# Environmental Quality & Public Works (EQPW) Committee - October 13, 2026 > Auto-transcribed civic record · Committee · October 13, 2026 - **Permalink**: https://meetings.lexingtonky.news/meeting/6906 - **Source video**: https://lfucg.granicus.com/player/clip/6906?view_id=14&redirect=true - **Date**: 2026-10-13 - **Body**: Committee - **Last revised**: October 13, 2026 - **Length**: 18,316 words > ⚠️ **Auto-generated content.** Audio from the official Granicus video was auto-transcribed by OpenAI Whisper-1. Structured facts were extracted with GPT-4o; the narrative summary was written by Anthropic Claude Sonnet. Speaker labels and verbatim wording may contain errors. See [methodology](https://meetings.lexingtonky.news/about/methodology) or [report a correction](mailto:editor@lexingtonky.news). --- ## Full transcript Today is October the 13th, Tuesday, 2026, and I'm now called to order the meeting of the Environmental Quality and Public Works Committee, and I want to thank everyone for being here. Looks like we have a good press section. I don't know exactly what they want to see. I'm sure it's about stormwater, so anyway, the first item on our agenda is approval of the September 15th, 2026 Committee Summary. Are there any additions or corrections? Seeing none, may I have a motion to approve? I got a motion and a second. Any discussion on that motion? Seeing none, all those in favor say yay. Yay. All right. Any opposed? And that motion passed. Okay, we have four presentations today, so in order to keep things moving along quickly, we've got first up is the Municipal Storm, Separate Storm Sewer System, aka MS4, sounds like a British Intelligence Unit. We have a program update on that. So the MS4 program maintains and improves waterway quality by reducing pollutant discharges from stormwater runoff, and we've got Bailey Young, the MS4 Section Manager, to present this update, and we are excited to hear it. Thank you. So I'm here to do the MS4 year in review, and so like Savignee said, MS4 stands for the Municipal Separate Storm Sewer System, and it's a system of storm drains, pipes, ditches, and other conveyances that are owned or operated by a city, county, or other public body designed to collect or convey stormwater and not sewage. So as you can see in the infographic to the right, our sanitary sewer is piped through laterals that go directly to wastewater treatment plants where stormwater is collected in storm drains that go directly into streams and creeks. Whereas Lexington and Louisville both have populations over 250,000 people, we have phase one permits, so our permit is tailored specifically to us, whereas other smaller communities have general permits. So we have around 100 phase two permittees in Kentucky. Our Lexington permit is made up of 10 program elements, public education, public involvement, illicit discharge detection and elimination, construction sites, post-construction, municipal operations, industrial facilities, water quality monitoring, reporting and record keeping, and TMDLs. Over the course of this year, we've had some positive water quality stories with Gatton Park opening that included rain gardens and some incentive grant projects. We also had an investigative journalism story on residents throwing pet waste bags into the storm drains, and so we talked about other urban pollutants that could be contributing to water quality impairments. And we also launched the volunteer monitoring program, and so we did a call out for resident volunteers to come and monitor with us. We had several policy updates this year, the first being the stormwater manual, which was implemented May 1st of 2026. The procedures manual was also updated, and we implemented a new maintenance manual for post-construction stormwater controls. It defines the maintenance responsibilities for the property owners, whether they're residential or commercial, whether they have an easement around the post control or not, and it also has inspection checklists so they can review what we're reviewing to show whether it's in compliance or not. A theme throughout the year was green infrastructure. We were able to attend the Wolf Run Watershed Council meetings and their technical committee meetings in partnership with DES. And so those meetings involved the community laying out where best management practices and green infrastructure projects could go. We also held a December workshop with the construction, development, and engineering industry. And at that workshop we had a green infrastructure panel where engineers, PhDs, ecologists answered community questions regarding green infrastructure and how it can perform better. We had a bluegrass watershed summit where different residents came together and talked about how to fill out incentive grants and where they could collaborate on those. And we had a green infrastructure field day together with Green Space Trust and UKRF where we held a community meeting in a detention basin and talked about plantings and what other green infrastructure could get installed there. Green infrastructure is also featured in the incentive grant program and so we worked together with the 10th District Office as well as DES's PIE team to talk about ways to make the application process more accessible, to tell narratives of the individual grantees, and to enhance reporting. And so we really wanted to increase accessibility through the online application and have videos and longer story form of our applicants. We also sent out postcards to try to get new grantees. Some of the ongoing projects from this year included 1,000 Delaware. They did an infill redevelopment project so this project was really exciting because we got to see it from the very beginning, from the ground up, where there was nothing on the site. And they exceeded storm water regulations through the grant program by installing rain water harvesting, permeable pavers, tree wells, and extra tree canopy. And so that project was very unique because most of the time we see sites in transition but not a complete site from the ground up. We also partnered with Kentucky American Water on a trash collector project. As you can see in the picture, they have done several different prototypes. They've settled on pontoons as a berm to collect trash off a headwall, along with a floating walkway where they can retrieve the trash. And so this project was neat just because they worked with UK and it was very innovative. This is not a standard thing so it was neat to see that. UKRF also did a project where they compared mowed basins versus treed storm water basins. They wanted to see if the tree volume itself of all the tree trunks took up how much water detainage volume it took up. They also wanted to see how the water infiltrated versus mowed basins versus tree basins. So that was interesting to see the results of that. Our storm water stakeholder advisory committee also focused on green infrastructure. Dr. Messer came and she looked at floating wetlands and the pollutant uptake of those in retention ponds. Dr. Simpson analyzed our watershed focused monitoring data to show TSS results on these graphs and to show seasonality and geographic location of highs and lows. Dr. McMahon looked at riparian buffers versus mowed buffers for stream restoration. And we also had Dr. Fox talk about climatology. We deployed our next five year monitoring program. And so all of this is around volunteers, all the pictures and the data. But we also have consultants do monitoring. They do wet weather sampling, impaired water sampling. We have a continuous water quality sonde. We also look at macroinvertebrates, fish, habitat, and geomorphic assessments. But it's really fun to get the community involved and just educate residents through sampling. We also deployed our illicit discharge screening factor program for dry weather screening. Through this program, we do monitoring of any outfalls that are flowing. And we looked at different sub-watersheds and we prioritized them based on sanitary sewer system defects, miles of force main, high risk commercial facilities, population density, and the sheer number of outfalls in a sub-watershed. So this allowed us to go inspect more outfalls and smaller sized outfalls in order to see different ones that we hadn't been going to before, to see if there's any illicit discharges in those locations. And all this gets at stream health. So we would love to see our streams functioning and their designated uses going really well. And so some of our impairments are for fish consumption or for recreation. And we would love to see more streams delisted off this list. So I showed you we were in the news for water quality projects and we were also in the news for water quantity during the June rain events. Lex Call operated really well and provided some of those reports. We did get 10.51 inches of rain in June, which made it the fourth wettest June on record. And so on July 1st, a Lex Call flooding report analysis item was placed in the EQPW committee. And so we plan on reporting out to that in November, so. Thank you. Thank you very much. Do we have questions? Council members, log in if you have any questions. I'm going to ask a question. One of the sections that you had right in the beginning, I think you talked about, I think we're changing, are we changing the way that we're interacting with residents when there's a feature in the back of their property or something, because I get calls from residents and I know other council members do too. And it's like, hey, this feature is clogged and it's on some sort of private property or the resident's property. And are we changing the way we're interacting with those? We're not changing, we're just holding true to what the ordinance says. Okay, could you just tell, so that we understand that a little bit better, could you say what that is? It's ordinance 1686 and 1687, it's different whether there's a easement, whether it's residential and whether it's commercial. So I don't have all of those distinct, but I think you're talking more about flumes and whether we clean flumes. And so if there's debris in a flume, a lot of times that's on the individual property owner to clear. Okay, all right. So I just think that that's, it is something that has come up a little bit and you guys have been really good working with constituents to try to make sure that impairments in the system kind of at least are moving through things, so I do appreciate that. Does anyone else have any questions? And Ms. Yank, this is part of our, this is one of our requirements through the consent decree that we do do this piece of education every year, correct? Yeah, it's in the MS4 permit. Thank you. Thank you so much. All right. Next up, we have the Snow and Revised Plan. We've got our interim commissioner, Charlie Martin, delivering this presentation. As you all know, this is a standard presentation that usually comes through EQPW. But the excitement this year is that we have a revised plan due to some of the actions from last year. So we're all delighted to hear what you have to tell us. Yes, the long awaited snow plan, so an ice control plan revision, so. Thank you so much. Yeah, thank you. It's a complete rewrite of the plan that we had before. I've been here 27 years. This is the most extensive evaluation of our snow plan that we've done since I've worked here. So I feel like it was probably long overdue, and hopefully it will be productive. The last six months spent pretty much every day working on the snow plan. So this is a summary, at least of what I believe are the highlights of the plan changes that have occurred. So you see the customary agenda, I just want to emphasize what's different and why it is important is probably the biggest part of this presentation. You've probably noticed already several slides are devoted to that particular thing, and then hopefully we'll have time for questions. So just to kind of frame or characterize what got us here is the first paragraph we all remember, the ice storm at the end of January. It led to this after action review that was done by Director Larkin with Dean, and it led to the creation of the snow and ice plan work group. That's kind of when I joined in, my first week as the interim commissioner I was invited to a press conference and the mayor said we were tearing the plan up, and I'm like okay. And so I immediately went to this after action review and basically really tried to focus on what is the intent and what is the outcome. And so you see that in bold letters, enhancing the adaptability of the plan, improving the consistency, strengthening the communication, and formalizing an incident management control practice. It was going to be an essential part of whatever new plan we would come up with. Well, my engineer brain had to kind of redo that a little bit into terms that I could understand more, so I kind of reframed it a little bit. And my involvement with the work group tried to help steer everybody in this direction, is having a consistent communication plan and a well-defined management program. But even more importantly is improve production through greater efficiency. In water quality, you'll be doing this for a long time, you have to start with maximizing the resources that you have already. Because if you build on or just add to a flawed plan, you just have more resources and more people devoted to a bad plan. So we really spend a lot of time as a work group really trying to focus on the efficiency and how to be able to maximize production out of the equipment and personnel that we have. So how we did that, is that basically there was 25 people at least, sometimes some weeks there were more than that, ranging everywhere from chief wells, all the way down to some of the drivers from streets and roads and water quality. We tried to really encourage collaboration and input from the front line, from the back line, and every line in between it. There was a lot of time spent on different topics, but it always seemed to hone down to the four subcommittees that got formed out of this. Communications group, which I've obviously mentioned before already, Council Member Baxter headed that up. We appreciate her hard work on that. External partners are so important to us as well, too, is that some of them react to what we do, some of them are working with us in concert. And having them as part of an integrated plan was important. Council Member Higgins-Horton led that one up. And we all worked on routing efficiency and in establishing a level of service that is adaptable to different conditions. You'll see this in the plan, that there is a table that is whether or not we're expecting cold weather following the event or it's going to warm up after the event. Whether we're having ice or we're not having ice and different levels of snow, each one of those have different actions to them. And so having an adaptable level of service was really, really an important part of the work group's action. So there's the pillars for the communications plan. You've heard me say this many times, many other people as well, too, is it's hard to resist the temptation of just forwarding on a constituent complaint you get. But sending it through Lexical is really essential for us to be able to track the performance of what we're doing. So I will encourage everyone again to continue to use Lexical to its maximum extent. The three bullets in between there, they all kind of build upon each other, is that the communications team really wanted us to emphasize the use of the website and the dashboard in order to be able to get as real time information as we possibly could to citizens. Having a defined media release team, people that have responsibilities of reporting specific information consistently on a regularly scheduled time frame was critical to a functioning communications plan. The refinement of the existing frequently asked questions, which took me a while to find that, that happened as well. So on this slide, you see how the escalating communications plan works, is that at initial levels of storms, we'll start with two type of releases, try to schedule them throughout the course of the day to hopefully match the evening news and the morning news. But there's the escalation as conditions get worse, then we escalate the communication stuff as well. There's gotta be flexibility and adaptability to this, and so this is the benchmark at which that we use. But further releases may be necessary depending on the circumstances, particularly if it involves rush hour. When we start having weather that happens at rush hour or when there is early dismissal of the government, schools, or anything else, that throws a wrench into things. So we're going to have to make sure that we adapt to that as well. We adapt by managing this thing, is that the management to me is the most important part of what we're doing here. And this is a really convoluted slide that kind of illustrates the top to bottom and the bottom to top flow of information. There's a whole lot of more details here. I could probably have devoted ten slides to the communication plan alone. Now we're transitioning into implementation. We cover this every week, every Wednesday morning with streets and roads, including the water quality and waste management people as well. It's how we're communicating with one another through ongoing event, because conditions change constantly and we have to change with them. So here's where I start the slides of what's different in the new plan. It's three parts. Basically the first part is an executive summary or more for public consumption. I think when we talked before about this, I talked about the part two that I had written originally, which was very much of an operations manual. I didn't want to abandon that because it goes into a lot of detail, but it is now the part two of it is the roadway manual. And part three is the sidewalk manual. That's a big, big change for us. The original plan was 14 pages. I think this one's 44 pages, not counting the appendices. More is not always best, but I think the attention to the detail that we put into this, I think is worthwhile in the fact of when we transition into implementation. The rank three and four streets have been combined. Now everything is a ranked three. And I want to make sure that I emphasize that is that distinguishing between what was a three and four was really hard for the drivers and was really hard for the citizens. Learning from the drivers that they're driving by three fours to get another three because they're following things chronologically. Your brain kind of works that way. You think you should be doing ones, twos, threes, and fours. By combining those threes and fours, we'll get more, I believe, we'll get more treatment and quicker on those streets instead of driving by them and coming back to them. Again, it's about trying to increase the efficiency of what we did. I'll talk about this in a slide here later. As it turns out, this is helping Fayette County Public Schools in putting together their plan B approach. Because they don't have to try to figure out how threes and fours are getting treated. They're all getting treated the same. They're after twos. A lot of news about this, a lot of discussion about this. This was a late addition. It's something that I kind of picked up from Council Member Higgins-Hord had Cincinnati come down and talk to us in late July. And that was something I kind of picked up from them about their level of effort that they do to pre-treat the roads. So what we're going to do is, given the storm event or what the forecast is, is that we're basically going to mobilize and pre-treat everything ones, twos, and threes. Not necessarily in that order. We're talking internally about whether or not threes, twos, and ones makes more sense or what makes the most sense. But the idea is to get salt coverage down as much as we can within the ranked areas. Because if you're doing it in the threes and coming back and plowing on ones and twos, that salt that you put down in threes is still working for you while you wait to get back to those with the plows. And also too, we all know this, is that basically traffic kind of helps spread salt as well too. So the more of it that we get down, the better off we'll be. It's not doing us any good sitting in the barn. Now, we gotta balance that out though with being conscientious of how we use our supplies. And it goes into Bailey's conversation here a few minutes ago about water quality. We can't just be throwing salt around randomly and stuff like that, because obviously that has a negative impact to streams. But if the weather forecast warrants it, getting salt down in all the ranked areas in the first four hours of a storm seems very attainable to the group, and that's what we're going to do for this year. What we spent a lot of time talking about drivers and trucks and routes and how we could cover this. And midway through this, it became apparent to us that we have a resource available to us already as far as drivers. My entire time here, I've been, water quality has been part of the snow plan. And so the question became, why don't we incorporate waste management folks into the plan as well? They have CDLs, they're qualified to be able to operate plows. So leadership in waste management works to recruit a group of people. And so now they're going to be part of our overall snow plan. They're going to be handling area three and then also assisting water quality. So we're able to add more drivers to the bench, so to speak, in order to be able to handle those longer storms. The longer and more extensive storms are really hard on the drivers. You can appreciate this, and I think I've said this before. After you've done about four or five 12 hour shifts, the fun is over and you're out. And so having more people available to us that are already in the government and stuff to keep those trucks rolling, what we felt like as the work group was really, really important. It also allows us to get the supervisors off of routes. As I felt like that getting the supervisors into being inspectors, being part of the communications plan, doing the support stuff instead of being lost on routes was going to be advantageous to us. They will still be driving some of the smaller trades trucks and be able to hit slick calls and hotspots as things come up as well. Anyway, I feel like that by making this change, this gives us more in our quiver, so to speak. Technology, truck mounted tablets, one of the things that I was a little frustrated with, and I think the group was frustrated as well, is there's somewhat of a lack of data in order to be able to determine how much can you cover given a certain storm event. And I think this is going to give us a lot of data that helps us adapt this plan moving forward. But right now, the main thing is we're going to know where trucks are at and where they're not at, whether they're actually working or not. But also we're using this on the contractor vehicles as well. And most importantly in the support of the communications issue is that you'll be able to see where a street has been treated and when it was last treated via the public facing dashboard. What also is different, Red River Ranch, they've been with us for a while doing Man O' War, Polo Club, and Alumni. But they typically would only come to work for us when there was an inch of snow or more. Now they're going to be in all events, all events. Likewise, we've added Clay's Mill from the boundaries that we've talked about there. Why? We're paying to fit up these trucks already. And so having them sit idly at West Hickman and not being utilized just didn't make any sense. And so utilizing these for all events, assigning those supervisors that we've been freed up to manage their outcome and stuff like that. It broadens our plate, I guess, so to speak, as far as our ability to be able to cover things as quickly as we possibly can and efficiently. I feel like I'm racing here right now. I'm getting close to the end here. As I mentioned before, the external partners, they are so important to us. We've got our meeting with them on Thursday, a couple of days from now. One of our partners, which people ask me about all the time, is Fayette County Public Schools. They've been great. I heard less than enthusiastic things when this started. And since that time, it's been more positive. We have met with them now four times. There was a meeting last Thursday about trying to come up with a plan B. Acting Superintendent Bradford and his team have been really, really great working for us. There's a Fayette County Public Schools representative here in the audience, so when we get to questions, if there's any questions about what they're planning to do. We mutually have the same goal, is what can we do, or how can we do this to be able to get schools open as quickly as possibly can? And the fact that we're both working from that same level is encouraging. Wrapping this up, you've seen this during the budget meeting and stuff, is that there's the allocation of dollars that we've got towards this year's snow plan. The $1 million that's in the commissioner's office is for those emergency contractors that we've talked about before, and I might have glossed over earlier. We've also started spending some of that money on things such as additional storage for bead heat, bead heat and brine are two of our liquid de-icers. And having more of it on hand here instead of in Indiana was advantageous. Just almost done, two slides? Okay. Likewise, we're installing a fueling station at West Hickman. The windshield time of getting to the typical fueling stations, to me, was too much. If we're going to load salt at West Hickman, let's load fuel there as well, too. The reason why is you think about some of the speedways that we use. Some of them are just too tight to be able to get snow plows in there. It's not safe for the drivers. It's not safe for the public either. Next steps, I won't read that slide to you, you see all that. The main one is the 27th, that's a big day for me, is what Director Larkin's told me. You're going to come up with a plan, but you need to exercise that plan. You need to exercise it and exercise it. Break it, because then it'll identify where your flaws are so you can fix it before you break it for real. Last but not least is this slide, the questions. I want to stop here, though, for just a second, because I chose this illustration for a reason. And you understand why, is that if we don't find a way to be able to use the existing resources we have, we will end up just throwing more resources at it and stuff. And so, I felt like that this was a real opportunity to be able to explore that. Thank you so much for the presentation. Council members, now is your chance to ask questions on our snow and ice plan. Council Member Baxter. Thank you, Chair, for the recognition. Since I don't serve on the committee, but I just wanted to take the opportunity to thank the commissioner and everybody who worked on this project for all of the hours that we put into it. And it's a plan that I'm really proud of, and I know that we've put the time in. And we have the buy-in of our employees as well, which is really important for the people who are going to be out there helping us out. So, I wanted to touch on a few things. Commissioner Martin spoke about the LexCall 311 service request. Time and time again, the conversation came up about, well, what does the data say? What went wrong before that we're going to fix going forward? And the problem was, is that we didn't have good data, because the calls weren't being tracked that came in outside of 311. So, as he mentioned, it's imperative that we are entering, as council members responding on behalf of our constituents, it's imperative that we enter those requests in 311, not just so that we have that data going forward, but so that we can track it and make sure that the requests are being completed as they come in. And then the other thing that I wanted to mention, Commissioner Martin mentioned that I had led the communication part of the plan. And I just wanted to mention a few people that I could not have done this work without. That's our government communications team, specifically Stacey Diamond and Nick Brock. They have been imperative to this, our PI team, and then Susan Straub in the mayor's office, and Layton Garlington in the council PIO office. We've put together something that I think that we are all really proud of. And as long as our tabletop exercises go according to plan and as long as everyone is educated on the process, I think that it will all turn out a lot better than it has in the past. So, thank you again for all that you have done and for all of the other communities that have helped us form this plan as well. So, thank you, Chair. Thank you, Council Member. Council Member Eplin. Yeah, thank you, Chair. Thank you, Commissioner. Really appreciate all the hard work you and everyone else has put into this plan. I was just curious about, where do we get our weather forecast from when we see an event? Is this just from the National Weather Service? Do we have private contractors? It's from National Weather Service. It's from local newscasters or weather forecasters. We have weather stations that are staged throughout the county that either are operated or maintained by us through a contract or the state one. So we take a kind of a collection of all different type of things. And through the incident management system, the incident commander, which will be me or Mayor or Rob Larkin, then we make decisions about how likely an outcome is going to happen and what type of response that we have to have for that. And I know how my approach is, is that I have a tendency to be very conservative. And so, I would rather throw more stuff at it than I would less. But it's really a collection of, it's not just one, we can recount on one and only one. Yeah, I was just curious because there have been some concerns about cutbacks, with federal cutbacks in the National Weather Service. And I just wanted to see what other ones we were operating on. And also, in terms of the command center, is that done out of City Hall, out of the Emergency Operations Center? Do you all do that virtually? What's the plan for that? Obviously, it depends on the escalation of the event. Is it, if it escalates enough, that it will be done out of the Emergency Operations Center? In the startup of most storms that are not predicted to get off the chain, so to speak, that'll be done from here. Okay. Basically, I am the incident commander, unless somebody else is appointed by me as an acting person. One of the charts I was telling you about, I could spend ten slides on, is about who's the primary, who's the backup for materials, mobilization, all these different steps that need to happen in what is a plan that is readiness, action, and recovery. Okay, and just one last thing. You had mentioned that you had done a more extensive look at sidewalks in terms of that. Can you just give some highlights of that for the public of what you're looking at that's different? I don't know if there's a whole lot that's different in it. Basically, I broke it away from the roadway plan and stuff. And so, I don't know if there's really a lot of difference to it, because it seems like most of the charge was about focusing on the roadway aspect of it. Again, it redefines who's responsible for what. And that might be the one point of clarity that wasn't there before, because that's what I learned when I got into it. Some of it is environmental services, some of it is parks, and some of it is general services. And that wasn't even apparent to me. Okay, all right. All right, thank you very much. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Council Member. Council Member Beasley. Thank you, Chair. And I just want to thank everybody who worked hard on this plan, our council members, our staff, everybody. I just have one question that I feel like I've asked about a bazillion times. So other than Red River Ranch, do we have any of our other contractors on retainer, for lack of a better word? We do not have them on retainer, no. We have one other contractor that is under contract with us. They're not in a retainer per se. And I had a contractor that is an excavator that contacted me out of the blue here about 60 days ago or something. And I have his number and all his contact information as well. But no, we are not using retainers. And interestingly enough, Cincinnati has an advertisement out right now looking for contract operations and they're not doing it either. And I suspect it's because of the huge expense that you have to invest to have them on retainer. Thank you. Thank you, Council Member. Council Member Curtis. Thank you, Chair, and thank you, Director Martin, for this presentation. And I also want to extend my gratitude to everybody who's worked on this plan, fellow council members, staff members, and for everybody in the community who took the time to participate in this process. I've got a few questions. I'm going to touch on some stuff that you've already hit, but I really want to drive home a few points and make sure that the public and the media are getting focused on some of this stuff. So first of all, when we're talking about the combination of rank three and rank four, what should residents expect in terms of the tangible improvement there? I know we talked a little bit about it with regards to internal communications, but what should that translate to for residents? My expectation is that people who are on ranked roads will see a truck faster than they would have when they were a four. They're, I guess, the winners in this. But I think that overall, not getting wrapped around the axle about one, two, three, four, and following things chronologically. Instead, treating what is a ranked road, and treating it as quickly as you can in the early phases of that storm will help us in the end result. Most of the icers, what my research has been, is that it doesn't melt snow. What it really does is prevent it from bonding to the pavement. So getting it down in the early phases of the storm is essential. So if you're on a four, you won't see the difference. If you're on something that's not a ranked road, the belief will be is that if we get that down early and people are still driving around, they will be moving that out throughout the neighborhood just in their tires track. Thank you, and I appreciate that further detail. Second question I have is, are we establishing measurable benchmarks for how quickly we believe each street should be treated, whether that's internally or externally as part of this plan? Not enough to my engineer brain would like to do, probably yours would like to as well. As Council Member Baxter pointed out, we kind of went into this thing with somewhat of an absence of data. I'm anxious to see how kind of data that the tablets are going to be able to give me. Early on, I started out with every truck I listed, how many gallons of fuel that it will hold, how much brine would it hold, how much salt would it hold, and tried to do the math of, if you applied it at this rate, how far would you get into it? And the variabilities of that, because of the storm and how quickly precipitation may accumulate, made that really, really challenging. What it did become apparent to me, though, is that sending small trucks into a route is not a good plan, because you're out of gas or you're out of salt before you even get half your route done. The smaller trucks will basically, at an average application rate, will cover about 35 miles. Most routes range between 30 and 40 miles. So we got that out of that. The metrics that we will apply moving forward is that my expectation will be is that based on a certain style of storm, we're able to cover this much in this period of time using these application rates. because then I think that's when we have the discussion in the future about are we covering more streets than we were before? Because I think a lot of times people want to have that conversation. Yes, and so what I'm hearing, and I just want to make sure I'm hearing correctly on this, is that this is, you hope that in the future we will have more explicit measurable benchmarks based on the data that we will collect as a result of. Yeah, I got to go off your subject there. The benchmark for this year is cover all ranked streets in the first four to five hours of a storm. Either before or during or after, 100% coverage of it, that's the one benchmark. The subsequent benchmarks that I'm hoping to be able to develop out of this is because of the heat maps that'll be coming from the GIS software. I'll be able to figure out how much time, how long did it take them to cover that route? How much salt did they apply to that route? How much fuel did they? And then you can start then developing some type of matrix about, given this type of storm event, we should be able to cover this much. Given a different storm event, we're only going to be able to cover this much. because as you can imagine, it'll be a declining performance depending on how severe the storm is. Absolutely, and I'm about to run out of time. I've got some more questions, so I'm going to log back in after I let my colleagues speak, but thank you. Thank you, Council Member. Council Member Boone. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, sir, for this new plan. Everybody's very excited about it, but I've got a couple questions. As far as the 311 calls that we're receiving, if we're, like in our office, if we're receiving multiple calls, whether it's repeat for the same area or the same road, is it advantageous for 311 to pile up those very similar kind of calls? Or once we've directed it once, is sufficient for the list of to-dos? The Senator may kill me for this, but I would rather see the calls piled up, as long as the person who's making the calls are being responsible. I mean, a repeat call, I don't want to discourage somebody from doing that if an extended period of time has happened and they haven't seen any response or any action for it. I know from my water quality experience, sometimes people will just keep calling over and over again and stuff, just because they think that'll help them. As long as it's reasonable and stuff like that. The other point of it, too, is making sure that they give enough information so you can be able to react to it. Don't just tell me it's on Kennesaw Drive. Kennesaw Drive, as you know, is a really long road. And without being able to narrow things down, that's why having information in Lex call is important. So I'm going to say right now, if people feel compelled to call to report something, I don't want to discourage them from not doing it. Thank you. And as far as the Red River Ranch contractor, I guess how many trucks are they adding to our fleet, per se? And or is there like a mile coverage that we're adding with that? I don't have the mileage coverage right off the top of my head. It's eight trucks, I believe is what it, I think I had that in the slide. But the, when we were looking at the, no I didn't, it's eight trucks. When we were looking at the total area per, total mileage per area, area nine at the start of this was the lowest mileage of the ones that we had. And so here we're paying a contractor to fit up eight trucks, but yet they have the smallest area of all of us. And that's why we made the change there and added Polo Club and then added Clay's Mill at the back end, because now their lane miles are up over 100 miles. Which is reasonable. My thought was is that putting out, making them use six trucks and keeping two in backup was a reasonable approach, especially considering the traffic that they'll be covering. Right. And then one more thing, I guess, about the pre-treating process. Can you kind of walk us through when you decide whether it's salt or beet heat or is there like a temperature and or time before storm kind of? In the plan, when you see the plan, there's a whole table that is for different circumstances. Whether it be snow, zero to one inch, one to four inch, four and above. And it's also then what is the weather prediction for the next couple of days. If it's going to be 70 and sunny two days from now, our approach is going to be differently than if it's zero and cloudy for the next week. But the choice between using beet heat or using salt, a lot of times, especially in the early parts of a storm, is going to be dependent on whether it's a wintry mix or whether it's pure snow. If it's pure snow, then you can put down the beet heat, you can put down brine and not worry about washing it off. If it's steady rain and stuff like that, that pre-treatment is actually going to be more focused on salt. Putting it down and letting it dissolve, at least it's there on the ground, for when that change then does happen. Did I answer your question? Yes sir, appreciate it. And you might have answered this in the previous meeting, but the tablets, do they track when the blade's down and salt's going, or is that? No, they do not. They do not, they don't, the driver has to push a button that says I'm actively treating or not treating. So it's active or deactive. The six months to try to do a comprehensive and really in-depth software program was really, really hard. If you've been involved with trying to start a software program, usually you're every bit of a year. So we took program that we already had through ESRI and was able to adapt it for this purpose. There's where the inspectors, the supervisors, the project managers and all that, because they can go out and lay eyes on that area, on that route, and determine whether or not it's been treated or not. To me, that gives me better information than whether the plow's up or down. That's great. Thank you, sir. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Council Member. Council Member Lynch. Thank you for recognition, Chair, since I do not serve on this committee. And thank you, Interim Commissioner, for your report. Just one question about the external partners, FCPS specifically. You shared in the presentation on that slide that they've provided over 350 additional lane miles to us. And that you put on here, on the slide, that's unmanageable outcome for city resources. So is that where their plan B comes in, or what's the solution? That's really probably what motivated plan B as much as anything else, plus the fact that the mayor was urging the acting superintendent to consider that as much as early July, no, late June, actually. They took our map of ones, twos, and threes, and then they overlaid their bus routes, and we could see where the bust is, so to speak. And that's where the bust in matter was, is that they had 350 additional miles that we weren't going to be able to cover. And so that's when we started talking about how they can adjust their bus routes, such as that we have common pick-up points in a plan B situation. And we're working through those common pick-up points right now, because we realize we need to pay more attention to those in our plan as well. Because that's where people are going to conjugate and stuff. But the 350 miles was kind of a starting point, is that if we were going to match all of their bus routes, that's how far away we were. Mm, gotcha. And then, what is the ETA on the final plan document getting to council? I'm sorry, I thought I said that early on. I'm sorry, I glossed over that. It's supposed to be posted on the website at 3 o'clock. At 3 o'clock today? Yes. Okay, thank you so much. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Council Member, Vice Mayor Wu. Thank you, Chair, for the recognition. Thank you, Commissioner, for your report, and to the working group for all the work that they've done on this pretty extensive document. My questions are also about the external partners as well. During the previous ice storm, a lot of the stuff that we heard about had to do with sidewalks and people not being able to walk or roll. We had some parking questions as well, and then of course with FCPS and getting kids to school. I wanted to touch on parking a little bit. Can you talk a little bit about our partnership with the parking authority and what, if anything, we're going to do differently relating to parking and snow removal? I'm going to have to report back to you on that, because that's partly what the conversation on the 15th is about, is that I know that they offer parking services to folks that are in the downtown area and stuff like that. I'm not so sure that helps people in the external areas and stuff like that. But like I said, the 15th, I'll have a better answer for you on that, and I'll have to report that to you. Okay, and you touched on sidewalks earlier, saying that we weren't really necessarily doing anything different in this plan in regards to sidewalks. In your discussions with the work group or with the after action report, what came up as concerns that folks had about sidewalks? And do you feel like the previous plans had addressed that sufficiently to where you didn't need to make any changes with the new plan? I think the biggest concern was is the recognition that by ordinance, the property owner's responsible for maintaining their own sidewalk. And so our inability to do enforcement with private property owners about maintaining their sidewalks is probably the biggest impediment to having a more robust sidewalk program. I felt like that, and here where I was a little bit of a disadvantage, obviously I was a spectator last year when a lot of it goes, so I go by what people told me, not what I saw myself. But our sidewalks weren't as much of a problem as the environmental services and parks did an admirable job with what they had to deal with. But it was a lot of it that was private property that people weren't taking care of their sidewalks and it was creating a problem for the public. I know on a personal level, it took me a week to break all the ice out of my driveway so I could actually see concrete again. And I realize that that's hard, but we gotta continue to encourage people to take their responsibility for their property the same way that we're expected to do the same. Yeah, thank you for that. And I saw on the schedule in the upcoming next steps that we have got more meetings on the books with FCPS. In your mind, during the working group's work and the after action report, have the issues in terms of coordinating and communicating with FCPS, have those all been more or less resolved? Are there still outstanding issues that we need to hammer out? There's still outstanding issues with everything we have here. We're in the implementation phase. You know this, but I'll say it anyway, is that having a plan is one thing. The implementation is where the rubber hits the road, so to speak. And so we continue to work with them, but the fact that we've had such regular and frequent communication with them about that is encouraging to me. So there is still a lot more work to be done, but I feel like the framework that we've put together in this plan gives us a clear path forward to what our mission is. Yeah, I appreciate that, and I think it's always difficult because we're two institutions that are independent. We don't have authority over each other, so when things sometimes don't go right, the community is looking for the responsible party, and blame sometimes gets shifted back and forth. I know just generally speaking, it's a very difficult situation, but I appreciate anything that we can do to move that forward. And I think communication's a big part of it, so thank you for all your work. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Vice Mayor. Council Member Reynolds. Thank you, Chair, and thank you for recognizing me, since I don't serve on this committee. And thank you, Commissioner, and I'm just going to echo, I'm really appreciative of everybody that worked on this. This is a totally robust plan, and I'm very impressed with all the things that have been looked at, and the things that we're going to be implementing. So thank you a lot. And I had a question, when we talk about pre-treating, and you mentioned that extensively, and the importance of doing that and getting ahead of it. What happened this past year is, I think the storm kind of went a different direction than we thought. And I've spoken with Director Larkin about that, and so my question is, how are you going to be able to gauge when you should pre-treat, and when you shouldn't, and how quickly, and all of that? Because we decided not to do that, thinking that it wasn't going to be much accumulation, and then weather is unpredictable. Well you know I say this because I have the advantage of being the morning morning quarterback and in the aftermath of all of it but my approach is going to be to we use those that weather information from those reliable sources and we make a decision and we make a decision and we go after it hard early on and as robustly as we possibly can. Again salt in the barn is not doing us any good it needs to be out on the street and so to me if there's any inkling of the fact that that salt is going to benefit us on the ground rather than be in the barn that's what we're going to do. My intention also too is that we we go at it really hard in the early phases of it you know again being a Monday morning quarterback it seemed like that once we got into the neighborhoods and into the ranks three and four it was too late that the ice had already established itself and so we had to go at things really hard in the early phases of it and how we're going to do that we're going to use the the um the weather forecasts and and also be aggressive be aggressive. So if it's just forecasting a dusting you would pre-treat? It would if they were predicting a dusting followed by cold temperatures I would be more apt to pre-treat in a more aggressive fashion because I don't know what's going to happen. If they if the reliable sources say it's going to be a dusting the ground temperature is already 37 degrees and so there's no not going to be any freezing and in two days from now it's going to be 55. We're not going to go out and throw salt and beet heat around too much just because it would be a waste of the resources. Okay thank you um and then when we talk about quality control I really appreciate you know all this technology to be able to track you know everybody and where they're going and what they've done and haven't done um there actually were some issues with the city clearing um sidewalks uh on Versailles Road that were on the map to be cleared by the city that didn't get cleared and so I'm curious for quality control how how will you ensure that that those things you know how do you keep up with that is it just through the technology that's in the trucks and and mapping and then if someone calls in and says this on your plan says it's going to be cleared but it hasn't been how how do you ensure that that quality that's the first I've heard so I'm reacting to that but we're going to have to get inspectors out there to be able to ensure that it's happening there's no reason why we can't use this technology either because we already own it it's just a matter of buying more tablets I'll have to talk to Director Carey about that to find out what what we can do in order to try to be able to make sure that we got the same level of coverage that we do in the roadway and and I brought that up I've brought this up in the past so it's not the first time that I mentioned it but I'm just yeah I'm just wondering how do we ensure that things are done too bad we didn't have you on the committee yeah so okay yeah I just want to be able to have a way to say you know things are crossed off our list duly noted like said maybe we can talk afterwards about this well he said the the active management of this you know I said that was one of the two most important things in that slide that had all of the flow charting stuff and all that active management we can't just say we're going to do this and leave it on autopilot and walk away from it 12 hours we've got to stay on it over and over again and that is a big part of what we need to do thank you thank you chair thank you council member council member against Horton thank you chair I don't have any questions for you but I would like to say that I too am proud of this effort and I just really wanted to make a couple of statements here I'd like to extend a thank you to you Charlie for your leadership as well as Deputy CAO Glenn Grant Glenn Brown for your leadership in this major overhaul of our snow and ice control plan you along with our dedicated staff from priority departments have invested time ideas and commitment to ensuring a year of better prepared services for our community I would also like to thank the director of the department of public services for Mark Riley who actually came down from the city of Cincinnati he spent time intently listening to my thoughts on how we could assist us as we rebuild a plan to support our community he came to Lexington and met with our team of 25 plus and presented critical changes that made it into their plan to make it more effective for their community which proved to be valuable to us as we were creating our own plan I also would like to thank the external partners committee members that I met with sometimes together and sometimes separately and that was Tyler Scott, Richard Dugas, Lara Boyson, Rob Allen and last but not least Mackenzie Holt and Renee Buckles who were rock stars behind the scenes trying to assist us in making sure that our revised partner spreadsheet was completed so thank everybody for all of the hard work that they've put into this plan and and again no plan is is a perfect plan but also at the same time it's about the action that's put behind it and about the people that are going to be out on the streets creating safe streets for us as we move forward so thank you all so much Thank you Council Member. Vice Chair Morton. Thank you Chair. Well first thank you to everyone who helped get us to where we are today and helped put this plan together. I guess my first question was is related to just 3-1-1 calls. I guess how would those 3-1-1 calls be prioritized? Are they first come first serve? Like what does that look like? I don't know if they're first come first serve as much as you know typically we have these in water quality we have a tendency to try to group them together where can you get the most bang for your buck as far as a service call so geographically we're going to have to group these things together because I'd rather knock out 10 calls in one hour than drive back and forth you know doing them in priority order is inefficient you'll you'll end up spending more windshield time driving around than you will anything else so clusters of problems is usually what gets treated first. Okay so I guess within the at the administration's discretion in live time basically within those so basically at the administration's discretion in live time within those 3-1-1 call sheets. I wouldn't say it's discretionary as much as it is again it's about clustering and stuff like that is that you know again you're just trying not to bring back and forth across the map and so if you've got a cluster of problems those are going to be the ones you're going to work through and then work to the other ones and so it's not playing favorites or anything it's just about trying to use your resources efficiently. Okay so then I guess for so 3-1-1 calls that come in that are not not ranked roads unranked roads I guess what would be the response or the expectation for constituents who are calling from 3-1-1 that are not that don't have ranked roads? If you throw out your plan you don't have a plan anymore so it will depend on circumstances of what's going on at that time if we stop treating the roads that we said that we were going to treat and it continues to accumulate and we just go chasing calls you won't have a plan anymore so I'm not going to recommend that. So I guess after the ranked roads are complete will that will unranked roads be touched are we not going to do any unranked roads at all? Then there are resources in order to be able to handle those other calls and stuff like that it's like what we've been talking about with the school system they still have special needs people that require door-to-door service still trying to figure out how we're going to deal with that but if if you had a situation that that all the other road ranked roads are treated and you need to get out in the others and we have resources to do it we wouldn't ignore that but we got to stay with the plan first. Let's see so you mentioned I guess there's multiple divisions that take part in this whole plan there's multiple divisions that take part in this whole plan are there specific district or zones that divisions are in and in each zone in each district are there roughly around the same amount of trucks so basically you look at the map of Lexington are we going to have the same amount of trucks all around Lexington in specific zones or districts? There are eight rural I mean I'm sorry eight urban route areas with four routes per eight areas four routes per so you've got a truck that does one 12 hours and that same truck does a different that's a different 12 hours two drivers one truck kind of thing so waste management for example we're going to be giving them area three which is the for sales road area and stuff trying to keep them close to their home base as well trying to keep them close to where fuel sources are water quality I believe does one two and eight and then streets and roads will do the other one so there are specific routes that get assigned to specific divisions and then in turn specific drivers because we send them out to run those routes in advance you know that we don't want them to run the first time in the middle of a snowstorm they need to be training on them already and have a pretty good knowledge of them right now they they do a hand by a handwritten turn by turn because we don't have a turn by turn software that will be something that I would like to pursue for next year to implement more of a turn by turn situation because it makes it a whole lot easier than driving a snow plow trying to do this at the same time okay so so we do have them we do have the city broken down by zones yes basically and in those zones there are the same amount of trucks per zone yes and those zones are roughly there's multiple districts in those zones in each zone is what I just yeah they don't they don't match the district boundaries at all if we actually we reworked what had been done in previous years there was an effort to rebalance the uh the the zones or the areas and routes and it confused the drivers because they used to be able to go I'll use Richmond Road as an example you go to Richmond Road you then you go back instead they had them going into certain streets that were on the other side of Richmond Road they were kind of lost with it and it was very confusing for them so we backtracked and retreated from that so not every every route has the same exact mileage but they all of them range between 30 to 40 miles one route 30 to 40 miles which goes back into my pre-treatment thing in my brain is that if I'm going 25 miles an hour and I'm spreading salt or anything else I should be able to cover that in the first few hours of a storm that's why we switched to the pre-treating so everybody has a route everybody and there's eight urban areas four routes per urban area then there's the rural areas and area nine that we talked about before which are big streets thank you make sense okay thank you council member um council member Sheehan thank you chair um thank you for this presentation and to everyone who has uh worked on this new plan um you know we're here because we've seen changes in our weather patterns and we're seeing more intense um snow and ice storms and I think a lot of work has gone into this plan particularly around like the communication channels and the way that the different government departments work together but as Miss Young pointed out in the stormwater presentation just before this we're also seeing more intense like rainstorms and those come with um flooding they come with downed trees they come like some of the flooding we've seen recently has had has displaced people out of their homes um it it blocks streets and in very similar ways um to what we see with snow and ice so are there parts of this that could be applied to other to what to our responses in these other extreme storm situations I think so and I think some of them already are I mean basically like I said in water quality when we have those holy cow events we've got flooded basements and things like that we're trying to treat them the same way we're going out and and trying to do diagnostic work in an area where we've got a cluster of problems and not individual problems so there may be other ones as well too I think I said I I really didn't think about that I was so focused on this and I I had the concern about you know knowing that you know whether whether it's different it's it's changing and for whatever reason and and if we're going to ramp up our resources I wanted to make sure that I could tell you that we are using our resources to this maximum extent practical and I didn't have the data right now to be able to to to to to to to to to to to inform the administration or you to be able to make that decision and so rather than just throw money at it and stuff is that we're we're throwing management and structure at it and see where that gets us. Thank you and I I think for me one of the things that I think sometimes you know we struggle with in government and the and and the the community also struggles with is we have all of these siloed things right and we have this program for this and this program for this and this program for this or this technology over here and this technology over here and I think it it makes it easier for all of us when sometimes you know we're using similar systems in all the places right so if we've taken all the time to establish these communication plans here then I would like to see them used in other emergency situations as well so then the the community starts to get used to this is exactly what I should expect each time when there's an emergency no matter whether it's snow and ice whether it's flooding or other things that might come up so I know that a lot of work has gone into this so I would like to just see it more broadly applied if possible. Thank you. That's a good point. I will say this is a because Richard Dugas has already been after me about using the tablets for street sweepers and other service calls and all that so yeah there are other people that are thinking the same thing as you are is that how can we utilize this approach in other parts of government and maximize efficiency elsewhere. Yeah, thank you. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Council Member. Council Members, I know you're on round two. I'm going to ask a few questions first and then and then I'll ask you to kind of expeditiously get to yours because we have two more topics. Very quickly, I just want to make sure the technology piece that is not going to be constituent or customer facing so our our constituents should not expect something that looks like an an Uber driver is approaching you know and an Uber driver's on this street. There should be no expectation of that. Is that correct? It is not real time because it is there's a safety aspect that needs to be on it so the citizens won't be able to see real time but they will see there'll be a time delay associated with what they're seeing. Okay, so there might be a map of some sort that says this was done this was cleared so there will be some sort of there will some be some sort of map that they could look at. Yes. Okay, great. And then my my next question for you is do you feel like um are you funded correctly for fiscal year 27? Do you have the funds that you need um so and if there is an event do you feel like you should be able to manage you should be able to manage? I think so, yes. Let me get to that slide. Whoops, I went too far. The barns are full. Both barns are totally full using uh current fiscal year dollars and stuff and so we have this this budget in place that allows us to hire not only contractors but also buy more materials as well. Based on the numbers that I've seen I think it was two years ago the most we used in salt was 12,000 tons. We've got 13,000 in the barn right now so I feel pretty good about it. Now granted we will use more salt than we did before again with the pre-trading and stuff like that. Part of the reporting thing is that at the every shift they have to report material supply and equipment status including the status of orders of whatever material that we need. We can't wait as soon as we use it we order it. You get in line in these things during a winter storm. Thank you. I've got um my next question is about um we had one event that happened this year that it was like a really quick flash freeze that literally went for about an hour or two during rush hour and there was cars all over the place and like no one really expected it um and and so the one thing I was a little concerned when you were talking about the beat heat or the pre-treat um like do you have thresholds for when you plan when when you're thinking about things like that because I don't know that wasn't like a real event it just happened it was super slick we had people sliding all over the place I don't know if you recall that. Yeah I was in that as well. Certain streets were terrible. Yeah is that um yeah in that particular event you know I'm assuming that that overnight there were weather reports that indicated that was coming in what I would be doing is mobilizing people in the middle of the night and having them getting salt down beforehand. The the plan every plan that we do is to try to avoid rush hour either in the morning or the evening so we're going to have to get ahead of it instead of reacting to it because if you got a salt truck out there trying to treat stuff and it's in the middle of rush hour and it's happening now it's too late. Yeah I agree thank you um sidewalks um did is part of the communication plan and first I wanted I do want to thank everyone who worked on it the council members who worked on it the staff who worked on it but as part of the plan the side one of the sidewalk issues we have is we have events downtown and I'm going to give you a personal experience we we were going to a Lexington Opera House event and it was during that it was like a week or two after the event um and still we couldn't actually we couldn't get out across the street like literally there was a bank there was no way to get from the sidewalk across the street on those four corners over there on Short Street so is there something that we did to consider events that are taking place at Rep Arena at anywhere downtown the um you know the Civic Center so that sidewalks do get um some I mean a lot of people walk and I don't want them slipping and falling into the road I guess let me ask you a question is it was it the sidewalk or was it the ramp or the access to their access it's mostly the access ramps this is where I'm banking on the fact that we've got the supervisors off of routes off running routes and instead we've got them in the smaller trades trucks to be able to go out and treat issues like that those smaller trucks are going to be more suitable for that and you have available bodies you're not pulling them off of area four route four instead that's what they're supposed to do thank you all right I'm going to jump to these other couple we do have two more presentations so please try to be expeditious thank you Councilmember Kirks thank you chair I will do my best to be quick um so y'all answered most of my questions but I do want to provide an additional point and I know I'm beating this uh over the head but just for clarity uh Director Martin um is posting in a private neighborhood Facebook group a 3-1-1 form entry I'm sorry I didn't understand the question if a constituent is upset about the snow response and they post in a private Facebook neighborhood group is that filing a complaint with 3-1-1 or creating any sort of paper trail or communicating with the government at all are we combing private Facebook groups for complaints is that the role that we play here I am not and I would hope that uh none of us are either because that's not our job and it is an unreasonable expectation for any of us to do that um I'm gonna be very when I was sworn in to this office it was in the middle of a very bad winter storm that uh our city in my view failed to respond adequately to then when this came forward in October of last year I asked what is the city doing to make sure that we are adequately prepared for the new normal that severe weather events like what we've experienced are becoming more and more commonplace and that concern was broadly dismissed now we've seen and I appreciate the work that's gone into this plan to acknowledge our new normal and I have a lot of appreciation and a lot of trust in you to execute this well but I'm also going to say what I think a lot of my residents are feeling as they watch this meeting or see about this new snow plan you've got the plan we're here to support you and um don't screw it up thank you thank you councilmember councilmember morton thank you um I just had a quick a quick follow-up um we discussed earlier that there's zones and I guess my follow-up question would be um are those do those trucks all the trucks remain in those zones until all the rank roads are clear or could those trucks be pulled elsewhere um depending on the storm event and stuff like that we will pull trucks and bring them over to help others you know there's always mechanical failures there's there's always something and stuff and so I know my experience here with water quality is that we would bring people over to help other areas and stuff once they got their area shirt up again it's it's always a function of the storm if if it happened and treatment was effective and there's no additional treatment that needs to get on then pulling them off and bringing and get the other stuff up where it needs to be is an absolute yes right so but those trucks won't be pulled until after those rank roads are complete in that zone except I feel like you've got to be comfortable with the fact that the the treatment in in whatever area or whatever route is acceptable before you pull them out of that area okay good and and I and I I hope so as well I just don't want to get into a situation where we're that there's not a process or a plan of where you're pulling trucks from to go elsewhere unless they're needed so I guess what I'm saying is for example I wouldn't want trucks pulled out of my district to go somewhere else to other zones and leave no trucks in my area it's unless those rank roads are complete basically right my thoughts but then and also I would love to to just have I guess like a maybe a a graph a map showing the zones of the the city so I can know what zone my area is in and how many trucks are in it but then lastly will cms have access to that real-time map that's internal so that we can see what's taking place there's two different questions in there let me cover the one the area maps will be are in appendix c of the executive summary that will be posted at three o'clock okay plus they're also in the roadway manual as well they're just at the at the area level not necessarily at the route level um and then you're talking about access to the software uh access just to that I know at one point and we took it down but we there was a map that kind of showed where the trucks were going I think it's in the dashboard to council member the dashboard will be available to everybody basically you'll be able to log on to the website and stuff like that you know certain users will have certain preferences and stuff like that because we obviously want to use it for a management tool so we would use it at a manager's level as opposed to having it at the public level and stuff because again I'm most interested in if one with one area or one route is getting treated one way versus another one getting treated another way I want to know why I want to I want to know why that that's not happening or if there's a solid reason for it what are we doing that maximizes a protect the the production I don't expect the driver to go out there and drive for 12 straight hours I mean it's not realistic with appropriate breaks and restoring and stuff like that but I want to know how many times we can cover an area within a 12 hour shift effectively and it will change depending on the severity of the storm but we will have to change accordingly as well okay so the council the map the dashboard that we have access to would basically just be the one that the public has access to we won't have any different one correct okay thank you thank you vice chair uh and lastly council member baxter thank you chair commissioner we've talked a lot about what the city's responsibility is but I know in part of the plan we address some of the responsibilities that our residents have as well as they partner with us in accomplishing our goals of the of the snow and ice plan can you kind of touch briefly on like the level of clearing that we like set that expectation for the level of clearing and what some of those resident responsibilities might be I'm glad you brought that up because I'd forgotten to really emphasize the passable street aspect of things is that you know a passable street means that you know a typical there's actually verbiage I used in the plan that I don't have committed to my memory here but the passable doesn't mean it's completely uncovered all asphalt and everything else passable means that you can you can get through that passable street is a street where at least one central travel lane is clear enough for a vehicle to navigate safely at reduced speeds even if snowpack or ice remains and the street is not cleared curb to curb that's the definition of passable now the other part of your question was um we we talked a little bit about um how residents and there's some you all will see when the plan comes out there are some images about the appropriate ways that residents can shovel like the apron of their driveway so that the when the plows come through the snow doesn't bank at the end of their driveway and we talked a little bit about when individuals park on both sides of neighborhood streets it's difficult for our plows to get down those roads so it would be really helpful if residents could park in their driveways or somewhere else so that we can access the roadways um but but was there was there anything else that we had really talked about as far as resident responsibilities there's a whole section in the executive summary that has to do with what residents can do to help during a snow and ice event that i think is what you're thinking of and it includes a graphic in there about how to shovel your driveway in such a way that you can store your snow and not have the plow come along and shove it right back into your driveway but yeah we did talk a lot about that and there that is a section of that in the executive summary of the plan thank you and and i just want to point out obviously like the majority of our snow and ice plan falls on the city's shoulders but it's really helpful when when our residents can help partner and make the the plan more successful so there's an faq question or an faq section in the plan as well and that answers a lot of the the questions that we kept hearing over and over again from residents so that's all i got thank you thank you council member and once again thank you so much for the snow plan all right we're going to jump to um the roundabout conversion study which was funded through a fund balance and recommended by the street safety task force last year i'd like to call traffic engineering manager david filantro to the podium to provide a little background and choose our speaker but first i'd like i'd like to ask um council member curtis who was interested in this item um to and it has a new roundabout in her district to talk about it thank you thank you chair and i'm really excited to get to the meat of what everybody's here today to hear about which is investments in uh innovative multimodal infrastructure design uh for our intersections involving uh roundabouts as many of y'all know uh as part of the street safety task force uh this was a huge part of our discussion i've been able to see firsthand uh just the level to which this type of intersection design can improve the safety and quality experience that people have on our roads in my district with uh the mini roundabout that we've installed on wilson downing um and people are taking notice of that i'm gonna give a quick shout out to uh one of my younger residents a kid in my district named bentley who i met with yesterday whose science fair project is essentially uh as he put it an eighth grade version of a roundabout feasibility study um so even our young people are taking notice and i'm very excited to uh share these results with y'all even if i uh admittedly i'm going to give you some some uh grief about the one in my district not moving forward um i do understand the reasoning and so i'm going to pass this off and i'm excited to hear what they have to say absolutely thank you we appreciate uh y'all inviting us here and letting us present my name is david filiatu one of the managers in the division of traffic engineering and like you all know this is a result of the street uh safety task force now you'll notice that typically capital projects are handled by uh engineering they've been a little bit lower on staff so uh traffic engineering we're a bit of a jack-of-all-trades i'll say so we've had we've been able to handle this uh through them but that being said the doug and his team's been involved in each each of the meetings and uh i'll uh right now palmers the engineering firm they actually designed the wilson downing roundabout as well but they just so happen to be the next engineering firm up on the undefined services list so they'll uh they're pretty good uh firm to continue this on so i'll hand it over to billy garrison he's the project manager for palmer thank you david i'm billy garrison with palmer engineering um glad to be here um agenda of what we're gonna go over today we're gonna go over a little bit of the project history then we will go over the concepts for each of the intersections we looked at which we looked at alexandria drive at cross keys drive laredo drive and walden drive pleasant ridge drive at bryant road loudon avenue and maple avenue beaumont center circle at beaumont center lane and windburn drive at mccullough drive then we'll have some time for some questions a little bit of project history um in the fall of 2025 lfcg the mayor and the council authorized funding to complete this feasibility study and conceptual design for conversions of six city-owned intersections the project was going to focus on improving safety and pedestrian comfort at the selected locations in early 2026 lfcg teamed with palmer to start the study the first thing we did was we looked at initial concepts for each uh intersection we pulled record plans pulled all survey data we could find we pulled crash data and lfcg provided us with traffic numbers for each intersection then we analyzed all this there were two intersections after we did this that were not moved forward to the next step due to i'll go over why we didn't move forward here in a minute but they were beaumont center circle and beaumont center lane then laredo drive and walden drive beaumont center circle at beaumont center lane this is the concept that we preliminary developed we eliminated the slip lanes relocated sidewalks added crosswalks with pedestrian refuges and um but when we were looking at the crash history this one doesn't have show a significant safety issue in the five-year period there were 12 crashes with one minor injury then we looked at the traffic operations as well and when you look at an always stop first roundabout in this area the queue time would be very similar for each type of intersection and perform very similar for that reason we decided the funds weren't didn't need to move forward for this one then laredo drive and walden drive this if anyone's driven on laredo drive they know this is a very steep road when we pull the survey data it's about a 7.8 percent grade through the intersection the maximum recommended entrance grade for a roundabout is about four percent so it makes for a dangerous situation entering the roundabout and it's not really feasible to flatten the slope in this area without major impacts to the residents around the intersection um now while a roundabout isn't the best idea here traffic engineering and the engineering are looking at other possible options to address the safety issues at this intersection that said there were four intersections that we did think are it's feasible to move forward with roundabouts um so these four we've decided to study further we pulled utility information pulled the existing right-of-way we looked at all drainage impacts developed the entrances around the roundabout and looked at how much right-of-way would be impacted and then we developed does how much it would cost to design the projects the first one we looked at was alexandria drive at cross keys um this one this is a full-size roundabout it will require right-of-way at each of the four quadrants two entrances to the south will need to be turned into right-in right-out entrances but those large parking lots have multiple entry points that will allow anyone going in and out to go any direction they need to it's just the two that are closest there to the intersection will have to be right in right outs and just a note on this one it was part of the high injury network from the 2023 safety action plan so it's already been noticed as a place with a lot of crashes to analyze these we applied what's called a crash modification factor or cmf what these are is they've studied intersections that have replaced stop controlled intersections with roundabouts and seen how many crashes they reduce and we're able to apply this to estimate how many crashes we will reduce and we're able to get a return on investment out of that which this is a five-year return on investment which takes the how much the crashes cost and how much you're saving by reducing these crashes and compares it to the cost of the project anything above one is considered means that you're saving more money than you're spending by the amount of crashes you're saving there were 23 crashes over a five year period at this intersection seven injury crashes 13 of the 23 were angles which roundabouts do a great job of preventing and are the type that caused the most injuries and then the cost to do the final design on this would be around $350,000 and then our return on investment on this one is a 0.8 to 1 the next intersection we looked at was Loudon Avenue at Maple Avenue note this one is a mini roundabout it's very similar in size to the Wilson Downing roundabout it's almost identical to that one we chose a mini at this one because it reduced the impacts to historic structures around the intersection a mini makes it where we don't impact any of the structures you do still have to buy right away at the corner and reconstruct retaining walls that are existing there now this one had a lot of crashes in five years 53 crashes over a five-year period five injuries this one has a different cmf whereas a full roundabout reduces crashes by about 72 percent a mini roundabout reduces it by 37 percent and you a mini roundabout reduces it by 37 percent and you can see but it still saves 19 crashes over a five-year period and it comes it ends up with an roi of 1.2 and there is significant traffic operations benefits to this one we did a forecast to estimate how much traffic there would be in 2036 and the maximum queue in 2036 would be almost three and a half minutes along Loudon Avenue if you left it as an all-way stop control if you build it as a roundabout it comes out to about eight seconds so and the design cost estimate for this one would be about 300,000 the next one we looked at was windburn drive at mccullough drive and we we looked at multiple sizes for this one too but ultimately decided to go with the full-size roundabout due to the bus traffic in this area there's a school just to the west that this is their only way in and out so there's a significant amount of buses and there's a lectern bus stop at the corner of this intersection there's also a significant amount of pedestrian traffic at this location due to the school and the bus stop will require right away on all four corners again and the lectern bus stop would have to be relocated it could be relocated close but then roundabout impacts the bus stop there were 24 crashes on this one four injuries three of those injuries were pedestrian crashes and we over a five-year period you save about 17 crashes and end up with an roi of 1.1 and there is traffic operations benefits to this one too in 2036 the maximum queue time would be about 51 seconds on all-way stop and it would be about eight seconds for a roundabout and i know this one has a very long queue length of about 300 feet in 2036 if you look at this all-way stop control the last one we looked at was a pleasant ridge drive at bryant drive this one we had to take a more holistic approach at we had to look at from the man o' war intersection to the west holistic approach at we had to look at from the man o' war intersection to the bryant road intersection due to how close these intersections are what you do to one impacts the other so we analyzed the queue on man o' war to make sure it went back up into the roundabout which doesn't show that it does and from spending a lot of time over here i've never seen it back up to bryant drive to plot it a lot but not to bryant then we also recommend putting in raised medians at plotted drive and eliminating the left coming going on to plot it if you're going south from man o' war if they need to make that left they can either make a u-turn at the roundabout or bryant circles around and connects to that road and then it eliminates the people from making the left turns that are they're making that are illegal already the roundabout would require right away at the corners and rebuilding the existing retaining walls that are there those will be impacted and it adds new pedestrian crossings across pleasant ridge park from or pleasant ridge drive from the hotel hotel and other developments along bryant over to all the restaurants that are on the other side of pleasant ridge drive there were 44 crashes here three injuries for this one we had to use multiple crash modification factors there is a one for installing the raised medians and access management that at the plotted intersection will reduce 68 of those crashes and then the roundabout will reduce 72 and you save 30 to 31 crashes over a five-year period and the roi comes out to one on that and then the final design cost estimate for this one would be around 550,000 dollars. Next steps for this project final design funding is not allocated yet I have listed here what the final design estimates for each intersection of those four intersections would be the total comes to 1,550,000 for all four intersections and with that any questions thank you council members please log in with your questions council member brown thank you chair and thank you for the presentation this is all interesting information going to the roundabout at pleasant ridge drive and bryant and bryant drive are those are those accidents and maybe you said it and I missed it did a lot of them occur because folks were trying to make a left on the pleasant ridge drive off of plot at or whatever that I would there's a lot of side swipes and that's where I would guess those are we didn't get the narratives to determine if that's exactly what's going on but we did look at the traffic numbers and in the peak hour there were 15 cars that were making that illegal left turn from plotted to pleasant ridge park okay and a big motivation motivating factor for that roundabout recommendation here is to prevent that is to give another option and prevent yes okay and then I'll go to the the one at windburn and mccullough did um and david I know we had conversations with neighbors over there talking about once the windburn drive connection is made to citation that we don't foresee or maybe just initial estimates it's not going to be a lot of traffic coming that way to get to russell cave potentially there's going to be a lot of folks going through the neighborhood to get to new town pipe did y'all take any any modeling of that new traffic connection and how it may impact this roundabout not not at this juncture when we talked about what impacts that connection would have as far as moving if we move one there was will to move forward with this one you would probably want to wait till after that connection got made largely for construction purposes because you might have lane closures blockages things like that and because this is the only way in and out that was the main thing we kind of talked about it moving forward in that respect was that once the citation connections made this is much comes much more easy to construct going forward but we didn't model the the traffic analysis for when that got connection was made if that makes sense okay and then council member morton I know I know we we've talked about this in a meeting before was this also going to help with that traffic congestion that's coming from the buses at windburn drive and and what's the other street that it backs up real bad on back there near the school I can't think of the name penny baker so would this roundabout have a positive impact on on that yeah honestly I think this was actually one of the solutions that were that was brought up at that discussion emphasizing that during school hours you know windburn one way in one way out and we can get out one way traffic is basically due to the four-way stop it's backing all the way up from that four-way stop to the school itself and I mean I think that the peak hour is one school releases for this one right so you know I think this was a hundred percent a solution that was at that table and so that's why I was interested in seeing it so I think you're 100 right okay I'll ask this and I'll move on so do you think that once the road connection is going to be made that we're going to see that traffic congestion that exists now kind of dissipate would give it another option for folks to get in and out it would certainly be be less I guess depending on where you're going to from there you know if you're going neighborhoods to the west or south maybe you choose that alternate uh location but uh so yes we would see some drop in traffic I would think okay all right thank you thank you uh thank you council member vice mayor will thank you chair thank you for the presentation I have a question about the Loudon and Maple intersection that one seems like it had a fairly high rate of crashes compared to the other ones why are we doing a mini roundabout versus a regular roundabout on that to do a regular roundabout you will be impacting the structures roundabout will be over the house on the northeast there and possibly the southwest okay and can you speak to what those sort of impacts or complications would be if we were to choose to do a regular size roundabout what does that entail with um we will have to look at the historic to see if these are on the historic registry and do a historic archaeology historic analysis on them to see what impacts that would be okay so in those cases we're not even talking about just uh in terms of the easements or anything we're talking about the actual structure of yeah that buildings yeah that's actually gotcha okay thank you for that um you talked a little bit about our roi numbers uh the return on investment can you expand a little bit about kind of what that means exactly in this context um every crash is assigned a dollar value so we take the crashes saved there multiply it by what the average crash will cost and then how much it costs to build the roundabout and you divide those and you get a five-year savings so if the it's over one that means you're saving more money on crash savings than you are spending on the project gotcha and i appreciate those numbers and i think to be you know good stewards of the the taxpayers money that's always a great consideration and i just want to add also on top of that we're also talking about people's lives and people's properties and people's injuries and potential deaths even um of the four uh that we've listed um that we would potentially like to move forward on do you have a ranking on them um the way we discuss is we would rank it by the rois which louden maple has the highest roi with can you go to that last slide where we have the four with the with the design prices and can you tell us of those um how they're currently ranked um louden and maple have a 1.2 um roi winburn and mccullough has a 1.1 pleasant ridge drive and bryant road has a one roi then alexandria drive and cross keys has a 0.8 okay thank you for that and then just to be clear um these costs are just for design correct these are just design funds do you all have potential estimates on what the construction costs would be on these um we have not developed those yet just because construction is very inflationary and we don't know when these will be constructed so we don't want to throw and then can you give me a little bit of a timeline on if we were to approve funding for this fairly soon um what would be the timeline on design of these would they be all happening at the same time would they be staggered how would we approach it i'll refer that one to doug thank you yeah yeah and and i'm talking about a best case scenario where we choose to fund all four at the same time so but i didn't have to come up here uh doug burton director of engineering so when this project started we were down three people about a month into this project we were to hire two people one of those no-show three days before she was supposed to start so we're still down two people so it's hard for me to give you a timeline our plan was to take the efforts from this study and then come to fund and ask for funding in next fiscal year so we can get burton interning but now that we're still short two people it's hard to give you a an estimate on that because we're still with the one person we did hire we're still trying to catch up with some of the backlog okay so your intention even without the staffing issues was to have it be an fy28 ask is that correct likely unless there was funding before that you obviously we can always move things forward if we have the staffing for it but we're still playing a little catch-up where we've been short so thinking about you know we're about to approach fund balance right so thinking from your capacity point of view would it make sense if there if it was the will of the council to fund all four of these with fund balance or does that not even i would i would eat the elephant one bite at a time maybe fund one of these okay uh and then just because again it's it's our issue is backlog you know we've got 30 projects a couple of them have just sat we've got a project management consultant coming on board hopefully by the end of year if not the first plus we've just hired somebody but they're brand new so getting them okay on boarded so at this point your preference would be if we are for these projects is to potentially fund one of them out of fund balance and then have the conversation next year about yeah one maybe even two windburn the problem with that one is again that you wouldn't want to do that one i mean you could go ahead and do the design but you wouldn't want to do construction until we get the windburn citation connection done but that is moving fairly well we have that's out of the commissioner's office now but it's moving around hopefully right away we'll be wrapping up soon so it could progress so two would be the the heaviest lift i would want to try just giving our current staffing okay thank you for that thank you chair thank you vice mayor um and council member curtis thank you chair and thank you for the presentation um i am going to be brief because i know we're short on time and i just want to say what i i know that i always say when we're talking about uh transportation infrastructure and you start hearing uh terms thrown around like roi and whatnot it does become easy to forget sometimes that these statistics are people and that when we're talking about the cost here we're we're talking about yes being good stewards of taxpayer dollars but we're also talking about a public safety epidemic and addressing that and in my mind it's important that we take that very seriously and we take that responsibility very seriously i i mean i know it's even in the news this morning about a young person crossing the street to get on a school bus who was hit and taken to the hospital here in lexington in critical condition that's not the type of uh environment that i want to be living in that's not the type of uh street culture that i want to be uh encouraging and whatnot so again while we're talking about funding and whatnot and we're looking at these numbers just remember that that's the type of thing that we're trying to prevent here and these are this is one way that we have the data that is statistically and consistently shown to reduce incidents like that so thank you thank you very much council member um i appreciate your presentation and thank you so much for your hard work um council members uh we are probably not going to have enough time for um the green lexington presentation i've talked to our public information engagement manager angela poe um and i would ask you to read um that presentation we'll contemplate throwing that in in november i just want to remind you all that we have we have four items in november as well so maybe i'm biting off more than i can chew but we have the waste contamination reduction plan we have uh we've got the flash flood assessment and hazard mitigation next month we've got the lfucg afscme consideration of work course board considerations and we've got chapter 17c of public rights away next next month all very engaging topics thank you so much for being here with us today and i will call this meeting adjourned