# Stormwater Stakeholder Advisory Committee - December 1, 2023 > Auto-transcribed civic record · Committee · December 1, 2023 - **Permalink**: https://meetings.lexingtonky.news/meeting/6535 - **Source video**: https://lfucg.granicus.com/player/clip/6535?view_id=14&redirect=true - **Date**: 2023-12-01 - **Body**: Committee - **Last revised**: February 15, 2026 - **Length**: 17,896 words > ⚠️ **Auto-generated content.** Audio from the official Granicus video was auto-transcribed by OpenAI Whisper-1. Structured facts were extracted with GPT-4o; the narrative summary was written by Anthropic Claude Sonnet. Speaker labels and verbatim wording may contain errors. See [methodology](https://meetings.lexingtonky.news/about/methodology) or [report a correction](mailto:editor@lexingtonky.news). --- ## Meeting Overview The Stormwater Stakeholder Advisory Committee met on December 1, 2023, from 9:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. at the Phoenix Building – 3rd Floor Conference Room, with Amy Sohner presiding. The committee worked through 5 agenda items during the session, covering a mix of administrative business and informational presentations. Two votes were taken: the committee approved the minutes from the September 8, 2023 meeting, and approved meeting dates for 2024. Three informational presentations were delivered, covering the effects of conservation activities on riparian soil health, the Tree Equity Score tool by American Forests, and an MS4 Program Update and Year in Review. No public comments were heard during the meeting. ## Attendance The following 47 members were present at the December 1, 2023 Committee meeting: Doug Burton, Jennifer Carey, Jim Conner, Ken Cooke, Steve Garland, Jim Griggs, Don Hill, Charlie Martin, Malissa McAlister, Richard McClure, Elizabeth McGee Lewis, Mary Murray, Hunter Pace, Amy Sohner, Russ Turpin, Tracy Wade, Jerry Weisenfluh, Denice Bullock, Sarah Donaldson, Jason Drew, Jared Gabbard, Mac Hall, Brian Hayes, Gabe Hensley, Becky Irwin, Demetria Kimball-Mehlhorn, Greg Lubeck, Frank Mabson, Craig Morgan, Jennifer Myatt, Lindsie Nicholas, Mark Sanders, Abby Terry, Richard Walker, Heather Wilson, Jerry Davis, Hunter Dockery, Audrey Ernstberger, Ken Johnson, Nathan Krebs, Sam Lee, Cooper Samuelson, Kenton Sena, Lesley Snead, John Steinmetz, Brian Stephens, and Bailee Young. No members were recorded as absent or late. ## Votes and Decisions Two motions were brought to a vote during the December 1, 2023 committee meeting, both passing unanimously. - **Approval of September 8, 2023 Meeting Minutes** [timestamp: 0:31]: A motion to approve the minutes from the September 8, 2023 meeting was made by Mary Murray and seconded by Jim Conner. The motion passed unanimously. No roll call vote was recorded. - **Approval of 2024 Meeting Dates** [timestamp: 1:47:57]: A motion to approve the committee's meeting dates for 2024 was made by Jennifer Carey and seconded by Steve Garland. The motion passed unanimously. No roll call vote was recorded. ## Approval of 9/8/2023 Minutes [timestamp: 00:31] The committee took up the approval of minutes from its September 8, 2023 meeting. Key speakers on this item included Amy Sohner, Mary Murray, and Jim Conner. - No corrections or amendments to the minutes were proposed during the discussion. - The minutes from the September 8, 2023 meeting were approved as presented. The item was resolved without debate or outstanding concerns. ## Effects of Conservation Activities on Riparian Soil Health [timestamp: 01:03] Kenton Sena, Cooper Samuelson, and Hunter Dockery delivered a research presentation on the effects of conservation activities on riparian soil health. Their findings indicated positive impacts on both water quality and soil conditions as a result of conservation efforts in riparian areas. The presentation was informational in nature, and no vote or formal action was taken by the Committee following the remarks. ## Tree Equity Score by American Forests [timestamp: 28:59] Heather Wilson presented this agenda item, providing the committee with an overview of the Tree Equity Score and the tools available for managing urban forests. The presentation focused on the Tree Equity Score, a resource developed by American Forests, and emphasized the importance of ensuring equitable distribution of tree canopy across urban areas. Wilson highlighted tools that can be used to assess and manage urban forest resources with an equity lens, underscoring the significance of canopy coverage as it relates to different communities. The item was informational in nature, with no formal action taken or vote recorded as an outcome of the presentation. ## MS4 Program Update and Year in Review [timestamp: 1:06:00] Lindsie Nicholas presented an update on the MS4 (Municipal Separate Storm Sewer System) Program, offering a year-in-review overview of the program's activities and an outlook on future priorities. The presentation covered several core areas of the program's work, including: - **Inspections** conducted as part of ongoing MS4 compliance and oversight activities - **Water quality monitoring** efforts carried out throughout the year - **Future goals** focused on watershed planning and hydraulic restoration The update was informational in nature, and no votes or formal actions were taken by the Committee as a result of the presentation. *Note: Additional detail on specific inspection numbers, monitoring results, and project timelines was not available in the source materials for this summary.* ## Approval of Meeting Dates for 2024 [timestamp: 1:47:57] The committee took up the matter of scheduling its meeting dates for the coming year, with discussion focused on ensuring the proposed dates did not conflict with holidays. Key participants in the discussion included Amy Sohner, Jennifer Carey, and Steve Garland. The committee reviewed the proposed 2024 meeting calendar, with attention given to avoiding scheduling conflicts with recognized holidays. No significant objections were raised during the discussion, and the committee moved through the item in a straightforward manner. The meeting dates for 2024 were **approved** by the committee. --- ## Decisions - **Motion** — passed (0-0): Approval of the minutes from the September 8, 2023 meeting - **Motion** — passed (0-0): Approval of meeting dates for 2024 --- ## Full transcript That was fun. As you've mentioned, it's always nice to see loads of people trying to get to a stormwater meeting. So that's really great. So welcome. I'm Amy. I'm the chair. And I am here to make you all approve the minutes or get any suggestions for changes that you have. So would anybody like to approve the minutes that were so gratefully emailed out prior? And when you speak, I'm sorry, you didn't speak. But when you speak, please say your name. And then also, if you're going to ask a question or anything like that, please press the Talk button on your little console if it's near you to that. So tell me your name. Mary Murray has made a motion to approve the minutes. Is there a second? And your name? Jim Connor. Any suggestions on changes to the minutes from the last meeting? All right, all in favor of passing them? Any opposed? Fantastic. That's always the best part. All right, so welcome to our December 1st meeting. We're excited to have you here. Our first presentation is going to be the Effects of Conservation Activities on Riparian Soil Health. Kenton Senna, Cooper Samuelson, and Hunter Dockery from the Lewis Honors College at UK will be presenting. And we've heard from them before. So I'm excited to see follow-ups, too. Thank you, gentlemen. So I'll kick us off, and then we'll give you guys some minutes. Sound good? Yeah, if it works. All right, so hello. Thank you all for being here. And thanks for the invitation, Lindsey. It's nice to be here and share with you about our work on the effects of conservation activities on riparian soil. And we're excited to have you here. And we're excited to have you here. And we're excited to have you here. And we're excited to have you here. And we're excited to share with you about our work on riparian buffers here. So my name is Kenton Senna. I teach in the Lewis Honors College at UK. My background is in restoration ecology, particularly on surface mine sites in eastern Kentucky. But I've been working increasingly in our urban forests in Lexington. So I'm really excited to be here with you to share about our project. And joining me are Cooper and Hunter, resource assistants who did the majority of the work on this project. So I asked them to come and share with me or alongside me on this project. Let me jump right in. We are interested in riparian buffers for a number of reasons in urban areas. Among them is this idea of the urban stream syndrome. This is a stormwater meeting. All of you are familiar with this. Very basically, urban streams are affected by altered hydrology, channel erosion and downcutting and impaired water quality. All of these are related to various aspects or mechanisms associated with urban development, primarily impervious surfaces. And so one of the questions that we've been asking for a while as part of this research program is whether the riparian buffers that have been established in Lexington, for example, as part of the Reforest the Bluegrass program have any effect on water quality in these streams. And that analysis is ongoing, but the preliminary results are positive. Like, yes, these riparian plantings can actually improve stream water quality. So here I have a figure from a parallel project showing nitrate concentrations in a series of streams that have had some riparian conservation activities done in them. And these are paired samples upstream and downstream of the reforested areas. And you can see, hopefully, oh yeah, this works. So the pairs of bars with asterisks floating over them are significantly different at a 0.05 significance level. And so, you know, we're seeing at a number of these sites that riparian conservation and restoration activities can significantly improve stream water quality in these streams that are affected by urban development. But our question that we're asking today is more about the soils themselves in those riparian areas. So we're asking, do these conservation activities have any effects on riparian buffer soils as compared to adjacent soils under kind of business as usual mowed grass, right? Which we love everywhere, mowed grass. So we're asking those in a couple specific ways. One, we're interested in whether those conservation activities can improve infiltration rates. Again, these are riparian buffers. They're adjacent to streams. If doing conservation in these areas can help to improve infiltration, we might be able to capture overland surface flow before it contributes sediment and other stuff into the streams. So infiltration, improving infiltration in buffers is really desirable. And then we're also interested in whether these buffers show any other markers of improved soil health, like microbial community development and so on. That's what we'll be sharing a little bit about today. I'll hand it off to Cooper and Hunter to talk about methods. Push the on button, there you go. Yeah, so essentially here, we just have a list of all the sites that we did. We can come back to this later on just because it's a big list and wouldn't be fun to read out right now. But here's an example of a sampling scheme that we did at Hickman Tributary. So essentially what we have here is an outline of the stream. And then over here would be the plots that we sampled in the sites. So each orange dot represents one plot that we sampled. Three of them will be in the planted riparian buffer zone and three will be in this standard mode zone. So here's just a graphical representation of how we divided up the sites. So we had three transects, three in the riparian zone and three in the mode zone. Each of these are paired to each other. So they're not vast distance apart from each other. So that way we can actually determine if there are any differences. And this is essentially what each plot looks like. It's a very rough picture, but what we have here is how we took the samples. So these red Xs up here represent the compaction data that we took and how we did it. We did it in an alternating pattern where Hunter and I each took five samples each to make sure that there was no bias in the sample taking. And then this area right here represents the soil sampling that we did in a one by one meter area. We took five samples out of the dirt and then further would homogenize those. So for the infiltration, what we did is we used a double ring infiltrometer with a five minute calibration period and then three repetitions per sampling point. So a total of four runs essentially through the infiltrometer. And that was done by hammering it into the ground, making sure that it did not move, making sure that it did not leak into the surrounding soil or else our measurements would be off and just pouring in water into the outer ring and the middle ring, and then just waiting to see how quickly the water drained from each other. Want to do compaction? Sure. Then with soil compaction, it's a pretty easy method. We just took a penetrometer and essentially, like you mentioned, we did sort of a zigzag pattern across the sites in both the mode and the buffer zones. The key with the penetrometers, you want to try to keep a real even pressure as you go into the soil. And that's pretty much it with that. We just logged all those 10 samples taken per plot. Then- Soil chemistry is Cooper as well. Yeah, this is what I'm doing now. So with the soil chemistry, what we did is going back to the slide of this one, we took five subsamples to get a more clear picture of what was going on in the dirt in each plot. What we did is we split it between the zero to 10, so the topsoil measurement, and the zero to 20, the topsoil plus subsoil layer, and then homogenized those subsamples, and then sent those samples off to UK Reg Services. So we took the samples, if you can imagine it, here's a full sample, cut it in half between zero to 10, 10 to 20, put all the 10 to 20s together, put all the zero to 10s together, and sent it off to UK Regulatory Services. We did that for each plot for each site, so we got a total of 12 bags of soil sampling per site. And then along with that, the soil samples are also being analyzed for the microbial communities, and that work is still ongoing, so. Wanna come back to the infiltration? Great, so I wanted to kind of breeze through the methods a little bit and focus on results, and hopefully we'll have time for questions. These are our preliminary infiltration results. So across the bottom, you see the different sites. Blue bars are buffer, B is for blue, is for buffer, and orange bars here are mode. So in this figure, I'm just showing a paired analysis between the buffer and the mode within each site for infiltration rates. So we are seeing, whoops, I apologize. We are seeing significantly different infiltration rates between buffer and mode sites at several of these locations. Yes. The units, yeah, so the units are a little funky, which is why I also just put this in response ratio. So the units are in inches per hour, which is like, those are really high rates in inches per hour. So I put it in a response ratio. We'll just skip right to that. So this kind of normalizes it, just within each unit, the buffer divided by the mode. So it's the ratio in that sense between the buffer and the mode. So across this scale, you see anything greater than one would be significantly better, or higher infiltration in the buffer than in the mode, and any ratio less than one would be higher infiltration in the mode than in the buffer, if that makes sense. So I wanted to highlight on this figure. Let me double check. Yeah, so two asterisks is P less than 0.05, and one asterisk is a P of 0.1. And so we have significantly higher infiltration in the buffer at the Allendale site, Hickman Trib, Masterson Station, Ribbon Park, and Roanoke sites. And then actually significantly lower infiltration in the buffer at the Alumni West site. So I wanted to talk a little bit about that site in particular. So the Alumni West site is the stream restoration site along Alumni Drive, kind of on the Nicholasville Road side. Some of you may be familiar with that. That was a natural channel design, stream restoration project. And the literature suggests that the natural channel design process sometimes can cause reduced compaction, or sorry, reduced infiltration in those riparian areas just because of all the equipment, and actually constructing the site, and placing the material, and tracking it in to reduce erosion. There's some compaction that's associated with that, and potentially some reduced infiltration. So it's interesting, the natural channel design process is really great for restoring streams, maybe not so great for restoring riparian areas, and maybe we'll come back to that. But all these other sites, the Allendale, Hickman Trib, Masterson Station, Ribbon Park, and Roanoke sites all had riparian conservation activities conducted in them. They weren't a more advanced or involved stream restoration project. Fairly simple, planting trees, shrubs, and just no longer mowing right up to the stream edge in those sites, and we're seeing significant improvement in infiltration. Yeah, Ken. I'd like to comment on the Roanoke site. That restoration started in 2006. The Allendale site was 2010. The Kilrush, we just got started. Right, great. Yeah, so, and do you guys wanna comment on the Kilrush site? Yeah, from your sampling perspective. So when we were out there in the field, Kilrush was probably the worst site that we did. So if you can imagine, you have the remnant buffer zone right up to the stream, but then the area that we normally would have sampled to get the mode zone, anytime we tried to dig past 10 centimeters, immediately hit rock. It didn't matter where we went. It was essentially impossible to either get the soil samples or drive the infiltrometer into the ground because it would just be straight rock. So that was likely due to the gravel that was left over from construction projects over the years, and it was not properly restored to an adequate level. So what we had to do for the sampling on that site and why it could be so odd is we had to go further from the riparian zone and up to a hill. So not only were we getting a sample that was further from our desired location, we were also getting a sample that had completely different topography than the riparian zone. So it wasn't a pretty site. We may have bent a couple shovels on that site. Right, so yeah, Kilrush, I thought was kind of an interesting maybe anomaly and really in large part. So not only was it a more recent site, but also we have this kind of remnant construction activity through extensive gravel on the site in the mode area where Cooper and Hunter had to go to sample for the mode. It was actually so far away from the paired buffer sample that it kind of violated the assumptions of our sampling. So I'll put a, not an asterisk on that because it's not significantly different, but we'll like, you know, we'll maybe star that one as an anomaly. All right, I wanna talk about soil strength. This is kind of, this is the compaction estimate using the penetrometer. And this is a really encouraging result. So again, actually very consistently across all these sites, we're seeing significantly lower compaction in the buffer than in the mode, which, you know, again is a, you know, suggests likely improved infiltration and aeration and other aspects of soil health. And from the soil chemistry data, I'm still doing some statistical analysis on this. So I don't have significance levels yet, but we're seeing, this is soil organic matter in the top layer of the zero to 10 centimeter layer that Cooper and Hunter were talking about. And we are seeing a general trend of higher organic matter in the buffer than in the mode across all the sites. And again, I'm gonna be doing some follow-up statistical analyses on there to kind of tease out exactly which of these are considered statistically significant or not. But the general trend is definitely improved organic matter in the buffer, which again, organic matter is critical for soil health. So if we're improving organic matter in these buffer areas with our relatively simple kind of conservation or planting activities, that's a win. The last thing I wanted to mention is copper levels. So, you know, we did a kind of a general panel chemical analyses and I just threw metals in there to see what would come out. And copper popped as a significantly different between buffer and mode. And I thought that was really interesting. So I wanted to share that with you. Again, consistently higher, a trend of consistently higher copper levels in the buffer than in the mode. I reached out to Jason Unrein, who some of you may know is a toxicologist and we were talking about it. And, you know, one of the things that is popping up in the literature as I'm doing some review is that buffer soils are thought to kind of capture in complex or sequester metals, which I think is what we're seeing here. And what Dr. Unrein was saying is that copper complexes readily with organic matter. So we're probably seeing here a function of that organic matter difference that I just showed you. I think to me, this suggests another positive outcome of riparian conservation can be capturing metals and other contaminants in those riparian soils before they get to the stream, which I think is another win. So if I can share kind of some overarching conclusions at this point, we're seeing generally improved infiltration rates in our buffer soils. We're seeing elevated organic matter, elevated concentrations of some metals, which is suggesting that those buffers are kind of capturing and holding onto those metals and not letting them pass through to the stream. And then we're also seeing lower compaction in those buffer soils, at least in the near surface layer. So with that, thanks for our funding and collaborators, and hopefully we have some time for questions. Yeah. So to go back to your compaction. Yes. When I was looking at the two alumni sites. Yeah. I'm just curious, those show that the buffer areas are actually less compacted. Right, right, right. Yes, great question. So it kind of changes the assumption made on the previous sites, where maybe that's why they're not infiltrated. Right. I didn't know if maybe instead of compaction, it had to do with other people or other areas. Yeah, that's a great question. I think, and I do have soil texture data from all these sites, so I'll look at texture as well to try to interpret the infiltration data. My, the thought that I had with the alumni drive sites, the stream restoration sites, is that compaction might not be, like writ large might not be kind of the way to explain it as much as it could be a poor connectivity and like macro poor, you know, presence and so on. I think that might be more of what we're seeing here. And so, you know, again, the compaction assessment that we're doing is a near surface assessment. So it's not gonna be able to help us understand like interflow, like into deeper soils. But one, so one thing that I was thinking is that the activity of, you know, doing that channel reconstruction is gonna probably squash all of your macro pores, at least in the subsoil. And you may, you know, then, you know, I'm not exactly certain I can go talk, I'm gonna maybe talk to Carmen Agredes about what kind of the surface treatment was on those sites. But, you know, so all that to say, we may have, you know, decreased compaction in the surface, but I don't know that that's necessarily coming through into deeper soil levels in a way that will like, very meaningfully affect infiltration at this point. That may be something that continues to develop over time. Those alumni drive sites are a recent construction, so. Oh, cool, yeah, yeah, yeah, great. And they've been, I mean, super successful, for sure. And our water quality data suggests that they're really pumping out, or sucking up nitrates pretty effectively. So I think really successful project, but this riparian area is maybe a different way of questioning, so. Other questions? Yeah, yes. I wanted to follow up with a question kind of like what Ken was pointing out. It seems to me that age, something in place, might affect. So, that it's an effect, or is that surgery? That's, so yeah, that's a next step. Yeah, yeah, thank you. Yes, ma'am. Yeah. Yeah. So, it's a great question, and that's definitely something that I would like to collect some more data on, looking at historical images and so on. You can help with that? Oh, awesome, okay, I'm gonna get your card. I think that's why we did the paired sampling approach, because we felt that that kind of controlled for, you know, the samples that we took were in the buffer, and then immediately adjacent in the mode. So we really worked to get them as close as possible to try to mitigate or minimize the potential for those to have different prior land uses, if that makes sense. Oh, yeah, right, yes, yes, yeah, I mean, and I definitely, that's definitely on my list, long list of things to do to kind of wrap this project up. That's awesome, thank you, yeah. Yes. Yeah, that you're running for in the soil? Do you want to comment on that, Gabriel? Yeah, so that's the research I'm doing right now, is continuing this project along. We don't have a particular species of bacteria or fungi that we are looking for. We're just seeing right now what the sequencing data gives back to us, and then seeing what actually was living in the soil, so then perhaps we can see if some of like the nitrate and the copper levels, if there's any correlation between the bacteria living in the soil, and perhaps them, like Dr. Senn had mentioned, sequestering and filtering out all those other contaminants and elements. So I'll just, I'll mention the microbial analysis is a soil DNA-based analysis, where Cooper extracted DNA from all the soil samples. Cooper and Hunter extracted DNA from all the soil samples, and then did PCR to amplify a target region, that's a fingerprint region for microbes, and then they sent it to sequencing, and then they're now working with like reams of sequence data to try to figure out community diversity, richness, and so on. So it's like a community-wide, microbial community-wide analysis, and then they'll be able to tease out similarity or differences across sites, and between the treatments, buffer and the treatments, yeah. Really exciting, I think, and that's the next semester. That's a spring, kind of capstone-like project for Cooper, so, yeah, we'll keep you posted. Other questions? Yeah. Me too. What time of year did you guys? Yeah. In the heat of the summer. Yeah. So, do you think that the soil saturation or not, probably made it? We thought about that a little bit, do you wanna comment on that some more, or? Uh, he wouldn't. Oh, I was, yeah, I was, yeah. You're the expert. Did you? So, that's why we did that equilibration run, so they did four runs and dropped the first, essentially, on the infiltrometer, and consistently across all of those data, the second through fourth runs were, like, the same. So we're seeing steady, like, action in those second through fourth runs, which we think is good. I'm not gonna say that that's saturated soil, you know, conductivity or anything like that, but it's at least consistent, and consistent across, you know, across the pair. But certainly, I think if we were to redo this, maybe now, you know, we might see some lower infiltration rates that might be a little bit more, like, normal, as a function of just the soil being more saturated. And I think y'all sampled in, like, the driest part of the summer. The summer was just so dry. It felt pretty dry. Yeah, it felt dry. It was drying you out. Other questions? Thanks for that clarification. Yeah, Russ. I'll ask more questions if you want. Following on his question about soil microbes, E. coli, or stormwater drainpipes. That's been, E. coli. So, I think about those. I can also imagine, in any situation, wildlife. My brain, my brain. You're also talking about hurricane track, and how that identifies it. I don't know. But there may be, you can speak about, about what might be future research. Yeah, that's a great question. I, y'all would know better than me, like, that, you know, E. coli is coming from wastewater, right? Wastewater overflows. I would not expect riparian buffers to be super good at stopping a wastewater overflow, or arresting a wastewater overflow. It might attenuate some of that. But, I mean, some of the overflowed drains that I've, or sewers that I've seen are literally on the stream bank. And so, I don't think that they're, that, you know, a buffer, you know, even a healthy buffer is necessarily gonna, like, protect against that. But, Ken, thoughts? I would argue that wildlife is a significant source, and based on the work by Dr. Bryan, that you're right about the direct discharges from no-fung sanitary sewers, you know, but overland runoff, since you're slowing it down in the wildernoise, there's volume, and therefore flow. Yeah, and maybe, you know, maybe pet waste would be a significant contributor of E. coli in that kind of scenario. And certainly, the buffer, by improving infiltration and capture would, I think, attenuate some of that. But, yeah, in our particular analysis, we're not trying to tease apart different sources of E. coli but that's definitely, like, an area of abundant, you know, research where we, you know, we definitely could work to implement something like that and do some source tracking in some of those sites. Yeah, so I could imagine a future project where we looked at, you know, tried to do source tracking on E. coli across different sites to evaluate whether the buffer might reduce some of the, you know, human E. coli compared to the others, yeah. Great question. Other questions? Thank you. Thank you. All right, next we're gonna hear about a tree equity score by American Forests but contrary to your agenda, we're gonna hear from Heather Wilson, which I'm excited about. We've heard from Dimitri recently so we're gonna let Heather take the stage now, Heather. How is everybody today? I'm glad it's warmer out and raining. So yeah, so your agenda says Dimitri's presenting on American Forests. I'm Heather Wilson, I'm with Urban Forestry for the city. I think I presented to you all last year around this time about how we could use existing water quality detention basins to reforest our city in appropriate measures. So today I'm going to talk about American Forests and their tree equity score, which is what your agenda says, but I'm also really gonna probably focus a little more on Planet Geo and tree platter. And the reason for that is that tree platter is something that we host here within the city. It was a program and a suite of tools that we did have budget for and had provided to us and it's something that's accessible by the city and by residents and by everybody to help us internalize how we manage our forests moving forward. Okay. So like I mentioned, the goal is really, this is really be like an introduction to the tools that we have available. I am gonna talk about American Forests. They are a nonprofit. I'll go into them a little bit in a second and their tool. And then again, I'm really gonna focus more on what we have available. They dovetail, they have very similar properties. You can just do a little bit more with what we have and because it is a whole suite of software that we did buy from a company that is designed to really focus on this suite of tools and helping cities move forward for their forests. So just real briefly, American Forests is one of the oldest nonprofits that's around that is focused on forests. They began in 1875, I think if I have the date right. And Lindsay, is there a way for me to get to the links? Hopefully. Hopefully. Okay, good. And so I'll just click on them real quick so you can see what they do, but they've been around since 1875. Their goal is to help forests be preserved, conserved, reforested and grown. Historically, historically their focus has been our naturalized forest areas. Over the past 10, probably 15 years, they've done a big focus on urban forests because across the board, across the United States, across the world, there's been a bigger focus on urban forests and all those benefits that trees provide to us. Yes, we get them from the forest, but in urban areas, they have a different kind of impact on the way that we use our world. So this is just their website. You can kind of work through here if you're ever interested and see all the things that they do. They do lobby in D.C. They do work with other nonprofits. They do a lot of initiatives to help other smaller communities and smaller groups put trees out into their urban areas and their forests. They have a lot of partnerships and they have lots of resources if you're ever interested in learning more about how you can put trees into your city. So let's just really quick about them. Lots of buttons. And then, so just to start off with, what a tree equity score is. So a tree equity score is a way to assess our urban areas to find out if our forests are distributed throughout cities in an equitable manner. Historically, what tends to happen is as cities develop and evolve, people with higher incomes, higher levels of education, more monetary accessibility, wind up with areas that are more forested. And in response to that, they wind up with all the better benefits that trees provide. They have higher rates of canopy. They have lower urban heat island effects. They have less runoff problems. And so historically, a lot of those districts that didn't receive canopy as cities were growing tend to be lower income, tend to have more impervious surfaces and tend to have less tree canopy. And so a tree equity score is taking cities and looking at where those forests are throughout the city and trying to figure out how it is that we can get trees into the areas that need it the most. And again, I've got a click to go through this tree equity score a little bit. These are the factors that go into the tree equity score when that score is given to your city. And then we can look as we go through this. Sorry, you guys, there's too many buttons. How this works in each city. So each city, you can pull up, they've done, I don't know, most cities throughout the United States now, you can pull up Lexington, obviously here. Our composite score is an 85, which is pretty decent as far as tree equity is concerned. Green areas have higher tree canopy. Oranger areas have lower tree canopy. And then they also have a whole range of layers and filters that we'll go into in a second that then delves into each of those blocks and tells you a little bit more about the socioeconomic rates in those areas to help focus where a tree canopy needs to go and where it already is. And again, this is Lexington. What I did here, I'll go into the actual way to do this here in a second. But what I did here is just ran through some of these filters. You can adjust them on a rate of zero to 100 depending on what parameters you're looking to try to delve into. And I did it just to pull out one of our lowest tree equity neighborhood areas here in Lexington is over here. And it's got a score of 52, which is pretty low, especially if you think of the range as 100, which is like perfect tree equity. Everyone in that urban area would have equal access to all the benefits a tree provides. And then I just adjusted some of these indices to show like what our tree canopy cover is to pull out those neighborhoods that have lower tree canopy coverage up to only 15%. Our goal in Lexington, and I'll talk a little bit more about that with the tree plotter is 30%. And so at 15, that's only half of what we're hoping our urban area will have. So we're gonna look at that right here. You can filter through these. Let me see which one it is that gives you your layers. These are neighborhood information. And I cannot remember exactly where it is how they pulled their neighborhood scores. Is it blocks or tracks for forest tree equity? Do you remember? I'll go a little bit more into ours because we can do it in both blocks and tracks. And so that's kind of one of those differences between what we can do with this and what we can do with ours. We can delve in a little bit deeper, but it is census data. There is also a number of, they pull it from Environmental Insights Explorers, and then they pull Tree Canopy Priority Index from Community Survey 2017 to 2021. So you can click on these little question mark box to find out exactly where their data comes from. But so this is a really quick and easy tool for the general public. You can get into a lot of detail here. You can look specifically if you're looking for what our tree equity score is in those individual census blocks or across the whole Lexington area. You can try to target for areas of tree canopy. And so if we were to look at areas that have up to a tree canopy coverage of, let's say, 30%, which is what our goal is, you can see how Lexington, we're doing pretty good across the board, but there's definitely areas that need a lot of help with getting to that space. You can also look at what your people in poverty line is. And so if you have a neighborhood you're looking up to, let's see if people have up to 13% poverty and they only have what their tree canopy coverage looks like, you can see that even though we have a tree equity score here of 79, we have people that are in poverty up to 13% poverty rates. And our tree canopy coverage is actually less than 30%. You can see over here that we're getting into the lower scores there. You can look at unemployment rates, children and seniors. And really, so you can kind of manipulate this tool to pull out those parameters that you're looking for to help you figure out what neighborhoods need the most canopy coverage and need the most help. A way that this is useful for people in the community is anyone, again, this is free tools to access, they can go and they can pull up their neighborhood data and they can say, I wanna put trees in my neighborhood because I can see on my score here, we have a lower tree equity, we have lower tree canopy, and I'm really trying to increase that canopy for all the environmental benefits that trees provide us. There's a lot more that you can go into with American Forests. Again, I figured it would be better to talk about what we actually have because that's a tool that we have put time, energy, and effort into, and it can go a lot deeper into our specific areas. And so this is accessible for the public. It stemmed out of our urban tree canopy assessment, change in our tree canopy assessment, and it's a tool that we have put a lot of time and energy and effort into, and it can go a lot deeper into our specific areas. Change analysis that we conducted in 2021, got the results in 2022. It lives on our LFUCG website. You can see here it's in our Lexington Tree Canopy tile, which is on our website. You also, I'll go into the tree plotter here in a second, which is basically a lot like the tree equity tool, but along with that, we also got a tree canopy assessment. Is anyone in here not familiar with the tree canopy assessment? Does anyone know that we did not have this tool available? That's good to know. If you all haven't gone into it, there's a lot of really great information in there about Lexington, about where our tree canopy is, about those parameters that were looked at as we did this analysis and how we can utilize this tool. So we did work with a company called Planet Geo. They are focused on consulting and providing data to communities throughout the United States. I think they're actually worldwide now. They have a huge suite of tools. Right now we have the tree canopy plotter. There's also an inventory tool that is accessible for us when we get to that point. So we can really understand where our tree canopy is, what it is that we have, and what it's providing to us exactly. And so they also do a big tree community, iTree collective where lots of cities and people can come together and talk about their canopy goals, how they're reaching them and goals to get to where we want each of our cities to be. This is what our tree canopy plotter data set looks like. This is what you'll get to if you go through our website, through that little urban forestry tile at the bottom. It talks about our tree canopy. You can get to this tool right here. There's three different ways that you can look at this data. It is all accessible to the public. The difference for us internally is that we have access to make plans, make changes into the data set that will show our canopy growth over the years. This data that was provided to us was from the 2020 NAIP flyovers. We'll be updated through our subscription for the updated 2022 analysis when that comes, or 2023, I'm sorry, when it is available. And so we'll have the updated results of our canopy once it becomes available again. I'm gonna go a little bit as we go through here into each of these plans. So you can look a little bit about the difference of how they function, what the differences are in them, and how you can use them to understand where our canopy is and to further any canopy goals you guys might have as you're looking at how trees infiltrate with water and how we cool our urban service areas and how we make sure that trees are getting into the parts of Lexington that really need them. So this first one is the tree canopy view. You can look at it a number of different ways. When I go into that online version, I'll go a little bit through those. But what I pulled out here was just a view of one of our variables that we can look at, which is the impervious surfaces under tree canopy. And so where that is darker, that is just telling us that we have more impervious surface covered by tree canopy. So where it's a lighter purple, that just means that there's a lot of exposed impervious surfaces. That is not having tree canopy infiltrate or stop that water before it's hitting those impervious surfaces and infiltrating into our ground. So I thought that was a neat one to look at. I think I said that backward. Oh no, I didn't. So it's neat to see in our internal sections of Lexington where we have maybe not a huge tree canopy coverage. We have larger trees and we also have a lot more impervious surfaces. And so a lot of those sidewalks and our roads are actually under canopy, which is great because it's capturing water before it's hitting that impervious surfaces, having it infiltrate down through those canopies and down the trunks and the stems of the trees before it actually hits the ground and into our stormwater. Again, this is all available to whoever wants to manage it. You go into our tree canopy plotter here and you launch the view tool. There's also a how-to. It's a really quick little snippet. It doesn't give you a whole lot of information, but once you're in your launch tool, there is a support button that you can go through and look at different ways to look at the city. We are able to pull data by all of these different attributes, whether we want to look at zoning, watersheds, property ownership, council districts. It's a really great tool when we are talking about council districts and working with council members to show what their canopy is in their districts, especially when they talk with their citizens and people are really interested in getting cooler areas in their neighborhoods or protecting their water streams or just adding street trees to make their streets have not only an identity but also to cool those areas. So we can just look at census block groups, which is a pretty busy block. You can also go into here to pull in different layers. I usually like to pull in the Google Hybrid. You'll get our streets as well as our urban canopy and then I'll zoom in because it gets really busy. If it gets too busy for you, let me know and I can go back to just the colored blocks. But depending on what you're interested in looking at, you can switch this to focus on, let's say tree canopy cover percentage. And I'll adjust that toggle bar a little bit over there. Right now we're showing a percentage of possible tree planting area. You can also look at places that are not suitable. So one of the things we did ask them, when we were looking at this data, we don't want you putting trees where we just can't put them. We can't put them in the middle of Red Mile Road. We can't put them in the middle of a park that has a ball field in it. And so it was really important to understand where we actually could put trees and where trees are just off limits. And so you can pull that in. If you're looking for areas that are unsuitable for planting you get a completely different map here. So we'll just go back to possible percentage. And then you can look at urban tree canopy currently. You can also look at the change between 2012 and 2022. And you can see, we did lose some canopy in certain areas. All of that's probably due to development. And we did grow in a lot of areas. And sometimes that is not only due to new plantings, but a lot of that has to do with canopy growth. And so between 2012 to 2022, that's 10 years. That's 10 years of canopy growth. And so a lot of those areas that we did not capture in 2012 when we did our first analysis, we are now capturing because they're actually of a size that aerial imagery will capture. And once we get the 2023 data, I feel like our canopy coverage will increase again. We're currently sitting around 23%. Our general goal is 30%. There are some caveats to that. But some of those newer neighborhoods, those trees maybe were five years old when this data was run, probably weren't captured in this last flyover. And so the next one that we'll capture, and it will show canopy growth. However, we're also going to have the new soccer complex and a lot of other development that's happened. And so we are going to have obvious lost canopy in big swaths of trees where we had them. You know, it's great. I love planting trees. I love growing a canopy. And it's really great. Not all cities show that they grow canopy when these assessments are done. And so part of that for us in Lexington, I believe is that as we're growing and as we're planting trees, we were just agriculture, not just, but we're planting trees in spaces that were farm field. And so while our canopy is growing, we're losing pervious surfaces. I mean, it's great to have canopy coverage, but we also have to keep in mind that we're coming from a state of not canopy. And so growing is welcome and good, but we also have to just remember that we're losing things in that same process as we're developing. Just something, you know, that kind of, I try to keep it in the back of my mind. But so if you're interested in a specific area, it tends to be for us, the North end of town is our lowest tree canopy. You can click on an area and you can zoom right to that area and it can show you, you know, streets and where everything is within there. And it gives you a rundown of this census block if you're looking specifically at this area. And it shows you, you know, exactly where in there you do have your tree canopy. We're at 11% here, which is pretty low for tree canopy coverage, especially in areas that are highly industrial, you know, because you have a lot of impervious surface. You have a lot of people that are in those areas. You have a lot of air pollution from the vehicles and the trucks that work through those areas and all that storm water that's flowing off into our watersheds. So this is our view piece of this. And it's really great to see where we are today with canopy. Sorry, this thing is getting finicky. And so with our view, which again is really great for where we are today and looking at a lot of different parameters, we then also have our plan. And so this is a tool to help us plan how we grow the city with all these other parameters in place and where our trees can be placed. So in our plan tool, it's very colorful and we'll scroll in a little bit. And you can look at all these different areas of Lexington and work within all of these different parameters, depending on if you're trying to target areas of low income, if you're trying to target areas of low canopy and low income, or where there's lots of children's or where there's human health. Equity across the board is a big, a hot conversation and trees and equity as related to human health, as related to accessibility to nature are really important factors. And so these maps really help us look at how we can focus on this and grow responsibly and equitably in Lexington. Sometimes these maps get really slow. And so if we wanted to look at areas that had, areas with existing tree canopy cover that is low. And that have a nature score, which nature score is an interesting composite. It really has to do with access to nature, all of those other socioeconomic factors that are built into this score. And it rates areas on how well they're doing and providing the benefits of nature to its residents. So if you wanted to look at areas that have low tree canopy coverage, they would potentially have low nature score unless they just also have access to open green space, have a high potential places for urban tree canopy growth. And then if you're looking for maybe areas specifically that are with vulnerable populations, you can toggle those areas out. Your high priority areas are in red. Again, they tend to be on our north end of town. There's a lot of industry over there. There's a lot of urban growth that's happened over there. And not so much out here on the south side. Though there are pockets, of course. But if we just were to rank, let's see, I think this was our rank one out of all of our counties, out of all of our census block groups, this is our top rank group for the highest priority for focus on planting. And we can zoom into that area again. It's right here next to the Meadowthorpe area, which is really, really green, which is really exciting. But again, just a couple blocks over, you're into an area that is much lower in canopy coverage. You can see here that they have, their percentage of area not covered is 83%. So that's a really high percent of not having tree canopy coverage, not getting the benefits the trees provide as far as clean air, clean water, cooling effects, calming traffics, places for people to be outside and be in community. You have a pretty decent amount of space that's actually plantable in there. And so if we planted 34% of that property, then we're getting close to our 30% tree canopy coverage in that space. You can look at your nature score, which here is a 47. Again, you can look at median household income, populations below the 200% poverty line, and populations that are of need, children and the elderly, people that can't necessarily get out and do this work together. And so if you're trying to, depending on what your parameters are, what your focus is, you can really work with this tool to really find your locations where you wanna put in your trees, where it makes the most sense. And so it's a really great tool with working in communities, working with nonprofits, working with organizations that really wanna do some projects and really have an impact on their city. Again, here you can filter it by our council districts, our census blocks, our census groups. Again, council districts is always really kind of eye-opening to look at, because you can see a lot of this lack of tree canopy is really focused in specific areas. And then just lastly, I'll go back and we'll do, the next slide just takes us back here, but it has to do with our grow tool. And so this piece is not really accessible for the community to make impacts on. We can do grow plans and save them as goals and as future projects within our system. And we can present on those and track that progress. Community can do that as well. It doesn't actually become live in our system because that would change the way the whole community looked for everyone, even though it may not be a plan that we are pushing forward. And so the grow tool is really neat because what we can do in here is again, look at Lexington, plan for how we want our canopy to grow. We can look at census block. We can also look at watersheds. And so it becomes, you know, obviously much bigger chunks. Go pull up. Maybe it won't. We can go to property ownership, which is a neat one as well. So property ownership gets very busy, but what I find really interesting about this is that you can pull out all the different ownerships throughout Lexington, whether it's LFUCG owned, whether it's state owned, whether it's federal. We have the school system in there. We have UK and I think Transy is their own separate entities. We have private property also. So you can see, you know, in general, let's see, UK is here in the middle. And so overall their tree canopy coverage is pretty low, it's 14%. They have lots of other reasons that they have open spaces. You know, we all use our land in lots of different ways. And so even though they might have a large percent of plantable space, whether or not that coincides with the way they want to use their land, you know, that's definitely a topic for conversation. But there's also the argument to make of how we do get to those next steps of creating that larger canopy where it is appropriate. And so UK is a neat one to look at. You know, you can click on it, it highlights where those areas are. It shows you the existing canopy coverage, your impervious surface, your bare soil, the change in that timeframe between our canopy analyses. And then you can look to start to try to make changes to the target for your growth. And let's say we just wanted to increase our canopy by 10% across the city. You can look at that. We can say our average crown diameter is 30 feet, you know, and that varies. We'll have some that are 50 to 60. Those are iconic baroques and blue ash and chinkabin. But in general, we'll have a lot of street trees that'll have red maple and the other trees that are all growing in close proximity. And so their average tree canopy will never be 30 feet individually. And so, and then you have to account for some mortality rate. I'd probably have to do a little bit more research to see what is actually representable of cities. But we'll just put it up to, let's say 8%, which I think is, you know, appropriate. And then as you apply it, it will model this canopy growth for you. And so if we wanted to look at, this is for our overall, if we were to increase our tree canopy overall all of Lexington by 10%, it means we would have to plant 361,000 plus trees, which is a lot of trees. But I do believe that if we do that, you know, we have the space for it. It just takes a whole lot of time and a whole lot of money and a whole lot of action to do that. You know, and if we wanted to look, let's see, we could look at, Bayette County Public Schools as, as what it would be like for them to do that kind of a, oh, I lost it. No, so their overall canopy is 11%. So they have a lot of room for growth. They have a lot of open space. They have a lot of development happening. And I know that they have a lot of initiatives actually being pushed forward to, you know, to make sure that they have a lot of space and actually being pushed forward to, to ultimately plant a lot of this open space. But you can see like, if you were to model this and provide this with them, it tells them that they have to, well, there it is. Okay, yeah. So trees needed, 6,000 trees. They have a lot of property. And in all honesty, if anyone's visited us for reforested bluegrass, which I'm sure most of you have, we plant between five to 8,000 tree seedlings every reforested bluegrass. And like five to six acres. They have, they have a lot. They have 43% of their acreage that's possible for planting. And if they only need to get to 6,000 tree seedlings, that's really doable in just a year, if they really wanted to. And being facetious, it's not really, because they're not going to go into tree seedlings like we do for reforest. But just to talk about size and give a ratio and an idea in your mind of what that space can look like, it is doable. And so the growth tool is probably my favorite tool to play with. We haven't gotten to the point yet where we're putting any of these plans into the motion. We've had this tool for approximately a year now. And so we're now to this point, to being able to start to look at that and make purposeful plans for moving forward. So my presentation today was really just to provide you with the knowledge that there's tools out there to help grow our urban canopy. There's tools out there to help look at it in a lot of different parameters, from tree equity, from human health benefits, from urban canopy growth. And so it's really neat. It's really accessible. There's another suite of tools called the iTree, which a lot of their data is what is built into the tools that I just showed you. But there's all kinds of information out there. It's whether or not you have the time to delve into it, to make sense of it. But this is a great tool that we have available to us and available to the public. And I encourage you guys to use it. Any questions? Yes, Ken. I have a question in terms of, you talked about public property and institutional property. But what about what kind of programs support we have for residential planning, identifying areas, providing support for that, and subsidies for private? That's a great question. Because what I didn't touch on is, in all honesty, Lexington, I think, is we're at 36% canopy on publicly owned properties. And I think it was 87% of plantable spaces actually on private. And so as public, we can't support that too directly. We do have a couple programs internally called Reforest at Home, where we do provide tree seedlings to the public. And then we also have an initiative called Lex Grow Trees that will be coming out that stems from the $1.5 million that council gave us a couple years ago that will help fund projects on private property through nonprofit. It's a collaboration of a lot of activity there. And so there will be funding for that. There's also nonprofits locally. Wolf Run Watershed is a great one for working. Well, you work on public property and property as well. But the question is, in terms of siting, where can we target to get that canopy in terms of looking at someone's yard and saying, OK, here's the thing. That tree plotter, if I can get back to it. You can go, again, oh, wrong way. Sorry. I can't hear you. But so when you're in here, you can change these to, or you can zoom in as deep as a private property and look for those spaces that have plentiful space. And then as far as targeting actually one private property, I think this would be a great tool to start with. You can also use that tree equity score that's with American Forest. That will help you target your neighborhood. But really, a lot of that will have to just be on the ground assessment. And so groups like Trees Lexington, or maybe even Seedleaf, or Wolf Run, there are nonprofits that are out there. I mean, and even as a city representative, we can go and talk with residents about what's appropriate on their property. We just can't help supply them with the trees or the process of the actual planting. But we can go and we can work with individual homeowners or property owners to locate appropriate places and to try to encourage them. There's also the Urban Forest Initiative. There's a lot of resources out there for the community to access to get help with that. I believe Bluegrass Greensource would probably be a great resource as well. And what's probably helpful, and I'll just go back to our tree head, or our LexGro trees. Ultimately, what we'll have on our site is a list of what those resources are, what community members can go to to find help, to find direction and guidance in those activities. Yeah, Russ. I know what I'm going to be doing this winter. Yay. I'm going to be doing a whole day of collecting data. It's really exciting. Yeah. This is a good tool. It's pretty fascinating, just the different ways that, as a tree advocate, it's nice to see the production data for my perspective, my bias. Well, you can go in rabbit holes. Yeah. But it's connecting a lot of dots as far as not just impervious area, but health, wellness, social equity, and different. I can see how this helps connect the dots with trees and different issues that we've got. And you've mentioned, you've had this for a year. And so kind of getting through it, getting the data, is, can you or anybody else here speak about how other divisions in LQCG are using this? So something that comes to mind is division planning, in terms of looking at, OK, now we've got this really cool tool, and it's going to help us dive to meeting our goals and objectives, and particularly addressing historical problems that haven't been addressed. But can anybody speak to that, as far as how that might be applied? I can speak briefly. Is someone else from planning here? Well, Tracy's here. Yeah, so I know that I worked with Valerie. Well, we worked with Valerie a little bit to include this tool in their planning. But Tracy can certainly speak more thoroughly. I'm the only one using the button. But I'm Tracy Wade with the Division of Planning. I'm on the tree board, too. But this is, obviously, a lot of data. But it is useful in terms of, we asked that the contractor also include zoning as a layer when they incorporated this. So we were able to look and see what zones of land that has been developed has the most deficiencies. And we have, as Heather mentioned, worked on a text amendment for open space that requires, now, trees to be planted in our industrial areas, which some of our developers are not too keen on. But they can group the trees. So they don't have to be, if you need a large vehicle storage yard, obviously, they don't want any trees in there. So they can group them on the edge. But it, at least, gets us closer to our canopy goals. And then, obviously, our urban forester works with the developers on a monthly basis to review the information that they submit for planning purposes. And I know it was used as part of the development with the comp plan as they were working through that. Another question in terms of the property ownership. Is there anything that could distinguish between LFUCG parks or city-owned green spaces? We did not do that. No, it's just LFUCG. But within those plantable spaces, you know what's appropriate and what's not. We have time for one more question. What happens if the things that are available are now indigenous to trees? Or are there any other trees that are native to trees? They are almost 100% native. Well, they're 100% native to Kentucky. Almost 100% native to the inner bluegrass. Not quite. I do add in things like serviceberry and things that are not native here. But they are all Kentucky native. They generally come from the Division of Forestry. We also have, we work with onetree.org through Green Forest's work to supply seedlings. So we do only work with natives. And then when we give them out to the reforested home, I do only give trees that are appropriate for our urban area. Yeah, and urban is not native by any means. And so sometimes people ask, why don't we add in trees that aren't native here? As climates change and water regimes change, I think it's just really important to focus as much as possible on our natives. Thank you. We're excited to go playing on your sites. Next up is Lindsay. She really doesn't need an introduction. She's going to give us a year-end review for the MS4 program. So Lindsay. Thank you. All right. Someone set this nice and low for me. Thank you. Sorry for all you tall people presenting. All right. Good morning, everybody. I am hoping to give this presentation. This is the presentation I gave to Urban County Council, the Environmental Quality and Public Works Committee. And I thought, after I was done presenting that and we were trying to come up with presentations for today, I thought it would be really great. I haven't actually got to present in front of this group since I've been in this role. And so it'd be a great opportunity to share some of the basic ground roots aspects of the stormwater program. Some of this may be on repeat for you all, and you know it like the back of your hand, and others in here may not. So trying to get us all on the same level playing field when it comes to some of the terms we use with this stormwater committee and just give you an update. So with that, we are going to go through some definitions, which some of you, again, you're going to know it. But I'd love to just get us all on that same even keel and touch on some of those things that maybe we've just assumed everybody in this group knows. So we're going to go through some definitions and why it matters, which again, most of you are going to know. We're going to do a year in review. The 2022 is not a mistake. This presentation was done in October, and we didn't have all of our data from 2023. And so we kind of give that year in review a year off. So it being December, we probably could have updated most of those numbers, but you can get those next year. So 2022. And then we're going to get into some watershed planning and kind of future goals and aspirations that we have and how we're moving this program forward. And then on the screen, you'll see the watershed map for Lexington-Fayette County. I'm assuming everybody in here knows that map. But we've got nine watersheds within our county, seven of which fall within our urban service area. And one of the key things I like to point out is just that our watersheds flow out of town. Downtown kind of sits right there in the middle. So anyway, let's just start with some definitions. Again, MS4, we say that a lot. We throw it out a lot in this community. But MS4 stands for Municipal Separate Storm Sewer System. That means that our storm sewers are separate from our sanitary sewers. Our sanitary sewers flow to wastewater treatment plants, whereas our storm sewers flow straight to our creeks and streams. In Lexington, we have an MS4 permit, which is administered by the Kentucky Division of Water. That permit authorizes us to discharge stormwater from our separate system into those creeks and streams, those waters of the Commonwealth, with a focus on water quality. So Lexington and Louisville are both phase one MS4 communities in the state of Kentucky. That's their large MS4s. And then the rest of the state of Kentucky are actually small MS4s or phase twos, any community with a population of 10,000 or more. So that's kind of how the MS4 program is laid out. All right, we've got MS4 permits usually last about five years. I think we're going on year eight or nine of our current permit. Our current permit expired on May 31st, 2020. And so we're actually working on an administratively continued permit at the moment. And we're hopeful of a new permit. I was gonna say 2024, but maybe. Maybe 2025, but 2024 is a hopeful estimate. And within our permit, so we have lots of presentations in this group. We're talking about stormwater. We're talking about trees, talking about sanitary sewers, but we don't always talk about the program itself. And I think maybe in 2019, 2020, we had work groups where everybody separated out and talked about the different components of our permit, but it's been a while. So I just wanted to kind of give a refresher as we move into a phase where we're gonna be getting a new permit. It's good for everybody to kind of understand these different components of our permit and how they play into the program. And what we're gonna ask of this group when it comes to reviewing that draft permit, once we've had a chance to do that internally and maybe have some of those discussions. So getting us all up to that level where we understand the different components of the MS-4 program. And so within the permit, compliance revolves around meeting the objectives of 10 program elements, which we'll see on two slides from now. And all of those are defined within our stormwater quality management program. And so that's a document that we have that we run our program by. So in Lexington, we're continually optimizing how we manage stormwater when it relates to quality and quantity and reviewing policies, procedures for effectiveness and implementing changes as necessary. There's always something that can be improved or changed as we move forward in time. And so why does that matter? I can ask anyone in this group and you're gonna have an answer to that because I'm preaching to the choir here. So watershed and we've got our nine watersheds and we've got a watershed. It's an area of land that drains to a common body of water. Anything on the ground ends up in the water. These are things that you all have heard a million times. And so the purpose of our MS4 program is to reduce the quantity of pollutants that stormwater picks up and carries into our waterways through our MS4. And the hope of that is to maintain or even improve the quality of water in our streams. Increases in these pollutants or increases even in runoff itself can harm fish and wildlife. It can kill our native vegetation, foul drinking water sources for people downstream of us. Remember we're on a hill and it also can cause recreational areas to be unsafe. So all things that we care about, even infrastructure getting damaged from stream bank erosion and people's properties disappearing, et cetera. I have a lot to get through so that's a very brief explanation of why it matters. It obviously matters a whole lot more even beyond that. So I promised you a slide that shows the 10 program elements. This is them on a wheel. So our programs broken up into 10 programs. And I think those all fall under about three main categories being the first category being public engagement and public education, public involvement. This guy right here is where this group falls in. So the Stormwater Stakeholder Advisory Committee falls under our public involvement. It's a requirement from our permit but it's become sort of a tradition. This group gets together. We're like-minded, we differ in opinion sometimes and it's just this place where we can come together and make good decisions for the future of Lexington and the future of stormwater in Lexington. The second category would be pollution prevention. Five of our program elements fall under that and we'll get into those a little bit in the future slides. And then monitoring and reporting, about three of our program elements fall under that. Each element has a series of objectives and milestones that we need to meet to remain in compliance with our permit. In all we have about 186 measurable goals as a part of this program. So we're doing a lot and it's touching a lot of divisions and departments within the city of Lexington all to remain in compliance with this permit but also with the goal of improving water. I would like to add that back in August we underwent an inspection from the state and for six out of the 10 of these elements and there were no identified deficiencies or violations and so that felt like great news. It's really a sign of the efforts across many divisions within the Department of Environmental Quality and Public Works. And so that was a really great opportunity to work with the state and kind of see what we're doing and how we can progress the program into the future. And then to just touch on funding, the MS4 program is funded through the water quality management fee and about 7.7 million was spent in 2022 on this program and you can kind of see the breakdown in this chart. So same colors, same wheel, but broken down by funding as opposed to equal pieces of pie. And just one interesting thing to note is that pollution prevention elements, so the illicit discharge detection and elimination, construction sites, post-construction, so we started here, we're going around, pollution prevention with municipal operations and industrial facilities, all of which fall under that pollution prevention chunk, that makes up for over 80% of the funding when we're talking about like how we're using the money. And so preventing pollution is a big chunk of that. All right, I'm going to transition into year in review. Again, this is 2022, but a lot of this overlaps into how we operate annually. So it applies across the board and this is you all. So our program elements, this is one of our program elements, the public involvement and this stormwater stakeholder advisory committee is one of those. And it's a main tool for engaging the public. It's a public meeting. You know, we have committee seats, you can see those here. Many of you sitting here fall under one of those seats, but we also love to have people from other businesses, watershed groups, neighborhoods, even any, you know, we've got people from UK that come and students, so it's definitely still a public meeting, but we do have that core group that's able to help us kind of bounce off ideas and discuss new permits, stormwater manual updates, et cetera. And all right, this is the big chunk that I was excited to show you all. We did this in 2021 and again in 2022 and our inspections went up, but I think the breadth of the MS4 program is really apparent through the number of inspections that we complete on an annual basis. You can see here the number of inspections in 2022 across five, those five program elements reaches over 13,000. That's huge. That's the, I think these inspections are the key to our program implementation and compliance. It really takes a team. And I'd say that most of these inspections are proactive. And so when we're looking at improving water quality, you know, you've got your construction sites, making sure that those operations and people are following, you know, our erosion sediment control practices that we require within the city. You've got our critical culvert inspections, going out and checking those critical places within the city. You've got all of our post-construction inspections. Those are all proactive. They happen on a routine basis, whether it's once a year, twice a year, quarterly, all the way down to our industrial inspections, again, proactive. And you know, with the exception of some reactive, which would be our illicit discharge and our spill investigation. So those are gonna be reactive. But I really like this slide. There's so many people, so many hands involved in getting this work completed. And it's really just a testament to how this program has grown, standing on the shoulders of those that have gone before us. So, all right. So we've talked about what we're doing, but what's the state of water quality? This is just a snapshot. You know, there's a lot of water quality data, but within this slide, I'm just talking about the MS4 monitoring that we do at our seven sites along the edge of the urban service boundary. So you hear Mack every June and the gang from Third Rock present on our watershed focused monitoring results. That's kind of the deep dive that we do into a watershed a year that we've done for seven years. You'll get the Wolf Run presentation in June. This is the annual quarterly wet and dry weather sampling that we do at the outskirts of town. It really reflects our urban presence. And so the seven sites are red dots on this map. It's probably harder for you to see, so I'm kind of trying to point them all out, but we've got one in each of our urban watersheds. That being Cane Run, East Hickman, North Elkhorn, South Elkhorn, Town Branch, West Hickman, and Wolf Run. And so you'll see those sites up on, this is your columns. And then on this side of the table, you're gonna see the parameters. And so this is an overall summary. There's probably like 50 tables in the annual monitoring plan. This is a very broad overview. If you want more information, you can go see when we post these annual reports with our, these monitoring reports with our annual report each year. But this is just, again, showing a snapshot. I think some top takeaways that we're still seeing E. coli, bacteria, nutrients, as well as increases in TSS, which is interesting, and I may touch on in a little bit. We're seeing stream impacts. So if you, this is, I've highlighted E. coli just as an example, but you can see the percentages in this table are the, I wanna make sure I get this right, because I always say it wrong. It's the percent that they met the regulatory and non-regulatory reference points for those parameters. And so you'll see cane run for the 56 samples that were taken met the regulatory standard 33% of the time. So that's kind of how you read this table. Sure, we'll have lots of questions, but again, this information is available on our website as we put out our annual report each year. And then you have town branch. So you can look this way, how are we doing based on parameters, based on our urban presence? And then you can also look down, what are each of our watersheds reflecting within these? The biggest one would be town branch. It's the most impacted by our urban presence. Town branch had the most exceedances within all of the watersheds, about 48 out of the 56 samples and then followed by cane run and West Hickman, and then East Hickman's on the other side, which had the least. I think another important fact. So down here at the bottom of this slide, you're gonna see macro invertebrate sampling. So now we're talking about the biology in our streams, macros, I didn't include fish, but we also do that in 2022. And I would say that we are seeing habitat and stream bank erosion impacts from our urban stormwater. I would, I think that that can be taken out or something that we can distill from the information that we're seeing from our macros and some of the areas and how they're decreasing. We're going from fair to poor or even very poor in some instances. So I think where we may be seeing water quality improvement, we're also seeing some degradation when it comes to habitat. So again, a lot we could talk with that slide, but I just wanna keep moving. And then I did touch on this, but just with respect to year in review, our Watershed Focus Monitoring Program, again, that deep dive into our watersheds, we started that in development in early year, even before 2015 and earlier, but the programs, the screening year for Cane Run started in 2016, and we're just now finishing with Wolf Run. But in 2022, we actually reported out for Town Branch. We started monitoring for North Elkhorn, and then we started the phase one screening for Wolf Run. And then we've gone through that whole process in 2023, and now we've already had our last sampling event for Wolf Run, and Third Rock is feverishly compiling those results and getting the water quality monitoring tech memo and report ready to go for you all to hear about in June. I think that now that we're wrapping up this final watershed, there's gonna be, there's a lot of questions about what's next, and those discussions are happening, and this group's going to definitely get involved as we continue on in that, we have this program, what does it look like? But we've also have a lot of data. And so you've got all this data from all seven watersheds, and I think it's going to take some time to figure out how we move that data from just data to action. And there's a lot of balls turning, but also how do we maintain the integrity and the continuity of making sure that we're continuing to monitor our stream sites and beyond. I think that moving that ball forward is going to take a lot of those things I just said, but we also need to review the data, look at hotspots, look at priority areas, look at pollutants of concern so that we can make those decisions. Having this also would allow us to, having monitoring and reviewing that program is gonna allow us to check on the success of the MS4 program, it can help us fine tune our BMP implementation and future programming, and then even direct capital, for example, with our incentive grant program. So I do want to kind of step back, we're kind of moving out of that year, 2022 year in review, and moving into this future discussion of what is the water quality, what does the MS4 program look like as we continue to move forward post-consent decree. And I think that as we start honing this watershed perspective and vision, we have to start looking at things a little bit differently. And so as we look at this watershed approach, we've got three approved watershed plans within the Lexington Fayette County area. That'd be Cane Run, West Hickman, and Wolf Run. And again, you all heard about West Hickman and its approval back in September, very exciting. And then in addition to that, we also got funding to update the Wolf Run plan, and that's about a 10-year span. So approved in 2013, now this year, next year-ish, you're working on that update, which is very exciting. But still no watershed plans in East Hickman, North Elkhorn, South Elkhorn, or Town Branch. And so I think as part of a larger picture, watershed planning opens the door to federal funding opportunities, which is huge. When we're talking about B implementation, that takes money. So being able to apply for funding for some of these efforts, it's huge as we're trying to focus capital investment. So what's next? We've touched on what's in the water, but I think we also need to look at the streams themselves. And so looking at another piece of that puzzle would be how can we move the needle on hydraulic restoration as well when we talk about watershed planning? So I feel kind of scattered, but I want to tell you all the things, so I'm trying to slow down. But I do want to just touch on an effort that we've started. Again, if you saw the presentation to Urban County Council, this is just review for you. But we want to start looking at hydraulic restoration as approach to watershed planning, but how do you do that? And so we do that by looking at the hydrology. So you see, this picture is a fairly typical urban stream cross-section. Most people in this room that have worked with streams, that looks really familiar. You've got three to five foot vertical banks on your stream, evidence of erosion, silted in bed, not much substrate, honeysuckle along the edge. I mean, it's classic. So this type of stream bank erosion leads to stream deepening and widening, water quality and biological disturbances, loss of land, damaged infrastructure. And so when we're talking about moving the needle on water quality within the city of Lexington, we definitely still need to focus on what's on the ground because that ends up in our water. But we also need to focus on how that water is being attenuated within our land before it's getting to our watersheds, or before it's getting to our streams and rivers. So let's talk a little bit about the water flow. You heard maybe a year and a half ago now from Bob Hawley with Sustainable Streams. We've been working with him on some of these discussions. And so I wanted to kind of bring it back up to this group, come full circle and talk about how we're integrating that and where we wanna move forward. And so flow is a measure of volume over time. And this critical flow is the flow that moves particles on a stream bed, or the flow of water that causes erosion. We can call it the stream bed erosion threshold or Q critical. We can kind of use those terms interchangeably. I'm gonna call it Q critical for the purposes of this conversation. And it's a key metric for managing hydrology, the hydrology of our streams and mitigating stream degradation. And you heard some of that from Bob Hawley, but I'm gonna give you a little bit of a summary. Currently in Lexington, we've got requirements that mirror what's in this table chart, this is a chart. So we require runoff reduction and treatment for smaller rainfall events, that would be our water quality requirements and then flood protection, that would be our water quantity requirements. So we've got regs here and we've got regs here within our stormwater manual, but we've got a gap here when you're looking at precipitation depth. In Lexington, it's a little bit different, but I didn't wanna mess with a published table. And so the middle flows that you see where there's no color, that's where channel erosion often begins. And those are the rainfall depths that you see along that bottom axis that typically are causing erosion and they're typically between the two sets of regulations that we have in place. So by reducing the frequency, magnitude and duration of discharges that exceed Q critical, so Q critical is gonna be that flow that causes channel erosion, that threshold, that erosion threshold, we can really start tailoring stormwater interventions and mitigate stream bank erosion. I wanna tie this in a little bit to Kenton, which I'm sad he had to leave to what he said, but I'll talk about that in a minute. So we're trying to get from, you know, when you see, and Bob says this a lot, when you see a community that starts managing Q critical within their policies, but also doing retrofits, you see streams going from stage, keep hitting the wrong button, from stage three, which is this widening degradation, that picture, this is very reminiscent of that picture that we saw on the slide of the downstream trib from one of our basins at Shillito Park, that's where that picture was taken, I forgot to mention that. And you start seeing streams move from here to a more equilibrium state where you've got a low flow channel with vegetative benches, where we're not blasting out our streams every storm event, we're starting to manage Q critical on site, which then allows our streams to start settling out their sediment and vegetation to start growing on those, and we're starting to reestablish that low flow. So we wanna be back at equilibrium, so how do we get there? As we look at updating our existing policies, so that'd be a step, right, like looking at future development and how can we stop the bleeding, but we also wanna talk about retrofitting existing basins, we have 1,242 basins in the city of Lexington, what can we do with those, how can we look back and make improvements there? So when you talk about basin retrofits to manage Q critical, we're talking about modifying an existing stormwater control or detention basins in this aspect, so there's endless ways to do this, you can plate an orifice with different existing orifices, you can insert low flow restrictions, you can add risers to existing structures, retrofits can be beyond that, bigger projects where you have earth moving, you're adding volume to a basin, you're installing native plants to help with that uptake of stormwater, so retrofits can really help accelerate that habitat recovery from that three to the stage five and have healthier ecosystems and cleaner water quality. And so we've taken our first step in this, so we've got a pilot project designed for that basin in Shilohto Park, and we're hoping to kind of test Q critical in one of those basins based on regional data, so based on work that other communities have done, SD1, Olam County, we're trying to take some of that information and test a pilot here in Lexington, do a basin retrofit and see how that downstream, that picture you saw that's downstream of this pilot, how does it do here? How can we test that theory and move it forward? So that goal would be for that project to hopefully move forward in 2024, and hopefully we can keep reporting back and you'll hear more from us. The one thing I did want to touch on that I thought was interesting from Kenton's presentation was that when we get in and do, and obviously he needs to explore that more and fine tune that observation, but when you get in and do large scale stream remediation projects, yes, there's probably tremendous water quality benefits to that. We saw that presentation from Carmen last week, or last meeting in September, phenomenal work, they're seeing improvements, but it does something to the soil. And so what I think is interesting about this approach, about the more passive approach of getting residents to hold buffers, not mow to the edge, having concerted efforts to plant within our buffers, these are a bit more passive. I think this in the same way, Q-Critical, trying to do retrofits, change our policies is another way to be passive, active, but passive. You're not getting in and blowing up the stream in order to change it. You're trying to change something upstream to have a positive impact on the whole stretch and beyond. So I think this is another method that we can work in partnership with our stream groups and to really make a change on our streams within the city of Lexington. All right, off my soapbox. All right. So just some last minute things that we've talked about, the stormwater quality projects incentive grant program in this group. And so I just wanted to give an update on that. This ties in a lot as well to tree canopy with what Heather presented on, and it also ties in with our watershed-based planning and developing watershed management plans that can help direct capital investment. How do we make sure that our incentive grant program is following with some of these recommendations in those watershed management plans? How do we account for tree canopy? These are all things that have come up at the water quality fees board meeting with this program. So the things that we talk about here are also affecting different parts of city government. And so what you see here is, so kind of a brief, people that don't know, 10% of the water quality management fee that's collected from residents in pervious areas throughout the city of Lexington goes to this incentive grant program. So that's 1.5 to $1.6 million a year that's going back into the community for water quality projects, retrofits, getting impervious area out of here, putting impervious pavers or tree canopy or stream restoration or repairing and setbacks, all those types of things. And so the table here is just showing the projects that were awarded for the different classes. We've got neighborhood education and infrastructure grants and the number of projects in 2022. We have a whole nother table that we could show for 2023 because those projects have been awarded and are going out now to get under agreement as well. And some of the pictures at the bottom are just some of the projects that we've had. This is the 900 block of North Limestone. It actually just won the American Society of Landscape Architecture National Design Award of Excellence for Residential Design. It's a long name, but that was really exciting to have people outside come in. We have design groups, landscape architects, they come in, apply for our funding, and then they go do something good in an area of town that really needs it and they're winning awards. And I think that's really exciting. And then this project here is that stream restoration that you saw from UK. All the educational opportunities that that's providing to students, hands-on experience, very exciting. This program has about 40 to 50 active projects at any given time. So our team's been working on ways to improve the grant program. You know, how can we, the grant program management, that's a lot to manage while also trying to collect more projects all the time. And so Frank and I have been vigorously working on, you know, how can we get a grant tracker together for our grant managers? So that's up and running, which is really exciting. And that'll increase access to project details and requests for reimbursement. Like people throughout the government can kind of access that and see what's happening and it not just being stored in one person's mind or email chain. So that's very exciting. And then we've also had a project to map all of our incentive grants from fiscal year 20 or from 2021, all the way to present, and then create an annual inspection program for that. We're putting this money on the ground. We wanna make sure that it's being maintained and is doing well. I think all of these needed advances are a testament to the years of dedication and success this program's seen. All right, and to wrap up, again, we've talked about honing that watershed vision. We're gonna do that by continuing compliance with the program elements within our MS-4 permit. We're gonna continue to promote and administer the incentive grant program. We're gonna focus on methods to transition that watershed focused monitoring program from data collection to action. And I will add, and also, you know, how do we keep the continuity of monitoring as well? So action, but also monitoring. What does that future look like? Explore critical flow in Lexington to protect our streams from further degradation and then maintain all these partnerships that we've had. All of you here at the table are partners in this with us from neighborhood groups to the development community. And we're all working together to improve water quality in Lexington. And I need water. Thank you, that's all I've got. Questions? Yes. I've got one, so I do work up and down for the work that I do in Mount Richard. The critical is 3.10 is the two-year, 24-hour storm. So that's what it is. It's not the two-year, 24-hour storm. You're not supposed to know. No. You'll get into Bob Holley, I promise. But we've done an excellent job. We've got Bedford, we've got Richard Walker, Greg Lubeck. Over the years, we've done excellent. We've got control of the 10-6, which is 3.07. The six-year, Richard and I talked back then when we ran some numbers. It's really close, critical 10-6. So if we go Bob Holley's way, say, okay, we're going to now adopt the critical. I would like to say, let's drop the 10-6. We've got enough, we're balancing so many storm events. Yeah. If we're gonna pick one, let's pick one to cross the board. I think the goal of Q-Critical would replace the 10-6. I don't think the 10-6 is what we need. But I don't think they're as close as you think. We've kind of been working on research in the background. And I think we would be ready to talk about that and have a work group if we needed to, when we're ready. Obviously, we're still piloting something. We're not there yet. But I would disagree that they're not actually as close. It's not the two-year, 24-hour storm. It's kind of hard to explain, but I don't. Oh, I do work, I use it all the time. Yeah. I don't want to get into playing the shell game. If we're going to pick something, let's pick something. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. I think the intent of this would be to replace the channel protection requirement and go with Q-Critical as our channel protection requirement. Yeah. When do we get to talk about this in a committee? Learn more about it. I mean, because I think this Q-Critical is fabulous when you guys are involved. And one that I think is needed based on, hey, you're getting pretty close. And I'm like, we're going to go down that road. And you say, no, we're not. Yeah, I agree. I think it's like Chillito, that was built in Miami. Yeah, yeah, it's the old stuff. It's the old stuff. I mean, we were controlling, yeah, we're looking at 10, 20 more, 100 more. 100 more? I mean, that was, well, I'm not, that's, yeah, I can talk about 20. Yeah. Until you start getting the water quality standards in stormwater design. I would say even in areas like East Hickman, which is newer development, we're seeing pretty bad stream erosion. I mean, Frank gets calls on the regular for incentive grant projects to look at those streams over there. That's not, that's not old. So I think, I think there's a conversation to be had, and I think it will be had. We're moving the ball forward and what that looks like, and we're trying to be strategic and intentional about it. And so I think there's definitely room for conversation as we continue those discussions. Go ahead. What are your current requirements? I think it was trend analysis on the monitoring. Yes. I think that was completed in 2020. The- Well, 2020 is when it first, okay, that was the end of the five-year plan. Yeah, so we took that as, yeah, so there's like a written plan trend analysis that we have. Mac's shaking his head. It's something, it was probably submitted with our annual report in 2020, which would have gone up in 2021. And was that done on the seven monitoring stations, or did you incorporate those large monitoring stations? We would have had two or three more. Mac, can you speak to that? That's what I figured. Just the seven. Yeah, and I would add that that would be a goal as we move forward, now that the Watershed Focused Monitoring Program is almost complete, data review, you know? So how do we move from data collection to using that data? Yeah. Yeah. You're welcome. It's really interesting to me, just kind of the juxtaposition of topics that we've had. To me, my perspective, I see a lot of overlap. It might not seem like it when you're in the trenches, but my perspective, there's a lot of overlap. Proximity of breakwaters, condition of streams, habitat spores, there's the equity for equity and water quality in our community. I think there's, I'm conscious that there's some trends that where I correspond. We've got some really great tools, and we've got some data. Moving forward. Tools and assets. We're looking at output stream and geo. Hopefully that's in the watershed. What we're doing with watershed assessments. I don't have an answer, but I'm asking that. Would there be enough? Are you all seeing enough overlap? Yeah. I have a lot of thoughts. As I was looking at Heather's tool, I noticed the stormwater reduction section I was gonna ask you about, but we were running low on time. But I think there's probably tools within that. But the whole time she was presenting that, I was like, wow, it'd be awesome to have a water version of this. Very neat tool. And so, I don't know that I can speak a ton to the future and how the city of Lexington would do that. I think that's something this group could work on. I think green infrastructure is something that's definitely gonna be coming up within this group and how we're dealing with maintenance and issues that we've seen and how do we move green infrastructure forward within the city. So, I think all of those discussions, all those tools need to have a seat at the table. I would agree with that. Hold on. We started late, but yes. I think we're good. This may be an inappropriate question, but I'm gonna ask it. How are you going to train your predecessor? That was on the announcement slide, Ken. You're stealing my thunder. You're okay. If someone's able to, it'd be really helpful if you could turn around and put up a different presentation. There's a mouse right there. I mean, I can walk all the way back, but that's just not, it used to be right here and a lot easier, but when you're doing both, if you minimize it, there should be a presentation. Yeah, that happened to me too, actually. Well, all that to say, I'll talk over while he's trying to get, it'd be the 01 SSAC presentation you're able to find. There, that first one. There it is. And then go to, well, I'll let Amy take back over and then I'll come back on, but I will, I'll just say it. Yeah, so my last day at the city of Lexington is actually on Friday of next week. I'm very sad about it. My husband's job is taking us out of town, and so we're moving to Cleveland, Ohio. And I'm doing the best darnest I can to leave where we're at and talk with everybody I can, Greg, consultants, Tetra Tech, Third Rock, Charlie, to make sure that everybody knows kind of where we're at and where we want to go. And they know too. I mean, we've all been working together on this. And so, but yeah, it's been a really enjoyable two years and I'm very sad to be leaving. I've enjoyed this group and this program and I'm being dragged out kicking and screaming from the city of Lexington, but I am hopeful of the future of this program and the prospects and how it will be moved forward. So, yeah. With that, I mean, I guess I can, you got it, you want me to do it. Okay, I'll do it, that's fine. Okay, so before we move into potential topics for next meeting and announcements, we need to approve our meeting dates for 2024. I did check that September 6th does not fall. I think we should be good. That doesn't fall on Labor Day this year. So we should be able to continue with our normal first Friday of the quarter. Does anybody have objections to these meetings dates? Can I get a motion? Jennifer moves to approve. Steve seconds. Any objections? All in favor, I mean. All right, any objections? Motion passes. Meeting events up there. All right. All right, potential topics for next meeting. I don't have a pen, so make sure someone's taking notes. Yes. I think we're gonna have to add an eighth watershed to our urban area. I saw that. Do we have an opportunity to discuss what stormwater management is in the Boon Creek area in relation to the actual program? How it compares to the... We were fortunate enough that one of the authors was the author of the 1996... Yeah, I'm not. That was a lot of questions in one, I don't know that I'm qualified to answer all of them. I'll move it to John. Well, I don't think we're going to do these actions again, so... I'm concerned about it. Well, okay, but compared to how we managed it in the 1996, 1998, 2000, versus what we're doing with the new program and how that compares. I'm trying to do that again. I think that would be an interesting discussion. Expansion, Boon Creek. Anything else? They're going to need ideas. Yeah, I'd be happy to, if the board wants it, to talk about the... Yeah, that'd be great. Which ties into buffers and BMPs, yeah. All right, we'll move on to announcements. Jennifer always gets mad at me when I call her to read off of the screen, so I'll read off of the screen, unless you want to. First two, go. I will read off of the screen. On Black Friday, we collected 585 gallons of... Which is the most we've ever collected. A lot. We use this as an opportunity to educate... Proper waste disposal, so don't pour your cooking oil down the toilet, down your sink drain, outside the fence line, or down your swimming pool. Thank you to everyone who visited the Art by Nature gallery, it closed on Black Friday. We had over 100 pieces of art. I want to say it was like 120 pieces of art that represented local creeks. Awesome, thank you. And then just to add to that, December 8th is our workshop for the engineering, development, and construction industry. We'll be getting lots of updates from different people from the Division of Water Quality, as well as some discussion on our composite drainage plan updates. So lots of good conversations to be had there, and then as well as the annual erosion and sediment control training that we have for that community. The next SSAC meeting, as y'all just voted on, will be March 1st. And then fifth annual water week, this is kind of after, but it's right after our next meeting, so I just wanted to make sure it got on this slide so everyone could be in the know, is March 18th to the 25th. So stay tuned, you can look up on our website, and there'll be information on there coming soon as they start getting stuff together and details and events planned. Before we close, are there any other announcements that I missed? Yes. I should've brought a tree. I love trees. We are in the process of recruiting who is a successor right now. I'm thinking about being an applicant. Hopefully we'll be able to seamlessly transition as we're approaching the end of the year. I'm thinking about being an applicant. Hopefully we'll be able to seamlessly transition as we're approaching the end of the year. Transition. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. I'm gonna go hide in a hole now. All right, thank you everybody so much. Thank you for coming. I'll let you go home. It's been swell. Come give me a hug, I'm a hugger.