# Stormwater Stakeholder Advisory Committee - March 7, 2025 > Auto-transcribed civic record · Committee · March 7, 2025 - **Permalink**: https://meetings.lexingtonky.news/meeting/6545 - **Source video**: https://lfucg.granicus.com/player/clip/6545?view_id=14&redirect=true - **Date**: 2025-03-07 - **Body**: Committee - **Last revised**: February 15, 2026 - **Length**: 12,891 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 March 7, 2025, from 9:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. at the Phoenix Building – 3rd Floor Conference Room, with Amy Sohner presiding. The committee worked through 6 agenda items during the session, which included the approval of previous meeting minutes, several informational presentations, and a discussion of potential topics for a future meeting. Over the course of the meeting, 2 votes were taken and 3 public comments were heard. Informational presentations covered topics including Pollution Prevention Responsibilities for Municipal Operations, an overview of KYTC's MS4 Program, and updates to the Stormwater Manual. ## Attendance A total of 42 members were recorded for the Committee meeting on March 7, 2025. **Present (42):** Jason Ainslie, Doug Burton, Jennifer Carey, Ken Cooke, Steve Garland, Jim Griggs, Amy Sohner, Russ Turpin, Traci Wade, Denice Bullock, Chris Chaney, Katherine Collins, Sarah Donaldson, Jason Drew, Brooke Gray, Brian Hayes, Gabe Hensley, Becky Irwin, Greg Lubeck, Craig Morgan, Jennifer Myatt, Angela Poe, Mark Sanders, Abby Terry, Richard Walker, Bailee Young, Jim Conner, Amy Clark, Jacob Crouch, Jerry Davis, Stephen Evans, Adam Garner, Robert Gibson, Don Hill, Ken Johnson, Nathan Krebs, Kevin Lewis, Richard McClure, John Pike, Brandon Popham, Brian Stephens, and Steve Vogel. **Absent (1):** Marty Marchaterre. **Late:** None. ## Votes and Decisions The committee took two votes during the March 7, 2025 meeting, both of which passed unanimously. - **Approval of the December 6, 2024, Meeting Minutes** [timestamp: 0:01:05]: A motion to approve the minutes from the December 6, 2024, meeting was made by Ken Cooke and seconded by Traci Wade. The motion passed unanimously. No roll call vote was recorded. - **Acceptance of the Updated Committee Roster** [timestamp: 1:22:41]: A motion to accept the updated Committee Roster as of March 7, 2025, was made by Jason Ainslie and seconded by Ken Cooke. The motion passed unanimously. No roll call vote was recorded. ## Public Comment Three members of the public offered comments and questions during the March 7, 2025 committee meeting, each addressing topics related to vehicle washing and program data management. - **Ken Cooke** [timestamp: 19:26] asked whether a dedicated program was being used to track data. Sarah Donaldson responded that she uses Excel or Word to manage and track the relevant data. - **Amy Clark** [timestamp: 33:41] raised a question about whether mobile truck washing services are subject to regulation. Sarah Donaldson clarified that LFUCG uses commercial car washes for smaller vehicles, and for larger vehicles, a car wash company is brought in to perform the service. - **Jason Ainslie** [timestamp: 38:25] asked what factors trigger a heightened level of concern when monitoring car wash companies. Gabe Hensley explained that the SIC code associated with a company would determine whether that company would be required to apply for a general KPDES permit. The questions collectively reflected public interest in how vehicle washing operations — particularly for larger municipal vehicles — are overseen and regulated, as well as how program data is being recorded and maintained. ## Appointments The committee took action on two appointments during the March 7, 2025 meeting. - **Amy Clark** was appointed to **Town Branch**. - **Jason Ainslie** was reappointed to **North Elkhorn**. ## Approval of 12/06/2024 Minutes [timestamp: 01:05] The committee took up the approval of minutes from its December 6, 2024, meeting. Key speakers on this item included Amy Sohner, Ken Cooke, and Traci Wade. - No additions or corrections to the minutes were proposed by any committee members. - The minutes were approved as presented. The item was resolved without discussion or objection, and the December 6, 2024, minutes were formally approved. ## Pollution Prevention Responsibilities for Municipal Operations [timestamp: 01:47] Sarah Donaldson presented on Pollution Prevention Responsibilities for Municipal Operations, outlining her role as the internal Environmental Compliance Coordinator and the obligations the municipality holds under the MS4 Permit. The presentation was informational in nature, providing the Committee with an overview of the regulatory framework governing municipal stormwater management and the specific compliance responsibilities that fall under the MS4 (Municipal Separate Storm Sewer System) Permit. Donaldson's role as Environmental Compliance Coordinator was highlighted as central to ensuring the municipality meets these obligations. No debate or contested issues were recorded in connection with this agenda item. The item concluded as an informational presentation with no formal action taken by the Committee. ## KYTC's MS4 Program Overview [timestamp: 41:10] Robert Gibson presented an overview of the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet's (KYTC) MS4 Program, providing the committee with background on the regulatory framework governing the program and KYTC's obligations under it. The presentation covered the history of the Clean Water Act, which serves as the foundational federal legislation underpinning the MS4 (Municipal Separate Storm Sewer System) permit requirements. Gibson outlined the specific obligations that KYTC must fulfill under its MS4 permit, giving committee members context for understanding how the program operates and what compliance entails for the agency. The item was informational in nature, with no vote or formal action taken. No additional speakers or concerns are recorded from this portion of the meeting. ## Stormwater Manual Updates [timestamp: 1:04:31] Doug Burton presented an overview of proposed updates to the Stormwater Manual. The presentation covered two primary areas of change: compliance with Kentucky House Bill 443 and technical revisions intended to reflect current standard engineering practice. No additional detail on the specific provisions of House Bill 443 or the nature of the technical updates was available in the meeting record. No votes were taken on this item, and it was received as an informational presentation. ## Potential Topics for Next Meeting [timestamp: 1:19:04] Under this agenda item, committee members discussed potential topics to be taken up at a future meeting. Ken Cooke suggested that the committee consider scheduling a presentation on the Floodplains Appeals Committee. No additional topics were proposed in the structured record of this discussion. The item was informational in nature, and no formal decisions or votes were recorded in connection with the suggestion. ## Announcements [timestamp: 1:23:13] Bailee Young presented several announcements regarding upcoming events and meetings. The announcements covered two notable items: Water Week and the Bluegrass Watershed Summit. No debate or concerns were raised during this portion of the meeting, as the item was strictly informational in nature. --- ## Decisions - **Motion** — passed (0-0): Approval of the December 6, 2024, meeting minutes - **Motion** — passed (0-0): Accept the updated Committee Roster as of March 7, 2025 --- ## Full transcript So if you have not heard, I guess there is a statewide tornado drill at 10.07. And so Bailey is going to tell you what we're going to do. So we're going to get all started with that first. So we are going to not participate in the tornado drill, but we are going to let you all know that if we were participating, we would be going to the bathrooms or the stairwell, and there probably will be a mass exodus. So we're just going to pause the presentation and then we'll continue. So that's all. If you would like to participate, you can still go do that with everybody else, though. Okay, well, thank you all for coming. We're really excited to see you. I missed the last meeting, so I'm sure that Bailey and you all had a wonderful discussion. At least the minutes showed that. But as far as the minutes go, we do need an approval for them. So would anybody—and please say your name. We've done this. This is our dog and pony show. Make sure you say your name when you do it and use your microphone. So would anybody like to approve, or are there any discussions about the minutes? Or make a motion to approve them? Ken Cook, who did not say his name, said that, yeah. And a second? Tracy Wade, second. Thank you, Tracy. You get the star. Any more discussion or any discussion at all about the minutes? Okay, all in favor of passing them? All right, any opposed? Fantastic. Okay, so now we have Sarah Donaldson is going to come up, and she is going to do something really fun with us. We're excited to have you. She's pollution prevention responsibilities for municipal operations. So, Sarah, thank you for coming. Bailey's pulling up my presentation. I'm going to give a—can you all hear me? Do I need a—a presentation, like about 15 minutes, and then we're going to play a game. It's a stormwater knowledge game, Jeopardy style. It's something I created for employee training that I have to do, and you all are going to be honorary city employees for the day and pretend you're in pollution prevention for municipal operations training and compete in groups. So I hope you sat near some smart people. No shuffling. So, yeah, again, my name is Sarah Donaldson. I'm in the Division of Environmental Services. I am the internal environmental compliance coordinator for the city. So what that means is I help divisions identify and prepare environmental permits, whether it's air permit, water permit, a waste permit. I help them comply with the requirements of the permit. If it includes sampling, I help sometimes oversee the consultants who are doing those sampling events for us. I help prepare environmental planning documents for our division, and I am just here as a general resource to assist if there's a project that's happening that needs to comply with environmental regulations. So everyone's pretty much seen this graphic, if you've been to these meetings, where I sit is in that municipal operations, MCM6, pollution prevention for municipal operations. So the city owns over 300 properties at any given time. We have a lot of property. We have neighborhood parks. We have large parks. We have wastewater treatment plants we own and pumping stations we own, golf courses, swimming pools, fire stations, detention centers, office buildings. There's a lot of property we own. So keep in mind that some of the requirements of our MS-4 permit, like inspecting detention basins or inspecting constructed BMPs or erosion and sediment control inspections on projects on some of our properties, those responsibilities lie with the individuals who are doing those inspections already for private properties or for the citywide requirements. So I'm not doing every single inspection involved for the PPMO permit on our own properties. So when I talk about properties that I inspect and that I'm involved in, they are, well, first of all, our MS-4 permit calls out four specific facilities that are considered municipal waste facilities. That's the two wastewater treatment plants, one of our closed landfills, Haley Pike Landfill, and our material recovery facility or municipal recycling facility. It seems to be called both. So definitely for those four properties I'm involved. And then I'm also involved with properties like our static properties where we have storage of materials that could impact stormwater or where our operations are that might be impactful to stormwater. So think of like where our salt barns are located, our streets and roads operations. It could be a maintenance building at a golf course or like our fleet services where they work on all our city vehicles. So those are the kind of properties that I typically inspect and am involved with. So I'm going to talk about four different things, four main tasks that I do, so you all know what I do. I'm involved with the municipal practice guides that we are required to prepare for our MS-4 permit. I do inspections of some of the facilities that I just talked about. I do plan reviews, so specifically stormwater pollution and prevention plans, and I am involved in training. So I do a lot of training for our municipal employees. Okay, so first are environmental plans. So our environmental, they're called the green works guides. These are our municipal practice guides. So the green works guides are a foundational educational program. They were created first around 2011. They were updated this past year in 2024. The employees have interaction with these guides in multiple different ways. First of all, they are introduced to these guides at new employee orientation, so they're brought up and touched on in that new employee orientation. I typically bring them up when I'm doing my employee training. I also have an opportunity to talk about them when I do my inspections, if I see something that I don't really like and one of the guides might be helpful. And then the supervisors, everyone pretty much has access to them, who has access to our intranet, so all employees. And I ask supervisors if they would like they can include them in some of their training that they do with their employees on a weekly or monthly basis. So these guides are task focused. They serve the purpose of introducing a topic and getting a operational understanding of that topic. I try and tell people they are not standard operating procedures. So if you come from an environmental consulting background, you might read standard operating procedures that are step one you do this, step two you do that, and they can turn getting a pH sample from a stream into a four-page, you know, to-do list. And that's not what these are for. These are mostly high-level best management practices. There are 24 guides. They outline a problem, so they describe what the main problem is, why is that task potentially impactful to stormwater. So, like, one of the guides is, say, pressure washing. And why would pressure washing impact stormwater? How can it be a problem? And then the solution, the things that we do, the general practices we do, so we are considering stormwater and using best practices, the benefits and outcome of following the best practice. So here's a good example. This is good housekeeping and spill prevention. You might not be able to read it, but basically the problem talks about what poor housekeeping, how it can impact water quality. So, for instance, if we have cluttered facilities where we have chemicals stored haphazardly, you can get more spills. If we don't have our waste containers labeled, people don't know where to put the waste in the proper area, and that can lead to inappropriate disposal of waste materials in the wrong place. So then the solution would talk about the things that we do to not have poor, to have good housekeeping. Like, for instance, we might use drip pans, or we might inspect our facilities more often to see, are we following good housekeeping? And then the benefits and outcomes. This is a section we changed a little bit more than the other sections when we updated them this past year. Not all the benefits and outcomes are related to stormwater. We pulled in some things that are not related to stormwater, because I think sometimes different things speak to different employees. Like, you might say, if we do this, we maintain our properties and our equipment better. And that might speak to someone. Yeah, that makes more sense to them. Or we stay out of regulatory trouble. That might speak to someone else. So there's multiple benefits to following these guides and these practices and having best practices. And, of course, we talk about what the benefits are for water quality. Then on the second page of each guide there's a do and do not list. So it tries to be very clear of general practices you do and general practices do not. So, for instance, with a spill, the general practice that we say is use dry methods for cleaning up a spill. Oil dry, booms, pads, things like that. Don't take a hose and wash the oil you just spilled down the storm drain. So they are very general guides. So inspections. I want to talk about the inspections I do at these facilities. I inspect 54 facilities a year for the purposes of the MS-4 permit. Now, that doesn't mean I go to these sites once a year. A lot of them I'm going to routinely. Some more than others. If we have a project at one of them, like Haley Pike Landfill, I might be there every week. But for the purposes of the MS-4 inspections, I go to each facility one time a year. I like to keep a tracking sheet. This is something I started when I came. I don't make a new tracking sheet every year with the date that I do the inspection and all that. I keep a record of the score that each facility received over time. So I can look at trends. I can see did they fix the problems I noted last year. I take photographs. And we have a point system for doing our inspections. So this is an example of my tracking sheet. You might not be able to read it. But you can see this is just a small portion of it. I've got the facility I inspect and when I inspected it, my major findings. But then I keep the previous year's findings on the same tracking sheet. So I can see how they're doing over time. And you can see for Tate's Creek Aquatic Center, they got a 94% in 2023 because they had some spray features that were not oriented towards the pool. You know, they're supposed to go into the pool. They were oriented towards the deck drains. And we had chlorinated water going where we did not want it to go. So they got a ding for that. But then in 2024, they had fixed that. So we'll talk about the municipal recycling facility. They got an 85% in 2023 for exterior bales stored near a storm drain. And then they're doing much better now. So if you look here, basically each checklist is made for each facility. They don't have the same questions on them. So one facility might have gasoline and diesel tanks. And another facility might not. So the questions that I have on the form or that were on the form, I'm using forms that were created. We've used these forms for many years. And I've made some small adjustments. But basically the questions are tailored toward that facility. So, like, our pools have specific questions related to the chemicals that they use, whereas our golf courses have questions related to herbicides and turf chemicals and storage tanks because all our golf courses have gasoline and diesel above-ground storage tanks. So questions like inspecting the secondary containment, are they keeping the valves in the correct position, those kinds of things. So the point system is weighted, meaning some of the line items that I check have more point value than others, depending on the severity of the risk to stormwater. And you can see in the picture, this is a picture of an emergency generator at one of our facilities. When I came, I saw that the hose was degrading and there was a small hydraulic oil leak that was running down into that drain. Now, that drain is a sanitary sewer drain. It's not a storm drain. But still, if I see something like this when I'm doing my inspections, I'm going to call the operational folks directly or mention it during my site walk, and I'm going to say, you know, go ahead and fix this. I'm not going to wait to give them my checklist at the end of the year or something like that. So things that can be fixed easily, I point out. And this was – actually, I went back a week later, and it was already fixed a week later. So very responsive. During my inspections, it's also an opportunity to, like, look at compliance with any of the water quality plans that we have, whether it's a groundwater protection plan, a spill pollution prevention control countermeasures plan, or a stormwater pollution prevention plan. So those are the three types of water quality plans that many of our facilities will have. So this is an actual inspection form. It's been shortened. Not all of our points and questions are on here. I've shortened it just for purposes of this presentation. You can see that spill response supplies readily available is only worth one point, and they got a point for that. Whereas outdoor chemical bale storage that are not impacting stormwater, that's worth three points. They got zero points that year for that because they had plastic bales stored right near a stormwater drain. And the plastic bales, unfortunately, were still dripping some of the contents, some of the residual contents. So that was discussed during the inspection. And during 2024, the bales were stored in a different area, much better, and keeping the property in a much better condition. We didn't have that issue in 2024. The recycling facility is, I mean, the on-site personnel are doing inspections monthly. I do my annual inspections. The state sometimes comes out and inspects us. We have a stormwater permit there where we do sampling twice a year. There's a lot going on and a lot of ways in which we evaluate compliance. So the inspection outcomes. I prepare an internal memo for the contact person and for the director and sometimes the deputy director. I summarize my findings, include a copy of checklist. I make some recommendations. And if they do have something like a stormwater permit with the state, I typically try and summarize what those results look like for the year so they can see in one document kind of how they're doing. Training for employees. So this last thing I'm going to talk about, and then you guys are going to have to actually participate. So when I first came in 2022, and I came from environmental consulting, so wasn't really familiar with working for a government agency, I prepared one presentation and I gave it to all the different divisions, the same presentation. I was just trying to learn what each division did and the specifics regarding each division. Since then, well, in 2023, I created the game you guys are going to play, and that went over pretty well with some groups, not so well with others. So, you know, everyone's variable. And in this year, I've really tailored my training for specific needs. So, for instance, if a facility has an integrated spill plan, which that's what – it's a spill plan that includes our groundwater protection plan, our SWIP, and our SPCC all in one document, we're required to train on that every year. So that's included in my annual training for those divisions, like Town Branch and West Hickman. But then for Gulf, I was updating their groundwater protection plans this year, and so I wanted to do a focus training on the changes that I made, get buy-in on the inspection form that they were going to have to complete, and make sure that they were okay with the format of the new groundwater protection plan. So I kind of adjust it. I like doing in-person training. It gives me an opportunity to meet our employees and for them to ask questions. I get some really good questions. I really do. I get some questions, too, that I feel like I might get backed into a corner. Like Sarah said, we could do this, you know. So it's really interesting to listen to the – I mean, I wouldn't even be able to predict all the different kinds of questions I get asked. And sometimes I don't know the answer, so I have to get back with that employee. But it's nice to do the training in person. Future tasks, things that I'd like to do. I'd like to create an employee field guide, similar to the erosion sediment control field guide that we have here in Kentucky, where we've got the Green Works guides, but they're amped up. They've got some pictures and some more guidance in them. The people who really need the Green Works guides are not sitting behind a computer. They are in their trucks. They are working in the field. And so I'd like them to have a copy of them in an easy field format. So that's on the possible to-do list for us. In future permit years, we may need to reevaluate our inspection list, like what facilities are included or not included in the inspections. I do want to prepare an on-demand training for employees who miss the in-person training. I think some divisions in some years also might have a lot going on and might prefer for that year to have an on-demand training. I wouldn't want to do that every year. Some of our divisions, I train a lot of people all at one time. I come to their weekly safety meeting and get it all done at once. Other divisions, like our golf courses, they have very few people that I go and train every year. And so they might appreciate in some years having an on-demand training. And the last bullet is really more of a pie-in-the-sky wish. It's like mom doesn't want a kitchen appliance this year. She wants an Audi R8. It's like probably never going to happen. It would be really nice to have a system where all environmental information related to our owned properties and our operational properties is in one place. So, for instance, the inspections that are done of our detention basins, along with the water quality sampling that our consultants do, and my annual inspection, and the monthly inspections the facility are doing, in one place. When we have someone show up from the state, from Division of Water, and do an inspection, they ask for all these different records. Now, everyone's very responsive. I get records very easily how it is now, but it would be nice to see everything in one place or have access to it across all divisions. So that is my presentation. Now we're going to play the game. So the way this is going to work, we're going to divide into four groups. Three groups. Okay, Abby says three groups. And I guess you're going to play. This side is one group. You guys are in one group, and you all are one group. And we've got these buzzers, so you're going to press the buzzer if you know the answer. And Abby is going to keep score. And some of you may have played a similar game if you've been in this training with Abby for, is it your ESC training, Abby? Yeah. What time is it? No, they need to be put on the spot, too. So, yeah. Okay. So I'm just going to start with this side. They're going to be able to pick first. And then do we want to, Abby, do we want to have the rule that you can't press the buzzer until after I'm done reading the question? Okay. Don't get antsy. You gave them a green one. They're all mixed up. Oh, they're all mixed up. How are you going to keep score, then? Oh, my gosh. You are more talented than me. All right. So will I be able to point and click with this? Okay. You'll click for me. All right. So you guys pick a category and a point score. I will tell you, I was not so good to make the point score. A thousand's not necessarily harder than 100, so don't worry about that. When you hit the buzzer, raise your hand, too. Do we have double jeopardy? No, there's no double jeopardy. So, okay. Brooke, pick first. Yeah, where do you want to go? Lawn maintenance for 500. Lawn maintenance for 500 or 100? 100. Okay. The following is considered a best practice. Use blank methods for weed pest control. If chemicals are required, use the least blank chemical to control pests or weeds. Manual and costly, chemical and costly, manual and toxic, or chemical and toxic? Who? John? This is John. I'll take C. C, manual and toxic. Okay. Hit it again. That is right. So great job. What color is he? So you can see on the training, I talk about the GreenWorks guides, or I give additional guidance for our employees. So our GreenWorks guide four talks about application of turf management chemicals and encourages integrated pest management. Okay. So you get to decide where we go next, John. Where? Okay. If a fertilizer spreader causes some fertilizer to fall in a paved area, what would be the best way to deal with it? Hose it to a storm drain? Notify the EPA? Sweep or blow it back into a vegetated area? Or leave it, it will wash away? C. That is right. GreenWorks guide three, we have one that talks about street sweeping and states that material can be washed away during rainfall. And just so employees understand, everything on the ground can get into the storm drains. Okay. Where do you want to go? All right. It's not necessarily harder. Track out on streets from construction equipment is always okay. It is part of construction, true or false? That's false. I've had a couple of violations this year. That is false. It's the largest source of complaint from people residing near construction zones. Okay. Whoever answered that? Sticking in that category, huh? What can be said about the application of fertilizers? The more fertilizer used, the better. Read and follow the manufacturer's application instructions. Fertilizers are always manufactured to be environmentally friendly or all of the above. That's right. B, read and follow manufacturer's application instructions. All right. 100? Okay. Street sweeping should be conducted when it's raining to help facilitate removal of particulate matter. No more than once per year on each roadway because street sweeping degrades the road surface. After special events like street fairs where additional debris is likely to have been accumulated or only when requested by the mayor. Yes. Yep. All right. Where do you want to go? Street sweeping. Improves safety by removing some roadway hazards, improves aesthetic, improves pavement and roadway marking visibility or all of the above? Give it to me. All of the above. Yep. That's right. All of the above. Where do you want to go, Ken? Okay. Which of the following are good housekeeping practices at construction sites? Keeping and maintaining a concrete washout, keeping unused containers closed and sealed, protecting materials from exposure to weather, picking up litter and closing refuse containers or all of the above? Correct. You guys. Thank you, Bailey. And Bailey, you're going to stop me because we probably won't get through all of this. Whenever you think that we need to stop for time. All right. Next. Where do you want to go? Oh, this is not a multiple choice or true-false. What is wrong with this picture? The silt fence is on the wrong side. No. No. The stake is on the wrong side, and it appears not to be trenched in. Well, that's not really correct either. The silt fence has got too much silt built up. That's exactly right. Oh, okay. Oh, get them, Tracy. Get on that microphone. The silt is built up too much. It needs to be cleaned out. It's too high. So that side is the side that needs to be clean sediment buildup. That's the project site side. Okay. You get to pick where we go. We'll do waste for 100. Yeah. When using an outdoor solid waste receptacle, which of the following helps to protect stormwater? Leaving lids or covers closed while not in use, making sure it's labeled trash, paint the container blue, or none of the above. That's right. This is actually a common problem with our facilities, because we have a lot of those big dumpsters. They get picked up. Then the lids end up open, and no one ever shuts them, and they're left over for convenience. So it's one of my pet peeves, actually. Okay. Vehicles and equipment for 1,000. Oh, yeah. Where should wastewater from vehicle and equipment cleaning be disposed of? Storm sewer inlet, poured in the grass, sanitary sewer drain, or none of the above? A lot of people missed this. None of the above. That is incorrect. You know, it's similar to a car wash. Those go to the sanitary sewer. Oh, yeah, I did, didn't I? Oh, my goodness. I want to play. Sorry about that. Let's move on. If a secondary containment structure has a drain valve, in what position should it be kept? Sealed, closed, unless draining clean rainwater. Sealed, closed, unless the primary vessel is being filled. Open, unless the primary vessel is being filled, or open at all times. That's right, A. So I look at where these valves are when I go do my annual inspections. But some of our tanks have integrated secondary containment, so they have an actual monitor that looks at the interstitial space. So we're trying to phase out of these old-style above-ground storage tanks. One more question. One more question. How did I know you were going to ask? 700. Equipment used to pour concrete must be washed in a designated washout area. If no suitable washout area is located on site, then where should washout be done? In a grassy area, near a water inlet, empty parking lot, or into a container? Yes. D. He said D. He didn't have his mic. Well, thank you all for playing the stormwater game. This is just an example of something that our employees have to go through. All righty. I'm sorry. You totally can ask questions. What software system do you use? I just use plain old Excel. I don't use Acela or have access to it. I do old school. Like a lot of my inspection forms are in Word. I send the records to the directors in a PDF packet. Nothing fancy. Yeah. This isn't exactly a municipal question, but I'm interested in I recently talked to someone who does mobile truck washing. Oh, I'm sorry. Thank you. I recently talked to someone who does mobile truck washing because there are no facilities, I think, in the county any longer for a fixed place. He closed the last fixed place. So my question is are these well tracked and inspected? Some of the truck washing he may go to a facility that has a lot of trucks and wash them all. But other times I think it's just, you know, make an appointment and he comes along. What happens there? I do not know the answer to your question. I do know I get the question a lot. So we use commercial car washes for our vehicles. But if we cannot wash, we have some vehicles that can't go through commercial car washes. So we have a car wash for our garbage trucks. If it's operational, I'm not really sure. But we also so like our own division has large trucks that cannot go into car washes. We have boom trucks and stuff. So when we do car washing, we bring in someone and we use booms to contain the wash water because we do use detergents. And then that water is conveyed to a sanitary sewer drain on site typically when we do washing. This is a common question I get actually from our municipal operations folks because they do wash equipment. And it can be a little bit. So we talk about if we cannot use detergents, don't use detergents. If you are washing something that's caked in mud, you know, wipe off the mud or brush off the mud as much as you can before you wash it. If you're going to wash something that's got mud on it but no oil or anything like that and no detergents, you can do it in a grassy area. We have special wash areas for our municipal vehicles too and where our street sweepers drain to sanitary sewer and things like that. So I don't know about the public ones though unless, Gabe, can you answer that? I can try. So there's two things. We do regulate these mobile truck washes. So number one is through a waste hauler permit. So all these guys are signed up to deliver their waste that they collect from washing to the wastewater treatment plant at Town Branch and they dump there. Number two is for these particular businesses that would hire a mobile truck wash, they're on our industrial and high-risk commercial inventory. And we do inspections there every other year usually and we pretty much emulate what Sarah just went over with you. You know, we're checking for their SWIP. We're saying, are you guys washing your trucks here? What are you doing with it? Show me some manifests. Let's see your protocols. So yeah, there is a point of regulation with mobile truck washing and truck washing in general on a particular site, right? So essentially they can't do that kind of work without having some kind of a registry or permit or training? I wouldn't go as far to say a registry or permit. I would go to say that most of these people are KPDS stormwater holders. So a general permit which delineates certain things that they can put down the stormwater drain. And they have to develop a SWIP and that should be included in their SWIP whenever they submit that to the state. We're not putting any truck wash water into the stormwater drain. And there's ways to look and see if that's happening. So it's the site, the institution that's responsible? Correct. Thank you. What triggers the level of concern where you're actually monitoring and watching these people? Is it the types of trucks? Because I've got a fleet of 25 pickup trucks that get washed regularly. And the people that wash them, there's no SWIP. There's no anything. Get with me after this and tell me where you're at. To answer your question, the SIC code would dictate whether or not you need to apply for a SWIP. Number one, an industrial and high-risk commercial. So apply for a SWIP. I said the wrong thing. Apply for a permit. So you're going to be on a list if your SIC code falls within a general permit. And if you're not on that list, then if we respond or we get a complaint or get a tip as to where somebody might be doing this, then we might opt to put you on the commercial, high-risk commercial list. And we would treat you the same as we would an industrial inventory. But you just wouldn't have the KPDS stormwater permit from the state. You would have us stopping by and saying, you know. And does this trickle all the way down to residential? No, residential is actually excluded in our ordinance. But I'm sorry, not residential, but still publicly-owned vehicles that are being washed by a mobile-to-car wash vehicle. Yeah, we would respond to that, and we have responded to that. I've received several reports over the last 10 years about folks setting up in parking lots and washing people's cars at large office buildings and stuff like that. So, yeah, we'll respond to that. That's fascinating because nobody I know of follows any of that. They just dump it straight down to stormwater. We need to talk, man. Any other questions? Okay, final scores. Final scores. Group 1, 2,000 points. Group 2, 1,200 points. Group 3, 2,200 points. All right, thank you, Sarah. That was wonderful. Anytime you get to press buzzers and play games, I think that that's great. I'd also like to say I really appreciate, as someone who does a lot of education, the benefits section that you do in the training. I think that that's really helpful for people to understand how they fit in the bigger picture. I think that that's really neat. Okay, next we have Robert Gibson, who's behind me, who's going to talk about our MS4 program. There's a little bit of change, and this is specifically directed at Ken. We're going to wait on questions, and if you do have questions, you can e-mail Robert after the event or e-mail Bailey, and she can help you facilitate any of the questions. Robert? All right. Good morning. Can we hear just fine? Yeah? Awesome. Well, thank you. Thank you, Bailey, for inviting me out here. My name is Robert Gibson. I work for Kentucky Transportation Cabinet, Department of Highways, Division of Environmental Analysis, where I am a permit coordinator. I deal with what we call 401 and 404 permits, 401 with Kentucky Division of Water, for water quality certificates, and then 404 permits with the Army Corps of Engineers, dealing with fill and dredge material in streams and wetlands. And then recently I've been tasked to head up our MS4 permit program as well. So I've been in the cabinet about two years. I've done MS4 work for about six months. I'm very new to this. Learning as I go, doing things like this, always beneficial. And, yeah, so let's get started. But before we talk about, like, our specific MS4 program, I think it's important to kind of look at why we do this, you know, and that is, of course, because it is dictated by the Clean Water Act. Why do we have the Clean Water Act? And to talk about that, we need to look at a specific event in history. That was really key to pushing us towards this environmental movement that we had. And anyone have an idea what really kind of led to the Clean Water Act? Raise your hand. Cuyahoga River Fire of 1969. Why is that important? Well, because the river had caught fire about 12 times the prior century to that. So I'll say 69 because that was pretty much the straw that broke the camel's back there. And if you were like me when you heard this, like, well, rivers shouldn't catch fire. That doesn't make much sense. So how does that happen? Well, the Cuyahoga River is situated between Akron, Ohio, and the heavily industrialized Cleveland, Ohio. And without any regulations, there was this factory waste, sewage waste, being poured directly into the streams. There's a quote from the Times article around that time, it says, the Cuyahoga River was the river that oozes instead of flows, the one in which a person does not drown but decays in. It gives you an idea of how bad situations were. We can see here these gentlemen, I like to think they just got this white rag, dumped it into the river, poured it out, and you can see all this oil and the muck on it. Over on the other side you can see just water being dumped straight into the river from pipes. So with all this oil factory waste built up, there's a bunch of log debris, the river's getting clogged up with that, especially on the rubber ridges, you can see kind of close right there. These logs get sucked into oil, and the theory was that a passing train track sparked, hit the logs that were covered in oil, and everything kind of went up into flames. So in the aftermath of this, we really kind of start seeing a public outcry to this event, and we see the conception of some really iconic organizations and events that we know today. In addition, I shouldn't just blame the Cuyahoga River Fire, there was recently, not recently, but around that time, an oil spill in California, and earlier in the decade, a book called Silent Spring talked about the pesticide usage in America. In response to this, we get this gentleman right here, Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson, who put on the first Earth Day celebrations in 1970. This was an attempt to really bring the pollution issue to a national level, and it was a huge success. You know, massive turnouts raised, I think around 20 million people participated in this across the nation, and it really kind of urged the federal government to take action. And it did. Another fellow right here, you may know him as Richard Nixon, president. And in July of 70, so just a couple months after the first Earth Day, he submitted to Congress Reorganization Plan Number 3. Don't know why the first two failed, but Number 3 was an attempt to consolidate all the responsibilities of the federal government environmental regulations into one agency, hence the creation of the EPA. They would give the EPA a birthday as December 2nd, which was the day that William, and bear with me here, Ruckelshaus, I know I probably said that wrong, was administered as the first head of the EPA. Along with EPA, in 1970 we get amendments to the Clean Air Act, the Resource Recovery Act, National Environmental Policy Act, or what we call NEPA, starts requiring environmental impact statements. And then in 1972, we see amendments to the Water Pollution Control Act of 1948, which became known commonly as the Clean Water Act. Here we got a couple amendments here, all of which are very important to how we regulate things today. First and foremost, it established a basic structure in regulating pollutant discharges to the waters of the United States. It gave the EPA authority to implement pollution control programs, such as setting wastewater standards for industries, maintain existing requirements to set water quality standards for all contaminants in surface waters, made it unlawful for any person to discharge any pollutants from a point source or navigable waters, into navigable waters, unless permitted otherwise. I think point source we think of, like that picture we saw earlier, just straight from the pipe, straight in. Funded destruction of sewage treatment plants, and then recognized the need for planning to address critical problems posed by non-point source pollutions, which is stormwater. And this is going to be the last little bit of our history back class here. In 1987, the Water Quality Act was implemented to really confront the issue of these rapid population increases, these heavily urbanized areas, and the pollutants coming from the stormwater runoff there. So in 1990, we see phase one regulation come to play, where medium and large cities are required to, that's populations of 100,000 or more, are required to apply for a permit coverage that's under the NPDES, National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System. As a side note, here in Kentucky, the EPA has deferred to Kentucky Division of Water, so we have the KPDES. Then nine years later, in 1999, we see phase two implemented, and these are for small MS4s and U.S. Census Bureau-defined urbanized areas, as well as MS4s designated by permitting authority to obtain NPDES permit coverages for stormwater discharges. Phase two also includes nontraditional MS4s, such as public universities, hospitals, prisons, and where I work, the Department of Transportation. I'll try to get through this before the tornado drill. So what does that mean for Kentucky? Here we can see a map of the Commonwealth, where we have 106 regulated MS4 communities, 32 of the 120 counties we have. The large MS4s, populations of a quarter million or more, we have two in Louisville, Kentucky, and then here in Lexington. There are no registered medium MS4s, and then the small MS4s, populations of 10,000 or more, we have roughly 100. What does that mean for KYTC? Here we can see a map of how we break up the districts. We break up Kentucky into 12 districts, and each district has a district office and an environmental coordinator, who also acts as the district's MS4 coordinator, with the exception of Somerset, for some reason they have two different people that do that, but that's not really important. And each EC in the district are tasked with direct communications with the partnering MS4 communities. So they'll do things like I'm doing now, they'll come to conferences with stakeholders and listen, go to talks, listen, give presentations. I've actually spoken to the EC down in District 3, so let's think Bowling Green, the other day, and they had just done, it's actually a really neat thing, it's part of our Keen program, that I'll talk about a little bit later, but they get the communities, the schools in the communities reach out to them, they come give little presentations, mostly focused on engineering, but they also do some EnviroScape activities, which is like a 3D model that really focuses on watershed and water flow and stuff like that. So they do some pretty neat stuff. This is a close-up of District 7, where you guys reside, the yellow you can see highlighted is the MS4 permitted areas, so you've got Georgetown, Lawrenceburg, Danville, Berea, Richmond, Winchester, Nicholasville, and then Lexington, so it's a pretty heavy area. So your EC has a lot to handle, and I was just talking to Bailey about this before the presentation, that spot just got filled this past Monday, it's been vacant since last fall, so that's why I'm here, instead of him, so I can get you that information again, and you'll be looking at him next time instead of me. And so that brings us to why I am here, and that is to discuss our obligations in regards to our MS4 permit, the KYS-03. In order to meet these requirements, we must meet these six minimum control measures, MC1 being public education and outreach, MCM2, public involvement and participation, MCM3, illicit discharge detection and elimination, MCM4, construction stormwater runoff, MCM5, post-construction, and then pollution prevention and good housekeeping being number six. As far as, excuse me, public education and outreach, really our bread and butter in this is our media outreach program. This is by far our most broad-reaching aspect of our permit, where we and the Kentucky Division of Water allow partnering MS4 communities to actually use our outputs for their qualifications as well, or requirements as well. So we partner with Kentucky Broadcast Association, KBA, and they put on radio and television ads. You can see here I've got some stats from 2022 and 23. Throughout this presentation, you'll see 2022 and 2023 referenced. We are currently collaborating all of our data for 2024. Well, actually in 2024, we did not have any television or radio ads distributed because we are in the process of remaking ours. The ads were made, I think, in like 2009, so they were a little bit dated and the governor wanted to spruce it up a little bit. So those are in the final processes. They have been made. I've seen them. I've heard them. They're approved. They're just getting the minor details touched up, and we'll be putting those back on the air and over the radio here soon. But we can see the ads in 2022, radio-wise, 66,000 TV ads, about 10K, and in 2023, about 50K radio ads and 8,000 TV ads. So these are being seen. I think it's neat. Can we have sound? Can we play this? No? Yes? Because is it better? Hey! I'm returning your stuff! Your motor oil! Your paint! I'm returning your stuff! Your motor oil! Your paint! And all your other trash! You dumped it on the ground, and it washed down the storm drain and into my water! Don't let it happen again, or next time, I won't be so nice! Stop polluting Kentucky's water by keeping trash off the ground. To find out how you can help, visit our website. That's ridiculous. That is the old ad that's been pulled. I don't even know if I should have played it. I wanted to have something. I couldn't get my hands on the new one. It's funny. You know? It's just goofy. The new ad's not as silly, but it's still going to be pretty effective. And don't ask why he has a Boston accent. I really do not know. Gosh. Moving on. All right. So it's not just the general public that we try to reach out to and educate. We actually take this requirement to educate our own staff, consultants, and contractors. So we do this by utilizing the University of Kentucky's Transportation Center, where they have the Roadmaster Road Scholar Program, which offers various trainings, including in drainage training, environmental awareness, pesticide operations, and snow and ice operations. And you can see there the stats of how many people attended each of these classes. As well as I put here on the bottom, because this class was made specifically for KYTC to meet their MS-4 permit requirements, is the Kentucky Erosion Prevention and Sediment Control Roadway Inspector course. MCM-2, Public Involvement and Participation. And this is our main thing here for this category, is our Adopt-a-Highway Program. Now this is a nationwide program. Kentucky's been doing it sometime in the 80s, I believe, is when we started. And I know myself personally, I have done some activities with this group, and I think it's great work. It's a great way to keep our right-of-ways clean. As you can see, in 22-2 and 3 as well, around 400 groups participated in this, with anywhere between 1,700 and 2,200 miles managed, and 1,800 to 2,100 hours of service. That's great on the increase there, all those categories, and I hope we continue to see more people getting involved in this. But it's not just highway cleanup with Adopt-a-Highway. We actually have Adopt-a-Highway art contests. We can't have five- and eight-year-olds out on the side of the road picking up trash, but we do try to involve anyone anyways. And these are from 2022. I think, yeah, it was throughout the entire Commonwealth of Kentucky, we had over 300 entries for this year, this year being 2022. And these are just some of the winners, which are actually really good, in my opinion. But this is just a great way to use this program to reach everyone, every different age group, and every different community. Additionally, public involvement, here's this KEEM project, or program I mentioned before, Kentucky Engineering Exposure Network. It's a unique partnership between Commonwealth of Kentucky School Systems and KYTC, where we send our engineers to educate students on STEM and the benefits of having engineering education. And while it is very much so heavily influenced by the engineering aspect of things, we do get credit for this because, like I said before, they do envelop this EnviroScape activity where kids get to kind of see how watersheds work. And it's really neat. I have not seen the EnviroScape activity myself, but I have seen some of the KEEM aspects put on before me, not actually in the school setting, but in a different setting. It's really neat and cool, and they do a lot of really great stuff. MCM3, Illicit Discharge Detection and Elimination, is kind of a weird one for us. The purpose of this is to ID and remediate sources of illicit discharge. But KYTC doesn't really generate residential, commercial, or industrial waste. We'll get to that later. It's KYTC policy that most, if not all, illicit discharges come from adjoining MS4 communities. So we really rely on them, especially for this first part, storm sewer mapping system. We really rely on partnering MS4 communities to do this. Our district coordinators will assist when they need it. Or in cases where we are not partnering for some reason with a district or a MS4 community, it's the responsibility of the district's MS4 coordinator to go out and to map any outfalls into KYTC right-of-ways. Prohibiting illicit discharges, yeah, but we can't really enforce that. IDD plan, we do have a plan. It's very simple. It is to identify illicit discharges, respond to any reports of illicit discharges, trace the source of that illicit discharge, and then remediate it. And then, of course, documentation. That's really the only things we do with illicit discharge. Here is an example of a map from Somerset down in D8, where they have mapped their stormwater outlets. We're moving right on to construction site and stormwater runoff, MCM4. For this, we review for each project, review for water quality impacts, and determine whether an individual storm construction permit is needed or covered by the KYR10 general stormwater permit is sufficient. Now, for those that don't know, the KYR10 is a permit for disturbance of an acre, land, or more. And even with this, if anyone applies to us for a proton permit to do work in our right-of-way, it is within that permit language dictating that they must oblige by this KYR10 permit. In 2022, we issued approximately 5,500 proton permits, and then 6K in 2023. We do this by developing an erosion prevention and sediment control plan, and that is for each project. We do have some general plans, but more detailed projects do get specific plans put into place. Site inspections, quality assurance inspections, and project final inspections, it is our policy that each site gets visited at least once a week. If there is a rain event or weather event where at least a half an inch of precipitation is gained, then that automatically triggers an inspection on all sites. And for most sites, there is a site inspector on site every day anyways. As for corrective actions and penalties, no inspections in 2023 resulted in any penalties, so it seems that we are doing just fine of a job. Again, documentation, there are daily forms that they fill out, the site manager fills out forms, and then training, we get the double dip again in some of these prior MCMs with the sediment erosion control trainings and such and the like. All right, post-construction. Generally post-construction, there are two forms of substantial impacts that we are looking at, and that is the increase of type and quantity of pollutants in the stormwater, and then the quantity of water being released into the reef-saving bodies as well. We attempt to minimize water quality impacts by using a variation of structural and non-structural BMPs. Structural BMPs, just think about how we design our bridges, culverts, and drainage systems. Non-structural BMPs, establishment of permanent vegetation on construction sites. If you ever have an urge to drop down Mountain Parkway and see all that, it would be a good time. Nice little turf mats they roll down, it's pretty neat. Contract special provisions to preserve existing vegetation, maintain vegetative buffer zones along streams, protection of wetlands during construction, and personnel training for post-construction BMPs. Now like I said before, I work on 401 and 404 permits dealing with stream and wetland impacts. Just want to say that there are language in there that prohibits any unnecessary removal of vegetation on projects. They're very particular about that. And again, training-wise, we double dip from our other one and use the KEPCS, the Kentucky Erosion Prevention and Sediment Control Program, to help fulfill this goal as well. Moving on, pollution prevention and good housekeeping. It is the job and requirement of each district's environmental coordinator slash MS4 coordinator to inventory and inspect all owned and operated KYTC facilities. Our maintenance facilities are covered by a permit KYG 50, but we also have facilities that are not covered by that permit. That includes 12 district offices, 25 welcome centers and rest areas, and then 14 truck weighing stations. And each of these facilities, coordinator goes, inventories, makes sure there's nothing there that is contributing to stormwater pollution. We also develop and assess implementation effectiveness of BMP plans at these facilities. For example, at rest areas, we ensure that there's litter control, pet waste stations, oil spill remedial stations, proper storage of de-icing materials, proper placement of trash cans and trash pickup, and then just general good grounds maintenance. It actually isn't KYTC staff that works at these rest areas. We contract out cleaning services, train KYTC staff and contractors on BMP plans in the environmental handbook, and then develop operations and maintenance program document and report. Really, that's it. That's short and sweet. That is pretty much what we do to meet our requirements of our permit. If you guys want, I mean, you can find our stormwater quality management plan, any of our previous annual reports, go to transportation.ky.gov forward slash stormwater. And there's all types of materials there that you guys can look at and read them on. And then robert.gibson at ky.gov. My initial plan was to bring my supervisor with me. He's been doing this many of years and that he could have batted down any questions that you guys threw up at him. I myself am new to this and don't want to mislead anyone. So if you please just shoot me an email, I will make sure that your questions are answered as quickly and accurately as possible. And that is it. That was a little shorter than I think I wanted it to be, but yeah. That was fantastic. Yeah. Good. And I think you are about to be sirened off. Oh! Actually, I meant to do that. That was fantastic. So now I got to do a dance or something until for another 30 seconds or whatever it is. But what I will do instead, because you don't want to see that, is I will bring up Doug Burton, who is going to give us some stormwater manual updates. And by the time Doug gets up here and gets ready, hopefully the tornado drill is... Maybe it's all for nothing, because I don't hear anything. Oh, I thought they were in the inside too, or our phones and all that. They're close enough. You'll hear them. Okay. But they're not going to disrupt us. Oh, there it is. There they are. Yep. There you go. They're still here. Thank you, Doug. Yep. All right. Bailey, do we need to do anything since we're just ignoring it and getting swept up in the tornado? All right. Great. Can everybody hear me? All right. So my name is Doug Burton. I'm the Director of Engineering. For those of you who don't know, we oversee the regulatory authority for new development and... Well, capital as well. But a lot of these stormwater controls are really designed for the new development community so that we meet the requirements that Sarah talked about earlier with the MS4 permit. So I'm going to discuss today some proposed updates we're doing to the 2020 stormwater manual. And there's two primary reasons we're doing that. First, as you may be aware, House Bill 443 was passed last year. And it basically says if you have anything in your manuals that's not a thou shall, you should probably change it to a thou shall. There is no thou oughtas, thou here's a ranges. It is a thou shalls going forward. The term is ministerial. You basically have to tell someone exactly what you want them to do, not give them... Eliminate any ambiguity that you have in your manuals, which is more challenging than you think it'd be. So we engineers, we like ranges between here and there. But that kind of goes away with this requirement. So there's the language of the House Bill. I'm not going to read it to you, but it basically says it's ministerial. And exception to that, which I'll cover a little later, is that if it's a public safety issue, then you don't have to do the ministerial part. The other thing we took this opportunity to do is update the manual for some just technical updates that we knew were coming. Just comments we've got since 2020 on things that, hey, you guys should look at changing this the next time you do an update. So several of these changes aren't necessarily the ministerial, but they're more in line with the best practices, if you will. So first, I'll cover some of the general changes that we're making, and then we'll kind of go chapter by chapter. I'm not going to read every one of these to you. We'll cover them briefly. But just wanted to give you a general idea. We're not done. So you'll see here at the end that there's still some chapters we're still working on. But we have until backing up to the House Bill, basically any changes that you want to make have to be in effect by July 1st of this year. It doesn't mean you can't make changes, but that's the pencils down in terms of the new changes that you're going to make. We'll still be making changes over the years. This isn't a stop on all future changes, but you need to update your manuals so that it meets House Bill 443. So overall changes, like I said, it allows you to add language that basically says public safety is an issue. You don't necessarily have to follow the ministerial. If you're putting someone's life in danger, but you said I follow the rules, obviously that's a bad idea. So it gives you a little bit of that leeway. So we added that language to the stormwater manual. A couple of things we did that are more general that aren't specific to the chapters is we created a maintenance manual for our post-construction stormwater controls. Post-construction stormwater controls work when they're brand new really well. They don't always work later when they're not maintained. So our focus of that is to make sure that we have a manual that folks understand what their expectations are. And then planting lists are being reviewed, as we'll discuss a little later when we talk about wetlands. Not always getting what we want, and so we have to be clear as to what we want really defined well in the manuals. If not, we need to review those and make corrections as needed. So let's go quickly through each of the chapters. We added a requirement to provide documentation of pre-qualification from KYTC for wetlands and streams. That's already a requirement. We're just saying prove to us you have the pre-qual so we don't have to do the digging ourselves. It's fairly easy. Next we added a requirement to the temporary stormwater controls be required downstream where you don't have a regional basin that's not there. So that's kind of two-part importance. First, when you have large projects that are phased and you don't have a regional basin downstream, it's important that you're doing something, otherwise you have this massive drainage area going to an area that may not be ready for it. The other thing is just it's a good general rule to be, you know, general protection of your downstream areas. Next, back still in chapter one, we added a requirement to the location of those same regional stormwater controls we just talked about are actually located and ID'd on development plans because what we're not seeing is that, well, what we're seeing, and Vaughn can attest to this, is like an arrow pointing regional controls this way. So we're not seeing a lot of specifics that allow us to verify that you have the capacity that you need to use those regional stormwater controls. And the last thing in chapter one, we removed the fee and loose for onsite stormwater controls for a couple reasons. First, we're not really using it, and secondly, it's not really set up to be used. I think we've used it once. I talked to Hillard, who's been here longer than most of us. He said he thinks it's been used once in the last 20 plus years. So it doesn't mean we can't bring that back, but until we have it better set up, as in the requirements, exactly what they are, and have a group of projects that are really programmed to use them, there's just no point in having the language in there because someone may say, hey, I want to use that, and we have to say, yeah, you really can't because we're not set up to do that. So next, chapter four, design documentation. This goes back to what I said earlier where we're just incorporating changes that we may have made previously. In 2024, we changed the composite drainage plans in amendment one to basically require, this is predominantly home builders, to survey those critical flow points, so the back corners of your lots or any swales or inlets that are back there, and this was a reaction to, we were seeing flooding of brand new homes because the grades were just, if a home builder on the downstream side built his lot too high, it just echoed all the way up, and by the time you got to the top, you couldn't correct it. So we incorporated that last year via an amendment, but now it just goes into the manual. Chapter five, next, hydrology. This is a long one, so I'll basically just say maximum of 100 feet of sheet flow, and that's in accordance with just general practice and what other communities are doing. Next, again, general updates. Pushed the wrong button. Chapter six, inlets and stormwater sewer manholes. We're using some software out there that just, there's better options out there, and this was done probably 15 years ago when we were doing major updates to the manual, but it's really out of date to now, so we're getting rid of HydroCAD for a couple applications. And then we're working on storm pipe and inspection procedures, and this is both for, try to push the button, no, there we go, for both chapter six and chapter seven inspection procedures for section six, four, and seven, six. We're still working on that. We don't know exactly what that's going to look like. KYTC has standards, but there are also some semi-recent ASTM standards that we're looking at. Do we mesh those? Do we just adopt KYTCs? But right now what we're seeing is the manuals basically say it has to be CCTV'd, so what they'll do is they'll stick a camera in there and go, it was CCTV'd. Good luck seeing cracks or damages that were in there. So we have to get better quality CCTV than what we're getting now, so we're going to make some updates to do that. Again, don't know exactly what that's going to look like, but we're working on that now. Culverts and bridges incorporate in the KYTC structural design guidelines. I think our structural design guideline was updated 20 years ago. I think it's got a 2005 date on it, so that's likely to go away soon. Those local regulations on things make sense. We don't have the capacity to develop structural manuals anymore, to be frank, and why would we? If KYTCs already do it, why not just adopt their standards? So that's where we're headed. Again, the 2005 manual will likely officially go away soon. Already talked about the inspection there for the second bullet in Chapter 7. Chapter 9, added requirement the fertilizer should not contain phosphors for obvious reasons. I know this group is aware. And then the last thing, Chapters 10 and 11, we're still reviewing those, but just to give you some ideas what we're talking about in there is post-construction stormwater controls. Again, those work really great when they're designed well and built well and maintained. That isn't always the case. So we're working on what do we need to do to get all those things to work well. I'll throw all the engineers under the bus in here, so I'm one of you. Engineers designing wetlands doesn't always work out great, because if you're like me, I know what my tomatoes and peppers and garlic look like, but stuff that goes in wetlands I have no idea. And I think some of our engineers who design these have the same. So we're looking at do we change requirements for what those design requirements for wetlands look like, what does the certifications look like, etc. So that at the end of the day, our wetland isn't just a dirt hole because it wasn't designed and built correctly. So that's what we're focusing on in this one as of now. And then in Chapter 11, erosion sediment control, just to give you an idea of what we're talking about, one of the first things we talked about were antelope protection socks, how those work great when they work great, when they don't, they're a dam, so there are things we can do to improve that, and all the other erosion sediment controls. So if you have any ideas, feel free to email me or Greg or Abby or Bailey on any changes that you know, I've been wanting this to happen for X number of years, because now's the time, because we're doing, we wouldn't call it a major update like we did in 2020, but now's the time, because when we do changes to the manual, unless we do an amendment, it has to go through council, etc. So it's a fairly involved process, so we like to do it as seldom as we can. So with that, next is our timeline, like I said, the pencil's down date is July 1st, so that's what we are basically backing into. This has to be, as I said, the process requires this to get presented at the EQPW committee, and then has to get approved by council and read out to council, so we're shooting to be on, as of right now, the June EQPW meeting, so any changes you have in mind, please send them to us soon. We'll be pushing this out to their stakeholders, which includes groups like this and the development community in April, so that we can get comments back and make changes and have time to do that, but again, it'll be pencils down on July 1st, because it has to be per House Bill 443. So, with that, any questions, and I'll just point to my staff. Yes, sir. Doug, this is Steve Evans from Kentucky Water Research Institute. I was wondering if you all are having any discussions about Senate Bill 89 and the removal protections for ephemeral streams in the state, if you're thinking about anything in the stormwater manual that may help protect that, those water bodies, in the event that that legislation passes through. To be frank, right now, it's mostly just shaking our hand at Frankfurt, because we have to be careful that we don't try to undo what Frankfurt's doing, because it's tough when you're a little brother. So we've talked about it, but we haven't actually, I don't think we'll have any changes in this manual update that we're doing now that will impact that, to be frank. It doesn't mean we can't down the future, but it's going to take a lot of thought, probably after that bill is passed and become enacted, to say what can we do as a community to potentially offset some of those problems that are created by that. But we have to tread lightly, because we're a little brother. Any other questions? Yes. This is just very short and general. So far, the ZOTA, which is going forward, the zoning ordinance, doesn't seem to do any changes in Article 19, and I was wondering whether anything you're changing in the stormwater manuals would impact. No. The good thing about Article 19, and Greg can back me up here, and Josh, Article 19 tends to be a thou shalt kind of, it has less range than some of our stormwater and procedures manual do. So it is already pretty thou shalt-y, that's the word, yeah. So it doesn't need those, and again, a lot of these changes that I'm talking about here weren't even thou shalt-y. We literally change ranges to here's what it's going to be, which is unfortunate, to be frank, in my opinion, but that's what we've got to do. State says we have to, we have to. That's already, thou, you can't have this in the vegetative buffer, yada yada yada. A lot of that stuff in Article 19 is already, it already meets the 443 requirements, so we don't have to make those changes. Going once, going twice. All right. Appreciate it. Thanks, everybody. All right. Thank you so much, Doug. I appreciate that. All right. So next, something that we always have is the potential topics for, well, the next meeting. So any ideas for future topics? Ken. I'd like to learn more about the floodplain, how it's operated, and what it's, like, the regulations are. Okay. All right. I was going to try and give you as much awkward silence as possible. That's a good starting point, Ken, I appreciate that, and I'm sure that Bailey will have lots of other ideas as well moving forward. Okay. Next is announcements, or is it the, yes, committee roster, that's what I thought was coming up next. So Bailey sent an email about this recently. Do you want to talk about this at all, Bailey, or do you just want me to? The people with asterisks by their names are willing to continue on in their role unless they're contested today. So we have an opportunity to nominate other people and then have a vote, but all those people on the list are either vacant or expired as of, like, Tuesday, so. So the first thing we need to do is see if there are any nominations, correct, Bailey, for any of the slots, preferably ones that say vacant would be lovely as well. Any nominations? We did talk to Robert about the KYTC one for when District 7 slot gets filled, so that one might be filled soon. Yes, Ken. So is Marty here for the conference? He is not here. I do not see him. Have you had a... So I would like to nominate Amy Clark for Town Branch. She's a resident of Town Branch and involved in a lot of water quality issues in that area. Fantastic. Do you accept, Amy? That's maybe another... I don't want to push out Marty, but if he's not volunteering, I'd be glad to. Thank you. I'd be honored. We need more Amys and more people who use the microphone, so good job. Any other nominations? Okay. Bailey, I'm sorry, we should have talked about this ahead of time. So Jason, Ainsley, should we include them, Jason also? No. Because he indicated he did not, or did not indicate that he wanted to participate. Oh, I'm sorry, Jason. I haven't been able to attend very much. I have a conflict. So this is the first meeting I've been able to attend for a while. If somebody else wants North Elkhorn, that's fine. If not, I'll continue. Is there competition for Jason's seat, North Elkhorn? Okay. Well, then I take that as a nomination. We got you going. And you answered some of the questions in the quiz and got us to win, so I'm all for that. Okay. I would entertain... Oh, Ken, do you have a... Well, I was going to say about South Elkhorn, are we allowed to nominate people we haven't talked to? I mean, you're allowed to do that, for sure. I will defer to Bailey whether or not we want to vote on those people. That's all right. Never mind. But I know that Neighbors United for South Elkhorn Creek discussed this via email, and they did have some ideas. I'm surprised... Anybody here from NUSAC? Okay. Well, I'm going to drop South Elkhorn. My suggestion would be to talk to them about it. You can nominate them. I was going to say, there's Cheryl Taylor. I'm going to recruit her. She used to run these meetings, I think. She used to be commissioner. Yeah, a long time ago. But we will not vote on Cheryl. Is that okay, Bailey, with you? Okay. All right. So then what I would like to do is entertain a motion to accept the list as presented, including Jason Ainslie, Steve Garland, Scott Southall, Amy Clark, and Russ Chirpin. Okay. First and a second. Any more discussion? All in favor? Aye. Awesome. Any opposed? Fantastic. Congratulations to all of you. I appreciate it. Okay. Now, announcements. We have a large list of announcements, Bailey. Do you want to go over these, or do you want me to just call on people or just talk about them? Okay. I'll let you do it. We have an announcement that's not on the list. We did submit our proposed monitoring plan to KDAL, and they accepted it. So that's a positive. So thank you all for your feedback in the work group and just collaboration on that. We do have question and answers. I'm not going to go over everyone. There's so many. But we have question and answer sessions for incentive grants, so be on the lookout for those. We'll have Zoom options. And then Water Week is coming up, and there's a lot of activities with Water Week, especially on the first day. What else do we have? The Wolf Run Watershed Council and Watershed Plan meeting is at 5.30 next Monday. There's a Bluegrass Watershed Summit at BCTC at 9 a.m., which Ken has been passing out the flyers for. Water Quality Fees Board meeting at 9 a.m. on the 10th. Let's see. Incentive grant applications for Class A and Class B education are due May 2nd. Household hazardous waste on the 10th, and mulch giveaway on the 17th. I think that's it. We'll be reaching out for more nominations for vacant committee seats, so you'll probably see more emails on those. And then does anyone have anything else? All righty. Oh, yep. I just want to say, in general, it would be super if we had that right after the meeting, just that schedule of events. Okay. Thanks. Sounds great. All right. Mark. Just a reminder, the Kentucky Stormwater Association annual convention is going to come back to Lexington this July. Right now, there is a call for abstracts out, and it's due March 21st. So anybody that's thinking to present or looking to present, go to the Kentucky Stormwater Association website and fill that out. Sounds great. And I'd just like to say that Bluegrass Greenswers host our annual Main Street Clean Sweep event, which is a litter cleanup in 20 communities during the week of Earth Week, so April 19th through the 26th. So there's four or five in Lexington, if you're interested in participating in any of these litter cleanups. We usually get about 1,000 volunteers picking up eight tons of litter in a week, so it's really a fun way to get involved around Earth Day. And then we have our Bluegrass Sustainability Summit on April 28th. The focus this year is on recycling and complete streets, but there will be a lot of water quality related things as well. So if you'd like to come to that, it's at UK Student Center. Sounds great. That concludes our meeting. Thank you all for coming.