♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ Good afternoon, thank you all for joining us. Calling to order this confirmation hearing for Commissioner of Law. We have Mr. David Barbary, if you would join us at the podium. I know you know how this works, but I'm going to kind of say it for the public. We're basically going to ask you to tell us a little bit about yourself, why you are applying or wanting this position. And then I'm going to open up the floor to my colleagues for questions and comments. And then we're going to go into a closed session back there, make our determination, and then come back out. All right, so Mr. Barbary, take it away. Good afternoon. First, I'd like to thank the mayor for her confidence in me in putting me up to this position and for you all for considering me for this job. I grew up in Ocala, Florida, which is the other horse capital of the world. I went to the University of Florida, worked for a few years, and then I went to law school at the Florida State College of Law. Practiced law in private practice in both Pensacola and Tampa. I was working for the local government in Tampa when my wife and I had our first child, and she is from Bardstown, Springfield area. And she graduated from Tates Creek High School. And she wanted to come home to raise our kids, so I started looking for a job up here. And I was interviewed in a hotel room at the Walt Disney World Resort by the Director of Litigation, Ed Gardner. And he basically phoned in the Commissioner of Law at that time. So basically, I was hired from the Florida area and came up here. I had visited a couple times with my wife and her family and stuff for Christmas and stuff. But really didn't know that much about Lexington. I think it's probably one of the greatest places in the world you can raise your family. I mean, I really appreciated being able to do all that stuff. I started working for the government in 2000, pretty much have been here through five mayors. And I think this is my 13th council, maybe. I've been exposed to probably almost every issue that we've ever had come up here. Hopefully, I've been doing a good job for you all in the interim period of time that I've been acting, so. All right, thank you for that. Council members, sign in to speak. Council Member Allinger. Thank you, Vice Mayor. I'm curious, when you had your Florida law degree, would you get reciprocity, or did you have to sit for the bargain? So, at one point in time, I was licensed in three states. So, there is no reciprocity in Florida. I still have an inactive license down there, because at some point, maybe I'll start practicing down there again when I retire. But I worked in Pensacola when I first got out of school. And so, I also sat for the Alabama bar. So, at one point in time, I was licensed in Florida, Alabama, and Kentucky all at the same time. But I had to come up here and take the entire bar exam again after being out of law school for like five years. It was fun. That sounds miserable, but congratulations. Thanks. Thank you. Council Member Morton. Thank you, and I've had a great time working to you, and I have nothing but most respect for you. I just have a philosophy question, I would say. So, can you discuss your philosophy on impartiality and balancing the administration's priority versus a council member's priority, especially given that council does not have its own legal counsel? Sure. And we try to make sure everybody in the Department of Law understands this. We represent the government, right? So, we're giving, whether you all think this is the case all the time or not, we're giving the same advice to the mayor that we're giving you all, right? We're not telling her anything different. She'll probably be the first one to tell you. We tell her no as much as we tell you no on something if it doesn't sound like a good idea. But we're always working to try to get to a yes for you all and for the government and what you all want to do. So, we try to treat everyone equally. You're all our clients, along with the employees here and the departments and divisions here. So, that's our philosophy, is equal treatment of the elected officials as well as our other clients. Thank you. Council Member Curtis. Thank you, Vice Mayor, and thanks for being here, Commissioner Barbary. We really appreciate you. So, since you've been acting commissioner before, this is a job that you're somewhat familiar with. I was wondering if you could speak to something that has surprised you, since you took on that role that you might not have expected from a prior time at LFUCG. Well, the biggest surprise, I don't know if you all remember the timing of this, but I think I started the week that there was the issue between the two council members, involving the order where one of them was not supposed to be able to attend the meeting. So, I don't know that in the 25 years I've been here, anything like that had ever come up before. And of course, you want to do what's right and under the circumstances. So, we managed to come up with a means where the people impacted by that in that district were still able to have some level of representation without turning everything on its head. So, yeah. And my follow up to that question would be just simply, this is often a thankless job, why do you want to keep doing it? Most of the people that worked, we're there because it's interesting and we like Lexington a lot. And we feel like we're making a difference in the community. That's why you do it. So, yeah. Thank you so much. Thanks, Vice Mayor. Thank you. Council Member Savigny. Thank you, Vice Mayor. And thank you for applying and wanting to do this and continuing in this field. I've got a question with you that is probably going to come up over these next, it comes up every year when we talk about different funds and fund uses and what we can use funds for. I'm kind of curious, because I've always been curious, what do you guys look at when you are making a decision that, hey, we can't use the landfill fund for this, or we can't. Where are you going statute-wise? So the general law, and it might even be at the constitutional level, the general law is when you do something that's in the nature of a special tax or fee, and you tell the public, this is why I'm raising this, this is why I'm going to do this. You don't have the ability without changing how you've set it up going forward to go back and spend it on something else. And the law on this changed a little bit, where it used to be the case, probably for most of the time local governments were in existence, where as long as it was still spent on a public purpose, you could go, my bad. And then it's still a public purpose, the government runs short of money sometimes. Well, the case law changed on that, and one of the courts basically said that going forward, if you do that, you can end up being individually liable for the expenditure. So we are probably, maybe even sometimes overly cautious in that respect, because we don't want to put you all in a situation of having some level of exposure where we're going to tell you, if somebody comes out of the woodwork and tries to come after us on this, we can't really represent you out of the self-insurance fund, because it basically says you're not supposed to be able to do something like this, so yeah. But I think it's a fairly simple concept. You're telling somebody, here's what I'm going to use this money for, so until you change kind of gears going forward, like I want to use it for something else. So you go ahead and officially do that in collecting it going forward, you're kind of in that bad area doing it otherwise, so yeah. Thank you. I was just wanting to hear your take on that. I'm sure it's going to come up, it comes up every year. It's like, can we squeeze this out of this, or squeeze that? And I think we've heard quite a few interesting potential uses of some of those funds, yeah. Great, thank you so much, I appreciate it. Thank you, Vice Mayor. Thank you, Council Member Lynch. Acting Commissioner Barbary, my question is, should you be confirmed? Do you have any changes, any improvements you want to make in the Department of Law? One of my goals is to, so my sense is, we're probably going to lose a lot. We lost a lot of institutional experience in the last five years, and some of it's sitting back there still working for the government, but that's tough, right? And so we're building that back up, but I want to put us in the best position as possible. Because we have a few employees that are at the point where they probably could retire whenever they want now. And I'm trying to set us up to be in the best position possible, that when something like that happens, the institutional knowledge is built up so that that doesn't become a big issue, so. That sounds good to me, and I just want to say, I've enjoyed working with you since you've been here. I appreciate your bluntness and your honesty, and we had some great conversations, so thank you. Thanks. Thank you, Council Member Ellinger. Thank you. You just brought something up that I was thinking about, but made me want to ask you, how much longer do you plan on being here, you talked about? I told the mayor, I look at everything on a year to year basis, so I don't really know. I mean, I could, if she gets reelected, I could be here the whole time, or I could come to her and say, I've had my fill, I don't want to do this anymore. I have enough time to leave tomorrow, I just, I enjoy doing this, and I'd like to continue doing it. Well, I've really enjoyed working with you. In the last CLEs that I took, one of the big issues was AI, and how people are writing their briefs, and do you have any policy on that? Actually, Michael has been working on that in the last month, so we will have one developed shortly. Yeah, because I think that seems like that's an issue that it certainly helps you, but also you end up getting false citations in there, too, with some of it. And the expectation now is that you actually use it. You're supposed to actually use it as part of the practice of law, yes. You're supposed to incorporate it. So, yeah. And it's very helpful in some respects. You just have to be real careful about double checking stuff. So, yeah. Thank you. All right, if council members don't have any further questions, you can have a seat, Mr. Barbary, and I'll take a motion to go into closed session. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. All right, we'll be right back. All right, we'll be right back. Please, can I get a motion to come back into open session? Second. I have a motion and a second. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. All right, we are back in session. Mr. Barbary, thank you so much for the service you've provided so far. We're happy to let you know that you have been approved to be our new Commissioner of Law. All right, thank you all very much. Thank you. We are adjourned.