# Environmental Quality & Public Works (EQPW) Committee - February 3, 2026 > Auto-transcribed civic record · Committee · February 3, 2026 - **Permalink**: https://meetings.lexingtonky.news/meeting/6681 - **Source video**: https://lfucg.granicus.com/player/clip/6681?view_id=14&redirect=true - **Date**: 2026-02-03 - **Body**: Committee - **Last revised**: February 13, 2026 - **Length**: 10,442 words - **Speakers**: Chair, Council Member > ⚠️ **Auto-generated content.** Audio from the official Granicus video was auto-transcribed by OpenAI Whisper-1, with speaker labels folded in from Granicus closed-captioning. 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 Environmental Quality and Public Works Committee met on February 3, 2026, at 1:00 PM, with D. Sevigny presiding. The meeting covered three agenda items in total, including the approval of a prior committee summary and two informational presentations. Across the course of the meeting, three motions and votes were taken, and no public comments were heard. The committee approved the November 18, 2025 Committee Summary and received informational briefings on the Sewer Cleanout Reimbursement Program and Lextran Services and Environmental Impacts. ## Attendance The following 12 members were present at the February 3, 2026 Committee meeting: - D. Sevigny - T. Morton - J. Brown - E. Curtis - L. Sheehan - L. Higgins-Hord - J. Hale - A. Beasley - H. Boone - Vice Mayor Dan Wu - Shayla Lynch - Jennifer Reynolds No members were recorded as absent or late. ## Votes and Decisions Three motions were brought before the Committee at the February 3, 2026 meeting, all of which passed unanimously. - **Approval of the November 18, 2025 Committee Summary** [timestamp: 0:03]: Moved by Curtis and seconded by Morton, the Committee voted unanimously to approve the summary from the November 18, 2025 meeting. - **Approval of Recommendations for the Water Quality Management Fee Incentive Grant Program**: Moved by Sevigny and seconded by Curtis, the Committee voted unanimously to approve the recommendations for the Water Quality Management Fee Incentive Grant Program. No specific vote counts were recorded. - **Amendment to Storytelling and Toolkits Deadline**: Moved by LeGris and seconded by Sevigny, the Committee voted unanimously to amend the deadline for Storytelling and Toolkits in the recommendations, extending it from June 2026 to December 2026. No specific vote counts were recorded. No roll call votes were taken; all three motions passed without dissent or abstention. ## Appointments The following appointment was made during the February 3, 2026 Committee meeting: - **T. Morton** was appointed to the role of **Vice-Chair of the Environmental Quality and Public Works Committee**. ## Approval of November 18, 2025 Committee Summary [timestamp: 03:00] The committee took up the approval of the summary from its November 18, 2025 meeting. D. Sevigny was the key speaker during this portion of the proceedings. No concerns or substantive debate were noted regarding the content of the prior meeting's summary. The committee approved the November 18, 2025 summary. ## Sewer Cleanout Reimbursement Program [timestamp: 04:00] Director Charles H. Martin presented information on the Sewer Cleanout Reimbursement Program to the Committee. The presentation focused on challenges the department faces when diagnosing sewer problems, specifically the difficulty caused by the absence of cleanouts on residential or private sewer connections. L. Sheehan also participated as a key speaker during this agenda item. The core issue identified in the presentation is that without accessible cleanouts, crews are unable to efficiently locate and diagnose blockages or other problems within sewer lines. To address this, Director Martin proposed a pilot program that would offer reimbursements to property owners, presumably as an incentive to have cleanouts installed, thereby improving the department's ability to service and maintain the sewer system. This item was presented for informational purposes, and no formal vote or binding decision was recorded as an outcome of the discussion. ## Lextran Services and Environmental Impacts [timestamp: 31:59] Fred Combs delivered a presentation on Lextran's services, recent highlights, and environmental impacts. The presentation covered updates to Lextran's fleet as well as the introduction of new pilot programs. The item was informational in nature, and no vote or formal action was taken by the Committee. No additional speakers, specific concerns, or debate details are reflected in the available record for this agenda item. --- ## Decisions - **Motion** — passed (0-0): Approval of November 18, 2025 Committee Summary - **Motion** — passed (0-0): Approval of recommendations for the Water Quality Management Fee Incentive Grant Program - **Motion** — passed (0-0): Amend the deadline of the Storytelling and Toolkits in the recommendations from June 2026 to December 2026 --- ## Full transcript ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ Good afternoon and welcome everyone. It is one o'clock on Tuesday, February 3rd, and it's time for the Environmental Quality and Public Works Committee. I call this meeting to order, and I thank you for all being here. Before we start, I want to thank former EQBW Chair Legree for her leadership over the last year, and I want to take this opportunity to express my enthusiasm for serving as the chair of this committee. At this time, I would like to ask Council Member Morton to serve as my vice chair. Council Member Morton, do you accept? Yes, sir. Thank you. Colleagues, I also want to welcome Council Member Eblen for his first time to his first meeting, and I look forward to working with you closely as we focus on environmental quality and public works with our city. Before we begin our business, I'd like to remind the Council that the committee's work we do is important, and we have much dialogue and debate, and it should take place during this meeting. Please be courteous to our speakers by paying attention and asking engaging questions to make our discussions informative and substantial. As other chairs do, I'll attempt to call on committee members first, but if I like you, I may move you up, and if I don't, I may move you down, but everyone will get a chance to speak. Let's enjoy this time we have learning together. Our first item is the November 18th Committee Summary. Are there any additions or corrections? Hearing none, is there a motion to approve? So moved. Second. We have a motion and a second. Any discussion on the motion? Hearing none, all those in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed? That motion passes. All right, our first subject today is the Sewer Cleanout Reimbursement Program. This item came from Council Member Sheehan, and Council Member, would you like to introduce it? Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Director Martin, for being here to present with us today. I will let Director Martin explain the issue, and he has some really nice graphics in our presentation, but this is something that has come up a couple times in my district, and this is why I reached out to him, because oftentimes when people are needing these sewer cleanout installations, they're in the middle of a sewer crisis in their house, and then having to go through an extra step of contacting a plumber to get this cleanout installed, and it makes it a much harder process. So if there's a way for us as a city to ease this for our residents, I would like to have that discussion. So I'll turn it over to Director Martin for your presentation. Okay, thank you. I was hoping you were going to do a lead-in, because that was my first note, was follow Council Member Sheehan's lead. So thank you for having me today. As Council Member Sheehan said, this is an issue that plagues, I think, most every district at some level or another, particularly if you're inside New Circle, because those are the older homes, and they were built in a different way than the way that we're doing them now. The statement of the problem is based, due to the lack of a properly located two-way cleanout at many private residences, it leads to problems diagnosing the sewer problems, as Council Member Sheehan said. I should have made this clear, is that we're talking about dry weather overflows. We're not talking about when it rains and all that stuff. This is just any sunny day when somebody has a reoccurring sewer problem that they can't seem to diagnose, and part of the diagnosis really involves the installation of these two-way cleanouts. So sewer pipes cause, there are failures that occur in both the private system and in the public system. Most people don't realize, but nearly 40% of the pipes that are underground are actually privately owned. Every lateral that leads to a house or business or anything, once it reaches the right-of-way, it's private property then. So it's a problem to be able to differentiate between that publicly and privately. Where's the line of demarcation between one or the other? It varies all over town, and it's really a problem in the older system. When I came to work here in 1999, I was shocked by this, is that there's not a cleanout located where the property line and the right-of-way coincide with one another. Utilities I'd worked with in the past, that was standard fare, but state plumbing code requires a cleanout within two feet of the exterior wall, and that's what plumbing code says, and it really leaves us somewhat handcuffed in being able to diagnose problems, which I'll talk about that here in just a second. So I had to bring some sketches along here just to be able to show. The sewer line, it's typically eight to 12 inches in diameter. The public line is located in the street. This could be behind the house in an easement, but I used the street just for clarity. And then the individual lateral that comes and serves this house, there's the cleanout that's typically located right next to the foundation. What's missing is this other cleanout that's at the edge of the right-of-way or the edge of the easement. These are here at every house. Some of them are hard to find. Nobody's ever found them. They're behind the bushes under the landscaping, all the other things that have gotten built over the years and because it's a plastic thing, you can't even use a metal detector to find them. But what's really missing is this, and this is what I'm really here to talk about, is how can we set up a program that facilitates installation of those cleanouts located at the edge of the right-of-way or the edge of the easement line. So looking at this a different way, before we were looking at it from the top down. Now you're standing beside the house and we've lowered you down eight feet into the ground and you're looking at it sideways now. So here's the sewer main out here and then the lateral that leads all the way to the house. There's either a cleanout at location A, which is two feet within the exterior wall, or we're still inside. Inside's always a real problem because if you're having a backup and that pipe is full of water, the last thing you want to do is take the lid off of it inside your house. It got to be a real problem for us is that when COVID came along, we wouldn't go in people's houses to deal with it anyway. Of course, they didn't want us coming in their house either. So that really exacerbated what has been a problem all along. Again, all things are built this way because that's what state plumbing code says. I went too far here. Wait, let me go back here. Well, got a little too wild with my clicker. All right, so you bring in this problem now that happens all the time. A tree or some form or another vegetation breaks that sewer line because it's seeking water. It's seeking the nutrients, especially in the summertime. This happens a lot. And so it breaks this, and now these people are having a sewer backup. But these two lids here or these access points aren't going to tell you whether or not this tree has broken into it on the private property side of things and what is the upper lateral or private property whether it's broken into the lower lateral. And here's where that abyss, oh, well, you need to install a clean out, and then everything kind of falls apart because the property owners don't really understand what it is that is being expected of them. And in some cases, they're challenged to be able to pay for that, especially if you're on fixed income or anything else. So what we tell people is that they need to have a clean out installed at that location right there, sitting right on the property line. That defines whether or not it's a private property problem or a public property problem. And it's as clear as bell when I explain this to you, is that if you open that white lateral and you look inside of it, if it's holding water, your stoppage is down here on our side of it. If it's dry and they're still having a problem, that means the stoppage is up here on the private side of the system. And you can clearly, by opening that lid, tell exactly what the problem is. Likewise is that if it needs to be cleaned in either direction, it can be cleaned in either direction without having to go in somebody's house and create a huge mess while you're trying to diagnose what the problem is. Because typically when our call crew shows up, basically somebody's toilet's backed up, that lateral's full of water, and you basically have to go from either point A or point B and run all the way down to it until you're able to unclog it. And you can't always measure and count whether you're not in the public part of it or not because none of them go straight. They turn, they do this, they do that, and so you can't even rely on a counter. Instead, what we would like to have happen and what we've asked people to do in the past is hire a plumber to come out and put in this two-way cleanout because then it can be really diagnosed. Is it the city's problem or is it a private property problem? Benefits and downside, I probably already covered this already, but the downside part of it would be is at some point in time you've got to dig up your yard and be able to install this, and Council Member Sviggi and I were talking about that before. The cost of that can be sometimes pretty significant depending on how much landscaping you have and whether if it's in a backyard, it's under a patio, or it goes on and on with the surface things, and also how deep it is as well, too. So the cost of having the work and the intrusive stuff, but once it's done, the benefit of it is the entire service lattel can be cleaned from outside the house, and again, there's no disagreements about whether it's a private property problem or a public property problem. Right now, basically, we get called out over and over again on the same problems over and over again because they've got that tree that's growing in their front yard and they won't do anything about it. If they call the city, the city will come out there, run it, we diagnose it, we tell them it's a private property problem, but it still lingers. It just stays there and doesn't go away. So I added number three about reducing operating costs because to be able to go out there and look at a two-way cleanout, take a picture of it, it is not holding water. This is not our problem. That gives us all the evidence that we need in order to be able to say we're not coming back and servicing this thing again. So when we were talking about this again here last year when the most recent problem in the 5th District popped up, I'm thinking to myself, what is it can we do here? How big is the problem? When I came here, it was like this, and then very soon, Rod Service and I implemented a program in conjunction with the Division of Engineering that all new builds would have a two-way cleanout installed at the property line. So it's really all homes that were built prior to 1999 that have this. That's a lot of them. That's a lot of them here in Lexington. So it's a pretty big bite of the apple, so to speak, if you were going to do this. So along last spring, early summer, the sidewalk people came to my house and put the Xs on my sidewalk, and so I got involved with the sidewalk program. It worked really well. I was really, really pleased with the way that it worked. It was very communicative. It was clear. It was a cost-share program. So what we talked about was trying to model after the sidewalk program that put together a pilot program that allowed someone who has an ongoing sewer problem and needs to have one of these two-way cleanouts installed that they've got a path forward on how to do this. So what I'm suggesting here would be we would verify the need and provide guidance to the property owner. We're not doing that right now. The property owner contracts for completing the work, and then we would issue a reimbursement based on whatever the program criteria would be. So the reason I'm here, you don't need to make a decision today. I know you've got a lot on your plates right now already, but I originally was going to do this in November, and then I got bumped on solar, which is okay. My original plan was to basically engage the committee, try to get input either here or in the aftermath after you've thought about it a little bit, and try to be able to put that input into an engagement with staff and the CAO's office, plumbing contractors, trying to find out what that business element, what they're capable of doing, and basically put together a program for FY27 utilizing existing staff, utilizing existing vehicles, the only thing that we would be adding to this would be the initial financial investment in trying to be able to launch the program to see whether or not that it would work. So basically what I'm asking for today is whatever advice or input that you may have, and basically some validity to try to be able to move forward with it. Thank you, Director Martin. Council Members, now is your time to ask questions to the Director about his presentation. Please sign in. Council Member Sheehan. Thank you again for this, because I know a lot of us have these homes that fall into this category, and I know I've come across this at least two times in the last year where we've had a conversation about this, so I appreciate you looking into this and being willing to put together this pilot program. I think for me, thinking about our community, in some of our programs like this where we've offered assistance, we've also been able to scale the percentage we would cover based on their income. So if you make under a certain household income, then we would cover more of the cost. So I would like to consider that if it's feasible. And then the other piece of this is I would like to know, is this something that we could cover out of our water quality fees, or does it have to come from a general fund? Do you have any sense of that? My recommendation, it would come from the sewer fund, Fund 4002, not the water quality fund, because it's more geared towards storm water and in-stream water quality. This is about a function of the sewer system, basically. By installing that two-way clean-out, we may reveal that the problem is on our side to begin with, and that's obviously a repair that we would need to facilitate in order to be able to make the problem go away. But the income level was something that I had considered that is worth vetting. The other part of it is trying to set the program up that there needs to be a demonstrated need. Because like with every program, there's a limited amount of funding, and you wouldn't want it to turn into a free cheese type of, you have to basically have the need. I think there would have to be some discussion about what you were doing with investment properties versus private property as well. Yeah, some of our other programs require home ownership for the applicant, or property ownership. The reason why I wanted to do this, obviously you and I talked about this before, is that you all have a lot broader experience with that as far as how you deal with your constituents and stuff like that. The ideal of this is it's a constituent-based type of program, is that the idea is for us to solve people's sewer problems. I know when the consent decree started, I kept telling everybody the goal should be, on any dry day, nobody should ever have an overflow. Sometimes when it rains, if it rains enough, it is what it is. But dry weather, dang on it, we ought to be able to stop that if we can. And so this would just be another step in trying to combat that issue. Yeah, and I do agree with you that there should be some sort of threshold piece where this is something that we're not necessarily at this stage for a pilot doing proactively, but when the situation arises or you have this list of people who have this repeatedly or are calling repeatedly about an issue that is related to this, I think then we could kind of prioritize those households first. Everything in the consent decree has been about big pump stations, big pipelines, big storage tanks and stuff. And that in thinking about part of what our post-consent decree world might look like, I probably won't be around for that, but in helping try to put that together, what are we doing that continues to invest in the reliability of our sewer system? I think this is an important component of that. Yeah, well, thank you, Director. I do, again, appreciate you putting the work into this and bringing this suggestion forward. Thank you, Chair. Thank you. Council Member Hale. Thanks, Chair. Thank you, Director, for your presentation. I just got a quick question. So do you know approximately the cost that it takes to install one of these two-way systems? To install a two-way clean-out, it is definitely a function of what somebody has in their yard or like downtown. Obviously downtown doesn't have a yard. It's a sidewalk. The cost would be much greater than that. I just saw a change order for rerouting an entire lateral in Meadowthorpe. It was $6,000. So I would say it's probably three to eight is probably a general range that I would talk about, $3,000 to $8,000. And do we have like an approximate percentage of how many homes that we have here in Lexington that were built before or that doesn't have these clean-outs, built before like 2015 that don't have these clean-outs? It's been a while since I've looked at this number, but what sticks in my mind is we have 130,000 service connections in our system. And I would guess that anywhere between 75% to 80% of them don't have a two-way clean-out at their property line. When we have done projects, we've gone in and rebuilt sewers in some of the older neighborhoods. I know in Council Member Morton's district, we've had the street torn up on a couple of streets for a long time. But part of that is running new service laterals and getting clean-outs installed in those. And so we've gone at it a little bit as part of our capital projects. And so the number is dwindling, but it's still a pretty big one. And this number does include not only installing the clean-out, but putting everything back to the way it was. That would be a reasonable expectation. With the sump pump program, one of our mottos is leave it like you found it, because if you don't, they won't invite you back. All right. Thank you, Director. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Council Member. Next up we have Council Member Ablin. You may have answered this, Director Martin. It's good to see you again. But I live in a 120-year-old neighborhood, and the city put in a new sewer line last year. The contractor did a wonderful job, and that included the clean-out, and they put them in the sidewalk. So is that your regular process, that as you upgrade sewer lines, you're doing that automatically? Yes, yes. So that's our process, unless there's something that inhibits that. Because all the people in my business, obviously we've long appreciated the need for having those clean-outs and stuff like that. And so as part of what we call the I&I program that LEED Eliminators do, yes, we have those clean-outs installed, wherever practical. Okay, great. Thank you. And Vice Mayor Wu. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Director Martin. To follow on Council Member Sheehan's question about sort of where the money's coming from, you mentioned out of the water quality fund, right? Sewer fund. The sanitary sewer fund. Yes, thank you. That amount of money that we're talking about, is that strictly going towards the reimbursement program? Is that what the bulk of our sort of... Yeah, I would... In my vision of it, again, taking advice and stuff, but my vision is that we would earmark a portion of that as a budgeted area line item, much like we've done with sump pumps over the years. We've been doing sump pumps for over a decade now, and there's a specific line item in a department ID that is dedicated to the sump pump program. This would be the same type of thing, because then you could also fairly easily track the investment that you've made. In your slide deck, you mentioned part of the next steps talking about potentially FY27 budget. If it's coming out of the sewer fund, would there be a separate budget ask in this next budget cycle? Yeah, and we had the budget meeting last Friday. It wasn't exactly a rosy picture that was painted, so I'm not so sure this is a great time to start a program. If nothing else, we would at least put together the fundamentals of it. As Council Member Sheehan pointed out, is that right now we don't even really give property owners really good guidance on what to do. I mean, oh, we need to contact a plumber, and it's like we need to do more than that. If we put together the framework of the program through the calendar year 27, maybe you're ready to launch it in fiscal year 28 when things are maybe a little bit more favorable conditions. As I said in my last slide, I was going to get input from the committee and then get input from the CAO's office. When we talked about this back in November, they saw the value in this as well, too, and so as we go through the budget deliberations, I would assume there's going to be some dialogue about whether or not there's room for this or not. It's definitely not a general fund type of thing. This is purely a sewer fund operation. And to that point, do you have an idea or a ballpark or even a wish of what you think that amount should be to start this program? 50,000 kept sticking in my mind, but I was going to hesitate on that. I obviously hesitated on that because I'd like to go back and see really where we stand right now. How many eligible properties do I feel like there's out there? Because I honestly haven't looked at that here recently. I hear about the ones that I hear about. I hear about them from you all and stuff like that, but I always don't necessarily know whether I know about all of them or not. And so I really want to dig in with sewer line maintenance folks because they really, the call crew, they know where the reoccurring problems are or not and find out are we talking about 10 properties or 25 properties that are on the waiting list? Because then I would use my budgetary number to do some math and try to figure out what would be a good starting point as far as a pilot program. Again, the emphasis is on a pilot program because I really feel like we'll learn some things along the way. Yeah, and that was kind of, I mean, you've answered my last question about how many properties are we talking about. And I assume, if I understand this correctly, it's basically the property owner kind of initiates it in terms of like a request or a complaint? Is that how the process starts? I'm sorry. It would be complaint driven. You've got to demonstrate a need in order to be able to do this because to your point, we're doing this as part of our rehabilitation system. So we're attacking it from that side and then we're going to attack it from the other side is giving you an opportunity to have relief to your problem by having this pilot program that you can access. And again, it being a pilot program and being a cost share thing is that the idea was that it would discourage people from doing it just because they should. It's really about the people who need it. Yeah, I appreciate that. And overall, I'm supportive of this idea. I think it's most likely in the long run going to save us money from the various service calls and future issues that it might present. So I appreciate it. Thanks, Chair. Thank you, Vice Mayor. I've just got a few things for you. Director Martin, do you... So my guess is you have an overall sewer maintenance plan because as you're going through neighborhoods, older neighborhoods right now doing the mains, you're doing all of these already. Is that correct? Every one of them we can. I hate to stand here and say all of them because somebody will bring one up that we didn't do and there's probably a reason why we didn't. We want to reinstall the lateral and install a two-way clean out at every property when we're going down the street because if the street's blown up and we don't replace the pipelines that are under us, then shame on us. Yeah, okay. And then do you feel like this particular problem, do you feel like we hear about it from everybody who is having the issue or do you feel like there are homeowners that we're not hearing from? I'm just curious. I suspect there's probably ones you're not hearing from because, again, like I said, if somebody's having a problem and they only have the clean outs that are located by the house, our crew comes out there. They're like, please run the lateral. And the guy knows what's going to happen. He's going to get 30 feet down there and he's going to hit roots. But when you're standing there with a machine and this person's having a problem, it's really hard to tell somebody no. And so we do it. We just do it over and over again. And because their problem gets solved, then they're not necessarily motivated to say, well, I'm going to spend $6,000 and replace my lateral. They'd rather go to Disney than do that. So are you actually doing some sort of pressure cutout of roots? Like are you actually doing something to remove the blockage on the person's property at that point? Yes, because if you're going to run the lateral and stuff like that, basically it's a high-pressure jet nozzle that punctures a hole in it. Because oftentimes it's not completely all roots. It's all the stuff that goes down the drain that catches on the roots. And it just turns into a big ball. Okay. I'm supportive of this program and trying it as a pilot. I do think that it would be interesting because it's different than the sidewalk. The sidewalk, I think we kind of have a general feel for how much each square of concrete typically costs, and we have some good cost structure for that. I am kind of curious as to, like we'd probably have some sort of cap cost on this. Hopefully it would be an inducement enough for people to do this, but I can also see where they would still be in the same boat unless it was big enough. We have a cap cost on the sump pump program. We started out with $2,000. It was a council initiative. The sump pump program really got legs, I guess, when the consent decree came along and everybody's bills were going up and there was a lot of pushing back about, well, what about all these sump pumps that are putting water in the system for free? Anyway, we did put a cap on that, and so there are some people that have had to spend their own money. Inflation came along, and now we're up to $3,000 and stuff. And so I think the same approach would be here as well, is that we would use the pilot to try to get a better handle on what the price range will be for replacing or installing cleanouts, and then we would refine the program to say this is how much that we're willing to spend in these circumstances. Anything beyond that would be a property owner's responsibility. You know, we find this a lot of times when we work in people's yards and stuff like that, is that, you know, they want to do an enhancement to what's there already, and we'll reimburse them for the value of what we tore up. We use landscape architects for that a lot of times. You know, we'll pay you for the grass and for the patio and stuff like that, but if you want to do brick pavers and stuff like that, you take our check and you put your own money into it. And a lot of times that works really well. Thank you, Director. I'm going to turn it over to Council Member Sheehan to wind this up. Thank you, Chair. Director Martin, thank you again for the presentation, and I do want to highlight that you have said multiple times this would not be a general fund ask, so we do have the sanitary sewer fund that could be potentially used for this. And then, colleagues, I also we talked about the sidewalk fund as being an example of a model for this. We also have our hazardous street tree program that's similar too, where both of these models have some sort of evaluation or assessment by an LFUCG person before then the money is committed. So I think we do have precedent for these types of programs already within government. So thank you again. I appreciate the discussion here today and your consideration as we start working on this pilot. Thank you. All right. Next up we have a presentation from the Lextran team who will share some of the services they offer and have environmental impacts. They will also, I would say, I have someone else that's supposed to do this, but I guess, Mr. Combs, you're going to do this. Yes, thank you. Yeah, I look forward to hearing from you. Thank you for having me in front of the committee this afternoon, almost this morning. To start off with our mission statement, we serve people in our community with mobility solutions. And a brief outline from the topics I'll touch on today, some highlights from fiscal year 25 and what we've done so far in 26, discussion on our services and environmental impacts, and then some notes on what we expect to come in fiscal year 27. But before we get started, I do want to share my appreciation for the team in the response to the winter storm. We missed very, very little service. We held strong during the Sunday when everything really started to get bad. So kudos to our operations and maintenance and customer service teams for responding to the storm in the way that they did. I'm very proud for the product that we put out over the past week and a half. Some other recent highlights, the transit center, we are finally open. We opened that about a week ago, and that is the interior renovation, and we did some work on the exterior as well. That includes real-time passenger information, so arrival and departure information, as well as just some more inviting and comfortable space for our employees and customers to interact. Our strategic plan is in the final stages. We'd like to wrap that up here in a couple of weeks. We will touch on the microtransit pilot and the LexRide downtown circulator projects in a moment. Those have been a focus of ours over the past year or so. Our team was awarded $6.1 million in federal grants for seven compressed natural gas buses and ten paratransit vehicles. We hired our first mobility manager to oversee the non-core services that include the microtransit pilot and the LexRide service. We also adopted our 2025-28 Title VI program plan and have been implementing small service improvements. We did those in May, August, and December, and that's just to make the whole system run a little more efficiently. So by the numbers, our fixed-route service, so that's the larger buses that run on time schedules, we are intending to move forward with the same service levels that we've previously run. That's 35-minute frequency on a majority of our core routes. Think of those routes as the major arterials in the city, with 70-minute frequency on nights and weekends. We do know that existing fixed-route service gaps remain, and a big point to that is that 35-minute frequency. We would love to see that number drop, but, again, that's going to take some more planning, some more funding to get that to happen. We do have the two pilot programs that we'll touch on more in a moment, which is the downtown circulator, or LexRide, and then the microtransit service. Out of our last comprehensive operations analysis, this table at the bottom shows how much of our community that we are covering with our fixed-route services. So nearly half of the low-income and carless households are within a quarter of a mile of one of our bus stops. Within half of a mile, we have about a third of low-income households and nearly three-fourths of the carless households. And that goes to show how much coverage that we have in our community with our services. We have 25 routes, about 75 buses, nearly 900 bus stops, a little over 3.5 million trips last fiscal year, over about 2 million miles served, and about 200,000 hours of service. So that gives you a sense of the scale of our fixed-route operation. Our wheel service, that is our complementary paratransit service, we did about 160,000 rides last fiscal year. Over 4,000 members of our community are certified wheels riders. That means by nature of their disability, they're unable to access our fixed-route service. And we have about 68 ADA-accessible vehicles for those services. On-time performance has been a real focus of ours. If you recall, the first time I came before council a couple years ago, our on-time performance was not very good. We have slowly but surely improved. We're over 80% now. Last quarter of last year, we dipped a little bit, but I think we're back to the 80% line. That's not good enough. That's not where we want to be. But we have noticed some real improvement over the past months. So into our pilot projects, the LEX Drive is our downtown circulator. It is in partnership with LFUCG, along with VisitLEX, Downtown Lexington Partnership, and LEX Park. Special thanks to Councilmember James Brown for spearheading this initiative. The LEX Ride service will be essentially two circulator routes connecting employees, residents, and visitors downtown and popular entertainment districts. You see a general map on the screen that shows roughly what the route will look like. We anticipate that would happen Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights from 4 p.m. to midnight. And we would run essentially Keeneland to Keeneland, so April 2nd through October 31st. Our fare on that service will be the same as it is on our fixed route, $1 per trip. And we look to have our first experience with a tap-to-ride fare collection onboard these vehicles. We hope to get some information back and maybe expand that out to our full fleet at some point in the future. The Microtransit Pilot Project, again, is a curb-to-curb transportation service with origins and destinations located within a specific service zone. Through our feasibility study, we identified six zones in Lexington that we felt that microtransit could be viable. We chose one that we'll talk about in a moment to try and really get a pilot project off the ground. That zone runs essentially clockwise from Versailles Road over to Newtown. The service would be from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m., seven days a week, with two vehicles logged in peak service. Where we are along that pilot, we have an RFP that is currently open. We expect responses to that RFP in a couple of weeks. And we look to get permission from our board to start negotiating a contract in our March board meeting, so March 25th. If all that goes well, we hit those targets. We anticipate a start date for the service to be sometime in the third quarter of this year. So July, August, September of this year, we would see those vehicles on the streets. So Bus Rapid Transit is another project that we've talked about, not only in council but in the community, over the past few years. Bus Rapid Transit is essentially a bus service that would mimic a rail service that you would see in a larger city, which is a higher frequency with dedicated lanes, faster boarding times with unique branding. The root of this conversation began really in 2015 when we did a study on Nicholasville Road, an alternatives analysis, which identified BRT as the most likely path to improve mobility on that corridor. We followed that up with the Imagine Nicholasville Road study in 2021. And then lately, we've been working on a traffic modeling study that would demonstrate what would happen if we were to implement the findings of the Imagine Nicholasville Road study. The next step for the BRT is to identify what federal grants might be available. Now, this is a very capital-intensive program with a reasonably high price tag, so we would need some support from our federal partners to make it happen. So programs such as the Capital Improvement Grant Program would be what we would look for to help us with those capital expenses. So in terms of environmental impacts, our fleet is diverse. We have CNG electric and hybrid vehicles in our fleet. About three-fourths of our fleet is some form of green propulsion. We have seven new CNG vehicles to be ordered this year. On bus stops, we've been installing solar lights that will help with safety and security. We've got about 30 stops completed so far, with others to come later on this year. So that's going to help us with the nighttime ridership with lighting to make sure that you can be seen and safe. But really, the environmental impacts in public transit is less so on the type of vehicle that we use, but the number of miles that we take off of the streets. We think of environmental impact in transportation in terms of vehicle miles traveled or engine miles traveled. So we did more than 11 million passenger miles traveled over the last year, and that is really where our environmental impact comes from. You add another person or two on a bus, that's going to make more of an environmental impact than just about anything else that we can do. So that's what we want to put service out there that's attractive and help us reach our environmental goals by being the mass transit partner that we are. So what do we have on tap for fiscal year 27? The strategic plan, again, is almost ready for release. We hope to feed in then to a long-range plan to think about, okay, what are our priorities with service and where are we trying to go? The microtransit and electrified pilot projects, we look forward to see what happens with those. What will the feedback be? What will those projects look like? We will continue our focus on our paratransit service, get that on-time performance up above 80 and into 90 percent. We will continue our operator barrier installation project and, again, look to the fare systems upgrades, the tap-to-pay that we're going to try on our circulator. What would that look like if we were to roll that out system-wide? And then incorporating those new vehicles into our fleet, seven fixed route and 10 cutaways. So that is the presentation I have. I'll leave it on the screen and happy to answer any questions. Thank you very much, Mr. Combs. Councilmembers, please sign in to ask questions. Councilmember Curtis. Thank you, Chair, and thank you, Mr. Combs, for being here. It's always good to hear from you in these chambers. My first question is going to be, I'm sure this is going to come as a shock to you, about bus rapid transit along the Nicholasville Road corridor. This is something that I remember us having several conversations about, including during your annual update last year. In the time since, we obviously have received some of the findings from that U.S. 27 study. In terms of actual implementation, is the last, not last, but the next big obstacle, is it just securing that funding, or is there more that we can be doing at the local level, not necessarily through those federal partnerships, to get us closer to actually implementing something? I think having the conversations with your constituents in the community to see how exciting of a project this would be always helps. I do think the big hurdle is going to be identifying those sources of funds at the federal level and see what we can do with a grant application. So we might be saying, hey, can we get a letter of recommendation or a letter of support or things like that that can help make that application even stronger. But I think continuing the conversation with our community on really the impact, the transformational impact that a BRT would have in Lexington, that's number one, I think. And to follow up on that, one of the things that I hear from constituents when I talk about LexTran and I talk about public transit as a concept, is that there is not so much a policy shift that's needed, but more of a cultural shift that's needed. Does that align with your understanding in Lexington as a very car-centric community? Does that align with your understanding of the shift that needs to happen in order to garner community buy-in for something like Bus Rapid Transit? It does, but I don't let that stop me from pulling the levers of policy that I have in my control. A big thing that I would point to is we talked about our service frequency, 35-minute frequency on our core services. If we could drop that down to 20 minutes, that would do so much to help with the cultural shift. Again, we're not trying to take all the cars off the road. That's not what we're trying to do. We're trying to play our part in the greater transportation system that includes walking, biking, automobiles, the whole nine yards. We want to be our part to that puzzle. Cultural shifts would help. However, what can we do in the culture that we have to make our service more attractive? That's the question I think that we as LexTran ask ourselves every day. Really, the two things that I hear more often, more frequency, more direct service. Those are the two things that in our strategic plan and our long-range plan are going to come back again that we're going to continue to focus on. Amazing. When we're talking about filling those service gaps, when you're talking up on this slide about incorporating new vehicles into the fixed route and paratransit fleet, are those replacing existing? They're not additional buses on those routes? These would be replacements. The downtown circulator, those are additional. That's a new addition to our service. Yes, these are replacements. Just so I can understand a little clearer, what are the major obstacles y'all are facing in terms of increasing that frequency and getting it down to that 20-minute mark? It's funding. Funding? Yep. Okay. Thank you so much, Chair. Thank you. Next up is Councilmember Brown. Thank you, Chair, and thank you, Mr. Combs, for your presentation. And thank you for acknowledging our staff and our team in regards to their response to the weather event. I was going to do the same to you all. I know I was out on Monday of last week, and there was very few vehicles, but I've seen plenty of buses out there getting people around, so we appreciate you and your team and all you all do in situations like that. And then I'll also speak a little bit to the partnership on the LexRide initiative. You all have been great partners in that initiative. Your team with putting together the grant application that got the initial funding. Alicia with our staff and her participation and her work on this has been great. Y'all have just been real good partners all around, so I appreciate your efforts with that. I remember a time when a partnership between us and you all broke down in regards to the C&G station that we were going to build together. We wanted to build our station out at the waste management facility, and you all took it apart yourselves and built that C&G station on your site. And now it looks like over half of your fleet is C&G, and you all have been building that fleet over time. Do you see phasing out any of these other options in growing capacity and other ones in regards to vehicles going forward? We have invested significantly in our C&G, including last year we doubled our fueling capacity on site. So that allowed us to add even more C&G vehicles to the fleet. We always want to keep some mix, because right now C&G fueling expenses is much cheaper than diesel. Who knows what that's going to be in 15 years? So we would like to keep some diversity, but really a focus on C&G. It works well operationally for us. It fits our service profile very well, and that's going to be the biggest part of our strategy. With electric vehicles, we might have hit the limit on how many our fleet can hold. So then from there, yeah, we'll try to get as many C&Gs mixed and matched with diesel if necessary. What's the challenges you all face with the electric vehicles? Is it charging station, charging times? What is that? A lot of it is charging time. So the way our service works, we are out the door off the lot at about 5.30 a.m., and we are back to the lot about 12.30 a.m. the next morning. So if you flip that around, we have from 12.30 a.m. to 5.30 a.m. to fuel, to clean, to get ready for the next day of service. So if you come back with an empty battery and it takes 45 minutes to an hour to charge, we can't get everything through the line and keep everything ready for the next day of service. Much different with diesel or C&G, where it's just like you fill your car, you put a pump in, leave it a few minutes, and you're done. Charge times are a lot different. So we feel like we might have hit the limit on how many of those with our current facilities that we could have just from a logistical perspective and operational perspective. Okay. Okay. Well, it looks like 26 and 27 is going to be a big year for you all with these launches of these two pilots. And it should be you should gain a lot of information and insight about what folks in Lexington want in regards to public transportation. Can you speak a little bit about the way you may take fares, especially with the LexRide and how that could potentially change your model if that's successful? The way that we collect fares? Yeah, the way you collect fares. Because I think this is the first time that you're going to be able to do maybe a click to pay and folks paying with their phones. So our current fare box system was deployed in 2008, 2009, somewhere around that time frame. So the equipment itself is ready. It's ready to walk out the door on us. I mean, it's old. It's time for it to go. The capital investment to redo the fare boxes the way that they are would be significant to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars per bus. And we have, you know, 70-some buses. It's a very capital-intensive program. It also doesn't have the capacity or the technology to interact with people the way that we are used to interacting in 2026. We expect to be able to take our phone out, tap it, and that's that. So that technology exists in other transit agencies. We just don't have it here. So the way that we can use our LexRide, our downtown circulator pilot, is to put some technology on board those vehicles to see how it works. We can get familiar with using that technology and then grow it from there. Plenty of partners in the space, in the transportation space, to help us build that out. But we hope that this is a good first step to get everyone used to mobile ticketing, account-based ticketing, and those kinds of technologies. Okay. Thank you for your work and your partnership. Thank you, Chair. Thank you. Next up we have Councilmember Sheehan. Thank you, Chair. Thank you for the presentation. I want to go back to the environmental impacts for a moment. You talked about one of the biggest environmental impacts is getting passenger vehicles, the passenger miles down for the single-use cars, one passenger car. But then with microtransit, we're going to be putting vehicles back on the road. So I'm thinking about the environmental piece of that, which is something that I've kind of struggled with with the microtransit program, because we're doing all this work to lower environmental impacts, right? So for microtransit and the RFP that you put out, was there any provision in there for people, for the respondents to the RFP to talk about hybrid vehicles? I think for the same reasons you mentioned that electric buses are challenging. I don't think electric cars might work the same way if you're out for a very long time. But was there any provision for people to report how many hybrid vehicles they might use? So we put a structure in the RFP, and I'm trying not to say too much because it is open right now, where respondents can bring their own vehicles, and that can be hybrid, electric, whatever they decide is best fit for Lexington they can use, or they can use some of our own vehicles. And what that would do is allow us to offset some of that capital cost to get more of LFUCG's money into operation. So we put that out for them to respond to us, and depending on how they respond, I'll be able to say, you know, there was an opportunity to do hybrid vehicles here or not. However, because this is a pilot program, if we can identify a long-term sustainable funding model, we can absolutely look at doing hybrid vehicles or electric vehicles in that fleet because that's going to be its own separate fleet. So, yes, long-term, we can absolutely look at that. Short-term, it's a little unclear. Okay. Thank you. Thank you, Chair. Thank you. And last up is Vice Mayor Wood. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Mr. Combs, for the update. In this past week with all the snow on the sidewalks and the roads being what they were, it popped out in my mind even more acutely looking at folks waiting for buses, you know, standing in piles of snow. A lot of folks don't have places to sit, don't have anything to kind of shelter over them. Of the 900 bus stops that you have in your system, do you know offhand how many of them either have benches, shelters, or some sort of, you know, building around it? A little over 100 would have shelters. And we wouldn't want a shelter at all those 900 stops because some of those have more lightings. So no one is really waiting there. They just get off the bus and go. So their boarding stop would be across the street and usually in that situation. So, yeah, it's a little over 100 of those 900 would have shelters, and we wouldn't necessarily go all the way to 900. Yeah. So it's a pretty good ratio. Yeah, and I wouldn't have an expectation that we have 900, you know, all the stops have shelters. Have you all identified through kind of looking at, I'm sure you have numbers on frequency and number of people that get on at certain stops, do you have any plans to add more shelters or benches, things like that? Yes. Every year we look at and reprogram the number of stops that we are going to either add shelters to or do replacements. Some shelters around town are also due for replacement. And we program that out. Usually we try to do 10 to 15 stops a year. Over the past five or six years, we're probably over a million dollars of investment in stops themselves, just in shelters, benches, again, the solar lighting project and other. We did some very, very small sidewalk connections. We're not trying to get into the sidewalk building business, but when we saw a location where for ADA reasons you could not access a shelter and because we need three feet of sidewalk, we went ahead as we were building a boarding pad, go ahead and connect that in. So we made a handful of small improvements there as well. Okay. I appreciate that. Thank you, Chair. Thank you. And thank you so much for the presentation. I've just got a few of my own questions. Kind of going back to the snow experience, do we have a well-managed method of clearing around the shelters? Like is it your team that clears around shelters? Is it the commercial entity that it's sitting in front of or streets and roads? For the transit center, we clear that one. For other things out in the system, we usually leave that to either streets and roads or property owners or business owners. Okay. There might be a few hot spots in the city that we try to help out with that we know there's a lot of activity or movement, but by and large, it is. Yeah. It's just one of those things I think that when we have these kind of severe weather events, people do rely more on buses as a method of transportation and just getting to the bus or getting to that stop can be difficult. On the bus rapid transit side, if you end up doing more of a stronger feasibility on that and cost, do you foresee, because a lot of people on bus rapid transit will use, they will actually use kind of like the electric line, like they'll do the aerial lines. Can you imagine a place where that technology is going to be much different than your current technologies? For propulsion, I don't think so. I think it would be similar to a bus that we would already have but branded in its own unique way. And then it's going to, as it flows through the corridor, there will be different treatments to help buses get through either signal preemption or dedicated lanes or in some cases just in regular mixed traffic. So as through the different segments of Nicholasville Road, things change a little bit. So typical bus, typical propulsion engine to be able to match all those different contexts. Thank you. And on the downtown circulator, will that bus have a different look and feel to it so someone will be able to identify it as the party bus or whatever we want to call it? It will have a different look and feel. It will actually be a smaller vehicle. It's called a cutaway. So like the LexTran wheels vehicle you see on the slide, it will be similar to that with its own unique branding. Okay. Cool. That sounds great. I truly appreciate your coming and sharing all your information with us and appreciate it. Thank you. All right, colleagues. That brings us to the end of our presentations. And now we will talk for a few minutes as it is our first meeting of the year. We will talk about the committee items that are here. I hope you've had time to review them. If you've got some motions to make, we'll need motions and things like that from the sponsors. I'm going to just kind of go through them pretty quickly. Council Member Reynolds is not here, but hers are the first two. And I think she's got the odor control program scheduled for March 3rd. And I believe she has the ongoing maintenance of projects scheduled for June 13th. The next step we have is neighborhood traffic management program. Council Member Sheehan, this is yours. And do you have something to comment on that? No, the next one is mine as well. We're working on getting this scheduled for the year and working with the related staff. Great. Colleagues, I believe we've finalized our work on the Haley Pike solar project within this committee, because we're going to see it come up next week in our work session. We've completed the review of the water quality management fee incentive grants. And the Mint Lane Pump Station is scheduled to be presented to work session currently on March 10th. So I would move to remove those three items, Haley Pike solar project, review of water quality management fee incentive grants, and the Mint Lane Pump Station from this committee. Second. I have a motion and a second. Any discussion? All those in favor say aye. Aye. Opposed? And that passes. We've got parking citation issuance during winter weather emergencies. It's so close to us right now. Council Member Curtis, anything on that? Yes, we're currently planning to present that before the committee on the May 12th meeting. And looking forward to having that conversation with more context after this most recent winter weather emergency. Sounds great. Thank you. Next one, the sewer cleanup reimbursement program. Do you want to leave that in committee, Council Member Sheehan? We will leave that in committee. The next step is the Street Safety Task Force Traffic Control Use of Data Analytics. We've got this scheduled to be presented at the August 18th committee meeting. Next one is LFUCG AFSCME to review and consider workforce conditions and operational impacts. That's a long one, Council Member Beasley. I think we've got that scheduled, correct? Yes, sir, for June. June 16th. Okay. And next we have the review of Chapter 17, Public Rights of Way. Council Member Wharton, I think that's expected in June as well? Yes. All right. So we're going to keep that there. The rest of the items are annual and periodic updates. The LECTRAN and services and environmental impacts, we've heard that presentation today. If there is no objections, can I have a motion to remove that? Or I'll make the motion to remove it. Second. Any discussion? All those in favor, say aye. Aye. Opposed? And that carries. The next item is Empower Lexington Update. That's planned for August. The Live Green Update, we have a planned presentation in October. The Urban Forest Street Trees Canopy, we expect that in August. Capacity Audit Update, that's actually due every five years. Our next report on that won't be due until April of 2028. You'll enjoy that one when that happens. The Energy Initiative Update, that is planned on March 3rd. Snow and Ice Control, oh, that's such an exciting topic. We're going to talk about that in October. And that topic will be discussed at work session today. Pavement Management Plan, that is scheduled for May. Division of Water Quality Stormwater Projects, that is scheduled for September. Municipal Separate Storm System MS4 Update, that's a required update. And we anticipate that to be in October. Consent Decree and Remedial Measure Plans, that's expected to be presented in May. And then we have some of those annual periodic updates. We have some of those annual periodic updates. And some of those annual periodic updates, if we have other topics that are more pressing, we will do those as written if we don't have time to get them presented. Do I have anything else for the good of the cause? Seeing nothing, I will consider this meeting adjourned. Thank you.