# Stormwater Stakeholder Advisory Committee - September 9, 2022 > Auto-transcribed civic record · Committee · September 9, 2022 - **Permalink**: https://meetings.lexingtonky.news/meeting/6536 - **Source video**: https://lfucg.granicus.com/player/clip/6536?view_id=14&redirect=true - **Date**: 2022-09-09 - **Body**: Committee - **Last revised**: February 15, 2026 - **Length**: 18,076 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 September 9, 2022, from 9:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. at the Phoenix Building – 3rd Floor Conference Room, with Amy Sohner presiding. The meeting covered 7 agenda items in total, including the approval of previous meeting minutes, several informational presentations, and committee membership matters. Over the course of the meeting, 2 votes were taken — one to approve the minutes from the June 3, 2022 meeting, and one addressing the expired Watershed At-Large Seats for the Cane Run and Kentucky River watersheds. Members also heard 3 informational presentations focused on urban greenspace and tree-related stormwater topics, covering the Greenspace Trust's community partnership work, urban riparian reforestation for stormwater quality improvement, and the use of trees in stormwater basins to increase urban tree canopy. The meeting concluded with discussion of potential topics for a future meeting and general announcements, and 2 public comments were heard during the session. ## Attendance The following 39 members were present at the September 9, 2022 committee meeting: Eileen Burk, Doug Burton, Jennifer Carey, Jim Conner, Ken Cooke, Amanda Gumbert, Don Hill, Elizabeth McGee Lewis, Tresine Logsdon, Charlie Martin, Tom Martin, Mary Murray, Meredith Price, Scott Smith, Amy Sohner, Jason Unrine, Jerry Weisenfluh, Jack Wilson, Denice Bullock, Jeffinisha Cobb, Sarah Donaldson, Gabe Hensley, Becky Irwin, Greg Lubeck, Frank Mabson, Demetria Kimball Mehlhorn, Jennifer Myatt, Lindsie Nicholas, Angela Poe, Abby Terry, Richard Walker, Heather Wilson, Ken Johnson, Brad Lee, Sam Lee, Malissa McAlister, Peyton Mills, Kenton Sena, and Mike Woolum. No members were recorded as absent or late. ## Votes and Decisions Two motions were brought before the committee during the September 9, 2022 meeting, both of which passed unanimously. - **Approval of June 3, 2022 Meeting Minutes** [timestamp: 0:33]: A motion to approve the minutes from the June 3, 2022 meeting was made by Jennifer Carey and seconded by Eileen Burk. The motion passed unanimously. No roll call vote was recorded. - **Reappointment of At-Large Watershed Seats** [timestamp: 1:40:01]: A motion to reappoint Eileen Burk and Jim Conner to Watershed At-Large seats was made by Ken Cooke and seconded by Jennifer Carey. The motion passed unanimously. No roll call vote was recorded. ## Budget and Financial Actions The committee addressed two financial items during the September 9, 2022 meeting involving project funding allocations. - **Dantzler Court Project:** A grant of **$16,000** was discussed in connection with the Dantzler Court project. No vendor or recipient name was identified in the meeting materials, and no resolution number was associated with this item. - **Eureka Springs Project:** An appropriation of **$25,000** was considered for the Eureka Springs project. As with the Dantzler Court item, no specific vendor, recipient, or resolution identifier was recorded in the available meeting data. No additional budget resolutions, contract awards, or fiscal actions were documented for this meeting. Resolution numbers and vendor details were not available for either item. ## Public Comment Two members of the public addressed the committee during the public comment period. **Ken Cooke** [timestamp: 21:23] spoke about the potential for adapting the Greenspace Trust model for smaller communities. Cooke's remarks focused on the possibilities such an adaptation might offer, as well as the challenges posed by local ordinances that could complicate implementation. **Scott Smith** [timestamp: 30:04] raised concerns about the city's approach to abandoned properties. Smith addressed the potential for using condemnation as a tool to acquire such properties, suggesting this as a possible avenue for the city to consider in addressing the issue. ## Appointments The committee took action on two reappointments during the meeting. Both appointments were for At-Large positions on the Watershed body. - **Eileen Burk** was reappointed to the **Watershed At-Large** position. - **Jim Conner** was reappointed to the **Watershed At-Large** position. No additional details regarding term lengths, vote counts, or discussion were available in the meeting record for these appointments. ## Contested Items - **Abandoned Properties and Condemnation:** The committee engaged in a heated discussion regarding the city's approach to handling abandoned properties, specifically around whether condemnation should be used as a tool to acquire them. The structured data available for this meeting does not specify which individual members were on opposing sides of the debate, nor does it record a definitive outcome or resolution reached during the discussion. ## Approval of 6/3/2022 Minutes [timestamp: 00:33] The committee took up the approval of minutes from its June 3, 2022 meeting as the first item of business. Key speakers during this portion of the meeting included Amy Sohner, Jennifer Carey, and Eileen Burk. The committee reviewed the minutes from the prior meeting and moved forward with their approval. No significant concerns or debates regarding the content of the minutes were noted in the record. - **Outcome:** The minutes from the June 3, 2022 meeting were approved. ## Greenspace Trust: Partnering with the Community to Improve Underutilized Greensp [timestamp: 01:04] Demetria Kimball Mehlhorn delivered a presentation to the committee on the Greenspace Trust's work to improve underutilized greenspaces through community partnerships. The item was informational in nature, with no vote or formal action taken by the committee. The presentation focused on the Greenspace Trust's efforts to engage with communities as part of its approach to revitalizing greenspaces that are currently underused. No additional details regarding specific projects, locations, funding figures, or partnership structures are available from the provided meeting record. The outcome of this agenda item was informational, meaning it served to update committee members on the Greenspace Trust's activities and direction rather than to seek approval or authorization for any specific action. ## Urban Riparian Reforestation for Stormwater Quality Improvement [timestamp: 31:44] Kenton Sena and Peyton Mills delivered a presentation on urban riparian reforestation and its role in improving stormwater quality. The presentation covered the ecological impacts of urbanization and the potential benefits of restoring tree cover along urban waterways and riparian corridors. The item was informational in nature, with no formal action or vote taken by the committee. ## Utilizing Trees in Stormwater Basins to Increase Urban Tree Canopy [timestamp: 58:16] Heather Wilson presented agenda item 4, which focused on the role of trees in urban environments and the potential for stormwater basins to serve as sites for expanding the urban tree canopy. Wilson's presentation was informational in nature, covering the importance of trees within urban settings and how existing stormwater basin infrastructure could be leveraged as an opportunity to increase tree canopy coverage across the city. The session was intended to inform committee members on this approach rather than to seek a vote or formal action. No additional outcome or formal decision resulted from this agenda item, as it was presented as an informational briefing for the committee. ## Expired Watershed At-Large Seats (Cane Run & Kentucky River) [timestamp: 1:40:01] The committee took up the matter of filling expired Watershed At-Large seats for the Cane Run and Kentucky River watersheds. Key speakers on this item included Lindsay Nicholas, Ken Cooke, and Jennifer Carey. The discussion centered on the reappointment of two individuals to these seats: - **Eileen Burk** — proposed for reappointment to one of the Watershed At-Large seats - **Jim Conner** — proposed for reappointment to the other Watershed At-Large seat The committee reviewed the reappointments and moved forward with approval. The item was ultimately **approved** by the committee. ## Potential Topics for Next Meeting [timestamp: 1:41:01] The committee briefly discussed potential topics to be taken up at its next meeting. Lindsay Nicholas led this portion of the discussion, identifying two items as candidates for future consideration: - **West Hickman Watershed Management Plan update** — A status update on the West Hickman Watershed Management Plan was identified as a potential agenda item. - **UK's PFAS sampling** — An update on the University of Kentucky's PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) sampling efforts was also flagged as a topic of interest for the committee. No formal votes or decisions were taken on this item; the discussion was informational in nature. ## Announcements [timestamp: 1:48:03] During this portion of the meeting, Lindsay Nicholas presented various announcements covering upcoming events and training sessions. The discussion was informational in nature, with no decisions or votes required from the Committee. No further details regarding the specific events or training sessions mentioned were recorded in the available meeting data. --- ## Decisions - **Motion** — passed (0-0): Approval of the minutes from the June 3, 2022 meeting - **Motion** — passed (0-0): Reappointment of Eileen Burk and Jim Conner to Watershed At-Large seats --- ## Full transcript From our stakeholder advisory group, I'm Amy Soder. I've been the chair now for my second meeting, so I'm well seasoned. But, so the first thing on the agenda, Lindsey takes care of everything, so we're, that makes it happier for me. The first thing on our agenda is to review the minutes from the June meeting. We did that, and Lindsey sent out those minutes previously. And so if you've had a chance to look at them and are on the committee and would like to, or have any questions or corrections, we'd be happy to hear that. Otherwise, I'd be happy to accept a motion to approve the minutes. Jennifer Carey. Move to approve. And a second? Second. And a second. Tell me your name again. Eileen. Eileen, I knew that, but I sound terrible, especially when I'm out here. All right. Any other discussion? All in favor? Aye. Aye. All right. Any opposed? No. Fantastic. So that was easy. All right. The best part of these meetings, I believe, are the presentations. I think it's really fascinating. I learned lots of things that I either wanted to know more about or didn't know I wanted to know more about, but actually did. And so first, we're going to welcome up Demetria Kimball-Melhorn from the Division of Environmental Services. I'm a little burned up, but everybody's here. Talking about Green Space Trust, partnering with the community to improve underutilized green spaces. Good morning, guys. How are you all doing this morning? Good. I had a few answers. That's good. So as Avi had said, my name is Demetria Kimball-Melhorn. I work with Environmental Services under the Department of Water Quality. I'm here today to talk about our Green Space Trust and how they are working with the community to improve underutilized green spaces. Not going to lie, I'm going to kind of see if I can get through this presentation. I recently lost our administrative staff, Kristen, to a new job. So she's put some of this presentation together, which is really great. So I didn't have to try and fumble through and find things. But please forgive me if I miss something. So a little bit about the Green Space Commission and Trust. So the commission actually started back in 1990 as a citizen-based advisory group to look at all of the county's unique environmental aspects. This actually was a precursor to our PDR program. And so they've done a lot of really great things throughout the years. In 2002, the Trust was actually created as a 501c3 nonprofit. That was really created to be able to take the conservation easement for the Cold Stream SUP project. And so in addition, because it's a nonprofit, they can actually get grant funding and we can have donations and hold other additional conservation easements. As administrative staff, we had two different ordinances. We had the commission and the trust. So they were actually the same group of people. What happened is we would have to go through and do a meeting for the commission, close that meeting, open meeting for the trust. That's a paperwork nightmare. So this year, actually, we were able to combine the commission and trust under one ordinance. So now we're shortened down to Green Space Trust. If I use commission, if I use trust, they're interchangeable. So in 2018, environmental services staff took over the Green Space Commission and Trust from Division of Planning. At that point, the commission had kind of been more of a just general citizens board, didn't really have a lot of actions, didn't know, you know, had a lot of speakers come in. But they weren't really engaged in any particular way. So as staff, I'm also the greenway coordinator. We all haul very many different hats. I was really trying to find a way to engage that particular group and see what they could do. So green space, greenway coordinator, what can they do? Well, really, we had established a goal to look at all of the different greenways and green spaces and create management plans. The city owns over 290 parcels under two acres. That's just what environmental services actually maintains, not what is in parks and facilities, pump stations, et cetera. So that's a total of 105 acres. Some of these are small lots, individual spaces. Some are small lots combined that were bought out from water quality flood lots, Kilrush, Furlong, Deauville. You may have heard of some of those areas. But then we also have very small remnant parcels all spread all over throughout the county. They could be detention basins, environmentally sensitive areas, a whole variety of things. So really what I did was I pushed for the commission trust, the trustees, to see what they could do. Could they go down from a high level to a boots on the ground? What does that look like? So we kind of created a model on taking those particular, like, how do we go through this? We want to take an area. We want to develop it. But we kind of have to have steps on how to go through that process. This is a whole long model. But basically we chose, they chose an area. They had site assessment, did some brainstorming design concepts, then had a public meeting. We could have all the information we want, create a concept, but if the public doesn't like it, well, then it doesn't really matter because then we're just going to get resistance. We really wanted their input. We took that design, whatever that happens to be, I'm going to show you examples in a few minutes, refined that design, heard what they said as the public, came back, presented that design idea again. From there, we had to, we put it in phases. What could we implement? How much did it cost? Where were we going to get our funding sources? And, of course, if we were able to implement it, how are we going to maintain it? So that's also a very big thing is we don't want to implement something without being able to maintain it. So the advantage is environmental services already has this really great maintenance program for our green spaces. And we were able to, we were able to absorb a lot of this area under that maintenance program. But we still have to have a cost. What does it look like? So the idea is really to take some of these underutilized areas and create a vibrant gathering place, water quality aspect, just different things that I'm going to kind of go through what we've done so far. Our first one that we did, Dantzler Court. So Dantzler Court is a water quality buyout lot that was bought out in 2007, 2008, and just basically bulldozed and created this open green area, kind of overrun by invasive species. Just an open lot. Nobody knew really what to do with it. So through our process, the commissioners went out, looked at it, did a site assessment, came up with a design. So this was the pie in the sky design they came up with. Not only from talking to neighbors, but creating, you know, keeping an open space so the kids could come play, something inviting, adding additional trees, maybe some signage. And then we had some budget. Like, all right, great. We have a design. Now what do we do? We had some really great buy-in from the council members. We had some trustees that went after grants. So they were proactive, went after grants. And then internally, environmental services was also able to kick in some money. So for $16,000, which really isn't that much money when you're talking about a project, we were able to purchase a bench, remove invasive species. Our internal staff helped with that. With the Bluegrass Community Foundation, we purchased 10 trees, native trees, when we were installed. COVID hit. So that was interesting, trying to put all this together during COVID. So we actually had an outdoor public meeting in September, spread out masks, talked to the neighbors. OK, we have trees installed. What else would you like to see? We put in what we call an adventure garden. You guys will see pictures of it. But have you ever seen the logs that are kind of placed around so kids can jump and, you know, use their imagination? It's not a playground. We call it an adventure garden. That way it stays in the realm of a green space, not a park. We also added a stream buffer and a wildlife, a wildflower border, an educational sign, and parks donated a bicycle rack for us that we had installed. So that was really great. So council member Ellinger is a big bike cyclist. So he thought that was a really great spot to have as a destination, place to stop, relax, get a drink of water and then move on. So this is what it looks like as an aerial view in February of 22. If you look down at the corner, just remember it was a large open lot, green space, yard, not very inviting. So overhead, you can kind of see where we put the trees. The adventure garden back in the back is where we had our water quality buffer because there's a small stream that goes through there. And we also included a lot of flowering shrubs and plants. So it was an inviting space. This is what it looked like in June. I'd say that we had a fairly large success. We were able to have a very inviting space, have a walking path, and the neighbors that we've talked to say it's actually being used quite a bit. So it was a huge success. Well, we had really great momentum. And the trustees were like gung ho, council members were gung ho. What's our next one? What are we doing next? What are we doing next? OK, so we just implemented Chancellor Court. What are we going to work on? So as this was being finished up, let me move forward. We started on Eureka Springs. So Eureka Springs is a detention basin that is over off the Circle of Man award. It was built in the 80s. It's a typical detention basin, a hole in the ground. So we actually went through the same model. We did a site assessment as the trustees, and then we went back and had our public meeting to hear what people thought they might want, create a design, and had another public meeting. This is where it's really important that we figured out to talk with the neighbors because up here, this is the detention basin. Up here is a large open green space that really, as trustees not knowing the neighborhood, we thought maybe we would put a picnic bench there or something to invite people to come in and relax. And really what we heard from the neighbors was a lot of people go to Mount Tabor Park. And then what they do is a lot of people cut through and cut through this neighborhood instead of going out to Eureka Springs Drive. So what can we do? The neighbors actually said during COVID that detention basin wasn't cut very often and they had a lot of reduced foot traffic going through because nobody wanted to walk through the tall grass. Okay, well, let's run with that concept. So what we came up with was to actually create a wet meadow and create a passive recreation area that people can stop and enjoy the wildflowers. We made it a wildlife refuge pollinator garden. So we installed a bench, installed additional trees, a wet meadow. And one of the things, another thing that we listened to the neighbors on is I was actually going to look at installing trees closer in this green area here to the houses. But some of the neighbors had gardens and they're like, can you please not do that because we kind of want to grow our garden. So we did end up putting 21 trees in, but we've pushed them out farther into the detention basin. This detention basin is what stays wet almost year-round. Eureka Springs has a natural spring in it. So to create a wet meadow was a fairly natural fit. So we actually had a budget of $25,000 that the council members had approved through some extra funding. So part of the things that we learned is to create our design, create our budget, and then see what we can have different pieces that we can implement depending on what budget we have. And this is what it looks like today, basically. So we have created a really nice area that people can sit, enjoy. There's a bus stop across the way. A lot of people who are walking to the park have a chance to stop and relax and enjoy the different natural areas. We also have an educational sign here. So people understand what a wet meadow is, why water quality aspects and that kind of thing. The next one that we are working on, again, trustees are have really great, you know, enthusiasm and they want to move forward is what we consider Cane Run Greenway. Edge Lawn, for those of you who know it as the detention basin. So this area is near Castlewood. It's a fairly lower income area. The neighbors really actually feel like we've ignored them and forgotten about them. So they were pretty, pretty happy that when we came out and did the first public meeting. And we're actually just breaking down to smaller, bite-sized pieces. We know we can't, you know, take the whole thing on. So what can we do in small pieces and small phases? This, again, were water quality buyout lots that they created additional detention area in. So there's an upstream larger detention area. And this is a small stream that they daylighted, Engineering Daylighted, I believe around 2010. So one of those projects. This has a large transient consideration. So we have to think about things like that. So park benches might not necessarily be what we want to put here, encouraging places to sleep. But we do want to encourage the local citizens to use it, residents to use it. So we're still in the design process and in phase, the initial phase. As you can see, our public meeting is coming up. Our first one was June 15th. Our public meeting is coming up next week. Just the initial thoughts. What do, based on what everybody thought, talked about, what do we want? Originally, we talked about putting a play area here. That's really close to Bryant Ave. They were really concerned with the kids being that close to Bryant Ave. Okay, so if we just leave it open and create more of a park, what I consider a manicured park-ish setting, putting additional trees in, putting some flowering bushes, that kind of thing, making it more aesthetically, typically aesthetically pleasing so that they don't feel like we just ignored them and they ignored what they were thinking. This is our first shot. Again, we're going to go back to the neighbors and see what they think. They may want something else. It's a balancing act of what we can afford, what we are kind of conceptually want to move forward with versus what they're looking at. The other area is Meadow Park. This is an area that we actually are looking at doing some additional water quality meadow plantings down the middle. So we would have a low growing meadow, similar to wet meadow, with some additional trees. That stays very wet. The mowers can't get in there very often. So having something that only is cut back once a year would help with water quality and aesthetics. I am going to skip back to the slide I should have put at the end. Applying the model going forward and things that we have learned. I talked. Don't rush the design and have at least two public meetings. Listen to your neighbors. Create the designs and phases. One thing we learned as we've gone along is what can we put in phases based on what budget we have? That way, you know, as you saw at Dancer Court, we had four or five different funding sources. And I think that's going to be more usual than having one large chunk of money. Honestly, as we have over the years. And then keep it simple. We do have to maintain it. So what is the easiest maintenance going forward? The themes that we are going to continue looking at are water quantity and water quality. That's always very important, but doesn't always have to be number one. Making the green space accessible and equitable. You know, so again, is it Dancer Court? Is it just an open lot? Nobody actually thinks that they can use. They don't know who owns it. That kind of thing. And making it inviting. Emphasize the five to ten minute walk. I don't know if you guys know. Parks and the mayor has signed a declaration that they are really concentrating on having a five to ten minute bike or walk accessible green space or park. So accessible is not necessarily a detention basin or an overgrown lot. It's something that is actually usable. And then improving all these underutilized green spaces. So what does that mean? Does that mean creating a community garden? Does that mean creating a food forest? Does that just mean creating an area that people can stop and relax and just take a few minutes to take a breath in this busy work life? So those are the things that really this that we move forward. The trustees look at. As staff, we give them four or five different areas that we think is best suited. And they go out and make their decision on what they want to work on next. So any questions? I get my question slides there. That's the answer for it. I have a quick question. How do you connect with parks? Because a lot of your final product seems like more of a park than it. Well, a green space and park are similar, but do you connect with parks at all or is it just sort of an environmental service? It's more environmental services, but parks, we're always working together on several different things. So we have very careful to define parks, considers a park a what is it, a programmed space. And so that's really the definitive difference, although they have some open natural areas. This is not programmed. There's not open soccer fields. There's not a play structure or that kind of thing. Yes, it's confusing. We are. We all are confused, too. Maybe just say a word about the difference between what Eureka Springs looked like a year ago versus what it looks like today. It's worth driving by. It really is. So this is what it looks like today. It's difficult to tell in this, but it is full of color, full of color. And we were able to add, like I said, 21 trees, part of them along the roadway and part of them within the basin. So as we go through, those will actually grow. It looked like a hole in the ground. It literally was uninviting, standing water, just eh. And I think that that's something that we've really tried to work on changing. And it was only able to be mowed occasionally because it was it was always wet. And so with the wet meadow, those and the trees, those root systems will absorb all of that water. So we have the center maintenance contract, so it's not going to be taken over by invasive species. It's going to stay in perpetuity as long as as long as we have that budget to be able to maintain it. And as far as I know, that will be Jennifer. Jennifer keeps pushing to keep that budget. Ken? No, go ahead. Okay. This is great, and I can think of so many other applications throughout the Kentucky River Basin where this would be useful for adding green infrastructure for water controls. But Lexington is always this model that I have to try to figure out how to adapt to smaller communities. I'm not aware of anywhere in the other cities that do like have a trust arrangement like this. Do you think it's adaptable for smaller communities to do this type of thing? Absolutely. If there's any kind of nonprofit that can within those smaller communities. I mean, we have lots of friends that we work with closely that could be the entity to assist in that. I mean, we kind of have that model now where, but I'll use Ken. I mean, he goes and has his budget and his grants, but he works closely with the city on what areas should be and could be implementable. What could we do? What could we move forward with? And really, honestly, creating a 501c is $15, $25. No, it's more like, but she knows how to do that. But the question is, will they have the local ordinances? And I would say that any community that uses the FEMA buyout money to buy properties is an excellent candidate for this model. So Danville, Richmond, all the other places that have those FEMA programs. And I just learned that there's a whole bunch of land along the Kentucky River that has been purchased under this that usually belongs to the county governments. So I think that would be an excellent way to transpose that model onto other communities. And really, we are looking at small budgets, right? I mean, $16,000 again for Dantzler was pulled from several different sources. We were able to get that $25,000 for Eureka Springs. We have $10,000 to $15,000 for Cane Run. So we're not talking of a significant amount that you couldn't get grants for. It sounds like the trust is sort of driving the selection of these projects more than the community driving that. Is there a way, for example, if a neighborhood has a green space, but we don't know how the city views that, what it's used for, what its potential is? Do you have existing studies and documents that could be available that sort of classify green spaces, or could we meet with individuals to talk about? So ironically, we're actually working towards that to do some sort of master study. But as I said, just under two acres, we have 290 parcels, 105 acres. So if you have a particular area, feel free to reach out to me afterwards and we can bring it up to the trust. I mean, really, so we take everything and staff, we give the trustees some options, and then they go out and say, okay, well, I think this is best suited. These three are all over, right? We have no one particular area they're concentrating on. And I think, again, as I said, they're smaller, obtainable to implement stuff, something. All right, you ready, Ken? I think this is an excellent model, and I appreciate the Green Space Trust Commission doing this. But it looks like it takes you about two years from the time you nominate a property until you get stuff on the ground. So with your 200 and some odd properties, that means we'll complete this program in 400 years. So is there a way to replicate the process with other parties, like neighborhood associations, homeowners associations, that kind of stuff, where they can propagate the model in a certain way to do it in their local areas? Is the commission trust willing to essentially authorize or sponsor or somehow sanction that kind of activity? I'm sure that's definitely something that we can take back to them. But I think that is why we're trying to do this model is we have these steps that have been refined. Like, this is not necessarily how it started. We have learned a lot over the last couple of projects. And you get that real-world experience where you can then govern and guide the other entities. And the second question I've got relates to what I would call abandoned properties. I think you know several examples where the property ownership is not known. And in terms of does the commission trust have a way to identify these properties and then process getting them either under government control or under some sort of conservation? Not at this time. Really, like you said, we have 290 parcels. So really, their concentration at this time is what we have and what we own. Let me add something to that, because we deal with that a lot. And the ownership is known. It's a ghost corporation or ghost individuals that even aren't alive anymore. I've got one right now that the three owners are deceased. They named some guy as the president, but in terms of the Secretary of State's office, they're non-existent. They're defunct. So when I presented this to the law department, they described this as a bar exam question. Because they don't know what to do. It's really hard. But we're running across them all the time. And not just where the corporation is defunct, but where there is no owner assigned. In other words, when you click on the parcel map, it says, no information available. And you ask PVA, and they say, maybe the original land grant still owns it, or something like that. So I know that's something planning and environmental services and water quality still struggle with. We don't really have a good answer for that right now. We're working through it. It happens. We had another one that came up the other day. It was supposed to have been a road and didn't end up being a road. So who actually owns it and what's going to happen to it? How is the ownership identified? Is it just owned by LPCG? These are platted ownership, parcel ownership, by the city of Lexington. Okay, so there's no way for us to know that it's actually water quality versus another LPCG entity? Not as a citizen. Not easily. The good thing is we work together really a lot with all of the interdepartments, parks, water quality, environmental services. And so we can help identify who maintains it. On these properties, no owner, why can't the city step in and just take that property? That's a law question. They can. That's the actual answer with the full will. Condemnation. They can. They can. Talk about it. You want to find out somebody that owns it? I mean, to say that we're slowing down or we can't do this, we can. But what does it cost per parcel? It costs like $20,000 per parcel to do the comparative judgment and do the surveys and all that kind of stuff. And then you've got to find somebody at 200 East Main Street willing to do that paperwork. And the maintenance of it. Because once we take ownership of it, we do try and keep it maintained. And the budget for that. It just sounds like an excuse not to do it. I don't think we should stand up and say, I'm going to get into this at the end of this program. Why can't we do something? Rather than, here's how we have to go about doing it. And I think that's a very good question. I don't think I'm the correct person to answer that. No, you're not. It's something that the group might want to look at in a longer term. Because I think there's a lot of these properties that are out there. And, you know, if nobody's owning them, they're probably not paying taxes either. So, you know, we should put these pieces into higher and better use. That's somebody's responsibility. It's not this group's. Here's part of the problem. The word condemnation is a negative connotation. And politicians don't like to use it if they don't have to. In fact, I can tell you about a public road project that took years and years and years and years just because the government wouldn't condemn little tiny pieces of property for the right reasons. It just wouldn't do it. So it's a perception and a political problem to utilize condemnation. There's a way to fix that too. No, I just think it's... You've got good projects, and ownership is standing in your way. I mean, that should be a big priority. And I think it's... I'm not saying... It's our responsibility, but it's somebody's. Somebody's right there to say, this is important. We need this piece of property. Here's a situation on ownership that can move. I do understand that. Absolutely. But I also... You have to remember, we have 290 parcels already that we're trying to see what we can do with. So we already have a large chunk to bite off. Any other questions? Well, thank you very much. Thank you for your time. That's the most heated I've seen this group get, so... I'd like to welcome up Kenton Senna and Nate Mills from the Lewis Honors College at UK. They're going to talk about Urban Riparian Reforestation for Stormwater Quality Improvement. Kenton and I go way back. We went up the elevator together. Way back. Thank you. Thank you. Well, I'm really thankful to be here. And thanks, Lindsay, for the invitation. And thanks, Amy, for the introduction. So, like Amy said, my name is Kenton Senna. I teach in the Honors College at UK. I know some folks in this room. Sorry, Kent, I'll speak up. So I teach in the Honors College at UK. My background is in reforestation of surface mines in eastern Kentucky. Since being in the Honors College, I've been delighted to work with Heather and Nathan to do work with reforested bluegrass sites around town. So we're really thankful for that. And I'm joined by Peyton. Peyton, do you want to introduce yourself? Yeah, I'm a Senior Environmental and Sustainability Studies major at UK. I'm in the Honors College as well. I grew up in a mining town, so all this water quality issues are super important to me. And I'm really honored that I'm on this project thanks to Dr. Kenton Senna. Well, I'm thankful for Peyton. All right, so we'll move right in. I'm going to kind of blitz through these early slides because you all already know this already, but we know that streams in urban areas can suffer from a lot of stresses and have some impairments. These can include shifts in hydrology, where the increase in impervious surface area in the city causes shifts and creates extra storm flow, which shifts hydrology, which can alter stream channels and so on. And we also have a lot of water quality issues in urban areas, stuff that runs off lawns and stuff that runs off parking lots and so on. All of that ends up in streams at some point. And this isn't an issue that's going away globally. The human population is becoming more urbanized over time, so we're going to have to be more and more creative about solving some of the environmental challenges of urban dwellings. Our kind of key question here, our entry point is reforestation as a potential solution to some of these challenges from a stream water perspective, reforestation and or other kinds of stream restoration. So as I mentioned, I've worked with Heather on reforested bluegrass sites. Several reforested bluegrass sites have streams that run through them. So my kind of initial entry point into this was, well, let's just monitor the water quality at these reforested bluegrass sites that have streams and see if that reforestation activity has had any kind of effect on the water quality. And our preliminary sampling from that, sampling that we started in 2020, suggested that we had nitrate reduction just as the stream was passing through reforested reach in several of those reforested bluegrass sites. So that was kind of a really interesting preliminary finding. We thought we would go back to see if we could get some more. So we went to KWRI, got some additional funding to continue that project and expand its scope a little bit. So let's not get ahead of myself here. We're, you know, again, kind of drawing on the report, leaning on the reforested bluegrass program, added a section of Wolf Front. And we also added a couple sites along Alumni Drive that are not reforested bluegrass sites, but they are stream restoration projects. Okay. So these are the, we ended up with seven sites. Several of these are reforested bluegrass sites, Masterson Station, Ribbon, a section of West Hickman, and other tributaries at Hickman Creek and Veterans Park. Those are all reforested bluegrass sites. These two Alumni Drive sites, as I just mentioned, are stream restoration projects that were done several years ago. And then Wolf Front, we just worked with a stretch of Wolf Front that Kevin recommended. They have been working with for a long time, doing various sorts of conservation activities. So the reforested bluegrass sites, all that was done on those sites was trees were planted in the riparian area. There wasn't any additional channel reconstruction, any of that kind of stuff. The Alumni Drive sites were natural channel design projects. They went in and dug up and did extensive stream restoration work. And the Wolf Front site has had many things along it, and Ken would be able to tell you much more detail about what's going on here. Just to kind of give you an idea of what we're looking at here, this is one of the Alumni Drive sites. This is Alumni Drive along the top of the slide here, University Drive over here in this corner, and Nicholasville Road over here, just to point you to the figure. So we collected a sample at the upstream section of this reach and the downstream end of this reach every other week since November. So we almost have a full year of water quality sampling from these sites at this point. Peyton is continuing that this semester. So our very basic sampling design is upstream-downstream sampling, take them to the lab, do the analyses, and then see if we're experiencing any kind of significant and consistent differences from upstream to downstream. And this is just the Masterson Station site as an example of the upstream sampling point and downstream. So kind of our key questions here are whether the restoration activity is associated with any kind of shifts in stream water quality. We're also curious about whether there are any measurable effects to macrovertebrate communities, so we're doing macrovertebrate sampling and assessing those. And then we're also, this summer we implemented some riparian buffer soil analysis as well, so looking at whether the reforested buffer area along the stream that was, for example, planted with trees as part of reforested bluegrass, whether that restoration activity has any kind of measurable effect on soil properties. Those are our kind of basic questions. Water quality, as I've mentioned, we've got these every other week, samples collected in pairs upstream and downstream across all seven sites, measured for lots of different things. The one thing that I want to talk about today is nitrate, because I think that's particularly of interest, and we talk about it a lot when we're thinking about water quality improvement. This table is really busy, I apologize for that. We've got the sites across the top, and then for each site we've got a mean difference. This is the mean difference across all of our sampling pairs between the upstream and downstream sampling, and then a p-value. That p-value is a significance of a pairwise t-test, a paired t-test between those upstream and downstream samples compared by date. I wanted to just highlight that nitrate was a constituent that actually decreased significantly in several of our sites. I think that was pretty interesting. These are in milligrams per liter for nitrate, so we had almost a 0.2 milligram per liter mean decrease in nitrate concentrations from upstream to downstream in the Alumni East site. Over half a milligram per liter decrease in the Alumni West site. The tributary to Hickman, we had 0.259 milligram per liter decrease. The Masterson Station site had a slight increase that was not statistically significant, and I'll talk more about that in just a second. Raven Park was also not significant, and West Hickman was also not significant. Wolf Run, Ken, you'll be excited to know, we also had a 0.17 milligram per liter significant decrease on average from upstream to downstream sampling. We're seeing in the nitrate, we're seeing a decrease in nitrate concentration as you move through that restoration or restored or reforested reach. I think that's really interesting, and I think from a scaled up basin perspective, I'm thinking about what you were saying about how can we take the really cool work that Dimitri was talking about and disseminate it and make this happen in other places. I suspect that we could do relatively small scale restoration work like tree planting in riparian areas, and that that would scale up the water quality impacts at the basin level in a pretty remarkable way. I'm excited about that possibility. This is just a quick example of what those upstream versus downstream concentrations look like over a sampling period. For Alumni West, Alumni East, you'll see the upstream is the orange line and the downstream is the blue line. You can see that fairly consistent separation where the upstream is pretty consistently higher than the downstream. Even though they're both varying over the course of the sampling period, we are having a significant and consistent decrease in the concentration. That brings us to macroinvertebrates. We divided each site into three sub-sites. Of course, we had the up and downstream as we were doing with the water quality, but we also added a midstream site to that for the macroinvertebrates. That's three leaf packs per sub-site per stream. We left these in the stream for several weeks at a time. Then we would go back, collect them, bring them to the lab, process them. That was just cleaning the leaves off, washing all the macroinvertebrates into a bucket, and then preserving those. Then we would go back and identify those by taxa. That was the closest taxa to species as we could get, which was generally order, sometimes sub-order for things like dragonflies and damselflies. Then we conducted data analyses on that. We got a diversity score using the Shannon Diversity Index. We had richness, evenness. Then we also calculated a pollution tolerance index score for each leaf pack itself. That's using the Stroud Water Research Center method, which basically weights taxa by sensitive, somewhat sensitive, or tolerant pollution levels. You add those together to get your final score. Of course, there were some minor issues with this. In the summertime, certain streams would dry up completely, so that left a few bags dry. More flashy flooding would push it up onto the banks where it would dry out. That definitely didn't impact every site, and it very rarely impacted more than a couple at each site. Some of the significant findings. Diversity was overall pretty low. Of course, that super low side of the diversity, that 0.0323, was from a dry bag. It's a little skewed in that way. Your average diversity for any expected ecosystem is about 1.5, so we're a little below that. However, with that being an average, there are sections of the world that have more normal lower diversity levels anyway. Kentucky is one of those. That's not a completely negative number. Our richness is 1 to 9. Our evenness is on the higher side, but of course that super high, 0.961, is almost always correlated with the super low diversity, which is expected. Our pollution tolerance varied from poor to fair, 1 to 13, so we didn't break into those upper echelons of sensitivity. But of course, over time, some of these sites are still very young. That could definitely change. However, we did notice that site variability diluted a lot of the findings. You can see in this very small table, we have the p-values per site and location. You can see that SOT just really diluted everything. We did it in Innova, trying to see if there were consistent patterns across all the sites. Essentially, the variability across sites was washing out any consistent patterns within sites. We ended up just doing within-site analysis. Here's the abundance of macroinvertebrates by SOT. Across the bottom, the blue is upper, and then as you move along the screen, we have middle and then down. We can see fairly consistently, of course, some of them are skewed. This one in particular was all dry. But for the sites that stayed completely wet, so Ribbon Park and then the two alumni sites on the far right, they also have this pretty consistent pattern of as you increase down the stream, you increase in abundance for macroinvertebrates, which is very encouraging. These are tolerance distributions, and we're looking particularly at somewhat sensitive versus tolerant species. There were some sensitive taxa found. However, they weren't at every site, so it's not a super good comparison to make. When they were present, they were in super low numbers. Instead of that, we're using somewhat sensitive versus tolerant taxa. We can see pretty consistently the blue is your somewhat sensitive, and then your orange is your tolerant. Somewhat sensitive taxa always dominate, except, of course, in some of your dry bags, which are, of course, skewed. These are just some minor correlations. These are not super strong correlations. Of course, over more sampling periods, longer times, and more frequent sampling, you might exemplify these better. Essentially, we're seeing correlations between the age of the site, so how long has the restoration been there, versus average diversity and average pollution tolerance index score. These are positively correlated. As those increase, so does the diversity and the pollution tolerance of the taxa found. We see the opposite with nitrate. As expected, the more nitrate you have in a stream, the less diversity you're going to have in your taxa. You had mentioned doing more sampling. We did one go of the microinvertebrate sampling, so we'd like to repeat that analysis a little bit more robustly, maybe next spring, and see if we have continued consistency in those results. The other thing, of course, that we added was soils. We're really looking at, does the riparian zone, does that new buffer zone, impact the soil health and communities, microbial communities within that soil at all, versus with the grass zones nearby. At each of these three subsites, upper, middle, and down, within about two months, at each of these three subsites, upper, middle, and down, within about two meters within the buffer zone, we would take a soil sample, and then we would step about two meters outside of it and take another. Of course, we looked at that for all your typical things, phosphorus, nitrates, calcium. We did infiltration analysis afterwards at each of those same sites that we took the soil samples. Basically, you stick a double ring infiltrometer in the ground, fill it with water, and over five minute intervals, you see how much water has infiltrated into the soil. We're also doing DNA extraction right now on those soil samples. We've extracted that DNA, diluted it when necessary. This is actually just some of the equipment we use. The computer will read your concentrations of DNA so you know if you need to dilute it before you run PCR, so polymerase chain reaction. We're just amplifying that DNA before we sequence it to see what attacks are present. That one specifically is a soil microbial community analysis. We're working with MoLab at UK, Planned Soil Sciences, to see if we can assess, to test for any differences in microbial communities between these mowed grass sites and adjacent reforested sites. Our significant findings with those soil samples, interestingly, was with zinc, which is important for plant health. It helps promote chlorophyll, which of course promotes plant growth in general. This is at the Hickman Tributary site. We see a net increase, almost doubling, of zinc between the grass to the buffers. That's definitely something to watch and see if it continues to increase because increased zinc at a certain concentration can begin to inhibit plant growth. Although it is important, it can be a negative thing, and it's something future samples should look at. Also with soils like with the microvertebrates and with the water quality, the variability across sites was pretty significant. We didn't really find a lot of significant differences between buffer and adjacent grass soils for the things that we were measuring, which I was actually surprised by. So quick maybe takeaway points. We are seeing some shifts in water quality as streams are moving through these restored areas. I think that that's positive. I think that's a great thread to keep pulling on. One kind of thing, I guess, X factor that remains to be determined is whether that's a concentration or dilution effect. If we're having additional water that's being added to the stream through that reach, we may be seeing a dilution effect, and that's why our concentration is going down. Or conversely, if we have water that's being taken out of the stream, that might be part of why we're seeing concentration at a couple of the sites where the nitrate concentration is increasing through that reach. So the next step, hopefully, if we can get the funding, is to deploy some water streamflow sensors at our sites to see if we're experiencing any shifts in streamflow through that reach as well. And then use that streamflow data paired with the concentration data to compute loads and give us a better idea of actual nitrate uptake or addition through the reach. And then more macroinvertebrate community sampling. Again, I just had some students in my office yesterday who were interested in doing some research, and hopefully we'll be able to get them out in the field to do more macroinvertebrate stuff in the spring. And like Peyton said, he's working on the microbial analysis right now, and hopefully we'll have those samples off to sequencing in the next couple weeks and have some idea fairly soon about soil microbial diversity between the grass sites and adjacent buffer sites. Hopefully we have time for questions. We've been talking for a long time, so questions? So you had mentioned that you had some macros that were pollutant tolerant and in a high abundance. Have you guys gone back and looked at what your drainage area is for the different sites, thinking that you may have more significant pollutant runoff potential upstream in some areas versus others? Just to kind of look at, especially if you do additional macroinvertebrates correlation. That's a good question. We have not. We did add reach length and restored buffer area in our most recent data pool, but I think adding drainage area is a great idea. We'll make a note of that. Can you go back to your table of results that included the infiltration data, please? Yeah, if I can. If I can. I think it was two slides back. One slide back. Thanks. There, that one. That is for one site. This is for one site. Could you explain to me what those numbers mean? Yeah, so this is the mean infiltration rate in the buffer. Remind me the units. That is milliliters of water. That's per five minute interval. Alright, and then what's the value of 22.5? It's the mean difference between the buffer and the grass. And what's the units? Sorry? Same units. Okay. Do you think you can translate that to gallons per hour or anything along that line or cubic feet? Yeah, I don't see a lot of that. But you are showing a difference. So it's not statistically significant. That p-value is pretty high. Yeah, which I was kind of surprised by. I figured we would see more increased infiltration in the buffer sites. We had a low sample size for this. We did three pairs of soil samples per site. So I think maybe doing a more robust soils analysis. Again, with the grant that you were writing that we were on, we might try to up the scale or the robustness of this particular analysis and see how that affects things. I noticed you didn't have total phosphorus or SRP or anything like that in your analysis. Is there a reason for that? For water quality? Yeah. Our samples are analyzed by Millie at the Department of Forestry for free. And she doesn't do phosphorus analysis. Seems like a good reason. Melissa, I saw your hand up. Just a quick question. Especially with the macroinvertebrates, I was curious about if there were other PMPs used besides just tree plantings that might help enhance the macroinvertebrate community that reduce scouring, slow moderation. Especially probably in Wolf Run, there's something besides just tree planting. Right. Well, your alumni drive site, they did a total... Basically, they redid the stream bed. Yeah. So they would improve the habitat. But I noticed you were doing leaf packs, which tends to favor your shredders as opposed to your more predatory betum macroinvertebrates. So I don't know if that... I use leaf packs in larger bodies of water in lakes. And for streams, we use the traffic-kick method or use riffle sampling. Yeah. I think we'll add some additional sampling methods in the spring, depending if we can actually do that. But yeah, so the reports of the grass sites, Heather, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the only stuff that was done there was tree planting. Okay. So no other... No other stream channel. Right. Yeah. Except for Wolf Stream, which is not... Not one of ours. Yeah. That we sampled here. Yeah. Great question. Yeah, you had a question. When you did the infiltration studies, did you do any kind of census of plant types and where you took the soil samples in the buffer to differentiate different effects of trees versus shrubs and forbs and things like that? Yeah, that's a good question. So for all of the reforested bluegrass sites, it was a well-treed buffer area. The alumni drive sites are much more recent in the trees there. well-grown. So those would have been like a tall grass kind of shrub like community. The adjacent grass site was mowed for all of all of the sites. It was just like mowed lawn. So I think it's fairly typical of a mowed lawn. It would be really interesting, those of us who do these restoration projects, we have a wide variety of plants to choose from. I think that would be a great a great follow-up question, you know. And again, we just did like three pairs of the infiltration analysis and soil analysis on the sites, but a more like stratified sampling approach where we're like maybe doing infiltration right next to a tree, a little bit further away from a tree, or so on. I think that could be a great idea. So have you looked at non-restored sites? Just like a comparison so you can, well, measure the benefit. Our thought with that was the upstream-downstream comparison. Right. But comparing a similar length upstream that hasn't been restored. That's a good idea. We might have another station even further upstream. Right, that's a great idea. Yeah, we haven't done that. We do have data, you know, from other work that the city has done, and so I'm working with Lindsay and others to try to think about how we can leverage those data for context. Other questions? So I'm thrilled because Bluegrass Green Source has been around for 21 years, and for each of our 21 years we've worked closely with Reforest the Bluegrass, and so I'm excited to have data that supports, at least is moving towards supporting the usefulness of Reforest the Bluegrass. So next, Heather Wilson is coming up. She's going to talk about using trees and stormwater basins to increase urban tree canopy. Hello you all. I'm Heather Wilson. I am with the Division of Environmental Services, and I'm at Urban Forestry. I know a lot of your faces, but there's also a lot of faces I've never met. So feel free to stop me through this. If you have questions, you don't have to wait till the end. If it, you know, if it dawns on you I'm going through. I am a tree nerd. I am not well-versed in water. So, so hope, I mean, they're tied together. We all know that, but so, so please just let me kind of rant on trees for a little bit, and then we can certainly go from there. But just to cover real quick what we'll walk through today while we're talking about our urban forest, we're talking about, I'm going to talk about the importance of trees. I'm sure most of you know this. I'm sure most of you have talked about this in one aspect or another at some point. And I'm also going to talk a little bit about their vital role in helping to increase our urban tree canopy, and how we can ideally use our stormwater basins to help with that. I do also tend to talk really fast, so if anyone needs me to slow down, just raise your hand. I'll cover the tree basics, like I said, the benefits of trees. Ideally, most of you have probably talked about the benefits of trees in some aspect or another, but I'm hoping to be able to maybe bring up some things you haven't thought about before. A little bit of biology. You didn't know you were going to have a biology lesson today, but we'll go real quick, because I think it's really important, because you have to understand that to understand how trees move through, or water moves through trees. That's really important for understanding trees in the water cycle. I'll talk about our urban tree canopy, our canopy assessment that we did back in 2012 really quick, and then just a really quick update on our updated canopy assessment, and a little bit of our basins, and how we can use those trees in there. But first, we have a pop quiz. So just like I said, I'm sure you all have talked a lot about tree benefits, and what those are for the community, but I want to know what you all, like what comes to mind when you think about the benefits that trees give us. And we can raise hands, or I'll call on the people that I know. Cooling. Cooling, right? Okay, yeah. Demetria. For transpiration. Okay, Ken. Air filter. Doug. Shades my garden too much. That's not a benefit for your garden. It is for your soil. Charlie. You only wanted benefits, because I was going to say clogging storm surge. We're only talking about the benefits. Okay, well so, so if you guys have listened to the things you've just said, Kenton, what's yours? That comes to mind. Okay, so mostly what we've just thought about, talked about, is the environmental benefits, right? Like, because that's the world that we're all in, and that's what we think about. But one of the big things about trees, and one of the many big things about trees, is that trees are also linked to having very strong social well-being and public health benefits. And those are really important things when we think about our communities moving forward in the world. They've been shown to reduce pollution. Yes, that's environmental, but it's also a human health factor. They've been shown to help people increase both their physical and mental health. You have tree-lined areas, particularly in the center. People are going to go out and walk in those shaded areas, rather than stay in their homes where it's nice and cold. They do work to strengthen community ties. So you've got that in the form of tree plantings. You've got that in the form of cleanup days. You've got that in the form of gatherings and parks under the shade of trees that will bring families and friends and neighbors together. You've also got that as a tie to history. And so not only just like your family member, maybe, that you've got planted in a tree near them, but also historical trees that have been there for hundreds of years, through lots of the development of our countries. They've been shown to decrease aggression. You can read through most of this. But if you all haven't already thought about these, or read about these before, there's a lot of research out there that supports this. I went into at the top. I've got some references at the end, if you guys are interested. But there's a lot of research out there that shows how trees really impact us on our day-to-day, not just environmentally. They have lots of economic benefits. They've been shown to increase shopping in downtown areas. If you have a tree-lined street, there's been studies that have asked neighbors, as well as businesses, to look at pictures and rate them on a scale of one to three, like what's your likelihood of shopping in this kind of area, and how much time will you spend there. And they always show up that tree-lined areas are going to have people stay longer. They're going to have happier employees. They're going to have people spending more money. There's even research that suggests that people are willing to spend more money for the same product in a tree-lined area versus an untree-lined area. Part of that may be that the people are in the tree-lined area, and they'd rather just go ahead and buy the product while they're there, rather than go to the other place. I don't know. I don't look far enough into that. But there's a lot of research out there that supports all of that. And, of course, the environmental benefits. Those are things we all know, things you guys talked about just a minute ago. Removing pollutants from both our air and our water, reducing storm water runoff, retaining soil on stream banks is really important, cooling our waterways for all the reasons that Kenton was just talking about, the micro and macro invertebrates, reduction of our heat islands within our cities, which is really important as we grow and we become more populated and we have more impervious surfaces. So trees are really beneficial for us in more than just the environmental way. Basics on the tree biology. Many of you probably know this. I'm not going to go through this whole diagram. I'm just going to pick out the portions of a tree that I think are really important, that I really want to kind of drive home for people that may not work with trees or may do and may not really remember all that biology because I'm sure it's been a long time ago. But the bark of the tree, the part of the tree that we always see and we understand, is variable tree to tree. It's based off the species. And so you can think of a beech tree. They have a really thin bark. And then you can think of a pine or an oak and they have a rather thick bark. The job of the bark is to protect the insides of that tree. And so the insides of that tree are like the insides of us. You know, it's all of their inner workings. Everything that keeps them alive is inside of that bark. So I always think of the bark as like our skin. You cut your skin, we heal. They don't really heal. They'll just kind of pose over it and try to amend themselves. Some trees are really good at that. Some trees are really horrible at that. And so it really depends on how well you take care of that tree in your landscape as to how much benefit that tree is going to provide you for how long. Just inside the bark, and again that bark depth can vary species to species, is the cambium. The cambium is where all the living tissues of the cell are created. All the divisions happen there. They either come outside to the bark or they create the inside pieces of the tree. And so that cambium layer is really never any more than maybe two centimeters thick. It's tiny. So anytime you hurt the outside of that tree, you're basically digging right into that cambium layer, which then affects the ability for that tree to grow healthy and keep rot from happening inside. Inside the cambium layer is the phloem. Who thinks they know what the phloem does? Because I would always get them confused. Phloem up. Phloem down. Down. Phloem comes down. It brings the food that is being created in the leaves down to the tree. That's right. So phloem, it comes down. The xylem is what takes the water and the nutrients up out of the soil. So those are the really important pieces of a tree. You know, you also have your heartwood, which is carbohydrate storage and structure for the tree. And then your sapwood, which is like the wood that's not quite the new growing material anymore, but it's also not the storage pieces of the tree anymore. It's kind of this in-between. And the other really important piece to talk about is roots. And so I think we all know about roots. We talk about roots all the time. Roots of a tree, given the right situations and plenty of space to grow, will grow up to two times the spread of the canopy of a tree. The roots have multiple functions. One of the biggest ones, the biggest, one of the biggest ones for the big roots that we're all familiar with, is to anchor that tree in the ground and spread support. Because it has to basically match what's above the tree to balance all of that weight that's up there. And trees, while they're solid, they bend. They bend for the sun, they bend in the wind, and they have to. Otherwise they would simply just break. So the roots have to be anchored into the soil well enough to keep that tree from falling over or for snapping. The other roots that I'm going to talk about is what we consider feeder roots. And the feeder roots tend to be in that top 6 to 12 inches of soil. It's also throughout the soil. The feeder roots are what bring the water and the minerals up into the tree. They're also where the mycorrhizae attach to the tree, which helps expand the ability of the tree to access water and other minerals that are maybe further out to the tree. They work in symbiosis. And so when we work in areas with trees, we have to make sure that we're leaving them enough soil volume to do the anchoring, as well as to bring up all the water and all the minerals that they need to support the growth of themselves. Because just like us, they cannot survive without water. They are living entities. I know it's really hard to see that sometimes, because they're just sitting there in the landscape. But every piece of them is alive and functions very similar to how we function. So that's why we always talk about making sure to not cut the inside of the drip line of a tree. Sometimes it has to happen. We have to be flexible in urban areas, because sometimes it's worth it to try to keep the tree and maybe cut it a little bit further, because it's better to try and then have to maybe mitigate it later. But just making sure that we don't disturb the surface there, so that all those scooter roots can do the job of bringing the water up into the tree. Okay, that was biology. Real quick about how water moves through the trees, and you probably all know that. One of the big reasons that trees are important in rainfall and stormwater reduction is because as that rain hits the top of those trees, first it hits the leaves when it's in full leaf. Then it has to move through that leaf surface, down the petioles, down the stem, and then the branches, and then down the stem. And so that slows that flow of water from impacting the ground heavy. And so what that does is that lets that water infiltrate through the ground, rather than just run off as soon as it hits. The bigger a canopy a tree has, the more of the ability it has to slow down that water. It's also the first line of defense of removing the pollutants from the rain and from the water from hitting our soils and getting into our water. Because as it slows down, the tree absorbs those, and it removes that from actually entering into our systems. You know, it comes through a tree and then it hits any understory plants, which may be there as well. Then ideally, in a great situation, it hits that duff layer where the leaves have been able to sit there and decompose and mulch. And then it eventually gets into our soil and can infiltrate into our waterways in a much more controlled manner. Just a little bit more about that. You know, all of that is dependent on a lot of different factors. One of them being the tree species itself, the spread of that canopy, the size of those leaves, the stem surface area. So you know, you've got twigs that are going to slow it down a little bit, but you've got bigger branches that will slow it down a little bit more. If you have tons of twigs, that'll also help to slow that down. There's some information out there called what's surface saturation storage capacity, which is a big player in how quickly rain gets to the ground, gets through that canopy and down the stem. Always kind of related to like the surface area of a road or when you're washing your hair. It takes a minute for your hair to actually get wet all the way through. So you've got that initial hit to the tree, and so it takes a minute for the branches to start to be able to kind of absorb that and slow down. And then once you get that capacity rate, it slows it down more. Differences, of course, when leaf on versus leaf off, so summer or winter. You've got your transpiration rates, which also vary by tree. Rainfall intensity is a big one. It's shown what some of the research is suggesting, or probably a lot of it is suggesting, that tree canopy does a better job reducing the amount of pollutants that hit our waterway versus the amount of water that hits our waterway. And so with that, one of the big, I guess, takeaways from that is that when you have a lighter rainfall event, maybe longer but lighter, you're going to impact the reduction greater than if you have one of those really heavy rainfalls. It hits really fast, and you don't get a chance to get to that saturation storage point. It just hits the ground pretty quickly, and it still runs right through the tree. And then, of course, intensity, duration, and time of year are all variables in how well your trees are functioning in reducing all the stormwater effects. Just as an example of how much a tree can take up in water, I wanted to, I don't know if anyone's ever worked with the iTree suite of tools. It's really neat. You can put in your home address and put in your trees and find out how much your trees are giving back to you in all kinds of ecosystem services. But I just did one of my trees in my backyard. I've got this beautiful overcup oak in my backyard, and it's pretty large right now. And annually, at this point, it absorbs about 6,400 gallons of water every year. It's a lot of water that's coming out of our system before it even gets into our waterways. That's just one of my trees. Okay, and so I just, you know, briefly was going to go through our Lexington Urban Tree Canopy. So we've done two tree canopy analyses. The first one was initiated in 2012. We just initiated another one this past spring. The goals of that was really so that Lexington had an idea of what the coverage of our trees in our community accounted for, what those ecosystem services were, where they are, where they need to be planted, and to help try to prioritize how we decide where to plant these trees. It was a way to connect all these people, all of us that are working throughout the community, in trees or in water or in environmental services, in actionable ways to put ecosystem services to work for us. In 2012, the Dave Resource Group was hired to do our analyses. That was a long time ago. Now that was 10 years. Technology has advanced quite a long way since then. So it took them a little bit of time. I think we had our first report in 2013, and then they updated again in 2015 with some updated imagery. And so we got that result in 2015. At the time, they said that we had about 25% tree canopy cover. That data report card from that year, we asked them to give us some report cards, you know, both for the city as well as for each individual council district, because we thought it'd be really interesting to see how the council members would take that information and how they might be able to use it within their districts. At the time, Lexington was given a C- as our overall grade. It's kind of probably pretty hard to see these down there, but these are... I can't read it either. I can't read it right now either, but it tells you like what our overall canopy is, you know, citywide. But then it has ecosystem services in there, the amount of stormwater we're taking up, how it's equitably distributed, and so that's what the different grades are. And I have all this, if anyone is interested or hasn't already seen it, I can share it. This past spring, we redid it. We went with a different group this year. This year, we employed Planet Geo. They've been around not as long as Davey, but they are really very technologically probably more in tune with the data that we're asking for and extracting that and using that in a sense for us. Again, the imagery that they are able to use is updated versus the 2012 data, and so our results are a little bit weird to talk about sometimes. And we really, like we just got this the other day, so I haven't went through it thoroughly, but they have now said that our canopy is 23%, but we've had a 5% increase. And so how they related that was that the imagery that the previous group had access to wasn't as robust and wasn't able to really leave out some areas that were honestly not plantable. And for example, Red Mile Racetrack was in the old data as a plantable space, and we all know we can't plant in Red Mile Racetrack because it's a racetrack and use it for everything else. So things like that were picked up before that we were able to make sure were left out this time. And so while the actual number is lower, we've actually had an increase. I think there's a lot of different reasons for that. Some of that is development. We are changing from a lot of open field to communities, and part of that community development includes the planting of trees. And so where there was once open grassland, there are now trees. Another piece of that is that trees that were too small to be captured in the earlier data are now have 10 years of growth on them, and so they are captured in today's data. And I believe PlanetGeo was able to incorporate trees of a smaller canopy size into this data than they had been initially able to do so in the 2012 data just because of the technology abilities. I will say that every district grew in canopy coverage aside from District 1. Again, we haven't really had a lot of time to start going through and really trying to figure it out, but one of the things that we'll be able to use this data to help us do is figure out where we need to put trees. And that's where we come to our storm basins, because storm basins are all over Lexington, and Lizzie helped me out and gave me this great map. There are apparently 1,233 storm basins throughout Lexington. Just a little backdrop real quick. Part of our stabilization budget funds last year provided up 1.5 million toward the creation of increasing our tree canopy throughout Lexington, and part of that created a group called the Tree Ad Hoc Committee. It's spearheaded by our Division of Environmental Services and Council Member Hannah LaGrie and a lot of community members. And so in that, as part of our discussion, we started looking at storm basins that could be retrofitted to be plantable for trees. And so Jennifer was able to pull that data, I'm sure with the help of... thank you. And so of those 1,200 storm basins, about 97 of them are actually retrofittable to have tree plantings put into them. What that basically comes out to is 122 acres of basins that are plantable. But why with trees? Well, because based off two of our urban tree canopy data, one of the things we asked for Planet Geo to give us is how trees are distributed equitably throughout Lexington. And since our storm basins are all over Lexington, this seems like a pretty equitable way to think about where to put trees. Because many of the areas where our storm basins are exist in parts of town that, like I said, don't have that, because many of them are located in areas that have high areas of impervious surfaces. And so just to look at our map of the storm basins in connection with one of the maps that Planet Geo gave us, you know, in Council District, where you can see... so the darker green of the map over here where we have our highest tree canopies. The lower green shows up as they get lower. And so maybe I'm not... I haven't done the numbers, but from just initially looking at it, it looks like we have a pretty high concentration of storm basins and areas of town that have lower tree canopy coverage. We also show that, you know, this is our different watersheds. It also seems that down here, I mean, there's a number... there's a high concentration which maybe is part of that top branch watershed, but it seems like the majority of our basins are spread out through these other community... the other districts or watersheds throughout Lexington that are lower in our tree canopy coverage. And again, this is kind of probably hard to see too, but it does show where impervious surfaces are. This map shows tree coverage over impervious surfaces, over pervious surfaces, where there's water, where there is no coverage. And Council District 1 is up here, and it's rather gray, if you can see in the image, and it correlates up here with a lot of area that could be used to provide tree canopy coverage to some of these areas of Lexington that are not currently covered. Some of the challenges with that is that not all of the basins obviously are owned by us. A lot of them are private property, and so being able to connect with people that have those basins and encouraging them to do plantings and connecting with stewards throughout the community to help with those plantings would be a really great way to encourage that tree planting to happen. Public property, we have trees at our nursery that we can supply the trees for, and then for private properties, potentially through our Tree Ad Hoc Committee, and this is all of our conversations, is figuring out ways that we can fund nonprofits and other groups to apply for incentive grants to plant within those water quality areas. Just to kind of go back toward reforested bluegrass and what Kenton had mentioned, reforested bluegrass started as a way to really help to fix our waterways. It was a way to help reduce stormwater runoff as well as to reduce the pollutants. 1999 was the first tree planting, and I think in that early years about 10,000 tree seedlings were planted each year, all volunteer help. The first couple years I think they lasted, you know, over the course of a month. There were a couple weekends whenever the handful of volunteers got out there. We've grown from that now where we have, you know, over five to seven thousand tree seedlings that we try to plant each year, but we always have a volunteer base of about three to six hundred people, at least, depending on what pond weather. So that's a really good example of the ways that we can use these open lands to put trees into the ground and to encourage the public to learn about water and learn about trees and to help our water quality and quantity throughout. And to help with flooding and to help with all of those other environmental problems and pollutants from getting into our streams. I think it's a really great way to, like Kenton mentioned, we started some research in those sites, but I think that the water basins would be a really great way to broaden that research, just because I would imagine that you have data of the infiltration rates and of the water that currently moves through those systems. If you have that data, and we've had it for a number of years now, and we start planting trees in those and installing permanent monitoring sites to figure out what that infiltration rate is, how those pollutants change, how the rate changes, how the observation rates are taken up in those basins going forward, I think we could do a really great job changing both our tree canopy as well as our water quality and quantity problems throughout Lexington. I think that's all I've got. There won't go to questions. Do you have any questions? Yes. I live in that Ashton Park area where we've got a lot of trees, at least for now. But because of the age of the trees, most of them, I'm going to say a lot of them, are well over 100 years old, it seems like this year, maybe a year before, that a week doesn't go by that there's not a tree company in there taking these big trees down. Do you have a program of education that these neighborhood associations can use to talk to their homeowners in those areas? There may be another way, a better way, maybe trimming them instead of cutting them down. Some of them are diseased and need to be cut down, but I just think we can't lose sawdust. This is a heavily forested area. We're losing that tree canopy a little every year, I mean more than a little. How do you deal with that? So we don't have an established program where we go and actively go out and speak. I know that I and others within our group will go out to neighborhood associations or homeowner associations when we've been asked to, and we'll talk at gatherings about the importance of retaining those older trees within our system and that there are other options for keeping them. It would be wonderful to start that kind of a program, but right now the way we deal with it is just by word of mouth and by being told this is happening and counting on those of us that are out in the community that do know that there are other options to be able to talk to their neighbors. I think one of the challenges with that, well there's many challenges with talking to other people about trees, because I'm sure you all have figured out, trees are very controversial, unfortunately, because all they want to do is grow. All they want to do is live, and so they didn't mean to do that, but some people really love trees, and some people really hate trees, and some people just don't understand why they hate trees. I think they just don't understand that just because a tree is big, it's not hazardous. Just because a tree is hollow, it's not hazardous. Just because a tree is dropping acorns, it doesn't mean it's bad. People get really afraid, and it just all goes back to just not really understanding the biology of a tree, the strength of a tree, the root system of a tree, and I think a lot goes back to, unfortunately, we get billed for keeping some of the infrastructure around our houses intact, like sidewalks. It is on us as the homeowner, and so a lot of times trees will keep sidewalks because the soil under those sidewalks is compact. The roots can't go down, so they can only go up in the sidewalks there, and so the sidewalk gets heaped. Figuring out ways to mitigate that, to offer alternatives to fixing those sidewalks, I think would be a big step forward. A lot of education goes into it. I think one of the big takeaways from trees that people don't get is that in the beginning, trees don't give us back as much as trees do when they are older. For the first 10 or so years of life, trees are more of a sink, and so they really take more to get growing, so they're not giving back quite as much. Once they hit about 10, 15 years, they start being able to really exponentially grow in the resources that they both take in as well as give out. I think a lot of that is people and developers don't understand that just because you are putting in 20 little trees, it's not okay to take out that big tree that was existing there because they don't equal, and they won't equal for a really, really, really long time. A lot of it is just education. I'm always happy to go and talk to neighborhood associations. There's one thing I feel like I know, it's trees. Hopefully, I feel like I can talk to people in a way that helps them to understand that. If you know of anyone that wants to have someone who can go talk, or if you have anything, I'm always open. You can always reach out to us at Environmental Services. Insurance companies are getting into this now that they're requiring some homeowners if they've got trees too close to their house to take them down. I haven't heard that. I feel like that probably stems from the fires. It stems from fire fear. Well, we can't leave damage to the house through storms. Right. Which is, they don't live in bubbles. We have to be able to coexist, and damages are going to happen. It's our level of tolerance for what those damages are. Insurance is requiring them to take them down? Yes. Well, yes. Or pay a higher rate. Or pay a higher rate. Encouraging them. So, they need some education. Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, and so that's the trick, right? That's the tricky thing. Because trees are everywhere. Everyone feels like they understand trees. Everyone knows they can plant a tree. But not everyone knows a tree. Hey, Heather. Gabe Kinsey. Power Quality. I guess this idea, I think, is controversial from a maintenance perspective. You know, we require maintenance. We have maintenance requirements in the basin. Really, the design of the basin requires water to flow in and out of this thing. I see lots of leaves already in basins and limbs in basins. That's a maintenance issue. So, I'm just thinking it's maybe counterintuitive for us to provide more of a maintenance issue to our basins. Has that been considered? Has that been discussed? Is there any data out there that you guys would consider? It's definitely considered. It's definitely discussed. Maintenance is probably, in our division, one of the hardest things to figure out. You know, like your question earlier about why can't you just go take over those lots? Because we don't have a way to maintain them. That's why it's not a good idea to take over new lots before we can figure out what to do with the existing lots. So, with the basins, I'm sure there's data out there. I haven't looked into it yet. We're just in the beginning stages of talking about what this might look like. And I'm sure part of that discussion would be figuring out what would make maintenance the easiest for that and how that might need to be adjusted. You know, how those designs are probably, in the long term, in the big picture, going to have to be adjusted. Because if there's one thing that's been shown that will help us with our climatic changes, it's trees. Trees are a vital source for our whole water transpiration and ecology environment. They like the oceans. If you think about, and just me being a tree nerd is very basic and it might not be founded at all. But I think that our world is basically developed to have water, trees, and mountains, and rocks, and snow. Because, if you think about it, if you were to just leave a field go, yes, you'd have your grasses come in. Then you'd have your weeds come in. And if we didn't have invasive plants, then you'd start having your woody plants come in. And so the ultimate, age is not the word I'm looking for, but the ultimate form of our environment is woody. It's trees. That is basically the end of that cycle of restoration and regeneration. And so we have to design with trees in mind. We have to bring them back into our world to encourage those systems to repair themselves. And to better our water cycle. I think you might have some examples that you can look at. For example, the Wellington Park basin that's been forested. I think that was a reforested site. That was an old field that became a reforested site and then became the park. And then became a retention basin. Speaking of a retention basin. Oh yes, the other part. We have another retention basin. I know that was forested around 2004, which is in the Horstman Lane area with pine trees in it. And then we planted some trees in the Good Foods Co-op, or the basin behind the Good Foods Co-op in one area. So I would think we could look at some of the maintenance issues on that. The other question that I have, and this is unique that engineers would have to answer, is how does this affect the discharge rates, flow rates, and the time to concentration impacts in terms of how these basins are seated in the larger watershed. I think you guys do a great job. I'm looking at Charlie's eyes. But you guys do analysis in terms of the discharge from a particular basin and have it adjusted so that it doesn't create some downstream impact. And in terms of studying these things, how many have you done under this new program? How many have you replanted? Basins? Yes. We haven't started replanting basins yet. Oh, you haven't started. Right. But Wellington Way, Horstman Lane, so we have some examples. But I think we could look at maintenance of those sites and see what kind of cost impact. I'm of the opinion it's a win-win because you don't have to pay a contractor to go in there and mow every two weeks. You just have to pay a contractor to go in there every once a season and remove loads and that kind of stuff. And I think the other piece of that, too. Oh, Charlie, go ahead. I was going to say, just to make to both of your points, because they're both valid in my mind, it's stuff that gets into the basin, whether it's leaves, grit, grocery carts, all the stuff that ends up from urban presence. Building these things or modifying them in such ways that you're intentional about how you're going to get in and how you're going to get out. Because the ones you mentioned, yeah, those were easy ones to root for. It's the low-end fruit. Gabe and I think about ones like Burkewood that you can't even get in there at all to get a cement block out of there. And so that's why some were probably not eligible for replanting. But I think, too, along those lines, Ken, that I meant to mention, too, when we think about designing basins, excuse me for my ignorance on this, but the way that I have experienced the design of basins is that the amount of water infiltration that's needed and necessary for the outflow and for retention is calculated. And then it's calculated the amount of soil that has to be removed and the trees that have to be removed and everything else that has to be removed to get this space. In that, however, and this is where I could be completely wrong, I feel like what's missing is that calculation of the water that's already being taken out of those systems by the trees that currently exist in those systems. And I'll use Southland Park as an example. Because there were very large bald cypress in the middle of what's been altered now. But there were some very large bald cypress in the water-loving trees within what has now been created as the basin of that park, which is needed for that area that floods heavily. But I just wonder, and I know the calculations are out there. I think one of the challenges is that these are living beings, and so calculations are a little bit different than being able to work with something that is man-made and structured. But are the calculations made and incorporated into the bigger picture calculations of how much water is already moving through that system with the trees that exist there? And so that's there. The data is there. There's a ton of research. It's a volume thing, really, in and out. Infiltration is incidental. But it's mostly just keeping volumes and flow rates pre- and post-construction the same. Based on peak flow. And so peak flow changes things because it impacts the uptake ability of those trees. Right. But so are those calculations added into that, trying to keep it at the same rate as the afterward, what those trees are taking out? Because you're not separating that amount out in the initial calculations. Infiltration? Well, absorption. Vegetation impacts. I would argue they were considered. But since they're calculating for the 1% chance storm, i.e. the 100-year storm, the volumes at that level are just so that we lost the tree contributions down in a small part of that. Where the stormwater basin design calculations generally, I think you do, what, 25-year and 100-year? There's a whole list of them. And so what they are not looking at are how the other storm events that aren't big enough to qualify for those flood control goals are impacted by your impact. So I think there's a whole class of storm events that are just not included in that analysis and would benefit from that. That's the quantity part. You've also got the water quality volume and runoff reduction part in new development, where those kind of things are looked at. Where's the water being discharged? Are you changing it from a forest to a grass? That's captured. That's that 90th percentile storm that developers have to account for as far as runoff reduction and water quality volume. Did that answer that part of the question? I think it kind of did. Yes. Now it's looked at. I mean, you know, more than 20 years ago it wasn't. The fact is development isn't being built on a lot of trees. We're taking our trees, trees around the way of development. Some of the areas that appear to be heavily wooded, it's stuff that's come up in the last 15 years or whatever. It's bare trees, it's rub, it's... Actually, we're not removing a whole lot of our trees. Some, though, we're protecting them as well. We are doing a better job of protecting them. I can't tell you we are. Oh, yeah, that's what I said. Yeah, we are. We continue to do this. Yeah. So I can't speak to engineering the volume and stuff, but as far as the maintenance concerns, that is a valid question. And when we had planted in Eureka Springs, some of the things we looked at is what not to plant, like willows that are very messy or trees that potentially have acorns that, you know, that flow down or what is it, coffee trees with the pods, that kind of thing. So I think as we go through this and look at this potential, that's something I'm not a tree person. That's what Heather is. She looks at me for the water side of it, is to look at the species that would be approved for a lower maintenance for those detention areas so you don't have as much of a clogging concern. But, Gabe, yes, maintenance is always one of the top. You have to go maintain it or else it's not a wasted effort, but it makes the challenges really hard later. Yes. One more item on the maintenance piece. I think what we've seen through the years in doing inspections of detention basins is where there are trees in the basin, the basin seems to be able to handle the leaves that fall and attenuate those. And as long as you keep the concrete channel clear of grass clippings and tree leaves, it usually functions pretty well. And the times where we've seen real maintenance issues are when property owners have intentionally taken their grass clippings from their front yard and dumped them in the backyard in their detention basin, or they've raked all the leaves from their front yard and taken them and put them in the detention basin. So it's that extra load that causes the maintenance issues and not just what's in the basin itself. And grit. And like I said, the other thing too, we have some basins that we shuffle grit out of on a regular basis and it just comes off the street. It's kind of a byproduct of the streets we live in someplace. Thank you very much, Chair. Well, I think that was wonderful, and I think maybe it could go to Lindsay for having all three speakers be totally connected and sort of wrap that around green spaces and things. So I think that that's really great. So as Chair, I do nothing but show up and Lindsay does nothing. And having said that, I'm going to turn it back over to Lindsay, who's going to talk about our Watershed at Large seats and new topics as well. Thanks, Amy. Okay, well, thank you, presenters. That was awesome. Great discussion. Hopefully we can keep those going in the coming months. I just want to bring up two of our Watershed at Large seats have expired, and so I know the last meeting, Eileen and Jim, you both mentioned that you'd be willing to stay on if needed, but I also wanted before we go. Yes, Ken. Well, I was going to move that we accept the nominations by acclamation. Okay. I need a second. Yes. Jennifer has seconded. So Ken has made a motion and Jennifer has seconded. All in favor? Aye. All right. Welcome back, Jim and Eileen. Three more years. You're stuck with them. This really is it. Just a couple things as far as potential topics for our next meetings and a reminder of when that is. I think December 2nd is our last meeting of the year, and so the hope is that we can have an update on West Hickman, and we don't know. We're still working on it. So that's the future, if not December, and the future is getting an update on the West Hickman Watershed Management Plan, and then in March of next year, we'll have a presentation on UK's PFAS sampling that they've been working on, and so Tiffany Messer has been working on that over at UK, so we're really interested to see. They're still waiting on some more results, and so we're giving them some more time, but that will be a really interesting presentation as well. I would like to open the floor for other potential topics for our coming meetings. Because our illustrious planning department is forcing this infield concept maybe on us, the thing I've noticed, we've had a lot of flooding in my neighborhood as a result of these expanded garages and impervious spaces. We've got requirements on what this type of infield, that they need to meet, but obviously something is not working, and I've talked to some of the other, my council person is clueless, but others have had complaints from their constituents about the same thing, that we're not, these expanded garages and areas aren't controlling their runoff, and to me, it seems like there's a breakdown. I keep hearing that code enforcement is coming out to look at this, and they're telling people there's nothing we can do. Well, that's not, shouldn't be the case. I don't think we should ever tell our citizens that we can certainly look at it, and certainly we've got to improve what we've got, but what we've got now, there's a breakdown. It seems to be somewhere in our approval process to get this work done, and it's only going to get worse. This infield concept gets expanded, and there's other aspects of that that I think are going to work too, but that's at another time, but I just think it would be good to drop back. We spent time on this size of lots and what you've got to do, just a couple of years ago, and there are requirements of it. I don't think engineering is, I don't think the information is getting to engineering that they can help make decisions. I'm a layman engineer. I'm just saying I don't think it's a lack of involvement, or it appears to be that these projects move forward without anybody looking at what's the impact of this on the drain, and do we need it? The other thing is do we need to make some modifications to the ideas that we've already got on the books, but there's a problem, and there's going to be a bigger problem as this becomes more prevalent in our neighborhoods, and especially in our older neighborhoods, because the younger neighborhoods don't have to comply with this because they've got covenants and stuff like that, and they can't build this. So we're putting them, these things are going to be forced into these older neighborhoods with 100-year-old storm sewers, and you don't have the infrastructure, and you've got to have the control to begin with to keep it from harming the neighbors and things like this. This is going to be a big problem. So you're talking like a deeper look into redevelopment, like infill redevelopment? What's the process? For what, though? I'm just getting clarification. For like infill on properties or at homeowner lots? I'll start with homeowner lots. So you're talking less than one acre, say? Yeah. Or there's a threshold of the size of the lot, and like some of these smaller quarter-acre lots, they could repave those and do those one lot at a time, and that has an overall impact that we could lose because we don't have the same review that we would, say, for an acre lot, or when they got built back. So are you talking the small lots, larger lots, or all of the above? I think all of the above. Okay, so there's your talk. What are the requirements, and are they working? Is this working? Because apparently, in my experience, I mean, it's not my property, but it's some of my neighbors'. Then you've got a daisy-chain effect where you've got this person's foot in something, and it's next to a neighbor's foot in something. And it's, I mean, when you've got water running in, that's just not fun. And I think we've got to look at that. As I said, our planning department is going to force this stuff more and more and more into these neighborhoods. And I just want to make sure the public is protected with what we've got on the books now. I second that topic. Okay. Some of the I&I pressure coming in would be interesting to learn more about the program and how it's changed over time. You know, how big of a problem it was and how big of a problem it is now. Okay. I think it might be, whenever it's ready, the Empower Lexington plan. I don't know that it's not for December, but for whenever it's finished, it's not directly water-related, but it all relates to water. Anything else before we move on? All right. I just want to wrap up with a few announcements. We have our Watershed Focus Monitoring Program volunteer sampler training coming up next Friday, September 16th. That'll be at the Top Branch Wastewater Treatment Plant in the training room. It starts at 9. We're kicking off with wolf-run sampling this fall, Phase 1, and then we will do Phase 2 sampling next summer. So as many volunteers, if you have people in your communities or in your neighborhoods or people that you may know that may be interested, let them know about this training, and we'll do another one in the spring as well for summer sampling. Just a couple other, I don't know if we've got some DES folks that want to speak to some of the things coming up. But Art by Nature, I don't know a ton about these, but it's now through September 24th at the Loudoun House, and the Nature Hop is coming up next weekend. Is that true? Okay. And then just an announcement that Demetria has been nominated to serve as the Secretary-Treasurer of CISWA. Is that the right way to say it? CISWA. Stonewater Association. Yep. And the elections are October 6th, so congratulations, Demetria. Hopefully. Is this shoe in? Yep. And Heather, you didn't say anything about Tree Week, but Tree Week's coming up October 8th through the 16th. I know there's a bunch of events that you all partnered with UK, and there's lots of stuff that happens, so stay tuned, and you can go to the website and look. Is it like Lexington? You can just Google Tree Week 2022. It's actually a conglomeration of the Urban Forest Initiative, which is basically a conglomeration of all of us within the tree world that kind of put this together. We reach out to the community to hold events throughout the community. They're all free, except for, I think, two. One is a non-profit, Four Cliff and Nature Walks, and then I believe there's a choir, choral piece group that's joining us this year. So those are the only ones you have to pay for, but everything else is free. It's tree-related. There's talks, walks, education. There's yoga. There's tree plantings. There's basically species work removal days. There's reforested bluegrass walks. There's all kinds of things, and actually, it started in Lexington, and now it's also in Hazard and Berea and Danville and Parooka. Yeah, I mean, we have branched out throughout Kentucky pretty much right now, which is really exciting for us. So yeah, go to Tree Week, Sunday, 22. It's all free. It's all through the week, varying times throughout the days. If you want to host an event, you can do that, too. Awesome. And then on November 25th, the day after Thanksgiving, there's the Gobble Grease Toss. I think that's at a school. Is it Red? What is it? It's at Redwood. Redwood School off of? Jessalyn. Jessalyn. Okay. So that's November 25th, and then our next meeting's December 2nd. If there's nothing else, you can, yes? Amanda? Yeah, so UK Extension is working with Greenpool Run to offer a Greenways Tour on Wednesday, September 28th, from 1 to 4 in the afternoon. So we'll send more information, or you can stop by and see me and I'll add you to our distribution list. Greenways Tour, September 28th. 28th. 1 to 4. We're going to start at Valley Park, park at the Noville Drive parking area, as long as we have a nod from that side of the room. I guess he has a slight nod already. Yes. The Division of Water Quality will be hosting their workshop with the Engineering Development Construction Industry Workshop on December 16th. We won't see this group again until December 2nd, so go ahead and get it on your calendars. It's going to be back in person this year at the Fayette County Extension Office. I'm sure Richard will have his donuts there as usual, so you don't want to miss that. We're revamping it. We'll have a lot of good stuff this year. Thanks. Thanks, Sandy. So Bluegrass Greensource has a Water Quality Incentive Grant to give mini-grants to homeowners in Lexington for riparian buffers or rain gardens, and so our final education piece, which you have to attend in order to get the $500, is on Tuesday, and it's virtual. So September 13th, if you want to attend and you live in Lexington, you can get a grant to plant things in your gardens for water. Any other hands? All right. Say we're good. Thank you, everybody, for coming. Do we adjourn? Adjourn. Do I need a motion for that? All in favor, leave. Ken says all in favor, leave. Thank you.