way, it maintains a status quo because it doesn't help good people do good things. And there's a big financial, administrative, regulatory barrier to do a lot of very simple, easy to do projects. I guess I've returned my response. Thank you. I am not going to spend my evening tonight looking at that data, but that's amazing. That's really nice to have. I won't either, so. Next we're going to hear about low-cost, high-benefit strategies for facilitating watershed-scale stream restoration from Bob Hawley from Sustainable Streams. Good morning, everybody. Josiah, that was awesome. Yeah, so, perfect. Awesome, thank you, thank you. All these questions, I feel like we have some, they lead right into this, so this is great. I am just one person, but I've got a great team, and we've worked with a lot of great partners, but I specifically want to highlight Boone County Conservation District and SD1 because they've done a lot of these strategies and implemented them with support of 319, and they recently got the lower eight miles of Gunpowder Creek delisted, which used to be impaired for sediment and habitat. And the biological community has come back in that lower section of Gunpowder, it's a 60-square-mile watershed, and so that's just one little example of what we're trying to do here, which is facilitate watershed-scale stream restoration, so not just like a few feet or even a mile of stream, but can we actually get the whole network of stream recovered. So I throw a lot of material at you because I don't want to lose your attention and I talk pretty quickly, but if there's anything you're particularly interested in, we have a lot of resources on our website, including our papers and guidebooks and webinars and things like that, so feel free to ask questions at the end, but also there's a lot up there on our website. So to begin, why do watersheds need restoration? So we, just for a sort of a framework, a reference framework, not necessarily like we can get back to this, but just to kind of remember what our watersheds used to be. So before Europeans came here about 300-400 years ago, our watersheds were a lot messier, they were mostly forested and they were really wet. And so our streams were well-connected with the floodplain and they often had multiple threads, so you might have an anabranch system like this, they were loaded with beaver dams and loaded with wood and floodplain wetlands and then since then, we've basically made them less connected to their floodplains, kind of concentrating the energy in the channel and exacerbating those erosive forces. And we've also made our drainage networks a lot more efficient at routing the water to our streams, so we're giving the streams more water and we've also disconnected them from the floodplains. So just kind of keep that framework, that reference point in mind, not to say that we can get back to this, but anything we do that can kind of push the system back towards this is moving it in the right direction. So just a couple examples, beavers are overlooked, but they're really the driver of initial settlement by Europeans. Beaver fur was so good for hats that Europeans basically exterminated all of the European beavers and they came to America to get our beavers. And, you know, beavers are basically free. And if you look at, here's a beaver dam, a beaver dam complex, and you look at how wet the floodplain is and how many channels there are and how much contact that water has with those vegetated surfaces that remove nutrients, right? Versus, this is right downstream of that beaver complex and that stream looks beautiful. I would love to build a stream like that, restore a stream to that quality, but a drop of water flowing through that is still going to leave the system a lot faster than a drop of water trying to get through a beaver dam complex, right? So, again, beavers aren't appropriate for every landowner, I get it, but just remember how wet our floodplains used to be when they were all loaded with beavers. When you read Daniel Boone's initial exploration of Kentucky, the only way he got across the valleys was to walk across the beaver dams because the floodplains were so wet. So, just keep that in mind. Another big impact was the historic deforestation. So, my kids found this on YouTube, Paul Bunyan from Disney, 1958, the famous fable of the great logger that cut down all the trees. And they even not only cut down all the trees, but they had to use the rivers to get the logs from the headwaters to the cities. And the rivers were too clogged up with wood and they were too messy and they were too well connected to their floodplain and the logs didn't float downstream. So, what did they do? They straightened the streams and they got rid of all those logjams and they sent them down to the cities and everybody cheered, right? So, again, this is like a funny thing from Disney, but this is actually memorializing something that was very common. The stream channelization to use the rivers to get the logs to the cities. And so, just kind of again to remember, our floodplains and streams and rivers used to be loaded with wood, right? And our hill slopes used to be mostly forested. So, where did all that soil go, right? When we cut down all those trees and we started farming those hill slopes 300 years ago, 200 years ago, we didn't have construction site erosion control sediment practices. So, we sent a whole lot of sediment down into our valleys. And anywhere we dig, when we do a stream restoration project in the valley bottom, we find five even ten feet of post-settlement alluvium. The soil that used to be up on the hills, up in our watersheds, and it's built our floodplains up, right? And it's made our streams less connected to the floodplains, right? And this is a picture actually from Zandale Park over in the Lansdowne Neighborhood Association. So, even a small stream like that has four feet of sediment. They're just taking up space in the floodplain that used to be good habitat, that used to be good flood storage, right? That used to help keep our floods lower for the rest of the valley and so forth. The other big thing was agricultural drainage efforts. So, not only did we send a bunch of sediment down to our valleys, we also drained those valleys with tile drains and ditches and channelized streams to keep those valleys drier so that we can make them suitable for farming. All that was good for our societies, but it's been really bad for keeping the water on our landscapes and in our floodplains and sending that water downstream a lot quicker, right? So, this is a typical agricultural ditch and the tile drain. And that tile drain basically drops that water table on the floodplain from where it used to be with all of our clay soils right up at the surface to way down at the tile elevation. And here's some real data from that. This is a Rolling Fork WMA. This is a wetland where the tiles have failed. They've clogged the sediment. And you can see the water table is right at the surface for many months at a time, which makes a great wetland, right? And where we've got tiles that are still working, the water table is well below the surface and only comes up when it rains. So, just an example of those drainage impacts. And so, collectively, how do all these watershed impacts affect our stream? So, if you've seen anybody present on stream geomorphology, they usually talk about Lane's Balance and how streams are a balance between erosion and resistance, right? And collectively, what we've done over the last 200-300 years, including even recently, is we've tipped the scales way towards erosion by urbanization, deforestation, and so forth, channelization. And we've tipped the scales. We've reduced our resistance at the same time by getting rid of the beavers and the wood and the vegetative resistance and so forth. And so, concentrating all that energy in our streams tends to make them erode the beds a lot more frequently. That leads to downcutting. And then, when they downcut, the banks get taller, and the banks get taller, they get unstable, and they start to collapse. And then, the banks continue to collapse and widen and it can take a very long time before the stream gets so wide that it can't transport its sediment anymore, right? And then, we start to see buildup of that sediment after the stream gets so wide. And then, eventually, many, many decades later, you get these bars colonized by vegetation. They become benches and you have a stream that's connected to a new floodplain again, right? So, this process of a stream getting thrown out of balance and trying to adjust to reattain a new balance with a new system takes a whole lot of years and eats up a whole lot of soil in that process, right? So, people are losing land and, you know, the streams are eroding into infrastructure and so forth, right? So, it's causing a lot of problems and it's sending a lot of soil downstream. That soil has nutrients, right? That's a big source of our nutrients in our waterways. So, again, just kind of keeping that as our reference as we think about what can we do at the landscape, the stream, and the floodplain scale to make our systems a whole lot wetter, right? And hold that water back a lot more effectively to get it more like what it used to be, right? So, we're going to start with so, and that begins with basically finding strategies that help to restore a more natural flow regime, a less erosive flow regime that are also win-wins for our societies, right? So, lower costs and beneficial reuses or good strategies for farmers and so forth. So, this kind of bottom of the pyramid here, rather than spending a lot of money, which we do, on physically restoring streams, which, again, those projects are awesome, but we don't have enough dollars anywhere in this country to restore every foot of stream with equipment, right? So, anyway, trying to restore a more natural flow regime. So, here's some getting to what we've done. So, this is from the Gunpowder Creek watershed, the one that's been delisted. The entire thing is not delisted, but the lower eight miles is. And this is one of our first implementation projects with Gateway Community College. They had this huge field that was mowed. You mow it once a week, costs money, looks like crap. And this is a commuter school. Students really don't, it's not inviting. So, we did a whole campus revitalization here. We did a whole bunch of, we did some detention-based reference and so forth. But just converting a field from a mowed field to a native meadow, look at all that interception storage you get when it rains. All that vegetation makes contact with that precipitation, holds it, right? And then those roots get way deeper into the soil and facilitate much more infiltration. And that's basically cost nothing. I mean, it maybe costs a couple thousand dollars to get that whole field converted. And the school loves it, right? And it's saving them money because they don't have to pay to mow it every week, right? So, just a simple example there. And that can go hand-in-hand with things like pollinator programs and gardening programs, right? So, it's not necessarily just a stormwater practice. But, you know, we've got other ideas like amended swales along right-of-ways and basin retrofits and stormwater policy we'll talk about. So, here's a right-of-way project we did along Kentucky Highway from Boone County. There's a mowed ditch beforehand and a stream wetland complex afterwards. So, what used to be the water would run off the road, get to this ditch, run straight off the property, right? No detention, typical KYTC practice. What we did for about $45,000 was we converted that into a stream wetland complex with a underdrain system at the bottom that now you can take a 100-year event off that interchange and the whole drainage area drains to this spot and that is released at a trickle that does not cause erosion. So, it used to be no detention. Now, we take the 100-year event and we release it at a trickle, right? So, what that does is it prevents erosion from this area but it also releases cool, clean base flow to the system downstream and helps to prolong those flows during dry weather to downstream reaches. This is another extremely cost-effective strategy. We've been working with a lot of partners on detention basin retrofits. So, basically, most of our flood-controlled detention basins were designed to basically not do much for storms less than about the two-year event. So, you get like a one-year storm, it goes in to the detention basin and it goes out and there's not a whole lot of attenuation. But if you restrict that outlet, that low-flow outlet, to hold back that water, you can do a whole lot of good without having to do a lot of grading and make the basin bigger and a lot of expensive replanting. So, here's the restrictor play in action. An event that would have just gone straight through the basin, now it's highly restricted. And then just looking at the design storms, before the retrofit, the three-month, the six-month, and the one-year storm all used to cause erosion downstream. So, they exceeded that critical discharge for stream bed erosion. After the retrofit, those storms no longer cause erosion. So, now it takes the two-year storm to cause erosion downstream. And what that does is it gives your stream a whole lot more time for vegetation to do its good work, right? And colonize sediment bars. So, here's an example of the inflow coming in, a huge spike, and then a very, very restricted discharge. And here's our streams and their detention basins up here. We've got a reach we call the spur and our downstream reach and our upstream control reach. And before the project, we got eroding banks on our spur, kind of a plain bed system without a lot of habitat diversity. After the retrofit, about five years later, we got a meandering low-flow channel. We got bars that are being colonized by vegetation at the toe of the banks, so the banks are no longer eroding. There's not any more wood in the system. Looking downstream farther, the same thing. Same story. Vertical banks before the project. Now we've got this nice vegetated bench that's developed, right, at the toe of this formerly unstable bank. And you see this tree that used to have the roots exposed. Now the roots are no longer exposed, right? So, that's what we're saying about giving the stream time for vegetation to actually start to re-stabilize this thing, right? If you're causing erosion every three months or every month, that's not enough time for a little seedling to get established and stabilize some soil, right? So, that's what we mean by these retrofits. And then at our upstream control site, before and after, we see bank erosion continuing or even getting worse. We don't see any bars or benches there anymore. So, kind of the typical urban stream syndrome sequence upstream at our control site where we did nothing, but at our spur site and our downstream site, we see habitat recovery. So, we went from poor habitat to average habitat with basically a $5,000 to $10,000 retrofit on a detention base, right? We didn't get any earth-moving equipment out there. We didn't do anything in the channel. We just fixed the flows, and that helped the stream to recover. So, you go from this stage of downcutting and widening to, very quickly, to depositing and then getting that deposition colonized by vegetation. We've got a detention basin screening tool. People are really excited about this, and there's thousands and tens of thousands of detention basins out there. So, we've helped a collaborative up in Lake Erie to develop a screening tool where you can kind of quickly, from your desktop, figure out where are your best candidates for quick, for easy retrofits, low-cost retrofits. And things like, if you've got a permanent pool that you have the ability to lower even to 6 inches or 12 inches, that makes an easy retrofit. If you've got a basin that you've got enough freeboard at the 100-year event to be able to restrict those low flows without changing the level of service for the 100-year event, that's a good, that's a low-cost, high-benefit strategy. And then, where you've got some really big basins, like the big partners, like the Amazons of the world, working with them to actually, maybe, you know, if it's a retrofit situation, maybe you make the basin bigger, maybe use real-time control, maybe it's worth the higher-cost strategy because it controls so much area, right? So, there's kind of those higher-priority basins where they cost a lot, but they also do a whole lot of benefits, right? And then other basins that screen out as kind of medium or, you know, medium-benefit, medium or high-cost, just catalog those for later. Let's get through these lower-cost ones first and then see where we are in our streams and, you know, maybe work on those later. The other huge one that was critical to the gunpowder success story is optimizing your stormwater policy. So, I don't really know what Lexington's stormwater policy is, but most MS4s have regional flood protection, where you can't make flooding worse downstream, and many of them have water quality protection. So, they have the water quality volume where you got to treat like the first 0.8 inches or something through water quality. But the zone where channel erosion often begins is right here in this kind of unmanaged zone, and then we also know from that previous case study that our typical flood control protection often prolongs the durations of these peak flows that end up making erosion worse as well. But what we learned with that retrofit that I just presented on and what we learned with the Northern Kentucky experience is that you can, in the bluegrass, you can basically take a flood control basin that anybody was going to build for flood control and just optimize the outlet a little bit so that it doesn't cause erosion without having to make the basin a lot bigger. We showed you with that retrofit that we didn't make that basin any bigger and we were able to restrict those frequent flows from causing erosion, right? So, it's not a big change in terms of, like, a developer, but it's a huge change for what the streams feel, right? So, anyway, that stormwater optimization, stormwater policy optimization was critical for Northern Kentucky's success story. And then the other thing they do, again, that gunpowder success story, the airport expansion up there, the Amazon expansion was huge. It buried so many miles of streams. It was seen as this huge environmental impact, right? Well, what did SD1 do? They worked with the Amazon stormwater team to help them optimize their stormwater basin to actually make their basin be a benefit downstream. So, they actually held back more water than they, you know, would have originally had to do in order to kind of compensate for the lost resources. And by doing that, by making that flow regime less erosive for the network downstream, that helped. Like, that was better than, like, 20 basin retrofits of existing basins, right? Because it was such a big facility. So, when you get one of those big plan reviews where you've got a lot of drainage area going to this side or a lot of imperviousness, kind of working with the developer to say, hey, here's the hole you were going to build. Let's optimize your outlet a little bit and make it even more effective, right? Because if they build it today, you'd be knocking on their door to retrofit it tomorrow anyway. So, let's just get it built, optimized first time. Okay, switching gears to stream restoration and channel storage. We do stream restoration. We do a lot of projects with Kentucky Fish and Wildlife. They're awesome projects, but you often don't have this situation in a city, right? But if you can, you know, restoring a channel to make it have a much better connection to the floodplain, you know, you turn the floodplain into a wetland, you have, you know, nice wiggly streams again, that's all great. By all means, if you've got funding to do that, do that. But what I'm going to focus on are these other three strategies that are a lot lower cost. So, hand-placed logs. We've been using these like crazy. This gets at that permitting question. So, to put in wood in a stream by hand without using equipment, we've applied for permits in Ohio and Kentucky from the Army Corps, and they say, no, you don't need to bother us with this. Like, you're just using wood and you're just using your hands. You're not putting equipment in there. So, don't bother, you know, putting this to paper and sending us a permit, right? Just go ahead and do it, right? So, anyway, that's like, we had that conversation a lot with clients where it's like, you know, if you want us to do a restoration project where we're going to put equipment in the stream, it's going to cost us $30,000 to get a survey to do the permits and all the modeling and all that, right? If we can avoid that and just go straight to putting wood in the stream, that's, you know, just put your money in the fix, right? Not the paperwork, right? So, anyway, here's some befores and afters. Some channel spanning log jams and, you know, log steps and so forth. This is a pretty good before and after in one of our wildlife management areas. So, beforehand you have exposed bedrock, eroding banks, a plain bed system that's not retaining any water. There's a very limited hybrid zone that's not holding back any water. You ramp these logs up behind live trees, put a lot of brush in there, and then what that does is that builds up that hybrid zone again, retains more water in the subsurface, carves out deeper pools for fish and surface storage as well, right? And all of that is, you know, pennies to the dollar for a strategy of, you know, doing that with equipment, right? This strategy does not work in every stream. It doesn't work if, like, you've got a hospital next to an eroding bank. You're not just going to rely on wood, you know, that's placed by hand. The key with this stuff is making sure it doesn't float away. So, we do a lot of this with volunteers, and we will always build a really good jam at the bottom of the project so that if any of the volunteers ones float away, they get trapped in ours so they don't send wood down to the next culvert and cause problems. So, you don't just want to do this willy-nilly, but it is a really low-cost strategy for getting at scale with transforming the stream channels and our storage. So, there's lots of lessons learned on this, but basically, the more the better. The bigger the better. You know, we've got all these dead ash trees that are falling in our streams right now. If you don't have any wood in the stream, all those dead ash trees are going to float and end up down at a culvert or bridge. But if you've got a lot of wood in the stream, if you've got a lot of good riparian forest and wood in the channel, that's going to catch those floating logs and help with maintenance downstream. So, it's kind of a win-win for heading off maintenance problems with culverts and bridges. The other big thing, and I know Lexington has done a lot of this, is reforest the bluegrass, is reforest our stream buffers. So, not only does that lead to better wood in the channel, you get channel-spanning roots even in perennial streams. In Kentucky, Texas, California, you get these channel-spanning roots that actually help build our pools and our steps that actually create storage and create good habitat just from having a healthy riparian forested zone. So, that's a win-win, right? It's shade, it's water quality, it's leaf litter for the macro-invertebrates, you know, it's a win-win-win if you can get a streamside reforested. Beavers, there's a lot of beaver haters. there and I'm not trying to convert you but there's also a lot of beaver believers and and this is this is um there's this is this is really catching on with not just conservationists but with like farmers and ag folks and livestock managers because I mean with the West and all the fires and even Kentucky having really severe droughts this is by far the easiest cheapest way to store water on your property keep your meadows wet right you know imagine this as like a refuge for livestock right during a fire or even wildlife for hunters or whatever so anyway it doesn't work everywhere but if it if it works or just stopping the removal of beavers on a property can work wonders for the landscape and keep it wet and and have a whole lot of benefits there the the last part we're going to touch on is the floodplain benefits and floodplain storage this is also a project from Boone County the gunpowder success story this is what we call bank full wetlands and and so here's gunpowder Creek the main stem flowing this way here's a restored wetland in the floodplain and we've got a connection to it here between the channel and the floodplain and what we did was remember all that sediment that you know our deforestation sent down to our valleys we excavated that got it out of the floodplain and then we create this connection right so here's a picture looking downstream during an event that's causing erosion so this is gunpowder Creek over here you see those standing waves so that's it that's a that's an erosive event and look at this floodplain elevation here so this this street this event would have never reached the floodplain prior to this project because that stream is so entrenched because of all the post sediment alluvium over here right so now we've excavated our wetland over here and we've created this connection so that we're able to offload this water into this wetland to offload some of that erosive energy to reduce flood stage and do a whole lot of benefits for restoring a more natural service regime all those kind of win-win wins we've done a lot of these in Ohio for their nutrient removal program I think it's called H2Ohio up there with the microcyst toxic algae issues but you also have flood reduction benefits and then beneficial reuse so so remember how we said we sent all of our soil downstream to our valleys that soil ends up being really rich and we had trucks coming from 40 miles away farmers landscapers whoever who wanted soil that was that high quality because you can't find topsoil like that anywhere and if you do you have to pay a lot of money for it we're just giving away for free right because if you come and get it with your truck you can haul off and reuse it it saves us money from having to haul it somewhere else on site right and so kind of win-win wins for you know our societies and also our waterways so lots and lots of benefits there you can these floodplain wetlands even if you're like an endangered species person I mean these things were extremely common a long time ago and and so if they were really common you imagine there's a lot of species that need them in their life cycles right so there's actually a lot of fish that that need these for parts of their life cycles and you know that's why they're rare but because you know so anyway endangered species benefits nutrient reduction benefits erosion benefits and so forth flood reduction benefits so anyway that was a whole lot of information at a very quick clip but the idea is sort of using ideas like these not necessarily you know copying these exactly but tailoring them to your community and your setting to figure out what works best where but really getting at these kind of lower cost strategies for to kind of get enough at scale to move the needle in the stream and get some of these streams delisted and some of that erosion reduced and nutrients mitigated so with that I don't know if we have time for questions but thanks for bearing with me on all that content Steve. So the hand-placed log that was really interesting I'd seen somewhere in a manual that I can't find anymore that people were linking these together you know using like rebar with multiple logs do like a cribbing or something like that do you know if that requires permitting or? I don't know about that but um out west they're doing a lot of what they're called beaver dam animals and they're not using rebar they're using they'll basically make stakes out of like sycamore willows and they'll use that as their rebar basically no and they'll make it they'll try to make it more like a beaver dam that's a lot of work to do that and so we're just trying to we're just trying to get wood in the system and make sure it doesn't float so the way to do it fast for us has been get it ramped up out of the bank behind a live tree and have this other end touching the toe of this bank because the water is going to want to make it float and then twist and float away right so if it's kind of lodged up against the toe of this bank and it's ramped up out of the water on this side it can't really float away and then you do that a lot with kind of crisscrossing kind of making it be in the middle and then using a lot of brush so we're kind of doing something similar to the beaver dam analogs but it's faster and it's kind of more natural so I don't know I would ask the permitting folks because because we've asked them so many times that they're like we're sick of you asking just keep doing it but they know what we're doing right so if you do something a little different the other thing you want to watch out for if you know you can't cause flooding on somebody's upstream property or an adjacent property right so so if you do a really good dam you know you might you might actually you know like a like a beaver dam analog you might actually raise it the water surface a couple feet right these log structures aren't doing that they're they're basically holding back sediment and you know they're kind of changing that that lower section but they're not they're not really cascading those those benefits that you know out to the adjacent partials another thing is they only work in kind of steeper first second order streams we can't lift logs that are big enough to span a big stream so they're only working in kind of the steeper settings where you just don't have like risk of causing someone to flood because it's such a steep stream so just keep those kind of things in mind but it doesn't hurt to call the permit folks and ask them right just to make sure have you only done these with some of your bigger scale restoration projects or have you also tried them on smaller privately owned properties? We've done several demonstration projects with park districts and conservation districts on small parcels so like a wooded park parcel you know a private parcel actually in Oldham County and yeah so so it's nice to do kind of systematic across the watershed and our big WMA projects but yeah we've done it on small scales too and even that one picture I just showed one structure just how that one structure transformed that that reach right so I mean the more the better but if you do a good jams it'll it'll have benefits you know. I'm just curious about like landowner perceptions and because we see a lot of clean streams yeah and that you know this the believe that a clean stream meaning zero woody material equals no flooding no damage that kind of thing yeah we right we understand the difference but wondering how that perception has played out. Absolutely yeah and it's like a case by case basis but you absolutely want to be on in front of that right so so the one we did a private parcel the private property owner wanted it and he got his neighbors to be okay with it right the the ones we've done with cities and conservation districts we talked to the maintenance folks and we're like look you think wood is bad but wood without more wood in the stream ends up down you know ends up at your culverts downstream so you know and then that whole strategy of like building a really good jam at the bottom so that you're catching floating wood from upstream so you know what I mean so anyway just kind of being proactive on those potential perceptions and concerns right from our biased history yeah. I have two questions one are you able to access mitigation money through a mitigation bank or some other system the second question is what parameters did they delist the lower part of gunpowder creek with? So the gunpowder I think is delisted is it delisted for sediment just sediment so not equal How did they measure sediment to delist it? It was a subjective RDP or was it? No it was biology. Biology was authentic American river. Right right right and then are you accessing mitigation funds i.e. mitigation banks or in fee money to do these projects? Yes so the hand place log structures and the one picture of the restored meandering stream that was a that was a mitigation project with Kentucky Fish and Wildlife. So we've done we're doing a lot of hand place log structures on our mitigation projects for Kentucky Fish and Wildlife. And you're doing these with tenants for Sanitation District number one tenants for? So separately SD1 has started their own bank. Well well within oh that's interesting yeah but but within their jurisdiction you're doing these things inside an urban MS4. Yeah that's a separate thing but that was you know like a 15-year journey for SD1. They worked with Kentucky Fish and Wildlife and said hey we need more of your projects up here and they were like we're too busy you just do your own bank. And you have a municipality an MS4 that has its own mitigation bank. Right right. Are you hearing that Lindsay? Oh yeah I know this. And that that bank is also using mitigation dollars to retrofit the tension bases. We can't spend mitigation money in Fayette County. The Corps will not approve the project in this area and so we got to figure out how you manage that in northern Kentucky. Some of us are working. Some people are working. 15-year journey though. Well that's true. Yeah but yeah it is it's a it's a big success. Yeah the Corps used to not spend money on urban mitigation projects because there's too many risk factors right. But we're saying we're mitigating those risks by restoring the flow regime upstream. So you're doing that with rapid biosystems balance. You're saying I'm going to take the RBP from 70 to 110. Yeah that's the yeah that's called the AM something. It's adjusted mitigation units. That's what it's based on. Flow class and RBP support. Yeah I just wondered in your replanting, your better planning for the areas around the streets. Do you, are you fighting invasive? Do you spend half your time ripping out honeysuckle? I mean it seems to me that that's such a big maintenance and cost factor. Yeah. When you're talking about solutions that are planning. Yeah. Planning good stuff. And Russ can probably talk more about this. But what we've learned, so a couple things. One, if you can restore wetland conditions, you'll get rid of the honeysuckle on the multi-floor roads. So they don't like wet feet. So that's like a big win-win-win right there. We'd like to do that on our projects. It's a lot less expensive than chemical treatment. But the other thing with reforestation, yeah if you just stop mowing, if you take a mowed field and you stop mowing, it's going to be all invasives like guaranteed right. So you want to do it with care. But what we've found is that, and Russ again can probably speak more on this, but if you can keep this invasive suppressed while you're getting established. So like for that first five years, so keep the honeysuckle out. You're not going to keep all of the like microstegium out or whatever. But like just until your canopy can get established, then you know the invasives, you can, it's a lot easier to keep them. And then of course the wider the buffer you can make, the easier it is to keep that protected. If it's just a real skimpy buffer, the honeysuckle is always going to be on the edges you know. And then live stakes along the toe of the bank, honeysuckle doesn't like that area either. So like live stakes made from live cuttings of like black willows, I mean those are great for the streams, great for shade, great for beavers. But also they don't get outcompeted by honeysuckle at the toe of the bank because honeysuckle doesn't like wet conditions. But the farther you go into the buffer area, honeysuckle will, yeah, be nasty. So all great questions. I'm gonna be around, so yeah, I know you got more to get to. Thank you, that was super. It was so engaging and so clear. I think you made us all beaver believers. You also made us look at Disney differently. Thank you. All right, so next we have one of Lexington's own, Tom Martin is going to do two presentations. First about floodplain appeals committee and then infill and development. So we'll let Tom take it from here. Okay, I'm not going to stand behind the podium. I spent all yesterday morning standing behind this podium for the most part. We had a committee meeting here and I'm used to that. I do like to stand and walk around a lot of times when I'm talking. I love that presentation. I love stream restoration. It's absolutely a perfect segue into what I'm going to talk about because we're talking about management. You know, we're talking about floodplain management, stormwater management, and that sort of thing. Some of you may not know that we had beaver come up into one of our watersheds and reestablish themselves and some people thought that was wonderful but a lot of people got real upset and didn't like it and they had to be relocated. Which is a shame from my perspective but that's one of the problems we have with perceptions. I like snakes by the way. A lot of people don't. I encourage snakes in my yard. I like them. They keep the chipmunks away and but again it's perceptions and balance and what we try to achieve and perceptions that can be tough. I'm really off into further than what I'm supposed to be doing today. Lawns. You know lawns are terrible? They are. We all know that but boy tell the real estate industry that. You got to have that curb appeal. Well there's something important here because you build equity don't you when you're homeowner. Economics have to work but sedges are much better. Anyway the floodplain appeals committee. Why do we have one and what does it do? Well the floodplain appeals committee was created in article 19 of the zoning ordinance. Okay what is article 19 of the zoning ordinance? It is the section of the ordinance that's specifically designed for floodplain management under the zoning ordinance. It's floodplain conservation and protection is its adopted title. It specifically regulates from a zoning perspective and the land use perspective our floodplains. It references engineering and engineering studies very heavily because that's very important as we know and how we manage our floodplains and our stormwater. Now it's important to know that most chapters in the zoning ordinance and for those of you who aren't familiar with my world, zoning ordinance and the land subdivision regulations are adopted regulations or administrative regulations. They're the law. We work in planning in the realm of administrative law. It's designed to guide the physical development of our community. That's what it does. Primarily the physical. That's really how planning came into existence was dealing with health and safety issues. Air, light, fire, flooding, those types of things. So article 19 has an extensive intent paragraph and that's how these regulations work. You start right at the first page and the first paragraph is going to be intent and everything flows from that. Everything that comes out of that is trying to meet the intent and I can tell you that article 19 is lengthy. It's a big, some of your intent paragraphs are this big. Some don't, some chapters don't have intent. They don't need them. This one is one of the longer ones in the zoning ordinance and that's because it cites public awareness of flooding potential. It's intended to protect human life and health. Minimize public and private property damage. That's the intent. It's also attempts to or the intent is to minimize surface and groundwater pollution and erosion of soils. It's trying to cover a lot of ground. It's important to remember that it came about primarily for floodplain management relative to damages in danger from flooding and to minimize the public impact and private impact of flooding. Minimize public investment necessary in flooding and if you think about it, it all comes out of FEMA and the National Flood Insurance Program. The reason we developed this chapter and wrote it back in the 90s was that we've been participating in the National Flood Insurance Program since its inception in the 70s and there's a point system and the more you do to address the flooding issues in your community, the lower the insurance rates are for the citizens who have to have flood insurance and that's what we attempt to do and I can tell you we've done a lot of good work here over the years. We've reached a certain numerical level and we're stuck there. We're stuck there. We've done about all we can do. We can't build a flood wall. Well, we don't need one. You build a flood wall because you need one in Louisville and Cincinnati. Boy, do they get the points for that. Their rates drop down. So, in reality, we've done quite a bit here and we've reached a level that we keep our rates relatively reasonable. Now, that's a subjective term because flood insurance is expensive. It's very expensive. I got a call the other day. We get a lot of calls. Greg gets a lot of calls. We deal with a lot of flood insurance issues because somebody will call up and go, I got a new policy statement. They want $2,500. Flood insurance will cost more than your regular home insurance and other insurance policies. The saddest thing that I've ever heard was a young lady buying her first house. It was a townhouse. Called me up in tears because at her closing they said, you need $2,500, $2,800 for flood insurance. Nobody had told her. Had no idea. I wrote a quick letter in and demonstrated to them that she was buying a house that had been built in compliance with regulations at the time. She was able to get much lower rates, grandfathered rates in for insurance, and she was able to buy her first house. I like those types of things. We can help people do that. That's important to note that that's one aspect. Again, the intent talks about you don't want to create an unjustified demand for public infrastructure. Again, you manage your floodplains. You manage your risk. You don't have to put in a lot of controls. It's a lot like stream restoration. It will help and then you don't have to have a high public investment to address the damages. And it comes back to, again, as I said, it's about management. We're in an urban environment. We manage our environment. We do. I think, what, about 2-3% of the state of Kentucky's landscape is still natural. The rest has all been modified one way or the other. That's particularly true in an urban environment. And again, as I stated, you got, Article 19 is a vital part of our participation in the National Flood Insurance Program. You ought to come up, if you want to, walk upstairs, take a look at our original maps. The maps get updated periodically every so many years. The original maps are something to look at. I don't know how they interpreted them, the way they were done and the quality, but because, again, you have to remember, Article 19 is part of the zoning ordinance. So, it really is oriented towards land uses, uses associated, uses around the floodplain. And so, again, it tells you what you can and cannot do in terms of a land use. You don't build buildings in the floodplain. You can put fences in the floodplain, get a permit for them, but you have to do them a certain way. They can't be flow. One thing that was really, lately, has popped up and people become disturbed by the news and they find out, guess what, you can't put a swimming pool in the floodplain. It's there in the ordinance. They're not allowed. That's how zoning works. You've got allowed uses, you've got uses that are not allowed, then you have conditional uses. Uses that have a certain level of approval that they need to go through. And when I talk about swimming pools, it's not the above-ground swimming pools. It's the in-ground concrete structure swimming pools that you can't put. So, we talk about 100-year floodplain. That is what we regulate to. We regulate to the 100-year floodplain. That's developed by FEMA. They pay for them, they map them, they use LiDAR. They've gotten a lot better over the years. They're really very accurate. There's various references on the maps. AE is a studied floodplain. That means it's been studied. It's been done. They have the math to back up that elevation of that floodplain. And that's what we regulate to, the 100-year. And we adopt those. That's what we adopt. They're integrated through an adoption, wording, that we regulate. Now, I like this one. If your property's in 100-year floodplain, we didn't put you there. We get those calls, we hear that a lot. I'm not in the floodplain. How can you put me in the floodplain? We didn't do it. FEMA did it. The science did it. When they find the mapping establishes these floodplains. So we didn't do it. And again, as I stated, they use LiDAR and elevations. And the 100-year designation, that's a statistical chance of an annual event. That's what that is. And that's another thing we hear a lot. Oh, it never floods here. I've never seen a flood. I've been here for 40 years. And you know what? They're telling the truth. It hadn't flooded in 40 years. That doesn't mean in any given year there's not a chance for it to flood and meet that level. It may happen four or five times in one year. It's a statistical chance. And as you all know, rain events change. I'm going to admit that I kind of enjoyed something a few years ago when we had a developer come in with a proposal. And old-timer been around a long time and he knows what he's doing. You know, he's pretty confident in his abilities and he understands development. And his development was heavily impacted by floodplain. I mean, the elevations were high and it was going to impact how he could use the property. So he was at the technical committee meeting. A lot of my co-workers know what that is. That's where we review development in the technical committee. We bring all the various agencies together. And this gentleman challenged technical committee and he said, I challenge any of you to show me where we've had a hundred-year event. And I said, after this meeting, why don't you come to my office? As a matter of fact, Greg Lubeck over here and sent me that beautiful map, that graph of the, what was it, April 2015 event. It was wonderful. You ought to see it. Yeah, that rain event was, oh, was it, no, I thought there was one in 15. Yeah, well, you ought to see this. It's beautiful because, guess what, it has 20-year sections in our community, 50. It had 100 here and I was able to show this gentleman. Yes, it does happen. You see, here it is. I enjoy that. If you looked at the Kentucky River portion of that graph, that was a 500-year event. So, it does happen and that's why we have to regulate. That's why we manage our floodplains. So, it's not a question of if but when. I threw that in here because I knew there'd be lots of pretty pictures and graphs and things like that. I was going to do mostly talking and not have a lot of pictures. I've got a lot of flooding pictures. That is Main Street, 1928, Town Branch. We're standing on it. It flooded. So, again, it's not if, it's when. Main Street flooded in 1928, ladies and gentlemen, and there it is. You recognize that name? The Phoenix Motel. So, yeah, it happened, 1920. I've got even, I've got one that shows the flooding by the old, oh shoot, the basketball coliseum on the UK campus where there's a big sinkhole right there and it shows how it filled up water and flooded. It's a great picture as well. But, I threw that in there just, again, it's not if, it's when. So, Article 19, it's well written. It really is. It's well written. It's very comprehensive. It's strict. It's specific. It places, as I said earlier, tremendous emphasis on engineering analysis and recommendations because we're dealing with principally flooding issues and managing and controlling flooding issues which, of course, relate to our stormwater and how we control and manage our stormwater. It governs development plan information, plan review standards. We, as a community, review plans and we're very upfront about it. We bring plans in. I mentioned the technical committee. We help coordinate with various different agencies, both governmental and private, utilities, and Article 19 talks about what you have to put on that plan and the type of information we need to see and we're going to see. And I can tell you, over the years, we've been very effective in our new development. We don't really have issues over, for the last quite a few years, since Article 19 particularly. And it's not that they didn't do a good job before. They did, but it was more done on a case-by-case basis and relied a lot on just the individual engineers to establish elevations and address any flooding issues. We keep people out of the floodplain, basically. Most of our issues that exist are the results of older areas that were developed prior to FEMA floodplains, prior to the National Flood Insurance Program. We have a lot of problematic areas and I can tell you that we have spent a lot of money over the years and continue to spend money to address these problematic areas. We purchase property. I've worked with Greg. Greg's handled a lot of projects. Division of Water Quality has a program and it depends on the money. You have to have the money. We use federal dollars a lot, FEMA dollars, and we buy houses. We clear the property and when you do that, it stays green. There's a nice little open green area on Furlong, Beacon Hill. I know Ken knows it. That's his creek. That's my creek, too. I lived on Furlong once upon a time in one of those houses. It's gone now. But again, we cleared that out because of flooding. Those are older areas. Those are problems that pre-existed and we continue to deal with those and study them. We've been very good and aggressive as a community in trying to deal with these problems. You've seen them. Southland, again, that's my neighborhood, that area. They channelize those creeks. You go look and you go, don't you love it? You see that concrete. There it goes. You're going, nature didn't do that. But back in the day, that's what you did and that's what engineers knew to do back then and it worked back then. We've learned better now and we don't do that now. So, when we can avoid it. Okay, nothing's an absolute. Now, as I mentioned, because it's a zoning ordinance requirement, it addresses uses and it has in there a section that says special permit uses because you have to allow a certain because you have to allow a certain utilization of property and you can allow a certain utilization of a floodplain and that's what we refer to as special permit uses. They have to be reviewed by the division of engineering. They have to be signed off on by the urban county engineer to be allowed and they have to meet certain conditions. I mentioned before, you can see, swim pools are not allowed. I broke some guy's heart recently. I don't know what he's going to do because I think he's already been spending money and call us first. We always, please call us first. We love to talk to you before you do something like that. So, let's see. Let me give you an example. Special permit uses, you go, let's see, you quite often have to meet requirements under article 19. Flood proofing would be a common example. New structures on fill can be allowed. They take an awful lot of evaluation and engineering analysis to do that. We've had one case of a change to the floodplain with fill, significant amount of fill, was over on Wilson Downing in that area, extensive floodplain. I think that might have been eight feet of fill in a portion of that property ultimately. That's a lot for us and that was a lot of fill to adjust that floodplain and bring the property out. And even then, certain things had to be done. Health and safety issues. This incident, you know where the Starbucks is at Wilson Downing and it kind of sits on a little island. Well, one of the things that was required under this process was they have to have an emergency access into that property if there's a flood and it's got to work. Fire trucks, ambulance have to be able to get across and into that property. And they need, they can get through up to 18 inches of water. You get above 18 inches of water, you can't get an ambulance in there for instance. That's one of the standards that we look at, our fire people look at. So again, you have to be, you have to get approvals. The distillery district, it got some approvals. It went through the floodplain appeals committee and there's certain requirements for flood proofing, elevation and utility. That's a whole different story. But I know, it's going on. It's, yeah, it is. It's a whole different story. You're right, it is. It's, but just your standard, Marikas, Marikas had to flood proof, elevation. Go take a look at Marikas and their structure sometime. You'll kind of look, you'll notice, oh there's some concrete down in there. That's where they elevated that building and got it up out of that extensive floodplain that's in the south. So again, special uses. Zoning's that way. There's always an ability, again it regulates, but you can ask. And 19, Article 19 is similar. You can ask to do certain things under the special permit process. But again, it's pretty well defined. We are pretty strict. So, where does the floodplain committee fit into this? Well, there's no perfect ordinance. There's no perfect regulation. And so, there has to be some sort of appeal process. There's an appeal process to zoning. It depends on which way you want to go. You can appeal decisions by the planning commission. You can appeal decisions made by various officials connected with zoning and building inspection. It can go to the board of adjustment. That's one method of appeal. You can go to circuit court. Our system is a system of laws. So, there's an appeal mechanism to grant people relief. And that's the purpose of the floodplain appeals committee. They exist to allow people literally to appeal a decision made by the urban county engineer. So, the urban county engineer is empowered to approve or disapprove special permit uses. He cannot approve variances from those standards. He can say either you get this permit or you don't because you're not doing what you need to do to receive this permit. But he can't approve variances. So, we have a floodplain appeals committee. So, a process for variances was created in article 19. If you're real interested in all that, you need to read it. But it's a big long, it's all in there explains it. Variances face a high level of justification particularly regarding the flood risks, public expense, creation of a nuisance, fraud or conflict. All this primarily relates back to flooding and flood hazards and not damaging your neighbor, not damaging the public, or not trying to get a variance that allow you to again commit fraud, get reduced insurance rates, whatever that may constitute. There's a protection. They have to meet that. When they come in, they have to justify themselves. We've had six or seven, seven I think, since I've been back with the government. I'm back with the government now 18 years. I say back, this is my third trip through the urban county government. I spent a lot of time in the private sector and the non-profit sector as well. But the Arby's, Lansdowne, Tate's Creek, it's sitting on top of the creek. It's been put in a culvert. Got put in a culvert when Lansdowne was developed. It's sitting there. Well, they came in and had to get a variance. Well, frankly, there was no reason not to grant those folks a variance. The creek is completely enclosed, you know, it's in a culvert. And they were built over part of that. The forked bank, back up the upstream from that. Same situation. Now, they went to FEMA and got a no-rise certificate, I believe, to show what they were doing. But it was an existing circumstance. The building was there. And that's what we've dealt with over the years. We've not had any requests through any new development. They all relate to existing, expansion of existing, or just older areas of our community. There was one on Beach Road. I think it was the first one possibly. Go-To-See Appeals Committee was developed. The property owners down there had a lot of older cabins and buildings and might have been some sort of campground down there on Beach Road once upon a time. And the property was gone. The structures were gone. They wanted to rebuild. Floodplain Appeals Committee said, no, no, we're not going to approve it. The Floodplain Appeals Committee, and I brought the bylaws. If anybody's interested, there's a copy of, or not the bylaws, that explains how everything works. I can get you a copy of the bylaws. They had to adopt the bylaws as a committee, which they did. But they have five members. They're appointed by the Planning Commission. They actually adopted an unofficial policy where we have a standby member, and that is to try to ensure a quorum whenever they meet. And they generally, that standby member is an engineer in private practice. The Commissioner of Planning, however they happen to be organized, you all that work in government know we get reorganized, and we get moved around, and the commissioners get different titles. But basically, whatever the commissioner's called, who is Planning's Commissioner, they're on the committee. And of course, they generally appoint somebody to represent them on the committee. A member of the Planning Commission, a member of the Urban County Council, a member of the Urban County Council, and a professional engineer in private practice, and again a member of the Home Builders Association, and again they've changed their name. Whatever they are now, I tend to forget. But they have a representative, and their representative happens to be an engineer as well that's been on the committee. He's been reappointed several times. So that's the makeup of the committee. As I said, they met seven times. But I can recall, I think I went back and checked the records, I think it's been seven times, which isn't much. And in fact, it's so rare that we generally have to go back in and have them reappointed because their terms have expired. And we have to go, oh wait a minute, we can't have a meeting until we get these people reappointed, which is always fun because then you have to go to the Mayor's Office or the Council Office and say, we need an Urban County Council member to get reappointed or be appointed. When you find somebody who's willing to do it, then they have to find somebody and they send us a name so the Planning Commission can appoint them. It's generally not that tough with everybody else, but we have to reappoint them. As I said, they disapproved one variance and they've approved the others that have come before them. As Greg mentioned, we had one heck of a one down on the Distillery District, an interesting area with the floodplain down there and an interesting variance that we have a current plan that's coming through down there that is raised some serious Article 19 and compliance issues for the user that's wanting to come in down to the Distillery District. As I said before, the requests are generally, have all been related to properties that were historically located in or partially in the FEMA 100-year floodplain prior to the National Flood Insurance Program. We don't have any issues with new development and how we relate to floodplains. Another interesting thing, back a few years ago, FEMA came in. Their consultants say it funded another study. We got kind of lucky for a while. We got our maps updated several times in succession over a matter of just a few years. This, I believe, and Greg, you help me on get this right, was the North Elkhorn. They were looking at the North Elkhorn watershed, I believe. They were looking at the North Elkhorn watershed, I believe. No, they just did the West Hickory. Yes, but prior to that, I'm thinking. Down to the river. Yes, yeah, that was, that study's more recent. I'm thinking of an older study because what I found interesting was they were talking about. The risk mapping they did on the North Elkhorn. Yes, the risk mapping and what's interesting to me about that is they were, wanted to rank risk based on the value of the real estate. I'm thinking, wait a minute, there's a built-in fallacy there because we manage our floodplains so effectively. They're not at risk. They're not going to be flooded. However, you go to some of our older neighborhoods, you go to Southland Drive where they have a flooding risk. That real estate isn't valued as highly or wasn't in then. The same is true with some of our older residential neighborhoods where the homes aren't valued as highly. They're actually at a higher risk. So, I had a philosophical and maybe even a moral problem with that risk assessment. It's misleading. It's just, anyway, but again, I can segue into a lot of things like that. So, again, I won't belabor this any further and be happy to answer any questions you may have about the Floodplain Appeals Committee and what it does or tries to do. Tom, if you could pause for just a minute for questions. I'd like to see if you'd be willing to come back at our next meeting and talk about the infill and redevelopment sections. We've got enough time here. Oh, that's wonderful. Good, I got out of that one. Thank you. There's a couple minutes for questions. Ken. Shocking. Basically, I think, Tom, what I want to do is first commend you for your technical committee process. Basically, in terms of the people that you, and I say you and your staff in terms of planning staff, the people that they collect for that process, the transparency through the use of Excel. I know you're going to build into this, but the transparency with your use of Excel, the public notices you send out with detail in those public notices in terms of the staff effort to do that, and so I really like that process. Now, with the Floodplain Appeals Committee, I've had a little difficulty with public notice on that. In other words, the last meeting you had, the only notice that went out on that was a posting on the website 48 hours prior to the convening of the meeting. That was my perception because I was not... Ken, there's a notice, there's a requirement that proper owners within a certain area, just like on a zone change or a Board of Adjustment case, they get notified. What about people who are doing restoration projects? Yeah, that's... 150 feet of the project area. Right, no. Where you're investing time and money and effort. Right, no. And who are known... Okay. Yeah, I understand. So, all right, I've made the recommendation that the Floodplain Appeals Committee process be included in the Board of Adjustments work, and they do that in other jurisdictions. In other words, and the reason why I advocate that is because there is a public notice process, there's a, you know, it's a fairly transparent process. Whereas your Floodplain Appeals Committee, the last meeting was a little sneaky to under the wire to get that in. Well, again, when it was created, Ken, it was set up to follow very specific legal requirements, notification requirements, and they haven't been changed since then. So, it's not a bad recommendation to look at changing that. The good news is they don't get called together very often, but I would agree with you that I think that interest groups certainly should be involved, and particularly what grew out of this committee, where we have representatives of the watersheds. Yeah, yeah, you know, I would agree with you that I think that we ought to send notices out. I can tell you what you can do. We do this for zoning. We do this for development. You send us a written request to be notified, and we put that in that file. So, when we go back and look, we'll go, ah, this person has to be notified, and we'll, yeah. Okay, but anyway, I love your technical review process. That's really good, and then looking forward to the infill and the development, because that was what triggered this presentation. Yeah. Hey, Jennifer, one more question. Okay, we didn't coordinate this, but Ken is asking in a different way exactly the question I had. If you could help me understand, most of our variances and appeals processes on professional judgments of staff, zoning officials, and so on, do go through the Board of Adjustment, as you said. Why the floodplain appeals committee? And one of the questions I have is, well, is it the membership of it? But you have professional advisors for that committee and so on. Why not have this variance be a part of all the variances, the other variances? It's a dimensional, usually dimensional, isn't it? It was quite often it can be, yeah. Not always, but it was because the committee was set up specifically, Amy, with Article 19 with floodplain management. So, it's just specific, and we needed a legal appeals process relative to special use permits in the Article 19. So, that's why it was created specific to Article 19. But why did it have to be special and different? Why couldn't it be a new responsibility? I would have to go back, Amy, to the 1990s and ask people who wrote it. Because it's a very small committee. It almost never meets. It has to be reconstituted and so on. And the membership, as it's designated, is not very special to floodplain appeals, to floodplains. It's got one engineer on it, but the rest of them are, you know, over the years. If you read Article 19, you will see that the urban county engineer is prominently mentioned. And that's another thing that's interesting. So, he's there. To be an appeals process for an administrative regulation, you're putting someone of the staff onto the committee. Anyway, I really have questions about that one. And there's another, in my experience, bitsy little committee that meets occasionally. And, well, it has, I think it's landscaping or something. And that again, that's an advisory committee. That's just an advisory committee. There's been talk about just getting rid of them because they rarely, a lot of times they don't have a quorum. Yeah, they're strictly advisory. I'm going to cut off the questions now, but Tom will be here in three months to talk about the next subject. So, if there's more questions or in between. He says he likes focals. I heard him say that. Hey Tom, what do floodplains do? They flood. They do. They flood, folks, and they're supposed to. All right, I'm going to turn it over to you. One last little thing. In a 30-year mortgage, you have a one in four chance of seeing the 100-year flood. Wow. There you go. During the course of a typical 30-year mortgage. That's a pretty significant chance. All right, thank you very much, Tom. Thank you. Okay, a couple last things on the agenda. We have an open seat coming open in March for Boone Creek, which is open. And so, keep that in mind. It expires in March, so we'll be voting on them in March. So, if you have a suggestion, excuse me, for somebody who would be great for Boone Creek or is living or working in the area, let Lindsay know ahead of March, and we can get that person instated. And then, approval of meeting dates. So, they are listed on your agenda. So, again, we do this quarterly. March, June, September, and December, the first Friday. Can I entertain a motion? So moved, as published in your agenda. Okay, and a second. And Eddie, all in favor? All in favor? Any opposed? Okay, so we'll see you, Tom, on March 10th. Can we do a monthly? All right, but we do, other than the tabled infill redevelopment, any potential topics for meetings? Ken? Basically, you know, our permit is expired and looming over us, and I sort of heard the general, the phase two ones mentioned. Any news on that yet, or? The general permit's been prioritized over ours, so they will see a new permit before we do. Can we ask for the permit writer to come to the meeting and give a presentation? I can ask. You're just slowing down, getting in the process. And here's one thing is, is I can't find a copy of the MS-4 permit anymore on Durell's website. You've got the annual reports, but not the actual permit. Okay, yeah, I felt that tension coming. I think it's very different than what it sounds. Along with everything else. Yeah, I'll make sure. I was really, I really appreciated the flooding information, and on the infill and development, could some of that transfer into the next topic as far as what I envision of the policy of infill redevelopment is going to increase a lot of impervious area, a lot more stormwater, and that may have flooding implications that might have, obviously, stormwater implications, but would that be, is that part of your intent on the conversation? You need to understand that infill redevelopment from a planning perspective is not fully and completely an engineering perspective. We reference manuals and things like that that people had to follow. You got to follow the regulations. So, maybe a follow-up. Yeah, I mean there are ramifications of development, period, whether it's infill redevelopment or greenfield. And we, the planning commission and that sort of thing, isn't going to get into the weeds of an actual design. Okay, they're not going to review the math for a detention basin. They're not going to review the calculations for runoff. That's not their job, not their expertise. Would you be able to speak to some degree on a broader picture of what we project our streams will look like as a result in 5, 10, 15, 20 years? Yes. Any more, any future topics? One question I have, and this is since Richard's in the room, in terms of what schedule are we supposed to update our stormwater manuals? Is it per permit cycle or is it per three years? The permit does not say it has to be updated at any particular but the permit does not say it has to be updated at any particular milestone. It's when the community and the government look like it's necessary if there's going to change of some kind. Yes, this is kind of a question in terms of whether this is within the scope of Tom's report next time or not. There have been amendments that are either half passed or entirely passed on parking and on open space. Townhouses in particular are looking quite different. Will that kind of initiative to change the shape of infill and redevelopment through these though to be part of your scope? Well, I was going to deal more broadly with infill and redevelopment maybe as opposed to again to get into all things are going to impact development whether it's infill, redevelopment, or whatever. All those things impact. Yeah, but I wasn't, you know, I wasn't really anticipating a presentation on planning in general and all that sort of thing or any changes like that. I was going to focus more just on infill and redevelopment. How it's done legally and then how it's perceived was more of my focus. Good, okay. Then I think I would agree that it would be a good idea to have a more engineering perspective on impervious surface, proliferation of impervious surface, or stormwater impacts associated with the new regulations and the new just initiative. I can say this in regards to the parking. There's more green being involved. There's more landscaping. Again, we're heading into a direction all the time of being more and more environmentally friendly. Does planning keep a map of intensity of development associated with physical built area, I guess? We could probably put that type of information together, but I don't know that we can tell you more. Let me just pause this for a little bit. Maybe this can take place after the meeting. You guys can chat afterwards because we're a little bit past time and that drives me crazy. I do want to notice some... If you have other ideas, you can send them to Lindsay for ideas for future topics, whether it's in March or any of the other dates you all just approved. We have a couple of announcements. We had 106 participants in the Gobble Grease toss and collected 500 gallons of cooking oil, which is awesome. December 16th, the workshop of engineering, development, and construction industry at Fayette County Extension Office. March 3rd, you already approved that. We have Water Week coming up in March as well, as well as Reforest the Bluegrass. But no, I did not. That's all where my mind goes. I'm sorry. Reforest 5K. And then... Citizens Environmental Encampment. Yeah. One of their groups, Jennifer can speak to it, but one of their groups has picked a planting project in one of our detention basins, and so we're working with them on that. But just connected to this work, this group and things we've talked about, it does seem duplicable and exciting that a group kind of outside of this group has found that as an interesting thing they want to take on. And so just a fun addition. And since I'm chair and have the floor, I get to say two things that I want to announce as well. On March 7th and 8th, we're going to be having our third annual Bluegrass Sustainability Summit. It's going to focus on climate change and environmental justice. So not directly water, but there's a lot of water in environmental justice, a lot of flooding issues in environmental justice. And then this is just a braggy thing. Yesterday, one of our environmental educators, Rachel Patton, who does a lot of water education in Fayette County and the surrounding counties, won the Environmental Educator of the Year Award for the whole state. So I just wanted to congratulate Rachel. She's not here, but she's here. Are there other announcements from the group? All right. Cool. Well, thank you. You guys have a wonderful holiday. Enjoy some time off, hopefully, and we'll see you in March.