So so 2026 General Government and Planning Committee meeting. Seeing as it is one o'clock I'm going to call our meeting to order. The first item of business is the approval of the January 20th 2026 committee summary. Are there any additions or corrections? Okay seeing none I'll take a motion to approve. I have a motion and a second. All any discussion on the motion? All those in favor say aye. Any opposed? Okay that motion passes. Our first presentation on our agenda today is an update on the Blue Sky Small Area Plan. Council Member Boone I'm going to turn it over to you for the introduction. Thank you Chair. Thank you all for being here and as some of you may know Council Member Hale and I currently serve on the Blue Sky Advisory Committee. The committee's focus is on supporting a job center that has been a pillar of our community for decades. Blue Sky already provides over a thousand well-paying jobs and our goal is to address the access and infrastructure needs required to ensure its long-term economic economic stability. I look forward to continuing these conversations as the committee turns our findings into actionable recommendations and I'd like to thank Ms. Miller for all her work on this project as well as planning staff the consultants and the stakeholders. With that I'll hand this over to Ms. Miller. Thank you. Good afternoon Council Members. My name is Eve Miller and I'm a senior planner within the Division of Planning's long-range planning team and I'm here this afternoon like Council Member Boone mentioned to give you all an update on the Blue Sky Small Area Plan project. I was here exactly this time last year to introduce the project so I'm excited to be able to give you all a year update. As a quick recap the Division of Planning received $500,000 in fiscal year 2026 to evaluate the Blue Sky Activity Center formerly a rural activity center but brought into the urban service area as part of the 2024 urban growth master plan. The intent of the project is to study existing conditions of infrastructure in the built environment as well as the natural features resources and physical constraints that affect the area as well as feature land use designations how to integrate and connect Blue Sky with other portions of our urban service area as well as economic redevelopment opportunities for the area. We contracted with Tunnel Spangler Washington Associates or TSW in the spring of 2025 and we kicked off the project in on April 30th of last year. The small area plan project has a 12-month time frame and since our kickoff in late April we've hit the ground running. With the consultant we've completed a variety of different tasks including a existing conditions inventory a market analysis public engagement throughout the summer and into the fall and most recently the plans draft frameworks and regulation recommendations. We expect the final plan will be completed spring summer of this year and following that with recommendations to modernize our industrial zones. The Blue Sky Activity Center is a little over 301 acres. The site has had business activities since the 1960s but has been active and had the most development and growth in the 1970s through the 1980s so it's been a productive industrial area for quite some time. Surrounding the study area neighbors include the hotels clustered around the I-75 highway interchange, the Athens ball field, a few restaurants, Sarah Athletics and the new Lexington sporting club and stadium and then also nearby is the Athens neighborhood community. Much if not most of the area is built out with a little over 60% of the study area being impervious paved or gravel surfaces. As you can see from this map much of the area is currently being utilized as warehousing manufacturing, auto sales and salvage and office space. And examples of organizations that you may be familiar of that are in this area are Adessa, Copart, Elliott Services and a branch of Elliott called 46 Solutions. The Blue Sky Activity Center is not only unique in its longevity but also in the natural features that the site has including extremely steep slopes which start out to be relatively flat at the entrance on Athens Boonesboro Road but slope downhill towards the back of the activity center on Cutters Hill Court. This means that small industrial buildings work well for a site like this but the area could be challenging for larger single development building types without retaining walls. The area is also cut by a stream and associated floodplain towards the back of the property as well and we've heard from employees and employers that navigating the crossing from Blue Sky Parkway to Cutters Hill Court can be a little bit tricky during rain or snowfall events and it can be worrisome because there's currently no rear connection to the site. Water, sewer and natural gas utilities are present in the area but there exist limitations in the internet connection as well as utility electrical power. Both of which we all know is crucial to any business operating and then lastly we've realized that the vehicle crash rates are high at the I-75 highway interchange particularly at the un-signalized section between the highway and Cane Break Drive. TSW's partner for the contract, Partner for Economic Solutions and Strategic Location Advisors completed the market analysis for the Blue Sky project and provided really useful assessments about the area's economic output and industrial capacity. What we found is that the Blue Sky Activity Center supports 150 businesses and over a thousand jobs most of which pay at least $20 an hour. We know that Lexington-Fayette County is a competitive place to have your business. Lexington exhibits a relatively strong labor force compared to our state and national benchmarks and we have really great access to post-secondary education and workforce training programs. And then Lexington has really great quality of life amenities that are crucial to any corporate site selection process. Blue Sky in particular is ideally positioned in the corner of I-64 and I-75 which makes it really ideally positioned. However, given the physical constraints of the study area including the topography, access limitations, existing built land, the market analysis suggests the area may be better suited for smaller scale specialized industrial employment uses which it already does a fantastic job of. The area is more likely to attract regional firms rather than large national manufacturing or distribution users which typically requires sites capable of expansion with 10 acres or more. They also need relatively flat land and great access to utility capacity. Moving forward, modernizing our industrial regulations, coordinating infrastructure capacity, and working closely with organizations like Commerce Lexington will be key to help Blue Sky redevelop as opportunities arise. What Blue Sky already does really well is provide opportunities for mixed office warehouse development, small headquarter functions, industrial incubator or flex space, and we want to as part of the smaller area plan find ways to continue to support the businesses already there and help them move into the urban service area. Throughout this whole process we've also been busy engaging employees and employers for feedback. We've knocked on every door and visited every business to date to promote the project and to share information about an event we had in the fall. We had a barbecue event and as we found out there is no better way to get input than to provide some really good hot sauce and really good smoked meat. So we had about 150 participants at that one event. It was really well attended and it was a really great opportunity to hear directly from them what their wishes and needs are for the site. We've also engaged with the Old Richmond Road Neighborhood Association. We attended their annual meeting in the fall and we've also hosted some focus group meetings with businesses and organizations in the activity center to hear about the problems they face and potential solutions that we can provide to support them. And then after this presentation we encourage you to check out our project website which is located at blueskylexington.com. From those outreach and engagement activities we've collected a wide swath of feedback from the Blue Sky community. This is a small sample of that feedback including that businesses appreciate that Blue Sky is secluded from other activities or development that might find themselves to be loud or distracting. Many employees are from surrounding counties and traveling in and out of the industrial area is very ideal and easy for them to access. And we heard several individuals wanted a do nothing option because they love the seclusion of the area as it exists already. In terms of improvement people have asked for sidewalks and methods to navigate the site more safely, installing street lights and provide more opportunities for lunch and retail. And they've also want to encourage redevelopment and aesthetic improvements to existing buildings in the surrounding environment. Taken all together that feedback feedback looks something like this and first place for the most requested is food and retail options for employees and employers. Individuals want a greater variety of options in the area without having to drive necessarily into town to access them. The second most requested feedback we've heard is people want more opportunities to walk around and experience the outdoors on their breaks and downtime. Whether that be through sidewalk infrastructure, a trail along the floodplain, accessing the ball field across Athens Boonesboro Road or place benches throughout the activity center. Third is utilities. We heard from several different groups that Blue Sky will experience powder outages on days with no rain or no weather events. And businesses had to cease their operations for that entire day until power was resumed. Power was resumed, which we all can agree is extremely frustrating for those businesses. One company also is concerned about internet capabilities and they are investing thousands of their own money to bury a fiber line just so they can have an increase in service speed. Also tied for third is lighting. Currently the area is not serviced by any street lights and individuals feel that they would benefit from the ability not only to feel safer for themselves but also for the businesses and investments that they've had in the activity center. Our next steps moving forward is to work with the advisory committee at our next meeting later this month to finalize the draft frameworks and the regulatory recommendations. We are in conversations with the state transportation office as well as our traffic engineering folks about how to improve the I-75 highway interchange that would allow for greater safety of businesses to move in and out of Blue Sky but also for the greater public as this area continues to develop and grow. And then finally we're continuing to discuss how we can work with the utility providers and internally the city to provide modern infrastructure and greater utility capacity for businesses. Our end goal is to make Blue Sky a more accessible welcoming and successful industrial area and we've been saying throughout this whole process that we want to support businesses that are currently in the area. Our goal is to ensure that the Blue Sky area thrives long term and we want to support the area as it moves into the urban service area. And with that I'm happy to take any questions or feedback you all might have. Thank you again for having me here. Thank you for the presentation. Colleagues go ahead and sign in with your comments or questions. Council Member Baxter. Thank you Chair and thank you for your presentation Eve. I know you guys have put in a lot of work and it's really evident. I've attended some of the meetings as well and they were well attended. It was it was pretty impressive. I might need you to help me with some district stuff. As you were talking to the businesses and the employees out there and they're giving you feedback like we would like to see more activated spaces, more infrastructure in general. Was there any conversation on a greater scale with kind of the owners of those businesses of a cost share situation or it was like yeah we'd love to have all these things that you would install or were they more like we would be happy to help do things? That's a wonderful question. I think it's a mixed bag. Some organization and industries are looking to grow and expand and they know to recruit highly trained individuals they need to offer those amenities such as you know sidewalk infrastructure benches or access to restaurants and others simply will come into the park to pick up their work truck and then leave for the day and then come back to park it and get into their personal vehicle and leave. So I would say it's a bit of a half bag and it's mixed. We have explored options for an industrial authority of some sort but we want to make sure that there is community buy in before we pursue any of those options. So thank you. No I think it would be important to you know kind of further those conversations and see what level of engagement those businesses out there are interested in. I know that there was one little thought bubble that said if we interfere it would create issues. So we definitely don't want to feel like we're forcing things on the people who have called that area home for a really long time and have really made it their own. So I think the potential of creating some type of authority out there may be a good idea. As you're going through and you may or may not have thought about this but as you're going through and looking at ways just to make the zoning regulations and everything more productive out there. I would ask that you take a look at what we already have on the books and talk to some of the employers out there about issues that they've experienced in their own like the development that they have tried to do some of the hurdles that they've had to overcome just based on regulations that we have that apply citywide and maybe look at us look at the potential of us creating carve outs for an industrial park like this that that may not need amenities that other zones would need and we can have a further conversation and you may already know what I'm talking about but I think it's really important to take all those things into consideration. So thank you for all your work. Thank you. Thank you chair. Council Member Boone. Thank you for your presentation. As far as like this area has obviously been there for a while and you did some outreach to surrounding neighbors and communities. Did you receive any kind of surprising or helpful feedback from surrounding businesses or the neighborhood or property owners around? What we found at the Old Richmond Road Neighborhood Association meeting is that many people didn't even know that Blue Sky existed where it is currently and they exhibited some interest in getting more relationships and growing that bond with the Blue Sky Activity Center area. So if anything I see a lot more collaboration between the community and businesses that work there which I think would be productive for everyone. So that's very exciting. I guess and kind of to Council Member Baxter's point as far as some people don't want change obviously they've been there for a while been doing their thing. How do you kind of take that into account as we are coming up with recommendations? Like obviously we want to improve it the way we can but some people think it's good. Like how do you balance I guess the two of those? Yeah that's a great question. To Council Member Baxter's point as part of the consultant contract we are looking at modernizing our industrial zones. So that is the B4, I1 and I2 zones. And currently we've never touched those ordinance articles since the 1980s. So they're a little bit out of date. I shouldn't say a little bit because currently we allow for activities like asbestos manufacturing and radium extraction. And we also don't define economic activities that we have nowadays that we didn't necessarily have in the 1980s. So I think working with the consultant to get their recommendations on how we can modernize that and work with the current businesses that are there to make sure the activities they are doing aren't excluded is really important. And we're definitely engaging in those conversations. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you Chair. Council Member Savigny. Thank you Chair and thanks so much for the presentation. Just a few things. So you mentioned the street like street lights things and so my assumption is that the current area is not in the, does not pay the tax for street lights. Is that correct? Yes. They are currently in Tax District 2. Okay. So I don't know if you've talked to the owners of property there about the ability to basically take that on by basically paying some tax and then they can get street lights. Well from my understanding with city staff and we're talking with law and environmental quality and public works, the properties have the opportunity to change over into a full urban services tax district when they redevelop and finalize a final development plan. So there is opportunities for that change to happen. What we're discussing internally is if there's an opportunity to do that on a larger scale all at once. Only because this is an issue that the city has never faced before. You know bringing in an area that is long productive as this area is, it's a situation we haven't encountered before. So we're discussing that and trying to figure that out. Yeah and that was kind of my following question was since the Planning Commission put this into the urban service boundary, what are the quirky things that you have to deal with? And do options open up for them? Does that make sense? I hope so. I'm trying to figure that out. Okay. Thank you. Thanks for your work. Thank you, Chair. Council Member Ellinger. Thank you, Chair. And that's kind of where I was headed too is with the infrastructure that they have and in bringing into the urban service area, what do they have and what are they going to need in trying to figure that out? Yeah, like we mentioned in the PowerPoint, I really do think the first and foremost the electrical ability and having electrical utilities provided all day as well as internet. They think the businesses out there think that's what's most crucial. But also we want to be able to provide infrastructure such as sidewalks and street lights and things like that. So we're trying to figure out how to recommend implementing those infrastructure components. Are they all tied into sewer or some on septic? Are they all sewer? They are all sewered. They're all sewered. Okay. Thank you. Thank you, Chair. Council Member Hale. Thank you, Chair. Thank you for this opportunity to give a brief wrap up, even though I don't serve on this committee. And thank you, Eve, for this excellent update. I also want to share how much I appreciate the opportunity to serve on the advisory committee for this project. It's been great to see the feedback loop that you referenced in your graphic timeline in action as we move toward the final plan. I'm really optimistic about where things are headed as we look at modernizing our zoning and building out the infrastructure and utility capacity Blue Sky needs. We have a unique chance to imagine a more connected and sustainable future for this area. At the same time, outreach has made it clear that the businesses already there value their peace and their current cost of doing business. As this work moves forward, I want to make sure that we continue balancing these new improvements with the leave-as-is comfort that the existing 150 businesses rely on. I look forward to seeing this project come to life. Thank you, Chair, and thank you, Eve, again. Thank you, Ms. Miller. For the public, when we finish out a small area plan, can you just give a brief overview of then what happens with that small area plan? That's a great question. As part of this process, when a small area plan or master plan project is finalized, we will have a hearing with the Planning Commission, and they will vote to approve it as a component, I'm sorry, as the 2045 Comprehensive Plan. That is a very short recap of the process afterwards, but if leadership wants to add anything else, but that's the process moving forward. Great. Thank you. That's helpful. I appreciate your presentation today. Thank you all. Next on our agenda is a review and analysis of LFUCG operated community centers. I'm going to turn it over to Councilmember Beasley for an introduction of the item. Thank you, Chair. Excuse me. And thank you, Christian Postel, for doing our presentation for us today. I'm just going to take a minute to tell you how we got here, and then I have some thank yous for some folks who are with us. So we put these in committee about a year ago, and we have visited not only the ones that are ran by Parks and Rec, but the ones that are ran by the Division of Housing and of our social services. We visited Tate's Creek, Dunbar, Black and Williams, Charles Young, Kenwick, and Castlewood. We did not visit William Wallace Brown, as it's inside of a school, and we felt that it would disrupt their school day if we did that. So here's a long list of folks who helped us with this. Sorry, Christian, give me just a second. We'd like to thank Christian Postel, Marcus Patrick, Debbie Sauber, Matthew Crutcher, the center directors, commissioners Ford, Allen Bryant, and Lantern, Tiffany Mazden, Sarah Brown, who was the first district aide, Jaden Norris, first district aide, Rene Buckles, who was the eighth district aide, Stephanie Bowling, Rolanda Wilfork, the Charles Young Center Board, Dr. Roger Cleveland, Norrin Hendricks, Parks and Rec, Alicia Larimore, who was our core staff who helped us with all this, Adina Tatum, first district aide, Mason Sims, eighth district aide, Danielle Sanders, and council members Lynch and Sheehan, as they both had community centers in their district and allowed us to visit those. With that, I'll turn it over to Christian. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you all. Thank you, Amy, for not, Council Member Beasley, for not making me read that list. I appreciate it. This was a fun project to get to be a part of. I was honored to be a part of the group. It's a privilege to get to just sort of be the voice of the working group. For those who don't know, Lexington Leadership Foundation operates a 22,000 square foot community center in what we would define as a fragile neighborhood in Woodhill. And I want to just frame why this matters. Community centers and neighborhood centers are civic infrastructure. So it's not just that families find safety and stability and connection through these reliable neighborhoods. There's actually research that backs this up. Seth Kaplan's research in 2023 essentially revealed that fragile neighborhoods are not defined by lack of money. They're actually defined by lack of social capital, if that makes sense, which leads to economic capital. And so what we found that or what Kaplan found was that through weakened relationships and thinning social institutions, social capital declined. So what we're talking about here over the next 10, 15 minutes is strengthening the fabric of our civic infrastructure. So the overarching finding of the group is that we just really want to increase reliability and equity across the neighborhoods. Lexington's in a privileged spot with each of these neighborhood and community centers, and we want to leverage all of the good that's already happening. So to start with that and just what to build on, everybody, social services, housing, and parks that has a hand on this deserves a hat tip to the fact that we're currently offering a lot of safe, trusted spaces in multiple fragile neighborhoods. Leadership and investment, where leadership and investment are strong, like Dunbar Center, these places are being used incredibly well. Utilization drastically increased after the capital ARPA investments were made in Dunbar Community Center. Utilization at Black and Williams is strong, could be even stronger, but it's pretty incredible what's going on there as well. Dunbar Center, as an example, had over 10,000 unique engagements last year and offered over 40 different programs and community partnerships. That is how you strengthen the fabric of a healthy city. We were blown away by how committed the staff was, so the government, the knocks on government, staffing, all that stuff, it goes out the window when you talk about people in positions at community centers. And finally, where some of these centers, not all, but some are operating as wraparound hubs already, primarily Dunbar and Black and Williams, serving residents in multiple ways in one place. What is varying too widely site by site as we focus on equity is really hours and staffing, facility investments, programming depth, partner access, communication visibility, safety readiness, and resident feedback loops. And this matters because if we're inconsistent, we're not equitable, right? And trust erodes. So the overarching suggestion from the working group is for the city to create and adopt what we've called a Community and Neighborhood Center Promise, which is a pledge to residents on the purpose of why these exist and a short list of minimum standards that every one of them will meet. You just heard Councilmember Beasley. We have neighborhood and community centers across parks and social services and housing, and so that may get a little messy, but it's worth the effort. It's worth the effort to put into them. So examples of what the neighborhood and community center promise could include are a clearly stated purpose and priority population served, posting reliable hours and access that we stick to and are clear with our staffing structure, transparent calendar, and intentional targeted communication, safety readiness, community engagement, and neighborhood voices, having a clear strategy for that, and having programs that are designed to reflect the needs of what the local neighborhoods say that they would desire in their space. Secondly, and this ties to money, it would be, the working group believes it would be wise for the city to measure and report quarterly across a shared standard measurement system to create one overarching public dashboard so that the city can see, you know, if this is the financial input for a community center, what is the collective output and then outcomes associated with the output based on taxpayer dollars. And there's positive measurement going on, but what if you flip the funnel upside down and they feed up? Data tells stories. Story leads to funding. If we want more capital investments in these places, it's going to start with how we're collecting information and data. And it's totally doable. We just listed some examples of what these sort of core universal measurements may be, but as you'll see later, there needs to be some follow up in that space. Next, we'd love to see staffing aligned to this community and neighborhood center promise, which means a minimum staffing model per open hour. Right now, it's just not equitable, and I don't have time to go into all the details, but some neighborhood and community centers are flourishing. Others may not be, and a lot of it's because of staffing. So we believe it would be wise to assess the current staffing model and consider needs based increases, which social services and parks and housing would certainly be excited to speak into. And we also recognize that there's some hiring and pay grade challenges, but our sense is that actually makes this more urgent. Supervisors are doing an incredible job at these sites, but they're being asked to carry quite a bit of weight. As somebody who operates a community center as part of our budget that's nearing a million dollars and serving thousands every year, I can tell you the investment is worthwhile. Next, we would love to see unnecessary partner pathway barriers removed. And we just wanted to give a little bit of a hat tip to parks, because conversations have already started to streamline that. But it would be wise to review partnership application requirements, insurance requirements, background check consistency. We need background checks. But having a standardized defined period for how long those background checks are good across sites and programming would be healthy. And creating a tiered partner requirements based on risk level as well as having one consistent intake and onboarding pathway across all centers. Right now there's friction. And frankly, some of the friction exists because a couple of these community centers have boards. And I'm so glad to hear that Councilmember Wu and Councilmember Lynch are assessing kind of the board model across the city. The working group would love to see term limits addressed and enforced on these local community centers. We think that that would increase partnerships. I would be glad to go into some more of those details down the road. Next, capital and programming investments. This is probably number one for everybody across parks and housing and social services. But we would love to see continued investment in programming number one. So for the inputs that have been made financially, thank you. We'd like to see that increased and to align with published programming needs that come from parks and come from social services and come from housing. And third, continued capital investment. Obviously, getting federal ARPA dollars, that money's not growing on trees. It's not coming down every year. But what happened at Dunbar Community Center was incredible. Everybody that was involved in that deserves a huge pat on the back. We would love to see that happen across the board. And when we talk about data telling stories, I can't help but wonder if city opioid money could be used to fund neighborhood community centers that are offering preventative services for kids in fragile neighborhoods. There's state funding available. There's federal funding available. Is anyone at the city level pursuing capital funds on behalf of these incredible places that we have on the fringe of these fragile neighborhoods? So this is communication and a school connection. I was trying to think through how I could frame this in a way that would make sense. There's good things happening. But imagine one, just think of whatever community center that you're aware of currently and think of it operating like an airplane, where your leadership is your cockpit, your programs you offer are the wings that give it lift. Your overhead for that particular community center is the, what do you call the middle of the airplane? The cabin. And the left engine is your revenue. Your fuel tank is your cash flow. Your right engine is your communication. It felt a little bit like we kind of had the communication for this like a Cessna on a 747 plane. And so if there's a developed communication strategy that is targeting children and families and elderly more and perhaps strengthening the partnership with FCPS, we believe that go a long way, top of funnel to getting people in the door and offering more services. And that includes, frankly, creating more opportunities for feedback loops. It's good to have QR codes. It's good to have things posted online. But what's the strategy to target folks along the way? And we just think holistically the communication strategy would strengthen community engagement as a whole. And finally, and this may be most importantly, most important, and I'll, I'm getting close to wrapping up, but I'll frame it this way. You know, there was an 18-month period during the height of COVID when 39 young people, 18 to 24, lost their lives to senseless acts of gun violence. And 12 of those young people were Lexington Leadership Foundation kids that our youth services invest in. And it's one thing to have services in place from a city level that respond to that crisis. It's entirely another to have staff prepared to also respond to the crisis when something happens to them. The Working Group believes the city would be wise to engage more with the community and to engage more with the community. to standardize safety readiness at every center, CPR and first aid and stop the bleed, including clear supervision with incident prevention protocols, and instituting a post-incident response playbook to make sure staff and volunteers are trained and taken care of. We also believe we should be tracking and reporting safety readiness, and this should be part of the community and neighborhood center promise. So the tertiary overview of the working group's recommendations are number one, to create and adopt the community and neighborhood center promise. Number two, to create a common metrics dashboard across all the community centers that funnels into one dashboard that showcases the great work being done everywhere, hopefully that data will tell stories and those stories will lead to funding. To increase staffing so that it aligns with whatever goes into the community center promise. Obviously there's a ton of discretion and variables involved in that, we understand that, but that's a baseline starting point from where we are today. Directing a streamlined tiered partner pathway, again we're going to have to work across social services and housing and parks to get that done, but to the extent that we can preserve safety and reduce friction, this will be a worthwhile use of our time. Fifth, to invest in programming and assess capital needs annually, again who's the point person who's pursuing that. Develop a communication strategy in partnership with public schools, and increase resident feedback opportunities, we just want to see that engine grow. And finally, deliver and offer common training and crisis response protocols. So we should put some next steps, because some of this has already gained momentum, and by the way, a minute and a half left, I just want to thank Commissioner Ford and his team, Laura and Monica, we've had some dialogue, and I appreciate their humility to be willing to receive this. They're working really hard, and we're for them, and it's an honor to be a resident of Lexington and see people invest so much, so well, into the assets and resources that we have. Councilmember Beasley and Morton are working with them already in some of these areas, like safety especially, but the next steps that the working group recommends are simply having Councilmembers Beasley and Morton work with the administration to adopt this community center promise. We sort of learned, Lexington Leadership Foundation, we think we have some really good ideas, but if we just have the humility to walk in and listen to other people's ideas first, we often will leave, and the aroma of humility will lift, and we often leave with much better ideas than what either of us had when we walked into the room in the first place. Secondly, I'd be remiss not to say that we really hope to see continued financial investment and increased financial investment in neighborhood center programming. That's a very difficult thing for someone to say who wants taxpayers to keep as much of the money that they earn as possible in their pockets, but this is such a worthwhile investment. We really believe in it. And finally, what's the ownership cadence from here? If these steps are instituted, who's running point? All the accountability questions, right? By when? And what's the follow-up? So right on time. Thank you. Colleagues, go ahead and sign in for comments and questions. Thank you for the presentation. You might have some questions from council members if you want to stay up here. Council Member Brown. Thank you, Chair, and thank you, Council Member Morton and Council Member Beasley, for your work on this. I think community centers has been a topic of conversation for a long time, and I also want to thank our folks in Park and Recreation and other divisions that have community centers. I think they are doing their best to make sure that these spaces are programmed and provide the needs to the community that they are designed and have and changed and evolved to do. I just have a couple of questions, and just to get your thoughts on it. So how were community center advisory boards kind of involved in this process? Were they part of the conversation? Were their input taken into this conversation? Because I know we have a few community centers that have advisory boards and some that don't. Did you all include them? I'll take it. So the Charles Young, we had pretty much a representative of each board attend that working group meeting. So for Charles Young, Mr. Charles Fields attended, and then for Black and Williams, Rolanda Woolfolk attended for a piece of that. Dunbar Center, we didn't have their advisory board, but we more so, since that was in Park and Recreation, we just took that lane. Before the neighborhood centers, we emphasized Rolanda was a representative, and then Mr. Fields was a representative. Okay. So they were there. And then specifically, the Charles Young conversation was almost led by the board representative. Okay. Well, I appreciate that. I'm glad they were at the table. I know a lot of times we talk about community centers and those advisory boards. There are a few advisory boards that, personally, I try to walk cautiously, but not to step on the advisory board's toes, even though they may need some direction and a little push in some ways. But as long as they were a part of the conversation and gave valuable input, I think that's important. I also have a concern about, and help me dispel this concern, about the funding and the measurements. I can see a scenario where funding has been allocated to a center, and it may be new funding that they haven't had to program before. And there may be a lack of utilization of those funds, and it may come out in the measurement that we either gave them too much money or there was a lack of opportunity to use that funding. How are you thinking about, and I guess it goes back to the slide where you said it could be used for a funnel to help inform and tell stories. Have you all thought about that? That's because different community centers are different things to different people. And I just wonder, we just put funding towards community centers this past budget year, and my concern is that maybe that funding wasn't utilized, and I hate for it to tell a story that it wasn't needed. Have you all thought about that at all? Thank you for that question, Councilmember. We have been working with parks already to see how much of that money that we allocated this past budget, how much they have used, and what is left, and what they're spending it on. And we do have that information. We've also heard from parks that the majority of that money will be spent in the spring and summer, because that's when their highest need is, but we've been assured that the money we allocated to community centers in the last budget, that they will all spend it before the end of the fiscal year. And if I can get in there and hop in, I think that one thing we noticed for every center that we visited with that allocation, there was nothing but, they were gracious for it. They were able to either expand the program they have, they were able to buy equipment to emphasize more impactful programming for that center, for the youth and seniors if needed to use it. But I think to Christian's point, can Christian, why don't you highlight kind of what you're talking about with that funnel to say and tell that story, because I think it's more so to say, well, if there's not a decent amount of programming here, how can we invest more dollars to get there, or in that next year's budget. Can you give an example of kind of how we talked through that? Yeah, absolutely. It comes out of a heart to see more, the community centers be better resourced, frankly. Their national standards for cost per person served at a community center, their national standards for cost per one-on-one mentor relationship for Big Brothers, Big Sisters, or Amachi, and those are sort of the benchmarks across the country that we could measure against. But nobody at the working group felt this desire to need to dictate anything. It was more of, how can we undergird the good work that's already being done and say, yeah, you're measuring some things really well. What would it look like to do this in a way where we could aggregate the data to show the collective financial input from the city's budget and say, look what that yielded in output, programmatically, capital, and in terms of cost per person served. Those numbers are what tell the story and where stories are born, and that's what unlocks opportunities for funding. An easy example with us is, I won't go into ESR, but I will go, which is done well, but I will go into Kentucky State's opioid abatement. We're running grant funded programming specifically to engage youth in athletics. And we're held accountable to standards based on cost per person served and family engagement. And it is just possible to unlock more funding if the city decided to go that way and do that. And I'm not trying to dictate, but the way to do that is to have universal measurement and tracking across these community centers. It would be really, really difficult for one community center to ask for state or federal dollars because it would be so small, if that makes sense. Does that help at all, Councilmember Brown? It does, and I'll circle back. All right, thank you, Chair. Councilmember Reynolds. Thank you, Chair, and thank you for the presentation. I also want to thank my colleagues, Councilmember Beasley and Morton, for bringing this forward. It was a recommendation of the Gun Violence Task Force to expand services for community centers and accessibility to them. My first question is, it says in the presentation that this addressed community centers and neighborhood centers, but I don't see any neighborhood centers listed, and they function differently than the community centers. Did you all look at any of the neighborhood centers or their structure? They have recently kind of been restructured with their own guidelines. The ones that we looked at are the ones listed on the LFUCG website under community centers. I was not part of the process before that decision was made, so one of the Councilmembers could probably speak into why that decision was made, but I don't. Indeed. I think so, more so that we looked at the, I guess, bigger operational community centers. More so, I think you're talking about like our, I guess, neighborhood buildings, kind of that our neighborhoods run. Is that what you define? They're neighborhood centers, and on the presentation, I saw somewhere that it said neighborhood centers, but yeah. So you mean the community centers. So, and this is something we ran into as well, just being within different divisions and different models. The Black and Williams and Charles Young Center are technically called neighborhood centers, because I guess they have the board and the definition, the ordinance that they're outlined under. But they serve, at least to us, we believe they serve a purpose, similar purposes as community centers. Whereas some of our smaller neighborhood buildings, for instance, like Green Acres, Douglas Park, all those different things are more, I guess, directly correlated, what I would say neighborhood buildings. But I think that you bring a good point, and there have been conversations of, well, the next step, do we look at our neighborhood buildings and how we can make them more impactful type of programming? Well, I appreciate the recommendations. I think one of the things that I had looked at a while ago was just kind of the lack of universal standards, or the way everything was done kind of hodgepodge. So I like the idea of having kind of a central point, a promise, and different things that all of them have to have. I know when I have spoken before with our staff in parks and in general services, the main concern is really lack of staff to be able to do the type of programming that some of us want to do, so that is a really costly investment. I'm not saying it's not one we should look at, but I'm kind of curious how our staff responds to this. I don't know if I can ask either Commissioner Ford or Director Conrad to come forward. Hi, Council Member, what was the question specifically? So, looking at these recommendations, would you say that maybe the biggest challenge is the need for more staff to be able to implement them, and that that is a cost? I think that the recent investment that was made through the last budget cycle was very helpful in ensuring that we feel like in the parks community centers, I can't speak for all the community centers, but in the parks community centers, we have a good staffing level. So at this time, I feel like our team, Adrian Tocor, our Deputy Directors with us, and Laura, our Superintendent of Community Engagement, I think they would contend that we have a good staffing model at this time. Across the parks community centers. Okay, to be able to implement the recommendations. Depending on, yes, all of the recommendations, or I think there's a number of factors when you're looking at reporting out and data collection that are much more complicated than just staff dollars. Okay, thank you. I might circle back. Thank you, Chair. Thank you so much. Council Member Lynch. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, colleagues, for doing this work over this past year. Thank you, Mr. Postel, for the presentation. My first question kind of just kind of deals with logistics. So, because we've acknowledged that neighborhood centers and community centers are different in our house and different divisions, and you've given recommendations for all of them, I want to know when the rubber meets the road. How is this going to be implemented and rolled out, and what's your timeline? I think that is a very great question, and that's, like I said, the friction we just ran into just when we got started, that there are different divisions, different leaders. But ultimately, they should serve almost the same purpose, same goal. And I think that that's just working with the administration to kind of fine tune a lot of these different recommendations. Speaking towards staffing, we know that this budget is going to be a tight budget. We're not asking for staffing this budget, but looking toward the future, staffing may be a conversation of need. Maybe it's adjusting staffing, maybe it's not adding staffing, but maybe it's adjusting. For instance, some of the centers we visited, we asked them directly, how could you provide more impactful program, how could you expand program, what does it take? And the answer was staffing, so we just didn't pull it, but that's what it was. But pretty much, just looking through them and working with the administration to try to fine tune them. I think the most pertinent ask for right now would be just the continuation of the programming dollars that we put in the last budget. That's the media ask, I think, for the future recommendations, just working with the administration to try to get them in place. So timeline, we haven't nailed that down yet. That's just going to be something we work through, but we just kind of got those recommendations. Thank you. What is your proposed minimum staffing model? You mentioned a staffing model in the presentation, and for which centers would that model be for? No, I would say no direct proposed model. I think that's just going to be working with the administration to come up with different ways. I will give example, for instance, our Charles Young Center, it has one staff member. Ultimately, that's the main, I guess, some of the main reasons why we can't have a lot of active program in the building. It's not open because it's just not the staff available to manage the building, manage programming, to oversee staff. So it could be looking at centers that may not have access to staff, see if we can readjust it. It could be kind of just looking down the future, like I said, is it rather adjusting staff or is it the need for increased staff? And or creating new models to say that, and I think this came up in our working group, that we have, like for instance, at some of our community centers, there's not maybe a staff member that's tasked with this age group, a certain age group, compared to another one. So maybe it's coming up with different models that can lead to more impactful programming and lead to better accessibility expansion of programming, expansion of services. Are you looking at, regarding the staffing model, are you looking at streamlining it so they're the same at every community center and neighborhood center, or is it going to be specific for each location? I think, I believe it should be streamlined, but I think that would have to be a conversation, what is feasible, what could work best with administration, but also what can be done, I think. I would love to see Charles Young have the same exact staffing as our parks and rec centers. And I would love to see Black and Williams have the same exact staffing as our parks and rec centers, or at least similar models. And I would love to see our parks and rec centers increase staffing to provide more impactful programming. My next question is, did you talk to the neighbors that utilize these centers predominantly and that live around these centers? Did you do a survey? Did you do any data collection around that? Did you do an engaged Lexington page to collect neighbor feedback? What does that look like? We did not, because it was more so just an internal look. But I think one of our main recommendations is to emphasize the communities, the surrounding communities, to do surveys to make sure we get their input yearly, annually, to make sure that their voices are heard so that they can be a part of that program. But for this working group, this was just an internal look, I would say. Although the neighborhood, Charles Young, Black Williams had that representative that was from the surrounding neighborhood. I would encourage you as you continue this work to talk to the neighbors that are utilizing these centers on a regular basis, and the neighbors that live around them, because I felt like that was a gap in the presentation, is that we didn't hear their voice through this. And so I think that's very important, to speak with them and see how they feel about the services or lack thereof at each of these venues. And then, my time's up, I got 30 seconds. My last question for right now is to do a little bit more deep dive into your recommendations regarding the boards that staff some of the neighborhood centers. I think another missed opportunity was actually going to their board meetings to have a conversation with them about what they think about what's happening at these neighborhood centers. Specifically speaking about Black and Williams, they have a newly elected board. Several of them are very energized, and I think their voices should have been in this part of this report as well. And so I look forward to hearing more recommendations about, specifically, what you would like to see for those boards. Thank you. Council Member Baxter. Thank you, Chair, and thank you, Christian, for your presentation. And Council Members, for you shining a spotlight on this is something that's really important, and I think that we can only be stronger when we put some focus on things like this. So I guess my question now is, when you were going through all of the initial look at everything, was part of the conversation ever how we can partner? Like look, one of our main goals is increasing staffing, but we know that might be difficult for us to do as a government. Did we look at potential partnership opportunities for other non-profits to come in to a community center or other opportunities similar to how LLF and Woodhill are partnered? Yes, ma'am. No, that's a great question, I think. And that's the greatest benefit of also those programming dollars, because we realize that some of those program dollars is being used to fill the gaps directly aligned to what you're saying. But yeah, I think that's 100% option, and I think that's 100% what some park community centers have used those programming dollars to fill that gap and bring in other professional services in. Yeah, I think that if we could get to a model where the city was responsible for capital maintenance of the buildings, but we had non-profit organizations partnering with us or other organizations in general partnering with us and kind of taking up shop inside our community centers. It may be a really good way forward. So I would just encourage you to kind of keep that top of mind as you're moving forward, too. Thank you. Council Member Savicny. Thank you, Chair, and thank you so much, Christian, for your presentation. First, I do want to also thank Council Members Morton and Beasley for bringing this to us. And I truly appreciate, actually, an outside partner coming in and kind of doing the presentation, because sometimes we get a more political view from someone internal, and you cut to the chase on it, so I do appreciate that. A few quick ones, I appreciate the recommendation of the Community Center Promise. And I call what you're looking for like a scorecard, so I think we should have a scorecard. I do think things like a scorecard do help us and help staff with continued funding or improved funding by being able to create some tension between what one center's doing, what another center's doing. Are they meeting our minimum standards and our community promise? And I don't know if that's kind of what, if you thought that there would be at least some pressure on places to do better. Yeah, I appreciate you saying that. I mean, objectively, if a local non-profit partner of the city through ESR dollars is going to be held accountable to certain standards, then why are our community centers not held accountable to the same standards when they're receiving budget money as well? That's the objective. But it's more than that, because the heart isn't to say, this isn't fair. That thought never crossed my mind until I just heard you say that. Frankly, there is so much funding out there at a state and federal level. I just want to see the city more resourced, and that excites me. I'd be willing to help with that to the extent that I could, right? And I think other people in the working group saw that and kind of saw opportunity for growth there as well. And I appreciate what you said, Council Member Baxter, with sort of that collective impact model, where maybe part of the strategy or part of the communication strategy we suggest is just thinking holistically about the communication strategy around partnership engagement. There's great stuff happening, we just want to put a B12 shot into it and see it amplified. I do also, I appreciate the conversation about the opioid abatement money. I hope that it would be nice to see requests actually come from the group that's managing that at the city. And I think most of what you're seeing impacted as programmatic things that are needed at community centers, it has definitely had, opioids have had an effect on a group of people, one way or the other. So, and Council Member Lynch, I had the same questions about, I do think asking the neighbors what they think. Because I do think the neighbors, if they think a place is crappy or good, they will permeate that amongst the neighborhood and make it more. It's just like, hey, we really, we think they're doing great things over there and we kind of like having them in the neighborhood versus, there's a whole lot of bad things that happen over there. So, I do think having neighborhood true feedback is really helpful. So, I don't know your thoughts on that. Yeah, thanks for saying that. Our community center opened in 2018 and there was some strategy involved in connecting with certain schools. But we sort of thought if we just open the door and post our hours, everybody's going to flood in. That's not always the case. When we utilize things like personalized mass texting for families that could be translated into Spanish, we saw children from Hispanic families flood our community center and get engaged in more programming. It took intentional strategy in partnership with other local non-profits, local church congregations, and with public schools to disseminate that information. And so, some of that's being done well, and it deserves credit. But we think it could be amplified across the board, across the board. So, little things like that, the working group just saw opportunity and said, let's illuminate this. And it's my understanding that it's now the next step is sort of, we've shared our observations, whatever you guys decide to do, great. If you decide to do one thing, great. If you decide to do all of it, great. But whatever it is, we just want to see the city flourish. And community centers are a path to helping people flourish. Thank you, thanks again. Thank you, Chair. Council Member Brown. Thank you, Chair. And Christian, going back to the question I asked earlier, I may have started from the funding piece of it, where I think you all were talking about the performance to inform the funding. So that did answer my question. And then I'd like to comment that Council Member Savigny had mentioned the score card, so to speak. I think that can be a tool to use to help to inform us on how to move forward. I think some concerns were shared earlier that I have concerns with. I think this whole initiative could work as a catalyst to get more community input. I think the reason that these council members started looking at this is because they did get community input about this. So I think this could really engage folks to get involved now and help shape what that promise is for each community center. And I guess my question was, are you all thinking this is a blanket statement or a promise for community centers, or each community center has its own promise? And I say that to say, I've seen Black and Williams kind of change and evolve over the years where there were a lot of community organizations in that building. And due to a lawsuit, so to speak, or the results of, we needed that space to accommodate some of our community-facing programs. But since renovations and further investment in that facility, now there's more opportunity for community space and involvement in that center. So this center has continued, and I think some of the other ones have evolved over time. So maybe each one, the promise is informed based on the community that engages us. But I will say this before I go to my last question. What folks in the neighborhood see and want that center to be may not be the same as what we see the need being for the broader community. So I think we just need to brace and be prepared for that type of feedback, because we've heard that before. So then my last question is about the community response recommendation, which I think is a strong, needed recommendation regarding our community centers. I just want to ask Director Conrad, what do you think about that response and how do you see that playing out, because that potentially could involve more funding, more staffing to have everybody prepared to respond to crisis like that. Yeah, so I'm going to lean on Deputy Director Tocor, because she led our most recent crisis response to incidents at one of our community centers. And I will just, before she gives you a little more background, CPR certified, first aid trained, we do that regularly with our team members. But we also, on the most recent incidents, Adrian Lux was standing beside us through the entire process, helping us with crisis response, as was Chief Weathers. So we have a very coordinated internal protocols and response. We can always do more, but I'll let Adrian give you a little more background on that. Thank you, Council Member Brown. Thank you, Director Conrad. Our crisis response is directly related to safety protocols for each center that is universal to the Parks and Recreation Community Center model. And it starts with having staff that have all the opportunity to become CPR and first aid and AED certified. And we have those in each of our centers. Someone is required to be in the center at all times as a staff member with that training in terms of how the center is staffed. We also have minimum staffing standards based on the volume of participants in the building at any given time. And so there's a ratio directly related to that, and our supervisors do a really good job of making sure we meet that. In the event that there is an acute crisis or emergency, our priority is to provide the highest duty of care to the participants and staff who are in our building and participating with us at that time. And so to use the Tate's Creek Community Center slash Gainesway Park neighborhood crises that were earlier in the season. The first thing that our staff does is to make sure that all of our youth participants are accounted for and in the building based on sign-ups, contact information so that we know who they are, which people they are, whether they're with us at that time. And that the person who is assigned to do that head count and person count is aware of where they are, that they're in the building and that the building is secured. And then our staff member remain with those participants so that if they have questions, if there are problems or injuries, that those can be taken care of by the staff who know who's in the building and who they're supposed to be taken care of. The first thing we ask our staff to do once our participants are secured is to call 911. We rely heavily on public safety to guide our decision making in terms of how and who we interact with any external victims, perpetrators, community members. We default to what they say, and so in the most recent ones, we were told to stay inside the building. And that public safety would respond and take care of those outside of the building, and so we followed that instruction. And then secondly, as Director Conrad mentioned, one Lexington has worked very closely with us and they were immediately responsive to our request. In fact, they knew about it and were on the way before we reached out to them to say, can you come help us? And that's because we have youth and adults who were dealing with gun violence in one instance. And they appeared and helped us coordinate assisting the participants and the staff. And in addition to that, directors and their superintendent level are immediately called. And as soon as we are called right after 911, we are in route to handle communications with families in the event that any press come. It's part of our communication strategy that only people at that level do that sort of communication so that it's consistent and accurate. So that the staff who are on duty at the time can devote their attention to the participants and other staff. Council Member Morton. Thank you, I'll wrap this up, but just to address a couple questions. So I know there's some questions regarding staffing. I'll reemphasize that our acts, as of right now, and has not changed, I don't think, is to plan not to ask for staffing as of right now for this next budget. So take that away, take that negative thing away. The second is that I want to emphasize that these recommendations, these findings were due to what was presented to us. Gaps that were presented to us, questions that were asked, we received some answers towards them, and that's how we got to that recommendation. So that's staffing. Regarding the neighborhood voices, I think Council Member Brown already hit it on the head. This started because of neighborhood voices. Because the folks in our communities come to us, had questions, had concerns, thought of community centers. And we said, well, we want to take a look into it. So this started due to community voices, neighborhood voices. And that's exactly what we pushed towards, emphasizing that there is a neighborhood voice loop. Emphasizing that yearly, that there's surveys that are then taken to, in consideration for programming, for services. Emphasizing that we need to be better at communicating to our residents so that they can access this building. I think one of the main goals of this was for our neighbors. So I do want to emphasize that. And then, as I stated already, the next steps in the recommendations emphasize neighborhood input, emphasize community surveys. We all know this is what I'm all about, community input. So rest assured that the neighborhood voices were front of mind for us throughout this whole process. So then, wrapping it up. So I just want to thank Christian. I want to thank everyone on the working group. I'm not going to name all those folks again. I want to thank the administration, everyone. This was a year long process. Visit every center, had a lot of good conversations. I just want to thank everybody for taking part into the thoughtful and honest assessment. And for the time they spent listening to staff, listening to partners and residents across neighborhoods that did attend. Councilman Beasley and I brought this forward because our community centers are more than buildings. They're critical pieces of civic infrastructure, especially in neighborhoods that rely on them for safety, connections, and opportunity. Our overall goal was to try to make the centers more accessible, more impactful, and provide resources and services needed for the surrounding community. This work gives a clear picture of where we're strong, where we're falling short, and what consistencies or inconsistencies and what equities we should look forward to and look at. So my hope is that this assessment leads to real and tangible changes, clear standards, better communication, stronger staffing support, and investments that reflect community needs. So that no matter where you live in Lexington, you can count on your community center or neighborhood center to be open, welcoming, and responsive to your needs. So I look forward to working with the administration to make that possible. And a special shout out to Mr. Christian Postale. He is one strong leader, and he took this baton and ran with it, and I'm appreciative for you, brother. Thank you. Thank you for the presentation and all those that aided in answering questions for our council members. That was our last, this brings us to our last item on the agenda. Colleagues, sign in if you have any changes to items on the referral list. I don't see anyone signed in, so that brings us to the end of our agenda. So I will call our meeting adjourned for today. Our next meeting is on March 10th. Thank you.