# Committee of the Whole (COW) - Budget - May 26, 2026 > Auto-transcribed civic record · Committee · May 26, 2026 - **Permalink**: https://meetings.lexingtonky.news/meeting/6778 - **Source video**: https://lfucg.granicus.com/player/clip/6778?view_id=14&redirect=true - **Date**: 2026-05-26 - **Body**: Committee - **Last revised**: May 27, 2026 - **Length**: 17,538 words - **Speakers**: Chair > ⚠️ **Auto-generated content.** Audio from the official Granicus video was auto-transcribed with OpenAI's open-source Whisper large-v3-turbo model, run locally by The Lexington Times. Structured facts were extracted with GPT-4o; the narrative summary was written by Anthropic Claude. Verbatim wording may contain errors. See [methodology](https://meetings.lexingtonky.news/about/methodology) or [report a correction](mailto:editor@lexingtonky.news). --- ## Meeting Overview The Lexington-Fayette Urban County Government held a committee meeting on May 26, 2026, beginning at 10:00 AM at the Council Chamber, 200 E. Main St, Lexington, KY 40507. The meeting covered five agenda items, all of which were informational in nature, focusing primarily on budget and financial matters including a monthly financial update for April FY2026 and presentations related to FY2027 budget recommendations. No presiding officer was recorded for this meeting, and no public comments were heard. A total of 6 motions and votes were taken over the course of the meeting, with presentations spanning topics such as the Link and Council Member Recommendation Summary, FY2027 Link Report Out Presentations, and individual FY2027 Council Member budget recommendations, as well as Mayor's Late Items. ## Attendance The following 11 members were present at the Committee meeting on May 26, 2026: - Council member Elliot-Baxter - Council member Ellinger - Council member Sevigny - Council member Sheehan - Council member Morton - Council member Reynolds - Council member Curtis - Council member Lynch - Council member Beasley - Council member Brown - Vice Mayor Wu No members were recorded as absent or late. ## Votes and Decisions The committee took six votes during the May 26, 2026 meeting, all decided by voice vote. All six motions passed. - **Include late items and mayor's proposed FY27 budget:** Council member Ellinger moved, and Vice Mayor Wu seconded, to include the late items presented on pages 17–23 of the meeting packet and the mayor's proposed budget for fiscal year 2027. The motion passed by voice vote. [timestamp: 32:27] - **Amend FY27 budget — Environmental Quality and Public Works:** Council member Sevigny moved to amend the mayor's proposed FY27 budget to include the requests for the Environmental Quality and Public Works links. The motion passed by voice vote. - **Amend FY27 budget — General Government and Services:** Council member Sheehan moved to amend the mayor's proposed FY27 budget to include the requests of the General Government and Services link. The motion passed by voice vote. - **Amend FY27 budget — Social Services and Public Safety:** Council member Baxter moved to amend the mayor's proposed FY27 budget to include the requests of the Social Services and Public Safety link. The motion passed by voice vote. - **Amend FY27 budget — Council Request Labels 7 and 8:** Council member Reynolds moved to amend the mayor's proposed FY27 budget to include council request labels 7 and 8. The motion passed by voice vote. - **Amend FY27 budget — Council Request Label 9:** Council member Sheehan moved to amend the mayor's proposed FY27 budget to include council request label 9. The motion passed by voice vote. All six motions were decided by voice vote; no individual roll call tallies were recorded. Timestamps were not available for the five budget amendment votes beyond the first motion. ## Budget and Financial Actions The committee addressed two appropriations during the May 26, 2026 meeting, covering building security and digital accessibility initiatives. - **Building Security Equipment and Personnel ($135,098):** The committee considered an appropriation of $135,098 designated for building security equipment and personnel. No vendor, recipient, or resolution identifier was specified in the available meeting materials. - **Digital Accessibility Plan Implementation ($50,000):** A second appropriation of $50,000 was taken up for the implementation of a digital accessibility plan. As with the security appropriation, no vendor, recipient, or resolution number was identified in the available materials. Combined, the two appropriations total $185,098. No additional financial items, transfers, or budget amendments were recorded for this meeting. ## Monthly Financial Update - April FY2026 **Agenda Item 0437-26** | [timestamp: 06:22] Commissioner Hensley and directors presented the monthly financial update covering activity through April of Fiscal Year 2026. Director Holbrook and Director Lueker also contributed to the presentation. The key finding of the update was a **surplus of $17 million**, attributed to two primary factors: - **Revenue performance** exceeding projections - **Underspending** across departmental budgets The item was informational in nature, and no vote or formal action was taken by the Committee as a result of the presentation. ## Mayor's Late Items [timestamp: 21:44] Director Carey presented the Mayor's Late Items (Agenda Item 0438-26), which addressed a set of additions and corrections to the mayor's proposed budget submitted after the original filing deadline. Director Carey explained that the late items fell into two categories: - **State legislation-driven changes:** Adjustments required as a result of new or updated state legislation that necessitated modifications to the proposed budget after its initial submission. - **Clerical adjustments:** Corrections to address administrative or technical errors identified in the original budget documents. No debate or significant concerns were raised during the presentation. The item was informational in nature, and no vote or formal action was taken by the Committee. ## Link and Council Member Recommendation Summary Agenda item 0439-26 consisted of a presentation in which council members shared their individual link recommendations and personal budget requests for the committee's consideration. Three council members took part in the presentation: Council Member Sevigny, Council Member Sheehan, and Council Member Baxter. Each presented their respective recommendations and requests as part of the budget process. The item was informational in nature, meaning no vote or formal action was taken as a result of the presentation. The recommendations and requests put forward by the council members were received by the committee for consideration as the budget process moves forward. *No transcript timestamp was available for this agenda item.* ## FY2027 Link Report Out Presentations **Agenda Item 0440-26** [timestamp: 33:32] Council members presented their FY2027 Link Report Out findings during this portion of the meeting, offering budget recommendations and proposed amendments as part of the annual budget process. The following council members delivered presentations: - **Council Member Ellinger** - **Council Member Sevigny** - **Council Member Sheehan** Each council member outlined their respective recommendations related to the FY2027 budget, with presentations focused on proposed amendments stemming from their link assignments. The Link Report Out process is a mechanism through which individual council members review specific departments or budget areas and report findings and recommendations back to the full committee. The item was informational in nature, and no votes or formal actions were taken as a result of the presentations. The discussion served to inform the broader committee of each council member's budget priorities and proposed changes heading into the FY2027 budget deliberations. ## FY2027 Individual Council Member Recommendations [timestamp: 2:06:08] During this agenda item, individual council members presented their specific budget requests and recommendations for the FY2027 budget cycle. **Key Speakers:** - Council Member Baxter - Council Member Morton Council Member Baxter and Council Member Morton each brought forward their respective budget recommendations for consideration. This portion of the meeting provided an opportunity for individual council members to formally present priorities and requests they wished to see reflected in the FY2027 budget. The item was informational in nature, meaning no formal vote or binding action was taken as a result of the presentations. The recommendations presented are intended to inform the broader budget deliberation process as it moves forward. *Note: The available data for this agenda item does not include the specific details, figures, or subject matter of each council member's individual recommendations. For the full content of each presentation, viewers are encouraged to consult the meeting video beginning at timestamp 2:06:08.* --- ## Decisions - **Motion** — passed (0-0): Include the late items presented on pages 17-23 of today's meeting packet and the mayor's proposed budget for fiscal year 27 - **Motion** — passed (0-0): Amend the mayor's proposed budget for fiscal year 27 to include the requests for environmental quality and public works links - **Motion** — passed (0-0): Amend the mayor's proposed budget for fiscal year 27 to include the requests of the general government and services link - **Motion** — passed (0-0): Amend the mayor's proposed budget for fiscal year 27 to include the requests of the social services and public safety link - **Motion** — passed (0-0): Amend the mayor's proposed budget for fiscal year 27 to include the council request label 7 and 8 - **Motion** — passed (0-0): Amend the mayor's proposed budget for fiscal year 27 to include the council request label 9 --- ## Full transcript Music Thank you. Good morning, folks. We'll go ahead and call this meeting to order for the Budget Finance and Economic Development Committee. Council Committee of the Whole for May 26, 2026 at 10.04 AM. We'll go straight to the agenda, and the first item on the agenda is the monthly financial update. We have Commissioner Hensley, Director Holbrook, Director Luker, and I'll turn the mic over to you, Commissioner. Good morning, everybody. I know we have a lot to cover today, so we will make this short and sweet. These are the financials through the month of April as we are working towards the close of our fiscal year. So for the 10 months ended April 30th, we have a current year surplus, so revenues exceeding expenses of about $17 million. That is for a variety of reasons. We're going to let Wes and Melissa talk through the vast majority of those. but is it a combination of both our revenue performance and underspending of expenses as we have seen in the last couple of years. A couple of things just to note, as we talk about that, we do take this into account for pre-funding with the mayor's budget. And so a lot of the payroll savings that we've experienced and that we project through the end of the year has been kind of taken into account for the pre-funding of the mayor's proposed budget. and so we kind of use that as a projection. We already know that we've experienced those savings to date, so we feel really comfortable with those when we're doing that budget. And then we have some items that we look at as we go into the end of the year with our PO close that Melissa's going to talk about. And just as we're kind of closing the year, there's some other environmental factors that we're keeping in mind, such as the cost of fuel. We all know that we're seeing the increased cost of some of our supply items going up right now, as well as our fleet costs are rather expensive. So as we're closing out the year, those are things that we're also keeping in mind as we're just kind of wrapping up. So without further ado, I'm going to turn it over to Director Holbrook, and he's going to kind of do our revenue overview, and then we'll hear from Director Luecker. Good morning, council members. Just looking at our performance to budget, we are on the whole extremely close compared with what we budgeted through the first 10 months, less than $1.5 million. And looking at some of our categories, there's a little variation to them. First is payroll. We had a little bit of a dip in the first part of the calendar year. We saw that come back in as we saw some of those larger payments that had been delayed with some of the mail processing catch up. Net profits, we did get a lot of net profit mail. We were not able to finish processing it all before April 30th. Some of that has to do with when we actually received it, so people drop it off at the post office April 15th and get it postmarked. It has to go to Louisville to get processed and then sent back here, and so that creates a little bit of a natural delay. We did have our online filing platform that was available this year. We launched that in March. We did have a few hundred businesses that filed through that, and we're trying to get the word out as we go through the summer so that way we can have that more available for businesses and they're more aware of it as we get into the next filing season when we do extensions in October. Insurance is very close to budget at this point. We've seen it tracked just a little bit below. Part of that, I think, is whenever we do our April processing of net profit returns, insurance also has to be manually processed, so that creates a little bit of a delay in getting that in. I'm hoping that as we get all that mail in, just based on how it's looked throughout the last three quarters, that we might land just on budget, which is $50 million for that revenue source. Franchise fees, we've talked about that's throughout the year. That's continued to be a bright spot compared with how we budgeted it. We'll see if the rainy weather this month contributes to any sort of decrease in that variance. But overall, it's been very strong. one other area we always talk about is our charges for service that is positive and there's a lot of different things that go into that as we've talked about but the main one driving it this about 1.8 million dollars of a positive variance is excess fees and collections from the sheriff and the county clerk we're at end of term and so that would that would contribute a lot to that. But overall, extremely close on actuals to budget of about 1.5 million off or 0.3%. Looking at the year-over-year comparison, you can see in most of our large categories, we're well above where we were in prior year. Some of that with net profits, we should hopefully see that grow a little bit more as we get our May numbers in and we report that. And so we've seen 6.4% of growth, which is overall very good growth and has allowed us to do a lot of wonderful things. We just captured a lot of that when we were doing our budgeting last year. So by design, it's supposed to be a lot closer than we have been in prior fiscal years. I'm happy to cover any specific revenue sources or any questions you all may have, or otherwise I can turn it over to Director Luker. Council members, are there any questions? Director, I'm not seeing any. All right. Good morning. So switching over to the operating side, I know the commissioners mentioned a little bit about some of our savings in our operating expenses. And that we are targeting some of those for our pre-fund in the FY27 budget. That pre-fund is $10.1 million as it stands before your Cal meeting today. And so some of these savings you'll see being reallocated, a lot of it will be within the personnel. We've got savings there within our full time salaries. We've got some savings in our payouts, they were a little less than we had budgeted for FY26. Now we are seeing over budget in our overtime account, which if you have a lot of vacancies, overtime tends to correlate together. So overall, we're within 3.4% of our personnel, so that's really great. Let's talk about operating. So operating is a large number there, $23.5 million. However, we can quickly identify about half of that for items that are currently in the process of being transferred to another fund. The homelessness set aside that was done as part of the fund balance in the fall, that $2.8 million is being moved over. You all have given it first reading. It will get second reading this Thursday. So there's $2.8 million right at the top that we know is moving out of the fund. We also are still paying for some of our snow and ice removal. We've got about a million dollars in salt that's about to go out the door to pay for the rest of the salt to get the barns full. We also have medical debt in there, so that's about $700,000 of savings with that. We have our jail contract for our medical services. There's a savings showing right now, but as we're finishing up our payments with the current provider and the new provider, we're going to need those dollars to make that budget whole. We also have grant match. So some of the grant match will be spent, but the majority of it will be rolled forward into FY27. That's about $3.75 million in grant match. So you can see there are a lot of these large items that are in our operating variance right now that will be either spent or moved forward to FY27 or moved to another fund for FY27. Some of those, like I said, are in process right now. And then we have budget amendments coming forward today. So we're always changing the budget there. Insurance, we are right there at budget. Debt service, we are basically at budget. Partner agencies, some of that is the microtransit with LexTran and United Way. So we know those are still in process and then the rest of that is the library, which we're statutorily required to pay. Capital, a lot of that deals with the sabitas and so we're not concerned with that. It's just the timing and with those sabitas with the GASME standard that we have to follow there. So overall we have a large variance, but like I said, we're using 10.1 in the mayor's proposed budget for pre-fund. And we have about half of that variance that we know is in process of being spent or moved in some form or fashion. Then if we compare to the prior fiscal year, you can see we're spending more in every single category, which has been true just about every month this fiscal year. We're spending more, we're just not spending quite to budget. So that's where we are for FY26. Does anyone have any questions? Councilmember Baxter. Thank you chair. Thank you director for your comments. I want to go back to the corrections medical contract. You touched on it for just a second. You said there's a little bit of savings there. I'm curious what the impact is going to be on our budget going forward. So we are we have looked at the new contract. What we have budgeted should be sufficient to cover the cost for the next fiscal year. What we're waiting on this fiscal year is we're waiting on final billing from the current provider. And with the aggregate cap that we have to pay that's over and above the standard contract costs based on medicine and hospitalizations and all of those things. And so with that money that we have that's not encumbered yet, we can start paying the new provider and then we have enough budgeted to cover the new provider for the next fiscal year. Should. Okay. I mean, of course, if there's anything catastrophic and we have a lot of hospitalizations that are over and above what were estimated, then that could change things. But right now, we feel good with the number. Okay, thank you so much. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Council Member. Next, we have Council Member Savigny. Thank you, Chair. Thank you so much for the presentation. Just a few questions on the personnel line item. So my understanding is since we did about $10 million worth of pre-fund, the personnel line item, is there any May or June big items that are going to hit? Are those just going to be like a standard run rate? I don't know if we have any obligations on personnel that have a timing issue. Yes. So we will have the first couple days, few days into July. July's payroll gets accrued back because some of June you're paying out in July, so that will get accrued back. But all of that is budgeted for, so we will be adding on more budget to cover any of those larger expenses that we might have of personnel. Okay. All right. But that variance is probably going to be there. That variance is going to be? Probably depends on, you know, over time. And if we have any big retirements between now and the end of the fiscal year. But it should be there, and we are targeting some of that for the pre-fund. Okay. All right. And do we pay out, like, vacation stuff? Vacation and sick. Okay. Depending on, there's certain criteria based on how long you've been here and how you're leaving. I get it. Okay. And then, so my thinking in general, I'm just kind of doing a match that that personnel number is probably going to be pretty close to what we pre-funded. So that kind of goes away. You made a comment that about half of the, you basically have identified about half of the $23 million is going to have some sort of, you're going to have to accrue, you're going to accrue or you're going to shift funds. So you might have 11 or 12 million dollars, do you think, in fund balance at the end of the, so I'm just going to push for that answer. I've been here long enough to know that I'm not going to predict the fund balance in May. But I'm hearing that you did a bunch of addition already. So those were the large items. We still have the day-to-day items. I know police, they're starting a recruit class. They just had to order all of their supplies. So there are other things that are small. We just know that there are these large items, and then we'll have some spin down on some of the other variances as well. I'm not going to predict a fund balance number. It's fine. It's fine. I'll do that. But it's good. All right. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Thank you, Chair. Council Member Ellinger. Thank you, Chair. On page six, the next page, when we look at prior year to this year on the insurance expense, that might have been what your answer would, Council Member Baxter, the difference between the 14 and the 10. So in FY25, we were using a balance in our insurance fund to help offset the cost. Every so often, it builds up and then we're able to use a balance. We were not able to do that in FY26, so that's why it's an additional $4 million. Thank you. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Council Members. And, Director, I do have a quick question about the funding that you identified in operating. Is there any way that that could get communicated to us as encumbered? I don't want to mess up the flow charts or how it's presented to us now, because I think folks are really starting to wrap their heads around it. But I think it would be beneficial if we knew that some of those funds and operating were already encumbered. Yes, so if you see on this second slide, we have some of the large ones listed out with amounts. And we talked about doing an additional slide for that. But we can send it to you in an email if you would prefer with those large items. Yeah, I think that might be something that we can discuss about how it's presented in a way. If it gets captured here, I don't think it gets captured in a way when we're talking about that specific operating that would be beneficial for Council to see and kind of understand. So I'd be interested in it being presented to us a different way. All right, any other questions for Director Luker? No ma'am, I'm not seeing any, so. Okay. Thank you. You ready for late items? Yes. So we have some late items for the mayor's proposed budget. So the first late item we have, and I believe you all had an email from Director Carey about this one, is removing the state reimbursement for turf mowing. So that's going to decrease our revenue by $181,270. There will be an offsetting expense reduction as well, so it's a wash. So that's our first late item. The first expense late item is a state legislation change. We received this the day after the mayor's proposed budget was announced, and we have to increase the amount that we're providing to the PVA office. And so that's an expense increase of $1,140. We've got some clerical changes. So we are correcting the account code for a rent lease based on the GASB standards in FIRE. So it's a $12,000 movement, but it's a WASH. The code enforcement increased licensing expense. So they have increased licensing expense that they have, and it was not budgeted for. So that's an increase of $5,625. We have another accounting code for the GASB standard, and that is $16,270. it's just moving that amount, so it's a wash. We have funds that were omitted for a copier and police, so they're moving $445 from one account to another to cover the cost of that copier lease. And then we have personnel corrections. We have two of those. One is to correct the funding for a heavy equipment technician senior, and that's an expense decrease in the general fund of $96,324. We had overtime funds that were omitted in used services, and so those are added in, and that's $47,548. This last item here on the general fund is that removing the state reimbursement. So this is removing the expense, which nets out with that very first one at the top with the revenue. So our changes to the late items for, or changes to the mayor's proposed budget for late items is an increase of $42,011. So that takes the new total for the ending fund balance for the budget to $1,171,682 for general fund. Next we have the Urban Services Fund. The first one we've already talked about, this is the Urban Services Fund portion of the PBA expense that we got notified of right after the budget was released. So for the Urban Services Fund, it's $2,360 more that we will have to provide to the PBA. We have a couple clerical changes, one of which is to add the budget for the compressed natural gas. It was included in the Water Quality Fund instead of the Urban Services Fund. So this is a $530,000 increase in expense to the Urban Services Fund for that. We have the accounting standards getting it into the correct account in facilities and fleet. And so this is $2,040 just being moved from one account to the other. And then personnel correction, if you'll remember from the general fund page, we had the heavy equipment technician senior. This is where they should be budgeted. And so that's a $96,324 increase to the Urban Services Fund. So we're actually decreasing the Urban Services ending fund balance by $628,684. And so the new mayor's proposed fund balance after the late items is $2,839,653. We have the sanitary sewer fund. The first one is a clerical change. This is the same moving it to the correct account code to comply with the GASB standard. It's $2,030, just a wash there. And then the second item here is due to personal actions that council, you all had voted on and approved from the time we released the budget to now. to now and so this is abolishing four unclassified positions of treatment plant operator apprentice one and abolishing four unclassified positions of treatment plant operator apprentice. And so this is a decrease in expense based on abolishing those positions. What we're doing here is we are increasing the mayor's proposed fund balance in sanitary sewer by $65,201. And so the new balance is $27,406,254. And then finally, the screen went black. The page, there we go. There's a blank page there. This is the Water Quality Fund. If you remember back when we were doing the Urban Services Fund page, We had the compressed natural gas was budgeted in the wrong fund. And so this is reducing the expense in the water quality fund by $530,000 for the compressed natural gas and moving to urban services fund. So this is a change of $530,000. And the new balance after that change is $5,286,838. So that concludes the late items. And if there are any questions. All right, council members, are there any questions about the late item presentation? Council member Baxter. Thank you, Chair. Director, I'm looking at the sanitary sewer fund, the changes in personnel, the abolishment of those eight positions. It just seems like the amounts are very low. I just wanted to confirm that those were correct. It's probably an abolish and create, and so this would be the net effect of that abolish and create. Okay. So we were abolishing the positions in the mayor's proposed budget there. Okay, great. Thank you. Thank you. Any other questions, council members? So I do have a quick question about that. Yeah, so the abolishing created, the way it's labeled in the packet is council action, but were those from the HR study in that position or is that something internal and water quality? It was a legislature item that was brought forward to council that council approved. Okay, yeah, but what's the genesis of that recommendation that came to council of that language? Charlie, handle that. A couple of years ago, we created a situation where we're constantly abolishing and creating treatment plan operator positions to create entry level positions. And as they get licenses, they are eligible for promotions to compete to become a full time, full civil service treatment plan operator. So you'll see this go on over and over again probably from now moving forward. Is we abolish the apprentice ones when we have apprentices that are moving up into the full-time positions. And as those full-time positions become available, we'll abolish them and create the apprentices again. And it's kind of wash, rinse, and repeat. That's the way we have to do it. Okay. So is it safe to say those positions now are classified? Yes. The goal was is to always have ten classified full-time civil service treatment plan operators for each plant. Along the way, we'll be hiring apprentices that don't have licenses and training them up to become one of the ten at each plant. Okay, okay. That helps me understand it. Thank you. It's a little confusing, but it works. Yes, sir. Thank you. And then I also have a quick question. I know I did see the email from Director Carey about the change in mowing from the state. I think that email ended that if we have any issues or any constituent issues with the services that we see on those corridors, what are we anticipating? I just think with the possible reduced level of service, so less frequent mowing, that you will see taller grass, more weeds. And when we were taking care of that for the state, we were the ones that would respond if there were ever situations like that. So in this case, since it's back under their purview, they would need to be the ones that are contacted. Do we, if there's a situation creating a hazard, do we have the authority or the ability to mitigate that? Yes, certainly, yes. Do we have the funding to mitigate that? Is that in somebody's maintenance budget or contingency? I think it would just depend on the situation and whether it is something that we asked our division of streets and roads to address or if it was something environmental services could address. Most likely, though, I would say it would be done with in-house personnel, so not really an added cost beyond staff time. Okay. Yeah, no, I see this as being something that you will and we will get calls about. Possibly, yes. Okay. Yeah, we'll just see if 17 is the magic number and we've maybe been doing it more frequently than absolutely necessary or if that will just kind of become more of a maintenance nightmare. Okay. All right. All right. Thank you, Director. Council members, any other questions? I'm not seeing any. Director, do you have anything else to present? Do not, thank you. All right, is there a motion to accept these late items? Council Member Ellinger. Thank you, Chair. I move to include the late items I presented on pages 17 to 23 of today's meeting packet in the mayor's proposed budget for fiscal year 2027, including the changes to the General Services District Fund, the full Urban Service District Fund, the Sanitary Sewer Revenue and Operating Fund, and the Water Quality Management Fund. So moved. Second. All right. A motion was made by Council Member Ellinger and seconded by Vice Mayor Wu. Any questions for the motion? Hearing none, all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Are there any that oppose? That motion passes. Thank you, Commissioner and directors. And we'll move to the next item on our agenda, which is FY27 link report out presentations. And we'll start with Councilmember Ellinger with the CAO and Housing Advocacy and Community Development link. Thank you, Chair. As the commissioner said, we have a lot to do, so I'll keep this brief. The link accepts the mayor's fiscal year 27 proposed budget allocation. Do we have any questions? I guess I'll be a little more soon. There you go. See, moving right along. I hope everybody else is this to sync today. All right. I want to thank my, I was the chair of the CAO in the Housing Advocacy and Community Development link. I want to thank my other members, Council Member Hale and Council Member Higgins-Hord. And I want to thank all of our staff and Kelly Farley, the mayor's team, and the mayor's staff. As you can see on page 26, that was the, we had our link agenda. I guess they handed me this so I can move it forward. There's our link agenda. And then you can look at our general fund overview. One thing I think that I want to talk about as a commissioner, where it was 1.3 and that 10.8, there's a difference of 8.8. And that's from this fiscal year that the transfers were put in for this fiscal year. budget was the affordable housing, the $5 million, the winter warming shelter of $2.2, and then the Office of Homelessness Prevention Interventions, $1.65. So that's why that number in this fiscal year is much higher. We'll just go to the chief administrative officer, and I'll highlight the highlights or the funding provided for one new development liaison position, funding provided for the Access Engagement Officer for the implementation of ADA training and continue organization-wide training. Our recommendation is the link accepts the fiscal, accepts the mayor's fiscal year 27 proposed budget allocation for human resources. The highlights the funds included in this fiscal year for the police and fire promotional processes. This process occurs every other year. funding provider for the new LFUCG training courses and OSHA standards and regulations and other training. The link accepts the mayor's proposed budget allocation. Lexical. The highlights. Professional services funds will continue to allow language line assistance for the residents of Fayette County. Operating funds will allow for branding and merchandise to be disseminated throughout the community. The link accepts the mayor's proposed budget allocation. Government communications. Highlights. Funding provided for the live captioning services. Caption advantage. Continued funding for the growth of our social media platforms, Facebook and Instagram. Continuing to introduce new features and explore ways to enhance the city's website. Capital highlights. Replacement playback program of $15,000 for capital reallocation fund. The link accepts the mayor's proposed budget allocation. commissioner's office and once again here's where that 8.8 was in there at the top highlights funding of 400,000 pride for legal aid of the bluegrass operates the housing stability services program for the city this allocation is being pre-funded for fiscal year 2027 funding provided for office of homeless prevention intervention budget at 1.659631 to reflect the ordinance requiring 0.3% of the prior year reoccurring revenue. Funding provided for the affordable housing budget at $5,029,186 to reflect the ordinance required 1% of the prior year reoccurring revenue and $2.2 million funded for the winter warming operations. Link recommendations. The link accepts the mayor's fiscal year 2027 proposed budget allocation. The link is concerned about the need for administrative support position of the Office of Homeless Prevention Intervention. We would like to prioritize this request for fiscal year 28. Code enforcement. Highlights. Overseeing and funding of homeless encampment claims have been moved from the Division of Environmental Services to the Division of Code Enforcement. Continued funding for the Housing Repair Assistance Program for $200,000. Continued funding for the Sidewalk Cost Share Program of $400,000. funding provided to maintain accreditation for international code council and international credit accreditation services the link recommendation is to accept the mayor's proposed budget allocation community residential services the highlights the overseeing and funding of tates creek community center was moved from the division of parks and recreation to the division of community and resident services increased funding provided for the operations of the black and williams center continued funding for the emergency financial assistance program The link recommendation. The link accepts the mayor's proposed budget allocation. The link discussed referring emergency financial assistance to fund balance discussion. The link discussed how both the Tates Creek Community Center and the Black Williams Center have similar needs and recommend similar services. Grants and special programs. The highlights. Funding is provided for training and allows staff to attend Kentucky Housing Corporation Affordable Housing Conference. The link accepts the mayor's proposed budget allocation. And that concludes our link, and I will open up for questions. And along with my other members, if there are any questions, we will be happy to respond. Thank you, Council Member Ellinger. Council Members, are there any questions? Council Member Lynch. Thank you, Chair. Customer Ellinger, I was curious about your all's linked discussion regarding the Tates Creek Community Center and the Black and Girls Neighborhood Center. Can you flesh that out a little bit more? What does that statement mean on the slide? Who would be best to answer that? Well, since we took it on, we wanted to try to make sure that they were equal in what they provided. And that was kind of how we came about with that recommendation on what both of the services that both are going to be providing. And we wanted to make sure that that was addressed since now we're taking that on for the Tate Creek, which wasn't prior to this. Okay, so just making sure that they're both the same? Well, that's what we were trying to make sure that the services that they were going to be provided were going to be the same similar. there are similar needs and similar services would be provided at both okay thank you and i think council member beasley who actually attended rc going on the committee was very inspirational uh helpful in that okay all right thank you next is a council member morton and my question is just regarding um the development liaison uh position and it's just similar to just i guess that where we are with creating that description um and i guess what does What will that process look like when that description is created? Will it come back to us kind of like that access and engagement officer position? Kind of similar to that. So whoever wants to answer that. And that probably will come from the administration here. Yes, we intend to bring that back to the council. I think it's a really broad position that generated from the council, and we feel it's best before we put this out that we have council approval of this. Okay, great. So we'll bring it back. Yes, ma'am, I appreciate that. And then I'll just continue to emphasize the importance for needing a community facing responsibilities within that position. And I'll just leave it at that. So thank you. Thank you. Since we're talking about development liaison position, and I know we're not going to do any motions until each link reports out. During the budget conversations when we're talking about trying to find funding for other positions, we had talked about pushing this position back to be hired January 2027. Can somebody from the administration speak to what that's going to look like in regards to when this position will be somewhat a little more flushed out and when it will go out for hire in the process to hire somebody on this. My plan would be to have this job description ready to you all to see early fall. And get it ironed out and approved. Then we would advertise for this position probably sometime in late October, the first part of November so that we would have the person ready to start the first of January if we're postponing it. When does that, and from our conversations, it seems like that timeline works well with some of the things that Commissioner Horn is doing in his office that may be related to the position. I think the last time we discussed this, and I know the commissioner's back there, He had been doing, he sort of was developing a plan so that he could track these things, these development processes. And I think if I remember correctly, he said that he would have a better idea of how this plan was working at the end of the year, in December. If this works, if his plan works, it will be a good model for this person to follow. Now there are other activities that are with this particular job, but that would be if that tracking system works, we would use that. But in summary, I think this person needs to be ready to come on at the first of the year as soon as the funding is available. Okay, thank you for that CAO. Any other questions for Council Member Ellinger? Thank you, council member. Thank you, Chair. Thank you. All right, next we'll move to the next link and that's environmental quality and public works and that's council member Savigny. Thank you, Chair. I'm just waiting for it to show up. There we go. I want to begin by thanking the folks that were on the committee, Councilmember Emma Curtis and Councilmember Shayla Lynch. And I also wanted to thank the staff and my aide Alyssa McKenzie, whose birthday is today by the way, and support staff Kelly Barley for their work. Here's our link. I put the bottom two in red because both engineering and building inspecting were reviewed by the link, But those are moved to planning and preservation in fiscal year 27. This is the overview of the link. So this link we covered about $175 million and about 10% of that comes from the general fund and the rest come from a smattering of funds that we have at valorem taxes for, fees and other forms of revenue. The first one that we talked about was EQBW administration. So in EQBW administration, that's where we put this year the winter weather, the extra winter weather money. So there's a million dollars in extra winter weather money in the admin bucket, as well as pothole repair, an additional 200,000. The rest of the winter money is in streets and roads like it normally is. One thing for this group to understand is that we're considering a second transfer station location at Haley Pike. And so we're beginning the process of the design of that, and that will come out of two different funds. So the design work will be done in 26, and then you'll see things happening in fiscal year 27. And then in fiscal year 28 and 29, they'll be starting construction. This is the general EQBW administration budget. And the group proposed, the one thing that you'll notice here, water quality management fund, between the two years, there's a big difference. That was the CNG station that we just actually moved it from that fund to the Urban Services Fund. So anyway, but when we did this, we had it the original way. Okay, then we're going to move to streets and roads. In streets and roads, the highlights of that really are it's pretty much business as usual. Paving was done a little bit differently this year. Paving is funded at 13 million versus last year was 14 million. And the group field felt like there was enough carryover money that it should not really affect what's happening out in the districts. So we should see very little change in that. And their budget basically looks like this. One thing I will tell you is that last year, this year we're bonding $10 million per paving. Last year we did, I think it was $6.5 million. And we had a bunch of, last year we had some, they call it like capital project carryover money that we use towards paving. So this year, the majority of our bond is actually going to be in paving this year. Next, we jump to water quality. No big changes in water quality. And the group recommends accepting the mayor's proposed budget. environmental services this is definitely the swiss army knife of of our government and they they do all sorts of great projects highlights here they're they're going to continue doing what they are doing we are recommending two different things there's several things that were not funded one of which was the green space trust on the cold stream master plan we wanted to implement the first piece of that and there's a nature trail that we wanted to fund and that could be funded through water quality management fund which does have a fund balance so that shouldn't be a big issue the other two items that we are that we would like to be considered in fund balance or pre-fund are the topology study pilot project that came out of the corridors commission. There's a corridors commission study and we wanted to try to do a pilot project on the Georgetown Street corridor. And then the other thing that we would like to consider funding with either pre-fund or fund balance in the future are the wayfinding sign program implementation that also came out of corridors. It's a little early on that one because we're trying to, they don't have all the sign prices pulled together, but it is something that we considered because we have the Breeders' Cup coming up at the end of October. So we did want, we were thinking, we're contemplating it, but we're also want to work a little bit more with the folks from visit lex on that so the environmental services budget we're recommending accepting mayor's proposed budget and we'll be making a motion to add the the money for the green space trust first part of the implementation at coldstream Next up is traffic engineering. Traffic engineering, the one thing that we want, one thing for this group to understand is that the map funds that come from the state, that funding source has slowly shrunk and we have used that money for several things. We are using some of that money for paving. But one of the things that it's hit probably the hardest is the multimodal safety improvements. So that money, we funded $300,000 last year and this year we're down to, it was reduced down to $50,000. So we do think that that could be problematic because that's a lot of the money that we use to do things for bike ped. So there's a recommendation at, We can, since fund balance comes up in October, they feel like they have enough carryover money and a little bit of money to kind of get us through that point. But we do think that that should be high on the list in the fund balance discussion, the additional 250 for that. So we're recommending accept the mayor's proposed budget for that, traffic engineering. Then we move to waste management. Waste management, we're recommended. The big things with waste management is that CNG station is one thing, and that you just saw from the mayor's changes in the previous discussion. And then the MRF is getting a bunch of updates, so that's something that's kind of neat. And then they're doing a great job with managing their staff and overtime. So that's going well and we recommend accepting the waste management's mayor's proposed budget. Engineering, probably the important thing, once again these folks are getting moved out of this organization and they're moved over to planning. Yang is down three engineers and they had six, they're down three and they are also down something else. Three engineers and they're down two inspectors as well. So they just did an RFP to do some project management consultants. So they're shifting their talent to get some contracted project management consultants because we struggle with paying a professional engineer their actual market rate. And so we feel like the project manager consultants can help at least clear some of the backlog of projects for engineering. So we are proposing to accept the mayor's proposed budget for engineering. Building inspection, they are doing swimmingly. They're just down one person and they are making up that work between two different people. And we are recommending accept the mayor's proposed budget for building inspection. So here's the overall link recommendations. There's just one change to add that one item, the implementation from the trust and water quality. And then there's a last slide here. This is one thing that we felt was important for council to understand, that since we deal with so many different funds in this particular link, the fund balance changes are pretty significant if we actually spend all the money that we're going to spend in fiscal year 27. So refuse, I mean, for the past four years, I've been saying that refuse generally runs at a loss. That continues to be the case. So refuse is going to be taking almost $3.5 million of the fund balance of the Urban Services Fund. The other two parts of the Urban Services Fund are budgeted to have some surpluses, so that's supportive and helpful. But the general size of that fund balance is somewhere between $15 and $20 million. dollars so there will be a period of time that we can afford that but then there will be a period of time that we're going to have to contemplate whether or not property tax values are supporting that that that level of business of that change the map fund is the fund balance is coming down because we had some built up funds and the senators who were funds water quality funds those landfill funds are all kind of operating into positives, so that is helpful. I've asked the administration that at the fund balance discussion, because we get the official fund balances of each fund, that they actually do include from now on in the presentation all the other funds, because the auditor does that fund balance. And we've just been talking about the general fund, but it is important to understand the relativity of all the other funds. So, and they have agreed to do that. Questions? Thank you for the presentation, council member. Are there any questions? Council member Sheehan. Thank you, Chair. you to the link for including a recommendation for us to reevaluate the multimodal funds in the fund balance discussion later this year because i do think as we are continuing to work on our complete streets policies and have to fund infrastructure that relates to complete streets we will need to continue to invest in that in that work and need to prioritize it so i appreciate um that we will check in about those funds in october thank you thank you council member next is council member morton thank you and um i just had just a quick question regarding the uk area bike and pet improvements um can you just share like a little bit more information um is that like kind of a partnership with uk um and then also i would just be curious like you know Do we have funds available to kind of do, put similar infrastructure in our communities and neighborhoods that lack that infrastructure? Because I'm all for pushing for safe streets for our community members, especially our neighborhoods as well. So. What section was that under? That was under traffic engineering. Traffic engineering. Do I have someone from traffic here? Because we didn't really, we didn't dig into that particular thing. you don't have traffic engineering you have me um you know traffic engineering struggles all the time as as council members civigny was talking about you know the reduced amount of mat money and stuff there is somewhat of a limited pool of of funding to be able to do these additional things whether they be transportation oriented or amenity I think to Councilmember Sheehan's comment about complete streets, it's going to have to be a really meaningful conversation of not only about the capital cost of it, but the ongoing operation and maintenance cost of those things. But basically what we presented as far as the budget this year was what we felt like was necessary and affordable. Okay, so within specifically for the UK area bike and pen improvements, is that a partnership? Is that directly just us doing those improvements? So this UK transportation, pedestrian safety stuff, that was part of an agreement with UK several years ago. It's a 10-year deal where for 10 years we're budgeting $100,000 to spend. That was a land swap with Coldstream and some streets around campus, so that was part of an agreement that we made with UK. I believe this is year 8 or 9 of that deal, and so we've done $100,000 every year for that deal. So it's a specific deal, specific arrangement that we made with UK. I appreciate that. Thank you. Thank you, Council Member. Next, we have Council Member Reynolds. Thank you, Chair and Commissioner. I'll probably be asking you to come back up, please. I had some questions in regards to the engineering. It was mentioned that we are down in engineers and that we're going to be contracting out to try to help with that. Could you explain a little more? I know the loss of engineers has had a big impact on some of our projects. And so what else can we do to increase that? Well, I think engineering is recommend or pursuing what we've been doing in water quality for a while, the same kind of thing where we actually outsource some of our project management to the private sector to try to help lessen the impact on us. The great thing about that is you get a higher level of continuity than you do sometimes when you've got a rapid turnover of employees as well. It's hard to get any momentum on a project if you've had three project managers in the course of two years. So I think what they're doing is a good thing. Since that division is leaving my department, I haven't really looked at it very closely. I'd have to defer to Commissioner Horn about what he plans to do moving forward. But I think with this hiring the consultants to help manage projects is a good first step. And then would we continue to look for those open positions, or are we saying we're not going to look for them and we're only going to contract out? I think that you're always looking. And so, you know, sometimes the economy has a lot to do with how productive your recruitment really is. Again, I can, from water quality standpoint, which equates, I think, to engineering, is that we have been able to find engineers at certain times when the economy is not so good, and other times when it's really good, it's hard for us to compete. But I think you continue to hunt and look at ways that you can maybe reorganize your division in such a way. Like what we did away with some of our engineers and we actually created construction manager positions and that helped us a lot. Unfortunately, those people are all retiring. Hopefully, we'll be able to find good replacements for them. Thank you. I see Commissioner Horn. Did you have anything to add? Excellent answer. Those positions are open until filled. it is the present intent to hire engineers for those positions. But as Charlie said, we are examining what are the other possibilities for that because contracting out those management services is significantly more expensive than having engineers in shop that can handle that. Okay. Yeah, it seems like a tricky situation. Thank you very much, Commissioner. Thank you. Thank you, Council Member. Are there any other questions? All right, thank you, Councilmember Savigny. Next, we'll move to finance, economic development, and planning, and that was Vice Mayor Wu. Thank you, Chair. I want to thank our whole finance team, our budget analyst, Kelly Farley, our legislative aides, and my fellow council members on that link, Councilmembers Reynolds and Councilmember Boone. We're going to try to keep this as boring and unexciting as possible, and I know Commissioner Hensley, that's how she likes it as well. So this link covers finance, economic development, planning and preservation, and a couple of partner agencies. All right, so this is kind of the department overview. As you can see by the numbers, there's nothing huge or super significant here. Commissioner Finance, I'm not going to continue to repeat myself to say accept the mayor's proposed budget, but that's what we will be doing for each section. Accounting, a couple of, one highlight here. We're doing continual funding for education with payroll tax updates as well as our GASB standards. There's some other things that we talked about as well that kind of had to do with public education and also efficiencies and easing of our community members paying some of their bills. In budgeting, we're going to utilize our membership to GFOA to create more cost efficient training and then we're also trying to automate some more of our financial reporting as well. Procurement, nothing super interesting to report there. In revenue, revenue is moving to the water quality building for more accessibility for our residents and we're also exploring ways to stabilize our e911 fund which currently is funded by landline phone numbers which as we know is a you know not a huge proportion of how people make their calls anymore. This will be presented to us in a future I think fairly soon be fed presentation I believe Amy Councilmember Beasley is her item in committee And I think we're maybe having that next month. Office of Economic Development. We're going to continue funding for Coldstream to support marketing efforts so we can get some folks in there as well as maintenance to keep it marketable. And we're also continuing to support our workforce training as well as our Second Chance Academy. In planning and preservation, as Councilmember Savigny mentioned, the divisions of building inspection and engineering are moving under the umbrella of planning and preservation. In planning itself, we should be finalizing our unified development code and also working on hiring a planner to fulfill 443 requirements. That is not in this. This has already been funded, and there's going to be some reorg there as well. Historic preservation, nothing to report. In PDR, we are continuing that funding and maintaining our 305 existing easements, and then our small farm preservation program is also trucking along. We've closed the first three farms, and we've got eight more under contract. A couple of partner agencies. We got Lexington Children's Museum maintaining a lot of their operations. And as we know, they're going to be moving, hopefully moving and building a new facility soon. And LexArts continued funding. That's it. Happy to take questions. Thank you, Vice Mayor. Council members, any questions? First, we have Councilmember Sabigny. Thank you, Chair. Just a quick one. I think on the PDR stuff, do I understand that right? That that's mostly to run that program, the actual, I think they still have a fund balance. Is that correct? That we're, so we're just basically rolling that fund balance over and that's what they'll be funding the purchase with? Yeah, for the purchase of the easements, that's exactly right. We have a fund balance for rolling over. Okay, it's about, do you know the proximate scale of it? Just so I know. Including the farms that we recently closed and under contract. I think it's around $4 million. Okay, thank you so much, appreciate it. All right, thank you council member. Any other questions for the Vice Mayor in this link? Seeing none, thank you Vice Mayor. Thank you. We'll move on to the next link report out and that's General Government and General Services and that's Councilmember Sheehan. Thank you, Chair. I chaired our budget link and Councilmember Brown and Councilmember Eplen participated, so thank you to you both. I would also like to thank our legislative aides, Sylvia Cassidy, Fallon McFarland, and Raina Slamaker. And of course, our budget analyst, Kelly Farley from our core staff and the budget team. Our link agenda included the constitutional offices, the offices of general services, information and technology, along with the council clerk, council office, citizens advocate, internal review, law, and the mayor's office. And the partner agency in our link was the Lyric Theater. Most of our link is funded through the general fund, but there are a few exceptions which will be noted on the slides. To start with the constitutional offices, you'll see that most of them are funded out of the general fund. As you heard earlier, our property value administrator, our PVA office, also has funding from our urban services fund. The highlights here, the budgets of the constitutional offices primarily come from the general fund, as I just said. No constitutional offices requested changes to the mayor's proposed budget, so we have recommended that we accept the fiscal year 27 mayor's proposed budget. For general services, you'll see it's funded across multiple sources. Highlights for this fund. Funding has been realigned to increase training and certifications for the capital project management staff and continued funding for the operations of the commissioner's office and mailroom. Our link recommendation is to add funding for the ADA transition plan. This is $1.5 million from the capital reserve fund. As you know, we have worked with the consultant WT group to do an update of our ADA transition plan, and we are required to have that ADA transition plan by the federal government. This update originated as a recommendation from the Access Lexington Commission during the ARPA funding process. We recently received the final report and are in the process of hiring a project manager assigned to the specific capital or physical changes that are needed to be made. So we need to set aside funding to get that work started. The transition plan recommended a three-phase approach over 20 years, and the first phase requires $22 million of funding across 10 years for the improvements recommended by the plan. Per federal government, or federal requirement, we are required to show a good faith effort that we are meeting our ADA transition plan. And now that we have this updated report, it can be a liability issue if we aren't updating our facilities and programming. Some municipalities have been sued for not meeting ADA requirements, and that has led to a consent decree like the one we have for our sewers where the federal government intervenes. So we do want to avoid that, which means we should make an investment in this ADA transition plan. We have also recommended to place into committee the ADA transition plan for the, to place it into committee for an infrastructure funding plan to determine the processes, guidelines, and funding policy for the implementation of the full plan over this 20 years. For facilities and fleet, our highlights are deferring vehicle replacement costs for this fiscal year will push costs to future fiscal years at a high cost to LFUCG. Fleet and repairs budget will dramatically inflate if global financial pressures continue. And some divisions may have a vehicle removed from the fleet without another to replace it. So we have recommended that we add $1 million from the capital reserve to allocate to fleet and continue discussion of our fleet budget and acquisitions pending our fund balance. Our fleet manager, Deputy Director Keene, has a long-term plan covering maintenance, replacement, and new acquisitions for our fleet. Especially considering the changes in costs and extended timelines for orders that we have seen over the last few years, we do not want to fall far behind on this plan. The request for fleet comes from multiple funding sources but totaled $21.5 million and was funded in the mayor's proposed budget at $18.3 million, a difference of about $3 million. Our link recommends that we meet in the middle and add $1 million from our capital reserve for the fleet. And of course, we would like to continue that discussion later to try to come back up to that requested amount. Parks and Recreation. Again, you'll see that this is funding funded over multiple sources. Highlights here, we have maintenance and chemical costs are heavily impacted by our global financial pressures. Funding is provided for one new recreation manager, one new recreation specialist senior, and operations at the new senior and therapeutic recreation center. One of our LEAK recommendations was to place extended social school programs, the ESP program, into committee for review. This is because we felt like we wanted a better understanding of the partnership there with FCPS and how that program functions and what it should look like in the future. For information technology, our highlights include working to flatten out complexities across LFUCG technologies, funding for AI training for MS co-pilot and other AI tools, funding for staff augmentation, project management, business analysis, and GIS support, as well as centralizing funding for staff training and career development. GIS would benefit from transitioning server maintenance to a manager services model as well. The link recommendation is to accept the mayor's proposed budget here. Enterprise solutions. This again is funded across multiple sources. The funding includes support for PeopleSoft to assist GIS teams with infrastructure planning, ADA compliance, improvements, and conversion of depreciated components. We recommend the acceptance of the mayor's proposed budget here. And computer services highlights, funding provided for continued investment in cloud and managed services. Funding is provided for a data center migration project to shift critical workloads into a co-located environment. Link recommendation is to accept the mayor's proposed budget. Council Clerk's Office, this is from the general fund. Funding provided for legal publications, meeting agendas, publication of ordinances, archiving and maintenance of records, and general council clerk operations. We recommend acceptance of the mayor's proposed budget. And council offices. Funding provided for Granicus agreement to access and gauge Lexington platform. Neighborhood development funds allocations were increased to expand the support of small scale projects that provide a direct benefit to the community. And we recommend the acceptance of the mayor's proposed budget. Citizens Advocate Office. This is primarily funded from our general fund. As you all have seen from the memo that we received, the caseloads for this office have increased and cases are becoming increasingly more complex. This increased load plus lack of support staff has made managing the workload difficult. This has in turn caused a cut back in community outreach operations that we have asked for from this office. The link recommendation here is to allocate $25,000 to provide temporary administrative and clerical support for the Citizens Advocate Office from the beginning fiscal year 27 fund balance. We would also like to place assessment of this office into committee so we can have further discussion about the complexities that this office is facing and determine a path forward. For internal audit, this is funding for funded from the general fund. Funding provided to leverage technology and maintain audit coverage. We have recommended to accept the mayor's proposed budget. Law is funded across several funding sources. Highlights plan to initiate competency training on the use of AI and the ever changing legal landscape. In the process of developing uniform database that can be used to assess with the generation of routine documents. We recommend acceptance of the mayor's proposed budget here. For the mayor's office, this is funded from our general fund. We have funding for the quick build program and to complete a neighborhood safety project through our complete streets manager. Reallocating funds for one Lexington grant programs to support survivor services and transitioning Complete Streets program from policy adoption to full implementation. And we recommend that we accept the mayor's proposed budget. And then finally, we have our partner agency, which is the Lyric Theater. This is funded from the general fund to support this partner agency. And we recommend that we support the mayor's proposed budget here. And that is the end of this link presentation. and I'll take questions or maybe refer to folks sitting in our chambers here today. Thank you, Council Member Sheehan. Council Members, if you have questions, please log in. First, we have Council Member Reynolds. Thank you, Chair. I just wanted to start by asking a question about the fleet. I'm in agreement that it's really hard to put off a fleet every year and how the money stacks up. but was there discussion about using one-time money for something that's really an annual expense well oops sorry um we didn't specifically talk about that but we chose to use the capital fund because this is a capital expense similar to we could have also considered potentially putting this into our bond as well but so but we ultimately decided to go with the capital reserve Okay, and then for the citizens advocate, how would that $25,000 be used to aid specifically the citizens advocate, especially if it is also one-time money? Is that correct? Yeah, so for this position, we have recommended temporary staffing so that we can assess what we might need to do for that office for the future. So this will be a conversation with the Citizens Advocate Office and our HR department so that we can look at either funding a part-time temporary clerk position or potentially doing like hiring a professional services to contract out some of the administrative work. But that will be an ongoing conversation. So this would be a new hire for part-time work? A temporary hire. Okay. And then we will assess whether that needs to become a full-time position later. Okay. Thank you very much. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Council Member. Next, we have Council Member Curtis. Thank you, Chair. So I have a quick couple of questions, and I'm guessing the best person is probably going to be CIO Rogers to talk about the AI training for the Microsoft Copilot project. This was something that was part of the conversation in this last year and we've since followed up on. And I'm just curious to hear a little bit more about where we stand and whether we're using that and how this year's request differs from last year's. This year's request will, so we have introductory training. It's actually ongoing right now. There's a session going right now that we've offered to basically everyone in the organization. What we're going to do moving forward is figure out sort of who needs further investment in the paid version of the product, in addition to phasing in some deeper dive topical training for specific organizational units that we feel are in a special, that could especially benefit from strategic use of that product. So back office, administrative type functions, things like that. We hope to do a little bit deeper dive, more specific, deeper learning on that topic. I appreciate that, and I appreciate the importance of making sure folks know how to most effectively and safely utilize those tools. I also just want to potentially save off some concern. And when we hear the term data center now, I think a lot of folks get rightfully frustrated. Frustrated, could you maybe go into a little bit further detail about what the data center migration project entails? So, essentially, it has become very almost untenably expensive for us to operate an actual data center on the premises here. In addition to plans to move to the new government center, we just don't feel like it's a very wise use of funds to duplicate that in a new facility. So instead, we are really kind of intensely moving forward with developing a hybrid cloud infrastructure that is some software as a service modeling, that is some just infrastructure as a service, so that we have some more options cybersecurity-wise, also for disaster recovery and continuity, really just modernizing our core server infrastructure in a way that controls costs and also controls some of those risks. Thank you. I really appreciate that clarification, and I just want to make sure that anybody who is reading this, reading a summary of this later or watching this now understands that this is not moving towards hyperscale data centers in Fayette County. That is not what's going on here. Oh, man, this is our data center for our stuff, and we're actually kind of evening out the impact of it a little bit with this. Thank you so much. And the other thing that I have just a couple of quick appreciations for is that additional funding for the Citizens Advocate Office. seeing the work that Amber's done just as a one-woman crew has been remarkable and I definitely think that it is very necessary to get additional assistance to that office which serves a critical role in terms of constituent and community services for our government overall. And I also appreciate the funding for the Quick Build pilot. It's really cool. Glad we're doing that. Thank you so much. Thank you, Council Member. Next we have Council Member Morton. Thank you. I appreciate the link recommending an increase in investment in the ADA implementation, and I 100% agree with it. Is that $1.5 million set to be spent after the implementation plan is done, or how is that going to kind of work? And if not, what would be the criteria of how those are spent? I might call Commissioner Ford up to speak to the details because we haven't seen the final report yet, but that was just recently received along with the funding recommendations or the plan. So if you want to answer this question, Commissioner Ford. I'd be glad to, Council Member. Good morning, Council. I want to first begin by thanking the Council and working with our administration for allowing us to take the big step to have a full ADA transition plan. It began with funding $200,000 committed through the ARPA funding, and it was followed up by $400,000 additionally from a prior year fund balance. We've had a very good consultant WT group out of the Chicago area that's inspected all of our sites. So we know exactly what we need to address. The recommendation, the Lynx recommendation of $1.5 million gets us started. It gets us started proactively. We know, to your question, Council Member, we have not identified which project we would tackle yet. But we know that there's a need there, and the funding would get us started. Secondly, I think it's also timely to share with you guys the LINCS recommendation that we study this in committee. Our administration has been working very hard to kind of redesign the government's approach to ADA. It is a three-prong approach. The council's support of Hannah's position, the access and engagement officer, will play a role in our ADA approach from a policy standpoint. Our division of human resources, Glenda and her team will continue to do their work related to accommodations for our employees. And last but not least, our division of facilities management will bring on a new team member, a project manager that will begin next Monday, June 1st, to help us with these retrofits, all the things that have been identified in the plan. And so we're working as we go now to kind of align that system. But we think that both of the LINCS recommendations will really get us started with the good progress we've made to get to this point with the transition plan. Right. So and then within that 1.5, there will be some form of criteria before it's spent. Yes, indeed, absolutely. Yes, indeed. Okay, appreciate it. And then, I just got a couple more. I know, when will the park fund list come out? Good morning. What was the question, Council Member? When would the park fund list come out so we can see kind of the second priorities? It's in the mayor's proposed budget, so it is in the document itself. Okay, appreciate it. And then lastly, and this is a thought towards the ESP. I know that's a great program. I actually participated in it when I was a little one. And I would love to see possible ways, when we're looking at that, if we could look at maybe, I know it's in FCPS and it's in school systems, but maybe non-commissional ways would probably bring it to our community center or different buildings, neighborhood centers, or whatever it could be to look at expanding programming as emphasized. So I would love to, I look forward to seeing that presentation. Awesome, thank you. Appreciate it, thank you. Thank you, Council Member Morton. Next is Council Member Savigny. Thank you, Chair. I just have a few questions on the source of funds for both the, it might be you, Commissioner Hesley, that might be helpful. The capital reserve, the 1.5 for the ADA and the one for the fleet. Typically, this year are we not bonding any fleet? Just- There's no proposed bonding of fleet this year, that's correct. Okay, all right. But we've bonded fleet in the past, isn't that right? We have. Do you think it's a better use of funds? Do you think it's better to bond that fleet or do you think it's better to? I'm just curious as to what, like using cash sometimes can hurt your bond rating. And I just am wondering what's the best way to do something. Yeah, I think both of those would, based on the fleet that we're probably proposing, they both have a ten year life. So they would probably be interchangeable in this bond. So I think they would probably be about the same thing if we were to propose either trading out some fleet for some paving if you wanted to do that. I think they would probably be about the same thing this year. Okay. But they won't. I'm just wondering, yeah, if you had your way to do something with this, which way would you do it? Is it this way? I think that the way that we have it works just fine. If you have a negative opinion of bonding paving as we've had in the past, I think that it works just fine to trade out those vehicles as well. Okay. All right. Yeah, my just, I think these are good uses of cash. I would just say that my guess is the ADA transition plan, it sounds like really won't be ready to actually spend that money till probably later in the year, in the fiscal year anyway. And the fleet, we have a certain amount of fleet already. I would just suggest to this body that if we approve these things, we contemplate kind of replenishing that capital reserve because I do believe we'll have, I believe we'll have a fund balance that is at least $2.5 million that we could replenish the capital reserve for things like this. Yeah, that's always an option in October. All right, thank you. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Council Member. Next, we have Council Member Lynch. Thank you, Chair. I just want to thank the link for considering the position for the Citizens Advocates Office. This was one of my personal funding requests, so I'm very, very grateful that the link considered it. As Councilmember Curtis said, Amber Deeps does a phenomenal job in her position, and I want her to feel supported and have that support as her workload continues to increase. I don't see it scaling back anytime soon. So I'm glad that you all made that decision in the budget link and I'm also glad that you all placed this in committee. Because we may need to restructure some things so that this office is better supported and we can provide additional resources if needed for this office because it's very much utilized by our neighbors. And it's kind of crazy to have one person to serve over 300,000 people. So, but we are excited that the item will be in committee and whoever is chairing that committee, I would like to join you. Thanks. Thank you, Council Member. Are there any other questions for Council Member Sheehan with the link? Not seeing any. Thank you, Council Member Sheehan, for your work on this. Next, we'll move to Social Services and Public Safety, and that's Council Member Baxter. Thank you, Chair. I was fortunate enough to chair this link alongside Council Member Morton and Council Member Beasley. I'd like to thank both of them for their help going through this process. So I'd like to thank my legislative aide, Elizabeth Withers, for her work on putting all this presentation together and along the process. Also, I'd like to thank all of our commissioners and directors and our public safety chiefs for their assistance with everything. So we will jump right in. So in our link, we covered all of public safety, which some people don't know that public safety also oversees animal control and our ABC administrators. That's something interesting. We have all of our social services departments there, and then our partner agencies, so the Human Rights Commission, NAMI, the Fayette Mental Health Court. In our social services administration budget, we've continued funding of the child and youth resource coordinator position that allows focus on some of the most vulnerable victims of domestic violence and developed pathways for services and Partners for Youth funding for the summer youth job training program. And continued funding for the recovery supportive living assistance program as well. So our recommendation is that we accept the mayor's proposed budget. In aging and disability services, funding was provided for the staffing and operations of the new senior and therapeutic recreation center. It's scheduled to open later this fall and the positions were added. There were some new positions that were added, but they were added in the parks budget. The senior center side of this new facility is just shifting some staffing and operations to that new center. Also, funding for instructor-led fitness and recreation classes and operating costs there. So our link recommendation is accepting the mayor's proposed budget. In family services, we provided funding for an additional early childhood education preschool classroom to just increase capacity and serve more children in the community. And funding was provided to maintain and expand the partnership with Community Action Council to connect residents with essential services and resources to improve economic stability and well-being. Our recommendation is that we accept the mayor's proposed budget. In youth services, we increased funding for clinician training to address our youth's varying mental health needs and provided funding for training, workshops, assistance, and incentives to support Lexington youth and families. Our recommendation is to accept the mayor's proposed budget. This is an overview of all of our public safety funds. There are several there. And in the public safety administration budget, we have provided funding for CAD maintenance and animal control and animal care and control contract operations. we also provided funding to continue the additional downtown security coverage we are proposing to accept the mayor's proposed budget there in emergency management we're providing funding for community preparedness through education training outreach and community engagement and we will be adding an outdoor warning siren at mlk park and that's coming out of that capital reallocation fund we propose to accept the mayor's proposed budget there and e911 we're allocating funding for employees based on call volumes that did not change from the previous fiscal year it's remaining at 52 e911 fund and 48 general fund however we are going to have to provide a subsidy of just over two million dollars because our expenses exceed revenues this is because a lot of that funding or most of that funding comes from landlines and we are not seeing our residents utilizing landlines anymore so we will have to provide that subsidy to make sure that enabland is funded fully we are recommending accepting the mayor's proposed budget there but later on councilmember beasley will refer to our social services and public safety committee a study of e911 shift differential this is just to study further the potential of making our additional shifts more appealing to hope that we can cover those shifts fully in community corrections funding was provided for the continuation of the competency restoration program and expansion of the behavioral health and medical assisted treatment program we are recommending the mayor's proposed budget there and as director luker did say earlier we have budgeted fully for the new medical contract out there so there was no additions that needed to be made there. In fire and emergency services, we provided funding for training and enhancing operational efficiency, faster response times, upgraded security, and reduced long-term cost. Continued funding for health and wellness coordinator contract through the UK. That coordinator plays a crucial role in managing and overseeing the health and safety programs, ensuring compliance with the best practices and addressing wellness needs of personnel. there's funding provided for two new recruit classes some capital highlights here the ems equipment replacement plan has been funded at seven hundred thousand dollars gear replacement and protective equipment at six hundred thousand and heavy fleet replacement plan of 1.5 million so we wanted to make sure that at least that heavy fleet through fire stayed funded we are proposing to accept the mayor's proposed budget additionally we would like to allocate fifty thousand dollars from the fy27 beginning fund balance to create a health and wellness coordinator pilot program this will be housed in fire but it will be accessible by our e911 operators this is to kind of mimic what police have currently and then councilmember morton will refer to ssps the development of comprehensive expansion strategy for our community paramedicine and crisis response services in police we have provided funding for two recruit classes there's funding for the first full year of two behavioral health and wellness specialists and increased funding for dna testing technology services some capital highlights here we're replacing our ballistic vests and they're the computers that our police officers use an x-ray tablet some vehicles in police and then some new canines we are proposing accepting the mayor's proposed budget here we also would like to allocate twenty thousand dollars to support programming and development of the pal program and this would come from the beginning fy 27 fund balance police has applied for a grant that we may get awarded later in the fall and but we wanted to ensure that powell had a sufficient budget in case they did not excuse me receive that award later in the fall with our partner agencies there were no new requests there so we are accepting the mayor's proposed budget. And that's all. I will entertain questions. All right. Thank you, Council Member Baxter. Council Members, if you have questions, please sign in. We'll start with Council Member Morton. Yes. And this is just, I just, I guess I have a question and I will put it to you, Council Mr. Brown, but then I would, you can give it to whoever you like. So within the fire and the 911 pilot program, I think we need to put behavioral in front of health, because the intent was mental health. So does that need to be amended, or is that, I guess, just for, and that's actually my apologies, but the intent when we had discussion was for mental health for our 911. one. So the question is, does it need to? Do we just need to amend it and say behavioral, put behavioral in front of health? Yeah, I think when you make the motion, I think when you make the motion, just state it that way, behavioral health and wellness. Do you want that now or when it was that? No, let's do it when we do the link report out. Okay. That's my apologies, actually. That's it. All right, thank you. Next is Council Member Reynolds. Thank you, Chair. And I don't know if this is for Commissioner Armstrong. For this person, when we talk about behavioral health and wellness, I see there's something to do with UK. Are we talking about a professional mental health specialist? Is this person a psychologist or are they a social worker? or what is their education and how do you see this specific role? How has it worked with police? Sure. So are you asking the question what's currently in place with the police department or what's being proposed for fire? Both. Okay, they're going to mirror each other as best they can. Yes. Okay, so for police, that person has been a mental health? Has been a mental health professional for some time and provides guidance and direction and counseling to those individuals that come forward and indicate that they need it, yes. And in terms of health and wellness, they're not like a coach that does, you know, some sort of – No, no. It's just mental health? Right. Okay. And I've heard before some folks saying that, you know, they actually prefer having someone outside of government to confide in. Do you feel like this person for police has been used a lot? Yes, they have been used significantly based on the information I've been provided. And I understand what you mean by outside government kind of thing, but since they are contract employees and not directly a member of LFUCG, I think that's how it's viewed. Okay, that makes sense. So this new person would be for fire and E911? Yes, as a pilot project. And then they could see that person for therapy once a week? Whatever mental health issues or concerns they have. Say we have a large-scale event like we recently had with the police department. Fire department was affected by that as well. So was E911. So to make sure that we have our primary three covered. And this is obviously not new per se because the police department has been doing this for a couple of years now. But it's becoming more and more common in public safety. And this person would not be a UK student. No. They would be a professional. They'll be a professional. Okay, perfect. Thank you so much. Sounds like this could be really helpful, so thank you. Thank you, council member. Next we have council member Savigny. Thank you, chair. I just have a question about the E911 fee. So I'm just curious, and I know it's tied to landlines, but I also think there was a modernization of that done at one time, like in different places in different states. I don't know, is that a local ordinance or a state ordinance or could we have a local ordinance that would be supportive? Because I have multiple devices that I know I get. There's some that I'm paying, if I have a Magic Jack for instance, I'm paying an E911 fee on that. So I'm just curious if that's my ordinance, if that's something we can control or not. Right, so we have been looking at currently the revenue sources that we receive for 9-1-1. The vast majority of that is through the landline fee. There is a small amount that's received on a wireless fee, but as you can imagine for a city like Lexington where a lot of the residents don't have a wireless number that originates here, a lot of our users are not reflective in the fees that we're receiving. We also have the CK911 network where we are a centralized hub for our region. And so E911 has a lot of parts and pieces that help the operation as a whole, which is why we actually thought, Council Member Beasley thought, it might be a good presentation for June because there are a lot of components to how that functions both regionally and for us as a government. And so there's the way that we do it now and then there is the way that we could potentially do it. There are different municipalities that do it differently than us. Some people put it on property tax bills, some people do fees on other bills like a LexSurf bill. So we have, without jumping too much into what that's going to look like, there are other ways that we can look at this, other ways to kind of address the need that we have. Yeah, and I don't know if it needs to be a separate item in committee or not, but I do think that it's one of those things that sometimes the way we do a fee, It worked great 15, 20 years ago, but now it needs to be modernized. And I would encourage us to not just write that $2 million off every year. Yeah, I think it's kind of become, for those of us that have been around a minute, our new street light subsidy. And it does grow every year, and especially when we look at the vast majority of that cost being personnel, it does go up. And Council Member Beasley just reminded me that it is in committee, so that's wonderful. Well, you just got a preview. Thank you. Yep. All right. Thank you, Council Member. Are there any other questions? Not seeing any. So we'll move. Thank you for that report out, Council Member Baxter. So we'll move to the next item on our agenda, and it's the individual council recommendations. And I guess that's me. So y'all laughing at me like you're about to vote against them all. So I'll start with the building security, and that is really not just me. That's Councilmember Reynolds and Councilmember Lynch who have worked on this item with me with Commissioner Armstrong. And, Councilmembers, if you remember from a conversation we had a couple weeks ago, it was about allocating, in regards to building security, $31,380 towards building security equipment. and then per the recommendation from Commissioner Armstrong at the administration that it would take additional building security personnel to the tune of $110,000. That's a correction from what was submitted from my office after talking to Finance and Kelly, our budget analyst, that that real amount is the $110,000. Oh, I'm sorry. Kelly, it's just for correction. It's 103? 103. All right. Yeah, that's me messing around with numbers. So the amount that is mentioned on page 24, the 103,718, is the personnel cost for the building security personnel. With the understanding that I think there's still opportunity to have discussions about what that looks like. But in general, that's what the recommendation is to staff the equipment that we're looking at. The next item in regards to individual council member requests is the digital accessibility plan implementation dollars of $50,000. If you all recall, this was a request that was made in last year's fund balance discussion that wasn't funded. But we still have the ordinance or resolution adopting the recommendations of the digital accessibility plan to come before council. And if you remember, LFUCG has some implementation strategies. The private sector has some implementation strategies in the plan. And then also the education and nonprofit sector have some. This $50,000 would help us as LFUCG implement some of the LFUCG digital accessibility plan recommendations. But I think there's still, in an effort to make sure that we balance this budget, this is going to be a request that's going to be deferred to the FY26 fund balance discussion or any other future funding opportunities. So that's the motion I plan to make when we get to that point. Are there any questions about the individual council recommendations that are presented? All right, Council Member Beasley. Thank you, Chair. I just have a question about the $103,000 salary. Does that include the two Department of Corrections officers, or that's just for the two security officers? Commissioner Hensley or Commissioner Armstrong, I'd ask you to help. But from my understanding, it is for the two security personnel, not the corrections personnel. That is correct. Do we have a number of what it will cost for the two community corrections department folks to be here? I was not asked for that. Are they current employees? I don't know. Here comes the commissioner, though. Someone's coming to save you. Sorry, I didn't get that piece of it. Ma'am, the two individuals that would be rotating off, just remember there won't always be two there, you know, to have that coverage up. Those would already be current employees, so it would not add a cost to the operating cost, or personnel cost out at the correction facility. Thank you. Council Member Savigny. Could you come back? Sorry. My questions are on this too. I do struggle a little bit, you guys, with adding personnel. So I just wanted to get it. And we've talked about this once. Is this, does it have to be, it's going to be manned, is it going to be manned like whenever the building is open? Or is it, do we just need it to be manned when it's, when there's like an event that's going on? Well, I'll use the word staffed. Staffed, sorry. Staffed. Anytime the building is open is when we'll actually be staffing it. So you're talking about 8 o'clock to 5 o'clock most days. but obviously with late night meetings to include not just council meetings but other events that are occurring here in the government center that would be staffed during that time as well. Okay. And we currently don't have that level of staff? No, we do not to be able to cover this additional responsibility. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Vice Mayor Wu. Thank you, Chair. Just for clarity's sake, the memo on page 114 of our packet, council member, where you have 141.381 as the figure for the security equipment and the staff, that should actually be 135.098, and I think it is reflected correctly on page 24. So I just wanted to clarify. Is that correct? Yes. Okay, that's it. Thank you. Thank you, Vice Mayor. Are there any other questions about the individual council requests? All right, seeing none, council members, we'll go back to link report outs and motions. What was presented to Kelly were different recommendations. She sent out an email after discussions with the administration about best ways to fund these recommendations coming from links. And that is what is reflective on page 24. So I just want to thank Kelly for her work on this, the administration, for helping us clear up different funding requests and strategies. So what we'll start with, we'll start with the links and then we'll go into the individual, not the individual, but the additional motions that may need to happen. So first we'll start with Council Member Savigny and his link report out in motions. Thank you, Chair. I move to amend the Mayor's proposed budget for fiscal year 27 as amended to include the request for environmental quality and public works links as provided on page 24 of today's meeting packet. So moved. Second. All right, a motion was made and seconded to approve the link proposed budget amendments on page 24. Are there any questions to that motion? Hearing none, all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Are there any that oppose? Hearing none, that motion passes. Yes, Link Chairs, I'll leave this to you all for preference. You can either reference the presentation of committee items that you are going to recommend to committee or you can do those individually. So, Council Member Savigny, I know you had a couple of, or did you have a couple of items that were non-budgetary? I think I had one item and I basically said as amended, but I didn't really look at page 24. Well, 24, I'm sorry, page 24 doesn't list those non-budgetary recommendations. I didn't, my non-budgetary recommendations were to consider in fund balance, you mean? Yeah, let's still make those as a motion so they will be compiled on a fund balance list. Hold on one sec. I'm getting Kelly shaking her head like we don't need to do that, but. I know, she's saying no, but I'll do it anyway. So I move to consider in fund balance the following items. An additional $250,000 for multimodal safety. And a topology study pilot project for $50,000 and a way finding sign program implementation for $150,000. All in fiscal year 2026 fund balance discussion to take place in the fall of 2026. So moved. Second. All right, there was a motion made to consider several recommendations for the FY26 fund balance. Are there any questions to those recommendations or to the motion? Seeing none, all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Are there any that oppose? Hearing none, that motion passes. Councilmember Sevigny, does that conclude your? Yes, thank you, Chair. All right. Thank you, next we'll move to Council Member Sheehan for link motions. I'll do two motions then, the ones that impact the budget and then the ones that aren't fiscal. First, I move to amend the mayor's proposed budget for fiscal year 2027 as amended to include the request of the general government and services link as provided on page 24 of today's meeting packet. Second. All right, a motion was made to approve the link recommendation budget amendments to the general government social services link and seconded. Are there any questions to the motion? If not, all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Are there any that oppose? Hearing none, that motion passes. And then I move to also include the other recommendations coming from the General Government and Services link to put into committee the Citizens Advocate Office, the extended school program, and the ADA transition plan. And then also to consider our fleet budget and our fund balance conversations. So moved. Second. All right, there was a motion to add a few items to committee from that link recommendation and also an item to add to the fund balance discussion for FY26. Are there any questions to that motion? Vice Mayor Wu. Councilmember Sheehan, in the links report out, does it specify what committees those items are going into? Or do we need to specify that now? We can specify them now. The citizens advocate office would be GGP, the extended school program would be GGP, and ADA transition plan would also be GGP. Okay. I'm not even sure you need a motion now since you're the chair of the- I'm following the process. I know. I appreciate that. All right, any other questions? Council Member Ellinger. Thank you, Chair. The $1 million for the capital reserve for fleet, you're not going to request that you're going to put in for fund balance instead? This is in addition to. So we did make, in page 24, it does have the $1 million for the additional fleet funding, but then we would also like to have an additional conversation at fund balance to support the fleet as well. So this fund balance discussion is in addition to the $1 million, which was included. So would there be $2 million then, so $1 million for this, and then another million? or just discussion about it? Just discussion. We haven't set a fund balance amount. Okay, thank you. Are there any other questions to the motion? Hearing and seeing none, all those in favor please say aye. Aye. Are there any that oppose? Hearing none, that motion passes. Next we'll move to Councilmember Baxter. Thank you, Chair. I move to amend the Mayor's proposed budget for FY 2027 as amended to include the request of the social services and public safety link as provided on page 24 of today's meeting packet so moved. All right a motion was made and seconded. Are there any questions to the motion? Council member Morton? I don't have any questions I'll just for public transparency but then also for the council awareness and transparency. So just after speaking with law they the survey has said that we don't have to amend the terminology under fire emergency services, under link recommendation to say behavior, health, and wellness because there's a consensus pretty much up here that that's what it's going to consist towards. So I just wanted to provide that transparency and that's also my apologies, not the links. I just sent the wrong language, so thank you. Okay, are there any other questions to the motion or comments to the motion? Hearing I see it none, all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Are there any that oppose? Hearing none, that motion passes. We don't have any future recommendations for funding consideration. We do have some items to refer to committee that my colleagues will do at a later time. Thank you. All right, thank you, council member. All right, next I'll go to Vice Mayor Wu. Thank you, Chair. Mine's not related to my link as we had no additional recommendations. But I do move to amend the Mayor's proposed budget for FY27 as amended to delay the start of the new development liaison position until January 2027. All right, there was a motion to amend the start date for the development liaison. and seconded. Are there any questions to the motion? Council Member Reynolds. Vice Mayor, just so the public understands, could you explain why this is being postponed once again? I'll call CAO Hamilton to come up and talk a little bit more about the timeline. We talked about it earlier in terms of giving us time to create the position and then list it in the fall. I think Commissioner Keith, I can't think of his last name right here, that he is doing right now he is doing a plan on how to track certain things in the development process. And I think he feels that he will have a much better plan if he can do this to the end of December. we wouldn't want to use that plan with this new development officer. So I think while he's getting that together, I can then get the description of the job together and present it to you all for your comments and things, and then advertise it. And by the time you get all that done, really, it'll be the first of January before we can have somebody on. Thank you for reiterating that. I just want to make sure the public was aware. Thank you. Thank you, council member. Are there any other questions to the motion? Seeing none, all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Are there any that oppose? Hearing none, that motion passes. Next, I'll entertain a motion from council member Reynolds. Thank you, Chair. I move to amend the mayor's proposed budget for FY 2027 as amended to include the council request label Numbers 7 and 8 on page 24 of today's meeting packet. So moved. All right, there was a motion to accept the budget amendments number 7 and 8 on page 24. Are there any questions for the motion? Hearing none, all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Are there any that oppose? No. All right, that motion passes. Thank you, Chair. Kelly was shaking her head that we don't need to do this, but in ours we had a discussion referring the emergency financial assistance to fund balance discussion, so I don't know if I need to do anything here since everybody else put theirs in fund balance, or is that going to already be in there? What was the question, Councilman? Do I need to add that since we brought it up? I'll make a motion that we refer the emergency financial assistance to fund balance discussion. So moved. Second. All right, that was a motion to move emergency financial assistance to the fund balance discussion, FY2026. All right, and second it. Are there any questions to that motion? Hearing none, all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Are there any that oppose? Hearing none, that motion passes. Council member Sheehan, yeah. Council member Sheehan. I move to amend the mayor's proposed budget for fiscal year 2027 as amended to include the council request label number nine for the digital accessibility plan on page 24 of today's meeting packet. All right, that was a motion to move item nine to the fund balance, FY26 fund balance discussion, and second it. Are there any questions to the motion? Hearing none, all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Are there any that oppose? Hearing none, that motion passes. Council members, before we break, I would just like to say that I second Councilmember Savigny's suggestion about having a conversation about replenishing the capital reserve at the FY26 fund balance conversation. I think the money that we've allocated this budget to use for ADA and fleet, I think is a good use of that funding. But I do think we should have a conversation about replenishing those funds. I also want to say in your packet was information about the American Rescue Plan spending. The CAO's office and Hillary have been doing an excellent job of staying on top of that. And CAO, I think we're what, 99% spent, which is pretty remarkable. I'd also like to thank the Link Chairs, their A's for their work in this budget process. We appreciate all the work that you all have been doing, along with kelly farley and then the rest of the core staff team that have supported that work the mayor's team the cao's office commissioner hensley and her team have been wonderful to work with as well as the commissioners and the directors and all the other staff that participated in the link process just an fyi leighton garlington and the council core staff office has run the engage page uh... budget survey for the last couple years and has compiled and shared with council members the results from what we heard uh... there in the budget it will upload that information shortly and engage so the community can uh... reflect in the view the the the feedback that we get that budget process not just want to thank him for that work and then without any further to do council members i was entertained i got it a question that council member ellinger we have a um cal meeting scheduled for thursday at 10 o'clock can we go ahead and cancel that uh if you don't mind i'd almost i'd like to cancel that at the the work session today i just want to make sure that we're good with every everything in budget and in law and that we don't need it to do any budgetary things but hopefully we'll cancel that at work session today all right just want to make us aware if we got everything done we don't need need to have that meeting thank you yeah yeah all right so with that i'll entertain a motion to adjourn our motion to adjourn and seconded all those in favor please say aye that motion passes thank you Thank you.