caption test for social services

and public safety committee.

Good afternoon, everyone.

I would like to call the OCTOBER

20, 2026 meeting of social

services and public safety

committee to order at 1:01 P.M.,

and I want to thank everyone for

being here today.

I really appreciate it.

And our first agenda item is

approval of the AUGUST 11, 2026

committee summary.

Are there any additions or

corrections?

MAY I have a motion to approve.

>> motion to approve.

>> second.

Chair: is there any discussion on the motion? Hearing none, all those in favor, say aye. >> aye. Any opposed? That motion passes. Today we have an update from the office of homelessness prevention and intervention which coordinates to ensure efficient effective system that offers everyone access to shelter, food, employment and housing and other basic needs and opportunities. Our homelessness prevention manager jeff huron will presented this necessary annual update and would I like to ask him to come to the podium at this time. Thank you so much. We'll start with just a quick over view of the office itself. The office was created in 2014 as a recommendation for then mayor gray's for the greater good report. And that was to provide an entity that had the resources and infrastructure to provide a broader level of support for the local homeless response system. Shortly after its creation, the office was designated as both the local continuum of care lead agency and collaborative applicant as well as the homeless management information system lead. Since I took ownership of the office in 2022, we have effectively doubled our staffing to four positions that includes our continuum of care coordinator position as well as recent additions in fiscal year 24 of an hmis data analyst position and in fiscal year 26, of an encampment coordinator position. Given our levels of staffing, the ohpi does not provide direct services. We do, however, operate as a resource navigation hub and provide funding and coordination for the local response system. Despite being a small office, the ohpi office is a small system. I break our work up into the categories of coordination, advocacy. We would serve to coordinate broader efforts larger than any one organization such as planning for extreme weather and public health emergencies or the implementation of our local coordinated entry system; which provides assessment and placement into housing for individuals experiencing homelessness. In terms of facilitatation. We would facilitate large scale efforts like our annual point in time count or census and additional dollars to support our local efforts. in terms of education, we provide a wealth of different levels of training and technical support for our community partner organizations. And we would also work with groups like the council and the public to ensure the people are aware of issues impacting this population and helping to promote best practice service models we will develop programming to meet those needs. Next to give you a scale of homelessness in the terms of scope in terms of progress locally like many communities, we unfortunately saw increases in homelessness coming out of the covid-19 pandemic due to factors like very low vacancy rates and increasing rents while we have seen the uncreases slowing, we are struggling to keep up with system inflow that at times can outpace our system outflow and residing in emergency shelter, transitional housing dedicated to persons experiencing homelessness or unsheltered settings. And in terms of subpopulation trends, we would have seen for the third year in a row, we had a decrease in the number of persons experiencing unsheltered homelessness with 48 persons unsheltered on the evening of this year's count. However, we do know that that is largely facilitated by things like additional seasonal resources that are available over the winter. And that we need more year round resources to keep that trend going throughout the year. Other sfactors that we would -- factors that we would point out is an increasing aging population. This is a national trend where, across the country, this is going to be the largest rate of growth for any subpopulation experiencing homelessness. And the same holds true for lexington. This year we had 10% of overall persons included in the count. Aged 65 and older and if we look at 55 and older, those individuals would compose about 25% of our overall population. I would also like to point out trends regardig families with children, even though we have fewer actual households with children, in this year's count, we had an overall higher number of persons, 10% higher than the previous year, demonstrating the need for additional resources for families. So what are we doing to address these numbers? One thing is that lfucg continues to invest significantly in addressing homelessness locally, providing over $8 million in annual funding. This comes from sources like the innovative and sustainable solution funds and annual set aside from the general fund that we use to pilot evidence-based best practice programming. And that currently sits at about $1.6 million annually. Other sources of funding would include a locally funded extended social resource program for which the ohpi would operate the emergency shelter funding. This supports our local shelters with annual operating costs. Presently about $2 million in funding. We also, as we mentioned, are operating a significant level of seasonal resources to meet our overall bed gap as we've discussed with the emergency shelter study and the work of the mayor's task force. Those investments are now totaling over $2 million each year. While we are glad to have this important support to keep our citizens safe, we do long-term want to see this investment shift to more permanent year round resources and slowly shrink that winter response to a much more manageable level. We also work to bring in federal funds such as authoring the annual continuum of care program application. We now bring in over 2.7 million each year from the source to support housing and supportive ervice programs in the community our annual update is to give you updates 41 total cleanups with 37 unique locations. Approximately 20% of those cleanups were routine maintenance of designated emphasis areas or areas that retain permanent signage alerting individuals to the inability to camp there and that is to try to prevent the return of encampments in areas that are roan to that activity. While overall costs in fiscal year 26 were higher than 25, we actually saw a reduction in the average cost per cleanup by about 25% these costs can range significantly as you can see from 300 to 24,000. For the environmental services, and the elkhorn road area, we cleaned the entire creek bed between winchester road and i-75, approximately about a half mile stretch, that was done to remove debris from previous encampments and to perform landscaping that helps to prevent additional encampments from returning. That was an area that we heard concerns from several business owners when we were really trying to work collaboratively across the divisions to give better solutions other impacts from having the establishment would factsor into the overall total cost being higher. We have a better ability to quickly identify and respond to encampments and perform routine maintenance in areas. We are also, as you can evidence with the lower average median cost, we are able to find cost saving measures, able to look across the government and identify ways that we can perhaps internally handle things like waste to reduce those costs instead of relying solely on contractors. We are also able to work with division and property owners and improve coordination with street outreach, police and community para medicine moving a number of individuals to positive outcomes like residential treatment and transitional housing. Other highlights from the year, one would be, as you know of the persons served 59% of exits were to positive housing destinations and over the past six months or so, they have averaged moving 10 persons to permanent housing per month and that is without access to ongoing subsidy or rental assistance. Despite not having resources like ongoing rental assistance, their dues seem -- there do seems to be long-term outcomes facilitated. Our team has the lowest rate of returns to homelessness after a positive exit. We are seeing fewer returns than emergency shelter transitional housing and permanent housing another point we would like to spotlight is the housing flex fund this is a flexible financial assistance resource that helps case managers facilitated rapid exit and diversion strategies under a housing problem solving framework. The ideal is not to replace resources like our coordinated entry system but to supplement them. If we view housing as an ongoing conversation with the households that we engage, we look for opportunities that might reduce the length of time that they experience homelessness or divert them away from literal homelessness all together. Over the first year of operations and rapidly exiting from homelessness and I would like to highlight our work on the fiscal year 26 continuum of care program competition. This was a very unique funding application it has been wrapped up in legal challenges since the nofo was released earlier this year and when a court of appeals decision allowed hud to move forward with the nofo, communities were given only 12 calendar days to produce an application that typically would take well over a month. Its work on the competition, continuing to pursue board and council approvals necessary to submit the application, continuing to provide feedback to our local project applicants and authored the entire application in five business days. At the same time we managed to recruit four new project applicant organizations, more than I have seen in any competition that we have previously operated. Finally just a quick note on where we are at in terms of strategic planning. Our previous strategic plan came to a close in 2025. And as you know last week, we presented the final recommendations of the mayor's task force on homelessness. Those recommendations will now serve as our updated strategic plan. There are 20 recommendations total, including five priority recommendations and 15 recommendations for long-term implementation. As a priority, we are going to continue to operate our winter shelter program at our vir sails road campus and we are going to work to, over time, transition that to permanent development for populations like seniors, families with children and persons with disabilities. We plan to increase our centralized intake to provide a more streamlined easy to navigate system. We are going to work to promote expanded diversion and rapid exit strategies and we are going to work with an ongoing committee to review the implementation of these recommendations. Of course there will be things that we will be working on that will go alongside of that work and continue into the future. We are already working as we launch winter shelter to make tweaks to how we track information about location of homeless origin in order to have informed conversations about local trends. We are going to work with the catholic action center to rigorously evaluate outcome data from their pilot transitional housing program and we are going to work to increase the level of permanent supportive housing, helping developers to build relationships with service providers for the establishment of new permanent supportive housing developments through the affordable housing fund and also helping providers explore funding sources like medicaid's 1915-I initiative to support activities like housing navigation. I am also glad to answer any questions you MAY have. >> thank you very much. You did it under time which is remarkable. Colleagues, if you have any questions or comments, please sign in now. Council member lynch. >> thank you for the presentation. My only question is about the eight emphasis areas. Can you remind me what those areas are, those locations are? >> yeah, several of them I would know by memory. That's going to be areas like the overpass at man o' war and nicholasville road near lowe's. The loudoun avenue bridge, virginia avenue bridge, most of the time it's going to be an overpass, areas that are going to be somewhat out of sight of the public and just be easy to access without a lot of oversight. A full listing of those is maintained on the city's web senate at all times. We currently have eight total. >> thank you so much. Thank you, chair. thank you. And anybody else? Just a few comments first of all, I have to say thank you for all your hard work. You have an impossible job and you and your team do so much and don't get thanked enough. I want to say that first of all and I know I can be the hardest critic so I really want to thank you. And I had a question, we have our encampment coordinator here who does great work. I know sometimes I get questions from constituents about removal also along the creeks. In my district and honeysuckle removal, is that something you all do where there are problem areas? Or how do you weigh what you are able to do and not able to do? >> so sometimes that can vairer, it MAY be that presently code enforcement would hold the funds for encampment removals. If there is something we can quickly and easily do that would serve to more long-term mitigate activity, we can often times fold that into the initial removal f. We were to take on a larger scale project like we saw at elkhorn road creek bed, we would have to go with environmental services to complete that kind of work. Often times we are going to weigh things like the number of times we've previously experienced encampments there, what the cost of those encampments were to weigh what the cost benefits of that decision would be. >> and you work -- I know sometimes creek beds is hard to decipher whose property it is. >> it can be a challenge, yes. >> and then for expand the street outreach, one of my items in committee. And I'm really glad to hear it seems to be positive. Is that right? It's making good strides. >> yes, we are seeing a lot of benefit from having an internal position that is primarily field based that ranges everything from steve being out at an encampment helping a resident get out of a flooded area, to being able to provide notice to people when impending weather is coming and also just having the ability to form relationships, build trust and really get people to buy into working with systems and services that's tradition MAY have failed them. We see folks that orderly we would not have expected to take big steps like entering treatment, not only take those steps, but be very, very engaged in them and grateful for the support. We recently saw hope center add a new program manager who comes with a health of experience. We are working on trying to roll out very soon to the community a centralized point of contact number so they don't have to have individual staff members to reach and we are finding a lot of new ways to track data to better analyze data and use that to inform our efforts. >> that's great. I know you mostly with the contracted outreach workers have been focusing in the center of town, do you foresee if you were able to expand and have a littles more outreach to other parts that have needs as well? >> so, with the most recent contract, we have kind of restructured a little bit outreach is conducted in a location-based approach but we are not trying to focus solely on the downtown core knowing we are seeing problematic issues in areas that are going to be all over the city and its geography but real estate really are trying to keep it consistent in terms of which team members are engaging with areas of town to keep that consistency for long-term engagement. >> wonderful. I don't see anyone else signed up but once again I want to thank you and your team and everything that you all do and we appreciate you. Thanks. >> next we will have camera manley and adam hedges, who are consultants working with traffic engineering present findings from a signalized crosswalk study. These are designated pedestrian crosswalks controlled by traffic lights and pedestrian signal heads that tell both drivers and walkers when it is safe to move. I want to briefly mention that this report is not final, but rather an update from the consultant that we hired to take a deep every look at our signalized cross walks and recommended from the street safety task force. This is an item that cm hale and cm curtis and I all agree were interested in learning more about in an effort to prevent more pedestrian fatalities. It's more of an overview and there will be another presentation to come with more concrete ideas. I was going to turn it over. I don't know if director -- there he is -- if director neil would like to say a few words and introduce the consultants. >> thank you. You did a wonderful job. I've got very little left to say. Just one thing is, we went out to do an advertisement for this back in APRIL, MAY and we only have one consultant group that applied for the project, which was concerning but I was very pleased when I saw that it was a combination of wsp and hvr because they're one of the top notch firms, two of the top notch firms around here so I'll turn it over to them. Thank you. >> good afternoon, my name is damron manley with wsp. This is my partner adam hedges. I want to give you a quick over view of the project purpose and need and goals in our folk to us start. So the purpose of this project, as we started, was to evaluate how traffic engineering efforts currently accommodate vulnerable road users or vrus and signalized road intersections and improve safety, feability and efficiency at each intersection or from a system wide approach. The need then was to evaluate these potential changes to typical or independent signal operations without detrimentally affecting or impacting vehicular traffic in a negative way. So we made a list of project goals for how we would achieve this and we wanted to come up with a holistic approach to so we started by saying okay, we are going to evaluate the pedestrian operatons from a system wide approach across all of lexington. And then we would identify safety and operational deficiencies or potential deficiencies for vulnerable road users. And then determine potential solutions or treatments to improve those conditions. We categorized those in two categories, short-term or long-term improvements. Short-term we are defining as implement implementing quickly requiring a little bit of long-term, again MAY need a longer timeline or larger budget to complete. I would say like adding concrete to an intersection for some reason like a curb bumpout per se and finally our last project goal, prioritizing the top intersection candidates with our short and long-term improvement recommendations for lexington. And those could be combined as a multitude or any form of combination of recommendations based on the intersectons as it stands so we started wanding to take a holist can overview. We wanted to get an intersection inventory of everything that we possible possibly could for the intersections from the facility information such as ada compliance, lighting, et cetera, and then grabbing safety data available to us operations from the operational side the actual signal database. What is in the signal, how does it operate and then that led us to the last thing I wanted to add to the intersection inventory is this is something we want to provide to lexington as a whole to are them to have this in a gis file that they can use for their future reference, if they get calls or compliant complaints about incidents, they have a database ready that can help answer some of the questions so they don't have to go and explore the questions at that time. So, narrowing the focus, then we wanted to go back to, you know, this is how do we improve safety for vulnerable road users without affecting in a negative way, so that gave us the question of how do we adjust signal operations to enhance the safety and maintain vehicular traffic at the same time? So that's going to lead me adam hedges. >> thank you. So these are just some of the potential countermeasures I'm going to walk through that we are thinking about implementing. These are all relatively simple operational improvements that don't require infrastructure for most part. So the top three being things that will just be digital, kind of changes so we can change from the controller cabinet in the way the intersection operates and the bottom three being some physical components but not an infrastructure requirement so these are kind of the list of the potential countermeasures when they can be used or what they might combat against. I will walk through each of these and try to give a little bit of an infographic or picture to what they actually are because these are technical terms at times so, the negative pedestrian offset, this is when there is a conflict really between potentially pedestrian crossing the road and flashing yellow arrow for left turning movements. I understand the word negative at the front of that sounds bad. It's just the technical term for what it is. Leading pedestrian interval. We have this downtown in a lot of cases where the walk comes on by itself before the vehicular phase to kind of give the pedestrians a head start so that would be used in those kinds of context where have you a pretty steady pedestrian volume or busier intersection where you need the pedestrians to get that head start or to be seen actuated rest and walk. This would be where you have a lot of green time on a main line corridor, so the green time is lengthy and typically, a typical walk operation is several seconds of walk and transitions to flashing and don't walk. This would allow it to stay in walk to give the pedestrians more of a chance to cross if that light is going stay green anyway. Added pedestrian detection. This one is just, as it sounds, adding pedestrian detection so that pedestrian phases get called and the signal cycle to give them opportunity to walk so people are not crossing unsafely or against a signal. Right on red considerations. This one, again, is a little bit self explanatory but looking at intersections that either have right on red or do not have right on red and figuring out if that is the most applicable application and how do we improve the compliance or awareness of that and audible pet detection is a newer improvement but you see that rolling out with new signal implementations or or signal alterations where it is telling you to wait or telling you to cross and what road you are crossing. So just for those with visual impairments, to better know where they are and to more safely cross at the appropriate time. So I will just quickly walk through some of these to give a visual representation of what each one is. So negative pedestrian offset again, this is trying to eliminate the potential conflict from left turners with pedestrians that have the walk often if you are turning left on a flashing see this is really to eliminate or delay that left turn movement so that pedestrian has exclusive crossing rights so there isn't a potential conflict with a left turner who actually main priority is avoiding the left turn would just be in its own phase or delayed until the walk is done. Leading pedestrian interval is a head start for pedestrians the light for vehicles would stay red pedestrians get a two to four second head start and the light would turn green for vehicles. This allows for pedestrians to get started into the cross walk, to be seen and have an opportunity to get across quicker. Actuated rest and walk, operates like a typical intersection but instead of transitioning after the walk period to the flashing don't walk, and don't walk section, it would feed off of the green vehicular phase to give the pedestrians more time and more awareness of it is still safe to cross and as the snral phase is winding down, it would then transition at the end to the flashing don't walk and countdown phase. Pedestrin detection, I think we are all pretty familiar with this but adding this in locations that don't currently have it or are not currently operating with detection, and then right on red considerations , this is just an example just right out here in downtown, I think this is broadway and maxwell, but typically this is used, if you can't, if a vehicle can't see well or if it's a tight intersection or there are a lot of pedestrian concerns, so looking at where that is being applied now and does that have more applications to be considered and the last one being the audible peg detection, so adding that where it is going to announce where you should cross and where you are crossing and what the intersection you are located at is so I will pass it back to cameron for an example. >> quickly to go through back to the beginning where we started. This just shows us our starting point of we are using all of the signalized intersection in lexington with potential pedestrian activity. You will see it's very hard to see but there are two highlighted areas. There is the central business district, which is in a very pale red underneath the dots which you might see in a moment the blue area is defined as the U.K. Area. They're local area context is much different than the remainder of lexington. I would say very specifically because not just the high pedestrian use but the types of users who, you know, I think they're called scooterrists now, are often on that. So that is 353 that we started with, and then the first cut, you know, trying to filter out all the noise and help us pip down to get useable recommendations for these intersections, the first cut, these intersections all consist of one or the other of this list pedestrian crashes in the crash history that we have available. A positive eec, high pedestrian activit or a simple operational change that we have noted as adam went through was clearly possible. I want to briefly mention that a positive eec is an expected -- excessive expected crash rate which is basically a statistical number that is the number of crashes at the intersection based on what would be statistically expected at the intersection. So if it's greater than zero, then it has more than expected and if it'sless than zero, it will have less or fewer crashes than expected. That gets us down to 267 intersections. These are intersection -- 237 intersections and they have both pedestrian crashes or safety concerns and a medium to high pedestrian volume. That leads us to the 94 intersections that wsp and hdr are going to filter through with a thorough fine tooth comb then of all of the versus how they work and potential recommendations that could come from them. That is going to get us to a point where we have a top 25 more or less ing side that top 25, we will, within the scope of this project we will create a project sheet for each intersection or maybe a combination of the few of the intersections where they're the same type, same location, same area where all of the, you know, behaviors are practically the same and those counter measures might be combined. An example that we believe is going to be a top priority intersection broadway at high street. So we will get to actually walk through one of the features that adam walked us through. So in the operation you can see in the image, there is a flashing yellow arrow. In this image it's not currently showing a walk sign but it is possible that you get a walk sign at the same time as the flashing yellow arrow. And anyone who has been in this area, knows that they're both very high pedestrian activity and very high vehicular turning movement. Turning movements and through movements and the priority is for the drivers to look straight ahead at oncoming traffic especially for the left turning vehicle. So the interesting thing about this intersection is there is no ped button because there is a ped recall on it, which means that it will serve every single cycle. So every single cycle regardless, you are getting a walk sign. Against that flashing yellow. And because there is no ped button, -- well, yeah, because there is no ped button, if you enabled the negative ped, when that walk and flashing don't walk turned on, you would stop the flashing yellow arrow. >> is two more minutes good do you think? >> less than that. thank you. >> we will if you turn that on, then that flashing yellow arrow would not turn on each time the walk flashing was turned on. What we are considering to recommend to lexington is this phase alone, to install a ped button which would improve the awareness of the users as they approach the intersection they're not just shown that they can walk, they have to press the button and when they do, that would, on their next phase, they would get their walk phase yellow would not flash until the walk phase was done. And you are not going to rest with that walk flashing so, yeah finally as part of the recommendations if we changed or added to the signal equipment, that would add to the audible ped system which would also improve user awareness. That is all we have. Open it up for questions. thank you so much for the presentation. Very interesting. Colleagues, have if you have any questions or comments, please sign in. I think we are having technical difficulties. You can raise your hand. You are not on the committee, are you? >> no. I'll wait then. I'll put you down. >> thank you. Council member beasley. >> I will sign in for dave. now I'm really confused. Okay. Hold on. Let me go back to my list here. So we have two that are not on the committee so I will go back to council member sevigny. >> thank you, chair for recognizing me. Thank you, guys for the presentation. I have just a quick one. So you are part way through it. So you have narrowed down where you are actually going to focus, it seems like, on your study. Is one of your solutions any of those, the mull taye way everyone stops -- multiway everyone stops and then there is the crossing between, so you did the x and everything crosses. Because I have been in communities where that is super effective, especially around an event area like or something like that and maybe around campus because I know there is one that I sit on on campus that is really annoying that takes a long time because you are waiting for everybody all the time. >> absolutely. So the list that we went through in this presentation is a list of the what we are calling like our simple operational changes that every single intersection we are growing to go through that list and say, you know, does this improvement option work here? Within the 49 that we do a deep dive in, we're going to do more far more than, you know, just say like from this list what should be part of it and what shouldn't and then just recommend that. Implementing the barn dance style crossing is something we will consider as we get into the top 25 as we take the 94 down to the 25. >> and I don't know if those are -- I have been in communities that they seem like they're always used but I don't know if they're -- if they can be turned on during event times so there can be two different styles. >> just for the databases specifically because I think we are all considering U.K. Basketball games as like a main priority of like let's just get everybody across to where they need to go and then turn the vehicles back on but, you know, as that would come then, you are worried then about the schedule not turning it on and turn turning it off automatically but doing that a little more personally. >> okay, thank you. Thank you, chair. >> thank you. Council member ellinger. >> thank you, chair. You are going to range your top Are they all based on what is going to be efficient and going to be the most responsible is does money come into it because there are going to be different costs for different things. When you start doing the ranking, it goes to be we get our best bang for this one or these are the biggest conflicts we are going to stop but this one might be more? So are we -- when we do that top 25, how are we balancing that. >> I don't know that the entire criteria on that has been fully defined but absolutely considered. The scope of this project is to focus on safety cut the detrimental effect on vehicular traffic. So anything between a consideration for lfucg to a recommendation is going to be focused in that light of how do we improve the safety without affecting in a negative way the vehicular traffic. So if we find something that we think this probably would affect very negatively or potentially negatively in the vehicular traffic then those will be filtered through and the same with cost and a very high priority. So I don't know if you want to speak to that. >> sure, I guess I see it as coming up with a little bit of a ranking which is like hierarchy based on the pedestrian crashes, so the crash experience and what this potential solution might be a counter measure for. So and the highway safety improvement program that we work on through kytc, a lot of times you are trying to equate crash severity to a number value, either dollar value or a score, so likely doing that same thing here and then using the way we think that counter measure might counteract that to come up with a benefit cost ratio. So that would be probably what we end up with as the top 25 ranking and then the benefit cost ratio being the thing that is scoring those criteria. >> thank you, thank you, chair. thank you. Council member curtis. >> thank you, chair for recognizing me since I don't serve on this committee. And thank you, gentlemen for the presentation. I really appreciate it. So I don't have any specific questions but I do want to take a moment to acknowledge a couple of things around this specific legislative item and the reason that we are doing it and where we are at in the process. So first off I want to say thank you to council member reynolds and council member hale for their interest in this and also thank you to council member sheehan and council member sevigny for chairing the streets safety task force and sort of spearheading and leading us through this broader discussion. so I think we all know at this point I have been enough of a broken record about it that pedestrian involved crashes in lexington are APRIL epidemic. -- are an epidemic. There is not one single solution to them but this is a major step in addressing that crisis. The reason that I'm here in this seat and the reason why I decided to run for office to begin with because my friend was crossing while crossing a crosswalk at a red light on nicholasville road and I believe I believe their death was because of a policy failure and traffic infrastructure are public safety issues, especially for vulnerable road users. Y'all probably remember when we voted on the recommendations from the street safety task force to actually fund them and see them through but I'm not sure if you all know that that was actually one year as of tomorrow you know it feels like we are applying a lot of pressure on our teams who handle these things to move quickly and to address these things and to get them right. So there is a broader scale and it's just one piece of the puzzle so I'm looking forward to getting the results of this study but then most importantly, I'm looking forward to implementing the result -- implementing tangibl measures based on the results of this study I know it's very easy when we see dots on the screen or when we are looking at the paperwork that is in front of us, to see numbers and start thinking of return on investment but in my mind, we are not responsible for assigning a dollar amount to a human life. And it is our job as elected officials here in lexington to keep our constituents safe. And in my mind, there is no greater issue of public safety in lexington than that of our traffic safety. So thank you for doing the work that you are doing. Thank you, colleagues for supporting this work. And I am looking forward to continuing this work in the years to come to make sure that what happened to me doesn't happen to anyone else. thank you so much for working on this I, too, have a family friend who was hit not very long ago in downtown lexington and passed away and I think that we just all feel really close to this issue and I know it's complicated and it's not just one thing. But this is just a piece of the puzzle and we appreciate you working on it and I really appreciate traffic engineering for all their work. They hear from us every day and they're juggling a lot so thank you, too, for working with the consultants on this and we appreciate your presentation. >> thank you very much. >> thank you. Next we will discuss vehicle speed contest and reckless driving exhibitions which we heard about at our last committee meeting on AUGUST 11 and I really appreciate vice chair baxter for sponsoring this item. And working to make upda its to it and I'm going to turn it over to her for opening remarks. but we will have evan thompson, our managing attorney in the law department, but I don't see the pumpkin jacket so I'm a little disappointed but that's all right. Thank you and thank you, council member vice chair baxter. >> thank you, chair. Like the chair said, this is a continuation from last month, and as a reminder, this item was another recommendation that came out of our street safety task force. We originally modeled it after the louisville ordinance. But after the last presentation, and feedback from several of our colleagues, evan and have I made some significant changes to it that we hope meets some of the concerns. So if you want to go over the changes, thank you. >> so we'll start like council member said, we were here last time, AUGUST 11, presentation about this vehicle speed contest and reckless driving exhibition ordinance or drag racing as it is colloquially known. We presented an ordinance that would prohibit speed contest reckless driving exhibition like racing, burnouts, doughnuts, drifting et cetera, promotion of speed contests and reckless less driving exhibitions on social media trying to get people to the events and also the obstruction of streets to facilitate these events. Those were the three major things prohibited by the ordinance: it would allow for violators vehicle to be impounded on the first offense for 30 years and 60 days for subsequent violations. and then it also allowe for lfucg to immediately impound or pronotice if they find the vehicle on the road when first investigation was necessary. There is also the imposition of civil fines civil penalties which equal the amount of impoundment and storage costs and provided multiple level of appeal rights as well. So, as council member elliot-baxter mentioned we heard your feedback. Provided sever recommendations so this presentation, instead of going through it all over again there discuss the recommended changes to the ordinance in light of those conversations: so we'll start with the changes. The first one is for the first page intimidating that will be removed in that draft. There is discussion about what is a vehicle it is already a definition of vehicle in that chapter but we further define vehicle to fit our needs for this particular ordinance and that would include every device by which any person or property MAY be transported which is a lot of words to basically be a lot, most of any kind of devices used on the roads. Thought including electric scooters. Vehicles like bikes that run exclusively and I underline exclusively to differentiate between a regular bicycle and e-bike which doesn't run exclusively on human power. It can run on electric power. And the same special exemptions found elsewhere in the code which are kind of antiquated like trolleys that run on wires and stuff like that, which I'm not sure we actually use that I can recall. So it also removes the separate violation for coordinating or promoting vehicle speed contest and reckless driving exhibiions so it would be prohibiting the actual doing or the owner allowing it to be done. The vehicle speed contest and reckless driving exhibition or the blocking the roads so that's what would remain in the draft. It wouldn't be trying to go after people coordinating because as was discused in that might be very difficult to enforce and also might require police to have to go into, you know, investigate social media and that type of stuff which they have a lot bigger fish to fry so to speak. And also provides the enforcement. There was a question about who is going to enforce so this is further defined in this new draft. It's performed by police officers in the division of police. I don't know how that happened but powerpoint has been around forever and somehow I still can't get it. Also because impoundment applies to the second and subsequent violations we raised the bond amount allowed for the appeals. Basically you can post a bond to get your car back during at peel. We raised it because it was currently a lot less than that but now that the only time we are impounding it is the second violation where the fine is significantly higher, we had to increase the bond. and some more, there are more changes we removeed impoundment for first violation and reduced the penalty to $1500 so they be impounding on second and subsequent violations. Some discussion from council members that believed that impounding on the first offense is a little strong so the first fine is $1500 and allows to impound for future violations and subsequent violations remain at 4500 and I am impoundment. It also removes the prosays of allowing for notice of future impoundment and the ability to, you know, investigate using all of the ways to potentially investigate a little bit confusing and potentially allowed someone to pay their way out of getting their car impounded so it is just removed any time for second or second subsequent violations would be impounded based at the time of the violation. At or close in time of the violation if you don't have the notice of future impoundment section, then you would also remove the appeal right for those notices because you don't have the notices anymore so there is nothing to appeal for that one. And then like I said, I won't say that again, but basically we increased the bond because the second violation and subsequent violations are $4500 for that violation, so we would have to increase the bond to higher than that. Any questions? >> thank you very much. Do you have any questions or comments. If so, please sign in. council member beasley. >> thank you, chair. Thanks, evan for going back over this and fixing some things. I have one question so we are all on the same page. The $6,000 they get for the impoundment. Where does that money go? >> I think so, the 6,000 was for the bond, so penalty is the 4500 and that we we calculated that to be the 60 day -- that's actually the cost for the entity who tows and stores vehicles on contract for us. That's the amount -- that's how much it costs for 60 days of impounding and storage. >> okay, thank you. Thank you, chair. thank you. Council member curtis. >> thank you, chair for recognizing me since I do not serve on this committee and thanks, evan for this presentation. And again, thank you to council member elliot-baxter for your work on this. I know that I was a vocal supporter of this in the last meeting that we had about it and I will personally say that I do oppose the changes and specifically around removing the promotion of events but if that is something that is part of a broader consensus, I'm cool with that. But the question that I haveing -- the question that I have is about the definitions specifically with regards to vehicle and so I just think I know the answer to this but I want to be very explicit about Can you talk to the difference between an electric scooter and e-bike and what is and is no the covered under this ordinance? >> yes so electric low speed scooters are treated separately under state law and those are 9 what are essentially like the ones that ran around town, so because they're treated separately in state law, it is treated separately in this ordinance as well. While ebikes generally are not as -- they don't have the special the definition that in state law that is something like e-scooters does, so it would be because I think it would be defined as the inverse of what a bicycle is, not scuffle so if there is electric power to the bike, it would be considered e-bike and potentially you get into whether or not it's a all the other various things that are not necessarily ebikes but are not motorcycles and they're not invest pas or whatever. Those types of things, which are also defined differently in state law. So it's state law streets all of these differently and don't define them well but they define e-scooters which is why that's treated separately and is excluded because it's excluded as under vehicle under state law. >> I appreciate that. And the reason I'm asking about this is because one of the issues that I continually face in my district is the issue of these ebikes in the middle of the night, people racing them very loudly and it's disruptive to my neighbors and candidly it's disruptive to me and I selfishly would like to get a good night's sleep once in a while. So just to are clarity, those would qualify as a vehicle under this and we could enforce this potential ordinance on folks who are speed racing and doing reckless driving exhibitions with ebikes. >> yes and I think there is even a potential for something that we might consider as an e-bike not being an e-bike and being something that is not even street legal used. Things that police can use to try to stop those as well. >> thank you so much. And I appreciate that clarification and I know my neighbors do, too. Thank you, chair. thank you. Council member sevigny. >> thank you, chair for recognizing me even though I'm not on this committee. I want to thank you for the presentation and thank you and thank council member elliot-baxter for bringing this item that was in our subset of the street safety task force to fruition. My question is mostly you know, there is a variety of parents who have cars that their 16 and 17 year olds drive so who ends up being the finee because it's not really a moving violation, right. >> under the ordinance, the owner of the vehicle is the violator. >> thank you. That's all I have. Thank you, chair. thank you very much. I appreciate the presentation. Thank you council member, do you have any motions for us. >> thank you all so much before I make a motion to approve this, I will have one amendment that will come after this and it's just on the effective date so I will make the motion to approve the vehicle speed contest and reckless driving exhibitions ordinance as presented today so moved. >> second. I see a motion and a second. Are there any comments on the motion. >> yes, chair. I need to make one amendment to the effective date. Originally when we presented the ordinance, the effective date was JANUARY 1 in order to give police the opportunity, not only to train our officers and educate the public, but also to create the civil violations there is a little bit of leg work that needs to be done so I'm going to make a motion to amend the effective date to JULY 1, 2027 because that's when they do all of their new legislation training. >> so moved. >> second. >> there is a motion and a second on the amendment. Amended language? Okay, all those in favor say aye. >> aye. any opposed? Okay, we are going back to the main motion. All those in favor of the motion as amended. Say aye. >> aye. any opposed? That motion passes and I think council member elliot-baxter has another motion. >> thank you. So as you all MAY realize, this is our last ssps meeting for the year, and so I would like to move to report out the proposed, this proposed ordinance to the full council at the NOVEMBER 10 work session. This will allow the ordinance to move along prior to the end of the year just because other wides it won't be reported out until FEBRUARY. Second. motion and second. All those in favor please say aye. >> aye. any opposed? That motion passes. >> thank you all. thank you very much. Now our last agenda item is a review of committee items and colleagues, I would like to go over the list since this is our last meeting of the year. So please log in as I go over them I would like to state that the majority of item on the list are mine and I will not be here; however, the majority of the items on that list are also annual updates so that is something that we have been moving for the chair to take over so the chair could take those over, whoever the new chair is in the new year I was going to go through the list is that okay, for those that are signed up? And then if you still have something else, let me know. So the first one is public safety technology. Council member elliot-baxter. Do you want to keep that in committee. >> I think at this moment I will probably remove it from committee and if needed I will add it back in so I will make the motion to remove. a motion and second. All those in favor say aye. >> aye. any opposed? That motion passes. That will be removed. The next one is vice mayor wu eviction diversion and right to council. >> I'm going to keep that in me for the moment. Thank you. that stays in. And we have next the comprehensive plan review of code enforcement. Council member lynch. >> I move to remove comprehensive review of code enforcement. a motion and second. All those in favor say aye. >> aye. all right. Thank you. Any opposed? That stays. -- sorry, is removed. The next is coordinated victim response plan and council member sheehan is not here so I will touch base with her about that. And then the next is a caring vilages model, council member lynch. >> I move to remove from committee a caring place villages model initiative for lexington. >> second. motion and second. All those in favor say aye. >> aye. opposed? Thank you, that passes. and youth council. Council member beasley. >> we are going to keep that in committee for right now. >> that will stay. >> next one is the annual report that we just had and that is necessary for them for federal funding so that will stay. And someone will take that over unless anyone wants to take it over right now. >> chair I have one question. yes. >> under annual updates, it has the annual review. I'm not sure why it's under that list. >> I didn't know if it was... >> encampment coordinator. >> we probably don't need to keep -- that one as an annual report. I will make a motion to remove that or can I remove it without a motion since I'm the chair or do I need a motion? I'll move to remove it from committee because it's encampment response and it was my item, thank you I'm sorry. >> there is a second. All those in favor, aye any opposed, that motion passes. Next we have the mobile parkt update I will make a motion to remove that from committee as an annual update. All those in favor thank you. Any opposed that passes next is strategic earth plan for lexington fire department. Do you have an update on that. >> there was a presentation for that and I will lean on council member hale. Your thoughts, brother? >> I was thinking about removing it but then I know that chief wells is retiring and we have a new chief that I want to keep updated on this particular pln. So for right now I'm going to keep it for right now. I'll make a decision later on. I will let you work with the new chair on that. That stays. Thank you. Emergency winter shelter program. Council member morton, how would you like to proceed with that item? >> I will move to remove that from committee. So moved. >> second. a motion and second to remove that from committee. All those in favor. >> aye. any opposed? That motion is removed thank you. The audrey grievous center update. That was done mainly because of their new restructuring. I think it could be email report so I will move to remove that from committee. >> second. motion and second which I probably shouldn't be making the motion. Being in charge, sorry. I should let the vice chair do that. (All talking at once) >> I'll finish that. And cardiac crusade. Council member morton. >> yes, to be determined schedule date for the next year so lit stay.

Clerk: thank you. Division of youth and services update I am going to keep that and move it down to annual reports. And then that can be decided how that proceeds. I know they didn't get to present this fall so they would appreciate a time to have an update moving forward then we have street task force vehicle speed contest and reckless driving exhibits. Council member elliot-baxter, how would you like to proceed with that. >> I will make a motion to remove from committee. >> a motion and a second thank you. All those in favor. >> aye. Any opposed. That passes community para medicine crisis strategy. >> we'll keep that in committee.

Chair: okay, thank you. Study of potential 91 shift differential council member beasley do you have -- you don't have an update on that, do you by any chance? >> I'm working with revenue. a review of the proposed e-bike ordinance. I know you had this kind of covered that a little bit. >> that is still a work in progress chair. >> thank you. so that stays. The signalized crosswalk study will stay in committee because it will come back so would I like to ask either council member curtis or, I guess hale, because you serve on this committee, correct? If you would be willing to take that over since I will not be here. Okay. And I don't have to make a motion for that, do I? Okay. So council member hale will take that over. Council member beasley, review of mental health and well-being for our first responders. Stay. And then the next one that I am still working on, but I would like someone to take over is the review of the local language access ordinance and I had talked to vice mayor wu about this. Are you willing to take that over? >> I will. Thank you. thank you. I'm not going to go through all the other ones they're annual and periodic updates but I see that council member morton, curtis and baxter have a few items in there. If you will look over those and then be ready for the new year what you want to do with them. Keep them in or not. So hopefully that works. Thank you. One last item I'm kind of staked that all of our staff -- all of -- I'm kind of sad all of our staff walked out of the room. Hopefully they'll watch it or I will repeat myself later. I just wanted to take a moment to thank all of my colleagues for giving me the opportunity to serve in the capacity of chair of social services and public safety committee for two terms. This is my last meeting as chair and I also really want to thank vice mayor backs for baxter for her word work -- vice chair -- I thought I wrote it down right. I said it wrong. so when you are vice mayor some day you will remember that. I can truly say that having this role has been an honor and I learned over the years that we have top notch public safety and top notch social services. Our departments are strong. Our chiefs, our commissioner and directors are the best of the best and work every day to keep our city safe, healthy and driving. So I want to thank each of you for your service to our residents. I also want to thank the commissioners chiefs and directors for taking my calls any time of day and night and for listening to my many comments and concerns, lexington is one of the top mid sized cities in the country for a reason and having the chance to see the inner workingsings of how this city run day in and out and to be able to contribute to it in some small way is such a gift. Our employees are incredibly inspiring. Thank you again. That brings us to the end of our agenda and this was our final meeting for this calendar year the next meeting of the social services and public safety committee is on JANUARY 12 and that is to elect a new chair in The time is 2:15 P.M., and if there is no objections, this